Eat, Pray, Love

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 de-
veloped 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 coming in from Mexico,
from the Philippines, from Africa, from Denmark, from Detroit and it feels like that scene in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Richard Dreyfuss and all those other seekers have
been pulled to the middle of Wyoming for reasons they don’t understand at all, drawn by the
arrival of the spaceship. I am so consumed by wonder at their bravery. These people have left
their families and lives behind for a few weeks to go into silent retreat amidst a crowd of per-
fect strangers in India. Not everybody does this in their lifetime.
I love all these people, automatically and unconditionally. I even love the pain-in-the-ass
ones. I can see through their neuroses and recognize that they’re just horribly afraid of what
they’re going to face when they go into silence and meditation for seven days. I love the Indi-
an man who comes to me in outrage, reporting that there’s a four-inch statue of the Indian
god Ganesh in his room which has one foot missing. He’s furious, thinks this is a terrible
omen and wants that statue removed—ideally by a Brahman priest, during a “traditionally ap-
propriate” cleansing ceremony. I comfort him and listen to his anger, then send my teenage
tomboy friend Tulsi over to the guy’s room to get rid of the statue while he’s at lunch. The next
day I pass the man a note, telling him that I hope he’s feeling better now that the broken
statue is gone, and reminding him that I’m here if he needs anything else whatsoever; he re-
wards me with a giant, relieved smile. He’s just afraid. The French woman who has a near
panic attack about her wheat allergies—she’s afraid, too. The Argentinean man who wants a
special meeting with the entire staff of the Hatha Yoga department in order to be counseled
on how to sit properly during meditation so his ankle doesn’t hurt; he’s just afraid. They’re all
afraid. They’re going into silence, deep into their own minds and souls. Even for an experi-
enced meditator, nothing is more unknown than this territory. Anything can happen in there.
They’ll be guided during this retreat by a wonderful woman, a monk in her fifties, whose every
gesture and word is the embodiment of compassion, but they’re still afraid because—as lov-
ing as this monk may be—she cannot go with them where they are going. Nobody can.
As the retreat was beginning, I happened to get a letter in the mail from a friend of mine in
America who is a wildlife filmmaker for National Geographic. He told me he’d just been to a
fancy dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, honoring members of the Explorers’ Club.
He said it was amazing to be in the presence of such incredibly courageous people, all of
whom have risked their lives so many times to discover the world’s most remote and danger-