Returning to My Mother's House

"There isnt a woman alive who wont be able to relate to this lyrical, poignant, and beautifully written story. Like Elizabeth Glberts Eat, Pray, Love, Gails 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."

—Christiane Northrup, MD, author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom and Mother-Daughter Wisdom, from the Foreword

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, and 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.

About the Author

Gail Straub

Gail Straub is coauthor of the best-selling Empowerment: The Art of Creating Your Life as You Want It and the author of the critically acclaimed The Rhythm of Compassion: Caring for Self, Connecting with Society, as well as Circle of Compassion, a book of meditations. Considered a leading authority on empowerment, she codirects the Empowerment Institute, a school for transformative leadership. Over the past thirty years she has trained thousands of people worldwide in empowerment, engaged spirituality, and the wisdom of the feminine. Straub lives with her husband, David Gershon, in the Hudson River Valley in New York. ...

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