The Sept 2nd 3-minute "Weekly Insight": After the Ecstasy, the Laundry (or "what is spirituality really for?")

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry (or "what is spirituality really for?")

(The September 2nd 3-minute Weekly Insight from Spirituality U.)

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

(or What is spirituality reeally for?)

I have been operating under a delusion about my spiritual life for decades. I don’t know where I got the idea, but somehow I always assumed that if I read the right spiritual books, did the right meditations, chanted the right chants, performed the right rituals, and attended the right spiritual conferences, my life would be heaven on earth. I would be happy, wealthy, healthy and partnered with a wonderful and loving spouse.  And I’dnever be depressed. 

But a series of encounters at a recent national festival woke me up to the real purpose of spirituality.

I was at the Sounds True “Wake Up Festival” in Estes Park, Colorado, back in mid-August. One afternoon I was in a breakout session led by Mark Nepo, bestselling author of The Book of Awakening. As people filtered into the room for the session, Mark (who is a cancer survivor) mentioned that the impending death of his father had forced him to deal with his mother from whom he has been estranged for over 17 years.

Several hours later, the great Buddhist thinker Jack Kornfield (author of After the Ecstasy, the Laundry) opened a keynote session by lamenting the fact that his seemingly happy marriage of 30 years had come to an end. And then the super-best-selling spiritual author Anne Lamott shared, well, let’s just say myriad problems from her personal life.

I was stunned. These three people were all seeming well-grounded, highly-successful spiritual masters. Yet, their lives seemed to contain more than their fair share of misery.

Then I got it. I realized that spirituality isn’t supposed to make your life perfect and deliriously happy. Instead spirituality is there to give you the tools you need in order to survive and even thrive when your life feels more like hell on earth than the Garden of Eden.

Spiritual reading can help you discover countless healthy ways to cope with physical, emotional, or social catastrophes. Meditation can help calm you down when your mind is racing through a seemingly endless list of impending disasters. Chanting can help give voice to both your sorrows and your joys. Attending conferences (or local groups) can help you gain strength by walking shoulder to shoulder with other pilgrims who are tip-toeing through a minefield of illness, depression and conflict.

And best of all, spiritual practices can help you get past your own miseries to help ease the suffering of others.

For more information about the real purposes of spirituality, read Jack Kornfield’s After the Ecstasy, the Laundry http://www.jackkornfield.com/2011/03/after-the-ecstacy-the-laundry/