Invitation of Pain 2023

A workshop for healing with Dr. Hillary McBride and myself

Hi beautiful friends,

From 25 to 32 I lived most of my life in my bed. I’m the only human in the world that’s had a wire pierce their brain stem. That was my full identity.

I had a hard time caring about anything or anyone other than the deep pain I was feeling at all times. It consumed every part of my life.

My trauma response is to freeze, so when I am overwhelmed with pain, all I want to do is get in bed, shut off, and hide from the world. I still have that in me. Honestly, the last month on my road trip has felt really painful for me and my body, and my nervous system felt so overwhelmed. I have learned, and continue to learn, how to love on and be with the part of me that so desperately wants to check out from the pain of the human experience. 

The presence of pain demands that we dialogue in a new way with our bodies and pain itself. When we do that there’s also an opportunity to take the healing deeper than the pain ever was.

When I went through the process of relating to my body differently, it changed everything about how I related to all of the pain I felt in the past. It also changed how I related to the emotions (like fear and shame) I experienced in the past but didn’t know how to process, and all of the ways those feelings got stuck inside of me.

As I communed with these parts that so desperately longed to be felt and loved, all of sudden the healing that was available to me felt deeper than the pain. The work we are doing is not just to help the pain go away but to be in a deeper relationship with ourselves.

If you or someone you know feels hopeless because of the pain in your life, Dr. Hillary McBride–therapist, researcher, speaker, and writer (and one of my favorite teachers)–and I would love to share our Invitation Of Pain Workshop with you.

It’s such an honor to share this work and all that I have learned in the past 10 years about pain because it’s everything I desperately needed to hear when pain took over my life. I do this work for her, that version of Ruthie, and for anyone that can relate to feeling hopelessness that comes with pain.

We do this workshop once a year and it truly feels like some of the most important work I get to do. 

I see you, beautiful soul. This is not the end of your story, but the invitation.

XX,
Ruthie