Eat, Pray, Love

mona, parents of the twin twelve-year-old girls Giulia and Sara. Paolo—a friend of Luca’s whom I’d met before at soccer games—is ...

been gnawing at me like a rat over the years, a depression that had chewed such perforations in my soul that I would not, at one ...

35 I couldn’t hold out. None of my pants, after almost four months in Italy, fit me anymore. Not even the new clothes I just bou ...

“Perhaps a buffalo?” This is becoming good vocabulary practice. I’m also trying to get a smile out of the salesclerk, but she’s ...

36 I have only a week left here. I’m planning to go back to America for Christmas before flying to India, not only because I can ...

dialect to her even-more-elderly mother in the kitchen, and within the space of twenty minutes I am busily eating the hands-down ...

mind. The Mafia has been the only successful business in Sicily for centuries (running the business of protecting citizens from ...

authorities arrested a brotherhood of Catholic monks in Sicily who were in tight conspiracy with the Mafia, so who can you trust ...

37 When I was growing up, my family kept chickens. We always had about a dozen of them at any given time and whenever one died o ...

This is the hymn I call “The Amazing Grace of Sanskrit,” filled with devotional longing. It is the one devotional song I have me ...

I honor the divinity that resides within me. Then I repeat it again. Again. And again. It’s not so much that I’m meditating as u ...

38 “Why do we practice Yoga?” I had a teacher once ask that question during a particularly challenging Yoga class, back in New Y ...

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define here a ...

pilgrims have been coming to India to seek for ages. Alexander the Great sent an ambassad- or to India in the fourth century BC, ...

To have found a living spiritual master. There is a theory that if you yearn sincerely enough for a Guru, you will find one. Th ...

39 One of my first roommates at the Ashram was a middle-aged African-American devout Baptist and meditation instructor from Sout ...

living Yogic master, and I’ve experienced that before. But many longtime devotees agree that it can also sometimes be a distract ...

sites.) The students here are about equally divided between Indians and Westerners (and the Westerners are about evenly divided ...

40 My arrival coincides nicely with the arrival of a new year. I have barely one day to get my- self oriented to the Ashram, and ...

tiring. All of us are swaying like kelp in the dark sea current of night. The children around me are wrapped in silks, like gift ...