Eat, Pray, Love

Some questions that I frequently get asked:

• What is music therapy?
• Are you a vegetarian?
• How old are you?
• Have you read Eat Pray Love?

Short answers: Using music for non-musical goals, most of the time, 30, and yes more than once.

Ok I will admit, more than twice. I'm asked about this book because in most social conversations I can easily bring up tales about my travels to Italy, India, and Indonesia..... or to the many countries I've visited in the past couple years. Like Elizabeth Gilbert my time in these countries particularly expanded my experience of life. And that's putting it lightly. I have memories in these places so strong that I can just close my eyes right now and still see it, smell it, and taste it. Clearly. And especially clearly right now since I just saw the movie. Nat and I went to see it tonight at the Gold Class Cinemas in Pasadena. She said it would be like sitting first class in an airplane. She was right, this made the Arclight seem ordinary.

I'm not going to critique the movie, I can't because I feel much to attached to give an honest answer. But I will say I was happy with the ways the cultures were presented and of course, the book was better.

When I saw the trailer a few months ago I got concerned that seeing this movie would trigger a that restless tiger inside of me. I've done pretty well at taming it over the past six months so I could focus on my business plans and personal relationships at home. But it's still there, I feel it. And I sometimes have to tiptoe around it, careful not to wake up a potential roar of wanderlust that I know from the past. Two years ago I decided the "American Dream" was not my dream, that working 40 hours a week paycheck to paycheck is no way to live life, and that there was a world out there I wanted to see. So I donated most of my belonging and put the rest of it in a storage unit, saved up money and quit my full time job, and took off and travelled. I never felt so ALIVE and FREE.

And just to remind myself, I am still very alive and have more freedom than most people I know.

But of course that feeling of being "alive" is just more intense outside of familiarity. Like Liz I ate my way through Italy (pizza, gelati, and pasta every single day and didn't gain a pound), lived at an ashram in India, and met the healers Ketut Liyer and Wayan Nuriashi in Bali. Through the movie I got flashbacks of taxi rides in India, drunken moments from Italian wine, romance in foreign lands, the ease of making new friends abroad, learning languages, learning lessons, laughing, crying, ohhhhh man I miss it all. Not that it doesn't happen in my life here, it does. But in travel everything is accelerated and magnified. The amount of things you do in a day are equal to a week in "real life" and spending a week with someone traveling is like putting in years into a relationship.

This week I've been feeling somewhat discouraged at the state of some of my personal relationships. I had an unsettling moment where I felt like nothing has changed even though I have been around the world twice. I actually asked myself, has anything changed? And did I learn anything if it all just went back to the way it was?

After all I've done in the past couple years that is a scary question to have to face. The obvious answer is that OF COURSE I've learned, and so much has changed. I suppose one of the things I learned is that you can't run away from anything.

When I met Ketut Lityer he told me I am very lucky, will live to be 100, gave me sex advice, and taught me a meditation to help open my heart. He said, "you have to believe." Believe.