Dear Friends,
This weekend I had the good fortune to spend a few private evenings with Grandmother Flordemayo, a renowned Mayan healer and curandera. As one of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, she carries a lineage of wisdom that reaches far beyond any single community.
What struck me, hearing her wild stories and simply sharing a meal, was that her eldership did not begin at some arbitrary age or when she was officially initiated. It has been the arc of her entire life, shaped by her mother, her grandmother, her teachers and the culture and land she was born.
I was sitting with her through the lens of a course we are about to film with Hedy Schleifer and Paul Browde on The Journey Into Elderhood. We’ll be exploring questions of aging: a changing body, accumulated grief losing friends and family, shifts in energy and role.
But eldership is more than hair turning gray. It isn’t a stage we suddenly arrive at like a birthday milestone. We all know a few seventy-year-olds who still act more like toddlers.
It’s a crossing. A recognition of our mortality and fragility, and a deepening appreciation for the world and community around us. And it looks different at fifty than it does at seventy.
Which raises a question who is guiding people through this crossing?
As a therapist, you’re already gifted a platform for sharing your presence and wisdom. Most people today don’t have a church, synagogue, mosque, or spiritual community they turn to regularly. In many cases, you may be the closest access they have to genuine eldership or spiritual direction.
Which is why I’ll make a bold proposition: eldership is underneath the job description for therapists.
Clients are watching how we move and breathe. Whether we embody equanimity in uncertainty, the capacity to hold our own loss and theirs without collapsing, the willingness to stay present when life gets hard. How we grow into elderhood is itself a clinical act.
The therapist who has made peace with their own mortality sits differently with a dying client, or one whose parents are in hospice.
The clinician who has grieved their own losses can hold a client’s grief without rushing toward resolution.
The therapist who has found a measure of contentment with their own life can models what adulthood can actually look like.
You’re not just a practitioner, you are, whether you claim the role or not, an elder in formation.
We are living in a time of profound uncertainty. We have major conflicts unfolding in the Middle East with no end game and many innocent people dying. Young people wonder if they will ever afford homes or gas in their car. Health care costs are escalating…
Entire professions are being reshaped by AI.
Communities are strained by polarization and the sense that the ground beneath us is shifting.
You know all of this.
In moments like these, society is looking for something that’s missing.
Elders.
Not simply older people. But those willing to step forward with steadiness, perspective, and genuine care and love for the generations around them.
For many of us, elderhood also means standing between generations; caring for aging parents while supporting children finding their footing in an uncertain world. It can feel like holding both ends of a bridge at once.
Yet perhaps that’s the sacred work: to become the bridge itself.
What that bridge is made of, I think, is seeing clearly and listening with open ears and an open mind. The willingness to be with suffering without turning away.
As we prepare this course with Hedy and Paul, I find myself wondering what elements of my younger parts still need eldering to help them along. And what elder wisdom I might actually have to offer my younger parts. Not wisdom offered as authority, but something shared with humility, warmth, and genuine care for the world that is coming.
I’d love to hear your reflections. Where in your own life are you crossing into elderhood, and what are you discovering there? Share your thoughts with our community in the Therapy Wisdom Hub. [link]
Because perhaps becoming an elder is not something that simply happens to us.
Perhaps it is something we slowly, courageously, grow into.
With warmth,
Brian Spielmann
Founder of Academy of Therapy Wisdom
P.S. As mentioned, we will be filming The Journey Into Elderhood with Hedy Schleifer and Paul Browde for Academy of Therapy Wisdom. If this theme is alive in you, I’d love your thoughts that I can share with them before filming. I read all the messages sent.
What you´ll learn:
- Vestibular Engagement for Emotional Regulation
- Using the Eyes to Hack the Stress Response System
- Subtle Sounds to Release the Peri-Trauma Response
- Effective Self-Holding and Self-Swaddling Techniques
- How and When to Apply Bilateral Stimulation
- Integration and Completing the Stress Response Cycle
