Presentation Transcript

1. By Sasha Kirsch
2. Italy The story first takes place in New York. Elizabeth went through a devastating divorce. She had crying fits on her bathroom floor and did not know what to do with her life. She started thinking about God and came to the conclusion that God is an experience of supreme love. She asked him to please tell her what to do. She tried to comfort herself by talking to herself, a small voice inside of her said “go to bed Liz”.
3. After a complex divorce, she meets a man named David who is an actor and a writer. At first it is a hot affair but then 9/11 happened and with the aftermath of her divorce she got depressed again. She feels that she is in need of David’s love but he starts pulling back from her. As a result, Liz lost 30 pounds.
4. Liz explains that David is not as loving to her as he was in the beginning. When she is in David’s apartment during the on and off relationship she sees a picture of a spiritual Indian teacher. David explains that she is his Guru. One time she goes with David to chant with a large group of people and that’s when she decides she wants to go someday to an Ashram in India. She decides to go to Italy, India and Indonesia. She will spend four months in each country. First she goes to Italy for pleasure, India for devotion, and Indonesia to balance both pleasure and devotion.
5. Italy She rents an apartment in Rome. After her first meal, she walks home extremely content and is able to sleep well for the first time in awhile. She walks endlessly to observe the greatest sight seeing places. She finds a great Gelato place and returns there 3 times. Then she starts reading Italian newspaper articles and talks to many people to try to learn as much Italian as possible because she is in love with the language. She is able to make friends quickly. In fact one day when she was in an internet café she sees a flier that is posted on the bulletin board by a native Italian speaker-Giovanni seeking a native English speaker. He becomes her language exchange partner. She finds a library where she reads Italian poems and she really appreciates them because she is a writer.
6. Liz signs herself up for Italian lessons for awhile at the Leonardo daVinci Academy of language studies. She meets a man named Luca Spaghetti and tells him that Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today and as a result they cannot relax on a vacation. She asks him if Italians on vacation have that problem. He replies “no, we are the masters of doing nothing”. In Italian, Far niente. She compares the Italian enjoyment of life with the American stressful way of life.
7. Liz made a vow to be celibate the whole year while she travels. She then talks about the soccer matches in Rome and how excited the Italian fans become when watching the game, enjoying cursing at the players. Luca and his friends take Liz to a bakery instead of a bar, as they do in America, to forget about their favorite team losing the soccer game. They consol themselves with eating cream puffs.
8. Liz learns about 20 Italian words a day. Giovanni and Liz have a great time teaching each other idioms in English and Italian. Liz’s favorite word in Italian is “Attraversiamo” which means “let’s cross over”. She uses this phrase when she wants to move on. She uses it all the time and makes any excuse to use it because she likes how it sounds.
9. She visits various landmarks like the Pantheon and the Augusteum. The Augusteum has played different roles in the life of Rome. She looks at it and thinks that her life has not actually been so chaotic after all. It is this world that is chaotic. The Augusteum gives her the idea not retain any obsolete ideas about who she is.
10. Liz goes to Naples for the day where she tastes the best pizza in the world and then returns to Rome where she decides to write an email to David to put an end to their relationship for good which is very hard for her to do. Giovanni calls her because she forgot about their appointment. She was all caught up with writing the email to David. Giovanni picks her up and finds her crying at first he doesn’t understand because Liz doesn’t say what is going on in her life. Eventually she says it’s about a love story and that she had to say goodbye to someone and he says I’ve been there.
11. Liz’s older sister Catherine comes to visit her in Rome and they both visit sights together including churches. Nobody but Liz is religious in their family. Liz talks about the pro’s and con’s for having children. She remembers being at a party given by a beautiful woman and her husband in New York City. The couple were a pair of successful artists. They just had a baby and the mother was celebrating the gallery opening of her new paintings. She remembers the woman as trying to do two things: taking care of her baby and hosting the party. She notices how sleep deprived the mother looks, and this makes her think that this is not the life that she wants. Liz is trembling in panic and is thinking “if you don’t recognize that this is your future, Liz, then you are out of your mind. Don’t let it happen”. She wonders if she is being selfish because her ex husband called her selfish. Society thinks that the normal way of living is to have a family and if she were at a family she would not have a place in it; but she considers herself lucky because she has her writing. People would say that she left he marriage in order to preserve her art. She recognizes that eventually she has to become a more solid citizen but is not ready for it yet.
12. When Liz returns to Rome, she has a conversation with her friend Giulio. Giulio thinks that in order to understand a city and its people you have to learn the word of the street. Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. For Rome, the word is “Sex”, for the Vatican it’s “power”. Giuilio asks Liz what’s the word in New York City and she says it’s “achieve” and then he asks what her word is and she thinks it might be “pleasure” in Italy but India it might be “devotion”.
13. Leaving Italy, she feels that she is more alive than she was four months ago, she put on weight and she expanded her life.
14. India Liz arrives in India in Mumbai at 1:30 AM and takes a taxi to an Ashram which is located in a remote village. The Ashram morning prayer (Arati, the name in Sanskrit) starts at 3:30 AM. She joins the gathering of the women who are singing the prayer. This is the first time she has meditated in four months. She recites the mantra which means I honor the divinity that resides within me.
15. Liz also practices Yoga. The reason for practicing it is to find union between mind and body, between the individual and his/her God, teacher and student, between ourselves and hard to bend neighbors. This shows that it is altruistic meaning yoga has to do with other people too. The yogic path is meant to quiet your mind and to make yourself content. The yogis explain people fail to recognize our deeper divine character. Yoga is the effort to find God within oneself and to hold on to that experience forever, this is called enlightenment. Yoga helps to turn your attention away from the past and helps you move on. Just like Liz’s situation with her divorce and David.
16. A Guru is a yogi and is the one who helps guide you, the disciple, along your journey toward enlightenment. One month after Liz was begging God for answers for help on her bathroom floor that she found her Guru. When she walked into David’s apartment she found a photograph of a stunning Indian woman, this woman was David’s Guru and became Liz’s also. In the Ashram in which Liz goes, the Guru is not in residence but she gives her schedule of practices to the devotees. In an Ashram you must show that you can work because you are expected to contribute to the overall operation of the place with about five hours a day of “seva” which is selfless service. If you have had an emotional trauma in the last six months, for example a divorce, they ask you to post pone your visit because it can be a distraction. However, Liz let go of her post divorce trauma in Italy. An Ashram life is rigorous so you are expected to visit when you are strong because days start at 3 AM and end at 9 PM and you will spend hours a day in meditation and contemplation.
17. Liz is assigned to do work in the Ashram, her work assignment is to scrub the temple floors. She says that polishing the floor is like purifying herself. The purpose of the work is to do it for God. Meditation is the way to attain enlightenment. Liz makes the difference between prayer and meditation. Prayer is the act of talking to God, and meditation is the act of listening.
18. In the Ashram, the diet is vegetarian. In the dining room, Liz meets a man from Texas who is a meditation student like her. His name is Richard. They become close friends. They both want the same thing from the Ashram, they want God to open their hearts. Richard works in the kitchen. He helps Liz meditate since she is having a hard time keeping her mind clear. She explains to him that she talks to herself every time she tries to meditate and Richard explains that it is her ego that tries to keep her broken and alone instead of whole. If she keeps up this spiritual path her ego will go away. He says she should try to keep her mind on the principal of love which will allow her to meditate.
19. Liz changes her mantra to Ham-sa which means I am that. It is the sound of our own breath. As Liz is meditating she has an experience of a force going up through her body that scares her because it is so mighty. Liz talks about her scary dreams that make her wake up. Once she wakes up her mind goes back to her failed marriage and dwells on David. She starts thinking about all the happiness they had together. The people in the Ashram would say it is perfectly normal and everyone goes through this to clear out all the residual demons. She goes to the bathroom and starts crying and gets her notebook and pen to start writing and asks for help. It’s as if she is writing automatically the answer which reassures herself.
20. The next day she feels hateful and angry. She talks with Richard and tells him everything about her dreams. Richard confronts Liz telling her she has control issues and that she has been dwelling on David for too long. He tells her that she has to let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to her. Liz meets a plumber/poet from New Zealand. She had lunch with him one day and after that he took her to an unlocked part of the ashram. Eventually he left her there by herself on top of the ashram, with a folded piece of paper. The paper read “instructions for freedom” that said she should let go and begin the rest of her life with great joy. She mediates and finds the answer “you can finish the business from within your self, its not only possible its essential”. Right before she goes to indonesia she writes two poems expressing how she found god.
21. Indonesia Liz arrives in Bali completely lost and she doesn’t know anyone. Right away Liz is in search for the Medicine Man named KetutLiyer whom she met when she first went to Indonesia. Mario, the man who works in the hotel takes Liz to see Ketut. When she gets to see him, he doesn’t remember her at first. He gives her a quick palm reading. After Liz reminds him that she is the writer from New York, he eventually remembers. He notices that she looks happier than she looked two years ago when she first met him. Liz feels more free than she ever been. Liz moved into a small house like a cottage. Liz’s first impression of Bali was that it was a true utopia but she is wrong. Bali has had exactly as bloody and violent and oppressive history as anywhere else on earth where human beings have lived. She did not know about the history of Bali. She came to Bali to search for the balance between worldly pleasure and spiritual devotion.
22. Ketut advices meditation to find peace within ourselves. He taught her a new kind of meditation called Four Brothers Meditation. The four brothers inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and poetry. The next day Liz got hit by a bus while riding her bike. She got a deep cut on her knee and then sees go a healer named Wayan who cures it. In the mornings she meditates and spends time with Wayan, afternoon she sees Ketut and evenings she meditates and then spends time in her garden. Liz meets a woman named Armenia in Wayans shop. She is invited to a party by Armenia. She hits it off with the Brazilian host Felipe who is also getting over a divorce. Liz is still keeping her vows for celibacy but she is very tempted to have an affair with Felipe.
23. Liz would like to help Wayan buy a house. Liz has the idea to email her friends in the U.S. to ask for money donations. After one week she got $18,000 which is close to the amount Wayan needs. She realizes that she came to Bali to help herself but now she is helping others. Liz starts her chanting and meditating again to calm herself down, she feels things are going too fast with Felipe. However, when Felipe invites Liz for dinner at his house, she breaks her vow to be celibate and makes love with him.
24. Liz is falling in love with Felipe but doesn’t know what to do. She has two dreams: 1) She sees the Guru closing the ashram because she feels that the students are now ready to go out into the world on their oawn. 2) The guru’s master is eating and enjoying himself and he says “enjoy”. Liz feels that Wayan is using her to get more money. Liz confronts Wayan and so Wayan buys the land quickly.
25. Liz goes on vacation with Felipe in GiliMeno, right off the coast of Lombok. She is finally happy, healthy and balanced which was her goal in the first place. Felipe tells Liz that he needs to stay in Bali and understands that Liz needs to stay in the U.S. but he still wants to be connected with her. Liz agrees with this kind of life because it resembles herself closely. The last thing she tells Felipe is “attraversiamo”.