A Memoir of One Woman's Spiritual Descent, Awakening & Re-emergence Coming soon! In the fourth book of her personal journey, Jennifer Lauck writes Home, an account of her decision to walk away from a traditional life as mother and wife in order to step onto a path toward self discovery via spiritual practice. Home offers an honest look into the complex practices and teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, retreat experiences, spiritual teachers and communities and the practice (and perils) of meditation as well as a deep look at the wisdom of feminine teachings beyond the limits of religion. Home: the fourth book on Jennifer's personal journey At the very dawn of religion, God was a woman. Do you remember? ~ Merlin Stone Introduction: What the River Says Since I was six years old, I've searched for home. I used to think it was in a house, on Mary Street, under the forever blue sky of Nevada. I rushed around in my twenties and thirties, trying to recreate home with places and even people. Eventually, I even made myself a home in an old arts and crafts bungalow and had a couple of babies with a beautiful man, in hopes that, finally, I would feel as if I were home. But there was a sacred hunger in me that couldn't seem to be filled from these external attempts to reach the hearth of my heart. I'd go a long way to deconstruct my child like perception of home too: analysis, therapy, group work, memoir writing, in depth study and so on. And now, finally, at the age of 43, I have integrated the truth of how home cannot be found in house, or a town, or a state. Home cannot be found in another person. Yes, there is a bit of home everywhere and in everyone. But the true home is within the heart of this woman I call myself. Wherever I am, I am home. At this moment, home is on the bank of a river. The sky over my head is my roof, my floor is the earth herself—covered with pine needles and wild grasses. The air I fill my lungs with is mountain air, crisp and clean and my furnishings are old Ponderosa pines, sturdy aspens, river rocks and the far off peaks of the Cascade Mountains. My teacher is directly in front of me. She is called The Metolius and is a fast moving river of icy water slipping past snags of fallen trees and sliding smoothly over mossy, tumbled stones. It is the river song that sang me to write this story I call Home. You might not think a person can get instruction from a river, you might say that's just nutty but I know better. All of nature has a voice and a story and even instructions, if we'd only listen. And so, without question, I accept that this river is my teacher. Unlike the times when I sat, slightly rebellious and fully inflated, before my human teachers, I do not ask the river questions like: what do you mean, I should write a fourth memoir? It's that a little nutty? I mean, come on, I'm only forty-three years old, what in the world could I possibly say? Yes, I have those questions banging around in my thinking mind and they are like so many rambunctious children. I love the way my mind is so insistent about tossing up questions, doubts and insecurities. I love this mind until I hate it again and then, I work like mad to get back to love again. I have come to accept that, unlike my own beloved children, who will grow and move on with their lives, all my inner children are here to stay. They are in-residence in my psyche, in my ego, in my shadows. These questions are also more than annoyances; they are the result of the known limits of translating experience to mere words on a page. It's a bit like taking that misty smoke that becomes an enormous genie and shoving it all back into Aladdin's tiny lamp. The writing task is so perplexing, and even impossible, that the sheer anxiety reaction to universes being confined by words and how to use them, becomes this series of questions tangling meaning and distorting creation. Such is the condition of being human; I'm always thinking, thinking, thinking. Worse, I'm thinking what I think is real and worse still, I'm thinking what I think is real and then interacting with other humans from my so called reality. As if it couldn't get any worse, then the other human responds to me as if his or her reality is real and before two deep breaths, our joint so-called realities get all twisted and snarled. That's when things get hopelessly confused and I find myself tripping around on the ground, as if my arms and legs were bound with fishing line. So many questions. How interesting that these questions and this tangling keeps the mind all cozy and happy and yet, another day passes and nothing gets done! But the river, oh the sweet and quiet river, moving with such clarity and purpose. She doesn't ask questions. She just flows. You can find her in the Cascade Mountains near Sisters, Oregon. Look for Metolius and you'll see how she forms from a mysterious source, in a swamp on the south side of Black Butte. From the swamp, she pulses through volcanic tubes under the butte and emerge in the form of a copper colored river cutting through the pines. She is what you would call a tributary, going down to empty her waters into the Deschutes River (a lover perhaps?) The Deschutes then flows to join the Columbia River. From there, the Columbia merges into Pacific Ocean. In writing about the Metolius; her journey, her merging and her expansion that ends at the sea, I wonder—perhaps my own story, rushing forth, is a small river destined to merge with the stories of so many other searching women. It is small and it is relatively insignificant and yet, it is here, it is full of life and thus part of a down stream movement of story needed to fill the sea of awakening feminine consciousness. I believe this is a time, like no other in our history. Women are on their way to an important and necessary plane of awareness. Men are as well, especially men who have learned a thing or two about surrender and how to honor women. But it is stated in great teachings, all the way from Tibet and here, in the west, that many women will become enlightened in this era. I say era because it's not clear how long this span of time will last. If this is true, I wonder: where are the stories of women who are on this path? Where are the insights that direct us, in clear language, to this home within ourselves? There are so very few and what is out there is cryptic at best. So many stories are well formed initially but then are edited into dull translations that are difficult to penetrate. Naked feminine honesty, accompanied by clear instruction and untainted by emotional baggage or hidden in intellectual rationalizations, is so rare these days. When I became a student of my first spiritual teacher, Tsultrim Allione, I had the very good fortune to stumble across a draft of her memoir of being on the spiritual path. It was in extremely rough form, thankfully! She hadn't edited, whitewashed or sterilized her story for "mass consumption" but rather had raw experience on the page. I was in heaven as I read her rough draft (more than a thousand pages long) and simultaneously mourned how it would likely never see the light of day to become a manual for the rest of us. She, like so many of us, has serious concerns about preserving the privacy of children and extended family. She, like so many of us, is cautious about speaking out about her truth because the misinterpretation and political fall out of her truth might jeopardize her greater work in the world. I understand, of course I understand. I have all the same concerns and yet, here I am—typing out my truth. The river says it is time. The river reminds me how women love story. We love it beyond enjoyment. We need story. Story is food! Is it any mystery that we have this rising interest in memoir, by women, about women? What about blogging? Yes, I am convinced women want to talk to each other, women are ready to evolve, women are responding the vibrational call to raise their energetic frequency. We are like geese, called to migrate, by a soundless pull resonating deep in our core. That call is what has me easing around all voices of judgment and limitation in order to tell this story of my own spiritual journey. I have nothing to lose by telling my story. I am not a spiritual teacher, nor will I ever call myself one. I do not run a large spiritual community with infrastructures reliant on contributions from wealthy people. I employ no one but myself. I am, in every way, free to speak. Back to the river. She is a swift moving one, her waters travel at an urgent clip that says, "I have places to go and people to see." And she is a wonderful teacher since it is my way to hurry as well. I, like the river, have other places to go, other songs to sing, and a path to traverse. Before I go though, I write this story of my own path, it's pitfalls and insights. I offer it as a naked truth, my truth, with the sole intent being to help others traveling to their own questions of home and happiness. This book is about my coming to my own spiritual path, it is about the pre-awakening dramas where I fell deeply in love in order to break my ego structures and let a new form take shape. It is about leaving my safe, well-groomed life as a wife and a mother. It is about being green faced on a commuter airplane, on my way to meet my first spiritual teacher. I clutched a barf bag in one hand, and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying in the other, chanting with desperate diligence: OM AH HUM BENDZRA GURU PEMA SIDDHI HUM—the Tibetan call for the teacher. It is about all the teachings I steeped myself in, over these years since. It is about divorce, mothering, messy love affairs and repressed memories popping to the surface like air bubbles trapped under river stones. It's about a journey to the fountainhead of feminine empowerment and being filled to overflowing. It's about coming home when everything in me wanted to stay at that fountain. It is about making choices, one of them being to stay in the world with all of it's insanity; the cell phones, the power lines, the internet, the news headlines blaring disaster, the dysfunction of human relationships, the deterioration of the environment, the abuse around every corner and the sorrows of this planet. It is about seeking a way to stay and yet remain rooted in my spiritual practice. It is about arriving at a place of calm presence, no matter the external circumstances and saying with tender aware resolve: there is room for this too.