A couple days ago I had an interesting thought.  What if we’re all just unconscious pawns of our programmed drive towards karmic resolution?

No matter what your answer might be to this question, I think you’ve gotta agree with me on one thing:  Human beings do some pretty convoluted things that don’t make any sense.

And now I state my case.

One of the funniest corrections Chris ( my partner of 25 years) ever got from Dr. Yuen happened live from New York during a seminar.  Chris was standing up there in front of 35 really neat New Yorkers with his arm outstretched and Dr. Yuen suddenly asked him this seemingly unrelated question. “Would it bother you if you were the kind of person who went around beating other people up?”

“No, ” Chris answered proudly, “I’d feel they deserved it.”

And people laughed.

“OK, OK,” Dr. Yuen said with a grin,  “I got it now…How would you feel if you were a policeman who went around beating people on the head with a stick?”

“Terrible!” Chris answered, his arm collapsing like a ton of bricks.

“Well that’s what you did, ” Dr Yuen said. “You went around beating men up with a stick.”  He paused. “And instead of looking for some man to beat you up, you’ve been looking for a woman to beat you up.”

There was silence in the room, while we all pondered Chris’ strange karmic search for a woman to beat him up.

Then Dr. Yuen stuck his head sideways around all the rows in front of me till he could see me in the last one. “How does that make you feel Laura?”

“I’ve been used,” I blurted out without thinking.

And everybody burst out laughing for a long time.

I still remember that feeling of something inexplicable leaving my body.  I’ll always remember that moment—Chris says he didn’t feel anything, but it really changed things.  NO, I’m not saying I quit beating Chris up.  We had been together for 22 years and though I had yet to hit him, I had been sorely tempted from time to time and the temptation was getting stronger.

Ever since that one seemingly tiny karmic correction from Dr. Yuen, though, I’ve never even thought about hitting me mate.  Such a model chap he’s been.

And why should I want to hit him now?  After Dr. Yuen corrected Chris for beating other men with a stick, Chris stopped looking for a woman to beat him up….which means he stopped trying to make me be a husband beater, plus he stopped flirting with crazy young women who were known to beat men up.

Someone out there tell me we’re not driven on an unconscious level by what we think we owe, or what we think is owed us.

How does that make you feel?