Ruth is the host at Trealy Farm. She leads courses of her own, as well as holding the space for others to lead workshops and courses.
Ruth is a qualified and experienced psychotherapist and trainer with additional specialisms in body therapy and equine assisted psychotherapy. She is also a writer and a farmer. She loves to dance, eat well, hang out with horses and humans, and go on pilgrimage.
Ruth believes in the importance of re associating – that is – coming out of our individual and collective dissociations to know our natural and sacred belonging – able to better attend to others and things; be intimate and spontaneous; willing to be sincere and genuine rather than ‘perfect’.
She sees mental health as a collective cultural, social and political phenomenon; challenging the ways individuals and their families can carry the suffering within a system, be stigmatised and isolated, as if their distress is independent of the world we live in. Increasingly she’s involved in offering and facilitating groups which are inclusive – where others, including horses, humans, and the landscape, are active participants. While some mainstream therapy tends to focus on dissociation alone, Ruth is interested in what happens next. In other words, how we then better connect to others and relate within an animate world.
Ruth’s life experiences are at the core of her work. An adoptee, she had a rural upbringing on a farm on the lower slopes of Cader Idris in Eryri within a small Welsh speaking community, speaking Welsh, hanging out with animals, conversing with landscapes and things, going to chapel. It had a repetition in its rhythms and rituals which supported wellbeing and good relations.
At eleven she was sent to boarding school where, in order to survive, she learnt to value mainstream culture over her own experience; in part replacing family connection and emotional bonds with achievement. To this day she experiences ‘homesickness’ and understands this as a longing to recover her sense of self as sacred, sensual and intuitive, and her birth right to belong to and participate within a vibrant living world.
She studied at Cambridge University, taught in various comprehensive schools in inner cities, and had careers in education and policy-making at a national and international level. She also wrote and co wrote a number of history books for children, adults and teachers. In her thirties, although outwardly successful, she realized she was troubled by a sense of longing for something lost. She moved back to Wales, trained as a psychotherapist and became the farmer at Trealy Farm. In 2018 Ruth started writing again and has had several short stories published (including in Harpers Bazaar, Spread the Word and Mslexia) as well as some non fiction (Dark Mountain; Routledge). She’s currently working on creative non fiction accounts of her experience as an adoptee, her relationship with horses and her sense of the world as a living presence.
Ruth spends much of her daily life ‘practising’ the recovery of a sacred and ecological sense of her self and her relationship with the world.
This has taken her to many places, including to live in a community of leprosy sufferers and their families in Bihar, India (where, by the way, she was greatly helped by them at a time of crisis in her life – not the other way round); to Arizona for horse work; and to the Dutch psychologist Poppeliers to experience a sexually grounded therapy which has relationship and earth connection at its core. But mostly it has kept her at home, learning from everyone and everything that shares the space – the land, things, the horses and other living beings. From this place she offers workshops, retreats and one to one experiences.
