The Money Diet & Eat, Pray,Love
August 13, 2010
You could say we are on a Money Diet- It’s sweeping the country in case you haven’t heard. 
My husband and I have vowed to trim our budget aggressively-In two years all three of our kids will be in college (gulp) so each month we cut out a few things out and we look at each other and say, that didn’t hurt too much,what else can we trim. There was an article a while back about shoppers going on a Shopping Diet where they tamed the urge to buy clothes by vowing to cease clothes-buying for one whole year. Well, this is somewhat similar.
I have an small idea to help you on your Money Diet as well. Save the $10 that you might be thinking of spending on the movie, and instead, just start to live by these, some of my favorite quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Eat, Pray, Love:
- “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process.”
- “The Bhagavad Gita-that ancient Indian Yogic text-says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.”
- “You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight”
- “To find the balance you want,” Ketut spoke through his translator, “this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it’s like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.”
-”And then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. The other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought is that you are never where you are”
and my favorite
-”There’s a reason they call God a presence-because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time. But to stay in the present moment requires dedicated one-pointed focus.
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