Undoing Karma?

If we run away from our pain in life, we are running away from something that has great potential.  In zazen pain often manifests in the emotions and in the body that is responding to those emotions, especially when those emtions are not in full awareness.  The body may be acting to mask the emotions that we don't want to look at.
 
What was prominent in today's zazen is that it is through pain and struggle that  the "best" spiritual growth comes.  Therefore, I need to accept and witness and use any discomfort or pain as a tool for concentration and focus, allowing my awareness to expand.

Awareness needs first of all to move through my karma. Karma is stuff that I have not let go of.. It is easy to let go of pleasurable situations, yet the struggle to build the "spiritual muscle" come more effectively from the pain encountered in zazen.  If I do not resist my pain,  if I accept it, and go deeply into the core of it and from there, I can release it, and expand my awareness a little more.  Undoing karma?   Possibly, but there needs to be no goal or achievement in Zen.

Makyo

I find that the Osho Zen Tarot often gives me something to focus on.  It is all stuff on the ego-mind, I recognize, but sometime the makyo involved is quite uncanny.   In Japanese Zen  the word makyo means, (ma- devlish) and (kyo - phenomenon or objective world). It is a distraction.  Little "devils" of thoughts, ideas, ambition, achievement, entertainment that tempts me out of the present moment. Tempts me out of mindfulness. Anyway, I looked at my card which was VIII Courage..  The courage of the small seed to transform into a fragile plant with all the risk that that entails.  It could be eaten or a gardener may decide that it needs to be uprooted.. Just two of many risks it would take.  

So I was looking at an 8 card. Since the age of 10, I have had a weird  connection with 8, always expecting something profound to come from it…  

Expect nothing! This is the Zen way!  Courage is needed. I have started the journey and that is it. There is no beginning and no end now. There is only the journey.  I was always on it, and became aware of it.. So therefore, there cannot be a beginning or an end.  It was always there, and I cannot now un-know what I know. Not that I would want to. The desire has been awakened. But… Desire paradoxically stands in my way. But such is the way of Zen to work out what to do with it.   I am here.. I am on the path. This is Zen, the pathless path that I have come upon through a gateless gate.