inside.
"What am I gonna do when I don't have Liz Gilbert to kick around anymore?" He sighed.
Then he said, "You've had a good experience at the Ashram, haven't you? You look all
different from a few months back, like maybe you chucked out some of that sorrow you
been hauling around."
"I'm feeling really happy these days, Richard."
"Well, just remember--all your misery will be waiting for you at the door upon your exit,
should you care to pick it up again when you leave."
"I won't pick it up again."
"Good girl."
"You've helped me a lot," I told him. "I think of you as an angel with hairy hands and
cruddy toenails.""Yeah, my toenails never really did recover from Vietnam, poor things."
"It could've been worse."
"It was worse for a lot of guys. At least I got to keep my legs. Nope, I got a pretty cushy
incarnation in this lifetime, kiddo. So did you--never forget that. Next lifetime you might
come back as one of those poor Indian women busting up rocks by the side of the road,
find out life ain't so much fun. So appreciate what you got now, OK? Keep cultivating
gratitude. You'll live longer. And, Groceries? Do me a favor? Move ahead with your life,
will ya?"
"I am. "
"What I mean is--find somebody new to love someday. Take the time you need to heal,
but don't forget to eventually share your heart with someone. Don't make your life a
monument to David or to your ex-husband."
"I won't," I said. And I knew suddenly that it was true--I wouldn't. I could feel all this old
pain of lost love and past mistakes attenuating before my eyes, diminishing at last
through the famous healing powers of time, patience and the grace of God.
And then Richard spoke again, snapping my thoughts back quickly to the world's more
basic realities: "After all, baby, remember what they say--sometimes the best way to get
over someone is to get under someone else."
I laughed. "OK, Richard, that'll do. Now you can go back to Texas."
"Might as well," he said, casting a gaze around this desolate Indian airport parking lot.
"Cuz I ain't gettin' any prettier just standing around here."
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On my ride back to the Ashram, after seeing Richard off at the airport, I decide that I've
been talking too much. To be honest, I've been talking too much my whole life, but I've
really been talking too much during my stay at the Ashram. I have another two months
here, and I don't want to waste the greatest spiritual opportunity of my life by being all
social and chatty the whole time. It's been amazing for me to discover that even here,
even in a sacred environment of spiritual retreat on the other side of the world, I have
managed to create a cocktail-party-like vibe around me. It's not just Richard I've been
talking to constantly--though we did do the most gabbing--I'm always yakking with
somebody. I've even found myself--in an Ashram, mind you!--creating appointments to
see acquaintances, having to say to somebody, "I'm sorry, I can't hang out with you at
lunch today because I promised Sakshi I would eat with her . . . maybe we could make a
date for next Tuesday."
This has been the story of my life. It's how I am. But I've been thinking lately that this ismaybe a spiritual liability. Silence and solitude are universally recognized spiritual
practices, and there are good reasons for this. Learning how to discipline your speech is a
way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your
mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity,
peace and bliss. Swamiji, my Guru's master, was a stickler about silence in the Ashram,
heavily enforcing it as a devotional practice. He called silence the only true religion. It's
ridiculous how much I've been talking at this Ashram, the one place in the world where
silence should--and can--reign.
So I'm not going to be the Ashram social bunny anymore, I've decided. No more
scurrying, gossiping, joking. No more spotlight-hogging or conversation-dominating. No
more verbal tap-dancing for pennies of affirmation. It's time to change. Now that Richard
is gone, I'm going to make the remainder of my stay a completely quiet experience. This
will be difficult, but not impossible, because silence is universally respected at the
Ashram. The whole community will support it, recognizing your decision as a disciplined
act of devotion. In the bookstore they even sell little badges you can wear which read, "I
am in Silence."
I'm going to buy four of those little badges.
On the drive back to the Ashram, I really let myself dip into a fantasy about just how
silent I am going to become now. I will be so silent that it will make me famous. I
imagine myself becoming known as That Quiet Girl. I'll just keep to the Ashram schedule,
take my meals in solitude, meditate for endless hours every day and scrub the temple
floors without making a peep. My only interaction with others will be to smile
beatifically at them from within my self-contained world of stillness and piety. People
will talk about me. They'll ask, "Who is That Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple,
always scrubbing the floors, down on her knees? She never speaks. She's so elusive. She's
so mystical. I can't even imagine what her voice sounds like. You never even hear her
coming up behind you on the garden path when she's out walking . . . she moves as
silently as the breeze. She must be in a constant state of meditative communion with God.
She's the quietest girl I've ever seen. "
63636363
The next morning I was down on my knees in the temple, scrubbing the marble floor
again, emanating (I imagined) a holy radiance of silence, when an Indian teenage boy
came looking for me with a message--that I needed to report to the Seva Office
immediately. Seva is the Sanskrit term for the spiritual practice of selfless service (for
instance, the scrubbing of a temple floor). The Seva Office administers all the work
assignments for the Ashram. So I wandered over there, very curious as to why I'd beensummoned, and the nice lady at the desk asked me, "Are you Elizabeth Gilbert?"
I smiled at her with the warmest piety and nodded. Silently.
Then she told me that my work detail had been changed. Due to a special request from
management, I was no longer to be part of the floor-scrubbing team. They had a new
position in mind for me at the Ashram.
And the title of my new job was--if you will kindly dig this--"Key Hostess."
64646464
This was so obviously another one of Swamiji's jokes.
You wanted to be The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple? Well, guess what . . .
But this is what always happens at the Ashram. You make some big grandiose decision
about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that
immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself. I don't know how
many times Swamiji said it during his lifetime, and I don't know how many more times
my Guru has repeated it since his death, but it seems I have not quite yet absorbed the
truth of their most insistent statement:
"God dwells within you, as you."
AS you.
If there is one holy truth of this Yoga, that line encapsulates it. God dwells within you as
you yourself, exactly the way you are. God isn't interested in watching you enact some
performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about
how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be
sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to
renounce our individuality. This is a classic example of what they call in the East
"wrong-thinking." Swamiji used to say that every day renunciants find something new to
renounce, but it is usually depression, not peace, that they attain. Constantly he was
teaching that austerity and renunciation--just for their own sake--are not what you need.
To know God, you need only to renounce one thing--your sense of division from God.
Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character.
So what is my natural character? I love studying in this Ashram, but my dream of finding
divinity by gliding silently through the place with a gentle, ethereal smile--who is that
person? That's probably someone I saw on a TV show. The reality is, it's a little sad for
me to admit that I will never be that character. I've always been so fascinated by these
wraith-like, delicate souls. Always wanted to be the quiet girl. Probably precisely because
I'm not. It's the same reason I think that thick, dark hair is so beautiful--precisely because
I don't have it, because I can't have it. But at some point you have to make peace withwhat you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with thick, dark hair, He
would have made me that way, but He didn't. Useful, then, might be to accept how I was
made and embody myself fully therein.
Or, as Sextus, the ancient Pythagorian philospher, said, "The wise man is always similar
to himself."
This doesn't mean I cannot be devout. It doesn't mean I can't be thoroughly tumbled and
humbled with God's love. This does not mean I cannot serve humanity. It doesn't mean I
can't improve myself as a human being, honing my virtues and working daily to minimize
my vices. For instance, I'm never going to be a wallflower, but that doesn't mean I can't
take a serious look at my talking habits and alter some aspects for the better--working
within my personality. Yes, I like talking, but perhaps I don't have to curse so much, and
perhaps I don't always have to go for the cheap laugh, and maybe I don't need to talk
about myself quite so constantly. Or here's a radical concept--maybe I can stop
interrupting others when they are speaking. Because no matter how creatively I try to
look at my habit of interrupting, I can't find another way to see it than this: "I believe that
what I am saying is more important than what you are saying." And I can't find another
way to see that than: "I believe that I am more important than you." And that must end.
All these changes would be useful to make. But even so, even with reasonable
modifications to my speaking habits, I probably won't ever be known as That Quiet Girl.
No matter how pretty a picture that is and no matter how hard I try. Because let's be
really honest about who we're dealing with here. When the woman at the Ashram Seva
Center gave me my new job assignment of Key Hostess, she said, "We have a special
nickname for this position, you know. We call it 'Little Suzy Creamcheese,' because
whoever does the job needs to be social and bubbly and smiling all the time."
What could I say?
I just stuck out a hand to shake, bade a silent farewell to all my wishful old delusions and
announced, "Madam--I'm your girl."
65656565
What I will be hosting, to be exact, is a series of retreats to be held at the Ashram this
spring. During each retreat, about a hundred devotees will come here from all over the
world for a period of a week to ten days, to deepen their meditation practices. My role is
to take care of these people during their stay here. For most of the retreat, the participants
will be in silence. For some of them, it will be the first time they've experienced silence
as a devotional practice, and it can be intense. However, I will be the one person in the
Ashram they are allowed to talk to if something is going wrong.
That's right--my job officially requires me to be the speech-magnet.I will listen to the problems of the retreat participants and then try to find solutions for
them. Maybe they'll need to change roommates because of a snoring situation, or maybe
they'll need to speak to the doctor because of India-related digestive trouble--I'll try to
solve it. I'll need to know everybody's name, and where they are from. I'll be walking
around with a clipboard, taking notes and following up. I'm Julie McCoy, your Yogic
cruise director.
And, yes, the position does come with a beeper.
As the retreats begin, it is so quickly evident how much I am made for this job. I'm sitting
there at the Welcome Table with my Hello, My Name Is badge, and these people are
arriving from thirty different countries, and some of them are old-timers but many of
them have never been to India. It's over 100 degrees already at 10:00 AM, and most of
these people have been flying all night in coach. Some of them walk into this Ashram
looking like they just woke up in the trunk of a car--like they have no idea at all what
they're doing here. Whatever desire for transcendence drove them to apply for this
spiritual retreat in the first place, they've long ago forgotten it, probably somewhere
around the time their luggage got lost in Kuala Lumpur. They're thirsty, but don't know
yet if they can drink the water. They're hungry, but don't know what time lunch is, or
where the cafeteria can be found. They're dressed all wrong, wearing synthetics and
heavy boots in the tropical heat. They don't know if there's anyone here who speaks
Russian.
I can speak a teensy bit of Russian . . .
I can help them. I am so equipped to help. All the antennas I've ever sprouted throughout
my lifetime that have taught me how to read what people are feeling, all the intuition I
developed growing up as the supersensitive younger child, all the listening skills I learned
as a sympathetic bartender and an inquisitive journalist, all the proficiency of care I
mastered after years of being somebody's wife or girlfriend--it was all accumulated so
that I could help ease these good people into the difficult task they've taken on. I see them
