Eat, Pray, Love

  The students here are about equally divided between Indians and Westerners (and the Westerners are about evenly divided between Americans and Europeans). Courses are taught in both Hindi and English. On your application, you must write an essay, gather references, and answer questions about your mental and physical health, about any possible history of drug or alcohol abuse and also about your financial stability. The Guru doesn’t want people to use her Ashram as an escape from whatever bedlam they may have created in their real lives; this will not benefit anyone. She also has a general policy that if your family and loved ones for some reason deeply object to the idea of your following a Guru and living in an Ashram, then you shouldn’t do it, it’s not worth it. Just stay home in your normal life and be a good person. There’s no reason to make a big dramatic production over this.

  The level of this woman’s practical sensibilities are always comforting to me.

  To come here, then, you must demonstrate that you are also a sensible and practical human being. You must show that you can work because you’ll be expected to contribute to the overall operation of the place with about five hours a day of seva, or “selfless service.” The Ashram management also asks, if you have gone through a major emotional trauma in the last six months (divorce; death in the family) that you please postpone your visit to another time because chances are you won’t be able to concentrate on your studies, and, if you have a meltdown of some sort, you’ll only bring distraction to your fellow students. I just made the post-divorce cutoff myself. And when I think of the mental anguish I was going through right after I left my marriage, I have no doubt that I would have been a great drain on everyone at this Ashram had I come here at that moment. Far better to have rested first in Italy, gotten my strength and health back, and then showed up. Because I will need that strength now.

  They want you to come here strong because Ashram life is rigorous. Not just physically, with days that begin at 3:00 AM and end at 9:00 PM, but also psychologically. You’re going to be spending hours and hours a day in silent meditation and contemplation, with little distraction or relief from the apparatus of your own mind. You will be living in close quarters with strangers, in rural India. There are bugs and snakes and rodents. The weather can be extreme—sometimes torrents of rain for weeks on end, sometimes 100 degrees in the shade before breakfast. Things can get deeply real around here, very fast.

  My Guru always says that only one thing will happen when you come to the Ashram—that you will discover who you really are. So if you’re hovering on the brink of madness already, she’d really rather you didn’t come at all. Because, frankly, nobody wants to have to carry you out of this place with a wooden spoon clenched between your teeth.

  40

  My arrival coincides nicely with the arrival of a new year. I have barely one day to get myself oriented to the Ashram, and then it is already New Year’s Eve. After dinner, the small courtyard starts to fill with people. We all sit on the ground—some of us on the cool marble floor and some on grass mats. The Indian women have all dressed as though for a wedding. Their hair is oiled and dark and braided down their backs. They are wearing their finest silk saris and gold bracelets, and each woman has a brightly jeweled bindi in the center of her forehead, like a dim echo of the starlight above us. The plan is to chant outside in this courtyard until midnight, until the year changes over.

  Chanting is a word I do not love for a practice that I love dearly. To me, the word chant connotes a kind of dronelike and scary monotony, like something male druids would do around a sacrificial fire. But when we chant here at the Ashram, it’s a kind of angelic singing. Generally, it’s done in a call-and-response manner. A handful of young men and women with the loveliest voices begin by singing one harmonious phrase, and the rest of us repeat it. It’s a meditative practice—the effort is to hold your attention on the music’s progression and blend your voice together with your neighbor’s voice so that eventually all are singing as one. I’m jetlagged and afraid it will be impossible for me to stay awake until midnight, much less to find the energy to sing for so long. But then this evening of music begins, with a single violin in the shadows playing one long note of longing. Then comes the harmonium, then the slow drums, then the voices . . .

  I’m sitting in the back of the courtyard with all the mothers, the Indian women who are so comfortably cross-legged, their children sleeping across them like little human lap rugs. The chant tonight is a lullaby, a lament, an attempt at gratitude, written in a raga (a tune) that is meant to suggest compassion and devotion. We are singing in Sanskrit, as always (an ancient language that is extinct in India, except for prayer and religious study), and I’m trying to become a vocal mirror for the voices of the lead singers, picking up their inflections like little strings of blue light. They pass the sacred words to me, I carry the words for a while, then pass the words back, and this is how we are able to sing for miles and miles of time without tiring. All of us are swaying like kelp in the dark sea current of night. The children around me are wrapped in silks, like gifts.

  I’m so tired, but I don’t drop my little blue string of song, and I drift into such a state that I think I might be calling God’s name in my sleep, or maybe I am only falling down the well shaft of this universe. By 11:30, though, the orchestra has picked up the tempo of the chant and kicked it up into sheer joy. Beautifully dressed women in jingly bracelets are clapping and dancing and attempting to tambourine with their whole bodies. The drums are slamming, rhythmic, exciting. As the minutes pass, it feels to me like we are collectively pulling the year 2004 toward us. Like we have roped it with our music, and now we are hauling it across the night sky like it’s a massive fishing net, brimming with all our unknown destinies. And what a heavy net it is, indeed, carrying as it does all the births, deaths, tragedies, wars, love stories, inventions, transformations and calamities that are destined for all of us this coming year. We keep singing and we keep hauling, hand-over-hand, minute-by-minute, voice after voice, closer and closer. The seconds drop down to midnight and we sing with our biggest effort yet and in this last brave exertion we finally pull the net of the New Year over us, covering both the sky and ourselves with it. God only knows what the year might contain, but now it is here, and we are all beneath it.

  This is the first New Year’s Eve I can ever remember in my life where I haven’t known any of the people I was celebrating with. In all this dancing and singing, there is nobody for me to embrace at midnight. But I wouldn’t say that anything about this night has been lonely.

  No, I would definitely not say that.

  41

  We are all given work here, and it turns out that my work assignment is to scrub the temple floors. So that’s where you can find me for several hours a day now—down on my knees on the cold marble with a brush and a bucket, working away like a fairy-tale stepsister. (By the way, I’m aware of the metaphor—the scrubbing clean of the temple that is my heart, the polishing of my soul, the everyday mundane effort that must be applied to spiritual practice in order to purify the self, etc., etc.)

  My fellow floor-scrubbers are mainly a bunch of Indian teenagers. They always give teenagers this job because it requires high physical energy but not enormous reserves of responsibility; there’s a limit to how much damage you can do if you mess up. I like my coworkers. The girls are fluttery little butterflies who seem so much younger than American eighteen-year-old girls, and the boys are serious little autocrats who seem so much older than American eighteen-year-old boys. Nobody’s supposed to talk in the temples, but these are teenagers, so there’s a constant chatter going on all the time as we’re working. It’s not all idle gossip. One of the boys spends all day scrubbing beside me, lecturing me earnestly on how to best perform my work here: “Take seriously. Make punctual. Be cool and easy. Remember—everything you do, you do for God. And everything God does, He do for you.”

  It’s tiring physical labor, but my daily hours of work are considerably easier than my da
ily hours of meditation. The truth is, I don’t think I’m good at meditation. I know I’m out of practice with it, but honestly I was never good at it. I can’t seem to get my mind to hold still. I mentioned this once to an Indian monk, and he said, “It’s a pity you’re the only person in the history of the world who ever had this problem.” Then the monk quoted to me from the Bhagavad Gita, the most sacred ancient text of Yoga: “Oh Krishna, the mind is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding. I consider it as difficult to subdue as the wind.”

  Meditation is both the anchor and the wings of Yoga. Meditation is the way. There’s a difference between meditation and prayer, though both practices seek communion with the divine. I’ve heard it said that prayer is the act of talking to God, while meditation is the act of listening. Take a wild guess as to which comes easier for me. I can prattle away to God about all my feelings and my problems all the livelong day, but when it comes time to descend into silence and listen . . . well, that’s a different story. When I ask my mind to rest in stillness, it is astonishing how quickly it will turn (1) bored, (2) angry, (3) depressed, (4) anxious or (5) all of the above.

  Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the “monkey mind”—the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. Happy thoughts make me happy, but—whoop!—how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it’s the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

  The other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought is that you are never where you are. You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in this moment. It’s something like the habit of my dear friend Susan, who—whenever she sees a beautiful place—exclaims in near panic, “It’s so beautiful here! I want to come back here someday!” and it takes all of my persuasive powers to try to convince her that she is already here. If you’re looking for union with the divine, this kind of forward/backward whirling is a problem. There’s a reason they call God a presence—because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.

  But to stay in the present moment requires dedicated one-pointed focus. Different meditation techniques teach one-pointedness in different ways—for instance, by focusing your eyes on a single point of light, or by observing the rise and fall of your breath. My Guru teaches meditation with the help of a mantra, sacred words or syllables to be repeated in a focused manner. Mantra has a dual function. For one thing, it gives the mind something to do. It’s as if you’ve given the monkey a pile of 10,000 buttons and said, “Move these buttons, one at time, into a new pile.” This is a considerably easier task for the monkey than if you just plopped him in a corner and asked him not to move. The other purpose of mantra is to transport you to another state, rowboatlike, through the choppy waves of the mind. Whenever your attention gets pulled into a cross-current of thought, just return to the mantra, climb back into the boat and keep going. The great Sanskrit mantras are said to contain unimaginable powers, the ability to row you, if you can stay with one, all the way to the shorelines of divinity.

  Among my many, many problems with meditation is that the mantra I have been given—Om Namah Shivaya—doesn’t sit comfortably in my head. I love the sound of it and I love the meaning of it, but it does not glide me into meditation. It never has, not in the two years I’ve been practicing this Yoga. When I try to repeat Om Namah Shivaya in my head, it actually gets stuck in my throat, making my chest clench tightly, making me nervous. I can never match the syllables to my breathing.

  I end up asking my roommate Corella about this one night. I’m shy to admit to her how much trouble I have keeping my mind focused on mantra repetition, but she is a meditation teacher. Maybe she can help me. She tells me that her mind used to wander during meditation, too, but that now her practice is the great, easy, transformative joy of her life.

  “Seems I just sit down and shut my eyes,” she says, “and all I have to do is think of the mantra and I vanish right into heaven.”

  Hearing this, I am nauseated with envy. Then again, Corella has been practicing Yoga for almost as many years as I’ve been alive. I ask her if she can show me how exactly she uses Om Namah Shivaya in her meditation practice. Does she take one inhale for every syllable? (When I do this, it feels really interminable and annoying.) Or is it one word for every breath?(But the words are all different lengths! So how do you even it out?) Or does she say the whole mantra once on the inhale, then once again on the exhale? (Because when I try to do that, it gets all speeded up and I get anxious.)

  “I don’t know,” Corella says. “I just kind of . . . say it.”

  “But do you sing it?” I push, desperate now. “Do you put a beat on it?”

  “I just say it.”

  “Can you maybe speak aloud for me the way you say it in your head when you’re meditating?”

  Indulgently, my roommate closes her eyes and starts saying the mantra aloud, the way it appears in her head. And, indeed, she’s just . . . saying it. She says it quietly, normally, smiling slightly. She says it a few times, in fact, until I get restless and cut her off.

  “But don’t you get bored?” I ask.

  “Ah,” says Corella and opens her eyes, smiling. She looks at her watch. “Ten seconds have passed, Liz. Bored already, are we?”

  42

  The following morning, I arrive right on time for the 4:00 AM meditation session which always starts the day here. We are meant to sit for an hour in silence, but I log the minutes as if they are miles—sixty brutal miles that I have to endure. By mile/minute fourteen, my nerves have started to go, my knees are breaking down and I’m overcome with exasperation. Which is understandable, given that the conversations between me and my mind during meditation generally go something like this:

  Me: OK, we’re going to meditate now. Let’s draw our attention to our breath and focus on the mantra. Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shiv—

  Mind: I can help you out with this, you know!

  Me: OK, good, because I need your help. Let’s go. Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shi—

  Mind: I can help you think of nice meditative images. Like—hey, here’s a good one. Imagine you are a temple. A temple on an island! And the island is in the ocean!

  Me: Oh, that is a nice image.

  Mind: Thanks. I thought of it myself.

  Me: But what ocean are we picturing here?

  Mind: The Mediterranean. Imagine you’re one of those Greek islands, with an old Greek temple on it. No, never mind, that’s too touristy. You know what? Forget the ocean. Oceans are too dangerous. Here’s a better idea—imagine you’re an island in a lake, instead.

  Me: Can we meditate now, please? Om Namah Shiv—

  Mind: Yes! Definitely! But try not to picture that the lake is covered with . . . what are those things called—

  Me: Jet Skis?

  Mind: Yes! Jet Skis! Those things consume so much fuel! They’re really a menace to the environment. Do you know what else uses a lot of fuel? Leaf blowers. You wouldn’t think so, but—

  Me: OK, but let’s MEDITATE now, please? Om Namah—

  Mind: Right! I definitely want to help you meditate! And that’s why we’re going to skip the image of an island on a lake or an ocean, because that’s obviously not working. So let’s imagine that you’re an island in . . . a river!

  Me: Oh, you mean like Bannerman Island, in the Hudson River?

  Mind: Yes!
Exactly! Perfect. Therefore, in conclusion, let’s meditate on this image—envision that you are an island in a river.

  All the thoughts that float by as you’re meditating, these are just the river’s natural currents and you can ignore them because you are an island.

  Me: Wait, I thought you said I was a temple.

  Mind: That’s right, sorry. You’re a temple on an island. In fact, you are both the temple and the island.

  Me: Am I also the river?

  Mind: No, the river is just the thoughts.

  Me: Stop! Please stop! YOU’RE MAKING ME CRAZY!!!

  Mind (wounded): Sorry. I was only trying to help.

  Me: Om Namah Shivaya . . . Om Namah Shivaya . . . Om Namah Shivaya . . .

  Here there is a promising eight-second pause in thoughts. But then—

  Mind: Are you mad at me now?

  —and then with a big gasp, like I am coming up for air, my mind wins, my eyes fly open and I quit. In tears. An Ashram is supposed to be a place where you come to deepen your meditation, but this is a disaster. The pressure is too much for me. I can’t do it. But what should I do? Run out of the temple crying after fourteen minutes, every day?

  This morning, though, instead of fighting it, I just stopped. I gave up. I let myself slump against the wall behind me. My back hurt, I had no strength, my mind was quivering. My posture collapsed like a bridge crumbling down. I took the mantra off the top of my head (where it had been pressing down on me like an invisible anvil) and set it on the floor beside me. And then I said to God, “I’m really sorry, but this is the closest I could get to you today.”