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

Liz has dreams for two nights in a row of a snake entering her room. She wakes up sweating, in a state of panic, thinking about her failed marriage and David. She knows experienced devotees at the ashram would tell her this is normal, that she is just clearing out her demons. She falls asleep again, and this time an evil dog chases her, threatening to eat her. She wakes up crying and heads to the bathroom, once again weeping on a bathroom floor. When she can’t stop crying, she takes out her notebook and writes, “I NEED YOUR HELP.” The reply comes in her own handwriting: “I’m right here. It’s OK. I love you. I will never leave you” (163).

Liz has a disastrous meditation the next morning. She avoids everyone, even Richard. He finally finds her at dinner and asks why she is “wadded up.” She says she can’t get over David. He says to give it another six months, then another six months, and eventually she will realize she was in the best place to mourn while her life was changing, there surrounded by grace. He tells her she can love more deeply than her love for David, that she can “love the whole world” (164).

When she says she thought David was her soul mate, Richard tells her that soul mates arrive as mirrors to reveal layers of yourself and then leave. Richard tells her she is wishing too much, that she wears her wishbone where her backbone should be. He tells her she has control issues, and that she needs to learn to let go. With both her husband and Richard: “Life didn’t go your way for once. And nothing pisses off a control freak more than life not goin’ her way” (166). When Liz tells him she doesn’t want him walking around inside her head anymore, he tells her to shut the door.

Liz remembers a crisis at the age of nine when she realized she would turn 10, a double-digit number, and from there she observed that life was passing by fast and that she and everyone around her would be dead soon. She wanted to put the brakes on the universe then, and now she wonders if this might be the origin of her control issues. Knowing her visit on Earth would be brief, she split herself into many Liz Gilberts to experience as much as possible, all of whom collapsed on the bathroom floor at the age of 30.

Liz remembers her Irish friend, Sean, attempting to tell his father about his spiritual discoveries and the importance of meditation for quieting the mind. His father replied that he already had a quiet mind. Liz doesn’t have a quiet mind. The Buddhists tell a story that the Buddha, after 39 days of meditation, transcended into enlightenment. He first thought it couldn’t be taught, but then went forward to teach the small minority whose eyes weren’t caked with dust. Liz, who has been driven to find inner peace, hopes she is at least mid-level dust-caked. The search for contentment runs you down: “Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time—when pursued like a bandit—will behave like one” (171). Richard tells her to let go of the drive and allow contentment to come to her. How can she do that with her hungry nature and energy? Her guru suggests: “Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water” (172).

Liz’s meditation the next morning is disrupted by brooding over her marriage and David. She remembers her psychologist friend, Deborah, who counseled Cambodian refugees. Although they had suffered terrible hardship, all they wanted to talk to her about was a love affair they can’t get over. Another time an old woman told her humans have fought over only two questions: “How much do you love me? And Who’s in charge?” (173). Liz realizes the questions of longing and control constantly agitate her in meditation. When they come up again, she tells herself not to judge herself for these thoughts. Then a voice bellows out from inside her saying that it loves her more than she can imagine. It scatters the negative thoughts in her mind; and in that silence, she begins to meditate on and with God.

Richard from Texas always knows when she is thinking about David, and he likes to wait for her to come out of meditation to see how she looks. When she can let go, she experiences the kundalini shakti that rides through her and “rumbles like a diesel engine in low gear” (175). Richard and Liz go into town. They stop by to greet the local tailor and watch women in their saris swinging sledgehammers in the hot sun. The tailor tells them the people there are used to hard labor. That is all they know, and they live short lives. A Kashmiri merchant tries to sell Liz a rug, and Richard lets him know she has neither a floor to put it on nor a wall to hang it. Liz says she has a brave heart, and Richard adds “other sterling qualities.”

The biggest obstacle for Liz at the ashram is chanting the 182 verses of the Gurugita every morning after meditation and before breakfast. It is a conversation between Parvati, the feminine embodiment of creativity, and Shiva, masculine consciousness. She, generative energy, and he, formless wisdom, dance together, “both the cause of the universe and its manifestation” (185). Liz consults with a monk, her favorite teacher in the ashram, and he tells her she doesn’t have to sing it. Since its power is purifying and burns away negative emotions, he observes it probably has a positive effect on her because she has such a strong emotional and physical reaction to it.

The next morning Liz returns to chant the Gurugita full of resolve, only to become overwhelmed with anger toward Swamiji, the reason the Gurugita is recited every morning. He was the one who laughed at her in her dream. From a wealthy family, he met a holy man in a small village near his. The experience was so profound it prompted him to travel to every holy spot in India until his middle years, always in search of a teacher who would show God to him. He met 60 saints and gurus before he finally encountered a mad sage who told him to go back to the village and study with the holy man he met as a child.

Swamiji returned home, studied with the holy man, became a guru, and started the ashram. He traveled the world and gave divine initiation—shaktipat—to hundreds or thousands of people a day. Liz’s guru is Swamiji’s most devoted student. Before she got to India, photographs of Swamiji frightened Liz; but now that she is there, she cannot get enough of him. When she curses him and shows him her failures, all he does is laugh. She feels most close to him when she struggles with the Gurugita.

One morning she oversleeps until 4:15am, minutes before the Gurugita. Thinking it a good reason to skip because her roommate has locked her in, she instead jumps out of the window, skinning her shin. She runs barefoot and bleeding to the temple. When she thinks, after just a few verses that she doesn’t want to be there, Swamiji laughs in her head and says, “That’s funny—you sure act like somebody who wants to be here” (185). She decides she needs to change her relationship with this spiritual practice and find something or someone “to whom I could devote this hymn, in order to find a place of pure love within me” (185). She lands on her nephew, Nick, whom she loves deeply and protectively, who has trouble falling asleep at night. Throughout the song, she tells him everything she wants to teach him. When it ends, she is in tears, and she realizes that the eight-year-old boy she intended to help has carried her through.