Karma and Yoga Practice

Often mistaken as cosmic judiciary, karma in yoga is something far more personal. It speaks to the conditioning we create within ourselves, the emotional imprints that shape perception, behaviour, and ultimately our experience of reality. In this article, Christine du Fresne traces the threads of karma through Pātañjali yoga, haṭha practices, and tantric philosophy, revealing how the clearing of conditioning becomes central to our evolution toward freedom and truth.

The term karma is often used but frequently misinterpreted, treated in relation to yoga philosophy and in general conversation as a ‘throwaway’ comment.

Karma is what we call conditioning in English, and we create it. We create our psychological states when we have emotional responses we can’t let go of. This concept of karma is the basis for all the practices in Patañjali’s text, the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, using meditation as the technique to experience liberation, which entails the eradication of karma. Patañjali uses the mind to clear the mind of karmic imprints, or conditioning.

We, and only we, create our karma, our conditioning. It happens through memories, called saṃskāra in Sanskrit. Our saṃskāra (literally ‘imprint’) carry emotional imprints called vāsanā – literally ‘perfume’, the emotional colouring the memories carry. The vāsanā shape our responses to life. They can really make us suffer!

If emotional responses stay with us, if we can’t let them go as we experience them, they become lodged within the subtle body. The subtle body is that part of us which is the movement of prāṇa, or energy, along pathways we can’t see in the body. These subtle pathways (not physical channels) are called nāḍī-s.

If we hold onto any emotional responses (and just think how many emotional responses you have every day), even the ones we would describe as ‘good’, they become lodged in the subtle body as tiny, subtle crystalline structures distributed along the nāḍīs. It is in this way that the mind itself is an expression of prāṇa – it is experience crystallised.

Instead of using meditation to clear conditioning as Patañjali describes, haṭha yoga uses increased flow of prāṇa through the nāḍī-s to purify. In our āsana practice, this surging movement of prāṇa (remember that haṭha means ‘forceful’, not sun and moon) is like a river of subtle energy clearing out the vāsanā, removing impurities in the nāḍī-s. When there are impurities, karmic deposits, in the nāḍī-s, the prāṇa can’t flow freely through the suṣumṇā – the central subtle pathway.

We create and reinforce karma constantly

In meditation we have a wonderful opportunity to watch vāsanā arise, to witness and let them go. In meditation, things that come up are part of a natural process of our system attempting to heal. When vāsanā become apparent, we may allow them to dissolve. But if we engage, we are reinforcing the emotional charge associated with that memory, that saṃskāra.

We need to balance extraversion with introversion if we wish to experience our Divinity. We need to practice keeping part of our awareness inside, staying centred in the space of the heart. Not easy!

But this is what drives our evolution. If we are to evolve, we must reduce or even eliminate the conditioned, karmic responses that keep us separate from our Divine nature. This is what yoga has been about since its very beginnings.

What is the evolutionary mechanism?

The mental framework of conditioning is established with language. We create our world through stories and narratives about ourselves and other people. We talk about the things that happen to us and in our perceived world. We rely upon language to understand and categorise things.  

The classic saying, ‘the world is as you see it’, refers to how our narratives shape and colour the experiences we have – and it generally happens through language.

But some of us want stories about how things really are; we have a deep-seated need to know the nature of Reality. The Truth.

But what IS Reality, what IS Truth?

Throughout the ages, humanity has been given stories about the nature of Reality; wars have been fought over these narratives and whole cultures decimated. But which of these stories is the Truth and how would we know?

Śaiva Tantra’s view of Reality is that Śiva, Consciousness, and Śakti, the power of Consciousness are two interdependent aspects of One Divine Reality.

The Divine, Universal Consciousness, the one Truth in the tantric view, is both the transcendent source of all things and also immanent as all things. It is transcendent because it is not subject to the limitations of the universe, such as space, time and gravity. It is immanent because it permanently pervades the universe: the physical, material world, all creatures, and all of us. We are an expression of Universal Consciousness. Everything is.

How is language involved in our quest for the Truth?

The Tantras themselves, the sacred texts we study, are of course based in language. Indeed, many of them were written by authors who were fully liberated and awakened spiritual masters, giving us the most direct insight we can hope to have into the nature of Reality, that is possible through words.

The texts are important because they teach us the path to travel and centre we seek. In our practices we turn within, open to grace, and surrender our sense of doer-ship. By doing so, we learn to express Truth through our bodies and in relationship to everything else in this world – dynamically, creatively and joyfully.

Our practices lead us to the realisation that our current view of reality is incomplete in that we see the world as outside of us. We see difference where there is only Oneness, and we are ruled by conditional desire and the impulses of our conditioned self towards particular types of experiences – extraversion.

But Universal Consciousness, the Truth, is non-verbal, non-conceptual. It’s quite simply an experience that cannot be described – no matter how hard some have tried to describe it. It is beyond language.

Yes, āsana and meditation practices help to clear the karmic imprints that prevent us from knowing this Truth, but the higher learning is in holding our centre – the place not rooted in attachment, anxiety, or fear. We do that through introversion – turning within.

It’s so easy to attach to the great experiences we have in class and in life, and we can so easily become attached to the little anxieties that come up. We can become attached to stories around inability to do certain poses and then attached to our ability to do them well.

When we allow emotions to arise and dissolve, we eliminate the conditioning that keeps us bound to a limited viewpoint. With this practice, we can see things as they really are, and I am assured that it is possible to be in that state while in this body.

When we’re not anticipating results, we’re in awareness.

When we find a way to centre ourselves as we act, we aren’t bound by karma. And I’ll add here that it’s not just ‘going with the flow’ either, because if we ‘go with the flow’ we’ll probably be acting from our conditioning, since it’s the unconscious that drives us.

In our daily activities, if we are mindful and cultivating attention even while barraged by distractions, then we are developing expanded awareness and conditioning is less likely to take us over. We can develop the awareness that everything is transitory, and the only constant is Consciousness itself.  We can hold our centre, staying calm within even as we act in a physically or emotionally strong way.

Remember too, that it is through experience that Truth is revealed. Everything else is a story, a narrative. Bringing attention inwards is not simply inviting grace, it is grace. We bestow grace upon ourselves when we take ownership of our capacity to expand.  We’re both inviting the grace of Śiva and our own grace, because we are Śiva.

The power of grace gives us the capacity for introversion.  The more we bring our awareness inwards, to the place of the observer, the more our experience shifts.  When we witness as observer, vāsanā lose their hold on us.

As a wonderful Sufi saying goes: “God gives us the ingredients; we do the cooking”.

And we need to be constantly on the alert for the stories that pull us away. Because we’re so prone to distraction (think social media and our many screens) we need to be clearly focused on introversion. We’re swimming against a powerful tide of extraversion.

So let’s untangle the ‘out-there’ reality and get to know ourselves better through association with our inner light.

With gratitude to Carlos Pomeda for his gracious teachings.