"Eat, Pray, Love" - The Book

I started to read 'Eat, Pray, Love' again - and I don't know why I ever managed to put it down!

The author, Elizabeth Gilbert.

If you still haven't heard about this book or this, you've either been,

a) living under a rock.

b) too busy with work and I.B.

c) completely deserted from the literary world.

Either way, it's this new phenomenon that has been touching the lives of both women and men for years. [It's also the theme of my entire blog.] In short, it's the true story of a woman who searches for happiness.

The blurb at the back of the book says this:

It's 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She's in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they're trying for a baby - and she doesn't want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion, and balance. So she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five pounds; to an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor and to Bali where a toothless medicine man or indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness begins to creep up on her.

In other words, she travels to Italy (for pure pleasure of the language, the rich and exquisite taste of food, and to bask in the beauty of the culture), India (to pursue her spiritual well-being by spending her time in an ashram, and to find enlightenment and a closeness to God), and Indonesia (to balance the two - pleasure and devotion - and perhaps find love on the way.)

It's honestly a beautiful book and definitely one of my favourites.

Here are some quotes that need to be shared:

"In desperate love, it's always like this, isn't it? In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place." Page 19.

This one's a funny one - she's describing the sad (yet sometimes true!) pathetic symptoms of what happens when we get too infatuated with our partners - and she does it by describing drug addiction!

"Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted - an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore - despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free). Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbours just to have that thing even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes.

So that's it. You have now reach infatuation's final destination - the complete and merciless devaluation of self." pg. 21.

Here, she explains faith..

"Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying, "Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding." There's a reason we refer to "leaps of faith" - because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn't. If faith were rational, it wouldn't be - by definition - faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity." pg. 184.

In this quote, Gilbert explains True Yoga.

"The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs. (As my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: "Desire is the design flaw.") The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine." pg. 128

Here, Gilbert visits Ketut Liyer, an elder medicine man in Indonesia for the first time. She asks him the question, "I want to have a lasting experience of God. Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God." And this is Ketut's response.

"Ketut said he could answer my question with a picture. He showed me a sketch he'd drawn once during meditation. It was an androgynous human figure, standing up, hands clasped in prayer. But this figure had four legs, and no head. Where the head should have been, there was only a wild foliage of ferns and flowers. There was a small, smiling face drawn over the heart. 'To find the balance you want' Ketut spoke through his translator, 'this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.'" pg. 28.

"Dante writes that God is not merely a blinding vision of glorious light, but that He is, most of all, l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle... 'The love that moves the sun and the other stars.'" pg. 48.

In this quote, Gilbert is expressing the situation with her lover David, which happened right after her divorce with her husband. It was a complicated relationship, where they were truly in love with each other but yet made each other so unhappy - just thought it shed some good insight.. and it reminded me of a certain somebody. (:

"It is this happiness, I suppose (which is really a few months old by now), that gets me to thinking upon my return to Rome that I need to do something about David. That maybe it's time for us to end our story forever. We were already separated, that was official, but there was still a window of hope left open that perhaps someday (maybe after my travels, maybe after a year apart) we could give things another try. We loved each other. That was never the question. It's just that we couldn't figure out how to stop making each other desperately, shriekingly, soul-punishingly miserable." pg. 85.

And finally, in this part of the book, she and David end things (via email though) and I just thought that his final message was really sweet.

"He agrees that yes, it's time we really said good-bye forever. He's been thinking along the same lines himself, he says. He couldn't be more gracious in his response, and he shares his own feelings of loss and regret with that high tenderness he was sometimes so achingly capable of reaching. He hopes that I know how much he adores me, beyond even his ability to find words to express it. "But we are not what the other one needs," he says. Still, he is certain that I will find great love in my life someday. He's sure of it. After all, he says, "beauty attracts beauty."" pg. 89.

And this - this is just one of my absolute favourites. It perfectly describes what happens and how it feels like when anybody gets out of a relationship.

"It's the emotional recoil that kills you, the shock of stepping off the track of a conventional lifestyle and losing all the embracing comforts that keep so many people on that track forever." pg. 99.

I'm sure that most people knew this already - but she describes it so well. And so I suppose that the only way to really get over someone, to get over that overwhelming emotion, is to learn that it is okay to be off that track and not have that same routine with that partner. I guess it really is just a matter of time and getting used to..

In this part of the book, Gilbert is explaining to Richard from Texas about David, her former love, who she can't seem to get over. This was Richard's great response. (But the problem is solved later on in another awesome quote.)

""Big deal. So you fell in love with someone. Don't you see what happened? This guy touched a place in your heart deeper than you thought you were capable of reaching, I mean you got zapped, kiddo. But that love you felt, that's just the beginning. You just got a taste of love. That's just limited little rinky-dink mortal love. Wait till you see how much more deeply you can love than that. Heck, you have the capacity to someday love the whole world. It's your destiny. Don't laugh." "I'm not laughing." I was actually crying. "And please don't laugh at me now, but I think the reason it's so hard for me to get over this guy is because I seriously believed David was my soul mate." "He probably was. Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can't let this one go. It's over. David's purpose was to shake you up, drive you out of that marriage that you needed to leave, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master and beat it. That was his job, and he did great, but now it's over. Problem is, you can't accept that this relationship had a real short shelf-life."

And then he continues for a bit longer, until she says,

"But I love him." "So love him." "But I miss him." "So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, and then drop it. You're just afraid to let go of the last bits of David because then you'll really be alone, and Liz Gilbert is scared to death of what will happen if she's really alone. But here's what you gotta understand. If you clear out all that space in your mind that you're using right now to obsess about this guy, you'll have a vacuum there, an open spot - a doorway. And guess what the universe will do with that doorway? It will rush in - God will rush in - and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed." pg. 157 - 158.

Truly one of my favourite chapters in the book...

And finally, a video that presents a good overview.