Svetlana Meritt is a former high-profile journalist and long-time spiritual seeker. During ten years of journeys far and wide, she began to tune into higher understanding.
On route, she discovered her life mission: to revive attention to ancient sacred sites, teach about the nature of terrestrial energy and conscious expansion. Based on her direct experiences, hew book invites living vicariously through her, feel into mysteries of the unseen Earth currents that inform all life.
Amidst an busy schedule of world travel and energetic upgrades, we appreciate that you fit this in. We are eager for your views on why it is said travel is the only thing that makes you richer.
Based on your book, Meet Me in the Underworld: How 77 Sacred Sites, 770 Cappuccinos, and 26,000 Miles Led Me to My Soul, you are long drawn to travel. It feels heart-activating to engage in your unique adventure travelogue. So, tell us a bit about your background, what originally sparked your interest in foreign places.
The love of travel has always been a part of my life, way back in my native Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia, where I was born. While I was still in college, I worked as a travel guide at the Adriatic Sea and on tours to the Serbian monasteries in Kosovo. I’ve been told I love traveling so much because I have a Sagittarius Moon, and travel is my default program of sorts. Be that as it may, I’ve always felt most alive when I traveled, as if traveling opened a set of new eyes. I would get insights, ideas, and inspiration I wouldn’t have had had I stayed home.
I resonate deeply with your travel experiences. An avid explorer myself, I am intuitively drawn to visit over 65 countries. Your own travelogue echoes we are each living the hero's journey, creating a map of self-discovery for navigating the road less traveled. Love that your book reflects universal elements. On some level, leaving the familliar, seeing who you think you are from new vantage points, reflects the path of awakening or what Joseph Campbell describes as the Hero's journey.
Only much later in life, after my travelogue was published and I started teaching a course on sacred sites, an unexpected memory from childhood floated to the surface of my consciousness – a memory that was buried for, what I still consider, mysterious reasons my whole life.
When I was seven, living in Belgrade, my mother brought me a coffee-table book for my birthday about the 7 wonders of the Ancient World and 100 wonders of the modern world – actually about the most famous sacred sites of the world! I was so fascinated by the beautiful pictures of ancient temples, mountains, sanctuaries, palaces, cathedrals, that I read the book over and over many times. For hours I stared at the pictures, noticing every detail, imagining what had transpired there, until they became amalgamated with my own image-making faculty.
Being fascinated with time, whenever life choices are linked to memory, a quote by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman jumps to mind. He says, "We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories." Its like we imagine how we would like to feel and can consciously create experiences to reflect our projections.
I relate to that. When I was 26, I came to Santa Barbara, California, to do graduate studies in French Literature, and forgot everything about the book I read as a child. I also continued my journalist career and led a very exciting life, interviewing famous public figures, such as the Dalai Lama, Yoko Ono, John Voight, Allen Ginsberg. Looking back, I think the seeds planted by the book germinated in me until many years later they led me to my own journey of exploring and researching sacred sites.
Every event the human experiences in this physical world is indeed a stepping stone to what is unforeseen and yet, on another leve, is orchestrated perfectly by the soul to learn lessons.
Its funny how we are all drawn to individuals who enable us to get more in touch with ourselves. In the spirit of 2 Cellos who offer their version of Coldplay's Every Teardrop is a waterfall, we are each a unique droplet in the cosmic ocean, interacting with droplets that create a path home.
If you had to put it into words, what did you observe was happening in your life to trigger what an awakening?
Simply put, I met a man I had been searching for since I was 16; a man who could answer all my numerous questions about the universe and the meaning of life; a man who interpreted my extremely vivid and exceedingly perplexing dreams. He became my teacher, then my partner, and finally my husband – Dwight Johnson.
Any particular reason you were drawn to specific countries that you write about in your travelogue? Was it business-related or was there another voice guiding you?
I’m afraid, nothing was business-related. We were guided where we needed to be, even if at the time that wasn’t evident. The guidance for the first country, the little island in the Mediterranean Sea called Cyprus, came through a book “The Magus of Strovolos,” about this teacher and healer, a western version of Don Juan, if you will. When we read the book we felt drawn to study with him and that’s how the idea about our journey was born.
As the journey continued, however, I became more sensitive to the inner guidance. I would experience something like an inner knowing, a deep conviction that would swoop through me and I would know without having to think. It is a beautiful feeling, a beautiful way to live, an inspired way to live. I only wish everything in my life would happen that way.
On the surface, trips related to study, work, or events, visiting friends, being drawn to structures, natural wonders or mysterious sites. Only later, it hits me that spontaneous itinerary changes, seeing images on postcards and dropping everything to go, cancelled and re-routed flights always have an underlying energetic purpose.
What shifted you from a non-spiritual motivation to feeling like you are on a spiritual journey?
Actually, it was a more or less spiritual motivation since the beginning, as we went to India to meditate in the ashrams, to study with the teacher/healer in Cyprus, and to explore the temples of Egypt. What shifted later was the rapport between the journey and myself. At the beginning I related to it as something outside of myself: there was me and there was the experience of the places, and we were separate. Later, however, the journey and I merged. My very life became the journey and vice versa.
Our readers are interested in milestones or pivotal moments. Please share a few that stand out.
I can identify two kinds of pivotal moments: those that made me become a better person through sacrifice and deepening of compassion, caused by Dwight’s life-threatening asthma attacks in India and Rome, or his accident in a church in France that left him with a broken hip. Those were really times of trials, when I was forced to forget about myself and my little needs, and give of myself unselfishly. There is a great beauty in sacrificing the wants and demands of your personality (which always wants something!) to attend to the survival of your beloved. You feel yourself become bigger in a way.
The other kind of pivotal moments were those that led to the expansion of my consciousness. Once it was through a weird accident I had in Antibes, France, which took me out of the body and consciousness for some time. After a night of excruciating pain, in the morning everything was miraculously gone, and I felt acutely aware of everything around me, able to merge with other people. I considered that event my rebirth. Another time it was through my victory over a deep-seated, paralyzing fear of authority, triggered and full blown by the disturbing and intimidating interaction with the woman whose house we rented in Provence. After many months of struggle, when I managed to lift myself up above the fear and look at it from that vantage point, I almost heard the cracking of the chains that held me captive in the fear frequency. The sense of liberation, of expansion, of becoming whole, was absolutely intoxicating.
As you can see, there were quite a few pivotal moments. But then again, it was a long journey – six whole years, and my inner journey was my full-time job. It was a do or die for me. I was fortunate that during those years we were financially helped, so I didn’t have to work. It would have been impossible to go through all those intense emotional trials and break-throughs if I had to work. A true and sincere inner work is a hard work, and sometimes it can spell the death of the personality, either symbolic or even physical. In fact, some incarnations are milestone incarnations, when our Soul decides to free itself from bondages we accumulate through life experiences.
Since publishing the book, you have been offering workshops and tours of sacred places. What compelled you to get into that? Also how do you choose which ones to visit over and over? After all, you have visited a lot.
Everything developed organically: one thing led to another, to the third, etc. It was part of my book promotion to give talks about Earth energies and sacred sites. Amazingly, every door opened and there was great interest in the topic, which makes me realize there is a need in the collective unconscious of humanity for this kind of knowledge. I gave talks even at conventional places like the Rotary Club to hard-core businessmen! Then my proposal to teach a course on sacred sites at the City College non-credit division was accepted, and that’s how everything unfolded.
Love that you are developing a new course around your experiences of energetics of sacred places. Growing interest in sacred places and visiting them reflects that expansion of collective consciousness.
What advice would you offer our readers who are themselves experiencing spiritual revelations or transcendental moments?
Even though it may be unpopular in the New Age community, it has been my experience that the higher you go, the lower you go too. It happens both ways. When you choose the spiritual path, much will be demanded of you. The light reveals not only the heights, but the ravines and hidden nooks, and god knows what’s in them. So be prepared for the unexpected.
And above all – share what you learn.
How has your personal and professional life changed as the result of publishing your book?
By the very nature of its genre – travelogue and memoir – the book has been another journey. Even though I didn’t anticipate it, it has offered me a different perspective, from a valuable time distance, to grasp the events in a wider frame. Many times in the course of writing, I paused in front of my screen and squealed: “Oh, I missed that!”
Mastering Time is linked to self-mastery. How do your views of time travel shift on your journey?
I also had a very unusual experience during the process of writing. At some junctures, I felt as if the very nature of time was fluid, and by reconnecting with myself in the past I was able to help myself in the present. It was somewhat like time travel: I would go back in my memory and with my present deeper understanding I was able to shift something, even if only very little, to ease the suffering of my past self.
On a more objective level, publishing the book helped me establish firmly my service activity. I fully realized that this IS my calling.
Do you envision other books or is this a springboard to other things?
Oh, yes. I’m gestating a new book on sacred sites as an outward manifestation of the Spiritual Science taught in ancient Mystery Schools. I’ve been having a growing sense the time has come when this knowledge, previously kept secret under vows of silence, is now being unlocked. The vows are lifted; the time has come to restore the Mysteries, not as they were, of course, but according to the present level of consciousness and understanding.
Readers would definitely enjoy hearing more about this sacred course you are putting together. Keep us posted and we can add an update. Readers love hearing whether any new spiritual mentor inspires you of whether your path/ course simply feels divinely guided by light, sound or something beyond words.
By the way, what is your vision for the changes unfolding around you? How do you view life and yourself differently?
It is a continuous deepening of understanding of how things work, of the invisible laws that govern life and manifestation. The point is: learning and inner work never really stop. My learning since the book came out has been to do things more impersonally, rather than to be attached to the outcome. Ultimately, the outcome, the results, are not in my hands. What is in my hands is to do my part the best I can. It was a very hard lesson to learn – to let go of what I wanted and thought should happen. For me, the reward for a lesson well learned has been a greater degree of wisdom.
Anything else you would like to add?
So much…but most importantly to encourage your readers to realize fully that we are collectively at an important crossroads; the decisions and choices we make now will set the frame for the upcoming era. Every effort matters; every inner achievement counts. Everything we do personally will contribute to the creation of a new society (I use this term in a broad sense). And we want the new society to be built on the spiritual principles and higher values. Let us be aware that we are all architects of this new civilization.
Sounds like this vision is following a new trend of visionaries, including Eckhart Tolle's teachings and his renowned book A New Earth among others. Many thanks Svetlana. Keep us in the loop of your travels, presentations and course developments. We are inspired by your energy and journey!