Read Online Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It by Elizabeth Gilbert - Free Book Online

dog-eared pages I had loved so deeply and I found that the words no longer spoke to me. The passages I had underlined no longer gave me those old feelings of hope and anticipation. They felt dead.
    So, I started at the beginning. I read that first page, “Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth,” and suddenly I knewwhat I needed to do. I needed help. I needed to be honest with myself and all the people who loved me. I needed to start living my life for myself again.
Eat Pray Love
had shown me the way once before, when I needed it most. There was no reason it couldn’t now.
    What I did next wasn’t a huge, life-altering act. I didn’t run away. I didn’t leave my husband or my baby. I picked up the phone and called a postpartum depression help line. And I told the truth.
    Two years later, on this past Mother’s Day, I held a photography-based fund-raiser for the Pacific Post Partum Support Society, the organization that helped me get back on my feet. I offered photo sessions to moms and their kids, with all proceeds going back to the organization. A total of 108 mothers participated, and all of the moms were given the opportunity to pose with their beautiful children and hold a sign with a message like, “You are a good mother,” or “You deserve to be celebrated.” I called it the Good Mother Project.
    The mothers who participated started talking to me. Some told me stories of how they had struggled with postpartum depression; others told me about their isolating experiences with a colicky baby or a sick child. They wanted to tell their stories. They wanted to share their experiences so that other mothers would feel less alone.
    So, I created a website and a blog. Here, I shared the photos from the Mother’s Day sessions and started connecting women through their stories about this sacred, common ground of motherhood. Every day on the Good Mother Project blog, another mama gets to tell her truth. She gets to see her beauty andstrength reflected back through her own words, and through the comments and support of the other women who read her story.
    I thought my
Eat Pray Love
journey started on that kitchen floor and ended in Bordeaux. But it is so far from over. Sometimes, I think it’s just beginning.

Penny Prayers
    â€”
    Aimee Halfpenny
    I t was the summer of 2010, and my unworn wedding dress was in the backseat of my Volvo. I had been driving around with it for two weeks. The dress rode with me to work, to the grocery store, to Zumba. It was a silent passenger I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of.
    I first read
Eat Pray Love
in 2007. I came to it hesitantly. I distinctly remember seeing the book displayed in stores and dismissing it. Another story about someone who figured it all out, magically got her happy ending, and would tell me what to do in just five easy steps? No thank you. But a friend confessed she thought of me when the author described her depression. Intrigued, I bought the book.
    I found, to my surprise, that I related to this broken woman who was desperately uncomfortable in her own skin. Like her, my thirst for travel was intense and I understood the need to run through fields and explore ruins. I had reforested hills inOaxaca and worked with the rural poor in Nicaragua. My world cracked open, and I received far more from the beautiful souls I met on my adventures than they ever did from me. They taught me that the act of giving isn’t a by-product of material wealth, it’s a way of life and a daily practice.
    So I plowed through Italy and India and then something happened—I got stuck. I was stuck for about three years. I’m not completely sure why I couldn’t continue, but my best guess is this: the heart cannot absorb what it’s not ready for.
    It wasn’t until I was suffering through my broken engagement, driving around with that dress in my car and feeling like my spirit had been pushed off a cliff that I