Eat, Pray, Love… and Sleep: A Midlife Reflection on Coming Full Circle

A reflection on food, prayer, rest, gratitude, and returning with a deeper understanding of the person I am becoming.

I just returned from India after a three-week family trip to my motherland, the kind that fills you up and wears you out in equal measure. On the flight back, still carrying the sweet memories of the trip - and of course, the taste of homemade ghee dosa, filter coffee, temple prasadam, and family meals, I watched Eat Pray Love for the second time.

It felt like coming full circle, but not as the same person who began the journey.

So here is my version.

Eat, Pray, Love…. and Sleep - with a small reservation on Love, which I’ll get to.

EAT…

In our home, food was never just food.

It was the first language of love we learned.

I could often sense the mood of the house by what was happening in the kitchen. The familiar idli, chutney, and sambar meant everything was normal, as it should be. A slow-simmered dal felt like ease. A hurried upma carried a different kind of energy.

On birthdays, my mother would wake up early to cook the birthday child’s favorite dish. She rarely repeated a recipe within two weeks and created so much variety within the limitations we had in those days.

It was her way of saying:

I see you. I know you. I love you.

My father showed love through snacks. He would come home with paper-wrapped parcels - bajjis or pakodas from the good shop in town. My uncles and aunts had their own sweet little underground operation: chocolates and ice cream quietly passed to us with a wink that said, this is between us.

So of course, I absorbed it. Food became my love language too.

I planned celebrations around restaurant tables. Though I am not a great cook, I followed our family tradition in my own way - cooking elaborate meals for festivals and feeding guests with the joy I had inherited from generations before me.

Then the pandemic happened.

Locked inside four walls, my mom ane me - cooked and ate and cooked again. I watched food videos, tried South Indian recipes, experimented with traditional dishes, comfort food, festival food, and snack food.

Food became entertainment, comfort, connection, and coping.

Somewhere in that season, I also began to hear a different conversation around food.

Not food as indulgence. Not food as restriction. But food as information.

Balanced meals. Better patterns. Eating to feel good tomorrow, not just satisfied today.

The last five years have been trial and error - new recipes, failed meal plans, restarts, and learning what works for my body, my family, my culture, and my real life.

I have finally found rhythms and recipes that help my family stay healthy without removing the joy from the table.

The love language is still there. It just speaks in a healthier dialect now.

PRAY…

I was born into prayer the way some people are born into a language.

Traditional. Orthodox. Rooted.

A home where the day opened and closed with chants. A childhood that smelled of incense, camphor, flowers, and temple corridors.

But for much of my life, prayer was transactional.

Give me this. Take away that.
Help me forget. Help me forgive.
Please make this happen.
Please stop this from happening.

Every prayer carried a request. A condition. A negotiation.

A few years ago, something shifted.

I stopped asking so much.

Now, prayer feels less like a transaction and more like a return.

A return to gratitude.
A return to stillness.
A return to something larger than my own plans.

I pray to say thank you.

Not only for what has worked out, but for the unseen support, the inner strength, the country that planted spiritual seeds in me before I was old enough to understand them, and the Guru who gave me tools I am still learning to use.

The chants are the same. But the intention is different.

I bow. I offer. I listen.

LOVE…

I am going to pause this one.

Ask me again after my fiftieth birthday.

What I will say is this: love is the thread that runs through the eating, the praying, the resting, and everything in between.

It is there. I am just not ready to write about it fully yet.

SLEEP…

And then we come to the thing I would trade almost anything for right now:

Sleep.

In midlife, sleep is not a luxury.

It is not a reward for finishing everything.
It is not something we earn after being productive enough.

It is the foundation.

It determines whether I show up as the person I want to be - or the tired, reactive, stretched version of her.

For many years, I treated sleep as the negotiable variable.

Stay up late to finish the work. Wake up early to get ahead.
Push through. Manage somehow.

Now I understand that almost everything I want depends on how well I have rested.

Patience with my family.
Clarity in my work.
The energy to cook a nourishing meal.
The presence to actually pray instead of simply reciting words.
The steadiness to respond instead of react.

There is no deep spiritual practice without rest.

There is no balanced food rhythm without regulation.

There is no sustainable wellbeing when the body is constantly running on borrowed energy.

The body keeps score. Sleep is one way it settles the ledger.

If Eat Pray Love was about a woman reclaiming her appetite for life, my version ends with a quieter midlife truth:

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is stop running the race that was never designed for your rhythm.

To listen to your body.
To honor your mind.
To rest before you break.
To recharge without guilt.
To build a life that supports you, not just one that keeps you productive.

Three weeks in India reminded me of all of this.

The food. The rituals. The family rhythms.
The temple visits. The exhaustion.
The gratitude.

Everything felt familiar and new at the same time.

Maybe that is what coming full circle really means.

Not returning to who you were.

But returning with a deeper understanding of what has always shaped you.

For me, this season is not just about eating better, praying deeper, or sleeping more.

It is about learning to live with more rhythm.

A rhythm that honors where I come from.
A rhythm that supports who I am becoming.
A rhythm that helps me return to myself - gently, consistently, and sustainably.

Eat. Pray. Sleep.

And somewhere in between, keep learning how to love deeply and live mindfully.

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May you be healthy & happy —from my Manam to yours, Lakshmi Krish | Wellbeing Coach