The Unbecoming Founding Circle
You can work, lead, care, build and keep life moving, and reach a point where you wonder how much of the life you are living still feels like yours.
Somewhere beneath the roles, the expectations and the version of you the world has come to know, something true is asking for your attention. Maybe it is a decision you already know you need to make. Or perhaps it is the voice you hear clearly for a moment, before responsibility, fear or expectation speaks over it again.
The Unbecoming Journey begins there. With the part of you that has never completely disappeared. The part that still knows.
In a circle, you do not have to find your way back to that part of yourself alone.
On 12 August, twelve women from different lives and different places will enter this conversation together. For six weeks, I will hold the questions, the space and The Unbecoming Journey.
You will arrive with your own story and be met by women who may recognise more of it than you expect.
You can be fully present in your life
and still feel like you are missing from it.
THE SOUL OF THE CIRCLE
A woman may enter the circle still deciding how much of herself she is ready to show. She may know there is something she wants to say, but not yet know how to say it. She may begin with the version of the story she has told before. The easier version. The one that keeps her composed.
Then another woman speaks. She says the thing she has been trying to make sense of on her own. She may stumble over the words. She may cry. She may laugh because she cannot believe she is finally saying it.
And somewhere in the circle, another woman is thinking:
Me too.
What felt private, shameful or too risky to say out loud is suddenly understood by someone whose life may look completely different.
The mask becomes less necessary. She begins to believe herself again.
You stop leaving yourself behind. And your life begins to belong to you again.
THE JOURNEY
The Five Rs are not stages to complete. They are lenses through which you begin to understand and remember yourself. You may recognise yourself in one immediately, or find yourself moving between several. Different parts of your life may call for different parts of the journey.
There is no neat sequence.
WHY I HOLD THIS WORK
People often tell me there is something in my presence that draws them in. A kind of power I do not always recognise in myself, but that other women seem to feel. It is difficult to describe from inside myself, but I have seen what happens when I trust it.
I do not enter a circle determined to follow a script. I pay attention to the women in front of me. To the energy. To the silence. To what is being said and what has not yet found the courage to be spoken. Sometimes the circle needs a question. Sometimes it needs more time. And sometimes it needs me to go first.
When a woman is still deciding whether it is safe to show herself, I am willing to show myself too. I share from my own life with honesty. I do not ask women to enter places I am unwilling to enter with them.
The Unbecoming Journey is not a framework I created from the outside. It began with my own recognition.
I had to face how unhappy I was beneath a life that appeared successful. That recognition led me away from the world’s definition of success and into a life I had to learn to trust before I could fully see where it was taking me.
My journey has held illness, uncertainty, shame, judgment and questions about the life a woman is expected to have by a certain age. It has asked me to look at the strength I had built my identity around, the parts of myself I had pushed aside and the decisions I was ready to make differently.
I am still moving through Recognize, Release, Reconnect, Reclaim and Return.
This work has become my life’s work because I know what happens when a woman begins to trust herself again.
I know because that woman is also me.
Akua
Creator of The Unbecoming Journey™
WHAT OPENED
It opened something in me that I didn’t even realise needed space. What surprised me most was how deeply we connected as women. We arrived as strangers, yet by the end it felt like a sisterhood was forming in real time.
I was unbecoming, but I was not alone. Held by you, Akua, and by the sisterhood that was silently forming around me, I allowed myself to fall apart.
Since coming home, I’ve felt a real shift in how I see things. The retreat left me feeling lighter, clearer and more in tune with myself, with a stronger sense of what really matters.
Akua, you reach the parts no others can. I have been touched, moved and enriched by this experience in infinite ways.
THE FOUNDING CIRCLE
On 12 August, twelve women from different lives and different places will enter The Unbecoming Journey together.
Over six weeks, we will gather online each week and move through Recognize, Release, Reconnect, Reclaim and Return.
This is the first six-week online expression of the journey. A circle of twelve women, held closely enough for every woman to be seen and to remember herself.
I am now inviting twelve women to enter the Founding Circle.
If these words feel like your own, the invitation is yours.