Praise for
Returning to My Mother s House There isn t a woman alive who won t be able to relate to this lyrical, poignant, and beautifully written story. Like Elizabeth Gilbert s Eat, Pray, Love, Gail s story will help women gain insight and wisdom that not only will help heal their relationship with their mothers but could, quite frankly, help save their lives! Bless you, Gail, for doing work that heals all of us.
from the Foreword by Christiane Northrup, MD, author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom and Mother-Daughter Wisdom
Unraveling the narrative of motherhood in all its forms, Returning to My Mother's House is a book of enormous transformation, intimacy, and heart.
Eve Ensler, founder of V-Day, and author of The Vagina Monologues and Insecure at Last
Returning to My Mother's House is Gail Straub s poetic, heartfelt, and very personal journey story, but it is also my story, your story, and the story of a culture in desperate need of taking back the wisdom of the feminine. I came away from the adventure of reading this book full of hope for the restoration of the feminine in each of us, and our world.
Elizabeth Lesser, Co-founder, Omega Institute, and author of Broken Open and The Seekers Guide
Gail Straub's new book, Returning to My Mother's House is a book for mothers and daughters everywhere. Gail's thirty-year journey is a testament to the fierce power of the mother-daughter bond as a healing force in our world. This book both encourages and challenges us to take back our female wisdom, our emotional intelligence, our interior lives, our creativity and imagination, and our willingness to live with death as a wise advisor. More than anything Gail's book is a prayer that we take back this wisdom before it is too late for both our human family and our earth.
Immaculee Ilibagiza author of Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
Returning to My Mother's House is an intimately personal yet universal book. It's a rousing tale of a gutsy woman's adventures, her worldwide travels, her caring work, and her trials, tribulations, and joys. Above all, it is a daughter's tribute to her own mother, to all our mothers, and to feminine wisdom and power.
Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations
Gail Straub's memoir, Returning to My Mother's House: Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine, shines as a model for a life lived outside convention. Here the remarkable Straub, who has helped thousands of people achieve their dreams with her ground-breaking Empowerment Institute, examines the dreams of her ebullient almost-artist mother, sadly unfulfilled in her shortened life. By drawing her mother's portrait in words bright with detail, Straub finds the feminine principle that she almost unwittingly sacrificed in her own life. The contrasts between the former bohemian, upward-striving mother and the international innovator daughter are both sharp and tender. As Gail Straub uncovers the forgotten layers hiding what her mother gave her, she discovers that her mother's circumscribed life prepared her for the vast changes she has been able to make in the journeys of others. In powerful and profound ways, this extraordinary woman has lived her mother's dream.
Molly Peacock, poet, President Emerita of the Poetry Society of America, and author of Paradise, Piece by Piece
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More Praise for Returning to My Mother s House
As too many women in leadership positions know, the flame of passion and purposefulness can be extinguished by workaholism which is often rooted in a neglect of our undervalued feminine. In this biography and teaching guide, Gail Straub courageously names the undiscussable shadow aspects of achievement that have accompanied her enormous success as a global activist and beloved spiritual guide. She painfully acknowledges the legacy of her mother's lost connection to her heart's desires as a woman who extinguished her feminine voice. Gail takes us on spellbinding travels of both personal and global proportions to retrieve her own lost feminine and reveals her own nature as an unbounded flame. Most poignantly, we as readers see Gail's bold paint strokes of vivid imagery as her mother's artistic expression finally finding its beautiful canvass. Gail leaves us with the kindling needed to fiercely yet gently examine what is required to stop, be still, and illuminate the quiet wisdom needed to lead in these urgent times.
Ellen Wingard, editor, Enlightened Power: How Women Are Transforming the Practice of Leadership
A good book gifts its readers with an exquisite map of the human heart, and Gail Straub's Returning to My Mother's House does exactly that. In this healing story, Gail has written an eloquent and compelling narrative of a daughter's thirty-year journey to reconnect with her late mother's authentic self, and the discovery of her own powerful feminine spirit in the process. This book addresses so many questions of motherhood that spoke deeply to me: choosing to be, or not to be, a mother; looking for a mother; and finding a mother. Gail's journey takes her literally around the world but ultimately returns her to her childhood home, to the original drawer of her heart-map with the imprints of love and wisdom left there by her mother. And as her story continues Gail expands upon these imprints, and creates her own empowered map. This book honors not only Gail and her mother's spirit but also the feminine power in all of us.
Loung Ung, author of First They Killed My Father and Lucky Child
Returning to My Mother's House is a sacred incantation of celestial feminine remembrance. Gail has written so tenderly, and so courageously about the crisis and opportunity that confront us all. In these tumultuous times, our mother planet is beseeching women of all ages, cultures, and dimensions to awaken, reintegrate, and honor our most precious gifts in service of ourselves and the most high. As one who has "lost" her mother at a young age, I experienced this book as an act of love, faith, and healing. It is a mantra for the reclaiming of our divine feminine purpose. I am so grateful for this deeply personal yet profoundly universal journey.
Rha Goddess, artist, activist, and author of We Got Issues
In Jungian psychology, the house is often seen as a symbol of the self. Gail Straub's return to her mother's house is the archetypal journey of the self back to the sources of its deepest wounds, as well as the sources of its deepest wisdom and healing. It is the kind of "return" that can only be made with the wisdom of time and perspective and still it requires courage and persistence to take what Jung called "the night sea journey" into the fertile conflicts of our early houses. In her new book, Returning to My Mother's House, Straub bravely takes this journey for all of us and what reader, having entered into the journey alongside this engaging soul, does not come out more whole?
Stephen Cope, Director, Kripalu Institute for Extraordinary Living, and author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self and The Wisdom of Yoga
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What You ll Learn:
The Five Most Common Ways a Woman Loses
Her Innate Female Wisdom
1. Closing her heart and running away from her emotions. Often, a seminal event forces a woman to stop expressing her feelings, stop trusting her intuition, or shut the door on her inner life altogether. This catalyst could be rape or incest, illness, divorce or marriage, the birth of a child, the death of a parent, or any loss.
2. Losing connection with her physical body as well as the body of the earth. In today s age of information and uniformity, most people live mostly in their heads, preferring the tidy logical mind over the messy body. We also spend most of our time inside buildings or cars. A woman who lives this way is routinely disconnected from her sensuality, her instincts, and the wondrous, nourishing natural world.
3. Addiction to doing. Driven by the benchmarks of our dominant culture, a woman can easily betray her sacred feminine in her quest to be productive, accomplished, and successful. Every woman deserves to find fulfilling work. Workaholism, however, is one of the most subversive enemies of a fruitful inner life.
4. Abandoning her interior life. Relentless busyness and speed leave no time for contemplation. A woman needs silence and solitude, restful periods of slowing down, and open space for spiritual inquiry to cultivate her profound inner wisdom.
5. Not standing up for her true self. In the workplace and in her intimate relationships with men, a woman is frequently misled, bullied, or seduced into dismissing her emotional intelligence and intuition. Striving to be rational, linear, and concrete to think like a man is a very effective way to crush the wisdom of the feminine.
Seven Practices for
Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine
1. Face your fear. Home to emotions, intuition, passion, and spirituality, the deep, mysterious feminine can be a terrifying place. Confront your fear of being irrational, unproductive, or out of control, of your own body, and of death. Only then can you begin to fully explore and truly feel your innate feminine power.
2. Create the trinity of home, roots, and community. To flourish, female wisdom needs a room of its own, a firm sense of place, and an extended, supportive family.
3. Cultivate a sacred quartet. Silence, Simplicity, Solitude, and Slowness are all vital to sustaining a rich interior life. Develop this quartet through contemplative practices, whether meditation, prayer, yoga, tai chi, or listening to classical music.
4. Take time to honor your body, your senses, and the natural world. Commit to balancing the rational wisdom of your head with the instinctual wisdom of your body and the earth. Place a priority on restful sleep and sensual pleasures. Take a walk. Plant a garden. Regularly just be outdoors.
5. Engage in creative arts. Do something every day to strengthen your imagination and your intuitive right brain. Write, draw, dance, sing, sculpt, or play an instrument.
6. Create your own women s support group. Reach out to and forge connections with other women family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and strangers. Surround yourself with women s stories, women s experiences, women s struggles, and women s triumphs. Learn from women s wisdom.
7. Embrace the other. Feminine wisdom celebrates inclusiveness and paradoxes. Welcome a diversity of people into your inner life. Stay open to experiences and lifestyles, ethnic and faith traditions, social and political perspectives that contrast with and challenge your own.
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