Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Liz places her blue energy experience in the cultural and religious context of transcendent experiences with God. For the Hindus, the kundalini shakti occurs in the meditative state and is “delivered through an energy source that fills the entire body with euphoric, electric light” (157). The Japanese call this ki, the Chinese Buddhists chi, the Balinese taksu, the Christians “The Holy Spirit,” and the Kalahari Bushmen n/um. The energy runs up the spine and blows out through the head.

Saint Teresa of Avila would enter meditative trances so deep she wouldn’t have a pulse. Her most difficult challenge was the intellect because thoughts of the mind will “extinguish the fire of God.” The Indian yogic tradition depicts the kundalini shakti as a snake coiled at the base of the spine that ascends through the seven chakras, then out through the head, “exploding into union with God” (159). Mystics describe the stilling of the brain in meditation, the ultimate union with God, as a blue light radiating from the center of the skull. This moment of release in mystical India is called shaktipat, and you need a guru to guide you on the path to reach it. This frees your energy on the journey to enlightenment.