An unlikely guru, the best-selling author tells us what it's like to find bliss

By Toni Lapp

By all rights, Elizabeth Gilbert should be stressed out. It's been three years since she published her breakout memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, and became an international sensation. Filming of the movie adaptation is scheduled to begin shortly, with Julia Roberts playing the lead.

And Gilbert's successor memoir is due to her editor at Viking in two weeks.

But this is Elizabeth Gilbert, who is as laid-back (“call me Liz”) as she is friendly, and she has graciously accommodated an interview request despite the deadlines bearing down on her.

I can hear background movement as we talk by phone. I fancy she's putting a tea kettle on the stove or feeding her plants in her rural New Jersey home, but I don't ask.

Instead I ask:

“What's it like being played by Julia Roberts?”

Without hesitation she answers: “Surreal.”

Then with a laugh she adds, “I file that under ‘stuff that I'm incapable of processing.' Everything that's happened after Eat, Pray, Love I file under ‘incapable of processing.'”

It's no wonder. Her book opened with her describing the demise of her marriage. “The only thing more unspeakable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving,” she wrote.

And that's when she began to talk directly to God for the first time.

She wrote of having a dark night of the soul when she collapsed in panic on the bathroom floor of the suburban home she shared with her then husband. “Hello, God,” she said between sobs. “How are you? I'm Liz. It's nice to meet you.”

What followed was a chronicle of transformation.

An Unlikely Guru

Hailing from an educated rural New England upbringing, Gilbert, 40, is an unlikely candidate for a spiritual teacher (an article she wrote about tending bar for GQ magazine was the basis for the movie Coyote Ugly). Yet she has won acclaim for her quest to comprehend her personal relationship with the divine, and her playful style and bright attitude serve her well as she examines her transformation.

It began with an act of self-indulgence that many of us could only dream about: Gilbert spent a year traveling, dividing her time equally on journeys to Italy, India and Indonesia. (A generous book advance enabled her to travel.)

That year was a leap of faith that paid off, says Gilbert, not only because the book chronicling her odyssey became a blockbuster (five million copies in print), but more important, because she discovered some truths about herself along the way.

Still, she maintains that a transformative journey can happen anytime, to anyone, and that divinity is available everywhere.

“I don't think that the search for spirituality is a luxury,” she says. “I think the way I went about it was a rare privilege because I'm a writer and I was able to write a book about it, but it's not even something I would be able to do again. A lot of us are bound by the things that I'm bound by now: I'm remarried, I have a family, I have a house to take care of, I have responsibilities in my community.”

But the external world needn't keep a person from finding a relationship with the divine, she says. Meditation, silence or prayer are available to all, and “you don't need a credit card for that.”

Prayer and Meditation

After four months in Italy, Gilbert traveled to India, where she planned to study at an ashram for four months. But at that point, the unhappiness she'd been trying to escape caught up with her, and meditation only seemed to cause negative emotions to bubble to the surface.

But instead of going under, she found a way to make peace with the situation. In particular, she resolved her feelings about her marriage and divorce.

She described having a moment of clarity one night while watching the Indian sunset from a rooftop. During meditation she took part in a “letting go” ceremony, which she described in her book: “I invited my ex-husband to please join me up here on this rooftop in India. I asked him if he would be kind enough to meet me up here for this farewell event. Then I waited until I felt him arrive. And he did arrive. His presence was suddenly absolute and tangible. I could practically smell him.”

In that moment, she received the resolution that had eluded her.

“I think what I realized on the rooftop in that moment,” she says now, “is there comes a time when you almost have to (release) yourself,” instead of waiting for the other person to release you. “I had been waiting all this time for him to say, ‘I understand why you left, and I forgive you. You're free to go, and I bless your life.'

“That's never going to happen. There are people who have had similar situations where loved ones have died before those words were spoken, whose approval they never got. We all have some of that in our life.”

For Gilbert, this realization was a turning point.

“Something did happen, something did shift in my own understanding of it,” she says. “But it doesn't mean it goes away; I don't think it ever does.”

Even now, when she experiences residual sadness over the events of her marriage, she remembers the rooftop ceremony where she and her ex-husband released each other, at least in theory (she acknowledges that he has not spoken to her since their divorce).

“That's what ritual is, it takes something that's intangible and transforms it so that you can handle it,” she says.

Much as she uses the visual of the rooftop to heal from her relationship, she uses another visual to control intrusive thoughts. In her book, she wrote of repeating the phrase “I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore,” a mantra that she would invoke “700 times a day.” That mantra sparked a vision of a harbor with ships carrying negative thoughts attempting to drop anchor. When one of those ships would attempt to enter the harbor of her mind, she would envision it being turned away.

Does she still send away ships bearing negative thoughts hundreds of times a day? Her trademark humor is evident in the answer.

“Plague ships,” she says, laughing. “Some of them slip by, but these days it's like a Superfund site: it's been cleaned up. It does get easier.” 

A New Person

No one was more surprised by the runaway success of Eat, Pray, Love, than the author herself. The accolades have poured in ever since.

One reviewer called her “Anne Lamott's hip, yoga-practicing younger sister.” Anne Lamott called her “everything you would love in a tour guide … she's wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, hilarious, heartbreaking, and God, does she pay great attention to the things that really matter.”

And what are the things that matter?

The new and improved Liz Gilbert is a much different person from the woman who collapsed in a panic on her bathroom floor nearly ten years ago and discovered prayer.

“I had lessons on that journey that are really mine to keep for a lifetime, and they have shifted me to a different paradigm, and that's made life a lot lovelier,” she says.

Where she once traveled the world over, she now finds bliss staying at home with her new husband (Jose, a Brazilian expatriate she met in Bali on the final leg of her journey—the “love” segment of Eat, Pray, Love). Together, they run an import store in Frenchtown, New Jersey, called Two Buttons.

The book that she's scrambling to finish chronicles the events that led to their decision to marry. That book was originally going to be titled Weddings and Evictions, but after she finished the first draft, she realized she was unhappy with it. She scrapped the manuscript and went back to the publisher for an extension and proposed a new title: Matrimonium.

Even the new Liz Gilbert needs a do-over every now and then.