Eat, Pray, Love

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. Even minutes after his birth, amid all the squalling newborns in
the nursery, he alone was not crying, but looking around with adult, worldly and worried eyes,
looking as though he’d done all this before so many times and wasn’t sure how excited he felt
about having to do it again. This is a child for whom life is never simple, a child who hears and
sees and feels everything intensely, a child who can be overcome by emotion so fast some-
times that it unnerves us all. I love this boy so deeply and protectively. I realized—doing the
math on the time difference between India and Pennsylvania—that it was nearing his bedtime
back home. So I sang the Gurugita to my nephew Nick, to help him sleep. Sometimes he has
trouble sleeping because he cannot still his mind. 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 no-
ticed that I was weeping cool tears. But before I could wipe the tears away the Gurugita was
over. The hour and a half was finished. It felt like ten minutes had passed. 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.
I walked to the front of the temple and bowed flat on my face in gratitude to my God, to the
revolutionary power of love, to myself, to my Guru and to my nephew—briefly understanding
on a molecular level (not an intellectual level) that there was no difference whatsoever
between any of these words or any of these ideas or any of these people. Then I slid into the
meditation cave, where I skipped breakfast and sat for almost two hours, humming with still-
ness.
Needless to say, I never missed the Gurugita again, and it became the most holy of my
practices at the Ashram. Of course Richard from Texas went to great lengths to tease me
about having jumped out of the dormitory, being sure to say to me every night after dinner,
“See you at The Geet tomorrow morning, Groceries. And, hey—try using the stairs this time,
OK?” And, of course, I called my sister the next week and she said that—for reasons nobody
could understand—Nick suddenly wasn’t having trouble falling asleep anymore. And naturally
I was reading in the library a few days later from a book about the Indian saint Sri Ra-