It gutted me. There was a part of me that didn’t believe it was true. And there was another part, one that already believed something was wrong with me, that I wasn’t capable of love, of loving or being loved… And that part heard him and thought, well, maybe that is true, because I did feel so numb.

And now, ironically enough, I can empathize with why he felt that way. At that point I was in bed with a wire in my spinal cord. I was completely shut down; I was not showing up to life, to our marriage, to him. And I have so much grace now for that version of me. Who knows how to handle something like that? I was so young and so clueless and doing the very best I could. Neither of us knew how to hold everything that life was throwing at us.

The truth is, I had been dissociated for most of my life, way before any of this. To survive life, and all the trauma, and the CPTSD I was carrying, I learned to numb myself and shut myself down. And then, in the years of the worst physical pain, it went even further. I was on all these heavy narcotics; I watched TV all day, I ate my feelings, I numbed in every way I could find so that I wouldn’t have to feel the level of physical, emotional, and spiritual pain I was in. But the thing about numbing is that you don’t get to pick and choose. I numbed the pain, and it took everything else down with it, so I was walking around like a shadow of myself, and I think he was in a room with that shadow, and he named the thing he could see.

I heard someone say this summer that “joy is the matriarch of emotions.” And it’s funny, because people will say to me now, “I wish I could feel joy the way you do; you laugh so much, you seem like you’re having so much fun.”

What I understand now is that line from Kahlil Gibran: “the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

I remember hearing that for the first time in the middle of a nervous breakdown at my brother’s house, and thinking, okay, that’s going to be my story, because God knows I have suffered enough. But I hadn’t felt any joy yet. And I couldn’t understand why. I had suffered and suffered and suffered, and I was still shut down, still numb.

In the past seven years, learning how to be with my own feelings has changed my life more than anything else I have ever done, and also learning to meet my parts with levity and humor, and not to take myself so seriously, and to hold two things at once, pain and joy at the same time, has drastically altered my life in every way.

On Thursday, I got into a little fender bender. It was my fault. I was in a parking garage, and I couldn’t see in the dark, and it brought up so much about my sight, and I wept into Eric’s arms. I cried harder than I have cried in a long time. I cried about how scared I am about my vision. I cried about the pain my body is carrying. So much fear, so much grief, all of these stories I keep making up about what my future might look like. I wept and wept and wept in his arms.

And the beautiful thing is, I felt it all.

By that evening we made a yummy meal, and we giggled and giggled about who knows what, which is very normal in our house: a lot of silliness and laughter. It isn’t that I stopped being scared, or that the grief packed up and left. It’s still here. But I didn’t judge myself for the fear or the anger or the sadness. I let myself feel it, and I let Eric witness it. The grief is still right here. And that dinner, the giggling, the joy that came after, was only possible because I let myself feel the grief.

I worked with a teacher named London, and years ago she told me I was an off-the-charts empath. At the time I didn’t believe her. I was like, no, not me, I really don’t think so, because I still had his words in me, and I had felt so numb for so much of my life. But she explained something I have never forgotten. When someone feels as deeply as I do, to survive on this planet, they have to learn to shut certain things down.

What I know now: The more I let myself feel, the more I feel all of it. Last week I saw a hurt young possum, and I cried, and I kept tearing up over the next two days, every time I thought about it. I felt so much sadness for an animal suffering that I couldn’t help. A younger version of me would have thought that’s too much, that’s over the top, and been embarrassed by it. But that tenderness is not a flaw. The grief and the sadness I carry are the same doorway as the joy and the love I feel for Eric, for children, for animals, for this planet, for plants, for my friends. You really can’t have the one without the other. If I numb the pain of watching an animal suffer or a child suffer, I also numb the playfulness and the delight and the laughter. It is all connected to the way I numbed the pain in my younger years. I flatlined so much of my life.

And it’s not just me. This is so common, way more common than we talk about. I think about Eric, who is such a big feeler and so tender, and how he learned to numb through alcohol before he got sober. When I hold it that way, it makes total sense to me.

This is a lot of what we’re doing in The River. Learning to hold all of it, without deciding that we’re too much, or that we’re bad. Most of the people I work with are deeply sensitive beings with tender nervous systems, and moving through this world has been brutal for them in so many ways. So we practice not over-identifying with these parts, and at the same time coming home to the wholeness we already are. That’s the work. Learning to be with all of it.

If you would like a free explore call about the River, I would love to chat with you about it. Just respond to this email, and we’ll get you scheduled.

Sending you and your big beautiful heart so much love,

Ruthie

Get in The River

Don’t miss this free three-day workshop with my dear friend Sarah. She’s become one of the people I trust most, and I’m in awe of how she moves through her own life. I’ve learned more about my nervous system from her than from almost anyone else.

Her workshop, Opting Out of Urgency, runs September 10, 15, and 17. It’s for the woman who’s tired of chasing peace through productivity and ready to find a pace that doesn’t cost her the life she’s trying to build. Replays available if you can’t make it live.

Save My Spot

So honored to have you in this sweet little corner of the internet.

Last week’s full moon and eclipse arrived with some potent energy — I think many of us were feeling it. We me…

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We are going to come together to release and let go. To move whatever has been sitting heavy, whatever has been stagnant, and let it finally move through and out.

August has held a lot. And before we step into September, there’s something powerful about pausing here: naming what we’re ready to release, and making space to walk in grounded. With clarity. Lighter.

We will journal together. A few prompts to help us name what’s ready to go. We will move our bodies, shake it loose, dance if that’s what wants to come through. A sacred space to let it all move through us together.

All of you is welcome here.

Today at 1 pm central. The live event is for paid subscribers. Sign up using the link below 🤍

XO,
Ruthie

Full Moon Dance & Release

Today 1-2pm CST

Register with the link below

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We will journal together. A few prompts to help us name it. We will dance, and we will let ourselves be seen. Held by each other, and by the energy of this moon.

All of you is welcome here.

The live event is for paid subscribers. Sign up in the link below 🤍

XO,

Ruthie

Full Moon Dance & Release

August 30th 1-2pm CST

Register with the link below

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The first half of my life was pretty brutal, honestly.

I lived in a bed for seven years and had several nervous breakdowns, and in the years after all of that, I threw myself into talk therapy and studied trauma and pain and suffering pretty obsessively. I took all the classes, read all the books, did all the things. I got so good at it that two different therapists, at two different points in my thirties, actually told me I didn’t need to come back. They started talking to me like a peer.

And a part of me wanted to shake them.

Because yeah, there was this egoic part of me that loved being told I was okay, that loved being the one who understood it all. But there was a part of me internally that was screaming, “I am not well! What do you mean, don’t come back?!” I didn’t feel seen. I didn’t feel understood. I felt really confused, because I knew so much, and then I would beat myself up for it, for how much knowledge I had, how much awareness I had, and none of it was moving the needle. Because it was just awareness. It wasn’t integrated into my body. It wasn’t felt. It wasn’t embodied.

It wasn’t until years later that I heard this Asaro proverb that finally made it all make sense to me. “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.” When I heard that quote, I felt chills all over, and I thought, “Tattoo that shit on my body — that’s the truest thing I’ve heard!”

That was it. That was the whole thing I couldn’t figure out.

Because I could describe my neuroses to you in so much detail. Every core wound, every place a trauma happened, every diagnosis. I had so much of my identity wrapped up in all of it that I just kept telling the same pain story over and over, and it never actually made me feel any better.

But in the last seven years, really delving into somatics and embodiment, into nuance, into holding two truths at once, into bringing more play and creativity into my life, I was finally able to move the needle on things I had suffered over for twenty-something years. Things I thought I would just carry forever.

And that’s what we’re offering in The River. It’s not just more knowledge. It’s more felt experience. It’s more unlearning. It’s meeting ourselves in new ways, learning how to hold two things at once, pain and beauty, and bringing in the laughter and the levity and the creativity and the expansion too.

If this resonates for you, if you’ve got a ton of head knowledge too and it just doesn’t feel like it’s moving the needle yet, book a free explore call with me by responding to this post or filling out the form at the bottom of this page. I would honestly love to talk to you. We can get into what this actually is and feel out together whether it’s a good fit for you.

With you,
Ruthie

Watch the full video of this lovely chat with and subscribe to join her incredible Substack community in doing the work of embodiment.

Opportunities to join me in the work together

Get in The River

Upcoming Event: Full Moon Dance & Release

August 30th 1-2pm CST

Register with the link below

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We’ll be talking about embodiment, healing in community, what it means to feel deeply in this world, and the practices that help us come home to ourselves with more softness and courage. If you’ve been wanting to understand more of the heart behind The River Within and to hear from someone I love and trust so deeply I hope you’ll come be with us.

Click this link to join at 4pm central

But this week I’m feeling the weight of what my body is carrying.

Since last winter, I have been losing my vision quite quickly.

It comes from Marfan’s syndrome, a connective tissue disorder I have lived with my whole life. Think of the lens of your eye like the jumping part of a trampoline, held in place by tiny springs. When your connective tissue does not hold, those springs stretch and loosen, and the lens keeps drifting. That is why my sight is changing so fast, in both eyes.

I have seen seven doctors. Most will not operate. Only one said yes, and he is my last resort, because he will not do it until the lenses have completely fallen off. The surgery itself carries such a high risk of losing my vision that he will not touch it before then.

I wore my last pair of glasses for a single month before I could not see out of them, and one eye had gotten four times worse in that time.

Now I cannot drive at night, and I don’t feel safe driving on a cloudy day. Traveling genuinely scares me because of how vulnerable it is to not have my vision. I truly don’t know if this will ever be fixed.

For most of my life, up until my thirties, I believed a story: that I would be okay when the pain goes away. When I fit into a certain size. When I find the love of my life. When a man comes in and takes over all my hard things, especially the finances. When I have a baby. When my divorce is final. When my bank account reaches a certain number. When the pain completely, finally goes away. And the list goes on and on and on.

I would be okay when

And I am watching myself hold two things at the same time. I am genuinely grieving. It is scary and disorienting, and I let myself feel it when it surfaces. Some days I am very sad about it. I feel sorry for myself. I let myself grieve and pity and feel all of it.

And other times I feel genuine, overwhelming gratitude for the journey this body has sent me on. Not a perfect life wrapped up in a shiny bow… but a beautiful life nonetheless. And the pain and loss don’t diminish the joy of it all. Both of those things can be true at once, and it often feels like they take turns. And feeling all of it is what makes us deeply human.

I am also holding so much hope. That this is not the end of the story. That one day I will be able to have the surgery, and that it will restore my vision again. I get to hold that hope and also the reality of what is here right now, in the same two hands.

What I’m in awe of though is that seven years ago, being in this state would have knocked me flat. For weeks. Nervous breakdowns. Spiraling. Not sleeping.

And now, some days it still knocks me down. But not for weeks or to the extent of a breakdown. Because I am still living a really full, beautiful life in the middle of it. I am planning my best friend’s birthday party that I am so excited to be co-hosting. I am helping so many beautiful animals that bring me joy. My belly hurts from laughter when I’m with my friends. I am taking on new clients and am able to show up for them fully.

And it’s not because I’m on the other side of my pain, but because I’ve learned to live within it.

What has been so wild to me is that I am launching this program in the middle of all of it. A past version of me, one I deeply love and have so much compassion for, would have used this as a reason to play small. But I’m not repeating that pattern, even in the middle of it all. Losing my vision would have been the perfect excuse to stay comfortable and to not step out of my comfort zone. Most people wouldn’t have questioned my decision for a second.

But I have built something in myself that can hold more now. More nuance. More than one true thing at a time. I get to grieve my vision and launch this work. I get to be scared and still show up anyway.

This is exactly the work Ally and I are going to do together in The River.

Ally had her own brutal year, with mold poisoning that knocked her flat earlier this year. And last spring, when the two of us sat down and started naming everything we were moving through, all these wild health things stacked up between us, we realized something that stopped us both.

On paper, all of it should have been taking us out. And yet there we were, still full of joy, and laughing and still delighting in our lives, right in the thick of it.

What a phenomenon. That is the only word we had for it.

That astonishment is how the The River came to be. Our own inner work is what got us here, to this way of meeting ourselves, and we could not stop wanting to share it. We haven’t found a method to “fix our lives” because we all know that there’s no magical solution. But we have been able to feel fully, gorgeously alive inside a life that has not been fixed. Our lives were never meant to be fixed. They’re meant to be met.

If you know that ache, the one that keeps whispering you will be okay later, once everything is finally handled, I made something for you, with Ally. The River begins on September 10th.

If something in you leaned in while reading this, book a free explore call with me, and we can feel whether this is a good fit for you. Just fill out the form at the bottom of this page.

Another opportunity I’m thrilled to share with you is a free three-day workshop with my friend Sarah.

I found her work years ago inside Kate Northrup’s Relaxed Money program. She was the one leading the monthly nervous system calls, and something in her voice settled my body before my mind caught up. Two years ago we met in person and became friends. Last year I joined an accountability group with her and our friend Jen. She has become one of the people I trust most, and I am in awe of how she moves through her own life. I’ve learned more about my nervous system from her than from almost anyone.

Opting Out of Urgency on September 10, 15, and 17. It’s for the woman who is tired of chasing peace through productivity and ready to find a pace that doesn’t cost her the life she’s trying to build. Replays available if you can’t make it live.

Save My Spot

Sending so much love to you,

Ruthie

Opportunities to join me in the work together

Get in The River

Upcoming Event: Full Moon Dance & Release

August 30th 1-2pm CST

Register with the link below

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Not long ago I spent time with some of the most tender, wildly sensitive women I’ve been around in a long while. Beautiful souls. And a few of them were struggling in a way I know from the inside. Nervous about being out late. Already dreading the sleep they knew they wouldn’t get. Spent right down to the bone from being around so many people, so many energies.

I have said every one of those things out loud, more times than I can count.

So I sat there and let myself hold two things at once. Real grief, that they know this exact ache, that they’re inside it right now, that heavy overwhelm. And underneath the grief, quietly, something I wasn’t expecting. I noticed how far I’ve come. Because that fear, that bracing, it just doesn’t feel alive in me the way it used to.

It is so hard to see your own growth while you’re inside of it. You almost never catch it head on. You catch it sideways, in a moment like that one, when you meet an old version of yourself in someone else and realize you don’t live there anymore.

There was something else in that room too, though, and I’ve been sitting with it since. I have always been so held by my friends. They have cared for me through a tender nervous system and CPTSD and all of it, with a devotion I will never stop being grateful for. But I have not really had friends who live as porously as I do. I’ve met clients who do. Not many peers. And being in a room with women who are as sensitive as I am, who know these exact sensitivities from the inside, touched something I hadn’t let myself name.

For a long time I had so much identity wrapped up in being too sensitive. Too empathic. Too porous for this planet. There were seasons I felt too empathic to even walk into a grocery store, because it would knock me flat for the rest of the day. I told myself a lot of stories about how much I could handle and how carefully I had to build my life to stay safe.

I want to be gentle about those stories, because they did something for me once. They protected a version of me who needed protecting. I’m not mad at her.

But she is not in the driver’s seat anymore.

Am I still highly sensitive? Yes. Empathic, porous, all of it? Yes. Those parts are real and I’m not trying to get rid of them. And I get to be a human on this planet and feel safe in my own body at the same time. Both.

I was gone off and on for almost three whole weeks, July into August. Different beds. Sometimes sharing a bed. So much travel, so many people, so many energies. And here’s what that would have meant for most of my life. I have needed something to sleep since I was in high school. Something, every night, my whole adult life. For years that was Ambien, or trazodone, the prescriptions I genuinely needed to get through a night. There is nothing wrong with needing them. They carried me.

These days I still reach for weed some nights, and there may come a day I feel ready to set that down too. But I am not taking the prescriptions anymore, and I am sleeping better than I have in my entire adult life. On this trip there were nights I didn’t sleep well, and the old dread that used to come with a hard night just wasn’t there. I’d read, or listen to a book, and instead of spiraling about how on earth I’d get through the next day, I’d think, well, this is great. Nobody gets to ask anything of me for these few hours. I get to be quiet with myself. I’ll catch up another night. It’s all fine.

If you’d told the old me that, she never would have believed you.

This is the thing I keep trying to say about The River. It is not about becoming less sensitive. It is not about armoring up or fixing the parts of you that feel too much. It is about something in you learning, all the way down, that it is safe to be exactly this porous and still be okay. The grip loosens. You stop bracing against your own life. And you get to do it in a room full of women who feel the way you feel, which for some of us is its own kind of homecoming. This is the work Ally and I are actually guiding women through. Not talking about it. Practicing it in the body, together.

The River Within is a small container for women who feel all of it, deeply, and are ready to stop treating their own sensitivity like a problem to manage. We meet on Zoom Wednesdays from 12 to 1:30 Central, September 9 through November 25, and we gather in person here in Nashville on November 13 and 14. There’s a link just below and if you’d like to receive a Free Explore call with Ruthie, just fill the form out at the bottom of this page.

With so much love for all of your parts and sensitivities,

Ruthie

Get in The River

Listen to this podcast where Ally & I talk more about our process of healing and our story behind The River Within.

Upcoming Event: Full Moon Dance & Release

There’s a reason we turn our faces up to the full moon. She pulls the whole ocean toward her, and no one calls the tide unstable for rising to meet her. We are mostly water, so when the moon comes full and something in you starts to swell, some grief or longing or tenderness with no clear name, that isn’t you falling apart. A lot comes up around a full moon. Sleep gets thin, feelings run closer to the surface, and there’s usually more to work with than you expected, so this is our invitation to stop managing it all and let ourselves actually feel it together.

August 30th 1-2pm CST

Register with the link below

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We cried until our heads ached. We laughed until our stomachs hurt. We danced on the sand through a silent disco, moving together through 5Rhythms, music only we could hear.

There is a word for what I felt there. Inscendence.

Thomas Berry gifted us this word. It is the impulse not to rise above the world but to climb down into it. To seek its core. Into our instinctive roots. The opposite of transcendence.

Which sits in stark opposition to how I lived for so long… for most of my life I tried to leave.

First I numbed and dissociated, which was such a brilliant tactic, because being here felt too scary and too painful. Then, like so many of us, I had a spiritual awakening and tried to leave a holier way. I punished myself for my humanness. I expected perfection, which is insane. Now, I couldn’t be further from that belief.

I do not believe we incarnate in order to transcend being human.

I believe we come to climb all the way in. Fully immersing ourselves in the human experience.

That circle of women was a picture of what this work makes possible. And what moves me most is that I did not always have this. Not in my friendships, or with other women, or even with myself.

Doing this work gifted all of this to me.

On that cliff’s edge I was not learning something new — I was watching my own life reflected back to me. The connection, the love, the joy, the laughter, the tears. None of it was an accident. It was carefully chosen, cultivated, and nourished.

If you have done the work and know that something is still missing, this is for you.

You have read the books. You have sat in years of talk therapy. You can narrate your own story with startling clarity. You know your attachment style. You can name your patterns, your wounds, your diagnoses, the exact childhood moment each one traces back to.

And yet somewhere along the way, the knowing became its own kind of home. You started to wear it. Anxious. Avoidant. ADHD. Codependent. The words felt like relief at first, because finally something explained you.

And all of it mattered. All of it got you here. I would not trade a moment of it, and neither should you.

The work we will be doing moves you out of your head and into your body. Where the knowing finally metabolizes into feeling. Where it gets to be tender, and funny, and creative, and full of play. Where there is room for the joy and the grief and the heartbreak, all of it, all at once.

Not more understanding. More embodying it.

That is what we have created for you in The River Within. That level of connection, being seen, being held, and being loved. It is what we were made for, and we have built a holy space where it can happen alongside other inspiring women doing this transformative work.

This loving container includes: Twelve live virtual workshops with Ally Fallon and me, Wednesdays 12 to 1:30 CST, September 9 through November 25. A two-day in-person intensive here in Nashville, November 13 and 14. A small accountability group of around five women, with support between sessions on Voxer. Somatic practices throughout: Yoga, writing, intuitive dance, breathwork, shadow work. The investment is $2,222, and payment plans are available.

And when you join, you receive Ally’s course A Book in Six Months, a $999 program, included as our gift to you.

This course is not just a random bonus. Ally built it on a belief that I believe in my bones too: that writing a book changes you even if no one reads it but you. That if a book idea won’t leave you alone, it must be written. That there is a version of you that can only exist if you express what is begging to be said.

The River will open up so much creativity in you. Writing is one of the truest ways to let it move. So we are giving you a real path for it, with guidance to take whatever is stirring and let it out onto the page.

This space isn’t another place to perform. It’s a way to come home to yourself, and to let what lives in you finally have somewhere to go.

We are keeping the group smaller so that everyone gets to be really seen and held in this space. So we get to know each other on this beautiful journey. And be a part of each other’s transformation.

The doors are open today.

If you would like to learn more, or if you would like an explore call with me to feel whether this is a good fit, I would love that. Just reply to this email, and we will set it up.

If you have read this far, you are not looking for another way to rise above your life. You are ready to climb into it.

Get in the river with us.

Get in The River

Ruthie

I didn’t even know I was doing it. It was unconscious; a deep abandonment wound running the whole show, and of course she didn’t want to get hurt again, so she took every good man who came close and quietly made him a brother instead. After my divorce I was single for almost nine years, and I friend-zoned men left and right, trip after trip with guy friends, handsome, wonderful men, and we never crossed the line, and then I would feel friend-zoned by them, quietly hurt, never once realizing I was the one who built the wall in the first place.

It was genius, honestly. A small child’s genius. The part of me that did this was not broken; she was brilliant. She built a whole system to keep me from the thing I was most afraid of, and it worked. For years, it worked.

When I finally turned toward this pattern, I didn’t find a wound to clean up. I found a want. A sly little pleasure hiding underneath the thing I swore I hated. I liked being the one who decided and I liked being untouchable. There was a real charge in being the one who could not be gotten to, the one who set the distance, the one who never had to risk the fall, and I don’t believe that’s a flaw to apologize for. That’s power. Owning that I got something out of it, that there was a yes underneath the whole thing, is the exact moment it stopped running me. You cannot set down what you refuse to admit you’re holding.

So I chose to love her. The brilliant little architect of my safety. I told her thank you and then something loosened.

Which brings me to the Real Housewives.

I’ve loved these women for years, and for years I was ashamed of it. Made up a whole story that it was numbing, that a spiritual woman wouldn’t sit there watching grown women throw wine and accusations at each other on a Tuesday night. The shame was louder than the show.

So I did a strange thing. I wrote out my patterns, every part of me I’d judged, and I named each one after a Housewife.

The mama bear who comes out roaring when someone I love is threatened, the one who’ll flip the whole table, that’s Teresa. When I feel her rise now, I don’t brace against her. I laugh, and I let her be fierce, because fierce is exactly what the moment is asking for.

Then there’s the part that collapses into my pain, goes a little victim to my own life. She’s Yolanda. A woman in real pain the world kept doubting. I hold that one softer than the rest and she lives close to my real body and my real history, and she deserves tenderness before she deserves a punchline. The laugh comes after the feeling, never instead of it.

And the inner critic, the one who’s certain I’m not evolved enough, not spiritual enough, not doing any of it right — she’s Shannon. Anxious, insecure, so hard on herself she can’t see straight. When I hear her spiraling now, I don’t fall in with her; I put a hand on my own chest and let her know she’s safe. Now that she has a name, I can hear her without becoming her.

Something happened when I did this. The shame had nowhere to stand. You cannot hate a part of yourself you’re busy laughing with.

And the show stopped being a guilty pleasure. It just became pleasure. I watch a single episode now, and I’m not lost in it for days. I’m fascinated, watching the whole human condition play out, the projection, the longing, the way we hand our shadows to each other and call it drama. A master class in projection I genuinely cannot look away from.

None of this would have happened if I’d kept the shadow in the dark.

Tomorrow night I’m guiding an online gathering through Kripalu — Shadow Work as a Practice of Self-Love and Radical Wholeness. Tuesday, 7 to 8:30pm EST. Body-based, gentle, a little playful, because the parts you’ve most hated are so often the ones carrying your deepest aliveness.

Come find your own cast of characters with me. You don’t need the Housewives for this. You just need the parts of you you’ve most wanted to hide, and a willingness to laugh with them instead of at yourself.

Bring all of them.

Sign up here

I co-led this retreat with my dear friend Erin, and it was three days of diving into the unconscious, into the body, into the parts of ourselves we’ve been the hardest on. The parts we’ve hated. The parts we’ve felt so stuck around that we stopped believing they’d ever move. We worked with horses too. Erin’s husband, Joe, had already done the training work with them, sometimes for years, because he and Erin don’t believe in breaking horses. They rescue wild mustangs and will spend eight years with one before it’s ready to be worked with by a human. No rushing. No force. Because they don’t believe in breaking humans either. Same nervous system logic.

That’s what the horses gave these women. You can’t fake it with a horse. They don’t want your bravery or your composure; they just want you exactly as you are, raw and all. A horse’s whole body reads yours, so when a woman is holding it together on the outside while something old is loud on the inside, the horse knows before she says a word. And when she finally lets herself feel it rather than manage it, the horse settles, too. Two nervous systems, no performance possible, just true signal. It’s one of the most honest mirrors I’ve ever watched someone stand in front of.

By the end of three days, I watched what I can only describe as weighted blankets coming off shoulders. More levity. More play. Real smiles, the kind that surprise the person having them. And I kept thinking the same thought on a loop: what a privilege. Not in a small way.

I’m sharing this with you because behind the scenes, I’ve been building something with my dear friend Allison Fallon, bestselling author and the woman who’s helped hundreds of people write the books they were scared to write. We’re calling it The River Within. And if I’m honest, I feel a little exposed even naming it today, tender and depleted and still finding my footing. But that’s sort of the whole point of what The River Within is. It’s not a program about having it together. It’s about what becomes possible when you stop fighting the parts of you that feel undone and start trusting the current that’s already moving through you, even on the days it doesn’t feel like it.

Consider this your first look. I’ll share more next week. If you want to be the first to know when the doors open, just reply to this email. I’ll make sure you’re on the list.

Something really special is on its way. And this time, we get to be together, in person, in the room.

With a full heart,

Ruthie

Upcoming opportunities to connect & do the work together

Interested in working 1:1 with Ruthie? Book a free discovery call

I tried to muscle that part into line for years. Called her lazy, avoidant, weak. It never worked. She just went further underground and came back louder.

So I got curious instead. Now when I go into mama bear mode, aggressive and defensive because someone I love feels threatened, I call that part of myself Teresa Giudice. She is one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey, flipping the table because she’s trying so hard to protect the people she loves. I’ve got a whole cast by now.

Sounds silly. And it kind of is. But I think that’s the point.

Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” What I’ve learned over the years is that you don’t always have to meet the unconscious with heaviness. Sometimes the fastest way through a pattern is to name it, get curious, and laugh hard at how human it is. And that laughter isn’t avoidance. It’s alchemy.

But first, you have to actually want to look. That’s where it all turns.

I’m hosting a live online gathering on exactly this: meeting some of these patterns and finding new ways to look at them through an entirely different lens- as parts that are trying to protect you. Greeting them with compassion instead of shame, and learning how to alchemize what you find.

Shadow Work as a Practice of Self-Love and Radical Wholeness
📅 Tuesday, August 11
🕖 7:00–8:30 pm EST
💻 Live online via Kripalu
$39 (scholarships available)

We’ll use body-based, trauma-informed practices to bring what’s unconscious into the light, and to start relating to the parts of you that you’ve been at war with. Not to fix you. There was never anything to fix.

Sign up here

I want to tell you about the seven-year cycle, because I know it is real. Not as mysticism, but as something closer to the body’s own clock for how long it takes a false self to finish collapsing.

Twenty-one years ago, I moved into that bed because, unbeknownst to me, a wire from a previous surgery had pierced my brainstem. For the next seven years, it was where I kept returning. I did get up, plenty of times, but so much of that time I spent in a narcotic stupor, checked all the way out of a life I did not want to be living. Here is the part it took me a long time to understand, even though some part of me was aware of it early on: there was a part of me that loved it. Not the pain, the permission. I did not have to show up for a job I didn’t like, a marriage I didn’t like, anything at all I didn’t want to do. I got to eat my feelings, watch TV, take the narcotics, and be taken care of, even while another part of me was also desperate to get out and could not find the door. So many real needs were quietly being met inside all that misery. I did not have the language for that then. I thought all of my pain was physical.

Fourteen years ago, I was thirty-three. My marriage was ending, and I knew it before I let myself know it, the way you know weather is turning before the first raindrop lands. I had a massive breakdown. I could not take care of myself, so I left Nashville and moved into my brother’s house in Louisiana, the brother who basically raised me, and he took care of me for six weeks, maybe two months. Getting back to Nashville after that is what finally got me out of that bed, and it is also when I moved straight into the influencer and Hollywood world, unconsciously chasing proximity to famous people as though their attention could tell me I mattered. None of it was a choice I made on purpose. Underneath it all, without knowing it, I was also lighting the fuse on becoming someone else.

Seven years later, to the week, it happened again. I had just turned in a book about who I thought I was and how I was supposed to “help the world," built on the identity I had spent those years shaping in that world. I did not realize until much later that I had actually written that book to transform myself, and that whatever happened with it out in the world afterward was none of my business. The launch was still nine months away. But right after I turned the book in, I stopped sleeping. Completely. Same as before, to the week. Everything I had built around being seen, being important, being someone, started to crumble. The version of me who needed that world to hold her together did not survive it.

I ended up going to treatment for three weeks. I thought I was there to learn how to sleep again. I did not yet know how much further down this breakdown was going to take me.

This is where it gets into the part I have only told a handful of people. If you want the rest, the treatment, the core wounds, the somatic work that finally moved trauma out of my nervous system after years of only narrating it, and what happened yesterday when I ended up back in that exact bed, not remembering it was the week at all, it is below for paid subscribers. I am also sharing the actual voice memo I sent a friend in the middle of yesterday’s journey, recorded in real time, me laughing hysterically at the absurdity of the human experience while sitting in one of the darkest moments of my life. It is a little wild to put out into the world, but it tells this more honestly than I can retell it now.

Read more

I want to invite you to take a moment to thank yourself for showing up for this work, for your willingness to look inward, to acknowledge the lineage that made your life possible, and to offer gratitude for the gift of life itself.

Whether you were in the room or are simply sitting with these themes now, you may find it supportive to spend some time with the following questions:

• What surprises me as I sit with this work?

• Where do I notice something in my body?

• What question feels more alive now than when I arrived?

• What, if anything, am I being invited to continue exploring?

Please keep in mind that there’s no need to arrive at any immediate conclusions. Whatever emerges can unfold in its own time.

Should you feel called to explore anything that arose, from the workshop, from these questions, or simply from where you are in your own journey, you can book a free 25-minute mapping call with me here. This is a free, no-obligation space to share a little about what you’d like to explore and consider whether a constellation session might be supportive. For ongoing sessions, I offer a sliding scale to help keep this work as accessible as possible.

You can also stay connected with the work Samantha and I are sharing through our Substack. We write about family constellations, lineage, belonging, and the process of coming home to ourselves.

With gratitude,
Zach

Tonight is going to be a very special time.

At 7pm CST, Zach Glassman is leading our free live gathering, What Wants to Belong: An Introduction to Family Constellations. Consider this your last little nudge to join.

You probably know that change isn’t solely willpower or better habits. It’s about the patterns we carry that didn’t start with us — the ones passed down through story, silence, and even the body itself. Judgment never interrupts them. What does is turning toward them and saying, I see you. I see how you survived.

That’s what tonight is for.

Constellations work is experiential, not analytical. You don’t need any prior experience, and you don’t need to share anything you’re not ready to share. Just bring your curiosity — and whatever pattern you’re tired of calling fate.

📅 Tonight, 7pm CST
💻 Save my spot
💛 Free

We would love to see you there.

XO,
Ruthie

Register

Zach Glassman is a family constellations facilitator whose work focuses on helping people uncover the unseen dynamics that shape their lives, relationships, and family systems. Influenced by meditation, creative practice, and a deep curiosity about human connection, he creates spaces where inherited patterns, hidden loyalties, and unresolved stories can come into awareness. His approach invites participants to soften into truth, allowing love to flow through what has been held or hidden and restoring connection to what seeks to belong.

Today I’m so honored that my friend Zach Glassman agreed to be a guest this week for this newsletter and for our free event this Thursday at 7pm Central. He’ll be diving into Family Constellations & the powerful shift that can take place when we sit inside another’s story. I would love to see you there. Register at the link below. Now, onto today’s guest post.

What the Body Helped Me Understand

From a young age, I learned how to read a room. I noticed subtle changes in the expressions of my siblings and parents and developed a sense of safety by tracking them. As the youngest of three, that awareness also helped me get what I wanted. I could anticipate moods and respond accordingly. It was part sensitivity, part self-protection, and part strategy.

My relationship with my older brother has always been complicated. He was an only child for five years before my sister arrived; I came two years later. He was harder for me to reach and tremendously independent. We have had moments of warmth and care, but there was also a tension I could feel without understanding. It may have been jealousy, annoyance, resentment, or something else altogether.

I wondered why he did not do the things I saw other older brothers doing: giving their younger brothers deep hugs, lifting them onto their shoulders, playing with them. I often focused on what I did not have instead of what I did: a brother who could be distant, but who was also remarkable in his brightness and cleverness. A brother who, I can now see, was showing up in the ways that he could.

—

A few years ago, family constellations gave me a different way into this relationship. In this experiential practice, a person brings forward a question, relationship, or recurring pattern. Other participants may represent people or qualities within that system, often knowing very little about them. Their role is not to perform or invent a story, but to notice what arises in their bodies.

In one constellation, I represented an older brother. Almost immediately, I felt a tremendous desire to step away. I wanted very little to do with the younger brother. It was not because I disliked him. I felt that I was holding too much of my own, and distance was necessary. Moving away from the family offered a safety that staying close did not.

Afterward, the person whose constellation it was shared more about his family, and what I had felt was consistent with his older brother’s experience. That suggested that I had not simply projected my own family story onto the constellation, even though the dynamic felt familiar.

I have also explored my own family of origin through constellation work, including my brother’s tension with our family. Through that work, I began to consider how much difficult and unprocessed emotion he may have carried from our parents.

I want to be clear: these experiences did not give me direct access to my brother’s inner life. His experience belongs to him. But they became emotional and somatic data points in my own body, bringing me more peace and clarity in my relationship to him and my family.

As I stood in that other person’s constellation, and in the months that followed, something shifted in me. I began to release some of my inner child’s grasping for warmth and connection and meet my brother from a more adult place. I had felt into a version of distance from the inside.

New questions became available: What if distance had felt necessary for him? How difficult might it have been to stay close? What if his distance was not evidence of a lack of care, but of how much he was carrying?

—

We often build stories about other people. Someone is too sensitive, controlling, difficult, or unavailable. These descriptions can harden into fixed positions. We see how another person’s behavior affects us, but we do not always feel what may be alive for them or what they may be holding.

One reason I am drawn to family constellations is that so much of how we understand our lives begins with the head. We decode events and patterns through language and analysis. We understand why a parent or sibling behaved as they did, or why we continue to respond in a familiar way. Insight matters, but it can still leave us standing in the same place.

Constellation work offers another entry point. We may bring forward an issue of our own, represent within someone else’s system, or witness what unfolds. The invitation is to notice what happens in our bodies and become curious about it. What shifts when someone excluded or suffering is acknowledged differently? What becomes possible when something long unspoken is finally allowed to be seen?

Today, I still read rooms and notice small shifts in energy. That sensitivity is still there. But I understand now that I can pay close attention to another person while knowing only what I know from where I am standing. A different kind of understanding can begin when I loosen my grip on the story I have told about someone and allow my body to encounter something new.

My experiences in constellation work do not tell me everything about my brother. They have allowed me to meet him with less judgment, experience my childhood from another vantage point, and turn up the volume on empathy.

—

This Thursday, I will be leading a gentle online introduction to family constellations. You do not need any previous experience, and you will never be asked to share more than feels right. You are welcome to bring a relationship, role, or pattern you are curious about within your own family system, or simply come and experience the work.

I hope to see you there.

Zach Glassman

Save My Spot

Food has never been just food for me. There were years when I tried to make my body smaller, swinging between deprivation and comfort. That is not an active or alive part of my life anymore, but the sugar still is. Sugar is still the first place I want to go when I do not want to be all the way here. I am actually off sugar right now, an elimination protocol for inflammation, and I am getting to watch the craving in real time. It is humbling how loud it gets when I can’t scratch that itch.

And then there is the phone. This one is tricky, because screens are part of my work. I teach on them, I write on them, I connect with you on one right now. But I know the difference in my body between using a screen and disappearing into one. The scroll is its own bed. It is the most socially acceptable way I know not to be here, and it runs deep in my family line.

I watched versions of all of this in the women I come from, long before I recognized it in myself. Women I love. Women whose stories are theirs to tell, so I will only say this: the women in my line have carried heavy things, and some of them never got to set those things down. What I once saw as leaving, I now understand as the only rest available to them.

But I didn’t understand that yet. I judged it. I criticized the pattern in them, and I promised myself I would never be a woman who left her own life.

Then I spent seven years in a bed.

You may know this part of my story. A wire from an old spinal fusion pierced my brainstem, and the pain that followed was not metaphorical. It was physiological, relentless, and real, and I want to say that clearly, because I will never be someone who tells you that your body’s suffering is just an unprocessed feeling. My pain was real.

And. There is an and.

The bed was also a way to not be here. The sugar was also a way to not be here. The screen was also a way to not be here. Somewhere underneath the very real pain, I was running a program I did not write. I was being faithful to something I had never consciously agreed to.

I would love to tell you the pattern ended when I got out of that bed. It didn’t. It still visits. There are still days when I climb in and pull the covers over a life I love, phone in hand. And then I do the old thing: I judge it. I criticize it in my head, the same way I once criticized the women before me. And then I get in the bed anyway. Judgment has never once interrupted the pattern. Not in them, not in me. It just adds shame to the inheritance.

There is a book I love called It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn, and the title alone rearranged something in me. Wolynn’s work, and the family constellations tradition it grows out of, rests on a simple and disruptive idea: the patterns that feel most personally shameful to us often did not originate with us. They are inheritances. They are the survival strategies of people we love, and people we never met, passed down through story and silence and even, researchers are beginning to find, through the body itself.

Family constellations goes one step further, and this is the part that undid me. It suggests that we do not just inherit these patterns. We stay loyal to them. A child will unconsciously carry a grief or repeat a way of leaving as an act of blind love. Not weakness. Love. The pattern is the belonging.

Which means my judgment was never going to free me from what the women in my line carried. Judgment is just another way of staying entangled. What frees us, in this work, is the opposite of exclusion. It is letting everyone belong. It is turning toward the pattern and the people it came through and saying, I see you. I see how you survived. I honor what this cost you. And I get to choose something different, not by rejecting you, but because you belong to me and I belong to me

For years I called the bed my fate. Now, I understand it as something I get to meet. In my body, not just my mind. Because this is the thing I will say until I have no breath left: we cannot think our way into a new life. Insight alone never got me out of that bed, and insight alone does not keep me out of it now. I have to feel it through, in a nervous system that is still learning it is safe to be here, and in a body I stopped treating like a problem and started treating like a person.

This is why I am so excited about what is coming this month.

My friend Zach Glassman is a family constellations facilitator, and he is leading our monthly live gathering, a gentle online introduction to this work. Constellations is experiential rather than analytical. It makes the invisible loyalties of a family system visible, felt, and workable. People are often stunned by what their bodies know in this work, information no one ever told them, grief that finally has somewhere to go.

You do not need any experience. You do not need to share anything you are not ready to share. You just need your curiosity and the patterns you are tired of calling fate.

It is free, and I would love for you to be there.

XO,
Ruthie

Register

Zach Glassman is a family constellations facilitator whose work focuses on helping people uncover the unseen dynamics that shape their lives, relationships, and family systems. Influenced by meditation, creative practice, and a deep curiosity about human connection, he creates spaces where inherited patterns, hidden loyalties, and unresolved stories can come into awareness. His approach invites participants to soften into truth, allowing love to flow through what has been held or hidden and restoring connection to what seeks to belong.

I celebrate it just as big as I celebrate his actual birthday on July 25th. Bigger, honestly. Because his family did not believe he would be here. They did not believe he would make it to forty if he didn’t get sober. He was not long for this earth, and I believe that completely. So every year, on this day, I get to celebrate the fact that my fiancé is alive.

I was telling friends the other night that one of my favorite follows these days is Hunter Biden. And when I said it out loud, I had to sit with why. It’s not really about him specifically. It’s about something I keep noticing in sober addicts as a category of human. I think they might be my favorite people on this planet.

The closest I can get to explaining it is this: most people are walking around in some version of a mask. Most of us are living closeted, not necessarily about sexuality, but about everything.

Sober addicts have already blown that whole system up. They have been through hell and come back with a story everyone in the room already knows. They have made an ass of themselves. They have done things they are ashamed of. They have seen themselves at the very bottom, at the place most of us spend our whole lives making sure nobody sees. And because of that, there is no more folding left to do. There is nothing left to protect by staying small. What’s left is just who they actually are.

What I think the real work of sobriety is, underneath the not drinking and not using, is learning to love the parts of you that you were told were bad, or dirty, or sinful, or evil. Meeting those parts with compassion instead of contempt, because they were never trying to destroy you. They were trying to keep you alive, the only way they knew how, with the tools a scared kid had access to. That is a completely different act than shaming yourself into submission. Shame just teaches the parts of you to hide better. Compassion is the only thing that has ever actually changed anyone. Jung said “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Sober addicts don’t get to skip that. They have to look directly at the darkness and then, somehow, still call it theirs, still love it.

Some of the most honest people I have ever met are sitting in metal folding chairs in the basement of a church, in an AA room, on any given Tuesday. Those are my people. I would rather be surrounded by people who are scarred, who have been beaten down and gotten back up, who are honest and real and filled with love and compassion, than by people who are dressed to the nines, who look like they have it all together, who don’t show a single flaw. Because that isn’t real. Nobody is actually that.

I watch Eric live this constantly. He is always looking out for the people everyone else’s eyes slide past. He buys extra food for people on the street. He has given money he didn’t have to someone who needed it more. He is always looking for a way to serve, because loving people that way is how he knows how to love. I think addicts, underneath everything, are often the most tender, generous, empathic people on this planet, and being on this dense, heavy earth has felt to them like an assault from the very beginning. So when they learn the big work, how to stay here, how to be sober while carrying feelings of that size, I am in awe. Their honesty, their vulnerability, their humility.

I don’t think that’s a metaphor when I watch Eric. I think it’s just a description.

I’ve had the honor of walking alongside people in the middle of their own addiction, helping them learn to meet those parts of themselves with compassion instead of contempt, and it remains one of the greatest honors of my life. Watching someone go from believing they are unlovable to knowing, in their body, that they are a beloved child worthy of the universe’s love exactly as they are, there is nothing like it.

So if you are in it right now, if today feels like the furthest thing from tender or honest or joyful, I want you to hear this. This is not the end of your story. It doesn’t matter if you’ve tried before and it didn’t stick. Today can just be a new day. Reach out to someone- a friend, a meeting, a sponsor, anyone. You don’t have to carry the next part of this alone. There is a life on the other side of this that gets to be soft and real and full, the kind Eric gets to live now.

Eight years ago today, Eric chose to stay. Everything since then, every extra sandwich handed to a stranger, every ordinary Tuesday, has been the light getting in.

Happy sober birthday, my love. I will never stop celebrating it as big as I do.

Ruthie

Upcoming opportunities to connect & do the work together

Save My Spot

Join Zach Glassman for an online introduction to Family Constellations, a gentle and illuminating way of exploring the hidden patterns that shape our lives, relationships, and sense of belonging.

So much of who we are is formed inside family systems long before we have the language to understand it. We inherit stories, roles, loyalties, and grief that can influence how we show up in the world.

In this workshop, Zach will introduce constellation work and explore how it can help us see what has been unseen, soften what has felt stuck, and relate to ourselves and our families with more clarity and compassion.

To thank all my lovely readers, I’m offering this month’s live event for free. I would love for you to join us there.

XO,

Ruthie

Save my spot!

Upcoming opportunities to connect & do the work together

This is camp country for my family. Camp DeSoto for the girls, Camp Alpine for the boys, two Christian camps that shaped every one of us in real ways. My brother Tim serves as the camp doctor at Alpine for one week each summer. This coming summer will be his thirtieth year doing it. I was a camper there growing up, then a counselor for two summers in college. My brother and his wife know everyone. We couldn’t go two feet in Mentone without running into someone they knew.

Here’s how deep the roots go. In 2019, we found out we had a half-brother none of us knew existed. My dad had gotten a girl pregnant when he was a teenager, years before he ever met my mom, and the baby was given up for adoption. His daughter worked as a counselor one summer, back when one of my nieces was among the youngest campers there, and she used to cut up my niece’s food for her. Neither of them knew they were cousins. She ended up in the camp infirmary sick another summer, and my brother, the doctor, took care of her, holding her hair back while she was sick, still not knowing she was his niece. We didn’t find out any of this until years later. Some things are too strange to be coincidence and too true to be fiction.

During college, I got heavily involved in RUF, Reformed University Fellowship, a campus ministry, at Ole Miss. So many of the counselors at these camps came up through that same world. Then I moved to Nashville and worked as a youth director at two different churches in my twenties. That world is small in the way small towns are small; everyone knows everyone, everyone’s history intermingles with everyone else’s history. I was fully immersed in it.

Then the wire from my accident pierced my brain stem, and my whole world came apart in ways I still don’t have full language for. I walked away from the church. Later, I deconstructed my faith entirely. For a long time I didn’t know what I believed. I felt abandoned by my life and by God. It took years before I found my own relationship to the divine, one that has nothing to do with a building or a doctrine. I love God, the universe, whatever you want to call the source that is so wildly in love with us, more now than I ever did inside organized religion. It just doesn’t look anything like it used to.

So going back this weekend, into a room full of camp people and college friends, all of it soaked in the language and culture I spent years walking away from, I thought I might feel a little tightening.

The sweetest surprise of the whole weekend was seeing my ex-husband’s brother, his wife, and their kids for the first time since Christmas of 2012. We have followed each other online for over a decade with zero bad blood, but nothing replaces being in a room together again after that long. They got to meet Eric. I got to tell them that Eric prays for my ex-husband every night before we eat dinner. We wish him nothing but good things. I am genuinely grateful he left me, as strange as that still is to say out loud. It was brutal and terrifying at the time, and I would walk through every bit of it again to end up exactly here. Being with them felt like this version of me meeting a past life version of me, one I lived in this very lifetime. I probably would have stayed in the church, had several kids by now, spent my summers driving them to camp the way my own mom drove us.

No one made us feel weird for being different, not once. Any story of feeling othered would have been a projection on my part, not the truth of what actually happened. Eric and I stuck out, tattoos and a different way of living, the only two people in the room who looked like us, and everyone wrapped us in open arms exactly as we are. Eric showed up with two long braids down his back, the only person in a sea of khakis and clean-cut everything, and the kids adored him. One of my old college roommates messaged me afterward just to tell me how much her boys loved Uncle E and how wonderful he is. He adored them right back.

Yesterday afternoon we all spent hours at the pool, then ended up together in the hot tub while it rained for a while. We laughed and laughed. Afterward, my sister-in-law hung back to visit with me one-on-one, and we talked about some of the ways we see the world differently. It was different in plenty of ways, and every bit of it was love. She and my brother love Jesus about as fully as two people can, and honestly, they are the closest thing I have seen to how I wish Christians moved through the world. Kind, playful, generous, unguarded. We see plenty of things differently. It has never once mattered. We both stand on love, service, and kindness, and that is the only thing I actually need us to agree on.

I think one real marker of healing is not the absence of difference, but the presence of ease inside it. But there’s another marker that matters just as much – staying curious about what someone actually believes instead of walking in with a fixed idea of how they need to think or who they need to become. Curiosity instead of certainty. That kind of listening is easy for me to forget, and this weekend I got to practice it.

I am also completely obsessed with my nieces and nephews. I could listen to them talk for hours, just to hear how their minds work and what lights them up.

I also got to hug and adore my best friend from elementary school, who was also my college roommate, and another college roommate on top of that. Both of them have kids headed to camp now too. Our lives have gone in completely different directions since then, and it was so heartwarming to see them again. Watching where their paths led is wonderful, even standing next to how different mine turned out to be.

I can barely recognize the version of me that lived inside that world full-time. She lived in a very small box of conformity. I still love her completely. She was so earnest, and she was struggling far more than anyone around her knew, and she hid every bit of it.

I got a real look at the life I thought would be mine. And I love the life I actually have. None of it needs to be resolved. It just gets to be held.

XO,

Ruthie

Upcoming opportunities to connect & do the work together