Improving our karma is concrete, as concrete as avoiding cracks in the pavement.When our mind is not cluttered by a myriad of thoughts from the realm of What-If and Why Not and How Come and How could I and Why didn’t I and Why Me? and Poor Me, our mind processes what is happening in real time a lot faster – just like our computer works faster once it’s been purged of all the temp and corrupt files, once it’s been defragged and debugged.One of the benefits that flow on from a moment-by-moment emotional neutrality is that we are able to handle much more efficiently whatever presents itself in real time – in the moment that is truly under our feet.

It is from within *that moment* that we can train ourselves to respond more meaningfully, more grandly from our true response-center, the high end, the noble end of our ego.I, who never ever used to spare a thought for my soul, have come to accept that we do not *get* a soul in a random way.

Rather, it can be said that our soul has *volunteered*, to *get* us, to accept us as the new vehicle through which she hopes to process – through our spiritual responses to life – some of the karmic baggage accumulated by her previous incarnations.

Souls pick us to be their upgraded vehicle to karmic evolution – which is why it is tacitly accepted that we ARE able to overcome all and any of the karmic challenges that come our way – if and only if we can tackle them in a spiritual manner which, of course, is not the way our western culture has ever taught anyone to overcome anything.

Through each of our wakeful moments, unknowingly, we add to our karma. Before grappling with the concept of Karma, one must practise being aware in the present, being aware of ourselves within the endless string of random and boring little moments that connect our all major ones, the happy ones and the devastating ones – like the many small breaths that connect each of the *big ones.*

Being aware and awake *in the present* means shutting out the monkey-chatter, the relentless flow of random thoughts that are not a productive part of any problem solving process – it is about shutting down unsolicited thoughts that invade our brain the minute we stop talking.

Sadly, we take in this network and make it rigid.We then use it as so many weapons against the ordered and logical spontaneity of nature.

As a rule of thumb, I will say that even as we consider ourselves thoughtful and caring, we are, to greater or lesser degrees, a part of our culture’s worship of individual power and profit and therefore equally, to greater or lesser degrees, removed from our spirit’s energy, from our energy field and the karma that is currently ours to amend.

The bottom line is that all of us, absolutely all of us are essentially good. We all care and do good when we want to be good. We feel moved to be good as a *reaction* to someone or to a cause.

Equally, as a reaction to someone or something, we are all able to act pettily or violently.

We are only good in response to a tug at our heart strings – but that goodness is limited in time and in space. It is not ongoing. And it certainly is not unconditional.Karmic amendment is what happens once we manage to actively accept what-is. It is what happens when we try to do life with a true heart-over-mind approach.

Karmic amendment is what happens once we manage to *care* from the bottom of our heart, not from the bottom of our wallet, or when we would otherwise react in anger, in resentment, with indifference, or react pettily, selfishly – because we feel aggrieved and we feel it is our right to temporarily close our heart to the stressor.

Karma is our personal, accumulated, fateful load – our score sheet as inherited from our soul’s previous incarnations, compounded by the karmic balance of what we have managed for ourselves in THIS incarnation, this lifetime.

Developing a spiritual philosophy that does not require us to line the pocket of any self-made *guru* is … empowering.

Adhering to a spiritual philosophy that is free of spiritual jargon and free of rituals is … liberating.