Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert ***

Elizabeth Gilbert has created an entertaining, sometimes thought provoking, highly autobiographical testimony of her search for identity and happiness. She begins with the recognition that she wanted to get out of her marriage and the emotional and financial devastation that results from her initiating the divorce proceedings. Ultimately she searches for inner-peace in three sections of the book.

She travels to Italy where she delights in the romance of the language, the seduction of the food, and the excitement of the men.

I am not the best traveler in the world. …I’ve traveled a lot and I’ve met people who are great at it…I’ve met travelers who are so physically sturdy they could drink a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new languages where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand down a threatening border guard or cajole an uncooperative bureaucrat at the visa office. People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal wherever they go…I don’t have these qualities.

I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, which of course it was. What was the root of all this despair? And then in a most entertaining manner listing a number of possible causes: Was it psychological…was it just e] temporal, a “bad time” in my life…Was it genetic…Was it cultural…Was it astrological…Was it artistic…Was it evolutionary…Was it hormonal... She ends with “Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?

In a lucid moment Gilbert states a profoundly simple notion of maintaining one’s self esteem; “Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.”

There are multiple dichotomies as her pursuit of the spiritual is so deeply grounded in the gourmet decadence of Italy. “The culture of Rome just doesn’t mach the culture of Yoga, not as far as I can see. In fact, I’ve decided that Rome and Yoga don’t have anything in common at all. Except for the way they both kind of remind you of the word Toga” and later she makes the observation about the self-indulgence of eating…”including a gelateria that serves a frozen rice pudding (and if they don’t serve this kind of thing in heaven, then I really don’t want to go there)”.

Her struggles with spirituality connected well with me because I seem to have the same kind of brain she describes; “Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists cal the “monkey mind” –the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.”

As she challenges the notion of doctrines and organized religion she captures the inevitability of it all in a simplistic revelation: “Religious rituals often develop out of mystical experimentation. Some brave scout goes looking for a new path to the divine, has a transcendent experience and returns home a prophet. He or she brings back to the community tales of heaven and maps of how to get there. Then others repeat the words, the works, the prayers, or the acts of this prophet, in order to crossover, too….Inevitably even the most original new ideas will eventually harden into dogma or stop working for everybody.”

Her guruic connection in Bali metaphorically explains the pursuit of spiritual tranquility as: “Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine…you want to stay near the core of the thing –right in the hub of the wheel—not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness—that’s your heart. That’s where God lives within you. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to that center and you’ll always find peace”.

Near the end of the book Gilbert quotes her guru as saying about a woman with whom he was once in love: “I think she had a secret mind insider her other mind, nobody can see inside there.” This book is the distinct opposite of that as she appears to explore that “secret mind inside her other mind” and share it with anyone in the rest of the world who reads the book. Her conclusion about the entire process of searching is stated simplistically: “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it”.