Amazon Wisdom Keeper
With captivating lyricism, Amazon Wisdom Keeper transports us into the multicultural upbringing and transformation of Loraine Van Tuyl, a clinical psychology graduate student and budding shamanic healer who’s blindsided by startling visions, elusive drumming, and her inseverable mystical ties to the Amazon rainforest of her native Suriname.
Is she in the wrong field, or did her childhood dreams, spirit guides, and premonitions somehow prepare her for these challenges?
Did Suriname’s military coup and her family’s uprooting move to the US rob her from all that she knew and loved at thirteen to help reveal her soul’s purpose, or is she losing her mind by entertaining far-fetched questions and hunches that can’t be answered or proven—like wondering if her perplexing life story is shedding light on the double binds in her field on purpose, and suspecting that her soul’s daunting blue print was plotted long before she was even born?
Van Tuyl wrestles with these questions and more as she embarks upon her risky quest, enduring test upon test in search of her true self and calling while enrolled in a rigorous academic program that regards intuitive healing methods as unscientific—and even unethical.
Amazon Wisdom Keeper is for anyone who has, at one point or another, felt alienated, crazy, or overwhelmed by mystical experiences and spiritual bleed-throughs in childhood or beyond. It is really a self-help book without explicitly saying so.
By getting swept up in my story, you'll begin to identify and carve out the steps along your story and heroic path of self-discovery, awakening and purpose that you perhaps also had inklings of since childhood. You'll retrace these steps with greater awareness, revisit and reframe your experiences, clear the impact of negativity from others, and look at your supposed short-comings and weaknesses in an entirely different light.
As you rediscover your gifts and strengths, you'll feel inspired, courageous, and informed how to navigate and overcome the obstacles that have tripped you up so often along your journey.
I aim to guide and encourage you to make the scary quantum leap in consciousness that mirrors the many technological developments and advancements that we have materialized in recent decades. While we have been able to birth incredible stories with typewriters and even with pen and paper, the ways in which we now can explore, capture, and share our selves, our souls, and our stories through advanced technology is brandnew in our history as a species.
Praise for Amazon Wisdom Keeper
Amazon Wisdom Keeper is truly a gift of revolutionary insights and forgotten truths that will contribute to the next phase of humanity. Read this captivating page-turner as a compelling personal memoir, a profound spiritual message, or as complimentary reading for cross-cultural psychology, counseling, feminism, ethics and spirituality.
- Megan Cowan, Co-Founder, Mindful Schools
A triumph of the heart! Amazon Wisdom Keeper reminds us of the essential need to connect to our authentic wholeness in order to provide service in the world. Loraine Van Tuyl has vulnerably and powerfully laid out her own journey along this path, inspiring growth, faith, and hope along the way.
- Anne Lowe, MSW, Social Work Instructor, Salish Kootenai College
Loraine Van Tuyl's debut memoir, Amazon Wisdom Keeper, weaves personal and political truths with poetic mastery. By daring to break from limiting conventions—in the field as well as writing—Van Tuyl has forged a liberating path for those at the margins just as her ancestors once did. It is an absolute must for psychotherapists and healthcare providers seeking to make conscious social change and expand the purview of traditional psychology through their multidimensional practice.
- Tala Khanmalek, PhD, Research Associate, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Princeton University
A passionate journey into spirituality that's unique, compelling, well-told . . . written with admirable conviction.
- BookLife
In a memoir that’s braver than most, Loraine Van Tuyl shows how personal and ancestral stories and gifts breathe vitality into our life force. While taking us through a memory portal, she invites us to retrace our steps through our jungles of experiences, and dares us to recognize our own instinctual reactions at interesting crossroads in our lives. Her story of reclaiming and nurturing her awakening life force as a student, in the face of strong resistance, is valuable because it opens the door to how personal, cultural and spiritual truths and traditions can transform traditional Western psychology as well as individual lives.
- Maria P. P. Root, PhD, Award-winning Psychologist, Reiki Master, Artist, and author of The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier
From the very beginning, Amazon Wisdom Keeper is a feast for your inner child as well as your growing and developing spiritual indweller. Loraine Van Tuyl draws the reader into a sacred setting that is, for most of us, far away and unknown, yet so richly and succinctly described that the plentiful allegories hang ripe, sweet, and waiting to be plucked and savored. The journey Van Tuyl reveals in dewy, saturating, and powerful language renders her intensely personal experiences into savored, exotic delicacies that are somehow as welcome and familiar as a beloved family recipe. I devoured.
- J. R. Schumaker, author of Diana’s Dragons: The Awaited
Loraine Van Tuyl's memoir vividly places the reader in magical and exotic settings, while at the same time navigating a magical and exotic inner landscape. The narrator is very likeable and relatable, and her fierce energy is enticing. For me, the biggest gift of the book was the camaraderie with a like-minded soul and being with a narrator who not only understood the 'reality' of magic and intuition, but stood in its power.
- Laraine Herring, author of On Being Stuck: Tapping into the Creative Power of Writer's Block
Loraine Van Tuyl is a clear voice to follow in the vastness of the mystical journey within to discover the sacred and the divine.
- Lisa Tahir, LCSW, Host of "All things Therapy" Radio Show
Amazon Wisdom Keeper richly mirrors the incongruence I experience as a sensitive psychotherapist working within a mental health paradigm that at times clashes with my own intuitions about healing and instilled in me a sorely needed dose of validation, inspiration, and spiritual camaraderie. I suspect it will help catalyze and energize the visionary process of other sensitive, spiritually-inclined healers, researchers, teachers, creators, innovators, and change-makers who also hear the call.
- Krista Harrison, MFT, CHT, Intuitive and Shamanic Healer
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