A short spoken piece (YouTube video) by Elay Amitay Halevi that uses a water-and-soil metaphor to explain spiritual purification: the soil at the bottom of a glass represents stored trauma, darkness, and illusions that remain when consciousness is stagnant. Increasing awareness is likened to turning on a tap so the water stirs and the dirt rises and is cleared; the speaker reassures listeners that negative material surfacing is a normal and intended part of the spiritual path.
If you take a glass of water and it has all this soil at the bottom, all that soil is all your trauma, all your darkness, all these illusions, these things don't actually align with you. That soil is all stored at the bottom of the surface. If you're stagnant, if you're never moving in your consciousness or your awareness, that stuff stays at the bottom of the glass. But when you start actually shifting your consciousness, when you start actually becoming more aware, becoming more tuned to yourself, it's like you turn the tap on and the water starts pouring in, and all the dirt then can come up to the surface, cleared out. So the spiritual path is a path of purification. Please remember that when the negative stuff is coming up. You are not crazy. You're not doing it wrong. This is supposed to happen.
