Art Heals All Wounds
Do you think art can change the world? So do I! We’re at a pivotal moment when scientists, medical practitioners, and creatives are coming together in recognition of the ways that art plays an indispensable role in our well-being, as individuals, communities, and societies. In each episode we hear from artists and creatives who share their inspiration for their work and its wider impact. These conversations about transformative artistic practices show the ways that art can be a catalyst for healing and change.
How do we change the world? One artist at a time.
Art Heals All Wounds
Deep Listening and the Healing Power of Writing with Meredith Heller
In this episode of Art Heals All Wounds, versatile and multidisciplinary artist Meredith Heller shares her story of how writing poetry saved her life. From a troubled adolescence to becoming a writer and workshop leader, Meredith describes her longtime practice of deep listening as the beginning of self-expression. Her latest book, Writing by Heart, is a guide for individuals to access internal quiet spaces and practice reflective writing. Meredith discusses her experiences working with various communities, including incarcerated women, and emphasizes creating internal peace, listening, and sharing heartfelt, authentic work that strengthens our circles of connection.
00:00 Introduction to Art Heals All Wounds
00:35 Meet Meredith Heller: A Multifaceted Artist
00:50 The Power of Listening and Connection
00:58 Meredith's Journey: From Nature to Poetry
01:19 Writing by Heart: A Deep Dive
02:06 Supporting the Show
02:21 Interview with Meredith Heller
06:47 The Healing Power of Writing
11:05 Creating Quiet Spaces and Connection
15:32 Workshops and Community Building
32:36 The Poem Knows the Poem
38:58 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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[00:00:00] Pam Uzzell: Do you believe art can change the world? So do I! On this show, we meet artists whose work is doing just that. Welcome to Art Heals All Wounds. I'm your host, Pam Uzzell.
[00:00:35] Singer-songwriter, body worker for persons with spinal cord injuries, dance and music instructor for children and seniors, and poetry workshop leader. My guest today has done all of these things. When asked about her life and these many pursuits, she says, the connection is listening. When Meredith Heller was 13 years old, she left home for good.
[00:01:03] She felt hopeless. She began first listening to nature. Soon she began to hear the first lines of songs and poems, words and melodies that urged her to stay, that there was work for her to do. Her latest book, Writing by Heart, came out of poetry workshops she's been leading for women. It's an invitation to anyone to find a quiet space to begin to listen deeply.
[00:01:33] For so many people, peace and quiet is a luxury. If we find ourselves in a life of noise and chaos, this book is a guide on how to find a quiet space within yourself. No matter Where we are. How do you find the first line to your poem? How will that open you up to connecting with the larger circle of others?
[00:02:00] Also sharing their poems.
[00:02:06] You want to know how you can really help me keep this show going? Follow me on your favorite listening app. So easy, right? And if you really want to give the show a boost, leave me a five star rating or review.
[00:02:21] Hi, Meredith. Thank you so much for being on Art Heals All Wounds. Can you just introduce yourself a little bit more, who you are and what you do?
[00:02:30] Meredith Heller: Absolutely. I'm so happy to be here, Pam. Thank you for having me. So I'm Meredith Heller, and what I currently do is teach and lead writing workshops for women all over the country and a few women around the world. And leading up to this iteration of my life, I have had other careers. I was a bodyworker for 27 years, specializing in doing rehab with spinal cord injury patients.
[00:03:05] Then I had a business doing music and dance with children for 10 years, and the elderly, doing music and movement, singing and movement. I was a singer songwriter performer for many years. During all of that, I was a poet in the schools for 30 years, specializing with working with at risk teens. And now all of that led me into leading workshops for adult women.
[00:03:33] And somebody asked me the other day, what's the connection between all of these? And I realized in that moment that it's listening, listening with my hands into another person's body, looking and listening for places of opening and freedom versus holding. Listening as a musician, listening to my body and other people's bodies through dance and movement, working with kids in the schools who are often so resistant, and listening for the openings where they let me in and where they let themselves out
[00:04:16] And now holding space for women, which is such a deep listening in a way that's a mirror so that other people can hear themselves.
[00:04:30] Pam Uzzell: That is profound. I love that connection. That's so, so interesting. Well, you've written a new book called Writing by Heart. And I would love for you to talk about this book a little bit.
[00:04:45] Meredith Heller: Writing by Heart came out of the workshops that I've been doing with women, leading them in personal, self reflective, self expressive, [00:05:00] poetic writing. This kind of writing where we show up with ourselves really as a practice of presencing. What's bubbling up here with me? What's going on in my belly and in my heart?
[00:05:16] Really and truly like not just the surface, but the deep, the underbelly and feeling safe enough and held enough to be genuine about what's happening and then to write about it in a way where we actually learn something about ourselves that we might not have known that we knew. But we do. So I started these workshops during the pandemic when we were all isolated and in quarantine and didn't have communities and I started this as a way of giving us access to a hearth to gather around and share and support each other and let each other know we're not alone. And they grew and blossomed and the need was huge. So it's been so exciting and it's my total passion. And I sat down after about three years of the workshop and looked at all the information and thought, Oh my God, it's so good.
[00:06:22] The writing invitations are juicy. The poems the women are writing are mind blowing, heartbreaking, open. I have to share this with the world. So I sat down every single day for two weeks for about 12 hours a day and wrote the first draft and then spent the next year making it sing.
[00:06:44] Pam Uzzell: That is very. Very interesting.
[00:06:47] I, I want to get into more of the details of this book, but I know that you wrote a previous book called Write a Poem, Save Your Life and that this work of writing is not. theoretical to you about how it heals. Can you share with me, I don't know what happened for you that led you to write that first book and to really discover how healing writing was.
[00:07:15] Meredith Heller: Yes, absolutely. Thank you. Writing really did save my life. I left home when I was a young teenager, 12, 13 years old. I started leaving and had left for good at 13. And I raised myself, this was on the East Coast, about 20 minutes outside of Washington, D. C. where I grew up. And I raised myself living out in domes I built in the woods, in abandoned houses along the Potomac River, in old barns.
[00:07:50] Nature was pretty much the only thing I trusted as I was growing up. It was the only place where I believed what I was hearing and feeling and seeing. So I immersed myself in nature to really learn from nature and the metaphors that I found in nature how to be human. What are the cycles of living and growing and dying and letting go?
[00:08:16] And so I was very alone, and I suffered with horrible depressions, and there was really nothing to hold on to. All my friends were dying of suicide and overdose, and I wasn't that far behind them. And poetry and songwriting found me. And I would get the first line of poetry or song lyric with melody in my left ear, like a lifeline, like a work permit that said, stay.
[00:08:56] Stay here. There's something here to work with. There's something worth your time and your attention and your digging into yourself to find a way in and a way through. And so anytime I got that first line I would just sit for sometimes 15, 17 hours at a time until I had a poem or a song that revealed to me, helped me to see myself and gave me just one degree of separation so that the overwhelm of everything I was feeling,
[00:09:37] I had a way to express it and to work with it and almost to be able to say, wow, if I can put these words on the page, maybe I can move them around to actually create some kind of meaning for myself that helps me hold all of this [00:10:00] overwhelm and chaos that's going on in the world. I feel like I was always looking for a deeper way of living, a deeper meaning than what I was being shown in our society and our culture.
[00:10:15] I think I was more of a mystic and the writing and the music helped me to do this and to make meaning and even finally to create beauty out of what was so painful.
[00:10:30] Pam Uzzell: So this practice of really deep listening goes way back for you.
[00:10:37] Meredith Heller: Yeah. Such a good point. You got it. Yeah.
[00:10:41] Pam Uzzell: It's fascinating. I, I wish for you, you would not
[00:10:46] experienced the pain. On the other hand, your experience of being in nature, maybe it just allowed you to get away from all of the noise that might have interfered with hearing this. So yeah, that's a very powerful story. I do want to go back to your new book. I started reading it and I'm realizing quickly it's not a book that you just gobble up and consume like a novel.
[00:11:17] So let's talk about some of the details of this book. What is its purpose? Well, how did you envision people using this book?
[00:11:28] Meredith Heller: Great. Yes. I love that you said it's not a, uh, something you can gobble up. I don't think you can gobble it up, but you can take little bites and chew on them for quite a while. And they just keep getting more delicious as you go.
[00:11:42] It's a guide book. It's a companion for anybody who wants to do this kind of deep, personal, as you so beautifully put, listening to themselves and you can follow along in the chapters exactly as they're laid out linearly, or you could open anywhere as if you're picking a tarot card and choose a writing invitation that stands out for you.
[00:12:11] And I do call them invitations rather than writing prompts. I don't like the feel of the word prompt. I don't want to be prompted. That feels like being pushed. No, but an invitation, something that draws us and invites us in. To be present with ourselves, an invitation to which I want to say, yes, yes, me, yes, this slowing down of time and being so I can really be here with myself and listen inwardly.
[00:12:49] So the book has a lot of different areas and topics of self exploration. Some of them lead us into working with our past and making peace with things that happened in the past. I'm very fluent in that in my own life. Others of the invitations invite us into deep expressions of imagination and creativity, and then others lead us into envisioning who do I want to become from who I am now?
[00:13:25] Where am I pointing the direction, the compass of my heart? Where do I want to go? Who am I creating myself into being? As I write it, I make it so. That's the big picture. And then within each chapter and each section of the book is a subsection called body mindfulness, which takes you on a guided journey,
[00:13:57] like a guided meditation to tune in with your body, with your felt sense, with imagination, with deep psyche, with your angels if you've got them and this experience generates the information that will go into our writing. So, so often people are like, Oh my God, you know, what if I can't access what I'm going to write?
[00:14:24] Or I don't know what, if I even have something to write. I always give you an experience that populates what will inform your writing. So it's really a companion. And my vision is that people take this book in their backpack with a journal everywhere they go.
[00:14:44] Pam Uzzell: I love that as you were talking, I was thinking about going back to your own story that you talked about, the need for a lot of us to find or create quiet spaces and [00:15:00] literally quiet is great.
[00:15:01] If we could be in the forest next to a stream, but not everybody can be. So maybe these types of guided meditations help you to find in your world, whatever it is, these quiet spaces where you can do this kind of listening. And one thing I've been thinking about a lot when I was reading your book this season on my podcast is focusing on connection.
[00:15:32] And you said something that I thought was so interesting that we're currently in our culture in a soul deficit and that we've lost our circles. And I would love for you to talk more about that.
[00:15:47] Meredith Heller: Yeah. Thank you so much. It's so true. And I love how you boil it down to connection. You know, we are tribal beings, even those of us who are loners and, especially as women, we have always gathered together from the beginnings of time to care for the children, to wash the clothes, to make the food, to create home, to sit together in red tent, if that was part of our community and our culture.
[00:16:26] And we've really lost this. We've really become such compartmentalized, isolated people, whether we live alone or even in our smaller family units. I mean, we've lost extended family. We've lost the whole part where our elders are part of our family and help take care of the youngers and lend their wisdom.
[00:16:55] We've lost that. too. We put our elders away somewhere else and we are at such a loss because of this. I feel like we're really fractured beings who don't have the the whole circle and the whole picture of who we are as human beings. And we also lose the understanding of our own progression as we age and even accepting the reality of our mortality.
[00:17:33] This is an important piece of understanding and fully inhabiting our lives right now, knowing that we don't live forever. This is it. This is what we've got. And without that connection with our elders, we can forget that. So gathering in circle, one of the huge reasons I created this workshop is because we learn so much by being with each other, by hearing and sharing our stories.
[00:18:10] And some of the really beautiful things that happen in workshop, there's this paradox. One is we see and feel our commonality. We're not alone. We hear similar stories from other people, other women who have gone through similar things or going through similar things, and we glean their wisdom and we say, Oh my God, I'm not alone.
[00:18:39] And that is hugely liberating and connecting. Simultaneously, we learn that my story is unique and it matters. So even though I have the same hopes and fears and desires and loves and longings as other human beings, my way of doing it and what has shaped me in my life is unique and my voice matters
[00:19:12] and it needs to be woven into the whole fabric, and we don't have a lot of these places that hold space for this weaving and depth of connection that feeds the richness of our humanity.
[00:19:36] Pam Uzzell: Yeah. You know, as you're talking, I'm just thinking about how much creative work has happened in these type of circles.
[00:19:45] I mean, the first thing that pops into my head are quilting circles and a lot of the language you talked about weaving and things like that, I thought , you know, these types of circles have brought about some of the most beautiful creative works, but then [00:20:00] talking about preparation of food of caring for
[00:20:04] children, that's also very creative work. And another thing that I'm going to chew on for a while is how these circles that are expansive enough to be multigenerational help us to understand our own mortality. That's not a word that a lot of people have brought up on this show, and I'm really glad that you did.
[00:20:29] This is our life. We have this opportunity to make something if we want to, but most importantly, to connect, to make relationships, to connect with ourselves. The idea of going to your grave without ever having created these quiet listening moments and then these larger circles is actually tragic.
[00:20:57] Meredith Heller: Yeah, and having expressed ourselves as this unique, that will never be done again, our unique signature
[00:21:08] and fingerprint of who we are shaped by everything that's happened to us. I always imagine myself as one of those trees on the edge of the mountain, you know, weathered and shaped and leaning and sculpted by life, you know, and I'm willing, like I'm willing to be that crazily shaped tree because it's true and then to express and exude.
[00:21:38] Yes, this is who I am in this life. For me, I think, as a creative, that would be the other piece. I love how you brought in the communities and the connections with people. And what a loss, what a tragedy to go to our grave without that. And the other piece for me is the having expressed this unique shape of being.
[00:22:06] Pam Uzzell: Yeah, and I think somewhere in my life, I'm not sure when, I realized that what I want and what most people want is to be seen for who they are and accepted and loved. And what you're talking about is such an amazing way, this writing and this listening to who you are, everything that's in there. Not everything is wonderful, obviously, but then to realize that you were shaped by all of that.
[00:22:41] And in a way for me, when I think about my life and what I wish had been different and all these things, I think, That is not the mindset I need to have. I would not be me without those experiences. So I love that you're doing this in these workshops. And I know you've done workshops with a very wide ranging communities.
[00:23:08] And I would love to hear more about those. I think, have you done workshops with women, incarcerated women?
[00:23:15] Meredith Heller: Yes, I just wanted to say one more thing. I loved that you brought up the quilting. That was so powerful. Last night in workshop, we're doing a series right now called Love Warrior tuning our hearts to the key of love and courage, tuning our hearts and our lives.
[00:23:39] And so we started last night was, uh, the first workshop of the series, and we started here in our hearts, in the homeland tuning our hearts first before we can go out and take our badass love warrior selves into the world to do work. And one of the women in workshop wrote about her heart as being a quilt, and I just got the depth and breadth of that metaphor, and it goes so much with what you just shared about the not having the regrets for for things in our past, but knowing how everything feeds into who we are now and how we show up and and what we're, we've, we've, grown our capacity to be able to do and share.
[00:24:36] And so I was thinking about the quilting and the quilt in this woman's poem last night, and how literally and metaphorically we take all the pieces of material from the past, the old pajamas, the old blanket, the, the [00:25:00] overalls, the baby bib, the curtains, you know, like everything. And we take those materials, those patterns, those textures, and sew them, stitch them together into the quilt, and that is exactly what we're doing in that workshop and in writing.
[00:25:26] We're stitching together all the pieces of our lives in a pattern that is able to hold us and, like a quilt, warm us and comfort us into this place where we can rest and be at peace with who we are in this moment in our lives. It's amazing. I think the next workshop is going to be called quilting.
[00:25:57] Pam Uzzell: That's so cool. I just want to point out to people who are only listening. Um, when you said Homeland, you pointed to yourself. You're not, you're not talking about the United States. You're not talking about any particular country that Homeland is, you know, and even beyond our bodies, it's, it's ourselves.
[00:26:17] So I love that.
[00:26:19] Meredith Heller: Thank you for pointing that out. It is. And, and back to what you said before Homeland, and I put my hand on my heart, Homeland, how I sit and make home, how I take my seat in my own heart, in my own being in relation to my connections with everyone else, because even those of us who are loners, we are still intricately connected to the whole community of life.
[00:26:56] Cannot be any other way. I mean, even if we're in our own little cave eating food, where did the food come from? You know, all the people who went into, all the souls and labor who go into anything in our lives, in our homes, and how we nourish ourselves and care for ourselves. We are a living community. Our heart includes this.
[00:27:22] This is our homeland.
[00:27:25] Pam Uzzell: The reason I was thinking about the prison workshops, and this is not the only place, but just this need to find a quiet space, especially when, you know, your freedom of where you are, when you do things, how you do things. is so rigid, this ability to find a quiet space. And I am really curious to know how to work with people, not just incarcerated women, but people who really have a challenging time finding that quiet space.
[00:28:04] Meredith Heller: Yeah, absolutely. It's such a good question and inquiry. I love before how you were saying the need for the quiet space and that how so many of us can't go somewhere to find absolute quiet. And I think the, the shift is what you just said. It's really about being able to find a way to make a quiet space within ourselves, no matter what's going on around us.
[00:28:37] So when I, when I taught at Juvenile Hall with teens, they would sometimes, there's so much resistance. I mean, it was incredibly challenging and incredibly rewarding, but they would always say, Hey Meredith, you know, why should we write poetry and we're in lockdown, we don't have any freedom, and what I would always say is what you were pointing to.
[00:29:05] I'd say, hey guys, listen, to me, the only place where there's no rules, where you get to make the rules, is your imagination. So let's open the imagination. And really inhabit it and find what we can do there, what we can create. Let's take any space that is ours and utilize it the most we can. So that was powerful.
[00:29:35] Um, working with the incarcerated women has been thrilling for me. I was a little nervous going in the first few times. I didn't know what to expect, and I fell in love. with these women. I found them so genuine and so real and so willing [00:30:00] to be honest about their own lives and the willingness to to make the kind of changes that will allow them back to connection, reunite with their families, their spouses, their children, their parents.
[00:30:21] I mean, there was really, I don't think I've ever seen such willingness to make atonement. And maybe it takes that kind of, um, imprisonment to make us see the value of our freedom, the value of our freedom to make choices, the fulfillment of our connections, and when that is taken away, again, like our mortality, it kind of makes us get here.
[00:30:54] inhabit this life, this now, more deeply than ever. And one of my favorite moments of working with incarcerated women, all of the women that I work with in the prison, they all get a copy of my book. So when the workshop series was over, they said, Oh, Meredith, we're going to miss you. You're, you're funny and you're cool and you get us and you make us write.
[00:31:23] And we love this. And. And then they were holding my book and they held it to their chest and said, but we have your book now and we're going to keep writing. And that was when I just lost it and started crying. What an amazing experience.
[00:31:43] Pam Uzzell: It sounds like an experience where you learn as much as the workshop participants.
[00:31:49] Meredith Heller: I grew from being with them. I learned about them and just the way that they saw themselves more deeply and more clearly in their writing. I saw myself more deeply and more clearing, clearly in the reflection of them. I can go deeper. I can own my life. I can know how valuable it is that I'm free, that I get to make my own rules, that I can choose to connect with people for deeper fulfillment.
[00:32:29] I can be real about who I am and what, what has shaped me in this life.
[00:32:36] Pam Uzzell: There's another line I want to ask you about. The line is the poem knows the poem. And I liked it, but, but I want to hear you explain that line a little bit.
[00:32:50] Meredith Heller: I love that you pulled that line, plucked that line out of the book. Yeah, the poem knows the poem.
[00:32:58] It's a little Daoist. It's a little Zen. It's about my experience when I am in creative flow, which is what I live for. When I'm in creative flow, I am plugged in and connected to something that is bigger than me. And it's like everything is heightened. In a heightened state, everything is more accessible.
[00:33:28] The ideas are there. The colors are brighter. The words are juicier. I am more deeply alive. And, it's as if whatever I'm creating, whether it's a poem or a song, begins to have a life of its own. And so, I always say, like, when I'm writing a poem, there's not me, the poet, and then the poem. There is simply the poeming that is happening.
[00:34:06] It becomes like another entity. And it's almost as if the poem is creating itself, giving itself life. through me as the instrument, perhaps the, where I point my aperture of attention. And so again, back to listening, there's the listening into myself and there's the listening into the poem, or the song itself, respecting that it almost becomes a living being with its own soul and its own heart.
[00:34:54] And if I trust it, and give myself to it, and [00:35:00] almost allow it to direct me, it becomes something bigger than I could ever create from the smaller place of, I am making a poem, you know, a poem is making itself with me. This is what I mean by the poem knows the poem.
[00:35:24] Pam Uzzell: I still think this goes back to that deep listening that you talk about that you've been practicing in your life.
[00:35:33] Another line I loved is writing is medicine, which I believe, but I don't do as much writing as you do. I don't lead workshops in writing. And I would love to hear about your experience that makes you say something like this.
[00:35:51] Meredith Heller: Yeah, thank you. Definitely one of my favorite lines and experiences. Writing is medicine.
[00:36:00] I think one of the beautiful things that happens when we approach our writing as a practice, like we dip into it often, and it's not about writing for an audience. So I always say this is a poetry practice, not a poetry perfect. And so that gives us room to explore and experiment and listen without needing to um, shape it into something that is marketable, you know, like that.
[00:36:38] So one of the beautiful things that happens when we show up in this writing practice is that It's kind of a piece of the poem knows the poem. We begin to write in a way where we make room to not know. We make room for the unknown and to not have to know. So the less we know, when we sit down to write, the better.
[00:37:04] And then what emerges as we're writing, where we write something that we didn't know we knew, and yet we do. This moment of discovery is, I think, really the treasure. And digging in and pulling up our own treasures builds trust in ourselves, builds resourcefulness, builds relationship and communion and communication with deep psyche, our muse, the creative life force.
[00:37:49] And this becomes our medicine. This becomes how we nourish, ourselves, how we feed ourselves, how we transmute what was perhaps painful or confusing or disorienting, and we write our way into accepting whatever that experience is rather than resisting it and pushing it away. We bring it in to our experience and work with it until it becomes The wisdom, the medicine that heals us.
[00:38:37] We create our own elixir of being by transmuting what was painful into something that builds our sense of self. This is the medicine.
[00:38:57] Pam Uzzell: Wow. Well, this is really such a profound conversation to have with you. I've started writing again after a long hiatus, and I think that I'm going to use your book as a guide, as a companion, as an invitation to help with that.
[00:39:19] And I'm hoping you can tell people where they can get in touch with you to find out more about your books, but also maybe to join a workshop.
[00:39:30] Meredith Heller: Absolutely. Come to workshop. Pam, come to workshop. Yay! MeredithHeller. com has all of the information about my workshops, the books, both books are available everywhere books are sold.
[00:39:46] So go to your favorite, whether that's Amazon or your indie bookstore, um, and, and get the books and follow along. And for any anybody who feels the call to write, both new [00:40:00] writers and seasoned writers who maybe just need a way to touch in in a fresh way. So many times we have so much judgment around our writing that blocks us from what we were just talking about, the good medicine that happens when we dip in, um, with our writing.
[00:40:27] It's really a friendship and a communion with ourselves. And this is a gift.
[00:40:35] Pam Uzzell: Well, thank you so much. Thank you for being on the show and thank you for doing this work. I'm going to think about that soul deficit and then the medicine for it for a long time.
[00:40:46] Meredith Heller: Thank you so much. I have loved, loved talking with you.
[00:40:54] Pam Uzzell: You're listening to Art Heals All Wounds.
[00:41:21] Thank you so much to Meredith Heller for sharing her story on the show. I'm feeling inspired to commit to a writing practice using Meredith's book as a guide. I'll put a link to Meredith's website in the show notes so that you can find out more about her book, Writing by Heart. Do you have a story to share about how art and creativity play a role in your life?
[00:41:43] Share it with me in a voicemail and I'll share it on the show. Do you know that every time you share your story, you help someone? It's true. Just go to my website, arthealsallwoundspodcast. com, and click on the big button that says, leave Pam a voicemail. If this show is valuable to you, and if you feel like you're able, you can also leave me a small donation at the buy me a coffee link at the top of my website.
[00:42:12] This show is completely independent, so anything you leave helps me pay for the expenses of making it. Thanks for listening. The music you've heard in this podcast is by Ketsa and Lobo Loco. This podcast was edited by Eva Hristova.