Back in February, I had the pleasure of interviewing business coach and author Marisa Guthrie for the first episode of Season Two of The Awakening Woman Podcast.

Marisa describes herself as a “reluctant capitalist” — someone who recognises the realities of the economic systems we live within while also questioning the extractive values they often promote. Her work explores the complex relationship between women, wealth and capitalism, and in this episode, we talk through the tension many purpose-led women feel between profit and purpose, and what it might look like to build wealth without replicating systems of harm.

This conversation touches on themes of responsibility, sovereignty, burnout and the ways women are often conditioned to extract from themselves in order to succeed.

We also explore how alternative approaches — rooted in community, ecosystems and collaboration — might offer a different path forward.

This is a rich and reflective conversation about the deeper questions surrounding money, work and what it means to create sustainable change in the world.

In This Episode We Speak About:

• Why many women feel conflicted about wealth and profit

• The concept of “self-extraction” and why it leads to burnout

• How capitalism shapes the way we think about success and work

• The myth of bootstrapping and the power of networks and relationships

• Why building wealth comes with responsibility

• The importance of caring for ourselves before trying to change the world

• Rethinking individual success through an ecosystem lens

Taw S2 Ep1 Crib Sheet

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About Marisa Guthrie

Marisa Guthrie is a business coach and author of The Reluctant Capitalist1.

With over 30 years at the sharp edge of ethical enterprise as a serial founder, CEO, Managing Director of a cross-party think tank, and advisor to an All-Party Parliamentary Group on micro business, she has seen what purpose-driven business looks like when it works, and when it quietly collapses under the weight of a misaligned model.

She now supports solo and micro entrepreneurs in navigating the space between profit and purpose as they build businesses aligned with their values.

She brings a systemic lens to business, helping them generate wealth ethically and sustainably without replicating the extractive patterns often embedded in modern entrepreneurship.

You can find Marisa on Substack.

The Reluctant Capitalist Book and October Summit

Marisa will be hosting her Make Money, Make Change summit in October, which will go deeper into the ideas behind the book, in conversation with others who are also building differently.

Marisa is offering a free summit ticket to those who purchase a copy of her book. You can find the full details for the book and the summit on Marisa’s Substack.

About The Awakening Woman Podcast

The Awakening Woman Podcast is a monthly podcast focusing on what it means for women to live, create and build in deeper alignment with themselves and the world around them.

Through conversations with writers, thinkers and practitioners, we will explore themes of:

• embodiment, healing and spirituality

• systems and society

• creativity and sovereignty

• wealth, work and liberation

If something in this conversation resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you.

You can join the conversation by sharing your reflections in the comments.

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A bit about me...

Hi, I’m Florence. Mother, writer, and voice and visibility midwife for women returning to themselves and their creative expression. I work with women—particularly mothers—who sense there is more truth, more life, and more of their voice waiting to be lived and expressed.

Through my writing, podcast, 1:1 Threshold support, and the Embodied Living Circle, I hold spaces that invite honesty, embodiment, and self-trust—so women can move at the speed of their own truth and create from a place that feels deeply aligned.

For women ready to birth their medicine into the world, I offer Creatrix-level support rooted in psychology-informed learning and content design—supporting embodied transformation and work that creates lasting, meaningful impact.

Visit my Work With Me page or message me directly to explore alignment.

Thank you for being a part of the Creatrix Corner. At the end of February, I interviewed the amazing Marisa Guthrie to kick off the launch of the new season of The Awakening Woman Podcast.

The episode goes live tomorrow, but as a lil’ thank-you for being part of Creatrix Corner, I want to share the full video interview with you today.

Why you’ll want to watch/listen.

I personally think this is a must for conscious female founders looking to grow their business differently.

The full video, including the podcast intro and outro (which is pretty cool if I say so myself), can be found here on YouTube. I’m having trouble exporting it as it’s pretty large.

Also, here’s a handy crib sheet with key people, terms and concepts mentioned (thanks, Claude ;).

Taw S2 Ep1 Crib Sheet

127KB ∙ PDF file

Download

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From there, we step into the heart of this month’s focus: experiments.

In this transmission you’ll hear:

• Why life is already offering us experiments — and what it means to become conscious of the loops we’re in

• The difference between reacting inside a loop and intentionally entering an experiment

• A personal story from my first teaching job that illustrates how life keeps presenting the same scenario until we’re ready to meet it differently

• Three pathways to experiment with this month: honesty, timing, and responding — each gentle, each your own to take or leave

Read more

“I’m done with Brown girl healing.”

I could feel the finality in her words.

Without anything else being said, those six words carried so much weight: betrayal, confusion, anger, hurt, grief, sadness—and maybe the quiet thread that lived under all of those…

othering.

The lived reality of being shamed by people who looked like her, people she had grown up with, communities where she was supposedly safe, and made to feel like who she was outside of the role she was meant to perform didn’t belong.

I didn’t know how her words would touch me, but something inside me knew they would.

They lingered—for days, in the way only words that touch at truth can.
Resurfacing in moments of stillness, knocking gently on the walls of my mind, rehearsing the line in the secret places of my soul until it became almost a chorus of realisation.

To the untrained eye and ear, it might sound like she had given up on helping other Asian women find liberation and healing. That is likely the conclusion she herself came to when the words left her.

I could feel the frustration, the hurt, the worry.

Why are they not getting it?
Why can’t they just see I’m trying to help them?
Why aren’t they able to let go of the limiting beliefs and habits that are keeping them stuck?

But those words were not her own; they are borrowed words.

What she was experiencing in that moment—what I too have experienced—is the reality that many Black and Brown women face when the world of personal development and empowerment meets the reality of their culture.

Culture.

It seems like such a flat word.

It doesn’t do justice to the immense weight of it.

Culture is not a construct.

Culture isn’t just about beliefs and traditions. It’s not simply patterns or ways of doing things.

It is buried deep—not just in the collective system, but perhaps more powerfully in our nervous system.

It’s what the body learns is safe, dangerous, acceptable, or required, often before we even have language.

And for a woman in a Black or Brown body, culture is not just identity—it is survival intelligence. Strategy that shapes how to move through hostile environments, what keeps you inside community, and what allows ideas and practices to survive beyond displacement, colonisation, and migration.

This reality is not fully understood within personal development, self-help, and women’s empowerment spaces, because they are largely White-coded. They do not deal with survival in the same way Black and Brown communities have had to.

They do not see the real dynamics that must be navigated constantly, often invisibly, to reclaim your right to simply be.

Healing and empowerment, as handed down in the West, do not account for the fact that Black and Brown women are often positioned at the lowest end of the social hierarchy. If the hierarchy is White men and then White women, Black and Brown women are often beneath their men and, at times, even their children.

I think this is why the matriarchy dialogue has felt so irritating to me; it carries an assumption.

In a utopian world where everyone is equal, it might seem like a straightforward move to centre women and mothers. But when you look at who is shaping the dialogue—and who is being left out—it’s not enough.

It’s not enough to say that matriarchy is not a White concept but something learned from indigenous cultures, because this argument falls flat when it moves unaware of the reality of what it actually costs for a woman living today in said cultures.

It speaks to possibility, but not to consequence.

Because the truth is that even the frameworks meant to liberate us can miss this. The matriarchy discourse, as it stands, imagines a world where change can be uniformly adopted rather than one where it must be negotiated carefully, sometimes quietly, and often at a price.

As a Black woman living in this reality, I have still been blind to it.

Even as talk of matriarchy grated on me, I still wondered why the vast majority of my subscribers are not women who look like me or come from the global majority. I wondered about the race discrepancy in the people who choose to work with me. I grieved it, questioned it, wondered and worried about it.

I made it about me.

I wondered whether I was the problem. Maybe they couldn’t relate to me. Maybe I wasn’t “Black enough” (I have had that said to me before).

And when I finished blaming myself, I made it about them, about their resistance to change.

But something shifted in me, and this essay reflects that.

Growing up in a traditional West African family, as the eldest daughter, there has been a lot of weight and expectation placed on me. At times, it has felt suffocating.

For a long time, I couldn’t understand why I always felt so powerless. Then I began to “do the work.”

Yet as much “work” as I have done over the years—enough to leave a religion I was born into, enough to separate and leave a marriage that ticked many of the boxes from the outside at least—I can still feel the heavy weight of culture when it presses down on me.

It is this awareness that created the shift.

Where I once questioned and lamented why more Black women wouldn’t choose themselves over destructive or toxic patterns, I don’t think I fully saw the weight, the burden, the cost of everything they were navigating.

What does it cost for a Brown woman to leave a religion she has known from birth that forces her into invisibility and silence?

What does it cost a Black woman to walk away from an abusive and toxic man who holds power in her community?

What does it cost a woman of colour to say, “I am gay” or “I am queer”?

What did it cost women like Audre Lorde or Bell Hooks to live their lives and speak truth into the world?

And, what does it cost the rising voices in intersectional feminism today to speak up against the normalisation that creates invisibility in their lived realities?

We forget this truth:

Liberty has a cost.

It costs death.
Sometimes bodily death.
But more often, the death looks like loss, erasure, consequence—before any rebirth, before resurfacing into a world that no longer fits or feels like it did before.

These are not small prices to pay.

It’s not always “live your best life”, and everything will rearrange nicely around you.

And the truth of this is hardly spoken at all.

Healing isn’t equal, so the question isn't what Black and Brown women need to heal, but rather to rethink the whole concept of healing.

Western concepts of healing lean towards individuation—wisdom largely shaped by White men whose ability to individuate did not require the same level of relational rupture, cultural consequence, or survival risk.

When you recognise the impact of culture, you begin to see that it is embodied; it can’t help but be.

Questioning culture doesn’t sever your ties to it.
Challenging ideas or addressing limiting beliefs doesn’t erase its impact.

It still holds in the body:
the danger,
the betrayal,
the grief,
the confusion—
the cost.

A woman might know she wants a different life…

…but her body says:

If I do this, I could lose my family, my belonging, my identity.

And that’s not irrational.

Neither is it weakness, or not wanting it enough.

It’s not resistance, it’s reality.

Because the body doesn’t just hold culture as expression, it holds it as survival coding.

The Road towards Liberation

I think this is why many Black women choose to work with women who feel more culturally familiar, or visibly African or Black-coded.

There is a quiet sense of safety in working with someone who potentially understands what you have to navigate without you needing to explain it.

A woman who uses Afro/Asian aesthetics, who speaks of cultural deities, priestesses, rituals and practices, can feel like a safer route to liberation—one that cannot be underestimated.

There is something beautiful and powerful in this, especially when it comes to understanding roots and breaking ancestral and generational ties.

Yet my journey and work have revealed another layer beyond this, one that not every woman, regardless of race, chooses to walk.

It’s the layer that surfaces when a woman feels ready to honestly face herself—to come face to face with the systems, the conditioning, and yes, the cultural ties that have held her in place.

But this is where the tension becomes more pronounced, where the costs are felt more keenly in women of colour.

I have a beautiful deck of African goddess oracle cards. They sit in a box alongside my crystals and essential oils in a cupboard in my bedroom.

I would love to use them more regularly. They help me stay grounded and connected to aspects of my roots displaced in me over generations, and yet…

I am a busy, now single mum, holding up the world every single day. The cards are not my go-to practice. They are not what I reach for to help me reveal more of who I am and create in the way I know I can, beyond conditioning, within this system. I need something that meets me in the bigness of my life.

And this brings me back to Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, and any Black or Brown woman who reached a place within herself where she knew she could not hold the work inside her if she stayed on the other side of her truth.

Facing your truth is not the same as healing.

It is death and descent, and it is resurfacing as someone more you.

This is a big part of the work I do with the women who choose to work with me. And now I know that it’s not because Black and Brown women don’t want change, or don’t want to do the work. Now I know it’s not because I am not enough, but because there will be a cost—and that means they are entitled to choose whether they are ready to face it and with who.

I’ve always known Black women to be strong, but this makes me see their strength in a whole different light — and Oh! The courage of my Black and Brown sisters.

They don’t need to invest to prove they are doing the work.

Doing the work can begin with the first step of quiet courage to orient towards themselves and stay in contact with what arises.

And I see the honesty in that.
I see the courage in every Black and Brown woman who orients toward truth, even when the cost is real and the path is unclear. That courage deserves to be named — not as a consolation, but as the truth of what it actually is.

Real work.

So what do Black and Brown women need to heal?

I’m not sure they need healing at all—not as it’s been handed down to us.

Maybe the more honest question is around what it takes to become more fully yourself, on your own terms, in your own time.

Maybe what we really need is more of that honesty. The honesty that the healing offered as universal is accessible only when certain conditions are met, and those conditions aren’t equally available to everyone at all times.

For some bodies, healing just costs more.

Thank you for reading and being here.

Much love,

Florence U. x

Ps. If you have gained benefit from this essay and believe others will too, you can let the Sunstack algorithm know by hearting, sharing or leaving a comment.

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A bit about me...

Hi, I’m Florence. Mother, writer, and voice and visibility midwife for women returning to themselves and their creative expression. I work with women—particularly mothers and women of colour—who sense there is more truth, more life, and more of their voice waiting to be lived and expressed.

Through my writing, podcast, 1:1 Threshold support, and the Embodied Living Circle, I hold spaces that invite honesty, embodiment, and self-trust—so women can move at the speed of their own truth and create from a place that feels deeply aligned.

For women ready to birth their medicine into the world, I offer Creatrix-level support rooted in psychology-informed learning and content design—supporting embodied transformation and work that creates lasting, meaningful impact.

Visit my Work With Me page or message me directly to explore alignment.

Whether you’re new here or you’ve been chilling with me for a while, welcome. I’m so glad you are here.

There has been some change in the wind, those of you who have been walking a while with me may have felt it. This post is really about owning it for real and sharing more about the whys and hows.

I’ve been thinking and operating as if my Substack were a publication, but the truth is, it’s not.

It is many things.

A movement, an orientation, an exploration, a discovery, a healing space that has allowed me to begin to articulate a philosophy that I didn’t know I was developing, let alone living, Embodied Living.

I want to honour that.

This space is not simply somewhere I come to write essays for the sake of it, even when it was me writing just for me, it was always held as a space for my growth and evolution, but over the past year in particular, it has become increasingly clear to me that there is a deeper purpose behind the sharing and work that I am called towards.

Last year was pivotal in that I launched The Awakening Woman Podcast and began to use the word Creatrix more in my writing.

I know Creatrix is often described as an archetype. But for me, it has become something more than that. It is the idea that we can create and birth something meaningful, powerful, even when constrained by systems, even within chaos. Not through control, but through faith, hope, direction, and relationship with life itself.

This connects closely with the concept of dharma.

Not simply as personal calling or individual purpose, but something more. Because we are part of the universal unfolding, the universe itself is in a process of becoming, constantly desiring and moving towards a fuller expression of life, and human creativity is one of the ways evolution unfolds.

And this is why the voices that have historically been silenced, suppressed, or pushed to the margins matter so profoundly.

We want change.
We are tired of the destructive old that is passing away, yet how can we bring in something new?
How can the world evolve through only a narrow range of experience?
It needs the full spectrum of humanity. If we truly want new and different, then the world also needs the medicine that comes from people who have had to create from places where creation once seemed impossible.

Because we prove it is possible.

That the old way, the normalised way, isn’t the only valid route.

This is deeply personal for me, not just because I am a woman but also because I do not come from privilege. While I was born and raised in the UK, I also experienced deprivation and grew up within communities that face discrimination and marginalisation. I can’t begin to explain how this has shaped me. Shaped how I move and hold myself. Shaped if, how and when I feel safe to express myself, how my nervous system responds to risk, and how much I believe my voice matters.

Creativity and self-expression aren’t neutral, which is why last year, The Awakening Woman was such a powerful turning point for me. The timing was perfect. After a year spent working in a children’s social work charity and being exposed to new ways of understanding my lived experience, I could finally say it out loud.

None of this is OK.
None of this is normal, and I am done acting like who I am, my life, my story, my dreams do not matter.
I have worth. I have value.
And I will rise because I choose myself, and I choose life.

I recognise that we don’t all get an equal shot at creativity, and I think that is what makes my work different. I don’t spiritually bypass, whitewash or sugarcoat the inequities around creativity and self-expression. I know there are barriers, I live them and yet…

I also believe that we all still carry something that wants to be expressed, that wants to be given back into creation. I want every woman, regardless of her lived circumstances, to feel that her truth, her voice, her beingness matters, and that in itself can be a whole journey.

The journey that offers back unique medicine to this world.

Creatrix energy says:
We do not wait for perfect conditions.
We create from where we are, and in doing so, we help shape the world we want to live in.

Another turning point came from starting the Creatrix Rising experiment late last year. Called Creatrix rising in recognition of the journey, the process. It started with a possibility, a question:

I began documenting the experiment. Not as a woman who knew the answer because she had reached the other side, but in real-time as a woman living the reality of single-parenting a young child, while holding dreams of creating a fuller, better life beyond my experiences to date in a system that would rather hold me down.

A big part of this has been examining what I have inherited and absorbed, what I want to keep, change or let go of e.g. like my last essay on Why I Am No Longer Building a Business. That was a biggie. Ydes, it had been happening under the surface for years, but it needed someone else to help articulate it to help it reach my consciousness in a way that I could begin to apply practically, intentionally.

Because I realised something.

I don’t want to build a machine.
I want to tend and nurture a field.
I want more life in my life.
And I want more community and connection.
If it doesn’t feel like me, if it doesn’t fit my life, I don’t want it.

With that realisation comes intention and responsibility.

And so this Substack is evolving in a way that honours both my desire to be in sacred community, connection, and collaboration with other women and the needs of my real life.

The responsibilities I have to my daughter.
The responsibilities I have to myself.
Because I only have so much energy and time to give.

That is why this space now has three layers, each an invitation to engage at a different depth but always returning to my desire to help women step into their own Creatrix potential.

The Field

This is the starting point. To me, it represents the open field before you get to the homestead.

It’s where I will post occasional public essays on how I’m experiencing Embodied Living in connection with liberation, motherhood, spirituality, or healing.
I am restarting my podcast as a monthly interview series featuring women whose work I believe we can all learn from. The podcast will live here.

Anyone can browse and linger here, but as a token of appreciation to my free subscribers, when I have capacity, I will send out spontaneous private emails containing thoughts and transmissions I’m forming in the moment.

Who this layer is for.

This Field is spacious by design.

It is for people who sense something awakening within them and want to explore these ideas in their own time. While I write as a Black woman and mother, the doors are open to anyone who wishes to stay a while.

The Creatrix Corner

The Creatrix Corner is the second layer.

This is the house you arrive upon as you wander and walk more deeply into the field.

This space is specifically for women who feel the pull toward expression, visibility, and creatrix energy who want to be in connection with other women exploring that path.

I envision most of my posts living here, including the ongoing Creatrix Rising experiments.

Yes, there are benefits to being in the house, such as receiving bonus podcast content, e.g. video interviews, Q&As, or deeper reflections.

But that’s not where the spark is.

To me, this is the first step into community and sistership.

I haven’t used the chat feature much yet because it hasn’t felt right until now. But it will exist here, and I have big dreams for it.

Like a warm kitchen or cosy lounge room buzzing with voices, this will be a hub. Not somewhere I lead from the front, but a communal space where women can connect, collaborate, ask questions, and support each other as we develop our voice and work in the world.

I’ll also be hosting a fortnightly notes and post-booster thread there.

The Creatrix Corner is available via paid upgrade priced intentionally at £15 per month or £80 annually, to honour either financial capacity in the now or long-term commitment readiness.

The Deeper Field

The final layer is for those ready for deeper commitment and contact.

You can think of it as a private room near the back of the house, somewhere to go for more intimacy, depth and connection with myself or a few other women.

This layer includes my 12-month sistership space, the Embodied Living Circle, and my 1:1 Threshold Field containers for personalised threshold and creatrix support.

For those of you who don’t know or want a quick reminder, the Embodied Living Circle is a small circle of women (currently a beautiful circle of 3) designed around the practice of Embodied Living, returning to relationship with themselves, each other and Life and seeing what this births through us over the year. If you’ve been on the edge or hesitating, I am leaving one space open for a woman who has been feeling the pull for the next week or so. If you think that’s you or you’re curious to find out more, you can reach out to me via DM.

Both of these spaces include complimentary access to the Creatrix Corner.

I can feel the energetic shift that this represents.

And I will be honest: there are two parts of me in tension right now.

The part that says:

Stay safe.
Keep things as they were.

And the part that says:

You are no longer that person.

You cannot create the life you want for yourself and your daughter while disrespecting your energy, your time, and the work you are here to do.

So this is the evolution… my evolution.

Trust is my word for 2026.

And this moment is asking me to lean more fully into it.

Whether you choose to remain in the Field or step into one of the deeper layers, you are welcome here to move in whatever way feels right for you.

With warmth and love as always,

Florence U. x

PS. If you’re new here, the easiest way to explore this space is to begin in the Field — read a few essays, listen to the podcast, and see what resonates.

If you later feel the pull toward deeper participation and community, the Creatrix Corner is where that begins.

And… if you’d like to explore these ideas further, you might enjoy these pieces:

• The Embodied Living Path
  An introduction to the philosophy that sits underneath much of my writing.

• Creatrix Video
  A critique of feminine embodiment and why creatrix energy isn’t about waiting for salvation or bypassing our lived reality.

• Why I Am No Longer Building a Business
  A reflection on leaving the machine model of work behind and beginning to think in terms of fields and ecosystems.

You can also type in creatrix and embodied living in the search function for an idea of other posts in the archive.

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This post is the first of the monthly teaching/transmission elements of the circle, and as such, I decided to do a spontaneous recorded audio instead of just writing a post.

For ease of access, I have also added a downloadable PDF to read if you prefer.

You will receive a separate logistical email later today.

Until then.

With love.

Florence U. x

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We hold on because we want to know or think we know, but I’ve learnt the hard way that holding on often causes more friction for the journey.

I thought that simply wanting or believing something was enough to make it so. I was wrong.

I didn’t realise a fundamental truth.

Everything is alive, maybe not all in an animate, sentient way, but it communicates with us if we allow it to.

I probably first saw this in relationships, realising that, regardless of how much I might want to steer the direction of how things unfolded, I could not know or control another human being. It’s funny to say it now, but that came as a shock to me.

But we don’t just do it with people, we do it with life in its various aspects.

Like how I held on tightly to the image of God that was given to me, afraid to see what else might present itself if I loosened my grip.

You see, life is always speaking to us in a myriad of ways. It wants to reveal itself to us if we let it.

Life is responsive and communicative.

This awareness was my first step towards developing the Embodied Living framework — this idea that you could be in relationship with the world around you and learn from and about it via deep listening.

But Embodied Living isn’t just about listening, it’s about using that feedback to co-create alongside what life reveals to you along the way.

We’ve been led to believe that not getting it right from the get-go is failure. It really isn’t.

It’s data.

But data is only useful if we listen to it, and we can’t listen if we’re holding on too tightly, thinking we know what the next step or final outcome should or must look like.

This Substack is an example of that. When I first started writing back in 2022, I thought I was creating a quiet space to deconstruct Christianity. It might have started out that way, but the more contact I had with myself, with life, the more the shape of what I was creating here changed.

All my posts were questions, explorations, me learning how to listen and make contact, and feeling into the answers that wanted to surface.

It was messy and often painful, sitting with the uncertainty of discomfort, the chaos of the threshold.

Yet it was part of what has allowed me to connect with my voice and its unique texture, and somewhere along the line, I began to speak into women’s empowerment and liberation in a way that was all my own.

But I didn’t get here alone. Other women paved the way for me, women who were bold and courageous in speaking in their own voice, sharing their own truth, giving me something to be inspired by and to aspire to.

When I first started writing, I couldn’t have foreseen the pivots that would get me here. Not failure — data, byproducts of the journey.

And now something else is emerging. Maybe you have been feeling it already in my posts.

The Embodied Living Circle is a part of this.

Historically, I’ve used this space to share my thoughts out loud, but it’s still been very much one-directional — writer and audience. But at the end of last year, going into this year, I felt a pull for something else to come through, another way of relating: a desire for community, connection, collaboration.

But like any change — and this is a big one for me — I can feel the honesty of the pull alongside the vulnerability of it.

This is my edge, my threshold.

Fire Horse

People are talking a lot about fire horse energy, and it’s all go, go, go.

Bigger. Better. Bolder.

But to me it’s been more than that.

While the horse might be about strength, movement, stamina, the fire for me isn’t about being fast, ferocious or forceful.

It’s about transformation.

Fire initiates.
It burns and clears.
It melts and refines.
It purifies.

The fire isn’t evidenced by what remains when the embers die down, but in the journey itself — in the being in the flames, in the transformation that is worked out.

That’s a different sort of fire horse energy.

It’s not push. It’s not a rush to not be left behind, but looking into the flames to see what it wants to reveal.

When we meet fire horse energy from a place of gripping, fear or urgency, it can distort.

We try to ride the horse before we’ve even listened to where it’s going or what it wants from us.
We try to command the fire without understanding what it’s here to burn or illuminate.

And this is where I feel the subtle but important distinction that Embodied Living asks of us.

Because from this lens, the question is not:

How do I use this energy to get ahead or get what I want?

But rather:

What is this energy showing me?
What is it asking of me?
What wants to move through me, rather than be forced by me?

And as I mentioned above, going into 2026, the fire is telling me that my next level of transformation, the depth and change that I can bring to my work, is through honouring my desire to connect, a desire for community and collaboration.

As someone who has been sharing their process, writing, thinking alone, holding my own process for years, working individually with clients who quietly reach out, I’ve been a best-kept secret. It’s felt safer for me, which is why moving from private to a more relational body of work feels exposing and vulnerable, but also — oddly, or maybe not so oddly — true for what this year is calling forth in me.

The Embodied Living Circle is the first step into this threshold.

I’m excited and grateful for the women who have already registered their interest. Feeling into this, I realised that actually, this circle isn’t meant to hold 10 women, but 4 or 5 who are ready to go on their own fire journey and do it holding hands together.

We start on the 9th of March.

If you’ve been opening the emails and posts and sensing into whether this could be for you, take this as a nudge from life that you can choose to listen and respond to.

There is still a space for you.

Most importantly, this is how we co-create. This is how we transform.

And in the upcoming weeks, I will share more about the other ways this Substack is changing to focus on community, connection and collaboration.

Just as you have been with me up until now, I hope that you will continue to journey alongside me.

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With love,

Florence U. x

If this piece spoke to something in you, the Embodied Living Circle is where this work is lived and practised together.

A small group of women doing life in real time and in honest contact with what is

You’re welcome to join us.

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She shared that she’s never liked the word scaling and much prefers the word growth. And then she offered a garden analogy, which has slowly been taking root within me since.

This post is a reflection on what emerged.

The Thing With Business…

Ever since I fell into entrepreneurship, I’ve been working from a concept of business that was never mine—an inherited model absorbed and normalised over time. It taught us to see business as something mechanical, a capitalistic machine that disregards people and land in its pursuit of more money, and as much of it as possible. While this philosophy shaped my approach for so long, it didn’t fit.

Like Liz, the word scaling has never sat right with m…

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The world feels heavy right now, like everything is burning all around us. Add on top of the daily realities of living life, well, the last thing I want to do is read posts on how to grow my Substack or business, and yet...

I’ve realised something.

When the world feels hard, we go back to the same things that never actually move the needle.

We’ve become accustomed to holding it all in until it feels so intolerable that all that’s left is to scream our pain and bewilderment into the void.

The void.

A word heard and used time and time again.

It sounds like it should be empty, vast, infinite...

Yet it is able to swallow everything we don’t want to feel and every experience we don’t want to see the light of day.

The void has become what we are choosing to escape from.

Like giving our sins back to the scapegoat Azaezel, we dump what we don’t want to hold or feel into its darkness.

But the truth remains, individually and collectively, we are hurting.

We might gloss it …

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A realisation hit me, and I knew I just needed to stop and capture it in the moment.

If you’ve ever felt the pull to create change in your life or the lives of others. If you’ve questioned your capacity or doubted your worthiness because you felt too much, too small or under-resourced, then this one is for you, sweet one.

We aren’t told this enough, so I’ll tell it to you today.

Your humanity was never the problem; they just made you believe it was.
The truth is, it’s the way through.

If this lands, leave a comment, heart, share widely and feel free to reach out via message if you are looking for support on the journey.

Speak soon.

Florence U. x

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I talk about receiving money in this post, but this isn’t a post about manifestation or outcomes. This is a reflection on how I’m remembering the shape of trust even while living inside real constraint.

Best read slowly.

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There’s something about the clock resetting to January 1st that brings on that special kinda crazy that comes with second chances. Many of us are still wrestling with giving ourselves permission to actually rest during the holiday season, but then the goal-getting, manifest-millions, live-your-best-life fever takes over, and a frenetic energy begins to stir the air.

I’m not immune to it. It makes me wonder whether I’m being too laissez-faire, and maybe it’s in my best interests as a single mum to join in and discover all the secrets to finally make this year the year I win at life.

But underneath the nervous energy, a steady truth hums.

A truth I’m delighted to see is being spoken about more and more, especially by women reclaiming life outside the hustle, grind, and fear-mongering paradigm.

This truth is one that I have been sitting with for a while because it highlights a tension unfolding in real-time, a splitting between those who are still absorbed in and following the trail of never…

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I’ve lived through a lot. My first professional job since becoming a mum ended at the end of 2024, and with that, my financial independence. I transitioned from a solo mum to a single mum raising a young daughter. And I decided to go “all in,” as best I could given my circumstances, on growing my Substack and freelance work.

So I’ve decided to do something different to mark my last post of the year.

I’m going to interview myself, I mean, ask myself some questions to tap into some of what I’ve been feeling and integrating over this last while.

But first of all, whether you are a new or longer-term subscriber, thank you for being here and walking this path alongside me.

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don’t show me your fragility
i cannot bear to see it.
your vulnerability only reminds me of my own,
your weakness an echo of my fear of losing control.

don’t speak to me of sorrow —
i would rather bury my head in the ground,
surround myself with love and light,
denying any existence of pain or suffering.

your authenticity disgusts me.
why should i have to see what i cannot bear to look at?
why do you push me to confront the darkness of night?

no — i refuse.
let me rest a bit longer in the comfort of this illusion,
a promise of certainty if i just hold on a bit longer,
try a bit harder,
believe a bit more strongly.

but i can’t help but remember your words —
they knock at the edges of my mind.
do they call or mock me?

what would happen if i turned to face them —
turned to face me?

do i have the strength and the courage to be here,
or should i continue to lie in this cloud of softness
atop this bed of nails?

I wrote this poem a week after publishing my first Creatrix Rising post. The silence that followed hitting publish felt heavy and deafening. I felt it, and a part of me wanted to retreat.

But I took it for what it was. As a truth-teller, my words are not always palatable. This poem became my way of asking why we’re so afraid of realness, rawness and how we’ve learned to hide our humanity behind curated light.

Sharing that post, sharing this poem was brave on my part, an act of resistance against the part of me that wanted to recoil back into perceived right-standing with the masses and comfort, instead, I chose the inner solidarity that said:

I won’t self-abandon, I won’t make myself smaller to make myself more palatable, even if I only receive screaming silence in return.

Guess what?

That choice cracked me open just enough.

I thought, what the hell, even when it feels uncomfortable, even when it feels scary or vulnerable, even when it feels like I’m speaking into the void, I’m going to write anyway, and I’m not just going to write, I’m going to write my damn truth. I’m going to show up for the version of myself who believes so strongly in what I have to say and believes it is worth telling.

And something shifted.

When I gave myself that permission, when I allowed myself to be so true regardless of whether it was pleasing, acceptable, palatable or not, I started receiving from the field. Words, thoughts, feelings, images, transmissions poured out in notes, and one of them even managed to pierce the silence, bringing with it gifts.

It showed me something: you get to decide who you want to be.

The person who is pushed back to comfort when faced with discomfort or the person who meets and embraces it.

This is a microcosm of the whole of life. Each choice we make is creative, generative, taking us closer to or further from the truth of our own becoming.

Two Kinds of Spaces

I see this a lot in the online space, maybe more clearly now than ever.

Maybe you can also notice it in two key ways that women show up online and in the spaces they create.

One space feels like you’ve walked into an exclusive designer boutique that feels too out of reach; a particular “you can’t touch this” quality about it. It may leave you feeling inspired, but it also leaves you with the echoes of you’ll never quite get here reverberating through your nervous system. You hungrily consume content not because it is nourishing but because it feels like if you don’t, you’ll miss out.

Yes, I’ve been that hungry consumer - I’m aware of that pattern, aware of why it lives in me. It taps into an ancestral or survival fear, which is why so many coaches and gurus still position themselves from here. It’s why Instagram does so well, it’s aspirational and hierarchical, maintained through scarcity, insecurity and FOMO.

And then there are some spaces that just feel like home.

You notice the difference in your body, the release, the way it deepens, relaxes and softens around the edges. You get comfortable, you lean in, you decide to stay for a while.

Maybe you know the kind of space I mean; it’s what I hope this space is for many of you. A place to return to for nourishment, even when the words feel difficult, even when they stretch you, because you know that sustenance can be found.

What’s the difference between these two spaces?

It’s the consciousness behind them. The women behind them. The beliefs and the values they hold.

But here’s the real kick: how many times do we give more credence and weight to the spaces that feel put-together and trigger anxiety while undervaluing the second, even when it’s doing the most sacred work?

I want to really get into this today because it has meat and is vitally important whether you are a female creator or “consumer”.

The Perception of Value

Why do we see some things as more valuable than others? The difference is the perceived value we assign to them, and that value reflects not only what we choose to pay for but also the kind of spaces we create for ourselves.

Yes, I’m talking about money, but I’m also talking about more than money. Money is only the instrument, a truth-telling mirror that brings the scaffolding to light.

And so it’s no wonder that talk about money and value is imbued with so much energy and emotion. Still, as I said, it’s an important conversation to have if you are a woman, especially if you are a less-resourced or privileged woman.

Money is a mirror, but what does it reflect back to us?

The silence after my first Creatrix Rising post.

The poem that emerged out of it.

The frequency shift that resulted from choosing truth regardless.

The note that went viral.

The processing that arose from it and all the moments in between were just confirmation of something I had already started seeing and processing.

We live in a world that favours attention hierarchy — a world where visibility becomes mistaken for worth, and polish becomes confused with truth. A world that teaches us that the more curated, the more distant, the more untouchable something is, the more valuable it must be.

We breathe that in. We internalise it without recognising that this is the very shape that is slowly suffocating us.

If this is the world we’ve inherited, it makes sense that so many of us have learned to dim, shrink, or self-edit.

It makes sense that we’ve forgotten what we sound like without an audience to impress.

Yet, once you see this hierarchy for what it is, the realisation hits:

It’s not our lack of ability that blocks us; it’s the system that teaches us to doubt our own enoughness before we’ve even begun.

So beautiful soul, I want to ask you,

What would life look like without that burden?
What would it feel like to create without the heaviness of the check-boxing to perform well?

Could you trust that there is space for your fullness and realness, even for the grief, the pain, the fear, the uncertainty, the scarred terrains you’re still walking, without the viral moments?

Could you trust that there is value, real value, in your truth, without having to devalue it or make it smaller because it doesn’t seem exclusive or shiny enough?

Because this system teaches us that hierarchy and separation are what create perceived value. If someone positions themselves as a more knowledgeable other or out of reach, if they mystify knowledge and speak as if they are the only ones who can lead you to the answer, it creates an energetic contract that we’ve learnt to sign our name to.

This is where and why so many conscious women with medicine get stuck.

We buy into the hierarchy, and it does two things:

• We are forever trying to ascend to a particular place, which often means buying more courses and programs that never truly scratch the itch (hint: because it’s non-existent) and…

• Because it erodes our self-trust, we undervalue ourselves, we position ourselves in ways that keep us struggling to receive, yes, receive money and the financial recompense of our labour and then spiritualise it to erode the cognitive dissonance.

Money as Mirror

Talking about money with women, especially women who see themselves as conscious, ethical or spiritual, is uncomfortable for me, and it also makes me angry. Angry because, as someone from a community of people who have been systematically marginalised and left to graft our way up for a crumb of acceptance and validation, I know how much that has shaped my sense of self-worth. How it’s made everything I do feel like it’s not enough and less valuable. And even when I have something amazing to give and offer the world, my nervous system is so vigilant about the cost of stepping out of safety that I unconsciously find ways to play it safe, stay small, and devalue my work.

So it really irks me when I see people spiritualise poverty or make not being resourced a moral or ethical virtue because there’s nothing holy about pretending that you don’t need money to live and create the life you desire, and honestly, I’m done with it.

And no, financial liberation doesn’t mean buying into the “charge your worth” brigade, making X amount of money, or selling “high ticket offers,” but it does mean being resourced so that you can begin to untangle from the trauma that keeps you living in scarcity and survival.

This is such important work for women; the less power and privilege you have or grew up with, the more critical it becomes.

And I want to say it again so that it’s super clear what I mean: financial liberation isn’t about money; it’s about finally recognising how the hierarchical conditioning we see in the system keeps us stuck. As long as we buy into the idea of never quite being enough, we never give ourselves the chance to be or have enough.

Because fundamentally, it doesn’t want you to recognise this truth:

Once you realise this, the question becomes not “am I enough?” but “can I trust myself to be resourced for my truth?” “Is this safe for me?” and then we are playing a completely different game.

Hierarchical structures do not want you to realise this because it breaks the perceived order of value. If there is no one to look up to, no perfect ideal to aspire to, if there is no one who has more, knows more, can help you get more, then how can the system survive?

This is rife within guru culture. I see subtle aspects of this when people encounter me: the expectation that, if I have wisdom to share, it should somehow make me more than I am. Because, well, hello, I’m imperfect, flawed, and have a lot going on in my real life. I know that there are quite a few people who feel let down when they discover that I, too, am a messy human because they’ve placed me on a pedestal. I’ve caught myself doing it too, so it’s not a judgment, just a mirror, a recognition that maybe we don’t show ourselves fully, authentically, because we’re scared of losing value in the eyes of others.

The Lie We’ve Bought

Maybe that’s one of the things keeping you stuck - the erroneous belief that you have to be more than you are right now because being you isn’t valuable enough?

It’s a lie.

You know it too.

We’ve bought into the pristine spaces that promise the world, then don’t.

We’ve also been in spaces where even their free offerings are life-shifting.

The perceived value of hierarchy is what enriches the elite spaces; it’s not the fact that they have more to offer.

I started this post with a poem reflecting how it feels to face someone’s truth and shrink away from it, and how that made me feel to be on the receiving end.

If we can't bear to look at our own humanity, we hide it away from others and convince ourselves that until we are fixed and whole, until we look the part, we cannot be of value.

Maybe, just maybe, that same fear, that same belief is the burden that keeps us stuck in our creative expressions and away from liberation in all its forms.

But you can’t create something real and meaningful while lying to yourself and others. And, you can’t attract what and who is truly yours if you’re only showing the illusion of togetherness to the world.

It’s time to stop lying - to ourselves and to each other.
And it’s time to build something that can hold us while we do.

In this day and age, when so many women are spiritualising or moralising about not having a paywall on Substack, I’ve decided to keep my paywall up, especially for these Creatrix Rising posts, where I share so much of my truth, time and energy. It’s strange to say that this is a radical act, but it really feels like it is. It’s not to extract money but as an intentional choice to honour myself - to say to my inner child that she is worthy of being held, supported and resourced.

But I’ve also created a third way because I get it.

If you can’t afford the full subscription and my work resonates with you, you can access Creatrix Rising for a month by leaving an offering of your choice - whatever amount feels true to what you have and what this work means to you.

This isn’t a scholarship. It’s not charity or a handout.

It’s recognition that the value of an offering and the capacity to pay aren’t the same thing and aren’t indicators of inherent worth. It’s me saying: I see you. I know that you’re giving what you have from your heart. Please come in.

I remember being the one on the outside, hoping someone would make space. Those doors stayed firmly shut, or opened only through language that kept the hierarchy intact - language that said “I have, you need, I’ll be generous.”

I don’t want to recreate that harm here.

When you offer what you have, and I offer what I have, we meet as equals. Your offering matters, and my work matters. We’re building something different together, and I welcome you in.

Beyond the Preview: What I’m Exploring in this Essay

Hi, I’m Florence Ukpabi, mama, Sacred Success Mentor and liberation-focused transformational guide helping women—especially mothers, women of colour, and soul-led changemakers—break free from internalised systems of hustle, silence, and self-sacrifice.

Beyond the paywall, this post dives deeper still into the ideas of enoughness, worth and value, and how money becomes both the mirror and the lens through which we live. I share the experience that helped me surface the third way mentioned above, and how it is shaping and transforming me and this space beyond what I could have conceived.

This post is for the woman who is tired of devaluing herself and is ready to begin to face the discomfort of advocating for her right to be resourced as she steps more fully into her truth.

Inside, I guide you through:

• What happens in the body when we collapse, shrink or self-edit

• The somatic truth of receiving and why it feels so exposed

• How a small act of generosity dismantled years of internalised scarcity

• The tension between safety and expansion in women’s creative lives

• Reclaiming the right to be resourced for your truth, not your performance

To continue reading, please choose the option that feels most right for you, and I’ll see you on the inside.

Much love always,

Florence U. x

PS. I’m so excited to share the launch of my new website. Though it’s in the first stages, you can find out more about my offerings, take The Collapse Quiz and leave a love offering.

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A woman with a staggeringly large Substack following recently conducted a series of polls on paying for subscriptions. At the time I completed the poll, only 3% of respondents said they would never pay for a subscription, while everyone else was open to it or already a paid subscriber to at least one Substack. And no, this doesn’t just apply to money-making and business publications!

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Today I woke up to a post from at .

She runs a monthly women’s salon, and November’s theme just so happened to be one close to my heart:

Does AI Have a Place in Creative Work?

And so I jumped at the opportunity to submit my essay, and found out via her post yesterday that it was one of the four selected for the salon.

To say that I was chuffed, proud and excited would be an understatement; I was all of that and more, but as I read the other three posts that were selected while busily trying to get my daughter off to school this morning. I realised even more so, just how complex and nuanced the entire conversation is.

I feel proud that my essay was selected for this crucial conversation, not because I wrote it, but because I think we are at a turning point. If we can have conversations like this, it gives me hope that we are not just riding the wave - we are taking back our right to think critically and maybe come to a little bit of an internal place of equilibrium.

And…

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My first reaction wasn’t excitement—it was panic.

“If this is virality, I don’t want it.”

Everyone speaks about virality as something to be desired, chased even. Honestly? Me too. I would scroll through Substack thinking, “What does it take to get noticed on this platform?”

What no one really talks about is how it makes you feel on the other side.

This post is part of the processing that came after—and I’m writing it because I haven’t seen anyone talking about this really important aspect of virality and the attention economy.

I started writing this while I was still in the “I hate this” phase.

I thought going viral (what a name) was something I wanted. It turned out there was much more to my relationship with attention than I realised.

It made me feel like a product.

What started on Saturday morning as a cute “Oh, my note has more engagement than usual” moment had, by Sunday, turned into full-blown dread as the Substack noti…

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The secret holding the promise of the elusive answer to help us all feel a bit better living in our skins.

But here’s what is not being said: much of what’s being taught as feminine embodiment is actually bypassing in disguise.

I talk about this in my latest Creatrix Rising post, The Truth about “Enough”.

And because it’s too important for me not to say again, I’m doing just that.

In this 8-minute video/audio, I explore what’s happening beneath the current wave of “embodiment” culture and how women today are unconsciously splitting into two extremes of what I call:

• The Ultra-Pragmatic Woman, bypassing through control, logic, and constant productivity,

• The Soul-Aligned Woman, who bypasses through spirituality, alignment and divine timing.

I’ve lived and been both, and here’s what I know to be true: both are trying to escape the same discomfort — being here, …

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Welcome…finally to Creatrix Rising. This post is ultra-long, so to get the full impact and make sure it’s not cut off, I suggest you read it directly on my Substack publication via the website or the Substack app.

Hope you enjoy it and if you do, tell a friend, share it, and show some love.

Florence U. x

I’m officially a single mum.

There, I said it.

It’s been a few weeks now, officially, but for years I’ve lived like it until I couldn’t live like it anymore.

I thought the change wouldn’t cost as much as it has—and I don’t mean financially, although that has definitely been a real cost. I mean energetically, psychologically, emotionally, physically, mentally.

I am a statistic.

If I wasn’t before, I most definitely am now.

“Single mother” rings differently than “stay-at-home mum” or “working mum.” Both of those have a kind of acceptability and respectability that single motherhood does not. And so it’s really no wonder that I now join the ranks of being another statistic.

But what does it mean to be a statistic?

It means that society has decided to dehumanise you, to fit you into a numeric value that condenses and summarises souls to tell a succinct story. Yet the truth is, behind every number is a living, breathing human being with a story.

When I first started dreaming Creatrix Rising into existence, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was creating; it was more an energy, an awareness moving through me than anything concrete at all. It was a mission and a vision, a realisation that awoke as I became aware of the systemic inequalities and injustices inherent in the system we live in for women, for mothers, for people in Black and Brown skin.

I realised something profound: no one was going to come and save you, and no amount of sacrifice, people-pleasing or waiting for someone else to fix it was actually going to create any real change that would benefit you or me.

And so, my content changed, as the decision to draw a line in my relationship cemented, the more I gave myself permission to speak to the very real pain silenced and marginalised women face within society.

Is it possible for me to truly live a life that doesn’t require either my soul’s death or my body’s burnout in order to be resourced and feel safe within the system?

Creatrix Rising wasn’t about creating another “how to create digital content or course to ditch your 9-5” nor was it a “follow this 5-step formula for success” kinda thing.

It was deeper, more.

For those of you who have been around here for a little while, you may even recall the first time I shared my mantra here:

Success isn’t Success if it bypasses your truth on any level.

These were the words that stayed with me on the wings of a dream - the faint echo of an initiation that followed me into the waking world and has shaped my work even before it was something that I could articulate.

We are given this idea of success as almost fait-accompli; this is what it is, and if it doesn’t look like this, then honey, it isn’t really success.

It’s why being a single mum is said in almost hushed tones. It doesn’t fit the success blueprint.

A working mum, even if she’s burning out, even if she has 0% time for herself, let alone her kids, is successful because she is still working the blueprint - feeding the economy, normalising the system. It doesn’t matter if she’s dying inside; her own cognitive dissonance will keep her stuffing down her truth until an inevitable breaking and reckoning is required.

I’ve seen her, I’ve been her - not a mum at that time, but that woman, that teacher, who thought the only way to prove her worth in a system that double dared her to stand the fuck up as a woman and person of Black skin was to work until her body broke down.

And even then, the fear, the conditioning, still made me too afraid to quit. I won’t go into the mystical experience which finally led me to honour my truth and leave, but it’s so telling that that’s what it took for me to permit myself to actually say “no more”.

And that’s if you’re a working mum/woman, but even if you’re a stay-at-home mum, you’re still playing the game, you’re still acceptable because you’re working the blueprint. You’re freeing up labour so that the economy still moves and shakes via your spouse; you become the perfect poster campaign for a traditional housewife, still sacrificing and coming last. He gets to work because you give him the capacity to.

Whichever way we look at it, society, at least this paradigm, requires a woman to be able to fit seamlessly into the cogs with as little resistance as possible. A woman who chooses to separate physically, a woman who begins to see the system for what it is, a woman who chooses to ask different questions and dares to pave a different way for herself - she is a threat and cannot be accepted or respected.

Embracing the Creatrix

Creatrix Rising isn’t about empowering women to create something they can monetise or sell while still being caged within the system, Creatrix Rising is about the woman who is ready to reveal the truth of her own sovereignty and creative agency, not just in relation to what she can do generate and sustain herself financially but what she can create to live a life that is more fully her own. It is liberation work.

But it’s become increasingly clear that this kind of creative uprising doesn’t just happen, nor is it pretty - it positions you not just against the external systems that will push and fight back, but the internal systems: your own conditioning, socialisation, nervous system, traumas and ancestry that work hard to keep you safe. It crashes against your everyday real-life lived reality and asks you:

“Are you sure?”
“Can you really?”
“Aren’t you just deluding yourself?”

This is the reason so many women give up time and time again. Not because they don’t want it enough (roll eyes), not because they can’t see through the lies to the truth, but because of the work that it takes every single day to create and rise.

The last few weeks have felt particularly heavy and difficult for me; creation has felt like an impossible task for my weary body and fractured, overwhelmed brain. It’s been all I can do to get myself and my 5-year-old daughter up Monday-Friday, ready her for school, make healthy meals, make sure she is happy, clean, safe, healthy and adjusting as best as she can to the monumental change in her life. I’ve done this while navigating a separation that was never pretty to begin with.

This is the reality of creation that nobody really talks about, the fact that creativity, this kind of truth-honouring creativity, doesn’t take place in a vacuum but in what often seems like the harshest landscapes of our real life.

We’ve bought into the 3x3 Instagram images, the edited posts of gurus that make it all seem so easy and inevitable.

The “watch me while I manifest 100k from ease and flow” posts (yep, I’ve seen that one a few times).

And when you don’t get the same result, the problem is you, not them, but no, my darling, you are not the problem. It’s the fact that they are still drawing on the system to make you feel like you’re not good enough.

So Creatrix Rising has morphed into an experiment.

An experiment that asks several important questions:

• Can I be more than a statistic?

• Is it possible to create from within chaos not merely a product, course or offer, but a life that doesn’t require the death of my soul or the burnout of my body?

• Is my voice, my truth, enough to liberate and sustain me? If so, under what conditions?

The Reality of Womanhood

The truth is that there have never really been many options for women outside of the patriarchal blueprints handed down to us.

According to data supplied for the 2022/23 US census, 28 out of every 100 single-mother families live in poverty. This is much larger than the percentage for married couples, which is about 5 in 100. What was even more shocking was the benchmark for poverty, which varies by a range of factors. For a 4-person family, the baseline for hitting poverty was an income of $27,750 per year.

Can anyone, let alone a 4-person household, really survive on that?

The UK figures are even more disturbing. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 44% of children in lone-parent families were in poverty in the latest data from 2022/23.

The Child Poverty Action Group’s (CPAG) most recent data reports that 43% of children in lone-parent families were in poverty, compared to 26% for couples.

The numbers speak for themselves: women and their children are being punished for reclaiming their liberation and sovereignty.

I made a very hard choice to leave the perceived benefits of a two-parent household, and it took me years of deliberation. I decided that I didn’t want my daughter to be raised in a blueprint that conditioned her to be a sacrificial lamb, and the best way that I could model that for her was to focus on my own rising.

But let’s be real. It’s hard out there, isn’t it?

So many people are struggling, so many people are afraid, and that is exactly the fear that keeps us stuck and tied to the system.

A Creative Experiment

While the concept of Creatrix may sound sexy and knowledgeable, I want to be clear that it isn’t about positioning myself as a guru. It goes back to the original life force of creation; the womb space, the void, the impossibility of what can be birthed from the darkness.

Creation itself is to step into chaos and bring life from it - this is the energy of the feminine creative principle. There is no order, no structure, no rule, only impulse and the pull towards Life.

Patriarchy has shut down this connection in us. Embodied Living asks us to reconnect to create.

I refuse to allow myself to be a slave any longer. I know it will be hard, but I also have hope and faith; this is why I am documenting and sharing my journey here. To remind myself, to assert my belief and to support others who want to rise too.

I’m creating FROM the chaos because that’s where truth lives. I’m not waiting to be perfect or ‘enough’ before I speak. This documentation IS the creative act, happening in real time.

A guru might say: “Join me to learn how to rise”.

But this space isn’t about that. Instead, I offer this:

Witness my creative experiment as it happens—in all its messy, uncertain, exhausted glory—because that’s what rising with skin and bones on actually looks like.

My goal: to write eight posts like this, one every 4-6 weeks.

To see whether I can be resourced simply by sharing my truth and my voice, through making about 20% of the essay free to access and the rest behind a paywall.

The first part of the post will introduce to the themes I’m exploring.

If you’ve felt yourself in these words so far, the rest of this post moves deeper.

Beyond the Preview: What I’m Exploring in this Essay

Hi, I’m Florence Ukpabi, mama, Sacred Success Mentor and liberation-focused transformational guide helping women—especially mothers, women of colour, and soul-led changemakers—break free from internalised systems of hustle, silence, and self-sacrifice. I am so glad you’ve landed here.

This particular post, beyond the paywall dives into the lived questions of enoughness, the fear of not being capable, and the initiatory dreams that showed me how karma, creation, and courage intertwine.

It holds:
✦ A raw reflection on the fear and grief that arise after freedom.
✦ A redefinition of “enoughness” through embodied living.
✦ Two teaching dreams—The Karma of Co-Creation and The Loop of Intervention—that reveal how we can shift the pattern and reclaim our agency.

So dear one, if these words already resonate, and you want to go further into this exploration with me, here’s how you can:
1) Upgrade to the paid subscription to read the full essay, currently £12.00 per month and grants access to my full ecosystem here.

OR

2) Leave a one-off contribution that feels good via my Buy Me A Coffee profile. And I’ll comp you in for a month; you’ll receive access to my entire Substack for the entire duration.

Choose the option that feels right for you and I’ll see you on the inside.

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The Fear of Not Enough

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This Substack is part of the revolutionary work I’m being called to do, not only to bring healing and liberation to myself and others but also to catalyse the changemakers and voices we need to create the kind of world we desire to live in. Every subscription, every “coffee”, every act of support, is part of resourcing this work so it can ripple further. Thank you for walking with me.

Florence Ukpabi
Mama, Liberation Guide & Sacred Success Mentor for Women

Buy Me A Coffee (other Beverage)

Subscribe now

Read more

This Substack is part of the revolutionary work I’m being called to do, not only to bring healing and liberation to myself and others but also to catalyse the changemakers and voices we need to create the kind of world we desire to live in. Every subscription, every “coffee”, every act of support, is part of resourcing this work so it can ripple further. Thank you for walking with me.

Florence Ukpabi
Mama, Liberation Guide & Sacred Success Mentor for Women

Buy Me A Coffee (other Beverage)

Subscribe now

Read more