By Guest Blogger Yehuda Berg

There’s nothing like sitting down to a home-cooked meal with all your favorite foods laid out before you. Unfortunately, there’s nothing more tedious than standing over the sink afterward, scrubbing the pots and pans. And what happens when your favorite TV show comes on after you’ve just eaten your delicious dinner? You probably say, “I’ll clean up during the first commercial.” But you quickly grow roots into the couch and, before you know it, morning has broken and you’re rushing to get to work. Now you’ve got a sink full of caked-on pots growing mold.

As annoying as dirty dishes can be, they’re even worse when you let them sit for a while. And the longer they sit, the harder they are to clean.

This is life. Something that is potentially easy to clean up right after it happens—an unkind word to your father, a lie to your best friend, an insensitivity to your girlfriend—gets left in the “I’ll deal with it later” pile.

Our soul is like a dish. It starts out clean but every time we act without consciousness, we dirty it. The longer we leave the dirt, the more pain there is involved in cleaning it.

This week, face your dirty dishes. Remember all the instances when you didn’t clean up your mess. The energy revealed can clean your soul, but only if you admit what you’ve been doing. If you don’t admit that you’ve been disrespecting your employees, or making poor life decisions so people will like you, or blaming your failure on your parents, then you can’t get rid of that junk on your soul.

Here’s a practical exercise for facing your dirty dishes:

Go through your old emails, date book, or calendar and jog your memory. Recall those moments when you treated others poorly and did nothing about it. If it helps, jot down a list and keep it with you to remind you. Then do your best to clear the air with those people.

Of course, be realistic. Our list is probably long and our chances of remembering and getting in touch with everyone are slim. The thing is, if we can really come clean with one person, it is as though we have done it with everyone on the list.

Once you focus on who you need to deal with, take yourself through the following three-step process. You must go through all three steps if you want to truly clean the slate and prevent it from happening again.

  1. Regret – Think about the incident(s).
  2. Remorse – Imagine the pain the other person felt because of you,
  3. Resolution – Resolve to yourself that you will not react this way again.

That last step is crucial. Whatever the situation was, it was only a test. It will come back at us again. If we do these three steps correctly, we’ll get the opportunity to react but we won’t even consider it as an option.

Give this assignment a specific window or close date, and concentrate on your inner search to cleanse and forgive. Make the effort to approach others with more sympathy and acceptance, and at the very least, with human dignity.

All the best,
Yehuda

 

BIO:

A bestselling author and luminary authority on Kabbalah, Yehuda Berg is part of a long line of kabbalistic masters, recognized as “the world’s leading authority on the Kabbalah movement”  by Newsweek. A progressive voice on spirituality, Yehuda is a prolific author of more than 30 books on topics ranging from self-empowerment, depression, sex, and the Bible.  His bestsellers are The Power or Kabbalah and The 72 Names of God, which have been translated into 20 and 14 languages respectively. His daily Tune-ups are sent to more than 200,000 fans, and he contributes regularly to Huffington Post.

Yehuda lives in Los Angeles with his wife and five children.

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Tell us, is this possible to do? Can you really clean your dirty dishes once the “mold” has settled on the plates, so to speak? Is it ever too late to pick up the phone and make amends? I sometimes wrestle with this. Would love your thoughts.

xoxEDxox