“To be in India is to experience India. It’s not that you have to go find it. It’s all right there,” she says.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, and Julia Roberts were on the Oprah show to promote the upcoming movie. Do you agree with the director, Ryan?

“I think it’s more than a book. I think it’s a movement, and I think it’s so personal to so many people,” he says. “It was to me. I was a fan, like Julia was, before it came into our lives.”

Liz also shares, “One of the great teachings that I learned in India is that silence is the only true religion.” So what about all the noise from the “EPL marketing machine” as Yoga Dork calls it?

In “Are you experienced?”, Sirensongs quips that the book will release a torrent of tourists unprepared for the experience.

With the release of the Eat Pray Love (or is it Eat Love Pray?) major motion picture (“The amazing adventure of a middle-class white woman who talked her publisher into bankrolling a scripted adventure”), India-tripping is set to become a middle-class fad for the first time since the days of the 70s Overland Chapatti Express. Except this time, instead of tie-dyed trippies, it will be mani-pedi suburban women seeking “adventure.”

She compiles a humorous list of ignorant questions that first-time travellers pose. Yet while her tone seems derogatory towards the potential newcomers, I would prefer to see it as an opportunity for many different kinds of women to be exposed to  India where they might never have even thought about it before.

I followed some of the conversations on the EPL Facebook page, and of course there were plenty of disagreements between the conservative Christians and others. And plenty of misinterpretations about yoga, Buddhism, meditation.

Nonetheless, if the book opens some women up to India,  so much the better. It would take courage for anyone to come and visit, with or without mani-pedi.

Taking inspiration from Katherine’s last post and a host of signs pointing me in this direction, I would like to discuss how technology has been influencing the way I see and interact with the world. I’ll start with the example of how I ended up on this site: I got a Google Alert that she had posted on the book Midnights with the Mystic. I commented and re-tweeted. Then she visited my blog, invited me to guest post.

Despite not knowing each other, I do feel a connection. When I read her response, I became so thrilled, started clapping, laughing, dancing. My husband looked at me as if I’d gone mad. Just reading her words had elicited powerful emotions in me.

It turns out, a lot of dialogue nowadays is happening around the very real connections people are experiencing through virtual means. The internet and social media research is just reminding us of things we already knew: that we are affected by others, and vice versa. That being involved with others, helping others, feels good because they are a part of us.

“How deeply you touch another life is how rich your life is.”–Sadhguru

between self and thought

lies the sweetest expanse

of life and nothingness.

Light and pure,

soothing and sure.

The cascading breath

carries me there,

to the space beyond time,

reason and rhyme.

No battles, no crises,

no wrong or right:

a place of seeing

without sight.

(written after my Isha yoga practice this morning)

From Five Directions, Technology and Mindfulness:

One big theme of the conference: Happiness is good business. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, is the lead singer of this movement, but he’s not the only one. I was impressed to hear how not only Zappos but Twitter, Google, Facebook, Whole Foods, and Samovar (a group of tea houses in San Francisco) place the physical and emotional wellbeing of their employees as a top priority, and are going about it in creative ways.

From Beth Kanter, Wisdom 2.0: Living Consciously In A Connected World:

We’re all struggling with balance of technology and a purposeful life.  We need to reflect inward and examine our motivations, patterns, and use of technology – understanding when we’re mindful and not.  Then we need to integrate ways of finding the right balance.  That balance is not a simple on and off switch – it is understanding how to integrate focused and receptive attentions into our online and offline lives.  And, there is also the issue of organization culture – how is your organization honoring a balanced use of technology and incorporating that into your working style.

I have been doing tons of research on how non-profits can use social media, thanks largely to Beth Kanter’s wealth of resources on the subject, with the aim of seeing what Isha Foundation can do with these tools. The workshop was an opportunity to apply what I’ve already learned, and of course see it in a new light. Gaurav put things in quite a different perspective, for example by highlighting the theoretical underpinnings of the tools (whereas I’ve been focusing more on the practical uses and tactics).

He started with the question: “What are social technologies and why are they important?” and showed how they are changing people. For example, the focus is shifting from content to people, and people themselves are shifting from consumers to creators.

However, I would like to ask: if technologies are changing people, why are we not any more joyful or loving? Surely if we could engineer ourselves the way we would want to be, we would choose bliss over blogging. If the tools enable us to be more “connected”, why can we not experience this connectedness on a deeper level? If anything, social media has tended to exaggerate our individuality (to the point where we feel the need to broadcast our every thought and action). So, how is this change beneficial?

As an inner technology, Isha Yoga creates the transformation from the inside out. Without fancy gadgets, it enables an individual to experience life in a more enhanced way–feeling more in tune with others, with one’s surroundings, with life! Having experienced this myself, it was only natural that I looked to social media as a way to express and share my joy with those in my network.

The workshop report will be available on the Foundation’s site soon. Gaurav’s post on Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps is a good summary, as is this article/interview on Why and how nonprofits should use social media. Slides are below:

PBS has released a new documentary about the Buddha’s life, complete with celebrity narration (by Richard Gere). It’s fascinating to me how people can be so intrigued by him, yet could completely miss him if he were here today…

An article in the Huffington Post inquires “What Does The Buddha Have To Do With Jesus?” Seems like a redundant question–duh, they were both enlightened. Rather than favoring brevity,  the author takes ages to preach about interreligious dialogue.

But we are terribly short of thinkers and practitioners, clergy and lay, who can think these two traditions together.

Once again, spiritual experience being reduced to religious philosophy. Sad.

Or… See what Sadhguru has said about enlightenment/grace in the bible.

“The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22)

‘If thine eye be single’ means that you are no more discriminatory. You are seeing everything as one; you are seeing everything as the same. If you become like this, your body shall be filled with light, and that is Grace.

Thanks, Ganesh for the video link!

Someone is rejecting me, Someone is dying for me… Some work is falling apart, Some work is coming together… Simultaneously, the dualities of life are manifesting around me… And neither is affecting me… Inside I am joyful regardless of what is happening… What I want or what I don’t want… It matters not… For my inner climate is independent of outer events, circumstances and people… Ah, everyone should do Isha… Ah, everyone should be as fortunate as me to have a Master like I do…

It matters not if people love me or hate me, It matters not if I get what I want or I don’t, It matters not if life is good or bad… I wonder with wonder, how am I becoming like this! Such tremendous Grace is being showered on me… I am watching the play of life like a spectator, playing my role as an actor on the stage of life, yet moving away from identification with the roles, faster and faster…

“I meditate religiously again like I used to, going back to my roots with my Buddhism with my mom. I need to do these things the way I used to do it. And unfortunately I got away from that, and I just lost that and unfortunately also lost my life in the process.”

And Deepak Chopra’s tweets have rocked the media world:

One passage I would like to highlight (from 16:44 onwards):

The word “spiritual” is being used very loosely… When we say spiritual, today, I know in the United Satates there are people selling spiritual bath soaps, spiritual massage oil, spiritual incense, spiritual whatever. When you say “spiritual,” essentially, to put it very simply, a technical definition of spirituality would be: When your experience of life has transcended the limitations of physical, if you have touched something beyond your physicality, that is spiritual.

When I say “touched beyond, a dimension beyond physicality,” we are not talking about the thought, we are not talking about the emotion, we are not talking about your physical energies, because all these things are phsycial…

There is a dimension within you which is the very source of your physicality.  If you touch that, if an experience beyond the phsycial dimension becomes a living reality for you, then you’re on the spiritual path.

Thinking spirituality, talking spirituality, reading spirituality is not spirituality. Unfortunately, that is passing off as spiritual process. If somebody reads something, they’ll become spiritual. If they listen to a talk, they’ll become spiritual. If they talk in a certain way, they become spiritual.

That is not the spiritual process. The essential spiritual process is to help a person to transcend the limitations of the physical…

For the common public it’s very important that we redefine spirituality, not as somebody’s teaching. This is not somebody’s teaching, this is not a method, this is not a technique.

This is a state of being where there is a distinction between who you are, and what you have gathered…Whatever you gather can be yours, but it can never be you. But right now you are getting lost in what is yours, but never touching the dimension that is really  you. So spiritual process is touching that dimension which is not gathered from outside, but which is you, essentially you.

Please take a few minutes to view this video on “Conquering Negative Emotions and Anger”