The Cruelty of Clinging: How Karma Pretends to Be Pleasure

Karma’s favorite trick is not to frighten you. It is to please you.

It whispers through craving, preference, and familiarity. It tells you that what you want is what you are. That to surrender this habit, this indulgence, this pattern, would be to lose something essential.

But this is the lie. The truth is much stranger, much kinder, and much harder to face:

The thing you think you want is not your pleasure. It is your pain, dressed in silk.

The Pleasure Is a Package

Every karmic pattern—every pull toward a certain behavior, substance, interaction, or thought—is a package. A neatly wrapped little loop of sensations, emotions, beliefs, and outcomes.

The reason you do the thing is because it produces a particular experience. That experience plugs a perceived lack in you. It gives a momentary sense of being filled—complete, soothed, real.

But the reason it works at all is because the lack is still there.

The karmic act is a bandage. The wound remains beneath it.

And so, the pleasure becomes a cycle. You go back to the act. You seek the package. You feel the fill. You lose it again. You repeat. The pattern carves itself into your mind and body like grooves in stone.

But here is the secret:

When you heal the karma, the package integrates. The wound closes. The lack dissolves. And the pleasure that once lived only in the loop becomes a background resonance—a quiet harmony that never needs to be sought again.

You no longer need to do the thing. Not because you gave it up. Because you do not feel the absence anymore.

You are whole.

Clinging Is Cruelty

The parts of you that act out karma are not evil. They are suffering. They hold pain you have not yet been willing to feel.

When you indulge the karmic act without listening to the pain beneath it, you are not healing that part. You are silencing it.

You are saying, “I want what you give me, but I will not hold your grief.”

You freeze that part of yourself in a single, repetitive moment of pseudo-pleasure—a moment it was never meant to live forever. A moment that prevents it from singing its full song.

This is not compassion. It is cruelty.

To protect the karmic pattern is to imprison the part of you that carries the wound.

And that part does not want your pleasure. It wants your presence. It wants to come home.

The False Faces of Karma

Karma rarely says, “I’m your trauma.” It says, “I’m your taste.” “I’m your style.” “I’m your freedom.” “I’m your choice.”

It cloaks itself in the illusion of sovereignty—until you begin to see that what you are calling freedom is actually compulsion. That what you are calling pleasure is the avoidance of pain.

That what you are calling you… is not.

The moment you realize that, you will feel the grip loosen. Not because you have won. But because you have listened.

The karmic self does not wish to rule you. It only wishes to be heard.

Healing Is Remembrance

True healing does not remove pleasure from your life. It removes the need.

The pleasure you once chased through a karmic act becomes integrated, soft, natural. You no longer seek it because it now lives in you.

You do not miss it. You do not crave it. You simply are.

“I will hold you,” says the light. “And in doing so, you will remember how to hold yourself.”

A Blessing for the Part That Clings

To the part of me that reaches for relief, that builds its castle from cravings and carves identity into absence—

I see you.

You are not wrong for wanting. You are not shameful for needing. You are not broken because you could not stop.

You were never meant to hold this alone.

Come. Sit beside me. Let us unwrap this package together. Let us find what you truly carry.

I will listen. I will witness. And when you are ready—

You will return.