What to do after the laundry
Posting this openly to see what comes back. I’m looking for next steps, and I suspect what I need is more next rather than another new path.
Open to anything
Background, briefly. About three years of practice. Started on a recommendation to read The Mind Illuminated and worked it with an online teacher. Went from an hour a day to three, plus a lot of assorted insight practice and a lot of hard work. Around nine months in there was a cessation. Then roughly two years of integration.
The integration work was where most of the change happened. Self-worth stopped being contingent on anything. Attachment patterns reorganized. It sounds foundational and generic written down, but it wasn’t — it was specific and it worked.
To be clear about where I think I am: I haven’t finished the path. Somewhere around second path, probably. Sensory desire hasn’t fully dropped, and while ill will is close to nonexistent, “close to” isn’t the standard — the standard is that it never arises again, ever, and that’s a high bar. So there’s real work left in that direction too.
What I’m oriented toward. I think the internal path is also external, because it’s a two-way street. Here’s the analogy I keep coming back to: if someone with an anxious attachment style spends enough time interacting with someone secure, they heal. That happens without technique. So bad conditioning isn’t only our own private problem, and neither is its undoing. I’m trying to build the capacity to be that kind of presence — not primarily as teaching, but as something structural.
Part of why: nobody needs to do the internal work the hard way. I got here fast, and that was luck plus generations of people who built the steps I walked up. I’d like to make the path shorter for people behind me. Not only emptiness — also merit, also capacity.
The actual problem: the maps run out. There’s a lot of public material on getting to awakening. There’s much less on what comes after, and almost nothing on the stage past that — taking non-duality back into difficult emotions and relationships, refining it there, returning to life, again and again. The one book I found that genuinely addresses it is After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. After that, dry.
The standard answer seems to be “you’ve done this, now go help.” And I am starting to teach a bit, and people get something from it. But just because you can help someone doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to medical school. I’m sure there’s more — more capacity if not more insight — and I can’t find who has it.
Everything also feels gated. I came from the Theravada side, where it’s often either practice-for-practice’s-sake, or awakening treated as an unreachable thing rather than something ordinary. Either way, post-awakening is not discussed.
What worked for me, in case it’s useful to anyone:
• To stream entry: shamatha, metta, and pointing-out style practices — resting with awareness.
• After: go to the heart, repeatedly. Brahmaviharas, tonglen, shadow work, psychotherapy, mirror work (literally standing there saying I love you), body image work. Find the painful parts and go in.
• Currently: nei gong, Damo Mitchell’s system. Completely different foundation, same endpoint, and it’s an entire world of its own. Recommended if you’re bored.
What I’m asking: has anyone been here? What did you do after awakening that actually went somewhere? What worked, what was a dead end, and where did you find people who’d been further?