Its been quite a while since I have packed my bags for an adventure or just plane travel. Hectic work schedules are taking most of the times and while I slog at work there is a lot going on in my head. The two major points I wish to venture this year are Jammu and Kashmir and North East. While I still don’t see any of them materializing in the near future but that doesn’t stop me from dreaming about it. Every time I get some time I am looking for cheap flight options and hotels in Jammu. But surfing on net about things that you don’t have a timeline often gets your goat. And that has been happening quite a lot these days. The good part is there is a book to rescue, which is Eat Pray Love.
The book majorly revolves around the dreams, desires and aspiration of a women. Aptly summed on the book cover as “One woman search for everything“. As a woman I could closely connect to the book at various points. Certain phrases in the book are real gem. They inspire and liberate you at the same time. That was the moment I decided to compile them all and publish it under a post so that I can share these nuggets of gyan with everyone. Hope you all enjoy reading them as much as I did compiling them.
Starting off the list with my favorite one.
To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travels, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel he way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby –I just don’t care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it’s mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to –I just don’t care.
Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.
Another wonderful Italian experssion: l’arte d’arrangiarsi – the art of making something out of nothing. The art of turning a few simple ingredients into a feat, or a few gathered friends into a festival. Anyone with a talent for happiness can do this, not only rich.
So be lonely. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time – everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will protect upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.
Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough – but tomorrow I could be a fireworks repository.
I think people have children for all manner of reasons – sometimes out of pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes in order to hold on to a partner or create a heir, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same, either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish.
Virginia Wolf wrote, “Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword.” On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where “all is correct.” But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, “all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course.”
“Admittedly, I am not the one who looks fantastic in everything, but still I cannot help loving myself.“
“Gandhi himself always wanted to study with a Guru, but never to his regret, had the time or opportunity to find one. “I think there is a great deal of truth, “he wrote, “in the doctrine that true knowledge is impossible with a Guru.”
There is a theory that if you yearn sincerely enough for a Guru, you will find one. The universe will shift, destiny’s molecules will get themselves organized and your path will soon intersect with the path of the master you need.
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.
People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.
I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old and she told me, “There are only two questions that human being have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? and Who’s in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trips us up and cause war, grief and suffering.
Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. if I want transformation, but can’t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I am aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don’t have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold and never lift.
“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can’t learn to master your thinking, you’re in deep trouble forever.”
Human beings are born with the equivalent potential for both contraction and expansion. the ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us, and then it’s up to the individual to decide what will be brought forth-the virtues or the malevolence. The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being’s difficulty in coming into virtuous balance with himself. Lunacy (both collective and individual) results.
People universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is a consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.
Hinduism see the universe in terms of karma, a process of continuous circulation, which is to say that you don’t really “end up” anywhere at the end of your life – not in heaven or hell – but just get recycled back to earth again in another form, in order to resolve whatever relationships or mistakes you left uncompleted last time. When you finally achieve perfection, you graduate out of the cycle entirely and melt into The Void. The notion of karma implies that heaven and hell are only to be found here on earth, where we have the capacity to create them, manufacturing either goodness or evil depending on our destinies and our characters.
It’s still two human beings trying to get along, so it’s going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart, it means we have tried for something.”
To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.
If you tell me slowly I can understand quickly.
The yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused my words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dog on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.
God loves us all and receives us all, and there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine – just imagine ! – what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept.
That’t all from my list but I am sure you will be able to squeeze much more from the book. Feel free to share the post on your social media, the purpose here is to get a smile on your face.