What To Do If You Feel Life is Cursed (or bad karma)
Many of us have been in this situation. Life is good (or not). Then suddenly life is great! Finally you get some ‘good luck’, and things seem to be going well. Perhaps it’s because you’re a good kind person, and after many years, at last there is goodness around the corner.
After years of bad and sad times, tragedies and nothing wrong right, everything’s wonderful. Then boom! A spanner goes in the works, and back you slide down again. Is this random? It is a curse for not going to church, or is it bad karma?
You don’t know. So you pick yourself up and decide to keep ‘making your own luck’. And boom! More bad things happen. And eventually you become despondent. And decide that you’re either for sure ‘cursed by someone or something’, or you must have done something bad in a previous life. And that’s your lot. And you’re stuck with it.
Not so fast!
Of course, first of all don’t feel guilty for feeing that life is against you. Having self-help gurus telling you that you should feel because others are worse off, won’t do any good. Perhaps if you were in a better place in your life, you may be more able to help those worse off. So sort yourself out first, to help others.
There are three reasons (realistically and logically) that your life is the way it is. Let’s look at all three:
It’s just life (random)?
Could be this. Some people say nothing is random, but others point to whole countries that are starving. Have they all been cursed or got bad karma? It’s more likely that they live in countries witih corrupt regimes, and western governments are doing little to practically help.
If you walk down the road and get hit by a drunk driver, this could be due to lax drink-driving laws or bad weather that caused freak weather that sent a car off the road.
It could be (simply logical reasons) that you suffer. If you have very low self-esteem and continue to stay with someone who knocks you around, it’s going to continue until you get help.
It’s a curse from God?
Unlikely. God is a nice guy, and would not want you to live your life suffering. Animal suffering doesn’t happen because God wants it to. It happens because people cause suffering – even if they pretend they’re religious.
One non-believer once told a Christian ‘I can’t believe in God because of all the bad things that happen in the world’. So the believer asked ‘Ok, so now God doesn’t exist, who’s causing it all’. He replied ‘People’. She replied, ‘So why when you put God back in – is everything His fault?’
There are many people who have suffered, who now don’t believe in God. But paradoxically, many people who have suffered have more of a faith in God.
Immaculée Ilibagiza lived in a room with many other girls for several months in Rwanda, after her whole family was massacred during the genocide. She prayed the Rosary and even met the people responsible years after, forgiving them. Hard to do, but she did. What about the six million Jews killed during the Second World War? They didn’t become atheists, they are still Jewish (those that are still alive).
Some believe that animal and human suffering is a consequence of humanity’s original sin, which disrupted the entire universe. And in fact that those that cause suffering (saying they are from God) are anything but. Possibly from the other side, even if they don’t know it.
Catholic Concern for Animals is an organisation fuelled by love for other species, but also for God. Remember Saint Francis of Assisi (and our own Northumbrian Saint Cuthbert) both lived their lives for help other creatures.
It’s bad karma?
Again, highly unlikely. Karma is more of this world (cause and effect). Aussie writer Andrew Matthews once wrote karma in a nutshell in most cases: ‘If you smile at someone, they will smile back at you. If you hit someone in the face, they’ll hit you back’.
Karma is more again an energy (a country at war is going to have more bad things happen). Children in Africa are not starving because they were evil in a previous life. There is enough (wasted) food to feed everyone on earth.
We have billions of people on earth now, and we have not had enough people in history for them to be reincarnated from. Same with the animal kingdom.
Mindfulness teacher Melli O’Brien has a great article to understand how karma really works. A lot of it is simply about intention. If you get drunk and run over someone then drive off, that’s bad karma. If you run over someone who is drunk and wanders in front of your car and gets killed – you’ll still feel terrible, but that’s not your karma, as you never intended anything to happen.
Many of us empaths often feel like this day-long. It’s impossible to go through life without perhaps accidentally hurting others (from emotionally wounding old friends to choosing the wrong vets for a sick animal). From accidentally killing a spider when trying to rescue it to treading on ants, when you didn’t mean to.
How to feel better?
It’s more about creating habits, and that’s where mindfulness can help. It can help you not to ‘overreact’ to everything. If you see something that upsets you, an emotional person may then have an outburst, and create a viscious circle of events that then tumble into worse ones.
Say you have a friend who has upset you. Instead of going off for a walk and practicing mindful thought, you may lash out, and lose that precious friendship forever. Or you may falsely accuse a partner of having an affair.
Or you may chastise a vet for misdiagnosing your animal friend. Or you may be angry at someone for eating meat when there are vegan bacon alternatives available (after seeing pigs in a lorry en-route to the abattoir).
Or (especially in today’s climate) lash out at anyone who doesn’t share your beliefs on politics, people on boats, immigrants, climate change or Trump.
Of course being angry never helps. It just sends people in the opposite direction from love.
How to break the cycle if you feel cursed
If you feel that life is overwhelming and you can never seem to get your life out of its present rut, follow the advice that ‘stupidity is doing the same thing over and again, and expecting the same results!’
Instead:
- Let yourself feel like you feel. Whether that’s sad, angry, ashamed, guilty or indecisive. All of these are normal feelings. Let them occur, to feel them and then heal to let go.
- Stop making dramas in your brain. Obviously big events are big events. But you don’t have to feel like everything in your world is broken. Try to focus on the next few hours, on what could go right.
- Look after the basics. If you eat well, exercise, and avoid smoking and excess alcohol (and get enough sleep), often life will feel better the next day anyway. Try to sleep, before making big decisions.
- Try to separate how you feel from what’s actually happening. People may be avoiding you because they are going through their own stuff. Not because they hate you, don’t care about you or wish to cause you hurt.
- If you find it difficult to deal with stuff alone, find a trusted friend to talk to. If you don’t have anyone, pop into a local church to pray, call the Samaritans or even talk to a professional, if needed.
- Know that when bad things happen, nobody is ‘punishing you’ from above. You may have lessons to learn (self-esteem, boundaries, balance). But nobody is up there ‘waving a stick at you’ if you messed up. All the universe is love, and love always wants to help.
Often the feeling of ‘cosmic punishment or bad karma’ is due to childhood beliefs (you’ll burn in Hell if you don’t do what we say!). Or cult-like organisations that tell you that you have to follow what they believe, to avoid punishment in the next life. No ‘karma’ is punishment’, it’s lessons of love.
To get over the ‘domino effect’ of cascading into several bad things happening at once, just don’t do anything! Just live a simple balanced life and don’t make big decisions, until you can get your mind in a calmer place. Mindfulness is good, as it avoids anything to do with religious beliefs, which can help some, but can trigger bad memories for others (often of guilt and shame, especially from a Catholic background).
Ruminating on mistakes, problems and misfortunes from the past often creates a heavy load of negativity. We may play ‘bad’ choices, ‘wrong’ actions or embarrassing moments over and over in our minds. Like the mistake you made five years ago that you won’t let go of.
When we’re stuck in a thought loop about what we’ve done in the past, we can’t fully embrace the present moment, nor move forward into the future with confidence and strength. This pattern can keep us stuck in cycles of feeling worthless, guilty or ashamed. Melli O’Brien
