Blog — Ruth Sowter.

Here’s why the stuff you know about self love and body love doesn’t stick

(which flows into intimacy issues and feminine energy blocks, doh...)

Let’s go through the usual advice we all get for self love

Get out of your head
Quiet your inner critic
Learn to love your flaws
Accept yourself
Stop hustling all the time and go with the flow more to get ‘into your feminine’

So you do this stuff and it feels better, for a while.

But then suddenly the self criticism rears its ugly head again, and it’s just as bad or worse than ever.

Life feels hard.

You wonder, does this shit not work for me? Am I terminally broken? Is this just something I am not meant to have?

It’s heartbreaking.

I started hating my body at 12.

I was curvier than my friends and it got me attention I didn’t want.

I would routinely cry clothes shopping and wore clothes that were a few sizes too big to try and hide.

I felt disgusting.

It got better as I got older, but not much.

I was always in a struggle with my body - trying to control my weight, my hormones (OMG don’t get me started on my hormones), feeling I couldn’t have or wear nice things because I wasn’t good enough for them.

Here’s what I tried to change this

Getting to my ‘ideal weight’
Dressing ‘to balance my flaws’
Lots of exercise
Yoga & meditation of various kinds
Yoga retreats, ‘goddess’ retreats, specific women’s spirituality & feminine energy training
Supplements, working with naturopaths
Therapy
All the self help - books and courses on self love, confidence, hypnosis, NLP

I sound like a self improvement nutter but this was over years and the self hate often manifested as depression and anxiety and I was desperate to get rid of it.

Here’s what I experienced:

Improvement for sure. But self love, nope. Not remotely.
I felt like a fraud as a yoga teacher talking about self love and body acceptance.
I valued everyone else’s opinion more highly than my own.
I put everyone else first.
My mood was severely affected by my weight and hormones.
I struggled to ask for what I wanted in any context but in my relationship worst of all.

Then what happened:

It still makes me wriggle with discomfort, but it meant my efforts for genuine intimacy in my relationship were stifled.

I didn’t feel worthy of the love I wanted.

It meant I felt disconnected from feminine energy because I didn’t deserve to.

I had literally given up on self love at this point and was just happy things were better than they used to be.

Then my marriage ended.

I was blindsided with shame, guilt, fear of the future.

I started exploring Tantra and jade egg because, why not? The worst had already happened.

And one day, I was walking to the shops, and I realised... I felt good. Not just good, amazing! Glowy.

Happy for no good reason.

Joyful.

I know finally understand why I was stuck for so long, and why this destroyed so much of happiness and my relationship.

When we don’t work with all the parts of the brain, things don’t stick. If we want changes in life, we have to EMBODY them.

There are three parts to this, and we have to work with them all in an integrated way for it to be effective.

Mindset. We have to be able to imagine and visualise how we want our lives to be and it has to make sense to us.
Desire. We have to want it at an emotional level. If you see your goal but it feels scary or you can’t believe you can have it, it’s harder to take the right action toward it.
Body wisdom. This is the part most often left out. It’s not just feeling your body, although that’s a good start.

I have some really exciting things to share with you about all of this that I am rolling out over the next couple of weeks!

But if you want to try a sample session I am doing 10 free 20 minute calls over the next few weeks where I will teach you a quick and easy way to make it part of your life.

They are not sales calls. They are short, powerful sessions to get you started.

Book yours here https://bookruth.as.me/

It’s funny how vibrators are considered totally acceptable and normal these days, but people still freak out about jade eggs.

Yes, there are some people working with jade or yoni eggs you can find who are a bit ‘out there’ and make some big claims.

Not unlike yoga. Or meditation. Or even a lot of business development people these days.

What is a jade egg? It’s a little gemstone egg women put into their vaginas and do yoga with. There are also yoni eggs which can be from other gemstones, but the benchmark safest eggs to use are made of high quality jade.

Most of the people kicking up a fuss about how bad the eggs are make it obvious in what they say that they don’t understand how the eggs are meant to be used.

But shaming women for trying something to enhance their relationship with their own bodies and sexuality says a lot about our society. It’s ok to get off. It’s not ok to get too deep and spiritual about it.

What I know is that the jade egg is one of the best tools I’ve ever seen for helping women learn about and love their bodies.

Which to me, makes it a tragedy if any women get put off trying it.

But I also get the fears. It took me years to come around to the idea of trying it. I would imagine myself in a room full of other women, eggs in hand, and my mind ended it right there. When I realised I could learn it all online, I felt a lot safer.

The truth about jade egg practice... it really is a lot like yoga.

You want to learn it from someone who knows what they’re doing, preferably with an actual qualification, not just someone who is passionate, because they will teach you how to do it safely and explain the hows and whys
You might not think a lot is happening to start with but you get better at it and you feel more and more
It is astonishingly powerful for creating self love and self acceptance
The health of your entire pelvis improves as you gain more muscle tone and awareness

Like yoga, the list of benefits could go on for pages as there are lots of different ways you can use the egg.

Before I did my first jade egg course, I don’t think I had ever felt self love. It crept up on me by surprise about 2 weeks in, and it was blissful. I was happy for no good reason, but I realised then, our relationship with our bodies and sexuality has a much bigger impact than we might logically think.

Even with this, I still didn’t see myself teaching it. But you know what, it’s too good not to. I see so many women with up and down body relationships and I know how much this could change things for them.

I’ll be sharing my new online beginners/refresher course in the next couple of weeks and doing a free live Q&A next week to share all the details. Feel free to pm me if you have any questions beforehand.