Rushed decisions, quick-cooked with fear...

Fast is not better. It’s just fast.

Often that speedy solution rips out the slow roots of wisdom that were breaking new ground in the tender knowing of our own body.

Sometimes the pharma-fix-it prevents the steadying boom-boom…boom-boom…boom-boom emergence of intuition, scrambling your connection to quiet, never-before-touched-inner truth.

Frequently those rushed decisions, quick-cooked with fear, provide a path forward but also scorch land – or lives – along the way.

What are you in such a hurry about anyway?

I used to be in a hurry too.

I hurried to:

• finish school,

• get a job,

• get home from my job,

• buy food - make dinner - clean up dinner - go to bed,

• build a private practice on the side,

• leave the first job that I was in a hurry to secure in the first place,

• get home from my private practice,

• get my kid to soccer-capoeira-piano-lessions,

• get my kid home from soccer-capoeira-piano-lessions,

• get him to bed, get him up, get him to school, get him out of school, get him into another school,

• get back to work,

• figure out the dozens of “problems” in my marriage,

and the list goes on and on.

Oh and the big one, I was in a hurry to have enough money-time-freedom to stop being in a hurry.

Did you know that that hurry is a trauma response to not feeling safe, secure, held, tended, and nourished in one’s body and life?

Did you know that that hurry is the mark of an over-culture that has trained women to not listen for the consent in our own bodies? Sometimes a body’s yes or no blooms over moments (or months) requiring a patient ear.

And how many of us didn’t learn to locate our own NO in our bodies as adolescents or young women stepping into our sexuality? How many of us felt rushed into a string of yeses that we might even still in midlife be healing from? (Thank you to my dear friends C.D.S. and C.K. for the rich conversation about this yesterday. xo)

Most of us hurry because we are trying to acquire a sense of safety so that we might feel secure in our relationships, with our wealth, in our own bodies, or with our place on this Earth.

The cultural myth has been – when you have ENOUGH ______ (pick your longing: time, money, freedom, love, health, etc.) you don’t need to be in such a rush anymore because you can FINALLY catch a breath.

And that unrushed time has been deemed: retirement.

When you FINALLY HAVE ENOUGH of the thing written into your personal narrative you just might experience a signal of enoughness and therefore might be granted permission to slow down, breathe, and feel SATISFIED.

After you toil and labor, strive and hustle, after all of those years of suffering and hurrying, you can now live at your own pace.

Of course, all of us know retired people – or are retired people – who are still scurrying about…OR are kaveching about not having enough to do. 🙃

It’s a perfectly legitimate storyline if you want to live by it – to sprint and whirl your way through life – but it’s not the ONLY storyline.

It’s the storyline that this over-culture has delivered to us and most of us have gobbled it right up and made it our own.

Dutifully measuring ourselves with external yardsticks: our success is measured on spreadsheets and our safety is determined by net worth.

If you’ve been raised up in this consumeristic, capitalistic, patriarchal society you’ve likely sat in rows to learn, received grades that determined your future, and worked hard to get ahead often forgoing your own wants-desires-needs in order to push through for the outcome that will move you forward on the monopoly board of life.

However, since 2020 as many of us watched friends and family members die when the world was flipped on its head, as some of us continue to lose our healthy contemporaries in their 40’s and 50’s to rogue cancers and uncommon illnesses, and as the younger generation has entered the work force eschewing productivity for a more easeful life of ease and freedom…our cultural narrative is cracking.

And as so many independent, resourceful, thoroughly therapized, and well-coached women find themselves in midlife, many of us are questioning…

Why am I spending my life rushing toward an external goal that’s depleting me?

The women I work with are asking:

Why am I tolerating an unfulfilling relationship, running myself into the ground at a job that is misaligned for me, or spending my life toggling between numbing and consuming in order to FEEL SOMETHING?

And…

How can I create the internal conditions of ENOUGHNESS TODAY regardless of what’s on the spreadsheet of my life?

I was recently listening to a lecture by author, storyteller, teacher and ‘student of indigenous eloquence’ Martín Prechtel, who posited this: What if the point of life is not to focus on being a success at all?

It got me thinking (and feeling) about the hurry. The rushed pace of modern life that continues to scrape at the nourishment of families and especially shuck the souls and bodies of women.

This week in a small private group that I facilitate, we explored this question of ‘personal success’ and how each of us define having a successful life in our own terms – rather than by the terms of the over-culture.

Responses varied from having abundant healthy relationships, to simplicity, to prosperity, to safety.

As hundreds of millions of women enter perimenopause and menopause over the next four years, I believe that we are going to have a massive shift in how success is defined in our world. As our estrogen drops along with our tolerance for living lives that over-harvest our energy, a door is opening for a tidal change on this Earth guided by a gaggle of wise women.

We will be the largest collective of women in midlife to have lived on this planet at one time…and some of us just might feel called to take the journey to become REAL ELDERS as we step into the final third of our lives.

Imagine having a world with legit wise women visioning, guiding, and stewarding in a more sensible world for us all?

Eldership is not a stage defined by an age. It’s a distinction for a person who has become wise through committing herself to relating to the natural world, stewarding relationships, and growing self-awareness that she might remember what’s been stripped by modernity.

An elder knows that what she does to others, she does to the whole. As Chief Seattle famously wrote in 1854:

“This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

And if we take to heart Chief Seattle’s words this means that we bring great discernment and consideration to how we show up with a spouse, friends, colleague, clients, neighbor, animals, plants, land…everything! Not because one needs to be perfect but because one needs to be WISE.

We are all connected and scurry-hurry choices that are the most convenient, efficient, or ‘cost-effective’ often malnourish, injury, and cause harm to others and then ultimately ourselves and the world.

If you are a woman in or around midlife, might I invite you to turn toward the parts of your life that you are trying to push through?

What if the revolutionary answer to whatever is ailing you at this moment is to:

• Nourish

• Root in a felt sense of safety

• Listen

If you are a woman who ‘can’t sit down’ or ‘always needs something to do’ this invitation is especially for you because that thrust in you is signalling something. Often, it’s an upregulated system ill-equipped to be in the present, or with uncertainty, or with the slow unfolding of a solution over time.

But isn’t that what a good elder offers?

Uncommon medicine rooted in the present, outside of the rational and predictable world, that bends with the natural curves of life?

How in the world will we, you and me, ever BECOME LEGIT WISE WOMEN if we don’t start that journey and live by those practices starting today?

There’s no pill, hormone, surgery, or even a plant medicine that will deliver you wisdom.

Wisdom is homegrown through the depth oriented, soul work of showing up day after day with the inner-standing that everything you think-feel-believe-do ripples.🌀And what you put out THERE ripples back HERE and OVER THERE and OVER THERE too.

So that fast solution that gives a hit of sacchariny-satisfaction to the ego or fast-inflates the bottom line just might also create a tremor of harm, hurt, or decimation for another.

And I believe that wise womaning begins for every woman by listening first to our own bodies. The very bodies that so many of us have turned away from by trying to control, contort, and constrict in order for them to conform.

What if that clarion call from your body that’s pleading for you to slow down, work less, down-size, create more intimacy in a relationship, open to more pleasure, or finally release that thought-loop that’s kept you in emotional bankruptcy is your invitation to begin your own wise woman journey?

What if your ‘hormonal dysregulation’ is a grand request to remember your SENSES and hop on the path to wise womanhood?

Nourish.

Root.

Listen.

I believe if we REALLY want our future to be a harmonic integration of healthy feminine and healthy masculine energies, we must become the wisdom keepers that we so wish that we had now.

No one is coming to save us. It’s you and me.

I will open the doors to my next group offering for wise women in the making later this summer. Get on the waitlist here.