After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
It's been a long time since I was first intrigued by Jack Kornfield's excellent title, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.
I'm reminded of it this morning, as I make my way back after the intensive training we did last week. Ecstasy is not precisely the right word, but it does convey the sense of being pulled strongly into another way of seeing, another way of being. Training lasted 8 days for the NLP Master Practitioners, 8 long days. As the leader of the group, I am fascinated, engaged, compelled, energized, and exhausted by the experience of nudging everyone just a little further than each would go alone.
Now I'm back at my desk, trying to make sense of paperwork, of logistics, of marketing, of the world as it is. I am driven by a new sense of purpose and distracted by a sense that there is so much left to process from the last week. Even when I sit very still, a part of my mind is whirring, whirring, whirring in the background.
It's been nearly ten years since I read Kornfield's book. As I flip through it now, I am not surprised that a number of my students have explored Buddhism. There are so many ways of opening the perceptions to find a better fit between ourselves and the world around us. There are so many ways to find that we fit after all.
And now. Maybe I need some laundry, some filing, some cleaning - simple, repetitive, grounding chores. I need to be practical and I need to rest and I need to let my mind loosen the connections it has made, come back into itself, remake itself. It is what my students are doing this week. They are separating and connecting and transferring what they learned to the places they really need it, to their lives as they live them.
After the training, the long, slow background processes of integration.
I'm reminded of it this morning, as I make my way back after the intensive training we did last week. Ecstasy is not precisely the right word, but it does convey the sense of being pulled strongly into another way of seeing, another way of being. Training lasted 8 days for the NLP Master Practitioners, 8 long days. As the leader of the group, I am fascinated, engaged, compelled, energized, and exhausted by the experience of nudging everyone just a little further than each would go alone.
Now I'm back at my desk, trying to make sense of paperwork, of logistics, of marketing, of the world as it is. I am driven by a new sense of purpose and distracted by a sense that there is so much left to process from the last week. Even when I sit very still, a part of my mind is whirring, whirring, whirring in the background.
It's been nearly ten years since I read Kornfield's book. As I flip through it now, I am not surprised that a number of my students have explored Buddhism. There are so many ways of opening the perceptions to find a better fit between ourselves and the world around us. There are so many ways to find that we fit after all.
And now. Maybe I need some laundry, some filing, some cleaning - simple, repetitive, grounding chores. I need to be practical and I need to rest and I need to let my mind loosen the connections it has made, come back into itself, remake itself. It is what my students are doing this week. They are separating and connecting and transferring what they learned to the places they really need it, to their lives as they live them.
After the training, the long, slow background processes of integration.
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