Author, leadership consultant and former Vashon resident Suzanne Anderson will return to the island next week to sign and read from her new book, “The Way of the Mysterial Woman,” at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 30, at Vashon Bookshop.

The publication of Anderson’s book and return visit to her former home are, in a sense, the final stage of an archetypal journey that began three years ago. In 2013, right before her book was to be published, her husband died suddenly and tragically. She plunged into what Carl Jung would call in “Hero’s Journey,” “the place of great trial.”

“Literally, I lost my beloved husband and the future path I imagined with him and all of the outer structures in my life,” Anderson said in a recent phone interview from Berlin, where she was speaking at the conference “Rising Women, Rising World” before leading European workshops based on her book. “My company dissolved; I had to sell the estate (on Vashon) and move off the island. I lost my community. All the other structures in my life were gone. Everything was brushed off the table like a sand mandala.”

But in the alchemical darkness of that time, the author directly experienced what she intellectually knew and had spent the last 15 years researching for her book — what she calls the Mysterial.

As a pioneer in women’s leadership programs and with graduate studies in women’s developmental psychology, Anderson has been working on decoding “an embodied, integral and accelerated pathway to unlock women’s innate potential to become Mysterial leaders who will positively shape our future.”

Blending modern psychology with ancient wisdom, Anderson and her co-author Dr. Susan Cannon lay out a practical pathway with five clear steps that she says open up the channel to develop leadership skills for women.

“The path mirrors our development from young to (mature) women,” she said. “We knew there was little research done on development, and until 15 years ago, the research was only done on males.”

The authors asked if there was a way to discover the healthy feminine essence so often buried in our culture to embody the deep understanding that “I am empowered to do what is mine to do.”

The book answers that question by revealing just how to access the new developmental pathways and “to awaken the next level of our evolutionary capacity.”

“The inner pathway is an upgrading, and it held up in the most difficult situations I could have encountered,” Anderson said. “Now when I speak at conferences, there is a confidence I feel in my body. I knew it before, but now I know it in my body.”

From the personal to the universal, Anderson acknowledged today’s challenging times and said most women she knows are in the midst of big shifts.

“What if the signs of suffering were instead the signal of the next level of expression of the Mysterial woman — the innate potentiality bumping up against the old structure? It is evolution,” she said. “This time requires that the feminine come online. We can’t solve the problems of today with the old operating systems.”