My passion is empowering people to trust their creative instinct, tap their wild wisdom, speak their truth, ignite their heart.
My journey led me to weave together a life rooted in poetry, music, dance, nature, healing, and embodied learning. With graduate degrees in writing and education from Johns Hopkins, Naropa University, and Goddard College, and having navigated my way through the dark terrain of trauma, depression, and insomnia, I’ve returned with courage, wisdom, and playfulness to share. I bring tools to guide us home to our wild hearts and open the way for soulful expression.
From an early age, I found freedom through creative expression– music, dance, and writing were my pathways home. At thirteen, disillusioned with society and longing for a deeper truth, I left home and school and raised myself in the woods along the Potomac River near Washington, DC. There, I discovered a sense of belonging in nature and learned to live by my own rhythms. It was in these years that I began writing the poems and songs that would save my life.
For 27 years, I had a thriving practice in massage therapy and spinal cord injury rehabilitation, retiring my hands in 2011. Since then, I’ve been a performing singer/songwriter, I owned Mount Tam Music Together where I led music & movement classes for children and coached guitar, voice, and songwriting for teens. In 2001, I helped manage the farm at Esalen in Big Sur, CA, and in 2006, I stewarded Whale Song, a retreat center on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. In 2024, I was made a Trails’ Poet of the Bear Yuba Land Trust in Nevada City, CA at my beloved Yuba River where I spend my summers camping and writing.
Since 1996, I’ve been leading writing workshops as a poet in the schools, at juvenile detention centers, women’s prisons, the Institute for Poetic Medicine, the Kennedy Center for the Arts, wellness & creativity retreats, and online for a global community of writers.
My Poems & Essays Appear in Numerous Literary Publications: HerStories, Rebelle Society, We’Moon, Raw Earth Ink, Sad Girls Club Lit, Tiny Seed, Aquarian, Avocet, American Songwriter, Tiny House, Creation and the Cosmos, and Aphrodisiac.
My Books
Write a Poem, Save Your Life & Writing By Heart
My Poetry Collections
Songlines, River Spells, Yuba Witch, & Caterpillar Girl
Happiest in nature, I spent fifteen summers solo-backpacking and vision questing. I now live with a gentle footprint in a tiny cottage made from a train caboose on Coast Miwok territory in Marin County, CA. I hike daily, listening for the paths — within and without — that sing us home.
I am mused by nature, synchronicity,
and kindred souls.
FIREBIRD by Meredith Heller