Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Worry about your craziness only.

This week, I finished the book Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert.



This book is an autobiographical story about Liz Gilbert's divorce, spiral into depression, and subsequent soul-searching. She decides to journey to three places over the course of the year in order to learn about life. She learns about the pursuit of pleasure in Italy (Eat), the pursuit of God in India (Pray), and the balance of both in Indonesia (Love).

In Italy, she eats wonderful food (obviously), but one of the major things she talks about is the joy of learning to speak Italian. She is more passionate about Italian than I am about Spanish, but there is a sort of 'high' that comes with learning a foreign language. There is something about the tast of unfamiliar words in your mouth and realizing that you are speaking fluently that is really exhilarating.

This book also talks extensively about the practice of Yoga. Yoga is not just a twisting, torturous form of exercise, but actually includes 4 types: Hatha (yoga of the body), Jnana (yoga of knowledge), Bhakti (yoga of the heart- prayer and devotion), and Karma (yoga in the path of selfless service).

I was in a cross-cultural play in college where the majority of the cast was Indian. I became fascinated with the culture and with yoga in particular. I may sound hippie-ish, but I think the concept of yoga is beautiful.

In this book, Liz says that yoga, in it's true form, is not a religion in and of itself nor is it strictly related to Hinduism. Rather, it's a tool to use with ANY religion. Many of the people she meets at the Ashram are Christian.

On her travels to Indonesia, she meets the funniest old medicine man who is her spiritual guide and who is somewhere between the age of "65 and 112." He really makes the last third of the book. In one of their conversations, Liz asks him what she should do about the craziness of this world. He replies, "Worry about your craziness only." Wouldn't that genuinely make everyone's life easier?

I highly recommend reading this book. However, it begs saying that you should take everything she writes and experiences with a grain of salt. This is the story of her personal spiritual journey and is not meant to be a guide for how others should live. Happy reading!

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