"It really is building up a different reality that comes from a conscious place, rather than an unconscious place," she says. "We loosen up the hold it has on us."

Barbara Sowada began a meditation practice about 15 years ago. It started as a way to deal with the stress she was experiencing in her middle-management job in health care.

"I was suffering migraines as a result of it," she says. "I was looking for some kind of relief.

Through meditation, she began to understand that she was contributing to the difficulty of her situation.

"Whatever we put into this world has an effect," she says. "In this stressful job, I was starting to see how my own perfectionistic tendencies and my quickness to anger were stirring the pot ... (I was) exacerbating the turmoil."

Sowada, who now lives in Wyoming, but visits Shoshoni every year, sometimes several times, says meditation has allowed her to see situations more clearly.

"It's like watching a movie in slow motion," she says. "I can see the (action) that will be more useful for me and the other person."

Kripananda says finding destructive patterns through meditation is different from a similar process in Western-oriented psychotherapy.

"We wouldn't analyze these, get into what caused it A why am I like this? It would be just a simple practice, recognizing there is something there that isn't helpful or necessary. These are stored very deeply in our subconscious. They reach back over a lifetime, which is why we can't understand them at all."

Sowada says karma is present in every part of life, but random things occur, as well.

"Things always have some influence of karma. It may be a very thick layer or a very thin layer," she says.

And parts of it correspond to the Christian notion that you reap what you sow.

"If you're mean to people, changes are really good that somebody is going to be mean to you," she says. "If you're kind to people, chances are that people will be kind to you. It doesn't mean that everybody will be kind to you. It just means that you're increasing the probability."

All of which means that Earl probably won't change his karma through his attempts to fix the past. But in the process, he may become gain awareness of his karmic patterns A even without a meditation practice A and that might change his karma after all. Even if what goes around doesn't come around.

By Cindy Sutter
Saturday, October 28, 2006

Every week when Earl seeks to right a past wrong on "My Name is Earl," the notion of karma gets another airing in our popular culture.

Earl's attempts to change his life make for funny television. But the show perpetuates a definition of karma A as retribution waiting to happen A that Hindus say does not reflect the complex and even elegant concept.

What then is karma, which Hindus sometime calls the universal law of cause and effect?

Swami Kripananda of the Shoshoni Yoga Retreat in Nederland says karma is the interweaving of all our deeds and thoughts in this life and in previous lives.

"The most common misunderstanding is that it's fate ... that because I run into somebody's car, I'm going to get that back," says Swami Kripananda of the Shoshoni Yoga Retreat in Nederland. But, she says, karma is way too complicated for that even to be possible. In other words, what goes around doesn't come around, at least not in a way that we are capable of understanding.

"It really has to do with the effect on us of all our actions and thoughts. We store these impressions up in our lives, everything we've done or thought or said," she says.

Kripananda describes karma as creating a groove.

"The more times we repeat certain actions, certain thoughts, we create a deeper groove inside," she says. "So the result of these actions is that we have these grooves inside that we begin to respond to and live from. The only way that is really fate is that we have to take responsibility for our actions and our thoughts and our words. Anytime we do any of these, we are creating karma."

And people can change their karma, she says.

"In each moment, we have an opportunity to choose what we do and choose what we say. We can even choose what we think."

Kripananda says that for a person to affect karma, he or she must first bring consciousness to it, generally through a meditation practice.