I just got a text message from one of my most beautiful sister-friends. “Beautiful” in the superficial sense. She is lovely inside as well, but I should be clear that what I mean here is physically beautiful. The text message was a smoke signal from the fitting room of Bloomingdales. We have all sent them. In this instance, her body does not look how she remembers before her babies were born and breastfed.
We are coming to the age where women seem to start noticing and vocalizing their “demise”. In a culture where we are about to be put out to pasture. I live in the town known for its love of botox and injectables (hint: starts with an “L” ends with an “A”). Where the path to aging is quite actually frozen in time. And while I understand and respect all choices and am a vehement advocate of wellness and beauty in aging (part of my vocation is helping people to look and feel well and beautiful!), I do want to know if there is an another way.
Like how do we un-condition all of this programming that has us believing that these lines that are taking shape on our faces and a bit of sag on the rump are hideous? The closest I hear to this idea as a movement is the idea that these are our “battle scars”. But that languaging falls a bit short for me because inside of it lies a defensiveness. And I don’t want us to have to fight to prove ourselves anymore. Nor do I want us to go to the opposite end to “acceptance”. That word has ring of defeat echoing in my ear “Fuck you, ACCEPTANCE”, I say to drown it out.
I don’t want us to fight OR to lay down and drown in it. I want to walk with my sisters into this next space of our lives as the true next level that it is. We are feeling our internal shifts as we step into the power that comes with aging. I want for us to embrace the external shifts as well. I don’t want to write one of those articles that has some pat “how to” answers at the end of it. I don’t have the answer. I just have this desire. I can commit to asking myself some questions…
Questions like:

• “how can I embrace these external physical changes? “
• “what if I welcomed them?”
• “what if I was excited about them”
• So much we do comes from external programming that is NOT TRUE.
• Why do we continue to shape our lives around this particular lie?
• Who is this lie serving?
• And how can we rise out from underneath it?

Do you remember how excited you were as a child to get measured and find that you had grown an inch? How can we walk into this next space of our lives with that level of excitement?
What if wrinkles were in vogue? You do understand that EVERY fashion and beauty trend is JUST A TREND. These are fabrications. Can we redefine and empower ourselves into embracing a new trend? When Coco Chanel was photographed with a tan in the 1920s, the current trend had been ivory skin. Just like that, new trend. What if we took away all of our ideas about aging that have been given to us by outside, outdated modes of thinking (and advertising) and create a new fashion? What if we approached each new wrinkle with the same excitement we felt about growing another inch? In this time where revolution is so deeply felt throughout our land, let’s turn another oppressive mode of operating on its ass, shall we?
Rachael Smith is a holistic wellness and energy medicine practitioner, intuitive, and educator with clients and students around the globe. 
Photo by Huha Inc. on Unsplash