Allow the frustrating nothingness to expand and deepen and become what it wants to become. To sit and play the sad songs or sink into the silence. To consciously and decisively leave the page blank. To trust that writing does not only happen with pen to page. Rather––that is only the final step and possibly the easiest one, for all its inherent difficulty. To sit with the knowing that if you are a writer (and I assure you that you are) you are somehow always writing, even on the nights you don’t record a single word. Breathe into the truth of that.

The second option? To write anyway.

Past the noise and the silence and the emptiness and the way too full. Past the deep well of feelings that lives in a space that words can’t touch. To light the candles and pour the whiskey. To lay down an offering to the muse and to let her know that you’d love for her to come and dance, but you’re going to write either way.

And then? Well then you sit with your good pen and your blank page and you begin. Without a plan. Without the need for the words to be anything but what they are. To get out of your own way and trust those words to take the lead. Trust the loops and swirls to become something, and to waste no time attempting to judge if they have any merit. Knowing there is value in every last word, no matter where they eventually lead.

And some nights it’s quite possible you’ll sit down with nothing at all to say. With the voices in your head screaming loudly that even if you did it wouldn’t be worth saying. And in spite of that, after a while, some words will appear in your head and you’ll decide to write about how it’s okay not to write. A little letter of permission, perhaps, for someone out there in the dark who is feeling just like you.

But then somehow you’ll write your way into writing about writing. And before you know it six pages of your journal will be covered. Then seven. Then eight. Covered in the messy black scrawl that means the words are tumbling out faster than even themselves, and your fingers will be stained black from the foundation pen you just filled with fresh ink before you had decided that there were no words.

And the candles will burn and the sad songs will play and you’ll realize that the demons inside will have calmed, just a bit. Just enough. And you can finally breathe.

Writing is the release valve.

No matter if you write with your pen or with your heart or without words at all.

No matter if you fill a hundred pages tonight or you don’t even pick up the pen.

Allow yourself to write.

Both ways are right
Neither is wrong.
Both are just different ways to let a story be born.

The post Ways To Let A Story Be Born appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Listen to the audio reading:

Don’t think too much. As a matter of fact, don’t think too much at all. This is not one of those exercises that requires much forethought or preparation. You can’t back your way into this one, all neat and tidy buttoned up.

There’s no clean way to do this. Not this time.

This is one you’ve got to blast your way through – close your eyes and jump, light the match and burn on the way down, get pummeled by the waves, upside down and spitting water, freight train your way all your way through to the other side.

And by all those overused, layered metaphors what I really mean is this:

You’ve got to fucking write.

Not think.

Just write.

Get a sheet of blank paper.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one page.

Fill that page. Pour it out. Do not edit or reduce or backtrack. Do not worry about being succinct or understood. Just write. Just writeandwriteandwriteandwriteandfuckingwrite.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Get a new page.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one paragraph.

Make this single paragraph sing with the hope of you, with the want of you, with the very blood and bones and guts of you. Select the lines that speak your heart. Your sex. Your sacred. Spill yourself into this paragraph as if lives depend on it. Because your lives – every last one? They do.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Get a new page.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one line.

Choose carefully the words that define you. Choose them with exquisite care. Just one line that is the truth of you and nothing but the truth of you in this living and breathing and beating moment.

One line. Only one line.

Do you have it?

Good.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Get a new page.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one word.

One pounding, pulsing, bleeding word. One word that flies or explodes or burns it all down. One words that is quiet whisper or the living manifestation of insistent howl of your bones. One word that glows white hot or grounds you into the dark blue-black of the deepest night.

One word.

Just one.

Does that scare you? Good – it should. This isn’t child’s play here.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Are you shaking yet? Is your heart pounding? Do you feel what we are doing here?

We’re not done yet.

Now – now that that is done. Close your eyes. Take the deepest breath you could possibly take. Fill your lungs with all those words and all those truth and all that emptiness and all that fullness and the love-loss-ache-bliss of all that carried story.

Now empty your lungs. All the way out. As your breath goes, watch all those words go too. Watch them float away on the air around you. Watch them turn to smoke and get caught in the breeze and dissipate, just like that.

Feel how damn good empty can feel when you choose it.

Now get a new page. A blank page. Purest white and completely pristine.

This is all yours. This page. It doesn’t contain any of the shit they told you was true. It doesn’t contain any of the shit YOU told you was true. Right now, it contains the only truth there is.

This story is always yours for the telling.

This has always been yours. You can expand to fill it all or take up the smallest corner. You can write in invisible ink. You can tell your story in red wine stains and spilled ink and bite marks. You can only write in pencil so it can always be erased. You can write in layers, and turn the page and write sideways. You can spin spiral and make your words dance.

You can ink it on the surface of your skin or x-ray vision the story onto the blank canvas of your bones. You can write a novel and then let the whole thing dissolve in the waves. You can write the truth and bury it in the ground, throw it in the fire, fold it into paper airplanes and watch it fly, roll it into a note in a bottle and toss it in the ocean and let it find its own way home.

Or, you share it with the whole fucking world.

You can care and not care and care-not-care all at once.

But you get to write. And you get to choose the story you tell.

And there’s no freedom bigger or bolder or braver than that.

Download the audio, motivational poster and printable PDF

The post get writing: write the truth of yourself appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Writers are often an introverted group, preferring the company of words to people, but that creative fire — left to its own devices — can burn itself out rather quickly.

You know what I’m talking about. We call it writer’s block. Frustrated Artist Syndrome. The whole overdone trope of the artist pacing in his slovenly garrett tearing his hair out — full of angst and unable to write or paint or make music. And always alone.

But here’s the thing. Writers — artists, musicians, creative beings — we gather. Somehow we pull away from our art and we dust ourselves off and we emerge into the outside air. And then we find each other. Introverted or no, there’s a magnetic force in play that brings creatives together. Over and over, through the ages.

We find one another because we need one another.

Deeply.

unknown photographer, vintage snapshot print, July 1915

Leonard and Virginia Woolf and their contemporaries — renowned intellectuals, artists, philosophers and other early 20th century badasses — formed the London based Bloomsbury Group — creating works that had long reaching impact on literature, economics and feminism.

The Saturday evening literary salons at Gertrude Stein’s 27 rue de Fleurs welcomed that Lost Generation of post-war Parisian expats that included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Joyce and Matisse into ‘a haven for the sacred sparks of insight visited upon humans…Stein’s apartment was a church with art as the divine matter.

And perhaps the most famous of these magnetic creative gathering points — The Chelsea, in New York City. To read it’s list of residents — Dylan, Bukowski, Joplin, Miller, Mapplethorpe, Ginsberg, Warhol, Cohen, Kerouac is to take a deep dive into the exploding literary and music scene of the 50’s and 60’s — an unintentional artists colony smack dab in the middle of Manhattan — a legend around every corner and more stories than the walls will ever tell.

All of these wildly talented artists convened in these spaces and places because they needed each other. Needed to be fed by the convergence of ideas and passion and creativity. To be supported. To find understanding — to discover others whose demons would play nicely (or at least creatively) with their own.

I need this. You need it too.

You know you do. Even if you look at that word that I keep using — Writer (With-A-Capital-W) and think… “that’s not me. I’m not a real writer”. Quiet that voice — right now. You’ve got a desire to write and a pull to the story — of course you do, or you wouldn’t be here.

And if you are putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or joining letters into words and words into sentences in the quiet safety of your own mind, then you, my dear, are a Writer.

And I would be willing to bet that you feel that hunger to gather with others. To find that tribe. To discuss. To dive deep. To drink. To dance. To seduce the muse. To be understood. To be uplifted. To join your fire to their fire and all of our fire. To burn. To rise. To create. Together. En masse.

In community.

Because you need it. To maintain the spark. To fuel the flame. To keep burning and burning and burning until your story can be born. Because when creatives gather? That is exactly what happens. Watch out. That combined creative fire? It’s magnified for all.

You need this. And we need you.

When my, ’Wild Heart Writing’ course launched a few years ago I watched as the women and men in that space formed their own version of what Hemingway and Bukowski and Woolf claimed for themselves so long ago.

Though this wasn’t a decrepit hotel in Manhattan or a ritzy salon on Paris’ Left Bank — simply your typical Facebook group — we created community. We formed a tribe. We showed up as ourselves, raw and vulnerable and lit from within with the power of what was being created. Not just words and stories and ignited hearts — but a swirling force of creative energy — far greater than any one of us could have created alone. We lifted and legitimized and most importantly of all we saw each other. Fully.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

Several years later — the community, and the sharing and the combined creative fire — it continues to burn.

And let me clarify one thing. I did not create this community. I created a course that helped weave common threads among strangers. The birth of the community was alchemy and mystery and full on magic. The creative community creates itself, and it grows itself and it becomes through the sheer force of that much passion in one space. It is inevitable and it is necessary and it is a thing of great beauty and love.

“We know that community is sacred. The fire where we gather, sharing our stories, tending to the light and release, is where we resurrect ourselves and remember ourselves. It’s where we die and labor ourselves anew. It is a holy place where we see with tender eyes and let ourselves be fully seen. The sweet honey loving of the Wild Heart Writers so naturally calling out what they liked and loved about another’s writing was beautiful. I find myself still posting here because it feels like a home for my wild heart and wild words to come and be real and revealed. Even though the course is over, I truly hope the writing and the group has just begun.”

Winter Session participant, Tulasi Adeva

Soon we begin again. Welcoming another group of creatives and soul searchers and wild hearts. Opening our arms to another collection of those who know that the best way to find yourself, is to get lost in the wild, and then write your way back home. Growing the writing community that started by the most perfect sort of serendipity.

I would love, more than anything, if you would join us — to make this commitment to yourself and your writing community, to be welcomed into our tribe of Wild Hearts.

I’m positive Hemingway and Fitzgerald would totally have my back on this one.

Xo.

Jeanette

“The Wild Heart Writers space allows me to feel alive and connected to my own wild heart and all the beautiful, messy, raw, honest, amazing pieces of me I see in all of you…You give words to the deepest truth inside me, that I don’t have. I give understanding to you that is true and real and known. You inspire me. I risk showing up. We expose our nakedness and see our common humanity”

Winter Session participant, Kathy Whitman

The post Do you need a creative community? appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

You have to live your life according to your own light and you have to move wherever life leads, without any compromise.Osho

Darling, it has been such a long journey.

An epic quest. No such thing as stillness and complacency for you. There never has been, has there?

No. You’ve always been made for bigger things that that.

You know it’s true. You never were like the rest of them.

The ones whose peripheral vision never saw past the nearest horizon. The bloom where you’re planted, stay close to home, safety-first, keep the same friends and the same job and the same habits – forever and ever amen.

No, not you.

Your restless rose up early. Teased you every time you felt that far-away wind tangle through your hair.

You were always called elsewhere. A daydreamer. A wanderer. An explorer of worlds nobody else could see. Long before you could leave you learned the limitlessness of your own mind. No geographic boundaries or sensible borders for you. You were made to move.

You’ve always followed the pull of your wild heart. For you there is no other way.

Lost and found. Found and lost. Souls like you know that they are really just one and the same.

Over and under and around and through. Barefoot and dirty. Among strangers or in the center of the vast alone. Traversing foreign lands and barefoot dirt country roads or the farthest reaches of your brilliant mind.

You wild and beautiful vagabond. You’ve wandered and you’ve searched and you never stay still for long – no matter what the outside world has seen and believed.

You are a universe unto yourself. You know no borders, swirl through the liminal spaces, live on the edges and dance in the margins and croon under the moon. You have no fear of the wild – for the wild is your second home.

This is how you were born, this is the way you’ve known and named your own self.

Because you were made for that restless wind. You were made for the trail into the shadows and the pathway straight into the blinding light. You were made for the cavernous depths of night and sunrise over the mountain and the crash of ocean against shore.

You know how to pack light. The second nature knowing of moving on and beginning again. No, you’ve never shied away from that.

And you are being called now, just as you are always called – into motion, into the wild, into the wind.

Into the truth and into the grit and the light and the wide-open world.

But this is different. Not like all the other times.

Sometimes you can search for so long that you lose track of the one place that matters the most.

Home.

It is time to go home.

Home to the earth that named you. Home to the ground that flows with that which brought you to life. Home to the root, to the heat, to the core of it all.

Home to yourself.

This is not about home on the map. Not about where you were born or raised. Not about where anyone lives or where the good jobs are or where you’re expected to turn up eventually. Not about the lover who weaves words into the heat of desire. Not about ties that bind or anything that feels like obligation or giving up or giving in.

It’s not about staying or leaving or anything in between.

It may not even be about movement at all, not the way most people think of it.

No. This time, you are called home to yourself. You are called to integration. To the point of intersection. To completion. To the center of the paradox and the white heat of your own knowing. You are called to a claiming of place and space and intention and desire.

And even if you don’t yet know who or where or what that home is, you will be guided on your journey and you will know, with absolute clarity, when you arrive.

This is just the way of things.

So look around you now – at all you’ve collected on your many journeys. Take stock, give thanks. These are the things that have brought you to who you are, that have delivered you here – to the greatest journey of all.

Gather up the few things worth keeping; the ones that speak the memories of the love that gave you life, the talismans that brought you knowledge of your power. The magic bits, the crystals, the torn love notes you wrote to your own goddess self. Tuck in only the things which nourish your soul. The rest is no longer needed.

You don’t need much to hold the most precious of your belongings.

Tie all those bits in a pack over your back. Use the silk scarf that held your hair in the sea breeze that day when you sat in the sand at the edge of the world and the sun shone warm on your shoulders and you saw all the way to infinity.

That day. Do you remember that day? When you were all the way broken and all the way lost and then somehow you found yourself there? You had that silk scarf tied around your head and your old black converse were full of sand and your heart had was in pieces and somehow you managed to save your own life. You found your way home that day. You will do it again.

You know what to do. You always have.

So heed the call. Set off on the path. Whistle that long slow whistle, the tune you’ve been hearing since birth – the one that always calls you home.

There will be choices to make along the way. It will not always feel safe or be easy. No – real journeys rarely do.

But the choices are all yours. This is the time of complete agency and ownership of self.

It always was, you see, you just were not ready to know it yet.

Here is one important truth.
Nothing is forbidden.

Someone taught me that once, and I read that line over and over the words became a steady drumbeat guiding me into my own life.

Do you hear me now – nothing is forbidden.

Stop right now and read those words aloud.

Now speak them again and again.

Nothing is forbidden.
Nothing is forbidden.
Nothing is forbidden.

Your life belongs to you. It always has, but it is so easy to forget. In the losing and the finding and the finding and the losing – sometimes we lose track of that one essential truth.

And in case you have, I will repeat it one more time.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing, is forbidden.

There is nobody walking with you on this leg of your journey – truly there can never be. The journey home is always a solitary one.

But solitary does not mean lonely, or even alone.

You know this, dear one, don’t you? You are never truly alone. Get quiet now. Pay attention. Can you feel your hand in mine? Can’t you feel the weight and warmth of it? Don’t you feel the touch of every loving soul and the light of all the wild things? The whole entire universe is lifting you up.

The fire keeps you company. And the spirit of the wolf. And the wild white mustang. And the essence all of those you met along the way. You carry them inside you and all around you.

You’ve become a part of their journey as well.

This is the way it always is with kindred souls. This is the way of the wild. This is the way of the pathway home.

Quickly now. It is time to leave. The full moon lights your way.

Your life belongs to you now. Your life and your story and your body and your precious wild heart. Every last bit of what makes you the miracle that you are. Regardless of what the rest of the world demands, here, there is no compromise. No settling. No making do.

This is reclamation. This is hallowed ground.

And it is entirely true.

Nothing is forbidden.

In the wild that is your home, nothing is ever forbidden. Not now, not ever again.

Welcome to your life, wild one.

Welcome all the way home.

“When did you know your life belonged to you?”
“When nothing was forbidden.” Isabel Abbott

Do you, like me, know you have a wild heart? And do you, like me, lose connection with it through the whirl and swirl of life?

If your answer is yes, please consider joining me on a journey back home as we step into sacred space together for 30 days of questions and prompts aimed at taking us back to that wild heart of us – which is our one true home.

The space is already filling with open minds and pounding hearts and sacred mystery.

And having you there, wild heart open and ready to write, would make it even more holy.  The Summer Session begins on July 25th – as a gift of love to ourselves.

Please join us.

“I loved this course. It was the reason I woke up in the morning. No really, it was the most heart centered real, present space, so  lovingly created, crafted and nurtured by Jeanette and a bunch of wild hearted writers from all over the globe –  brought together with a love of the written word and expression. I highly recommend this course. It’s totally totally worth it!”
~Hanizan Abdul Hamid

Sign Up Now

The post Nothing Is Forbidden {It is time to go home} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

“Being tame is what we’re taught: … put the crayons back, stay in line, don’t talk too loud, keep your knees together, nice girls don’t…As you might know, nice girls DO, and they like to feel wild and alive. Being tame feels safe, being wild, unsafe. Yet safety is an illusion anyway. We are not in control. No matter how dry and tame and nice we live, we will die. And we will suffer along the way. Living wild is its own reward.” SARK.

You did. I did. We all do.

We speak our needs. Cry our hurt. Kick and scream our anger. Sing our joy.

Do you remember it?

Do you feel that tingle way down low when i remind you – does that rooted memory of your innate wild spirit whisper back – yes – i am still here?  

Do you feel the stirrings of spaces inside you that have been shoved down, made quiet, pushed back?

Do you remember a time when you were free? When your heart beat steady with pulse of sun and moon and tide and you could dive under the waves and fly higher than the trees and always come back home. When you were one with dark rich earth and the green of all that is alive and the creatures that move unseen in the dark.

When you knew the truth. In your bones.

And you knew when it came down to it you were just like those wild things, you were kin to the storm and you rose with the sun and spun circles around the earth.

That when it came right down to it, you had no owner.  No captor.  

In all the ways that really mattered, no matter what they said, you belonged only to yourself.

Somewhere deep inside of us, we are always that.

Somewhere, deep inside of you, i know that you know this is true. No matter how distant or how separate or how impossible it feels right now.

Because somehow, somewhere – you forgot.  Or you were tricked, convinced otherwise by a culture that benefits from your compliance. Or you lost that wild heart of yours accidentally, without even noticing she was gone.  

And so your wild heart, she went into hiding. Tucked away behind books, or in shoeboxes crammed with old memories and older pain. Hidden inside messages of too much and not enough. Painted behind layers of shame and doubt and loathing.

Your wild heart may be hidden inside the fractured shells of past lives.

Or deep within the echoed expectations of others.

Underneath that pile of unmet dreams.

In the silenced loud and in the stifled, not permitted and yet righteous anger.

In the child trauma, where so much was taken from you.

In the silence of all the words you have been unable speak.

Within the covers of that tattered journal, where truth was finally spilled.

In the song that finds you, again and again and haunts you sweet and true.

Tucked between the ribs of old lovers and that ragged sigh of a space where teeth met bone.

Closed in boxes shoved to the back of closets or grown dusty in attics.

Between the lines of that letter, the one you read until the page was tattered. The one that will always be your undoing.

Hot and tender and raw in the unmet need for skin against skin and the want of your holy body.

At the junction between this life and that one, where past and present and future meet and the road forks and you made an impossible choice.

Slipped inside the line that lives between goodness and wholeness and the sliver where they become one.

And she is right here. Today. As close as your breath. 

Yes, wherever your wild heart is hiding – she is still there.  And she wants to be found.

I promise you, she wants to be found

Because you see, your wild heart is the truth of you. And you are the truth of your wild heart.

And if you don’t yet know it, let me remind you:

Forget what they told you. You are love child of a passionate affair between goddess and universe. You were born of a steamy forbidden heat and you were made for the cyclone of unadulterated wholeness. You are a daughter of delight. You are the unconstrained mother of all. A fierce warrior. A wicked priestess. Your roots twist into this earth. Your spirit rises in glorious asana.  You let loose with the howl of the wilderness you’ve held tight all these years.

You are wild.

Do you hear me?

You are wild.

Your heart is wild. Your soul is wild. Your spirit is as wild as the howl that has been building in your chest, ready to open the locked door of your rib cage.

Your urge to run – fast and hard and long – to places where you are unknown and unseen – so that you can finally take up all the space you need.  

That is your wild.

Your craving for quiet. For candles and darkness and the presence of what is most holy to you.

That is your wild.

The voice that tells you to leave, that your highest good can not be served here. The knowing that tells you to run to her – because her arms are the only home you’ve ever needed. The sound of the waves and the wind you feel tangling your hair when you are nowhere near the ocean and the air is entirely still. The sound of your laughter, pure unadulterated joy. The heat and longing and need of your skin and bones and center. The spiral and spark, deep in your belly that reminds you there is more. The way your knees hit the ground and your shoulders quake and you feel the loss of everything that has gone away. Your refusal to compromise what you know to be true.

Your resonant yes.

Your holy no.

Your sweet seduction

Your siren song.

Your agency. Your autonomy. Your surety of self.

Your movement through doubt and ache and fear.

This is your wild.   

This is your home.

And no matter how many times you lose your way, your wild heart remains. Waiting, always, for you to return.

When you hear her whisper, that small rise within – she is calling to you. And if you listen, and answer her call, she will help you create a map to trace the path back.

You can dance your way or paint your way or fuck your way or yell or scream or sing or pray or run or dive or write.

There are a million true paths. All of them within your reach.

Take a deep breath now. Close your eyes. Get steady. Get real steady. Feel yourself rooted to the earth and rising to the heavens. Now go in and go out all at once. Become and disappear. Stretch out your hands, palms up and ready to receive.  

Do you feel it? Right beneath your ribs? Do you feel it pulsing, red and ready?

Call it to you now, all the way home.  Feel the heat and solidity. Feel the want and divinity. Feel the pull of the tides and the wild, wild moon. Hear your howl.

Now open your eyes.

It is time to begin again

Wild this time.

*******

Do you, like me, know you have a wild heart? And do you, like me, lose connection with it through the whirl and swirl of life?

If your answer is yes, please consider joining me on a journey back home as we step into sacred space together for 30 days of questions and prompts aimed at taking us back to that wild heart of us – which is our one true home.

The space is already filling with open minds and pounding hearts and sacred mystery.

And having you there, wild heart open and ready to write, would make it even more holy.

Please join us.

Sign Up Now
 

The post Wild This Time {begin again} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.