Karma is an emotionally intense experience which causes a sense of imbalance in the participants. The Law of Karma can most easily be described as an emotionally intense experience with someone that is then re-experienced from the perspective of the other participant(s). If you punch someone in the nose, eventually (in this or another lifetime) that person will punch you in the nose, so both of you get to experience both sides of the intensity.
 
The one unchanging rule is Karma. Part of being on the Physical Plane is having intense experiences so you can learn from them. The whole point of coming to the Physical Plane is to learn. You take on different personality traits (Overleaves), and you take on a certain imprinting and a certain role so you can learn various lessons from different perspectives. The way that you learn those lessons is by having intense experiences that teach you in a dramatic way. You do not get every Karma paid back in one lifetime. So you need many lifetimes to pay back all your Karmas. That way you grow in wisdom, learn balance and the Universe itself stays in balance. You always get both sides of the coin of every karmic experience before you are completely done with the Physical Plane.
 
When people are in Karma, they are often acting illogically and sometimes even out of character. They feel driven to do the Karma, nevertheless, and are obsessed with continuing until the end. Anyone outside of the karmic situation can tell the person in Karma what she should or could be doing differently, what might work better. Those in the Karma, however, are incapable of taking any advice to change their actions or the Karma until it is complete. Usually people play out a karmic payback right on the line, the way it was done before. It will also take about the same amount of time to replay the karma as it did to play it originally. It might speed up a little, but there is only so much karmic intensity that a human being can process and still function in her life.
 
There is no positive or negative Karma―it is all just intensity. There are, however, Karmas that the personality enjoys more and some it enjoys less. You may be intensely happy and have an intense feeling of salvation when your real estate agent finds you the perfect house in time for Christmas; the agent may experience an intense feeling of satisfaction beyond her usual joy at receiving a commission and feel strangely like she has somehow saved your life. It is still a Karma― a payback of the life where you discovered the perfect cave for her and her family which sheltered them before the winter solstice ritual and helped her family survive the winter snows. Once you and your real estate agent entered into this karmic payback, you were strangely compelled to work with each other, no matter what friends, relatives, and colleagues advised either of you to do differently.
 
On the other hand, a karmic experience might include being the victim of a drunken driver, perhaps a soldier on an alcoholic binge. That driver happens to be the same citizen you ran over in a chariot in 40 B.C. after a night carousing with fellow soldiers in your legion of the Roman army. Neither side of that intensity is usually judged "pleasant."
 
Karmas do not have to be initiated. If you see yourself heading towards a karmic situation, you can stop and decide not to pick up that karmic thread whether it is a creation or a clean-up. Once you begin a Karma, however, you will stay with it to the end. The only choices you have in Karma are putting it off until later (that life or another, if it is a payback), or not getting involved in the first place (if it is a new opportunity for Karma), or going ahead and doing it. Once you begin a Karma, you will do it all the way until the end. When you are in the middle of a Karma, you really can't judge what the end will be if it is a payback, or what exactly your Essence wants to learn from this situation if it is a creation. You will, however, notice when it is over because the intensity will be gone.
 
You cannot "forgive" Karma or let someone off from paying you back. There is, however, sometimes a certain amount of "karmic transmutation" that occurs if you are paying back an Infant Soul Karma as an Old Soul. Perhaps instead of taking a life to pay back when you were murdered, the person in karmic debt to you might save your life or somehow give you a life by giving birth to you. Both parties will still, somehow, experience the opposite side of the situation they experienced before, in order to come to balance. You can look at a Karma as rationally as possible with as much of a positive viewpoint as you can, or you can make yourself utterly miserable and let it spill over into non‑karmic areas of your life while you go through it.
 
A way of ameliorating karma is to recognize when you are in Karma and try to act within the Karma's limits instead of acting in some additionally unpleasant way. You do this by not embellishing the Karma, making it worse, struggling, or making it more difficult than it needs to be. You can make your karmic intensity as pleasant and enjoyable as possible by accepting your choice in the matter, knowing that you obviously need to have some intensity in your life in this area right now or you wouldn't be embarking on it but instead avoiding it.
 
In the beginning cycles, infant through mid‑young, you are busy creating a lot of Karma to be cleaned up in your later cycles, mid‑young through old. However, you do clean up some Karmas within the same lifetime and/or within the same cycles. Some Karmas are just particular to one lifetime or to a cycle. For example, an Infant Soul-type of Karma would focus on survival, perhaps providing or receiving food when it is scarce. You create most of your Karma within the seven levels of each soul age at the fourth level and you clean it up at sixth level. Still, you do some creation and some cleanup in every level of every cycle. On the whole, Old Souls do much more clean-up than creation, while Infant Souls do much more creation than clean‑up.