KarmaTube Theater · May 23, 2026

Loving Karma

A global screening and conversation

The Journey Continues

Were you moved by this film? Share what stayed with you — your reflections join a growing community of kindred spirits sitting with the same questions.

Film available to watch until May 30 · Learn about the 6-day journey

Before the Film

For the first time, KarmaTube streamed an entire feature film on Zoom — a quiet experiment in collective witnessing across continents and time zones. The two directors came on briefly, warmly, unrehearsed. Andrew Hinton joined from Portland, his children tucked into the next room. Of ServiceSpace he said: "These are the good guys. The people that give me hope when I feel overwhelmed by the world." And of the film itself: "This is very much a film about community. Best watched in community." Johnny Burke dialed in from Vietnam at 10pm, his young children audibly awake and uncontainable. He introduced them as his "little Tashies," smiled, and went on mute.

Before pressing play, the room was invited into a different quality of attention — not just watching, but noticing. Where does this make contact with you? What is bubbling up in response? "Our intention," came the framing, "is not just high-definition content, but a high-definition heart field." It turned the next 80 minutes into something more than a screening.

The Film

Loving Karma follows Lobsang Phuntsok — a former Buddhist monk who, after years away, returned to the foothills of Arunachal Pradesh to build Jhamtse Gatsal: a Garden of Love and Compassion for over 125 orphaned and abandoned children of the Monpa tribe. The film revisits this community and its children — particularly Tashi, once its most troubled resident, now its most tender caregiver — to ask whether love and compassion can truly heal even the deepest wounds. Through Lobsang's own story of abandonment and forgiveness, and the children's slow, unforced transformations, the answer the film offers is quiet but unmistakable. At the center of it all is a conviction that what was broken in us can become, with time and care, the very source of what we give.

 

 

After the Film

Three minutes of collective silence first. Then voices — from a nunnery in the Himalayas, from Colorado, from California, from the chat. JT spoke through tears of joy: "Not one piece of pain was wasted — the hurt finger, the angry villagers, every moment was shifted into how we can heal." Phurbu Tsering joined from a nunnery in Spiti Valley, watching alongside ten to fifteen young nuns. The line that stayed with her was Lobsang's: love is not something you say, love is not something you show — love is something you do. Soma, 73, said she felt suddenly, unexpectedly young: "I feel reawakened to my own childhood. And this is a huge gift for anyone."

Then Butterfly: "I came in this morning with a troubled heart. And by merely watching, I am already transformed." And from the chat, a note from Sister Marilyn — she had once met a young man, centered and compassionate, quietly extraordinary. She told him he reminded her of a film she had seen. He responded with a radiant smile: "I am a graduate of that school."

Johnny shared that after the first film, he and Andrew became Tashi's sponsors — receiving her letters for years, love hearts and misspelled names, never certain they would go back. "We got more from the community than we gave. That boost of energy has just lasted." Andrew named what the film keeps teaching him: Ram Dass's line — we're all just walking each other home. "The kids are walking Lobsang home as much as he's walking the kids home." Now a father himself: "I'm parenting them, but in a way, they're reparenting me somehow."

The call closed on a quiet arc: in Tashi and the Monk, Tashi's dreams are dark — ghosts, fear, violence. At the end of Loving Karma, she shares a dream and the room fills with laughter. An inner landscape of nightmare, turned into a global vision. Not an ending — an opening. A six-day pod was beginning the very next morning.