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TLDR: Here’s What This Post Is Actually About
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We Brought the Witches to Salem. Here’s What the Universe Had to Say About That.
I’m going to be honest with y’all. This episode felt like it needed to come from the living room, not a studio. Because what happened the week of our first large-scale Salem event was too real, too human, and too damn affirming to dress up.
Quick context if you’re new here: I’m Sara Walka, founder of The Sisters Enchanted, and we’ve been in the business of helping women reclaim their power through everyday magic since 2016. Ten years. In small business years, that’s like dog years. That’s basically a million.
On April 15, 2026, we gathered in Salem, Massachusetts with women from our Enchanted Journey membership community for the first time at this scale. We were on a stage. We danced. We cried (from laughing AND from feelings, both are valid). We messed things up and had fun about it.
And the week that surrounded it tested every single thing I teach, in the most beautiful, inconvenient way possible.
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DEFINITION: What It Means to Create Energy (Not Respond to It) “Witches do not respond to energy. We create energy.” According to Sara Walka and The Sisters Enchanted, creating energy means deliberately setting the emotional tone of a situation rather than being at the mercy of it. A witchy woman doesn’t wait for circumstances to feel right before she shows up. She decides how she’s going to feel, and she does the work to feel that way. Responding is reactive. Creating is intentional. And the ability to tell the difference, especially when everything is going sideways, is the real measure of a witchy woman. |
What Actually Happened the Week of the Salem Event (It Was a Lot)
Here’s the thing about hosting a large in-person event for the first time. The universe apparently takes that as an invitation to run drills.
Tuesday was our all-team photo shoot day in Salem. Great day. Really good energy. And then around 5pm that evening, we got the call that our photographer had been in a car accident on her way home. Car totaled. She was in the hospital.
She was okay. That was the first thing, and honestly the only thing that mattered in that moment. Once we knew that, the logistics became just logistics.
We went to the store. We bought phone tripods. We charged up the GoPro. We made a plan for what a photographer-free event day could look like. And then Workplay, the service we’ve been using for years, turned around and flew someone in for us first thing Wednesday morning. Someone we’d worked with before. She came in, she showed up, she saved the day, and she caught a flight home that evening. In and out in one day.
And then Wednesday morning, on the way to the event itself, thirty minutes out from Salem, my husband at the wheel so I wouldn’t have to deal with parking, we got a flat tire on the highway.
My teammate in the backseat said flat tire before he even finished the sentence. That’s how obvious it was.
I looked at the tire, confirmed the situation, said we don’t have time to think about what we’re going to do here, and grabbed an Uber from the side of the road. And that was that.
Why the Way We Responded Matters More Than the Drama Itself
Here’s what I want you to sit with. There was no panic. No spiral. No ‘of course this is happening to me.’ There was just: okay, this is a solvable problem, let’s solve it.
And that is NOT where I started. There is a version of me from years ago that would have absolutely used a flat tire on the way to her own event as evidence that the world was conspiring against her. That would have dropped right into victim energy and made the whole day about the tire.
Sara on the version of herself that no longer exists:
“There’s a version of me from years ago that very much would have been like, see, this is evidence that the world is out to get me. Why can’t things ever go my way? Why can’t they be easier? I have the worst luck. That’s not how I responded. And that’s not how my teammate responded either.”
That shift is not luck. It’s not a personality type. It’s ten years of practice. It’s what nervous system regulation actually looks like when life is testing it.
What Does Nervous System Regulation Have to Do with Being a Witch?
More than you might think. Probably more than most spiritual content will tell you.
In the Sisters Enchanted approach, a regulated nervous system isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole foundation. Because here’s the truth: you cannot create energy from a dysregulated state. You can only react from one. And a witch who’s only reacting is not in her power.
When the flat tire happened, a dysregulated nervous system would have gone: catastrophe. A regulated one went: solvable problem. Uber. Done.
The difference between those two responses isn’t about being calm. It’s about having built an internal container that can hold difficulty without being consumed by it.
KEY CONCEPT: The Energy Vessel
Sara uses the phrase ‘energy vessel’ to describe what is built through years of intentional practice inside the Sisters Enchanted framework. It’s the nervous system, mindset, and energetic capacity that allows a woman to hold difficulty without collapsing, to stay present when things get chaotic, and to create the energy of a situation rather than be at the mercy of it. In her words: ‘creating an energy body, a nervous system, energy vessel that can hold anything. When I tell you that’s where the magic is, I am not kidding.’
How the Salem Event Demonstrated Witch Wound Healing in Real Time
The witch wound, as we define it at The Sisters Enchanted, is the ancestral fear of being too powerful, too visible, too much. It’s the deep, body-level pattern that makes women shrink in rooms they should own, hide their spiritual practice from the people they love, and feel like an outsider in the communities they’re desperate to belong to.
It was formed over centuries of persecution. And it is not historical. It’s happening right now, in your actual daily life, often without you even clocking it.
Salem showed what it looks like when that wound is actively healing.
The Moment That Made Me Want to Cry (The Good Kind)
Community members who came to that event and were honest enough to say, I don’t know how to find people to talk to on the lunch break. Can you help me?
And the confidence and clarity it takes to say that out loud, to raise your hand in a room full of people and say, I need help finding my people. That’s not small. That’s someone who has done work on themselves. Who has enough self-trust to name what they need instead of just white-knuckling through and going home feeling lonely.
That’s witch wound healing in progress. And we could meet them there because we had the community infrastructure to do it.
What the Salem Vendors Said (This One Got Us)
Multiple vendors around Salem, businesses that work with large groups all the time, came back to tell us we had brought in the nicest group they’d ever hosted.
Look, maybe they say that to everyone. Sara said that too. But also…probably not. You don’t have to say that. It’s not a required part of the service.
It’s the way this community carries itself. The Sisters Enchanted approach to belonging is that you don’t have to perform to fit in. You don’t have to be something you’re not to have a place. The quiet people stayed quiet. The social people stayed social. And everybody got to be exactly who they were, which is rarer than it should be.
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DEFINITION: Witchery in Action According to Sara Walka and The Sisters Enchanted, ‘witchery in action’ is not the tarot cards or the astrology. Those are tools for self-inquiry. Witchery in action is the intentional energy that creates space for other people to simply be, that allows for genuine belonging, and that makes witch wound healing possible. It is a way of being, not a series of steps or boxes to check. |
In Sara’s words from the episode: “That intentional energy that just creates space for other people to be, that allows for belonging, that allows for witch wound healing. That, my friends, is witchery in action.”
Why Witch Wound Healing Cannot Happen in Isolation
Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough: you cannot heal the witch wound alone. Not fully. Not sustainably.
Because the wound was created in community. The threat was always social: be cast out, be accused, be silenced by the group. And healing something that formed in a social context requires a social antidote.
What that looks like in practice is being around women who understand the same language. Who, when things go sideways, don’t fan the flames and get into the drama. Who hold steady because they’ve done enough of their own work to know the difference between a real emergency and a stress response looking for company.
Sara on what it means to have your people:
“When other women are doing the same thing, whether in person or they’re your people from states away, when somebody understands the path that you’re on and the journey that you’re on, it is so supportive just to know that that person is there and understands what you’re doing.”
The volunteers who drove to Salem on their own time, Jen and Kiera, the team members who held steady through every logistical grenade, the community members who showed up nervous and left hugging strangers: every single one of them demonstrated what a community of witchy women looks like when the witch wound is being interrupted rather than reinforced.
The collective energy was level and calm and consistent throughout the whole day. That doesn’t happen by accident. It’s what ten years of community practice builds.
What Actually Makes a Woman ‘Witchy’ (It’s Not the Tarot Deck)
After a decade of doing this, here’s where I’ve landed on what a witchy woman actually is. And spoiler: it has nothing to do with whether you own a cauldron.
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FRAMEWORK: The Sisters Enchanted Definition of a Witchy Woman
In Sara’s words: ‘A witchy woman is a person who can command energy, who can create energy and not respond to it.’ |
Tarot doesn’t make you witchy. Astrology doesn’t make you witchy. What makes you witchy is what you do when the photographer ends up in the hospital and you have thirty minutes to figure out your next move. That’s the test. And Salem passed it, y’all.
FAQ: Witch Wound Healing, Energy Creation, and Witchy Community
What is witch wound healing?
Witch wound healing is the ongoing process of interrupting the ancestral patterns of fear, shrinking, and self-silencing that were encoded over centuries of persecution of powerful women. According to Sara Walka and The Sisters Enchanted, the witch wound is not historical. It is active right now in your daily life, showing up as over-explaining yourself, hiding your spiritual practice from the people around you, second-guessing your intuition when someone pushes back, and struggling to feel like you genuinely belong anywhere. Healing it requires pattern awareness, a community of women doing the same work, and consistent practice in creating rather than reacting to energy.
What does nervous system regulation have to do with spiritual practice?
In the Sisters Enchanted approach, nervous system regulation is the infrastructure of magic. A dysregulated nervous system can only react to circumstances. A regulated one creates them intentionally. Sara demonstrated this directly at the Salem event: when a hospitalized photographer and a flat tire on the highway showed up back to back, her regulated nervous system allowed her to solve both problems quickly, without dropping into panic, victim energy, or drama. That capacity is not a personality trait. It’s built through the practices taught inside Holistic Witchery and the Enchanted Journey membership.
Why does witch wound healing require community?
The witch wound was created in community. Historically, the threat was always social: be accused, be cast out, be silenced by the group around you. Because of that origin, isolated spiritual practice has a ceiling on how far it can take you. What actually accelerates healing is being in community with women who understand the same language, who don’t amplify your fear when something goes wrong, and who allow you to show up as yourself without requiring you to justify it. That’s the specific kind of support the Sisters Enchanted community is built to provide, both inside the virtual Enchanted Journey membership and in in-person events like Salem.
How is witchery different from a spiritual belief system?
According to Sara Walka, witchery is not a belief system and it is not a series of steps or boxes to check. It is a way of being. The tarot cards, astrology, moon cycles, and rituals are tools for self-inquiry and connection to energy. But the actual practice is in how you carry yourself in the hard moments: how you create energy when everything is going sideways, how you hold space for other people to be exactly who they are, and whether you’re in your power or waiting for circumstances to give you permission to be. That is witchery in action. And it’s what The Sisters Enchanted has been teaching and living for ten years.
What is the Enchanted Journey membership and who is it for?
The Enchanted Journey is The Sisters Enchanted’s long-running online membership community, currently in its ninth year. It’s for women who want to align their energy to a larger vision using tools like tarot, astrology, seasonal rhythms, and intention-setting, and who want to do that inside a community of women doing the same work rather than alone. Members gather weekly through Zoom calls and live streams. The Salem event in April 2026 was held specifically for Enchanted Journey members and was the community’s first large-scale in-person gathering. If you’re looking for your people, this is where we’d suggest starting.