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Helping Others to Thrive
Know: Where the Status Quo Ends and You Come to Life is a Self-Help book that explores how we lose connection with our inner voice, how to regain it, and what life looks like when we do. Why was this an important book for you to write?
My aim to see all people thrive was at the heart of why I wrote the book. Observing how our world “works” felt off to me as a child and it was something I couldn’t shake. Eventually deeper levels of what holds us all stuck arrived and I continued to build on that pattern for twenty-two years sharing the beginning of what I learned in this current book. I have other books in the works to take this concept further for my reader. I knew articulating what is going on and why was most important in this book before I share how we each fully change it. My work takes repetition, it’s like learning a new language!
I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?
The hardest thing to write about were the personal examples I shared. I wanted to be honest and fair in each situation when some of them were highly emotional for me. However, I feel I achieved my goal. Writing about these hard things I feel also made me a stronger writer.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
The evolution of what’s holding us back to what’s possible through memorable story examples. As well as narcissism is collapsible and might not be what we’ve believed it was and that natural equality is the outcome of collapsing narcissism.
What do you hope is one thing readers take away from your story?
The one thing I want for the reader to take away from the book is to feel understood. This is the first tenant in healing oneself from what I term “The Model” or the control we assert to scrap for a shred of “perceived” love (cathexis) or a place in the hierarchy. What we’ve been silently living is agreed upon “dominance”. That’s over and now we’re headed toward expansion which in my work is us free of pain points because natural equality leads, which means we’re emotionally mature and in a powerful neutral within. Put another way emotion will be perceived quite differently in the future and beyond The Model.
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Know: Where the Status Quo Ends and You Come to Life
Amy Cerny Vasterling’s Know is a heartfelt and deeply personal journey into self-trust and the reclamation of what she calls “personal knowing.” Vasterling draws from her own life and her experiences as an intuitive advisor to lay out a powerful critique of what she labels “The Model”—society’s unwritten rules and expectations. Structured in three parts, the book explores how we lose connection with our inner voice, how to regain it, and what life looks like when we do. It’s part memoir, part manifesto, and part field guide for sensitive souls trying to navigate a noisy, demanding world that doesn’t always make space for them.
Vasterling’s writing is clear and accessible, without fluff or over-intellectualizing. That’s rare in the self-help genre, which can often feel cold, detached, or overly prescriptive. Her voice is warm, intimate, and honest—even when she’s being blunt. She doesn’t pretend it’s easy to ditch society’s script and follow your own. She tells stories about discomfort, mistakes, fear, and even the collapse of her long-term marriage. But she also shows how choosing yourself, even when it’s hard, is the most liberating thing you can do. As someone who’s always second-guessed my gut and felt the weight of expectations pressing in, her insistence that you already know struck a nerve.
What I especially appreciated was her nuanced view of sensitivity, not as a flaw to fix but as a form of wisdom. Her metaphors, like comparing highly sensitive people to elephants with intuitive strength, stay with you. The book doesn’t offer a step-by-step plan, and that’s the point. It’s not about copying someone else’s path but tuning into your own. That said, at times I did wish for a little more grounding in how to apply these ideas in messy day-to-day life.
In the end, I found Know: Where the Status Quo Ends and You Come to Life to be a brave and soulful book. It’s especially well-suited for women, creatives, healers, and anyone who feels like they’re swimming upstream in a world that praises conformity. If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing life “wrong” despite having all the right pieces, this book might just be the permission slip you need to do things your way.
Pages: 140 | ISBN: 978-1-966629-14-6
LITERARY TITAN 