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
And I'm amazed and grateful to have created
the Conscious Girlfriend Academy.
Ruth in her office in 2020, just before the Academy was born
Ruth and pet chicken, cerca 1970 (age 8)
Ruth in 1992 (age 31)
Ruth with Michelle/Max, co-founder of Conscious Girlfriend, in 2017
Ruth in 2023
First, the formal bio:
- Ruth L. Schwartz co-founded Conscious Girlfriend in 2014, and created the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, which she currently directs, in 2020. The Academy has served women and non-binary people in over 25 countries, and is the leading global resource helping lesbians date wisely and love well.
- Ruth is the author of eight books, including the Amazon LGBTQ bestseller Conscious Lesbian Dating & Love. (See all her books below.)
- Ruth has 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.
- Ruth has worked with individuals and couples since 2003, and practices as a coach, not a state-licensed 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.
- Ruth came out in 1982 and is a longtime teacher and leader in the LGBTQ community.
- The website datingadvice.com named Ruth one of the Ten Best Queer Dating Experts in 2023.
Now, a more personal story from Ruth 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. Yet it makes sense when you think about the shamanic archetype of the wounded healer. There's an 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 of course, 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 -- and when she broke up with me, the pain was almost unbearable. I was shocked and shattered.
I huddled on an old green stuffed chair and cried for months. Then we got back together again, and the same thing happened. It took me a long time to realize that even though she and I had been madly in love, we had never talked about what we each wanted from our relationship, what we intended, or how we would navigate it if 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, 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 walk my talk every day in my own relationships, and keep learning. But I'm very grateful that I know now how to both choose the right partner, and, most of the time, be the right partner -- and that the Academy offers a path to lesbians and adjacent people ready to choose healthy love.
Every day I get emails letting me know how the book and Academy have changed lives. (Read excerpts here.) 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 that skill in lesbian and queer community is a way to affirm our own lives, while making possible the love we yearn for and deserve.
Want an even faster track? Take Academy classes and get Conscious Girlfriend Coaching to support you 1:1. I've trained all of our certified coaches, and highly recommend them.
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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