Oldie but goodie: The muddy cup, the cleaning the house with dirt metaphor 🧼

This doesn’t go as deep or provide as creative of a perspective as a lot of the things I like to write about, but I find it so useful that I think it’s worth sharing.

There’s a personal growth trope that things seem to get worse before they get better. If you’ve been numb relative to feeling your body, the first sensations you feel are usually very painful. When you start to set boundaries with your family, you often hurt people or seem to be more alone. Taking on new responsibility in a career suddenly shows you all that you don’t know and where your professional talents are under-developed.

There are two common metaphors for understanding this:

(1) A muddy cup: Leave it alone and the dirt settles on the bottom. The water above appears to be clear, then you shake it up and it seems like you “made it worse”. In this metaphor, awareness does the shaking, and the mud is all the shadow material you’ve been repressing, projecting, and otherwise hiding from yourself.

(2) The dirt under the rug: The room looks clean, but then you lift up the rug and are shocked by what’s underneath. Awareness is the lifting up of the rug, and the stuff underneath is all the karma you haven’t dealt with yet.

 
I think that the second metaphor is better in some ways because there’s no illusion that you’ll ever have a perfectly clean house. Stuff we haven’t dealt with, like dirt, accumulates, and every so often we’re going to want to deal with it or else our space will get lumpy, mouldy, etc. Another way to say this is that truth is infinite—we’ll always be confronting more truths and some of them will be uncomfortable. Getting rid of the illusion that we’ll ever be perfect allows us to enjoy the perfect imperfection of now, including the process of cleaning up itself.

Whatever internal mess you’re starting to see as a result of Relatefulness is probably not new—you’re becoming (more) aware of it. Sometimes the cup needs to stay still, or the rug needs to stay unswept… but when you’re ready, facing it will lead toward a cleaner, more authentic space.

With love, Jordan