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.