Ep. 283 – Your Karma Defines Your Dharma

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Aug 5, 2025

Dive into a captivating discussion on how your karma influences your dharma and life's purpose. Embrace the chaos of change as an opportunity for spiritual growth, and explore the balance of aging with joy and vulnerability. Discover how life’s challenges can transform into lessons and the importance of accepting realities to foster deeper self-awareness. With reflections on mental well-being, this talk invites you to see change as a catalyst for liberation and personal evolution.

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INSIGHT

Karma Defines Dharma

Your karma is the life circumstances you are given and your dharma is how you work with those circumstances.
Transform your given conditions into a path to spiritual freedom.

INSIGHT

Cycle of Spiritual Awakening

True spiritual awakening involves moving from attachment to detachment, then returning with joy to worldly life.
This cycle celebrates union with God without clinging or separation.

ANECDOTE

Caring for Father as Practice

Ram Dass cared for his ill father initially out of obligation but evolved it into spiritual practice.
Over time his service became a natural, loving surrender and a vehicle for awakening.

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In this recording from a 1992 retreat, Ram Dass talks about dealing with change, using the stuff of your daily life to get free, and how your karma defines your dharma.

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This episode of Here and Now is from a talk Ram Dass gave during a retreat at the Omega Foundation in 1992.

Beginning with quotes from the great poets Kabir and Rumi, Ram Dass talks about how you start to work with each thing in your life as a method, as a practice. What you’ve got in life becomes what you work with, so your karma defines your dharma.
Ram Dass brings up the constant changes we’re dealing with in terms of ecology, politics, and how living in “interesting times” can be seen as a blessing instead of a curse. “In dealing with these changes that are going down,” he says, “part of the real art is to look at what is changing and see how your identification with that which changes is creating so much fear in you that you’re pushing against change.”
Continuing with his exploration of change, Ram Dass brings aging and death into the mix. He digs into dealing with changes to the body as we age, and how his work with people who are dying is really work on himself. “For me,” he says, “each act becomes part of the awakening.”

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“And what you do is you just start flipping and taking what you’re given and start to work with it. In other words, your karma defines your dharma. That means what you got is what you work with. I mean, like, my baldness is my karma. I mean, it’s my genetics, it’s everything. Now, it becomes my dharma. Now, I can use it in order to become free of being bald, or being not bald, or whatever.” – Ram Dass

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