On Healing and Authenticity
A personal update
I will be visiting family in Canada for the next 3 weeks so this will be the last newsletter for a while. In the meantime you can peruse the archives. And please join the waitlist for my 5 week online course: Foundations of Blissful Cooking. I will announce more about in September. Thank you and see you soon!
I have been healing a lot lately. It is such an incredible process, but it can be hard to share. So thank you for being here.
As some of you know, I have been going through a divorce for the past year with a young daughter. My Dad is terminally ill with cancer and I am about to visit him in Canada. At the same time, I am trying to build a business out of this cookbook author/speaker/teacher thing that will sustain a life with my daughter in Brooklyn so we can stay close together and be a family. It’s a lot. I am sometimes looking for something, anything, to stay steady for a while in this massive sea of change that goes in every direction. I have been lucky to be quite stable my whole life—but that stability has come from my circumstances and relationships, not myself. Except in small moments, I have never been able to find true internal stability. And this year is the first time I am experiencing my full instability without the crutch of a relationship. It’s cosmically terrifying and I have run from it in so many ways.
I find myself constantly trying to reframe my instability rather than face the reality of how horrible it feels to be so uncertain about the future.
But one thing I have found, time and time again, so predictable it feels like a law of the universe; is that if I allow myself to feel the full feelings, I will feel more stable. If I relax my body, unclench my stomach, release my throat and just allow the full wave of grief or fear or rage to envelop me; if I do all that, even when it feels like it is going to kill me, well it doesn’t kill me…. it stops. And behind that wave comes wisdom, strength, peace and joy. And if there is something I must do, that is also there.
And this process of releasing and then strengthening and being honest and loving and open has healed all the important relationships in my life one by one and built new ones. I have had a strained and then estranged relationship with my mother since early childhood. Yet this year we have established a true connection that means everything to me. My mother has done the work to be here for me, and I have done the work to be open to her changing. It is kind of like the end of a Disney movie.
I started this healing process in my body when I began to practice yoga, and it has helped me in every other aspect of my life. (I also have done a lot of talk therapy!) And it made me realize that I have been practicing this therapeutic art through my cooking for years before I found yoga. That is where the Blissful Cooking practice comes from and why I am so passionate about sharing it with you. Cooking has always been a way to create a firm foundation from which everything else can grow.
I get scared sometimes when I look at my beautiful daughter while she is still asleep in the early morning light, that I don’t have enough for her and I can’t do it on my own. But if I allow that fearful message to come through, another one now comes after: That I have the utmost wealth in love and relationships and that I am the farthest thing from alone.
I have to own that I spent most of my life living inauthentically because I thought I had to in order to be safe. I thought the person that I am was wrong and would not be welcome.
But it’s been the total opposite. The more I have shown myself, the more I have been met and held every day. And it feels so good, like sparkling water pouring through my cells.
Looking back at my life, I see these moments of inspiration and authenticity where I was seen and quickly put myself back under wraps. But I remember that lightning feeling of being the real me for a bit. I liked it, but I was too afraid of it still. I had more foundation to build.
My life has taught me (and I bet you are no different) that all our power lies in our authenticity. In following our gut about who to love, where to put our energy, what to create. If you stick to the truth even if that truth scares the bejeezus out of you… you will begin to heal.
And after every hard thing is the medicine. Joy, connection, love, inspiration, motivation, delight. This is our bodies’ beautiful natural mechanism of hormonal response to strengthen what is best for our specific self in our specific body. That is why no one can tell you how to be yourself. You just know it when you are. And that version of you, the real you, they will find their family, their community and their purpose like walking a beautiful path full of surprises, one more beautiful than the next.
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I think you should write a column in the Nytimes. Great writer.
So beautiful, Leanne. Your honesty and authenticity uplifts us all. ❤️