Welcome
You’ve arrived in a space where story, memory, and meaning converge to illuminate the inner landscapes we all travel.
I write to make sense of the human experience — to find beauty in the ache of becoming, and meaning in the moments that ask us to see more clearly and love more deeply.
Wherever you are on your journey, may what you find here remind you that transformation isn’t a single moment, but a lifelong unfolding — one that begins, always, with the courage to listen to your own heart.
Debra
About
Debra Vanderwerf is a writer and nonprofit leader whose work bridges transformation, spirituality, and social impact. She has served as Executive Director of the Sounds True Foundation and Director of Operations for Valarie Kaur’s Revolutionary Love Project. A Shamanic Reiki Practitioner, she integrates ancient wisdom into modern life through writing, teaching, and community engagement. Her forthcoming memoir explores the passage through loss and awakening—a return to living in devotion to the heart. Debra lives in Portland, Oregon, and is available for consulting, speaking, and workshops.
Seeking representation for completed manuscript
Kneeling Before the Altar of My Heart:
A Journey of Healing and Inner Devotion
Kneeling Before the Altar of My Heart is a raw and radiant auto-fiction novel of disintegration and devotion — to truth, to healing, and to the quiet, relentless call of the heart. It is a cinematic journey through loss, intuition, and the fierce grace of beginning again.
Over two years, the architecture of Debra's life crumbles piece by piece. A spiritual awakening. The end of a twenty-one-year marriage. A love affair that turns violent. Nights spent trying to stitch herself back together in her father’s basement — at fifty-two years old.
When she begins to rise again, she lands at the pinnacle of her career in the spiritual publishing world, helping deliver messages of hope and healing to people across the globe. Yet even there, disillusion sets in. Two prestigious positions end quickly, revealing how deeply her inner and outer worlds have fallen out of alignment.
Then comes the call: her mother, swollen and unrecognizable, lies in an induced coma. Her brother’s addiction erupts in chaos. Her beloved cat dies. Her health collapses. Everything she’s rebuilt dissolves once more, until only silence remains.
In that stillness, signs begin to appear — a woodpecker pounding at her chimney, a jaguar pacing through her dreams, and a curandera’s whispered prophecy: “You’re going to heal the temples on your journey.”
So she lets go. She sells many of her belongings, stores the rest, and buys a one-way ticket to Singapore. Her pilgrimage unfolds across Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Australia — each sacred site offering a mirror, a lesson, a reckoning. In the journey’s deepest revelation, she discovers that the temple in need of healing has always lived within her — in her body, her lineage, her heart.
Approachable and deeply human, Kneeling Before the Altar of My Heart invites readers into the universal pilgrimage of becoming — a reminder that even in our unraveling, devotion to truth can lead us home.
Pilgrimage Route
Explore the interactive map to trace Debra’s route, see the faces and places that shaped her pilgrimage, and step into the moments that transformed everything.
Journey across Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Australia — through temples and ruins, winding trains and ferry boats, tuk tuks and crowded markets. Along the way come encounters with people from all walks of life and moments of remembrance, release, revelation, and joy — each one a glimpse of the sacred in motion.
