Eat, Pray, Love (20 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Gilbert
Tags: #Autobiography, #Non-Fiction, #Travel, #Contemporary, #Spirituality, #Adult, #Biography
W
e are all given work here, and it turns out that my work assignment is to scrub the temple floors. So that’s where you can find me for several hours a day now—down on my knees on the cold marble with a brush and a bucket, working away like a fairy-tale stepsister. (By the way, I’m aware of the metaphor—the scrubbing clean of the temple that is my heart, the polishing of my soul, the everyday mundane effort that must be applied to spiritual practice in order to purify the self, etc., etc.)
My fellow floor-scrubbers are mainly a bunch of Indian teenagers. They always give teenagers this job because it requires high physical energy but not enormous reserves of responsibility; there’s a limit to how much damage you can do if you mess up. I like my coworkers. The girls are fluttery little butterflies who seem so much younger than American eighteen-year-old girls, and the boys are serious little autocrats who seem so much older than American eighteen-year-old boys. Nobody’s supposed to talk in the temples, but these are teenagers, so there’s a constant chatter going on all the time as we’re working. It’s not all idle gossip. One of the boys spends all day scrubbing beside me, lecturing me earnestly on how to best perform my work here: “Take seriously. Make punctual. Be cool and easy. Remember—everything you do, you do for God. And everything God does, He do for you.”
It’s tiring physical labor, but my daily hours of work are considerably easier than my daily hours of meditation. The truth is, I don’t think I’m good at meditation. I know I’m out of practice with it, but honestly I was never good at it. I can’t seem to get my mind to hold still. I mentioned this once to an Indian monk, and he said, “It’s a pity you’re the only person in the history of the world who ever had this problem.” Then the monk quoted to me from the Bhagavad Gita, the most sacred ancient text of Yoga: “Oh Krishna, the mind is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding. I consider it as difficult to subdue as the wind.”
Meditation is both the anchor and the wings of Yoga. Meditation is the
way.
There’s a difference between meditation and prayer, though both practices seek communion with the divine. I’ve heard it said that prayer is the act of talking to God, while meditation is the act of listening. Take a wild guess as to which comes easier for me. I can prattle away to God about all my feelings and my problems all the livelong day, but when it comes time to descend into silence and
listen . . .
well, that’s a different story. When I ask my mind to rest in stillness, it is astonishing how quickly it will turn (1) bored, (2) angry, (3) depressed, (4) anxious or (5) all of the above.
Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the “monkey mind”—the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. Happy thoughts make me happy, but—
whoop!—
how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it’s the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
The other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought is that you are never where you
are.
You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in this moment. It’s something like the habit of my dear friend Susan, who—whenever she sees a beautiful place—exclaims in near panic, “It’s so beautiful here! I want to come back here someday!” and it takes all of my persuasive powers to try to convince her that she is
already
here. If you’re looking for union with the divine, this kind of forward/backward whirling is a problem. There’s a reason they call God a
presence—
because God is right
here,
right
now.
In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.
But to stay in the present moment requires dedicated one-pointed focus. Different meditation techniques teach one-pointedness in different ways—for instance, by focusing your eyes on a single point of light, or by observing the rise and fall of your breath. My Guru teaches meditation with the help of a mantra, sacred words or syllables to be repeated in a focused manner. Mantra has a dual function. For one thing, it gives the mind something to do. It’s as if you’ve given the monkey a pile of 10,000 buttons and said, “Move these buttons, one at time, into a new pile.” This is a considerably easier task for the monkey than if you just plopped him in a corner and asked him not to move. The other purpose of mantra is to transport you to another state, rowboatlike, through the choppy waves of the mind. Whenever your attention gets pulled into a cross-current of thought, just return to the mantra, climb back into the boat and keep going. The great Sanskrit mantras are said to contain unimaginable powers, the ability to row you, if you can stay with one, all the way to the shorelines of divinity.
Among my many, many problems with meditation is that the mantra I have been given—
Om Namah Shivaya—
doesn’t sit comfortably in my head. I love the sound of it and I love the meaning of it, but it does not glide me into meditation. It never has, not in the two years I’ve been practicing this Yoga. When I try to repeat
Om Namah Shivaya
in my head, it actually gets stuck in my throat, making my chest clench tightly, making me nervous. I can never match the syllables to my breathing.
I end up asking my roommate Corella about this one night. I’m shy to admit to her how much trouble I have keeping my mind focused on mantra repetition, but she is a meditation teacher. Maybe she can help me. She tells me that her mind used to wander during meditation, too, but that now her practice is the great, easy, transformative joy of her life.
“Seems I just sit down and shut my eyes,” she says, “and all I have to do is
think
of the mantra and I vanish right into heaven.”
Hearing this, I am nauseated with envy. Then again, Corella has been practicing Yoga for almost as many years as I’ve been alive. I ask her if she can show me
how
exactly she uses
Om Namah Shivaya
in her meditation practice. Does she take one inhale for every syllable? (When I do this, it feels really interminable and annoying.) Or is it one word for every breath?(But the words are all different lengths! So how do you even it out?) Or does she say the whole mantra once on the inhale, then once again on the exhale? (Because when I try to do that, it gets all speeded up and I get anxious.)
“I don’t know,” Corella says. “I just kind of . . . say it.”
“But do you sing it?” I push, desperate now. “Do you put a beat on it?”
“I just say it.”
“Can you maybe speak aloud for me the way you say it in your head when you’re meditating?”
Indulgently, my roommate closes her eyes and starts saying the mantra aloud, the way it appears in her head. And, indeed, she’s just . . . saying it. She says it quietly, normally, smiling slightly. She says it a few times, in fact, until I get restless and cut her off.
“But don’t you get bored?” I ask.
“Ah,” says Corella and opens her eyes, smiling. She looks at her watch. “Ten seconds have passed, Liz. Bored already, are we?”
T
he following morning, I arrive right on time for the 4:00 AM meditation session which always starts the day here. We are meant to sit for an hour in silence, but I log the minutes as if they are miles—sixty brutal miles that I have to endure. By mile/minute fourteen, my nerves have started to go, my knees are breaking down and I’m overcome with exasperation. Which is understandable, given that the conversations between me and my mind during meditation generally go something like this:
Me:
OK, we’re going to meditate now. Let’s draw our attention to our breath and focus on the mantra.
Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shiv—
Mind:
I can help you out with this, you know!
Me:
OK, good, because I need your help. Let’s go.
Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shi—
Mind:
I can help you think of nice meditative images. Like—hey, here’s a good one. Imagine you are a temple. A temple on an island! And the island is in the ocean!
Me:
Oh, that
is
a nice image.
Mind:
Thanks. I thought of it myself.
Me:
But what ocean are we picturing here?
Mind:
The Mediterranean. Imagine you’re one of those Greek islands, with an old Greek temple on it. No, never mind, that’s too touristy. You know what? Forget the ocean. Oceans are too dangerous. Here’s a better idea—imagine you’re an island in a
lake,
instead.
Me:
Can we meditate now, please?
Om Namah Shiv—
Mind:
Yes! Definitely! But try not to picture that the lake is covered with . . . what are those things called—
Me:
Jet Skis?
Mind:
Yes! Jet Skis! Those things consume so much fuel! They’re really a menace to the environment. Do you know what else uses a lot of fuel? Leaf blowers. You wouldn’t think so, but—
Me:
OK, but let’s MEDITATE now, please?
Om Namah—
Mind:
Right! I definitely want to help you meditate! And that’s why we’re going to skip the image of an island on a lake or an ocean, because that’s obviously not working. So let’s imagine that you’re an island in . . . a river!
Me:
Oh, you mean like Bannerman Island, in the Hudson River?
Mind:
Yes! Exactly! Perfect. Therefore, in conclusion, let’s meditate on this image—envision that you are an island in a river.
All the thoughts that float by as you’re meditating, these are just the river’s natural currents and you can ignore them because you are an island.
Me:
Wait, I thought you said I was a temple.
Mind:
That’s right, sorry. You’re a temple
on
an island. In fact, you are both the temple
and
the island.
Me:
Am I also the river?
Mind:
No, the river is just the thoughts.
Me:
Stop! Please stop! YOU’RE MAKING ME CRAZY!!!
Mind (wounded):
Sorry. I was only trying to help.
Me:
Om Namah Shivaya . . . Om Namah Shivaya . . . Om Namah Shivaya . . .
Here there is a promising eight-second pause in thoughts. But
then—
Mind:
Are you mad at me now?
—and then with a big gasp, like I am coming up for air, my mind wins, my eyes fly open and I
quit.
In tears. An Ashram is supposed to be a place where you come to deepen your meditation, but this is a disaster. The pressure is too much for me. I can’t do it. But what should I do? Run out of the temple crying after fourteen minutes, every day?
This morning, though, instead of fighting it, I just stopped. I gave up. I let myself slump against the wall behind me. My back hurt, I had no strength, my mind was quivering. My posture collapsed like a bridge crumbling down. I took the mantra off the top of my head (where it had been pressing down on me like an invisible anvil) and set it on the floor beside me. And then I said to God, “I’m really sorry, but this is the closest I could get to you today.”
The Lakota Sioux say that a child who cannot sit still is a half-developed child. And an old Sanskrit text says, “By certain signs you can tell when meditation is being rightly performed. One of them is that a bird will sit on your head, thinking you are an inert thing.” This has not exactly happened to me yet. But for the next forty minutes or so, I tried to stay as quiet as possible, trapped in that meditation hall and ensnared in my own shame and inadequacy, watching the devotees around me as they sat in their perfect postures, their perfect eyes closed, their smug faces emanating calmness as they surely transported themselves into some perfect heaven. I was full of a hot, powerful sadness and would have loved to burst into the comfort of tears, but tried hard not to, remembering something my Guru once said—that you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.
But I didn’t feel strong. My body ached in diminished worthlessness.
I wondered who is the “me” when I am conversing with my mind, and who is the “mind.” I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from
Jaws
and couldn’t help smiling:
“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”