Dear Friends,
My wife De is a big Brandi Carlile fan. She actually looks much like her, without the guitar. So for her upcoming birthday, I surprised her with tickets to the Brandi Carlile: The Human Tour at the Gorge Amphitheatre in May.
That may have been the unconscious prompt for this newsletter.
What does it actually mean to stay human right now? To be a parent, a partner, a professional, a friend, a spiritual person, just an ordinary being navigating this speedy age of AI, robots, and an endless news cycle of injustice and despair.
Staying human, I’m realizing is a practice.
On the way to my river spot this afternoon, I listened to an interview with Jim Collins about his new book, What to Make of a Life. One of his central ideas is about cliffs; those fractured moments when life as we know it shifts and we’re suddenly jolted to find a new way forward and there is no going back. Being human just got a lot more complicated.
My neck fracture injury last November was a cliff for me. The pandemic was a cliff. The political upheaval of the last several years has been a cliff. And for many of us, this moment is its own kind of cliff.
As therapists, you know this territory. Clients arrive at your door from a cliff: divorce, death, illness, aging, the slow loss of a life they thought they understood.
Collins also writes about fog. That disorienting in-between place where the old certainty is gone and the new path hasn’t revealed itself yet. Fog happens to everyone. The question isn’t how to avoid it, it’s how to stay alive in it without losing yourself in the mist. And this is where your work matters so deeply…
You help people regulate their nervous system when the ground has disappeared. You help them stay present with the unknown until some clarity begins to unfold on its own time.
And then there’s fire; the inner flame that, even in confusion and darkness, still knows something; still cares, and still wants to show up with presence rather than just noise.
There’s something ancient in this. Early humans survived not because any one person figured it all out, but because they shared what they knew. How to make fire, how to hunt, how to find what the earth was offering… Wisdom passed hand to hand, generation to generation. That sharing wasn’t optional. It was how our species evolved.
And this is what brings me to eldership; not as something that arrives later in life, like a reward for time served, but as something being asked of us now, in this particular moment.
To be an elder, to be fully human, isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about tending the fire when the fog is thick, staying grounded enough that others can find some steadiness in your presence, and metabolizing what we feel, rather than unconsciously passing on confusion to everyone around us.
Many of us feel deep down a call to act right now, a deep yearning to own our eldership. To respond to injustice, show up in community, participate in what comes next. And yet, if the action costs us our humanity, if it disconnects us from our bodies, from compassion, from each other, something essential is lost in the doing of it.
Maybe the invitation isn’t to choose between inner work and outer work, but to let them feed each other. To act from presence, to speak from care, to stay engaged without losing our capacity to feel.
That’s not easy. Some days it feels much simpler to shut down, or harden, or settle into the certainty that we are right and others are wrong.
But staying human asks something more of us.
And maybe that’s exactly what Brandi’s The Human Tour is about.
Not just a concert, but a gathering of kindred spirits… A reminder that joy, even now, is not a luxury. It’s part of what keeps the fire burning.
I’d love to hear from you… Where are you finding your footing on the cliff right now? What’s keeping your fire alive?
Come share in the Therapy Wisdom Hub. These are the conversations worth having together. Join the conversation here →
With respect and care,
Brian Spielmann
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.
P.S. Can’t leave you without a link to Brandi Carlile’s video: Human.
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
