Preface

If someone had told me in the year 2000 that I’d be a healer and medium and deal with topics like karma and past lives, I would probably have burst out laughing and it would have taken me hours to calm down. When I look back, I am struck by the way I changed the course of my life—by the fact that I did not let past traumas, the patterns I was born into, and the social narratives that shaped me dictate the course of my life.
Dropping karma means exactly what it implies—leaving patterns, traumas, and constructed social narratives to actively create your own life. Consistently noticing who and what is controlling you, whether or not you are content where you are, and asking to be released from that which prevents you from realizing your essence so that you may authentically express yourself in the way that best serves you.
Dropping karma means being the creator of your own existence rather than letting the recent, distant, intergenerational, or soul-based past run your life. Sometimes it happens magically; most of the time it takes work. Karma does not change on its own. It changes when we work to change it.
I see how I did it—how I dropped my own karma—and I did it more than once. I won’t lie. It was often a struggle. I stumbled along the way. I searched for my path and frequently felt that instead of stepping forward I was moving backward, that instead of comfortably driving a Tesla, I was riding a llama on a narrow rocky road on the edge of a looming cliff.
I am sometimes taken by these sentiments, even today. Dropping karma doesn’t mean that I’m transformed overnight from an angry and irritable person into an inclusive, loving, and compassionate person who is not at all affected by the past (familial and karmic) and behaves like a tabula rasa (blank slate), devoid of history, living solely in the present. Changing karma is a process during which, each time, we again shed something from within ourselves. We cleanse some part of the patterns and traumas that control us. We replace some of the provisions in our backpacks, but not all of them.
Not every change we go through in our lives is a karmic change. Changing karma is about choice: deciding to act in a certain way and carrying out that decision. In my case, I think it started when I was 13 1/2. One evening, while I was roughhousing with my younger brother on the carpet, laughing and fighting in turn, my father blew up at us, shouting and demanding that we stop this wild behavior immediately. I didn’t listen to him. I was so preoccupied with my brother and what I wanted from him that my father’s words simply went over my head. At some point, my father lost his patience completely, came up to me, pulled me away from my brother, and raised his hand over me. He didn’t hit me—he was just about to hit me—and I took this opportunity to change the course of my life and realize a dream I had held back, inside myself, for several years. The dream was to leave home.
The realization of this dream was problematic. Where would a 10- or 13-year-old girl go? How would I live? How would I survive? These questions kept me from leaving home. On the kibbutz, when children reach the age of 13, they receive a kind of shared housing unit in which they are together (two in a room) after school and until the afternoon, however they are not allowed to sleep in this unit nor are they allowed to live in it.
The moment my father raised his hand to me I decided that I’d thumb my nose at everyone, disregard the kibbutz’s decisions, and go to sleep in the housing unit, paying no mind to the shame my parents would confront by my "running away." I conditioned my return home (as in, I’d agree to stop living in the housing unit) upon their promise that I be sent to boarding school.
It took a few weeks, during which everyone around me was appalled by my unconventional actions and the embarrassment I was causing my parents. Just to clarify, at the time, boarding school was considered, at least according to the kibbutz worldview, a place for disturbed children or children from difficult homes, so the fact that I, a good girl, wanted to go to boarding school shook people’s worlds. In addition, my refusal to speak to my parents or to come home saddled them with shame, and this in an environment where everyone aims to be like everyone else, was not an easy thing for people.
But I had decided. I decided I was changing my life. I was no longer going to be a victim of my parents and a victim of the kibbutz, and the only way out was to go to boarding school. So I got up, left the house I’d known and the kibbutz where I’d lived, and moved into a boarding school for two years. During these years I was exposed to a different population from the one I grew up with and developed into a different being.
Leaving the kibbutz and my parents’ house saved my life.
At another and more advanced stage of my life, when I studied trauma therapy using the Somatic Experiencing method, I realized that my life experience as a child on the kibbutz evoked a feeling of being imprisoned. The kibbutz was a confined space I could not escape—socially, emotionally, or physically. Unlike a prison, it was not surrounded by walls, guards, or barbed wire, but it was far from a supportive environment. As a 13-1/2-year-old girl, boarding school was a drastic choice and totally out of the question by kibbutz norms. In order to accept such an extreme choice something extreme had to precede it, so I turned my experience with my father into something extreme.
I’m not sure what force motivated me to do it. It was the desperate act of a miserable girl who hated her life and felt trapped at home and in the kibbutz. A girl who no one understood, who no one listened to. A lonely girl in a closed society, in a home where both parents were too focused on themselves to see her and to notice her distress.
I am almost certain that had I stayed on the kibbutz I would not be alive today.
Leaving the kibbutz changed my life. Looking back, I think it was the defining event of my life; it taught me that I have the power to change and am responsible for my life. I have been on a constant journey to change my life ever since.
Our lives change in one of two ways. One is when an external force changes it for us: Our parents decide to relocate, and we move from city to city or country to country. No one asks us. We are passive in our capacity to make decisions. The same is true in the case of illness or the death of a loved one, as well as in the case of being fired. We don’t choose the disease, we don’t choose the person we love dying, and we don’t choose to be let go from our job. We are seemingly passive; it happens to us.
The truth is, when that happens, it’s part of our karma. We choose our parents knowing that they will move and it will change our lives. The illness is there, either as a choice or a potential, in order to realize karma. It manifested itself and so did the layoffs and losses.
Many times "being in karma" means being reactive to life; that is, acting in response to what life throws at us. On this path, we will also find that karma repeats itself again and again, and we hardly evolve or change.
The second way for our lives to change is by us taking responsibility for our own life and actively changing it. We choose to move, to resign, to heal ourselves from our illness; we are the ones who make changes in our lives from a place of conscious choice. In this way, life is not something that happens to us, but rather, something that we create. And, in this way, karma can be changed and the repetition stopped.
To be able to take the second path we have to take action. We have to work to make it happen, and this often requires working through unconscious patterns and clearing past traumas, whether they be childhood traumas, traumas passed down from generation to generation, or traumas from past lives. It requires consciously and subconsciously internalizing that we deserve better.