On Saturday I stood on a cliff’s edge with a circle of women, gathered to bless one of my best friends, Dr. Hillary McBride, and the new life she is carrying.
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.
But you are starting to sense what I sensed. That the way home isn’t going to be found just by thinking your way there. You understand your patterns perfectly but still feel stuck inside them. Knowing there’s a better way doesn’t mean that you will arrive there.
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.
I know this from experiencing it firsthand: I did not write my book for other people. I hoped it would help as many as it could. But I really wrote it for the transformation that it worked inside of me. And I have come to believe that my journey of healing & transformation is itself a service to the collective.
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.
Ruthie
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