Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

The American perception of yoga focuses on stretching and physical fitness. The ancient practitioners developed the stretches to prepare them for sitting hours and hours in meditation. Yoga in Sanskrit translates as “union,” the union with God through meditation. Gilbert says that one pursues the yogic path intending to overcome the flawed state of man and find contentment.

The yogis attribute human discontent to our egos, which fail to recognize our divine character. For them, every creature manifests God’s creative energy, each one is God in disguise. The guide to achieving this union with God is called a guru. The two Sanskrit syllables of guru mean “darkness” and “light.” A great yogi has achieved the “permanent state of enlightened bliss” (136). Liz remembers an evening in New York with Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk, poet, and peacemaker. He sat in silence until he drew everyone in the auditorium into his silence and each one into the discovery of his or her own silence.

David introduced Liz to her guru a month after she begged God for answers on the bathroom floor. Westerners have problems with the word guru, but in India, people do not. Liz’s New Englander skepticism and pragmatism, her intellectual heritage, have made acceptance a struggle. Now in India, she has said “yes” to her guru.

The ashram is located far outside Mumbai on a dirt road in a tiny village. It stands unique in the perfection of its gardens, temples, and meditation “caves” surrounded outside by dust and poverty. The devotees come and go from around the world.

Some locals work here as paid staff, and some are devotees. One skinny teenager fascinates Liz, always fastidiously dressed in the same dark trousers and oversized white shirt with a face “drenched with luminescence” (140). The son of a poor shopkeeper, he has been invited to stay in the ashram.

One temple in the ashram is “open to the public,” but the rest of the complex is for serious students who previously studied with this guru. The minimum stay is one month. Liz plans to stay for six weeks, then travel through India. Applicants are screened for mental and physical health, lack of addiction, financial stability, family support for their study, and ability to perform five hours a day of “selfless service.” The days begin at three o’clock in the morning and end at nine o’clock at night. Gilbert says that people come to the ashram “to discover who you really are” (142).

Liz arrives at the ashram for New Year’s Eve, the transition from 2003 to 2004. After dinner, people gather in the courtyard. The Indian women, dressed as if for a wedding, many with children in their laps, chant in “angelic singing.” At 11:30pm the tempo speeds up. They clap and dance, and Liz feels like they are drawing 2004 toward them. Finally, it is the new year.

Liz’s work assignment for several hours a day, to scrub the temple floors, is a metaphor for scrubbing clean her heart and polishing her soul. Teenagers work beside her at this task requiring energy without a high level of responsibility. She finds it easier to work than to meditate, for her “monkey mind” jumps from the distant past to the unknowable future, experiencing worry, anger, self-pity, and loneliness. She says that they call God a presence because one only finds God in the present, right here and right now. Her guru assigned her a mantra, Om Namah Sjivaya, but it doesn’t fulfill the two-fold purpose of the mantra for her: to give the mind something to do and to transport her to another state. Liz has trouble matching the syllables to her breathing.

Meditation begins at four o’clock in the morning. The students are supposed to sit for sixty minutes in silence. Liz and her mind go back and forth, talking back to each other about what she is supposed to be doing, the mind offering images of a temple, an ocean, jet skis, an island, and a river. Liz keeps repeating the mantra, but it doesn’t work. After 14 minutes, she quits in tears.

For the next 40 minutes, she tries to sit as quietly as possible. She says that when meditation is performed correctly, a bird will sit on your head thinking you are an inert object. She has not achieved this, and she watches the devotees around her enviously. Her guru once said if you permit yourself to fall apart, you will do it over and over. You must practice “staying strong.” Liz doesn’t feel strong when her “mind” and “me” keep up their relentless exchange.

Liz sits at the dinner table attempting to practice the discipline of mindful eating. Her guru always asks students about their digestion and whether they put too much food in their bodies. Gilbert says the guru has never been to Naples! The food is vegetarian, light, healthy, delicious, and served buffet style with the temptation to take second or third turns.

She sits alone when a man with a dinner tray looks for a place to sit, and she nods at him. She assumes he is new, with his cool way of walking, with “the authority of a border town sheriff, or maybe a lifelong high-rolling poker player” (152). Probably in his 50s, with giant hands, he has white hair and a white beard and wears a plaid flannel shirt over his wide shoulders. He sits down and drawls, “Man, they got mosquitoes ‘round this place big enough to rape a chicken” (152). Liz meets Richard from Texas, the only name in the book she hasn’t changed, with his permission, of course.

Richard, whose career path includes used-car salesman and soldier in Vietnam, observes the amount of food Liz eats and immediately names her “Groceries.” He met Liz’s guru through an ex-girlfriend. Ten years ago, he started to pray, always the same prayer, “Please, please, please open my heart” (153). God responded with open heart surgery. After that, he asked God to be gentle with him.

Liz asks him what to do about her meditation, and he asks her why she is judging her experience. When Liz says she argues with herself in meditation, he replies that it’s her ego “trying to make sure it stays in charge” (154). Its only job is to stay in power. He says that when Liz’s spiritual path puts her heart in charge, the ego will be out of work. He tells her not to listen to it. When she asks how to do that, he says the same way you take a toy away from a toddler. You distract him. He advises her to give her mind a better toy.

After Liz’s conversation with Richard, she speaks to her mind when she sits down for meditation and tells it not to worry, that she’s just giving it a place to rest, and that she loves it. She tries a new mantra: Ham-sa which means “I am that” in Sanskrit. It feels natural, the sound of her own breath, with Ham on the inhale and sa on the exhale. As she sits with it, thoughts come, but she doesn’t pay attention to them. She falls asleep and then awakens to feel a “soft blue electrical energy pulsing” through her body that magnifies when she tells it she believes in it (156). It scares her. A full hour has passed, and she is panting.