Loraine Y. Van Tuyl - Amazon Wisdom Keeper: A Psychologists Memoir of Spiritual Awakening

PRAISE FOR AMAZON WISDOM KEEPER

Loraine Van Tuyl has drawn on an extraordinary multicultural background and a career as a professional healer to produce a beguiling and insightful work of wisdom and compassion... Highly recommended!

MARK PLOTKIN, PhD, President, Amazon Conservation Team, Times Environmental Hero for the Planet (2001) and bestselling author of Tales of a Shamans Apprentice and Medicine Quest

What a wonderful book and author! Loraine Van Tuyl is a clear voice to follow in the vastness of the mystical journey to discover the sacred and the divine.

LISA TAHIR, LCSW, Host of All Things Therapy Radio Show, www.nolatherapy.com

In a memoir thats 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

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

Loraines inspirational journey takes us from the jungles of Suriname to the United States and Europe as she grapples with a world that places more value on what can be seen and measured than the truth in her heart and in her past. Her process of shedding conventional thinking and expectations for the beauty, simplicity and truth of time-honored indigenous wisdom serves as a guide for a world that has lost touch with its inner truth.

JENNIFER B. MONAHAN, Shaman and author of This Trip Will Change Your Life: A Shamans Story of Spirit Evolution

Loraine Van Tuyl has written a memoir that spans time and space, memory and precognition. She manages to escort the reader across the bridges she creates with skill and purpose so that the reader can begin to understand what is required to move from one realm to another and maintain equilibrium and balance. We can all learn from the courage and commitment to meaning and understanding Van Tuyl so poignantly demonstrates in Amazon Wisdom Keeper.

ISA GUCCIARDI, PhD, Founding Director and Primary Teacher, Foundation of the Sacred Stream, and author of Return to the Great Mother and Coming to Peace

Once Loraine Van Tuyl was separated from her beloved home, it feels as if she was always trying to get back to what she had lost. I loved the part of her trying to develop a multicultural dynamic to aid her thoroughly Western education in psychology and psychotherapy; her dedication, despite a growing sense of isolation, is impressive. I think the big lesson for me was a reminder, as a creative person, of the need to not only trust intuition and deeper feelings, but to continue to develop them until we can rely on them, until theyre second nature, and trust that the intuitions and dreams arent just a symptom or sign of a delusional psychosis.

COFFEE AND INK SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

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 it 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

As we are poised at this critical time to evolve our consciousness, Loraine Van Tuyl has every reason to bring Amazon Wisdom Keeper forward to the public, and especially to therapists, to help us open ourselves up to the multidimensionality of our beings.

DONNA MORRISH, MFT, Founder, Paths of Grace

Amazon Wisdom Keeper is both a thoroughly engaging memoir and a timely, illuminating infusion of earth-centered wisdom. Loraine Van Tuyl has interwoven her rich and multilayered experiences and insights with stunning finesse, creating a ripple effect that continues to move deeply within me. I feel at once validated, strengthened, and inspired.

JULIE SUZANNE BROKKEN, Artist, Poet, and Photographer

All the tales are so validating and inspiring.

DENISE COLBY, PhD, Founder, Integrative Wellness

AMAZON WISDOM KEEPER

Copyright 2017 by Loraine Y. Van Tuyl

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-316-8
E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-317-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944793

For information, address:
She Writes Press
1563 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707

Cover and interior design by Tabitha Lahr
Drawings by Yantze Li

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

Special thanks to: Brooke Medicine Eagle (www.medicineeagle.com) for permission to reprint excerpts from her book, Buffalo Woman Comes Singing: The Spirit Song of a Medicine Woman
Copyright 1991 by Brooke Medicine Eagle

David J. Wallin for permission to reprint an excerpt from his book, Attachment in Psychotherapy.
Copyright 2007 by David J. Wallin

To my dear husband, Robert Van Tuyl, and
my precious children, Terrance and Jade.

[Traditional] psychological theory too soon runs out for the creative, the gifted, the deep woman. Traditional psychology is often spare or entirely silent about deeper issues important to women: the archetypal, the intuitive, the sexual and cyclical, the ages of women, a womans way, a womans knowing, her creative fire...
Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Introduction

PART ONE

Chapter 1: My First Communion

Chapter 2: The Revolution

Chapter 3: Shell-Shocked

Chapter 4: Pilgrimage

Chapter 5: The Right Lid

Chapter 6: Commitment Bootcamp

Chapter 7: The Finish Line

PART TWO

Chapter 8: Border Light

Chapter 9: Authority Issues

Chapter 10: Awikio!