I'm Ruth
And I'm amazed and grateful to be at the helm
of the Conscious Girlfriend Academy.
Ruth in Joshua Tree National Park, 2024
My Coaching Specialties
🔻 My typical client profile: Highly intelligent, psychologically savvy, often has a complex trauma history, and is motivated to do some deep brain and nervous system rewiring.
🔻I have extensive training and experience working with attachment healing, both with individuals and couples.
🔻I coach many therapists on personal, clinical and/or practice-building issues. I also have a small sub-specialty in supporting therapists who became romantically involved with clients.
🔻Consistently attracted to people who aren't good for you? I can help you rewire your attraction patterns.
🔻I have many years of experience working with sex, sexuality and gender. Want to claim or reclaim your sexual spark (single or coupled), or gender identity? I can help. I can also coach you in expanding into energetic sexuality/Tantra, and more. Learn more here.
🔻My personal life history includes interracial and cross-cultural relationships, having a partner transition gender, donating a kidney and supporting a partner through chronic and life-threatening illness, and extensive self-advocacy around my own chronic health challenges.
🔻As a longtime professor of Creative Writing, author of 8 books, and a multipassionate entrepreneur, I love helping people to break through creative blocks, make career shifts, and start businesses.
🔻I'm trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS), a powerful method for transforming ambivalence, stuckness and internal conflict.
🔻I generally work on Zoom and in packages of ten hours. Sessions can be 60-90 minutes long, or longer. From time to time I also offer half day, full day or several-day IN PERSON intensives.
Ruth and pet chicken, 1970
Ruth with Michelle/Max,
co-founder of Conscious Girlfriend, in 2017
First, the formal bio:
Ruth L. Schwartz co-founded Conscious Girlfriend in 2014, and created Conscious Girlfriend Academy in 2020. The Academy has served women and non-binary people in over 25 countries, and is the leading global resource helping lesbians prevent heartbreak, date wisely and love well.
Ruth came out in 1982 and is a longtime leader in the LGBTQ community, as well as the author of eight books, including the Amazon LGBTQ bestseller Conscious Lesbian Dating & Love. (See all of her books below.)
Her degrees and certifications include a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology, and an M.F.A. in Poetry. She is a certified Somatica Sex & Intimacy Coach and a Board-Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, with additional training in shamanism and many other modalities. She has worked with individuals and couples for over 20 years, and practices as a coach, not a psychotherapist.
Ruth has taught at Ashland University, Mills College, California State University-Fresno, and five other colleges and universities, and has worked with private students and clients since 2003. The website datingadvice.com named Ruth one of the Ten Best Queer Dating Experts in 2023.
Now, here's a more personal story about how I got here, and how the Academy can help you.
As a child, I would never have imagined I'd be running an international program about conscious lesbian dating and relationships. It only makes sense when you think about the shamanic archetype of the wounded healer -- the surprising and elegant way that sometimes, with commitment and grace, our wounds can give way to our gifts.
I was a sensitive kid with well-meaning teenaged parents who were terribly ill-equipped to parent me or to love each other. I learned to leave my body when they fought. We moved every year, so I had to start over... and over. It made me flexible, and it unmoored me.
I turned to romantic love for my salvation, but I had no idea how to create a healthy, enduring relationship. The first time I fell madly in love, our connection was magical, passionate and mutual. But while with her, I also experienced the terrifying depth of my attachment wounding, though I didn't have those words for it at the time.
Less than a year in, she broke up with me out of the blue. I huddled on an old green stuffed chair and cried for months. Then we got back together. And then, a few months later, she ended it again.
It took me a long time to recognize that even though we'd been madly in love, we had never talked about what we each wanted from our relationship, or what we'd do when things got tough. I hadn't known the first thing about choosing a partner, nor had she.
What did I want, and how could I become fully ready for it, available for it, and capable of it? I had never asked myself those kinds of questions, and I realized belatedly that it was highly unlikely I could have the relationship I wanted without that.
Honestly, I had seen the red flags from the beginning. My partner hadn't deceived me. I just didn't know what else to do when I was in love.
That shocking pain was my wakeup call, and started me on the personal growth quest that led to my getting many kinds of advanced training, having many more relationships, learning a lot more the hard way, and eventually founding Conscious Girlfriend with Michelle Murrain.
There wasn't a roadmap for lesbians who wanted good relationships, so I had to create it myself.
I don't teach from the perspective of a guru who pretends to have it all figured out. I work hard every day to walk my talk, and I'll never be done learning. But I experience vastly more peace, liberation, ease and happiness, and show up with vastly greater skills, than I used to :)
Every day I get emails letting me know how the book and Academy have changed lives. As I like to say, lesbian relationships aren't rocket science, but they are neuroscience. They can be the very best relationships on the planet, but they do take skill.
Building these skills in lesbian and queer community will affirm your life and help you transform both your own trauma, and your ancestral trauma -- while making possible the love you yearn for and deserve.
Highly motivated? You'll get the most transformation from becoming a Deep Dive Academy Member, so you can access our group coaching, and also getting 1:1 support from a Conscious Girlfriend Coach. I've personally trained and vetted all of our certified coaches.
Interested in coaching with me? I offer very few coaching slots and have higher rates than other Conscious Girlfriend Academy coaches, but if you're highly motivated to do some work in one of my specialty areas, do get in touch. I especially love couples work.
Note: I'm a huge fan of group coaching. It's far more affordable than 1:1, and you'll learn from watching others get coached, as well as getting your own laser-coaching in our true-to-their-name Deep Dive sessions.
A Chat With A Client
Click below to see Ruth chat with former coaching client Carol about all the positive changes in her life.
When Carol first found Conscious Girlfriend Academy, she was hurting. Her partner of 16 years had moved out without warning, leaving Carol alone to pick up the pieces of her life.
Carol enrolled in the Academy, and also began doing some 1:1 coaching with Ruth. Two years later, she and Ruth reconnected to celebrate all the positive changes in Carol's life since then, including the kind of partnership she has always wanted.
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 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
"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... 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.
Accordion Breathing and Dancing (Poetry)
In her first poetry collection, Ruth L. Schwartz explores themes of mortality and eros, inspired by her eight years of working as an AIDS educator, and her relationship with a partner in heart and kidney failure, as well as her daily lived experience with the challenges and beauty on the streets of San Francisco.
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