Karma: A Yogi's Guide to Crafting Your Destiny

by Sadhguru

We act in order to express our fulfillment, not to acquire it. We act in order to celebrate our inner completeness, not to pursue it. For most people, however, this simple equation is reversed. Most people do in order to be. They act because they feel incomplete. Their action is prompted by a desire to acquire something or to enhance their identity in some way.

The problem is that civilized society regards the uninhibited expression of emotion as a sign of weakness or of lack of sophistication. The suppression can create untold havoc in the human system.

If you have love for something, you do it; if you have no love, it is better to simply desist from action. Doing something miserably or self-righteously is not a contribution to life.

How, then, are we meant to live? It is quite simple. Whether you walk or dance, work or play, cook or sing, just do it with total attention and awareness. Or else, do it with total abandon. Both ways, you are closer to creation.

As your acceptance deepens, you also move into higher and higher levels of freedom. Acceptance is freedom from the blame game, freedom from the drama of “othering,” freedom from the dance of duality.

This book seeks to whet your appetite, not satiate it for good. It seeks to explore karma, not to offer ready-made conclusions. If you find questions still churning within you at the close of this book, it means only that it is time for some yoga. For it is in the laboratory of self-experiment that every question receives its own nonverbal answer. And that is the deepest invitation at the heart of this book: an invitation to turn from reader to seeker.