Meb's Summer Recommendation - After the Ecstasy, The Laundry

Jack Kornfield is a storyteller with a mystic’s heart.  When I picked up After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, I knew I’d found someone who could speak to me. I bought the book after having been invited to the White House to have lunch with Hilary Clinton (OK, I was one of many, but she was at my table). I came home to find the house in total disarray, the kids a physical and emotional mess and Bob laying on the floor, holding a tall glass with a straw like you see hospital patients using.  He had hurt his back watching the kids during the two day trip I took to Washington.  And I am sorry to say that the first thing I thought about was not that poor Bob had hurt his back, but that I had one hell of a lot of work to do to clean up after my honorary experience in Washington. Clearly, I was not enlightened.
During our Chase, I often wondered if some of the saints and these wonderful spiritual teachers we were reading about ever had a really bad day.  Did Mother Teresa ever get tired, not just of serving the poor, but of grocery shopping? Do Zen Masters pay taxes and wash their cars? Do they even have cars? I found that I could get to a place of inner harmony alone and by a beautiful ocean, but despaired that I would ever find peace throwing a party for a ten year old or reading an assigned text to my blind daughter because it was not in Braille again.  I wondered if there was any hope of living in a truly connected way in this culture, in my own community, and in my own skin.  People assume that mystics and saints live in perfect relationship to God and that those who are “enlightened” can stay that way---well I did anyway.  Jack Kornfield shares his own experience and those of many others to say that the path of the heart and one’s spiritual journey is imperfect but that peace and wholeness and inner happiness can be found in the Western world, and that the laundry might just be a way to find them.
He quotes the founder of Japanese Zen, Dogen: "The human mind has absolute freedom as its true nature."  There are thousands upon thousands of students who have practiced meditation and obtained this realization.  Do not doubt the possibilities because of the simplicity of the method.  If you can’t find the truth where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
Jack Kornfield says, “What we have no words for, we cannot understand.”   After the Ecstasy gives words to experiences and feelings we all know but don’t talk about. It’s funny, compassionate, and very, very honest.  I am reading it again for the third time. It continues to give me hope that I will figure something out about this mysterious and complicated life I am living. Meb