Eat, Pray, Love, Page 23

  And then, to my surprise, still in meditation, I did an odd thing. I invited my ex-husband to please join me up here on this rooftop in India. I asked him if he would be kind enough to meet me up here for this farewell event. Then I waited until I felt him arrive. And he did arrive. His presence was suddenly absolute and tangible. I could practically smell him.

  I said, “Hi, sweetie.”

  I almost started to cry right then, but quickly realized I didn’t need to. Tears are part of this bodily life, and the place where these two souls were meeting that night in India had nothing to do with the body. The two people who needed to talk to each other up there on the roof were not even people anymore. They wouldn’t even be talking. They weren’t even ex-spouses, not an obstinate midwesterner and a high-strung Yankee, not a guy in his forties and a woman in her thirties, not two limited people who had argued for years about sex and money and furniture—none of this was relevant. For the purposes of this meeting, at the level of this reunion, they were just two cool blue souls who already understood everything. Unbound by their bodies, unbound by the complex history of their past relationship, they came together above this roof (above me, even) in infinite wisdom. Still in meditation, I watched these two cool blue souls circle each other, merge, divide again and regard each other’s perfection and similarity. They knew everything. They knew everything long ago and they will always know everything. They didn’t need to forgive each other; they were born forgiving each other.

  The lesson they were teaching me in their beautiful turning was, “Stay out of this, Liz. Your part of this relationship is over. Let us work things out from now on. You go on with your life.”

  Much later I opened my eyes, and I knew it was over. Not just my marriage and not just my divorce, but all the unfinished bleak hollow sadness of it . . . it was over. I could feel that I was free. Let me be clear—it’s not that I would never again think about my ex-husband, or never again have any emotions attached to the memory of him. It’s just that this ritual on the rooftop had finally given me a place where I could house those thoughts and feelings whenever they would arise in the future—and they will always arise. But when they do show up again, I can just send them back here, back to this rooftop of memory, back to the care of those two cool blue souls who already and always understand everything.

  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. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. 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, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet. If you bring the right earnestness to your homemade 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. I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet. 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.

  61

  Richard from Texas left today. Flew back to Austin. I took the drive with him to the airport, and we were both sad. We stood for a long time on the sidewalk before he went inside.

  “What am I gonna do when I don’t have Liz Gilbert to kick around anymore?” He sighed. Then he said, “You’ve had a good experience at the Ashram, haven’t you? You look all different from a few months back, like maybe you chucked out some of that sorrow you been hauling around.”

  “I’m feeling really happy these days, Richard.”

  “Well, just remember—all your misery will be waiting for you at the door upon your exit, should you care to pick it up again when you leave.”

  “I won’t pick it up again.”

  “Good girl.”

  “You’ve helped me a lot,” I told him. “I think of you as an angel with hairy hands and cruddy toenails.”

  “Yeah, my toenails never really did recover from Vietnam, poor things.”

  “It could’ve been worse.”

  “It was worse for a lot of guys. At least I got to keep my legs. Nope, I got a pretty cushy incarnation in this lifetime, kiddo. So did you—never forget that. Next lifetime you might come back as one of those poor Indian women busting up rocks by the side of the road, find out life ain’t so much fun. So appreciate what you got now, OK? Keep cultivating gratitude. You’ll live longer. And, Groceries? Do me a favor? Move ahead with your life, will ya?”

  “I am.”

  “What I mean is—find somebody new to love someday. Take the time you need to heal, but don’t forget to eventually share your heart with someone. Don’t make your life a monument to David or to your ex-husband.”

  “I won’t,” I said. And I knew suddenly that it was true—I wouldn’t. I could feel all this old pain of lost love and past mistakes attenuating before my eyes, diminishing at last through the famous healing powers of time, patience and the grace of God.

  And then Richard spoke again, snapping my thoughts back quickly to the world’s more basic realities: “After all, baby, remember what they say—sometimes the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.”

  I laughed. “OK, Richard, that’ll do. Now you can go back to Texas.”

  “Might as well,” he said, casting a gaze around this desolate Indian airport parking lot. “Cuz I ain’t gettin’ any prettier just standing around here.”

  62

  On my ride back to the Ashram, after seeing Richard off at the airport, I decide that I’ve been talking too much. To be honest, I’ve been talking too much my whole life, but I’ve really been talking too much during my stay at the Ashram. I have another two months here, and I don’t want to waste the greatest spiritual opportunity of my life by being all social and chatty the whole time. It’s been amazing for me to discover that even here, even in a sacred environment of spiritual retreat on the other side of the world, I have managed to create a cocktail-party-like vibe around me. It’s not just Richard I’ve been talking to constantly—though we did do the most gabbing—I’m always yakking with somebody. I’ve even found myself—in an Ashram, mind you!—creating appointments to see acquaintances, having to say to somebody, “I’m sorry, I can’t hang out with you at lunch today because I promised Sakshi I would eat with her . . . maybe we could make a date for next Tuesday.”

  This has been the story of my life. It’s how I am. But I’ve been thinking lately that this is maybe a spiritual liability. Silence and solitude are universally recognized spiritual practices, and there are good reasons for this. Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss. Swamiji, my Guru’s master, was a stickler about silence in the Ashram, heavily enforcing it as a devotional practice. He called silence the only true religion. It’s ridiculous how much I’ve been talking at this Ashram, the one place in the world where silence should—and can—reign.

  So I’m not going to be the Ashram social bunny anymore, I’ve decided. No more scurrying, gossiping, joking. No more spotlight-hogging or conversation-dominating. No more verbal tap-dancing for pennies of affirmation. It’s time to change. Now that Richard is gone, I’m going to make the remainder of my stay a completely quiet experience. This will be difficult, but not impossible, because silence is universally respected at the Ashram. The whole community will support it, recognizing your decision as a disciplined act
of devotion. In the bookstore they even sell little badges you can wear which read, “I am in Silence.”

  I’m going to buy four of those little badges.

  On the drive back to the Ashram, I really let myself dip into a fantasy about just how silent I am going to become now. I will be so silent that it will make me famous. I imagine myself becoming known as That Quiet Girl. I’ll just keep to the Ashram schedule, take my meals in solitude, meditate for endless hours every day and scrub the temple floors without making a peep. My only interaction with others will be to smile beatifically at them from within my self-contained world of stillness and piety. People will talk about me. They’ll ask, “Who is That Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple, always scrubbing the floors, down on her knees? She never speaks. She’s so elusive. She’s so mystical. I can’t even imagine what her voice sounds like. You never even hear her coming up behind you on the garden path when she’s out walking . . . she moves as silently as the breeze. She must be in a constant state of meditative communion with God. She’s the quietest girl I’ve ever seen.”

  63

  The next morning I was down on my knees in the temple, scrubbing the marble floor again, emanating (I imagined) a holy radiance of silence, when an Indian teenage boy came looking for me with a message—that I needed to report to the Seva Office immediately. Seva is the Sanskrit term for the spiritual practice of selfless service (for instance, the scrubbing of a temple floor). The Seva Office administers all the work assignments for the Ashram. So I wandered over there, very curious as to why I’d been summoned, and the nice lady at the desk asked me, “Are you Elizabeth Gilbert?”

  I smiled at her with the warmest piety and nodded. Silently.

  Then she told me that my work detail had been changed. Due to a special request from management, I was no longer to be part of the floor-scrubbing team. They had a new position in mind for me at the Ashram.

  And the title of my new job was—if you will kindly dig this—“Key Hostess.”

  64

  This was so obviously another one of Swamiji’s jokes.

  You wanted to be The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple? Well, guess what . . .

  But this is what always happens at the Ashram. You make some big grandiose decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself. I don’t know how many times Swamiji said it during his lifetime, and I don’t know how many more times my Guru has repeated it since his death, but it seems I have not quite yet absorbed the truth of their most insistent statement:

  “God dwells within you, as you.”

  AS you.

  If there is one holy truth of this Yoga, that line encapsulates it. God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are. God isn’t interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. This is a classic example of what they call in the East “wrong-thinking.” Swamiji used to say that every day renunciants find something new to renounce, but it is usually depression, not peace, that they attain. Constantly he was teaching that austerity and renunciation—just for their own sake—are not what you need. To know God, you need only to renounce one thing—your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character.

  So what is my natural character? I love studying in this Ashram, but my dream of finding divinity by gliding silently through the place with a gentle, ethereal smile—who is that person? That’s probably someone I saw on a TV show. The reality is, it’s a little sad for me to admit that I will never be that character. I’ve always been so fascinated by these wraith-like, delicate souls. Always wanted to be the quiet girl. Probably precisely because I’m not. It’s the same reason I think that thick, dark hair is so beautiful—precisely because I don’t have it, because I can’t have it. But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with thick, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn’t. Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.

  Or, as Sextus, the ancient Pythagorian philospher, said, “The wise man is always similar to himself.”

  This doesn’t mean I cannot be devout. It doesn’t mean I can’t be thoroughly tumbled and humbled with God’s love. This does not mean I cannot serve humanity. It doesn’t mean I can’t improve myself as a human being, honing my virtues and working daily to minimize my vices. For instance, I’m never going to be a wallflower, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take a serious look at my talking habits and alter some aspects for the better—working within my personality. Yes, I like talking, but perhaps I don’t have to curse so much, and perhaps I don’t always have to go for the cheap laugh, and maybe I don’t need to talk about myself quite so constantly. Or here’s a radical concept—maybe I can stop interrupting others when they are speaking. Because no matter how creatively I try to look at my habit of interrupting, I can’t find another way to see it than this: “I believe that what I am saying is more important than what you are saying.” And I can’t find another way to see that than: “I believe that I am more important than you.” And that must end.

  All these changes would be useful to make. But even so, even with reasonable modifications to my speaking habits, I probably won’t ever be known as That Quiet Girl. No matter how pretty a picture that is and no matter how hard I try. Because let’s be really honest about who we’re dealing with here. When the woman at the Ashram Seva Center gave me my new job assignment of Key Hostess, she said, “We have a special nickname for this position, you know. We call it ‘Little Suzy Creamcheese,’ because whoever does the job needs to be social and bubbly and smiling all the time.”

  What could I say?

  I just stuck out a hand to shake, bade a silent farewell to all my wishful old delusions and announced, “Madam—I’m your girl.”

  65

  What I will be hosting, to be exact, is a series of retreats to be held at the Ashram this spring. During each retreat, about a hundred devotees will come here from all over the world for a period of a week to ten days, to deepen their meditation practices. My role is to take care of these people during their stay here. For most of the retreat, the participants will be in silence. For some of them, it will be the first time they’ve experienced silence as a devotional practice, and it can be intense. However, I will be the one person in the Ashram they are allowed to talk to if something is going wrong.

  That’s right—my job officially requires me to be the speech-magnet.

  I will listen to the problems of the retreat participants and then try to find solutions for them. Maybe they’ll need to change roommates because of a snoring situation, or maybe they’ll need to speak to the doctor because of India-related digestive trouble—I’ll try to solve it. I’ll need to know everybody’s name, and where they are from. I’ll be walking around with a clipboard, taking notes and following up. I’m Julie McCoy, your Yogic cruise director.

  And, yes, the position does come with a beeper.

  As the retreats begin, it is so quickly evident how much I am made for this job. I’m sitting there at the Welcome Table with my Hello, My Name Is badge, and these people are arriving from thirty different countries, and some of them are old-timers but many of them have never been to India. It’s over 100 degrees already at 10:00 AM, and most of these people have been flying all night in coach. Some of them walk into this Ashram looking like they just woke up in the trunk of a car—like they have no idea at all what they’re doing here. Whatever desire for transcendence drove them to apply for this spiritual retreat in the first place, they’ve long ago forgotten it, probably somewhere around the time their luggage got lost in Kuala Lumpur. They’re thirsty,
but don’t know yet if they can drink the water. They’re hungry, but don’t know what time lunch is, or where the cafeteria can be found. They’re dressed all wrong, wearing synthetics and heavy boots in the tropical heat. They don’t know if there’s anyone here who speaks Russian.

  I can speak a teensy bit of Russian . . .

  I can help them. I am so equipped to help. All the antennas I’ve ever sprouted throughout my lifetime that have taught me how to read what people are feeling, all the intuition I developed growing up as the supersensitive younger child, all the listening skills I learned as a sympathetic bartender and an inquisitive journalist, all the proficiency of care I mastered after years of being somebody’s wife or girlfriend—it was all accumulated so that I could help ease these good people into the difficult task they’ve taken on. I see them coming in from Mexico, from the Philippines, from Africa, from Denmark, from Detroit and it feels like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Richard Dreyfuss and all those other seekers have been pulled to the middle of Wyoming for reasons they don’t understand at all, drawn by the arrival of the spaceship. I am so consumed by wonder at their bravery. These people have left their families and lives behind for a few weeks to go into silent retreat amidst a crowd of perfect strangers in India. Not everybody does this in their lifetime.