I recently learned something miraculous about leaves 🍂
When trees transition from summer to autumn, they prepare for winter by stopping food production. As Katherine May writes in Wintering:
The reds and oranges and yellows don’t suddenly appear in fall. They’ve been there all along.
Writing about this same phenomenon, Maria Popova observes how leaves show us that each act of letting go “reveals what we are made of.”
One of my Feng Shui teachers offers that the first step in activating the creative energy in your space and life is to let go of what is draining it. Eventually, you can add colors and elements to allow for more of what you want. But the first step is letting go, which is sometimes all that’s needed for energy to move.
My creative ecosystem turns TEN this winter (!!!) and we are both stepping into a new era. A cycle is completing and a new one is beginning, and I am in the fourth, final phase of The Creative Cycle:
Becoming → Emergence → Expansion → Release
(For alumni and clients — We used to call this fourth phase Integration, but Release feels truer to its essence, so it got a glow-up😍)
Learning about the miracle of leaves this week made me realize that I’ve been so focused on trying to define what exactly this new era is, and who I need to be inside of it, that I’ve forgotten to consider what I need to let go of to let it, and her, come forth.
I had forgotten the primary principle of the Creative Cycle that can ease so much of our angst, which is to let yourself be in the phase that you are in. Part of me was skipping fully being in the Release phase. I was instead trying to manufacture revelation by writing a 20-year-plan and trying to become the next best version of myself while doing so 😭
That is not release. That is over-functioning and over-optimizing in order to avoid the vulnerability of release. It’s profoundly more comfortable for me to be imagining, creating, and expanding, all necessary acts in the creative process. But they aren’t the whole process.
Release is not doing. It is a setting free. A loosening of the grip. Completion. Then: revelation.
Invitation #8: Let it go
Admittedly, I have an Elsa-loving three-year-old, and this song is on repeat in my house. Hands up if you also know every word 🙋♀️
But it’s a brilliant lyric, and if you are anything like me, release may be a creative edge. Much of our training omits release, both as a creative phase and as an ongoing practice to keep our channels clear and open. It may also be where some of the deepest possibility lies for you.
For your consideration this week:
What if release is a creative act? What if release and revelation are sisters?
The Release Phase is aligned with Autumn, so those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are currently in it right now, and it includes reflection, celebration, grief, death, rest, integration, renewal, transition, transmutation, transformation, and, of course, revelation.
Consider that any release, of any size or kind, creates movement everywhere and revelation where you need it most: what you release over here gives you freedom and insight over there.
Practicing release requires us to choose trust over control, and the unknown over certainty.
Here are 8 Releases For Creative Freedom ⬇️
1. The Box
Think about rules, structures, and identities that may once have created possibility but may now be feeling limiting.
2. The Shoulds
What goals, expectations, and timelines are not yours?
3. The Clutter
Clear out your work bag or your workspace and notice what happens. Declutter your project list, offerings, people you follow, and limiting beliefs. Another lesson from Feng Shui that can be applied to all aspects of our creative lives: everything you keep is either fueling your future or anchoring you to an old identity.
4. The Weight
Consider what creative cobwebs, grudges, resentments, or over-responsibility you are ready to be free from. Cry, sweat, dance, shake, be in water, make a fire. Go on a Release Walk.
5. The Drains
Make a list of what is leaking your creative energy: habits, patterns, relationships, and environments that drain and deplete you (even if they didn’t used to). Don’t worry about knowing how you’ll solve them.
6. The Doing
Wonder about where rest is needed and what you can stop doing. This may also be about releasing control in your work.
7. The Spells
Astrologer Chani Nicholas offers this beloved prayer: “may you break the spells that keep you asleep to our own magic.” This is about the continual release of cultural conditioning and systems of urgency, scarcity, and oppression that keep you from your aliveness, joy, and sovereignty.
8. The Gifts
Consider what is ready to be completed, celebrated, and shared. Sometimes we let go of what works to make space for what might sing.
I’m curious to know what number intuitively calls to you. Here are 3 prompts for journaling, dancing, walking, praying, or conversations this week:
3 Prompts:
1. What wants to move? What do you want to release right now — in your work, your body, or your creative ecosystem?
2. What is ready to be completed, shared, or let go of?
3. What is shedding? What has grown too small for you? What could you let go of to make space for your next era?
On the other side of release is flow, aliveness, grief, ecstasy, rapture, space, lightness, sorrow, freedom, awe, possibility, peace.
We also allow more of our true colors to be revealed 🍁
With big love and endless encouragement,
Liz
⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️
Reading, Listening, Sharing:
⚡️ ️ Dora is an amazing new directory of resources + mutual aid map for NYC. I feel like we need one of these for every city in the US.
️⚡️ Writer Roxanne Gay on Feminism as a practice, not a dogma
️ ⚡️ New research from Jenny Veldman and Andrea Vial on Masculinity Contest Work Culture, as an alternative to this week’s egregious NYTimes article on women ruining the workplace
️ ⚡️Mourning Teen Vogue and the Erasure of The Black Women Who Built It
Quotes on my heart and mind:
As you move through these changing times… be easy on yourself and be easy on one another. You are at the beginning of something new. You are learning a new way of being. You will find that you are working less in the yang modes that you are used to.
You will stop working so hard at getting from point A to point B the way you have in the past, but instead, will spend more time experiencing yourself in the whole, and your place in it.
Instead of traveling to a goal out there, you will voyage deeper into yourself. Your mother’s grandmother knew how to do this. Your ancestors from long ago knew how to do this. They knew the power of the feminine principle… and because you carry their DNA in your body, this wisdom and this way of being is within you.
Call on it. Call it up. Invite your ancestors in. As the yang based habits and the decaying institutions on our planet begin to crumble, look up. A breeze is stirring. Feel the sun on your wings.
— A Message from The Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers
We deserve leaders who stand up to the people with the most power, not scapegoat those with the least.
— Matt Bernstein
⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️
A note about AI and this letter:
This letter is a labor of love written by yours truly.
Image Credit: Aaron Burden
