Not a week (rarely a day) goes by when I don’t hear from someone out there in this wild world of ours, someone just like you. Someone with a regular, ordinary, mundane life. Someone with joy and bliss and heartache and grief. Someone with trauma and fear. Someone struggling against demons. Someone determined to rise.

Every single one of these someones has a story. Every single one of these stories has value.

And every single one of these someones has one thing in common.

The someones that reach out to me, by email or message or social media comments – they want…no, want is not a strong enough word right now – they long – to tell their stories.

Somewhere deep inside there is a pulse of desire. A kernel of an idea. A sweet and lingering pull toward the blank pages of the journal, the blinking cursor in the word doc, the empty spaces waiting to be filled. Sometimes just to the very idea that somewhere inside of them lives a story worth telling, a story someone might one day want to hear. Possibly even a story that could matter, that could change things. A story that could delight or distract or make someone on their darkest nights feel just a little less alone.

Maybe even a story that could save.

I said that these someones have one thing in common. That wasn’t quite right.

It wasn’t quite right because of course there is more than one thing.

There is this universal thread that stitches these souls together. It weaves in and out through countries and across oceans, around the curves of different languages and customs, through the years of age and space and time. That thread is the call of stories. The nameless pull to bookstores where you get lost for hours in the feel of pages turning in your hands, where you press books to your nose and breath in the smell of paper and ink and the dreams of whoever strung the words together and bound them into the world you’re holding in your hands. The siren song that brings you together with others like you, where you slip-slide through stories, voices trading and growing softer and more true as the night darkens around you and the veils slip away.

It is said that a writer lives things twice.
Once in the living, like everyone else.
And once again in the telling.

You, sweet someone, live your stories again and again and again, even if you’ve never put them down onto a page. You turn them over and over in your mind. You layer them upon your heart.  A poem crosses your path and a line or maybe just a word jumps out and you feel this thrill of recognition, because it means that somewhere in this vast and lonely world, that poet (likely someone you’ll never meet, maybe even someone not on this earth) in some moment knew *exactly* the thing that you feel to be most true. You know the exact page on your favorite book where the author wrote those words that brought you to life, or maybe even saved you. You’ve scribbled words on grocery store receipts or in the notes section of your phone or just etched them onto the deepest parts of your heart. You visit old bookstores like some visit church, and inside the pages of story you find penance and community and redemption and salvation.

You’ve probably been this way since you were very little and you got lost in the pages of books or told your teacher or your parents that you would one day grow up to be a writer.  You’ve learned that there are many you can’t share this with. The people who will look at you with amusement and condescension. The ones who will tell you that art is not a sensible way to make a living, and words even less so. The people who will tell you that your story isn’t interesting enough to turn into a book, or that it’s already been told a million times over. The ones who red pen slash the most tender spillings of your heart.

Perhaps, it is also quite likely, that all of those people above – and all of their very loud voices, live inside of your own head.

If you’ve been reading this without being able to look away.

If you’ve been reading this and you’re heart has been beating in recognition.

If you’ve been reading this and your soul is screaming ‘yes. she is talking about me. she is talking TO me”

If you’ve been reading and those loud voices are telling you it couldn’t possibly be about you.

I want you to stop right now and take a breath. I want you to pretend you are sitting right here with me today in my living room. The light is bright through the old paned windows. There is a deep blue mid-century sofa and bright mustard yellow cushions. On the table are mason jars filled with sunflowers and bright red blossoms. There is a fan blowing in the corner to keep us cool and a soft voice crooning love songs playing on the speakers. A candle is lit and it smells like amber and roses. 

I want you to bring yourself here with me.  Right here. I want you to turn to face me and to look me in the eye.  I’m going to reach out and take your hands now. Both of them. I want you to breathe with me, all the way down to your toes. And I want you to listen like you’ve never listened before.

You are here today because you have a story.

You are here today because something deep inside you knows you need to write it.

You have always known.

You may have written me before to tell me this, or you may have started to several times and stopped yourself.

You may have only told your best friend or your lover.

Or maybe you’ve never told anyone at all.

But you know, love.

You know.

You know because the words have been piling up against the levees for so long now that it’s a wonder you can hold them in.

You know because the dams have been threatening to break and to spill a flood of story.

You know because there are oceans of worlds inside you that long for nothing but the chance to finally, finally, finally taste land.

You know because it has always been this way. And you know that it always will.

And I know that this matters. That it matters more than almost anything.

And I know that there are others out there like you. Others who are waiting to tell their own story, and others that need more than anything for you to tell yours.

My work in this world is to create a space for this to be real, for you and for all the someones out there like you, Wild Heart Writers, one and all.

In just a few short weeks, a wonderful, ragtag group of someones from all across the globe will gather. We will sit around the campfire and for 30 days we will tell our stories. We will open our hearts. We will open the dams and let the waters of words flow.

And we will finally, finally get to feel what the ocean feels when it crashes on the shore, moving the entire cosmos with the force of it’s being.

Join us.

Your story is waiting for you.

bit.ly/yourwildheart

The post Your Story Is Waiting For You appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

No doubt, questions can hold a tremendous sort of power.

Tonight I find myself wondering – what might that question be for you? The one that you hold tucked deep inside. The one that hints at itself from time to time, appearing, and disappearing like mist, slowly revealing itself as the key to self-discovery, awakening, or transformation. The one that can’t be forced, but that must rise, organically, from the center of your very being?

If you get quiet with yourself, right now, I have a feeling you likely have at least some idea what that question is for you.

And what If I told you that you didn’t have to seek or force or find an answer to that question in order to harness its power – at least not in the way that you might think.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Almost two years ago I was feeling utterly lost and alone. No job. A relationship imploded. The holidays. Single Motherhood. No plan. No idea. Unsure of who I was or what I wanted or where I was going. One night that December I sat down and hastily wrote out a list of 30 questions.

It turns out those very questions would allow me to chart own map home. I just didn’t know it yet.

All I knew that night is that everything was crumbling and nothing seemed certain and that the solid ground I thought I could rest on was suddenly unstable in every direction. In that moment, I had no answers – no innate knowing. No fucking idea what I was going to do.

Without answers, I turned to the questions.

If I was empty of knowing, the only place to start was inside of the questions I longed to answer.

If I wanted to find myself, it seemed I would have to relearn (and unlearn) who I was. What I knew. What I wanted. What was waiting to be born. Who I was becoming.

And so I let the questions rise. Questions that would take me forward and backward and root me in the present. That would lead deep and high and far and wide. I didn’t think. I didn’t plan. I just wrote.

I knew somehow, then, even if I couldn’t have yet articulated, that the path I was seeking wouldn’t be found by getting it all figured out. Instead, all would be slowly revealed by allowing the questions to be named, to fill the space around me, to settle deep into my bones.

And then, as Rilke suggested, I could throw myself into living those questions in fullness until I one day lived my way into the answers. Whatever those answers might be and however long that might take and whatever might change along the way.

The first messily scrawled version of these questions – written by fountain pen after tears and whiskey and one of the most alone and lost sensations I had ever felt – showed no hint of what they would soon become.

After all, they were never intended to be anything other than simple journaling prompts – a guide just for myself.

It turns out that these particular questions had much bigger plans.

That night I hadn’t the slightest inkling that the unlined paper I was holding was the beginning of my new path, a new vocation, a calling, a community, a home. But I knew it held something. A whisper of possibility. A hint of what may come. All I really knew for sure is that they were the beginnings of the map that would lead me back to myself.

Back home. A place I desperately wanted to be.

It was months later before I fully realized the power of Rilke’s quote. Months of writing into the questions (and writing and writing and writing) and inviting you all to live into the questions with me (and watching with wonder what unfolded from that invitation). Only then did I fully understand that it wasn’t the just answers that hold power.

It was the living questions themselves that were the catalyst for all the rest because it was the questions that called in all the rest of you. You restless seekers, and you word witches, all you steady and true pinpricks of light against the darkest night sky.

The questions did more than trace my way back home. They cast a searchlight that allowed us to find each other.

Because beings like us, for all the depth of our knowing and wisdom and wanting, tend to get tangled sometimes. It is that brave ability to forge our own way in the world, to forgo the expected, to take the road less traveled, that sometimes leaves us – on those darkest nights of the soul – suddenly without meaning or moorings. We uproot as a matter of our nature, us seekers, and yet we crave a way to root down even in the most inhospitable soil.

Yes, It is our very ability to step into wide open discomfort that often leaves us lost. But it is also that very thing that allows us to be found.

Again and again and again.

And so we found ourselves living in the expansive space inside the questions. In the dance of unknowing. In the learning and unlearning and remembering and letting go. Allowing the questions to unfold within us and between us and around us. Individually and collectively and universally on a sacred journey.

Wild Heart Writers, one and all.

The writing mattered, of course it does. It always will. But what mattered more was the willingness to give ourselves over to the practice of inquiry. The peeling away of layers. To sit with the discomfort of the spaces without requiring the answers to flood in immediately. To expand and let the question live inside, to fill in the empty spaces until it is ready to become what it wants to become.

The questions are the crucible – they hold the alchemy of transformation.

And when the answers are ready? Holy. Holy. Holy.

That’s when the magic begins.

If you are ready to live inside of the questions within a beautiful community of Wild Hearted Writers, we open the doors in less than one week for the 2018 Wild Heart Writing Journey.

If your living questions are ready for safe space, supportive community and fierce inspiration, come and join us as we dive into the depths of inquiry, the power of story, and the safe space where the answers fly freely.

xo.
J.

Do you want to know the question that changed everything for me?  It is one of the questions included in the upcoming 30-day writing journey.  If you’d like me to send you this question, and a sneak peek into the essays that make up the daily structure of the course, send me a quick email or comment here and I’ll send it to you right away. 

The post What is the most powerful question? appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

So it wasn’t a shock to see a link like “11 LGBTQ Stories to Celebrate Pride Month” from Off The Shelf. The contents of the list though WAS a bit of a surprise, a lovely one. And an opportunity for a different sort of pride.

One of the books on this list was Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write about Leaving Men for Women, which happens to contain my coming out essay. The hardest and most essential piece of writing I’ve ever released to the world. My first ever in print.

I remember the day I got my author copies in the mail. I tore open the package and opened the cover. I ran my finger down the table of contents and there it was. My name. In print. I’d never seen my name in a book before. Never even imagined such a thing was even possible.

Breath held, I quickly flipped to page 86 and read my own words as if I had not read them a thousand times already trying to make them perfect.

Perfection is not easy to achieve in a story that holds so many jagged edges and broken parts.

My heart was pounding. My body had chills. I felt on top of the world – and also sick to my stomach. Not just because my story was in a book (a REAL LIVE BOOK. with pages and ink and new book smell!) but because *this* story was in a book. This story that had, until then, lived only online and only anonymously.

Back then I was I was Jen, the faceless blogger behind “Awakenings: Navigating the Spaces Between In and Out”. There I poured out the rawest, most visceral and most true stories I had ever written.

Perhaps – because of the safety of anonymity, the truest stories I ever will.

Before then I was what we now call a mommy blogger. Talking childbirth and breastfeeding and gentle discipline and chronicling life in suburbia way back before blogs were even called blogs. It was all very safe and light and entertaining. I even had a little base of loyal readers – but I wasn’t a writer. Never would have dared the audacity of claiming such a thing.

And then came Awakenings.

My entire undoing was chronicled there. The breaking and the becoming. The raw and messy and real. The fear. The confusion. The loss and the ache.

And still – there are parts of the story – the ones where I walked entirely outside of my own integrity, the ones where the shatter cut too deep to bring words to the reality – that remain untold.

When this book came out I had to make the choice. To keep the sanctity of that space where I could say whatever I wanted, or to step fully into owning the story.

It was another choice I didn’t know how to make.

But I remembered how it was, in the early days of my own discovery. How I scoured the internet, searching with everything I had – desperate to find these stories somewhere. Someone who was walking this path. Someone who had survived. Anything to cling to make this feel less impossible.

I had a wonderful husband and two beautiful children. I was a small town preacher’s daughter from the Eastern Canadian Coast. Nobody in the most immediate layers of my close-knit family had ever been divorced.

I had no fucking roadmap for this.

I needed to find something that would make me feel less achingly alone. Needed it like I needed air. Someone or something to tell me that I could and would survive.

Back then – I couldn’t find it – not the story I so desperately needed. And so I did what those of us driven by story must do.

I began writing it.

And then others – other women on their own dark and desperate nights – began finding me.
More and more of them. From all over the world. They sent emails. Long emails drenched in grasping hope. Letters that left their entire lives and hearts splayed out on the screen in front of me.

Was it worth it?
Would you do it again?
I’m not as brave as you, I can’t leave.
I love her, so much – I can’t live without her.
When I touched her skin – everything changed and I couldn’t go back.
I took off my wedding ring today.
I’m afraid of losing my children.
I’m afraid of losing my family.
I am so very afraid.
I can never forgive myself.
I can’t do this.

They sent message after message. I read their words, held their tears. Knew their desperation. Read those letters again and again until I had some of the memorized.

Yes – even then the words created a circle so that we could save each other.

Some of them – as deep as I was in the dismantling of my own life and in the stickiness of my own chosen grief – I couldn’t even answer. I’m ashamed of that. But how could I provide any sort of viable wisdom when I was making such a royal clusterfuck of it all? Hurting and damaging and bringing my entire life down to the rubble – making that impossible choice that wasn’t ever a choice at all.

Choose my life – and all that I love? Or choose myself?

But you can’t un-know something once you know it. You can’t undo what has been done.

I got caught in a tailspin and when the force finally died down life as I knew it was over. And there I was – standing underneath that big ole’ rainbow flag – wondering what the fuck I was supposed to do now.

It’s true. In the end, it wasn’t a choice at all. The choice to come out and live true, and the choice to attach my name to these words of truth in that book.

I had to do it for my own integrity – an integrity I would have to scratch and claw my way back to owning over the course of many years, an integrity that came at a high cost and that left me broken before it found me whole.

And I had to do it for the others out there who needed my story more than I needed the comfort of my hiding space.

And so there it was. My name. In a real-life book.

I didn’t talk much about this book when it came out. I didn’t shout from the hills that I was a published author. I didn’t tell my family or post more than the merest whisper on social media. I didn’t blog about it or give copies to my friends. I tucked it away as if it hadn’t happened at all. I was aware that this wasn’t just my story. And that it hadn’t been long since the fallout and the breaking and the collateral damage.

I wasn’t proud of my reluctance to own this in a bigger way – I just didn’t want to cause any more hurt. I couldn’t live with myself if I caused any more hurt.

Please, don’t let me cause any more hurt.

Just like the blog – this book brought so many souls to me. Women who had been, like me, desperately searching for a story that made them feel less alone. In the years since I’ve met many of in person. To so many more I’ve been able to be a hand outstretched in the dark to say “Here I am. This is my story. Tell me yours. You are not alone in this. Not now and not ever again”.

Because here is the thing. Telling our stories matters. Not just the ones that follow the hero’s journey. Not just the stories of happiness and light, of glittering freedom or triumph – though they have their place and should not be forgotten.

It matters most that we tell the real stories. The hard stories. The stories of the dark and desperate nights. Of the demons and the devastation. Of the things done to us and the things we have done. Of our want and our desire. Of our sex and our back-door pathways to whatever or whoever we called savior at the time. Of the trauma stored in our bones, and the things we have broken on our path to saving ourselves.

We must tell stories of our own becoming. On our own terms and in our way and in our own time. With autonomy and sovereignty and yes – choice.

When we tell our stories. We save others. This is not an overstatement, or a metaphor meant to give you all the feels or to power up this essay. This is a truth. I know it not just because stories have saved me.

I know because I still get emails. Emails that say “I stumbled onto your blog on the darkest of nights and I read and read and read and your words gave me hope and because of this I am still here on this planet”.

Words like that – they are not easy for me to hold. They push against my own struggle with purpose and bigness, with the voices that tell me to not take credit for such a thing. That I’m not that special or important or powerful and neither is my story.

But here’s the thing, if stories have saved me again and again (and they have and they did and they do – more times than I could count) then who am I to push back these truths given to me by others?

Who am I to accept them with anything but the most humble and holy gratitude for the fact that somehow in this wild and miraculous world my story pushed its way out of me and then filtered and twisted and found its way to the very place it was needed the most?

Blessed be. Blessed be. Blessed be.

The messages remind me every time of what I know to be true.

The bravery it takes to tell your story has the power to save lives.

A few weeks ago I posted on Facebook to ask others if they felt the same. I asked:

Tell me – would you say that writing – telling your story – has saved you? Or that your writing has saved others?

The answer, of course, was as I expected. Yes. Again and again and again. Writing has saved. From the inside out and the outside in. Telling your story – pouring it out. Whether in a voice memo or onto a private journal or for the world to see. And then searching relentlessly to find your story out in the world – to connect your lived experience to words written by another. This saves lives. This saves hearts. This saves relationships and voices and experiences.

It is a seed for empathy, for advocacy and activism and justice. For visibility and inclusion and validation. It is the root of connection. It is a pathway to the hard truths. It is a way to make real what is unreal, to give voice to the voiceless.

There is a space and a place and a need for stories – for YOUR stories.

It is my life’s work – not just to write myself, but to swing wide open the doors and throw off the bars and remove the barriers between you and your story. To counter the messages you’ve absorbed about your life or your experience or your ability to write it. To dismantle everything built up inside of you that separates you from your own innate power. To sit you down in a room full off blazing light and ultimate permission and give you endless pages ready for the translation of your experience into the words only you can write.

The story only you can tell.

And then when it has poured out of you, and the pages are covered and your fingers are ink-stained and you have finished, I am here to say –

This here, what you have done….

It is good.
It is holy and hard and true and necessary.

Because your words have the power to save.
To heal.
To collect the scattered pieces.
To knit back to wholeness that which is broken.
To unleash the constraints that hold us to lives that are not longer meant for us.
To illuminate the dark corners and set us free.

These words and these stories can save a life.
Who knows – maybe even your own.

Hell yes, writing has the power to save.

But only if you begin.

Xo.
J.

P.S. No matter what comes my way in the length of my writing career, Dear John will always represent one of my proudest moments. Not just the first moment I saw my name in print in a real-life book, but the moment of choice of owning this story publicly, wholly and completely.

Everything began with that.

Thanks to Candace Walsh and Laura Andre for creating this anthology, for the pivotal moment of choice when I made this story public, and for all that has come to be since then.

The follow-up book ‘Greetings From Janeland’ is now available for pre-order. It includes a brand new essay from me, as well as so many other women who have done the bravest thing.

The post The bravery it takes to write your story has the power to save lives. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Or perhaps it hasn’t been that hard and really, you know that life is good and you are grateful and it’s not entirely heavy. But there is an undeniable feeling of disconnect. Of distance. Of separation from self and purpose. Close enough you should be able to touch it, and yet – for some reason you cannot. And the frustration of this dips and loops and causes confusion and fatigue.

I see you, and I know these spaces. Intimately.

I have come to refer to my essential self, my innate center, the pulse and spark and beat that is wholly me – as my wild heart. It beats steady and true. It is untamable, unbound by expectation, unconstricted by rules and regulations. This is my way of naming and knowing that piece of myself that is unchanging and true. My compass and guide. The space I return again and again.

And it is true that, in the course of living this life, I have lost my wild heart – my connection to self – again and again. Perhaps this is also true of you.

It may also be true that you believe that you’ll never find your way back.

But what if your wild heart is not truly lost or gone or missing?

What if it is simply that in order to survive you closed the door, locking it tight or ramming it shut or hiding the whole thing behind a brick wall so you wouldn’t be reminded of it or tempted to go looking when it was not safe or wise to enter. And over time that door became obscured by debris and covered in tangled vines and perhaps you even forgot it had ever been open.

But what if making your way back to your wild is not a complicated affair – not as complicated as we would make it, at least. Sometimes it is simply a matter of finding the portal that clears the path, the one that lets the door swing wide open – intentionally and yet without force.

So all that is needed then is to walk through, into the light that pulses with remembrance, and reunite with that which has been denied.

It is true that most of the time your wild heart – which is to say your truest essence – is closer than you think.

25 portals to your wild heart

1. In the music, the low base, hip spin of the downbeat. In the lyrics that take you home. In the melody that sounds exactly like freedom.
2. In the way that as the day has settled into night and the house is finally quiet and the candles throw your shadow against the wall, casting the curves of your body as art formed of darkness and light.
3. In the darkness when no light remains and suddenly everything is finally seen, full and whole and holy.
4. Under the moon, with only her as your witness, bare feet on wet grass, and the spin and the howl and the hands clasped in unspoken prayer.
5. In the wilderness where a tangle of trees and mossy forest floor whisper and the wild things blink their eyes in the darkness to silently welcome you home.
6. In solitude. In silence. In becoming and belonging wholly to yourself, responsible to and for no one else.
7. In the ocean. In her pounding surf and relentless force and eternal return, in the salt and wet of her – the baptism of the way she brings you to a state of almost painful aliveness.
8. In the unknowns. Inside of the questions for which there are no answers and yet you could write novels without trying – because the question itself holds that much.
9. In the strength of allowing the questions to hold that much.
10. In the liminal spaces. The in-between. The worlds between here and there where all is suspended.
11. In the heat and sweat and salt of desire. In the space where body meets body and it all slip-slides into everything and nothing, all at once.
12. In the contradictions. The hard and holy. The grit and grace. The juxtapositions and the paradox and the things that shouldn’t be but are – and in the breathtaking beauty of this.
13. In community. In tribe. In a village of souls who see and honor and know. Who lift and hold. In the gathering around the campfire, where the pain slips away in favor of the music and the dancing.
14. In truth spoken after long silence. In the reclamation of voice, the throat chakra set free, the deep knowing finally said aloud.
15. In boundaries held – the hard spoken no that is the deepest honoring of self. In the holding of this, even in the face of hurt or misunderstanding or loss.
16. In the harsh acceptance of unmet want. In the grief that drives you to your knees and the love that lifts you back up again.
17. In the forgiveness. Not of him or her or them or the wider world. In the way you extend that toward yourself, and say yes. self – I love you. Yes, I honor you. Yes, I forgive you. For all of it. You did what you had to do, and it was the best that you could. Now, let it rest. It is time to rest. The time for penance is over.
18. In the yes delivered clear, full-throated and honest. The holy yes that ushers in all that has been longed for and everything that has been waiting for you.
19. In the spaces where wholeness is chosen over goodness.
20. In the discovery that you already have all that you need and even more, all that you want.
21. In the demand. The requirement. The statement of this is what I need and I will not settle for any less. Not ever again.
22. In the burning and in the rising. The fire of initiation and the forging and the ashes and rubble and collateral damage. And in the painful forming and uncurling of wings, the stretching and tentative first attempts at flight. And then the soaring, high and free.
23. In the revolution. In the hand painted signs lifted over heads and the marching and the chanting and the solidarity and the spilling into the streets in righteous anger.
24. In the surrender. The acquiescence. The laying down the weapons and walking away from the battle. Because the fighting is over and it is now time for peace.
25. In the words. Always, always in the words. The words that flow like honey from lips or that scrawl messy on page or click rhythmic from fingers onto keyboards. Not just the pretty and purposeful words – no. The raw and the gritty. The dark and unholy. The words that drip like hot wax onto waiting skin.

The words that shape the stories you once thought untellable. The words that are received and held and known and lifted by people you once called stranger. The words that stack one on the next on the next until they begin to form themselves into the story that changes the course of all things. The words that don’t just unlock the door, or swing it wide open – the words that blast off the hinges and knock down the walls until your wild heart floods your entire being with light and energy and freedom.

In the end, it is always the words that bring me home. The words that unwind the chains and break open the locks. The words that return me to myself, to my wild heart, to the truth of my being.

Tell me, is this also true for you?

If it is, grab paper and pen. Find a quiet sliver of space. Sit down and get ready to write yourself free.

The post 25 portals to return you to your wild heart 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

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