Karma, and Choosing The Path That Brings Growth

There is a real romance attached to special forces, especially when filtered through books and movies. Discipline, brotherhood, mastery under pressure, mythic testing of the self. But that romance usually edits out the moral residue. Carrying acts that do not align with your inner compass, wars that later reveal themselves as incoherent or unjust, and the long psychic aftermath. For someone wired like me, that dissonance would not have worked for where I needed to grow. It would have been a weight. This is not a critique of the warrior path, but a way of looking at paths and trends that society puts forth. 

The artist's path does not get the same cinematic glow, but it has its own rigor. Watching Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop is not about rebellion for its own sake. It is about pushing the limits of embodiment, expression, and presence. They are not escaping discipline. They are channeling it through a different nervous system. The same is true of great guitar players, dancers, and writers. They are testing how much truth a human body and mind can carry and still stay alive.

That is the parallel with special forces that does not get named often enough. Both are about capacity. One is romanticized because it serves power structures. The other is tolerated because it does not.

Karma matters here. Karma is not about what looks noble from the outside. It is about what pulls you and what will not leave you alone. It is about what you have to do in order to become whole. A soul does not choose the path society applauds. It selects the terrain where its work actually is.

I was born to hippie parents and exposed early to art, music, and Asian philosophy. That was both a gift and a destabilization. I was not handed a single narrative and told to stay inside it. That freedom came with existential vertigo. Other kids had rails, religion, culture, and certainty. I had openness, and openness without grounding can feel like falling.

Punk rock mattered because it gave me a reset. Not truth exactly, but a refusal of false certainty. A clearing of the table. From there, it made sense to look for something older than ideology. Primitive art, early human mark-making forms that emerged from survival and meaning-making rather than doctrine.

Wood carving held that truth. The material does not care what you believe. Grain runs where it runs. Cut against it, and you pay. Follow it, and the form emerges. Every carver anywhere in the world learns the same lessons. That is an embodied truth. That is also why Tai Chi found me. The body reveals what the mind endlessly argues about.

So when I chose art because it offered the most freedom, I would adjust that slightly. It provided the most honest constraints. Freedom inside reality, not fantasy. Wood. Breath. Movement. Health. Writing. None of these lets you delude yourself for long.

Seen from that angle, my life makes a quiet, but precise sense. Carving, health promotion, Tai Chi, writing, and community work in Taos help me translate ancient nonverbal truths into modern contexts where people are profoundly disconnected from their bodies and from meaning. I did not join the army, but I still serve. I did not go to war, but I work with suffering, discipline, and repair.

The question of where the best place for me is might not be geographic at all. It might be this. Standing at the intersection of art, movement, health, and meaning, doing the work that will not leave me alone. From a karma perspective, that is not indecision. That is alignment in motion.

It isn't romantic, but it is necessary.

Karma, the Five Bodies, and What Rock Art Taught Me Today (part two)

 

Standing in Sego Canyon today, looking at these ancient pictographs that once inspired me back in art school, something clicked. Some people like to describe these figures as “aliens,” but what if they’re early depictions of the energetic body — the subtle forms that ancient people sensed, felt, and lived with every day? When you see them in person, that possibility feels real. It’s like staring at an imprint of internal experience painted on stone.

That reflection tied directly back to what I’ve been learning about karma.

One of the most powerful lessons I’ve taken from Sadhguru is that karma doesn’t disappear through escape, not even through suicide. Ending this life only carries your unresolved patterns forward, with even more weight. In other words, the pain we avoid becomes the debt we carry. That understanding alone is a massive incentive to stay, to endure, and to grow.

I’ve felt that in my own life this year.
People have yelled at me more than they have in decades, and at times, I have resisted the lessons beneath it. I feared change. I feared losing parts of myself I had grown attached to. And when people sensed that fear, some tried to take control or twist the dynamic, especially when I stepped into the role of “teacher.”

But I now see that as karma, too.
When someone glimpses a path that could change them, and they’re not ready, they often retreat deeper into their own maze. They choose the comfort of familiar suffering instead of the vulnerability of transformation. That’s the “bartering” of karma: trading future freedom for present safety.

I’ve done it.
I’ve watched others do it.
And it’s always sad, because the maze only grows thicker.

Distractions as Karma Avoidance

Another trap: distractions.
Football games, Super Bowls, politics, endless entertainment, even worthwhile things, become escape routes when they pull us away from the deeper work. Nothing wrong with them by themselves, but if they become a substitute for introspection, then they feed karma instead of dissolving it.

Tai Chi showed me this clearly.
Once I stepped into real internal practice, I realized how many things I had used to avoid my own evolution.

Practicing Tai Chi in Sacred Places

One thing I’ve committed to is practicing Tai Chi in sacred places.
It feels like a way of accelerating the shedding of karma, like sweeping my past patterns out into the open air, allowing them to burn away under the sky and on the stone. Today, moving under the canyon walls, those pictographs watching over me, I felt a kind of alignment inside that I haven’t felt in years.

I felt unconstricted.
And that’s rare, society squeezes people into certain shapes, certain behaviors, certain expectations. I’ve long believed that this compression is one reason our country struggles with obesity: we lose our natural connection to the body. We store fear of our true selves as weight. We let norms dictate posture, breath, movement, appetite, everything.

But Sadhguru talks about something deeper, something I’m just starting to explore.

The Five Bodies: A Map for Karma and Growth

According to Sadhguru, each person has five bodies:

1. Physical Body (Annamaya Kosha)
   The flesh-and-blood shell, shaped by food, habit, movement, and environment.

2. Energy Body (Pranamaya Kosha)
   This is the field Tai Chi directly works with breath, flow, vitality, circulation, Jing/Qi.

3. Mental Body (Manomaya Kosha)
   Thoughts, memories, interpretations, a major container of karma.

4. Intellect / Discriminatory Body (Vijnanamaya Kosha)
   The part that can discern truth from illusion, the tool that cuts through the maze.

5. Bliss Body (Anandamaya Kosha)
   The quiet, inner core untouched by karma, the destination of all spiritual work.

When these bodies fall out of harmony, life becomes heavier.
When they align, transformation begins.

Tai Chi, practiced deeply and sincerely, works on all five.
And I think that’s why I felt the pull to practice here, because places like Sego Canyon remind me that humans have always known the depth of the inner world. They carved and painted what they sensed. They documented the invisible.

Seeing these pictographs today, truly seeing them, made me realize that what I’m working through isn’t new. People thousands of years ago were wrestling with the same internal bodies, the same energetic movements, the same karmic patterns.

Change is hard.
Growth is uncomfortable.
Karma demands participation.

But standing there today under the canyon walls, feeling the wind move through the gap where ancient hands once painted their inner world onto stone, I felt something like gratitude.

This trip is shedding something.
A layer, a weight, a pattern,  and more importantly, I see a way out of the maze instead of deeper into it.

Karma, Change, and the Light I Finally See (part 1)

 

2025 has been a year of extremes for me — highs, lows, and more confrontations than I’ve had since high school. Some of that was on me. I’ve been resisting the next stage of my own growth, standing in denial because change is uncomfortable, and fear can be a quiet anchor.

In Karma by Sadhguru, he writes that many people “barter their karma.” They accept negative experiences as a kind of payment for not changing. I saw myself in that. I kept choosing the pain I knew over the transformation I needed. And that resistance had consequences — tension with others, fear, hesitation. But it also gave me clarity. A light at the end of the tunnel finally appeared because I stopped running from the lesson.

I’m starting to understand that adversaries aren’t obstacles; they’re catalysts. They push you to places you wouldn’t choose, but often need. Whether someone tries to take advantage of your fear or simply reflects it back at you, the direction you turn — negative or positive — is always your own responsibility. That, to me, is the essence of karma.

Today I’m wandering through Moab with the red rock breathing around me. I practiced Tai Chi on the arches this morning, feeling every movement reconnect me to that deeper current inside. And for the first time in a long time, I feel grateful. Grateful for the lessons, the discomfort, the people who challenged me, and the clarity that followed.

Karma isn’t punishment. It’s an invitation. And I’m finally saying yes.