After 6 months of going through the nurse coaching processing as a client, I know without a doubt that my voice matters!
I am no longer afraid to publicly say what I think even if it is different than the majority. I have the courage to be me and am choosing from this day forward to accept others where they are.
What do you need to say out loud that you have not yet said? I challenge you to speak the truth in love, holding nothing back.
It’s okay to believe differently than those we love. Unity is not uniformity.
Unity is defined as “a thing forming a complex whole.”
A little something I read on Instagram that spoke deeply to my heart early this morning when sleep alluded me…
“Bring me the one who disagrees to my face but supports me behind my back. Bring me the one who takes risks a little far but pushes people to be better than they were today. Bring me the one who challenges me to rethink my perspective, to research before forming an opinion, and who has relentless faith that we will work out our differences and if we don’t, we’ll disagree cordially….
I’m so thankful for a mother who taught me, and continues to teach me, about unconditional love in spite of differences in beliefs, appearances, and talents.
Most everything I learned about love, I learned it first from my mother because of her relentless courage to choose faith over fear, love over hate, unity over division.
She taught me it’s okay to be messy, that it’s okay to be myself, that it’s okay to be different. She accepts me as I am, and holds space for me no matter the choices I make.
It is my hope for every human that you find your path and find your peace, wherever that may be.
It is my belief that we are on this earth to hold healing space for each other, no matter what.
Welcome to my raw, authentic, messy and brave nurse coaching world! I’d love to introduce myself to everyone.
My name is Ruth Renee, and my favorite colors are turquoise and deep blue. To me, these colors signifies healing, inner wisdom, and boldly speaking the truth in love.
It took me many years to discover how powerful and needed my voice truly is!!
For too long, I believed lies that I was not enough, that I was not worthy, that I was not lovable, loving, or loved.
CW//brief mention of sexual abuse
.
.
.
.
When I was 7 years old, I was sexually abused for a short time. It shattered me in a profound way. But because of my courage and faith in God, I continually persisted forward. I take the next right step in faith, and I can now trust that God will not fail me.
Today, I accept who I am and where I have been. I know that my past does not define me. It may have shaped and molded me for a season, but God transformed me in a way that I will forever be grateful. In God’s image and by His love, I am forever changed. A new creation! A beautiful butterfly who now knows that she has wings and was always meant to fly!!
My purpose as a nurse coach is to help other women heal and move beyond the ashes of destruction, lies, and limiting beliefs trapped in their hearts and minds. It is the pure desire of my heart to be an advocate for real and lasting change. As a nurse coach, I gently guide other women toward healing and grace, toward receiving the perfect love that only God can give. “We love because he first loved us.”
If you don’t feel lovable, loving, or loved, please know that I have been where you are now. I appreciate how hard it is and how alone you may feel. I plead with you to not suffer in silence, to not isolate, to not believe the lies playing over and over in your head. Please know that I am here hoping and praying that you never give up on yourself!
Many times, I wanted to give up. Unfortunately, trauma patterns had a strong hold on me for a season because I believed the lies told to me by unsafe people. But, God sent believers into my life to be the hands, feet, and heart of Jesus; to show me sincere loving kindness in a way that I had not been able to receive for many years. Right place, divine timing! I give the glory to God for saving me. But I did play a part. I prayed for angels and God sent many beautiful souls to help me heal and learn to trust again. I believed in faith that God would help me. I took the first step in courageously bold prayer.
If you feel lost, I am here. If you are afraid, I am here. If you feel hopeless, I am here holding on to Hope against Hope until you can trust and believe for yourself that you are beautiful and loved, just as you are. You are perfectly imperfect, and God made you just as you are for a unique purpose. I am here to be your guide, to help you see the light and truth until your vision becomes more clear. I am here to help you get out of your own way so that you can be the bright light you were created to be. I am here without judgment, control, or manipulation. I am here carrying gentleness, grace, empathy, even courage and peace. I would love to share these gifts God has given me. You are worth it. Your greatest identity is as a child of God.
If you are struggling to feel hope, I would love to be a bridge to peace. I would love to be a light on your path to help you see the way forward to hope. You were fearfully and wonderfully made to receive God’s love and grace so that he can carry you home. I believe with all my heart, might, mind, and strength that God is for you. You are created by love, for love. To love and be loved. It is wired in your DNA to be connected to God and to other people. Please know that there are safe people to whom you can reach out! I would be honored to be that person who holds a safe nurturing space for you. A rich soil to help you blossom and grow.
As a nurse coach, I am passionate about helping other women feel wholly confident in their own skin. I am believing for you until you can fully believe in yourself that “all things are possible when we believe.” God is a promise keeper and a “man of His word!”
If you feel stuck, look up! The sky changes every day!! Peaceful Sunset @nursehealingadvocate
So many women come to me for help because they believe the lie that they are not enough. I am right here, right now telling you that this is simply not true!!!
God created YOU just as you are for a reason. You are fearfully and wonderfully made because you have a purpose and you are UNIQUE, SPECIAL. and LOVED! God wants to prosper you and give you a hope and a future, not harm you. GOD IS FOR YOU!! f you believe, then all things are possible. This is my faith and my hope. Empathy and desire for restoration is what motivates me to get out of bed each and every day.
If you would like to connect, please consider reaching out to have a conversation. You don’t have to live in fear. You don’t have to suffer alone. I am here. I see you. I believe you, and I believe in you. You are more than enough. You are worth it! You are not alone.
I’m so curious, where do you find even the tiniest spark of hope? Focus there and remember that HOPE is the belief to “Hold On, Pain Ends!”
Looking back at my 6th grade self receiving an achievement award, I wish I could have understood my lovability was not based on what I achieved or didn’t achieve.
I am telling my younger self now, I am lovable because I am a creation of God.
I was and am just as He created me to be. Wherever I am, He meets me there. All God wants is my heart.
There is nothing I can do or not do to change this divine truth. It’s taken me a long time to see truth.
Only by allowing God’s love, mercy, and grace into my heart, could the deep pains I’ve carried since childhood begin to heal.
Only then could the lies be removed, and replaced with truth that I am love. Nothing can ever change this truth.
I praise God that He got through to me, that I remembered He is trustworthy, long enough to let down my guard, to let Him in to my heart to heal me.
God is the Master Healer and only true source of life and love. Any healing, growth, success, and light you see in me, I give all the credit to Him! He saved me. He healed me.
With hope and much love,
Ruth Renee RN
Student Nurse Wellness Coach
What miracles have happened in your life? Who has helped you heal? I’d love to hear more in the comments below, or you can email me ~ nursehealingadvocate@gmail.com
The most important thing I’ve learned about transformation is that we get there the quickest by slowing down, by speaking our truth in love, and by becoming who we truly are at the deepest level.
When you slow down, you can hear yourself think. You can sort the clutter of all the voices in your head until you can encounter your own.
You must let all the other voices go, and only then can you have a clear conversation with God. Only then can you discover who you really are!
For the first time, you meet your most authentic self without all the noise of the world telling you who you are and who you are to become.
You then have a choice…to share or not to share your most authentic self with the world. To be brave enough to truly be yourself, to JUST BE YOU, to speak your truth in love.
Your authentic voice matters! When you do not speak your truth, you abandon a part of yourself. It becomes harder to love all of yourself!!!
One of the most important things I’ve learned about being able to love myself is that authenticity matters! I matter!! My story matters. My authentic voice matters!!!
When you speak the truth in love, you step into being more fully alive, more fully you, more fully connected to God, grace, understanding and knowing. Knowing that this is the one life we have to live on this earth, HERE AND NOW.
When you hold back, when you shift your words to what others want to hear, a part of you dies inside, a part of your awareness fades away.
You step into living only half alive. And piece by piece, you continue to fade away, and the real you slowly dies.
If I could tell the world just one thing, it would be this…YOU MATTER, YOUR VOICE MATTERS, YOUR AUTHENTIC VOICE MATTERS, YOU ARE ENOUGH!!!
I’ve been doing healing work and trusting the process of transformation for quite a few years now.
I have many regrets of who I was and how I behaved in the past, but I am not my past. The slate is wiped clean.
When we transform, we step into grace and beauty, into knowing and understanding that no one is worthy, no one is perfect.
We all make mistakes. We all lose hope.
It’s okay to let others know you struggle. It’s okay to be vulnerable. It’s okay to give yourself permission to be you. I want to hear what YOU think, what YOU believe, what YOU feel, not how the world tells you to be.
I am here cheering you on. If you feel you have to hide a part of you, if you feel you can’t love yourself, or can’t let the world see ALL OF YOU, I am here cheering you on to just be you, to SPEAK YOUR TRUTH IN LOVE.
I know you can step into being you, loving you, accepting you.
I struggle with anxiety, depression, and complex PTSD. Thoughts of hating myself return from time to time, but I no longer live in the world of self-hate and abandoning myself, abandoning my voice.
I know that what I have to say is important. I know that I matter, that my authentic voice matters.
And I choose to speak the truth in love. I choose to live more fully alive each and every new day.
Today, I live in the world of hope and never giving up, the world of climbing every mountain, the world of giving myself permission to rest when I am weary and tired.
Today , I choose to step out of darkness into the light.
Mother’s Day….the truth is that it isn’t always so easy.
I have some resentment issues popping up around my son not wanting to go on Mother’s Day outings today, but I’m trying to look at other victories and come from a place of service and sacrifice, rather than expectation. That was me last year, and it didn’t go well. Today I choose to give my worries and painto God, so I can settle into appreciation and hope.
_______
For Mother’s Day this year, I planned ahead. I invited my kids to an outing I think we will all enjoy. Foot massages are scheduled with my daughter, and then we will get take out for a picnic at the lake, my favorite spot in the city. The place I go when I need to be in nature, when I need to clear my mind, the spot I took my kids to feed ducks when they were little. The place I took my mother to visit when she was in town for my birthday. So many wonderful memories!!!
A few days ago, I pulled out the cricut machine and the scrapbook supplies and created a homemade invite for Mother’s Day. I dropped it off for my kids at their dad’s, to let my son know the invitation is still open if he changes his mind. If not, I can respect his decision.
So while I’m sad my son is not coming, I dived into the resentment a bit deeper this morning. I released the hurt and pain. I uprooted the bitterness from my heart.
I then had space to connect with God to see the good things I have and what has changed and gotten better since last year. I looked at what is true. And I feel a little more peaceful, a little less sad. I released my worries to God, and I know that God’s timing is perfect. I know that reconciliation with my son is happening at its own pace.
______
Complex PTSD blew my family apart like a nuclear bomb, but God is putting it back together in a new way, healing the broken relationships between me and my children, reconciling hearts. He has already done it with my daughter. He brought her home just last week. His timing is perfect. And I can surrender my timing and my will to Him.
I know Mother’s Day isn’t always easy and I want you all to know I’m praying today for healing over mother-child relationships, praying for comfort for those who’ve lost their mother, for mothers who have lost children, and for those who are struggling to connect in the way they want with their mother or child. I’m praying for those who struggle with infertility. Praying peace over today for all of you wonderful imperfect humans, mothers, and children!!
My mother taught me to hold onto “Hope against Hope.” She taught me what a mother’s love is. When the time is right, when my son is ready, I know he and I will reconcile. God has brought so much healing to my family, and HE IS NOT FINISHED YET!!!
God is my anchor and he gives me the ability to love as he loves, to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. And I’m so thankful for my mother who taught me these truths, passed on the gifts of strength, hope, love.
“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” – 1 Corinthians 13:7
______
Through all of my heartache and struggle, the most important lesson I’ve learned is this….God’s love for us is so much bigger than the love with which we love our own children.
Praying you feel God’s love and healing presence today!!
Much love,
Ruth Renee RN
Student Nurse Wellness Coach
Is there any small space of resentment or pain you can witness and release to clear space for hope, love, gratitude, and truth? ❤️
May God bless you and keep you, and be a refuge for you in times of heartache and trouble.
For it is you who light my lamp; the Lord my God lightens my darkness. For by you I can run against a troop, and by my God I can leap over a wall. This God—his way is perfect; the word of the Lord proves true; he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.” – Psalm 18:28-20 ESV
Just as the seasons change, your past is not your present.
As humans, it seems change doesn’t happen as naturally for us, as it does for the seasons. So what’s the difference?
We humans always have a choice, and often times we choose to live in our past, rather than fully living in the present, in the now ~body, mind, and spirit integrated in the same place at the same time.
Trust me, I know how hard it is to let go of broken dreams. I’ve struggled to surrender many of my heartaches to God.
The sudden tragic loss of my father when I was a teen. My divorce and the loss of my dream in life to grow old with my first love.
I struggled to let go, to move on, to accept that I couldn’t fix this broken dream just like I couldn’t fix the dream of having my father heal and stay alive. I so badly wanted my dad with me to celebrate my graduations, my wedding, the births of my children. It has been so hard to let go, to let myself surrender these broken dreams to God.
I feel deeply and it’s okay to grieve loss for as long as we need, but for me I realized my chronic grief was hurting me more than it was helping me heal. I became stuck. I stopped living. My body was present, but my mind lived in the past trying to analyze, overthink, and find a way to fix unfixable problems.
Two lessons I’ve learned the hard way…
1) Praying someone to stay alive doesn’t always work, no matter how great your faith. Our time is not always God’s time. Our will is not always God’s will.
2) I can’t “do the work” for another to heal their past trauma, as much as I desperately want. I can’t change anyone except myself.
I have tried to do things my own way, to do the work for others, to fix others because I could not fix my dad.
I have lived the past over and over expecting a different solution. And that, my friend, is the very definition of insanity, and why letting go of the past and surrendering our will to God is so important.
Through many years of hard life experiences, trauma counseling, and doing the healing work for myself, I have learned that change requires the same from all who want to step out of brokenness, from all who want to let go of the broken dreams of the past, from all who want to step into being your greatest empowered healthy self, the person you were always called to be.
The good news is that change is always possible. As a good therapist told me over and over, I always have choices and options!
When we find the motivation to change, it begins with a single shift in our mindset, followed by a choice, then lots of small steps, and for sure we need to celebrate all the little victories and even the failures. It is all just feedback and a learning process about ourselves, the goal being to peel the layers until we reach the core of who we truly are at the deepest level.
The most important thing I’ve learned about transformation is that we get there the fastest by slowing down, speaking our truths, and becoming our authentic selves as best we can.
Some words by recovery expert Melody Beattie have been balm to my weary, grieving soul over the last few years.
“Let go of all expectations. Cut the strings of resentment and negativity that connect you to another. Detach from bitterness and forgive. Make room for love and positivity. The universe will do what it will.
Sometimes your dream will come true, sometimes they won’t. Sometimes when you let go of a broken dream, another one gently takes its place“ ~Melody Beattie
It can be hard to let go of broken dreams, to let go of the past and love fully alive in the present moment, but it is possible!!!
With the help of my higher power I am doing so, and I believe you can too.
We decide if we let the past continue to be our present, like the perpetual Groundhog Day movie.
Or, we decide if we choose to allow each new day be a fresh start to do something different, for us to be someone healthier than we were the day before.
Change is always possible!!
And I believe you are worth it!
With hope and confidence,
Ruth Renee, RN
Student Nurse Coach
Are there any broken dreams you are struggling to let go?What have you learned because of the struggle?
If you’d like to connect, please email nursehealingadvocate@gmail.com or comment below.
Telling the story of my past
Overcome with exhaustion
sadness, fear, and hurt
Thoughts haze and fog
Droopy eyelids blink
Head weighs heavy
Memories of trauma
Impossible to carry
Alone
Drive home safe
Collapse into bed
Open the window
Turn on the fan
Weighted blankets
Fetal position
Calves twitch
Intestines flutter
God whispers, “rest”
Weak eyelids closing
I whisper this prayer
God, I’m hurt and scared
This terror from my past
I can’t carry it alone
I need your armor
I need your love
I need you with me
Help me know
it’s safe to rest
Meet me, Jesus
in my worry
hurt and fear
Meet me, Jesus
in my room
on my bed
Make it safe
Make it safe
to sleep
to rest
to be alone
Trapped words set free My time is now To verbalize what happened The story of my life symbolism in everything Understanding God, truth, poetry my gift, my talent, my identity
Seeds not buried under a rock
But planted in good soil
Watered enough to grow
Sprout and blossom
Rise up as a sapling tree
Young, small at first
Growing mature, tall, strong
A mighty live oak
Reaching up to the blue, blue sky
A mighty live oak
Filled with leaves year round
Sometimes needing pruning
Always bearing green, green leaves
Thank you, God For sending me believers Who showed me who You are I learned who I really am I accept the gifts and talents You gave me before I was born I am finding my purpose, my calling My words no longer hidden My talents no longer buried under a rock
I let go of guilt and shame I cast my cares on you Because you care for me More than I will ever know It is time now My time is now Trapped words set free Trapped words set free
______
Ruth Renee 