How To Love Our Aging Bodies: Unleash the Crone Within

I turned 30 this year. It’s not an age that anyone really considers to be old any more, but it is the age that the dread is expected to set in. The dread of more birthdays, the dread of wrinkles and grey hairs, the dread of looking old, of getting old.

It’s the time when our aging begins to show. Already the lines have started to deepen on my forehead when I raise my eyebrows in surprise or tighten them in concentration. There are ever present creases around my mouth and its many expressions. And the hard (but worth it) work of full time motherhood has created pretty much constant bags under my eyes.

The Voice In Our Heads

Even as a staunch feminist who has practiced radical body acceptance for years, sometimes there is still that little voice in my head that has never completely gone away. It was planted in my brain from this youth obsessed, consumer culture we live in. This voice repeats what it’s heard in thousands of beauty ads. And it’s in your head too. It gets in there so deep, we mistake it for our own voice. It tells us “as my body ages, my value as a person also dimishes.”

Our wrinkles are the wisdom and emotions of our years slowly etched onto our faces. But we have been taught to despise them.

Our culture worships the glamour of youth and devalues the elders. We treat older generations of people like outdated smart phones.

Women dying their hair, buying lots of products, and undergoing medical treatments to keep from “looking old” makes me sad. This is not a judgement of women who to do these things. I completely and compassionately understand why we feel like we need to do these things. I feel sad because older women are not properly revered as they should be, as they once were.

Remembering the Crones

In Ancient Neolithic cultures women were the leaders of their communities. According to Barbara G. Walker,

Villages tended to describe themselves as ‘motherhoods’, to be organized primarily around the needs and activities of women and their offspring… Women’s power to create life, apparently out of their own substance, and to respond with their mystical blood cycles to the phases of the moon, made them creatures of magic in the eyes of primitive men, who knew themselves to be unable to match such powers. [Women] became seers, priestesses, healers, oracles, lawmakers, judges, and agents of the Great Mother Goddess who gave birth to the universe.

Elder women we called Crones, which meant “CROWNED ONE”. The people of these communities respected the Crones above all others for their knowledge and wisdom. Signs of aging, like wrinkles and grey hair, were met with reverence and honor – never shame. It was only after the rise of the Christian Inquisition, a 400 year period of time during which an estimated 9 MILLION WOMEN were tortured and killed, that women lost their role as the leaders of society and the term “crone” became distorted. Under the new patriarchal regime “crone” morphed into a derogatory word for old women.

Reviving the Crone Within

Back to our original question: How can we love our aging bodies? We revive the Crone within. We take back the concept of the Crone with pride, so that no one may shame us about our aging bodies. Helen Rippier Wheeler states it so well:

 It takes courage to grow old in an ageist culture that diminishes old people. Lacking media images that promote the value of old women and men, Americans will need to activate the crone archetype by other means. We could start with our own lives, challenging negative stereotypes and refusing to buy into a consumer culture that tells us we need anti-aging products and expensive procedures when our bodies show signs of aging. We could focus more on the potential advantages (to ourselves and others) of growing old — competence in many areas, greater self-knowledge and acceptance, emotional maturity, coping skills and resilience. The Golden Girls character Rose Nylund, played by Betty White, learned a valuable lesson from a crone in her own life: “My mother always used to say, ‘The older you get the better you get — unless you’re a banana.'”

Love Getting Older

We can learn radical self love to find a new way of seeing ourselves beyond how our culture teaches us to see ourselves. Every year we can sink deeper into our own unapologetic realness. Know that the body is only a shell to contain your soul. Your inner radiance will NEVER diminish. It burns brighter as the body grows older.

I honestly love getting older. No one can make me hate it. I have never been more at peace, more connected with my inner wisdom, than I am right now. And the older I get the easier it is to care less about what other people may be thinking. I know my self acceptance is infinitely more powerful than anyone’s judgments about my appearance. Over time, we can completely change our appearance obsessed culture. Never forget, there is a Crowned One inside every one of us. And she comes more fully into her power with each passing year.