BEFRIEND AGING
Aging can be more than decline and disappearance. It can be a time rich with possibility.
Aging touches every part of your life.
How you see yourself. How you feel in your body. Your relationships, your work and your sense of what matters now.
Some mornings, you look in the mirror and don’t quite recognize the person looking back. The friends around you have started talking about their knees. Someone you love has received a diagnosis. Your children may need you differently and your parents may need you more. Retirement is approaching, newly arrived or not unfolding quite the way you imagined.
You may feel less visible, less capable or less alive than you once did, even if no one around you would guess it. And underneath all of it, you’ve realized that you have more days behind you than ahead. That can bring fear, grief and resistance.
It can also bring a question: How do I want to live now?
You may be doing everything “right.”
You take care of yourself. You try to eat well and go to the gym. You’ve probably done more inner work than most and may have spent time with a psychotherapist along the way. Perhaps you’ve also had a little help from the dermatologist. All of it has its place. And still, none of it quite reaches the questions underneath.
Who am I when the roles that defined me begin to change?
How do I live in a body that no longer looks or responds the way it once did?
What do I do with the parts of my life that still feel unfinished?
How do I face mortality without letting it make my world smaller?
You do not need someone to talk you out of these questions, you need somewhere to bring them.
Aging is not a problem to fix. It’s a relationship to build.
There is another way to age.
It is difficult to grow older in a culture that worships youth.
Most of us were given very little information and almost no tools for what comes next. We either try to outrun aging or resign ourselves to the idea that aging simply sucks and there is nothing we can do about it.
Befriending aging begins somewhere in the middle. With honesty about what is hard, curiosity about what is changing and a willingness to stay engaged with your own life.
You can grieve what has changed without believing your best years are over.
You can develop a more accepting relationship with your body, even when your feelings about it are complicated.
You can make peace with parts of your past and become clearer about what you want from the years ahead.
You can feel more at home in yourself and know your innate value.
There is still more to learn, create, contribute and become.
It’s time to befriend aging.
Aging can bring grief, resistance, fear, shame and regret to the surface. It can also raise questions about purpose, identity, legacy and mortality. These experiences rarely arrive one at a time.
A change in your body can affect your confidence or sense of visibility. Retirement can unsettle your identity. The death of a parent can bring your own mortality closer. An old memory can surface just as you are deciding what you want from the years ahead.
None of it happens in isolation.
This is why aging needs more than advice about how to stay healthy or positive. It needs a place where the emotional, physical and existential parts of the experience can be held together.
I’m walking this path too.
I’m Wendy Shami. I have been a psychotherapist for 25 years and I am also 63. I am not teaching about aging from a distance or from the top of the mountain. I am walking this path myself. I have my own questions and my own moments of resistance to what is changing and what it means. And I have an inner agist who has plenty to say about it all.
What I bring is the ability to hold those questions with you. I bring clinical training, experience and a deep respect for the wisdom of the body. I also bring my own humanity and the understanding that aging is a deeply personal journey.
My role is not to tell you how to age – it is to create a grounded space where you can tell the truth, listen to yourself more deeply and decide how you want to meet this part of your life.
Work with Wendy
Befriend Aging Workshops
Small-group workshops for people who want an honest place to explore what getting older is bringing up.
Through teaching, experiential exercises, reflection, small-group conversation, and gentle somatic practice, we make space for the harder questions. What emerges is unexpected insight and a deeper understanding of what's happening in both mind and body.
Offered in Toronto and online.
Retreats
Retreats offer more time and space to step away from daily life and listen to what this stage may be asking of you.
I facilitate conscious aging experiences as a guest presenter with established retreat hosts. These multi-day gatherings include teaching, experiential exercises, reflection, somatic practices, honest conversation and connection with others navigating similar questions.
Individual Psychotherapy
I continue to hold a small private practice for one-to-one psychotherapy. This work is primarily available to people who have attended a workshop or retreat and would like individual support with something that has surfaced.
My private practice is currently full.
Aging changes when we have somewhere honest to bring it.
“The workshop left me curious and wanting to learn more. I feel compelled to continue exploring Conscious Aging so I can be better prepared for my older years, appreciate the people around me who are already in that stage of life, and deepen my spiritual path as I move toward life’s later chapters.”
Lisa – 49 Years of Life Experience“Being an elderly person, I realised that I knew very little about aging and the processes that each of us goes through at this stage of our life. The major thing that shifted for me was the realization that I needed to look at the difficult parts of my life from a different perspective. I released any residue of bitterness that I might have been carrying with me. This release was very liberating to me and for that I am grateful.”
Tina – 79 Years of Life Experience“I joined the workshop because becoming older it’s a difficult transition in life and I thought that sharing my thoughts and listening to others in the same situation was a good way to reflect about this crucial time in my life. I got in touch with my wisdom and spirituality, I discovered ideas, feelings, emotions, insights that I did not know I had and I experienced a sense of deep connection with the group.”
Janet - 82 Years of Life Experience
Curious, but not quite sure you’re ready?
You do not need to open Pandora’s box all at once, you can begin by dipping a toe in.