EAT, PRAY, LOVE by Elizabeth Gilbert
I’m not one to read the Oprah book selections because she said so. However, I did feel justifiably smart and ahead-of-the-times when I had already started reading EAT, PRAY, LOVE because I saw it on my fave-o blog Trashionista and then saw that Oprah had approved it for her book club.
I could not have read it at a better time in my life. Much like the author, I found myself in a transition period in my life and looking for answers. I was actively seeking an answer for any and every question I was asking myself, but never sure where I was to ask them. As usual, books and literature tend to act as my Magic 8 ball and provide the answers just when I needed them most.
Author Elizabeth Gilbert goes looking for answers herself when she divorces at thirty-something and decides to travel to Italy, India and Indonesia. It is there she, and the reader, find the answers in the title verbs of eating, praying and loving in her effort "to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India, and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two."
Drawn to Italy by its romantic language, Gilbert learns that the culture feeds itself both literally and figuratively with food. She learns conversational Italian and aids in teaching English to her newfound Italian friends and begins her journey towards finding her God. I say her God because after reading this I have grown and strengthened my belief that everyone believes in their own personal God. Upon her divorce, she calls upon God while on her bathroom floor. It is there, her journey truly begins. But I digress.
In battling her demons of Depression, Loneliness, which she says ‘track her down" only a few days after arriving in Italy, she personifies them. Having conversations with them and addressing them as if they were people surely must make it simultaneously easier and harder to escort them from the life to which they have become accustomed and until you see the light of Happiness at the end of the dark tunnel clouded by negativity.
Gilbert writes "when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after dark times, you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until drags you face-first out of the dirt." She continues with its justification by saying, "this is not selfishness. But obligation. You were given life; it is your duty to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight." This is a good summary of her time in Italy.
In India, Gilbert, also a practitioner of yoga, enrolls in an Ashram. In layman’s terms, an Ashram is a place one goes seeking instruction in disciplined personal divinity. Yoga is the effort to experience ones’ supreme excellency personally and hold onto that experience forever. She fights to quiet her mind – a struggle I can definitely empathize with – and learn what her krishna and her focus is during her time there. Again, she confronts the demons that keep her from truly meditating and uses them to build on and create her most enlightened focus. Once its found, she works to hone it, to make it the perfect focus and realizes that it’s a continual process. One that is never truly complete; one that moves and morphs and alters with her life and one that will tell you what it senses that it needs.
Gilbert travels to Indonesia – Bali more specifically, with no particular plan in mind. Living in a hotel for a few weeks, she makes quick friends with a Balinese healer and a an ancient medicine man. The two of the, aid Gilbert in her continuing journey. While she is seemingly quiet in mind following her stint in the Ashram, there is always more to learn. The medicine man continues teaching Gilbert enhanced meditations that build on what she had accomplished in India.
The meditation of the Four Brothers I found to be most interesting and according to the medicine man rarely taught to Americans. Balinese believe that every child born is accompanied by four spiritual brothers –represented physically by the umbilical cord, the placenta, the amniotic fluid and the waxy substance that protects the baby’s skin. Parents save as much of the four elements as they can and bury it in a sacred space near the home in a coconut shell. The child is taught that these brothers who represent intelligence, friendship, strength and poetry always surround him/her and are always with him/her. They are taught to speak with their brothers and ask them for protection whenever is needed. If you call for them when you wake, they will join you; to say their names at mealtimes and you will include them in the meal and to tell them at bedtime that you are sleeping and need their protection and they will keep you safe from demons and nightmares.
Gilbert extends the happiness and joy that she finds in Bali full circle when she asks her American friends for assistance in helping the healer she has befriended. It is here that we see the true karmic mantra of getting back what is put into the universe.
EAT, PRAY, LOVE is not only a journey for the author but also for the reader. I underlined passages and made notes in the margin and discovered new ways to think about conflict, happiness and the quest for both.