BellaOnline Forums Religion and Spirituality Meditation Eat, Pray, Love and Meditation

A key part of the memoir Eat, Pray and Love is that Elizabeth (the author) spends many months in an Ashram in India. She is having ALL sorts of trouble meditating. Her thoughts run in circles, she gets overwhelmed with negative emotions, and despite the best efforts of highly talented people, she feels unable to meditate healthily.

I have a review of this book in this forum -

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Hi everyone,

I have a review of Eat, Pray, Love on the Meditation site:

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Okay, I placed a hold on this book at my library!

Jilly, let us know your reactions to it!

Susan, I'd love to have a cup of tea with you someday. Seems like you've got some very interesting stories!

I liked EPL. I felt better for having read it, and I'm surprised to learn that there have been many negative reviews.

One thing EPL does is churn up emotions - perhaps some are looking for an entertaining story where they can remain at a distance ... my opinion ...

I am halfway through the book and I love it. No emotions being churned up. I don't think anything she is doing is very strange. But then, people say I've had a strange life too.

Her troubles with getting her mind to shut up sound like what we all have to deal with, at least from people I've talked to. I like the advice from her friends to watch the thoughts, not judge them, and to not assume she is failing b/c she can't dive right into her bellybutton.

In the book, she just decided to prolong her time at the ashram. Good choice; the rest of India will still be there later. This is her time to go as far inside as her inner self decides is correct.

And....grump. There is *no way* i could get up at 3:30 AM, BTW...don't they have ashrams for night owls?

ha, ha, ashrams for night owls - I found during my year at the ashram I had to get to bed as early as possible for 6am meditation ...

It seemed in the negative reviews that they primarily fell into two camps.

Camp 1 was made up of women who hated her right away because she didn't want to have kids. Remember, the key thing at the beginning of the book is her being happily married. Her crisis is that her husband assumes they will now have kids - and she definitely does NOT want them. For many moms out there, that instantly makes them feel defensive and upset. How dare she ruin a great thing just because she's so selfish that she won't give her husband a kid? She's crying because she doesn't want to have a baby? Buck up and have one already. There are still a LOT of people out there who feel that way - that as a functional mature adult woman who is married it is your duty to make kids, and if you don't you are selfish and wrong. So to hear of a woman not only feeling that way but actively divorcing her husband who loves her just to "get her way" really seems to upset them. So that seems to be a block of the angry reviews. Since it happens right at the beginning it "taints" the whole book for them.

There's another half of the reviews which I found fascinating. They were fine with the "take off to Italy and romp with a sexy guy" part. they didn't seem to mind the "take off on your husband" part. But when they hit the meditation part they were bored out of their skulls! A number of reviewers said they put the book down here. Some said they skipped pages until it got to the fun sex ending part.

This intrigues me so much. The readers crave excitement so much that even when they're "relaxing and reading" they can't read about learning to relax? They were so ADD that they couldn't read information and learn how to handle ADD - and they skipped ahead to an ADD-intense section? I mean, it's probably those people who needed that section the most!

Well, you know my stance on having kids, so I won't 'get' that part either.

Isn't more selfish to want to immortalize yourself by having kids to live through, or to have someone 'take care of you' later on? Isn't it more selfish to add to the world's population, taxing our limited resources, adding to the carbon footprint? I would think the few of us who don't want to make babies would be thanked somehow.

hmmm. I think i should move this to the proper forum...okay, that part is now here in MNK:

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