Karma is the belief that a person's actions, whether kind or harmful, create energy that eventually returns to them in some form, often summarized as "what goes around comes around." It isn't limited to one lifetime in most spiritual traditions; unresolved karma is often described as carrying forward into future lives until it's balanced out.

In a reading, karma is often used to explain a recurring pattern, a difficult relationship, or a challenge that seems to repeat itself despite a person's best efforts, framing it as something to work through rather than simple bad luck.