How to Write from the Soul

Embodied Poetry, Moon Journalling and the Art of Showing Up with Nora Wilhelm

What if the most profound writing you'll ever do isn't aimed at an audience at all? What if the point isn't a finished piece, a polished poem, or a published book, but the act of really listening to what your own inner voice has been trying to tell you?

That's the invitation at the heart of my conversation with Nora Wilhelm, a social entrepreneur, changeworker, and writer from Switzerland who found her way back to herself through the powerful act of creating. Nora is the founder of Well Change Atelier, a platform for creative regeneration, and the host of Writing with Flow, a programme helping people build writing routines that feel sustainable. In 2024, she wrote her first book, and the lessons she gathered along the way, about showing up daily, writing gently, and trusting the process, form the backbone of this episode.

Embodied Poetry and the Soul Volume Practice

Nora has been writing poetry since childhood, processing grief, wonder, and the incidents of daily life through verse. But she resists the label of 'poet'.

"I don't even know that I would think of myself as a poet," Nora says. "I always found that these labels are stifling." Her embodied poetry practice, which she sometimes calls 'soul volume poetry', began as a pursuit of the truth. "It's all about cranking up the volume of your own soul," she explains, "what's already there, what you deep down already know maybe is important, the voice that's whispering always and... allowing that to come through."

The process Nora has developed to access that voice is both practical and surprisingly accessible. She begins with rapid-fire association: a word is offered, such as candle, sunrise, dancing, and participants write the very first thing that arrives, without pausing to evaluate it. The speed is deliberate. "If we go too slow in this, the critical mind has time to come online." From there, participants are given a metaphor, a flower blooming, for instance, and invited to write about it, letting their own meaning attach naturally. What does the flower represent to you? A relationship? A season of your own life? Something in the wider world?

The final step is the most personal – choosing something that matters to you, finding a metaphor for it, and writing about the metaphor rather than the thing itself. "I find that this yields incredible results," Nora says.

She also practises a collective dimension of this work, gathering lines from participants across a retreat or conference and weaving them into a single emergent poem, sometimes performed live. At the Art of Change conference in Austria, she read one such poem accompanied by a guitarist. "I really feel like I'm connecting to something deeper and really in tune with the pulse of life," she reflects.

Journalling with the Moon

If embodied poetry is about depth, Nora's journalling practice is about rhythm. She follows the moon’s cycle as a natural prompt for twice-monthly reflection, something she describes as being rooted in the lunar traditions of her Celtic and Germanic heritage.

"Before we were following a solar calendar, we were lunar people," she says. She points out that the moon is always there: visible, changing, requiring no alarm, no reminder app, no act of willpower to exist. It simply does what it does, and you can choose to follow.

At the new moon, Nora journals around intention: what does she want to call in for the coming cycle? She sometimes cross-references with astrology, particularly the work of astrologer Chani Nicholas, to sense the broader themes at play. At the full moon, she turns to reflection and release: how far did she come with her intentions, and is there anything to let go of?

She offers this approach as an invitation, particularly for anyone who finds daily journalling unsustainable. "A moon cycle is more or less a month," she notes, "so twice a month, journalling practice." Having a visual, natural marker, the moon itself, makes it easier to remember and easier to return to if you miss a cycle. There is no judgment built into it. The moon will come back around.

Writing a Book Five Minutes at a Time

When Nora decided to write her first book in spring 2024, it didn't flow easily. She kept putting it off, waiting for the right conditions, the right mood, the right amount of time. Sound familiar?

The shift came when she stripped her goal back to something almost embarrassingly small: five minutes. "No matter what, you must write for five minutes and that's it," she explains. "And then if momentum comes and I want to write more, amazing." If it doesn't come, five minutes is enough and achievable – the act becomes automatic.

Nora also anchored her writing to an existing daily habit: waking up, coffee in hand, still in bed. "The coffee was the reward for actually writing," she smiles. This is the habit-stacking principle that James Clear writes about in Atomic Habits, referenced in the conversation: stack a new behaviour onto something already steady in your life, attach a small reward, and let consistency build its own momentum. "First sip after first words written," Nora says.

Her other key insight is about creating the conditions for inspiration rather than waiting for it to arrive uninvited. "Create pockets where inspiration is actually possible," she says. "What we know about flow state, becoming inspired, very often it requires idle time. So it requires being outside and taking a walk in nature without anything, without even a podcast, or sitting by a river and just having your journal there and no other distractions. Something that could today be called boredom, but it's just kind of blank space for your consciousness to come online and the clarity to reveal itself."

Once the book was written, the self-publishing process brought its own steep learning curve, from sourcing ethical printers to navigating interior design and cover creation. "The writing part in the end was the easy part," Nora says, with characteristic honesty, "compared to all the tedious project management and editing and figuring it out after the fact." Her book is not yet released, but the process has already informed her Writing with Flow programme, which helps others build exactly the kind of sustainable writing rhythm that carried her through it.

Writing as a Way Back to Yourself

Running through these practices, the poetry, the lunar journalling, the daily writing habit, is a single thread: creativity as a path home to yourself. Nora speaks about the Well Change Atelier's broader offering of modalities, writing, painting, dance, and working with clay, as processes to move through. "It is for the process, not for a product," she says. "It's about being with the process and letting that reveal profound insights for us."

This is also how she describes poetry at its most powerful: as a mirror. When a poem moves you, when it brings tears or warmth or recognition, that feeling is not about the quality of the writing. It is about the quality of the listening. "If it moves something," she says, "then you've gone there. You've gone to that place of depth."

And perhaps that is the invitation in all of it. Whether you pick up your journal at the new moon, spend five minutes writing before your first coffee, or let a metaphor carry you somewhere you didn't expect to go, you are not producing something. You are listening and turning up the volume on what is already there.

Your Turn: Writing from the Soul

This practice draws on two of the approaches Nora describes in the conversation: metaphor-based writing and thought-provoking questions. Both are gentle ways in, and they work particularly well together because the metaphor loosens the grip of the analytical mind, while the question invites something deeper to surface.

Begin by choosing a metaphor for where you are right now. It might be a season, a weather pattern, a body of water, a creature, a phase of the moon. Don't overthink it. Write the first thing that arrives. Then write about it, not necessarily about your life directly, but about the metaphor. Let the metaphor carry whatever it needs to carry.

When you feel ready, sit with one or more of these questions. You don't need to answer them directly. Let them be present as you write:

• What is the voice that has been whispering in you lately? What has it been trying to say?
• If you wrote about what matters most to you right now, what metaphor would you reach for? What does that metaphor tell you?
• Is there something you are ready to release as this cycle comes to a close? What would it feel like to set it down?
• Where in your life are you waiting for the lightning bolt of inspiration?
• What might you write if you simply began, just for five minutes, today?

There is no correct answer and no finished poem waiting at the end. There is only what comes through when you give yourself enough space to listen.

Want to explore embodied poetry, moon journalling, and sustainable writing habits further?

Listen to the full conversation with Nora Wilhelm on Episode 75 of the Writing with Purpose podcast.