By Sadhguru – Founder, Isha Foundation

Karma means action. Action means, we are talking about your action. When it comes to action, you perform action in four different ways. You can do action with your body, you can do mental action, emotional action and energy action. In all these four levels, action is constantly happening — some of it you are consciously doing, a large part of it is unconsciously happening.

The imprint of every action that you perform in these four dimensions is always left within you as a residue. These imprints gather over a period of time and they develop their own tendencies. This is like software. Unconsciously you write your own software depending upon the type of the actions you perform in your mind, in your emotion, in your body and in your energy.

Whichever kind of software you wrote, after sometime that is how this whole mechanism will function. It is not written by some other dimension or force, it is written by you. But because you did most of it unconsciously, you cannot believe you did it.

Depending upon the volume and the type of karma you have gathered or the karmic impressions that you have, you develop a certain tendency. Based on this tendency, accordingly you will move in certain directions and you will also attract certain type of life towards you. If you find that you are constantly attracting unpleasant things into your life, for no reason if you are ending up meeting all the wrong people and the wrong situations, then the first and foremost thing that you need to do is, take a backward step, sit down, withdraw into certain amount of meditativeness and see how to redraw this software that has been unconsciously written within yourself. It is most important.

This is like, suppose you are driving and your car goes out of control. What is the first thing you should do with it? You apply the brakes or do whatever to somehow stop it. When something goes out of control, the first thing is you want to stop it. That is exactly what you need to do.

If you notice that things are just going out of control for no explainable reason, the first thing that you need to do is just stop it for a while and look at what is happening with this. For a small period, just stop the process of mind, process of emotion, process of everything and you will see it will correct itself.

What we refer to as meditation is just this, that you stopped everything for a few moments a day. You don’t have to call for any Gods or do this or that. You just stop it — no need to do anything. Suddenly you find that your life works like a miracle, simply because you have stopped and given this the whole system the  necessary time to fix and redraw itself the way it wants.

[Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times best-selling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2017, the highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished service. www.ishafoundation.org]