Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.
Author & Memoir Coach
You’ve been on one hell of a journey.
It’s time to share your heart, words, and wisdom.
Hi, I'm Brad. When my clients write a memoir, they heal, grow, and transform their own lives--and they help their readers heal, grow, and transform, too.
It's Time to Tell Your Story... Finally
It’s been one hell of a journey, this life. It was rough, I know. But you got through it. You did the hard work. You healed. You really did it.
I can relate. A professional writer for 30 years, I took the hard road through life, too. For me, it was depression, addiction, and PTSD.
I had 10,000 doubts and a hundred false starts.
I questioned my own self-worth and, despite decades of experience, I even questioned my writing ability and my story. But like you, I made it. And this year I published my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing.
I did it, and I know you can write and publish your story, too.
You know that telling your story will heal you further. You sense that writing a memoir would bring you back to yourself, to that place called home. You know deep inside that it’s got to come out.
Have you already started yet? Maybe you wrote the first chapter and then part of the second. (I stopped and started mine multiple times.) Perhaps you plotted it out on paper. You may have even taken a writing class or two.
What’s keeping you from finishing it?
What if you could check “write a memoir” off your bucket list? What if your memoir was now sitting on your bookshelf sandwiched between your dog-eared copies of Eat, Pray, Love and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.
Your book is crying out to be written.
If you’re like me, you’ve yearned to write a memoir for as long as you can remember. You KNOW your life is memoir-worthy. And your closest friends have told you this, too.
You’ve searched your local bookstore and YouTube for resources to help you write your memoir. You’ve listened to podcasts. And they helped… a little. You were able to make some progress. You wrote ten or twenty or thirty good pages, too. But then you stopped. You put your nascent book in a desk drawer just as you were finding your groove. You suddenly feared it was awful though you knew in your heart that it wasn’t. You knew it was good.
But now you can’t find those pages. It’s no longer in that desk drawer. It’s not on your hard drive anymore, either. You now realize that searching for answers on Google is a dead end. If you don’t do something different, you realize your story will never be told.
I felt this, too. The longer I waited to write my memoir, the more it felt like a beautiful bird was trapped in my chest, flapping its wings and crying to fly free and sing its song.
But today my book is in the world–and now it’s your turn. The world is waiting for your book.
You know your story can heal people who’ve been through similar hardships. Your story and wisdom could serve as a roadmap for their growth. It could help them on their journey of recovery and transformation.
In short –though your brain is overflowing with advice from so-called experts, you’ve never felt more confused. I understand this. I’ve been there. But then, on my journey to write and publish my memoir, I made a crucial discovery. Yes, a little advice is a good thing. But the key to writing and publishing a memoir isn’t “out there.” It’s in here, inside your own heart. Like the bird that was alive inside my chest, your story is flapping its wings inside you. It’s yearning to fly free.
It’s time.
And I have the care, experience and wisdom to help you open your heart and release your caged story. Let me show you how to remove your deepest mental blocks to writing a memoir and becoming an author.
Writing a book will change you. A book can help you build a business, heal your past, and even locate your true purpose and best self. Discover how my writing course and one-on-one coaching can bring your book to life.
Yes, there is a lot to learn about writing a memoir.
All good memoirs share a few key things in common. They all are made of great stories and a strong author voice. They all have a vulnerable narrator, plenty of action and suspense. Transformation, too. The narrator—you!–must arrive at the book’s end a changed human.
Last, the writing must be heart-felt. The words must flow. They must be natural and spontaneous, not forced. A remarkable memoir will never be written by an AI chatbot.
And yet, despite all these “must-haves,” people do write and publish a memoir every year. Thousands of people.
How do they do it?
Here’s The Key to Writing a Remarkable Memoir—and actually getting to The End
Every successful writer has a toolbox in their brain, whether they are conscious of it or not. Every time they sit down to write, they apply a few tried-and-true techniques that they lean on when inspiration fails them.
Second, every successful writer knows how to tell a great story.
Third, every successful writer knows how to write with emotion. They infuse their sentences with heart-felt feelings, and they embody the feelings so their words don’t feel contrived or empty. They share from the heart.
Fourth, every successful writer knows how to reflect on the past. They know how to tell their readers why their experiences were meaningful to them. They share the lessons they learned that helped them move forward in life.
Fifth, every successful memoirist knows how to connect deeply with the hearts of their readers, too. They show that we humans are all connected. They know how to speak universal truths and say. They say things like, “We humans are so precious and confused.”
Here's how I know... For years, I longed to write a memoir, too.
During the past 30 years, during which I’ve worked at the highest levels of publishing as a professional editor, I’ve helped birth dozens of memoirs and nonfiction books. I’ve written and edited hundreds of magazine articles. Yet I felt like my life and career were incomplete. My heart ached to tell my story.
And I finally did it.
My memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, was published last March by Hachette Go, a major traditional publisher. And the reviews have been off-the-charts positive.
Here’s what some of the U.S.’s best-loved authors had to say about it.
Reading Brad Wetzler’s Into the Soul of the World is like embarking on a thrilling, dangerous journey—rivering straight into the heart of what matters most—to find yourself transformed. Ever the seeker, Wetzler wrestles with dark family secrets and triggered trauma, redefining what it means to be a man and spiritual being living in the twilight of our hyper-American materialism. If Into the Soul of the World belongs on a shelf next to Eat, Pray, Love, what lingers is Wetzler’s relentless audacity to try to tell the truth, however uncomfortable—about families and lovers and our times—In hopes of setting himself, and us, free.
Michael Paterniti
Author of Driving Mr. Albert and The Telling Room
In the age of toxic masculinity, Brad Wetzler’s Into the Soul of the World offers a powerful, profound, and deeply personal road map for actively cultivating a different kind of manhood. Through energetic and lively prose, Wetzler takes us inside the heart and mind of a man who refuses to conform to society’s restrictive notion of manhood and instead presents a new path for men to walk. This is not an easy path, Wetzler is clear, but we’ve never needed it more.
Emily Rapp Black
Author of The Still Point of the Turning World
Let Me Show You How You Can Finally Write and Publish Your Memoir. The world is waiting.
Sign up for my weekly Memoir Deep Dive Class and Community.
Transformational Memoir Writing Course
Isn’t it time to share your wisdom, your words … and your HEART?
If you have a story to tell (and you do, don’t you) and need expert guidance, Memoir Deep Dives: A Weekly Memoir Writing Class and Community is the course for you. Brad will guide you in planning, drafting, and finishing your memoir or nonfiction self-help book.
You’re ready to make progress. Brad is the memoir writing coach you need, and he’s ready to get you where you want to go.
Brad has been featured in
Are you an aspiring author, wellness thought leader, therapist, or spiritual teacher?
Are you struggling to write a book about how you healed from trauma, addiction, depression, or the thousands of other things that make us human?
Or are you simply aching to tell your story while continually getting stuck and losing momentum?
I can help you. I will show you how to write your story with power, grace, and radical emotional vulnerability. And more heart.
Together, we’ll make sure that you ask and answer the hard questions, challenge yourself, tap into the courage to tell your truth, and gain momentum.
Testimonials
Eddie Pinero
Inspirational Speaker and YouTube Influencer
What I found most valuable was his ability to see the big picture. Brad has a very unique way of getting to know his clients, understanding where they shine, and ensuring that they elevate themselves where it matters most.
Melissa Walker
Embodied Sex Therapist (MA, LPC, R-DMT)
I highly recommend his coaching if you want to write a book that readers will find accessible, where they can immerse themselves in the story, feel welcome, and really get what you want to share.
Mark Werkema
Airline Pilot, Historian, and Nonfiction Writer
I highly recommend his workshops, writing coaching, and consulting for anyone serious about improving, learning, and growing as a writer.
Into the Soul of the World
Brad Wetzler’s memoir, Into the Soul of the World, was published by the Hachette Book Group in March, 2023.
This powerful memoir shares an adventure journalist’s story of a decade-long, round-the-world quest to overcome his drug addiction and to understand and heal from past traumas.
Suffering from PTSD and severe depression from past trauma, battling an addiction to overprescribed psychiatric medication, and at the rock bottom of his career, journalist Brad Wetzler had nowhere to go. So he set out on a journey to wander and hopefully find himself—and the world—again.
Into the Soul of the World is Wetzler’s thrilling, impactful, and heartrending memoir of healing—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. An adventure journalist at heart, Wetzler mixes travelogue with empowering insights about his inner journey to better care for his own mental health. Journey with him as he travels across Israel and the West Bank, before moving on to India, a candle-lit cave on a mountaintop in the Himalayan foothills, and a life-changing encounter with a 100-year-old yogi.
Wetzler’s writing is full of the poignant, amusing, and occasionally heart‑breaking situations that unfold when we finally decide to confront depression (or any mental health struggle) and declare ourselves ready to heal: How do we heal our past and thrive again? What does it mean to live a good life? How can we transform our suffering and serve others? His answer: live to tell the story and find the humility and courage to be the best human you can be.
Get Your Copy of
Real Mosquitoes Don't Eat Meat
A collection of the best of the best Q&A from Outside magazine’s perennially humorous and informative “Wild File” column.
Enlightened-ish with Brad Wetzler Podcast
Enlightened-ish is a podcast about about adventure, storytelling, and how we can live with more courage and authenticity. In addition to great stories from abroad and home, Enlightened-ish features truths to live by and inspiration from the world's great wisdom traditions. Enlightened-ish can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and other podcast outlets.
Episode 7: Living Our Authentic, True Self
October 8, 2021
In this episode, Brad Wetzler revisits Siddhartha, the classic spiritual novel by Hermann Hesse, and discusses the concepts of "true self" and "authenticity." What do these words actually mean? He asks, how do we locate our true self? And how do we live from our true self? What is the cost of living in our true self?
Listen →
Episode 6: Yoga, Lovingkindness Meditation, and Finding Faith in Ourselves
September 30, 2021
In this episode, author, journalist, yoga & mindfulness teacher, and seeker Brad Wetzler unpacks and shares the life lessons he learned on a pilgrimage to Mount Arunachala, the great Shiva mountain in southern India.
Listen →
Episode 5: Landscape of the Heart
September 17, 2021
Brad tells the story of a recent road trip across New Mexico and Colorado--and into the core of his own heart. What is the heart? What does it mean to drop into the heart? Is all this heart talk even real except to poets and romantics? Brad answers these questions, and he comes to a surprising conclusion about what enlightenment actually is. Hint: Cows do it.
Listen →
Get Your FREE eBook
You've been on one hell of a journey. Now it's time to tell your story.
Brad Wetzler
A U T H O R, S P E A K E R, & M E M O I R C O A C H
I N S P I R I N G W R I T E R A N D
A W A R D – W I N N I N G A U T H O R
Brad Wetzler is an author and memoir coach. He edits books and coaches aspiring memoirists. When his clients write and publish their books, they get more income, more readers and fans, and more opportunities to make impact on the world.
His memoir, Into the Soul of the World, was published by Hachette Go in March of 2023.
