Looking into how eldership is when we have the opportunity to shine most brightly as our essential selves.
Looking into how eldership is when we have the opportunity to shine most brightly as our essential selves.
Eldership is Leveling Up
Life has a rhythm. Many in fact. There's the daily beats of waking and meals, preparing to go – doing - returning, work and not work, day and night. Then there are the weekly rhythms of workdays and weekends, work and play, social and personal. There is also the well noticed monthly rhythm of money in/money as well as the seasonal rhythm of wet/dry, cold/warm, green/grey. When we get to the annual rhythm, we feel it less than note it in passing by the holidays: birthday, Christmas, New Year, Passover, Ramadan...
Things get fairly vague when we expand much further than that. Once past our childhood we don't really experience a rhythm to our lives. In the beginning school and rapid growth, plus puberty make a short if irregular, even syncopated rhythm we can follow, or which feels forced upon us. But beyond this the rhythm seems fairly arbitrary until we get to something like a midlife crisis or menopause. In fact, if asked to put the major milestones of life in general on a number line, most would be in the few childhood years, then there would be a couple of markers in the adult years and then a brief blip labeled "old age". It would look somewhat like a belt with fancy decorations at one end and a utilitarian buckle at the other.
This type of timeline reflects both the focus of western culture where the most important thing is to be productive and to fear infirmity or disability, losing the quality of life, as well as the inevitability of death. It also reflects how we have been taught to over value and even fetishize youth. If the rhythm of our life is fast paced and exciting at the beginning, then becomes monotonous like a metronome so it fades into the background as white noise, coming to an inevitable whimper at the end, why do anything other than fight for a youth which extends as long as possible and carries it's benefits over into the mediocrity of the middle?
This perceived life rhythm effects our ability to manifest in a variety of ways. It can keep us focused on manifesting youth and youthful pursuits when they aren't in our best interest or even enjoyable. It can keep us manifesting work product like a well-oiled machine long past the stage when we're meant to enjoy the wisdom of our experiences. And it can keep us from allowing our wisdom to radiate out from us into the world. So, we work ourselves until the very end with increasingly diminishing returns waiting for the day we feel old enough we can safely lay down our burden, only to find the day never comes or comes way too soon.
As a side note, because we are taught to perceive ourselves and life through the lens of this timeline, our fears and focus aren't unfounded. This timeline is easily derailed by injury, illness, or accident forcing an unexpected new rhythm on us. We are then stuck making choices around going with or against the rhythm, letting the fight become our identity or declaring "Plot Twist" and adventuring into the unknown.
Underneath this fairly recent modern invention of the metronome life remains the natural life rhythm which consists of three phases (with multiple transformations throughout): Childhood, Adulthood, and Eldership. While manifesting happens in all of them, each has a means of manifesting which honors who and what we are in the moment and works best for and with us to create the life we deserve.
As we are both manifested and manifestor in any given moment, creating and working within creation, we can enhance our manifesting results by working with instead of against the rhythm of our phase of life.
Childhood
In the beginning we are manifesting both ourselves and the foundation for all the lessons we will attempt to work through in this embodied life. Like ice, we are poured into a mold created by our parents, family, socio-economic circumstances, country and so on. This mold is put into an environment which works upon us to produce a specific form, shape, and consistency. How we experience others and the world around us creates our perception of ourselves and the world providing a framework for our navigating the life ahead of us, for good or ill. Within this framework we solidify ourselves, developing the matrix of who we are and who we want to become. The manifestation process in this phase of life is therefore a bit like an infinity symbol made of our internal life and the external world. Each lobe works to transform us and informs the other as we move back and forth between our internal process and external integration.
From ages 0 – 3 a large portion of our identity for this lifetime is formed. While most of us retain very few memories from the time, memory being a function of linear time which we do not yet have the mental skills to process, this is where all the "that's just the way I am" and the "I've always been like this" stem from. More than we realize, this perception comes from external interactions rather than internal experience. What our parents say about us to others or tell us about ourselves quickly becomes our reality. How those around us respond to our needs, wants, and attempts at connection and interaction imprints on our nervous system and settles into our brain stem. This is where we learn to cope, survive, or thrive and where triggers, habits, and knee jerk reactions form.
Simultaneously and up until age 7 our soul is incorporating with our body in order to focus on being here and achieving our goals. This is why children often have what seem like amazing psychic gifts and insights at a young age which subsequently disappear as they mature and why past life memories are most often reported by young children. They haven't yet forgotten who they have been or who they truly are as a soul and do not yet have enough of themselves here to keep a separation between it all.
Around ages 7-11(ish) – your mileage may vary - the tide turns, and we are able to focus our manifesting efforts on ourselves, growing our body, exercising our will in a limited fashion, learning the boundaries of our circumstances and what possibilities there are, or aren't for self-actualization. Growth spurts often happen during this phase which catapult us from small child to preteen and our emotional maturity can struggle to keep pace.
Around ages 11(ish) to 21 are when our bodies mature sexually, we individuate from our family, and we begin learning the ways in which to navigate social structures (relationships, work, politics, housing) as an individual. This is often thought of as the time when our karma activates as it's when we have achieved enough empowerment and agency over our lives to start working on the lessons we came here to undertake and manifesting our soul purpose.
Of course, each of us will have unique experiences of all of this and one size most definitely does not fit all, but any of us can feel the rhythm of this within our lives and feel the back and forth in the manifesting which was achieved.
Adulthood
As an adult the flow of manifesting turns outward. While all life is experiential and so we will be changed and transformed all along the way by the life we are living, this is not usually the primary goal. In this phase manifesting is about producing things whether it be a career, relationship, children, lifestyle, freedom, or even just survival. Hence, we think of self-care not as a given, but as an adjunct to life and we have "lifestyle" brands, activities, and even companies which market various means by which we can turn our attention on ourselves. We label self-focus as selfish and yet see it as a goal to be achieved which is what we envision when we dream of winning the lottery.
From age 21-28 we generally work through the "what if's" of the various roles, lifestyles, and directions available to us. These might be incredibly narrow because the focus is on survival. They might be about following through on expectations of our family, our culture, or the social group we are in. We might have a calling at this early stage or feel compelled to follow a passion where it leads and so on. We often try on all manner of different hats in order to figure out who we are as an adult, what we should do, and where we go next.
Age 28-29 is a well-known common turning point in our lives most commonly called Saturn Return in spiritual circles, but it is well known in therapeutic circles. It is the moment when either external circumstances or something bubbling up inside us brings us to a crossroads or forces us to see we are already at one. While some people continue to go straight ahead, it's fairly common for these liminal years to be about 90 degree turns. We may change our career, get married, have our 3rd child, get up and move to another country, get a divorce or make some other life change which redirects our course and sets us on a new road. This can be surprising or validating, excruciating or a breeze depending on where we are on our path.
From then until the mid 30's our rhythm is to manifest as best we can each step forward, each means to get from here to there in the moment. This is when we find ourselves fully engaged in being a "doing" and when this becomes a habit so ingrained, we no longer can physically stop.
The less conscious we are of this, the more we are full speed ahead in producing, existing, and moving through one problem to the next, the more dramatic is the next transition, midlife crisis. This is when you are asked to tune in and turn on to who you are, what you're doing and why, or the world turns on you.
Throughout our adult lives we are meant to be manifesting our path, creating things which flow out of us into the world, and doing what we came here to do. What we are not meant to lose sight of is ourselves. We are not meant to submerge until there is nothing of us other than the unceasing daily/weekly/monthly rhythms which take from us and give nothing in return. Instead, if we can maintain a conscious sense of self, advocate for our own needs in the face of life's demands, we can work through lessons once and quickly rather than repeatedly and over decades. We can manifest life rather than survive it and find ourselves supported by our embodiment rather than consumed by it.
Eldership
From age 56 to 65, although there are those who start at 45 and others who don't begin until 70, we move or are moved into the Eldership phase of our lives. Here the rhythm of things shifts like the changing of the tides. Instead of things going out from us into the world, the world is attracted to and called towards us. Put another way, instead of working to reach a goal as we did throughout our adult lives, we become the goal others work to reach.
All we have learned, achieved and become now converts into a radiant energy which, if allowed, pulses out from us. How we live, rather than what we can do or offer, is the point and most valued to the world around us. This doesn't mean crumbling into obscurity, surviving on limited means, or giving up on our dreams. Quite the contrary. It's about returning to life as a being rather than a doing. It's about manifesting just as richly as ever, but pulling the results to us rather than using ourselves up in order to push them out.
The transition to eldership can be rather difficult as it asks us to wrap up loose ends, come to terms with all we've done and all we haven't, and most painfully, give up our identity as a "doing". We are challenged with focusing back on ourselves, our dreams, our personal needs and our desires, reawakening our childhood sense of ourselves and our potential, but through the lens of all the wisdom and experience we've accreted.
This can be a time when we are energized to take on a career or skill we've been called to for decades, when we give ourselves permission to let go of other's expectations and start living in a way which gives us joy, or when we allow ourselves the freedom to indulge in any damn thing we want to learn about, do, or just sit with.
It can also be a time of reckoning with those things we'll "get to once I have time". The things too frightening, difficult or painful to deal with during our adult phase because the energy and attention necessary would derail everything we're busy doing. This is the phase when we are able to manifest deep healing and expanded awareness, unfold to our psychic gifts, and finally manifest the relationship we have always wanted, even if that is with ourselves.
It is not uncommon for people to get stuck in their manifesting at this point, feeling like they are beating their head against a brick wall because how they have always done it either doesn't work any longer or is so painful they aren't sure they can keep going. Often people who force this adult style manifestation through see decreasing results which no amount of extra effort remedies.
This is because manifesting in eldership isn't about doing more faster, but being more. It's literally about chucking out all the old made up rules we've created for how the world works and how we work in it. It's about converting our experience into wisdom and literally starting to work smarter, not harder. Setting ourselves the problem of: If I literally cannot do it the way I did it before and if the old way is only one way among a variety of ways to manifest the goal, then what new way am I best suited to use and is best suited to support me now?
The most difficult part of eldership is letting go of how we have been for so many years in order to be something we are not yet. While this is something we crave as a child when we have our entire lives ahead of us and only lack the freedom and maturity to achieve it, in eldership we can experience it as a loss. It is the difference between becoming a star which glows brightly in the darkness providing light for yourself and others or collapsing slowly into darkness.
While it is a fact our embodiment will eventually fail us and death is the inevitable consequence of birth, eldership is when we have the opportunity to shine most brightly as our essential selves. It is when we have the potential to be the most healed, healthy, and beautiful version of ourselves and a means to show to the universe our crowning achievements of this life. It is when we can share ourselves with the world, not through making one more product or providing one more service, but being who we truly are and allowing others to experience us. Think of it as a twofer. We get to live our best life and others get to experience us doing so, which gives them permission to do so as well and transforms us into an arrow pointing the way.