Uncovering Divine Femininity: The Collection | Part 5
“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”
If you’ve read other posts in this series, you know that about a year into my 18 month return to the Divine Feminine, I had a breakdown. And I thought, “okay, this is officially rock bottom.” I had called in experiences that left me with only two choices: to break down and heal repeated cycles of hurt, or to just stay broken. I wanted to be broken down so that I could then be restored. And I was.
But first, I spent a couple of days on the floor weeping, and I remember feeling despair like I’d never known. My immediate reaction was the one I’d relied on over and over again throughout my life– even though I had worked hard for a year to uncover my Divine Feminine, but in this moment of despair, I wanted my Wounded Masculine energy back.
I wanted to put up walls and tell myself the other person is the problem.
It’s easier to do that. It feels safer because it feels familiar. To act offended and blameless, rather than look at ourselves and our suppressed insecurities. I started to feel the armor reattaching itself to my skin because people who have not resolved their mental and emotional wounds will continue to live in patterns of the past. I knew I did not want to repeat the past again. As I felt the masculine armor making its way back on my body, I stopped it. I thought, “No. What would the Divine Feminine do?”
And damn it. She would create.
I didn’t want to create. The last thing I wanted to do is create. I didn’t want to stand up and paint. I wanted to lay there and cry. But you can’t heal without self awareness, and over the past year I had really become self aware.
I knew if I wanted to receive the abundant life of pleasure and play and ease God had for me, I had no choice but to finally act differently to this painful situation. To remember I called in this experience. To remember this wasn’t about the other person. This was about me and the lesson I needed to learn. I understood the lesson.
But the test? Well, my final grade depended solely on how I reacted to the lesson. Would I react from Wounded Masculine energy or Divine Feminine energy?
We can learn to not take things personally, knowing we all are learning to love in richer ways and needing some physical way, aside from crying, to help the emotions get out. I knew I needed to create.
My daughter loves to paint, so I grabbed some of her paints and canvases, and I used one as my palette and one to paint on.
But just because I had chosen to give this whole Divine Feminine approach a try, didn’t mean I did it with a smile.
I was angry. So I just painted raw emotion and feeling onto the canvas. No plan, no training, just expression.
Whatever was near me made its way into the painting. My morning coffee, particles from my tea bag, paint, pastels, charcoal, sage, everything got smeared onto that canvas.
When I was done with that painting, I looked at the palette I’d used and thought, “Well, that’s kind of cool too,”
So I turned that into a painting. And that’s how it started.
I’d never had this desire to create art in this medium before. My best friend is an actual artist, and she is successful and incredible at it, so I’ve never seen this as my realm. It wasn’t a planned thing, just a vehicle to get the pain out. But when I stopped and looked at the painting, I realized that I had, maybe more than any other time, created something true.
Uncovering Divine Femininity
The Collection
Unveiled TODAY, March 24
Original paintings available now at jessicazimmerman.com/art-shop
The paintings represented how I felt.
I included significant messages, some visible, some lost in the layers of paint and charcoal. Some are more visible, and some are visible just for me.
The number 1111, a hummingbird, a rose, a feather. Secret messages, reminding me of the Divine Feminine and the guiding force of important women in my life.
On January 12th, I went to bed thinking that not only had I learned about divine femininity, I was actually experiencing it. As I’d been creating, ideas for what to share and write about next started bubbling up, and I asked for guidance to discern what was next.
The next day, I woke up and it was Friday the 13th. Later that day, as I logged onto Instagram, all the spiritual, uplifting, positive accounts I follow were posting about how the number thirteen relates to divine feminine energy. It felt like confirmation that I was on the right path. The posts said things like the number thirteen represents Femininity, as there are typically thirteen cycles in a calendar year. “Friday” was named after the goddess Freya, or Venus, and Friday the 13th had traditionally been a day devoted to creativity, wisdom, soul nourishment, and the celebration of beauty.
To me, there is no such thing as coincidence. Signs and synchronicities are everywhere if we are open to receiving them.
Friday the 13th was my sign, and as the messages got clearer and clearer that morning, I remembered that in the night, I’d had a dream that I had written about my journey to the Divine Feminine and had also released paintings.
At that point, I just had those first two paintings, but I knew that I had to trust my intuition. I didn’t stop to think, because if I had, I would have been held back by thoughts like…
“But I’m not a painter! I’m not an artist. This isn’t what I do.”
“How do you even sell art? How do you price it? How do you ship it?”
“Will anyone even buy it?
I could have believed all those thoughts, but instead I honored and trusted my intuition. And for the first time ever, I really don’t care about the results.
I mean, I’ve written some badass business courses. I’ve done launches and podcast book tours and morning shows and I’ve always had this approach of this is what I want. This is my goal. This is how much I want to sell.
But not this time.
This time, it was about honoring my intuition and enjoying the process of creating. About giving my Divine Feminine an outlet for creation.
And if nothing sells, that’s fine. I’ll hang it in my house.
I’ll enjoy the interplay of graphic lines and soft shades, of the intersection of masculine and feminine, to remember that I have integrated and found wholeness. I’ll look at the coffee grounds and layered background tones and the rigid, dark lines of the silhouette and feel grateful that Divine love requires both the ordered and the free. The messiness of the background juxtaposed with the precision of the line figures…
There’s balance and wholeness and it represents the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine coming together in perfect unity.
It’s honest and true and reminds me of how beautiful we can be when we surrender to perfect Divine love without overemphasis on either energy.
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And then there’s the hidden symbols…
There’s 1111, the angel number I started seeing when I was waking up spiritually.
Every time I looked at the clock, every day, I would see it at 11:11. And I would just see it on a license plate. I would see it on a sign, at the gas station, on my receipts. I thought, “why do I keep seeing 1111?” And then I researched it and discovered why. 1111 signifies high vibrations and new beginnings. So, in all the paintings, there’s 1111.
There’s also a feather.
I drew a feather because it was the first physical sign I started seeing. I wasn’t searching for them, but I would be thinking about something and all of a sudden this feather would appear. I started realizing, oh that’s God, those are my angels, those are my spirit guides telling me whatever I was thinking about at that time that I’m on the right path or that’s the direction to go.
I started seeing feathers everywhere. I have a huge wooden bowl filled with feathers in my living room because I find them all the time. It’s been this beautiful reminder that if we’re willing to get off our phone and get off screens and go out into the world and just think and imagine and feel and look around and be in nature, God speaks to us through the creation.
Next, the hummingbird; a reminder to seek high vibrations.
Before this journey, I was operating from a low vibration. Before I even really knew about energies, this is the language I used to describe the disjunction I felt with Brian. Whenever we were apart, I could feel myself operating at a higher, lighter energy. When we were together, I felt weighed down and sluggish. When I started learning about energies, I discovered how important it is to stay at a high vibration. Because high vibrational beings exude life and creational force. My vibration was so low, but now that I operate from a high vibration, I do not sacrifice that for anything, because I know the work that it took to raise it. Hummingbirds, with their wings that beat more than four thousand times per minute, represent that high vibrational energy for me.
There’s also a rose.
Some of them just look like a nondescript flower, but for me each one is a rose. The very first time I ever met my spiritual advisor, she asked me if I had ever worked with flowers, and I was like “yeah, I actually have.”
And she said, “well, your sister Courtney is your healing angel, and she guides you where you’re supposed to be. And one of the ways she does that is with flowers.”
She even asked me if I had ever lived in a neighborhood that had to do with flowers and I said “yeah, I lived in one called Rosewood Terrace growing up.”
The rose is a sacred symbol, a timeless flower. It represents deep emotions: love, passion, admiration. A rose can also mean secrecy and so much of the awakening process feels like a secret. It feels like you have to keep it a secret while it’s happening and also like there is this secret inside of you that you are uncovering. The rose, with its soft petals and hard stem covered in thorns, is not only a powerful symbol for love, but it also represents new beginnings, strength, and hope. The thorns protect the rose from predators, but they also anchor the plant onto others as it grows so it can be more stable. The petals represent the sensual, sexual, soft elements of love, and the thorns represent boundaries. You need both.
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Speaking of sensuality, you may be wondering, why nudes?
I was photographing the paintings the other day and my son walked into the house and said, “there sure are a lot of naked women in this house!”
While I believe at our core we are souls, God decided to put us in physical forms. I’m not just a soul, but a soul in a body. And not just a body, but a female body.
I feel so grateful to have been given this incredible gift to get to experience life as a woman. Women carry children. Women are creators. Women hold generations within them.
I was raised in a very conservative environment. All the best intentions, but the takeaway message was to cover up. I don’t think I’m alone in having felt shame around my body. In fact, one of the first things I began doing when I started waking up to myself was the very innocent act of wearing crop tops. It was kind of my own “F— you” to anything that made me feel shame around something as beautiful as the female body.
I have grown to love my body. To cherish it. To thank it. To be grateful for it. In fact, I’m kinder to my body now than I have ever been. I don’t deprive it. I don’t overwork it. I don’t over exercise. I’m not rigid with it at all. I indulge. I just do what feels true. And it has balanced out in a way where I didn’t work for it at all. I just allowed myself to receive. I’ve read many things that say this naturally happens as you come into wholeness of your energies.
So as I’ve completely embraced my body, my sexuality, my sensuality… I have zero shame around sex. I have zero shame around my own skin.
I had to be stripped down naked metaphorically to remember who I was made to be, and these physically naked forms remind me of that. That even without any protection or adornment, I’m worthy of love. And you are too.
Finally, I signed each piece JP, because those are the two names my mom gave me.
Jessica Paige.
Clay is the name my dad gave me. Zimmerman is the name Brian gave me. But this time, it just felt right to honor Jessica Paige.
There are 34 paintings in the collection and that number is intentional for a few reasons:
Uncovering Divine Femininity
The Collection
Unveiled TODAY, March 24
Original paintings available now at jessicazimmerman.com/art-shop
The spiritual meaning of angel number 34 typically symbolizes new beginnings, growth, and expansion. 34 also represents the Empress energy. The empress is a mother, a creator, and nurturer. She represents the creation of life, romance, art, or business. There are so many different kinds of women and expressions of the Divine Feminine. I hope you see yourself in one of these 34 depictions.
When I step back today, I’m kind of amazed. Five months ago, I was on the floor weeping. Five months feels painfully long when you’re going through it, but once you’re on the other side, you see how incredibly beneficial that time was.
I am so grateful for it.
God showed me everything I had built so that I could tear it all down. So I could start a new life on a solid foundation. So I could be reborn.
Five months ago, I had never painted a painting. Today, I’m launching a collection. Because I chose to listen to my intuition. I look at these 34 paintings, the tangible expression of this incredible 18 month journey, and I feel like I am validating and celebrating the past 18 months. I am validating myself and I am celebrating her.
The journey is worthy because I am worthy. I am holding space for my emotions while at the same time standing in my power. It feels wild and free. It feels like love. No more chasing, ready to receive.
So that’s the core of this collection. Images of Divine Femininity, uncovered for you. I hope it reminds you to embrace that which the world so often overlooks and undervalues– the soft, the nurturing, the receptive. The Divine Feminine available to us all, rooted and shaped by love.
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If you’ve read other posts in this series, you know that about a year into my 18 month return to the Divine Feminine, I had a breakdown. And I thought, “okay, this is officially rock bottom.” I had called in experiences that left me with only two choices: to break down and heal repeated cycles of hurt, or to just stay broken. I wanted to be broken down so that I could then be restored. And I was.
But first, I spent a couple of days on the floor weeping, and I remember feeling despair like I’d never known. My immediate reaction was the one I’d relied on over and over again throughout my life– even though I had worked hard for a year to uncover my Divine Feminine, but in this moment of despair, I wanted my Wounded Masculine energy back.
I wanted to put up walls and tell myself the other person is the problem.
It’s easier to do that.