Welcome to the Mary's Cup of Tea podcast. I'm your host, Mary Jilkovsky. I'm an author,

speaker, and all-around self-love advocate. And this is the podcast that will inspire you to love yourself.

At 17 years old, Ruthie Lindsay was hit by an ambulance outside of a gas station in rural Louisiana.

She broke her neck, punctured her lungs, and ruptured her spleen.

Doctors performed a spinal cord fusion using wire, and miraculously, she walked out of the hospital within a month.

Only, a few years

later, newly married and settling into adulthood, a simple turn of her head left her body riddled

with chronic pain. Her case confounded medical professionals, and in the months that followed,

she became addicted to narcotic painkillers, depressed, and bedridden. After dozens of visits to specialists

and surgeons, a doctor discovered that the wire holding her neck together was piercing in her

brain stem. Without another surgery, she would be paralyzed. As she prepared for the procedure,

her father passed away suddenly, her marriage began to collapse,

and she surrendered her spirit to dependency and suffering. The surgery repaired her spine,

but she still felt broken, inside and out, until she chose to change her narrative. Ruthie went

home to the same town where she almost lost her life. She decided to learn joy again to retrain her spirit

to soothe her physical pain, to salvage strength from her suffering. She traded fentanyl for

sunsets and morphine for picking flowers on the side of the road. Ruthie stopped using her

body as a hiding place and started using it as her bridge to connect with the world. Ruthie Lindsay, our guest

on the podcast today, is the author of the memoir, There I Am, the journey from hopelessness to

healing, speaker and a midwife of souls helping feel endeared to their own life, body, and soul.

Her message, which you will hear from the bottom of her heart in this interview,

is one of strength and resilience, the faith she lost and rebuilt in herself, and the power of

...