The Oprah Winfrey Show: Eat, Pray, Love Phenomenon | Full Episode | OWN

[Music] I hope that by now you all have had a chance to read our first book club 2. 0 book while by Cheryl Strait she just was the interview I did prior to this one a few years back there was another woman who kind of set the world to blaze with her own Journey back to her self when Elizabeth Gilbert set out to recover her soul through eating praying and loving millions of people were inspired to look at their own lives to kind of take stock and make some changes however small to happiness for themselves for months women have been carrying it everywhere I've seen it on planes and buses and trains everywhere Eat Pray Love has been on the New York Times bestseller list now for 30 5 weeks take a look at what struck a big old nerve a deep one 31-year-old Elizabeth Gilbert had the husband the career and the life so many women Envy but privately she was literally falling apart on her bathroom floor night after night I don't want to be married anymore I don't want to live in this big house I don't want to have a baby within months she left her husband and filed for divorce soon after she moved in with another man but her new lover didn't hold the key to her happiness either looking to put an ocean between herself and her wreck of a life Elizabeth accepted a writing assignment in Bali there a medicine man gave her a life-changing prophecy saying she would be back and this was how lizz's year-long quest to reclaim herself began she started in Italy where for months she ate plates and plates of homemade pasta and rediscovered what made her feel good then it was on to India to pray there she scrubbed Stone floors at an asham while living with strangers and keeping silent her last stop was the island of Bali where the pieces of her broken life finally came together in a whole new order wow our entire audience has read Eat Pray Love and author Elizabeth Gilbert has practically become a rock star I haven't been this excited since Bono was here really when Bon was here for the first time I was like quivering and I'm now quivering that you're here I'm so thrilled to have you here that makes two of us [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Elizabeth wow thank you oh my God I am not kidding you this summer EV I'm not kidding everywhere I went everybody was reading it did you have any idea that it would become this kind of phenomenon of course not and I you know sometimes people come up and they say I I found your book at exactly the right moment and thank you so much for writing this for me and I'm like I wish I could say I wrote it for you but I didn't I wrote it for me you know I I I wrote it to write my way out of the horrible situation I was in in my life and that's all I was thinking about when okay so a better question is did you have any idea that you're the depth of your feelings of Despair would strike such a chord though I guess no I definitely never anticipated anything like this but on the other hand you know if you considered that that Journey started on the bathroom floor 3:00 in the morning going through the beginnings of a divorce sobbing my eyes out you know it seems like this really low moment on the other hand who amongst us has not met our bathroom floor tiles at 3:00 a. m.

from a quar of an inch away the ti show of hands show of hands if you're not real familiar with the grouting on your bathroom tile you know and and so I think that that that alone makes it a universal experience for people you know who are struggling with those similar questions and the reason why I thought I wanted the women or and men who are watching this to take this hour and give back to themselves cuz I know you're going to hear something that you know strikes another chord but you were there had the visually in your life if we were looking from a distance it looked like the perfect picket fence you had all the stuff yeah I had all the stuff um but the stuff wasn't satisfying me and I was never a person who was after the stuff you know what I mean that's not how I was raised and it's not what I was really into somehow I had fallen into what started to feel like a trench and I had that horrible moment that I think many of us have in our lives where you look around and say whose house am I living in you know who am I married to what are my values whose body is this what's going on how did I get here yeah you know and um and from there it all it All Began okay that bathroom moment yeah tell us about that oh that was fun yes yeah good times yeah um so were you crying every night were you every night in the bathroom 6 months okay yeah you know nothing serious you know because it's one of those things where you're faced with that moment where you realize I can either eat this you know and continue on in this path I can white White Knuckle my way through it or I'm going to have to tear this thing apart down to the foundations and that is not going to be appreciated by everybody watching can hear understand that moment where you think am I going to settle do I choose to settle for what this is cuz this isn't bad this is really good and that's what you tell yourself like what am I complaining about this isn't so bad I've had women come up to me and say before they left their marriage why am I complaining he doesn't beat me yeah and I think well don't we Aspire for more than just not being beaten yeah you know like I mean don't get me wrong not being beaten is great but like maybe there's something else in your life besides that that that you're made for and what were you feeling in that bathroom I was feeling the call to leave to run to scram you know and and I've always been a traveler I've always been an Explorer I've always been somebody who takes Journey and I just wanted to get out of there did you feel that if you didn't you would die I felt like if I didn't I would die and I felt like a squirrel in a box that's what I come to feel like you know just like sort of clawing at the walls of my life and I think I might have swallowed that except for the fact that you know thanks to how I was raised and you know the woman who raised me I never got the memo that said you're not allowed to become the hero of your own life's journey you know um I was never taught that you are not allowed to do that and somehow I had lost that that path along the way and I just increasingly began to feel like this is your life and you are the only person who can be the hero of it and this is not working here well one of the reasons I love this for so many reasons I love e pray love but you were very discreet in describing you you know you told us but didn't really tell us what was going on in your marriage in order to protect his privacy so was it just this sort of unsettling with yourself that was unravel combin it was a combination of things that had you know incomp abilities that that had occurred but I I won't lay that on him you know um because the reality is that it it was much more of an internal volcano than it was anything else yeah yeah and and that the the deal breaker was that we were talking about having kids and I think one thing that had happened as I had Advanced on the trail toward marriage is something that happens to a lot of women which is that I was ambivalent in many of these key moments in my life I felt ambivalence I was an equal yes and no I want to do this I don't want to do this I didn't want to hold up the train of progress so I just always said yes and when it came to let's have a kid that's where I thought I cannot make that decision from a place of yes and no that has to be a yes or it can't happen and you we're able to do that because now it's not just your life it's another life it's not just my decision it's introducing another Soul into the planet who has the right to be born to a mother who desperately wants a child and I was a mother who was crying every a mother to be a potential mother to be who was crying on the floor every night saying I don't want a kid and yet I felt this obligation you've gone this far you've started this I guess you got to you got and so many women are in that predicament where they say well you're now here so now I guess I got to I guess I got to do this everyone wants me to do this you know um but I had to answer that I had to answer and what happens too I think it's a sort of psychoanalytical truism that if you can't speak out it expresses itself through your body okay we I I I got to go to break but then we got to come back and tell us the moment you're in the bathroom and God spoke Okie do back in a moment [Applause] often people compare the two books wild and eat prey love when wild first came out it was introduced to me by a friend who said oh it's just like Eat Pray Love well it isn't just like because everybody's journey is different but what is similar is that both our women both were going through a traumatic time in their lives divorce and in Cheryl's case death of her mother and in search of something to give meaning to their lives and for Elizabeth it was setting out on a journey to eat gosh I wish I'd been on that Journey uh to pray and to eventually find love for herself even though she didn't expect that for Cheryl it was a clearing that's what I felt through the whole process of reading while that it was a clearing and a connecting to something deeper and and really ultimately to what is for all of us and that's that you know ultimate Consciousness presence your soul being in touch with God so that's how they're similar because they both discovered the same things through different paths which I keep saying everybody has a different one tell us about that moment of Despair where you're in the bathroom I I'm not I'm not somebody who's who really grew up praying we we went to a very conservative Protestant church where you didn't really pray yeah you know so I just started um I just started praying I mean I had this I thought oh I've heard of this right when people are in Despair and they're sobbing and sometimes they pray so let me give that a shot you know and I just started speaking directly I had no experience how to do it but I just said to God um I need your help I don't know what to do please tell me what to do and the decision I was struggling with was do I stay in this marriage do I leave this marriage and I just kept saying over and over again tell me what to do tell me what to do tell me what to do and I I kept waiting for the the big sort of Charlton hon answer you know yes stay no go you know and um but that's not how it works no and what happened was that all of a sudden I fell into this pocket of Stillness unlike anything I had ever felt in my life this Divine quiet envelope of peace and I heard this voice that was my own voice but not and in my head and it said very clearly go back to bed Liz and that was the answer that God gave me that night which was you don't need to know tonight on a Tuesday at 4:00 in the morning what to do because you don't know and you won't know until you do know but in the meanwhile you need to sleep because you need your rest and you need your strength go back to bed I'll keep the watch try it again tomorrow we'll try it again tomorrow and every night it came go back to bed we're getting there when you know you'll do it you'll do what you need tell me about this moment in the book on page uh 4 when you write you are writing to yourself I thought this was an interesting process you sit down and you find yourself writing to yourself this I'm here I love you I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long I will stay with you if you need the medication again go ahead and take it I will love you through that as well if you don't need the medication I will love you too there's nothing you can ever do to lose my love I will protect you until you die and after your death I will still protect you I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me how did that happen I mean really that came out of this thing that I started doing I'm a social person it's easy for me to find people to fall apart on like any person in this audience if I meet you in a grocery store and having a bad day you'll be holding me while I weep in your arms within 5 minutes right like I know how to do that and I've always used that as a way to not really cope with my own problems and so during these years as I was trying to build myself back up I thought okay I'm not I'm not doing this now what I'm going to do is I'm going to get a journal and I'm going to ask myself for help as though I was a friend um a dear loved one and I'm going to write back to myself everything I've always wanted somebody to say to me when I'm in my deepest despair there's nothing you can ever do to lose my love I'm here I'll always be here and we know how to do that for other people I mean who amongst us has not done that for a dear friend right who calls in the middle of the night and you say I'm here I love you you're great we're going to pull through this yes but we don't know how to turn that around and direct it towards s and somehow the act of doing that in a diary and I would sit down with the diary sobbing like snot running down my chin sobbing and right not so I have a friend who calls it double pumping it you know like those big you know and uh and I would write I am in so much trouble I need you and there it would be I would write back I'm here what do you need you know tell me I love you what do you need well this is what I didn't get from the book is that a conscious thing so you you would write back consciously to yourself or is it like something would write for you it it clearly the snot ined woman was not capable of divine grace at that moment so something was coming through there um and something you know we all have this kak copy this word salad of voices in our heads at any time somehow the act of of sitting down and asking for the specific voice I needed summoned it I do not dare to say what that voice was you know I know that it came through me but it was not entirely me um you know is it an angel is it like you know your gu my social worker who does it matter you know does does it matter as long as you believe in it and lean on it and listen to it I'm not sure that it does matter yeah um it's just there when you need it and so did you start listening to it more yeah and and and a lot of the things that it was saying I remember one time writing I want to quit you know this was when I was feeling particularly suicidal I want to quit and the voice whatever it was wrote back so quit let me do it you know quit working so hard I was struggling so hard to pull myself out of the depression and it was saying let go it's not your job I've got you I'm holding you okay let it [Music] be well my favorite part of Eat Pray Love was the eat part and gosh the whole time when she went and found that pizza oh boy I could taste that pizza uh I actually got her to tell me the name of the place um I've never eaten my way through Italy but the very first time I went to Italy I remember ordering the pasta dish as an appetizer and then ordering the same dish for my main meal and then order ordering the same dish for dessert did you consciously choose I'm going to eat I'm going to pray I'm going to love I I wish I could say that I mean now when I look back on it there was like it's clear some Divine hand was guiding it because it was so perfect the order that I had done it in if I went to India first instead of Italy first I would have been sent home in a basket because I was still on anti-depressants I was sick I was weak I was skinny I was just out of a divorce I would not have been able to physically do the yoga the meditation the hard rigor spiritual work you know so I went to Italy first and I ate my guts out for four months and I went to India toia ital okay but you went to Italy first because you wanted to learn language IED pleasure I wanted language and the things I wanted in my life that I really felt when I examined myself and thought what's missing why are you so sad I felt I'm missing pleasure and I'm missing devotion so I went I'm like well where do you go to get that who's the master of pleasure who knows more about pleasure than anyone in the world Romans Romans Romans you got to go to Rome you know like and they endorsed that there and you know when I told my American friends I'm going to go study pleasure for 4 months they were like can you do that you know and when I told my Italian friends I'm here to study pleasure they're like viante Be Our Guest knock yourself out yeah right why only four months yes yeah so you're in you're in Rome eating just really eating whatever you want what it was was that the freedom to gain 24 pounds yeah Freedom yeah there's no reason that you can't have pasta for lunch and then do it again for dinner that's what I realized no reason you can't have gelato before breakfast that's what I told myself I like for these four months Liz you have always been so driven so organized so responsible why don't what if you just did what you wanted that would make you happy every day for 4 months what would happen to you and how how horrible would it be really you know because the things I wanted were harmless to one else except maybe you know my jeans yeah um j e a ANS yeah I know I know yes but what I loved about it you ate it and then there wasn't you know as we all do I still do you know you eat it and then you go oh God how many calories is that I shouldn't eat that and then now I can't eat for two more days because you know I was like I'm not doing that yeah you didn't do that I'm not I I made a rule I got disciplined about it about my eating and the discipline was I'm not doing that you were disciplined about pleasure I'm disciplined about my pleasure I'm not going to beat myself up for something that is so simply wonderful as this meal and I have to say like I don't want to become you know like the binge Guru you know but but and I do think there's a difference between eating six bags of potato chips over your sink at 400 a. m.