Loving Life via Eat, Pray, Love

Using an old writer friend’s favorite word…This old post seemed apropos based on my last movie post and a commentor’s comment. So here you go! This movie is old now, but the meaning is still-I’m going to use it again-apropos.

{Don’t worry there’s no secrets or plots revealed here. Just my 2 cents on how the movie can inspire you to live a conscious, happy and meaningful life.} [photo credit]

When the poop hits the fan, we might not be able to take off on a year long trip to three different countries. Heck you may not even able to get away from the job, relationship or the worries at all. That’s why we envy Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. Because she gets to do what we always wanted to do, flee when times get tough.

But the reason why I fell in love with the movie, maybe a tad-bit more than the book, is that I could genuinely experience the difficulty that taking huge risks like that bring. On the surface, it seems easy to do what Liz played by Julia Roberts did. But in reality, it’s impossible to run away from your problems. Even thousands of miles away in India, her problems followed her wherever she went. It’s like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are. It’s only when she stopped running and turned to face them that her life seemed to shift for the better.

The question is, “How do we keep walking forward when we’re pull down with worries and regrets from the past?”

There are times in your life when you’re faced with a difficult decision. A decision that Roberts perfected with painful honesty. She says, “Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”

Is Eat, Pray, Love the three rules to live by so that we can love our lives be free of pain and difficulty?

Let’s see…

EAT: If eating stands for pleasure, then we must remember to fully indulge in our lives. To fully embrace our lives, we must learn how to let go and experience everything going on around us.

PRAY: We need to be grateful for the celebratory moments as well as the gut-wrenching ones because they both contribute to who we are and who we are supposed to be.

LOVE: Ambition. Wealth. Success. Power. They are all important, but mean nothing in relation to love. Love brings the balance we need in our lives to propel our dreams and ambitions forward. It makes our lives meaningful. It makes us want to wake up every day and share the love with others.

Every one’s quest is an individual one. But there are definitely jewels in the book and the movie. If you’re feeling weighed down and confused, try embracing your experience, pray/meditate or just reflect on the pain that you’re experiencing at this moment and then love yourself and others. Eventually you’ll right yourself up again toward your dreams and to experiencing a self-transformation, one that Gilbert wrote about and Roberts beautifully depicted. You’ll see.