Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Liz planned to stay at the ashram for six weeks and then travel through India, meeting holy men, visiting temples, seeing the Ganges and the Himalayas, and even meeting the Dalai Lama. Instead, she decides to remain at the ashram. Something told her it would be “spiritually negligent” to run off. Zen masters say, “You cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water” (188). Richard tells her to “stay put” for three months and she will see “some stuff that’s so damn beautiful it’ll make you wanna throw rocks at the Taj Mahal” (189). She says she has the rest of her life for sightseeing.

In the middle of her meditation one morning, she finds herself wondering where she should live at the end of her year of travel. Some places less expensive than New York would allow her to have a meditation room. Then she realizes how ridiculous it is to be meditating in India wondering where she would meditate in a home that doesn’t exist. She calls herself a “spastic fool.” She tries a new form of meditation, Vipassana, an intensive Buddhist technique that requires one to sit totally still for ten hours without a mantra.