eat_pray_love

Thumbs-Up is an Indian soft drink, sort of like Coca-Cola, but with about nine times the corn syrup and triple that of caffeine. I think it might have methamphetamines in it, too. It makes me see double. A few times a week, Richard and I wander into town and share one small bottle of Thumbs-Up—a radical experience after the purity of vegetarian Ashram food—always being careful not to actually touch the bottle with our lips. Richard’s rule about traveling in India is a sound one: “Don’t touch anything but yourself.” (And, yes, that was also a tentative title for this book.)

We have our favorite visits in town, always stopping to pay respects to the temple, and to say hello to Mr. Panicar, the tailor, who shakes our hands and says, “Congratulations to meet you!” every time. We watch the cows mill about enjoying their sacred status (I think they actually abuse the privilege, lying right in the middle of the road just to drive home the point that they are holy), and we watch the dogs scratch themselves like they’re wondering how the heck they ever ended up here. We watch the women doing road work, busting up rocks under the sweltering sun, swinging sledgehammers, barefoot, looking so strangely beautiful in their jewel-colored saris and their necklaces and bracelets. They give us dazzling smiles which I can’t begin to understand—how can they be happy doing this rough work under such terrible conditions? Why don’t they all faint and die after fifteen minutes in the boiling heat with those sledgehammers? I ask Mr. Panicar the tailor about it and he says it’s like this with the villagers, that people in this part of the world were born to this kind of hard labor and work is all they are used to.

“Also,” he adds casually, “we don’t live very long around here.”

It is a poor village, of course, but not desperate by the standards of India; the presence (and charity) of the Ashram and some Western currency floating around makes a significant difference. Not that there’s so much to buy here, though Richard and I like to look around in all the shops that sell the beads and the little statues. There are some Kashmiri guys—very shrewd salesmen, indeed—who are always trying to unload their wares on us. One of them really came after me today, asking if madam would perhaps like to buy a fine Kashmiri rug for her home?

This made Richard laugh. He enjoys, among other sports, making fun of me for being homeless.

“Save your breath, brother,” he said to the rug salesman. “This old girl ain’t got any floors to put a rug on.”

Undaunted, the Kashmiri salesman suggested, “Then perhaps madam would like to hang a rug on her wall?”

“See, now,” said Richard, “that’s the thing—she’s a little short on walls these days, too.”

“But I have a brave heart!” I piped up, in my own defense.

“And other sterling qualities,” added Richard, tossing me a bone for once in his life. Eat, Pray, Love

52

The biggest obstacle in my Ashram experience is not meditation, actually. That’s difficult, of course, but not murderous. There’s something even harder for me here. The murderous thing is what we do every morning after meditation and before breakfast (my God, but these mornings are long)—a chant called the Gurugita. Richard calls it “The Geet.” I have so much trouble with The Geet. I do not like it at all, never have, not since the first time I heard it sung at the Ashram in upstate New York. I love all the other chants and hymns of this Yogic tradition, but the Gurugita feels long, tedious, sonorous and insufferable. That’s just my opinion, of course; other people claim to love it, though I can’t fathom why.

The Gurugita is 182 verses long, for crying out loud (and sometimes I do), and each verse is a paragraph of impenetrable Sanskrit. Together with the preamble chant and the wrap-up chorus, the entire ritual takes about an hour and half to perform. This is before breakfast, remember, and after we have already had an hour of meditation and a twenty-minute chanting of the first morning hymn. The Gurugita is basically the reason you have to get up at 3:00 AM around here.

I don’t like the tune, and I don’t like the words. Whenever I tell anyone around the Ashram this, they say, “Oh, but it’s so sacred!” Yes, but so is the Book of Job, and I don’t choose to sing the thing aloud every morning before breakfast.

The Gurugita does have an impressive spiritual lineage; it’s an excerpt from a holy ancient scripture of Yoga called the Skanda Purana, most of which has been lost, and little of which has been translated out of Sanskrit. Like much of Yogic scripture, it’s written in the form of a conversation, an almost Socratic dialogue. The conversation is between the goddess Parvati and the almighty, all-encompassing god Shiva. Parvati and Shiva are the divine embodiment of creativity (the feminine) and consciousness (the masculine). She is the generative energy of the universe; he is its formless wisdom. Whatever Shiva imagines, Parvati brings to life. He dreams it; she materializes it. Their dance, their union (their Yoga), is both the cause of the universe and its manifestation.

In the Gurugita, the goddess is asking the god for the secrets of worldly fulfillment, and he is telling her. It bugs me, this hymn. I had hoped my feelings about the Gurugita would

change during my stay at the Ashram. I’d hoped that putting it in an Indian context would cause me to learn how to love the thing. In fact, the opposite has happened. Over the few weeks that I’ve been here, my feelings about the Gurugita have shifted from simple dislike to solid dread. I’ve started skipping it and doing other things with my morning that I think are much better for my spiritual growth, like writing in my journal, or taking a shower, or calling my sister back in Pennsylvania and seeing how her kids are doing.

Richard from Texas always busts me for skipping out. “I noticed you were absent from The Geet this morning,” he’ll say, and I’ll say, “I am communicating with God in other ways,” and he’ll say, “By sleeping in, you mean?”

But when I try to go to the chant, all it does is agitate me. I mean, physically. I don’t feel like I’m singing it so much as being dragged behind it. It makes me sweat. This is very odd because I tend to be one of life’s chronically cold people, and it’s cold in this part of India in January before the sun comes up. Everyone else sits in the chant huddled in wool blankets and hats to stay warm, and I’m peeling layers off myself as the hymn drones on, foaming like an overworked farm horse. I come out of the temple after the Gurugita and the sweat rises off my skin in the cold morning air like fog—like horrible, green, stinky fog. The physical reaction is mild compared to the hot waves of emotion that rock me as I try to sing the thing. And I can’t even sing it. I can only croak it. Resentfully.

Did I mention that it has 182 verses?

So a few days ago, after a particularly yucky session of chanting, I decided to seek advice from my favorite teacher around here—a monk with a wonderfully long Sanskrit name which translates as “He Who Dwells in the Heart of the Lord Who Dwells Within His Own Heart.” This monk is American, in his sixties, smart and educated. He used to be a classical theater professor at NYU, and he still carries himself with a rather venerable dignity. He took his monastic vows almost thirty years ago. I like him because he’s no-nonsense and funny. In a dark moment of confusion about David, I’d once confided my heartache to this monk. He listened respectfully, offered up the most compassionate advice he could find, and then said, “And now I’m kissing my robes.” He lifted a corner of his saffron robes and gave a loud smack. Thinking this was probably some super-arcane religious custom, I asked what he was doing. He said, “Same thing I always do whenever anyone comes to me for relationship advice. I’m just thanking God I’m a monk and I don’t have to deal with this stuff anymore.”

So I knew I could trust him to let me speak frankly about my problems with the Gurugita. We went for a walk in the gardens together one night after dinner, and I told him how much I disliked the thing and asked if he could please excuse me from having to sing it anymore. He immediately started laughing. He said, “You don’t have to sing it if you don’t want to. Nobody around here is ever going to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

“But people say it’s a vital spiritual practice.”

“It is. But I’m not going to tell you that you’re going to go to hell if you don’t do it. The only thing I’ll tell you is that your Guru has been very clear about this—the Gurugita is the one essential text of this Yoga, and maybe the most important practice you can do, next to meditation. If you’re staying at the Ashram, she expects you to get up for the chant every morning.”

“It’s not that I mind getting up early in the morning . . .” “What is it, then?”

I explained to the monk why I had come to dread the Gurugita, how tortuous it feels.

He said, “Wow—look at you. Even just talking about it you’re getting all bent out of shape.” It was true. I could feel cold, clammy sweat accumulating in my armpits. I asked, “Can’t I

use that time to do other practices, instead? I find sometimes that if I go to the meditation cave during the Gurugita I can get a nice vibe going for meditation.”

“Ah—Swamiji would’ve yelled at you for that. He would’ve called you a chanting thief for riding on the energy of everyone else’s hard work. Look, the Gurugita isn’t supposed to be a fun song to sing. It has a different function. It’s a text of unimaginable power. It is a mighty purifying practice. It burns away all your junk, all your negative emotions. And I think it’s probably having a positive effect on you if you’re experiencing such strong emotions and physical reactions while you’re chanting it. This stuff can be painful, but it’s awfully beneficial.”

“How do you keep the motivation to stay with it?”

“What’s the alternative? To quit whenever something gets challenging? To futz around your whole life, miserable and incomplete?”

“Did you really just say ‘futz around’?” “Yes. Yes, I did.”

“What should I do?”

“You have to decide for yourself. But my advice—since you asked—is that you stick to chanting the Gurugita while you’re here, especially because you’re having such an extreme reaction to it. If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it’s working on you. This is what the Gurugita does. It burns away the ego, turns you into pure ash. It’s supposed to be arduous, Liz. It has power beyond what can be rationally understood. You’re only staying at the Ashram another week, right? And then you’re free to go traveling and have fun. So just chant the thing seven more times, then you never have to do it again. Remember what our Guru says—be a scientist of your own spiritual experience. You’re not here as a tourist or a journalist; you’re here as a seeker. So explore it.”

“So you’re not letting me off the hook?”

“You can let yourself off the hook anytime you want, Liz. That’s the divine contract of a little something we call free will.”

Eat, Pray, Love

53

So I went to the chant the next morning, all full of resolve, and the Gurugita kicked me down a twenty-foot flight of cement stairs—or anyway, that’s how it felt. The following day it was even worse. I woke up in a fury, and before I even got to the temple I was already sweating, boiling, teeming. I kept thinking: “It’s only an hour and a half—you can do anything for an hour and a half. For God’s sake, you have friends who were in labor for fourteen hours . . .” But still, I could not have been less comfortable in this chair if I had been stapled to it. I kept feeling fireballs of, like, menopausal heat pulsing over me, and I thought I might faint, or bite somebody in my fury.

My anger was giant. It took in everyone in this world, but it was most specifically directed at Swamiji—my Guru’s master, who had instituted this ritual chanting of the Gurugita in the first place. This was not my first difficult encounter with the great and now-deceased Yogi. He was the one who had come to me in my dream on the beach, demanding to know how I intended to stop the tide, and I always felt like he was riding me.

Swamiji had been, all throughout his life, relentless, a spiritual fire-brand. Like Saint Francis of Assisi, Swamiji had been born into a wealthy family and had been expected to enter the family business. But when he was just a young boy, he met a holy man in a small village near his, and had been deeply touched by the experience. Still in his teens, Swamiji left home in a loincloth and spent years making pilgrimages to every holy spot in India, searching for a true spiritual master. He was said to have met over sixty saints and Gurus, never finding the teacher he wanted. He starved, wandered on foot, slept outside in Himalayan snowstorms, suffered from malaria, dysentery—and called these the happiest years of his life, just searching for somebody who would show God to him. Over those years, Swamiji became a Hatha Yogi, an expert in ayurvedic medicine and cooking, an architect, a gardener, a musician and a swordfighter (this I love). By his middle years, he had still not found a Guru, until one day he encountered a naked, mad sage who told him to go back home, back to the village where he had met the holy man as a child, and to study with that great saint.

Swamiji obeyed, returned home, and became the holy man’s most devoted student, finally achieving enlightenment through his master’s guidance. Ultimately, Swamiji would become a

Guru himself. Over time, his Ashram in India grew from three rooms on a barren farm to the lush garden it is today. Then he got the inspiration to go traveling and incite a worldwide meditation revolution. He came to America in 1970 and blew everybody’s mind. He gave divine initiation—shaktipat—to hundreds and thousands of people a day. He had a power that was immediate and transformative. The Reverend Eugene Callender (a respected civil rights leader, a colleague of Martin Luther King Jr. and still the pastor of a Baptist church in Harlem) remembers meeting Swamiji in the 1970s and dropping on his knees before the Indian man in amazement and thinking to himself, “There’s no time for shuckin’ and jivin’ now, this is it . . .

This man knows everything there is to know about you.”

Swamiji demanded enthusiasm, commitment, self-control. He was always scolding people for being jad, the Hindi word for “inert.” He brought ancient concepts of discipline to the lives of his often rebellious young Western followers, commanding them to stop wasting their own (and everyone else’s) time and energy with their freewheeling hippie nonsense. He would throw his walking stick at you one minute, hug you the next. He was complicated, often controversial, but truly world-changing. The reason we have access now in the West to many ancient Yogic scriptures is that Swamiji presided over the translation and revitalization of philosophical texts that had long been forgotten even in much of India.

My Guru was Swamiji’s most devoted student. She was literally born to be his disciple; her Indian parents were amongst his earliest followers. When she was only a child, she would often chant for eighteen hours a day, tireless in her devotion. Swamiji recognized her potential, and he took her on when she was still a teenager to be his translator. She traveled all over the world with him, paying such close attention to her Guru, she said later, that she could even feel him speaking to her with his knees. She became his successor in 1982, still in her twenties.

All true Gurus are alike in the fact that they exist in a constant state of self-realization, but external characteristics differ. The apparent differences between my Guru and her master are vast—she’s a feminine, multilingual, university-educated and savvy professional woman; he was a sometimes-capricious, sometimes-kingly South Indian old lion. For a nice New England girl like me, it is easy to follow my living teacher, who is so reassuring in her propri- ety—exactly the kind of Guru you could take home to meet Mom and Dad. But Swamiji . . . he was such a wild card. And from the first time I came to this Yogic path and saw photographs of him, and heard stories about him, I’ve thought, “I’m just going to stay clear of this character. He’s too big. He makes me nervous.”

But now that I am here in India, here in the Ashram that was his home, I’m finding that all I want is Swamiji. All I feel is Swamiji. The only person I talk to in my prayers and meditations is Swamiji. It’s the Swamiji channel, round the clock. I am in the furnace of Swamiji here and I

can feel him working on me. Even in his death, there’s something so earthy and present about him. He’s the master I need when I’m really struggling, because I can curse him and show him all my failures and flaws and all he does is laugh. Laugh, and love me. His laughter makes me angrier and the anger motivates me to act. And I never feel him closer to me than when I’m struggling through the Gurugita, with its unfathomable Sanskrit verses. I’m arguing with Swamiji the whole time in my head, making all kinds of blowhard proclamations, like, “You better be doing something for me because I’m doing this for you! I better see some results here! This better be purifying!” Yesterday, I got so incensed when I looked down at my chanting book and realized we were only on Verse Twenty-five and I was already burning in discomfort, already sweating (and not like a person sweats, either, but rather like a cheese sweats), that I actually expelled a loud: “You gotta be kidding me!” and a few women turned and looked at me in alarm, expecting, no doubt, to see my head start spinning demonically on my neck.

Every once in a while I recall that I used to live in Rome and spend my leisurely mornings eating pastries and drinking cappuccino and reading the newspaper.

That sure was nice.

Though it seems very far away now.

Eat, Pray, Love

54

This morning, I overslept. Which is to say—sloth that I am, I dozed until the ungodly hour of 4:15 AM. I woke up only minutes before the Gurugita was to begin, motivated myself reluctantly to get out of bed, splashed some water on my face, dressed and—feeling so crusty and cranky and resentful—went to leave my room in the predawn pitch-black . . . only to find that my roommate had left the room before me and had locked me in.

This was a really difficult thing for her to have done. It’s not that big a room and it’s hard not to notice that your roommate is still sleeping in the next bed. And she’s a really responsible, practical woman—a mother of five from Australia. This is not her style. But she did it. She literally padlocked me in the room.

My first thought, was: If there were ever a good excuse not to go to the Gurugita, this would be it. My second thought, though? Well—it wasn’t even a thought. It was an action.

I jumped out the window.

To be specific, I crawled outside over the railing, gripping it with my sweaty palms and dangling there from two stories up over the darkness for a moment, only then asking myself the reasonable question, “Why are you jumping out of this building?” My reply came with a fierce, impersonal determination: I have to get to the Gurugita. Then I let go and dropped backward maybe twelve or fifteen feet through the dark air to the concrete sidewalk below, hitting something on the way down that peeled a long strip of skin off my right shin, but I didn’t care. I picked myself up and ran barefoot, my pulse slamming in my ears, all the way to the temple, found a seat, opened up my prayer book just as the chant was beginning and—bleeding down my leg the whole while—I started to sing the Gurugita.

It was only after a few verses that I caught my breath and was able to think my normal, instinctive morning thought: I don’t want to be here. After which I heard Swamiji burst out laughing in my head, saying: That’s funny—you sure act like somebody who wants to be here.

And I replied to him, OK, then. You win.

I sat there, singing and bleeding and thinking that it was maybe time for me to change my relationship with this particular spiritual practice. The Gurugita is meant to be a hymn of pure love, but something had been stopping me short from offering up that love in sincerity. So as I