Eat, Pray, Love – Lesson 2

Obviously, one third of the movie is about praying. And yes, there is a lesson we could all learn from a character in a movie/book that feels the need to pray. Liz goes to India, half way around the world, to pray and chant and meditate. It doesn’t go so smoothly; she’s late for chanting and she does it with no feeling of devotion. She tried to meditate and all she ends up thinking about are minor worldly issues like decorating her room. She is too preoccupied by the world to give in to the peace of praying, or in her case, meditating.

This rings a giant bell! I pray and concentrate really hard on concentrating during praying. I think of being in the presence of God and of how cleansed I should feel, and then I drift to how I have to pick up some meds on my way home! I would love to go into how we should pray from the heart and prepare our souls for the prayer before actually doing the prayer, but that is not the lesson I have learned from the movie. The lesson I’ve learned is that it doesn’t come easily. The idea of how Liz was able to succeed at the praying part was because she stopped wishing that it would hit her in the face and she actually started working hard on trying to reach that state of enlightenment instead. For her it was chanting and meditation, for me it’s reading Quran and making sure I understand the message in between the lines, realizing the miracle of the holy book, admiring God’s creations (which is meditating, sometimes I think people forget how we are required to look around and think about life, the universe, and everything), I also think a big part of it is just letting go of the world.

It’s not easy to commit to reading Quran daily, fasting out of Ramadan, praying more, and dedicating half an hour of one’s time for the pure and simple act of admiring the world. Personally, I get preoccupied with life; what I have to do, where I want to go, what I should do with my life, etc. And with this preoccupation I forget that at the end of the day, I don’t really find the answers, and I feel desperate and depressed and end up wishing for God to help me. And when I classify that, it falls under taking the shortcut of wishing desperately for enlightenment to hit me when it won’t. I forget that religion is in the heart, and to be open to Islam I need to prepare my heart if it’s not ready (which it obviously is not), and to do that, I have to work hard for it. After all, it is a blessing to feel enlightened, and good things don’t come easily.

Eat, Pray, Love – Lesson 1

I’ve just watched Eat, Pray, Love. And regardless of what I think of the movie, I think there are some precious lessons learned from it. Liz, the heroine, starts by feeling that she has lost the appetite for life. And in one scene, she is starting to pray to God which is something she had not done in a very long time, if ever. It’s a clumsy act of her, she doesn’t know how to pray or what to say, but she feels the need to ask God to guide her into fixing what has become of her life. I was incredibly touched by this scene because I think I’ve been in her shoes. I think I’m still in her shoes. At some point, I feel like the world has become too small, my skin too tight, my mind too full of so much nonsense that goes in my life, and my heart too heavy for me to handle. It is that moment of total despair where I know that if I talk to God, He will listen to what I have to say, and He will know, and He will understand. Most importantly, He will help me get through it even if it’s by letting me forget some of that despair in order to be able to continue living for one more hour, or one more day.

I think for me the essence of that moment is what I keep missing. This is the moment of surrender, the moment where a muslim is truly muslim. It is the moment of acceptance. And for me, it is a leap of faith when I decide to jump off a 150 meter building and know that God will catch me. I do it, I jump, and I cry, and I talk to God, and I ask Him with every molecule of my body to save me. But I don’t do it as completely as I wish I could. I got this hook in my heart and my mind that is not willing to let go. This hook holds me back, keeps me in the world where everything goes wrong, and I have absolutely no idea how to get rid of this hook. I think part of me doesn’t want to because it’s afraid of not being able to handle it; I won’t be able to stop sinning, I won’t be able to quit my bad habits. The other side of the hook is the part of me that drives the sinning and the wrong habit, the devil in me so to speak, the part that enjoys the mischief even if it hurts me the most in the end.

So what to do? I’m currently not doing anything (very big fat wrong) because I am convinced I’m not strong enough to let go just yet. I’m trying, and I’m praying, and I know I do not do enough because I know I’m not committed enough. The devil in me is telling me that I’m still “a good girl” despite everything so I forget to fix myself up some more, and the despair is still there, but at least God gave me a little window to clean up my act, and maybe I will before it’s too late.