It’s here, the official first episode of Becoming YOU Beyond Deconstruction - whoop whoop!
I decided to kick things off with a re-run of The Becoming Series, I loved doing those interviews so much and they were the reason why I decided to create a public podcast - so if you didn’t get a chance to listen or even just want to listen again now you can.
Instead of releasing three episodes today, I’m going to drip over the next few days.
I also decided to move my podcast over to Substack (yes, they do that here also - soooo amazing) what that means is that like every other post I write, you will get each new episode delivered to your inbox, available to listen on the Substack app in addition to anywhere you would usually listen to podcasts.
I know today is Black Friday and all. and I had been thinking about joining the masses and offering something but actually, there is nothing else I want to offer apart from this right now. I do feel something formulating and solidifying itself but it is not there yet so I will wait until it is before sharing it.
What I would really love from you is if you could write a review for the podcast on iTunes or Spotify - of course after listening to a couple of episodes if you’ve never listened to any before. As a thank you, I would love to offer a free oracle card pull for the first five people who leave a review and screenshot it back to me before Tuesday using this beautiful deck of Afrocentric oracle cards.
This episode sits with an awareness that deconstruction can feel very difficult and lonely but also honours it as an opportunity to reclaim life in a way that feels truly liberating and nourishing.
The purpose of deconstruction isn’t merely to reconstruct but it’s a portal back to our sacred self.
So in this episode, I talk more about the whole idea of Becoming, what it means and how it relates to the journey back to self. I also share my own journey, the catalyst for my more conscious and intentional deconstruction journey.
I hope you enjoy it.
Florence xxx
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Episode Transcript
Florence Okwusogu This is the first episode of Becoming yay, and I feel like there's so much to talk about, all the logistical stuff to get out of the way, but also explain this whole idea of becoming and returning them back to self a bit more. What is it?
I recently heard someone say that you don't think up ideas. Ideas find you, ideas find people who are most tuned into their frequency to bring them to birth. And that's how I feel about becoming. My own questioning, deconstruction and inner healing journey has meant that I saw a real opportunity to talk about the possibility and potential, rather than to focus on the pain and ugliness. Because whether you choose to call it questioning, deconstructing or something else, the truth is that this experience can feel really heavy and really distressing. We have to navigate the feelings of loneliness and isolation, the confusion, the fear, the doubt, the anxiety, along with the trauma and the grief. But my path has shown me that in any crisis there is also an opportunity for so much more.
So for me, deconstructing and deconstruction, my entire questioning journey has shown me that this is not the endpoint, that this is an invitation to journey into something else, into something potentially glorious, life-affirming and life-changing. It's an opportunity to journey back to ourselves. So I see Becoming as a celebration of freedom, potential and truth. The opportunity and permission to rediscover everything that you are, that you forgot or didn't allow yourself to remember in order to remain safe. And if you're here anyway, then this is something that you're probably interested in, there's a part of you that feels drawn, that feels a call to awaken and rediscover what was hidden away for safekeeping. I created this space for you. For us to explore and journey together. And what better way to illustrate the potential of this journey than by speaking to a few hand-selected people to share their own journey of returning back to Self? But before we go any further, I just want to take a moment to introduce myself.
You may already know me and you may have known me for years, or you may be quite new to me. My name is Florence. And I'm a mum to a beautiful two-year-old girl, a wife and a woman of black African heritage, born and raised in the UK. On the professional side, I spent most of my life working within psychology in some shape or form, whether that's being a psychology teacher or lecturer, working within the mental health care setting, or doing some coaching and hypnotherapy work with clients. So outside of my psychology qualifications, I have additional qualifications in counselling and hypnotherapy, and this has allowed me to do beautiful one-on-one work with people who want to do that sacred work of rediscovering, reawakening and reclaiming their power, and its also what I continue to do on myself every single day, and which I love doing every single day is a big part of my life.
When people are asked about their deconstruction journey, there can often be a specific catalyst. For me, there were a few, but probably the game changer was becoming a mum to a beautiful girl because when I looked at her, I felt like I was looking at myself as a child. I was looking at my own inner child and something inside of me clicked and I knew I didn't want her to grow up under the same religious stronghold and bondage that I had. But I also recognize that whilst I might have more consciously been deconstructing since the birth of my daughter, it has already been an unconscious process and journey of question, questioning that I had been on for many, many years already. If I'm honest with myself, I've probably been doing this since childhood or at least since I was diagnosed with early-onset depression at around the age of 19. What I didn't realize was over all the years, there's been one thing that I have been fighting for, and that one thing is freedom. Freedom to simply be me and express my truth.
I have a piece of art that I drew during a drama therapy course I took as part of my inner work journey that depicts this really well. It's a picture that shows how I saw myself at two points in time, or actually, it's a picture that shows how I saw myself at the time of drawing and where I wanted to be. My now side was me in a transparent box, surrounded by a uniform of people in the middle of a mountainous terrain. Some of the people were climbing on top of the box trying to get to me. And the funny thing was that nobody put me inside the box, I created the box as a way to protect myself from the people outside and the world outside getting to me. I created that box to safeguard what was most precious and sacred to me, my essence, my truth. But the downside the downside of creating this box also meant that I was trapped and stuck inside.
On the other side of the picture was what I desired in my future and it was a drawing of a blazing, bright, pulsating, multi-coloured star just bursting with energy. This represented my truth, my soul, my essence. It was everything that I wanted to express out in the world but everything. I was too afraid to. And I spent the vast majority of my life up until my early thirties hiding, denying myself, contracting myself, making myself smaller. And the result of this was it created dis-ease within me, disease illness. It brought toxicity and trauma into my life. And I've got the battle scars to show it. At age 41, I'm around 70% grey.
At 28, I developed a rare autoimmune condition which changed my life completely. This was around the time of my Saturn return and it was also around the time that I became born again. When I reflect on this from a place of hindsight, I honestly feel that I came into agreement with those life choices that led me to where I am now, because they served a purpose and fulfilled a need that I felt I had in my life. They made me feel valued, valuable, loved, safe, wanted, desired, cared for, chosen, special, you name it. My Saturn return is in Libra, which is basically about the personal growth and lessons learned from relationships. The biggest life lesson and personal growth aspect for me has been around me learning to have an authentic relationship with myself, something that honoured me and my wellbeing, and also to really question my relationship with God, to start again basically from scratch. And so, my inner healing journey began. The personal development of my faith was a huge aspect of my healing because with everything going on in my life. Trigger warden here. At many times, my illness felt too much for me to bear and I didn't want to live.
My struggle with religion came when I let other people in. Everyone has an opinion, especially around how I should deal with sickness and healing. All of a sudden I became the problem because I didn't have enough faith or I wasn't fasting or tithing or worshipping on the correct day or praying correctly or praying enough or calling on the original name of God. So I went for a whole period where I just disconnected from the church and decided to continue on my healing journey alone.
My church experience really traumatized me, and I was already going through so much with my illness, I really just needed to go back into a quiet place and lick my wounds. It was then that I decided to strip everything back, everything that I knew of God and build from the bottom up. And that was the first phase of my deconstruction reconstruction journey. And it opened the door for me to really give myself permission to look at God in a totally new way.
The second round of my deconstruction reconstruction journey came when I was living in a women's refuge, and I retrained as a cognitive hypnotherapist almost ten years later. It was through this time of opening myself up to something that many, many people had warned me was demonic and of the occult, that I actually realized just how asleep I had been. And when I say asleep, what I really mean is how I had been living in an almost trance-like state of absorbing everything from society, all the norms, beliefs, expectations, and not just of society, but of church and family and school without checking in with myself and asking myself whether I actually wanted to believe any of these things and whether these beliefs were serving me. And so I thought it was highly amusing that I'd been warned of hypnotherapy out of fear that I might be brainwashed or hypnotised when actually that's exactly what happens to every single one of us from the moment we are born. Knowing how the conscious and unconscious mind works now meant that for the first time in my life I could see exactly how I had been living out from programming and not out from who I truly was or the life I wanted to live.
At that time, I was working as a coach supporting Christian women, and I was happily surprised to see five scriptures in the New Testament that referred to this trance-like dream sleep state. One time is when the Angel Gabriel comes to visit Joseph while he's sleeping. Another time is at Jesus's transfiguration and my fave time is mentioned in Romans in the following Scripture.
"And do this now in the time that it is already the hour for you to awaken out of sleep for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed". How often are we made to feel like salvation is some far-off place, some far-off time in the future? I mean, even though we have supposedly already been saved, once we say the prayer, we have to suffer and struggle on this earthly plane until that salvation is manifested in the last days, or we die, whichever comes sooner. I began to really question this whole narrative, and it didn't sit well with me. I mean, doesn't the Bible talk about being transformed by the renewing of our minds and not conforming to the patterns of the world? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my salvation and this abundant life that we keep on hearing about wasn't something that was far off in the future that I could only experience when I die, it was something present here, attainable now that I could come into agreement with and begin to co-create by taking back my sovereignty and power, knowing and embracing who I am beyond the conditioning and socialization.
If there was anything that was going to make the world quake, it was going to be me standing in my authority and power and not me trembling and afraid because I was so caught up on being perfect, good and holy. As a teacher even I knew deep down in my bones that no one learns when they are afraid, it just switches the brain off and no one is effective when they are scared. Fear and living an abundant life they just can't go hand in hand. So there were all these breadcrumbs being laid down, and with every hit I took in life, like leaving a toxic 16-year relationship, like entering a relationship that I expected was going to be perfect but wasn't shook me to the core and meant that I had to rethink everything from scratch. Each tremor gave me an opportunity to go back to my foundations and check the framework I was building on. So I began to wake up, realizing that if I was going to get any joy and freedom from this life, it could only be as me living and being as fully me as I could possibly be. So came the journey of returning back to self.
And there's a word in the Hebrew which I loved that sums up perfectly Teshuvah. And for those of you who may not know this about me, I spent a good few years in the messianic faith. And the messianic faith is really Christians and Jews who want to reconnect with Hebrew roots. And so there's a lot of connection to Eastern spirituality and Eastern wisdom. So in Hebrew, teshuvah means to turn around and go back to where we came from or to return home to Source. Unfortunately, in Western Christianity, this word has been translated to repentance, which I think totally misses the point. When you repent, you're basically agonizing about how wrong and how sorry you are. But teshuvah is about the deep desire we have to return back to our inner knowing, to return back home to what is true for us and where we belong. When we return to self, we are really returning to Source, we are returning to our truth, our essence, which is our home.
So there you have it. That's the basic premise of becoming, the journey of becoming who we are through the process of awakening and then choosing to return back to ourselves. So over the next three days, here's what's going to happen. I'm going to release two audios each day. Obviously today this is the first one and there's going to be another one. And it really gives you the opportunity to reflect on what comes up when you hear the stories of other people and you hear the thoughts of the guests that have been invited to share. And I invite you also to share your thoughts, reflections and questions in the comment space, and feel free to connect with each other and the volunteer guests as well. And if you know of somebody that will also benefit from this series, please feel free to share the registration link as well. I look forward to connecting with you.
Take it deeper (Journal and Reflection prompt)
Returning Home
One of the things that stand out to me which I didn't touch upon in the session is the correlation I see to the parable of the prodigal son, this idea that we go on a journey to make something of ourselves in the world only to realise that everything we wanted was already in the place we call home. I love the idea of teshuvah, the original Hebrew word translated for repentance as the journey of returning back to where we started from - this is the journey that I believe we all deeply desire.
What else stands out to you from this session?
EP01 Becoming as Awakening and Returning to Self