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What's on the menu at Lucid Cafe? Stories of transformation; healing journeys; thought-provoking conversations about consciousness, shamanism, psychology, ethics. Hosted by Wendy Halley of Lucid Path Wellness & Healing Arts.
You're listening to Lucid Cafe. I'm your host, Wendy Halley. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Lucid Cafe, a podcast exploring healing, consciousness, and the complexities of being human. Well, it turns out I'm in the midst of a period of unplanned upgrades. It's actually great, but a wee bit jarring.
Wendy:10 months ago mother nature created an opportunity for me to upgrade my wellness center including getting a new energy therapy pod called the Harmonic Egg Ellipse. And now that I've had it for a couple of months, witnessing how it's impacting people's lives and health is kinda blowing my mind. So definitely an amazing upgrade. Thank you, mother nature. And if you listened to the last episode, I announced that I'm preparing to release an introductory online course called Become Your Own Shaman, which is really exciting.
Wendy:And turns out I have to do a major upgrade to my website to make it possible to add an online course to it, which I'm in the process of doing. And guess how smoothly the transition went? Not really smoothly. But I was able to rebuild enough of the pertinent page on my site over this last weekend to have a functioning site again. But sadly, the library of podcast episodes I had created that were listed by topic didn't make the transition.
Wendy:So I'll be chipping away at recreating those pages in the coming weeks, in case you're looking for them. My hope is to still get the become your own shaman online course up and running sometime this summer. So please sign up for my newsletter if you'd like to get updates, which you can do either on the podcast website at the bottom of the page or on the contact page on my website lucidpathwellness.com. Or you can always subscribe to Lucid Cafe so you never miss an episode, and I'll also continue giving quick updates on the podcast. Alright.
Wendy:I'm hoping today's episode will inspire you to wanna do some writing. My guest, Meredith Heller, has lived quite a life. Creating music and writing were the things that saved her from a very difficult and traumatic childhood. Now she's helping others to find their inner writers. In this episode, Meredith talks about how her new book, Writing by Heart, A Poetry Path to Healing and Self Discovery, is inspiring women to find and express their authentic voices.
Wendy:I can't imagine how anyone reading this book would not feel moved to pick up a pen and start writing. Her easy, rule breaking, and creative approach to writing makes a process that's typically daunting super accessible. So please enjoy my really fun conversation with Meredith Heller. Oh, Meredith, thank you so much for joining me.
Meredith:Thank you. I'm so happy to be here with you. What a treat.
Wendy:Well, I'm looking forward to to chatting with you about your new book, Writing by Heart, A Poetry Path to Healing and Self Discovery. But before we dive into your book, I'd love to learn a little bit about your writing journey, what that's been like.
Meredith:Absolutely. Thank you. So poetry found me. I left home young. I left home at 12, 13 years old and raised myself living in domes I built in the woods along the Potomac River in Maryland, about 20 minutes outside of Washington DC.
Meredith:I lived in domes I built. I lived in abandoned houses and old barns, and I was very alone. I had a lot of trauma. I I had horrible depressions, and all of my friends were dying of suicide and drug overdose, and I wasn't far behind them. Oh, man.
Meredith:And poetry found me. I would get-- I'm also a singer songwriter. I would get the first line of poetry or song in my left ear like a lifeline and a work permit that said, stay here and find a way to name the overwhelming feelings of loss and longing and find a way to name it and shape it into something that brings me to greater clarity, deeper understanding, and possibly beauty. So that's how it began, And it was always my muse and whatever I was making, whether it was a poem or a song that kept me engaged in life. And I didn't share any of my work for a very long time, probably 20 years.
Meredith:It was my refuge. It was how I prayed. And I didn't want anybody near it. I don't remember what first started me sharing, but but as I began to share my poetry and my music, and I saw how it lit something in other people that helped them to know themselves, then I realized it's not mine. It's mine.
Meredith:I shape it. It comes through me, but it's bigger than me. Right. Yeah. And so, that's when life started getting more exciting, and I realized I was in deep relationship with my creativity.
Meredith:So then I had dropped out of school as a teenager, I went back to school. I got an undergraduate degree. I got 2 graduate degrees in writing and education and started teaching in the schools as a poet in the schools. So I was a poet in the schools for 30 years, and that was an amazing experience.
Wendy:What ages did you teach?
Meredith:Yeah. 1st through 12th grade, but I specialized with teen girls for empowerment and self expression, of course, because that's where my broken open happened.
Wendy:That makes perfect sense. Especially after reading your book, you don't talk about your history in this particular book, but now it makes a whole lot of sense. The voice has such authority in it, and it's such a welcome invitation to anyone who would like to try writing poetry. So now hearing your story, it makes perfect sense. You're coming from direct experience of how it helped you.
Wendy:It transformed you.
Meredith:Totally. Absolutely. Yeah. And even yes. And I I'm always coming from that personal experience of knowing.
Meredith:So my first book, Write A Poem, Save Your Life, is my story of how it saved me. Like, and I and I do tell about, oh, tip of the iceberg of some of the stuff that happened as a teen, how I lost my voice through trauma, how I found my voice and started reconnecting the abandoned parts of myself and calling myself back home and being able to hold a space for all of me, like the the sorrow and the depression and the doubt and the mess and the all of the broken down and collapsed parts and the bravery and the courage and the beauty and the brilliance and the all of it. And that's when I really my healing path really started. And I I realized that there's wholeness in this making room for all of it. And I think that's my main message.
Meredith:So I work with adult women now all over the US and a few around the world. I think that's my main message is through the writing that we're doing this personal self reflective and expressive, making room for all of the parts of ourselves. This is how we become whole. This is how we heal. And opening this line, like you were saying about the voice, love that you brought that in, opening this line of knowing what I feel and being able to voice it.
Meredith:I think for everybody, but especially for women, It is really our anchor and our empowerment.
Wendy:I think I know what you mean, but I would love for you to explain why you think it's important for women to reach inside and identify their feelings and, I guess, process them, you're suggesting through poetry. Why do you think it's extra important for women to do that?
Meredith:Yeah. It's such a great question. Thank you. I think that as women, we tend to take care of others.
Wendy:You think!?
Meredith:Just a little. Do you think?
Wendy:It's like genetic.
Meredith:That's what I'm saying. I was trying to find that line.
Meredith:That's exactly what I wanted to say. It is in our DNA to care for the babies. And so we learn to push our own needs and wants and intuition and desire aside for others. And there's a beauty in that as caretakers, but I believe our true power comes when we attend to what's here in us, what's bubbling up in our bellies, in our hearts, and give it our attention, tend to it with curiosity and kindness and courage.
Wendy:Yes. Absolutely. And as you're talking, I was just thinking about a little talk I did last night and talking about the nature of these times and how challenging they are. And I was referencing a a visionary experience I had back in 2008, which talked about these coming times and how it sort of tied into this chaos we're experiencing and trying to explain that. And what I discovered during that whole process is that a lot of prophecy, a lot of indigenous prophecy was revealed around the time of the Mayan long count calendar ending.
Wendy:I don't know if you remember all
Meredith:that in 2012. I do. I totally remember that.
Wendy:Yeah. It was very dramatic. Lots of films and is the world gonna end kind of talk. But what I discovered is that and I don't know if this is accurate or not, is that it's the end of a world age and the beginning of a new world age, and these world ages are, like, 5000 plus years long. And the world age that's ending right now is dominated by the masculine, and we're about to move into the world age that's
Meredith:I wish you guys could see Hallelujah. I wish you could see Hallelujah.
Wendy:The body language Meredith is throwing
Meredith:at me right now. So The vomit and the and the draw in the new.
Wendy:So we're moving into a period, which I'd like to believe is true, where there's balance between the masculine and the feminine. So I I wonder about this tendency for women to quiet our voices is a byproduct. I wonder if it's always been that way throughout human history or if it's more of a byproduct of this latest world age where the masculine has been dominant. And so we had to kind of step back and swallow our voices. Just a thought.
Wendy:Any thoughts?
Meredith:I totally agree. And it's not my area of research, but I know that there were matriarchal cultures and societies. And so I think what you're saying is, is that it does cycle. But what I love about what you're saying is you said the balance. And I think that is what we're really talking feminine has been suppressed and repressed.
Meredith:And I would even argue it's because it is we are, the feminine is so powerful, so potent. And just like the way, this might be controversial, but just in the way that the church and so many religions squelched and made the body bad, We are embodied in this lifetime. This body is our instrument. Let's come through it, not rise above it, not bury it
Wendy:Or ignore it. Yeah.
Meredith:Ignore it. Thank you. Not make it bad and wrong, but live through it. This is our human experience. Let's experience everything we can.
Meredith:And the sensuality is the feminine, so bring her.
Wendy:I'll drink to that. I am. So so poetry in particular has a sensuality to it, wouldn't you say?
Meredith:Oh, yeah. That's beautiful. That's a beautiful thing to say. Thank you. Absolutely.
Meredith:There's there's yeah. She's used that was that was poetry. There there's Check me out. Yeah. Check look at you.
Meredith:There's music. There's rhythm in poetry, and this is sensual. You know? I mean, a lot of times when I'm writing, I will take the skeleton of a of a poem with me on my walks. My walking is my meditation.
Meredith:I will take that skeleton of that poem on the walk and flesh it out to my heartbeat, my breath, my stride. And so this is another way to make our writing unique to our own rhythm. I do wanna say one thing about poetry. I am using poetry these days as an umbrella term because sometimes poetry intimidates people, and and I wanna do the opposite. I really wanna invite people in to this poetry practice as a way of presencing and expressing what's real and what's really going on down deep.
Meredith:And, and, so these days I'm using poetry as an umbrella term for this personal self reflective expressive writing, and all forms of writing are welcome if you work along with the book, if you come to my workshops. You can write in any form you want, Poetry, prose, story, mind spill, heart spill, song lyrics, make up your own form. Just write. That's where I'm coming from.
Wendy:And that feels so freeing, right, for someone especially who really wants to write and they've never have before. And I think a lot of people hear about all of the the rules they have to follow. I know I certainly have in my in my history of writing. Absolutely. And it it is intimidating, and it feels like there's a right and a wrong way to write, which is sad.
Wendy:Don't you think? It's terrible. You're suggesting the opposite. There is no right or wrong way. It's just, like, just get the shit out of you, whatever whatever way you have to.
Meredith:I'm suggesting there is a right way
Wendy:Yeah?
Meredith:And that's your way. Okay. Okay. Yeah. However you do it
Wendy:Mhmm.
Meredith:However it comes naturally for you or in whatever ways you wanna experiment and explore, that's your way. That is the right way because this tunes us back into listening, trusting our creative instinct and our intuition. And this is what creativity is. I mean, we are, all of us, innately creative because we're expressions of life force. Life force is creative.
Meredith:How could we be anything different? Right? And so any form of of any open door of creativity is about deep play.
Wendy:As long as you don't use adjectives or adverbs.
Meredith:Exactly. Right. But just throw away all the rules. Yeah, throw away the rules and write to commune with your deep self, write to touch what's really here and give it expression, and then have what you wrote be a mirror so you can even have that feedback loop of where you are and what's going on. And when you start doing this kind of writing and you're tuning into, like, deep psyche where the metaphors live and the subterranean world that we usually push away and don't talk about, you know, like the deep, dark, fertile, this is where it becomes alive.
Meredith:Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And the thing you're writing, you start to write things that you didn't know you knew, but you do because you're tapping what I call wild wisdom. And when you get to this place in your writing where you're willing to not know, and then you write something that's like, boom, how did I write that? Where did that come from?
Meredith:That image, that metaphor is so holds the space for me to understand what I'm going through. And that's what keeps you coming back to your writing because it's a place of learning and discovering and becoming more of who you are. It's rich. It's so rich. Yeah.
Meredith:And alive.
Wendy:And you think about it. It's our birthright. Right? I mean, that's how we've learned throughout our history is through telling story, and I don't think it matters what form it takes. Right?
Wendy:Absolutely. But finding ways to tell your own story or even someone else's story, that's a really cool healing thing.
Meredith:Yeah. I love that you bring that up about story. One of the things I notice in workshop in the workshops that I teach that's so beautiful is 2 really important things happen in workshop. 1, we're sharing our pieces so we're being witnessed, And there's so much healing in being witnessed, especially when we take things out of hiding and air them. And then we're hearing everyone else's story, and so we have this sense of commonality.
Meredith:We're not alone. For the most part as human beings, we have the same needs and wants and fears and dreams and longings and desires. We're human beings. This is what we're doing. And yet And yet.
Wendy:And yet we feel so alone Right. Especially with our wounds. We might feel like we're the only one who feels this way. Exactly. You keep it very private.
Wendy:Right. But you're saying, no. Bring it out and share it, and you find that it's universal.
Meredith:Exactly. It's universal. So as we begin sharing these things that exactly what you said that have made us feel alone and insular and that we've kept private. When we start to share these and hear other people sharing them, we see the universality of our human experience. On the one hand, paradoxically, we find that our story and everything we've been through is unique, and it matters.
Meredith:Our voice, our story, and how we engage and participate in the whether it's a workshop or the family or the community or the whole living community of life matters. So we hold both of these at the same time. Oh my god. I'm not so different, and I'm totally unique, and it matters simultaneously woven together.
Wendy:Love it. Your book, Writing by Heart, is really an invitation.
Meredith:Absolutely. And all and and I don't I don't never use the word writing prompt. I don't ever wanna be prompted into anything. I wanna be invited. So they're all called invitation.
Meredith:So I love that you said invitation. It's an invitation for your muse to find you, for your poetry and your musicality of language to find you, and for you to find your voice.
Wendy:How do you think writing poetry or whatever form it takes can be like medicine?
Meredith:Yeah. What happens when we come to writing, as I say, as a practice rather than as a perfect. This is writing as a practice. It begins to nourish us and nurture us, and we begin to weave the lost and abandoned and exiled, wounded, painful parts of ourselves back into being on board in the wholeness of who we are, And this is where the medicine lives, in this remembering and making room for all of it without judging it, without saying my depression is bad. My depression has really important juju for me if I'm willing to dig in and find the treasure.
Meredith:And you can do that in your writing because you can be totally honest. Who who's who are you writing for? In this kind of writing, nobody out here. You are writing for yourself. And if you don't want anybody to ever find it, burn it or rip it up.
Meredith:But you've been there with yourself doing the dig into the down and dirty and coming up muddy with with dirt on your fingernails and a grin on your face because you've tasted what's real.
Wendy:You speak in poem.
Meredith:I like that. Why not? If I have a choice, why not?
Wendy:No. No. It's beautiful. Very musical, very lyrical, the way you talk. I was gonna say that, I I've always kind of looked at symptoms as, like, any symptom that anyone has as, important.
Wendy:Right? And it's trying to get your attention because it has a story to tell. And so what you're suggesting is tell whatever you're feeling, tell the story of that feeling or the symptom, depression being a symptom, or or anxiety or whatever. That's incredibly powerful. It's a an acknowledgment.
Meredith:Yeah. It's a being with. It's an opening the doorway for whatever is presenting itself also to have a voice. Because we want to learn its wisdom. We wanna learn what it needs.
Meredith:If we give the symptom or the parts of the body. There's a big chapter in the book on body language. I was a bodyworker for 27 years. I specialized in doing rehab of spinal cord injury patients. What I I mean, I worked with 100 of thousands of bodies, and what I learned is that if we give it the invitation, the body will tell us its medicine, how to heal it, what it needs, what it longs for.
Meredith:We open that conversation just like the writing is opening this conversation, this communing with deep self. And from here, anything is possible.
Wendy:Alright. Let's start writing, folks.
Meredith:Okay. Let's do it. Here we go.
Wendy:That's how I felt when I was reading your book. I was like, oh, I
Meredith:Time to write. It's time to write.
Wendy:Yeah, exactly. Because it's it's really probably is akin to taking one of your workshops is what I'm guessing. Yeah. But you get to do it in the privacy of your own home if they can't meet with you in person or however. Do you do workshops online too?
Meredith:So right now, I'm teaching online mainly. Oh, okay. I do in person retreats, but you have to you have to come to a couple of workshops, online workshops before you can come to the retreat because we the retreat starts deep and goes deeper.
Wendy:Gotcha. Yeah. No. That makes sense.
Meredith:Yeah.
Wendy:So your book is, like, there's so many creative ways to engage yourself in a writing process, and you make it, again, like I was saying before, so accessible. Yeah. It's not intimidating at all. So for anyone who might feel like, oh, I'm not a writer, hell, yeah, you are. You can do it, especially with with this book.
Meredith:Yeah. Just open any I say the pages every page is a doorway. Open any doorway and walk through to your where to yourself? It's a doorway to you. You're making more room to know yourself, to explore yourself, to express yourself.
Meredith:What could be better? And then the way you show up, it echoes into your life. Women who come to my workshop say, we walk the workshop into our life.
Wendy:I like that.
Meredith:Yeah. Right? We stand taller. We have more support in who we are, in in what we know about ourselves, being able to have a feeling and know how to articulate it more easily, to ask for what we want, to know what we need. Like, they walk that into their life, and I'm like, whoo wee.
Meredith:It's just like a
Wendy:big boost of power, personal power and and confidence. That's one of the questions I was gonna ask you, and you just kind of answered it, I think, unless you wanna embellish or add. Can you speak to how writing transformed you? Like, how it healed you?
Meredith:Yeah. Absolutely. Having left home so young, 12, 13 years old, with absolutely no support and no stability and everything that I knew constantly changing and constantly falling away, my friends all dying. I was pretty shut down, and I did not have confidence or self esteem. I was pretty, like, in survival mode.
Meredith:And as I began writing more and more, it gave me the capacity to I have very deep feelings. I've always felt
Wendy:everything. You know? Like I I suspect you're not alone with that. Yeah.
Meredith:Right. Exactly. Like, if most people just have 7 colors, I have 64. I feel every single one of those colors, and each of those colors is a musical note. You know, like that.
Meredith:So I often operated in an overwhelm of this amoebic overwhelm of feeling. And the more that I wrote, I learned how to take the feelings and name them, know how to call them by name. And when I did that, it gave me it gave the feelings a shape, and it gave me one degree of separation so that I could actually look at it instead of sitting or it sitting in the middle of me or me sitting in the middle of it, which is probably simultaneous both. So then I could actually look at it. And then once I could look at it and name it, well, then I could move it around and reorganize it just the way we do words on page.
Meredith:Right? Oh, well, what do I actually wanna feel? What do I wanna create in my life? What what do I need in my orbit to support me, what I call living in a a state of You know? Yeah.
Meredith:Right? How do I support the that is when I'm in flow? It could be creative flow. It could just be flow when I'm walking down the street going through my life and boom, there's that person I needed to talk to and they just showed up, what I like to call synchro mystic.
Wendy:Synchro mystic? What describe that.
Meredith:It's that mystical flow when we are in tune with the universe, that which is bigger than us. And we are part of it and things line up synchronistically. Oh, I was just thinking of that person, and there they are. And, Oh, you know, I had an idea about this thing. And oh, my god, there it says that word right there.
Meredith:And I'm at the right place at the right time. And those moments of synchronicity that, for me, always feel like, back to what we were talking about before, I'm not alone. I am connected to something bigger and larger than me. For me, that's the life force. I'm a huge nature person.
Meredith:That's where I source that connection. That's what I like. That's what I believe in is nature, and I learn how to be human from how nature operates. It goes dormant at times. It has a fallow time, making room for fallow.
Meredith:There's a chapter in the book called fertile darkness, and and then the sprouting and planting seeds and then leafing and budding and blooming and fruiting and ripening and rotting and dropping away. All of this is part of what life does. How do I make room for this instead of just becoming a cog in the machine, which never worked for me. And my cog didn't fit anywhere. So I
Wendy:I can't imagine what that would be like. To feel like, yeah, your cog doesn't fit. Right? Machine. Yeah.
Meredith:My cog doesn't fit.
Wendy:It doesn't fit. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. I can certainly relate to that.
Wendy:Do you remember what started it all for you? Like, do you remember that moment you put pen to paper or however it worked for you that first time. Like, I'm trying to imagine what you described as a young woman or an adolescent
Meredith:A kid.
Wendy:Struggling yeah. Struggle kid. Uh-huh. Struggling, on your own. And, like, how old were you when you started writing?
Meredith:Well, there's yeah. It's a great question. I really appreciate it, and then there's a couple of branched roots to that. So I started writing young, like 5 years old. I started writing short stories.
Meredith:And, I would sit in the basement of the house I grew up in all by myself for hours and hours and hours after school and write stories. I I have a sister who's 2 years older, but we were never close. We're very different. And I had imaginary brothers and sisters, and I would write stories all about them. I knew every single one of them.
Meredith:I mean, not like a lot of brothers and sisters like a whole tribe. Why not when if you cook. Right? Exactly. The more the merrier.
Meredith:And so And
Wendy:they were all really nice. Or were they?
Meredith:Well, they were all really interesting and unique. Okay. Right. Very specific personalities. So I would write the stories about them.
Meredith:So that was probably my youngest experience with writing. Music was my first doorway into creative expression. And so I would write my own songs with lyrics, And I think that was when I really started. And there's something for me about music and melody, married to lyrics that allowed me to capture the emotion in the melody paired with the words, metaphors, visual, sensual imagery that could express what I was feeling that for me freed me. It freed me and gave me that pathway of expression, which for me is really important.
Meredith:Expressing myself is like, that's how I know myself. Through expression. Yeah. I don't think I've ever ever even said that before, but it's it's true.
Wendy:Okay. Well, it makes perfect sense. Right? I mean, it seems like of course. Right.
Wendy:But maybe we don't think of it that way just naturally. Yeah.
Meredith:I know that for me, when I articulate something, I feed it back to myself in a way, and then I know it twice.
Wendy:Yeah. I think I understand that. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you're in a dialogue with yourself, sort of.
Meredith:Yeah. Yeah.
Wendy:Alright. So then I feel like I'm going back and forth between your
Meredith:Yeah. That's great. Yeah.
Wendy:Autobiographical material and your latest book. Let's go back to your latest book. So I wanted to just touch on some of these. You're not calling them prompts. You're calling them invitations.
Wendy:Let's look at the body and how you use that as a tool to help people.
Meredith:Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. So body language is the longest chapter in the book, and it goes through it starts with the hands because they are so complex but not as vulnerable as other parts that we get to in the book.
Meredith:And then we work our way through the body, giving the body an opportunity to tell its story, different body parts. What's the story here? Like, let's work with hips. That could be really vulnerable for some people and also empowering. Asking, going into dialogue, into communication with our hips.
Meredith:How and where have you been shut down? Where did you learn to hold so tightly when you walk or when you dance or or the direction that your pelvis tilts forward or backward. And is that natural for your body, or is that a trauma response? Is that something you learned in protection? When do your hips feel free?
Meredith:What does it feel like when your hips feel like they can move in any way they want? And so in every section of the book, especially so I think for this, for body language, there's a section called body mindfulness where it's a guided journey meditation to help you to access what's happening in your body or a felt experience or deep psyche or imagination or your senses that's gonna give you the information for your writing so that you're not thinking your way there. You're having an experiential journey that gets you to the information that's gonna populate your writing. So it becomes, like, very right here and right now and alive. And I even have chills as I'm saying this because it's so true.
Meredith:I'm always telling people. And when I'm teaching workshops online, I can see when people start thinking their way to something. I say, don't think your way there because Please
Wendy:don't. Yeah.
Meredith:Please don't think your way there. Don't do that to yourself.
Wendy:Habitual though for most of us in the western world.
Meredith:It is.
Wendy:We're pretty top heavy.
Meredith:We really are. And we rob ourselves of the discovery that's going to be so much more interesting and juicy when we come from something experiential, a felt experience or a bodily sensation or our senses or something that populates in the imagination or something that bubbles up from deep psyche. It's going to be so much more interesting and juicy than anything we can think our way to. And once you taste that, then you learn to stop thinking your way there. So in the body language section, we do a journey for each body part, and that's very tangible.
Meredith:And that's a great way to start, for people because it is so tangible, and the information is right here in the body. You know? And I yeah. Yeah. Put your hands on that part of the body.
Meredith:Yeah.
Wendy:I was just gonna say, like, as you were describing just like examining your relationship with your hips, when do we ever do that? Never? Right. Never? Never.
Wendy:I mean Exactly. So it's like Never.
Meredith:Never. Right. As you
Wendy:were kind of asking the questions, I'm thinking, I don't think I know my hips in that way. I mean, I don't just as an example. I mean, unless I'm an anomaly, but I suspect, none of us really think of ourselves in that way.
Meredith:Right. Right. And I think that's I I think that there are so many of us who haven't given ourselves and our bodies the invitation to tell the story. And it's the wounding stories and the glorious stories, especially when you come to hips. Like I mean, my own journey, like when I started listening to my hips, I realized I'm a big walker.
Meredith:I walk like 5 miles a day. That's how I meditate. And at one point, I was aware that I held my hips very straight and with no movement, and I called that my soldier. Protection, not letting anything in because it wasn't safe, and not letting anything out. And that was painful to feel that and to become aware of it.
Meredith:But once I became aware of it and I started writing this that story of the soldier
Wendy:Right.
Meredith:I thanked the soldier for protecting me. I needed protection. And then it began to shift because I became curious. How do my hips wanna move? How how are they capable of moving?
Meredith:I also grew up dancing, so I do have a lot of fluidity in my body and my hips, but my dancing is, like I might even do it in a group, but I dance by myself with myself. And so then and walking is out in the world. So I needed to protect myself in the walking. But, like, the curiosity, well, how do hips move, and what are they capable of? And what happens like, what do I feel when I allow my hips to start moving?
Meredith:Woah. There's feeling there. What happens when I allow myself to feeling? And then it's like this amazing doorway, and we become more Like you were saying, we become more rich. We become richer as we melt the patterns of conditioning that we learned before we had a choice that's that are so much out of protection and trauma and wounding and needing being expected to be a cog that fits in the machine.
Meredith:So when we start melting all of that stuff down, and there are many, many ways to melt it down, Writing is a path home. There are many paths home. We begin melting that conditioning and that armoring and those survival patterns. We begin to soften those, and then the life force that moves through us in its own rhythms and serpentine motions, talking of hips, it feeds us. It feeds our life, and and we begin to be nourished on a deep soul level as part of nature, I would say.
Meredith:We really are part of nature. We come back into our We
Wendy:are nature.
Meredith:We are nature. Thank you.
Wendy:Yes. Thank you. Yeah. That that's I mean, I don't wanna digress too much. It's just that is something that I think is also deeply embedded in our cultural psyche is that we are separate from nature.
Wendy:And it's it's like you could say it's the lie that started many other lies and the the way we conduct ourselves. I won't get on that soapbox right now. I just I just
Meredith:Yeah. We we we would you and I would rage on that on that topic. So I just keep pointing my compass back to what you just said, which I love is that we are nature. And as we melt down all the stuff that isn't who we truly are, then we get to be our natural selves. And this is really, I feel, when we begin to be nourished by life and we have something to offer.
Wendy:That just sounds lovely. Yeah. And we're talking about the body, but you have invitations to connect with in the natural world, the elementals.
Meredith:Yeah.
Wendy:Also, your sensory experiences. So how you are engaged in the world and how the world engages with you, the world around you, and and more. Right? There's so many different ways to explore yourself through your book, which is, I mean, it's it's really cool.
Meredith:Great. Thank you. I'm so glad you love it.
Wendy:So one of the things I wanted to because you mentioned shamanic journeying in your book, so, of course, I have to explore that a little bit with you. I'm curious about how a shamanic practice influenced your writing and maybe even how you got pulled into learning how to connect to the dreaming in that way.
Meredith:Yeah. Thank you. So glad I wanted to go there with you too. I think in my twenties started working with a couple shamanic practitioners, and I learned to journey to a drumbeat, which as soon as I did it, I was like, oh, I've been doing this my whole life. You know?
Meredith:It's like,
Wendy:Which
Meredith:makes sense given your trauma background. Right? Right. Right. Trauma and really, rich inner life and imagination.
Wendy:I find the 2 usually go hand in hand
Meredith:Yes.
Wendy:With people who've had tremendous trauma. They retreat inward and sometimes outward.
Meredith:Yes. And sometimes both at the same
Wendy:time. Exactly. Yeah. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Please.
Meredith:No. It's fine. I love riffing. So learned to journey, was completely at home there, had wild, amazing experiences that completely changed my life. I was part of a shamanic drumming circle for a while that I loved, and I wish I still had this one.
Meredith:It was on my 50th birthday. I did a journey to drumbeat where I'll just say they. They completely dismembered my heart until there was nothing there except a matrix of space. And I was shown how every hurt and resentment that I attached to was like a knot tied into the matrix of threads that crossed that then became part of my heart vibration. And so it was my task to catch any hurt or wound or resentment before it became a knot that was embedded in the new heart field I was given.
Meredith:And then slowly over time, the crossed fibers of the field became musical tones that sang notes and harmonized with other notes and became I basically got a new heart. I was given a new heart, and the dismembering was pretty intense.
Wendy:Yeah. And they usually are, aren't they?
Meredith:And gnarly and weird and, like What the oh my god.
Wendy:Were you gonna say what the fuck?
Meredith:Yeah. I was. I was gonna say what the fuck. Thank you. I wasn't I didn't know if we're allowed to
Wendy:stop. Allowed.
Meredith:Yeah.
Wendy:It's totally allowed. Right.
Meredith:Oh, it's so great. Good. Good. Otherwise, I'd have to repress myself, which we know I can't stand doing. I don't want you to do that.
Meredith:I say fuck a lot when I teach my workshops. The other day, somebody I do too. Yeah. Somebody said fuck a lot. I'm sorry.
Meredith:And I made everybody unmute, and we all said fuck 3 times really in a fulfilling way. It was just enlightening. Yeah.
Wendy:It's a great You just go with whatever's in app.
Meredith:It's It is it's so versatile.
Wendy:Fucking great word. Yeah.
Meredith:And you can put it wherever you need it. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You have a fabulous buck.
Meredith:Let's start a new podcast.
Wendy:All right. Let's do it.
Meredith:Okay. So so that was my experience with Shamanic Journeying. Like, oh my god. This. Fucking yeah.
Meredith:Right? And it definitely informed a lot of the body mindfulness sections in the book and the journeying to find animal allies, which is my favorite kind of journey to do, my absolute fucking favorite kind of journey to do, for healing and to help navigate changes and challenges. Right? Because then you call on this animal who has this instinctual nature and skills and sensory capacity, and they don't doubt themselves. They know what they need, and they search it out, and they find it.
Meredith:And to have that kind of instinct in your toolbox to navigate whatever it is or to do healing work, physical, psychic, emotional, every realm is happening simultaneously. I just it's my very favorite thing to do. We did a really interesting workshop, which is the last chapter, chapter 14 in the book, Metamorphosis, where we went through the metamorphosis that a butterfly goes through from pupa to caterpillar to chrysalis to winged 1 to adult butterfly, and we inhabited each stage of the process to map and track our own cycles of change and transformation and becoming. And it's one of my absolute favorite workshop.
Wendy:It's very cool. That's very cool.
Meredith:Yeah. And the poems that came out of that workshop. I mean, the the women who come to workshop shop who have example poems in this book, I mean, I just call them the warrior women poets, brave and beautiful and vulnerable and genuine, and and show up every week and dig deep for the treasure that feeds them. Re vitalize.
Wendy:It shows in the examples.
Meredith:Yeah. I mean, potent. Like like mind blowing heartbreaking open poetry. And yeah, I'm just deep bow to the women poets. I'm so proud with them with, and I celebrate them.
Meredith:And I just feel so honored and joyous that I get to share with them what I love, what I'm passionate about, what, my healing journey has been this poetry path, and then to watch them open and blossom as they work with the writing path as a pathway home to love. I tell you yeah. There it is. I, my first book, write a poem, save your life, I I realized recently, it felt like I wrote it in blood. And this book, writing by heart, feels like I wrote it in honey.
Meredith:And it's the journey from survival That's beautiful. To love. And I think so many of us are on this journey, and writing is a path home to love.
Wendy:Yeah. I mean, that's just what you described speaks to your direct experience of what writing has done for you. You had to go into the trenches and write with your blood before you could write with your honey.
Meredith:Yeah.
Wendy:So you work with people in these workshops, And if someone wanted to learn more, how would they do that? Mereditheller.com. Okay. That's pretty straightforward.
Meredith:Yep. That's the that I must have gotten that one. That's just it's me. You will find me there. You can write to me.
Meredith:I will write you back. All of the information about the workshops, the books, everything's there. I am on Facebook also, a little bit on Instagram, I and get a copy for yourself. And for anybody who feels the call to write these pages or doorways open.
Wendy:They really are. I mean,
Meredith:It's not home.
Wendy:As a long time writer, I had never seen invitations in this way. That's just like, Jesus, where was this book 30 years ago, 40 years ago?
Meredith:Well yeah. And that's the other piece of it. Thanks for saying that. Because my journey was so was one that of such aloneness and having to find my own way because 30, 40 years ago, 45 years ago, I didn't know anybody who was doing this, and I didn't want anybody really to have to go through what I went through by themselves. I wanted to say, here's a way.
Meredith:Follow me to yourself. Follow me to find yourself. Here's a way. Get bring your paper and pen. Come on.
Meredith:You know? And
Wendy:And all your invisible friends.
Meredith:Bring all your invisible friends and your magic wand, otherwise known as your pen. And I really suggest invite people to write with pen and paper because there is an organic process that happens that I think involves and engages body, nervous system, arms coming from chest, coming from heart into hands, deep psyche that's different than tapping on keys.
Wendy:I could see that. Yeah.
Meredith:Yeah. And it's it's nice to play in in each way, to do some writing with pen and paper and see what it pulls from you. Even the the pressure it takes to push pen across texture of paper engages us physically and sensually. I have an old push typewriter. I think it's from the forties.
Meredith:Uh-huh. Cool. And it's so cool. A little blue royal. I call him baby blue.
Meredith:And, a lot of mornings I'll sit and type at the typewriter because I'm not as attached to what comes out and all the keys jam and I don't care.
Wendy:Right. You
Meredith:know? And so it's like it gets a different part of my perception, a different part of my awareness. So it's also fun to experiment. What writing voice comes through when I'm tapping on keys? What writing voice comes through when I'm dragging a pen across paper?
Meredith:What writing voice comes through when I'm even talking it? Some people are like, I don't have the patience to write it out. I said, grab your phone and open your voice memos and talk your piece. Speak
Wendy:it. Yeah.
Meredith:Speak it. So it's like anything is welcome. What I'm talking about is a practice of presencing.
Wendy:Alright, Meredith.
Meredith:Oh, so great to talk to you, Wendy. Thank you so much. Thank you. Loved it.
Wendy:So do you feel inspired to write? If you'd like to learn more about Meredith, take one of her workshops, or get a copy of her latest book, please visit meredithheller.com. The link is in the show notes. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you'll consider sharing it with someone who's feeling creatively stuck or just plain stuck.
Wendy:Writing is such a powerful tool. Well, I'll look forward to reconnecting with you in a few weeks with another episode of Lucid Cafe. Until next time.