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Let's be clear: The blockbuster bestseller “Eat, Pray, Love — One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia” is not about career reinvention.

Still, the book — featured twice on “Oprah,” read by untold book clubs and the basis for a film to star Julia Roberts — is inspiring career coaches to suggest it to clients. Friends and family are giving duplicates to loved ones who have found themselves in professional or work-life turmoil — and who, in turn, tell their friends.

“Eat, Pray, Love” is the memoir of Elizabeth Gilbert, a writer who, in life-meltdown mode, launched a “year of self-inquiry.” At age 31, she recognized that her path — marriage, suburbs, possible baby — was making her feel “utterly consumed with dread.”

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After a messy divorce and an obsessive relationship, Gilbert, a self-described emotional wreck, headed off to Italy in the fall of 2003. Her goal was to “thoroughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well.”

In Italy it was to be the art of pleasure, with a special emphasis on food; in India it was to tap into the spiritual through big doses of chanting and meditation, and in Indonesia, Bali to be specific, it was to find a way to balance the two — pleasure and spirituality.

Kimberly Jones of Nesconset read Gilbert's story and found it affirmed her decision to change her career. After finishing 14 months of intense schoolwork, she had found herself slipping into something akin to postpartum depression. It was fertile ground, she says, for an “it's over — now what?” line of second-guess thinking.

Jones, a lawyer for 14 years, finished work in September on a master's degree in public administration — a field in which she hopes to make more of a social impact. “If I wanted to just work for the buck, I would continue practicing law,” she states.

In her view the book is “about looking at your life and being present and making choices and being responsible for the choices and not spreading blame.”

The copy she received for her birthday in October is now underlined and dog-eared, and she's suggested the book to friends. “It's that kind of book,” she says. “It bonds people together.”

And, yes, the many thousands of others who purchased the book or received it as a gift have responded to Gilbert's humorous writing style and tales of the wild and crazy characters she met along the way. They would include Luca Spaghetti — his real name — an accountant in Rome. And at the ashram in India, Richard from Texas, whose first comment to her is, “Man, they got mosquitoes 'round this place huge enough to rape a chicken.” (He, reportedly, has inspired a line of Richard from Texas T-shirts.)

Siobhan Murphy, an executive coach in Babylon, has suggested the book to clients. In one of her newsletters, she pointed to two key issues that often come up in her practice:

First, as Gilbert travels on her journey, she develops more faith in her natural instincts. She “shifted into believing she could and should have her prayer answered,” wrote Murphy, advancing beyond “a tentative vibration that said: 'I'm not sure I’ve the capability to have this.' She granted in a new possibility.”

Murphy wrote, too:

“The author is also introduced to the power of forgiveness and the use of ritual to release the hold resentment has on her. Frequently in coaching, I find that people need to forgive themselves, their employers, their colleagues or someone in order to unhook themselves from the past, reclaim the energy they're using in anger, and use that energy to move forward towards their goals.”

Indeed, in an interview with National Public Radio earlier this month, Gilbert spoke of how we often cling to comforts, “your comforting senses of your own limitations, you know, like this is who I am. I'm boxed into this . . .” But, let those beliefs go and “you'll be amazed at the things that occur.”

Yes, this sounds a lot like therapy, but Gilbert also did much personal excavation work on her own through writing and asking for divine guidance. She states she was able to contact her inner wisdom — or was it God or “the angel who was assigned to my case” — through written dialogues. And that wise voice, she writes, “is always available for a conversation on paper at any time of day or night.”

One person who was inspired by the book is , Jonathan Lien26, who read it at the recommendation of Murphy, his stepmother. (Gilbert, who expected her memoir to be read pretty much just by women, said she's “really touched when I hear that men are reading it.”)

Lien read the book in January, quit a real estate job in February and took off in March for five weeks of backpacking in Europe. He states he came back with a clarity — that he wanted to work in the family business, Cornucopia Health Foods in Sayville, in a role that would help bring it to the next level.

Such a thought had crossed his mind earlier, he says, but actually making the change took “stepping away and looking at the bigger picture instead of focusing on the little details of life.”

Certainly, such travel jaunts can be characterized as running away or goofing off. In reality, they have the capability to help allow your true desires to surface, states Lindsey Pollak, a career blogger and author in Manhattan.

Pollak is the person who in October told me about the book the day before I left for two weeks in Italy. I started reading it on the plane and completed it a week later in Amalfi — where I met a woman from San Francisco who had just quit her financial services job and was traveling for several weeks, “Eat, Pray, Love” in hand. As for me, the book reinvigorated my interest in journal writing and some day spending more than two weeks in Italy — make it more like two or three months.

Still, let me not give the impression that you have to uproot your life and reconfigure yourself. “We romanticize the idea of a spiritual journey,” Gilbert stated in the NPR interview. “And we think that we've to actually change our nature . . . in reality, it is the opposite.”

And, she said, often “we wait for our happiness to happen to us . . . or wait for somebody to come and bring it to us.” But “my whole book is about taking that into your own hands.” (In her own case, she was able to banish depression, right her course and marry a Brazilian businessman whom she met in Bali — and let's not even get started on her enhanced career success!)

That self-reliance is something that Jones, the lawyer-turning-nonprofit-executive who is also relocating to California, found compelling: the affirmation for “taking a risk and making unusual choices and aggressively pursuing your happiness.”

She characterized her take-away message from the book this way: “Don't settle. No matter how long you've to wait, be patient and faithful in yourself.”