Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
—c. g. jung
Clearing the Ground:
Cleaning Up the Junk
Anyone who chooses to tend the soul’s garden may realize that it’s time to change and that the big changes begin within. The focus on problems moves from “out there” and a desire to blame others to a deep inquiry about how the landscape of one’s own mind, heart, and emotions contributes to creating the outer conditions. In India I heard a saying that the path of material pursuits is sweet in the beginning and bitter in the end, while the spiritual path can be bitter in the beginning and sweet in the end. Cleaning up the inner landscape is hard work! But nothing rivals the harvest of peace and contentment it brings.
Working with dreams speeds up the process of spiritual growth. Dreams act like inner films created by the soul-Self where we can watch ourselves and others from a different perspective and discover our shadow side. Like most people, I resist suggestions about ways to modify my behavior when they come from others. But when the scenes come from that cherished soul-Self, the inner gardener, who is filled with loving and kind intentions, dreams often take on deep meaning. The first in a series of dreams arrived to reveal the process.
A beautiful small tree and some packets of seeds sit by a garden fence ready for planting. But the garden is stacked with junk. The fence around it falls apart. The trash stands high and imposing. A woman begins to clear the area and toss the mess into a bin to take it away and prepare the space for planting. She examines the items and identifies old tin cans, jars, and buried tin boxes. She carefully opens the cans and empties them into a compost pile, then tosses the cans into a bin to cart away. Instead of food, the cans contain anger, grudges, greed, and much more. When it looks like a large part of the stuff is gone, more junk surfaces. It seems the work will never end. The space appears dark and in need of sunlight and much attention. The small tree and new seeds desperately need a clear, clean space to grow or they will not take root.
I woke up troubled. I’d spent the day before repotting laurel roses and camellias for the terrace. I loved planting and getting my hands in the earth, so the inner gardener, my soul-Self, chose the symbolic language of gardens to speak to me. Up to me to figure out the meaning. Poor woman! I thought as I reflected on the dream. How could she have so much junk? I’m glad that’s not me, I thought. And then I realized that is me. The scene represented an image of my inner life crammed with junk! I felt miserable and wanted to cry. I don’t have so much trash to clean up, I protested. It can’t be true. But without the demands of corporate travel and minute-by-minute reports, I couldn’t deny it.
Sitting alone in the quiet I admitted that maybe my inner garden required some tidying up before seeds of intuition and a tree of life might take root and grow well. Some junk, like co-dependency, neediness, and whining, had been useful as a child or a young adult. Those behaviors might have helped me to get through tough times and evoke a little pity from family and friends, but now they only sapped energy and kept new, healthy seeds from growing. As an executive, I’d spent so much time working on business objectives and making money that I’d totally ignored the existence of my inner life. The dream added another dimension to the deepening dialogue with my soul-Self, my inner gardener.
I really wanted to ignore the junk and leave the cans closed, but I also wanted to plant good seeds for a better life. The dream intended to help. As I sat on the terrace overlooking the port of Antibes and sipped coffee, I pondered its meaning while the gulls flapped and squawked overhead. I don’t like this dream, I thought. But it revealed what needs to be cleared out so that new things can grow. The decaying stuff left behind could serve as compost to nurture the secret garden. I decided to do the work, look at the waste, and embrace my dream life. Then the dreams came fast and furious, revealing every last piece of junk I needed to get rid of. It resulted in so much work to do that I had a hard time keeping up. Maybe my dreams can really help, I thought. I committed to working with them and paid full attention.
The work of clearing arrived in dream assignments, and my sleep time turned into night school. A pen and notebook waited beside the bed, and the dreams woke me three or four times a night. I’d wake up, write them down, and go back to sleep. Each morning I reviewed the images, pondered what they meant, and worked to apply anything I understood. This became exciting, exhilarating, and meaningful work as the subtle contact with my Self, my wise inner gardener, blossomed into a real relationship of teacher-student.
Fear or Flower?
The junk dreams revealed the work to do—forgive people I held grudges against; face fears; stop whining and playing the victim; let go of anger, co-dependency, and addiction to work and coffee. If I cleared away the inner trash from my secret garden during the daytime by being kind, forgiving, and grateful, at night I’d dream of huge trees blossoming with flowers the size of dinner plates. If I fell back into old habits and patterns, I’d find a tree at the heart of my garden withering and in urgent need of care.
Fear appeared like a huge foreboding animal on the loose in the garden. That animal of irrational, uncontrollable dread lurked in corners and under hedges in my deepest psyche, and pursued me until I felt overwhelmed with anxiety and worry. That beast represented fear of ridicule, fear of making a mistake, fear of the end of the world, and especially fear of dying. They all filled my secret garden and killed its newly growing sprouts. I didn’t know how to face it or combat that dark animal because it appeared so huge and vague. I felt I should be terrified, but of what?
As a child with a deeply spiritual nature, my introduction to spiritual matters came at a wood-paneled country church with a narrow spire. The pastors instilled fear as they described a story in which all people are sinners marred by a fall from grace and expulsion from the garden. Life led to inevitable hell, unless you lived exactly as they prescribed. But stories from other traditions spoke of the beginning of humanity as an act of love and joyful creation where the Divine yearned for companionship and we return to a conscious awareness of this oneness. “I am One and I want to be many,” say the Upanishads.
For some of the pastors in the small church, however, interest in spiritual life could only be motivated by inciting fear and anxiety. “Be saved NOW! Because if you die in an auto accident on your way home tonight without having confessed, you will burn in hell forever,” one of the preachers threatened. I shivered with terror and bit my nails to the quick until they burned. There’s got to be something more, something better, I thought. I knew in my heart the Divine represented love—not hate, vengeance, and fear.
But fear seems to be a natural human condition still related to our animal nature, and sometimes it’s useful. It tells us when to fight or flee and pumps that adrenaline into our blood to rush us out of harm’s way. I wanted to lose the animal of irrational fear, the one that paralyzed me and kept me hunkering in a corner in pain. It was only on my trip to India when I met a deeply spiritual teacher that I began to understand and truly tame this wild beast of fear. “The antidote to fear is love,” he said, and he showed a better way. It took many years of conscious effort and hard work to practice love, open my heart, and lose the fear. One day after months of hard inner work and many, many more garden dreams, this exhilarating dream arrived:
I stand at the garden gate. The fence is mended and it’s a spectacular, sunny Technicolor day. Light shimmers on the leaves and on the nearby waterfall. The garden grows thick with vegetables and fruits to feed and delight—fig trees, tomatoes, veggies, and roses of all colors and varieties grow in lush abundance. A pomegranate tree stands in the center thick with flowers, and if it’s well tended it will bear a huge amount of fruit.
I awoke in a state of joy, feeling the promise of accomplishment. If I kept up the inner work, the dream seemed to say, the harvest would be grand. Renovating the inner secret garden of the soul requires many hours, days, and months of concentrated effort. I knew I was set for a lighter, happier journey, but it required more work. As I ventured into the world with the newly cleared inner space, I found myself with so little junk to hide behind that I felt naked. Awareness of the sense of vulnerability struck hard on a London city street where I’d been many times before. But this time, cowering in a doorway out of the view of the crowd, I knew who I had been, but not who I was now, and I wanted to hide.
Clearing Your Inner Space
The invitation to change and grow means taking time to clear out old behaviors, old frameworks, rigid mental structures, and old ways of working that no longer serve. It may mean changing jobs or careers to find a new company that works more in harmony with your renewed sense of values or creating your own company. Or it may mean simply changing your attitudes about your current job, mate, and home. On a sheet of paper you might want to draw images of the junk in your inner garden. Do you have behaviors and attitudes you want to leave behind? Describe what they feel like. When you’re ready, shred the paper with your writing, throw it away, bury it, or find a wood-burning fireplace where it might safely burn to ash. As you tear or burn the paper, imagine the junk and the behaviors associated with it dissolving, too. Truly let go of whatever is blocking your way.
Often when we make a resolution to leave some old junk behind, like a grudge against someone or an addiction to sweets or coffee, a test comes to see if we really mean it. We may bump into the person we want to forgive or find ourselves in a situation that repeatedly challenged us in the past. This time, remember the resolution to let go of this ugly stuff and pass the test by truly changing your feelings and attitudes.
Compost: Finding Riches in the Waste
Instead of carting it off, some of the junk and trash might actually be useful as compost. In physical gardens, compost made up of kitchen waste like vegetable peels and peach skins, weeds and lawn clippings, can go back into a heap to decompose and add valuable nutrients for the soil. In secret gardens many experiences and attitudes like pride, excessive ego, and perfectionism can be put into the symbolic compost heap, where they can transform and bring vital energy to nourish art and life. Perfectionism may change into healthy attention to details, for example. What kinds of experiences might you relegate to your symbolic compost heap that will nurture your secret garden?