Returning to My Mothers House: Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine

Description

By Gail Straub

“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 will not only help heal their relationships 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, M.D., author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom and Mother-Daughter Wisdom

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 individual human beings and as an earth family.

What people are saying:

“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

“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 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.” Enough history, we need her-story! We need books like Gail’s—brave tales of the feminine, lost and found. Reading this book encouraged me to go back and heal aspects of myself and my relationship with my mother. I found myself dreaming of my mother, looking at old picture albums, reading letters we wrote to each other over the years, and thinking about her–her unrealized dreams, her abandoned self, her frightened heart, and the legacy of love and loss that she passed on to me. I came away from the adventure of reading Returning to My Mother’s House 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”

“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”