Returning to My Mother’s House

Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine

Unraveling the narrative of motherhood in all its forms, Returning to My Mother’s House: Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine is a book of enormous transformation, intimacy, and heart.

 — Eve Ensler, founder, V-Day, author, The Vagina Monologues

About the Book
Excerpts

This is the story of how I returned to my mother’s house and reclaimed my own female wisdom, taking back what both Mom and I had betrayed. I see now how my story is so many of our stories. It is the story of both men and women who have abandoned their inner lives, leaving behind their hearts where deep dark feelings reside; putting aside their intuitive imagination where dreams flourish; ignoring the invisible worlds where the irrational and the mysterious offer their incomparable gifts; and disowning the realms of silence, simplicity, and solitude where the interior matures. Modern life rarely acknowledges or even allows space for such things. But we ignore these things at our peril, both as a human and as an earth family. —From the Introduction

Gail Straub, a leader in the human potential field, had helped thousands around the world find meaning and purpose in their lives, all the while sensing that something fundamental within her was missing. Many years after the premature death of her mother, she undertook a period of soul searching and came to believe that, like her mother and so many women of our time, she had overcorrected in the direction of the masculine, her “successful” life of outer accomplishment and committed social activism having come at the expense of a rich and satisfying inner life.

Her search took her around the globe—to Africa, Bali, Russia, China, and Ireland—where she encountered the longing to retrieve sacred female wisdom among the women she met. Finding her way back to her innate female wisdom restored a sense of balance between external and internal worlds, activism and contemplation, public and private realms, and gave her a sense of equanimity that had eluded her for decades. Gail’s poetic and heartfelt story is for anyone who has ever struggled to build and sustain an interior life in our driven and fast-paced society—and for mothers and daughters everywhere.

Forward

Prologue

Choosing Not to Have Children

Exercises:

The Five Most Common Ways a Woman Loses Her Innate Female Wisdom

Seven Practices for Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine

Study Guide: Returning to my Mother’s House

Praise

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

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

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

Purchase

Returning to My Mother’s House: Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine

$21

Cover
Pages
Dimensions

: : :

Hardcover/Kindle
236
6 x 1 x 9 inches