I could feel her, out there in the universe. The blame and the flagellation and the tender heart. I know this space, intimately.

“What would someone who loves you deeply choose for you right now?”, I asked her.

“Hold everything I share completely safely and in non-judgment.” She replied

“My friend” I answered, thumbs typing truth and bearing witness via instant messager, “As far as I can tell from here you are doing exactly that. You are loving yourself so very well.”

“Today I’m just feeling like shit for all of the choices I’ve made,” came her response, pain and self-judgment arising like magic from the little text bubble on my screen.

And my response came tumbling out of me, faster almost than I could keep up with it.

Love, sometimes this life is about horrible choices.

There is a quote that stays with me, I first heard it in a song, but it comes from Jean-Paul Sartre.

“Freedom is what you with what has been done to you”

I”m sure you’d agree that often the worst of all damages are those we perpetrate against ourselves, and so I would add to that line, even what’s been done TO you BY you.

It’s hard to imagine that anything like freedom could live at the root of all our bad decisions, but I believe it is so.

So, we should do a thing sometimes, you and I.

Let’s fucking cover the goddamn walls with craft paper, the floors too.

Let’s write all our fucking horrible choices with a rainbow of sharpies.

Let’s write them big.

Bigger.

Larger than life (the way they live in our minds).

Let’s speak them all out loud. No excuses, no apologies, no hiding in a dark corner covered in a blanket of shame.

Let’s sing them and rage them and cry them free.

Just the real, no bullshit deal.

Let’s tell each other all the stories of how we have been the finest instigators of our own undoing.

Don’t forget the asshole moments. The selfishness. The sin without redemption. The broken promises and all the times we have been reckless with the most precious hearts. Get them all out too.

Remembering, of course, that memory is finite and false and a shitty recorder of actual history. So that’s really all they are, you know. Just stories. No more powerful and no more or less accurate than any of the others.

This might take a while, we’ve got some years of living to get through.

Day might turn to night, and we might still be at it.

There are so many bad stories to tell.

I get it, I’ve lived a life too.

And when we’re done. When we’ve covered the walls and the floors and maybe our own skin and laid bare our hearts, and we are emptied and it is complete. Then let’s take in all that proof of disaster and say:

“Okay, universe, look at the holy brilliant fuckups we are. Get a good look at us, standing here in the middle of this mess of our own making. See how human and how divine and how utterly unextraordinary we are”.

Let’s stand there in the aftermath and look at each other dead in the eyes until we cry and then let’s keep looking until we start laughing and then let’s laugh until we are dancing.

Let’s try to see if we can come up with anyone we know who couldn’t cover just as much paper as we have, or more. I’m guessing we can’t, so I say let’s throw our bad decisions one hell of a party. Let’s invite the neighbors and celebrate the holy wonder of this wreckage and invite them to add whatever shit they’ve been carrying around with them too.

We’re all walking around this earth way too heavy for our own bones.

So let’s throw off the weight. Tear down the paper. Rip it all to shreds. Paint over the worst of it. Dance on top of the whole damn thing. Trash the room with all of our bad decisions, until we are sweaty and breathing hard and the confetti of our miserable life choices tangles in our hair, proof of the way we carry them with us everywhere.

Let’s stand there in the aftermath, in the totality of what we have made, in the middle of a room, in the middle of a life built on shitty ass decisions, terrible choices, horrible lapses of judgement, moments built on anger and fear and loathing and trauma and the massive self-sabotage fuckery of the life we have built.

A life
Built.
Two people.
Standing.
In spite of all the reasons maybe we shouldn’t be.
All the moments that could have taken us off this earth.
Still here.

You and I, love. We are still here.

Finding freedom from what has been done.

Making beauty from the wreckage.
Creating life from the unliveable.
Cause that’s what we do, babe, me and you and everyone like us
We make beauty out of the worst possible things.
And if we were not here to do that.
To live in truth.
To call it out.
To bare our skin.
To show others what is possible.
Well, so many of them wouldn’t live quite as much, or risk quite as much or live quite as wide open as they could.

And that’s not nothing my friend.
Far from it.
That, my dearest, is everything.

The post Creating Beauty From the Wreckage appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

“Not so much, but it’s really something I should not discuss because it should never have been in the first place. I’m sure karma and her friends are raining down upon my head. I deserve to battle alone…”

No.

That is a lie. A lie that your heart tells you because you are punishing yourself for the crime of being human.

You and me? We are so very human.

I don’t know the specifics of your story. I don’t know the exact reason you feel that karma has decreed that you suffer in solitude. But since I am human, just like you, I can fill in the blanks, and I can imagine.

So from that space, I will tell you now. It is not true. You don’t ever deserve to battle alone. None of us do.  So, do me a favor, dearest, and shut that down right now. Even just for the time you read this letter.

Now, it’s true that I don’t know a damn thing for sure about your story. But shared experience holds a pretty clear mirror, and I see beyond your words. I feel your heart, and I know.

I know, love. I know.

You have loved, haven’t you?  You have loved someone you believe you shouldn’t, and it is over, and you hurt, and maybe someone else has gotten hurt as well, someone you never wanted to hurt along the way.

You are punishing yourself for that. Holding yourself responsible, neon-lit scarlet letter upon your chest. Your heart is broken, but you don’t think you have the right to feel that grief, so even the sadness becomes another marker of all the ways you have done wrong.

But here’s the thing, I don’t know too many people who have gotten through very much life without at some point and in some way, loving someone we’re told we shouldn’t. If karma decreed that we be alone for the human act of loving when the world says we should not, then most of us would be destined to exist in perpetual solitary confinement. Some sort of horrible self-constructed purgatory, forever and ever.

Our hearts are beautiful and mysterious and sometimes selfish and not often very forward thinking.

And they do what they are here to do.

Love.

To seek love and find love and open to love, again and again, and again.

To fill in what is empty in us.

To allow ourselves even momentary kindness, or touch or desire.

To be seen and known, even for a brief time or a time outside of time, no matter what lies on the other side.

Bravely and recklessly. In kindness and fullness and in greed and desperation.

So, without knowing anything about what is happening for you right now, know this:

If the act of loving, even outside of contract or social acceptance or what the world decrees is ‘right’ makes you deserving of anything, it is entering the room with all of us who have stood where you are now standing.

All of who have loved and lost and broken, who have brought hurt to others. All of us who have confused and tangled our own hearts, or made questionable choices to quench our own desires, or stepped outside of our own integrity to taste what called to our souls or our bodies or our longings for things we cannot even name.

This is a part the humanness that connects us.

Threads woven between broken and stumbling souls.

Fumbling and scared.

Wanting and open.

Holy and whole.

We don’t get here clean. We can’t. It’s not how we were made, us miraculous, stumbling, terribly messy, deeply wanting humans.

And my god, if I don’t believe we all deserve infinite tenderness inside of this truth.

I didn’t always know this. I didn’t know it when I made the choices that cost me my own grasp on integrity and all the stories I had told myself about who I was and the things I would and would not do.

Not when my choices left me dazed, months later, when it felt as if the entirety of the life I had known had burned down in the wake of my own decisions, collateral damage beyond my comprehension.

I didn’t know it when a few short years after that someone dear to me broke my trust to have a hidden relationship with someone I will love until the day that I die. I didn’t know it when I yelled and wailed and walked through the night with tears streaming down my face, sowing the seeds of anger and resentment and letting them take hold and root down deep.

I didn’t learn this lesson until I fell into a love that was a remembering.

A love where past and present and future and countless parallel lives tangled and exploded into life, as real and anything I could touch or taste in front of me. A love that was my first experience of what it was to be seen and loved for who and what I am, never once asked to be anything or anyone else. A love so holy it could never have felt wrong. This love, the groundwater and memory and inevitability of it, it pulled me forward in spite of everything I thought I knew about what was good or right.

In the process of this loving, I chose a path that was not the one the world would have had me make. One that brought great hurt to another and once again risked the foundation of the life I had rebuilt from the ashes. And in the process of this loving, I made a choice not between goodness and wholeness, as I first thought, but instead a choice that was an integration, finally, of the two.

In the aftermath of this love, there was a difference inside of me. A self that refused apology, that recognized that a such a love, it demands that we listen. It asks if we are willing to taste, to allow, to open. In the aftermath of this love, I found redemption and forgiveness was finally made possible.

When there is a chance for a love like that, I learned. We take it. And we don’t always take it the way we believe we should. And we don’t always take it without betraying others, or ourselves. Sometimes, integrity, the real and rooted kind, is something we only find through the path of that betrayal.

And if that was true for me, then it was also true for the others who had broken my trust and brought hurt to my doorstep. There was no forgiveness of self without the forgiveness of others.

It is true, when we stumble off the path that marks our relationship with our own integrity, that profoundly personal and incomparable relationship, there is work to be done. Hard, painful, deeply humbling work.  None of my words are here are to offer excuse or absolution. That is between you and whatever and whoever you answer to in the deepest part of your soul. It may require penance or the hard work of rebuilding or the letting go of what refuses to repair.

And every last one of those will hurt and come with costs I cannot know or name.

So no, I’m not handing out free passes or making light of what has been done. God knows I am still carrying the marks of my own choices. And god knows, it may be something you live with now and forever, as it has been for me. This knowing of what it is for your actions to impact another, maybe even someone you dearly and deeply love, is not a thing that can be undone. I’m not going to sugar coat or gloss over that reality. But I’m not going to let you sink into the pit of self-loathing either.

And I am going to tell you that there is redemption, even now, right there waiting for you.

It’s true, redemption and forgiveness are sticky things, almost always. But never more so than when we are asked to shine that light on our own hopelessly human hearts.

And maybe its presumptuous of me to type this, when I don’t really know a damn thing of what your heart is living right now, and there are days when I know my own work of self-forgiveness is a patched up, beaten around work in perpetual progress.

And possibly this is simply my own attempt to remind or even convince myself that I am worthy, in spite of the times in my life when I’ve left the path of my own integrity, and brought havoc by the act of my own loving.

Or maybe it is only this, that we need to meet each other here. That we must.

We must remind one another of the fact that we are here, and alive and human, so terribly and beautifully and sometimes painfully alive. And that very thing is what makes it so blindly brilliant, so achingly true.

We are not defined only by our actions in the moments we step off the path. I cannot believe that because that would damn me and you and all of us. I believe that ultimately, what defines us is the way we keep stepping back on. The way we trip and struggle through the wilderness of our selves, the way we wander through the dark desert night believing ourselves worthy of being cast out. And still, somehow, when the light rises in the sky, our path appears again, and we step back on, put one foot in front of the other, and onward we go.

And you, my dear friend, are finding your way back to the path. Even if you can’t feel it or see it right now, you are.

And you deserve to be there. And so do I. And so do all the rest of us.

We are here, you and I and everyone we loved in the light and all of those we have loved in the shadowy spaces.

Our hearts doing the thing they are made to do, pulsing and yearning and casting aside all doubt in the hope that we will be met and seen and known in holiness and in wholeness, with our guilt and our scars and every last ounce of hope remaining in our bones.

Here we are, you and I. Hearts beating. Still loving. No matter what.

______

Photo from header image by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

The post Terribly and beautifully and painfully alive. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Hey you.

You are talented and fucking amazing.

Yes. I’m talking to you.

None of that looking over your shoulder, acting like I’m talking to someone else. Don’t go giving me all that false-modesty, self-deprecation, ‘this-old-thing’ bullshit. We don’t have time for that right now. You can save that shit for the mean girls from high school.

Talking down to yourself is so 1990’s (and not in the retro, everything old is new again, high-waisted jeans hipster sort of way, if you know what I mean).

If you’re wasting your precious time talking smack about your fine self, then you’re using up time you won’t ever get back, to do nothing but drag yourself down.

Cut that shit out, sugar.  Ain’t nobody got time for that.

The world needs your power. Use your voice (just don’t use it for dumb shit).

And darling, any words (spoken or unspoken) that don’t reflect the absolute, irrefutable truth that you are a Divine-Earth-Shaking-Revolutionary-Badass-Of-Epic-Proportions falls into the category of ridiculously dumb shit.

(Why yes, I do suggest you stop right now and add that title to your Instagram Bio for the world to see. Done? Good. Let’s move on).

You ready for the truth?

There ain’t nobody in this whole damn world with a voice like you. Not a single other person alive has lived through your particular story (and honey, I *know* you’ve lived through some hard-core shit). This world, it needs you to speak up. To own your gorgeous self like the sovereign being you are.

In fact, if anyone out there tries to squash you into a box, you smash that box to smithereens and use the wood to build a stage. Then you climb on, stand up tall, pick up a megaphone and ditch your inside voice for good.

It’s time to get loud.

There’s some serious shit going down in the world right now. And your voice? It fucking matters.

Yes. You are talented. Yes. You are amazing.

Yes, you are a Divine-Earth-Shaking-Revolutionary-Badass-Of-Epic-Proportions.

Now start fucking acting like it.

P.S. Repeat after me:

“Watch out world, I am a Divine-Earth-Shaking-Revolutionary-Badass-Of-Epic-Proportions. I’ve got something to say and you’d better be listening.”

P.P.S. Tell those mean girls from high school to stuff it.

P.P.S. Know someone who is spending too much time not owning their brilliance? Forward send them this post and remind them just how fucking amazing they are.

Rebel Deck is no bullshit guidance from the universe, complete with bright colors, language like a sailor and a motherfucking unicorn. In other words, it’s perfect for me (and you). Head over to the website to subscribe to the free weekly readings and use coupon code ‘AWESOME’ to take 10% off your order.

The post You Are A Divine-Earth-Shaking-Revolutionary-Badass-Of-Epic-Proportions. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Dear Jeanette

I have left everything behind and embarked overseas to start a new chapter of my life. I had a good life but it wasn’t enough. Something was calling me from deep within. I yearned for something more.

And now? I’m here. The goodbyes and letting go left me emotionally drained and I have really no idea now why I am here. Reality is sinking in. The language is confusing. I feel very much alone. It is one the hardest things I’ve done and it’s only the beginning. The demons have started to rear their ugly heads and I am very vulnerable to believing them.

I want to do so many things. And yet I’m scared. Frozen. I don’t know the first step. I want to hide in my room on the 6th floor in a city where it rains most days and where everyone has it tough. I want to shine so others can then feel safe to shine too, but am lost. Groundlessness – with nothing familiar at all.

I know I need to go inwards. But that frightens me because I must move beyond the demons to get to that inner guidance deep within. I’m exhausted physically and mentally and don’t know if I have the strength to rely on me. I so want to run to someone- anyone – who will hold me and tell me that I’m not a failure for feeling this way.

Signed,
Far from home

Read these lines as many times as you need to in order to start believing.

Second: this life, sometimes it is hard.

Relentless, even. And in those times it seems impossible to tell if the hard is external, or situational or entirely of our own making. The voices get loud and layer one on top of the other. The tender and the harsh tones merge into an internal cacophony that leaves us – as you just described yourself – frozen, paralyzed, stuck in a 6th floor apartment or the floor of our closet, or just inside the prison of our own body and mind.

When we are doing something we love – say running or hiking – and we fall and injure a joint, it swells. The body sends more blood flow to the injured area, the tissues fill with fluid and white blood cells and the skin is forced to expand. It is our body’s way of initiating its own healing. But once the initial shock and adrenaline wears off, it’s painful. It’s uncomfortable. It sucks. It stops us from continuing our loved activity.

Our natural inclination – ice it, heat it, take an anti-inflammatory to bring down the swelling. ASAP.

But as important as healing is, that inflammation has a purpose. Our bodies – outside of disease – don’t do unpurposeful things.

“The inflammatory response is a defense mechanism that evolved in higher organisms to protect them from infection and injury. Its purpose is to localize and eliminate the injurious agent and to remove damaged tissue components so that the body can begin to heal. The pain and swelling can keep the athlete from using the injured part, serving to protect it from further injury”

Just like a fever, swelling is an example of the body acting as teacher – the extra fluid helps stabilize the joint, the pain reminds you to be tender and gentle, and points you – and other healers – to the area that needs care.

You were doing something you were powerfully called to do. The rush and exhilaration of that choice carried you through to here, even in the hardest and most grief filled places. And now you’re here. You’ve landed. All that adrenaline is calming down. And now your body and heart and spirit are having a purposeful reaction to your current reality.

It’s not bad, it’s not a failure, it’s not anything that needs external judgement. It is calling your attention, it is asking to be gentle, and it is showing you the area that needs care.

The paralysis is real. The inner-freeze-head-in-the-sand-can’t-take-a-deep-breath-to-save-your-life. It’s real. The doubt and insecurities and the voices questioning your choices – those are real too. They – like an injured joint – are swelling up to slow you down, to convince you to listen.

They are begging for loving care, gentle attention and a purposeful plan for healing.

Notice I said a purposeful plan for healing. An injured joint that isn’t moved will seize up, the muscles will get tight and weaken. The injured part of the body will experience a sort of paralysis, where any sort of movement is painful and feels unwise.

Much like you just described.

I know you believe you need to go inwards. But in cases like this I’m not always sure that inward is what is called for.

Or – perhaps it is just that the path in often only appears by moving out. To become embodied, to dive deeply into the living reality. To move our bodies (and our spirits and our souls) enough that we release ourselves from the traps we create inside our minds. And if there is a trap I am familiar with – it is the trap of my own mind. The twists and turns and double backs, like one of those impossible mazes I used to take my kids to at Halloween. I can get lost in there forever.

“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”
— Junot Díaz

You could translate the above quote to mean going inwards – and maybe that’s even the way he meant it. But to me – it means not going inward – but going IN-TO. Into life. Into the richness. Into the chaos. Into the raw and the noise and the heat and the fear and the humanity. Into the LIVING.

And to me – moving INTO the living means getting OUT of myself. The voices of my deepest wisdom are rarely loud enough to be heard above the noise inside my own head, and they rarely come when give myself over to the freeze or the pull to isolate.

I never know for sure when those wise voices will appear – but I know I often hear them whispering while walking strange city streets, or in the midst of a stand of trees, or over the roar of mama ocean, or when smiling small children, or when I take my feet to the mountain or my hands to the yoga mat. Sometimes they come to me on the open road, windows rolled down and hair impossibly tangled and the music playing so loudly I feel it in my bones. Sometimes they come in the most human and raw and messy of moments – where my humanity mingles with another in ways that are rough and sticky and too complex to put into words.

But once they are whispering, I can tease or coax or nudge them forward, and -if I am ready and willing – give myself over to following where they lead.

The only thing is – I have to get far enough out of my own head and deep enough into my own body – my own lived experience – to hear them in the first place.

You know how to move. You’ve already done the leaving. You said the goodbyes, you picked up life and heart and soul and transported it around the world. You did the brave and the wild thing that so many of us dream of doing and never have the courage to do.

Fuck. That’s huge. That’s beyond huge. No wonder you’re spinning. To me, to not spin, at least a little bit, would be strange.

Not only did you leave – which is huge and draining – but then you had to arrive.

Oh – how we fail to pay attention to the demands of arrival.

You’re in a entirely new place. A place where the language and the soil and the sounds and the tastes and the people are foreign to your experience.

So often in transition we let our thoughts be consumed by the challenge of the endings – leaving a job, leaving a relationship, leaving a country. So much attention to what is being left that we discount the magnitude of the arrival. Of the new. Of the unfamiliar. Of the scary and the strange and the “Oh, what the HELL have I done?”.

Damn – if it isn’t the arrivals that sometimes spin us out, especially because we are so rarely truly prepared for the fullness of their reality. And how can we prepare for something we cannot know or possibly predict? But still, we expect our arrivals to unfold, Hollywood movie style – to be new and exciting and wonderful and filled with rainbows and glitter and unicorns.

Only sometimes the arrival is just as hard as the leaving. And sometimes it’s harder.

And fuck if that doesn’t knock us on our asses.

So, of course you are spinning right now, love. It’s your soul’s way of demanding a period of recalibration – because everything that you knew is not what is. Why wouldn’t the feelings surrounding this be just as complex as the experience and the choice itself?

When we take that big of a leap – whether physical location or metal or logistical or emotional – it can take a while before our full beings catch up with our physical bodies, or for our physical body to catch up to our spirit and soul. A period of disequilibrium is frustrating, clearly – but also natural. Expected, even. You used the word groundless to describe how you were feeling – and this makes perfect sense. Your feet have actually not had time to find their new solid ground.

Once, I wrote this passage to a woman who was in the groundlessness of deep heartbreak and longing:

“So let the floor fall out from under you. Nothing big ever happens, good or bad, unless the floor falls out first. Let your longing wind you down through that spiral. And know that falling can be the most wickedly awesome and totally safe thing you’ve ever done. Down, down, down – and when you hit that solid ground you’ll know. And you might touch down softly, or you might land in an ungraceful thud. But land you will. And then, when you’re ready, you can stretch your shaky legs, stand up, dust yourself off, raise your hands open, toss your head back to the heavens and say ‘Here I am. All that I am, and all that I will be.”

Make no mistake, I believe you will land and you will rise. Because someone bold enough to do what you’ve already done is ready for the demands of beginning anew on this new foundation.
Your old life, as ‘good’ as it may have looked on paper, wasn’t enough. You were yearning for something more. But holy fuck – this more is so much more. It’s the biggest more ever. It’s maybe more than you were ready for. And you can’t logic or explain or will it away.

So yes, you will rise, but right now you’re deep inside of the more. And it’s not easy.

And that’s okay.

That’s actually, really, totally okay.

You stepped right into your new chapter you were craving. Full force and brave as fuck. Quite frankly, I’m in awe of you.

But you know, sometimes when I’m entirely hooked on an exceptionally good book and I read my way through an intense transitional chapter, even though I’m eager to go on and find out what happens, I put the book down. I need a pause. I have to give myself time to sink into what just happened and wait till my brain has processed it all. I need to take a breath before I continue – because my brain is so deeply involved in the story that it needs to accept what has just unfolded before I have room to discover what will happen next.

Give yourself the gift of the pause. Let your body and soul and mind and heart find their new equilibrium. You’ve turned the page and the new chapter lies before you, but give yourself time and space to take an infinity of breaths before you begin to read (or write) your way into what comes next. Get out into the world before you, deep into your wonderful human body and allow it the gift of existing in this world. Give yourself a chance to be lost and found and enough silence to hear the whisper when it comes. And it will come.

You don’t have to know the right first step. You just have to be ready willing to walk into the unknowing with all of your hope and all of your fear and all of your doubt and all of your bravery.

Be gentle. Pay attention. Offer purposeful healing. Seek Equilibrium. Unfreeze, slowly. Stretch yourself out into the world. Let your eyes calibrate to this new light and notice how it caresses the lines and curves and soft and hard of you. Allow your mouth to twist and stumble around new shapes. Be so very sensory. Notice everything. From every angle. The way your bones feel. The way you orient to space and time. Invite your whole being into this new way of living, into the totality and wholeness of it. Let it be strange and uncomfortable and painful and stiff. Let it be magical and novel and unfamiliar and entirely wonderful. Follow the whispers where they lead.

“So, grab this world by its clothespins
And shake it out again and again
And jump on top and take it for a spin
And when you hop off shake it again
For this is yours, this is yours
Make my words worth it
Make this not just some poem that I write
Not just some poem like just another night that sits heavy above us all
Walk into it, breathe it in, let it crash through the halls of your arms
Like the millions of years of millions poets
Coursing like blood, pumping and pushing
Making you live, shaking the dust
So when the world knocks at your front door
Clutch the knob tightly and open on up
And run forward and far into its widespread, greeting arms
With your hands outstretched before you
Fingertips trembling, though they may be”
Anis Mogjani

Shine on, love. Shine on.

I can’t wait to know what this chapter holds.

Xo.
J

Uncommon Sense is an ongoing series where I respond to comments and questions that stir my heart. They arrive by email, by text, by comment. They speak to something universal in me, and my response comes quick and sure. If you have something stirring in your heart and would like me to respond – please send me your message. I cannot respond publicly to all messages, but I do promise – with everything that I have –  that I will honor it and keep it safe.

{This post was first shared at Patreon and  The Urban Howl}

The post The groundlessness of new beginnings. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

“It’s been a year and I still don’t feel like I’m any farther ahead. I need to write more, create more, but I’m so often paralyzed by the fear and the blocks – all the voices that tell me I shouldn’t bother, I won’t make it. I know that this is my purpose, and some days I feel so clear and so brave and so on course. The problem is it never lasts. I can’t seem to feel wise or like I know anything for more than a day or so – and then the doubt returns. And the doubt, it blocks me from the creativity that feeds my soul. It keeps me still and small. How do I find the words to tell the true stories in the face of so much fear?”

I know some days it feels like you will never have your shit together. Some days it feels like life is a never ending battle between the laundry and the bills and your ability to give a damn. Some days you look at the other woman out there with her tribe and her books and her beautiful art and you can feel a heavy weight sinking down into your chest. I’m telling you – that lump? It’s your art. It is calling out to you, begging to free. Maybe you can’t pull yourself from the fog right now. Maybe you’re simply surviving and you don’t even notice the lump in your chest because you’re too focused on the water up to your neck, but soon you’re going to feel just a little bit better. And then you’ll feel a little bit more bold and maybe a little bit more brave.

No more longing. No more planning. Create now.

Art without action is art that will die inside your body, and art that dies inside the body is a living trauma.Winona Grey

Art without action is art that will die inside your body. When art dies inside the body, the body stiffens, the heart locks down, the mind becomes bitter, life turns gray. Art that dies inside the body is a living trauma that you carry with you. Your soul becomes colorless – haunted by the ghost of what you should have made. The ghost of your art is that lump – that sickening, sinking, dreadful feeling. You are grieving over your lost art even now and I’m not sure you even know it.

Please don’t wait any longer. Please begin the work.

Walk your body through the motions if you have to. Throw yourself into the art. Pick up the pen, the torch, the brush. What are you waiting for? Get out of bed. Light a candle. Pick up the nearest fucking tool you can find and start now.

Warm up first, then catch fire.

Let it burn through your body.

Burn down the dam, let the waters rush forth, let the wind pick up, and run alongside the art holding onto it like a kite.

Then, release it.

Breathe.

Watch it soar high above you. Peace will fill the body with every breath in. Joy will wrap itself around your bones.

Please, start now.

If you want to join me for a live call about Creative Resistance – where we’ll talk about all the ways we avoid our creative calling, imposter syndrome, money blocks and the audacity of creative entrepreneurship – I’ll be live on Zoom (with Winona as one of my guests) on Tuesday, April 11th, 2017 at 2pm PST.  If you’re not able to make the call – make sure you subscribe to my email list and I’ll send out a recording once the call is complete.

To join the call:
Join from:

• PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://zoom.us/j/2862682980
• iPhone one-tap (US Toll): +14086380968,2862682980# or +16465588656,2862682980#
• Telephone: Dial: +1 408 638 0968 (US Toll) or +1 646 558 8656 (US Toll) Meeting ID: 286 268 2980
• International numbers available: https://zoom.us/zoomconference?m=m3d6sR3854QSkQKZj3ItQyrfc1ExPtq6

Winona Grey was a sad little girl haunted by traumatic memories until she found a camera and learned to tell the truth through self portraiture. Then, for ten years, she was a resolute and quiet young woman learning to survive with a mental illness until she found the words and began to write. Now she teaches the path to self love through self portraiture as sacred ritual and writes in the voice of the brave woman she has become.  Follow Winona on Instagram | Join the Sacred Self Portrait

Uncommon Sense is an ongoing series where I respond to comments and questions that stir my heart. They arrive by email, by text, by comment. They speak to something universal in me, and my response comes quick and sure. If you have something stirring in your heart and would like me to respond– please send me your message. I cannot respond publicly to all messages, but I do promise – with everything that I have –  that I will honor it and keep it safe.

The post Uncommon Sense: Create like there is no time to waste. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

We fell in love. It’s so stupid. I am so stupid. Why would I allow my heart to find the deepest most gravitational love I’ve ever felt in a person so wildly unable to be what we both wanted him to be?

Right now, before I say anything more – before I offer my pretty words or wrapped up wisdom – I want to tell you a story. Not an easy story, or one with a fairly tale happy ending. No white horse. No sunset. Just the story of a girl with a broken heart who finally learned to cry.

It is also the story of how my bones came to know the truth that I share here.

The story of my own break, and my own deliverance.

The story of a love that changed things – and how what came next may prove, in the end, to be the most important story of all.

~~~

Once upon a time I stopped believing in love, at least the version of love I once held as absolute. My heart had settled into a sort of resigned cynicism and I began learning was it was to walk my own path.

Right then, only minutes before the night was to end, I met her. Ocean eyes and gravel voice and arms that felt like home.

As love affairs go, it as impossibly brief. But in those few months – in the midst of lucky pennies and inexplicable serendipity and lyrical language, I learned that I could once again see past the present and into a future.

Into even, it seemed, a forever.

The end? That was coldness and confusion. Words of love and promises of protection and daydreams of walking side by side by the sea. And then a swift and brutal cut.

And that end – I will not lie – it drove me to the ground, gutted me to the root of self.

It was a fetal position on hard floor sort of grief. It was whiskey and cigarettes and the saddest sort of music in the deepest and darkest nights. It was throwing myself on the bed and crying and clawing at the sheets as if I was a primal, wild thing.

It was the break that opened me enough, finally, to grieve all that long demanded grieving.

It was one loss that stacked all the losses on top of each other until they staggered over me and fell around me and formed the ground and the air and everything there was – black hole of empty – all of it my own.

Because in that love I did not only find a hope, I found a knowing, a faith, a lack of the questioning that had followed me as long as I could remember. And if that knowing was not real – was anything?

How stupid could I be? How naïve?

I called myself all these things, just as you have today.

It is tempting, in the loss of love, to also lose all the rest.

It was tempting to pass blame on myself for trusting that promises made were promises kept. For allowing the belief that I could have another forever – when for years I had told myself that my own karma precluded such grace.

But you see, there was also something born in me during those days that I did not yet know.

What I could not have known, those nights spend crying on the hard wood floor of my apartment, was hope rekindled is a most stubborn sort of hope.

And on the other side of all the blame and feeling foolish and wanting to change it all was this – if I could be wrong not just about this love (and oh, I was so very wrong) I might also be wrong about all that I had believed about love for so very long.

I might be wrong about the boxes I had put around it. I might be wrong about the way my guilt made me feel unworthy of having it again. I might be wrong to think that walking away from one forever meant there could never be another.

I might, possibly, be wrong about everything.

And inside of this came the deepest paradox. In the empty that followed – the vast and unchained freedom of unknowing – all things were made possible again.

“But I knew, I should have known, but I didn’t want to know, stupidly I clung to a sliver of hope, and now look what’s happened. It has wrought only pain for us both.”

No. Enough. Stop right now. You are not stupid. You are human.

And us humans, we can be remarkably sensible about very many things. Making it to yoga class and eating our kale and looking both ways before we cross the street and paying our bills on time. Sensible and pragmatic and careful.

But rarely, dearheart, does sensible extend to love.

And it shouldn’t. Because insensible is exactly what something as impossible and reckless and foolhardy as love demands.

And as much as you are hurting now, you and I and all the rest of the foolish humans we share this earth with, we are here to love.

We are here to love hard and true. Here to give ourselves over to the rush and bliss of it all. Here to offer our patchwork hearts over and over again. Here to feel and fall and hurt and bleed. Here to say yes and to choose wholeness and to break anyway and to do it all again.

We have to. It is, for most of us, a biological and physiological imperative much like food and shelter.

Oh, we try to sensible. We try to build walls and put rules around who and how and when we will allow someone to cross. We try to create these complex structures around the chaos of human emotion.

And oh, how we fail. How we crumble and soften and yield. How we offer ourselves over and over again.

Oh – how we fall.

And isn’t it beautiful? And isn’t it painful?

And isn’t it everything?

And so you fell in love and he wasn’t really available and you are sitting there now in the murky deep of it. And it hurts and it sucks and if I could take it all away I would.

In a heartbeat.

I’d take it away because I know that space. I know the hard ground and the taste of the salt water I’m made of and the way even getting out of bed feels impossible some days. I know how some moments there’s not even enough air.

I know the desperate and the bargains you want to make with the universe and every last prayer you’ve prayed to gods you don’t even believe in.

But stupid? No, love.

Not stupid. Not you. You are infinitely, impossibly, beautifully human.

And here is one other thing I know – I know it in a deeply visceral way – is that a love like this. The inevitability of it. The gravitational pull of it. The certainty and bliss and coming home of it.

This sort of love delivers something important. Even when it does not last.

Because when you have come through the ragged open wound of it. When you’ve picked yourself up off the ground and you’ve cried rivers of tears, hard and true and honest and good. When you have taken the first steps out of the fog, and you bring air all the way deep into your lungs for the first time in months, you will have something you did not have before.

You will have a knowing. You will have been loved in a way that made all things possible. You will have known a love that will forever be your measuring stick for the ways you are capable of loving and of being loved.

This love – its importance is not measured in longevity or solidity or delivery to some mythical happy ever after.

This love matters because it cleared a path through your heart and made you see.

And this does not for a second take away the ache. And it will not fill in the space that he claimed in your heart, nor remove the gaping hole his loss carved in you. It does not negate the grasping, the relentless hope, the way you’d have him back in a breath if only you could.

“Let us not forget, that we never stop loving silently those we once loved out loud.” ~Oriah Mountain Dreamer

All that, my dear, all that part is so impossibly and painfully hard. It hurts and it’s awful and I hope you have friends who will come and bring wine and sleep over night and hold you when you need the warmth of a body next to you just to keep breathing.

Because on some dark nights, it is just loving arms that you will long for – no matter who they belong to. And because honoring that part of the longing is valid too.

And so, as you walk through this. As you stumble and trip. As you make the calls you think you shouldn’t make and write the letters you’ll never send and make desperate promises to the wild full moon – I hope that you are held. I hope that you honor your own needs, and just as equally that you honor this love, and this grief.

Without platitudes or promises, I would guess – because I feel it deep in my bones – that whatever happens with this love or the next or the next – you will forever walk through this world differently. Because you now know the sort of love that lives in this world. The extent of what you can feel and the ways you can be met.

And you will know, from now on, that this is the kind of love worth waiting for.

And with a knowing like this, nothing can ever be the same again.

xo,
Jeanette

Uncommon Sense is an ongoing series where I respond to comments and questions that stir my heart. They arrive by email, by text, by comment. They speak to something universal in me, and my response comes quick and sure. If you have something stirring in your heart and would like me to respond – please send me your message. I cannot respond publicly to all messages, but I do promise – with everything that I have –  that I will honor it and keep it safe.

The post Uncommon Sense: || Isn’t it beautiful? And isn’t it painful? And isn’t it everything? appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

“Life is complicated. I am tired of hiding.”

“Why are you hiding?”

“Because I’m ‘too much’ girl”

“Oh. I know that story. All too well.”

“I just had a long distance lover dump me because I’m too much. And it hurts. Fuck it. No more.”

+++++

Listen to me. Right now.

You are right. Fuck it. No more. Never again.

You are not too much. You have never been too much. You will never be too much.

The very idea is preposterous. Because you were born to be you. All of you. Not a tiny acceptable sliver. Not a watered down version with colors dulled and edges softened.

No. You were meant to be every last pulsing-bleeding-loving-crying-feeling bit.

And if someone tells you that you are too much for them, the only truth you need to remember is this:

It is highly likely that they are not now, and never could have been, near enough for you.

Because you, my girl. You are the sun and the moon and the stars. You are the force that pulls the tides. You are the unrestrained howl under a wide-open moon. You are the essence of what it is to dance into ecstasy. You are the heat and the sex and the sweat and the burn and soft and the grace and the grit and the ocean of tears.

You are all of everything.

You are the mother of us all and the daughter of the universe.

You walk through shadows and light.

You burn down and rise up and hold captive the pulse of the world.

You make the gods tremble.

And that, my dear, is bound to make some people crazy uncomfortable. It will make them pull back and push away. Because the way you dance with your shadows and your steadfast commitment to your light will push them into spaces that are fascinating and compelling and utterly terrifying. Your very being asks them to step into places they may not be near ready to visit, let alone stay.

Because like the depths of the ocean that calls you home, you will never be easy.

But darling, you were not brought here for easy. You are here for so much more.

Because you are a boundary pusher.

You’re a truth seeker.

You’re temptation and seduction and heat.

You’re a mirror and a sorcerer and inside you swirls the power of the ancients.

So no, you are not easy.

But in the space of that truth – please also know this. Do not get this confused with the notion that you do not deserve the deepest ease. Don’t for a minute let them convince you that you will not know the grace of a lover who does not require that you constantly translate yourself or diminish yourself or quiet your storm or tone down your extravagant love.

Because that, my girl, is bullshit.

Because out there somewhere there is a love who will never dream of calling you too much. Who speaks, like you, in poetry and candlewax and stardust. Who runs outside on stormy nights to howl at the moon. Who collects bones and sings incantation and talks to the ancestors. And that lover, when you find him or her, will see you and know you – just as you are and just as you should be.

And they will say yes. Yes, you. I will go there with you. I have been waiting for this.

And so while you are waiting, I want you to do this. For me, and for every last too much girl out there.

You take all that too much and you channel it. You gather every last ember of your too much broken heart and you light that flame. And in doing so you will call forth the others and you sing the song that brings us home.

And then you – in your infinite, perfect too-muchness – unleash it all on the world. And you go and love too much and you cry too much and you swear too much. Fall in love to fast and get sad too often and laugh too loudly and demand with clarity the exact terms of your own desired existence.

Don’t you dare consider doing anything but that.

Because we need you. Everyone of us, man or woman, who has been called too much. You are our reminder, in the most desperate of moment, that we are exactly as we should be.

Every last too-much bit.

Within the pages of this original inspirational book is the permission you’ve been waiting for. Permission to grow into your wholeness. Permission to take up as much space as you need. Permission to ground down into the deep wisdom of your own knowing: You are exactly as you should be. You are not too much.
Buy Your Copy Now

Uncommon Sense is an ongoing series where I respond to comments and questions that stir my heart. They arrive by email, by text, by comment. They speak to something universal in me, and my response comes quick and sure. If you have something stirring in your heart and would like me to respond – please send me your message. I cannot respond publicly to all messages, but I do promise – with everything that I have –  that I will honor it and keep it safe.

The post Uncommon Sense || You are not too much. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Sort answer: You don’t.

Long Answer: Sugar, you really absolutely, positively don’t. In fact, the quest for this ever-elusive equilibrium is pure crazy making. Balance is a fallacy. A giant conspiracy designed to make us all feel like we’re continuously fucking up and falling short. It sells yoga videos and meditation retreats and time saving kitchen devices. We download productivity apps and make to-do lists and buy things that plug into our electrical outlets to make us feel like we live in the midst of an artificially scented rainforest.

Serenity now. Please.

And despite all of this we are wildly, continuously off kilter. Unbalanced. Crossing the universe on a tightrope with no safety net below. There is not enough time, or money, or passion or even interest to sustain it all perfectly all the time.

And darling, of course something has got to give.

But here’s the real truth.

We’re made for the ebb and flow. Just like the ocean. Just like the cycles of the moon. Just like the movement from dark to light to dark again.

We were born to shift and be selfish and howl and get messy. We were made to create beauty and to make crazy love and to find the bliss right at the center of our raw, aching parts. That’s the heart of life, the center of the paradox.

And it often says to hell with balance, because balance keeps us safe.

What if we halt the chase for this impossibly esoteric notion of balance and give ourselves to something a lot more earthy and true and real. How about we let ourselves be seduced by the beauty of disequilibrium? What if we agreed to let it all go, with a wild, lusty abandon.

Because that’s when we find that it’s all about the moments. Moments for pure creation. Moments of uninhibited sex. Moments of the sweetest mother baby love. Of pissed-the-fuck-off anger. And of come-here-right-now lust. Of falling head over heels in love with the world. Of feeling like the ground is going to give way beneath our feet. Of feeling free and wild and true, and of feeling chained and constrained and too heavy to get out of bed. And yes, in the midst of all this, even moments where it all feels like it’s sliding into the most exquisite alignment.

And before, you might have been tempted to call that balance. To try subduing it and controlling it and keeping it at all costs. But now? No.

You’re too fierce, too elemental, to unabashedly you to be something as mild and tame as balanced.  And that’s fucking hot. I’m pretty sure your partner would agree that you living in the fullness of your perfectly unbalanced self is a pretty good way to keep the love turned all the way on.

No balancing act required.

So don’t wait to fall off the tightrope.  Take a flying leap.  Trust your wings.  And the unsteady ground that greets you will be perfect and exhilarating and true.

Just like you.

The post Uncommon Sense: The Fallacy of Balance appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Our lives often feel like burning buildings. We navigate our days trying hopelessly hard to avoid the flames. We test the doorknobs of rooms we are being invited to enter, and if they transmit heat we walk away and look for other places to find safe shelter. We have been taught that safety and security lives in the opposite direction of the flames.

This is often true and wise and good. There is a clear wisdom to avoiding that which may bring annihilation. Most of life is survived by doing that very thing. But there are times in life where we exert so much energy avoiding the burn that our entire existence is wrapped up in tossing buckets of water on an impending inferno.

Sometimes the only truly wise thing to do is to walk straight into the fire. To welcome the burnout, to coax the threatening spark until it turns into a blaze which illuminates all the dark spaces. To walk into the fire, knowing that we will be reduced to ashes.

In the process of destruction, the fire can deliver us a new, fertile ground from which to begin again. What is birthed from the ashes often rises stronger, more essential, more connected to the core of truth than what lived before.  And from this space we are offered a clear view of what remains, what truly matters, what is truly needed.

So go ahead. Ignite your life. Fan the flames. Allow everything to be illuminated by the blaze. Feel the freedom in being reduced to ashes and welcome the rebirth that follows. There is a devastating beauty here, a brutal core of truth in all that remains.

Spread your wings wide. Do not be afraid. You will always know how to fly.

This post originally appeared in Amulet Magazine

Uncommon Sense is an ongoing series where I respond to comments and questions that stir my heart. They arrive by email, by text, by comment. They speak to something universal in me, and my response comes quick and sure. If you have something stirring in your heart and would like me to respond – please send me your message. I cannot respond publicly to all messages, but I do promise – with everything that I have –  that I will honor it and keep it safe.

The post Uncommon Sense: Walk Straight Into The Fire appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Dear one,
As women we often anchor ourselves to all the solid things around us. And then, without warning, we find ourselves in a place where nothing is certain. There is no longer anything to tie ourselves to.  Nothing to create an illusion of security in an insecure world.

This is the time to find the anchor within ourselves.

Grab a mirror. Look at yourself until it begins to feel uncomfortable. Until you want to turn your head. Fix your gaze on the woman who looks back. Now look past the surface and see all the women inside her. Name your motherline. All the strong women who have come before you. All the women who have lived through their own personal hells and joys.

Your sweet grandmother. Your amazing mother. Your own fierce self. Meditate on each one, their strength and what they passed to you. Honor all that they have given to bring you here, all that you have given to become who you are.

Now take that overwhelming passion inside you and harness it. 

It is valuable and true and you have spent too long offering it to everyone but yourself. Gather the energy and nurture the spark that lives within. This is divine creatrix power. This is the birthplace of all creation. Pull in everything that you have always given to others and hold it close. Coax it to the surface. Claim it as your own. Hold it in your center until you hum with it. Until it burns. Until it begins the necessary process of distilling you down to your essence. Your core. Your one true thing. You.

Now you are ready to really begin.

There is no prescribed path. No steps I can give you to deliver you to some neatly anticipated outcome. But we begin with a question.

What brings you to your center, to the root of you?

If you don’t yet know (and it’s okay if you don’t) you will have to try and try and try until you find it.

Get messy. You can do yoga and dance and write and meditate to dubstep until the beat pounds through your bloodstream. Get out the paint and canvas and markers and glitter and glue and see what comes.Hula hoop until your hips spin with enough energy to recreate the universe. Spray paint the truth of your heart across your living room wall. Go deep into the heart of the natural world. Get hopelessly lost and then perfectly found in the middle of the deepest forest or put on your best boots and drive somewhere the streets hold no memories and walk until you find yourself. Talk to the birds and wild beasts. Scream at the sky. Change everything. Write and write and write until you cry. Cry and cry and cry until you’re empty. Find a downtown club and dance till you sweat and ache.

Strip yourself down. This is not a one-time thing.

Here’s the truth. It’s going to be uncomfortable. 

You’ll move in and out of truth and peace and beauty and breakdown. You’ll want to run away from yourself. You’ll want to run toward the first thing that offers external comfort. But hold steady. Just like you’d want a lover to do. Nurture that inner fire.  Stay there. Right there.

Bring it home.

This journey lasts until the end of your life. You will find yourself over and over again, and the woman you discover will be both new and familiar every time. You’ll know. And then you’ll forget. You’ll feel just as lost and without anchor as you do right now. But you’ll begin to see the beauty in the middle of the broken pieces. Each time it will get easier and easier to remember.

Easier and easier to find your way back to the purest essence of you.

Every time you lose your way, just come back to the mirror. Face yourself again. See the woman who gazes back at you, with all that she has and all that she’s lost along the way. Learn to recognize her truth and beauty and wisdom. Greet her with kindness. Offer her love and thank her for her wisdom and service.  Smile slowly.

And begin again.

The piece above originally appeared, in edited form, in the first issue of Amulet Magazine.

Uncommon Sense is an ongoing series where I respond to comments and questions that stir my heart. They arrive by email, by text, by comment. They speak to something universal in me, and my response comes quick and sure. If you have something stirring in your heart and would like me to respond – please send me your message. I cannot respond publicly to all messages, but I do promise – with everything that I have –  that I will honor it and keep it safe.

The post Uncommon Sense: Harness Your Divine Creatrix Power appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.