I Owe A Word of Thanks To Elizabeth Gilbert for Eat, Pray, Love

Not the movie of course, I haven’t even seen it yet.  I’m talking about the book.

I know that there’s a lot of women who hated this book.  I’ve got a lot to say about that but I’ll save it for another time.  So much nasty, negative talk over such a beautiful heartfelt journey to the center of one’s self--

That book opened up a whole new world to me--and it’s not the one you think.

As many of you know--I’ve been very public here--everywhere for that matter-- about my food issues (compulsive overeater) and my body issues (severe body dysmorphia)--I’ve struggled with these things for most of my life.

Eat, Pray, Love came out about six months after I finished five years of a very strict and regimented food program (the details of that lovely adventure would require another blog post so I won’t bore you with them here).  Anyway, after the five year stint of no sugar of any kind, no wheat products, no meat, no coffee, and no alcohol I found myself back to my old ways--the magical thinking that every woman who feels she can’t trust herself around food experiences:  if I could just eat whatever I wanted without gaining any weight my life would be total happiness--Just put me in a room filled with cake and ice cream and let me run wild.  This was my big fantasy; my Balm in Gilead.  My ideas about pleasure and fulfillment had gotten so distorted from the deprivation that I thought about food all the time.  But now that I think about it, I felt that way my whole life.  Food was my pleasure place, my way of acting out, my coping tool, my drug. I‘ve known for a long time that if I couldn’t resolve my food issues, I’d never have true peace.  I didn’t see any way to do that other than having the ability to eat as much of whatever I wanted and stay thin.   yeah, right keep fantasizing--

So here it is Summer of 2006 and I’m reading this book because, like so many  women, I want to experience this freedom, this extravagant answering the soul’s call and saying yes to yourself no matter how crazy it seems.  This woman was  living a dream...My dream. 

What happens in India...

Changed my life.  It’ the second leg of this three part journey where she spends six months at an ashram in India.  She goes very deep into the details of her meditations and what she experiences and while I am reading I start to feel what I can only describe as a pure, perfect resonance.  I began to feel my own heart open and fill with so much love and tenderness.   I want to experience this love, this bliss, this connection with the divine. I want to find the spiritual life I was missing, to swim in those waves of pure love. Something in my brain snapped and I had what my friend Patty used to refer to as a “molecular rearrangement”

I got it. 

I got that I’d been looking for love in all the wrong places and I got that there was something so much bigger than me, so much better than any dessert that I could eat without consequences, so much deeper than anything I could possibly conjure up in my head.

I’d been so very hungry all these years-- but not for food--I was longing for  a deep connection to myself and the divine, only I had no way to name it because I didn’t know it existed.

It was that connection I was looking for when I turned to food.  No wonder I had to keep going back again and again, doing the same things over and over--it’s like trying to get water from a dry well.  No matter how hard you try, there’s only dust so why keep doing it? Because sometimes you don’t know that there’s another way, that there’s something else that’s better.

I can’t say that my food issues were totally healed after reading this book but I can say for sure that things shifted in a very good way and it took a lot of the “charge” off the issue  for me.  It cleared the way for me to do some real work as opposed to spinning around the same stuff over and over again and getting nowhere.

Om Namah Shivaya

That’s the mantra from the Siddha Yoga ashram.  At the time, I had no idea what a huge part of my own language this phrase would become.  And the core of the teachings:  God lives in you as you.

Liz Glibert only thinly disguises the identity of the ashram that she’s attending so it only took one google search to find them.  Since I’m right outside of New York City I was able to attend the Tuesday night meditation that she speaks of in the first chapter of the book.  The experience I had during the meditation defies description.  Big Love, transcendence, total bliss--none of that even begins to describe it.  Let’s just say I have never felt anything even close to it in my life.  It was one of the most incredible things I ever experienced.  After the first night, I was hooked and it’s been my spiritual practice, my salvation, my peace of mind, and sometimes my lifeline ever since.  Thanks Liz Gilbert for introducing me to what I was searching for but didn’t know existed.