In All Circumstances

In the third and final part of her book, Eat, Pray, Love, Liz Gilbert travels to Bali, Indonesia. Following her experiences in Italy and India, Liz seeks to fulfill her mission of finding balance between the devotion to her practice and the enjoyment of her happiness. Only after a few weeks into her stay in Bali, Liz reflects on how quickly and satisfyingly she has attained this balance. She reflects on maintaining happiness saying,

“. . . most of my prayers are expressions of sheer gratitude for the fullness of my contentment. I have never felt less burdened by myself or by the world. I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.”

When do you feed your soul? And when do you allot time to enjoy the things that bring you pleasure? Better yet, how do you find a balance between the two? Between working forty-hour work weeks -for most of us, it may easily be more than that- pursuing further education, caring for our families, and spending time with our friends, it is no wonder that we even find time to have a thought to ourselves. But, if this balance is so important for our lives, then we should either change the way we live, or we should reorient the priorities that seem to fill the void in our schedules, occupy the thoughts of our minds, and use up the energy of our being. Usually, instead of changing the entire course of our lives, changing our mindset and our attitude will lead us to a source of contentment, a point of balance. This source of contentment and this point of balance may look different to each of us. Because we are so vastly unique and because each of our interests, passions, and dreams cover such a diverse array of what constitutes happiness, we should open our eyes to the direction that our quest for finding this balance is taking us. Furthermore, our hearts should learn to sing the song of contentment within every valley, upon every mountaintop, and with every bend and turn that the courses of of lives take us. “ . . . continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments,” Liz writes. How many times do we lift our eyes to look for answers, to seek truth, and to fill our souls when we are trying to make sense of our circumstances? How many times do we instantly turn to prayer only when our lives begin to unravel? How many times do we practice meditation only when we are weary? How many times to we admit that we need help only when we have reached our breaking point? No doubt, these moments that bring us to our knees and point us in the direction of redemption are valuable in and of themselves. But, our contentment does not need to be found only when we reach a point of despair. Finding a point of balance, a source of true contentment, is something we can practice and maintain during those times when everything seems to be going right. When our prayer, our meditation, or all those other moments in which we feed our souls become our ritual, our daily habit, our instinctive remedy, we will notice that our contentment becomes synonymous with the way that we find rest for our souls. We may notice that feeding our souls becomes just as necessary as feeding our bodies. In the same way that our bodies become weak without food, our souls become weary without spiritual sustenance. In the same way that they say, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” creating a daily ritual where we sustain the desires of our souls and maintain our contentment, becomes necessary for us in order that we may confidently and courageously journey through our lives. We find, then, that turning to nourishing our souls does not only become necessary for surviving trying circumstances, but it is essential for living even in the midst of our utmost happiness. These moments that we pray even when we cannot find a reason to complain, these times when we meditate even when we have a complete burst of energy, will become an emblem for how we carry ourselves through the journeys of our lives. When we acquire the willpower and the strength to maintain our contentment and to relentlessly pursue it in the midst of sadness, doubt, fear, but also utter happiness, bliss, and gratitude, we may begin to see our lives in a hue we had not yet seen before. When we come to find our own point of balance and our own source of contentment, we may find that our happiness is not circumstantial but, in fact, defies every law, social norm, and personally crafted idea we have formed regarding our circumstances. With this contentment, we may dare to find peace and joy take root in our souls, flushing away the burdens we have learned to carry for ourselves and for the world around us.