Your Wild Knowing Is Waking

It rarely arrives the way you expect. Not with a thunderclap, but with something small.

I was standing in the kitchen, feeding the dogs, when my phone pinged. A client, asking to move her session to another time. An ordinary request. And my default, thirty years deep, was already forming the word before I had even finished reading. Yes. Of course. Yes.

Except the time she wanted would tip an already full day into an overfull one. One more thing squeezed into a diary with no room left in it. And still, some old and faithful part of me was reaching for the yes, because saying yes is simply what I do, and because somewhere long ago I had decided that my whole livelihood depended on my always being available. On my never being the one to say no.

And then I felt it. A clench, low and hot, somewhere deep down inside, that after all these years of this work I can name in a heartbeat. Stress. The body speaking before the mind has caught up. And then, underneath the clench, lower still, down in the deep animal dark of the womb, something else stirred. Older than the stress and potent and utterly without doubt. It did not plead. It did not explain itself. It rose up through me like heat coming off a road and it said, no. I cannot do this. However much I once wanted to. This does not feed me any more. Remember.

I looked at the phone. I typed, sorry, no can do. And I put it down.

That was all. Four words. And yet what had just moved through me overrode decades of conditioning. Decades of yes. The yes I genuinely believed my living depended on. Or so I had always thought.

I have spent fifteen years as a psychotherapist, and fifteen more as a spiritual mentor, and in both I have sat with women in this exact passage. I have watched that small, startling no arrive a thousand times, in them, and that afternoon by the dog bowls, in myself. It is not a symptom. It is not you turning difficult, though you will almost certainly be told that it is. It is the first word spoken aloud by a part of you that has been silent for a very long time.

Something is waking. And I suspect you already know it, my loves.

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Here is what I have come to understand, in the consulting room and in my own body both.

Underneath everything you were ever trained to be, there is a wisdom in you that was never lost. Only buried, and buried alive. A wild, instinctual, blood-and-marrow knowing, older than your manners, older than your conditioning, older than the good girl they built on top of her. She has a body, this knowing. She lives in the womb, and the hips, and the low animal belly, in all the parts of you that were never once fooled. And this peri/menopausal passage, the one your body is in right now, is when she claws her way back up to the surface and opens her eyes.

There is a reason it happens now, in the body, and not only in the soul. For most of our adult lives, the hormonal weather tuned us toward tending. Toward soothing, keeping the peace, reading the room for everyone else’s comfort long before our own. As that weather changes, the tuning changes with it, and the old accommodation grows harder and harder to sustain.

Most of the women I sit with experience this as something going badly wrong with them. It is the opposite. It is a nervous system that is finally, after decades of vigilance, allowed to stop performing everyone else’s safety and start telling the truth.

And the truth, it turns out, has been waiting. Because this peri/menopausal passage carries a second gift, wilder and fiercer than the first. For the first time, you feel the edge of your own life. Your finitude. Your mortality, plain as a hand laid on your shoulder. And it burns the nonsense clean off you, the way heat renders fat off a flame.

What is left, when it has finished, is appetite. Real, unhidden, no-longer-apologising appetite. You stop pouring yourself out for everyone else, and you begin, at last, to want, out loud. You start asking the questions you were always far too busy and far too well-behaved for. What makes me feel alive in my own skin. What do I actually hunger for. Where has my pleasure been all these years, and who on earth taught me to ration it. What do I want, now that I can feel the whole sweet finite shape of my one and only life.

That is the wild knowing. The primal wisdom, catching light again in the body like a banked fire that has finally found air, and at long last making itself known. The woman it makes is not some diminished, faded thing. She is riper than she has ever been. Fuller. Warmer. Bloodier and braver and more herself than the world ever once gave her permission to be.

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Here is the part that makes me still feel the heat of my own anger my loves, and I think you may feel it with me…

Nobody told you any of this. No one sat you down at forty-five and said, a great initiation is coming, and here is the map. Every culture that ever knew how to love its women marked this threshold. Ours took it, scraped the meaning out of it, and handed it back as a list of symptoms and a gentle nudge toward the exit.

And we did not only lose a ritual. We lost the elders. Because the entire point of a maven is that she has walked through the fire and then turns around to light the path for the women coming up behind her, and a culture that spends decades convincing its midlife women that they are declining, fading, and past it has quietly switched off its own wisest generation at the precise moment it needs them most.

That is not a rite of passage. That is an abandonment. And we have been calling it normal.

There is a shape to this peri/menopausal crossing, and it is worth knowing.

The whole of our mothering years is one long act of tending. Giving, holding, nesting, pouring our light into everyone but ourselves. This threshold is the turn. The moment a woman stops handing her life force away and gathers it, at last, back toward herself. It can feel like selfishness, if you were raised the way most of us were. It is not. It is the most natural correction of a whole life.

And it asks of you the one thing you were trained, somewhere back around thirteen, never to do. To take up room. To stop dimming. To be seen, exactly as you are.

Now let me be clear about what I mean by being seen, because the culture has already sold us the cheap version.

The cheap version is vanity. Performance. Being seen for a curated, filtered, surgically smoothed edition of yourself, and calling it confidence. The culture would love for you to hear “step into your radiance” and reach for the syringe. That is not radiance. That is the old dimming in a brighter dress.

The radiance I mean is the exact opposite. It is the light of a woman who has stopped performing entirely. Whose face has lines in it, and lets them show, because every one of them is hers. It is not a surface, and it is not for sale, and it is certainly not on offer to the twenty-year-old, whatever the adverts insist. You have to have earned it, down in the dark, over years.

Because the radiance I mean is simply this. It is your wild knowing, with the lights finally switched on.

I hold astrology the way I hold all the deep old maps. Not as fate. Not as fortune-telling. As an archetypal mirror, as above, so below. The great players moving across the sky are the same players moving through us, only writ enormous, and when I read the heavens I am reading the pattern of the very moment we are all standing inside.

And the pattern this week is almost too on the nose to bear.

On the 30th of June, Jupiter, the vast archetype of expansion and blessing, moved into Leo, for the first time in twelve years, and there it stays for thirteen months. For the last year it sat in Cancer. The nest. The mother. The tending of everyone else. This week it crossed up out of the nest and into Leo, the sign of the Sun. Radiance. The heart. The courage to be seen.

Which is the maven’s exact passage, written vast across the stars. The same archetypal turn your body is making right now, up out of the tending and into the radiance, is being made overhead by the largest and most generous force in the sky. What is stirring in you is stirring in the heavens. As above, so below. And the heavens have gone and parked the planet of expansion in the house of the heart, and left the lights blazing for a whole year.

You do not have to read the sky the way I do to feel it. But I read it this way, and it is telling me precisely what my body already knew. These are the archetypal forces most alive in us now. Expansion. Radiance. The heart, thrown wide open. This is the season to come up out of hiding.

On Wednesday July 8th, I am opening the door to a free live gathering called Wild Knowing, where I lay out the whole map of this passage, its seven gateways, and help you find exactly where you are standing on it right now. It is the thing I wish to God someone had handed me, years ago, when I was down on my own floor with no idea what had hold of me.

Wild Knowing: The Hidden Initiation of Midlife

🌑 Wednesday, 8 July · on Zoom · [12noon PT] · replay available

→ Reserve your place: https://discover.priestesspresence.com/wild-knowing/

And if this is not your passage, if you are a man, or simply not standing at this threshold, send it to a woman you love. She may be somewhere in her own ordinary afternoon right now, phone in hand, frightened of her own no.

You were never too much. You were told to be less, by people who could not hold your light.

That is over now.

Your radiance was never vanity, and it was never a decline. It is your wild knowing, awake at last, blood-warm and unafraid, and no longer willing to hide.

Step out of the wings. Let them look.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

P.S. For the women who want to walk the whole passage, and not only glimpse the map, I open my nine-month journey, Metamorphosis, in August. But that is for another day. Come to Tuesday first.

A gentle note. This passage can stir up deep and difficult things, and there is no courage lost in reaching for real support. A good doctor, a trained therapist, or a circle of women who are going through what you are is priceless.