The Intelligent, Compassionate Learning Community For Lesbians++
Welcoming all self-identified women and adjacent non-binary people who love women, or want to.
Hi there, I'm Ruth,
Conscious Girlfriend Academy Director.
Ruth in her office in 2020
Ruth and pet chicken, 1970 (age 8)
Ruth in 2023 (age 61)
Ruth in 1992 (age 31)
Ruth & Michelle/Max, 2017
Ruth in 2021
Ruth in 2023
First, the formal bio:
Now, a more personal story.
As a child, I would never have imagined I'd be running an international program about conscious lesbian dating and relationships. Yet it all makes sense when you think about the shamanic archetype of the wounded healer. There's an elegant way that, with commitment and grace, our wounds can become our gifts.
I was a sensitive child with well-meaning teenaged parents who were ill-equipped to parent me or to love each other. I learned to leave my body when they fought, yelling vicious things at each other.
As a teenager, I turned to romantic love for my salvation. But of course, it turned out that I had no idea how to create a healthy, enduring relationship.
When I fell madly in love with the first person with whom I really wanted "forever," our connection was magical, passionate and mutual.
And when she broke up with me, I was completely shattered.
I had thought the strength of our feelings for each other would be enough. What did she want from a relationship? What did I want? What were we each capable of? I had never asked those questions of her, or even of myself.
Honestly, I had seen the many red flags early on, but I hadn't paid attention, because I was too much in love.
She did a lot of messed-up things, and I tolerated them. But I also lacked the skills to communicate with her in healthy ways. I see now that even though we were both good people, cared and tried hard, our relationship never stood a chance, because neither of us knew what a deeply intimate long-term lesbian relationship required.
I remember one day after our breakup, when I had cried for many hours on my old green stuffed chair. Part of me desperately wanted to blame my ex , but another part of me realized I needed to understand how I had contributed to what happened.
That question started a quest which eventually became Conscious Girlfriend.
But because no one was offering me the kind of information I now teach, I had to learn the hard way.
And I wish I could say I learned it quickly. But, I didn't. I went through two more shattering breakups before I fully committed myself to finding a different way.
My quest took years -- because again, I was mapping unmapped terrain. It included a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology, many workshops, many books, and several certifications in hypnotherapy, shamanic counseling, and other paths of deep healing.
I stayed single for several years as I transformed myself and my romantic possibilities during that time. There wasn't a roadmap for lesbians who wanted good relationships, but I compiled one myself.
Now I offer a faster, easier path to women and adjacent non-binary people who are ready to choose healthy love. Since the book Conscious Lesbian Dating & Love came out in 2015, women from 25 countries have taken our classes -- and every day I receive emails letting me know how it has changed their lives.
I really believe that together, in Conscious Girlfriend, we are co-creating a new world, one that can truly nourish us, not just through romantic love, but also through community and connection.
And if you want to take the fast track, I highly recommend you get some Conscious Girlfriend Coaching to support you 1:1, along with our classes that provide both the content you need, and the community support to make your journey easier, faster and more fun.
I highly recommend all our coaches! And I personally am only able to make time for 2-3 clients per month. But if you're drawn to work with me directly, I'd be honored to support you in preparing to find the woman of your dreams, and making sure your emotional and sexual bond stays strong.
Books by Ruth L. Schwartz
If you're a single lesbian who wants deeply fulfilling lasting love - or feels doubtful about ever being able to find that kind of love - this book was written for you. You'll learn exactly why and how the conscious approach to dating and love will make all the difference for you, and also get a detailed roadmap to help you find and create the relationship you most want. Great relationships don’t happen by accident, luck or magic. Instead, they’re a direct result of the choices you make, and the actions you take. Drawing from neuroscience, psychology and spirituality, this book will help you take charge of your relationship destiny, no matter how many heartbreaks or disappointments you’ve had in the past.
Reviewers say, "The best book written in the last 20 years!" "This book has been a real friend to me lately." This unique and comprehensive guide book will help you connect with wise, compassionate inner guidance, understand the deeper purpose of your life’s challenges, transform destructive patterns and old wounds, embody your soul’s unique blueprint, and create a joyful, evolutionary life. Drawing on shamanism, psychology, neuroscience, energetic and somatic healing, Buddhism, 12-step recovery and other sources, this book contains the tools and understandings you need in order to change, heal and love your human life.
“One chilly blue morning in May, a surgeon angled a six-inch cut along my side, then reached in and removed my healthy right kidney. Four hours later, he spliced that kidney into my partner Ana’s thigh, and her ‘death in reverse’ began.”
A medical drama, a memoir, and a love story all in one, Death in Reverse chronicles Ruth Schwartz’s life with her partner, Ana, during the tumultuous twelve months following transplant surgery.
Anyone who has ever dealt with a major health problem—or cared for a sick partner—will identify with this portrait of a couple struggling to maintain emotional and sexual intimacy while confronting the myriad challenges of chronic illness and disability.
As in her previous collections, Miraculum shows Schwartz's true ability as a poet. These poems are passionate, tender, tough, and brimming with life.
"Ruth L. Schwartz will settle for nothing less than the essential. Her passionate poems are alive to the vulnerability of the body, the daily possibility of joy, and the deep struggle not only to make sense of, but to affirm a world where the terrorists 'opened fire: / as if it were a box, now cracked, / consuming its own lid and hinges, / sparking out, unstoppable, / into the tender, / flammable world. . . "'
- Mark Doty
Winner of the 2004 Autumn House Poetry Prize selected by Alicia Ostriker. Schwartz's Dear Good Naked Morning explores what it is to be a woman in love with the world.
"In Edgewater, her powerfully moving and redemptive third collection, Ruth L. Schwartz writes with consummate passion, precision, and honesty of the raw hungers that give rise to the world, human and natural. In poems both lyrical and grit-laced, she grapples with her twofold, central question: How can we love fully, open-eyed and openhearted amid all the flaws and beauty, each other and the world? How could we not? "
- Jane Hirshfield
Poetry. In SINGULAR BODIES, Ruth L. Schwartz, winner of the 2000 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, explores the theme of the body and its transformations-through eros, illness, disability and death. Informed and inspired by ten years of AIDS and cancer education, Schwartz offers a "numinous, deep-hearted collection [that] explores the redemptive quality of love-and it's ability to hold even the hardest facts of physical life.in its enormous arms"-Alison Luterman.
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