List Blinkist (2020)
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From rock bottom to new beginnings.
Elizabeth Gilbert had it all – a successful career as a writer, a beautiful new home in suburban New York, and a husband she adored. It was the picture-perfect life she had always dreamed of. But as she approached her early 30s, something felt deeply wrong. The natural instinct to settle down and start a family that she assumed would kick in . . . never did.
Instead, she found herself more excited about writing a story on a giant squid in New Zealand for her magazine job than the prospect of parenthood. Whenever she tried to envision having a baby, she just couldn’t see it. Her marriage to her husband was slowly disintegrating as the disconnect between them grew wider. One night, wracked with sobs over her failing marriage, Gilbert ended up crumpled on her bathroom floor. In that rock-bottom moment, she did something highly uncharacteristic – she started fervently praying to an entity she suspected might be God.
For the next seven months, Gilbert continued having earnest conversations with the non-denominational, spiritual presence she thought of simply as God. She didn’t belong to any particular faith, but felt drawn to connect with a higher power during this immensely difficult time in her life. Finally, after that period of soul-searching and reflection, she made the agonizing decision to divorce her husband, the man she once thought was her soulmate.
But what would she do next? Unmoored from the life she had planned, she moved in with her rebound fling, David. Yet that all-consuming but unstable relationship, coupled with her increasingly bitter and acrimonious divorce proceedings, only left Gilbert more lost. She was confused and flailing.
However, in the tumult, seeds of possibility began sprouting in Gilbert’s life. First, she fulfilled a long-held dream of learning Italian by taking classes. Studying the language opened her eyes to a whole new culture and way of life. Second, she found an Indian guru and immersed herself in the spiritual practice of yoga, which quieted her mind and helped her find moments of peace. Third, an Indonesian medicine man and energy healer whom she’d profiled for a magazine assignment invited her to come live and study with him in Bali.
From these experiences trying to find her center again, a vision slowly took shape for the next phase of Gilbert’s journey. She would go on an extended travel adventure of self-discovery and healing, traveling first to Italy to absorb the language more deeply through studying the Italianate culture and way of life. Then she would go to India to dive deeper into the spiritual dimension through devoting herself to the yogic tradition at its source. Finally, she would end up in Bali to live and study with the medicine man, absorbing the healing modalities and philosophies of that part of the world. With this revitalizing global quest ahead of her, there was a tiny flicker of hope inside Gilbert. Maybe she would find her way back to wholeness.
Giving in to pleasure in Italy.
In 2003, just weeks after finalizing her divorce papers, Elizabeth Gilbert found herself in Rome, ready to begin the first transformative leg of her planned global journey of self-discovery. Her very first meal in the Eternal City set the tone for her entire stay there – an utterly decadent yet simple plate of spaghetti alla carbonara with a side of sautéed spinach, followed by fried whole zucchini flowers, veal saltimbocca, a basket of warm bread drizzled with thick green olive oil, luscious tiramisu for dessert, and generous pours of the house red wine.
That night, her belly full in a way she hadn’t experienced in years, Gilbert had her first solid night’s sleep undisturbed by anxious, nagging thoughts about her future and what came next after her divorce. For once, she was able to simply be present and experience the pleasure of the moment.
This inaugural meal was just the start of Gilbert’s new epicurean lifestyle in Italy. Rarely cracking open a guidebook or planned itinerary, she spent her Roman days wandering aimlessly through the city’s ancient cobblestone streets and piazzas. She picked out her favorite fountains to sit alongside, sipping espresso and people-watching. She smiled warmly at the young lovers canoodling shamelessly on park benches. And she treated herself to two or even three daily trips to her favorite gelato shop, indulging in the creamy, sweet pleasures of salted caramel or ripe strawberry.
Beyond giving herself over to these culinary delights, Gilbert also soaked in the cadences of the Italian language like a sponge. She struck up conversations with the handsome taxi drivers, attempting to negotiate the fares in her beginner’s Italian. She pored over the local newspapers at cafés, sounding out the foreign words and phrases. And she engaged kindly older locals in friendly philosophical debates, her language skills improving with each interaction.
Gilbert even enrolled in a conversational language school alongside other foreign students who, like her, wanted to learn Italian not for any practical reason, but simply for the pure joy and music of it. It was a departure from her usual pragmatic, achievement-oriented approach to most endeavors. This was about being, not doing.
However, her new unencumbered life of “la dolce vita” in Italy wasn’t all sunlit indulgence and bliss. About ten days into her stay, the familiar pangs of depression and loneliness that had pursued her for years began to resurface and resurge. Gilbert attributed it to having impulsively stopped taking her prescribed antidepressant medication back in America, irrationally thinking that being in the postcard-perfect environs of Rome would be enough to cure her inner demons.
In a moment of inspired self-care and compassion, Gilbert started writing herself supportive, loving notes in her private journal. She created an inner dialogue where she acknowledged her sadness and pain, assured her hurting inner voice that she was there for herself no matter what, and pledged to continue showering herself with patience and unconditional love through this transition. The next morning, she awoke lighter, some of the weight lifted from her shoulders.
As the weeks passed, Gilbert slowly started making new friends in Rome. There was her devastatingly handsome Italian language partner, Giovanni, whom she regularly met up with for tandem language practice over glasses of robust red wine. His gregarious and warm twin brother, Dario, also became a fast friend. And then there was the foodie aptly named Luca Spaghetti, with whom Gilbert bonded over their mutual, unabashed love of oxtail stew, cannoli, tiny cups of rich espresso, and bracing lemon limoncello liqueur.
Though she had abandoned her daily yoga practice, unable to fully reconcile the structured spirituality with her new epicurean Italian lifestyle, Gilbert started embracing the local philosophy of “bel far niente” – the beauty and profound importance of doing . . . nothing. Of letting the sweet moments of life’s simple pleasures wash over you and being fully present. Inspired by the joyful freedom this granted her, Gilbert finally felt ready to properly close the painful, traumatic chapter with her ex-fiancé David back home. Her journey of healing through the act of savoring was only just beginning.
Committing to prayer in India.
At 1:30 a.m. on December 30th, Elizabeth Gilbert’s plane touched down in Mumbai, India – the second stop on her global journey of self-discovery after four transformative months of indulgence in Italy. By 3:30 a.m., she had arrived at the humble ashram that would be her new home for an extended period of study.
After the gelato-fueled hiatus from her spiritual practice in Rome, Gilbert was keen to slip back into her meditation mantra that had once centered her: Om Namah Shivaya, meaning “I honor the divinity that resides within me.” As the Indian sun rose over the ashram that first morning, the hedonistic delights of Italy already felt a world away.
Gilbert had come to learn that the path of yoga was about far more than just mastering bendy pretzel poses. Practiced with discipline and devotion, it was a means to access one’s highest spiritual self and sense of unity with the divine through movement, breath control, and single-pointed meditation.
This particular ashram belonged to the Indian guru that the universe had seemingly delivered to Gilbert during a period of profound drift and tumult back in her former life in New York. There was a belief that if one yearned strongly enough for spiritual guidance, the cosmos would provide a teacher. And when Gilbert was feeling especially lost and unmoored amid her divorce and chaotic rebound relationship, she had been struck by a photograph of an Indian woman whose eyes seemed to be asking her a profound, existential question. Gilbert didn’t know what the question was, but deep down she knew her answer had to be yes.
On her first jetlagged day at the ashram, Gilbert joined the robed disciples in a lively, dynamic session of call-and-response chanting, meant to welcome the new year. Rather than droning monotonously, she was tasked with mirroring the vocal refrains of the lead singers and small orchestra, passing the sacred sonic energy back and forth for hours. Though surrounded by strangers, she felt anything but lonely as their voices unified, ushering in the next cycle.
In addition to daily meditation, Gilbert’s work assignment was the humble task of scrubbing the temple’s floors each morning. She found the physical labor tiring, but not nearly as exhausting as the ongoing struggle to quiet her mind enough to properly meditate – a battle her ashram-mates didn’t seem to share. In yogic philosophy, this “monkey mind” of wandering thoughts and lack of focus was one of the greatest obstacles to attaining the blissful stillness of pure meditation.
In contrast to her indulgence in Italy, Gilbert and the other devotees were trained to eat with extreme discipline, restriction, and mindfulness at the ashram. One particularly memorable fellow student was Richard from Texas, an unlikely yogic prospect given his former career as a truck driver and oil rigger. He nicknamed the formerly indulgent Gilbert “Groceries” for her seemingly insatiable hunger.
As the weeks passed, Gilbert’s “meditation muscle” did begin to strengthen through her commitment to the practice. She started having vivid visions, including ones of the ashram’s guru’s late mentor Swamiji, as well as a striking symbolic dream of a snake entering her room – thought to represent the buried emotions around her divorce that were finally surfacing to be felt and released.
“This will be a sweet time of grieving for you,” Richard assured her during one particularly frustrating period of stalled meditation progress. Just when Gilbert felt like she couldn’t quiet her harsh inner critic during her sessions, an almighty voice within her roared back “You have no idea how strong my love is!”
Even more demanding than meditation was the 182-verse Gurugita chant performed every morning, which Gilbert found maddeningly tedious and impossible to master. No matter how much she willed herself to connect to it, it remained a source of profound irritation and resistance. Until one morning when her roommate playfully locked Gilbert inside so she would be forced to find meaning in the chant, prompting her to imagine singing it as a lullaby to soothe her young nephew to sleep. In that act of self-less channeling, she was finally able to transcend her narrow self-obsession and egoic block to performing the chant with authenticity.
By the end of her time at the ashram, Gilbert described herself as no longer praying to the divine, but rather as having become the very embodiment of reverent prayer itself. Her Sanskrit name, imbued by her guru, was Antevasin – “one who lives at the spiritual border.”
Relearning love in Indonesia.
Even for a spontaneous traveler like Elizabeth Gilbert, her arrival in Indonesia for the third and final leg of her global odyssey felt utterly directionless. She had no concrete plans for where she would live or what she would do. She hadn’t been in contact with the elderly Balinese medicine man, Ketut Liyer, since profiling him years earlier for a magazine piece; she didn’t even know if he was still alive, let alone his current address. Unlike pleasurable Italy where she indulged the senses, or spiritual India where she centered her prayer, what would she find in the lush island landscapes of Indonesia?
Gilbert decided to begin her stay in the central hill town of Ubud. At her hotel, one of the staff members, named Mario, happened to know the very same healer Ketut that she had met previously. He took Gilbert to see the aging man, but to her excruciating embarrassment, Ketut didn’t seem to remember her at all. She described the unique healing painting he had made for her during their interview, reminded him that he had invited her to return and study under his guidance. Feeling increasingly desperate, she finally blurted out “I’m the book writer from New York!” And just like that, the memory sparked. Ketut recalled his talented former subject.
They came to an informal arrangement. Gilbert would teach Ketut English vocational skills, and in exchange he would initiate her into the local Balinese meditation traditions and philosophies, helping her find the spiritual path back to the divine that she had been seeking. Apart from their regular lessons, Gilbert’s days in Bali were largely unstructured as she settled into her new temporary home.
She marveled at the overwhelming natural beauty that surrounded her, from the iconic terraced rice paddies to the exotic blooming orchids, from the breathtaking painted sunsets to the papaya and banana trees bearing fresh fruit right outside her bedroom window. Through Ketut, Gilbert learned the core precepts of the Hindu-Buddhist-influenced Balinese spiritual tradition, including the belief that the human body comprises five elemental essences: water, fire, wind, air, and earth. By concentrating on connecting one’s inner microcosm to these elemental energy sources through meditation, you could align yourself with the divine macrocosm of the entire universe.
As the weeks passed, Gilbert’s relationship with Ketut Liyer deepened from mere student and teacher into a true bond of companions. The elderly healer was eager to hear all of Gilbert’s tales from her well-traveled life abroad, as he had never ventured far from his humble village. In turn, Gilbert posed the big philosophical questions she had been grappling with to her new friend: “What should we do with all the craziness in the world?” His reply: “Nothing, the world will always be crazy.” “How can we find inner peace?” His answer: “Meditation.”
One of the key meditations Ketut taught Gilbert was a powerful practice of visualizing and embodying four archetypal feminine energies – a Balinese woman at different stages of sexual and spiritual unfolding. This helped her confront, embrace, and integrate the various aspects of her own psyche.
At first, it seemed like a terrible bit of misfortune when Gilbert was struck by a bus and injured her knee. But this led to a fateful interaction that altered her path once again. To treat her ailment, she visited another traditional Balinese healer named Wayan. The two women bonded over both being divorcees, and Wayan made a prediction: she would pray for Gilbert to find a new great love to enter her life, sensing she needed to temper all her spiritual questing with an open heart as well.
Not long after, at a party for the expatriate community in Bali, Gilbert met a charming older Brazilian man named Felipe. He was handsome, worldly, hilarious – and utterly smitten with the idea of romancing this divorced American woman finding herself through travel. Though initially hesitant to compromise her solo spiritual journey, the electric chemistry between them was undeniable. They fell into a love haze for months, but Gilbert knew she couldn’t just remain in that blissed-out bubble forever. She was a woman of ambition with roots and commitments back in America.
They decided on an unorthodox arrangement, committing to a life of structured travel, splitting their time between the US, Brazil (where Felipe’s kids lived), Australia, and, of course, their spiritual homeland of Bali. On the tiny tropical island of Gili Meno, as they prepared to leap off their boat into the sparkling sea, Gilbert smiled at her new Brazilian lover and said “Attraversiamo” – Italian for “let’s cross over.” She was ready to begin the next chapter of her journey.
Final Summary
In this Blink to Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, you’ve learned that after a painful divorce, Elizabeth Gilbert embarks on a global journey of self-discovery, indulging in pleasure in Italy, finding spirituality through meditation in India, and embracing a new love while studying healing in Bali. Through her travels, she is able to confront her past emotions, open herself up to new experiences and perspectives, and ultimately find balance between worldly pleasures and spiritual connectedness.
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