What I have been up to

Launching this blog now: which has been some time in the gestation and making. Go to ‘About’ above to see what I will be posting on. You can subscribe at right…Robust Debate Welcome. You can also cross to new, related Facebook page. Publishing and editing as Publisher at John Leonard Press a range of exceptional and eminent writers and poets. 2012 Releases: Robert Gray’s landmark Collected Poems - ‘Cumulus’; the late great Peter Steele’s Selected Essays - ‘Braiding the Voices’; Brook Emery’s poetry volume, ‘Collusion’; and Graeme Miles’ ‘Recurrence’. Writing a prose speculative-non-fiction book on spiritual perspectives on the feminine – just released – ‘The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame’. An article on the book – why I wrote it - is also posted here. Writing new poems and in final editing of a poetry volume for early 2013 publication, ‘The Book of Assassination’. The title follows the book’s long, long-line poem on love and the word. Poetry – others and mine, archival and new, Australian and international – will be posted regularly. Hosting this Monday, 15 October, 7.30 for 8 pm, a new reading/salon, Gilgamesh Readings. Featured writer is one of Australia’s finest poets Petra White. Free. At Evening Star, corner York and Cecil Sts, South Melbourne. Reading two extraordinary new releases, both world-class and both by Melbourne-based authors: the luminary literary prose of Alison Croggon in her new novel, ‘Black Spring’ (Walker Books), a rewrite on ‘Wuthering Heights’ among other things; and Jeff Sparrow’s narrative-journalistic ‘Money Shot – A Journey into Porn and Censorship’ (Scribe). Will also be posting on both. The blog has an ‘Inspire’ tag – about the work of others. Check a brilliant Australian-based initiative to provide tech-savvy downloadable apps which provide teenagers (and younger ones and adults if interested) with accessible, intelligent and practical short meditations about mindfulness. I’ve been practising the first one – highly commend the site and not for profit project: go to: smiling mind

 

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN WOMEN AGAINST VIOLENCE

WHY I WROTE ‘THE DIVINE WOMAN AND THE TWIN FLAME’

“The roots of violence against women lie in persistent discrimination against women and girls.” - UN

My new book, released this year, offers a spiritual template for individual women to explore living their full potential. But I also want to make it very clear that for me this feminine spirituality can be politically active and potent. By acknowledging the horrific circumstances faced by millions of women and girls politically, we can begin to contribute to the momentum and advocacy for positive change. Consider:

Among the poor, women are usually the poorest.

According to a UN briefing paper: “Violence against women and girls is not confined to a specific culture, region or country, or to particular groups of women within a society. The roots of violence against women lie in persistent discrimination against women and girls.

Up to 70 per cent of women experience violence in their lifetime, according to country data available.

Women aged 15-44 are more at risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, car accidents, war and malaria, according to World Bank data.” (www.un.org/en/globalissues/briefingpapers)

The UN research reports that half of women who are murdered are murdered by intimate partners or ex-partners. According to the World Health Organisation, in Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the US, this figure is 40-70 per cent.

Millions of women globally are paying money for, and enjoying, a book that eroticises contracted female submission (’Fifty Shades of Grey’).

Many women now believe it is compulsory that their ‘pussies’ be hair-free (resembling a child’s), and that a woman’s natural body state is socially and individually unacceptable, even ‘disgusting’.

There is considerable evidence that younger women now feel compelled to have sex according to pornographic paradigms.

The UN estimates that, worldwide, one in five women will become a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. Women and girls are systematically raped in almost every warzone in the world. Angelina Jolie expressly confronts this in her film, ‘The Land of Blood and Honey’.

Boardrooms remain filled with men and professionally powerful women often have to negotiate periods of discrimination to advance to higher levels.

As of February 2012 in Australia, women earned an average of 17.4 per cent less than men across all sectors (average fulltime weekly wage of $1186.90 cf. to $1437.40). In some sectors, the gap was much wider – eg. Health, 32.6 per cent. (Australian Bureau of Statistics)

Of 500 young people who contacted the Australian Kids Helpline counselling service (Jan-March 2012) about concerns about ‘sexting’, 75 per cent of them were female and most under 19. One in three were aged 10-14. (Wendy Squires, ‘The Age’).

Three million women and girls will face Female Genital Mutilation between February 2012 and 2013 (WHO, ‘The Guardian’). Simultaneously, the number of women choosing voluntary plastic surgery to alter the appearance of their genitals (labiaplasty) is ‘sky-rocketing’. (Deborah Bateson, Medical Director of Family Planning NSW, ‘The Age’)

As the author of ‘The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame’, I believe that, woman by woman, the lot of women worldwide can be changed for the better. ‘The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame’ offers every woman a spiritual template for connecting with her authentic power, as a woman, in all aspects of her life. When a woman integrates this power, she becomes self-directed (what I call self-sovereign) and if she chooses to, she takes this power out into the world for the betterment of all. This power is essentially humane and will also alter for the better a woman’s relations with men and the masculine.

The book explores the most important issues in women’s lives: vocation, intimacy, love, sexuality, health and vitality, mothering and family life, creativity, spirituality and men.

The ‘Twin Flame’ aspect of the book explores the potential for women to form intimate relationships of the highest potency – whether they are heterosexual or not, and whatever their relationship orientation.

Early readers have described the book as life-changing. It is available from bookshops or can be bought online at: Facebook, The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame. Publicity enquiries or for images: twinflamepublicity@gmail.com or call Rowena Fitzgerald on 0413 210 940.

Jacinta’s blogspot, which addresses related themes of the book and other issues, is: http://www.jacintaleplastrierofficial.blogspot.com

Book Launch

Dear All, The book is now officially launched and released, in Melbourne; Sydney launch to follow in a month with other author events and talks planned along the East Coast over 2012. I am now in the process of writing blog articles to post on issues and themes related to the radical rebalancing I see between the feminine and masculine occurring across the planet - in individual and collective senses, in spiritual and concrete political instances  - along with reviewing outstanding artistic experiences I have been privileged to share. I will email out links as stories are posted. Upcoming: Becoming Your own Heroine and Living Life as an Adventure // Talking about Pornography // Jacqui Stockdale - artist and imaginaire.

Media Release

Dear All, please find below the text of the Media Release 5 June that is now being released to mainstream and spiritual media on my new book, 'The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame'. Enquiries for interviews/images/stockists/sales, email: twinflamepublicity@gmail.com

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For Immediate Release:

June 2012

Divine Women - Doing it for Themselves

 

Australian author and journalist Jacinta Le Plastrier believes very few women still really live in their full power. She should know: she has spent the past five years re-thinking and writing about women’s experiences of life, work, finances, relationships, well-being, and love, and their beliefs about intimacy and sexuality.

Her new book, The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame, is a book about a woman’s most important relationship – with herself – and how developing and understanding that relationship authentically creates the kind of self-directed power she sees lacking in most women’s lives.

The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame explores the most important issues in women’s lives, including vocation and mothering, family life, creativity, men, intimacy, love, spirituality, health and vitality. But while the author offers a spiritual slant on these issues, her ideas are very much about concretely improving each reader’s experience in the everyday. For Le Plastrier, a woman reclaiming her full power is not a sentimental or soft journey.

The book also explores relations between women and men, sexually and spiritually, whatever a woman’s sexual or relationship orientation, and advocates a radical shift in the way women literally ‘see’ men.

What is your real purpose in life? What makes a powerful woman? How can we change the ways, positively, that we see men, to make ourselves as well as men happier?

These are some of the central questions discussed in The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame, which is also a very practical guide to a woman exercising mastery over life’s challenges.

“I think it’s time for women to get interested in facing their challenges like heroines, to treat them like adventures that they can enjoy even during the difficulties. Men have been encouraged to be heroes for centuries but being a heroine for most women has looked like a Jane Austen character,” says Le Plastrier. “It’s time for women to really step up to what they are capable of, to set out to claim what they want, and to do what it takes to get what they want, in a positive way.”

According to Le Plastrier, few women really understand or ‘get’ men: “It may be true that men don’t understand women very well either but I am only interested in what I personally can change. My perceptions of men have really altered during the writing of this book, and it’s been amazing to see how dramatically connecting to my inner power as a woman has so significantly improved my relations with, and love for men.”

The essential theme of the book is what Le Plastrier calls ‘self-sovereignty’, the ability to be the governing force in one’s own life, one she argues is linked to becoming a ‘Divine Woman’, connecting to an inner or ‘divine’ femininity.

 “When a woman develops and integrates a powerful relationship with herself, that power then radiates into all aspects of her life, initiating change where needed, gently or robustly. At heart, it is a relationship about creating and building self-love. If she is heterosexual, this rebalances her energy with men externally,” she says.

The second key theme of the book focuses on what the author calls Twin Flame relationships – idealised, yet utterly possible relationships where partners exist in the deepest harmony with each other because both are self-directed and independent. In these couplings both partners understand that living powerful lives for themselves improves their relationship but also improves the world. The Twin Flame concept is linked to the idea that each person literally has another person who is their perfect complement, or other ‘half’.

While many scoff at Hollywood and its romantic notions of soul-mates and one true love, Le Plastrier believes such films are actually motivated by this profound idea.

“Women and men want to be with the one that I call their true flame or twin flame, whether they are heterosexual or same-sex. This is a powerful relationship that is now available to many due to the kind of spiritual changes occurring on the planet.

“But a woman cannot have this kind of relationship without self-sovereignty. That’s why the book is so tough about the need for women to become self-sovereign if they want to live the most meaningful life they can.”

In The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame, Le Plastrier asserts that femininity and power are not mutually exclusive, and women can be powerful without losing touch with their own individual expression of the feminine within.

“The self-sovereign woman is authoritative with her sexuality, and most definitely knows what serves her and what doesn’t,” she says.

“The book was also my own personal experiment. If I wanted to explore how women can heighten their higher feminine power in a very practical way, and how that might affect sex and love for them, then I had to learn how to do it myself. When it comes to old ways and attitudes that don’t serve me or other women, my view is: Enough! We’re done with that now.” 

Praise for The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame

“Your book is an amazing description of the emergence of the divine feminine on the planet, and a true gift to those of us, following the path of self sovereignty.”

 Michelle Bihary. Psychotherapist, The Delta Centre

“Thank you so much for the work, it is inspiring, full of courage and authenticity.’

Angela Clarke, musician/composer

“Jacinta’s work is a clear call for change and a re-setting of the balance of power for the betterment of everyone. It’s remarkable, truly groundbreaking, in its relocating of the divine feminine power in individuals and humanity as a whole.”

Rebecca Ryan, healing professional and co-facilitator of The Divine Woman course

The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame has an RRP $29.95 and is available from specialist book stores across Australia.

For online orders contact twinflamepublicity@gmail.com or visit The Divine Woman on Facebook.

NOTES TO EDITORS

About Jacinta Le Plastrier/IMAGE ATTACHED

Jacinta is an Australian-born author, journalist, editor and publisher of long-standing experience. A former contributing editor at Belle, Good Weekend, and Elle, she continues to write for these and other well-known publications.  Jacinta is also Publisher at the prestigious, award-winning Australian poetry press, John Leonard Press, and runs seminars on women’s empowerment based on the Divine Feminine.

She lives in Melbourne with her three ‘divine’ daughters.

For further information, interviews and images; or to request a review copy, please contact Rowena Fitzgerald  twinflamepublicity@gmail.com, or phone 0413 210 940.