Where Water Remembers

A return to the body, the beloved within, and the sacred unseen

When it comes to “healing” or integration work, the prevailing belief is that awareness is the first step. I’ve said this myself many times, and it’s not entirely wrong, but it’s an incomplete picture.

What I’ve been sitting with is a deeper, more subtle truth—one that turns the Western psychology-influenced perspective on its head.

The Limits of the Conscious-First Model

Modern therapy, even in somatic circles, often centres conscious intention as the entry point to change. It’s rooted in a worldview that elevates thought, logic, and language as the highest forms of intelligence. This is why approaches like CBT or psychoanalysis, shaped by the medical model, focus so heavily on naming, analysing, and reframing. The phrase “I think, therefore I am” says it all.

But anyone who has ever tried to think themselves into a new reality knows how fragile and limited that path can be.

Because healing—or rather, integration—doesn’t always begin with awareness. Much of what needs tending to was never verbal to begin with.

The irony of running a 7-day Conscious Reality Creation Challenge a few months back isn’t lost on me either yet, the focus wasn’t on thinking your way through, it was about being with your body, what lays benath, in your waters.

My experience has shown me that change often begins in the unconscious, in the silence between our breaths. That’s where the seeds of transformation are planted—long before we consciously know what’s growing.

A Body First Approach

For a culture that clings to control, this is threatening. We would rather be sold the quick fix of mindset work than journey into the messy, murky, and often sacred realm of the subconscious and the body.

It becomes easy to bypass what we can’t see or name. And yet so often, I’ve had a felt sense of something shifting—without language for it at all. Most of what I write is birthed this way. Body first. Mind later.

This essay is an example of that. A tuning into a truth that wanted to be felt, understood, and given form. Without this deeper, slower descent into the body, healing becomes a loop of surface-level reframing and mindset “hacks”. Real change sticks when it moves through symbol, sensation, and soul.

Healing often begins in silence.
In the body.
In dreams.
In strange urges or releases.
Long before the mind dares—or is able—to make sense of it.

I believe that the depth of integration I’ve experienced—and now offer to my clients—is because I approach transformation differently.

The body is the portal.
Bottom-up, or unconscious-first processing, is foundational.

The Wild Card Woman and the Wisdom of the Body

When people ask who I work with, I say, the Wild Cards.

It’s a layered term. Yes, I centre mothers and women of colour—but beneath that, I work with the women who forgot they had soul fire because they learned to douse their flame to be safe in a world that refused to see them.

These women carry trauma—often capital T trauma.

Mindset work alone won’t shift things for them. I know this because I am one of them.

The kind of woman with fire in her spine and tenderness in her heart—yet who learned to mask her sovereignty just to survive. The kind of woman the system wrote off long ago. Unaccounted for. Uexpected.

A wild card if there ever was one, ready to arise like a phoenix.

Yet everything she has had to lock up to make it this far still lives within her body.

This is why, the conscious-first model will never bring her home to herself.
The good news? Science and psychotherapy is catching up to what the body already knew.

• Neuroscience and somatic psychology affirm that experience is processed through the limbic system and the body before the prefrontal cortex makes meaning of it.

• Implicit memory—emotional, sensory, preverbal—can shift before explicit memory catches up. That’s why we often feel the change in our breath, behaviour, or nervous system before we can name it.

• Insight follows rather than leads.

• Jung spoke of this. The unconscious surfaces through dream, symbol, and image long before the ego recognises what’s happening. Integration becomes a dance—the unconscious reaching out, the conscious self responding.

This has been my experience. I’ve felt things stirring in dreams, symbols, sensations, images. Only later did the words arrive.

So this isn’t to say that awareness isn’t important, it is. Awareness is the first step to conscious integration—but only of what the body has already known.

A Living Example of Integration in My Own Life

Let me share a lived example from my own life.

Last month, I wrote an embodied piece around resurrection. I didn’t realise how much it had been stirring in me until I wrote it. But of course—it was Easter. The body remembers what the mind forgets.

Even though I no longer identify as Christian, something sacred still lives beneath the surface of those stories. I felt the pull. I sat with it. I cried—not because I missed religion, but because something once tender and beautiful had become buried beneath dogma.

Behind the scenes, I’d also been unknowingly working on integrating the inner masculine, the realisation only surfacing through reflection of what had already been unfolding for months before.

This is what I mean by unconscious-to-conscious integration. I was already living the work before I could name it.

We don’t talk enough about the inner masculine in women’s healing spaces. And it’s understandable, many of us haven’t had safe, loving models of masculinity.

Most of the men in my life—family, lovers, even spiritual leaders—were unsafe. So I learned to be independent. Self-reliant. Distrustful. A fortress of strength and survival.

And yet underneath it all, I was tired.

I’ve come to believe that most so-called Type A women aren’t wired that way. We’ve become brittle from decades of being told we had to be strong to be safe. We’ve forgotten softness. We’ve forgotten how to receive.

So when the idea of integrating the masculine came to me, truly, I was sceptical. Angry, even.

Did I want to?
Could I?
What would that even look like?

But beneath the resistance, a familiar was calling.

Let me share a story that rose out of this inner work. It’s a symbolic remembering, a weaving of Lilith, the Samaritan woman at the well, and the archetype of Yeshua (or Jesus)—not as doctrine, but as embodied presence.

I’ve called it, The Well in the Wilderness.

The Well in the Wilderness
A sacred story of reclamation, remembrance, and resurrection

Prelude
There was a time I knew Jesus not through doctrine, but through devotion. Through my years of growing up silent, and even in my body’s resulting struggle with illness, he was the safest male presence I had ever known, he became the one I could trust when no one else felt trustworthy. A whispered song that I would sing, when everything felt too much.

I hadn’t realised how much he had meant to me, how much I missed him in the years thave have passed since deconstructing my belief. Not as religious figure, but as a companion. Something solid and dependable. I realised that he is my image of the inner masculine. Pure. Protective. Present.

This Easter in particular, I felt the sting of love and loss even more than ever. Echoes of something sacred, but no longer simple. My body felt the grief of that story of sacrifice, it haunted me. Yet what to do with something that no longer made sense or felt true to me?

Feeling into it, following the threads of sensation and symbol, there was an image that lived underneath.

An image that had already begun surfacing. Returning again and again, asking for my attention. Not a cross, but an image of goats. Yes goats. Endless goats. A wilderness full of them. Each one burdened with blame. Each one wandering with no home.

I didn’t understand it at first. But then I remembered Lilith and Yom Kippur with its yearly sacrifice of goats.

The one who was cast out. The one who refused to shrink. The one who dwelt in the wilds beyond doctrine. I saw her too in the woman at the well. And I began to wonder: what if he met her there too? Not to fix her. Not to cleanse her. But to sit with her. To witness her.

This story is what emerged. A weaving of old memory, soul vision, and sacred archetypes. A resurrection not of doctrine, but of integration—of the feminine and masculine within me, and if we let it, within us all.

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A poetic dialogue between the Exiled Feminine and the Embodied Masculine

[Scene: A sun-drenched well at the edge of the wilderness. The wind carries the scent of old prayers, and goat tracks vanish into dust. A woman stands alone, a shadow of wildness in her eyes. She is not one, but many. She is Lilith. She is the woman at the well. She is the feminine exiled.]

Lilith/Woman:
They say I was too much.
Too loud. Too knowing. Too free.
They carved my name into curses
and sent me to the wild—
with the scapegoats,
the cast-offs,
the unclean.
They forget the wilderness remembers.

Jesus/Yeshua:
I did not come to forget.
I came to find you
where they left you—
not in temples or thrones,
but here,
where truth has no robes
and water draws itself from depth.

Lilith/Woman:
You’re not like the others.
You do not flinch when you see my rage.
You do not turn when I speak of blood,
of the night,
of the men who came and went
but never saw me.

Jesus/Yeshua:
I see you.
I see the first light that touched you—
before shame whispered your name in fear.
I see the sacred fire in your voice
that was never meant to be silenced.
Not too much. Just never met by enough.

Lilith/Woman:
And what of the goats?
Do you know how many were sent?
Each one heavy with blame not its own.
They fill the wilderness like ghosts,
and still the people thirst.

Jesus/Yeshua:
I walked among them.
I bore their names.
I let them crown me with exile,
so I could meet you here—
not to carry you away,
but to sit beside you.

Lilith/Woman:
What are you offering me?

Jesus/Yeshua:
Water that sees you.
Not the kind that washes you clean of yourself,
but the kind that remembers
your womb,
your voice,
your dance.
Water that sings your name back to you
without shame.

Lilith/Woman:
Then stay.
Not to fix, but to feel.
Let the well bear witness.
Let the scapegoats rest.
Let the wilderness
become sanctuary.

[They sit together at the edge of the well. The wind hushes. Somewhere in the distance, the last goat stops wandering. Not because it was found—but because it is no longer alone.]

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Afterword – A Reflection
There is a wellspring inside each of us. A place where our exiled parts still wait for someone to meet them without fear.

This story, for me, is a return—not to a belief system, but to belovedness. To the possibility that what was once rejected can be restored. That Lilith is not a curse but a keeper of fire. That Jesus is not an external demand but a doorway allowing our own inner masculine to meet with us. That wholeness comes when we stop sending parts of ourselves away and begin sitting with them instead.

The phrase "water that remembers your name" draws on the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto, who explored how water might carry memory, emotion, and healing. Whether metaphor or mystery, it reminds me that the way we are spoken to—and the way we speak to ourselves—shapes the waters within us.

A Blessing

If this stirred something in you, may it become a thread in your own reweaving. A blessing on your journey through the wilderness—and toward the water that remembers your name.

Written in sacred witness and remembrance.
For the ones who were never too much—only never met by enough.

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Meeting the Inner Masculine in a New Way

This was co-weaved with ChatGPT around Easter, but it still moves me to tears for two reasons.

Firstly, it shows that we have the power to integrate the disparate parts of us and create something that feels soul true. I might have left religion, but I still have the power to shape and keep what works for my soul and my journey. This is about everything, no one but you, gets to decide what you leave behind and what you journey on with.

Secondly, it captures the longing at the heart of womanhood: to be seen, valued, and loved in presence. But not by a man outside of us.

The sovereign woman no longer waits to be rescued.
She doesn’t hand over her worthiness to anyone else.
Instead, she meets the embodied masculine within—and finds him already there.

I know many people embrace the idea of Jesus through Christ Consciousness, but I don’t know, it’s never really sat right with me, especially as I enter into this level of my becoming. It still feels like outsourcing power to something external. For me, integration happens when the inner masculine becomes embodied—not idealised.

That’s the energy of sacred leadership, sovereignty, rest that I’m sitting in and calling forth in the women I work with. But guess what? That energy has always been here—just waiting.

This is what makes my work different.

It’s not about my truth. It’s about holding space for yours to rise.

I don’t offer formulas. I offer a field.

Not a method, but a mirror.

Not a fix, but a remembering.

Not healing, but integration.

If this piece called to you, maybe it’s time to stop affirming truth only with your mind—and start trusting the truth already rising in your body.

The body is the portal.
It already knows.

When you trust it’s yes, your yes, you begin to live in sovereignty.

If you’re ready to walk that path, I invite you to apply for The Awakening Path—a four-month (extendable to six) journey back to the truth of who you are.

Heads up, especially for those of you who have been thinking about it for a lil’ bit—the price will increase to £1,888 for the 4-month journey from the 1st of June.

Read the full details via the link below.

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Coming Soon: The Awakening Woman Podcast

And, last but not least today, I’m so excited to share: the limited series podcast The Awakening Woman is only a few weeks away.

Lovingly put together for the woman who is done surviving—and ready to thrive.

I’ve already had some amazing conversation with aligned guests and I’m also sitting quietly to see what it is I want to share with you on my solo episodes.

Plus some lovely surprises.

Speak soon.

Florence U. x