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Elizabeth Gilbert

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Once Rayya got clean and sober, she never judged people, no matter how badly they were acting out. She never condemned them—not even when she was angry or frustrated with them, not even when she was setting boundaries with them—because she knew what it was like to be at the very bottom. She knew what it was like to be feared and despised. She knew what it was like to live completely outside of your own integrity, a million miles away from your heart. As she said to me once, “Until you’ve stolen money from your father’s wallet to buy heroin while he was sick in a hospital bed, you don’t know what it feels like to need to be forgiven.” She also used to say, “Mercy is what I owe, because mercy is what I always needed—and mercy is what I have been given.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
From what I now understand, given the latest neurological research, people like me—people with process addictions—have nervous systems that don’t work quite right. Many of us, having experienced at a young age what are officially referred to as “consistent disruptions of safety,” have trouble regulating our own emotions, taking care of ourselves, telling fantasy from reality, understanding the concept of boundaries, knowing whom to trust, and distinguishing our feelings from other people’s feelings. As a result, we can end up with an attachment style that is sometimes referred to as “disordered-disoriented”—which describes my romantic history perfectly.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
Religion is for those who don't want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Inspirational
People often talk about crawling into the rooms of recovery on their knees, but when I turned to twelve-step for the second time, I felt more like I was walking in there with my hands up—like a career criminal turning herself in, ready at last to give up the game.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
There is a prayer that we recite in those rooms that I love very much. It simply says, “Dear God—thank you for all that has been given, for all that has been taken away, and for all that remains.”

Like many gratefully recovering addicts, I stand in amazement at all that remains—astonished that I was allowed to keep anything, after all my many years of madness and acting out. By all rights, I should have lost absolutely everything in the course of my various and sundry maelstroms and upheavals. Many people with minds as disordered as mine have indeed lost everything.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
My codependency gives me outlandish ideas about how responsible I am for others, and my anxiety distorts my perception of reality—convincing me that I can control people and keep them safe, if only I try hard enough. But I cannot control anyone.
Nor can I keep people safe from their own choices.
Adults get to do whatever they decide to do—even to the point of their own self-destruction or death. And as my sponsor always reminds me when I am about to overstep into someone else’s territory: “God didn’t bring anyone into your life for you to control them.”
Because I can’t control them. I have enough trouble controlling myself.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
When you are in the grip of addiction, or when you are severely impacted by someone else’s addiction, eventually nothing works—not even the things that don’t seem obviously related to the addictive substance or behavior. Losing the lease to our apartment and getting my bank account hacked had nothing to do with the fact that Rayya was drugged out of her mind, or that I was lost in a dense fog of codependency—but these are also the kinds of things that happen when your life is falling apart: suddenly it’s raining hammers. Everything unravels. You sprain your ankle, your car breaks down, your dog dies. You can’t handle anything. And that’s when the madness really sets in, because it seems like the world itself is a machine of pain that has turned its full force against you.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
It is my way—it has always been my way—to become captivated by other people’s charisma and madness and wildness and beauty. To disappear into their stories and become hypnotized by their existence. To become lost in a trance of themness and to forget who I am, what I am, and where I stand.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
To even talk about not having a partner makes the story about me not having a partner. What is actually happening in the ecosystem of my spiritual life and my physical life and my emotional life is that a garden is blooming. . . . It isn’t about who isn’t here. It is about what is here.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Inspirational
If I am truly to become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian...I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Inspirational
Addiction serves a purpose. It is medication for an aching soul, relief for a pained body, and escape from an impossible mind. Addiction is a pretty good survival strategy when all your other strategies for living have failed.

As Rayya used to tell me, “I needed every gram of heroin I ever took back in the day, or I would have never made it out of my childhood alive. I could not have survived without my buffer of drugs.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
I read today that all addiction is a form of misplaced worship.
I get that.
And I’ve certainly done that.
I’ve mistaken the delivery device of heavenly pleasure for heaven itself.
And thus I have worshipped so many things— and so many people, too.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
Rayya already had a community filled with fellow recovering addicts who had loved her for years, and who would have gladly received her admissions of shame and fear and helped her to process her overwhelming desire to drink. They could have guided her back to the principles of the program—back to the acts of service that keep us sober; back to a position of humility and surrender. But Rayya had pushed all those people away in order to chart her own path. And the last thing you ever want an addict doing is charting their own path.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
People don’t stick needles in their arms and pump themselves full of mind-erasing drugs for no reason, after all. And the thing Rayya had always loved about heroin was the way it eliminated her from consciousness—how it allowed her to discard her entire identity, as if her “self” were some heavy old overcoat she didn’t need to wear anymore and could just throw to the floor in a crumpled heap. The only problem with heroin was that you had to come back from the high. You had to wake up, stand up, put the overcoat back on. That had always been heartbreaking for her.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
I did things for and within that relationship that no sane or emotionally stable person would ever do. And I woke up at the end of that encounter exactly the way another kind of addict might wake up in a motel room somewhere off the highway outside Vegas, wrecked and bewildered, with no memory of how she had gotten there—and not sure where that fresh new tattoo had come from, either. Blinking in the blazing sun, wondering where her money went, and asking in devastated confusion, “How did that just happen?” Or maybe it would be more accurate to ask: “How did that just happen again?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
How you can tell you might be in a codependent relationship: You care more about somebody else’s well-being than they do, and/or you believe that you cannot function without them, and/or you believe that they cannot function without you. The codependent’s motto: 'You break it, we fix it!
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pictures of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone?
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
Once Rayya got clean and sober, she never judged people, no matter how badly they were acting out. She never condemned them—not even when she was angry or frustrated with them, not even when she was setting boundaries with them—because she knew what it was like to be at the very bottom. She knew what it was like to be feared and despised. She knew what it was like to live completely outside of your own integrity, a million miles away from your heart. As she said to me once, “Until you’ve stolen money from your father’s wallet to buy heroin while he was sick in a hospital bed, you don’t know what it feels like to need to be forgiven.” She also used to say, “Mercy is what I owe, because mercy is what I always needed—and mercy is what I have been given.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
From what I now understand, given the latest neurological research, people like me—people with process addictions—have nervous systems that don’t work quite right. Many of us, having experienced at a young age what are officially referred to as “consistent disruptions of safety,” have trouble regulating our own emotions, taking care of ourselves, telling fantasy from reality, understanding the concept of boundaries, knowing whom to trust, and distinguishing our feelings from other people’s feelings. As a result, we can end up with an attachment style that is sometimes referred to as “disordered-disoriented”—which describes my romantic history perfectly.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
Religion is for those who don't want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Inspirational
People often talk about crawling into the rooms of recovery on their knees, but when I turned to twelve-step for the second time, I felt more like I was walking in there with my hands up—like a career criminal turning herself in, ready at last to give up the game.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
There is a prayer that we recite in those rooms that I love very much. It simply says, “Dear God—thank you for all that has been given, for all that has been taken away, and for all that remains.”

Like many gratefully recovering addicts, I stand in amazement at all that remains—astonished that I was allowed to keep anything, after all my many years of madness and acting out. By all rights, I should have lost absolutely everything in the course of my various and sundry maelstroms and upheavals. Many people with minds as disordered as mine have indeed lost everything.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
My codependency gives me outlandish ideas about how responsible I am for others, and my anxiety distorts my perception of reality—convincing me that I can control people and keep them safe, if only I try hard enough. But I cannot control anyone.
Nor can I keep people safe from their own choices.
Adults get to do whatever they decide to do—even to the point of their own self-destruction or death. And as my sponsor always reminds me when I am about to overstep into someone else’s territory: “God didn’t bring anyone into your life for you to control them.”
Because I can’t control them. I have enough trouble controlling myself.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
When you are in the grip of addiction, or when you are severely impacted by someone else’s addiction, eventually nothing works—not even the things that don’t seem obviously related to the addictive substance or behavior. Losing the lease to our apartment and getting my bank account hacked had nothing to do with the fact that Rayya was drugged out of her mind, or that I was lost in a dense fog of codependency—but these are also the kinds of things that happen when your life is falling apart: suddenly it’s raining hammers. Everything unravels. You sprain your ankle, your car breaks down, your dog dies. You can’t handle anything. And that’s when the madness really sets in, because it seems like the world itself is a machine of pain that has turned its full force against you.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
It is my way—it has always been my way—to become captivated by other people’s charisma and madness and wildness and beauty. To disappear into their stories and become hypnotized by their existence. To become lost in a trance of themness and to forget who I am, what I am, and where I stand.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
To even talk about not having a partner makes the story about me not having a partner. What is actually happening in the ecosystem of my spiritual life and my physical life and my emotional life is that a garden is blooming. . . . It isn’t about who isn’t here. It is about what is here.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Inspirational
If I am truly to become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian...I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Inspirational
Addiction serves a purpose. It is medication for an aching soul, relief for a pained body, and escape from an impossible mind. Addiction is a pretty good survival strategy when all your other strategies for living have failed.

As Rayya used to tell me, “I needed every gram of heroin I ever took back in the day, or I would have never made it out of my childhood alive. I could not have survived without my buffer of drugs.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
I read today that all addiction is a form of misplaced worship.
I get that.
And I’ve certainly done that.
I’ve mistaken the delivery device of heavenly pleasure for heaven itself.
And thus I have worshipped so many things— and so many people, too.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
Rayya already had a community filled with fellow recovering addicts who had loved her for years, and who would have gladly received her admissions of shame and fear and helped her to process her overwhelming desire to drink. They could have guided her back to the principles of the program—back to the acts of service that keep us sober; back to a position of humility and surrender. But Rayya had pushed all those people away in order to chart her own path. And the last thing you ever want an addict doing is charting their own path.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
People don’t stick needles in their arms and pump themselves full of mind-erasing drugs for no reason, after all. And the thing Rayya had always loved about heroin was the way it eliminated her from consciousness—how it allowed her to discard her entire identity, as if her “self” were some heavy old overcoat she didn’t need to wear anymore and could just throw to the floor in a crumpled heap. The only problem with heroin was that you had to come back from the high. You had to wake up, stand up, put the overcoat back on. That had always been heartbreaking for her.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
I did things for and within that relationship that no sane or emotionally stable person would ever do. And I woke up at the end of that encounter exactly the way another kind of addict might wake up in a motel room somewhere off the highway outside Vegas, wrecked and bewildered, with no memory of how she had gotten there—and not sure where that fresh new tattoo had come from, either. Blinking in the blazing sun, wondering where her money went, and asking in devastated confusion, “How did that just happen?” Or maybe it would be more accurate to ask: “How did that just happen again?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
How you can tell you might be in a codependent relationship: You care more about somebody else’s well-being than they do, and/or you believe that you cannot function without them, and/or you believe that they cannot function without you. The codependent’s motto: 'You break it, we fix it!
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pictures of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone?
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
Once Rayya got clean and sober, she never judged people, no matter how badly they were acting out. She never condemned them—not even when she was angry or frustrated with them, not even when she was setting boundaries with them—because she knew what it was like to be at the very bottom. She knew what it was like to be feared and despised. She knew what it was like to live completely outside of your own integrity, a million miles away from your heart. As she said to me once, “Until you’ve stolen money from your father’s wallet to buy heroin while he was sick in a hospital bed, you don’t know what it feels like to need to be forgiven.” She also used to say, “Mercy is what I owe, because mercy is what I always needed—and mercy is what I have been given.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
From what I now understand, given the latest neurological research, people like me—people with process addictions—have nervous systems that don’t work quite right. Many of us, having experienced at a young age what are officially referred to as “consistent disruptions of safety,” have trouble regulating our own emotions, taking care of ourselves, telling fantasy from reality, understanding the concept of boundaries, knowing whom to trust, and distinguishing our feelings from other people’s feelings. As a result, we can end up with an attachment style that is sometimes referred to as “disordered-disoriented”—which describes my romantic history perfectly.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
Religion is for those who don't want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Inspirational
People often talk about crawling into the rooms of recovery on their knees, but when I turned to twelve-step for the second time, I felt more like I was walking in there with my hands up—like a career criminal turning herself in, ready at last to give up the game.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
There is a prayer that we recite in those rooms that I love very much. It simply says, “Dear God—thank you for all that has been given, for all that has been taken away, and for all that remains.”

Like many gratefully recovering addicts, I stand in amazement at all that remains—astonished that I was allowed to keep anything, after all my many years of madness and acting out. By all rights, I should have lost absolutely everything in the course of my various and sundry maelstroms and upheavals. Many people with minds as disordered as mine have indeed lost everything.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
My codependency gives me outlandish ideas about how responsible I am for others, and my anxiety distorts my perception of reality—convincing me that I can control people and keep them safe, if only I try hard enough. But I cannot control anyone.
Nor can I keep people safe from their own choices.
Adults get to do whatever they decide to do—even to the point of their own self-destruction or death. And as my sponsor always reminds me when I am about to overstep into someone else’s territory: “God didn’t bring anyone into your life for you to control them.”
Because I can’t control them. I have enough trouble controlling myself.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
When you are in the grip of addiction, or when you are severely impacted by someone else’s addiction, eventually nothing works—not even the things that don’t seem obviously related to the addictive substance or behavior. Losing the lease to our apartment and getting my bank account hacked had nothing to do with the fact that Rayya was drugged out of her mind, or that I was lost in a dense fog of codependency—but these are also the kinds of things that happen when your life is falling apart: suddenly it’s raining hammers. Everything unravels. You sprain your ankle, your car breaks down, your dog dies. You can’t handle anything. And that’s when the madness really sets in, because it seems like the world itself is a machine of pain that has turned its full force against you.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
It is my way—it has always been my way—to become captivated by other people’s charisma and madness and wildness and beauty. To disappear into their stories and become hypnotized by their existence. To become lost in a trance of themness and to forget who I am, what I am, and where I stand.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
To even talk about not having a partner makes the story about me not having a partner. What is actually happening in the ecosystem of my spiritual life and my physical life and my emotional life is that a garden is blooming. . . . It isn’t about who isn’t here. It is about what is here.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Inspirational
If I am truly to become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian...I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Inspirational
Addiction serves a purpose. It is medication for an aching soul, relief for a pained body, and escape from an impossible mind. Addiction is a pretty good survival strategy when all your other strategies for living have failed.

As Rayya used to tell me, “I needed every gram of heroin I ever took back in the day, or I would have never made it out of my childhood alive. I could not have survived without my buffer of drugs.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
I read today that all addiction is a form of misplaced worship.
I get that.
And I’ve certainly done that.
I’ve mistaken the delivery device of heavenly pleasure for heaven itself.
And thus I have worshipped so many things— and so many people, too.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
Rayya already had a community filled with fellow recovering addicts who had loved her for years, and who would have gladly received her admissions of shame and fear and helped her to process her overwhelming desire to drink. They could have guided her back to the principles of the program—back to the acts of service that keep us sober; back to a position of humility and surrender. But Rayya had pushed all those people away in order to chart her own path. And the last thing you ever want an addict doing is charting their own path.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
People don’t stick needles in their arms and pump themselves full of mind-erasing drugs for no reason, after all. And the thing Rayya had always loved about heroin was the way it eliminated her from consciousness—how it allowed her to discard her entire identity, as if her “self” were some heavy old overcoat she didn’t need to wear anymore and could just throw to the floor in a crumpled heap. The only problem with heroin was that you had to come back from the high. You had to wake up, stand up, put the overcoat back on. That had always been heartbreaking for her.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
I did things for and within that relationship that no sane or emotionally stable person would ever do. And I woke up at the end of that encounter exactly the way another kind of addict might wake up in a motel room somewhere off the highway outside Vegas, wrecked and bewildered, with no memory of how she had gotten there—and not sure where that fresh new tattoo had come from, either. Blinking in the blazing sun, wondering where her money went, and asking in devastated confusion, “How did that just happen?” Or maybe it would be more accurate to ask: “How did that just happen again?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
How you can tell you might be in a codependent relationship: You care more about somebody else’s well-being than they do, and/or you believe that you cannot function without them, and/or you believe that they cannot function without you. The codependent’s motto: 'You break it, we fix it!
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pictures of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone?
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
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