Chapter 1: Question: What is it that you seek when you are attempting to heal? What gives you comfort?
Chapter 2: When we seek balance in our lives, it is important to “have it all” or only that which we are really interested in having?
Chapter 3: How do we identify ourselves? What are the characteristics that we use to define ourselves?
Chapter 4: What tips do you have for others in recognizing when you simply have to surrender control of a situation?
Chapter 5: When disaster strikes, who are the people that you reach out to?
Chapters 6-8: If given a choice to do one thing completely different than your life right
now for one month, what would it be?
Chapter 9: How can calling upon the positive energy of our friends and colleagues help center us?
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
INTRODUCTION (or How This Book Works or The 109th Bead)
Japa Malas are strings of beads used by Hindus and Buddhists in meditation to help with focus and devotion (this idea later morphed into the rosary). Three represents balance: the Trinity, a barstool, etc., and japa malas have 108 beads “a perfect, three-digit multiple of three”. Ergo, in effort to find personal balance, the book itself has 108 chapters in 3 sections (36 chapters in each section) chronicling the author’s journey to three locations: Italy (to study pleasure and food), India (to study prayer and meditation) and Indonesia (to study balance). There is a 109th bead attached to the japa mala which prompts the mediator to thank their teachers. This introduction serves as 109th bead, and is not only an introduction, but also Gilbert’s grateful acknowledgement to her teachers and friends.
BOOK ONE: ITALY (or Say It Like You Eat It or 36 Tales about the Pursuit of Pleasure)
1
“I wish Giovanni would kiss me,” is Gilbert’s opening hook. Giovanni is her Italian language exchange partner, whose charm is only increased by the fact that he is much younger, Italian, tall, dark and handsome and has an equally charming, tall, dark and handsome twin. But, she proceeds to explain why this is a bad idea. It’s not that she has any moral compunction about having twin lovers, but that she has decided that, in her search for healing and peace, a year of celibacy is necessary medicine.
2
Gilbert flashes back to three years ago to tell the events that catapulted her out of her marriage and into this journey across the world. As she said, “I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me. I don’t want to be married anymore. I don’t want to live in this big house. I don’t want to have a baby.” As the primary bread winner, she had worked hard to create the ideal suburban life, and even as it progressed famously on the outside, on the inside she was not only questioning that she wanted it, but dreading having to live it. She declines to give specifics on the collapse of her marriage, admitting it would be a biased report. But, the critical point not only of this chapter but also in her life happened as her marriage disintegrated: “What happened was that I started to pray. You know – like, to God.”
3
As she has introduced “that loaded word—God” into the book for the first time, she takes a chapter to, “explain exactly what I mean when I say that word, just so people can decide right away how offended they need to get.” She describes her very inclusive theology saying that even though she uses the “word God… [she] could just as easily use the words Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu or Zeus” or the ancient Sanskrit “That” or “even the most poetic manifestation of God’s name… ‘The Shadow of the Turning.’” She says the terms themselves are all “equally adequate and inadequate descriptions of the indescribable” and she has chosen the name “God” out of simple preference.
Gilbert was raised Protestant and therefore considers herself a “cultural” Christian and not a theological one, meaning that, though she does “love that great teacher of peace who was called Jesus” and even occasionally asks herself, “WWJD?”, she “can’t swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God.” Rather, she is drawn with “breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed – much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts… and who has [reported]… that God is an experience of supreme love.”
She compares her beliefs about God to a “really great dog” she got from the pound – “a mixture of about ten different breeds [that] seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all.” When asked what kind of dog she had, she simply answered “brown.” “Similarly, when the question is raised, ‘What kind of God do you believe in?’ my answer is easy: ‘I believe in a magnificent God’”
4
Gilbert describes her first prayer, “speaking to the creator of the universe as though we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party,” the simple essence of her prayer, “Please tell me what to do.” and the response she received which began with a comforting sense of being surrounded by silence and stillness and ended up with a voice speaking to her from within that still silence with warm compassion. The voice, she said, was her own voice, speaking from within herself. She says it was “perfectly wise, calm and compassionate…what my voice would sound like if I’d only ever experienced love and certainty in my life.” What did it say? “Go back to bed, Liz.” She says this wasn’t so much a religious conversion experience as the beginning of a religious conversation.
5
Her divorce got uglier than she thought possible. Meanwhile, she falls in love (and moves in) with David and 9-11 occurs (made all the more poignant by the way it parallels her marriage, “everything invincible that had once stood together now became a smoldering avalanche of ruin”). The relationship with David became a vortex of insecure addiction and withdrawal. Gilbert is honest and insightful in her analysis of herself during this time, making a poignant parallel between herself (hooked on David’s love, which was often withdrawn) and a junkie whose dealer no longer supplies the drug for free.
6
Gilbert qualifies that there were a few good things that did happen during the years of her divorce and on/off again relationship with David. The first good thing was that she started learning Italian for the pure love of it.
7
The second good thing that happened during this time was that she was introduced (by David) to an Indian Guru to help her in her newfound spiritual journey.
8
The final good thing was that, on a business trip in Bali, an old medicine man invited her to (or rather prophesied that she would) return to Bali and live with him for a time. He read her palm and prophesied several things – that she was a writer, would lose her fortune shortly and then regain it later, that she would have 2 marriages and that she would soon return to Bali.
9
Wanting both “worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence—the dual glories of a human life…the singular balance of the good and the beautiful” she decided to take a year to travel to Italy, India and Indonesia—four months in each place. And in each place, rather than try to explore the country itself, Gilbert’s goal was “to thoroughly explore one aspect of [herself] …in a place that has traditionally done that thing very well”: Pleasure in Italy, Devotion in India, and Balance in Indonesia.
Japa Malas are strings of beads used by Hindus and Buddhists in meditation to help with focus and devotion (this idea later morphed into the rosary). Three represents balance: the Trinity, a barstool, etc., and japa malas have 108 beads “a perfect, three-digit multiple of three”. Ergo, in effort to find personal balance, the book itself has 108 chapters in 3 sections (36 chapters in each section) chronicling the author’s journey to three locations: Italy (to study pleasure and food), India (to study prayer and meditation) and Indonesia (to study balance). There is a 109th bead attached to the japa mala which prompts the mediator to thank their teachers. This introduction serves as 109th bead, and is not only an introduction, but also Gilbert’s grateful acknowledgement to her teachers and friends.
BOOK ONE: ITALY (or Say It Like You Eat It or 36 Tales about the Pursuit of Pleasure)
1
“I wish Giovanni would kiss me,” is Gilbert’s opening hook. Giovanni is her Italian language exchange partner, whose charm is only increased by the fact that he is much younger, Italian, tall, dark and handsome and has an equally charming, tall, dark and handsome twin. But, she proceeds to explain why this is a bad idea. It’s not that she has any moral compunction about having twin lovers, but that she has decided that, in her search for healing and peace, a year of celibacy is necessary medicine.
2
Gilbert flashes back to three years ago to tell the events that catapulted her out of her marriage and into this journey across the world. As she said, “I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me. I don’t want to be married anymore. I don’t want to live in this big house. I don’t want to have a baby.” As the primary bread winner, she had worked hard to create the ideal suburban life, and even as it progressed famously on the outside, on the inside she was not only questioning that she wanted it, but dreading having to live it. She declines to give specifics on the collapse of her marriage, admitting it would be a biased report. But, the critical point not only of this chapter but also in her life happened as her marriage disintegrated: “What happened was that I started to pray. You know – like, to God.”
3
As she has introduced “that loaded word—God” into the book for the first time, she takes a chapter to, “explain exactly what I mean when I say that word, just so people can decide right away how offended they need to get.” She describes her very inclusive theology saying that even though she uses the “word God… [she] could just as easily use the words Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu or Zeus” or the ancient Sanskrit “That” or “even the most poetic manifestation of God’s name… ‘The Shadow of the Turning.’” She says the terms themselves are all “equally adequate and inadequate descriptions of the indescribable” and she has chosen the name “God” out of simple preference.
Gilbert was raised Protestant and therefore considers herself a “cultural” Christian and not a theological one, meaning that, though she does “love that great teacher of peace who was called Jesus” and even occasionally asks herself, “WWJD?”, she “can’t swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God.” Rather, she is drawn with “breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed – much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts… and who has [reported]… that God is an experience of supreme love.”
She compares her beliefs about God to a “really great dog” she got from the pound – “a mixture of about ten different breeds [that] seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all.” When asked what kind of dog she had, she simply answered “brown.” “Similarly, when the question is raised, ‘What kind of God do you believe in?’ my answer is easy: ‘I believe in a magnificent God’”
4
Gilbert describes her first prayer, “speaking to the creator of the universe as though we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party,” the simple essence of her prayer, “Please tell me what to do.” and the response she received which began with a comforting sense of being surrounded by silence and stillness and ended up with a voice speaking to her from within that still silence with warm compassion. The voice, she said, was her own voice, speaking from within herself. She says it was “perfectly wise, calm and compassionate…what my voice would sound like if I’d only ever experienced love and certainty in my life.” What did it say? “Go back to bed, Liz.” She says this wasn’t so much a religious conversion experience as the beginning of a religious conversation.
5
Her divorce got uglier than she thought possible. Meanwhile, she falls in love (and moves in) with David and 9-11 occurs (made all the more poignant by the way it parallels her marriage, “everything invincible that had once stood together now became a smoldering avalanche of ruin”). The relationship with David became a vortex of insecure addiction and withdrawal. Gilbert is honest and insightful in her analysis of herself during this time, making a poignant parallel between herself (hooked on David’s love, which was often withdrawn) and a junkie whose dealer no longer supplies the drug for free.
6
Gilbert qualifies that there were a few good things that did happen during the years of her divorce and on/off again relationship with David. The first good thing was that she started learning Italian for the pure love of it.
7
The second good thing that happened during this time was that she was introduced (by David) to an Indian Guru to help her in her newfound spiritual journey.
8
The final good thing was that, on a business trip in Bali, an old medicine man invited her to (or rather prophesied that she would) return to Bali and live with him for a time. He read her palm and prophesied several things – that she was a writer, would lose her fortune shortly and then regain it later, that she would have 2 marriages and that she would soon return to Bali.
9
Wanting both “worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence—the dual glories of a human life…the singular balance of the good and the beautiful” she decided to take a year to travel to Italy, India and Indonesia—four months in each place. And in each place, rather than try to explore the country itself, Gilbert’s goal was “to thoroughly explore one aspect of [herself] …in a place that has traditionally done that thing very well”: Pleasure in Italy, Devotion in India, and Balance in Indonesia.
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