Eat, Pray, Love

I began reading Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert and fell in love with it instantly. 


I had to go away to Austin for a few days, but did not want to part with the book, so I bought another version of it, on CDs and listened to it on the road. The audio is narrated by the author herself, whose gentle, wise and silky voice envelopes my ears with love and tenderness as it proclaims simple truths. As she slowly reveals the details of her life, her travels and  her life experiences echo my own so closely that tears inadvertently drop from my already tired eyes. 

The author's trip to Italy especially wakes many memories in my heart. Yet, it is not the story of pleasure seeking in Italy that speaks to me most at this moment.  Instead, I am most happy to hear the author reaching India, where she begins to practice yoga, sheds the shreds of her past, and finds her inner self. Here is what she has to say about finding one's secret self:

"The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists called it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that the unhappiness in the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs. 

The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere in us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.

Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from the endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you."

And listening to her, I decide that it is also time for me to return to the practice of yoga. 
On that thought, I smile. And now, I shall leave writing to another day for I must get back to my journey and  head for yet another delightful adventure.