Laundry

"The life of our community was simple and sane, and I threw myself into it with all my love and energy. I did this with all the skill of a very strongly formed and defended personality. Deep prayer and meditation experiences sustained me for a long time. After some years I felt I could trust the community, so I rested for a breather. Around this time, one of the older sisters died. I had been close to her, and it triggered a succession of memories: the death of my twin brother at our birth, the near-death of my mother, the distance, hatred, and loss of my father. I realized how split off my life had been because of my sorrow. I saw that even in the monastic community I had lived on the surface, had been running from the grief and emptiness. I finally stopped. That realization started years of healing work to find the place where the grief, the monastery, the pain of my own life, and the pain of the world could be held in the same sacred heart."

"When I came back it was as if my 12 years of experiences in India and Tibet were a dream. The memory and value of those transcendental experiences was in some way a dream challenged by the culture shock of returning to my family and to work in the West. Old patterns came back surprisingly quickly. I got irritable, confused. I wasn't taking care of my body, I worried about money, about relationship. At the worst point I feared that I was losing what I had learned. Then I realized I couldn't live in some enlightened memory. What became clear is that spiritual practice is only what you're doing now. Anything else is a fantasy."

‘A clearly enlightened person falls in the well. How is this so? After any powerful spiritual experience, there is an inevitable descent, a struggle to embody what we have seen.’ The well we fall into can be created by clinging to our experience and spiritual ideals or by holding inflated ideas about our teachers, our path, or our self. The well can be the unfinished business of our psychological and emotional life--an unwillingness to acknowledge our own shadow, to include the human needs, the pain, and the darkness that we carry, to see that we always have one foot in the dark. As bright as it is, the universe also needs us to open to its other side.”

~ From "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path"
by Jack Kornfield.

“Enlightenment does exist... Unbounded freedom and joy, oneness with the divine ... these experiences are more common than you know, and not far away.”