MMS Commentary #1: Eat, Pray, Love

When one minute feels like a lifetime... "kill me now".

I decided it would be fun to start an MMS Commentary series, with “MMS” standing for “Movie Meditation Scene”. As the title implies, I pick a scene from a movie (or a series) about meditation and offer my two cents’ worth.

Eat, Pray, Love (2010)

I can’t believe it’s been almost 20 years since I read the book by Elizabeth Gilbert, and 13 years since I watched its film adaptation.

I remember feeling quite captivated by Gilbert’s personal story about leaving her life behind and embarking on a year-long journey around the world in search of herself.

One of the three destinations she ended up exploring and immersing herself in was India, where she first learned to meditate.

In this particular scene in the movie, Gilbert (played by the stunning Julia Roberts) sits down for meditation and appears to go through one of the most torturous 60 seconds of her life.

Anyone who has tried meditating for the first time might relate with what Gilbert experiences in the scene:

1- Restlessness

The moment she settles into her posture and closes her eyes, Gilbert’s mind gets flooded with random thoughts - thoughts of the past, thoughts about the future, even thoughts of building a meditation room at her new home.

We are so used to being stimulated all the time, that when we attempt to just rest and do nothing in particular, that “nothingness” can feel alarmingly foreign to us.

When the mind feels uncomfortable, the discomfort shows up in the body too, and often in a more obvious, tangible way during meditation.

We see Gilbert in a restless state, bothered by the heat and random sensations of itching, and constantly wanting to move her body and change her posture.

Even the sound of the ceiling fan seems extra loud amidst her struggle to settle down. Everything that shows up in her experience seems to irk her.

Feeling defeated, Gilbert turns her head to check how much time has passed since she sat down, and to her dismay, the clock shows it has only been less than a minute.

Kill me now, she says to herself.

When a minute feels like a lifetime, the thought of enduring even one more moment of our experience can feel absolutely unbearable.

The more we fixate on the future (i.e. for how long this experience will continue, or when this experience will end), the further away our desired endpoint seems to be.

This is where “being present” must be put into actual practice.

We learn to come home to the here and now and simply attend to each moment of our experience as it arrives.

2- Comparison

During her practice, Gilbert opens her eyes in frustration and sees her roommate sitting quietly in front of her. She thinks to herself:

Screw you, Corella. How the hell does she do this? She looks like a friggin’ Mother Theresa.

I found this part to be especially hilarious, because I remember myself thinking the exact same way about fellow practitioners during my first meditation retreat.

I was experiencing a lot of physical pain during a particular sit, and even though the group was advised to keep our eyes closed, I decided to open mine out of the extreme agitation I was feeling, as well as curiosity towards what other people were experiencing.

I was parked at the back of the hall, with easily 50 meditators in front of me. I saw that they were all quietly sitting in the proper meditation posture, their bodies still and unmoving.

The sight of everybody’s poised and serene back view sparked fury in me.

Is everyone else doing this better than I am? I wondered. I felt extremely inadequate about my ability to meditate.

It was only after the retreat had ended and I had the opportunity to speak with others that I discovered that just like me, everyone else struggled in the same ways.

It was also amusing for me to hear people confess that they too had opened their eyes during their sit and checked out how others were doing.

In the movie, when Gilbert finally has the chance to speak with Corella, she realises that her roommate, whom she deemed to be performing so much better in meditation, is having a difficult time with observing silence as a practice.

Such comparison doesn’t serve us in our practice, and is considered an unhelpful state of mind and attitude that we should learn to work with.

The key to working with the tendency of comparing ourselves with others, is to let go of our preoccupation with the external, and start turning our attention inwards to observe what arises within us.

We will then be able to see more clearly how we are pulling away from the present moment by distracting ourselves with judgements about others, and getting lost in the stories we feed ourselves.

3- Expectations

Gilbert starts her meditation by telling herself to empty her mind.

She quickly realises that it is near impossible to achieve an empty mind.

Stop thinking, she chides herself. Why is this so hard?

Meditation becomes hard when we form expectations towards the experience before we even allow ourselves to see it clearly.

We get stuck in some ideas about how our mind and body should or should not be, and we become frustrated when we find that reality does not align with those ideas.

Mindfulness meditation, in particular, isn’t about getting somewhere or feeling a certain way.

This gentle practice of observing the reality of our experience encourages us to see things as they are, and learn to work more skilfully and wisely with what is.

We see a restless body, accept it as it is, and then learn to let go of unnecessary tension and calm the body down.

We see a chaotic mind, accept it as it is, and then learn to change our relationship with thoughts and settle the mind.

Parting Wisdom

Later in the movie, when Gilbert wonders when the grieving over her life situation will be over, her friend and fellow meditator Richard asks: “What, you want a day on the calendar?”

“You wanna give me one?” Gilbert jokingly asks.

“No, you gotta do the work,” he said. “Meditate”.

I’d like to confirm that Richard is right - there really is no other way.

If we have decided that meditation is what we are committing to, we will have to do the work to see the change.

It is hard work. But it is not impossible work.

One of the final scenes of the movie shows Gilbert sitting in stillness and meditating at ease in Bali - the final destination of her journey.

It is evident that she has been doing the work.

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If you have an MMS (Movie Meditation Scene) you’d like me to cover in this series, please leave a comment and a link to the video!