Synopsis "How Spirituality Kicked My (Blankety-Blank) Ass"
As a former religious freak gone "spiritual," J. L. Forbes searched for a sustainable connection to Divinity (or God) since early adulthood. When the scandalous acts of several leaders caused the dissolution of her home church, it occurred to her that Christianity wasn't adding up to unconditional love and peace of mind. Most of the church folks she knew weren't living harmoniously, including herself. This bothered her and drove her to find a deeper spiritual connection. In desperate attempts to experience continuous grace and unconditional love, she spent years reconditioning her religious thinking (from guilty associations into positive affirmations) merely to find herself drunk and being pulled over on the highway with her two-year-old daughter in the backseat of her car. Although Oprah may have found the drunk-driving fiasco intriguing enough to have J. L. Forbes on her show in 2005, the Queen of Daytime Television didn't exactly have a positive impact on her life. She left HARPO studios weeping, humiliated, and nearly hopeless. Yet what woke her up to desiring genuine transformation wasn't her DUI experience or the disappointing talk show. During her uncontrollable descent into darkness thereafter, J. L. Forbes discovered that beneath the surface of her positive attitude lurked a terrorizing subconscious dialogue, which she was destined to face within herself. If she desired true transformation and a sustainable connection to Spirit, she needed to stand up, recover from the pang of public exploitation, and take the journey into her deepest fears toward self-actualization with very little support. 'How Spirituality Kicked Your (Blankety-Blank) Ass' is dedicated to moments of her life where J. L. Forbes experienced wake-up calls and radical clarity, while she relentlessly sought truth and freedom from a confining and mundane existence. Written in a storyteller's voice, this book is a transparent retelling of the Author's personal journey from childhood where she was inculcated in a deeply religious community, into her coming-of-age, when she struggled with asking existential questions and not receiving answers, to finally giving up and spiraling out of control after a heart wrenching admission from her mother. The result of her self-destructive behavior was that she was forced to face her inner darkness and her most daunting fears while breaking beyond her strict childhood programming. In searching for God thereafter, the unclear path led to many spiritual, mental and emotional awakenings, along with healing, and ultimately, self-awareness. The book is both a candid memoir chronicling J. L. Forbes' life's travails in a working class town in central California and a detailed reflection of the greater reality which revealed itself over time through tribulation. Beyond the story of her dynamic and harrowing journey is an out-of-box point of view on the human experience in relation to spirituality. Unlike most memoirs, each chapter is rich with insight and distilled to core truths that eventually liberated her. The author is clearly dedicated to relating to her readers as she brings each chapter down home to a universal life lesson.
