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| Pureland Japanese Garden and Meditation Centre |
As soon as I read Liz Gilbert’s famous book ‘Eat, Pray,
Love’ I identified with her in some way. We read it for book club and watched
the film. In our discussion some readers chafed badly against her angst because
when compared to their lives, she seemed to live a charmed one. There was a
very angry reaction in some quarters; ‘I’d like to live her ‘crappy’ life where
she got paid to travel round the world and write about it’. I may be gullible
but that thought had never entered my head. I did understand their reaction, especially
with the depressing state of the economy and people feeling overworked, over
stretched and under paid. Compared to a minimum wage job, a mortgage to pay and
in some of our reader’s cases having a life limiting disease, Gilbert did seem
to have a charmed life. I don’t think the sugary film helped her case any
because a beautiful, sari wearing, Julia Roberts wafting all over the place and
feeling unloved seemed a bit of a stretch. I did envy her love affair with
Javier Bardem, but I didn't envy her quest to fill this void she had discovered
at her core.
Inspired by the book the book club went to a meditation
concert held at our local Japanese Meditation garden and experienced an
afternoon of singing, poetry and a talk on how the world is an illusion and a
lot of the struggles based within it mean nothing in the spiritual sense.
Buddha Maitreya did not speak from any organised religion but advocated finding
oneness; a sense of existing as a unique individual yet connected to the
universe and nature. He told us to stop searching for the thing to complete us,
because we are complete in ourselves. We joked at the time about him becoming
my spiritual guru in the same way Gilbert had Kehtut in Bali. Yet now, more
than three years later that does not seem to be such a stretch.
Every time I go and help next door I am given a little gift.
These gifts are meaningful and beautiful to me. I was given a CD of his songs,
then a new relaxation CD, then a lovely book that’s about using writing to
relax (we’d been talking about using Haiku as a mindfulness technique) and often
his latest poetry in little plastic wallets. Last week he gave me a series of
poems and one was particularly unusual because it was a series of verses rather
than the Haiku form he usually uses. I wouldn't be as arrogant as to suggest
that the poem was specifically for me, but he did seem deeply affected by a
talk we’d had concerning my health. ‘Not very good health’ as he calls it, is a
new experience for him. He is somewhere around his late seventies and swears he
has never had a day of ill health in his life. This is so far outside of my
experience that we are coming from completely opposite ends of the scale; we
are almost like alien species to each other. Even the normal British greeting
of ‘hello, how are you?’ is funny to him because he sees no need for it. ‘I am
always well, always well’, he says shaking his head and giggling.
One of the parts of Gilbert’s book that really resonated
with me was when she was struggling in the ashram with the discipline of early
Morning Prayer and leaving her emotional baggage behind her. She wants to be
there because she wants the experience to change her in some way and preferably
for the better. She wants to be spiritual, calm and to find this stuff easy but
it is a huge challenge, reducing her to tears of frustration and making her
feel inadequate. After a while, she does fit into the ashram and decides she is
ready to take a vow of silence. On her way to get her badge that shows everyone
she does not speak she is called to the office. There, she is asked to be a
host for the ashram – welcoming new visitors in and showing them where
everything is. At first she refuses because she is ready to be the silent,
pious, spiritual person she imagines God expects her to be. The director seems
to think God has other plans and she has chosen Gilbert precisely for those
characteristics she is trying to eradicate. Whereas Gilbert does not value her
qualities as a ‘Chatty Cathy’, the director of the ashram has seen a way to use
these qualities for God’s purpose. God loves you as you are and will use you as
you are she is told; God made her a ‘Chatty Cathy’ and why would he do that if
he did not value those qualities?
Maitreya obviously felt something similar about me – he says
I have a smiley, approachable face that makes people want to talk to me and
this is clearly valuable to him and the people who come into the garden. The
poem follows this thinking, but declares we should be honest about who we are
as we meet people in life:
‘if you are a not healthy person,
As a not healthy person’.
He is saying ‘be who you are’ and don’t use a mask or
pretend to be something you’re not. The harder part of it, for me, is that he
says people then see me as a
non-healthy person and that’s the part I don’t think I like. I have to be
honest for people to understand me and how I feel, but then I don’t want the
part I can’t control – their reaction to my ‘non-healthy’ status. Some people
may show pity, or not know what to say, but if I am going to be in the world I might
as well be honest. He had asked me to help him in his kitchen and I thought I might
find it tough, but then thought I’d just get on with it. I worked as I used to
work in a tea room and took the orders, then waited on tables. He took me to
one side and told me to make them wait and carry the tray themselves, then ask
them to bring the tray back when they’re finished. ‘They don’t mind’, he said.
He was telling me to acknowledge my illness instead of ignoring it. It is nice
to be valued for my good qualities, but also have my problems acknowledged and
accepted. Not everyone will react in the same way; for some people my drawbacks
will be enough to hide my better qualities but those people don’t matter. I had
become used to masking for my ex-husband who used to get embarrassed if we
parked in disabled bays, hid my tablets where people couldn't see them and finally
wrote to me and said that even the fact that I was ‘pretty, intelligent and
younger’ couldn't disguise my disability.
The people who can accept all of you, even the faults and
drawbacks, are the people who stay with you. I think my new neighbour wants to
be one of those people and I am happy to have found this ‘guru’. My very unique
friend.
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