About My Name

My name is actually Heidi Arena. Arena is my middle name, and it is pronounced Ah-ren-na with a soft 'e'. The Slovak pronunciation on this page is how I say my name, and how my parents pronounced it when I was growing up. How to pronounce Arena. But the Catalan, French, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, and Spanish pronunciations are all close enough. I am astounded by the number of different pronunciations people have derived for my name. Believe me, there's even more than that website listed!

Arena was a religious name given to me when I was born, but it was not my middle name back then. My mother named me Heidi Jill, which was a perfect childhood name—it even came with a storybook and nursery rhyme! But it just didn't fit when I became an adult. So in the early 90s, I changed my middle name to Arena, and most people began calling me by that name. I liked my first name and wasn't trying to get rid of it, and my family, as well as professional people, still called me Heidi.

In offering this website, I had been in a bit of quandary around what to do about my name. First I thought that I would use Heidi Arena as my domain name. (Heidi is a much easier name for people to pronounce and remember.) However, many of my friends had no idea that my first name actually is Heidi. Some even reacted with something in between horror and shock, when I told them that I was thinking of using Heidi Arena as the name for my website. “What's with the Heidi?" "Don't go with THAT— you are not a Heidi!” Even my oldest friends who originally called me Heidi, are now unable to call me by that name without sounding like they're joking. So I decided to be name fluid and switch the order around. After awhile it no longer sounded backward.

Friends have urged me to just use Arena as a single name. But I want to integrate the parts of myself that both Heidi and Arena represent. I prefer not to leave the ordinary name behind, like other spiritual teachers have done. The ordinary is spiritually good enough for me. I enjoy living in the simplicity of the mundane, without the need to transcend it. With both names and life, I want to let go of the lofty, and live humbly rooted in ground. I also preferred to not use my personal name for the domain name, and was greatly relieved when I finally came up with Kind Ground – a name that fit for everything that I wanted to offer. Kind Ground was perfect, except for the fact that when you google it, you come up with links to kinds of ground meat. Now that’s not the association I intended, but it certainly is raw and viscerally mundane enough!