From a practice perspective, I’ve always thought the mechanism of kamma has 2 parts
Opportunities present themselves
We operationalise kamma by the choices we make - as such we determine what kamma will be made.
So kamma is not a process in which we are helpless. There is no way to let kamma sort out issues or determine the direction… it is how we interact with kamma generated in the past and how it becomes transformed into our present and future.
For me the trick is to see opportunity for better practice, and to generate good or ‘no’ kamma from choices and actions in the face of suffering.
This is why I was so optimistic in my initial post - it is an opportunity to understand what is making you suffer right now (shame/guilt) and to explore the “deluded” thoughts that are creating this suffering and to unravel them
It’s quite possible to start a new relationship and still put the children first. Doing anything that doesn’t put them first while they are still kids would be a problem. You might have felt drawn to renounce further relationships, but it seems that you don’t. I left my husband and father of our two children nearly forty years ago. After two years he remarried. All three of us always put the children’s needs and interests first. The result was that three adults had their needs met as well, the kids had the benefit of an additional concerned adult in their lives, and now the grandkids have an extra grandmother. Moving on (in the right direction) seems like a no-brainer to me. Karma plays out, but the theoretical models are hard to interpret, so hard that they perhaps are more use for interpreting how events have played out than for deciding how to push events forward.
