In After the Ecstasy, the Laundry–How
the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path, Dr. Jack Kornfield
offers an excellent guide for those seeking spiritual understanding
and spiritual growth. Kornfield’s writing style,
and the personal accounts of spiritual travelers in all religious
faiths provide a compelling account of incorporating experiences
of spiritual ecstasy into enlightenment. Spiritual enlightenment
or wisdom makes bearable and even enriches the nitty-gritty everyday
life in the trenches.

Kornfield relates experience after experience
of people who were perplexed and disturbed when holy moments,
extreme spiritual highs, visited their lives. Often the people
who experienced such spiritual highs were not conscious seekers
of spiritual growth. Even more disturbing than the visitation
of spiritual ecstasy was the depressed, or down time which frequently
followed these experiences of oneness with the Divine. As spiritual
seekers stayed with their faith and worked through such down times,
they became aware of the strength and meaning which spiritual
growth added to all aspects of life. Times of woe and distress
could be regarded with serenity and empathy for themselves and
for others.

Kornfield divides the book into four parts:
Preparation for the Ecstasy; The Gates of Awakening; No Enlightened
Retirement; and Awakening in the Laundry. By recounting descriptions
of growth in each of these stages,
Kornfield presents a guide for continuous growth for all spiritual
seekers. In a coherent, readable style, Kornfield adeptly weaves
together traditions from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sufi and Buddhism.
These travelers found that as attitudes towards God, themselves
and humanity change, life becomes less of an antagonistic challenge
and more one of accepting, letting go of negativity and honoring
and living in the present.

Kornfield, himself a Buddhist Monk, presents
an excellent example of growth by a simple change in attitude
when he described his experience of learning to bow to his elders
in his initial training as a Buddhist Monk. It was, he explains,
a practice of reverence and mindfulness to respectfully bow upon
encountering any elder. Elders were everyone older than he in
ordination time and in the beginning of his training, that meant
everyone else at the monastery. Kornfield worked through feelings
of injured pride by learning to recognize traits or characteristics
to respect in each person to whom he bowed, and with this recognition,
he offered genuine respect in each bow. “The true task of
spiritual life is not found in faraway places or unusual states
of consciousness, it is here in the present. Learning to live
joyfully in the present, to ‘let go’, to accept whatever comes
our way, to live in the moment, is the journey inward toward spiritual
enlightenment.”

This book provides entertaining reading which
artfully leads toward changes in concepts preventing us from acceptance
and joy. It is delightful to read, and a useful reference to be
reread over and over. Though the concepts
are simple, easily understood, they are amazingly difficult to
master.

© 2001 Wanda
Y. Johnson

Wanda Y. Johnson,
Ph.D. is a therapist in Arlington, Texas.

This review first appeared online Sept 1, 2001

Categories: General, SelfHelp

Tags: Life Problems, Wellness and Health Psychology