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When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It's safe. Let go.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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That's the thing about a human life-there's no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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There's a reason we refer to "leaps of faith" - because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn't. If faith were rational, it wouldn't be - by definition - faith. Faith is belief in wha..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I've done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I'm scared they will never leave. I say that I don't want to take the drugs anymore, but I'm frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together. In response, somewhere from within..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I've done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I'm scared they will never leave. I say that I don't want to take the drugs anymore, but I'm frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together
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inspirational
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.
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life
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilling yearnings.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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There is a reason they call God a presence - because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Instructions for freedom": 1. Life's metaphors are God's instructions. 2. You have just climbed up and above the roof, there is nothing between you and the Infinite; now, let go. 3. The day is ending, it's time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, let go. 4. Your wish for resolution was a prayer. You are being here is God's response, let go and watch the stars came out, in the inside and in th..
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life
let-go
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favourite fountain? And then to do it again the..
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love
from
pray
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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I'm not laughing." I was actually crying. "And please don't laugh at me now, but I think the reason it's so hard for me to get over this guy is because I seriously believed David was my soul mate. "He probably was. Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you bac..
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Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat Pray Love. |
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People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.
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decisions
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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I have good idea, for if you meet some person from different religion and he want to make argument about God. My idea is, you listen to everything this man say about God. Never argue about God with him. Best thing to say is, 'I agree with you.' Then you go home, pray what you want. This is my idea for people to have peace about religion.
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religion
tolerance
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Om Namah Shivaya, meaning, I honor the divinity that resides within me.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the 'monkey mind' -- the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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They flank me - depression on my left, loneliness on my right. They don't need to show their badges. I know these guys very well. ... Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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I wondered, "Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?"
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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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 part..
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happiness
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless, newbor..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That's where you need to go.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.
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love
elizabeth-gilbert
pray
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Saint Anthony] said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company.
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religion
saints
devils
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.
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women
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
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motivational
inspirational
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live..
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soul-mates
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn't it?
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Real, sane, mature love--the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school--is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Your treasure - your perfection - is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live?
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure... I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choki..
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words
thoughts
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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And when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty to find something beautiful within life no matter how slight.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |