Relational Release
A collection of sacred meditations called The Soft Unbinding, each one offering a brief insight into the emotional healing it supports, from grief and fear to self-belief and ancestral release.
A Gentle, Powerful Path to Releasing Emotional Pain Through Sacred Presence
If you have done the inner work and still find yourself carrying the weight of the past, if you struggle to feel at home in your body, or notice that memories linger longer than they should, you are not alone. Many people reach a point in their healing where traditional talk therapy no longer touches the deeper layers of pain. This is often because pain does not live only in the mind. It lives in the nervous system, in the body, and in the soul.
The Soft Unbining is a sacred meditation series created to meet that pain with presence and compassion. It is not about fixing or forcing. It is not about striving to become something new. Rather, it is about gently unbinding what was never yours to carry in the first place. It is about softening the survival patterns that formed in response to trauma, and returning, slowly and safely, to the Self that has always known how to heal.
The collection of meditations was lovingly crafted as sacred companions for your journey. They draw on the wisdom of Internal Family Systems (IFS), heart-based healing, and nervous system awareness, without using clinical language. Instead, they speak in the language of the soul, quiet, compassionate, and intuitive. Each meditation invites you to sit with the parts of you that carry fear, grief, longing, shame, or exhaustion, and to meet them not with judgment, but with reverence.
This is not a series you listen to once and move on. It is a practice. A devotional return to your inner world. Each time you listen, you may find something new, a deeper layer, a softer release, a more spacious breath. You are encouraged to choose whichever meditation feels most aligned with what is present for you in the moment. There is no correct order. There is no rush.
Whether you are sitting with the wounds of childhood, tending to ancestral burdens, grieving a lost connection, or reclaiming your right to boundaries, The Soft Unbinding is here to hold you. It is here to remind you that healing is not something you must force. It is something you allow. And you never have to do it alone.
Let this be your invitation home.
Let this be the beginning of a softer way forward.
Let this be The Relational Release
Let this be freedom
Welcome to the Relational Release Guidebook
This sacred guide has been created to gently support and deepen your journey through each of the six medicinal practices. Inside, you will find IFS-informed reflections, somatic rituals, and integration prompts to help you connect with your inner system and embody the healing with care.
Let this guidebook be a quiet place to return to, a companion for your parts, a space to reflect, and a tool to help you honour what is unfolding. There is no right way to use it. Follow what feels true for you.
You are not just listening. You are remembering.
And you are not alone in this.
You can download it here.
Guidebook
Healing The Mother Wound
This practice guides you to connect with the unmet longings and protective parts shaped by your relationship with your mother. It offers a space to grieve what was missing while receiving energetic mothering that nourishes and soothes the heart.
Releasing The Father Wound
This meditation helps you tenderly meet and release the pain held in your system from an absent, unavailable, or harmful father figure. It creates space for repair, internal re-fathering, and reclaiming your inner authority.
Letting Go Of Parents
A practice to release unmet expectations, inherited pain, and emotional entanglements, not with resentment, but with compassion. This meditation invites you to honour what was, grieve what was not, and create space for the love that now lives within you.
The Ancestral Altar
This practice supports the release of ancestral burdens that your body and nervous system may still be carrying. Through breath, presence, and spiritual connection, it helps you return what is not yours to hold and receive support from those who came before you.
The Threads That Remain
This meditation honours the complex grief of estrangement. Whether the relationship faded, fractured, or was never safe, it helps you acknowledge what was lost while gently reclaiming your energy and belonging.
Becoming The Parent
This practice meets the sacred ache of grief with tenderness. It gently reveals the love, hope, and life still pulsing beneath the pain, allowing you to feel held in your sorrow while reconnecting with your own light.
BONUS
Forgiveness For Friends
A gentle, heart-opening practice to help you release lingering pain, unspoken resentments, and unresolved memories from past friendships. With compassion and clarity, this meditation supports you in honouring what was, grieving what has changed, and freeing your system from what no longer needs to be carried.
Download Your Relational Release Integration Toolkit
This bonus toolkit serves as your daily companion for integrating the medicine of each practice into your everyday life. Inside, you will find IFS-based prompts, somatic micro-practices, nervous system anchors, and sacred rituals to support ongoing healing and embodiment.
Use this guide to pause, reflect, and tend to your parts with presence. Whether you have five minutes or a spacious morning, this toolkit meets you where you are, helping you stay connected to Self, one breath and one choice at a time.
You can access your tool kit here
Tool Kit
What Changes When You Keep Listening
The Soft Unbinding is not designed to be consumed once and forgotten. It is a series crafted for gentle repetition, because healing, especially of the nervous system and wounded parts, requires consistency, safety, and spaciousness over time.
When you return to these meditations regularly, something profound begins to happen.
Neuroplasticity, the brain’s capacity to rewire itself, is activated through repetition and emotional safety. Each time you listen, you are strengthening new neural pathways that support self-compassion, calm, and emotional regulation. Research shows that repeated engagement with mindful, heart-centred practices like meditation can reduce amygdala reactivity (the brain’s fear centre) and increase activity in the prefrontal cortex, which governs self-awareness, empathy, and wise decision-making (Hölzel et al., 2011).
Psychologically, these meditations create space for internal attachment repair. As you meet younger, hidden, or protective parts with presence and curiosity, your system learns a new relational template, one where safety, connection, and inner belonging become possible. This mirrors Internal Family Systems research, which shows that when protective parts are witnessed rather than pushed away, the nervous system can settle and integration becomes possible (Schwartz, 2021).
Somatically, the body begins to respond differently. Instead of bracing or shutting down, it starts to soften. The vagus nerve, a key part of the parasympathetic nervous system, becomes more responsive. You might notice improved digestion, deeper sleep, less reactivity, or an increased capacity to be with what once overwhelmed you. This is your system unbinding itself from old survival patterns.
Emotionally, the repeated act of being with what was once exiled, shame, grief, longing, fear, builds internal trust. You begin to feel safe enough to grieve, to say no, to let go. The meditations become not just practices, but sacred rituals of returning to yourself.
Over time, the outcomes include:
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A calmer, more regulated nervous system
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Decreased anxiety, inner criticism, and emotional reactivity
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Greater self-trust and clarity in decision-making
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Increased compassion for the parts of you shaped by pain
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A felt sense of inner safety and belonging
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A stronger connection to your intuition, your soul, and your sacred centre
You are not just listening. You are unlearning what kept you bound and remembering the wholeness that was always yours.
How to Choose and How Often to Listen
Healing is not a linear process, and neither is the path through The Soft Unbinding. These meditations are not designed to be followed in a specific order, but to be chosen intuitively, based on what your system is holding, feeling, or resisting in any given moment.
How to Choose
Let your body lead the way.
Before selecting a meditation, take a few quiet breaths with your hand on your heart or belly. Ask inwardly:
“What part of me needs the most love right now?”
You may feel a pull toward grief, shame, fear, or a sense of unworthiness. Trust that pull.
If nothing arises clearly, read the short descriptions of each meditation. Notice which ones make you pause, feel tender, or even slightly uncomfortable. Often, the meditation we resist is the one we most need.
There is no right or wrong choice. The meditation you are drawn to is enough.
How Often to Listen
Research in neuroscience and psychology supports the importance of repetition and consistency when it comes to healing trauma and rewiring emotional patterns. Listening to a meditation just once may bring insight, but listening regularly is what creates lasting change.
Daily or near-daily listening activates neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to form new, more adaptive pathways (Davidson & McEwen, 2012). Even 10 to 20 minutes of consistent meditation practice has been shown to reduce amygdala reactivity (the brain’s alarm system) and strengthen the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for emotional regulation, decision-making, and empathy (Hölzel et al., 2011).
When a meditation feels especially relevant, you may choose to repeat it for several days or weeks. This deepens the relationship between your Self and the part of you being tended to. It creates a felt sense of safety through familiarity, which is essential for systems impacted by trauma.
You do not need to rotate constantly.
You are not trying to complete something.
You are returning, again and again, to what wants your presence.
A Gentle Rhythm Might Look Like:
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One meditation a day, repeated for 3 to 5 days before moving on
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A longer weekly practice with shorter, nourishing meditations in between
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Revisiting certain meditations during moments of stress, transition, or emotional activation
Listen with intention.
Let it become part of your rhythm.
Allow each repetition to carry you deeper, not just into the meditation, but into yourself.
There is no rush.
Your healing is not on a timeline.
This is not performance.
It is devotion.
Go Deeper in Sacred Space
If you feel a particular part has stirred, or a pattern has surfaced that is asking for deeper attention, you are warmly invited to book a one-to-one session. These 90-minute sessions offer sacred space to gently explore what is arising within you, with the support of presence, compassion, and therapeutic skill. Together, we will listen deeply to the parts that carry pain, protection, or longing, and begin the tender work of unbinding what no longer serves. This is your time, to be seen, supported, and gently guided back to your Self.
Book Your SessionsCreated from Lived Experience and Professional Mastery
I created The Soft Unbinding as both a response to my own healing journey and a reflection of the hundreds of stories I have held in sacred therapeutic space. These meditations emerged from the quiet truth I have witnessed again and again: healing does not come through force. It comes through gentle presence.
This series brings together everything I know to be true, from my own experience of unravelling deep patterns of emotional pain, to decades of professional training in Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic trauma work, HeartMath, breathwork, and nervous system regulation. It is rooted in compassion, neuroscience, and the sacred intelligence of the body.
I have trained with pioneers in the field including Dr. Richard Schwartz, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, and Dr. Joe Dispenza, and I have woven their research into a language that speaks directly to the soul. The Soft Unbinding is not a method, it is a movement back toward wholeness.
Each meditation was lovingly crafted not as a technique, but as a living, breathing companion, created from what I have lived, what I have studied, and what I have witnessed in others. It is my offering to those who are tired of trying to heal by effort alone, and who are ready to heal through attunement, reverence, and return.
A Final Whisper from My Heart to Yours
No matter where you are on your healing path, please remember this:
You are not too much. You are not too late. You are not broken.
You are becoming.
You are returning.
You are deeply worthy of love, rest, and gentleness.
May these meditations hold you when the world feels heavy.
May they remind you that your healing is not only possible, it is sacred.
With tenderness,
Angela M. Carter
IFS Therapist
