I got a taste of my own medicine. Literally. I crushed a tablet for my six year old to swallow. I added a dash of sugar and a few drops of water, and I expected him to ingest it without a hitch. After ten minutes of prodding, he finally opened his mouth and, cringing all over, accepted the spoon. His reaction was quite over the top, I thought. “Hey, it can’t be that bad!” I said and, feeling a bit haughty, encouraged him to regain control. He spit the contents of the spoon onto the floor, wailed, and cried for water. He ran through the house panting and spitting for ten minutes.
About an hour later, curiosity possessed me to dab my finger in the crushed medicine and touch my tongue. Bleeeaaah! Blargh, blech, ptoo! The biting, ascerbic chemical, something akin to Drano with a pinch of urine, sank into my taste buds and stayed there, and that was just a little dab. In one moment, my empathy and respect for my son increased a hundredfold. I also felt remorse.
The greatest remorse came not from giving him the medicine but from invalidating his reaction. I wondered what was wrong with him and thought he should “buck up.” Such sentiments come so easily when we watch someone suffer from a place of comfort and contentment, but nothing hurts more than hearing it when you yourself are suffering beyond what someone is willing or able to comprehend.
“How gravely the glutton counsels the famished to bear the pangs of hunger.”
~ Kahlil Gibran
Months ago when I was in so much pain that all I thought about was ending my life, upon complaining of the three week wait for an appointment, a psychiatrist actually told me to “buck up.” I couldn’t believe it. The lack of empathy didn’t surprise me. It was the implication that I could cope with enormous psychic pain by simply gritting my teeth and bearing down. The last time I tried that, I was soon screaming for an epidural, and my emotional pain was, without a doubt, commensurate with childbirth. Perhaps she meant, “Pay me.”
If one of us cries out in pain, it is our nature to hear it. Karma is not punishment. Karma is a gift from your soul to the person whose perspective you could not understand at the time. And a gift to your own soul, because it opens the heart and increases your capacity to receive love. (We cannot sense ourselves receiving what we cannot fathom giving, because our perception of the intentions of others is rooted in a mirroring process, in empathy.)
At some point in the future, you will taste your own medicine–out of love. When your karma comes to fruition, it means that some part of you wants a greater intimacy with the consequences of your actions, actions that came from love but also from ignorance and ego, from a perspective rooted in the assumption of being separate. There is nothing wrong with that, but you want a greater intimacy with how you affect others, because that connects you to others on a deeper level. Your consciousness opens to theirs, quite literally. It means that you have chosen a sacred and honorable path, and you deserve great reverence for that.
You will walk that path until you realize that my pain is your pain, and your pain is my pain. Then, rather than tasting the medicine, we administer it with a deeper understanding, a fuller compassion, and endless patience. We administer it exactly as though we were giving it to ourselves, not because we fear guilt, but because we become conscious that we are the same. We discover that our nerve pathways do not end at the tips of our fingers and toes but extend into the people around us. They carry our nerve endings, and if we chomp down, in short order we will be howling. (I must have been a snobby psychiatrist in my past life, ha!)
Karma is not about punishment at all, because you never did anything wrong. So when you find that something you did gets done to you, and you wonder why you are going through it when all of your intentions were good, remember that. Your intentions are still good, and that is exactly why it happens. You are witnessing the other side, out of love.
This sacred path, you’ve chosen it because you want more from others. You want more love, and you want it to be more real, to move into a higher level of being than you knew before. You want to experience a true psychic bond with others and with the Divine.
Anytime you ask the universe for more than you can receive, it’s as though you’re asking for something that cannot fit into your small hands. And so the first thing the universe is going to do is… give you bigger hands.
Sometimes that can only occur when the small thing in your small hands is removed. In the pain that arises because of losing what you seemed to possess, of experiencing in your own individual awareness what you evoked in someone else, you grow in awareness on a multidimensional level, which is to say, you know what this particular experience feels like, and you enter this knowing, and it opens your heart. Suddenly you can taste what a greater love would be like, and your hands get bigger, and then more gets placed into them. It’s paradoxical, but it happens.
The bitter taste of your own medicine is simultaneously the taste of love. Through loss, you gain even more, always and not just figuratively. Remember that. The next time you feel pangs of grief or loneliness, frustration or failure, remember. You are on going to receive far more than you lost.
You want to know what real love feels like? Okay.
love this, thank you
Very nice. It’s a good way to look at karma. In the west we tend to look at it as pay-back. Some people are even afraid of what they think lest karma comes back to them.
I see it simply as the beliefs and conditioning that we create in ourselves. Our actions then come for beliefs and conditioning, and this is our karma. Releasing beliefs and conditioning, in love, is being free of karma.
Thanks, very illuminating.