Review of The Healing Journey: How a Poor Chinese Village Girl became an American Healer, by Sue Maisano, PhD

 (New Milford, CT: Visionary Living, Inc., 2018). ISBN: 9781942157236

A spiritual practitioner and healer that I am serving as book editor for emailed me a few days ago after attending a writer’s conference. “I got a literary agent,” she said. “But he says that Eat, Pray, Love memoirs are out. No one wants to hear your story.”

No one wants to hear your story. What a horrible view of things. Plus, it’s a falsehood. No one wants to hear your story. Nothing can be further from the truth.

Telling (and thereby owning) your story, to paraphrase Brené Brown, is one of the bravest things that anyone can do. Stories are the stuff of which we are made, as fundamental to our makeup as atoms and cells. Governments, religions, multinational corporations, and the military are expert storytellers. They have raised it to a high art (in collusion with the media), making it more necessary than ever for those with alternative, holistic, and healing views to tell their stories.

If anyone needs proof about the importance and value of story, they should read Dr. Maisano’s book. Heavily weighted to memoir, with self-help aspects reserved for the end, The Healing Journey is exactly as advertised in both title and subtitle.

It follows the classic three-act structure of the Hero’s Journey, as explicated by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell decades ago, with a clear cycle of Separation (leaving China), Initiation (graduate schooling, marriage, children, and career paths), and Return (the part of the journey when the Hero shares what she has learned with the “village”).

In a time of controversy over immigration and the path to U.S. citizenship, Dr. Maisano tells an underdog’s tale of determination against all odds. From her childhood in China to her defying the predictions of the so-called experts and attending the best possible schools at each level of her education, The Healing Journey reminds us that the fundamentals we were taught (and perhaps I am showing my age here)—honesty, integrity, self-discipline, respect for family, and commitment to education—do bring to fruition our hopes and dreams.

The Separation of Maisano’s hero’s journey comes when she decides to go to America for her graduate work in biology. Every high school junior should read this section. She diligently ignores the advice of “friends” urging her to aim lower, identifies the right program, reaches out to its lead professor, and makes a case for herself. As with all her levels of schooling, Maisano did not test well on her entrance exams, so it was her commitment to her career path and persistence that got her into the school she wanted to attend.

From there it is a blur of marriage, three children, and the struggles that come with being a postdoctoral fellow with a small salary and long hours. This is the major arc of her Initiation into adulthood.

Along the way, she amasses considerable knowledge and experience that leads her toward a different path. This kind of decision—especially for a married mother of three with a new mortgage and a nervous husband—takes tremendous courage. It truly is the hero’s path. It is following one’s Bliss—sat chit ananda in Sanskrit. People often mistake the word Bliss to mean “easy” or “pleasantly spiritual,” but it is rarely easy to change paths, to start over, to say that all that came before was a Prologue to something new.

And what this new path leads to for Maisano, most importantly, is her Return. She wanted to do more to help people—to guide them in finding their passion and their path. To help them achieve their full potential, despite all odds. This book is just one aspect of her work.

These are the strengths of The Healing Journey and, as you can see, they are many. If you are struggling to find your path, or have found it and are unsure how to make the commitment to change direction and fully follow it, this is an excellent book for you.

People do want to—and need to—hear your story. Dr. Maisano has proven this once again, and done it in a very inspiring—and inspiriting—way.