It’s probably safe to say that most of those interested in matters metaphysical have a decent number of incarnations behind them, and having a decent number of incarnations on this planet carries with it a rather unfortunate side effect of having unresolved karmic burdens. Whether the burden is having been wronged by others or, worse, oneself having wronged others, it is more than likely that we’ve done both at some point and so have to work on resolving all those knots.
There are, of course, several challenges with that. For one, figuring out the wrong that was done can take a good deal of digging. The tools exist, however, and some are more effective than others. In skilled hands, a past-life regression can not only turn up the charged situations that took up residence in our unconscious, but perhaps also resolve them in one fell swoop, by having us re-experience the original triggering event and go through the catharsis of understanding it, everyone involved, and letting it all go.
A skilled hypnotist is not always an accessible option, however, and neither is a skilled psychic (who could serve a similar role by striking a deep chord in our inner being by channeling the original trigger event). You could meditate ad nauseam or ask to be shown the answers in a dream, but these methods can take quite a various amount of time and depend completely on the strength of your determination and faith to see things through, and probably fail more often than succeed.
Yet even lacking this rather important step of finding out “the root cause”, it is still possible to resolve a karmic knot. Perhaps not all of them — possibly just the simpler ones, but it could be worth an attempt.
Usually in such cases, the most obvious symptom of a deep-rooted problem is that someone’s behavior keeps triggering you because you find it unacceptable in some shape or form — and what’s worse, being a conscious seeker, you hate yourself for your inability to accept it, even though you’re fully aware what you “must” do to resolve a karmic entanglement: you have to understand it, to forgive it (if necessary), and to accept it. It seems to never end: the behavior triggers you, you react in a strongly negative way, you hate yourself for reacting this way — and yet there is nothing you can apparently do to stop the vicious cycle.
Ah, but perhaps there is. Once you do this long enough, maybe one day you’ll get so tired of the hopelessness of it all that you’ll just sigh deeply, close your eyes, and say to yourself, “You know what, f#@% it. I don’t care that I can’t accept it. This behavior is just unacceptable to me, and I don’t give a shit that it’s wrong of me not to accept it. I don’t accept it, will never accept it, and that’s just how it is. Big fat period, and f#@% off.” (pardon the liberal sprinkling of French — I have a weakness for foreign languages).
But… after you do that, something completely unexpected happens. Lo and behold: this simple, desperate act of accepting yourself exactly as you are has the capacity to stop the endless circle. The behavior, which you just pronounced to yourself to be definitely, certifiably unacceptable, with no hope of ever getting resolved, suddenly loses its emotional charge and stops triggering anything in you even remotely similar to what it did before. As if in a mirror, accepting and forgiving yourself opens you up to accepting and forgiving the other, even without knowing what the original root cause for this resentment was God knows how many lifetimes ago.
I hesitate to call this a “technique”, because even though it works, the decision has to be absolutely authentic and sincere, from the very bottom of your heart, and if you try to treat it as a technique, it just won’t work, because the acceptance will be fake. And that, unfortunately, is the weak point of this approach, for repeating the trick with full intention and sincerity once you know how it works is very difficult — perhaps as difficult as any other method.
So I guess no matter how much effort we put into trying to wiggle our way out of doing the hard work, there are, after all, as Ra said, no “shortcuts to enlightenment”. The caterpillar still has to go through the pain of squeezing out the extra goo out of its butt before it can join the proud ranks of colorful specimens on a collector’s wall our Logos’s endless creativity.