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

In the middle of her meditation one morning, she finds herself wondering where she should live at the end of her year of travel. Some places less expensive than New York would allow her to have a meditation room. Then she realizes how ridiculous it is to be meditating in India wondering where she would meditate in a home that doesn’t exist. She calls herself a “spastic fool.” She tries a new form of meditation, Vipassana, an intensive Buddhist technique that requires one to sit totally still for ten hours without a mantra.

Vipassana does not consider the notion of God and focuses instead on detachment. Liz has trouble with this because she has met spiritual seekers in pursuit of detachment who, she says, “seem to live in a state of complete emotional disconnect from other human beings” (191). She decides to sit in Vipassana-style meditation for an hour that evening, forgetting about the mosquitoes that come out at dusk in India. She determines to try it, to see if she can do it, because if she can sit through being eaten by mosquitoes, what other discomforts can she sit through—“jealousy anger, fear, disappointment, loneliness, shame, boredom” (192). She sits for two hours without slapping the mosquitoes, “disregarding the reflex.” She counted twenty mosquito bites, but within half an hour, they had all diminished. She says, “It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away” (192).

Gilbert says that in the search for God “you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult” in hope that you will find something greater than what you give up (193). The devout perform rituals diligently without assurance, in “faith,” a “belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch” (193). If we knew all the answers, belief would not be a “leap of faith,” but rather an insurance policy. Liz doesn’t want an insurance policy. She wants God “to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water” (194).

Liz says that she has become more deliberate and specific in her prayers. Even though God already knows what she needs, prayer is a relationship, and the job is half hers, asking with a clear intention. The same is true of destiny, “a play between divine grace and willful self-effort” (195). She recalls the story about the man who went to church every day and prayed to a statue of a saint to win the lottery. After months of this, the statue comes alive and in disgust tells the man to buy a lottery ticket. She can decide which lottery tickets to buy, in terms of people, sex, life, money, energy, food, and books. She can choose her words and she can choose her thoughts. Richard told her, “Groceries, you need to learn how to select your thoughts” the same way you select what to wear (196). If you admit negative thoughts exist and understand where they come from, you can dismiss them with forgiveness. It takes spiritual practice to let them go. They thrive on old habits, grudges, and familiar vignettes.

She has started being vigilant about watching her thoughts, repeating about 700 times a day: “I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore” (197). She pictures the harbor of her mind as an open bay, the only access to the island of herself. She now has stricter rules about who may enter the harbor. She says that plague ships, slave ships, and warships of thought are all turned away. Exiles, mutineers, pimps, and prostitutes are all turned away as well as cannibalistic thoughts. Missionaries are screened carefully. Her mind is a peaceful harbor, an entryway “to a fine and proud island that is only now beginning to cultivate tranquility” (197). The only thoughts that can enter her mind must abide by her new laws.

Liz has become friends with Tulsi, 17, who scrubs temple floors with her, “a teenager, a tomboy, an Indian girl, a rebel in her family, a soul who is so crazy about God that it’s almost like she’s got a schoolgirl crush on him” (198). When she turns 18, she will be a candidate for an arranged marriage. There are rules. She can’t be too old, too dark, too educated, hold a higher position than the man, or have had an affair.

Tulsi hates weddings and has already been rejected as a good candidate because her devotion to God is beyond normal and her behavior rebellious. Tulsi says she does not want to get married. She wants to roam. Liz tells her she was married once. Tulsi wonders why she was born an Indian girl. She wants to live in Hawaii.

Richard from Texas is also divorced. He speaks of his ex-wife with a fondness Liz envies, but he is not close to her. It doesn’t bother him. Liz continues her obsession with her divorce. She talks about her guilt one day with her ashram friends: Richard from Texas, the plumber/poet from New Zealand, the Irish dairy farmer, Tulsi the teenager, and Vivian, the ex-nun from South Africa. She says she must end it but doesn’t know how. The plumber/poet slips her a note to meet him after dinner. He leads her to a building she has never entered before and up a set of stairs to a rooftop that leads to a tower. He points to the tower and tells her he wants her to stay there “until it’s finished” and hands her a folded paper.

It contains “Instructions for Freedom.” She has been wanting to talk “with” her ex-husband, and she realizes she can talk “to” him. He doesn’t need to be there. The rooftop ritual works. Her husband joins her on the rooftop, just “two cool blue souls.” She discovers “if you bring the right earnestness to your homemade ceremony, God will provide the grace. And that is why we need God” (207).

Liz drives with Richard to the airport for his flight back to Austin. He tells her she looks different, like she released some of her sorrow in the ashram. He tells her she could pick it up again when she leaves, but she assures him she won’t. He says they should be grateful for the incarnation of this life this time. Next time she could be breaking rocks by the side of the road with a sledgehammer. He encourages her to move on with her life, to find a new love “because sometimes the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else” (208).

On the way back to the ashram after seeing Richard off, Liz decides that she has been talking too much and has created too busy a social life. She has two more months at the ashram and decides to enter silence and solitude. She must discipline her speech “preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth” (209). Instead of being a social bunny, she will be quiet. She will wear the badge “I am in Silence.”

The next morning when she is in the temple scrubbing the floor, a boy comes to find her with the message to report to the Seva Office. The woman at the desk tells her she has a new work detail. Rather than floor scrubber, she will be “Key Hostess.”