The author of ‘Eat Pray Love’ has posted a colorful status about the death of the renowned Ketut Liyer, a week after the Balinese traditional healer’s death. Liyer passed away last Wednesday night at Surya Usada Hospital. No one’s quite sure how old he was, but his son told reporters his father died at 100 years old.
Elizabeth Gilbert definitely pokes a little fun at Liyer in her Facebook post, saying he was many things, including a “hustler,” and that even after all she had been through with him, he would never recognize her. However, there’s certainly an overarching fondness and gratitude in the American author’s tribute to the cheeky old medicine man.
“He was a healer, a mystic, a time-traveler, a world-bender, a mind-shaper, a compassion-expert, a flirt, a comedian, a bozo, a hustler, a magician, a trickster, and a fully ascended spiritual master,” Gilbert writes.
But perhaps one of the best parts of her post is when she tells of how Liyer “pretended” to read her palm but his work with her went much deeper than that:
As for his work on me, it was perfection. When I met him in 2002, I was a fucking wreck of a woman — shamed, skinny, terrified, lost, and trapped inside a mind that felt like a caged and starving wolf. He pretended to read my palm, but that wasn’t even the point (it never was with Ketut; many of you had palm readings from Ketut over the years, and you know he was kind of full of bullshit, right? Guy was so blind, he couldn’t even SEE your hand, much less read its detailed lines.) No, he looked into my spirit, and he was like, “I’m taking this one.”
No, Liyer’s magic wasn’t the palm-reading for Gilbert. His words to her apparently changed her life in a much larger, more monumental way than a simple palm reading could ever achieve: “Ketut showed me how to start sky-walking, and I have never looked back.”
In turn, Gilbert also left her own imprint on Liyer’s life. It was Gilbert’s account of Liyer in ‘Eat Pray Love,’ her bestselling 2006 memoir, later turned motion picture in 2010 starring Julia Roberts, that rocketed the Ubud healer to next-level fame.
See Gilbert’s full post here:
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