Ok, I claim being a Wise Elder!

“Why do you treat yourself like sh#t?”

What I actually said to my client, Dan, that day was a little more tender: “You’re kind… but not to yourself?”

He thoughtfully received it as we left our call, and I didn’t know what he did with it until his Substack post showed up a day or two later, entitled: “What the Wise Elder Once Asked.”

That’s when I found out he’d crowned me a “wise elder.”

I want to tell you what he took from our time together and why he offered me that title. And what that title cost me to earn.

But before any of that, I have an invitation for you:

Come join us this Sunday for my monthly Elevation Ceremony.

If you carry the same kindness for everyone except yourself, this is also built for you:

It’s live, it’s free. And it’s online, so you can join from wherever you are. And if you can’t make it live, the recording is yours to experience for seven days.

[REGISTER HERE]

Dan didn’t write about that call to flatter me. He wrote it because six words rearranged something in him, and he needed to understand why: “You’re kind… but not to yourself?”

In his post, he wrote, reflecting on his own life, about the Helper archetype, the way caregivers and fixers learn early to earn love by being useful. And how that pattern hardens into offering grace to everyone except themselves.

He named his own habit of intellectualizing his pain instead of feeling it, staying safe in his head while his body carried the trauma burden.

He wrote about a hidden vault of pre-verbal feeling, the stuff too old for language, and about the difference between analyzing a wound as opposed to processing and releasing it.

He wrote about the terror of dropping his Helper role and finding out who he is when he isn’t fixing anyone.

By the end, he was asking himself why he’d spent so long treating himself like the exception to his own compassion. A key question that may be his next assignment to answer!

Wise wasn’t handed to me. I earned it by walking through fire, by releasing and processing anxiety, depression, a sense of unworthiness, anger, over and over. And burning through my own trauma instead of letting it continue to churn. Moving through that painful crucible required a strength I didn’t know I had until I needed it.

Wise elder isn’t about age either. Plenty of people get older without getting wiser. But if you walk through the fire, it matures you. Once you arrive at a place of deep self-reflection, that maturity builds on itself, year in and year out; it compounds.

That’s the elder that Dan met. Not someone who has it figured out, but someone who has walked through the psycho-spiritual fire enough times to offer the map to someone else who’s ready.

If you’re ready to hear what your own life has been trying to tell you, I’ll see you Sunday.[REGISTER HERE]