That thing where you sabotage yourself? It's not even yours.

It's programming. And it's time to delete it.

Turns out deleting internalised patriarchy is very flammable. GIF credit: Andre Arkade

All women have an inner compass.
But hardly any of us were taught how to find it – let alone trust it.

What we were taught instead was how to tune into what mattered to everyone else.

What mattered to our parents.
What mattered at school.
What mattered at church, or in our cultural community.
What mattered in the media – especially when it came to how women should look, how we should behave, who we were supposed to grow up to be.

I don’t remember anyone ever asking me as a child what mattered to me. Do you?
Not in any but the most superficial of ways.
You were allowed to have a hobby. You could be “into” swimming or Sindy dolls or pretending you were in Adam and the Ants. But no one was asking:
What do you really care about? What do you find so interesting you could do it for hours? What makes you feel most alive?

That kind of language would have felt laughable. Or dangerous.
Imagine what would happen if girls were encouraged to find their own individual answers to those questions?
Society steers away from opening that Pandora’s box – because chaos would ensue.
Girls and women would stop being so easy to manage.

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So we all grow up learning to orient by something else.
We learn to look outward, not inward.
We learn about becoming “good”, by becoming what (not who) others need us to be.

And if you’re now an adult building something of your own – a business, a body of work, a new way of living – that conditioning doesn’t just disappear.
It comes with you.
It shows up in the way you overwork, over-give, over-adapt.
In the way you second-guess yourself, delay decisions, drown in to-do lists.
In the way you feel exhausted, but also guilty for resting.

That’s not a personal failing.
It’s a system installed inside you.

And the cunning thing about that system is this:
It makes you think the problem is you:

That you’re too sensitive.
Too anxious.
Too indecisive.
Not confident enough. Not productive enough. Not likeable or attractive or together enough.

But what you’re actually experiencing is not a personal fault or flaw.
It’s the enemy within – the internalised system, installed early and reinforced everywhere.

Most of us can see that the world is not working.
We see the corruption. The inequality. The narcissists and psychopaths in charge.
We feel the grief and burnout of a system that was never built for us.

But what most of us miss is this:
The system is not just around us.
It’s inside us.

In our thoughts.
In our nervous systems.
In the way we fear rejection, crave approval, label our dreams “ridiculous”.

That’s why rewiring is not optional.
It’s foundational.

The enemy within (and why you have to root it out first)

Forget positive thinking. Forget mindset work.
This is about pulling the entire system up by the roots.

Because until you do that, you’ll always be running in conflict:

• Trying to follow your intuition – while ignoring it

• Trying to lead with your values – while secretly doubting them

• Trying to create from vision – while paralysed by invisible rules about what’s allowed

You’ll keep looking outside yourself for permission or approval.
You’ll keep shrinking back to “safety” every time you take a big step forward.
You’ll keep veering toward someone else’s definition of success, often without even realising it.

And the most crazy-making thing of all?
It won’t feel like “the system inside you”.
It’ll feel like you.

Like your personality.
Like your anxiety.
Like your self-doubt or inconsistency or inability to “get it together.”

But it’s not.
It’s a virus.
And the more women we speak to, the more we see the same code running underneath it all:

– The fear of being too much, too noisy, too big, too yourself
– The compulsion to prove worth, expertise, value to others
– The chronic undervaluing of creativity, joy, pleasure, desire and rest
– The instinct to make yourself smaller, quieter, more palatable

These are not your flaws. We all share these traits.
They’re evidence of the system within.

And they have to be rewired before anything else is possible.

Because you cannot connect to your inner compass while your body is ruled by fear.
You cannot return to sovereignty if your nervous system still believes approval equals survival.

This is why we begin with this work, to rewire the enemy within.
Not to fix you.
To free you.

Next, remember who the hell you are – and reconnect to your true compass

Once you’ve begun rewiring the enemy within – once you can actually tell the difference between your truth and your conditioning – you’re ready to remember who the hell you really are.

This is the second movement of the work:
Coming back to your inner compass.
Not the compass made of rules, shoulds, expectations and conditioning.
The one that already lives in you.
The one that’s tapped directly into your Self.

We teach this compass through four directions:
In the South: your values
The North: your vision
The West: the masculine principles
The East: the feminine principles

And the work is to come into relationship with all four.

The South: your fuel source

We start in the South, with your values – not the ones you inherited, but the ones that are actually yours.
Because the fact is, most women are trying to live and work using contaminated values.
Values dictated by our family of origin, by school, by media, by a world that told us what to care about and who to be:
Be good, be kind. Be productive, be busy. Be available to others, be a good listener, be a shoulder to cry on. Be successful, but not too successful. Be selfless, not selfish. And don’t forget to smiiiiile!

But your real values aren’t found in that performance.
They’re found in your body.
In what enlivens you.
In what opens your heart and tickles your mind.
In what tops your energy back up, instead of draining it dry.

When you reconnect to your true values, you stop running on guilt and fear.
You start running on life force energy.
And EVERYTHING becomes a hell of a lot clearer from this point on.

The North: your vision

From that grounded place, you look North – to your vision.
Not what you’ve been told success looks like.
Not a vision shaped by someone else's branding blueprint or business strategy.

Your real vision. The one that keeps whispering to you when you’re quiet.
The one that’s been there the whole time, lurking in the background.

This is your lifework vision.
Not work-life balance – that tidy masculine lie.
But the felt sense of what you’re here for.

What you see that others don’t.
What you’re drawn to change.
What only you can create, or offer, or bring to the world.

And when your values are aligned – when you’re running on the right fuel – your vision doesn’t feel difficult, or overwhelming, or too big and heavy to achieve.
It feels exciting. Effortless.

Moving toward it, you feel energised, full of momentum.

The West and East: balancing how we move forward

But knowing what you want isn’t enough.
You also need to know how to move toward it.

And this is where most women get stuck – because we’ve been trained in imbalance.

We’ve been raised inside a culture that over–emphasises the West – the masculine principles.
Action. Logic. Structure. Analysis. Measurement. Strategy.
Blueprints and to–do lists. Consistency and constant hustle.

The West has its gifts. But in isolation, it becomes a trap.
A grind.
A shutdown of the soul.

Meanwhile, the East – the feminine – has been systematically devalued.
Imagination. Emotion. Intuition. Embodiment.
The unseen. The instinctive. The creative.
All of it pushed underground. All of it labelled soft, woo-woo, chaotic, irrational, irrelevant.

But the truth is:
Without the feminine, you have productivity without creativity.
Without the masculine, you have vision with no container.

The compass requires both.
It requires rebalancing how you move through the world – and how you build what you’re here to build.

This is the map we teach, the model we use, and the work we return to again and again. It anchors everything we offer – from our coaching and programmes to our retreats and collective journeys. This isn't some external framework we impose – it's your own compass. It's already there. We just help you reconnect to it.

So you can move forward in a way that aligns with your rhythm, your power, and your values.

Reimagine your lifework

Once you’ve rewired the enemy within…
Once you’ve remembered what truly matters…
Then – and only then – can you begin to reimagine what your lifework is meant to be.

And we use this word very deliberately: lifework. One word, because it is one thing. Not a juggle. Not a split or a compromise. Not a balance to be struck. But a whole, woven experience. Your lifework – not separate tracks, but one path, powered by your values, shaped by your vision.

Because work-life balance is bullshit.
It’s a false promise built for a world of men with wives at home.
It assumes there’s a clean line between living and working – and that someone else, somewhere, is picking up the mental and emotional load.

But as women, we know better.
We don’t stop living when we’re working.
And we don’t stop working when we’re living.

We write client proposals while a child naps next to us.
We cook dinner while answering messages.
We take care of other people’s needs – physical, emotional, mental – whilst carving out time for ourselves.

So no, we don’t want compartmentalisation.
We want integration.
We want work that feels like it belongs in our lives – not something that bulldozes over them.
We want to create things that matter, sustain ourselves and the people we love, and feel alive while doing it.

We don’t want a gym session and a massage once a month to be the reward for pushing ourselves to breaking point.
We want our days – our actual life – to feel meaningful.
Creative. Spacious. Nourishing. Alive.

This is what we mean when we talk about lifework.
Not just how you earn a living.
But how you build a life with meaning and impact and connection and joy, all smooshed up together.

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We’d love to hear from you.

Does this resonate? Where are you at in your journey to liberate yourself from the system within? Do you have a sense of your own inner compass? What feels true, or new, to you about this work?

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So, what next?

There are a few ways to begin.

Move From Force to Flow – work 1-2-1 with us

If you’re ready to go deep, we currently have two spaces open for 1:1 coaching – this is the most tailored, immersive way to work with us. Find out more here.

If you’d prefer to work alongside other brilliant women, you can apply to join our Women are the Medicine Mastermind – a small, powerful group experience. We have four spaces available at the moment. Find out more and apply here.

Or, if you’d like to dip a toe in and get to know us first – why not become a paid subscriber and join us for our next group experience?

We’re kicking things off with something deceptively simple – but radical.
An old chestnut, maybe. But one with deep roots.

The Artist’s Way is one of the most powerful tools we know for coming back into connection with your feminine principle – your creativity, your joy, your deep inner voice.

It’s not a writing course.
It’s not a hobby or side project.
It’s a 12-week act of resistance, rewiring and tapping back into your natural creativity.

Because what happens when you stop chasing productivity and start listening to what wants to come through you?

What happens when you let desire, play, and emotion back in?

What happens when you stop treating your creativity like a luxury you never have time to indulge – and start treating it like your compass?

And yes, it can be confronting.
Just last weekend, I spoke to a published poet – a gifted, successful teacher and writer – who told me she’s tried to complete The Artist’s Way multiple times.
She always gets stuck on Week 6: the one about money.

Because that’s where the wound lives.
And she’s not alone.

Most women who’ve tried to do this work solo hit a wall.
Not because they’re not committed – but because they’re doing it inside the same system that taught them to silence it in the first place.

So this time, we’re doing it differently.

We’re doing it together.

Join us – and shape what we create next

We’ll be opening up the Substack chat as we begin this Artist’s Way journey.
Everyone can follow along. But if you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll be invited deeper – including access to our live group sessions every four weeks:

– Real-time circles to reflect, share, and stay accountable
– A say in how this space evolves
– Thoughtful, real conversations about what it means to rewire, reconnect, and reimagine – not just in theory, but in your body, in your thoughts, and in your actual life

If you feel the pull, we’d love you to walk it with us.
Get involved now »