Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It Read Online Free PDF Page A

my losses, my neuroses, my obsessive-compulsive disorder, my anxiety, my anger, my broken heart, my laughter and my love. I marched, bags in hand, right to a therapist’s office. On my first visit, the therapist asked if I was truly ready to do this. I told her that I wasn’t “ready”—I don’t think one is ever truly “ready” to look in the mirror and face the demons staring back at you. But I had no choice. I was going to have to slay those demons and claw my way out of the hole of my depression one grain of sand at a time, or I was going to suffocate and die. It was as simple as that.
    I started to read a lot of self-help books. I went back to church after a twenty-year absence. I began to pray. I found God again. In finding God, I learned to let go. In letting go, I learned to breathe. In learning to breathe, I learned to be present. I started to feel lighter. I started a yoga practice. In that practice I found stillness. In that stillness I have grown closer to God, but perhaps more important, I have grown closer to myself.
    During this time, I began a relationship with the man I believed to be my Felipe. He turned out to be my David. In many ways, that loss was more painful than my divorce. It seems impossible that a two-year relationship could carry more weight than a fifteen-year marriage, but the truth is, I had attached so much hope and expectation to my David that when it ended, I voluntarily jumped right back into the hole of my depression and had absolutely no intention of ever coming out.
    But I reached for my copy of
Eat Pray Love
, complete with its flags and highlights, and I found a friend again. It was as though I could hear Liz’s voice calling me from the shelf. Richard from Texas was right! Groceries could love the whole world—or at the very least speak to it. And I was finally ready to listen. I was reminded why I started this journey to begin with. And when I got to “Pray,” this time I was ready for it. Not only could I appreciate the work Liz was doing, but I could understand and absorb it, all the blood, sweat and tears. I could do that because I had been through it myself.
    My work looked different than Liz’s. I wasn’t at an ashram in India—I was hiding under my blankets in my bed, refusing to shower and hoping my children were able to get all of their nutritional requirements from ramen noodles. My prayers were different. But I still began to pray, and I never stopped. I learned to meditate. I learned to accept my “monkey mind” because I knew I would never be able to quiet it fully. I found forgiveness and peace.
    It’s impossible to recount in such a brief space all the things that
Eat Pray Love
“Made Me Do.”
    But I can say this: it made me take the greatest journey of my life. For many years, my favorite word was
believe
. When I was suffering through that deepest, darkest time of my life, I stopped believing. In love, in hope, in the future, in people and, mostly, in myself.
Eat Pray Love
made me believe again.
    Many years ago, I started a blog about life as an autism mom. Thanks to
Eat Pray Love
, I realized I had a lot left to say. I titled my revamped blog, “April’s Doorway.”
Doorway
, one of my new favorite words. Constantly in movement. Open, shut, swinging, slamming, a window, a peephole, a latch, a lock. A beginning.

Reaching My Boiling Point
    â€”
    Tina Donvito
    W hy in the world did I think I could do this? I thought to myself as I stared up the steep incline in the middle of the jungle.
    Taking an adventure vacation was the latest punishment I’d decided to give my body. I’d read
Eat Pray Love
as I was beginning infertility treatments. Although my goal in life was the complete opposite of Elizabeth Gilbert’s (I wanted a baby, she didn’t), I found myself dreaming of a life-altering journey like hers that could help me climb out of the black hole of my