This month, September is the month in my programs when we celebrate the wisdom initiation. This is the month of the sage, and so it’s the perfect time to address this concept of aging, which I like to think of as sage aging. I know I’m not alone in enjoying this particular wordplay. Staging points to the fact that as we grow older, we also grow wiser.

But where does this wisdom come from? Well, I know in working with women who are moving into and through menopause and beyond. And as such, a woman myself, I can tell you that our hormones are very chemistry trigger this initiation. There’s a lot of things about the loss of estrogen that are not so comfortable. For many of us, the hot flashes and the sleep disturbances and the changes in our body composition are just a few things that are not our favorite parts of this sacred passage.

However. The loss of estrogen and the reorientation of our hormonal systems there, it gives us an upside.

Estrogen is one of the main drivers for us to mother, to care, take, to orient our attention and our efforts outward to other people taking care of others, often to the detriment of ourselves. And there’s a benefit to staging as a wise woman, which is as the estrogen drops away, we stop taking care of everyone before ourselves. And as we begin to take care of ourselves first and to stop listening to others truths over our own, or tending other people’s desperate needs over our own needs and desires, we become rather unforgivable.

We become rather unapologetic. We suddenly have our full faculties available to sit in our own experience. I talk about earned wisdom in a few of my classes programs, and also in my Wise Woman Pathfinder experience. Or there’s actually an assessment where you count the points that you’ve earned over a lifetime of living through experiences that left you wiser.

And when people take the Earned Wisdom assessment, they’re basically asked a series of questions about what they’ve lived through. Of course, I would love for you to come take the Wise Woman Pathfinder experience, because there’s more than just the Earned Wisdom assessment in there. There’s a whole sequence of surveys that point you to your life’s purpose and your next best path in your wisdom.

Years. But let’s stick right now with this concept that every single one of your experiences, be they joyful and easy or more often, the tough ones, the challenging instances in your life, they have built wisdom. You have earned wisdom by living through what you’ve lived through.

In a culture where we’ll give you a diploma for studying in a university. And a whole lot of debt. We will give you a prize for winning a competition. In a culture where points are accrued for all sorts of victories and accolades and competitive wins.

The biggest accomplishments of all are ignored. Worse. Many of us regret that which built our deepest wisdom. Think about the things you’ve lived through, the tough times you weren’t sure you’d even make it through. Think about the losses you’ve experienced. Think about the mistakes you’ve made, the painfully embarrassing, dreadful, flinty cringe mistakes you’ve made. Every single one of things that you might regret or be tempted to regret earned you wisdom that could not have been earned any other way.

So let’s give yourself some points for earning this wisdom by surviving what you’ve survived. Let’s give you the encouragement and opportunity to pat yourself on the back for learning the lessons, even the hard way. As you do this, you are acknowledging that you are sage and that all this time, even through your failures, you have sage yourself. Well.

You have become wiser for it. It’s true that some less conscious folk make mistakes and just keep on making mistakes, and they don’t care. I suppose there’s some subset that’s even a sociopathic subset that really isn’t influenced by anything in the past, and certainly isn’t growing wiser in any compassionate sense of the word. But I’m not talking about that tiny percentage of jerks.

I’m talking about you. So this month, the month of the archetype of the sage in you give yourself some credit. You’ve lived through a lot, and you have a lot of wisdom to share. You know, I love helping wise ones like you share your wisdom in the world. Develop your intuitive genius abilities, and even bring your skills and your wisdom into this world as a lucrative business.

Whatever your path is moving into the wisdom years, moving into your own version of this sage, please know that I see you and I am celebrating your earned wisdom. I celebrate and I’m grateful for everything it’s brought you here. Wise one. Every one. Everything. Every bit of the journey that has made you wise.