Customer Reviews

After the Ecstacy, the Laundry

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A wonderful client of mine reminded me in a recent session that I had recommended this book to him twice! Like the books I've previously reviewed for our online book club, this one is so full of wisdom I could re-read it every week and still learn from it. I am always looking for books that offer a practical focus for healing and ways to face day-to-day challenges through the lens of, hopefully, grace.

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, is by Jack Kornfield, author, meditation master, and co-founder of Spirit Rock, a meditation retreat in Marin County, California. This book is about how the modern spiritual journey unfolds. Most, if not all of you, aren't able to spend a few years sorting things out in silence on a mountaintop. The challenges of work and family, emotional pain, and our own imperfections require most of us to stick around and make a spiritual life around "real" life. In the introduction Kornfield asks, "What happens when the Zen master returns home to spouse and children? When the Christian mystic goes shopping?"

This book, through traditional tales and individual stories, shows ways to translate the excitement of discovering your spiritual path with making peace with the necessary "laundry" of our lives. "All spiritual life is preparation for transition, from one state to another, from one circumstance to another. The ability to make wise transitions is the ability to keep a beginner's mind. Change is not the enemy."

Yes, the book has a Buddhist orientation, but it also draws upon Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Sufi traditions. It's about our hearts, and how we can prepare them for a deeper experience of love and awakening. It's about truth, and the power of truth to heal and to make sense out of some of our hardest lessons. It's about acceptance of ourselves as we are. Yes, that!

So, I invite you to take this opportunity to read this funny and wise book and maybe even be willing to air that dirty laundry, openly and without judgment.

Alex
[...]

A year ago my son and I were in a terrible accident, and my son was hospitalized in Intensive Care for a month. I have spent the last 10 months in counseling and having very emotional ups and downs dealing with the aftermath. This book came highly recommended and I couldn't put it down. What a change it has made in my life! I have learned how to live my life with mindfulness and how to deal with the past and how better to cope with the pains that memories can bring. I highly recommend this book to anyone who needs some guidence in finding their inner peace!

This book helped me so much. After having made progress in not allowing the daily difficulties of life to get me down, I found out that one event still had the effort to undo it all. This book explains how the spiritual path is not linear and that it is okay to have cycles. Spiritual growth is a process. I needed to hear it is okay not to be perfect and that even Christ had to do the laundry.

The title to this review sums it all up. I read with fascination the book by Kornfield. I kept wondering if he has ever read anything by Krishnamurti!!
Kornfield seems addicted to 'authority''Masters' etc.'Practice practice practice'.'Grind grind grind';'train train train''folllow follow follow'!! Would that one could enter the gates of Paradise so easily!!If there is Paradise,it is now, not tomorrow; if there is bliss it is now, not tomorrow;So how to live in the now in the real world all the 'time'!
Kriushnamurti answers that lucidly,and emphatically destroys the notion that one needs an authority,Guru,practice,training,disciples and such like. With respect, having lived the 'teachings'in the real world as a lawyer then school teacher, and never been to a retreat or monastory, I humbly agree with the wisdom of Krishnamurti. Kornfield's book does no favours to those who wish to live a 'complete' life, though it is interesting in how not to proceed!!
The reviewer who distinguishes the spiritual and real worlds should perhaps realize that it is all one world, and is complete when the 'spiritual' and 'real'are one!!