Eat, Pray, Love a Little
There’s been a lot of people finding inspiration from books this past year. In the wake of Julie and Julia there’s one woman making over a dress a day on a $1 budget, and another who’s committed to wearing one dress every day for a year. Not surprisingly, Elizabeth Gilbert’s best seller, and now major motion picture Eat, Pray, Love is inspiring people to take a journey of their own.
For many of us, taking a year to go find ourselves in Italy, India and Bali is an impractical, if lovely idea. We have finances to consider and family responsibilities and most of us need to show up for work in the morning. Fortunately, there are ways to try a journey of your own on a smaller scale, to eat, pray and love a little.
A recent report on CNN’s ireport detailed local options for a journey of self discovery. They suggest New Orleans to eat, Colorado to pray and Hawaii for love. Great ideas all, but they still require a trip to the airport. Fortunately, self discovery can be had for an even more modest budget.
Rosamunde Pilcher says that “luxury is the total fulfillment of all five senses at once” and that is a luxury we can all afford, we just need to get a little creative.
Here’s how to eat, pray and love in your own city.
Eat
Is there a restaurant you’ve always wanted to try but never made the time? Try lunch instead of dinner and you’ll spend less. Sites like groupon.com or livingsocial.com offer daily deal, many of which are huge savings on restaurants you could try one of those. If you want to stick to just a $5 budget, find a bakery or local coffee shop in your town. Take the morning off, get a coffee and something warm and sweet and just sit and enjoy it for an hour. Eat slowly, breath deeply. You’ll feel miles away from ordinary.
Pray
Try to find a place that is quiet and peaceful. It might be a church, it could be a park or a beach or the library or local lookout. Find a place where it’s quiet and go, alone to pray. Take a journal with you.
Love
It’s hard to pick a date on the calendar and declare “I will meet my soul mate on Wednesday!” (well, it is pretty easy to say, hard to follow through on) but you can find love any day of the week if you know where to look. Focus on loving yourself better or loving others. Loving yourself better could be as simple as refusing to criticize yourself, or trying a new haircut or eating really, really fresh vegetables at lunch time.
Loving others could mean paying more attention to the people in your life or reaching out to others. You could love by volunteering for a day – read to someone who’s bed ridden, serve at a soup kitchen, walk a couple of dogs from your local pound. When you reach out to others, you’ll feel them reach back to you and while it’s not quite the same as falling in love in Bali, it still feels pretty amazing.
“Eat” and “love” are easy, “pray” can be a little less familiar. If you’d like to learn how to pray, try our free life lesson Embracing Prayer. You’ll be matched with a study coach who will talk through your answers with you as you learn.
Have you read the book or seen the movie? How will you eat, pray and love this year?
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Great stuff! I’m going to adapt for my Facebook status plus comments.
That is really neat Amia! I think it is good to be intentional about things in my life! And those three are excellent areas to be intentional. Way to Go!
I’ve launched an Eat, Pray, Love challenge on my site embracing the challenges we face as women for answers to eating for change, praying for results and loving for promise & acceptance.
Thanks for sharing this with us. I feel it very inspiring. For me the most difficult part is to reach out to others because I am a kinda shy person always hanging out with a couple of steady friends. I always feel lonely so I spend more time with God but I dont really really want to be isolated from the society. I want to blend in and improve my language. I check out many ways of making friends but I am just too shy to talk with stranger at the first time especially female which bothered me a lot…
Anyway thanks for your ideas, I will try it out and reach out to others as I can.