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I stopped in the hospital gift shop after an appointment the other day.
It’s one of the small things that helps reset my nervous system—wandering slowly past candles, soft blankets, and the kind of small objects that seem designed to make difficult days feel a little more human.
Near the register was a sign:
KARMA
pronounced: ha ha ha.
I laughed.
Not because it was especially clever, but because the way we use the word karma now has drifted so far from its original meaning that it almost does feel like a joke.
Most people talk about karma like the universe is running a cosmic justice system. Someone hurts you, and eventually the universe steps in and delivers the punishment.
“Don’t worry,” people say. “Karma will get them.”
It’s comforting, I suppose. The idea that somewhere there is a moral accounting department keeping score.
But the longer I work with human patterns—in therapy rooms, in conversations, in my own life—the less karma looks like punishment. And the more it looks like pattern.
One of the strange things about being human is that we often repeat experiences that once hurt us.
Not intentionally.
Not consciously.
But the nervous system learns familiarity long before it learns wisdom.
If your early experiences of love involved emotional intensity—tension, conflict, dramatic repair—your body quietly learned that this is what connection feels like.
So later in life, when someone steady appears, something odd can happen.
Your mind may say:
“This person is kind.”
“This relationship is healthy.”
“This should feel good.”
But your nervous system hesitates because calm doesn’t register as familiar—intensity does.
And sometimes the pattern returns.
Not because the universe is punishing you. Not because fate is cruel. But because your system is reaching for the emotional terrain it recognizes.
We call it chemistry.
We call it bad luck.
Sometimes, we even call it karma.
From the outside, these loops can look mysterious:
Why does someone keep choosing the same type of partner?
Why do certain conflicts keep appearing in slightly different forms?
Why do people who swear they want peace keep finding themselves in chaos?
It’s easy to imagine some external force orchestrating the repetition. But very often, the explanation is simpler—the pattern hasn’t been recognized yet.
And patterns that go unrecognized have a way of quietly recreating themselves.
This is the part of karma that rarely gets discussed in everyday conversation. Not the myth of cosmic revenge, but the quiet mechanics of cause and effect playing out inside human behavior.
Habits repeat themselves.
Beliefs shape perception.
Old emotional maps guide new decisions.
And before we realize it, the same story appears again—sometimes with different characters, sometimes in a different setting— but strangely familiar.
When people say karma is real, I sometimes think what they’re actually noticing is this:
Patterns have momentum.
Karma might not be the universe keeping score. It might be the moment we finally recognize the pattern we’ve been repeating.
The hopeful part is that patterns are not permanent.
The moment recognition enters the picture, something shifts. You begin to see the structure of the loop. The familiar reactions. The emotional terrain you once mistook for inevitability.
And once you see the pattern clearly enough, you gain a new possibility that didn’t exist before.
Choice.
Not the kind of choice that comes from willpower or forcing yourself to behave differently. But the kind that comes from understanding.
When you recognize the pattern, the repetition no longer feels mysterious. And what once felt like karma begins to look more like something else entirely:
A lesson you finally learned to see.
Maybe karma isn’t the universe keeping score.
Maybe it’s the moment we recognize the story we’ve been repeating—and realize we don’t have to keep living it the same way.
~
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