Identity ~ The Woman Behind the Roles
Identity ~ The Woman Behind the Roles
As women, many of us carry life in many forms. We birth children, yes and we also birth businesses, books, visions, homes, movements, healing, and new ways of being. Often, we are holding many roles at once.
What if there were a softer, simpler way to hold yourself as you hold so much for others?
What would need to be released for you to land in true inner containment where your nervous system can breathe, and your heart can come back online?
Whatever you are called to create in this lifetime, know this: as you create, you are also being created. Each creation reshapes the woman who carries it. You are forged anew by what is asking to be born through you.
And yet, when we over-identify with roles and expectations i.e., mother, partner, leader, caretaker, achiever, we can lose contact with the sacred process moving underneath it all. We begin to perform the creation instead of being in relationship with it.
In times of change, we are invited to respond with honesty to feel what is true, to make room for the feelings we once pushed down like rage, shame, guilt, grief. To grieve what we thought our inner world and outer world “should” be. And to remember that we are not only the one who creates; but we are also a co-creator with life itself.
You are not your roles.
You are the woman beneath them. You were always here, always worthy, and you are still listening.
Roles require performance. And in those performances, we offer our core energy to “be on,” often shape-shifting to what other people expect instead of moving from our inner landscape of truth. This begins early in our development and it can come along and hitch a ride on our cellular memory and spiritual DNA. Over time, these patterns can become so familiar in the body that there may be no clear cognitive recall of when or how they formed.
So, slowly, we wire into our nervous system a setting of “holding it all together for the good of all” because to chose otherwise would not provide safety (according to our nervous system).
But is it really for the good of all when the core of where this energy is coming from has become disconnected from her own truth? It doesn’t fare well within the self when the nervous system becomes attuned to being “on call” all of the time.
Pause and Reflect…
What is my body doing to keep me functional?
What does inner containment feel like somatically?
Every creation asks for a new body to hold it and it begins with the nervous system. When we want a new world, we will be called to do the inner work of the world we primarily inhabit - our bodies. Through the lens of craniosacral rhythm, I experience the nervous system as a kind of living intelligence that is primal, simple, and exquisitely responsive. And here is nature organically ebbing and flowing, blossoming and wilting, expanding and contracting according to her own rhythm.
With generations of women overriding their own rhythms to survive, it is no wonder we are here trying to understand ourselves, and often feeling pressure to “regulate” all the time. But we do not need to be in regulation mode constantly. First, we need to learn the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways our nervous system is responding to life both internally and relationally.
So we have a vision, an idea and we ask ourselves: Are we expecting to create this with the same nervous system we have in this moment?
What we are called to birth in the world often requires more honesty, more capacity, and different boundaries. And when those internal upgrades arrive faster than our current structure can hold, the body may respond with signals like fatigue, tension, anxiety, shutdown, heaviness. These are messengers that something is asking to reorganize within.
The body becomes the holding vessel for creation without integration.
Pause and Reflect…
What is my body asking me to change as my life evolves?
What is my body protecting me from feeling?
When I speak about containment, it is not about control. It is about capacity. Containment is the ability to feel our feelings and process our experiences without abandoning ourselves or by running away, pushing hard, or collapsing. Containment needs structure, and structure needs a supportive and anchored foundation with anchored roots.
This is why womb and pelvic care is so essential for us women as it leads us back to our roots, so we can find safety and structural support as we open to change and creation energy. When we are rooted, we are grounded. Plants and trees root before they rise, and so much of that is done in the dark, the inner work. They do not rush to grow. They follow nature’s cues.
And we can learn to follow cues within ourselves, too, such as rolling energy back into slowness and reflection first, so we may hear what is true.
How you care for and support yourself is how you build containment. This is how we learn to sense, create boundaries, and move in rhythm through our cycles and the season of life we are in while staying in relationship with nature herself.
Pause and Reflect…
What does containment feel like in belly, pelvis, breath?
What does non-containment feel like?
Motherline
Our motherline also speaks through the roles we inherit in the body. We are not blaming our mothers and grandmothers. If you still are, you are avoiding yourself and accountability for what you hold in your body. We are simply reflecting on what was passed down through their ways of being: how they held their needs, their truth, their grief, their limits. Our ancestors needed to survive and so they adapted strategies to do so and these were innocently passed along as we quietly forgot what had been stored in the quietude of the tissues in the body, the wisdom and truth that had to be hidden to stay alive.
Many of us inherited roles: to be good, to be easy, to not have personal needs, to shrink big dreams, and to carry the emotional load for others. When we live in these patterns for too long, we stay in collapse as carrying the weight of the world as if we were made and chosen to do so.
These can become body patterns: throat tightness, solar plexus bracing, pelvic guarding, breath holding. Voice is not simply a mindset or something we speak. It is the breath, jaw, diaphragm, throat, and pelvis.
Pause and Reflect:
Whose voice am I still obeying inside my body?
What truth is living in my throat… my belly?
“I know this logically, but I can’t feel it within me. There is a disconnect.”
Does this sound familiar? Some realizations can be spoken, but the body is still braced. The nervous system does not shift by insight alone. The body needs to come on board and integrate through lived experience. This happens through cultivating safety and new experiences.
Bodywork can be a direct pathway to soften protective holding patterns, reconnect to sensation, clarify your true yes and no, and make space for grief and stress to move gently, over time.
Pause and Reflect:
What do I understand, but still can’t embody?
What would my body do if it trusted it was safe?
Ways I Support Women in This Work
Bodywork
This is most supportive when you feel braced, tight, depleted, overwhelmed, or “stuck in your head” when your body is asking for support to soften, settle, and come back into safety.
In these sessions, we support nervous system settling, softening protective holding, reconnecting to breath and pelvis, sensing your yes and no, and making room for what has been held to move.
What to expect: slow, intentional, breath-based touch, paced by your nervous system and guided by what your body is ready for.
Mentorship
This is most supportive when you are in a threshold season ~ pattern work, identity shift, relationship dynamics, leadership and motherhood tension, grief integration and when you need language, clarity, and witnessing that brings you back to truth.
We support clarity, boundaries, voice, motherline repair, inner authority, and cycle/rhythm mapping so insight becomes a lived change.
What to expect: deep witnessing and practical integration without performance, and without “fixing.”
Virtual note: Mentorship can be offered in person or virtually so you can be supported wherever you are.
Woven / Series
This is most supportive when you want continuity, when life is reorganizing, when you are building capacity over time, and when your system needs repetition to trust and integrate.
We support re-patterning, sustainable change, and integration into real life where your body and your choices begin to match.
What to expect: some sessions may include touch, and some may be dialogue-led guided by what’s alive and what will truly support you.
Not every session includes bodywork; we choose what supports your process that day.
Why Touch Helps the Truth Land
Sometimes we can name the truth, but the body doesn’t trust it yet.
The nervous system needs experience to update not only understanding. Touch can give the body a new reference point for safety: I can soften and still be safe. I help support you in finding your inner safety.
And when the body softens, something changes. Boundaries become easier. Voice becomes clearer. Decisions become less fear-based.
This is not forcing release, it is inviting safety.
Threshold Seasons This Supports
This work often supports women navigating seasons such as:
Leadership and responsibility: For those who hold a lot and lost access to the self.
Motherhood identity shifts: You have been giving constantly and feeling far from your own needs.
Relationships and boundaries: Conflict, resentment, people-pleasing, over-functioning
Grief and loss: When your heart is moving through change and your body feels tender or shut down
Recovery and rebuilding trust: After accidents, illness, or long-term stress patterns
Creation seasons: Writing, building, birthing a new vision, needing capacity, not pressure
Motherline healing: changing inherited patterns
Cycle transitions: postpartum, perimenopause, irregular cycles when rhythm is asking to be honored
Signs Your Roles Are Living in Your Body
Nervous system “on call”
can’t rest even when there’s time
urgency, always thinking ahead
easily irritated or emotionally flooded
difficulty sleeping or shutting off
numbness, disconnection from desire
Body patterns
jaw clenching, tension headaches
shallow breathing, breath holding
tight neck, shoulders
belly bracing , digestive tightness
pelvic gripping , heaviness, hard to soften hips
fatigue that doesn’t resolve with sleep
Relational patterns
over-explaining
resentment after overgiving
difficulty receiving help
feeling like the emotional container for everyone
saying yes when you mean no
These aren’t personal flaws, these are intelligent strategies your system learned to survive and we can relieve them.
An Invitation
If something in you felt seen while reading this, trust that. Reach out for an exploratory call to support you in coming home to yourself and moving from a well resourced body.
In Rooted Love,
Christine Jude
