Budda Meditation in Florida

Submitted by outandaboutinjax on July 8, 2010 - 1:07pm
outandaboutinjax's Blog
Tuesday night I went to a Buddhist Meditation class held in a small building behind the Granary, a whole foods store on Kingsley Road. (This was originally posted in www.outandaboutinjax.com a blog all about events and places to go in Jacksonville! Check it out for listings of events, pictures and links to everything there is to do in Jax!) I know what you're thinking -- you can't really picture me in a Buddhist Meditation class. If you know me pretty well you're thinking a meditation class? Don't you have to be quiet in a meditation class? First of all, let me explain how I ended up in a Buddhist Meditation class. One major factor is that I just finished reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert for the fourth time. I bought the book when it originally came out in 2004 and it changed my life. I've read it several times since then and each time, her story inspires me in a different way. Essentially, Eat, Pray, Love is the story of Liz dealing with a crushing depression in the midst of her divorce, by taking a year off to travel to Italy to study pleasure, India to study spiritual devotion, and Indonesia to find a balance in her life between the two extremes of pleasure and spiritual discipline. There is no way for me to overstate how awesome this book is, or how much it has totally inspired me. Her writing style is quirky, energetic, full of self-revelation, and lots of humor. When you're reading it, you feel as if Gilbert herself is sitting across from you with a cup of coffee telling you the whole story. Each time I sit down to write a piece for the blog, that's what I try to accomplish, and my style of writing is very much modeled after the writing in Eat, Pray, Love.

It's not just the writing style of course that inspires me. It's also the bravery. The adventurous spirit Liz embodies in the stories in her book (ie: making friends in Italy when she barely knows Italian, going to Bali without a map or plan) is part of what inspires me each time I have to take a deep breath and muster up the confidence to walk into a totally new event for my blog, introduce myself and start asking questions. If you have never read this book, just trust me on this -- drop whatever you are doing right now and go get it. There's a movie coming out based on the book and starting Julia Roberts. The movie is coming out in August (just in time for my birthday) and believe me, I will be one of the first people in line to see it.