Spiritual Awakenings A Conversation with
Elizabeth Gilbert Author of Eat, Pray, Love— Now a Film Starring Julia Roberts
by Leah Ingram
silence in her own company without crawling out of her own skin to some- body who could sit for four or five consecutive hours and be undisturbed by my own existence on Earth—it seems like a simple thing, but isn’t. In that silence and stillness, I
met this other voice that I never had before, which is this older part of me—this calm, sedate, affectionate, forgiving, wise soul that watches my comings and goings and my spastic fears and desires and anger, and all the stuff that pulls on me, and intercepts me before I get dragged too far away from myself.
lizabeth “Liz” Gilbert’s story of her year-long odyssey of self- rediscovery via sojourns in Italy, India and Indonesia, after divorcing herself from her former way of life, struck a nerve with millions of women around the world through her best- seller, Eat, Pray, Love, available in 40 languages. Now, actress Julia Roberts renders the universal truth embodied in Gilbert’s personal journey accessi- ble to an even broader audience with this summer’s release of a film based on the book. “It’s the way that [Liz] wrote this
E
book,” says Roberts. “It’s like a bell that just keeps ringing.” Gilbert be- lieves her message resonates because it’s about trying to figure out who we are in relationship to those around us and how we get over our greatest disappointments and try again. In the end, Gilbert does get in tune with herself and coincidentally, finds
true love, which is further explored in her latest chronicle, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. It’s her go at unraveling the mysteries of marriage.
How are you different after Eat, Pray, Love?
I think the main difference is this relationship that I forged with my- self in all those months spent alone, particularly in India; in those long, tedious, difficult, emotionally painful hours sitting in the meditation cham- ber, trying to find some sort of center in all that maelstrom of thought and confusion and worry and anxiety and resentment and that whole soup that I was bathed in before I left [home]. And to watch the evolution over
time, over those months, and see my- self go from somebody who quite liter- ally could not spend five minutes in
And she just says, very sweetly
and with a kind of amusement, ‘Do you really want to go through this again? Because if you do, I’ll do it with you. But, maybe we don’t want to do this again. Maybe we want to actually remember what we learned and do a different thing.’
How did you integrate what you learned from your trips into your daily life?
For me, all the spiritual lessons that I learned would mean nothing if they didn’t have a practical application. So I was eager, after my four months in the ashram, to come back home and put it into practice. I mostly use it in trying to arrange my life so that it is as unstressful as possible. I push every day against forces that say you have to go faster, be more effective, be more productive, you have to constantly
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