Fifteen years ago, author and filmmaker Marie-Rose Phan-Le stepped away from her high-powered position in the film industry to document ancient traditions of healing and spirituality around the globe. From the beaches of Hawaii to the peaks of the Himalayas, with stops along the way on Vashon, Phan-Le sought out lineage holders and keepers of the healing wisdom. That her outward journey would lead to an inner transformation came as an unexpected surprise to Phan-Le, who will read from her new memoir, “Talking Story: One Woman’s Quest to Preserve Ancient Spiritual and Healing Traditions,” this Friday on Vashon.

Phan-Le once described herself as a cultural anthropologist, who earned her degree not through academia but rather as a child born into war-torn Vietnam, as a refugee raised in France during her formative years and finally as a citizen of the United States. She’s witnessed the casualties of war and globalization, observing and learning to live in different cultures. But what ultimately hooked her attention and eventually led to her award-winning documentary “Talking Story” and eponymous book was what she calls the losses of many cultures’ spiritual and healing legacies.

Healers, according to Phan-Le, are those committed to alleviating the suffering of others or helping them to find meaning in their suffering. And with the passing of elder healers trained in venerable practices and ritual, the healing traditions are disappearing — from Peru’s indigenous Shipibob-Conibo community, Hawaii’s kapuna or elders in the Kalapana area, China’s minority Naxi who settled in Lijiang, lamas of Tibetan descent living in the sparsely populated village of Ladakh, India, regions around Tibet’s sacred Lake Manasarovar and even nearby the populous city of Kathmandu, Nepal.

“It’s not about preserving the traditions in a museum, but keeping the teachings and tools alive to prepare us for the times we are in,” she said. “The (ancients) had our current and future existence in mind when they planted the seeds (of wisdom). They were thinking of us way back when.”

Phan-Le sees the relevance of the insightful teachings played out in many aspects of modern life, including the Seattle Seahawks. The team meditates and visualizes, she said, which are applications of age-old meditation tools. And Pete Carroll’s whole-person coaching of one for all and focus on the community as winners instead of star players are values found in indigenous cultures — including the way the team dealt with the Super Bowl loss.

“We were so sure they had a God-given path to winning. I’d even painted my nails blue and green,” she recalled with a laugh. “It was a great game, and then they taught us how to lose with grace, how you move on from loss.”

Far from Seattle, in the jungles of the Amazon, Phan-Le met an internationally recognized shaman who healed his own heart ailment using shamanistic plant healing after allopathic, or Western medicine, failed to help.

“Plants are medicinal, not woo-woo,” Phan-Le said. “They help cure modern illness with their chemical makeup. We really can let go of the dualistic view of allopathic versus natural or spiritual medicine. It’s about having more choices in our collective medicine cabinets.”

In her current position as chief operating officer and creative director of High Impact, Inc., a visual media company, Phan-Le said she applies many of the things she learned on her journey to the business.

“Spiritual teachings allow you to be more successful,” she said. “Meditation and mind training, compassion and emphasizing collective well-being are all applicable in the work environment. Indigenous values remind us that if we put everyone first, then no one is last. Healers and spiritual teachers weren’t in an elite position. They had to care for the well-being of the entire community.”

The teachings Phan-Le learned didn’t just appear at the tap of a wand, however. Many of the places she and her crew visited were “tough logistically, physically, emotionally and spiritually,” especially given the thin air of the Himalayas. And when they arrived, being granted an interview was not a fait accompli just because they had made the arduous trip.

“The request (for an interview) always had to be made along with what I intended to do with the knowledge they would impart or the experience they would share with me,” Phan-Le wrote in her book.

Drawing on a tradition called “talking story” that she learned from the healing community in Hawaii, Phan-Le ended up being granted permission because she took the time to really listen to what the healers had to say.

“Talking story is about taking the time to linger over the details of the mundane, to ponder the realm of the profound and to surrender any structure of time or agenda,” Phan-Le writes in the book’s preface. “It is the art of listening and being present.”

Talking story opened doors previously closed to other Western visitors, especially with a group of lamas living in the high-altitude village of Humla, Nepal. It was there that Phan-Le experienced the stunning revelation that she, too, had the power to heal. The incident eventually led her to work as a hands-on healer on Vashon, in Seattle and the Southwest before she shifted her one-on-one healing practice to the one-to-many form she now employs in business.

Still, it took Phan-Le almost 11 years to finish her documentary and about seven to complete the book because, she said, it took a long time to integrate all that she learned.

“It’s not like being blissed-out on a lotus cloud,” she said with a distinctive twinkle in her voice. “I still get stressed out, but I can call on those spiritual tools to help me.”

Coming full circle, “Talking Story” is fulfilling Phan-Le’s promise to the healers who gave her those invaluable tools by sharing their stories, by transmitting their spiritual legacy so that others in a different culture and context might hear it.

“I had the burden of carrying these stories as a single person,” she said. “Now they are in a form that others can carry. If they share one of the stories, they help me with my promise. It’s all been a great surprise.”

At the beginning of her journey, Phan-Le called herself a cultural anthropologist. Today, she identifies as an ethno-spiritualist, someone who studies how different cultures use their spiritual resources to adapt to mundane issues of both survival and living well.

“I realize that my work now is to bridge the relevance of what was then with what is now.”

Marie-Rose Phan-Le will read from and discuss her book at 6 p.m. Friday at Vashon Bookshop.