Woman Unwound

Seeing as how we still have one whole day of August left, I’m keeping Pay What You Can going! 🧡

This is my remaining availability before we’re all back in the school shuffle.

You know the one I'm talking about...

The making lunches. The finding missing shoes. The getting kiddos out the door. The homework. The sports. The 100 tryouts and open gyms for all you sports parents. 😂 The constant mental gymnastics of keeping everyone else’s lives moving all while still keeping track of your own damn keys (where the hell did I set my coffee though)!

So before the calendar completely takes over again, come take an hour for yourself.

Massage. Energy work. Sound healing. Card readings. Whatever your nervous system is asking for. You don’t have to wait until you’re completely depleted to deserve care.

Pay What You Can is still on for the remainder of August, with a minimum exchange of $50 for an hour or $75 for 90 minutes.

Book yourself in at womanunwound.noterro.com or shoot Candace Raynes or Woman Unwound a message and I’ll get you sorted.

You spend so much of your time holding everything together.

Let someone hold space for you for a change. 🧡

My bodywork sessions go deeper than a typical massage ever will. Not because I believe there is some magical technique that makes me better than everyone else, but because the work I do lives at the intersection of the physical body, fascia, the nervous system, energy and what I understand as ancestral patterns carried through the bloodline.

There is a foundational part of my practice that I don't talk about nearly enough, and it is perhaps the deepest reason I do what I do. I believe our bodies can carry far more than the experiences we have personally lived through. We carry the ways our families learned to survive. We carry patterns of fear, suppression, hypervigilance, grief, disconnection and self-abandonment that can move through generations of women until they become so familiar that we mistake them for our own personality.

We have women in our bloodlines who lived through things they never had the space, safety or permission to process. Women who had to stay quiet. Women who endured marriages they could not leave. Women who learned that being loved meant being useful. Women who buried their anger because anger was dangerous. Women who put themselves last because everyone else's survival depended on them. Women who learned to disconnect from their own bodies because feeling everything they were living through would have been unbearable. Their lives shaped the women who came after them, and those women shaped the women who came after them. The survival did not necessarily end when the circumstances ended.

This is where ancestral healing becomes much more than a spiritual concept for me. It becomes a way of looking at the woman sitting in front of me and asking what might be living underneath the pattern she has spent her entire life trying to understand. Why does setting a boundary feel terrifying when she knows she is safe? Why does resting create guilt? Why does being cared for feel uncomfortable? Why does she automatically scan the room for everyone else's needs before she can even feel her own? Why does she know exactly what everyone else wants while having absolutely no idea what she wants?

Some of those patterns belong to the life she has lived. Some were learned in childhood. Some were reinforced by family and culture. Some may feel much older than that.

This is why I combine bodywork and energy work in the way that I do.

We can talk about our patterns endlessly. We can understand our attachment styles, learn about our nervous systems, identify our triggers and become incredibly self-aware. Yet there can still be places in the body that are holding the story. The shoulders that will not soften. The belly that stays braced. The chest that feels heavy. The jaw that never quite unclenches. The body that remains prepared for something even when the conscious mind knows there is nothing to prepare for.

The physical work gives us a way into those places. Fascia, breath, sensation, movement and touch allow us to work with what the body is actually experiencing rather than simply talking about it. The energetic work gives another layer of access to the emotions, grief, sensations and ancestral pieces that don't always have a neat explanation. Together, these approaches allow us to explore what is happening beneath the surface instead of simply trying to convince the mind that everything is okay.

This is where I think the bloodline piece matters so much because you are not only healing for yourself.

You are untangling programs that may have been handed to you by women who were doing the very best they could with what they had. You are separating their fear from your own. You are learning to recognize which parts of you are actually yours and which parts were built around survival. You are creating enough safety within your own body to finally hear yourself underneath all the voices, expectations and inherited rules about what a woman is supposed to be.

I don't believe ancestral healing means blaming the women who came before us. Quite the opposite. I think it means being willing to look at what they survived with enough compassion to understand why certain things were passed forward, while also becoming conscious enough to decide what ends with us.

I can honour the woman who taught me to endure without believing endurance is my destiny.

I can understand the woman who taught me to stay quiet without making silence my inheritance.

I can love the women who came before me without carrying their terror as though it belongs to me.

That is the kind of unwinding we're doing together in treatment.

Not simply releasing tension from a muscle. Not simply calming your nervous system for an hour. Not simply giving you a beautiful energetic experience.

I want to help you get underneath the layers and begin to hear the woman who exists beneath the survival patterns, the family programming, the expectations and the fear.

The voice underneath all of that is very quiet. Sometimes she has been quiet for generations. Sometimes healing the bloodline begins with one woman finally becoming safe enough inside her own body to hear herself.

That woman can be you.

Candace Raynes
Woman Unwound

Marriage doesn't serve women the way we've been taught it does.

Let's actually talk about this for a minute, because the statistics around marriage and men versus women are fu***ng fascinating.

A large meta-analysis looking at nearly 7.9 million people found that being unmarried was associated with a 46% higher risk of death from any cause among men, compared with 22% among women. In other words, the protective health effect associated with marriage is considerably stronger for men than it is for women.

Then there is the question of what happens inside the marriage.

One that gets even harder to ignore when we look at what researchers found about older adults. Being married was more strongly associated with survival for men than for women. Men appear to receive a meaningful health benefit from simply having a spouse. Women don't get that same payoff from marriage alone. For women, the quality of the relationship matters far more. A good marriage can be beneficial, while a strained or unhappy marriage can carry real health consequences. So when we talk about marriage as though it is inherently good for women, the research simply doesn't support that neat little story. The benefit isn't equal. The protection isn't equal. The expectations certainly aren't equal.

So let's sit with that for a second.

Men benefit more from marriage. Women benefit far less. The quality of the relationship matters enormously for women. Yet women are still raised to believe marriage is one of the greatest achievements they can have.

Find a husband. Build a home. Have children. Take care of everyone. Keep the family together. Be supportive. Be nurturing. Be understanding. Be accommodating. Be the one who remembers everything. Be the one who makes it all work.

Somehow we have convinced ourselves that all of this is what women are getting from marriage. What if we looked at what women are actually being asked to contribute?

Women perform approximately 76% of unpaid care work globally, more than three times the amount performed by men. The International Labour Organization estimated that 708 million women were outside the labour force in 2023 due to unpaid care responsibilities, compared with 40 million men.

That's not a fu***ng small difference.

Women aren't just going into marriages. Far too often, women are going into marriages carrying an invisible job description. Manage the house, the children, and the appointments. Manage the birthdays, the groceries, and the meals. Manage the emotional climate, the family relationships, and the calendar.

Manage the fu***ng everything.

Then we're told we're lucky to have a husband. A husband who gets the health benefits of marriage while his wife becomes the infrastructure that makes his life work. This is where the old programming comes in.

Women have been taught from childhood to please. Make everyone happy. Don't be difficult. Don't make people uncomfortable. Don't ask for too much. Don't say no. Be nice. Be helpful. Be selfless. Take care of everyone.

We learn to read everybody else's emotions before we learn to recognize our own. We learn to anticipate everybody else's needs while ignoring the screaming fu***ng need inside ourselves. We learn that being needed means we're valuable. We learn that sacrifice means love, that exhaustion means we're doing enough.

We learn that saying no makes us selfish.

Then we become women who can tell you exactly what our husband, our children, our parents, our friends and our coworkers need while having absolutely no fu***ng idea what we need.

This is one of the places where women are finally starting to wake the f**k up. Because the question shouldn't only be, “What do I bring to this marriage?”

Women need to start asking: “What does this marriage bring to me?” What am I receiving? Who takes care of me? Who notices when I'm exhausted? Who carries me when I can't carry everything? Who makes room for my dreams? Who remembers what matters to me? Who cares about my emotional wellbeing?

Who gives back? Who makes my life better?

If the answer is that marriage gives him companionship, emotional support, domestic labour, childcare, s*x, stability and someone who manages the invisible s**t of everyday life while you receive exhaustion, resentment and another fu***ng thing to manage...

What exactly are we calling a partnership?

This is not me saying men are inherently bad. It isn't me saying marriage is inherently bad. It is me saying we need to stop pretending the traditional arrangement has historically benefited women and men equally.

It hasn't.

The numbers don't fu***ng show that. The labour doesn't show that. The expectations don't show that.

We are allowed to question it. Every last iota of it!

We're allowed to stop accepting relationships where being loved seems to depend on how much we provide. We're allowed to stop mothering grown men. We're allowed to stop managing everyone's emotions. We're allowed to stop being the person who keeps everything running while nobody notices that we're falling apart.

We're allowed to say no and to set boundaries. We're allowed to have our own money and our own friends. We're allowed to have our own interests. We're allowed to rest and to have needs. We're allowed to disappoint people. We're allowed to stop serving people who only seem to value us when we're useful to them.

Perhaps most importantly, we're allowed to stop believing that marriage is something a woman needs in order to have a complete life.

Men have been shown to receive a significant health benefit from marriage while women have been taught to make themselves beneficial to everyone else inside it. Those are not the same thing.

I don't want women to stop loving. I don't want women to stop partnering. I don't want women to stop building families. I do want women to stop disappearing inside them.

I want us to raise daughters who understand that their worth isn't determined by how much they can do for other people. I want women to know that being a good woman does not mean being endlessly available. I want us to stop calling self-abandonment devotion.

I want us to stop calling exhaustion motherhood and over-functioning love.

I want women to understand that they can choose themselves without becoming selfish.

Nobody else can do that part for you....

Nobody else can decide when you've had enough. Nobody else can say the no. Nobody else can draw the boundary. Nobody else can stop you from giving everything you have to people who have become accustomed to taking it.

You are the one who has to decide that your life belongs to you.

Marriage doesn't have to disappear.

The woman disappearing inside the marriage does.

Candace Raynes
Woman Unwound

🤎 PAY WHAT YOU CAN WEEK 🤎

I did a "Pay What You Can" week last month, and I think I want to make this a monthly thing.

There are a lot of people moving through the end of summer feeling worn right down. The financial strain is real. Groceries cost more. Bills keep coming. Back-to-school expenses are piling up. There are a million things that need your attention, and spending money on yourself can feel like the easiest thing to cut.

I especially want to make this available for the moms who spend money on everyone else without thinking twice, yet struggle to justify an hour for themselves.

You deserve that hour too.

For the last week of August, I'm opening space for Pay What You Can Week, where you can come in for whatever kind of support feels right for you. That could be a Body UnWound treatment, energy work, sound healing, a card reading, or a combination of different modalities.

The minimum exchange is $50 for an hour or $75 for 90 minutes.

If you have the capacity to pay more, you can. If $50 or $75 is what you can manage right now, that is enough.

This isn't about creating a discount or making anyone feel like they have to prove they need it. It's about making space for people who are tired, stretched financially, and still deserving of care.

You don't have to wait until you're completely depleted to take care of yourself.

You don't have to earn rest.

You don't have to be the one who holds everything together every single day.

Pay What You Can Week runs August 24–29.

Message me to book your spot, and we'll figure out what kind of unwinding your body is asking for. 🤎

This is my monthly Thank you to my current incredible clients and a Try Me Out and see what you're missing for all those who haven't yet been in to see me 💚

Message Candace Raynes or Woman Unwound to book in or head to www.womanunwound.noterro.com and book yourself in ✨️

✨️ Remaining availability | August 24th–29th ✨️

Summer is running out of runway, friends. 😭

Back-to-school is somehow already around the corner, which means the annual female Olympic event is about to begin:

Work.
School schedules.
Lunches.
Permission forms.
Appointments.
Sports.
Activities.
Lost water bottles.
Where the f**k did the other shoe go?
Making sure everyone is fed.
Making sure everyone has what they need.
Remembering everything for everyone.

All while somehow being expected to keep your own s**t together. 😂

So to all the moms heading into another season of doing approximately 47 things at once...

You've fu***ng got this.

You don't have to do it perfectly. You don't have to be endlessly patient. You don't have to pretend you're not overwhelmed. Some days you're going to feel like you've absolutely nailed this motherhood thing.

Other days you're going to lock yourself in the bathroom, take one deep breath, say your favourite curse word (f**k is my personal go to 🤷‍♀️) and wonder how the hell everyone made it to Thursday.

That's when you call me. 😆

Come get your body worked on.
Come unwind your nervous system.
Come move some energy.
Come sit in the quiet.
Come talk s**t about being a woman, our kids, your husband, your ex, your mother, the patriarchy... whatever needs to come out that day. 😂

You don't have to show up here polished. You don't have to have it all figured out. You can just come as you are and we'll take it from there.

✨️ Treatment is covered by most major insurance companies.

Book online at womanunwound.noterro.com or send Woman Unwound or Candace Raynes a message and I'll get you into one of the remaining spots.

There are women walking around this world who genuinely do not understand how they are still breathing.

You know the ones. The women who look back over the wreckage of their lives and think, I honestly should have been gone by now. Women who survived things that could have taken them out, only to find themselves standing in the aftermath, looking around and wondering what the hell is supposed to happen next. Women who have had to rebuild themselves so many times that rebuilding stopped feeling like a choice and became something their bodies simply learned how to do.

I know that woman because I am her.

There have been years in my life when I have looked at everything I walked through and genuinely wondered how my heart was still beating. There are chapters that could have ended me. There are versions of myself I had to leave behind because they could not survive where I was anymore. There were seasons where simply staying alive took almost everything I had.

Then somehow, in the middle of all of that rubble, I started creating little pockets of life.

I created moments where my body could finally unclench. I built relationships where love didn't feel like something I had to earn or protect myself from. I built a home where the people inside could breathe. I became a mother who refused to knowingly hand my children the same wounds I had inherited. I built work around helping women find their way back into their bodies. I started uncovering pieces of myself that had been buried under years of survival, silence, conditioning and simply doing what I had to do to get through.

I learned how to laugh again. I learned how to soften without immediately preparing for something to hurt. Those things can be incredibly easy to miss when you are still surrounded by your own wreckage.

We have been taught to look at everything that is still broken and decide we must be failing. We stare at the mountain in front of us and forget to turn around long enough to see how far we have already come.

So I need you to hear this.

The little pockets of thriving you have created inside your traumatized existence matter. They matter even if you are still struggling. They matter even if your nervous system is still learning what safety feels like. They matter even if there are parts of you that still feel completely exhausted.

They are evidence that something inside you kept reaching for life when you had every reason to stop believing life could feel different.

That does not mean everything happened for a reason. I don't believe that. I don't believe we were meant to suffer the things that happened to us. I don't believe some grand plan required us to be broken so we could eventually become stronger. Some things were devastating. Some things were deeply unfair. Some things should never have happened to us at all.

We do not have to find the blessing in our trauma. We do not have to be grateful for what broke us. We do not have to turn every wound into a lesson just to make the pain easier for other people to understand. We are allowed to look at what happened and say, That was horrific. That hurt me. That changed me. I should never have had to survive that.

Then we get to decide what we want to build with what remains.

That is where my work lives now. I am not interested in teaching women how to become better at surviving. Women are already fu***ng phenomenal at surviving. I want us to stop building our entire identities around how much pain we can tolerate. I want us to remember what it feels like to be inside our own bodies without constantly preparing for the next thing.

I want us to remember that our needs are not an inconvenience. That our boundaries are not cruelty. That our softness is not weakness. That our children deserve to grow up knowing what safety feels like. That love was never supposed to require us to disappear inside it.

I want to keep moving the mountains that were placed in front of us so the women coming behind us don't have to spend their entire lives trying to climb them.

I know I can't save everyone. None of us can. What I can do is take what I have been given and build something different with it.

So if you are sitting somewhere today wondering how the hell you are still standing, I want you to look at your life differently. Look for the places where life has managed to grow.

Look at the people who love you without making you question whether you are safe. Look at the ways you protect your children differently than you were protected. Look at the boundaries you finally learned to hold. Look at the pieces of yourself you have dragged back into the light. Look at the moments where you feel like yourself again.

Look at all the evidence that the "rubble" did not get the final say.

You might still have a mountain in front of you. That doesn't mean you haven't already moved mountains. You might still be healing. That doesn't mean you haven't already come a fu***ng long way. You might still carry pieces of the woman who had to become hard just to survive. You do not have to hate her. She got you here. You can thank her for keeping you alive without asking her to run your life forever.

Maybe the point isn't figuring out why we had to walk through hell. Maybe the point is realizing that we made it through, then deciding what we are going to build with the life we fought so hard to keep.

Survival can become something else. It can become remembering. Remembering that we are worthy of love that does not hurt. Remembering that our children deserve a softer world. Remembering that women were never meant to spend their entire lives proving how much they can endure. Remembering that there is still something inside us that knows how to grow.

Something that was there before the trauma. Something that existed before the survival. Something that never actually left.

We are not the rubble. We are what kept growing through it.

Even here.

Especially here.

✨️ Remaining availability | August 24th–29th ✨️

Summer is running out of runway, friends. 😭

Back-to-school is somehow already around the corner, which means the annual female Olympic event is about to begin:

Work.
School schedules.
Lunches.
Permission forms.
Appointments.
Sports.
Activities.
Lost water bottles.
Where the f**k did the other shoe go?
Making sure everyone is fed.
Making sure everyone has what they need.
Remembering everything for everyone.

All while somehow being expected to keep your own s**t together. 😂

So to all the moms heading into another season of doing approximately 47 things at once...

You've fu***ng got this.

You don't have to do it perfectly. You don't have to be endlessly patient. You don't have to pretend you're not overwhelmed. Some days you're going to feel like you've absolutely nailed this motherhood thing.

Other days you're going to lock yourself in the bathroom, take one deep breath, say your favourite curse word (f**k is my personal go to 🤷‍♀️) and wonder how the hell everyone made it to Thursday.

That's when you call me. 😆

Come get your body worked on.
Come unwind your nervous system.
Come move some energy.
Come sit in the quiet.
Come talk s**t about being a woman, our kids, your husband, your ex, your mother, the patriarchy... whatever needs to come out that day. 😂

You don't have to show up here polished. You don't have to have it all figured out. You can just come as you are and we'll take it from there.

✨️ Treatment is covered by most major insurance companies.

Book online at womanunwound.noterro.com or send Woman Unwound or Candace Raynes a message and I'll get you into one of the remaining spots.