Nature or Nurture: Karmic Resonance with Early Life Dynamics

From a one lifetime perspective, it’s easy to locate parents and the original holding environment, social culture, etc. of childhood as an origin for later dynamics in one’s life and relationships. The correlation between early life circumstances and the unconscious, and between early life circumstances and adult mental health and relationships, is a noted reality in psychological thought. I won’t say that this isn’t true, either. It is an effective map for understanding and uncovering one’s psychology. However, it’s just a fractal in a deeper storyline when you bring in the storyline of reincarnation – the Soul incarnated into a family and culture which reflected the psychodynamic environment the Soul was still in process with over a series of lifetimes. Not all Souls on the planet need reincarnation or the notion of Deep Time to consider their psychological development: we have the micro-storyline of our current ego and current incarnation through which we also process the deep self. We are given so many symbols in the micro alone. But what happens when we want to go beyond that?

When we see the Soul having a history before it comes into this life, the parents and culture no longer operate as these figures whose identities and choices imprinted a blank us — they become other soul travelers and groups of soul travelers who happen to hook into our particular psychologies and spiritual development, and us into theirs. Karma too, is an ecosystem.

I find this lens to be more empowering and agency-creating. Individuals who are concerned with how their development went awry because of early circumstances or the inherited woundings of their culture of origin may become more aware of their ability to parent and condition themselves, to consciously develop. To in turn even foster the development of the surrounding culture and world. When one is aware of what their parents or the world did to wrong them, this is only true in as much as one believes this is how reality functions. At a depth level, before this incarnation our souls and psychologies were in conversation with our to-be parents. To see oneself as a Soul who has been here before changes the playing field as to how childhood affected us or how we resonated with our childhood before we even came here in this current ego/body.

It is important to make the distinction that karma is not as simple as reward or retribution for good or bad deeds done. Karma is the gravity or level of attraction we have to certain repeating storylines from life to life.

As an example, one thing I see from time to time is a karma around warrior realities – people who have warrior karmas in their natal chart who have lives full of battles and adversity, sometimes reflected in this life in the early home life in the form of abusive or combative childhoods. Imagine the possibility of learning that you are indeed a warrior and survivor (rather than a victim), and to gaze into the question: What are you fighting for? What is your mission? What mission are you resourced to carry out because of this training?

When we take the events of our lives at face value, the dramas appear like things in of themselves. But from a depth psychology or soul perspective, these dramas are just reflectors to the Soul, waking the Soul up. From a Leo perspective, we are here to be Creators, to direct and create these dramas of our lives. To know the Soul is to stop being swept up in the dramas orchestrated by the unconscious, and to start writing and acting out the beautiful plays we have inside of us for the making. To do this though, we are assisted by being in the driver’s seat – and so it is shadow work and the soul work that empowers us to be conscious drivers.

I don’t know the answer to the question of why we have so much to work through to get to that point, except for perhaps the Neptune-Pluto sextile or that we are in the Kali Yuga (spiritual dark ages), or that this is just where we are at in terms of collective psychospiritual development. Throughout space and time, I don’t think it need always apply that we have to become lucid within the dream rather than just being lucid to start with. But this is where we are. In the cycle we are in collectively, there is some kind of haze, which we penetrate through deep self-awareness. In as long as we don’t penetrate the haze, it continues to show us stories and plays which we get lost in, and project the depths of ourselves onto. In the reality in which we are deeply self-aware, we still project the depths of ourselves onto the plays before us: except we’ve created them with our free will. Perhaps it is not the Universe as an external entity that grants us free will, but instead our very own deep Psyche being extraordinarily self-aware that grants us free will. Deep self-awareness ultimately leads to the divine within, and when the divine within is touched and known, the divine without is not threatening, not a scary unknown. Our internal and external realities are felt as one. We are not at war, the things we desire are already there, and we fit in. We exist in harmony with every unfolding moment.

(Written February 19, 2017 and lightly edited; wanted to archive here.)

~Sabrina Monarch

(Top image: Maria Svarbova)

Sabrina Monarch is a soul-centered Evolutionary Astrologer who publishes weekly astrological forecasts. She has been collecting astrological experience for over a decade. She also enjoys kundalini and ashtanga yoga, hiking and creative writing. You can subscribe to receive her weekly forecasts by email here.

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