Episode 217: Creative but Stuck? The Key to Simplicity with HeatherAsh Amara

By Sarah Walton | February 27, 2024

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HeatherAsh Amara is one of those women who really cracked open the code to what we need to feel free internally and what we need to understand that our inner knowing is probably going to be our best guide.

She skillfully and unconditionally guides people to shift from self-judgment to discernment, from victimhood to authentic vulnerability. She helps us shed limiting domestication so we can ground into the self-intimacy, steadiness, and stillness that exists all around us.

Journey to writing

HeatherAsh’s love of writing started when she was a child. She started working as a journalist, working with women and business, and eventually landed a job at a publishing company. Her boss encouraged her to write her own book.

“One day she was like, ‘I think you're ready. I'll help you,’” says HeatherAsh. “Somebody believing in me, me having this just urge in my being … I started finding I was so passionate about sharing what I was doing and what I was learning about that it just started coming out of me and it overrode my introvert shyness.”

She says the draft of her first book was terrible. She was under stress and felt it had to be perfect. HeatherAsh realized she had to get out of her head. She’s written nine books so far and runs her own company

“Writing is not an easy choice of things to do, because the amount of tension that you have to hold in your body for something new to come through is pretty intense,” says HeatherAsh. She compares her body to a container where all her ideas bounce against each other. She needs to let the discomfort happen before she can create something new and bring all of the experiences and learning into language.

“What I love writing about, is tension; we want it to be simple,” says HeatherAsh. “And there is a way that it is simple. But the simplicity is that learning how to hold the contradictions and getting big enough to understand that two things can be true at the same time, and how do we metabolize that in our bodies? How do we show up in challenging situations and have our hearts stay open?”

Writing Warrior Goddess Training

When it came time for HeatherAsh’s second book, her world was falling apart. She was going through a divorce. The center she was working at was having trouble. But her publisher was asking for the material. She eventually shared a program for a course that she’d written for women.

Every month, she did two-hour calls and wrote about what the group needed. This became Warrior Goddess Training, which reached Number 1 in Goddesses and Shamanism on Amazon for four years.

HeatherAsh says it brings tears to her eyes to know she was able to bring together learnings from different communities that resonated so well and helped women find grounding, their voice, and their courage. Next year is the book’s tenth anniversary and it’s still selling.

Being a better dance partner

HeatherAsh talks about the contradiction in movement that happens in dance. As a kinesthetic person, she sees our relationship with life as a dance and that we’re always learning about how to be better dance partners.

There has been a lot of upheaval over the years, and if you think about it in a way, how do you become a better dance partner? How do you get more grounded? How do you get more present?

It's not about changing the world, and it's not about fixing yourself. You're not broken. You just have a lot of beliefs and patterns and habits that aren't serving. Let's fix those. Dance is a beautiful metaphor to use.

This idea that women are broken and need fixing comes from the idea that men are more important than women. Even in the modern Western world, there is an illusion of the freedom that women have.

While it’s true women can work, start their own businesses, and choose their relationships, this external freedom is only about 100 years old. Many women do not yet feel this freedom internally.

We've picked up agreements that were not enough, that we have to be perfect, that we have to take care of everybody else, that there's a right way, and that there's a wrong way. We’re very much in a reward-punishment model, and when something happens inside of us, when we can't create the business, or when we're struggling with our family, we tend to think, “I'm at fault. Something's wrong. I'm broken.”

HeatherAsh helps untangle those old beliefs and agreements that we've taken on from our family, from our religion, from our peers that we make up.

Following inner knowing

One of HeatherAsh’s dreams was to build a retreat center that was off grid, that was could help people connect to the land and to get quiet and to disconnect from all the noise that we have in the modern world.

On April 6, 2023, one of the largest wildfires in New Mexico went through. The firefighters managed to save the core of the land, but 90% of the forest on her land was lost. HeatherAsh had to decide whether to walk away from the land or not.

Her vision shifted from a five-year plan to a 50-year plan of helping to restore the land and be its steward for decades to come. Through the heartbreak and loss, HeatherAsh says she learned the importance of grieving.

“One of the things that I've learned to within our community is the importance of grieving, the importance of being in a relationship to our feelings, because that allows us to then really show up with more love.”