Wild & Holy:

Resident Crone Joan Advent welcomes poet, shaman, and founder of the School of Wild and Holy, Wendy Havlir to explore the importance of our rewilding. Wendy shares the roots of her own rewilding: including studies of Contemplative Psychotherapy at Naropa; a decade-long deep dive with Women Who Run with Wolves author, Clarissa Pinkola Estés PhD.; comprehensive Shamanic training; and finally coming home to herself as a poet. Wendy shares 2 poems chosen for our listeners, “Walk with Me” and “Dress Me in Wild Love.”

The author of The Mistress of Longing and The Reach is Holy, she describes our longing and desire as an ancient navigational system and return to love. And offers an in depth explanation of shamanic soul retrieval and its place in returning to our wholeness.

Wendy reveals the origin story for her upcoming offering “A House Where Love Lives,” which is rooted in her younger self’s dream, and is a medicine for these times focused on heart-led living, reclamation, and coming home to ourselves.

01:17 Meet Wendy Havlir

05:03 Wild and Holy Origins

10:28 Wendy’s Rewilding Journey

14:09 Clarissa Pinkola Estés

16:34 Lineages and Poetry

19:24 Poem Walk with Me

25:57 House Where Love Lives

32:56 Soul Retrieval Explained

38:21 Longing as Compass

45:22 Offerings and Invitation

50:14 Poem Dress Me in Love

52:32 Books and Farewell

Wendy C. Havlir, MA3

Website: shegathersbeauty.com

“A House Where Love Lives” Listener Discount

$250 off Threshold Keeper is coupon code CRONE$250 off Soul Weaver is coupon code CRONECODES

Transcript

Welcome back to the Crone Codes.

I am your host, the creator and the resident Crone, Joan Advent. And I am so delighted and honored to welcome my friend, my soul sister, mentor Wendy Havlir to join us today. Welcome, Wendy.

Wendy: Thank you, Joan. I’m so overjoyed to be here

Joan: I know. It’s so going to be so good.

There is so much depth and richness that Wendy brings, and I am excited to share the wonder of Wendy with you.

So let’s just start with the essence of who Wendy is.

So as we do on The Crone Codes, I want to invite you, our listener, to take a moment, close your eyes if you’re able to, to just receive and let wash over you. The essence of who Wendy is and all the medicine she brings, the codes she brings, and all that she has accomplished in order to be here with us today with these codes.

So Wendy Havlir is a poet, shaman, and the founder of the School of Wild and Holy. It’s a place where women are guided through sacred initiation. Ancient wisdom, teachings and practices, rewilding and remembrance, rooted in ancestral lineages of seers and mystic poets. Her work weaves shamanism, poetry and lived experience to open thresholds into deep liberation, embodied spirituality, and profound partnership with love itself. She’s the author of The Mistress of Longing, a very powerful book about the deep call of the Divine Feminine, and the power of desire. She also has a book of poetry, The Reach is Holy and is currently working on her next compilation.

Welcome.

Wendy: Thank you, Joan. I feel like I just had a ceremony, having you read that. That was really beautiful.

Joan: Yeah, ceremony is also, I would say just having worked with you in the past and what I know of you, like ceremony is a key, aspect of your medicine as I’ve experienced it.

Wendy: Mm, thank you.

Joan: Yeah, you’re welcome.

So there, there are so many pieces of, what I just shared that, that feel so important when we consider the crone codes that we gather throughout the course of our life. Particularly as we sit here in 2026 with the collective landscape that we’re all navigating and living. But I really want to start with wild and holy and this, this sense of like rewilding.

And remembrance, which I’m assuming that, that those all go together. That wild and holding rewilding and remembrance.

Wendy: Mm-hmm. Hmm.

Well, I love so, so of course the words wild and holy are the name of my school, the School of Wild and Holy, which was actually given to me by my helping spirits. And as a shamanic practitioner and someone who, as one of the many facets of who I am and someone who, has cultivated really deep partnerships, with my helping spirits, um, and being in that kind of holy communication with them.

Hmm. Daily and all day long. I’m so honored that they, provided me with the sort of marching orders, if you will, the directive in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic, that it was time to open my school. And they gave me the name of the school And I would say that, it is very much about rewilding and the holiness of that and the remembering of who we really are.

And so what I have found so much in my own life and in the work that I do, there’s this powerful shedding and sort of stripping away of all of these layers that have grown over us through the years by simply being human. And the sacred process of realizing that there are these like extra layers and so this beautiful sort of falling away so that we can remember who we really are and.

I think to be human is to be both wild and holy already. I don’t think that there’s anything that we have to do or become to that is our essence. We are wild because we are in this skin and we have blood and organs and feelings and flesh and you know, all of these things and desire. Desire, all of all of these things that are deeply human and grief and ways of being and moving that only humans can do.

And what also is true in the cosmology that I walk with and in the teachings that I provide by way of the school of wild and holy. Is that we came Holy. And our soul is untouchable. It is unmarked. Yeah. So no matter what we’re experiencing in this realm of activity, there is also a truth that stands by us.

For the duration of our time in this human body. And so there’s this way that remembering that we are both wild and holy at the same time is becoming more and more and more essential for us to be here in this life as we know it right now, not to escape it. Yes, but to be able to be better grounded and supported in that.

And on a personal note, I would just say that my own personal life has been this remembrance of being untamed and, and rewilding myself.

Joan: And how long has that journey been happening? Consciously.

Wendy: Consciously? Yeah. ‘cause I was gonna say from the moment I popped out of the womb, but um hmm.

I would say really since probably consciously around 2007 or 2008. And there have been many initiations since that time.

Joan: Yes. Yes. And I know that you have studied, uh, with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, and was, was that a seminal aspect of that journey?

Wendy: I would say it would be even before the date that I gave actually corresponds to my time at Naropa University where I was studying Contemplative psychotherapy and there was a sort of magical way that things were. And, and really it goes even way beyond that, but we don’t have that much time.

So I’m gonna start here where I sort of was inner, was guided. There was a way that. It was really magical because all of a sudden I realized that I could, I already had quite a lot of academic experience, and while I was at Naropa, I was realizing that I could begin to open myself up to bridging the worlds of spirituality with applied practicality, and there was so much, you know, deep contemplative.

Practice with a mindful awareness practice while also learning how to be a psychotherapist. And so really learning so much about the mind. And how powerful the mind is. Not necessarily always in a good way and often all of the ways we get hooked into really believing something by way of our mind.

I would say that that was kind of an opening to realizing that there was something more that, that I was beginning to actually experience. In my body and with others and helping people in that way. And then it was, was with Dr. E Clarissa Pinkola Estés. And I mean I think that I studied with her for eight, nine, maybe 10 years.

And that really blew the doors open. Yeah. Into realizing this instinctual nature, everything really became more embodied. More about being more wolf like and understanding what that meant and moving into storytelling.

Joan: Yeah. So if anyone does not know who Dr. Pinkola Estes is, she is the author of Women Who Run with Wolves and a powerful, voice, not only for Cronehood.

But for that instinctual nature within all of us as women. And she really goes in through story, and you can correct me if I’m wrong or flesh out more. Um, she goes in through story to those common, universal aspects of our journey as women and the, the rewilding and the what are the, the layers that we’re meant to shed.

Wendy: Yeah. And you know, one of the things that I think is so remarkable about her work is she’s a Jungian analyst, so she’s working with all of the archetypes that are common to, you know, all of us at different parts of our lives and so on and so forth. But that she actually, and she is a Curandera, she is a traditional storyteller and she comes from a long line of storytellers and the ways that she can.

Bring life to the story and to our own lives and bodies through her particular unique way of storytelling is just profound. I mean, I think that she, and this work is, you know, as, as big or bigger than like, you know, the work of many, I’ll just say. And also she spent time with wolves, like researching them.

Wow.

And understanding, yeah. And understanding what it meant. I mean, to the extent that she could, what it meant to be wolf like, and that part was really important to her. Um, so yeah. Yeah.

Wow, I didn’t know that.

Mm-hmm.

Joan: Wow. And so for you, because I hadn’t planned on discussing her or talking about her, but, but my sense is that for many of us who have been on a conscious journey of rewilding remembering who we are, that we often have, uh, mentors, teachers, or lineages that we are…

You know, we are kind of the next generation of, or one of the generations of. And so you are, I would say in, in her lineage you are in many different lineages. The shamanic lineages, the poetic lineages. When I first read your poetry, I really felt, as if I were reading a poem by Rumi or Hafiz or you know, any of the mystic poets.

And so it just feels important to name that sense of lineage. because we certainly have our, our biological ancestral lineages, but then we have our, whether it’s teaching or spiritual lineages, that each of us. On a conscious journey will be drawn to, or mentored or guided by.

Wendy: Mm-hmm. Indeed. So many lineages that converge within each of us. And I think that, through all of the lineages that I’m aware of thus far in my life, you know, poetry is really the river that moves through all of them for me. And that is something that I’ve been rewilding all my life to some degree, is permissioning myself to be the poet. And to understand the relevance of the poet and poetry.

The archetype of the poet and poetry and, even still today, I can sometimes get, you know it, it’s a practice of mine to remember that there are many things that I can do, but really there’s, there’s something that I must do. And it must show up and be like the primary thing of whatever I’m doing, and that is poetry.

Joan: Hmm. So speaking of that, I had asked you if you share a poem or poems with us. And I think this would be a beautiful time for that. I, I don’t know what, what you’ve chosen. So we’ll all get to enjoy this together.

Wendy: Mm-hmm. Well, I’ll tell you a quick little interesting story. One of my most, most, one of my, I love all my students, but one of my beloved students, I think she’ll be okay with me saying her name.

Mafalda is helping me compile all of my poetry since I think we’ve gone all the way back to, 2019. And, I’m so close to my poetry, I often don’t know. Like I just don’t know. And I actually asked her, Mafalda, are there like some poems that you really love that you think would be beneficial for me to share right now?

So the ones that I’m reading for you are two that she actually picked out. And so I just love that. And she is quite the poet herself. So I want to bring sort of all of the poets that I love and so many of my students are poets. And, um,

Joan: You bring it out in people. I dare say that you. I know you are, um, I don’t want to say coaxing, but you are inviting and creating the space for, because there are pieces I have written with you that I, I really don’t think I would’ve had access to certainly on my own, but

mm-hmm.

Perhaps with any other teacher, so. Yes.

Wendy: You’ve written beautiful things that I’ve had the great, good fortune to witness, so thank you. Thank you.

Joan: And Mafalda actually shared two of her pieces in December in a couple.

Wendy: I know. I listened. They were gorgeous.

Joan: So it’s the, the circle keeps coming around.

Wendy: It’s the circle, and that just feels so yummy, like.

To bring all of the poets into the room right now as we’re speaking.

Joan: Yes, and before you dive in, I just keep feeling compelled to share. I’ve been doing some studying with a Hawaiian indigenous elder (Ke’Oni Hanalei), and he shares that his grandmother, who was his kind of primary teacher, Initiator into the traditions would say to him that through that lens, that indigenous Hawaiian lens, you must learn.

I’m not going to quote it exactly right, but the essence is, is you must learn or understand poetry before you can speak.

[The actual quote is, “Before you learn how to speak you must first learn how to be a poet.”]

Wendy: Oh my goodness.

Joan: Because there is this essence of the mystical and the, the ways that we are so deeply connected and the mystery. And so to understand that before you even begin to speak.

Wendy: Oh, thank you for sharing that. What a beautiful teaching. Yes, because there are, there’s so much in the poetry that isn’t being said, that is yet known and felt and is a whole language in and of itself. So that’s, that is beautiful. Hmm.

Okay. Well, okay, let’s dive into this one. This is called Walk with Me.

I won’t pretend to know how it will all turn out. I leap anyway, I came to do it this way. I want my whole heart, not just parts.

Wearing the mantle that is mine. Embodying the unknown. My promise to our collective bones. I am an expander, rule breaker here in a meeting place imbued with mystery. The wild frontier of this moment. Fire lives in my heart. Yours too. Potential is alive and well in the empty portals of what belongs with you.

This living, Is an act of making holy, there is nothing about my love that is wrong. There is nothing about your love that is wrong.

Joan: Ooh.Yes. I just feel that washing over me.

Mmm.

There’s, there are so many threads. It’s, it really is like something I would love to just wrap myself up in.

Mm-hmm.

The words, the essence. The… And what a poem for this time.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

For this time, I know you have an offering that is coming out and that it speaks to not just an offering, but that the essence of who you are.

A House Where Love Lives. Is that right?

Wendy: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. The name is multi-layered, but the way it actually came to me was by way of, my younger self. And, at the time I had, I had the course laid out and, it’s always co-created with my helping spirits, but I couldn’t, the name wasn’t there and they weren’t giving me a name, and it was like a name is.

So important for me because it also helps me understand more and flushes out more about what the offering is and who’s going to come. Mm-hmm. , And so I was doing a something completely separate that had nothing to do with the offering and I was just simply doing a meditation, with a younger part of me.

And, and I had asked her, and I think that this is important because it will correlate to those who are called to participate in this. I had asked her, what is your original dream? Like, what is your dream for your life?

And like, she didn’t miss a beat, she simply said a house, where love lives.

Hmm.

And it was so moving, I still get a little emotional, my heart kind of bursts open and so I knew instantly, oh, that’s what we’re doing here. That’s what we’re going to be doing here. A house where love lives and, there’s a real focus, in this offering that has to do with living from the heart and seeing from the heart and an aspect of reclamation and a form of soul retrieval. Right now so that we can be together, we can be connected in a way that is palpable and real, and resourced. And, the school itself is essentially a house where love lives. And there is a council that lives there who call themselves a Council of Love, the Council of Love. And they take the students into their homes.

Hmm.

And they really enliven them with love.

Hmm.

And the strength of that and the power of that and the reclamation of that. And so, yes.

Joan: Hmm. And it, it seems to me there’s, there’s something with the starting out with your younger self and her longing.

Wendy: Yes.

Joan: That. You know, that tells me that all, like all of me is welcome or all of us is welcome.

Mm-hmm.

And I can feel like there’s some bitter sweetness to that of, you know, some grief perhaps from those places that don’t always feel welcome.

As well as that. Could this be true? Like could it,

Wendy: Right,

Joan: could it be true that there is a house where loved dwells, where, where all, all of us is welcome.

Wendy: That’s right. Including the exiled parts, the parts that we’ve learned to put away somewhere and certainly not bring out into the open. Um, yeah. And so it’s that it’s a very tender, vulnerable place. A place of those younger parts I think often when we are permissioning ourselves to turn our gaze toward them that innocence. And remembering what did this innocent part of me long for?

Yes.

And how can I use my own personal agency to tend to that now?

Joan: Hmm. Yeah, that is a powerful question and I, I hope that our listeners will take that to heart mm-hmm.

And, and really commit to finding some time to sit with that.

Wendy: Mm-hmm.

Yes. And really taking it to heart indeed, right? Like,

Joan: Yes, literally.

Wendy: In shamanism and the lineage that I belong to really the heart is where spirit moves. Spirit moves through our heart. The, the highest, the truest, gritty, get down, dirty, perfection, loving truth, it comes through the heart. Not here. because we’re rewilding.

Yes.

We’re not gonna rewild through this.

No. We’re gonna rewild through our heart, through our hands, through writing, through listening, through receiving and being resourced.

Joan: Mm-hmm. Yes, so I would like to get into longing and desire and that reach.

But before we do, just for anyone who’s not familiar with the term soul retrieval

Hmm.

Can you just speak to that.

Wendy: Of course, of course. Thank you. Thank you. Well, shamanically speaking.

Shamanically speaking, there is, a belief that we as humans experience soul loss. We experience soul loss at different times of our lives. In Curanderismo this would be called susto, A time when our soul leaps out of our body because some kind of danger or trauma is happening. And this is why we say that the soul is unmarked.

The soul knows how to be whole. And so a soul retrieval will, will happen when, for whatever reason, and it’s nobody’s fault or there’s no blame or anything, there’s actually a Divine intelligence, really a wild intelligence that, Will occur for deep protection that a part of our soul will leave.

Mm-hmm.

And go find safety and what is also true is that it can sometimes wreak havoc for us because we have a part of us that is missing. So there could be an emotional distress, physical distress, energetic distress. And so a shamanic practitioner, a trained shamanic practitioner, I’m very clear about that.

It’s so necessary that someone has good training who can provide you with this, but a shamanic practitioner who understands through their helping spirits that a soul retrieval is necessary, they go with their helping spirits to locate that part of the soul, and they bring it back. They bring it back to the individual.

And, it’s remarkable what happens for a person when they have a soul retrieval. They feel life force again. Things start working better again in their lives. They have more energy or they understand things better and in new ways it’s like they have themselves back again. So that’s soul retrieval.

Joan: Yes. And it, and it is, I would say the journey of remembrance, but it’s also the bringing all parts of us back home to ourselves.

Yes.

And so that is a specific intervention or way to bring components of us back that maybe we, we haven’t even been aware of or

Exactly.

Or, or known what medicine they hold or what power they hold or what wisdom or truth.

Wendy: Yeah, and I want to also clarify that in a group scenario, in the class that I’m doing, I’m not necessarily performing a soul retrieval in the way that I just described it for each person. But there are ways, I believe personally that in group work there is a force, a grace of retrieval and remembering that can happen.

And in fact, I had a student recently say that they felt like the entire course, of The Heart of the Matter was in and of itself a soul retrieval. So there are a couple of different ways that I’m talking about this and I just want to be clear about that and hopefully that’s not confusing.

Joan: Well, I think it just points to some, someone could get more information if they needed it and if they’re

Wendy: Absolutely.

Joan: If they’re interested in your work they can absolutely reach out to you, ask you.

Yeah.

In engaging with it., I feel like we have, you have sufficiently answered the question.

Wendy: Okay. Excellent.

Joan: But I do want to circle back to this topic of longing and desire, because I do think it is a hallmark of what you bring and certainly your book. [The Mistress of Longing.]

You’re beautiful. It’s a small book. It’s a potent book, but it’s, there’s so much that comes through The Mistress of Longing. And I have to say, as someone who was disconnected from that in my own life, like learned very early on, it was not, was not a good idea to want things or to long for things or to let my heart really deeply desire to remember, uh, the sacredness of that and the importance of that to being here and to being human. And have been one of my primary teachers about that.

Mm-hmm.

And your transmission has been a primary medicine for that. So. What can you tell us about longing and our heart’s desire? Our soul’s desire?

Wendy: Hmm.

Well there’s so much there and I think that you pointed to something that’s so necessary to understand about ourselves is that often, more often than not, we can be really disconnected from our longing and our desire for multiple reasons. Each person is different and has had their own life experience that has in some way shown them, taught them, or they’ve learned to tuck that away because it isn’t safe. But I actually think to really be embodied we must feel, we must feel things. And I think something that I’ve learned even over the last. Five, six years is that there’s a way even that a deep feeling, like a deep grief, a deep fear and deep joy is also a longing.

Longing really opens us. And it’s like Dr. E or Clarissa Pinkola Estés often talks about the river, beneath the river. Rio abajo rio. And, that’s what longing is. And, and that always feels so important for me to clarify. Like, we’re not talking about when we’re talking about longing in this way.

It’s not, you know, It’s not something out there.

Hmm.

It’s something deep in us. It’s a hunger, like a way that part of us has actually been starved.

Hmm.

And The Mistress of Longing says that longing is the most exquisite navigational system that we have. And that we came with longing. The reason why we’re even here in a body in this incarnation was from longing, was from desire to come and be here, for whatever particular purpose that is for each of us.

And of course, well, I would imagine anyone who’s listening to us right now probably, probably has some kind of cosmology that is open to other lifetimes and, and soul and having a sense that we, you know, we come for specific reasons. I don’t ever want to assume that I know what anyone holds as true for them.

That’s not for me to do, but when something is deeply missing in our lives, not because we’re not already whole, but because we don’t remember our wholeness, our wildness, and what we need to be here to feel enlivened in our body and our heart longing will tell us

yes,

if we’re listening, it will tell us the precise next steps for what we need to have a full belly and to return the radiance to ourselves to return our deep sense of meaning of being here.

So it is quite, an ancient technology, that is actually love.

Hmm.

It is actually a return to love.

Hmm.

Is what longing is.

Hmm.

It’s a return home.

Joan: Yes. And there are some cosmologies or beliefs systems that might even express that it is, it is the Divine or the sacred within us, like the, the aspect of the Divine.

Mm-hmm.

or God, whatever name you might choose, that is exploring life through us and through our longing. That it is that

mm-hmm.

Yes.

The, the, the sacredness to explore itself, to dance with itself in, in all these different, um, dimensions or all these different forms.

Wendy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Joan: So we’re gonig start to bring this to a close, but I wanna see first if, , if there’s more you want to share about “A House Where Love Lives”, in terms of, because this is something that’s coming up, or if there are ways that if people are interested in you, your poetry, your books. We’ll have all that listed in the show notes, how to access those things.

But is there anything further you want to share about that?

Wendy: Yes, and I would love to share a poem too.

Yes.

As we wrap up, if there’s time for that. I think that I would love to invite people, that if they feel called or interested in working with me, that I would be really honored and would love to have a call with them, a free call a clarity call where they can ask me anything and we can just spend some time together. Because I certainly offer a few, I have a few spots for one-on-one work and I love that to really go deeply with someone. Um. And of course, A House Where Love Lives is going to be an incredible offering.

It is a call home. It is, um, the people that come to together in my offerings and collective are extraordinary women. Joan, of course, knows that well because she has been one of them, and I feel so lucky to be a part of these weavings, and so this offering will be extraordinary. Remarkable because it is being created for this precise moment for what we are all sort of reckoning with outside of ourselves and within, within ourselves. We are in such a huge change right now, and so there will be poetry and writing and there will be channeling and there will be this incredible nervous system that you get to plug into, um, that is the School of Wild and Holy and the Council of Love.

And so I’ll stop there because I could go on and on forever.

Joan: Yes. So I know. I always experience you and your medicine in such a visceral way. Like in, in, in such a, like dark chocolate, velvety rose petals. Mm-hmm. You know, just the, depth of heart way. And I trust our listeners are finding that as well, and your poetry is one of those transmissions. So I would, be a vote of confidence for anyone who is feeling drawn or curious to check out Wendy’s work.

Check out her as well as like her, your Instagram, where you do share both your poetry and videos from time to time. And I would love to have you gift us with another poem before we close.

Wendy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, thank you. I’ll do that. And I, I forgot to say that for, your listeners, if anyone is interested in A House Where Love Lives and, and joins that cohort, by way of this podcast, I’m offering a discount. So, just make sure when you reach out to me that you mention, this podcast episode.

Joan: So generous. Thank you.

Wendy: Mm-hmm. It’s my pleasure. Okay. Well this poem is called Dress Me in Wild Love.

I choose wild love flowing freely from my lips.

I choose unspoken trust and passion from our hips, communion and softness, bathing and moonlight, numinous doorways, and breathtaking insights.

I choose pleasure gathered in my arms. Promises made with kisses and long walks, Ravens dark feathers. Fire in our bones. I choose prayers spoken revelations out in the open, her hands laced in mine. We are canopies of light sounds of devotion in the middle of the night. Making altars in the river from a rounded feast, I am a willing temptress spreading my wings, living naked as a wild flower, taking in the sun.

I am heart pressed poetry dressed in wild love.

Joan: That’s a good one. It is. Will these poems be in your new compilation?

Wendy: They will. They will. I’m very much hoping to release this book later in the year, if not first thing next year. Mm-hmm. It’s quite a big compilation.

Joan: Yay. I’m looking forward to it. And I would give a shout out both to, The Reach is Holy and the Mistress of Longing.

I know The Reach is Holy I’m sure you can get both on Amazon, but I also want to give a shout out that The Mistress of Longing was published by the wonderful Lucy Pearce.

Wendy: Yeah, if you’d like to purchase, there might even be a few signed copies left of The Mistress of Longing, through Womancraft Publishing, which is in Cork, Ireland.

And you can also find that book anywhere, that you can purchase books online. So, yeah,

Joan: okay. So I want to thank you again, Wendy, for taking this time to join us for, for, for bathing us in the beauty of your words and your wisdom and your heart.

Wendy: Thank you. It’s been such an honor. I have loved getting to be with you again.

Joan: I know.

Wendy: That’s so awesome. Yeah.

Joan: Yes. And we want to thank you, our dear listener, for being with us today. And I want to remind you that whether you are making ripples in your life or big ass waves that you are love. And you are loved.

Until next time.