The art of regaining balance

Karma – the need to rebalance energies made imbalanced through the addition of or removal (abrogation) of another’s life choices without their permission.

Sometimes the balancing a karmic debt can be very emotional and drama-filled. Because of this, it can take most of a lifetime to balance one instance of karma. Other times it can simply take a couple of astral meetings to work things out.

The amount of difficulty is driven by the age of the souls involved, and by their acceptance or reluctance to put things “right”.

In this lifetime, I had one instance where, while I was willing to put things “right”, the other person wasn’t so enthusiastic about it. [See Karma and the Essence Twin] I’ve also had one where both of us were willing and the re-establishing of balance entailed me to merely invite the person into my home. [See The Diary of Annabelle Lee for the story of what caused the karma.]

But the easiest rebalancing of all was the karma I incurred from my past as a Japanese business man, circa 1650. I was fiercely competitive, as was my main rival. But the strangest part was that we actually enjoyed the competition, and both of us thrived on it, as did our relationship. We developed a camaraderie based on our rivalry with one another and we relished the ability to shock the other with our daring. Every day we strove to find ways to steal the other’s best customers, or find another (better) way of marketing our goods.

However, as the years progressed, the competition somehow got the best of us, especially when the economy began to dip. I found a way to manipulate my competitor’s son into making a bad deal for his father’s shop, and in shame, his father killed himself. That left the company vulnerable, and I bought it, paying less than it was worth. But what I learned that day was that although I had made a great deal on a company, I had no one to share it with; I had no one to gloat with. It wasn’t the competition I had loved so much, but the friend I’d had to share it with.

In this life, I met my rival when I joined the company where he worked. We were friendly, enjoyed working on projects together, and even enjoyed the same type of humor and similar pastimes (books, music, and movies). However, there was a certain lack of trust between us that we both felt, but couldn’t seem to overcome.

In an effort to get it resolved, we both went out at lunch time and did a meditation by the nearby lake. Meeting on the astral levels, we recognized the issues immediately. Our past was getting in the way of our present, and because of what I had one then, we were both having a difficult time creating that trust that we wanted.

We met several more times and each time we recognized the changes in each other and ourselves. While I had hurt him then, I was no longer that person, just as he was no longer Aio Ito, my Japanese competitor and the man I had shamed with my manipulations.

We were both more than those people now; we had grown and changed, and in that changing we had learned. We had learned that while competition can be fun, friendship means more, much more. Winning his company from his family hadn’t been fun because he had no longer been there. The fun had come from the rivalry we shared.

It might seem an odd type of relationship to most people, but still it was a friendship. Winning wasn’t the point of it; sharing the triumphs and the defeats with each other had been the point.

Once we recognized and acknowledged the truth of all of that, we found we could trust one another again. Now we had an even stronger friendship than when we had been rivals in Japan.

We had both learned that friendship was the key, not competition, not winning, not things. No object in this world would ever be worth as much as the friendship we rediscovered and rebuilt. And it’s something that each of us should always remember, in every life we live—without friendship, no one wins.