At 88 years old, Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen is finally sharing her story. For decades, the Mill Valley psychiatrist lent an ear to her patients, allowing them to open up and share their stories and struggles with her. But her work didn’t lend many opportunities to get personal.

“I wanted to share the whole part of myself,” said Bolen, a Jungian analyst and activist, especially toward women’s issues. “I felt like this was the time to share my story.”

For her 14th book, “Ever Widening Circles and Mystical Moments,” whose March release tied into International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, she decided to open up and reveal parts of herself and her family’s history that she had previously kept close to the chest.

“This is the unusual story of an extraordinary woman’s life as a Jungian psychiatrist and as a spiritual seeker,” wrote Marin author Isabel Allende. “In these pages, Jean Shinoda Bolen reveals for the first time her private life, including many photographs, and she takes her readers to the realm of the soul as she has done in all her bestselling books. A fascinating memoir for her millions of fans and an open invitation for those who need inspiration in these difficult times.”

In it, Bolen writes about her Japanese American family’s forced relocation from California after the bombing of Pearl Harbor when she was in kindergarten; her childhood marred with experiences of feeling “otherness” as her family moved around to different states; her unexpected journey into medicine; her son Andy’s battle with neurofibromatosis type 2; her own cancer journey; and her role in the women’s spirituality movement — with photos of her and her family peppered throughout.

“It’s autobiographical, but it’s not really a pure autobiographical book. It’s historical, spiritual, psychological and political because of when it happened and how it all affected me before I entered into becoming a doctor. I was really much more interested in being a history major or something,” said Bolen, whose mother was a physician and her father a businessman.

In fact, it was a spiritual moment she had while at a Christian Evangelical camp that led her away from history or law, like she previously thought, and instead toward medicine.

“That evening, shortly after dusk, I went by myself to a small chapel on the Forest Home grounds and there I got on my knees and prayed to God. ‘Something’ happened in prayer that was a turning point in my life. I had a felt-sense of the presence of divinity, of a loving energy. I was filled with gratitude. I felt the gravity of asking a big question that went with what I now felt. With all my heart, I asked, ‘How can I thank you?’ The answer which came was: ‘Help others, be a doctor.’ … This may not seem a tall order, given that my mother, my grandfather, two aunts, and two uncles were physicians.

“However, I would never have decided to be a doctor on my own. I wasn’t interested or good at science or math, and took the minimum that was needed for a pre-college curriculum in high school. It would not be easy to fulfill this promise,” writes Bolen, who finds her calling when she goes into psychiatry.

This year, she was inducted into the YWCA Golden Gate Silicon Valley’s Marin’s Women Hall of Fame, recognizing her longstanding work in the community and her fields of work.

“For almost seven decades, Dr. Bolen has thrived in, and contributed to, the local community. Mostly from the home she now lives in, near Muir Woods, she raised her two children who attended the great Marin public schools, established her private practice, wrote her many internationally acclaimed books, and became an inspiring and action-oriented voice for women’s equality,” the YWCA Golden Gate Silicon Valley writes in her profile.

Inspiring others

The time felt right for Bolen to write this story, she feels — in part because she felt comfortable sharing her family’s story after her parents died.

“I am breaking two major taboos telling personal stories about my family and myself. There is my family of origin, with hundreds of years of Japanese tradition of maintaining appearance, which means that writing about my impaired younger brother is revealing a family secret.

Then there was the Freudian psychoanalytic training in my psychiatric residency which taught me to be a neutral blank screen and to volunteer no personal information,” she writes.

But she knew that doing so would serve a great purpose: helping to inspire and inform others.

“The hope is that it will stir up the readers,” she said. “I want my personal book to be an influence.”