Ruth L. Schwartz, the founding director of the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, helps us explore paradigms of healing relational trauma, emphasizing conscious solitude, energetics of the heart and understanding one's relationship needs.
My guest today is a dear friend, a sister, poet, mystic and writer Ruth L. Schwartz. She is the author of eight books and founding director of the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, a worldwide organization for lesbians and queer women dedicated to preventing heartbreak, dating wisely and loving well. The Academy provides education and support on conscious lesbian dating, relationships and sexuality, and helps self-identified women learn to be the right partner as well as to find her, so they can have happy, healthy love and fulfilling sex.
In this episode, we talk about two different paradigms of healing relational trauma and relational wounds. We discuss our primal need for connection and being in relationships with others, self and life. Through this sincere conversation, Ruth helps us understand the concept of conscious solitude, the Internal Family System model, and what it means to befriend the power of our heart, our energy field and our relationship needs.
Episode Chapters:
(00:00) - Introduction to Ruth L. Schwartz
(02:58) - Two paradigms of healing relational trauma
(08:22) - Overcoming the binary view of relationship gains and losses
(12:44) - The role of relationships and solitude in healing
(16:25) - Relationship dynamics with others, self, and life
(21:55) - Discussing the Internal Family System model
(24:00) - The theory of Parts in IFS
(31:57) - Healing through the relationship with self
(38:53) - Conscious solitude framework
(43:16) - Coherence and the energetics of the heart
(54:22) - Befriending our nervous system
(57:24) - About Conscious Girlfriend Academy
Resources:
- Learn how to prevent heartbreak, date wisely and love well at http://www.consciousgirlfriendacademy.com
- Check out our book: Conscious Lesbian Dating & Love: A Guide to Finding the Right Partner & Creating the Relationship of Your Dreams https://www.consciousgirlfriendacademy.com/book
- Connect with Ruth L. Schwartz on IG - https://www.instagram.com/consciousgirlfriendacademy/
- Find Ruth on FB - www.facebook.com/groups/consciousgirlfriend
- HearthMath Institute https://www.heartmath.org/
- Robert Falconer - IFS Consultant https://robertfalconer.us/
Anne-Marie Marron:
- If you have a power reclamation story to share or questions, please send them to Ask Anne-Marie https://anne-mariemarron.com/ask
- Find Anne-Marie on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/anne.marie.marron/
- If you wonder whether Power Reclamation Coaching is for you, book a discovery call https://calendly.com/anne-marie-marron/30-minute-consultation
- For more on customized immersions with Anne-Marie, please visit: https://anne-mariemarron.com/integral-leadership-immersion
Anne-Marie Marron 0:09
Hello and welcome. You're listening to the power reclamation show where we explore the mysteries, heartbreaks and resiliency of the human experience together, we'll focus on rewilding ourselves through raising consciousness and dismantling domestication. This is a collective journey of challenging hierarchical systems of power over as well as our own personal conditioning and limiting belief systems. This show is about embodying the power of love presence and our own inner authority. So today's guest is my dear, dear sister, Ruth Schwartz, with Conscious Girlfriend Academy. Ruth, would you just share a tiny bit about you and your work? Sure. Yeah.
Ruth L. Schwartz 0:58
I Well, I've worn many hats in my life, including this one. Right now, I am the director of Conscious Girlfriend Academy, which is a worldwide organization for lesbians and queer women dedicated to preventing heartbreak, dating wisely and loving well. And for a long time, I was a professor of creative writing. For a long time before that, I was an AIDS educator. I have always been a poet, a mystic, a writer, somebody trying to engage with the big forces and the big mysteries of our existence. And so right this minute, that has all come together in this particular form, where I'm getting to think and teach and read and write a lot about dating and relationships through the lens of being conscious and being the woman or adjacent, non binary person who loves women
Speaker 1 1:54
Beautiful. Well, we're going to get into more of that today in our talk. So I'm glad you're here. Let's get started. Thank you so much. We've been talking about doing this for how long, like, a couple of years, probably since. I don't even know, 1000s of topics that I would love to talk to you about, but the one that's coming up today, it feels like we have beared witness to one another, falling in love, having our hearts broken, finding ourselves, you know, seeking love again, and then also finding ourselves in this place of deepening into our own solitude and finding the most rich nourishment there. And you and I have had a friendship. It seems like we have these parallel paths where we come in and then we and we're always in in friendship, but like we're overlapping almost at the same time, you just have been such an ally. And here we are again with this deep journey around how to heal and what does healing look like. And I think that's what I want to seed. So the topic that we've been riffing on individually you with your conscious girlfriend Academy. My last podcast, I wove some of this in, which is these two paradigms, and there might be more, but this one paradigm where, and then I want you to just kind of riff on this with me, but the one being our relational trauma needs to be healed in relationship. And there's a lot of truth and beauty and a long lineage behind that paradigm. And then there's this other paradigm that I think is getting a little bit more articulation. Joe Dispenza feels like he's kind of leveling this up a lot lately, which is there's very deep healing relationally that can happen in solitude as well. And so I thought we could just start with those two pieces and see where it takes us. So I'll just turn it over to you, because I know we've been riffing. Where would you like to go next with this
Speaker 2 3:57
well meaning, I'm so glad we're having this conversation. And, you know, I think it we can look at what do we mean by solitude, what do we mean by relational wounds? What do we mean by healing, like just kind of unpacking each of those terms. Because as I was thinking today, getting ready to do this, I was thinking about what intimate romantic relationships have primarily served in my life? And I don't think that they have primarily healed my relational wounds. I think that they have often re inflicted some of the same relational wounds. Sometimes they've healed other kinds of wounds. Certainly sometimes they've healed the wound of having a deep sense of aloneness in the world, in my particular being, my particular consciousness. And so there's been a healing that has come in just from whatever kinds of deep engagement have been possible between me and whoever I was. With, and then absolutely they've been tremendously expansive. Like, I feel like part of my project on Earth has been to understand the human experience, you know, which, of course, is not understandable. But still I I engage. And so I feel like with my lovers and partners, I've learned so much about different aspects of the human experience, both my own and theirs. So it's been tremendously rich and satisfying to my soul in that way. But I don't know that that's the same as healing. And when we talk about specifically, like, Okay, I came out of childhood with these particular relational wounds, the concept that a lover or partnership is going to re inflict, but then for the purpose of helping me heal some of those same relational wounds, I'm not sure that I've actually experienced that. I don't know. I'm curious to know what you think
Speaker 1 5:58
for yourself. I think the same is true for me. I would say in my Well, what I want to tag here is repetition compulsion, and that oftentimes we're going to attract what has been familiar from the past. Potentially, I don't know if this is how the universe works, but with the potential for healing, but oftentimes, I think it becomes a recapitulation. And I think in my last partnership, there was a certain kind of healing at an attachment system level that happened for me that had never happened prior. The irony is the way that we split up re inflicted that same attachment wound, but at a deeper level. So then I spent the next two and a half years working that inside of myself, but the relationship itself was the was the arrow, I feel like had, like, hot, burning arrow that just cut to the core of a wound that I distantly was aware of. Uh huh, yeah.
Speaker 2 6:56
So I guess part of me went to, well, would you say that from that relationship, there was a net gain in healing or a net loss. But then another part of me thought, wow, these terms are way too binary. There was obviously a deep engagement for you, both in those wounds and in receiving some deep, deep medicine for them, and then also having to really re encounter them in such an excruciating way. Maybe it's kind of ridiculous to say, was there a net gain, net loss? I mean, it's just some other shape, like spiralameric.
Speaker 1 7:35
Yeah, I think I like what you're doing with your hands there. It does feel like a circuitry of some kind. But I would say if this had happened to me maybe 10 years ago, I don't know if there would have been any gain, because I don't know if I would have had the years of cultivating being with such intense emotional states, to have the breakthroughs that I had this time around, to see things more clearly, to really, ultimately, to have a level of self acceptance and compassion for parts of myself that I I don't know if I could have gotten there without the lance of this boil like this being cut so deep, right? So there was a big gain, ultimately. But let's come back to what you were saying, because I feel like you were kind of seeding that maybe there is, maybe there isn't gain well,
Speaker 2 8:26
and maybe it's just so much more mysterious than that, you know, just in terms of what our souls are doing like. Because I'm thinking about two relationships that I had that were roughly 20 years apart, and the first of these two was so shattering when it ended and the way that it ended, and at that point in my life, I was not familiar with much inside me, and so I really did not know how to work with it In a healing way at all. And then the second relationship, a little bit more than 20 years later, was with a woman who, at times, there were these moments where, uncannily, she even looked to me like the the former partner. And it wasn't something that I had seen right away, but I remember, I don't know, maybe a month in, it's like, it was like I was doing a double take, and the former partner at that point was dead, and so I was like, what I mean? Like, it's giving me chills to talk about it right now, because I couldn't believe how much in that light, in that moment, her face looked like the other woman's face. So there was some kind of deep retracing, clearly that, you know, in some way I have to honor the mystery of and early on in this second relationship, I kept having this gut sense that she was going to break up with me out of the blue with no explanation. And a part of me was sort of bracing for that. Yeah. And then I was like, Well, why do I think this? Why do I feel this? Where is this coming from? Is this just my stuff? And she and I actually talked about it. I talked about, I keep having this fear. Do you think there's any chance you would do that? And she said, Well, it wouldn't be my pattern. And then I thought, well, that is what the other person had done. So I must just be holding this from that other relationship. But in fact, it is what the second woman also ended up doing and and it is certainly true. I mean, 20 plus years later, the level of depth to which this relationship went was exponentially greater than the first relationship, the level of of depth that that, you know, the second woman was playing at, was much deeper. What happened between us was much deeper. And the level of my pain also felt concurrently come commitmentally deeper and like so what had 20 plus years before, felt like, Oh my God. I don't know how I'm gonna want to go on with my life. Then to have gotten to a point as so much more, I think further, even these terms are binary. But you know, I felt like, Okay, I know myself so much better. I have so many more healing tools and and once again, I'm like, I don't know how I'm gonna want to go, yeah. And so the level of shattering was intense. And yet, out of that, which speaks to what you were saying, the level of transformation that I ultimately have harvested from that has been very intense. But I don't think that that's what the relational therapists mean when they talk about, you know, relationships are the only way to heal our attachment wounds. I don't think it happened that way for me. I think it happened in much more of a extremely dark night of the soul, yeah, sobbing on my hands and knees, talking to my guides traveling to the other side of the world, because I, you know, was in search of a place large enough to hold my grief, you know? I mean, so it made me embark on a very deep and ultimately transformational journey. But it wasn't that I got that healing with that partner. Yeah,
Speaker 1 12:14
maybe that's the distinction, because some people are destined to do it inside of the relationship where they stay. I mean, attachment injury, and repairing those together, and building the trust with rupture and repair, and rupture and repair, and when there's a level of rebuilding, or not even rebuilding, but building trust and capacity over time. And there's probably a lot of, I mean, there is a lot of healing, because I think we've both had moments of that with the people we've dated. But then there's this other piece you're talking about, which is, and this was my recent journey of just being splayed out on my knees, dark night of the soul. And so that became healing relationship with myself and me reconnecting with something larger than myself to hold me Right, right. And then there's this thing that Joe dispenses talking about and where that fits in, which is this conscious solitude is a way of healing attachment or relationship wounds as well. So I wonder if that's where we should go, because I know in CGA, you talk a lot about the relational piece, but let me ask you, is there more that you'd like to explore on healing through relationship, that could be helpful in this moment, or would it make more sense to shift over to this other paradigm? Well,
Speaker 2 13:27
I guess I just want to say we are each such different beings, and you and I. Anne Marie, you know, part of why we're we're friends is because we both often feel like a different sort of being than many of the beings around us, at least the human ones you know. So I just want to be careful not to generalize much from my own experience, because when I look at the particular human wounding that I have from my childhood how I would characterize my relational wounding. I see a lot of people, I work with, a lot of people who have very specific pieces of relational wounding that I don't have. I certainly have plenty of relational wounding, but it's like it's just sort of like a different cell structure, yeah, and, you know, like I was as, you know, as a kid, I was praised, I was adored, I was celebrated. I received a lot of a certain kind of love and affirmation and essentially zero criticism. And I know now that that is rare. It is super rare for me to talk to people that have had that experience now. I mean, some of the wounding was my parents were very young. They had no idea how to raise a baby. They both wanted me to be my their therapist starting about age three. You know, it wasn't like I was held. It was. Like I was attuned to it wasn't like I had, you know, parents that were bigger than me that knew how to take care of me, spiritually, emotionally or even physically. So that's my wounding. But I think in certain ways, with that wounding, maybe it makes sense that there is healing that comes from being with forces that are much bigger than me, which means the larger world, the spirit realm, the whereas with another human being, it's not really their job to be bigger than me. Now, you know, yeah, yeah, at least as I'm an adult. I mean, as when I was an infant, it was, I guess, from a human psychology standpoint, somebody's job. I don't know it's just so I just wanted, I want to really explicitly name, I guess, for Conscious Girlfriend Academy, people that might be listening to this that the medicine is different depending on the wound. Like I know so many people that were intensely criticized, not praised, not celebrated, not affirmed or adored or supported in the ways that I was as a kid. And so it makes complete sense to me that for people that have had that experience, there are very specific human pieces of healing that need to come in. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 16:20
Yeah, I'm glad you're naming that. I think it brings it to the larger point, which is, everything is relationship, ultimately, whether it's relationship with a therapist or a partner or a friend. And the question is, how do we find our way to healing these fractures or these wounds that have happened in relationship with other. And I really appreciate you naming like, it's almost like it depends the entry point is the kind of wound we've had, like, what kind of healing, or in hakomi, they would call it, what's the missing experience that needs to be healed from that time? And then it's a mystery as to how that happens over a lifetime, or if it happens, or if it's about something different, right, right?
Speaker 2 17:02
I love that you said that, because it's like if it's even supposed to happen, you know, like I've done journeys where I've looked at the experience of my sister, who, on the human plane, is a very, very, very hurt and damaged person, tragically and intensely so. And when I talked, you know, when I had the experience of being in contact with her spirit, her spirit was just like life and fun and ex and powerful and excited to dive into this human life where she would get to experience degradation and debasement and feeling powerless because she was so curious about what that would be like. Wow, yeah. And so, you know, well, that confounds our notion about
Unknown Speaker 17:50
exactly, I
Speaker 1 17:52
know, because I think they're gonna often be the sense that we're here to heal all these wounds, when maybe we're here to just have a big life experience. Some some of us heal certain things, quote, heal or have it be more integrated. And some of us, from the outside, it might look like we're causing a lot of damage to ourselves, but we might be a right on purpose to whatever it is like your sister, she's trying to have a certain kind of experience,
Speaker 2 18:17
right? I mean, if we can trust those perceptions that come through from those larger places. But times when I've had these conversations, which have often been struggles and arguments with my guides or with these larger beings that I sometimes dialog with, even though what they say is very challenging and confounding to my human self, it also, at the same time, has this feeling of deep brightness, like, oh my god, this finally makes sense. Because if I look at my sister's life through a purely human lens, it is just unmitigated tragedy. Yeah, it doesn't make sense at all. And it certainly doesn't make sense. And if I look at my family's life in general, you know, like, if I think that the purpose of human beings is that we're all kind of, perhaps slowly sometimes, but we're all evolving on this arc of consciousness, and each generation is able to do things the previous generation was not you that's not necessarily the case. What do you think the case is? Well, you know, my guides have said I am not going to be ever large enough to grasp it. I can just have these moments of glimpses. It's like the that parable about the blind men and the elephant, just describing one part of the elephant. They can't conceive of the whole thing. So sometimes I've had the image of like in moments I have one finger on one hair in the elephant's tail. I can't say what the elephant is, right? But it makes sense to me that we're not all here for the same reasons. Our souls really charted different courses for us. We might not even all be here from the same planet, you know, like there's a whole lot going on here.
Unknown Speaker 19:59
Uh huh? Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1 20:01
I wonder, what is the deeper notion of being in relationship? Maybe we go back to what you said, because I think it's like, what is, what does it mean to be in relationship with life, and what is this whole conscious solitude? What does it mean to be in relationship with ourselves? Yeah, which is not an exclusion with relationship with other. So maybe we start there You look like you've maybe got something you want to share about that.
Speaker 2 20:26
Yeah. I mean, I think at this moment in my life, after many decades, some of which you witnessed me through, of Gino, just kind of intense relationship after intense relationship after intense relationship, all of which I would say, if they weren't healing, they were incredibly they were incredible crucibles for learning. They were absolutely transformational. Yeah, but now I feel myself to be in a period of time where I am loving not being in an intimate relationship. I am loving it so much, and what I feel like I'm doing is just deepening and deepening and deepening the intimacy with this person. We can even call this one person, you know, because there's so many aspects of me and parts of me, and I'm sure that this Compendium is not the same as it was five years ago, 1015, 20, you know? So it's like, Who is this person and who is this person now, and what feeds this person now, what trains this person now, what lights this person up now? And so I feel like, by not being in one steady intimate relationship where I'm continuously interfacing with another being I have all of my energy, or so much more of my energy gets to just be with all of these inner relationships and that it feels really good.
Speaker 1 21:55
Say more about that. What say the inner relationships? What are you discovering? And what are these inner relationships, different parts of self? Or,
Speaker 2 22:04
yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there's so many different ways that we could talk about this. And as you know, one system of thought, I've been really influenced by His internal family systems. And recently, I saw a talk by Robert Falconer, who's this amazing. Ifs person who's also, I would call him very shamanic. I don't
Speaker 1 22:27
know if he's I had a session with him. He's quite shamanic. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 22:30
So he was saying just, we're walking around with this illusion that we each are one person, not with us as one person. We are a multi part mind we really are. Each of us is a whole bunch of beings crammed into one body trying to make choices as oneself. And no wonder we have so much trouble doing that, you know, and and so I find that really provocative and fascinating. And again, I don't know if it's as true for everyone. I certainly know many people for whom I think that is very true, and maybe some of it is just the quality of our soul or the nature of the complexity of our human experience, the degree of trauma, whatever it is, but it certainly is true for me, like there are a whole bunch of beings in here that push and pull in different directions. And so the work of trying to understand, like I use this metaphor a lot in the academy, how can we become more congruent with ourselves, more compatible with ourselves, before we think about who on the outside are we compatible with? How can we develop more compatibility with ourselves? How can we get the different parts of ourselves rowing or paddling in the same direction, whatever kind of you know boat we're in. So that's what I feel like I'm doing right now in a fuller way than I've ever done before.
Speaker 1 23:51
Yeah, I see that in you. I've been witnessing that. And it could sound really esoteric for some listeners to say, we have all these beings in us. So I want to just break that down. You're talking about parts like we have protectors. We have different parts that have different needs. Or can you say more about what you mean by all these beings? Yeah,
Speaker 2 24:12
I mean in ifs, they talk about it on the one hand, as exiles, which are usually younger parts of ourselves, and then different kinds of protectors that have emerged, kind of in in layers on top of those exiles. And some of the protectors are managers trying to make sure that we, you know, live reasonably functional lives. Some of them are firefighters trying to extinguish the pain of the fire of the pain through any means necessary, so they cause addictions and compulsions and kinds of stuff, and that's kind of the basic ISS model. But I think people like Bob Falconer are taking it much further and saying, Okay, we have parts of ourselves that are deeply connected to spirit. We also have parts of ourselves or places. Where we've gotten infiltrated by energies or beings that are not even us, that you know need to be released. And so, I mean, I guess I can ground the conversation by talking about some of the parts I experience inside myself, and maybe you can as well. Sure, yeah, you know, I have a part of myself that does not like to feel too isolated, and that may be a young part in exile, and I have another part that just absolutely thrives on solitude and feels the deepest sense of connection in nature, and not just any nature, but as we were talking about earlier, I have very specific relationships with a few places on this earth, and you were saying the same. And so it's not just any river, it's not just any Creek, it's not just any open landscape. I mean, I can enjoy visually any view or river or creek, or getting in one on a hot day, but, but there's some places where, when I'm there, I just feel like, oh my god, I'm knowing and being known deep relationships, yeah. And then I have another part of me that sometimes just wants to be surrounded by people in a city, being anonymous, just people watching, and likes to be tasting a lot of different flavors and energies of humanity around me, yeah. And I think that's one of the parts that has propelled me to travel a lot, although by traveling, I'm also making contact with different earthly or spirit places. Yeah, so, but it's like just naming all of those things. It's like, Well, where am I going to live? You know, I don't want to be too isolated. I don't want to be around too many people. But then another part of me does want to be around a lot of people, but certain kinds of people with certain
Unknown Speaker 26:46
like how they got very noisy.
Unknown Speaker 26:49
No
Speaker 1 26:50
traffic jams in there, right? Yeah. And so these are examples of being in relationship to oneself. And this is what you're saying that you teach in the academy is in order to be relationship with other, it's really helpful to be in relationship with these parts. Because what happens if you're not in relationship with these parts in relationship with another? Well,
Speaker 2 27:11
one thing that I've done in the past, and that I see many other people doing, is identifying with one part, let's say, identifying with the part that says, I want to be in a partnership. I want to find a committed partnership. I want human intimacy. I want to be with somebody who's ready for that, who's going to show up for that, and they look for that. In some cases, maybe they even find that. And then, if they haven't been listening to other parts of themselves underneath. You know, sometimes the minute they find that it's like another part starts emerging, which is like, Wait a minute. I don't want that at all. I want complete solitude. I want complete freedom. I don't want to have to talk to somebody else every day. And so I want to normalize that. I mean, I think it's possible that not everybody is as complex and as internally contradictory, and I think those of us with more attachment wounds often are more internally contradictory because we really had to develop these different parts in order to survive. But I do see many people walking around either identifying with wanting a relationship with someone else and disowning all the other parts of them that either don't want that or are terrified of it. And then so if they either that keeps them from finding somebody, or if they do find somebody, it's going to get really messy. And chances are they may find somebody who's got their own version of something similar going on. And then it gets exponentially more tangled with all of these pushes and pulls coming from both people and, you know, collisions. And I also see the opposite, you know, people that are walking around saying, I don't want a relationship. I don't want a relationship. And then they meet somebody, you know, they get lit up. There's so much chemistry, connection, attraction. Oh, my God, I really want a relationship. But of course, the part of themselves that they were first speaking from has not gone away, and so that part is still there somehow. And depending if they find somebody else who's really all in, then that part of themselves is going to have to get stronger, or maybe they're going to find somebody else who's going to be more identified with the unsure about relationship thing. And you know, like all of these very intense push pulls that we end up playing out, as you know, in such excruciating ways with other human beings and causing so much hurt and experiencing so much hurt. It is my belief that the more congruence we have internally, the more we can make external choices that are not disowning any of the different parts inside and then we're also allowed. More likely to find somebody else who's more congruent. And whatever it is that we create, you know, it's not necessarily so easy to arrive at consensus with the parts of inside of me, you know, for the listeners who remember the lesbian feminist days of the 1980s where we had to have these endless meetings about, you know, like, can we achieve consensus? About, do we hang the toilet paper roll this way?
Unknown Speaker 30:27
Really important things.
Unknown Speaker 30:30
It gets really exhausting to try to consensus.
Speaker 2 30:36
And I'm, I am speaking tongue in cheek, but it was, you know, it was things like, are we gonna, as a household, pay for peanut butter? Or do we, do we object to peanut you know, it was, I mean, it was very earnest and beautiful, but it was also very exhausting. Yeah, so consensus is hard.
Unknown Speaker 30:55
Consensus of these parts. Well,
Speaker 2 30:58
yeah. I mean, that was an example of trying to get to consensus between different people, but I find that even for me like that's why I'm loving not being in an intimate relationship with someone else right now, so I can just have these inner meetings, dialogs between the different parts of me that want different things. Because yeah, as I say in the academy, this is our 24/7 365, relationship like this is the person that is never going to be able to break up with us, or that we'll never be able to break up with. So yeah, it feels deeply meaningful and worthwhile to me to be really engaging relationally in this interior way. Yeah, well, I feel like I'm talking a lot. I want
Speaker 1 31:43
you to talk a lot. This is great, and you're just lighting me up because I feel there's so much we could talk about around relationship, and I know you do quite a bit in Conscious Girlfriend in my work, but I'd like to really focus our time now on what it means to build this kind of relationship with self, all the parts, with ourselves. I think it was, it's kind of like, let's explore this other paradigm, that there is deep healing in conscious solitude. And that's conscious solitude is a term that Joe Dispenza use, uses as he's delivering this paradigm. Because, as you know, for many months now, I have, well, many months now, gosh, like a year, I have really been turning inward. And it was as a result of this breakup where, I mean, I was working such deep, heartbreaking material that didn't, I mean, it had to do with the ex partner, but the ex partner's choices and attachment style really just opened this deep wound in me, and when I finally got through what felt like a year and a half of just emotional angst, and I'm sure most people listening know what a dark night of the soul is, and just this feeling where You cannot see your way through. You feel like everything is dissolved, and how you've been able to orient and to your point earlier, it's kind of like, how do I go on? Like, who am I? What is life and what's love? You know, when there's so much pain, and once I got through a lot of that intensity, I landed really deeply in this home. I've been here almost two years, but it was probably six months in, and all of a sudden, because I live far enough from town, I was unable to go and just grab a coffee or go meet a friend for this because it's a Mountain Drive and it's, it's kind of a it's a journey. It's not a zip down and zip back up between client calls that I started spending a lot more time by myself, which has been a part of my whole life. I have had a I love I'm an introvert. I love connection, but I love quiet time and nature and but what I'm really have been noticing, and I know we've talked about this, is the appeal of of this paradigm where we are being not everyone. It's like when we're called, just like anything else, there is another path that has a deep, to your point, a deep journey around no longer seeking external support and validation for a lot of these parts. I mean, of course, the external support can happen, but there is something ruthless about this journey of getting acquainted with for me, it's been a lot of the verbal dialog about myself and life and and seeing the ways that I because, unlike you, I grew up in an environment where I felt constantly criticized. I was never doing anything right, and so I have that internal diet. I have that internal voice in me. I mean, you know that so well about me, but my point is, I'm kind of rambling on here. Is that something is fundamentally changing, and I could say in my brain, but. The amount of time I've spent alone, but not just in my brain, like deep in my heart. And when Joe Dispenza introduced this concept, he was talking about, and we can put some language around this in a moment, if it feels helpful, just a framework, but he was talking about, I don't remember the research studies, but they scanned someone's brain, and they could see that this woman, who had been spending a lot of time in solitude, that her two hemispheres were starting to communicate more together. And he said something that and and I have tracked this in myself, because I live in a mountain home, there's a lot to tend to. I have a lot of decisions to make. I'm also building a retreat space on part of my home that I haven't had anyone to turn to. Well, sometimes I'll WhatsApp you and be like, hey, what do you think about? But for the most part, I haven't had time to go outward and ask someone. And so there's been this consistent having to actually start to attune to what am I sensing, what am I feeling? And to do that means I have to get underneath the six year old and me that's panicking because she needs to make her lunch and breakfast and doesn't know how to read the macaroni and cheese box, because that was really my introduction to becoming so self reliant. So all of that to say that do believe that we heal so deeply in relationship, even when there is a lot of challenge and rupture, sometimes the healing is inside of ourselves. It's not between us and the other person to our point earlier. But I also feel that there's a lot of merit to the level of self compassion and exquisite learning and knowing of the parts of us that we most don't want to see, the things we see in other people that we most dislike, how that might what that might be activating in us, and where there's potentially shame around some that version of that inside. So maybe my question for you would be, let's talk about solitude, and let's talk about from your perspective, why? Why it can be a powerful practice for people, especially given that our culture doesn't actually our culture would be more biased to your isolating. This is your attachment trauma. There's something wrong with you, which has been my internal voices that I've had to really work with. And I know I said I was gonna ask you a question, and I'm still riffing, but I have one more thing to say, because I reached out to a mentor some months back, and I said, Is this okay? Like I am so luxuriating and all this time sitting by the fire and watching the snowfall and doing doing my own thing at home, creating, but I'm not seeing that many people right now. And she was like, Oh, sweetie, yeah, this is how you get to know you in a deeper way. Is you're not surfing through someone else's emotional field every single day, you are surfing through your own material to your point earlier. There's no one else's material that I'm trying to make meaning out of. It's all mine. It's all my inner conflict. It's all my own projections. And that, when she said that to me, everything's settled, because I've kind of felt like, you know me, I can be so nerdy in certain ways, and it was like, Oh, this is such a deep study of what it means to start deconstructing even these cultural beliefs that we are supposed to be with other people and be in community. And I'm not saying we shouldn't be, but I'm saying, Who are we in those communities if we haven't done this integrative work of getting to know these parts of ourselves so that we know which one is in the driver's seat in a community or a relationship environment. So all right, your turn. What's coming up for you around all of that, or the conscious solitude frameworks. Or,
Speaker 2 38:56
you know, just as we could easily agree that to say, you know, there's so many types of relationships, and even if we talk about romantic and sexual relationships, there are so many types of romantic and sexual relationships, you know, just absolutely vast numbers of different types. I think there are also vast numbers of different kinds of solitude, slash being alone, slash isolation. And there have been times in my life, not that long ago, even like when the relationship ended, the second of the two relationships, the one which I was so shattered. I remember then being alone in the house that I was living in and feeling like this clawing discomfort and bleakness, and a part of me that felt so desperate from aloneness and just needed to be around other people like it. And it was, it was so primal, and it was. Shocking to me, because, as I said, at that point in my life, I had a lot of tools, and it just felt like none of the tools that I had could touch that it was like I need to be around others. Yeah, and now I am at a point where my need to be around others is so different and so much less. So what was healthy or healing or life giving for me at that point and what is at this point are just so different. So I think it's really important not to say to somebody who's anywhere like having that experience that I was having a few years ago, like you need to do conscious solitude like that would have just made me climb the walls. That was just medicine, totally for the part of me that was in so much anguish in that way at that moment. But now I think I have healed. I mean, since that time, my need and desire for intimate relationship really changed. And so, as you know, for several years, I've gone kind of obsessively back and forth around this question of, does this mean I'm healed, or does this mean I'm broken? Like, wait a minute, why don't I have that same level of desire for intimate relationship that had fueled me for decades in my life? Is that just because I got so hurt by that person, that now I've withdrawn. That would be the broken explanation, or is it because I had to do so much deep work in the wake of that shattering, that now I've healed something in my attachment system, and I've engaged with it so much. I don't think it's brokenness, but I don't know if it's as binary as its healedness, either, and when I've talked to my guides about it, they just said it was like one phase of my life ended and another part of me had to come forth like there was a death that happened, and which makes sense, and that's part of why, for a long time, I didn't know, How am I going to be able to live? How am I going to walk life again? So in the wake of that, I don't know I'm living a different life. Yeah,
Speaker 1 42:11
I witnessed that. You know? What strikes me right now is that this isn't really about solitude or relationship external. It's really about our connection to it's definitely our connection with other people, but it's our connection to ourselves and what, what the authentic need is in any given moment, whether it comes from wound and we're trying to run away from being alone because it scares us, or we're trying to hunker down to be alone because we feel like we should power through that's like that could be my wound at times,
Speaker 2 42:41
because people scare us and so, yeah, we're running away from people to be alone. Yeah,
Speaker 1 42:47
exactly. There's all these variations. But I think that you know you and I often talk, we talk so much, actually about energy. We're talking a lot about psychology right now, but I want to shift our conversation towards some energetics for a minute, because even if we just because I agree with you, conscious solitude, well, we haven't even defined what that is yet. But solitude, it's like being with ourselves, whether someone's in the next room or we are living alone and we don't see people for days. I think solitude is an interesting word. It could be framed and defined in so many different ways, but I feel like the essence of what we're talking about, especially when you brought in the parts work is and this is where I feel so much juice these days, and it's happening a lot. When I guide ceremony with plant medicine, I'm feeling like I'm witnessing so many people, and I would say I'm included in this where the heart and the mind are learning to come into connection with each other, and that when I think about the science of when I think about Heart Math, Heart Math is an Institute in California. It's been around for decades. I was certified probably 10 years ago or more. And the thing that I love about their research is that they have, for a very long time been trying to help people understand and they, by the way, they talk about trees too and their resonance, but that while we focus so much on our mind and our thoughts, and of course, our narratives are a huge part of our suffering, My suffering, many people suffering that there's an intelligence in the heart, and even the heart releases hormones just as much as the brain. The heart sends more messages to the brain than the brain to the heart. And in this I think it's an E, G, I can't remember the actual testing equipment, but it is able to measure that the heart, its amplitude is 60 times more than the brain, which means the power that it exerts is 60 times more. And the electromagnetic field, which is like the distance that it expands, is 100 times more. Wow. And so there's just this sense that the heart holds all. Like it holds energetically, so much power. It also drives our emotions and our thoughts. And getting back to energetics, all of this creates the field that we walk around. And you remember pig pen from Snoopy? Did you ever see Snoopy when you were little? It's kind of like that little dust bowl that lives around us. And this is, those are our emotional states. It's and I often feel that in our culture, with the speed that we're in and with the amount of use on the devices, we don't necessarily pay as much attention to our energetic field, not only what are we projecting, but what are we picking up especially sensitive people, or when you're in a relationship and you can feel, I mean, I have this attachment with my dog, and when she's sick, my whole system is just fucked. I mean, I'm just like, I can feel the activation I can feel, you know, when she had cancer recently, just like a lot of my whole field got I lost my coherence. And I think that when I think about everything we're talking about, whether it's in a relationship, whether it's we find it with ourselves, whether we're out by a river or a tree, it seems like what we're all ultimately solving for is connection and connection at a deeper level of like coherence in our own Field, where our heart and our mind are actually supporting each other, rather than we get these intuitive instincts, and the mind is like, oh, that's crazy. Don't do that. You and I both know, because we've shared many messages about moments where our body and our heart are guiding us to do something, but our mind is like, why would you do that? Like, why would you live there? Or, why would you I had traveled 17 hours to get to an island that I'd never been to before, Salt Spring and Fall, and all I wanted to do was abort that plan because it sounded so fucking long and stupid, and I wanted to do something like get on a plane and go to Big Sur, but my heart was like, this is where you're going. And I listened, and it was probably one of the most empowering trips of my life. And so I know I'm saying a lot here, but I think what I want to highlight, and then I want to toss it over to you, is that there's something so beautiful when we can be with our psychology, we can understand our wounds, and we can also understand that we're not broken, and what if there wasn't as much to fix as we think? And what if we slowed down enough to start to feel who we are as an energetic being, and what it's like to work on the coherence of these inner dilemmas that you spoke to, and what I'm talking about with the heart and mind having different and what would it be like to spend more time getting to know how to become more coherent in moments when we feel stressed and abandoned or whatever comes up at an attachment level? Yeah,
Speaker 2 47:53
it's such a beautiful solution to the binary of conscious relationship versus conscious solitude, this or that, because if what we're seeking is coherence, and if how we access it is connection, it could be through connecting to all the parts of ourselves. It could be connecting to a tree or a river or a mountain. It could be connecting to another human being, any of those things could potentially help us access greater coherence, or not
Speaker 1 48:26
true. But then the question is, are we discerning enough if it's not to say no and move away, right, especially if we feel, if we have any kind of fawning where we want to please or appease, or we're afraid to set a boundary, or we question our need that piece feels really significant too, is being able to discern if something isn't creating coherence. It's okay to say no, right, right? It's okay. I mean, you watched me with a dear, dear friend whom I spent time, where we took a pause, and then we spent time, I don't know, three weeks ago or something, and the field felt so incoherent, and this was consistent in our previous times, but I hadn't been able to identify it. So as much as I love this person, I don't like how my nervous system feels, and there's nothing wrong with her, and there's nothing wrong with me, but there's been in honoring that I have felt that's how I stay in the love with myself and with her. So back to what you were saying. I think it does take it out of non binary. So do you want to say more about any of those threads that you just
Speaker 2 49:32
Well, I was also just thinking about I was looking at the plant behind you, and I had the thought today that I am part plant,
Speaker 3 49:44
and you are with your sunshine needs. You might,
Speaker 2 49:48
you know, people might not normally be able to perceive that about me. They don't see my leaves. They don't, you know, see that I'm engaged in the process of photosynthesis, or whatever it is that I'm doing. But there. Is no question that I need a lot of natural light and I need a lot of sun, yeah. And that is just that seems to be a basic need, having a lot of natural light and sun contribute so much to my well being, yeah. And I have known very, very few people for whom that is as true. And I've known lots of people that have really different conditions that contribute to their well being. And, you know, like, like, some people that really, really like to be in lots of rain and fog and gray days, and, you know, they don't care that much if they have a lot of windows in their house. You know, they really like to be in the Redwood Forest. I think redwoods are magnificent beings, but I don't like to be in Redwood Forest for very long, because they're so dark, right? So, yeah, you know, and on the level of plants, we could acknowledge this, like that Fern behind you, has very specific needs, yeah, and different kinds of plants have different kinds of needs, right? So if I'm going to own my plant nests, I can own the kind of plant that I am, even though my leaves are not as visibly apparent. I know I had a point there. Well,
Speaker 1 51:09
can I tag on to that Absolutely? Because it feels like maybe your leaves aren't seen, but your field is felt, you know, going back to the field and the state. I mean, I know you as a teacher. I mean, I obviously, I know you as a dear sister, but the level of compassion that your presence brings forward, those are your leaves like that's that's what maybe they're not visible, but that's what comes off in your field, because of the way that you have deepened that with yourself. That's
Speaker 2 51:43
such a beautiful way of looking at it. And, you know, yeah, just yesterday in a class, I was talking with a participant, and I was just kind of encouraging her to get to know her Nancy self. Like, what are the conditions under which Nancy thrives? And she's saying, yeah, she's never really let her out self ask that question. And then she was reflecting back to me that she sees me being much more energized and looking more radiant and looking much better than I was for a period of time. And I said, Well, that's because I am really trying to live this life asking those questions. You know? What are the conditions under which this roots self with all the co you know, the whole combination of spiritual wounds, physical wounds, in terms of health challenges. You know, emotional wounds, etc. You know, different parts of myself, like this whole compiled collage being that I am. What are the conditions under which this being thrives at this time? And a lot of that is energetic, because I feel so different in different places. Yeah,
Speaker 4 52:48
absolutely different. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1 52:53
that's why. And I'm just noticing the time so we can start to transition in a moment. But I I think that's why I'm so passionate about this program I'm putting together around the nervous system, befriending your nervous system. Because I think the more that we strengthen and tonify our capacity to be both activated and find centering and groundedness at the same time, the more I think it's easier to discover who we really are, to actually know our Nancy Ness, or to know and to be honest about the subtleties like me with this friend who I adore, and realizing, oh, it's about my nervous system. I don't have to make up any story about her. It's about the level of fragmentation that I start to feel in the field, where my I don't feel like my thoughts are very coherent, and then I leave and I'm like, coherent again, and that's not to blame anything. It's just the field, right? So I think that that would be such a huge piece in my book of just why working with our nervous system at a very physiological level, whether it's breath work or silence or meditation, is so helpful in terms of this coherence that we're talking about and the field that we're creating,
Unknown Speaker 54:05
yeah,
Speaker 2 54:06
that's beautiful. And then just seeing where does our nervous system feel, that sense of ease and opening around with Yeah, in which places, in which circumstances? Yeah, you know that that's all part of befriending our nervous systems? Well, I guess
Speaker 1 54:22
I won't leave you messages anymore referring to you as a cat. I'm going to start referring to you as a plant with all of your sun needs. I always call you a cat, but I won't anymore.
Speaker 5 54:32
I don't know, give me on heart cat too. I think you are. I think you are. We've covered a lot
Speaker 1 54:38
of different ground. Do you feel that there's anything else that you want to make a comment on before we talk a little bit about what you do with with CGA Conscious Girlfriend Academy, I think I
Speaker 2 54:49
just want to say that this is just a process of discernment for each of us at each point in our lives, like what feels like? The medicine now so that, because we do so much, have a tendency to say, is this a sign of healing, or is this a sign of my wounding? Is this getting me forward or this moving me backward? You know, like, what's healthier? And all of those binary terms, a, they're so binary and B, they suggest that there is a healthier and so, or a better or a more evolved and so. What if we could throw that out and just say it's just about what I mean. This is what I like, about where you went with coherence. You know, what feels like? It brings me more coherence or more peace, or more ease, or more well being what just feels like it deeply serves me more at this moment in time, because that could be romantic relationship of myriad kinds. You know, we haven't even talked about monogamous, poly, living together, not living together. You know, frame of relationship like so many different kinds. Some of it might be not romantic relationship. It might be just deep soul friendship. Is that still solitude? I remember one day you said, like, Does it count as solitude if I'm with Angel? That's
Unknown Speaker 56:13
right, that was me in a binary place speaking,
Speaker 2 56:16
right? Yeah, exactly. So I just for anybody listening. I just really want to say explicitly, we are not talking about better, worse, more spiritual, more evolved, healthier. You know, we're just talking about like, this vast realm of experience that we're each engaging with from different places in different moments in our lives, with different needs, yeah, and different possibilities. Yeah,
Speaker 1 56:43
because I, I appreciate you bringing that in as the as the closing, because without that, it's so easy to reinforce narratives of, Am I doing this right or wrong? Am I broken, or am I being getting fixed? Am I healing, or am I backtracking? And those
Speaker 2 56:59
narratives absolutely do not enhance coherence. No, the opposite, yeah, whether we're trying to be more healed or better or, you know, yeah, ourselves, yeah,
Speaker 1 57:11
exactly, yeah, yeah. Well, let's just talk a little bit about Conscious Girlfriend Academy, and because I know it's about women finding love. But I also know it's a lot bigger. That's more than just about love. So absolutely,
Speaker 2 57:24
I mean Conscious Girlfriend Academy is a conscious, compassionate space for lesbians, queer women, women, loving, women, adjacent, non binary, people on this plane of existence at this time. And I think, you know, in a way, it's arbitrary, and then in a way, it's not like there are certain experiences that lesbians or women who love women tend to share, certain ways, that we tend to be able to get each other, sometimes that many of us don't feel gotten in the larger world because it's so heteronormative. And so it's a space for us to come together and get to know ourselves more and more deeply. Many people come with the specific intention of finding a romantic partnership. Some people come with the intention of healing from a past romantic relationship. Some people aren't sure. Some people are in a current romantic relationship and want to have tools for that, but I think also there's this phenomenon of whatever somebody's doorway in may be a lot of you know, we all know this from our lives. You know, we head toward a particular door and go through a particular door thinking we're going to find a particular thing on the other side of it, and sometimes what we find is completely not what we expected, but has its own deep rightness and medicine for us. So sometimes that happens in the academy. So, you know, on the most basic level, the Academy is a school where people can come and learn about how to prevent heartbreak, date wisely and love well. And then within that, there's a whole lot about, you know, who am I? How COVID or coherent? Am I with myself? What triggers to come up for me when I'm in relationship with another close person? How can I best work with those for myself, for, you know, to heal, to help that person heal, to create more healing, or well, being between us,
Speaker 1 59:19
beautiful. Yeah, I just get the sense that it's a place where, and I've seen, I've seen people's reviews of the academy, that it's just a place where people feel safe in a way that maybe they've never felt before, and as a result, they're getting to know who they really are, because they can start talking and hearing themselves speak about what is actually most true for them, and then to feel celebrated and that by other women, what a gift. Yeah, what's happening for you?
Speaker 2 59:49
You know, women and non binary people, and I just felt so moved when you said that about safety, because you're right. People give that reflection a lot, and I think that it is. It is a field that we co create in the academy, and it is such a blessing to me that there is some way that I am able to access or hold a frequency that facilitates that, and then most of the time, other people show up and and the frequency gets exponentially stronger. And so much of the safety and healing that people experience in the academy comes from their relationships with each other, but in a different circumstance that wouldn't be happening. So, you know, the same people could be co creating something that didn't feel safe at all. You know we've you, and I know that from the workshops and the trainings and the environments that we've been in, so I don't know. I just felt deeply moved that somehow something happens in that space, yeah, that allows for this unfolding. I'm
Speaker 1 1:01:02
going to nerd out for a minute, because you naming that. It just feels when there's safety in one person, and then there's a sense that the safety ripples into another, the whole field can become coherent, and safety is the key the nervous system being able to relax and open, and so it feels like that's part of you as a teacher, and then people joining you in that field, bringing the field themselves, and that there's an amplification, and that's a rarity, because we both know and many other communities, there can be a lot of energy that creates discoherence. Is that even a word incoherence, incoherence, that's the word Thank you. Yeah, that creates incoherence. And and then there's no safety, and then everybody's tightening up, going into their strategies of protection, and then it just gets tighter and tighter, right? So to everyone that's in the academy, and to you just so grateful that you're all creating this space, because this is, I think I'm going to use the word healing, because this is so appropriate, where the healing of being able to be our true selves, that's a huge amplification into the world. So and then thank you
Speaker 2 1:02:10
for psychology or neuroscience. Yeah, you know one thing I say all the time is that by experiencing that anywhere, and by being able to allow it in anywhere we are literally creating new neural pathways that more available to us in romantic relationships, if we want that, or in friendships, if we want that, or even in our family relationships, if you know, like in some way doesn't even matter as much where we are as we're re patterning those neural pathways, you know, so then maybe, if I'm spending time in a beautiful canyon that I love, surrounded by mountains and a creek, I'm creating neural pathways there that then I'll take forth into my human relationships. You know, absolutely
Speaker 1 1:02:57
yes, I'm so happy we did this. Thank you, beautiful. Coming on.
Speaker 5 1:03:03
Great. It is beautiful and looking to be in this space. Love you. Ruth, I love you. Okay, well, to be continued, I have a feeling we'll do more. Oh yeah, always Bye, bye.
Speaker 1 1:03:15
I hope you enjoyed the show today. If you want more, you can subscribe to this channel. This will automatically queue up the next episode for your listening. If you have a burning question or topic you want to learn more about, please send an email to ask Anne Marie. The direct link is located in the show notes, and please leave a review. This keeps me inspired and focused to bring you more. If you want to learn more about my work is a power reclamation guide, leadership coach and organizational culture consultant. You can visit my websites in the notes, thank you again for joining today. You
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