Throughout this series we have explored Rinaanubandh as a bond between two souls — the invisible thread that connects you to your mother, your partner, your enemy, your teachers. In every episode the Rinaanubandh has been relational — between you and someone else. But there is a dimension of karmic debt that virtually no teaching addresses — and it is, in my experience after two decades of Akashic Records work, among the most fundamental and most overlooked of all. The karmic debt you carry not with another soul but with yourself. The Rinaanubandh between who your soul came here to be — and who you have allowed yourself to become.
Welcome to Episode 11 of the Rinaanubandh Series — the first episode of Month 2. Having completed the foundational teachings of Month 1, we now begin applying the understanding of karmic bonding to specific relationship dynamics — starting with the relationship that underlies every other — the one you have with your own soul.
Can You Actually Owe a Karmic Debt to Yourself?
This question challenges the conventional understanding of Rinaanubandh as an inter-soul dynamic. To answer it we need to revisit the fundamental nature of what a soul is — and what happens when a soul, lifetime after lifetime, fails to honour its own deepest truth.
In Vedic philosophy every soul incarnates with a specific dharma — a soul purpose, a unique contribution it came into this lifetime to make. This dharma is not assigned externally. It emerges from the soul’s own nature, its accumulated wisdom across all lifetimes, and the specific gifts and capacities it carries into this incarnation. When a soul lives in alignment with its dharma — expressing its authentic nature, developing its genuine capacities, fulfilling its deepest purpose — it accumulates punya, merit, across its lifetimes.
When a soul consistently abandons its dharma — suppresses its authentic nature to please others, denies its genuine capacities out of fear, lives in ways fundamentally misaligned with its deepest truth — it creates a specific kind of karmic debt. Not a debt to another soul. A debt to itself. An account of unlived potential, unexpressed truth, abandoned purpose that the soul carries forward across lifetimes until it finally summons the courage to honour what it truly is.
आत्मनो धर्मं त्यक्त्वा — ऋणी भवति स्वयम्॥” “Better is death in one’s own dharma — another’s dharma is full of danger. One who abandons their own soul’s truth — becomes indebted to themselves.” — Bhagavad Gita 3.35 with Karmic Extension
The Six Signs You Carry a Karmic Debt With Yourself
A quiet, insistent background feeling that the life you are living is not quite the life you were meant to live — not dramatic unhappiness, but a persistent sense of incompleteness that success and comfort cannot resolve.
A lifelong pattern of saying what others want to hear, choosing paths that please others, making decisions based on fear of disapproval rather than alignment with your own deepest truth.
A clear awareness of specific capacities — creative, intellectual, healing, leadership — that you have consistently suppressed or minimised despite feeling deeply called toward them across your lifetime.
A pattern of abandoning your own needs, boundaries, and values in relationships — giving yourself away so completely that you have lost a clear sense of who you actually are outside of others’ needs.
Something keeps calling — a creative pursuit, a healing path, a way of contributing that you have dismissed as impractical or unrealistic. The persistence of that calling across years and decades is the debt speaking.
A tendency to return mentally and emotionally to paths not taken — choices not made, directions not pursued — with a quality of longing that suggests the soul recognises what was left unfinished.
How a Karmic Debt With Yourself Is Created
The mechanism is not dramatic. It accumulates quietly across lifetimes through consistent choices that move away from rather than toward the soul’s authentic nature. Three specific patterns generate the most significant self-directed karmic debt.
How the Debt Accumulates Across Lifetimes
Dharma Abandonment: When a soul, across multiple lifetimes, has been shown its authentic purpose — through inspiration, through calling, through specific gifts — and has consistently chosen safety, approval, or comfort over that purpose. Each lifetime of abandonment deepens the account. The debt is not punitive — it is simply the accumulation of unexpressed soul-energy seeking expression.
Self-Betrayal Under Pressure: When a soul consistently abandons its own values, boundaries, and authentic expression under the pressure of others’ expectations, cultural conditioning, or fear of rejection. The soul that spends lifetime after lifetime being who others need it to be — rather than who it actually is — creates a profound debt of authenticity with itself.
Gifts Suppressed Out of Fear: Every soul arrives with specific gifts — capacities for healing, creating, leading, teaching, or serving that are uniquely its own. When those gifts are suppressed — out of fear of visibility, fear of failure, or a belief of unworthiness — the unexpressed energy of those gifts does not simply disappear. It accumulates as a karmic pressure that will continue building until it is finally given genuine expression.
Why This Is the Most Important Rinaanubandh to Heal
In my two decades of Akashic Records work, I have come to understand something that may be the single most practically important insight in this entire 120-episode series — the quality of every external relationship in your life is a precise reflection of the quality of the relationship you have with your own soul.
When you are in deep debt to yourself — when you have abandoned your dharma, suppressed your authentic voice, denied your gifts, and consistently betrayed your own truth — this self-betrayal creates an energetic frequency that attracts the same quality of relationship externally. The person who consistently abandons themselves attracts partners who abandon them. The person who does not value their own gifts attracts environments that do not value their contribution. The person who does not honour their own truth attracts relationships where their truth is consistently disregarded.
This is not blame — it is a description of the energetic mirror that external relationships hold up to the internal relationship between a soul and itself. Healing the karmic debt with yourself — returning to dharma, honouring your authentic voice, giving genuine expression to your gifts — does not just benefit you personally. It fundamentally transforms the quality of every external relationship in your life, because the external relationships were reflecting the internal one all along.
How to Begin Repaying the Karmic Debt You Owe Yourself
- Identify the calling you have most consistently ignored. Not the practical career choice, not the socially approved direction — the thing that keeps returning regardless of how many times you dismiss it. Name it without judgement. This is the primary marker of where your self-directed karmic debt is concentrated.
- Identify one specific way you have most consistently betrayed yourself in relationships. The boundary you never set. The need you never expressed. The authentic response you replaced with a pleasing one. This pattern is the wound that has been creating both the debt with yourself and the external mirrors of that debt in your relationships.
- Make one genuine commitment to your authentic truth that previously you would not have made. Not a grand gesture — a real, specific, sustainable commitment. One boundary enforced. One creative pursuit begun. One honest conversation had. The soul does not require dramatic transformation all at once. It requires genuine movement in the right direction.
- Practice the Ho’oponopono prayer directed at yourself. We will explore this healing practice fully in Episode 63 — but begin now by directing the four phrases inward rather than outward. Say to your own soul — “I am sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you” — for every choice that moved away from your dharma. This is the beginning of the internal forgiveness that releases self-directed karmic charge.
- Take up one gift or capacity you have suppressed and give it genuine expression. Not perfection. Not public performance. Simply genuine, private, consistent expression of a capacity that is authentically yours. Writing. Healing. Creating. Teaching. The expression of a suppressed gift generates a quality of soul-satisfaction that nothing else in the external world can provide — because it is the soul finally beginning to pay its own debt.
- The debt with yourself is the only karmic debt you can begin repaying completely unilaterally — no other soul’s cooperation is required
- Every day of genuine alignment with your dharma reduces the debt — no movement is too small to count
- The relief you feel when you finally honour what your soul has been asking for is the energetic signature of a debt beginning to be repaid
- And the transformation in your external relationships that follows genuine self-honouring is often the most startling and most rapid healing a person can experience