Finding Freedom in the Flow of Life

In her new memoir, All the Way to the River, Elizabeth Gilbert says, “This book is about the many ways that people—despite their best efforts at living sane and stable lives—can sometimes get swept up into high-octane dramas and traumas, finding themselves washed up on shores that can feel very distant from their true natures.” This happened to Gilbert when she became lovers with her friend Rayya Elias, embarking on a beautiful relationship that spiraled into a harrowing journey through addiction and illness. Gilbert writes, “How the hell did I get here? is a question that I believe everybody will have to face at some point during their passage through life.” As she explores this question, she not only plumbs the depths of despair but also illuminates the possibilities that grief and loss offer us for new beginnings. 

Born in Connecticut in 1969, Gilbert is the author of nonfiction works including the best-selling Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2007), Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage (2010), and Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear (2015). Her novels include The Signature of All Things (2013) and City of Girls (2019). She has given TED talks on genius, creativity, success, and failure that have garnered millions of views.  

Gilbert talked with me from her home in New Jersey about the challenges of writing All the Way to the River, coming into alignment with her true nature, and why she isn’t done learning and growing. 

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Congratulations on your book! What was it like to write it? Well, it started out as a different story. First, it was going to be about my best friend, Rayya, dying. Then it was going to be this romantic tale about Rayya, the love of my life, dying. Then it turned into this nightmarish narrative—the bardo. And then there was a layer I didn’t see coming: Rayya isn’t the only addict in the story. 

I wrote a hundred-page novella based on what happened, trying to get away with not using real names because there’s some horrible stuff. As soon as I was done, I was like, “You coward.” Then, I thought I’d write a veiled book of poetry. But in the end, the only way out is through. In Dante’s Inferno, to get to Paradise you’ve got to go to the bottom of Hell. While I was writing this book, there was a descent into hell every morning when I woke up, when there was anywhere else on Earth I would rather have been. I heard the voices of my spirit guides saying, “We know this is really painful for you and you don’t want to do it. See you at your desk at 6 a.m.”

In your book, you share what happened with great openness and vulnerability, even though you began to pull your punches from a young age, wanting people to like you. From early on, you write, your “survival strategy was to always give the pleasing answer, never the truthful answer, because it felt safer to be pleasing than to be truthful.” Worrying about what people will think is one of the biggest obstacles in the bardo of life, especially for girls, because we’re taught to seek the approval of others. I used to call myself the Human Zamboni. You know—those machines that smooth the ice? I was always thinking about what I had to do to smooth the ice ahead so there wasn’t a single bump and people would like me. I thought it was my job to make sure no one experienced an uncomfortable feeling. It was ridiculous. 

When somebody said, “Change the term ‘people pleaser’ to ‘people manipulator,’ ” it was a big revelation. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like you’re such a nice person.

When somebody said, “Change the term ‘people pleaser’ to ‘people manipulator,’ ” it was a big revelation. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like you’re such a nice person. It’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m doing. I’m manipulating your experience of me.” 

How free do you feel of your childhood conditioning? Somebody I know who’s a meditator said that people who live on mountaintops for yearslong meditation retreats, in isolation, often say the last piece that drops away is, “What are they thinking about me?” Even after two years in total solitude, you’re sitting on the mountaintop wondering, “Are they mad at me? Do they approve of me? Do they respect me?” As I’ve gotten more ground under my feet and been able to risk my popularity—the approval of others—to be more honest, I’ve become immeasurably more free. 

Feeling trapped because of what others think is an illusion, right? You’re allowed to hang up on any phone conversation with no explanation. You’re allowed to stand up and walk out of any room. You can get up in the middle of dinner, take your car, and leave. You have a driver’s license, a bank account. You’re a grown person. If you can handle people’s disapproval, you’re not trapped. 

I’m much better at handling it, but it’s a spectrum. I’m looking forward to being one of those old broads in their 70s, 80s, and 90s whom you cannot knock off their center because they’ve lost the ability to care what you think of them. That’s the ultimate liberation. 

The Tibetan Book of the Dead speaks to this, encouraging us to reflect on whether we’re living in alignment with our authentic self, whether we’ve embraced the “radiance of our own true nature.” One of the hardest things for me growing up was the misalignment between my outer and inner selves. The tricky thing for girls and women is that when you’re taught to be accommodating, you become so disoriented from your true self that you can’t recognize it. Changing this takes a lot of time spent alone, where you’re not responding to people from the minute you wake up till the minute you go to bed.

It’s strange how we humans can fall out of alignment with who we are, isn’t it? This doesn’t happen with, say, dogs. When I look at my dog, I know there’s no “true dog” somewhere inside him. I heard an interview with the poet David Whyte where he said, “A heron can’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘I am changing my identity completely. I’ve had it to my back teeth with being a heron. I’m going to be a flamingo.’ ” We’re the only species who can decide or pretend not to be what we are.

Exactly. What we want, or think we want, can spirit us away from our true selves. What’s your relationship to desire now? What do you want? I’ve had over half a century of conscious life, with extreme examples of getting what I wanted and barely surviving it. And then having what I wanted taken away from me, the way you take scissors from a toddler. There are times when the cosmos has taken the scissors away from me, and I had a tantrum because I wanted those scissors. Later, I was like, “Thank God somebody took those scissors away.” The question I used to live in was, “What do I want, and how do I get it?” The question I live in now is, “What is God’s will for me?” What I call God, which we could just as easily call the Dao, the way of the universe. The question for me now is, “What is the way that is wanted for me?” If I can move in that direction, that’s best for everyone. 

In bardo, we’re artists, determining our trajectory with the choices we make. Do you feel like you’re the artist of your life? The first half of my life I was trying to create it, but now I’m more cocreating with a higher power. Like: Which way is the water running, what’s the path of the least amount of harm, how can I be of service? I’ve been doing twelve-step programs for years now, and when I first came into them, I was irritated by the talk of service because I was exhausted from people-pleasing. But they’re not the same thing. You can’t be in service if you’re constantly pandering, bowing, scraping, saying yes when you want to say no, becoming overwhelmed and full of resentment. To be in a life of service, you have to take care of yourself, which means giving up trying to please others. 

In Buddhism, it’s said that the likelihood of being born human is similar to the chance of a blind tortoise that comes to the surface of the ocean once every hundred years putting its head through a ring floating on the waves. If we’re lucky enough to be born human, we have the ability to make the most of our lives, unlike other animals. In All the Way to the River, you say that perhaps “Earth School,” our time here on the planet, “has a curriculum that has been carefully tailored to push each soul toward its highest growth, evolution, and ultimate liberation.” How would you describe your sense of “becoming,” or forward movement? I was a girl who on the first day of first grade had all her pencils sharpened and in that pencil box. I had my mom drive me to school early so I could meet the teacher before the other kids did. I walked up to the teacher and said, “I’m Elizabeth Gilbert, and I’m going to be in your class. I’ll be sitting right here in the front row. Let’s get this thing going.” 

To be in a life of service, you have to take care of yourself, which means giving up trying to please others.

I’m not done advancing. I like learning and growing. I’m interested in the future and who I’m becoming. I’m interested in trying harder and learning more and, in moments of upset, working to get from “this is upsetting” to “this is interesting.” I try to get from suffering to “let me use this opportunity for transformation.”

Are you a worrier? Less so than I used to be, but the thing I worry about now is not having control. It makes me think of that famous line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” where he’s “both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.” Life unfolds in ways that we can’t do much about and, at the same time, we have to participate in the flow. Our lives are our destiny, and we’ve got to play them.

It’s weird being a person, a spirit embodied in the form of a great ape, with consciousness and imagination, and a sense of past, present, future. It takes a long time to figure out how to operate—we spend our lives learning. You get dropped into a family, and it’s like being thrown into a theater, where the show was running long before you were born. You wake up on stage wondering, “Who are these people? What are their values? What do I have to do to survive?” The one thing we can agree upon is that it’s very interesting.