My passion is empowering people to trust their creative instincts, tap their wild wisdom, speak their truth, ignite their hearts.
My Story
My healing journey led me to weave together a life rooted in poetry music, movement, nature, holistic healing, and embodied learning. With graduate degrees in writing and education from Johns Hopkins, Naropa, and Goddard— and having navigated my way through the dark terrain of trauma, depression, and clinical insomnia, I’ve returned with courage, wisdom, and playfulness to share — tools to guide people home to their own wild hearts. My work invites us to reconnect with our inner wilderness, our wise bodies, the natural world, and our creative pulse to live a life of curiosity, wonder, presence, depth, and soul‑rooted expression.
From an early age, I found freedom through creative expression — music, dance, theater, and literature were my first languages. Then, at 13, disillusioned with society and searching for deeper meaning, I left home and school. I raised myself in the woods along the Potomac River near Washington, DC, where I discovered a sense of belonging in nature and learned to live by my own rhythms. This was there I began writing the poems and songs that would ultimately save my life.
For 27 years, I held a thriving practice in massage therapy and spinal cord injury rehab, retiring my hands in 2011. Since then, I’ve been a performing singer-songwriter, led music and movement classes for children, taught poetry writing, and coached guitar, voice, and songwriting for teens. I’ve been a nature guide and gardener, co-managed the farm at Esalen in Big Sur, CA, and stewarded Whale Song, a retreat center on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, where daily swims with wild spinner dolphins opened my heart and deepened my connection with life.
Since 1996, I’ve worked as a poet in the schools in Boulder, CO and Marin County, CA, leading writing workshops at public and private schools, juvenile detention centers, women’s prisons, the Institute for Poetic Medicine, the Kennedy Center for the Arts, wellness and creativity retreats, and online for a global community of writers. In 2024, I was awarded the Trails’ Poet of the Yuba River in Nevada City, CA.
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 include:
Happiest in nature, I spent fifteen summers solo-backpacking and vision questing. I now live with a gentle footprint in a tiny cottage in Marin County, CA and spend my summers camping and writing beside rivers and oceans. 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