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Does your past life karma carry forward to your next life?  

                                                                                                

Your Karma is closely tied to the kind of life you lead in your subsequent lifecycles.                

Your good and bad karma’s both will come back in your subsequent life in various forms. The reason they come back in our lives is not just to punish us but to make us understand and appreciate things from another perspective.

 Karma

Karma is the memory of our souls, which means it’s often long-standing, even stemming from prior lives. Indeed, the course of our current life is mostly predetermined by our karma in previous lifetimes: What we didn’t finish then, we come back to finish now which some people would say is the purpose of reincarnation.

The unpleasant situations that we are facing in our current life are the consequence of our lingering karma, which can always be reversed and resolved. If you want to erase the energy carried over from previous lifetimes, you need to understand these five properties of past-life karma first:

1. Karma has no expiration date 

                                                            

Karma is the luggage your soul carries with it as we navigate through successive lifetimes. Unfortunately, unlike the luggage at the airport, this particular baggage never gets lost, which means you’re stuck with it until you open it up and sort through its contents. You might not even know what your past karma was while dealing with the challenges in this lifetime. But when you open and dig through your karmic suitcase, then finally, you can confront your outstanding karma and lighten your energetic load.

2. Karma means that no person in your life is a coincidence

Karma places everyone into your life for a specific reason, and karmic relationships will play out as planned despite your best efforts. It could be an unresolved issue between the two of you or some past life connection which needs resolution in the present life that has brought the two of you together. That’s why it’s important to acknowledge the role of each person in your life: Why are they there? What have they come to teach you and vice versa? What is the karma you’re meant to experience with this person? The sooner you acknowledge the truth of the karma you share with someone (whether it’s good or bad), the sooner you can resolve your issues.

3. According to karma, what you have done, you become.

We have been told about karma that “what goes around comes around.” But the reality of karma is more expansive than just being “punished” for our bad deeds—positive karma exists just as much as negative karma. If you stole, others will steal from you in following lives. If you did good to others, good things will happen to you. Your actions throughout your various lifecycles become the circumstances of your being, so if you want good to happen to you in your subsequent lives then make sure that you do the same and live a virtuous life.

4. Karma can make our roles reverse

One of the most fascinating facts about karma is that it often causes us to reincarnate in a reversed manner. This means that your parent may have actually been your child in a former life. Then, before reincarnating in this lifetime, the souls agreed to take on the opposite act. Souls switch genders, too. Positions shift throughout lifetimes based on karmic need; whatever dynamic is needed to repair or heal karma will be manifested through changing roles in our cycle of lives on earth. The people you know now may have had a very different impact on your previous lives! Similarly, if you hate someone for whatever reason karma might put you in that person’s shoes in your present life to let you experience things from the other side. So as far as possible keep your stand neutral and never be judgmental about anyone.

5. Karma repeats to produce new results

There’s a greater reason that karma repeats itself, and it’s not to cause you pain. Instead, it’s to teach you to take different actions for different results. If you’re attracting the same type of partners into your life over and over again, it’s time to stop and inspect your choices: Why do similar people keep coming into your life? What should you be doing differently so as to get the desired people? This calls for honest introspection and evaluation of your own faults and weaknesses, which is admittedly hard to do. Don’t be afraid to look within. Recognize what must be changed inside of you so as to change what’s outside of you. Then, you can modify your behavior to end karmic patterns and progress in your potential. Past-life karma is resoundingly present in your current life. Mustering up the courage to open your karmic suitcase today can change your destiny for lifetimes to come.

6. The soul is eternal

One of Hinduism’s most fundamental teachings is that every living being is a physical incarnation of an immortal soul. Though these physical bodies die, each immortal soul lives on. According to the Bhagavad Gita all souls are a part of the Divine and thus spiritual in nature. Just as sparks of a fire become extinguished when separated from fire, souls forget their true spiritual nature when separated from their Divine source.

Lacking proper knowledge, each soul is stuck in a cycle of reincarnation called samsara, in which each is born into a variety of physical bodies, including that of plants and animals. From body to body, and species to species, each soul lives one lifetime after the next, all the while ignorant of its Divine nature.

The soul moves through this cycle of births until — after lifetimes of spiritual practice. — this Divine nature is fully realized, the cycle of reincarnation ends, and spiritual liberation (moksha) is achieved.

7. Karma and reincarnation are closely tied

Hindu texts strongly encourage individuals to spend their human births endeavoring to make spiritual progress. Though not impossible to achieve moksha in other incarnations, Hindu sages have long insisted that this is far easier done in a human birth.

The whole of material creation can be likened to a rehabilitation center meant for helping a soul to rediscover its Divine nature. One of creation’s mechanisms to help facilitate a soul’s spiritual development is karma, the concept that every thought and action has a corresponding reaction.

Through karma, selfless actions uplift a soul, while selfish actions degrade it. The results of both selfless and selfish actions are experienced over a series of lives, as a soul comes to understand how its actions affect those and the world around it.

Karma is thus the ultimate teacher of empathy. Theoretically speaking, if one takes its karmic lessons seriously, and strives to act selflessly, one can continuously elevate its status of existence. If, however, a person chooses to commit one selfish act after another, spiritual progress is not made and in extreme cases what progress has already been made can be squandered.

8. There are three types of karma

Karma is generally divided into three categories: sanchita (latent karma), prarabdha (ripened karma), and agami (future karma). Sanchita is the accumulated karma from your past thoughts and actions, the results of which will eventually be experienced in the future. Sanchita is like the seed of a tree you planted in the past. In due time, the tree will grow and produce a particular fruit you’re destined to eat.

Prarabdha is what you’re experiencing now. It is the seed of a past action that has grown into a tree, producing the fully ripened fruit you’re eating in the present.

Agami is a seed of action you’re planting in the present that will inevitably produce the fruit of the future.

The three categories of karma ultimately work in creating a cycle of cause and effect. The fruit you eat now (prarabdha) leaves an impression in your mind — compelling you to plant more of a particular seed (agami), which will cause you to eat similar fruit in the future (sanchita).

In other words, karma is habit forming. Repeated actions become like grooves in the

mind that get deeper and deeper. You have the free will to change your habits at any

time, but the deeper the groove, the harder those habits — whether good or bad — are to change.

9.    Selfless work frees one from karma 

When the eternal soul identifies with the physical body, the soul becomes attached to

what  this  body is doing, feeling and  thinking, seeking  out pleasurable experiences and avoiding unpleasurable ones, accumulating karma the whole time. Even good actions performed with the intent of gaining some reward binds a person to this world, as that good karma has to be experienced at some point.

Fortunately, the way of breaking free of karma’s cycle is explained in the Bhagavad Gita:

“… without being attached to the fruit of activities, one should act as a matter of duty, for by working without attachment one attains the Supreme.”

Because the Supreme (another word for the Divine) is the source of creation, a person’s real duty is to perform spiritually uplifting work. This means acting not for one’s own material desires, but for the spiritual benefit of oneself and others. By doing such selfless work, a being becomes an instrument of the Divine, and is thus no longer tied to the results of its actions, thereby discontinuing its karmic cycle.

10. Good association is key in one’s spiritual growth

Because karma is habit forming, creating those deep grooves in the mind, it can be very difficult to make and follow through with better choices, even if one wants to. Take, for example, exercise. Lack of exercise usually makes one less healthy, have less energy, and can even cause laziness. The more people choose to not exercise, the worse they generally feel, and the worse they feel, the harder it will be for them to begin exercising, even if they wanted to break the negative cycle. Our choices shape our perception of reality, which is why the less people exercise the more they might come to believe they are simply incapable of getting in shape, fueling a cycle of negative exercise karma.

However, when you spend time with people who are not only disciplined in their exercise routines, but also willing to share what they know, one has a much better chance of breaking through personal  negative health habits to create new positive ones.

In the same way, by spending time with and taking guidance from spiritually advanced souls, it becomes possible to overcome lifetimes of karmic baggage, opening the door to profound spirit.