Breakfast with Elizabeth Gilbert

On a Tuesday in March, surrounded by coffee, granola and some goats cheese puff pastry things, I and a few hundred others had breakfast with Liz Gilbert. And it felt like destiny.

During my creative writing course a few weeks earlier, I had been asked to write about an author who has inspired me and why. Liz immediately popped into my head. Like many women, I read Eat Pray Love (2006) and fell for her honest and raw descriptions of how her travels through Italy, India and Bali had helped piece back together the parts of her that had fallen apart after her divorce. The food, the culture, the heart ache, the love, the spiritual wondering and exploration; every part of her story stirred up something in me.

The desire to travel the world was instilled in me from birth. Both my parents are journalists. I was in Tiananmen Square with them in 1989, just days before the student-led protests calling for democracy, free speech and a free press in China were halted in a bloody crackdown (much to my grandparent’s horror). I wasn’t even a year old.

I was in Portugal before that, as a tiny little thing sat on the beach hidden from the sun beneath a makeshift scarf shelter. It’s fair to say, Eat Pray Love didn’t start my love affair with travelling the world but it has continually and quietly whispered encouragement since, a sound which has only grown louder over the years.

I’ve watched the film, starring (the always fabulous) Julia Roberts during my yoga teacher training in Bali in 2018. I acknowledge the cliché. I have listened to podcast after podcast with Liz talking about being brave, creative and living life’s “Big Magic”. She is wise and inspiring; spiritual and yet practical. She doesn’t dish out any fluff. I love her.

I flew through City of Girls (2019), her latest novel about “a young woman discovering that you don't have to be a good girl to be a good person” (yet another ‘aha’ moment) in a couple of days and I fell head over heels for my beloved New York all over again.

Needless to say, the prospect of being in the same room as this woman was VERY exciting.

The day before the event, a friend had posted on Instagram that she had a ticket going spare and that big hearted, beautiful friend is the reason this Liz Gilbert loving gal got a spot in the room.

Here are my takeaways from the morning:

CURIOSITY.

Liz’s opening speech that morning was all about curiosity. I immediately knew that I was exactly where I needed to be. A big buzz word I picked up many years ago from my wonderful yoga teacher Rachael Coopes, staying curious has become my mantra. Curious about the world, curious about how you feel in your body, breath and mind, curious about the way you navigate and move through everyday life.

Curious about why you react to certain things, places or people. Curious about why you feel certain emotions in certain situations. Just. Stay. Curious. These teachings are everywhere; Pema Chödrön teaches us to let our curiosity be greater than our fear; Brené Brown wants us to lean into our curiosity and vulnerability, Glennon Doyle tells us to “be curious, not defensive.” And Liz is part of this tribe.

“What are you willing to give up to have the life you want?”

This was the big question of the morning and really hit me in the feels. Liz asked us to think about where our energy is going, where we have our priorities and if we thought we needed to be making some shifts in order to focus on our goals? If you say you want to be a writer she said, but you’re not sitting down to write every single day, are you really prioritising your writing?

Are you willing to miss a weekend away with friends? Watch less TV? Are you willing to get up earlier? Go to bed later? Are you willing to make your ‘so called’ dream a reality by prioritising what needs to happen in order to get there? Notice, she said, if your energy is being used for everything except the thing you say you want.

Only you can determine who or what is important to you.

Draw a circle around these people and things. Call it sacred. You are at the centre of this circle, use it as a boundary and invite only love and respect inside. Who and what you care about is all that matters. In the same way Liz asked us to consider what we were willing to give up, she also invited us to look at this inner circle carefully and ask ourselves if this is where our time and energy is going? Or are we wasting it elsewhere, on things that are not important to us?

“The most relaxed person in the room holds all the power. And the quality of your life will be determined by how relaxed you are.”

She talked about how finding a way to become more relaxed and at peace in our lives can bring so much power to a situation. Being relaxed allows us to see possibility and impossibility. She used the martial arts as an example; when you are relaxed you create a heightened sense of awareness. You can walk in and view the full situation rather than heading into flight or fight and acting from fear.

“The only thing left standing at the end of the day is the truth.”

Liz dropped this truth bomb towards the end. She talked about the importance of always being true to yourself; that in staying true to what we feel, what we believe and think will always lead to true happiness.

As she says: “We’re going to get to the truth eventually so we might as well start there.”