By Mark Hughes @ The Karma Institute

Many people have commented about our logo for The Karma Institute.  “Is there some significance, some meaning?”  Absolutely!  It represents the journey we take to get to our authentic self. What does that mean?  Each and everyone one of us has one or more inspired paths to take during our lifetime.  For some it is easier to find than others.  Some spend most of their life chasing the question, “what is my purpose?”  The answer is aligning your will with the will of your Higher Power, the Universal Energy, God. Many of us have experienced the rush from taking a risk and doing something that just seemed right, perhaps without logical reasoning.  The doors opened and everything just seemed to go right.  The light was Green.  Full speed ahead.  The Karma Institute’s Principles of Rightful Living comes when we align our will with the will of that Universal Power and we experience blissful satisfaction.  Our logo represents the two wills merging and coming to a point of awareness that leads to a moment of truth and personal glory. 

Easier said than done?  Yes.  Remember it is called a journey.  It is a process.  The process starts with developing a practice of listening to the voice within.  I think for too long there has been a discussion of how to meditate.  Countless books, audio tapes, CDs and DVDs have been dumped on the public with a promise of finding the perfect method. Meditation is simply the quieting of the mind.  There are many roads to Mecca. When you continue to search outside, you fail to do the search from within.  I profess not getting stuck on doing it right.  I suggest a routine of quiet time.  Repeated quiet time.  And then more quiet time.  At the moment you get frustrated, be quiet.  You can read books and listen to tapes on the subject for years but with the most gifted spiritual leaders, the process took time.  I would rather have you spend “quiet time” than reading and learning about “quiet time”.

Like a muscle, if you want to strengthen it, you have to exercise it.  So is the case with tapping into the natural knowing, the voice within.  With repeated practice of quiet time, you will begin to get a nudge.  Your first question will be, “is this my intuition or my ego?”  I don’t know. You won’t know.  So the only way to find that out is trusting the voice and acting on it.  Start small.  Don’t start with a career change for example.  Start with a nudge to call someone or explore an idea.  See how it develops.  Then listen again.  Be quiet.  What do you hear?  Take another baby step if you are so directed.   Be willing to take a risk- a small one at first.  The important thing is to respond to the voice within.  You have to strengthen your intuitive muscle by acting on it.  Like a friend that calls you repeatedly and leaves you a message on your voice mail, if you don’t call them back, they will stop calling.  If you don’t act on the nudge, the voice within will stop nudging. 

I have spent over twenty years in search of the elusive voice within.  Here has been the primary reason it took me so long: I ignored the scary.  It was fine if I heard what I wanted to hear but if I heard something that was scary or caused me to fear taking action, I didn’t act on it.  So I had a lot of false starts.  I’m dumber than I look.  In life, some of the most important dreams, aspirations, goals or plans come with inflated fear.  Why?  Because it is important to us and we don’t want to fail so we avoid failure by not doing it.  Crazy isn’t it?  But if we hear that we are suppose to act on Y and it is scary, we will settle for X.  X turns out to be not satisfying because it is NOT our authentic journey so we return to the meditating process and say, “hey, what’s the deal here?”  The deal is that you are not willing to have the faith and courage to absolutely follow the voice within. 

When I was in the process of losing my home due to uninsured construction defects, I told myself I had nothing to lose so I trusted the voice explicitly.  I did things my rational, reasonable mind would never have permitted.  I told my family that I didn’t expect them to understand what I was doing because I didn’t understand it myself.  I stayed the course regardless of illogical financial decisions.  There were times that I was down to no savings, nothing in my checking account, and a hand full of change in my pocket.  I went silent.  I listened.  The voice said, “keep going”.  Despite my fear, I did and I was repeatedly rewarded with the gifts of being in alignment with my Higher Power.  A friend would call me and say, “I want to pay you to…..”  Or someone would buy my trampoline off of Craigslist for $100 and it is exactly what I needed to pay the bill for the day. Now, I do not recommend others to take this course because it can be quite stressful but I share this because it tested my faith and commitment to following the voice within.  The results have been remarkable.  For the first time in my life, I feel at peace and protected by this bubble of faith that comes from knowing that my natural knowing, my intuition, my higher self, the voice within (whatever you want to call it) won’t let me down.

Is the road always paved with guaranteed flawlessness and ease?  No.  That is the challenge of truly listening and surrendering.  One must let go of their expectations and an attachment to an outcome.  That is not your decision to make.  You must trust and act and trust and act and….  The outcome will be made available to you.  I could tell story after story of my inner voice telling me to do one thing and the outcome was completely unrelated yet perfect in more ways than I could ever have imagined.

The notion of Karma is cause and effect.  Do good things and good things will happen.  Create the life you want by doing what is right.  By taking the high road, however challenging, is the right thing to do.  That is what listening to your inner voice is all about.  Taking the high road and doing what is right… what is authentic.  And that is why we advocate living your authentic self.  You learn to develop an ear for the voice within, you set yourself on the path you are suppose to take, and you live a blessed life because you are in alignment with your higher power because you are acting on it.

The Karma Institute: Living Your Authentic Journey.

By Mark Hughes, Parent & Teen Life Coach @ The Karma Institute

Today’s teenager is given greater freedoms than any other teenager that has come before them.  Most have cell phones, many of them have laptops, and almost all of them demand greater freedom but don’t want the responsibility of the consequences.  They live in a fast paced society where the dewey decimal system has been replaced with google.com.  Their lives are immediate and therefore many of their choices are based upon immediate gratification. Because they live in that world, they move at a pace that doesn’t allow them an opportunity to reflect.  Not enough time.  Gotta go!  Often this immediacy leads to really bad decisions and regrettable outcomes. As a result, parents like to ease their pain by making decisions for them thereby removing them from the process of thoughtful consideration.  As a result, they have come to take for granted their liberties and have done little to assume the responsibility for their behavior.  

The key to raising teens is empowering them to make their own decisions.  That starts with helping them to understand some basic principles of Karma, the science of cause and effect.  Karma is simply the understanding that all of the things that we do have a result that is the outcome of that which we do.  “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”  As we make decisions and engage in activities, we want to be better prepared for a higher degree of predictability with results that are more favorable.  The challenge with today’s teenager is that we, as parents, don’t give them the opportunity to learn this powerful lesson.  We allow our teens to escape the lessons of Karma by allowing them to escape their responsibility of personal decision making.  How often do we ask our children to reflect on the moral considerations of what right and wrong actions (not values) are and what consequences can occur with decisions that don’t consider the science of Karma?  The sooner our children learn the power of reflection and are able to dissect how their negative experiences were influenced by faulty decision making, the better prepared they will be for the real world once they leave home.

I know that as a parent I find it much easier to give in than to reason with my teenager’s ambition to “be on the move, entertained all the time”.   I also know when I give in it is driven most of the time by my desire for them to be happy.  None of us like it but we must be ready for the heat when we demand that they slow down and take a moment to make a sound decision on their own.  One important step you can take as a parent is to develop family guiding principles that they agree to. These are predetermined principles that are used in making sound decisions (ie safety, harming others, moral, legal, etc.)  It is extremely important that you have clearly defined principles of behavior that are mutually agreed upon. Without their “buy-in”, you have an uphill battle.  Our children want boundaries; have we clearly defined them in a collective process, together?  If the teen participates in the development of the guiding principles, they are more likely to adhere to them.

Encourage your teen to start with a foundation of family values that supports the notion, “how is this decision moving you towards our family values or moving you away from them?”  I understand that many teens could care less about establishing family values; instead, consider how you can bridge your family values with their goals and desires.  It looks like this, “by using our family values as a starting point, how does this decision move you towards your personal goals or away from them?”  If you can suggest that these family principles re-enforce the notion of Karma and will offer a greater probability of success, your teen might just listen… and begin to understand how powerful Karma can be in making sound decisions in their lives.