Eat Pray Love

While I have come to Italy in order to experience pleasure, during the first few weeks I was here, I felt a bit of panic as to how one should do that. Frankly, pure pleasure is not my cultural paradigm. I come from a long line of super conscientious people. My mother’s family were Swedish immigrant farmers, who look in their photographs like, if they’d ever even seen something pleasurable, they might have stomped on it with their hobnailed boots. (My uncle calls the whole lot of the ‘oxen.’) My father’s side of the family were English Puritans, those great goofy lovers of fun.”

The above is an extract from the book Eat Pray Love, a book that remains one of my favorites of all times and whose lost meanderings in search for meaning for that inner voice, for that sense of being alive I associate with. While looking for material for this blog post, I stumbled across someone who had written a rather unique book review combining, photography, reading and food. (http://homeiswheretheboatis.wordpress.com/2010/07/31/eat-pray-love/) a commendable piece of work

As the author states, yesterday was for me a day of pleasure. Pleasure without guilt, pleasure for life as is, in what it offers. 

I saw a movie in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week and refused to be anything but thrilled about the experience. My love for the mission and the journey, the protagonist goes through is deep.

Everyone knows the storyline, but what is missing was for me the deepest connect, was the scene where she realizes she is now hollow. Something has gone missing, there is nothing in her, no joy no sorrow, just automode. and to continue living like that is not something she can do anymore. 

So she travels. Slows down. Opens up. Learns to be alone and not be lonely. To look for answers, to ask the deep questions, to battle uncertainty, to enjoy the moment when a lot of balls were up in the air. To be and allow it to happen.

During her stint in the ashram, there was the sense of how the hell does any of this help that came up. Loved the advice that the Bali man gave her later, meditate with a smile on your face, your heart and your liver. Smile from inside.

As the day passed yesterday, I went back to a yoga class after what felt like years. The class did not make me smile, it made me sweat and made me realize how far I had drifted from the "center of me" but as i finished the class I was beaming. A beginning towards the centering had been made, and for now that was enough. As the shlokhas of the class drowned the teachers voice, I found myself nodding that this, is what I would run one day.

A simple place to unwind and de stress.

Towards the end of the movie, she states that the past year taught her, that if and when you are stuck, if you are willing to give up everything that you know is as safe and comfortable, and delve into the world of uncertainity, trusting the people that you meet, admitting and acknowledging that there shall be a lot of flaws that you shall see in yourself, falling in love with yourself despite these flaws and loving you as much as you love others, then and maybe then a new space starts to open up, where something new emerges.

There was a flow to her life, as is there in each one of ours as well. recently someone tried to teach me the art of 'free floating', not thinking not being, not nothing.

Was amused at how tough it was. In class yesterday, we had to trust 2 sticks to hold our weight as we well on to them. I could not. In fact have never been any good at all those trust falls that corporate camps insist on, specially the one where everyones stands around u in a circle and u let yourself go.

The last three words being the tough ones. Let it Go.
Not everything has to have an agenda.

Pleasure Seekers. That should be the name of some tribe.