How Elizabeth Gilbert’s All the Way to the River helped me rediscover the quiet wisdom of listening instead of begging and pleading.
After rereading last week’s post about All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert, I found myself realizing the importance of her book didn’t stop at codependency. There was so much more that her story revealed to me. It was about what happens when we reach the end of ourselves. It was about exhaustion and surrender and the slow, humbling process of learning to listen again.
Gilbert’s story didn’t follow a tidy arc of redemption. It began with depletion. She poured herself into caring for Rayya, the woman she loved and eventually lost to cancer, until there was nothing left of her own life to tend to. She describes how she became so entangled in her partner’s pain that she lost the boundary between where Rayya ended and she began. Her story has so many twists, struggles, and frustrations that most of us would have crumbled under the weight of it all.
When it was all over, she found herself empty and disoriented, unsure of who she was without someone to rescue. She out ran her pain as long as she could. Then, out of desperation, she began attending addiction groups again. She didn’t go back because she was confident she belonged there. She went because she didn’t know where else to go or what else to do.
It was in those rooms, listening to others speak about “the God of their own understanding,” that something began to stir inside her again. It wasn’t a booming voice from above but a quiet, patient, steady presence; the same one she had ignored for years. As she listened to others share their stories, she began to hear her own truth reflected back to her. Their honesty softened her. Their vulnerability mirrored her own. She realized that faith wasn’t about doctrine or certainty; it was about relationship. It was about rebuilding trust with something greater than herself, even if she didn’t yet know what to call it. In that realization, Gilbert saw that she was not better than Rayya, she was not her savior, just human. And that was the moment she began to hear more clearly again.
In my work as a therapist, I often see something similar unfold. People come into sessions weighed down by expectations that were never theirs to carry. Parents, churches, teachers, and entire systems have told them how to live, how to think, and what to feel. They’ve spent years inside invisible prisons, believing the walls were real.
For a long time, those walls can even feel like home. We grow accustomed to the weight of guilt and the illusion of control. We organize our lives around keeping the peace, pleasing others, or avoiding disappointment, and we call that normal.
But then something begins to shift. It might not look like much from the outside. Maybe it’s a quiet breakdown in the grocery store, a song that lands too close to home, or a single conversation that opens a crack in the armor. A perfectly timed comment from a trusted friend. A serendipitous moment too strange to dismiss. A flash of recognition that life doesn’t have to be this small.
And for the first time, you start to wonder, What if there’s another way to live?
That’s usually where the listening begins. Not the kind of listening that happens with the ears, but the kind that begins deep inside. A listening that feels like remembering something true that was buried for a long time. It’s subtle at first. Sometimes it’s met with resistance or fear. But once the quiet inner voice has been heard, it’s hard to go back to pretending it doesn’t exist.
I sometimes wonder if “the God of our own understanding” is so hard to hear because centuries of traditions, expectations, and dogma have trained us to dismiss anything that sounds unfamiliar. With thousands of years of weight behind a single explanation, it becomes nearly impossible to tell what belongs to our own ego, what was planted there by culture, and what might actually be the genuine still small voice of our own understanding. When everyone around us insists on what it’s supposed to look like, sound like or align with, what happens when that voice says something completely outside the boundaries of what we’ve been taught? I’m thinking here about the stories of Abraham, Moses, or Noah. Each were asked to trust a voice that didn’t match anyone else’s definition of faith in their day. What if the sacred texts that were meant to awaken us have, over time, become our golden calves, standing in the way of our genuine listening?
Gilbert’s recovery didn’t happen overnight. She still grieved. She still stumbled. She still wrestled with her addictions. Yet she tells her story without pretense or polish. Her raw honesty gives hope to anyone who is still in the thick of it. Because that’s what real transformation looks like. It’s messy. It’s humbling. It’s full of detours and setbacks. But eventually, it leads us to a place where we can meet Divine without anyone else’s interpretation in the way.
At one point in the book she writes, “Life doesn’t fall apart all at once, and it doesn’t get healed all at once. Rome was neither built nor dismantled in a day. Sometimes a spiritual awakening takes a minute to sink in, or a few months, or a few years.” She adds, “Healing is slow, messy, and not at all linear, and we do not achieve sanity overnight.”
What I love most about Gilbert’s reflections on healing is how unhurried they are. She doesn’t present spiritual growth as a reward for discipline or moral perfection, but as something that unfolds quietly over time. The kind of change she describes can’t be forced or strategized. It happens in the small, ordinary moments when we stop pretending to have it all figured out and start allowing life to teach us. That’s the moment when surrender begins to replace striving, and curiosity starts to take the place of judgment.
She describes one of those turning points on page 209:
Meaning: I believe there is a right and natural order of things—the Tao, the path, a way of living in easeful alignment with the drift and movement of the universe—and I was moving in exactly the opposite direction. If the universe can be said to want anything from us, I now believe, it is that we position ourselves to exist in harmony with reality—to sway in accordance with destiny, without excessive argument or struggle. But I was fighting. I was trying to force reality to bend to my will by insisting that I would either get my ‘most beautiful story,’ goddamn it, or I would kill anyone who kept it from me. I was trying to control things that could not be controlled—trying to control a person who could not be controlled—and that’s why everything in my life was falling apart… and still, I would not surrender my will.
I’ve read a lot of books about surrender, but this one swept away some of the cobwebs in the sacred corners of my being. Gilbert’s honesty exposed something I’ve seen in myself and in so many others: the relentless urge to control what hurts us. We believe that if we just try a little harder, hold on a little tighter, we can force life to give us what we think we deserve. But as Gilbert realized, the universe is not something to dominate. It is something to move with. The moment she began to stop fighting reality was the moment she started to find peace again.
Towards the end of her book, Gilbert writes this beautiful poem:
I WILL NOT CALL YOU BUT YOU WILL COME
One day, dear God, after all this madness is over,
I will wake up to find you sitting at my breakfast table,
dressed in good linen and sensible shoes.You will surprise me with a giant suitcase full of gifts.
You will undo all the padlocks
and show me pictures of my own innocence.You will teach me the human excellence of inquiry, honesty, and faith.
The days will carry on—and still you won’t leave.
You will tilt my entire house toward freedom.
Serenity will be your promise—serenity fulfilled.
There will be no charge for anything that happened before I found you, nor dread of what comes next.
Until that day comes, though, I will still have my difficulties.
Yet sometimes I will feel you bending over me while I sleep.
I am sorry I was so much trouble, I will say—
and you will laugh,
the way my mother laughed at me that one time
when I was very small and I cut off all my hair.I don’t mind a bit of trouble, I will hear you say.
I will ask your name,
but not even you will know how to answer that question.But just for the sake of ending all arguments,
we will agree to call you Love.
Reading those lines on the flight home from Madrid and Barcelona stirred something quiet and familiar inside me. Maybe it was standing inside cathedrals that were built in the thirteenth century and realizing that people have been searching for this same Love for hundreds of years. Somewhere over the Atlantic, I thought about how “the God of our own understanding” has been waiting patiently for all of us. Not waiting for us to get it right, but waiting for us to listen. Not in the way we were taught to believe, not through guilt or performance. But through the raw, personal language of experience, the kind that only we can interpret. The kind that changes us from the inside out.
Maybe that’s why religion has always moved so slowly. Listening has never been our strongest practice. Dogma can be built overnight, but deep listening takes decades for each of us to learn. In almost every generation, religion has been intertwined with power and authority, and sometimes listening to the God of your own understanding could be dangerous when what you heard did not match what the ones in power wanted you to believe. Every generation builds its cathedrals, writes its doctrines, and then, over time, the walls begin to echo with something deeper than words. You can almost feel it in the stones, the slow unlearning, the quiet evolution. Maybe all of it has been leading us here to remember that Love doesn’t live inside the structure, dogma, or doctrine, but in the spaces we are willing to truly listen.
When I was younger, I learned that praying seemed to be more about me telling God all the things I needed him to do in order for my life to be better. There was a lot of begging and pleading for him to see things through my eyes. Now that I’m older, I’ve come to accept, just like Gilbert, that prayer seems a lot more like listening, surrendering, and allowing the universe to work through me in any way it sees fit. I now understand that loved ones get sick, unfortunate events happen beyond my control, and begging for things to be different than reality only adds to my own suffering.
Maybe that’s what the still small voice has been saying to each of us all along, beneath the noise, beneath the striving, beneath the fear of being wrong.
Maybe it was never about getting it right, but instead about listening.
And when we finally do, Love will be there waiting, just like it always has been.
So perhaps the work now is simply to listen, right where we are, and trust that Love will meet us there.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
