“Have you read the book,” is always the first response I get whenever I tell someone just how much I loved the movie. “Yes, but I loved the movie so much more,” I respond. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s original work, I felt her character was a bit too self-indulgent and ruminative in her depression in almost a hey-look-how-much-I-suffered-so-please-don’t-hate-me-for-leaving-my-marriage kinda way. In the movie, Julia Roberts plays the kind of character we all want to be- someone who makes mistakes in love and life, but is able to land back on her feet and dust herself off each time (all while sauntering around in thousand dollar couture).

I have prescribed this movie as cinematherapy to almost every female client I have. A universal struggle many of my clients have is that they don’t know how to strike a balance in life, and especially in love. When they think they’ve spotted true love, they jump on it, smother it, suffocate it like some endangered species of fruit. Inevitably the apple of their eye turns out to be rotten, and they come in to therapy feeling they’ve been left with nothing because they gave everything. When the right one shows up, he gets to the pay the price because the female is so gun shy from the previous rotten apple.

In the movie, Robert’s Yoda-like Guru says, “sometimes- in order to be in balance… it is necessary to fall out of balance for love.”  This is such a powerful message and one I think is so important and unorthodox to what we traditionally think about love. Yet the meaning can be harmfully misconstrued. One must find themselves in balance with life, before they can fall out of balance with love.

What does being out of balance with love mean? I believe it to mean that we still do us. We still do our spiritual practice, we still cultivate our auxiliary relationships, we still chase our dreams and passions. Yet when true love comes along, we get in it and wrap ourselves up like a warm blanket. We roll around in it and breathe it in, in all of its purity and goodness. We lose ourselves in it and don’t worry about the clock.

I, myself have struggled with this concept as I have spent the last four months hard-lining mother nature’s little eight ball- a blissful neurococktail of dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin all meant to make me forget I ever had a life before he showed up. There have been moments that I felt guilty- even hypocritical, to spend days with him playing board games, card games, or just laying in bed and belly laughing. Thinking, “this much time together can’t be good- have I lost me? did I go and undo all of that work I did on myself? “

At the same time, the last four months have been some of the most pure, blissful, enjoyable, gratifying, and just-plain-good moments of my life. I still do the things I did before, but now they are amplified when they are shared. Morning coffee is even better when I’m pouring for two. Hearing the message that it is ok to be out of balance in love was the inspiration for a giant “wheeeeewwwww,” in the theatre and one I hope everyone can take a page from.

Photo via VaDaVelle