the temple floors without making a peep. My only interaction with others will be to smile beatifically at them from within my self-contained world of stillness and piety. People will talk about me. They'll ask, 'Who is That Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple, always scrubbing the floors, down on her knees? She never speaks. She's so elusive. She's so mystical. I can't even imagine what her voice sounds like. You never even hear her coming up behind you on the garden path when she's out walking… she moves as silently as the breeze. She must be in a constant state of meditative communion with God. She's the quietest girl I've ever seen.'
63
The next morning I was down on my knees in the temple, scrubbing the marble floor again, emanating (I imagined) a holy radiance of silence, when an Indian teenage boy came looking for me with a message-that I needed to report to the Seva Office immediately. Seva is the Sanskrit term for the spiritual practice of selfless service (for instance, the scrubbing of a temple floor). The Seva Office administers all the work assignments for the Ashram. So I wandered over there, very curious as to why I'd been summoned, and the nice lady at the desk asked me, 'Are you Elizabeth Gilbert?'
I smiled at her with the warmest piety and nodded. Silently.
Then she told me that my work detail had been changed. Due to a special request from management, I was no longer to be part of the floor-scrubbing team. They had a new position in mind for me at the Ashram.
And the title of my new job was-if you will kindly dig this-'Key Hostess.'
64
This was so obviously another one of Swamiji's jokes.
You wanted to be The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple? Well, guess what…
But this is what always happens at the Ashram. You make some big grandiose decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself. I don't know how many times Swamiji said it during his lifetime, and I don't know how many more times my Guru has repeated it since his death, but it seems I have not quite yet absorbed the truth of their most insistent statement:
'God dwells within you, as you.'
AS you.
If there is one holy truth of this Yoga, that line encapsulates it. God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are. God isn't interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. This is a classic example of what they call in the East 'wrong-thinking.' Swamiji used to say that every day renunciants find something new to renounce, but it is usually depression, not peace, that they attain. Constantly he was teaching that austerity and renunciation-just for their own sake-are not what you need. To know God, you need only to renounce one thing-your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character.
So what is my natural character? I love studying in this Ashram, but my dream of finding divinity by gliding silently through the place with a gentle, ethereal smile-who is that person? That's probably someone I saw on a TV show. The reality is, it's a little sad for me to admit that I will never be that character. I've always been so fascinated by these wraith-like, delicate souls. Always wanted to be the quiet girl. Probably precisely because I'm not. It's the same reason I think that thick, dark hair is so beautiful-precisely because I don't have it, because I can't have it. But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with thick, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn't. Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.
Or, as Sextus, the ancient Pythagorian philospher, said, 'The wise man is always similar to himself.'
This doesn't mean I cannot be devout. It doesn't mean I can't be thoroughly tumbled and humbled with God's love. This does not mean I cannot serve humanity. It doesn't mean I can't improve myself as a human being, honing my virtues and working daily to minimize my vices. For instance, I'm never going to be a wallflower, but that doesn't mean I can't take a serious look at my talking habits and alter some aspects for the better-working within my personality. Yes, I like talking, but perhaps I don't have to curse so much, and perhaps I don't always have to go for the cheap laugh, and maybe I don't need to talk about myself quite so constantly. Or here's a radical concept-maybe I can stop interrupting others when they are speaking. Because no matter how creatively I try to look at my habit of interrupting, I can't find another way to see it than this: 'I believe that what I am saying is more important than what you are saying.' And I can't find another way to see that than: 'I believe that I am more important than you.' And that must end.
All these changes would be useful to make. But even so, even with reasonable modifications to my speaking habits, I probably won't ever be known as That Quiet Girl. No matter how pretty a picture that is and no matter how hard I try. Because let's be really honest about who we're dealing with here. When the woman at the Ashram Seva Center gave me my new job assignment of Key Hostess, she said, 'We have a special nickname for this position, you know. We call it 'Little Suzy Creamcheese,' because whoever does the job needs to be social and bubbly and smiling all the time.'
What could I say?
I just stuck out a hand to shake, bade a silent farewell to all my wishful old delusions and announced, 'Madam-I'm your girl.'
65
What I will be hosting, to be exact, is a series of retreats to be held at the Ashram this spring. During each retreat, about a hundred devotees will come here from all over the world for a period of a week to ten days, to deepen their meditation practices. My role is to take care of these people during their stay here. For most of the retreat, the participants will be in silence. For some of them, it will be the first time they've experienced silence as a devotional practice, and it can be intense. However, I will be the one person in the Ashram they are allowed to talk to if something is going wrong.
That's right-my job officially requires me to be the speech-magnet.
I will listen to the problems of the retreat participants and then try to find solutions for them. Maybe they'll need to change roommates because of a snoring situation, or maybe they'll need to speak to the doctor because of India-related digestive trouble-I'll try to solve it. I'll need to know everybody's name, and where they are from. I'll be walking around with a clipboard, taking notes and following up. I'm Julie McCoy, your Yogic cruise director.
And, yes, the position does come with a beeper.
As the retreats begin, it is so quickly evident how much I am made for this job. I'm sitting there at the Welcome Table with my Hello, My Name Is badge, and these people are arriving from thirty different countries, and some of them are old-timers but many of them have never been to India. It's over 100 degrees already at 10:00 AM, and most of these people have been flying all night in coach. Some of them walk into this Ashram
