What the Trees Know About Letting Go: What Happens When Women Open to Their Creative Energy
So many women carry the same quiet feeling about themselves. "I'm not creative." "I could never be an artist." It is often said with a small laugh, as though it were simply a fact, like the weather.
On September 27, a group of women gathered with my dear friend Queen of Shui Lois Kramer Perez and me at the Center for Mind Body Balance in Saddle River for our Fall Art & Shui Soulful Art Retreat Day. We chose this time on purpose. The autumn equinox is a pause at the center of the year, a balance between light and dark, a time to gather in the harvest and step into transition. Outside, the trees were doing what they do every fall. They were letting go of what they no longer need, without apology and without fear.
Our retreat days are all about being open in a safe space, a place to come to release. Old habits, outdated mindsets, and the belief that creativity belongs to someone else fall away, the way a branch lets go of its leaves.
We began in a circle with with motivational oracle card pulls, an opening meditation, and time to ground. A twig with a ribbon tied at the top served as our talking stick, passed from hand to hand so that each woman could speak and be heard. Then everyone built a mandala together from crystals, flowers, rocks, and leaves. No one was in charge of the design. Each woman placed her pieces, and the pattern grew from the group.
Then came the sigil project, which fit the season beautifully. A sigil begins with an intention. Each woman journaled a mantra for the year ahead, a phrase naming what she most wanted to focus on. On plain scrap paper, inside a single large circle, she crossed out the repeated letters, then the vowels, and arranged what remained into a symbol. It is an old practice, and it asks for no drawing ability at all.
Some women made bold, geometric sigils with clean, strong angles. Others let their letters become swirling, cursive forms that looped within their drawing space. Then they added color. Within a few hours, a plain scrap paper had become something that belonged to its maker alone, carrying a meaning only she fully knew. I photographed every one, and each was as unique as the woman who created it.
Each sigil, as unique as its maker.
A sigil is charged with your energy, your focus, and your belief. Then it is released, and the desire is sent symbolically out into the universe, trusted to find its way. Later in the day, Lois led a dissolving ritual that completed the circle. Each woman wrote a phrase on dissolving paper, connected to her sigil, naming what she specifically wanted to release. Then, with her own small cup of water, she dissolved it herself, in her own time and in her own way.
This is what the trees understand. A tree does not hold its leaves out of fear that it will have nothing left. It lets go, trusting that something new is already forming deep inside that will emerge come spring. The sigil holds what we invite in, and the dissolving paper holds what we set down. Together they are the inhale and the exhale, the very balance the equinox asks of us.
I have come to believe that creative energy is within everyone. It waits beneath the story we have told ourselves about who we are allowed to be. Give a woman a safe circle, a judgment-free space, and permission to open, express, and release, and it rises.
The leaves are falling in earnest now. What are you ready to release this season, and what might you make in the space it leaves behind?
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With gratitude, Jessica
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