Review: Eat, Pray, Love

One cold November night in the opening throes of what would be a traumatic and drawn-out divorce, Elizabeth Gilbert found herself curled up on the bathroom floor, praying. 

Having lived her life reaching for the kind of success American women are supposed to desire--a husband, a family, a country house, a lucrative career--she suddenly realized that despair was threatening to swallow her whole, and she called out to the Divine for guidance…and was answered, not with a burning bush or a thunder from the heavens, but by a sudden internal silence, a moment of perfect clarity, and her own authentic voice.

From this moment, a long and winding journey began--through the abyss of divorce, then onward through Italy, India, and Indonesia, and at last to herself.  Eat, Pray, Love is a memoir of that journey.

This book quite literally fell at my feet.  I was browsing through Whole Life Books here in Austin and accidentally bumped my hip into a table, causing a trade paperback to slide off and hit my shoe.  I bent to pick it up…and didn’t put it back down again for days.

Gilbert was lucky enough to have the money and resources to take an entire year to travel and "find herself." In Italy, she sought to learn about pleasure by immersing herself in the language and culture (and food); in India, she lived in an ashram and practiced yoga, mantra, and intensive prayer to learn about devotion; and in Indonesia, she studied with a Balinese shaman and along the way encountered romance, friendship, and her ultimate goal:  balance.

The book is divided into three sections, one for each country, and within each section 36 "chapters," totaling 108, the number of beads in a japa mala as well as her age when the story took place.  Reading each section I found myself craving the same things Gilbert craved:  I ate an awful lot of pasta during the Italian section, and my longing to visit the country redoubled almost painfully. 

The section that stirred me the most, however, was the section in India, for it is in those pages that Gilbert really delved deeply into spiritual exploration and devoted less time to her own day to day experiences than to the experiences of resistance, surrender, and ecstasy that led her to extend her stay at the ashram.  The lure of the monastic life has, as you know, always appealed to me, and though I doubt I will ever dedicate myself to a guru or twist myself into a yogic pretzel, I felt a great resonance with Gilbert's life in India.  One passage in particular really spoke to me:

This is what rituals are for.  We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down…And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual you're craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising…If you bring the right earnestness to your ceremony, God will provide the grace. And that is why we need God.
    So I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru's roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation.  I felt the dusty tiles under my hands.  I felt my own strength and balance…This kind of thing--a spontaneous handstand--isn't something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it.  We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to.  That's our privilege.  That’s the joy of a mortal body.  And that's why God needs us.  Because God loves to feel things through our hands.

Throughout the book Gilbert refers to the Divine as "God," rather than any other title,  not out of Christian loyalty, but because it is "the name that feels the most warm to me."  She considers all names and titles for Deity to be equal, but realizes that people have to relate to God on their own terms--it is in fact absolutely essential that they do so.  Gilbert says,

In the end, what I have come to believe about God is simple.  It’s like this--I used to have this really great dog.  She came from the pound.  She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all.  She was brown.  When people asked me, "What kind of dog is that?" I would always give the same answer: "She's a brown dog."  Similarly, when the question is raised, "What kind of God do you believe in?" my answer is easy:  "I believe in a magnificent God."

The book does have its weaknesses; for all that I appreciated the humor in the character of Richard from Texas, the sections featuring him tended to get a little pontificatory and the conversation a bit stilted, as you might expect from Gilbert trying to distill months of interaction with a dynamic character into a few pages.  Also, I found the Indonesia portion of the book far less fulfilling, perhaps because by this point in the story Gilbert was ready for love again and the focus of the story shifted from her spiritual path to her love life--not that she didn’t have the right to do so, but I found that my enjoyment of the book was based so heavily around her life with God that poor Felipe simply couldn’t compete.

Overall, however, this is a beautiful book, both hilarious and insightful (often at the same time).  I love reading the stories of people's spiritual journeys; it's one reason why, despite its flaws, Phyllis Curott's Book of Shadows remains one of my favorite books on the subject of Wicca.  Seeing our own stories reflected in those of others reminds us that, though the real work of the spirit is always done alone, we don’t walk alone on our path, even if it is a meandering one through dark and dangerous woods.  Others have walked here before, or there would be no path.  Others will follow us, and be grateful we went ahead.  I would love to see more stories like Gilbert's, and Curott's; more than simply a book of spiritual wisdom, Eat, Pray, Love is a journey that Gilbert and the reader take together, and I found myself changed by the time I reached the end, which is the beginning, which ends without ending.

Perhaps the one quote in the whole book that moved me the most ardently was this, which I leave you with on this lovely Friday morning:

I'm tired of being a skeptic, I'm irritated by spiritual prudence and I feel bored and parched by empirical debate.  I don't want to hear it anymore.  I couldn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances.  I just want God.  I want God inside me.  I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.

Comments

[Sharon]

Thank you for this review. It will certainly go on my list of Books That Must Be Read.

My own favorite in this genre so far is "Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine," by Sue Monk Kidd, because it mirrors my own journey. Although I haven't taken the time to pursue it with the fervor that she has, I can relate to it because I started from a very similar place.

[Hecate Demetersdatter]

Well, that's two more books to add to the neverending reading list. I won't live long enough to read them all, but I'll die (heh) trying.

[Aradia]

Thank you for posting the extract about how she sees god like her favourite dog. I'm gonna write that down and put it somewhere where it will make me smile. :)

[Nan]

I might have to assign this one to read despite my feelings. If I have to travel the world over to find my spiritual center, peace, etc, then I guess I never will. Funny how people who live in the projects or rural Mississippi never write about finding themselves....

I know, you will most likely throw cold tofu or something equally nasty at me the next time I see you, but such is the life of a cynic.

[Teece]

wow...i'm laughing at the synchronicity.

I read this book back in March/April, and wrote in my blog about my experience of reading it. I, like you, ate a lot of pasta during the first portion, found myself drawn emotionally to Elizabeth's desire to connect with the divine, and lost some interest in the 3rd portion when it began to focus on her love life.

I found you today by happenstance through a google search regarding gurus and the search for the divine. I enjoyed this post and was scrolling back to the top of the page to search your other posts when i saw your "book list" at the top. Turns out that I just ordered your "Body Sacred" last week and it is next on my list of must reads. Having connected with this post, I am now doubly excited to read it.