In her early thirties, the Elizabeth Gilbert “went through a divorce, a crushing depression,(and) a failed love.” To recover, she embarked on a year-long trip around the world, alone. Her plan: to spend four months in each of Italy (to experience pleasure), India (to explore spirituality), and Bali (to find life balance).
Eat, Pray, Love
For Canadian readers: Eat, Pray, Love

The premise of this “memoir of self-discovery” is a fascinating idea, but Gilbert moans throughout of the terribly hard times that she endured that precipitated the trip.

Give it up, Liz. Lots of women have found themselves suffering through divorce, depression & failed affairs. Many have had children in tow. Most have not had the luxury to quit their jobs & travel self-absorbedly for a year.

That being said, Gilbert does write with grace and humor and provides a fascinating chronicle of the details of her journey.

Gilbert spent her first four months in Rome doing only what would give her pleasure. Because this type of indulgence goes against the grain of traditional North American thinking, she grappled for weeks with guilt & inability to relax.

Her Italian friends, though, convinced her that she should master bel far niente – “the beauty of doing nothing”. And so she bypassed fashion, opera, cinema, fancy automobiles and even art to concentrate on only two things: eating beautiful food and speaking “as much beautiful Italian as possible”.

She spent her days walking the streets of the city, studying her index cards of Italian words, attending Italian language classes, eating with friends (including the wonderfully-named Luca Spaghetti), meeting & talking to Giovanni–a student who posted a notice to find someone to practice his English with–and buying & cooking lovely food. During this time, Liz gained “the twenty-three happiest pounds of her life”.

Gilbert had booked the second four months in an ashram in India. Here she pursued a rigorous routine that included rising every morning at 3:00 for 4:00 a.m. group meditation sessions, and spending hours each day in assigned tasks of “selfless service” (hers was to wash the temple floors) and in the meditation caves –“dark and silent basements with comfortable cushions, open all day and night, to be used only for meditation practice.”

It was in these meditation caves that Gilbert found her greatest personal revelation: kundalini shakti –“a union with God delivered in a meditative state through an energy source that fills the entire body with euphoric, electric light”. She describes herself after such an experience as being “ravenously hungry, desperately thirsty, (and) randier than a sailor on a three-day shore leave”.

Here I must admit a personal bias. While I have no doubt that many people, including Gilbert, experience these manifestations, I do not believe that it is a union with the true God, the Creator of the universe.

These months seem to me to be the most indulgent of her year, despite the austere lifestyle. Is it really necessary for people to be able to stop off their daily lives and meditate for hours on end, day after day, to find God? What of the hundreds of millions of people in the world who spend every waking moment in the arduous task of providing food & shelter for themselves & their families? Are they denied a relationship with the Almighty? Is the Guru who spent 18 hours meditating each day throughout his childhood more entitled than anyone else?

Nonetheless, Gilbert found her months in the ashram very fulfilling.

The last third of the year found Gilbert in Bali where she traveled basically on a whim, to see again an ancient medicine man who had told her on a previous trip that she would return. She spends many days sitting with the medicine man, Ketut, while he dispenses both physical & spiritual “cures”.

She admits to having no other plan for her time here, but luckily finds an English artist’s house for rent after a few weeks in a hotel. The house & gardens are lush, as is the surrounding countryside. Bali reveals itself to be Gilbert’s Eden – her paradise, which word she points out “comes to us from the Persian (and) means literally a ‘walled garden’.”

And it is in Bali that she “takes a lover”, a Brazilian named Felipe who amazes her because he is so “old” (52). She had thought she “was old and divorced” (PUH-leez!) but finds that she is, in fact, young and beautiful.

At the end of the assigned year, Felipe proposes to her that they attempt to ”build a life together that’s somehow divided between America, Australia, Brazil & Bali.” (His business is in Bali, his kids close by in Australia, other family & the gems which feed his business in Brazil.) Gilbert calls it a “whole new theory of traveling: A, A, B, B. Like a classic poem, like a pair of rhyming couplets.” And so she feels as if she has found the life balance that she has been seeking.

Gilbert makes her living as a writer and is an accomplished wordsmith who writes with wit and warmth. She deftly shares the emotions that lie at the core of her experience. Although I found the entire experiment to be extravagant and self-indulgent, I do think that Eat, Pray, Love is a thought-provoking read.
Eat, Pray, Love for Canadian readers
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[tags]Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert, Italy, India, ashram, Bali, medicine man, paradise, divorce, self-discovery, bel far niente, kundalini shakti, the beauty of doing nothing, meditation, meditation caves[tags]