The Karma of Cause, the Karma of Result (Part 2)

We can view the karma of cause and the karma of result in somatic terms. The unfinished business created by the karma of cause comes about through the incomplete mind-body process previously described, that results in holding patterns of tension. As we saw, when something occurs in our life, we tend to accept a small part of the total experience into our consciousness and block out the rest, so that it remains trapped in our body in the form of unacknowledged feeling, emotion, sensation, insight, and so on, held at bay by unconscious tension, holding, and freezing. When we resist our body’s experience, we increase the backlog of incomplete experience and our somatic frozenness. In order to hold the increasing backlog at bay, we must develop more and more sophisticated ego strategies of avoidance, denial, and rationalization, and also increase the force of the energy we put into locking up and numbing our bodies to maintain our repression. This process is what is meant by creating karma, the karma of cause. As our ego situation becomes more and more at odds with what is held in the body, our karmic backlog, our karmic debt, and our bodily dysfunction increase. The karma of result is the totality, at any given moment, of what we have been unwilling to fully experience and the way in which we have managed to avoid it through short-circuiting the natural cycle of life.

Reginald Ray
from Touching Enlightenment; Finding Realization in the Body