Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Age: In Living Life Intentionally, Your Life Improves With Age

We’re culturally conditioned to put youth and beauty on a pedestal, but I’ve come to relish the wisdom and embodied connection to myself I’ve developed with aging.

Maybe you were not an awkward kid. Maybe you loved childhood and fondly look back on your childhood days as idyllic, full of love, health, and vitality. Yet likely your childhood and your journey through adulthood has not been without its traumas.

As I’ve been learning in my healing journey, experiencing traumas and hardships is part of the human condition. In our out-of-sync, individualist, disconnected and fast-paced culture, humans have been experiencing traumas in new ways, with alienation and a crisis of meaning happening on a large scale. Our global mental health and substance abuse crises have only escalated during the pandemic.

So why am I arguing that life improves with age? I believe that when you lead a heart-centered path, when you are aligned with your purpose and when you begin to heal from your traumas, you begin to step more into your power.

When you begin to take ownership of your life, have a positive mindset, practice gratitude, and continue to pursue a meaningful path, you begin to unlock a new level of maturity, of growth, and of wisdom.

I argue this as someone who long had destructive coping mechanisms from long-standing traumas, as someone who always profoundly battled with self-consciousness, who struggled to find meaning, and who struggled to find self-worth or a career path that I was truly driven to pursue. As someone who has long felt intrinsically inferior in many capacities, as I’ve begun my healing journey, I’ve learned how to take accountability and ownership over my past destructive habits, and to find self-compassion, self-understanding, and self-love beyond what I had ever previously imagined.

As someone who’s now become devoted to uncovering the reasons I’ve always been physically, emotionally, and spiritually sensitive, I’ve learned to find my sensitivities to be my strengths. I’ve learned to find my strength from what I’ve endured; I’ve learned that I must continue to be strong beyond what I had ever imagined myself capable to be, because I must rise to the levels of my responsibilities and challenges.

Becoming older, surviving my 20’s and then my 30’s, and finding motherhood during this time, were instrumental to my personal growth. Motherhood became a portal through which I re-birthed myself and became the responsible mother I needed to be. Motherhood has brought a magnifying glass to my life, in all of its stages, from my childhood to my early adulthood to now, while also providing a mirror for me to see myself through a new lens.

With the arrival of my thirties and motherhood, I felt compelled to change my life, to level up, to show up for myself and my daughter the way I had wished my mother had shown up for me. With this spiritual awakening, I’ve begun the path of healing and transformation.

Living a conscious life means owning up to your shadows, your past, the ugly parts, but it also allows you to walk into the light, to live life urgently in a way true to yourself, to be in service to people as best you know how.

My 20’s gave me freedom, but brought me much chaos, self-destruction, new traumas, and a lack of direction that I compensated for with my entrepreneurial streak, but which left my life splintered and largely aimless. As I’ve written before, the true “adulting” entails not just doing any old activity as an adult but rather taking ownership of your behaviors, your mindset, your lifestyle, and your life path.

When you live with intention, you become more mindful of what you consume: the foods you consume, but also the information and energy you consume, the people you engage with, what kind of relationships you allow into your life. You become mindful about self-care, spiritually, physically, emotionally, romantically, and professionally.

We are all aging; it is our responsibility to age gracefully; and by that, I don’t mean surgeries and cosmetic procedures, but to truly age gracefully from within. It is our responsibility to love and show up for ourselves; because only then can we truly show up for other people. As I’ve finally begun to show up for myself, I’ve become awakened to the beauty of my sensitivities. The wisdom I’ve gained from my traumas and my self-destructive path I’ve learned to recognize as a blessing. I am now on the earth medicine path, and walking this path has been integral for my spiritual growth, for me to live an embodied, healthy, purposeful life.

My journey is a testament to the ability of nature and community to help one find healing and transformation. You must have the desire to work toward improving your life in the areas you are unhappy; you must actively work toward making the changes you wish to see while also practicing gratitude for where you are at in your life now. Wisdom comes when you learn to surrender your ego, to realize your interconnectedness with others, when you accept with humility your role and strive to serve people in the way most authentic to you.

Rediger, Jeffrey. (2020). Cured: Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life. Flatiron Books.

Jain, Shamini, PhD. (2021). Healing Ourselves: Biofield Science and the Future of Health. Sounds True, Boulder, Colorado.

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