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Women in the Arena
Women in the Arena is the celebration of everyday women living extraordinary lives in plain sight. We seek to inspire, encourage and challenge you to reach for the great heights you're made for.
Women in the Arena
Revive the Fire: How Heidi Love Defied the Odds to Follow Her Wildest Dream
🚀 Never Too Old, Never Too Late: Heidi Love’s Inspiring Journey of Chasing a 40-Year-Old Dream!
What happens when you decide it’s never too late to chase the dreams you had as a teenager? Heidi Love is proof that no matter your age, your past, or how wild your dreams may seem, it’s never too crazy to reignite your passion and go for it!
Join us in this powerful conversation as Heidi shares her remarkable journey of transformation, where a teenage dream to visit the Bay of Virgins in French Polynesia was pushed aside for decades—only to be reignited later in life.
🌟 After a career, a marriage, and motherhood, Heidi decided to follow the call of her youthful passion, setting sail on the adventure of a lifetime.
🎯 Key Moments from Heidi’s Story:
- ✨ Rekindling a Dream at Any Age: Heidi’s pursuit of her childhood dream proves that it's never too late to go after what truly excites you.
- 👩‍🎓 Balancing Life’s Challenges: Learn how Heidi balanced motherhood, a career, and a marine biology degree while pursuing her passion.
- ⚡ Facing Past Trauma on the High Seas: Feel the intensity as Heidi battles PTSD during extreme lightning storms, but refuses to let her past hold her back.
- 🌸 Learning from a Matrilineal Society: Discover the powerful lessons of gratitude, presence, and self-acceptance she learned from the Cunayala people, and how it shifted her worldview.
- 💦 Taking the Leap: Heidi’s life-changing dive into the Pacific Ocean was more than a swim—it was a plunge into healing, courage, and reclaiming her story.
No dream is too old or too wild to chase. Heidi’s journey reminds us that it’s never too late to reignite the spark inside and pursue the dreams that set our souls on fire. 🎧 Listen to her story and be inspired to chase your own dreams—no matter where you are in life.
🌍 Visit https://www.heidiloveauthor.com/ to connect with Heidi and learn more about her journey of resilience, healing, and adventure.
Thank you for all of your support.
If you like what you hear, please go check out more episodes at https://womeninthearena.net/
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***Last thing- This is my WISH LIST of interviews:
• Joan Jett
• Dolly Parton
• Viola Davis
• Ina Garten
Maybe you can help a girl out...***
Go check out all of our episodes on our website at: https://womeninthearena.net/
If you'd like to connect, reach out to me at audra@womeninthearena.net
***One last thing...I have an interview wish list because a girl's gotta dream
- Viola Davis
- Dolly Parton
- Ina Garten
- Joan Jett
Maybe one of you can help me out!
Thank you all for supporting this show and all Women in the Arena!
Welcome in everyone and thank you so much for joining me again this week. This week I have a guest who is an adventurer, a chaser of dreams and a survivor. This week my guest is Heidi Love and she is the best-selling author of Laughing at the Sky, wild Adventure, bold Dreams and A Daring Search for a Stolen Childhood. It is a number one Amazon new release in four categories. She's rising from poverty and a childhood of sexual assault. Heidi is the co-founder and former marketing strategist of the $7 million strategic marketing firm Ethos and Vaunt and has received an MBA and a Woman of Achievement Award from the University of New Hampshire. She has served on the boards of Maine's Women's Fund and the NPR Safe Spaces Radio. Heidi has sailed nearly halfway around the world, from Maine to French Polynesia and beyond. It has been her lifelong dream. It is my pleasure and my honor to introduce to you Heidi. Heidi, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
Audra:Thank you, it's great to be here. It is so wonderful for you to be here with me and I'm so excited to talk to you about your story of survival, of adventure, of never giving up on your dreams, and what you discovered along the way Great. So I want to talk to you about your dream of sailing to French Polynesia. But let's begin with where and why that seed was planted.
Heidi :I survived violent crime when I was 11 and attempted murder, and I would run away occasionally. One day I was hanging out in the library I was actually 15 years old and I knew at the library. The police didn't hang out at the library very often. Often, when they found me, they would bring me home, which wasn't my ideal direction to go. And so I was in the library and it was getting dark, it was dreary, it was cold, they were going to shut down Somehow.
Heidi :I found this magazine to keep me occupied and it was a National Geographic and it was about Gauguin and French Polynesia and had his gorgeous paintings and beautiful photography. And I was going through and I was pretty excited about it all when I came across this picture of a waterfall. It was sparkling and I just followed my eyes down from the top of the waterfall to the caption below and the hair on my arm and parts of my face just started to vibrate. I never experienced anything like this before and I thought something powerful is here. And when I read the caption at the bottom of the photograph, it said Bay of Virgins.
Heidi :Well, I just knew at that point I was going to go to the Bay of Virgins in French Polynesia. I didn't know how I would get there, but it was my dream to do it. I thought I could live there, right near the waterfall, there would be clean water, the people looked so happy and amazing and the women looked celebrated. The women looked celebrated. I had come from inner city Philly northeast Philly it wasn't my father worked with gangs and it wasn't really didn't look at all like that in the magazine, and so I just decided I wanted to go and live there. So that was my dream, and so I just decided I wanted to go and live there.
Audra:So that was my dream. So your dream was born as an escape from your reality and it was the furthest point from where you were at that moment and it sparked something in you. It sparked excitement and creativity and hope. Yes, it was probably something that you didn't have very much of at that moment, considering what you were escaping from in that dark, cold library yes, exactly, and it was a real challenge because you can't fly or drive to fatahebo, where the Bay of Virgins is.
Heidi :So that was my first obstacle, it was your first challenge to be able to go there.
Audra:So you picked one of the hardest places on the planet to get to, yes, but you found hope, you found purpose and you found a focus Correct. So you told me that you had this focus and you had decided, okay, I need to figure out how to get there. And you took some creative steps on some investigation on how you would get there. So tell me a little bit and tell the audience what did you do next on your investigation on how to get to French Polynesia?
Heidi :Well, there was actually a step before and that was the first thing that I saw. First place I wanted to go was the Galapagos, and before I even saw this magazine. So, just to take a step back, I wrote to the Ecuadorian government and asked how I could come and live in the Galapagos. And they wrote back about nine months later and there were all these brochures, science brochures and tourist brochures with penguins and blue-footed boobies and lizards and sea lions, and they said in order to live in the Galapagos, you have to either be born Ecuadorian that was out marry an Ecuadorian I wasn't about to get married at that point or become a marine biologist. So I decided I would study marine biologist. I went to school, studied marine biologist, I met my first husband, had a child and my child became so much of my focus. He just was so amazing and the dream sort of was to go to French Polynesia, sort of went in the background a bit. So there were quite a few intervening years.
Heidi :But later on I had left my husband and I was on a date with an amazing man and I started getting these chills again, like I'd had years and years ago, all the way down my arm and my face and I thought something is going on here. I felt I was in this vortex of energy and I didn't know what it was. It sounds crazy. But I was trying to get the conversation away from me because I felt like I could hardly talk. And so I said to him so you like to sail? Is that right? And he said they said yeah, do you like to sail? I said yes. He said where would you go? And it just came flooding out of me French Polynesia. I want to go to Fatahiba. His jaw dropped, his eyes dropped, he grabbed my arms and he looked at me in the eye and said you have to go, you just have to go.
Heidi :And so we decided at that point we were going to get a boat. It was our first date. I don't think we decided to get a boat at that point, but we were pretty excited about the love that we shared, this love of sailing and adventure. So we had to get a boat, we had to outfit it, we had to leave our jobs. We both were in companies at the time.
Heidi :We both had our own companies, were in companies at the time. We were both had our own companies and we, finally, we bought a boat. We outfitted it, bought lifeboats and bought a lifeboat and all kinds of courses on how to sail safely. We launched a lifeboat in the pool at MIT and had to do a lot to get ready. And we prepared and we scraped the paint off the boat and rewired the boat and got a wind vane and all kinds of things that we worked on for a year to try to get it ready. The one thing that we didn't prepare for, however, was my fear. That was a whole new chapter in the story, so that's how it started out.
Audra:So I'm going to pause here for a moment and just make sure that I am clear on that. You had a whole life between being a teenager having this initial reaction to French Polynesia. You went to college, you had a whole different career. You were a marine biologist. You got married, you had a child, you had an entire career, changed careers, left a marriage, went into a new relationship and then this old dream came flooding back.
Heidi :Yes, and there was one other little piece that I probably should share here. I was having in my 40s my son was getting to the age of that I was when I experienced violent crime and I was experiencing a fair amount of PTSD. So the urge to run away came back, Even though I was separate. I wasn't in the Philadelphia anymore. I left my husband. I was afraid to be alone. I thought if I were alone I would come. Well, the violent crime was around rape. I thought if I was alone I would be raped again, and I was afraid to be alone. So I did a lot of therapy, and that was a piece of why this dream came back. I was still running away. I couldn't be in my job. I was making million dollar decisions at home with my at home. I was not doing that, and so I think that was a big piece of it too that was a big piece of it too.
Audra:So you, so you were still. You were very capable, in your own company, making these big, giant decisions, but you had this, this old fear gripping you at home. Yes, so you were. As you had said prior, you prepped for a year to go on this journey, with everything but your fear, right? So that was that's part of the anchor of this story. So how old were you when you finally set sail to go on a dream that was first sparked and inspired you when you were 15.
Heidi :55. You were 55.
Audra:Yes, so the reason why I want to say this out loud is because it is never, ever too late to chase an old dream, even with old fears on board, and literally on board, because you were on board a boat, that's right. Never too late to chase an old dream, even when you're bringing some old ghosts, some old fears, which we're going to talk about, that you brought on board with you, correct? Where did you?
Heidi :leave from Left, from Maine, portland, maine, and we sailed down to the Caribbean and on my husband and I sailed together and on. To start we decided we would meet a group of boats in Hampton Virginia. We sailed down, had an amazing sail down to Hampton Virginia and then a group of us were going to sail on our own boats to the Caribbean and, unbeknownst to us, there was a very unexpected storm that came up and some boats actually had knockdowns. One woman was lost and that wasn't exactly where we were. However, the waves were really churned up and we had some very difficult problems with crashing waves and we ended up having to go back into Hampton Virginia against the wind and there was another storm coming behind it and as we started going towards the shore, the Coast Guard came on and said Securite, securite. All boats take immediate shelter.
Heidi :Extreme lightning is coming at seven o'clock, at 1900 hours, and we thought we would be back in time, but because we're going against the wind, it was a lot, took a lot longer, and as the flashes of the lightning came towards our boat and our mast, it was quite alarming to me and I actually had a PTSD attack, dissociative attack, and thought I was 11 years old while I was on the boat, so that when we came back, so that was the second big obstacle that I encountered, of your fear from being attacked at 11, came roaring back in the middle of that storm, correct.
Audra:So you're battling a physical storm and you're battling an emotional one, correct, simultaneously Correct. And you made it inshore from that storm the boat down and find different crew.
Heidi :We can sell the boat whatever works, because he was very, very supportive of it and understood what was happening to me. So it ended up that he sailed down with a crew and I flew down and in the meantime I did a lot of therapy. So that was how I tried to overcome that part of the fear.
Audra:Where did you fly down to to meet your husband?
Heidi :I flew down to the British Virgins and then we sailed through the Caribbean. Then in hurricane season, we came back to Maine, went down again at the end of and I was able to spend the summer with my son, which was wonderful, and then we sailed, flew back, got the boat sailed up and around to Panama, spent a season in Panama, but through that whole time when the weather would get bad and I would get afraid, I would start to have flashbacks and triggers from what happened to me at 11 years old, and so I had to really understand how to stop going from the flashback to full-blown PTSD.
Audra:I had to learn how to calm so you were learning to calm in the middle of the storm. So you were learning to calm in the middle of the storm, physical and emotional, but you kept pushing through. You kept going I did you, you could have, you could have quit like just said, I'm done, I'm done, I'm done and never get back on that boat again. You could have and nobody would have said anything to you no most of all husband.
Audra:My husband could have said that's it, we're done, we're done. You didn't. You kept getting back on that boat, I did, and you kept pushing through, so tell me the story of your amazing and lovely trip and your visit in Cunayala.
Heidi :Cunayala is a matrilineal society north of Panama. There's 360, some islands there, and one of the things that's amazing is they have this concept of Paradiso, where they really are present in the moment and grateful and appreciative of the moment, instead of thinking about someday I'll go to heaven or someday there'll be a Shangri-La, or maybe tomorrow it will be sunny and it won't rain. They really try to focus on the present and we're in paradise right now, and that's a little piece of the whole. Calming practice for me also is, regardless of where I am, I can be grateful for something, even if it's only the breath that I take. If I'm triggered, I can be grateful that I'm aware of the trigger, that I'm breathing in the air that I'm breathing, that I'm seeing colors that are around me, and so that was really an interesting learning experience.
Heidi :And the other piece that was interesting about this society is there's a lot of gender fluidity and there's a lot of valuing of female traits. I guess they have what's called third gender. They have what's called third gender, where some boys, some people who are born male, are given the honor to grow up as female and they're considered third gender. And what I learned from one of the women, lisa, who was born male and embraced being female, is that it's really important to know who you are and embrace who you are.
Heidi :So that was very interesting to me because I grew up feeling, at 11 years old, feeling that women were weak. At 11 years old, feeling that women were weak and I didn't really wasn't really sure I wanted to be a girl anymore because I didn't want to be weak. And down there it seemed like women were not only respected but they were honored for the traits that they had and they had leadership roles and they took care of the commerce and they were powerful and they stood in their power and embraced their femininity. They didn't try to be male leaders, they really embraced being female leaders and that was unbelievable to me to see how strong they were.
Audra:It's one of the only matriarchal societies in the world and it's beautiful. When you told me about this amazing island, I went and did some research and it's an unbelievable society. It right in the fact that they teach to be strong in who you are and not try to be anybody else, and I think that is such a beautiful, gorgeous lesson that they don't want you to necessarily emulate anybody else other than who you are.
Heidi :Yes, exactly, and I found in traveling almost halfway around the world. There's a lot of remote islands and they have very interesting society and such wisdom that they've learned that that was just unbelievable to me me.
Audra:Yeah, these remote societies have such wisdom that in these developed countries haven't caught up to yet, which I think is remarkable.
Heidi :Yeah, often their sense of time is very different than us. I find I can get stressed out a lot because I have all of these things that I'm doing. You know, I found like on these islands, often I could just breathe and be and be in the moment and it was just. It was just amazing A different sense of time, a different sense of gratitude. I was walking down the beach with a friend of mine in Cuneyala and there was a man there that was working on his island and lived on the island, and my friend went up and said thank you so much for being here. This is like so gorgeous. I've never been any place like this.
Heidi :I'm going back to the United States in a few days. What can I send down to you? What would you like? What kind of gifts would you like from the United States? And he looks around and he says this in his own language that he has bananas, he has plantains, he has crabs, he has lobsters, he has fish, he has coconuts. And he looks around and he puts his hand out and he says it's paradise, I have all that I need. I don't know too many people in my community that feel like they really have everything they need and what they have can fit in their hands and around them. In a way, Maybe that's not fair. So many people have high gratitude. It's just a different culture.
Audra:What a beautiful thing to look around and say I have everything I need. There's nothing you can send me that I need, Right? I wish we could all have that.
Heidi :Well, we can, though. I mean, we can feel more gratitude, we can feel more presence. I'm not saying it's easy, but I think the experience for me. I like to stop and be grateful. I have some flowers, cut flowers that a friend gave me, that are just, you know, sitting next to me on the computer and I just look at them and they're so beautiful and I can be present and grateful for that.
Audra:Anyway, when did you go next on your journey?
Heidi :We went through the Panama Canal. I've been through the canal four times. It was so amazing, so interesting to go through the canal. And then we went to the Galapagos and that was the first dream come true for me because, as I mentioned earlier before, I had the dream to go to French Polynesia. I wanted to go to the Galapagos and so we spent a month in the Galapagos swam with sea lions. The Galapagos swam with sea lions, snorkeled, with penguins going by. It was really amazing.
Heidi :If you have an opportunity to go there, I find it so amazing. It's the really incredible ecology there. The people were wonderful, and then that took about 10 days from Panama and then we had a huge crossing from the Galapagos towards French Polynesia. And all of this time I was wanting to search for the waterfall in the magazine and by now it's been 40 some years and I'm not even 100% sure the waterfall exists, let alone it's really at Batahiva, so I believe it's most likely there and I felt like I had to go and find it. I was a little bit obsessed around it, yet I didn't really know if it was there.
Audra:So did you end up finding it? I can't tell you, you have to read my book, oh oh, so we'll have to go, and we'll have to go and read a little bit of a mystery in a cliffhanger that's right to go and lie that out twists in this book.
Audra:oh, we'll have to go and find out. You had said. You had said to me, because this adventure, this was a five-year adventure and it wasn't just a physical one, as you have told us throughout this story. It was most definitely an emotional one, you had told me, as we met, before you had this amazing healing incident in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I did what did you experience in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that finally gave you this full circle healing moment where you finally said, okay, I'm free, I'm free of this.
Heidi :I'm free. I'm free of this. And when I had had a PTSD flashback and I thought my assailant hurt me once and I perpetuated that in my mind every day of my life, and so it was interesting to me to actually recognize what I was doing. And then it was even harder to know what do I do about this? And so at that point I had quit the boat and I met a therapist who had climbed to 24,000 feet on Mount Everest and she was doing a study on breathing, and she's the one that helped me develop a calming practice. And I wrote another book on how to calm it's a workbook on calming and so it started there, by first understanding how I perpetuated it in my mind and then knowing what to do about it, how to calm.
Heidi :From coming from the amygdala in your brain, the flashbacks can come, but for me there was a time between an instant or two, between when the flashbacks would come and when I would just go into full blown PTSD. I learned how to stop that connection. I couldn't stop the initial trigger flashback, but I could stop going from there to having a full-blown PTSD. So when I was in the middle of the Pacific the incident you're talking about waves were colliding. I had three-meter waves, so nine foot wave hitting a nine foot wave and colliding and going up about 15 feet. And basically, if a breaking wave hits the center of your boat that's a third or more of the size of your boat you'll likely get capsized. And these breaking waves were crashing and coming in towards me. I was on watch it was just my husband and I so we were exhausted. One of us would be on watch, one of us would sleep. He was sleeping below and I had the beginning of the trigger and I was able to use the calming practice and stop it.
Heidi :And then I just started to believe it or not, rage at these waves saying this is not happening, you're not taking me down again, and I just raged. I had no idea I had any rage inside me. I thought I was a. Really I didn't even think I had any anger inside of me. I was never allowed to have anger as a child, so I didn't think I had any anger, but boy did I release it at sea. And I've heard since about. I have a friend who works with the Gestalt Institute in Sweden, denmark. She's actually in Copenhagen and she has a class where they take the students that have been traumatized out to the woods and make them scream and yell, and it's all this part of releasing rage that you might not even think you have. So that's what happened to me in the boat.
Audra:But you released 40 years of fear and anger and pain in the middle of the ocean and it no longer held you captive, right, and you wrote a book for those to maybe give them a pathway for release as well.
Heidi :Right. Yes, I wanted to inspire other folks because I believe we all, or most of us, carry stories. It could be from trauma that we have, it could be from all kinds of things. Be some inspiration for others to rise above the stories that we carry and live bold dreams.
Audra:So you were brave enough to live this big, full, big fat, bold dream that was born out of pain. It also gave you release from pain and amazing experiences along the way. Was there a favorite part of this journey that you had that took five years and halfway around the world?
Heidi :Oh yes, but I don't know if I should tell it, because I don't want to give away my book. How about, if I tell you a second favorite, give me a second favorite. There's a clear favorite, but I really I don't want to give away the whole plot of my book.
Audra:Oh yeah, Give us a nibble.
Heidi :Okay, I loved being in Gunayala. I felt such feminine energy there. I felt so valued. I felt that people seemed so happy. They gave me a nickname it's called, it was Ansu, which is mermaid, and I learned um. I learned about 50 words. They a lot of some of them spoke English. A lot of them spoke Spanish, but I tried to learn some of their language and that really helped me be not accepted by their culture but embraced in a way, and I loved to.
Heidi :I loved just swimming and diving and snorkeling and meeting the people. And just one time, my friend Lisa, who I mentioned is a third gender leader in this society, she took us up a boat up a river and then we hiked really deep into the jungle and there was a waterfall in a different waterfall and we could dive in from the rocks and then swim downstream and I felt like it was a national geographic and she had um, she had a friend of hers that also came with us. And another time we just went to one of the islands. They had a ceremony. They have a ceremony when the girls come of age and they let us come to their ceremony and eat their food and drink the famous coconut drinks that they have, and it was so they grabbed. My son came down at that point and a little girl about three years old grabs his hand and he's. It was just really wonderful.
Audra:So so let me, let me read between the lines here when girls come of age, so I'm going to assume, when they start to menstruate, or right, or or they're going to soon start to menstruate Right, or they're going to soon start to menstruate Sure.
Audra:They celebrate it. Oh, yes, wow, what a flipping that on its head. Whereas in Western civilization we hide that and we call it the curse. Right, or at least that's what my grandmother called. It is the curse. It is, and it's something that we hide and call it disgusting. Here in Western civilization and here on this amazing beautiful island, it's a celebration. Wow, what an amazing place.
Heidi :Yes, yes, they also. They do a embroidery work. They make this art, artistic pieces, and they use them in their dress and there are so many symbols and animals and stories and they use these stories to teach their children and their grandchildren. Often a grandmother will work with the grandchild and teach them about who they are and their culture and it's really fascinating.
Audra:This sounds like a magical place and I am so inspired by you. I was inspired by you by the first time I met you. I'm even more inspired by you now, on so many different levels, not just by your candor and your bravery about being so transparent, about the stories of the things that have happened to you, of the of the traumatic things that have happened to you, but that you had a dream that you didn't give up on, even if it took you 40 years to get to and multiple tries to complete, even though it was difficult, and that you had to get off the boat and keep getting on to complete. I am just like I said, there's so there's layer after layer, that your life inspires me and I I just am grateful that we were introduced.
Heidi :Well, thank you, and I really feel like we all have dreams that we can. We can focus on and and, and rise above whatever's holding us back to do that. It's not. It's not. I'm not special with this. I am trying to inspire others to live bold dreams.
Audra:Well, once again, Heidi's book is laughing at the sky. You can reach it. You can find her book on Amazon and all of your favorite booksellers. Heidi, I'm going to give you an opportunity which is my favorite part of the show that when I get to step back from the mic and give you a moment that you can speak directly and intimately with the audience, for you, to give them a moment of inspiration. So the mic is yours.
Heidi :Well, thank you, moment of inspiration. So the mic is yours. Well, thank you. I think four takeaways.
Heidi :For me in traveling halfway around the world was, first of all, breaking the silence.
Heidi :It's really important to break the silence, find compassionate listeners, find your tribe and really deeply, not just tell a piece of your story, but everything that's holding you back. And the more that we as a world tell our stories and break the silence that keeps us from whatever it is that holds us back, that's really critical. And then this whole idea about rising above the stories to live bold dreams, managing your fears, overcoming your obstacles whatever that obstacle is, to see if you can break it down and manage it. And then to understand if you're perpetuating something that's holding you, either perpetuating a trauma or a failure or whatever it is. I think that if that's holding you back, it's good to be aware of that. And then, lastly, it's really to me all about loving well, if you have rage or you have fear, or you have grief, deep grief, to find ways through that experience to turn it to sorrow and find and then love. Well, so I have gratitude and love well. So that's, I think, what I learned in going halfway around the world.
Audra:Heidi, you have been a delight and a joy to get to know. Where can the audience reach you if they'd like to reach out to you and connect with you?
Heidi :Well, my name's Heidi Love and I have a website, HeidiLoveAuthorcom, and they can reach me through my website, HeidiLoveAuthorcom.
Audra:Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you spending your time with me and with the audience and sharing a little bit of your story and giving us a few teasers about your journey of the five years of Halfway Around the World and a little glimpse into your experiences of on the boat and laughing at the sky.
Heidi :Well, thank you, and thank you importantly, for the work that you do, because it's really really important.
Audra:I'm giving it my best shot. I know you are, I really am, because, like you, I think that silence gets us nowhere, and I'm using the tool I have, which is my voice, and putting a microphone on it, so and giving everybody else access to it. So we'll do it together. We'll give everybody else access and amplify their voices. So thank you for lending me yours, thank you and thank you all again for listening, and we'll see you again next time.
