Eat, Pray, Love - Suggested Discussion Questions on "Book Two India"

For those who are unable to complete the reading prior to our meeting, I provide a list of passages and questions from the reading so that you have something to reflect upon. These passages and questions are simply a guideline to jump start conversation. As always, my preference is that you spend the entire evening sharing your answer to the final question.

• Pg 128-129 "My Guru always says that only one thing will happen when you come to the Ashram—that you will discover who you really are."

Pg 175 The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mundane worldly order. In the search for God, you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult. You abandon your comforting and familiar habits with the hope (the mere hope!) that something greater will be offered to you in return from what you've given up. Every religion in the world operates on the same common understandings of what it means to be a good disciple—get up early and pray to your God, hone your virtues, be a good neighbor, respect yourself and others, master your cravings. We all agree that it would be easier to sleep in and many of us do, but for millennia there have been others who choose instead to get up before the sun and wash their faces and go to their prayers. And then fiercely try to hold on to their devotional convictions throughout the lunacy of another day.

Throughout this section, Elizabeth Gilbert gives details on what life in an ashram is like. Buddhist and Christian monasteries and convents often observe similar daily schedules.

• In your opinion, is strict discipline a necessary ingredient in the pursuit of devotion? Why?
• Do you believe there is spiritual value to stepping so completely out of usual routine? Why?
• The first quote implies that Ashram life is more about discovering yourself, than discovering God. Do you believe that these are tied together? To carry forward a theme from Italy, Is spiritual self-discovery self-nurturing or self-centered?
• How do you express devotion in your daily life?

• Pg 168 I sat there, singing and bleeding and thinking that it was maybe time for me to change my relationship with this particular spiritual practice. The Gurugita is meant to be a hymn of pure love, but something had been stopping me short from offering up that love in sincerity. So as I chanted each verse I realized that I needed to find something—or somebody—to whom I could devote this hymn, in order to find a place of pure love within me. By Verse Twenty, I had it: Nick. Nick, my nephew, is an eight-year-old-boy, skinny for his age, scarily smart, frighteningly astute, sensitive and complex. ... So each devotional word of this hymn, I dedicated to Nick. I filled the song with everything I wished I could teach him about life. I tried to reassure him with every line about how the world is hard and unfair sometimes, but that it's all OK because he is so loved. He is surrounded by souls who would do anything to help him. And not only that—he has wisdom and patience of his own, buried deep inside his being, which will only reveal themselves over time and will always carry him through any trial. He is a gift from God to all of us. I told him this fact through this old Sanskrit scripture, and soon I noticed that I was weeping cool tears. ... I realized what had happened—that Nicky had carried me through it. The little soul I'd wanted to help had actually been helping me.
  

Two recurring themes in this section are: our thoughts can affect our state of being; and our thoughts are something we can strive to control. I love this particular passage because it demonstrates the amazing results of a simple choice to change one’s attitude towards a situation.

• Please share a personal experience where a conscious change in mindset has resulted in a new outcome.
• What is your opinion of the power of thoughts? Do you believe it is possible to control them or are we destined to always be controlled by them?

• Pg 191 "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. ... 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. ... But at some point you have to make peace with what 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. ... 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.
  • This passage brings tears to my eyes ... the concept of accepting myself unconditionally for who I am, as I am. Some people assert that this means one does not need to strive for improvement. I see this as a challenge to be more authentic, respectful, loving, accepting—as Gilbert writes "honing my virtues and working daily to minimize my vices." What do you think?
  • Where I struggle the most is not in sharing those qualities with those around me, but rather in directing those qualities towards myself. After all if "God dwells within me, as me.", then aren't I deserving of the same consideration I would give someone else? What is your reaction to this assertion?
• Pg 208 I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's the history of mankind's search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of cherry-picking. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.
  • As a person for whom organized religion has not resonated, I appreciate the sentiment in this passage. What is your personal reaction to this passage? Is there something in your personal history that contributes to this reaction?
    
• Was there a particular passage that made you stop and either consider or appreciate?