Online :: April 4 - May 29, 2022
“Meditation is one of the most powerful friends you can have on the journey of coming home to yourself.”
Become a Mindful Writer On & Off The Page
8 Weeks of writing, meditation, and mindfulness in a community of writers dedicated to waking up and doing right by the miracle.
“After the debut year for my young adult novel, I was having a bad case of writer’s block. I wasn’t confident or sure of any creative direction I was going in. During the first couple days into the Mindfulness for Writers course, I started filling pages with words again! It’s like flipping a creative switch on a daily basis, and it helped to shut off those critical voices in my head that told me everything I was writing was trash. I’m so grateful for Heather’s encouragement and guidance!”
It's time to go deep.
This April, I'll be leading a group of flow seekers into the wilds of their inner lives. We're going to build a meditation practice for you from the ground up so that by the time June rolls around, you'll have a sustainable practice of your own that will support not only your writing, but the rest of your life.
If you already have a practice, this is your chance to strengthen it, tweak it, and discover ways to apply mindfulness to your writing. This course is for all levels, though the focus is on beginning or revamping a meditation practice.
Please note that this course is only open to female-identifying writers, due to the intimate nature of our conversation. If you identify as male, I’m happy to refer you to some wonderful teachers I have personally worked with. Email me and I’ll send you their way! Thank you for understanding.
When: April 4 - May 29th, 2022 :: 8 weeks, online
:: Work at your own pace ::
*** I’m adding an extra 2 weeks this year so we can spend more time together on the page, with writing exercises specifically geared toward applying your mindfulness learnings.
Why do writers need to meditate?
I’m just going to leave this right here to answer that question:
“Meditation can be a writer’s secret weapon and Heather is amazing at teaching you how to wield it. When I came to her for coaching, I was in the grips of the worst writer’s block and anxiety I’d ever experienced. By the time we finished our work together, I was happier, more productive, and more balanced than I’d been in years. But don’t take my word for it: check the numbers. The year before I worked with Heather on integrating my meditation and writing practice, I wrote 50,000 words and threw out 40,000 of them. The year after I worked with her, I wrote (and kept!) 500,000 words.”
Flow: oh, that elusive addiction of writers. We want it. Gotta have it. Crave it like none other. In all my years of working as a writer, I've never found anything that unlocks flow the way meditation and mindfulness practices do. Nor have I found anything - I mean anything - that has helped me navigate the ups and downs and uncertainty of the writer’s life the way this practice does.
Meditation for writers, by writers
I'm so convinced of meditation's usefulness that I got certified as a meditation teacher to help my fellow writers discover this wonder for themselves. This means that I approach the practice as a writer, integrating your time on the cushion with your time in the writer’s seat. Basically? I speak your language.
Mindfulness is the writer’s compass that keeps us heading toward our North Stars, no matter what story and publishing and Inner Critic dragons we need to slay.
Give me eight weeks, and I’ll help you build a practice for life.
Over these Eight weeks, we’ll be using tried-and-true habit formation principles, mindfulness, and your own creative magic to build and strengthen your practice.
This course is meant for you to work at your own pace. We have Zoom calls every other week, as well as optional weekly sitting meditation (30 minutes).
The Zoom calls are recorded for those who can’t make it - or those who are just freaking tired of Zoom calls.
You’ll be provided with a tracker so that you can get some proof in this pudding and see how this practice is supporting you holistically.
**** This course is not intended to add more stress to your life and it is not a tool to fiddle with, then forget. I’m aiming at nothing short of transformation: but you have to want that.
What we’re doing here is creating MORE inner spaciousness, increasing your bandwidth, and doing some serious work on your writer wellness with the aim of giving you this practice for life. We’re not hustling for our worth: we’re re-connecting to it.
For many women, wellness is just one fad after another. We’re looking to ditch that overwhelm and access our own inner wisdom with a practice that is simple and will be with you no matter what. No fancy clothes. No bells and whistles. Just you and your breath. Sound nice?
If you show up for your practice, it will show up for you (just like your writing).
If you’re in a place of signing up for a million online courses out of panic: breathe. Then email me to see if this is the right time for you to begin this work. ****
“I signed up for the Mindfulness Immersion course because I was interested in deepening a meditation practice that I’d begun on my own...Heather was an enthusiastic and compassionate supporter of my growth. My personal goal for the course wasn’t to increase flow so much as decrease the chatter that can occur when I sit down to write. I feel that the Mindfulness course helped me in that area while also providing so much great information that I’ll be able to use in my daily life.”
Our Format : Three Parts
Part One: The Weekly Mindful Missive
Each Sunday morning, participants will get a short but nutritious email - the Mindful Missive - with thoughts on the focus / theme for the week ahead to ground you in this practice and discover how it relates to your writing and creativity. I’ll include supporting material.
A guided meditation recording set to each week’s time. Each week we’ll be increasing our time and I’ll be there to support you with a simple guided meditation that will slowly increase the silence until you realize you don’t need me there at all. Note: My goal is to get you meditating WITHOUT someone else’s voice in your head. Guided meditations are great to start off and to explore new modalities, but they can easily become a crutch or entertainment. Meditation is about becoming a friend to your mind and you need silence and boredom and feels to get to know what’s between your ears. Trust me, your writing will thank you for it.
Simple assignments to work on refining your meditation and mindfulness practice in and out of the writer’s seat.
A writing exercise that combines craft and mindfulness. Think haiku explorations, working with details, digging deeper into character emotion through somatic meditation and writing….and more.
A new, helpful tool to work with each week on the cushion to help you maintain focus and build a practice that works for you.
A bonus practice to try something new on the cushion: We’re focusing on mindfulness meditation, but I’ll give you some yummy things to add into the mix.
One tool to integrate the week's work on the cushion while in the writer's seat
A couple of journaling questions / exploratory work to go deeper, make connections, and identify areas where you need additional support.
If you’ve worked with me before or are on my newsletter, then you know I like to make worksheets and workbooks. Get ready for some deliciousness.
“I got to see how mindfulness practices and meditation can help with multiple aspects of my writing process and career. ..meditating before each writing session allowed me to be more playful, expansive, and flexible.
I had more fun drafting than usual, was less critical of myself, and wrote more words in the same amount of time.
Partway through the month, I shifted my focus because I got an edit letter for a book that is under contract, and tasks began to pile up for promoting my first book. The mindfulness practices helped me to maintain my focus during revision, and I was more intentional than usual about noticing when I needed a break rather than thoughtlessly scrolling through something online.
In addition, when aspects of being a debut author started to make me feel stressed or insecure, the techniques I learned in this course helped me to figure out what was bothering me, why, and what I wanted to do to handle the situation.
Heather is a compassionate, open, generous leader, and I really appreciated all that she shared with us during this experience. I think any writer at any stage of any project (or any person in another creative field, I would Imagine) could really benefit from working with Heather, and I can especially recommend a mindfulness immersion course like this one to other authors who are navigating the highs and lows of a debut publishing experience. It’s been a very grounding experience for me.
”
Part Two: 1-on-1 Support
Every participant has the option to book a single discounted Breakthrough call with me for $99 (regular $250). This single discounted call can be used any time during the course.
If you sign up for IGNITE or FLOURISH then the Immersion course is free for you and, of course, you’ll have lots of additional support in our calls and unlimited messaging that FLOW offers.
Part Three: Community
Learning Together: Every other Tuesday beginning April 5th we’ll meet from 7 - 8:30 PM (EST). This will be recorded for anyone who can’t make it, and you can submit questions to me for the Q+A ahead of time. There will be a short writer’s dharma talk from me, we’ll sit together for about 10 minutes so you can experience live guided meditation, and then we’ll have Q+A.
Weekly 30-Minute Sits: These are entirely optional, time TBD. We jump on Zoom, I lead us in a 20-minute meditation, check in at the end, and we’re out after 30-minutes. This is done in real time, for whoever can make it, and I’ll also record for anyone who can’t.
Curriculum
This is just a quick overview of how long we’ll be sitting each week. Each week has integrative recipes for mindfulness in the writer’s seat, as well.
Week 1: Before the course begins, you’ll receive a posture clinic PDF, a meditation/flow chart to track how your meditation is affecting your creativity (and other areas of your life), and a short personal intake - this is meant to help you explore what having a daily practice might look like on a really practical level for you, what areas of resistance you are already working with, what modifications you might need due to health / body issues. Craft focus: The intake will include a short assignment to see where you are not present on the page.
Week 2: This week is focused on getting you set up. We look at where you’ll sit, when, on what, and get into the nitty gritty of posture and modifications. We’ll talk timers and boundaries with people in your house so no one barges in on you when you’re sitting. There is no meditation this week, but I will encourage you to go to your chosen space each day and sit there for one minute, just to get used to it. Craft focus: Haiku to develop the art of slowing down on the page.
Week 3: Five minutes. We’re keeping it nice and easy. Mindfulness of the breath, working with boredom and discomfort, and a few helpful tips for when your mind is racing. Then we’ll talk how to translate what’s happening on the cushion to the work you’re doing in the writer’s cave. Craft focus: Missed Moments. Where were you racing on the page? How can you use mindfulness to make sure that every moment is being explored to its fullness, and that each of those moments earn their place?
Week 4: 10 minutes. Don’t worry: if you want to only increase by one minute and do 6 minutes, that’s fine. We’ll be looking at the quality of our attention, tools for working with emotions that come up, and more. Craft focus: The Niggling Feeling. How to use somatic awareness to notice when something on the page is or isn’t working.
Week 5: 15 minutes. But you do you! Here we get into all the ways the Inner Critic comes to the meditation cushion and the writer’s seat. We look at self-defeating behaviors, revisions to your habit formation, and more. This week is all about HOLDING YOUR SEAT. Craft focus: Applying your own mind’s awareness of the inner critic to character misbelief and desire.
Week 6: 20 minutes. Not everyone will get to this time by Week Four, and that’s okay! 20 is the number most meditation teachers say is the sweet spot, and I agree (but 12 minutes is when the neuroplasticity starts getting its TLC, so 12 is good too! Hell, two minutes is good). 20 minutes is just long enough to go through all the cycles of wanting to quit and doing your taxes and then getting mindful and then forgetting and then being bored and then noticing your thought patterns and then telling stories and then getting mindful again and then having a few minutes where things are a little bit groovy (or not - it’s all good). Meanwhile, your parasympathetic nervous system is loving you. This is the week we start really looking at your relationship to your mind and what you’ve been discovering. What are the ways you’re beginning to notice this practice influencing you off the cushion? What’s coming up for you? How do you work mindfully and skillfully with it all? Craft focus: Beginner’s mind on the page: Mary Oliver and the art of seeing things new.
Week 7: This is the troubleshooting week. What’s not working, where are you experiencing resistance, and how the heck do you keep this up without me sending you a text every day? We look at the many ways you can continue to get support from the meditation community at large. I’ll probably talk to you about the Four Noble Truths and how to relate them to your writing. Nothing too Buddhist or woo, just straight talk about writing and life being hard and how we can work with that with a bit of elegance. Let’s see what our group needs, though. Craft focus: Using mindfulness in revision.
WEEK 8: This last week is entirely focused on how we can apply what we’ve been learning to the page directly. We’ll get into how mindfulness supports the use of metaphor, deepens tension in scenes, helps refine characterization, and more.
We’ll be using the RAIN method with your character in scene, as well as incorporating other components of the course as you build a character, especially the “stories” they tell themselves. How can you be, as Natalie Goldberg says, present on the page? Where are you rushing, not living in the moment of the scene? We’ll discuss strategies for transferring what you learn on the cushion into your work.
“I’ve had a crush on the idea of mindfulness for a while and tried a few apps that I loved for a day or three. What was different about Heather’s approach is that it was created with a writer in mind. She was very open about sharing her vulnerabilities — and they looked an awful lot like my vulnerabilities. ”
Feeling Unsure If This Is For You?
If you think you can't meditate, this course is for you. If you've tried meditation and it hasn't stuck, this course is for you. If you're curious about what meditation and mindfulness are all about, this course is for you. If you want to enhance your current meditation practice, this course is for you. If you want to enhance your creative flow, improve your focus and memory, reduce stress, relieve anxiety / comparison / self-doubt / fear, THIS COURSE IS FOR YOU.
About Heather
Heather Demetrios is a critically acclaimed author, writing coach, and certified meditation teacher based in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
She has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a recipient of the PEN America Susan P. Bloom Discovery Award for her debut novel, Something Real. Her novels include Little Universes, I’ll Meet You There, Bad Romance, as well as the Dark Caravan fantasy series: Exquisite Captive, Blood Passage, and Freedom’s Slave. Her non-fiction includes the Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection Code Name Badass: The True Story of Virginia Hall, and she is the editor of Dear Heartbreak: YA Authors and Teens on the Dark Side of Love.
Her honors include books that have been named Bank Street Best Children’s Books, YALSA Best Fiction For Young Adults selections, a Goodreads Choice Nominee, a Kirkus Best Book, and a Barnes and Noble Best Book. Her work has appeared in LA Review of Books, Bustle, School Library Journal, and other fine outlets.