In his book, “After the Ecstasy the Laundry” Jack Kornfield coined (or used) this phrase to describe the joys and challenges of the spiritual life. I was asked to contribute an article to the Bristol Buddhist Centre Newsletter about my experiences of the “laundry” that followed the “ecstasy” of ordination into the Western Buddhist Order last year. This is the full-length version of what I wrote.

For me, being ordained into the Western Buddhist Order in June 2005 was the culmination of a 10 year process which began one afternoon in June 1995 when I sat on a home-made, green painted bench at our Rivendell Retreat Centre in Sussex. It was in the middle of a short retreat with Saramati called “Touching Earth” – a retreat looking at the basics of Buddhism and the loftiest of Buddhist aspirations alongside our current-day environmental crisis and in the context of the history of western philosophy and culture(!) I loved it. It opened up and connected so many aspects of my heart-mind’s passionate interests, concerns and longings that I knew I had found, in Sangharakshita’s translation of the Dharma as explained by Saramati, the path I needed to follow. I wanted to join the Order which Sangharakshita founded because I sensed that it was a unique context in which to explore and unfold everything I had ever aspired to be and to do.

I have started there because, in a sense, this was the first ‘ecstasy” of the ordination process for me: a moment of ‘vision’ which was followed by 10 years of ‘transformation’ – working slowly towards a glimpsed possibility. * The language of striving towards a goal in our spiritual life is pretty unfashionable in many quarters of the Movement at present, but I still relate to it, albeit much more lightly than I have done in the past. It has been abhorrent to me, myself, at various points along the way, too. With the advice and support of kind, wise friends, I have learnt over and over that I have to let go of grasping after the ‘fruits’ I seek. It is no good to keep pushing and pushing and making more and more linear, directed effort to get away from where I am (in dukkha, suffering) and towards my conception of my goal, nirvana – a snuffing out of the fires of greed, hatred and delusion.

“Hatred does not cease by hatred”, says the Buddha in the Dhammapada. How many times have I heard that: Yet still I practise as though allowing myself aversion towards certain ways of being (and doing) will lead me away from hatred, delusion and greed. So a big part of the ten-year laundry load that was set in motion that afternoon at the Rivendell bench has been finding out just how many unhelpful views and approaches I need to come to terms with, purify, launder and may be even let go of.

In Penarroya des Tastatvins, the village in Spain near to our Aranya Retreat Centre site, there is a big open-air washing pool where the women used to (and some still do) gather together to do their laundry communally, side by side, chatting to their friends. I think this is an interesting image to set alongside how we practise together as a spiritual community. There isn’t an option about doing laundry – literally or psycho-spiritually – it just has to be done somehow. How much more agreeable (and sustainable and possible) it is to undertake this in the company of good friends. The ecstasy and laundry are indivisible parts of the spiritual life, as Bhante articulates so clearly in Vision and Transformation. Laundry – the work of purification and transformation – just goes on and on and on. Not in a ghastly “I’m-never-going-to-get-to-the-bottom-of-this-washing-basket” kind of way, but in the way beloved of Zen masters: that doing the laundry is all that there is and, if we approach it in the right way, that the ecstasy and laundry do not have to be separate. As Hakuin says “This very place, the Lotus Paradise.”

So what about me since the ‘ecstasy’ of ordination? Well, I loved being ordained and look back on the retreat as a two-week oasis of light and positivity in a very variable year. Becoming Satyalila, I carried with me all my samskaras (deep-rooted habit patterns). I am a bit of Bag Lady – well, we all are – in the sense that we’re carrying the “bags” of our conditioning, our deep-seated habits. It’s not that I put them down at ordination, but rather that (as I prepared for ordination) I had had the opportunity to empty them out in the company of good friends, have a good look (a sniff, even!) and learn how to tackle laundering the contents. I learnt what kind of laundry I was likely to be doing in future. I also began to learn how to carry my bags of washing gently and with kindness in such a way that they don’t trip me up too much – or that if they do, I know how to pick myself up and tackle whatever has spilled out!

So what was in my two biggest bags of washing? Well. Firstly, I have a very strong tendency to over-invest time and energy in my work (at that time in an Oxfam Bookshop). I tend to work too hard for too many hours and let it matter too much. The result of this is usually that I Get Into A State. I also share the universal longing to love and be loved by someone special and all last year was wrestling with the painful tangle of trying not to fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time.

Ordination had been a huge landmark on my horizon for almost a decade. In June 2005, it suddenly disappeared behind me like a sign-post on a road and there I was in this new country, the Order, with my bags of washing at my side. I hadn’t gone far along the road after ordination when I got tripped up by the two I’ve just mentioned. Work and tangled heart both got out of hand in a way I wasn’t anticipating and I found myself flat on my face in the mud by the end of October last year. Ten weeks off work with exhaustion were what you might describe in washing terms as the ‘soaking’ period: I lay in bed or pottered about quietly with support and visits (and some washing powder in the form of good advice!) from friends. My old demon of nihilism came visiting and I began to feel the dark, icy waters of depression lap at my ankles. Familiar states. But unlike in the past, they did not stay so long or so tenaciously. Somehow I take them less seriously and know that they will shift and change – and when I forget this, friends remind me. Since New Year I’ve been on a gentle cycle: going back to work, then finding a new, hopefully less demanding, job and letting the pain in my heart settle and fade. Of course I’m not looking forward to the next laundry cycle, whenever it comes. But it will be fine, just as the post-ordination laundry experience was fine. I know my friends in the Sangha are all about me; that we are all sharing our ecstasies and doing our laundry all the time. It’s what I signed up for.

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* “Vision” and “Transformation” are terms used by Sangharakshita to describe the first and subsequent 7 stages of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path in his book Vision and Transformation. It’s interesting to notice that Vision, which one could equate with “ecstasy”, is just the first stage and that the remaining 7 stages are all about Transformation or “laundry”!