Taking Ourselves in Our Arms

In Soul on Earth, a guide to Living and Loving Your Human Life, Ruth L. Schwartz, Ph.D. channels material from her spirit guides, much as Jane Roberts did in the 70’s with her Seth books. Ruth’s guidance on the nature of reality and the challenges of personal transformation are equally profound, and she goes an appreciable step further by demonstrating the material with stories and shamanic journeys from her personal life. I appreciate that candor and integration.

I also appreciate the author’s ongoing suggestions of ways to ask my own guides for assistance in various areas, and, her laying out of questions to ask myself in order to clarify particular difficulties. She invites and smoothly draws the reader on through her 352 pages. As she writes of how to dissolve our personal resistances to life and how to align ourselves with our unique design, her tone is comforting and compassionate, her viewpoint coherent and reasonable, her insights incisive and often startling.

Here is a sample of her voice from Chapter 15, The True Locus of Transformation: We must understand that any of these inner movements actually enacts the violence we deplore, and that even the deploring can become a kind of violence against the violence. So we must instead take the violence—both “our own”, and that of others—in our arms like a wailing and difficult baby. We must take ourselves in our arms this way, and our whole disturbed and disturbing, difficult and confused species.

The book bears out Ruth Schwartz’s description of herself as a “shamanic teacher and practitioner, writer and professor with a passion for personal transformation in the service of global change.” As a book that nourishes, Soul on Earth is a book to return to again and again.