Eat, Pray, Love
Liz Gilbert’s problems with her divorce, and a later romance that failed, motivated her to escape to Italy, India, and Indonesia. Her memoir of this trip begins with months of depression in New York, which she hoped to overcome on a year-long journey.
She spends four months in each of these countries, and her time in Italy was spent mostly in Rome with brief visits to other famous Italian cities. Besides her travels, her days included learning to speak Italian and eating their superb foods.
In India, she attended an Ashram which is famous for its classes on Yoga and is attended by pilgrims from all over the world. Her closest friend there, Richard from Texas, labeled Liz a "control freak" because she fought "so hard against herself" in meditation sessions. She was well aware of her concentration problems during meditation, but she also knew that "Devotion is diligence without assurance."
What Liz learned from her Guru in India about prayers and meditation went with her to Bali, Indonesia, where she regularly visited a toothless medicine man, somewhere between 60 and 120 years old, and who did palm reading and drew pictures to help his clients with their problems. She also met a young woman "hands-on" doctor who dealt with herbal medicines but advised Liz to look around for sex.
So Liz experienced a new romance and felt better for it. She had found a "balance between devotion and pleasure." A friend had once told her that "all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people," which made Liz choose contentment as her best offering.
Before she left Bali, Liz thanked the young woman for her services and advice and arranged that the doctor would have a home of her own to continue her medical practice.
Eat, Pray, Love is excellently written and shows Liz Gilbert’s humorous yet openly personal account of how she dealt with her divorce and the crushing depression that followed. Her experience in finding God deep in her meditations is inspiring and challenging. Eat, Pray, Love was published in 2007.