22 March 2017

In the dream, I am standing at the fence in my backyard and have found animals have gotten into the garbage bags which are now laying all over the yard.

Mess in a dream or as a metaphor is one way to think about how the ego works.

What do I mean by that?

It’s explained in more detail in the 19-Day Transformation Program by Richard Hastings, but basically, if you think of your True Self striving for positive goals or striving for development of excellence and if you think of the ego as being the part of our being which has a lot of fear then when fear steps in it can cause a mess for the True Self.

When a person is just starting out with transformation work then it can take a lot of time and effort to identify the fears or anxieties and to work through them so that they cannot interfere with progress anymore. In time, it becomes easier to spot your own patterns and tendencies and then ego messes not only get easier and easier to clean up, eventually the ego stops making them at all.

So for me to dream of a mess in my backyard is a symbol of an old ego pattern but in this case I have done a significant amount of work on this issue so the mess is no big deal. In fact, a part of me now gets excited when an opportunity to do some work with a mess shows up.

It means there’s some learning to do and some application of new and old skills.

In the past, when I saw a mess I would have felt so afraid but now when I see it, I feel excited.

When I reflect on the mess and the work involved in cleaning it up I feel grateful at the opportunity and have enthusiasm for the discoveries ahead.