Book Club: Eat, Pray, Love: 8-9

The second book in our book club series is Eat, Pray Love. Is it a Hindu book? Not exactly, but it is very relevant to the experiences of non-Indian Hindus. The author has a Hindu guru (whose identity has been rather easily found out by those familiar with the world of Indian gurus). Julia Roberts after playing the author in the movie, claimed to have become a Hindu. So I think it will be worthwhile to examine the experiences and stories that led these women towards Hinduism…

Bead 8

Due to Gilbert’s job as a freelance writer, she is sent on a trip to Bali on a writing assignment. While there she has the opportunity to meet a ninth generation medicine man and ask him a question. This moment is the very beginning seed of the book that we are now reading. It set her on the path that would lead her eventually back to Bali.

The question she asks is:

“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.”

His advice to her includes that she should look at the world through her heart rather than through her head. Also that she worries too much. “I promise ou that you will never have any reason in your life to every worry about anything.”

This, I think, is a common problem for me and my peers. I am definitely also someone who is too focused on the mind, the head, analyzing and worrying and getting worked up over nothing. The mind is a great tool and the intellect is important, but they have to be tempered and trained. As any meditation teacher will tell you, the untrained mind is like an untamed monkey constantly running and yelling and disrupting with no peace. A mind can be trained and calmed to work for us rather than against us.

Bead 9

Here Gilbert begins to struggle with what direction to take next. She wants to find a way to return to Bali as the medicine man asked/foretold. She also wants to visit her guru’s ashram in India and learn austerity. But then she also wants to visit Italy and enjoy a culture where “pleasure and beauty are revered.”

I find her paragraph describing this conflict very important. It is a crucial question for a lot of us: What is more important? Learning to enjoy the world or learning discipline?

“All these desires seemed to be at odds with one another. Especially the Italy/India conflict. What was more important? The part of me that wanted to eat veal in Venice? Or the part of me that wanted to be waking up long before dawn int he austerity of an Ashram to begin a long day of meditation and prayer?…I’d been missing both during these last hard years, because both pleasure and devotion require a stress-free space in which to flourish and I’d been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety. As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion…well, surely there was a way to learn that trick.”

So she decides not to choose, but to do them all: Italy, India, and Indonesia.

For me personally, I don’t feel quite the same conflict. Devotion wins out hands down in my life and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I feel uncomfortable with pleasure for pleasure’s sake and never like to feel unproductive.

For that reason, I struggle with the just being part of religion. I could stand to learn to cool it with the discipline and take enjoyment in life. Not that I don’t, but it’s just in very small and simple ways.

Enlightenment isn’t something you can really force in the end. I think it does require devotion and discipline and hard work, but it also requires letting go of control and allowing one’s self to be able to be still without rushing to the next thing. Those are the skills I am still working on.

I’m not as much of a traveler as Gilbert and to me I am able to find the whole world where I am, but I know it can be helpful to go to other places in order to shake thing up within one’s self and also because different places do have different vibrations about them.

Gilbert writes: “It wasn’t so much that I wanted to thoroughly explore the countries themselves; this has been done. It was more that I wanted to thoroughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well.”

I think that’s a really worthy goal!

Gilbert’s humor continues to make the book a really enjoyable read. She certainly knows how to anticipate the things that will cause her readers to raise an eyebrow and then bring them up herself. I find that this makes her very relatable, though I know not everyone feels that way about her writing.

During this planning of a trip, Gilbert can’t actually go yet because her divorce is dragging on and on. While speaking to her friend Iva, she gets into the nature of prayer, which is something that I have also often struggled with. I’d have to say my point of view on it has always been exactly what Gilbert herself says and I find Iva’s differing perspective to be really refreshing:

I explained to Iva my personal opinions about prayer. Namely, that I don’t feel comfortable petitioning for specific things from God, because that feels to me like a kind of weakness of faith. I don’t like asking, “Will you change this or that thing in my life that’s difficult for me?” Because–who knows?–God might want me to be facing that particular challenge for a reason. Instead, I feel more comfortable praying for the courage to face whatever occurs in my life with equanimity, no matter how things turn out.

Iva listened politely, then asked, “Where’d you get that stupid idea?…Where did you get the idea you aren’t allowed to petition the universe with prayer? You are part of this universe, Liz. You’re a constituent–you have every entitlement to participate in the actions of the universe, and to let your feelings be known. So put your opinion out there. Make your case. Believe me–it will at least be taken into consideration.”

And so she petitions God to please help end her divorce, which at this point is only bringing pain and bitterness into the lives of both her and her ex-husband and everyone who loves them. When she finishes, her phone rings and she’s told that after years, her husband has finally signed the divorce papers.