How many times have you thought it yourself?

How often do you lay awake at night, dreaming of seeing your words laid out on the page?

How many times have you wondered what would change if you let loose the story that has been building inside you?

How often do you wish you had the support, knowledge, and space to begin?

How deeply do you know that now is the time, even if you’re not sure what the hell to do to get started?

5 clear signs it’s time to begin your book

#1. You’ve got one hell of a story.

You’re alive and kicking after all that might have taken you out. You’ve survived the breaks and the grief and the trauma and all the messiness of living. You’ve also explored the wonder, beauty, and bliss of it all. You’ve lived, my friend, and yeah—it all makes for one hell of a story.

#2. “Dude, you should write a book”.

People have been telling you for years “damn, Jeanette, you should write a book” (except possibly anyone in your life invested in keeping you small—the absence of their voices in the course of ‘write a book, dammit” says as much as the presence of the others). But your people? They’ve been waiting to turn the pages.

#3. Words are your drug of choice.

You mainline words like they can keep you alive. Likely they have. Brave writers have been the fuel that has kept you here. You know the value of story to the collective, and deep down you know your story might be the very thing someone out there needs more than they know—that you might save a life, exactly the way yours has been saved.

#4. You’ve always been a writer.

You’ve collected inspiration and notes and ideas for years. You’ve got journals stretching back to grade school. Maybe you’ve envisioned holding your book with your name in careful serif font on the cover. Even if you’ve never admitted it, you’ve held onto this dream for a very long time.

#5. You’re ready – but you don’t know where to begin.

Despite all the want and all the knowing you still have not started. The words are piling up inside you, but it feels daunting, perhaps terrifying, at least mildly (or entirely) intimidating. You know you need help to get it all from your head and heart onto the page.

A few other key signifiers that it’s time for your book to be born:

The post How Do You Know If It’s Time To Write Your Book? appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

This is not an easy world in which to live as the owner of a hopeful heart. 

Not an easy time to build a home safe enough to hold the immensity of your own tenderness. 

The last few years were not so much built for believing.

And yes, I know, holding that much hope in one human body is not a job for the weak. 

It can sometimes seem like everything would be easier if you just laid it all down for good.

But please, love, promise me a few things. 

Promise me you will continue to show up relentlessly or the undoing of your own disbelief. 

Promise me you’ll play those love songs until the tears of you turn into oceans of saltwater born only to hold you buoyant.

Promise me you’ll never let them convince you that your hope is anything but proof that it’s worth going on. 

My god, it is worth going on. 

You were not made for a suspension of hope.

You were born with a lifetime of repair supplies and enough care to heal the whole fucking world. 

No matter how many goodbyes have rooted themselves into daisy chains holding your bones so tightly you fear you’ll never unravel, you are not made of the ingredients for a lasting recipe of cynicism and distrust,

You are here for chasing the light straight into the fiery red ball of the setting desert sun. 

For flying headfirst into the chasm of your own tender want. 

For etching a million and one daydreams into the ground under your kneecaps when 3am finds you praying to stop praying alone. 

You wild love story

You eternal bliss seeker.

You snakeskin shedder. 

You brilliant spell caster.

You fairy godmother of presence and intention. 

You dancer of a thousand love songs. 

You holy believer in the sanctity of our fumbling humanity.

You with your demolition hands tearing down the walls that keep the revolutionaries outside the gates, so that you can be the one to welcome everyone inside.

You with your architect heart erecting monuments of belonging. 

You with your delicate fierceness holding the roof above all our heads. 

Nurture the embers of your tender fire.

Protect the goodness in you that refuses to die. 

Write your love spells in gold dust and prisms of light. 

Become the most fierce caretaker of your brilliant body of want. 

Gather the lost ones in your wide-open arms and sing them a lullaby of homecoming. 

Hold steady, dear one. 

Keep your feet planted on the ground of what is right now. 

Keep your eyes on the horizon of what may come. 

Keep your hopeful heart fueled with goodness. 

Keep your hopeful heart fueled.

Keep your hope. 

Keep your hope.

Keep your hope. 

Please, for the love of all that is possible in this world, keep your hope.

The post A Love Letter For Hopeful Hearts appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I was 44 years old and had never traveled outside North America, let alone traveled for longer than a weekend fully on my own. 

I had no idea then that the world would implode and that I wouldn’t get to return. 

Hell. I had no idea about any of it. But then, we never do. 

What I do know is that this trip changed me. Altered my insides. Rearranged my pieces and put me back together differently. 

What I do know is that I will never be the same.

I learned some things along the way, and today, in honor of the anniversary of the trip that rearranged my soul, I thought I would share some wisdom. 

1. You can’t outrun your demons by crossing an ocean.

Wherever you go, there you are. The same loneliness, the same empty hungry, the way you get lost inside the chasm of your own mind, all of this will be waiting for you. Quite likely you will judge yourself for feeling it. You will tell yourself that traveling, especially solo traveling, is meant to be empowering. Others will tell you that you are brave. You will alternate between believing them and not believing them and both will be true. There is deep work to be found when you meet yourself in a new place, without habits and fallbacks and the distractions of the life you know. You’ll learn to see your reflection differently. You’ll grapple with your demons in a whole new way. And perhaps, somewhere along the way—if you stay steady—the war you’ve been fighting will turn into a dance of integration, if only for a few moments. And you will know the taste of freedom. 

2. You must eternally be braver than you want to be. 

Sometimes, in order for an experience to change things, we must act as if things have already been changed. As if WE have already been changed. To show up as the person we want and know ourselves to be and not the one we have been mistaking ourselves for. This requires a wild level of bravery, of suspending disbelief, of refusing to fall into doing things a certain way because this is how they have always been done. When you leave the confines of your life reinvention is possible, but only if you claim it with relentless tenacity. So claim it bravely, wild lover, as if it has always been yours. 

3. Always sit at the bar (and let the bartender choose your whiskey).

Resist the urge to escape to your phone. Don’t tuck yourself away at the back corner table with your nose in a book. Choose the seat next to the friendly-looking soul on the bus. Be brave enough to start the conversation on your red-eye flight. Just one question is enough to open up worlds of connection. All we know about what we like and want comes from having tried something that was once a mystery. Let yourself be open to every last unknown love affair by not always being the one to decide what you try next. Ask your server for advice on where to go after lunch. Have a conversation with the old man at the corner store and listen to his suggestions on the most beautiful spot in the area. Don’t be so convinced you know what you need, and get out of your way for long enough to discover what is waiting for you. 

4. Get on the god damn train. 

No seriously. All your plans and itineraries and goals are great, but sometimes logic just needs to fuck off and have itself one hell of an adventure. Even if it’s a four-hour train ride and it’s just for one night and you’ll have to come back again the very next day. If there is the potential for magic to be waiting at the station at the other end, get on the train. Sometimes you need to be kissed and romanced by a human you’ll never see again. Sometimes you need to walk for miles just to touch the walls of a castle that is set to tip itself into a churning sea. Sometimes you need to throw away all the plans you had made in order to find the one that was meant for you all along. Buy the ticket. Get on the train. Cast your vote for adventure. See what happens next. 

5. Fuck sensibility, you can sleep on the bus. 

Of course, you need sleep and nourishment and slowness and sustainability, but life-changing experiences are rarely built on a foundation of safe and sensible choices.  There is a whole lot of time for sensiblity. Sometimes what you need more than all wise choices in the world is the good sense to know when to leave good sense behind in favor of grabbing hold of and claiming every last moment you can. So stay awake all night talking to someone you’ve only just met.  Chase experiences through uncharted paths. Kiss an almost stranger against a streetlight in the middle of a rainstorm. Do the opposite of what your regular life self would do. Remember, this is not regular life. You, dearest sojourner, can always sleep on the bus. 

6. What is for you won’t go by you. 

Over and over again, in their lilting voices, the Scots whispered to me “Whit’s Fur Ye’ll No Go By Ye” as if perhaps they knew that absorbing this truth was the whole reason I came. What is for me will not go by me. What is mine to have is mine to have, to claim and taste and know. More importantly: If something is not truly mine, not truly for me, I am free to leave. To let go. To move on. And what is more, it is only in the leaving that what is meant for me will find its way to me. It turns out, there is no way not to be changed by this. 

7. Just pack your black leggings and most badass boots. Forget the rest. 

I packed two suitcases of clothing and supplies for every situation. Lugged an entire wardrobe across the ocean. I was weighted down my by own belief that I needed a hell of a lot to get by, to be safe, to stay me. And then what happened? I lived in my leggings, leather jacket, and my favorite boots for almost three weeks. Sometimes, the things we think we need —the way we insist on clinging to the habitual and customary accouterments of the life we’re working to escape—is what weighs us down holding us to a version of ourself we no longer are truly invested in being. Often, it’s by dialing it all down to the core that we open ourselves to the unfettered adventure that has been waiting for us all along. 

8. Stop when you see beauty, no matter how many places you need to be. 

Double back when you have to. The extra time is worth it so you don’t miss something good. Listen for the spaces and people that whisper your own true name back to you with an undeniable and ancient pulse, keep them close and closer still. Climb fences, ignore barriers, traipse up hills and across fields. Get your feet wet and let the wind tangle your hair and redden your cheeks. Walk until you lose yourself and then walk until you find yourself and then walk some more until you forgot why you left and remember where you were going. Plant your feet in the earth and stretch as tall as you can. Chase light and wind and castles and rainbows and adventure and romance and discomfort. Give your body over to whatever feels like pleasure to you. Resist the urge to name or contain it. Do not resist the urge to meet and be met by it fully. Learn to recognize the unmistakable sensation of your own belonging. Never, ever stop seeking your home.

9. Rentry is a bitch

Reentry. It’s a challenging thing. The self so transformed as to be unrecognizable and the life that has held itself in not so suspended animation. To have lived inside the deep and holy presence of such belonging. To have embraced the fear and discomfort and loneliness. To have trusted the self and her wanting and her knowing with such totality. To have seen and tasted and touched and known. There is a reason returning travelers seek out others who have gone away. There is something inside an experience like this, even one so comparatively brief, that longs not for a place to tell all the stories, but for the spaces where the stories do not have to be told because they have been lived and known. The challenge of coming back from an experience fundamentally changed, when everything else has stayed exactly the same lies in not letting life consume the lessons of living. To hold your experiences as holy and to refuse to relinquish the knowing of what it is to be so fully alive. To return to a life that no longer fits the whole of you is to return to a life that is no longer truly yours. Who knows, maybe it never was. If this is true, perhaps this is is all an invitation to build something new. 

10. The story you tell will never come close to the story you lived. 

 The words we have can say so much and so little and in the end no matter how good the writer or how complete the attempt to transcribe the whole of an experience, what makes it onto the page is only the smallest part of what was lived. The rest floats off and up and away through the breath and nestles against the skin and inscribes itself onto the bones. To know the whole of a story you must put down the pen and the page and all of your futile attempts to capture and admit you cannot, ever. Not really. But also know well that you must try. And that means finding a way to invite your reader into the story that will never know what it is to be fully held inside of words on a page. You’ve got to find a way to gift them your breath and the tenor and tremble of your heart. Not what you did and saw and knew, but what you lived; touched and tasted and held in hands and brought home to your body and named a million kinds of holy. That’s the only chance, you see, they may ever really know what it is to be born again inside of a story you could never fully write. 

The post Ten Lessons From My Solo Trip To Scotland appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Not one more. 

You are not on this earth to be a living apology. 

None of us are. 

Yes. We fuck up. Every last one of us. 

And yes, there is grounding to be found in committing to the hard and holy work of trying to make it right. 

There is also deep wisdom in knowing that sometimes there isn’t a right to be made. 

Whatever it is that you’ve done. 

Whatever weight you are carrying. 

Whatever breach of your own integrity you’ve lived through. 

Here you are. Living in the guilt and self-flagellation and inward-directed recrimination. You’re telling stories about yourself where you’re painted the villian, every single time. 

So, you did a thing that you’ve named wrong, or the world has named wrong, or a loved one has named wrong or some powerful dudes who compiled a book of parables and myths thousands of years ago made wrong. 

How entirely human of you. 

Own it all. 

Stand in the truth of it. 

Make the apology you need to make to close your own open wound. 

Do what you can to stanch the flow of blood in the others. 

And then be done. 

Listen to me, now. 

Atonement was never intended to be a full-time job. 

There is nothing to be gained by carrying your own apology until it threatens to bury you under its weight. 

Warning: the people and structures in your life may not be comfortable with your sudden refusal to continue with your guilty confessional. 

Yes, it is true. 

Sometimes the one thing that others cannot handle is your refusal to apologize even one more time. 

But it is done, whatever it is. 

Because it is now a part of your bone and heart and guts and it has changed you. 

Because in some inexplicable way, you are better for it. 

Because you finally even like it there, like what it has made of you, as much as it may have broken. 

Because even if you don’t understand why, you needed it the way it was and the way it is, no matter the fallout. 

Because owning the damage caused does not mean that you must spend your life cleaning it up over and over again, in some groundhog day spiral of guilt. 

Because you can’t undo it, you can only move on from it. 

Because staying where you are is a vicious sort of quicksand, pulling you back down into a depths you’ve pulled yourself out of one too many times already. 

When you say no more apologies; not in your words, or your actions. Not in your body, or in your experience…this is when the real illumination begins. 

So, be done with your penance love. 

Be done.

Stand tall, not in the shadows of your wrongdoing, but in the full light of your inescapable truth. 

Learn to love what your living has made of you. 

The post You Are Not On This Earth To Be A Living Apology appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I know you’re exhausted and frazzled and ten different kinds of underwater and upside down. It’s go-go-go and don’t you dare stop and keep all the balls in the air all the time and frantic tears at midnight and a longing for something nameless and true. 

You haven’t taken a breath deeper than the shallow end of the kiddie pool in weeks. 

But listen to me now. 

You know the source of your own medicine.

You’ve always known, even if you’ve spent your whole life forgetting. 

Even if it changes minute by minute and is too amorphous to hold. 

Even if have used everything they have to convince you that this is not meant for you. 

Even if you do not fully comprehend what you know and tear at yourself desperate for the solidity of your own knowing. 

Even if it’s the opposite of all the world deems sensible and understandable and acceptable. 

Still, you know. 

You know what knits you together. 

You know what gathers your scattered pieces. 

You know the source of your own sacred undoing, which is a kind of saving that few understand. 

But you do. 

You know what grounds you and roots you and rises you high. 

You know what makes your skin sing holy.

You know what tastes like healing on your tongue. 

You know what deepens your breath into the earth. 

You know what takes you out of your head and silences the relentless diatribe.

You know the source of your wholeness and goodness. 

You know what sets your soul right into your body. 

And what makes that human body expand until it fills the universe.

And you know what makes it all quiet and small again so that you exist inside of the all and the everything. 

It is the cold engine of the ocean knocking you off your feet or rocking you gently to shore?

Is it the body to body, feel the bass reverberate in your chest on the dance floor?

Is it hard edge of rough sex, body taken completely, and given everything all at once?

Is it the scalding bath or the desert heat or the hush of quiet right after the rainstorm?

Is it her arms or his arms or their arms wrapped around you until you sleep?

Is it bare feet on mother earth in the middle of nowhere or a yoga mat in the center of the city?

Whatever it is…

Your medicine is YOUR medicine. 

Only you can define it, claim it, hold it, and know it as your own. 

Has it been the grace that saves you?

Has it held you together when the world was tearing you apart?

Has it lifted you off the ground when gravity became overwhelming?

Has it gotten you out of bed when the simplest of tasks felt like a mountain that must be climbed?

Has it helped you lose yourself in lust or joy or peace or movement or connection?

Has it rescued your breath from your bones and brought your shoulders down from your ears?

Has it regulated your heart rate, claimed the panic in your chest, gave you the power to finish the day.

Then so be it. 

And if you’re still not quite sure, here are some questions to ask:

Does this thing that I do make me feel more like me? 

Does this exchange of energy bring me deeper into residence inside the container of my own blood and breath and bones? 

Does this action or experience carry me home to myself?

Yes?

Then it is your medicine. Yours and yours alone. 

Protect it and honor it. 

Use it wisely, with discretion or abandon or something somewhere in between. 

Claim your medicine, love. Hold it close. 

Let it forever bring you back to the brilliance of you. 

Tell me, loves. What is your medicine?

The post Know The Source Of Your Own Medicine appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Today I woke up early. ⁠

I sleep naked and the morning light in my room is some kinda heaven. I was walking around making the bed before getting dressed and caught sight of myself in the mirror and, for once, was filled with a rush of kindness.⁠
⁠
Not critique of the belly that stretched to birth two babies or the breasts that we’re not perky and lifted even when I was young and firm everywhere else. It wasn’t the kind of hard-earned self-love that had to be worked for and deserves to be celebrated, not even a ‘damn girl, you’re FINE for 44″ moment. ⁠
⁠
It was simply that, for some reason, this morning I felt soft and beautiful, just for those moments in the morning light. I felt kind, like I belonged all the way inside my own skin. I turned and shifted, not admiring or tearing down, just receiving the gift of my own gaze. And then I took some photos. Sitting on the bed, no attempt to hide the soft roundness of my belly, or the natural lines of my breasts. I stood and turned, stretching on my tiptoes to capture the reflection of my ass. ⁠
⁠
I didn’t edit or filter or perfect. Didn’t take multiple shots attempting to get it right. I just snapped and then I sent them to two of my very best friends in this whole world. The two whose words and images and voices and love have been my constant companions these past two months. I shared those two naked and vulnerable shots with them — but they didn’t feel vulnerable, nor need validation. They just felt true. Real. Soft. Whole.⁠
⁠
And I know that just as I had received myself, they would receive me. ⁠⠀
⁠
My dear friend Morgan responded,

“Seeing you gives me a glimpse of what it must be like to be a lover seeing the beloved’s naked body because I just love you so much I could cry. And we think we’re so flawed. We are so silly. We are beautiful.”⁠⠀
⁠
My heart filled, it is always an exquisite gift to be so wholly seen, especially by one who knows your heart so deeply. ⁠
⁠
“You’re gonna make me cry” I said. ⁠
⁠
“That’s what love is supposed to do.” she replied, “Make us weep with belonging.” ⁠

Years ago, I was a part of a Facebook group with 22 other women. For the first time in my life, I was given a glimpse behind the veil. I got to see these women and their lives in a way we rarely open to the world. It changed my everything.

And then one day we started sharing nudes.

The women in this group — they ranged in size and shape and form — as women always do.

Tiny and petite to deliciously voluptuous. 
Boyish and angular to endless curves.
Tall and short and everything in between.

And do you know what?

Not once did I spend a second critiquing. I didn’t think, “my god, she would be more beautiful if only she…(gained weight, lost weight, lifted her boobs, tucked her tummy, worked out more, cut her hair)”.

I just thought, “What a god damn miracle this human is. How glorious. How brave. How fucking brilliant and beautiful”.

I was in awe, struck dumb speechless, every single time.

I’d spent a lifetime hiding my body. I wasn’t even fully naked when I gave birth.

After this, I was never the same again.

Your body? Glorious as fuck.

Your ass? Yeah, it’s fire.

That good, good body of yours? It deserves to be celebrated, lauded, to have a fucking party thrown in its honor every damn day of your life.

Your body is soft and strong and it has done so much to get you here. 
Your body is wise and holds infinities. 
Your body is (as John Mayer suggested) in fact, a mother-fucking wonderland.

My god, you are beautiful.

It can be easy to forget just how beautiful.

But as my dear friend Morgan Wade reminded me yesterday, when we love someone, we look on their body as the holy grail of all good things.

When we love someone, we see their body as a miracle of hills and valleys and soft and hard, lines, and curves of wonder.

Think back to the last time you looked at the body of a lover that you were head over heels undone for.

A friend who is nestled as close as another human can be to the center of your being.

Remember the awe? Remember the tremor? Remember the grace?

It can be hard to love ourselves like that.

Some days, near impossible.

This is why we have to seek and find the ones who can see us.

The ones who love us full force, no holding back.

The ones who gaze at us with eyes of love and gratitude and wonder.

The ones who can undo all the damage done with their tenderness and their love and the gifts of a gaze bent on truly seeing and honoring what is.

And no, that doesn’t have to be a lover.

In fact, I’d suggest that even if you DO have a lover, you should open yourself to being seen that way by others.

By the friends who know you without pretense. Who see and hold and honor the ugly and messy of you along with your beauty.

By strangers in safe spaces who get just how unprecedented you are.

Humans (near or far or in the next room or across cyberspace never to meet in person) who, upon opening a text or DM or a page with your gloriously naked form would never leave you on read.

Who won’t give a quick emoji reaction and move on with their day.

You need the people (friends or lovers or strangers even) who will pause and take a deep breath and let the honor of the gift of your form stop them in their tracks.

Who will stop what they are doing to write back right away and to say that not only is your ass fire, but that the all of you is holy.

That you are divine.

Worthy of Shakespearean sonnets and epic 80’s love ballads and the walls of any museum.

Humans who will tell you that the soft overhang of your belly is a prayer.

That the angles of your hips are art.

That the fall of your hair across your breasts is worthy of a national holiday.

(In fact, if you are sending nudes to anyone who is NOT doing all of that and more, I’d highly suggest asking yourself if they are making themselves worthy of the honor, because love — your body is a rare gift, and should always be treated as such).

It took other brave women to teach me that my body was worthy of being seen. 
It took other brave women to bring me out of hiding and into a place where I was willing to ditch the religious shame and the patriarchal bullshit and the messages from a culture that always told me I was too much something and not enough something else.

It took worshipping the unhidden forms of other women with my eyes and skin and mouth for me to learn to worship my own.

And your body, my dear, is worthy of worship.

Every single moment of every single day of your life.

If you don’t have someone to tell you so, come to me.

I will remind you again and again and over and over again.

Your body, love, is glorious.

The post Your Body Deserves To Be Celebrated (find the people who will tell you so) appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

To leave, to run, to quit, to stop, to yell, to get angry, to rejoice, to dance, to sing, to fuck, to break, to mend, to come undone, to end, to begin, to scream, to cast spells, to call in what you want, to lay it all down, to rest, to get out of town, to unlock, to unleash, to go wild, to embrace, to get intimate, to hold boundaries, to eat and drink and be merry, to make art, to take a break, to bust ass, to be a bitch, to say fuck no, to say hell yes, to swear, to get in the car and drive, to go off the grid, to chart your own course, to break the rules, to change the rules, to make new rules, to become a devotee of your own truth, to name your own religion, to ink your skin, to cut your hair, to change the goddamn game, to break your own heart, to forgive, to absolve yourself of guilt, to stop doing penance, to move on, to go back, to release, to hold tightly, to love, to dream bigger, to smash the patriarchy, to seek healing, to honor your trauma, to fiercely claim your joy, to get naked, to believe in redemption, to honor your wisdom, to get louder, to find a space of your own, to travel, to ask for what you want, to name what you need, to roar your righteous anger, to choose your own name, to ask for what you’re worth, to be the boss of yourself, to know yourself and your body and your heart as holy

But, why don’t we all claim this permission from the get go?

The answer is shame. Pervasive. Externally placed. Hellbound on keeping us small.

“At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time.”Elizabeth Gilbert

After a lifetime of contorting myself to fit into boxes never meant for the likes of me—it’s true. I got tired of feeling ashamed all the time

It does feel wildly subversive to say that I no longer feel ashamed.

Not in body my soul or beliefs or movement through the world. Not for who or what or how I am. I do not hold apology for the ways and hows and whos of my work and my desire and my love. There is an ownership of power in this simple fact that refuses to fit into words.

But if you see me, you’ll know it.

Sovereignty. That’s what I call it.

Somehow, through all the twists and turns and fuckery of this life, I became a woman who is sovereign onto herself.

Does this mean I’ve beaten all my demons and that I don’t give a fuck and that everything is peachy keen all the time?

Oh hell no. Not even close.

I am a woman who will forever be grappling with herself – pushing and growing and expanding and contracting. Learning and unlearning and tripping over the same lessons 50 times or more on the way to integration. It gets messy in this brain and heart and body of mine. That’s just how I’m made.

But the fact remains that there is not a person, or relationship, or religion, or belief system or organization that holds me to any agreement that negates my contract with myself.

Fact: Your shame serves nobody.

In fact, where there is shame, there is no pleasure.

It is your pleasure that the universe spirals eternally toward.

So, are you ready to be subversive?

How about revolutionary?

There comes a time in the evolution of a human where she gets tired of asking permission to live and breathe and be and love in the way that is most honest and true. When she stops looking outside of herself and she writes her own permission slip and she doesn’t look back.

They call me a permission catalyst, it’s true. But here’s the secret, you never needed permission from me.
It’s on you.

What I CAN do is help you carve a path to the permission that has ALWAYS lived in you.

I’ve opened up only two new spots for Creative Sovereignty Coaching this quarter.

This work is rooted in radical permission.

To own your story.
To remove the masks.
To shed your shame.
To speak and write and live as a human sovereign unto yourself.

Is this finally your time?

If you’re feeling the call to claim permission to live your life on your own terms, and to live and write your way into the truth of your story – simply send me an email and we can open a conversation that has the potential to blast the doors of your heart, your creativity and your boldness wide open.

You can also book a free 30 minute discovery call to learn more.

No more asking permission.

The permission you seek is there for the claiming.

The only question is – are you ready?

The post It’s time to stop waiting for permission appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

It’s how we’re made.

But somewhere along the way, we buy into the idea that we shouldn’t need so much. Shouldn’t want so hard.

Put on the armor.
Place another brick on the wall.
Practice your poker face.
Never let ’em see you sweat.

You’ve probably seen that post that got shared everywhere. The one about how ultra independence is a trauma response. And yo, last I checked, not many of us get through this ride called life without at least a dash of trauma.

It makes so much sense. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, amiright?

We live in a culture of individualism.
Batten down the hatches.
Every human for themselves.
Don’t worry, I got this.

Right. Except we don’t got this. Not alone. Not really. It just isn’t how we’re made.

And when we start wanting and needing as we inevitably will (as perfectly designed as we are for the collective and communal experience of living) the voices in our heads can get awfully loud.

You know the voices.

The voice that says we are asking/wanting/needing/seeking too much.
The voice that says we ARE too much.

And at that pivotal point of extension into whatever lies on the other side of safety. At the outreach. At the possibility. At the space where we are asked to leave the safe harbor and venture into unknowing waters where we absolutely cannot go it all alone, even if we wanted to (and let’s be honest, we really don’t ) those voices can get terribly loud.

They say that this much needing is not safe. Way too vulnerable.

Our alarm systems start blaring and the self-destruct warning flashes a yellow-orange-red threat of incoming DANGER.

This happens to me as much as it happens to anyone. I feel so deep and want so much, so often, that it takes my breath away. Inside of the strong and confident and sovereign woman is a tender girl who burns with needs and hopes and the wildest of wishes.

And much of what I want and need I may never get to have. I know this.

This is what it is to be human, of course. Not a single guarantee and a hell of a lot of wild unknowns and some crashing heartbreaks along the way. None of us get out of this clean.

But the story of being here, alive and human, is more than just that. So much more. To allow the truth of wanting is to allow the possibility of having.

This human thing? It’s also full of stories of the sort of magic that can happen when we trust our knowing, wanting, craving selves.

When we remove the stigma of being ‘needy’ and instead acknowledge that for any of these dreams to come true we HAVE to know and name our own needs.

We have to be so intimate with our wants that we trust them to live outside the safe confines of our tender hearts. Even when we might be judged or fear we won’t be met. Even when the crash and burn seems inevitable.

And you know what – we do that. Again and again and again.

Holy hell, how can that not be an act of bravery, of sovereignty, of solidarity of self?

So amen to your perfectly needy heart.
Amen to your grasping hands and your tender longing and the way your body spills over with desire.
Amen to the wishing well pennies and the shooting stars and the crossed fingers and the wood you can’t seem to stop knocking in spite of yourself.
Amen to the want and the crave and the burn.
And hallelujah to the having, when it comes, to the wholeness when it arrives, to the spaces where it all comes together, if only for a moment.

To be human is to have needs.
To speak them is a wild reclamation.
To be met inside of them is a holy miracle.

Every. single. time.

The post amen to your perfectly needy heart. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Once upon a time I got embroiled in the comments section of a thread written by a woman I admired.

She railed against polyamory as trauma bonding, no different from humans who enjoy a ‘vending machine of lovers’ and avoiding real connection — claiming that ‘sacred union’ was only possible in the context of monogamy.

My commitment to ethical non-monogamy is new, but after 12 years as an out queer woman, this post felt all too familiar.

A sweeping, blanket judgment against an entire group of people and the ways and hows and whys of their love (and their love-making), written by someone who planted herself firmly outside of this group.

This is not limited to polyamory or queerness, this sort of projection occurs over and over again, whenever we creep closer to the edges, leaving the exalted center of heteronormative sex occurring within the realm of committed (read: monogamous + vanilla) partnership.

man + woman + till death do us part (or some version of) + missionary + conventionally attractive + private + babies + happily ever after = acceptable.

Exist outside the gender binary? Got a collection of collars and restraints and like it hard and rough? Want your lover to have the same parts as you? Desire more than one human or more than one gender at once? Have a secret, kinky turn on that people think is weird? Have a primary partner and one or more secondary partners? Blow the hierarchy out of the water entirely and embrace relationship anarchy as a positive force? Dream of a great big orgy of hedonistic desire?

You dirty, deviant little freak, you.

Truth: Sex is only palatable to the masses when it’s heteronormative, perfectly vanilla (no kinky shit, please and thank you), safely monogamous and fits into the fairytale of heading straight for marriage and babies and happily ever after.

Anything else?

Suspect.
Dangerous.
Shameful.
Questionable.
Wrong.

We’ve all lived too damn long lugging around this puritanical notion that pleasure must be villainized to protect us from ourselves.

Fuck that.

Seriously.

The only question you need to ask is this:

Is everyone involved in full personal safety and enthusiastic consent?

Ask it loudly and repeatedly if you need to.

Yes?

Then you go with your bad, brilliant, beautiful, pleasure-filled self.

Fuck the masses and what they deem acceptable.

Fuck the projection and judgments.

We’ve all wasted way too much damn time in the closet.

Our bodies are here to feel good.

And what makes that happen isn’t for anyone else to decide.

Just you and your partner(s).

End of story.

Remember…

your body is not the enemy
your sex is not a scandal
your skin needs no censor
you are not here for denial
your pleasure is
what the universe
demands
it is the purpose
of your
creation
anything else
is
blasphemy

excerpt from | Treatise of Touch

The post Come Out Of The Closet (Your Body Is Here To Feel Good) appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I love this film.

Aside from the fact that Cate Blanchette is most certainly forever my Personal Icon Of Style and unknowing Official Third Wife (following Kate McKinnon and Brandi Carlile), her character Bernadette is also me. 

Or at least she’s the me that takes up residence whenever I put walls up between myself and the relentless force of creation that is both my master and my muse. 

In the film, Bernadette is a brilliant and award-winning architect who has stopped designing houses.

More specifically – she’s an artist who has stopped making art. 

And it’s not working out so well for anybody. She is, quite frankly, an anxious and paranoid mess of a human.

As Bernadette’s colleague tells her over dinner “

“People like you must create. If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.”

Me without that unyielding force of creation rushing through me and into the world?

A menace. Pure and simple. 

That’s what makes a year like 2020 really fucking hard. 

I create from life. From the spark that happens when I am not just ‘breathing a little and calling it a life” (forever nod to the creative goddess that is Mary Oliver – pure opposite of menace as any human could be), but when I am LIVING. 

All caps, full out, flinging myself headlong into this wild ride called life. 

My spark comes from interaction. Experience. The edges of my comfort zone. New people. Novelty. The rush of discovery. Movement. Desire + sex + pain + bliss and all that lives just past the deepest kind of opening I can manage. From the clusterfuckery and brilliance of a life entered willingly and with curiosity and enthusiasm and fear and a dash of reckless abandon.

In recent weeks Facebook has been (as Facebook so kindy does) serving up proof of my wide-open living from the archives. Reminders of adventures and new lovers and risks and becomings and a body laid bare with pleasure and concerts and dancing and the long expanse of road from here to the sea. 

You know, all those things we so took for granted in the before-time. 

Last year at this time I was riding full force on really sweet fucking ride – and I was milking it for all it was worth, creatively speaking. I was deeply embodied, words tumbling out of me faster than I could catch them. Whirling and spinning, siren singing me into the sweet center where things get really good. Last year at this time, things felt really, really good.

This year, of course, life slowed way down and got super small. For most of us, a life once lived large shrunk to the confines of the walls of our home. Our community, at least the ones we could hug and hold, as small as our immediate family, our coworkers, and maybe a carefully selected quarantine pod. The rest of life… the fun, the sources of joy, of coming together, of wild abandon. Gone. Poof. Just like that.

This year, I’m breathing. Sure. I’ve worked through the worst and made my way to some sort of resentful contentment. Like most of us, I’ve made the best of this that I possibly can. Some days are better than others. 

But do I feel all the way alive? Hell no. 

I don’t. And neither does my art.

I’m chafing at the confines of this new life. Hell, almost all of us are. We didn’t know what would be taken from us and we have no idea when it will be back. And god damn it all to hell, everything changed, just like that. And yes, I want to scream at the heavens about it, I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Collective trauma and grief? Holy fuck, yes. 

In the midst of the logistics and the loss and the  ‘what the hell do we do now?’ there is the artist of me. 

The one who craves the rush and the burn and the wild and the new as both the source of the flame and the crucible where the alchemy of creation occurs… 

I’ll be honest. She’s been struggling. 

So I’ve recycled words from my vast stores compiled from years of writing. I’ve found new ways to breathe life into past creations. I’ve pushed and pulled and prodded and knitted together the embers of past fires into something that I hope speaks to the here and now. 

Now and then I magically catch a brand new spark and I hold and nurture it with everything I can to try and coax it into some sort of fire.

But am I always teetering right on the border of ‘Whew – She’s Gonna Make It’ and ‘Straight Up Menace’?

You bet I am. 

I can’t trip over that border for a million Very Sensible Reasons (like motherhood and rent and self-employment and my very real desire not to make a shitty time any shitter by sinking into a pit of my own despair). 

But it takes a hell of a lot of effort to keep myself on this side of the line. 

It takes a dedication to mining every ounce of these small and quiet days for anything that holds the slightest amount of heat. 

It takes intention and willingness to create a different relationship with my creativity. 

It takes a hell of a lot of radical permission and a relentless sort of grace to accept that this is just how it is right now. 

It takes a circle of friends who catch and hold me whenever I begin to tiptoe into Menace-Ville, dragging me back over the line as necessary. 

Most of all, it takes a wild sort of trust that the muse isn’t going anywhere. 

Faith that she’s biding her time just as impatiently as I am. 

A steady knowing that she will be ready and waiting for me when life picks up its spin once again.

I want to burst out of the gates full force, all engines blaring right now. 

I want to live and dance and dream and travel and taste and fuck and sing. 

I want to walk for hours and hug strangers and get my heart broken by so much beauty. 

I want to live and breathe air that has not yet met my lungs and set my boots on ground that has never known my footsteps. 

I want first kisses and rainstorms and crowded night clubs and ocean sunsets and museums filled with art older than time. 

And I want it all to fill me until there is no choice but for all that living to overflow into art. 

So much art that it obliterates the Menace in me, at least for a little while. 

If you’re like me – part Artist, part Menace, and this year has you doing battle with yourself just to keep the spark alive… just know you are not alone. 

Just know that your art will outlast this year.  

That the doors will open again, and we’ll all come tumbling out into the streets. 

And that when we do, we are going to be so hungry for LIFE (and the living of it) that we will all be filled with an insatiable hunger for creation. 

And when that happens – it’s the artists like you and I (and Bernadette) who are going to need to get the hell to work. 

So steady up, my friend. 

Pick yourself up and dust yourself off and be relentless about carving a path to the work of your heart, even if it doesn’t look or feel like you want it to right now.

This shit ain’t easy. 

And yeah, you’ve been a bit of a Menace lately. 

But that’s not all you are. And it’s not all I am either.

You, my friend, are (both simply and extraordinarily) an artist who lost the source of her art for just a little while. 

But darling, it’s coming back. 

I promise it is.

The world is coming back and I am coming back and you are too. 

It’s coming back and you and me —like Bernadette when she finally finds her spark—are gonna kick the shit out of life.

And holy sweet hell, it’s gonna be beautiful. 

The post Don’t Be A Menace (You Must Create) appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.