Eat, Pray, Love - Books 2 and 3

I have less to say about the last two parts of Liz Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love than I had about the first part. Just a bit of a confession here, I just don't agree with most of her thoughts on God and spirituality. Now that doesn't mean I am criticizing her beliefs - they are just very different from my own. However, I don't argue with some of the lessons that she learns during the second part of her journey, which is to India where she lives in the Ashram of her Guru for four months. One of the main lessons has to do with being still and meditating. Again, I believe that as a culture, American's are horrible at the concept of quiet and actually listening to God. Gilbert talks about how difficult it is to meditate because when she asks her mind to rest, it will quickly become, in turns, bored, angry, depressed, anxious, etc. I can totally relate to that. She says that she is burdened with what the Buddhists call the "monkey mind" which can swing from one topic to another. And I thought it was just me who was ADD. I guess not. Having this tendency to swing from thought to thought keeps a person from being present and in the moment because he or she is moving from the present to the past to the future in thought. Gilbert achieved the needed focus through a mantra. Her conversations with herself in this section are funny and so relative.

Gilbert also uses this section to talk about how sometimes in religion, humans create rituals that start out for a specific purpose but then nobody remembers what the ritual is all about and the ritual ends up driving the faith. Here is a story told to her by the Indians about a saint who was surrounded at his Ashram by his followers. For many hours a day, they would all sit around and meditate. However, the saint had a cat which was particularly annoying, so they tied the cat to a tree to keep it from distracting the meditation. This became a habit. As years passed, nobody remembered the original reason for tying the cat to a tree, and they believed that they not could find God unless they tied a cat to a tree. The moral to the story is not to get too obsessed with the repetition of ritual just for its own sake. There is more to the search for a relationship with God than ticking off the ritual.

Part 3 is Gilbert's return to Indonesia and the paradise that is Bali. Here she reunites with the medicine man who read her palm several years before. She includes some really interesting history of Bali in this section. She also meets some very important people like a medicine woman who is a real healer and good friend and teaches Liz important lessons about trust. Gilbert also meets a man and learns to love again.

I really enjoyed reading this book and got a lot out of it. It was honest and open and not at all preachy, which is great. It was simply a sharing of a woman's experience from a very dark part of her life to a new type of light.