“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.

I know you don’t think so.

I know you stand each morning, lift your face to the mirror and wage silent war on the skin and bones that hold you in this life.

I know you do because I do too.

But you are beautiful.

You are beautiful because of your unrelenting insistence on being utterly, uncompromisingly, completely you. Even when it hurts.

Even when it’s the hardest thing.

You are beautiful because you’re still here. Loving and laughing and bleeding and fighting and falling soft at the end of the day, into whatever space or place or body is your chosen refuge.

Your beauty is mixed with the wind and the way it tangles your hair and reddens your cheeks. It shines from the sun, and your delicate shoulders and the smattering of freckles across the bridge of your nose. It’s your happily ever after daydreams and way your inner badass takes over when she’s needed, even though you’re a good girl at heart.

Your beauty lies in the way you keep on being you. Regardless of how often you’ve been told to be something else.  Regardless of messages given by culture or family or the ghosts of lovers past who have no damn right taking up any space in your heart.

But you? You take in those voices and messages and images and directives. The magazine covers and the headlines that beg you to consider all the ways you could improve if you just squelched that irrepressible spirit for a little bit. The past love who told you in a hundred small and silent ways that you were both too much and not near enough. The rules and regulations that govern just how much you’re permitted to shine before it’s labeled narcissism. You take them all to the ocean and toss them into the current and watch them swirl out to sea.

In a world that requires assimilation, you remaining you is one hell of a wild ride. It’s the craziest thing. It’s the riskiest thing.   It’s the most impossible thing. It’s the most necessary thing.

It’s the most beautiful thing.

It is, in the end, the only thing.

And baby, you are doing one hell of a job.

So on the days when you doubt, on the days when even the moon seems to shine too bright and you long for the safety of shadows. Turn yourself to the light and let it reflect your beauty until you remember to trust in it, if even just for a moment.

And then you go out into this one wild world of ours, and you do whatever you were born to do. Whatever your wild soul leads you to do.  The thing that will make you move into yourself and fill up the space and breathe out the universe.

Make your art. Tell the truth. Take that selfie. Step into yourself. Wear that dress. You know the one I’m talking about. The one that feels like heat and sex and swirls around your legs like the sweet seduction of freedom.

Paint your lips red and your nails black.  Cut off your hair. Take a lover. Leave your lover. Pile everything that matters in the car and just drive high into the mountains until the only sound you hear is your own voice mingled with the calls of the wild things.

Damn the consequences. Even the worst of what you can imagine will figure itself out eventually. And there you will be at the end – standing tall in the midst of it all.

You.  Beautiful, beautiful you.

You take my breath away.
xo

Jeanette

The post Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I am holding my hands open to you now, palms up. Place your hands in mine.  Feel the pulse of shared experience.  Trust me when I say that I know this story.

This is a story we all know. We reside in one space and desire pulls us to another.  Yes.  It is brutally human, breathtakingly real.  We often look for what we don’t have along roads we never meant to tread.  The things we find there shake us to the core.  We are seen and known and witnessed in ways we have never been.

Of course, if she is the catalyst for you leaving, then she is the catalyst for you leaving.  Nothing can rewrite that part of the story.  Not your word choice.  Not the way you paint it for others. Not the justifications or the rationalizations or the things you wish were true.  Deep down, you know what is true.

She feels like home, like breath.  Like something I have always known and always wanted but never claimed.  She is like memory and holy water and the intermingling of lives not lived.

This love that feels like home. Yes. I know this.  Know it well.  I understand the love that is memory.  Lust that is holy.  Desire that overwhelms and teaches and heals.

I know, from the inside out, the power of life changing love.  The force of it.  The sweet inevitability. The longing to run headlong and offer yourself as sacrifice to what feels like salvation.   I know how the body quakes and soul expands and spirit explodes in one blissful realization.

But I also know the other side.

I know it is difficult, this leaving of one thing to dive headfirst into another.  I know that the new relationship often struggles to hold the weight of being the undoing of the first.  I know that after being defined for so long as a part of a partnership that is vitally important to define yourself for yourself.

And so I would say this, love.  Even though it may not be what you want to hear.  Even though it might be wrong.  Even though you are not me and my experience is fundamentally mine and not at all yours.  Even with all of this, there are things I want to say.

Hold some space around you as you go through this.  Be cautious of the urge to dive into another life. Another love. Another partnership. Take the time first to learn where your edges and center live.  To learn the blessings of your solitary heart.  To learn your solid ground.

You need some room to go through the grief that will come. The guilt. The ache of the teardown.  And yes, you’ll need to be held and heard and carried.   Your body and heart and mind and soul will need to be loved and loved hard and good and long.  But there are going to be interminable lonely nights that you will walk through alone. That you must walk through alone.

And diving into that free fall, blissful though it is, is sometimes a way to avoid rooting into yourself.   Instead, imagine what could happen if you decided to build a shrine to your own divinity.  Become solid with the ways and hows and whys of your existence in this world.  Learn how you breathe and eat and sleep and dream when you are not intermingled with another.

This does not mean deny what is.  This does not mean closing yourself to love. Not this love, or any other.  It does not mean following grief with grief.  No, not that.

It means loving yourself first.  It means romancing your own mystical soul.  It means taking yourself on a date and buying the good wine.  It means getting comfortable with Saturday morning solitude and mowing your own lawn.  It means long walks in warm rain, and catching eyes with a stranger in a coffee shop and smiling and looking away, and then looking back – knowing you are fully free to do so.  It means sharing body and heart and soul on your terms and your timeline and with gratitude and reverence.

It means trusting yourself to know what is true, even if it is exactly the opposite of what I’ve said here.  My advice may be right or it may be wrong. But in the end, there is nobody who can live this life but you.  It is all yours.  In the leaving or the staying.  In the yes and the no.  In the heat and the heart and the lonely and the grief.  All yours, and only yours.  And you will live it exactly as you should.

You will do it with a beauty and grace and fierce wisdom that will amaze even you.

And it will be perfectly, exactly right.

The post Uncommon Sense: Romance your own mystical soul appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

This is a love letter.A love letter to women in transition.

This, then, is also a love letter for all women. For at one time or another we will all find ourselves moving between spaces and lives and iterations of ourselves.  Indeed, perhaps we always are.

~~~

Dearest,

This is not easy. I know that. When I look down the length of my own body I can still see the indentations of gravel on kneecaps from the time I spent on the hard ground, howling at the moon.

We all go to the earth sometimes, down to the depths of ourselves and sit with the center of our pain. It aches to be, to dance, to live and breathe and eat and sleep in this space that is neither here nor there. Somewhere in the namelessness. Somewhere in the wild nothingness of the ether. Somewhere in between.

There will come a time – there will come many times – when we must stagger the liminal spaces between this life and that. When the night sky has deepened to the color of an unhealed bruise and only the haunted remain awake. When that ceaseless moan ramps up its siren song in the melancholy hush of 3am. When the cacophony of voices deafens and hands grasp from all sides pulling, grabbing, pleading us to stay. Or to go.

staystaystaygostaygogogogo.

The liminal space is best friends with desperate bargains. With grasping and pleading. With prayers from those usually far too busy to kneel. With the disordered embrace of childhood religion. With the distancing from faith that sustains. With the desperate push-pull. With the exquisite intermingling of loss and longing.

It is a space of disequilibrium. Of quaking knees and unsteady breath. Of a yearning for balance that is nowhere to be found.

Balance, she is a tricky bitch. The tightrope is stretched taut, high above an anxious audience. The space fills with an expectant hush so loud it transforms your being into an echo. Half of the souls below are hoping you’ll make it, the other half wait for you to fall. You will freeze in the middle, guaranteed. You’ll be convinced you have to stay, await a clear answer that delivers you the certainty of the exact right choice. The one that will make everyone happy.  The one that delivers truth without regret. The one that will take you to the other side without collateral damage.

And I wish I could say that that answer will come. That you will do what you need to do and cross to the other side and everything will be the same.  And maybe it will. But darling, transition is no time for the hopeless task of satisfying everyone. You’ll drive yourself mad trying.  We all do.  But now it is time for doing exactly what scares you the most.

JUMP.

You think you need a tightrope act, but you really need trapeze release. You have to let go before you’re holding on to anything solid. Have to feel that brief, terrifying moment of freefall and trust that you will be caught if you need be caught. Fall if you need to fall. Land where you need to land.

Feel the air rushing past your body. Trust. And trust. And trust. Speak your bone truth. Discover the root of your endless compassion. Un-learn lessons that have kept your heart on lockdown. Embrace what you need. Discard what does not serve. Bless your tender kneecaps. Bless your holy longing. Bless your wild soul.

And know you won’t be alone at the end. We will all be with you. Everyone who has leaped. Everyone who has landed. Everyone who has found their way through the liminal spaces, and everyone who still lives there. You’ll be full with your own fierce reality. Unapologetically, divinely you. And the ceaseless moan and the echoing gasp and the desperate prayers will fade. And you will be filled with the song of yourself.

It’s time to turn up the volume and dance, love. Damn, you make beautiful music. 

The post Staggering the liminal spaces {a love letter to women in transition} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

you get picked last for the team
left out of the plans
excluded from the circle.
the rejection letter arrives in the mail
she picks the other girl
the door you were about to walk through
gets slammed hard in your face
and you are left outside in the cold
stunned and alone.

yes
sometimes this is how it is.

you will stand in the harsh glare of the spotlight
looking out into a sea of faces and know
this performance will not be greeted by applause
you will want more than you get
and loved less than you deserve.

at the end of the day you will sit wearily
having done your best
your very best
and realize that nobody has noticed
or worse, everybody noticed all the wrong things.

and you will know what they are saying about you
because you have heard it before
from those voices that live in the very back corner of your brain.
the ones that say
that you are too much
or not enough
or far more difficult
not near as easy as expected
bigger or smaller or louder or more silent than what
they
wanted-needed-expected you to be

and exiled from your desire
and chastised for your wanting
and ridiculed for your being
you ache
your shoulders droop
and you feel vulnerably visible
or maybe as a ghostly apparition,
ignored by those whose witness you most crave
naked before impossible judgment

this is when demons that stalk
roar out of shadows
perch on your right shoulder
breath fire into your ear
flamed whispers searing a brand into
the sacred flesh covering your collarbone

-inadequate
not good enough
stupid
worthless un-liked
less-than
too much
slut
boring
attention whore
waste of space-

and you will hear them loud and clear
every fiber of every muscle absorbing
every last word
drowning out quiet voices that speak other, highly suspect, truths
– you are loved, you are beautiful, you are enough-
because those words make bile rise in throat
skepticism entrenched deep fighting against
flowery words that yearn for a home
that cannot be found.

but right now?
this is not the giving up time
no matter how many times you’ve given up before
that would be a predictable end to a predictable story
and you are anything but a predictable woman
with a predictable life

this time the searing breath wakes you up
this time the numbing is excluded from the party
and your head lifts
and your shoulders square
and you breathe deep into the exact
center
of your goddess power.

this time
you do not apologize
or sulk into shadows
or back off the stage in shame.
you do not accept their rejection
conform to their definition
you do not dim your colors
or fade into oblivion

No.

this time
you will start your own team
widen your circle
cast your net
change all the plans
rip up that letter filled with no
and paint the word
acceptance in rainbow colors across your skin
under the glow of the welcoming moon.

you will do what you damn well please
refuse to define yourself as
part of any half-conceived partnership
decline the invitation to stay
when your soul only whispers, go.
and choose to exchange vows with
your own wild divinity instead
you will take steps to get what you want
give yourself every last ounce of love you have always deserved
discovering along the way the multitudes within you
so that alone is never lonely

you will buy enough paint
to create your own marquee
emblazoned with every last bit of your glory
you will step back into the spotlight
and magnify the beat of your heart
until it fills the room
and the sound of your own electric heart
becomes a standing ovation loud enough to power
twenty more women toward their destiny.

and you will take notice
off all the right things
and all things they took pleasure in labeling wrong
until your too-much-not-enough becomes just exactly right
and you wrap it all up in bliss
celebrate it as front page news
bold headline blazed right across the top of the wise night sky

and you will hear what they say about you
they will always say things about women like you
but the truth of your song
is now playing so loud
that their words will be drowned out by
the sound of your own singing
and by the festival of spirit that has been gathering in
celebration.

when the demons come
and they will come
you will usher them close
coax them near
seducing with piercing eyes and parted lips
you will perch on their right shoulder
and whisper
with quiet insistence
go. now is my time.
filling up your chest and your lungs and your mighty spirit
with visible proof of your inherent divinity.
your roaring sensuality
your selfless selfishness
and you will sear their skin with your brazen reclamation
of self.

and you will throw your arms wide
and lift your head back
and feel love radiating at you from all directions
especially from your white-hot core
fierce with reality
righteous with conviction
certain of self

and you will breathe
it in deep and think

YES.
So THIS is how it is.

_____

Photo by Fabrice Villard on Unsplash

The post So This Is How It Is (A Poem To Remind You Of Your Divinity) appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.