Local author pens first book for teens

The teenage years are an important part of every person’s development — it helps shape who they become as an adult. Keeping that in mind, Baldwin resident Deneen Vukelic has published her first book, which provides teenagers with a map to becoming better people and more spiritually in tune.

Vukelic, a mother of three school-age boys who has lived in Baldwin for nine years with her husband, Sasha, has a background as a holistic healer. She’s always been drawn to natural healing, she said, and opened business as a certified raindrop practitioner — a person who uses essential oils in the form of massage — in 2008. She ran the business out of her home until 2013 when she set her focus on researching and writing a book.

She also ran a workshop for kids that focused on meditation and teaching them to develop intuition. Those workshops led her to realize that she wanted to direct her efforts toward benefiting and working with kids.

To prepare for writing the book, she said, she spent hours meditating and read a lot of books for research. Since teens have different worries than adults (more social anxiety instead of pressures caused by mortgage payments), Vukelic wanted to write a spirituality book specifically aimed at teenagers.

The book, “Soaring — A Teen’s Guide to Spirit and Spirituality,” took about six months to write and after a lengthy editing process, was released last month. It’s broken up into three parts, Vukelic explained, each with its own aim. The first part is an interpretation of God, free will, intuition, karma, reincarnation and other spiritual topics. The second section is a fictional story of male and female characters that takes readers on a journey that stretches from before birth to the end of a long life as a way to explain further the broad concept of karma, divine purpose and life lessons. The final part emphasizes ways to care about yourself in the right way by examples of eating right and handling relationships.