Wisdom
reclaiming the wise woman within (without losing the plot)
The Wise Woman is having a resurgence right now. It’s more than a trend or nostalgia, it’s a remembering. She’s returning because something essential has been missing.
Wisdom
In a world where it’s increasingly hard to know what’s real, what’s true, and where to go from here, the reclamation of the Wise Woman feels more necessary than ever.
For a long time, wisdom has been treated as something you ‘acquire’. Through books, credentials, and frameworks. All useful, of course (I wouldn’t be here doing what I do without them!). But it is incomplete.
What I think we’re now reckoning with, collectively, is that knowledge without embodiment becomes brittle. It loses its relational quality. And thus, it loses meaning.
The Wise Woman represents a different way of knowing - one that lives in the body, in lived experience, in cycles, in relationship. And while birth work is one of the most visible places this wisdom is being reclaimed, it doesn’t belong only to pregnancy or babies.
This is birth work with or without a baby. It’s the work of creation, transition, healing, tending, and remembering.
~ creation is not limited to childbirth
In a culture that equates creative power solely with reproduction, many people are quietly excluded from conversations about birth, wisdom, and creation.
But creation is not limited to babies.
To carry ovaries - to have developed eggs in utero - is to hold the memory of creation itself. Long before any conscious choice about motherhood, the body carries an implicit knowing of how life begins, differentiates, organizes, and unfolds. (Not as some mystical thing but biological…but yeah, it’s also kind of miraculous.)
Like the earth - she first tends the seed within the dark depths of her soil. Within the mess and all that pressure and compaction, is a holding. And from that tenderness of patience, comes germination. The seed of potential sprouts into life seemingly in an instant. That first growth, slow at first, makes its way toward the light.
Whether what is sprouting is an idea, a project or a baby - that is the power of creation that I’m talking about.
The Wise Woman tends creative energy itself - through relationships, healing spaces, communities, art, passion, culture, and meaning. It moves through us but is not something we own.
I was reminded of this recently while hosting a small women’s retreat on the Sunshine Coast. What struck me wasn’t any single insight, but how wisdom emerged between us - in stories shared by the fire, in moments of quiet after journalling, in the way people spoke differently once they felt more settled in themselves, and how we all held the space for each other.
Wisdom making was ‘live’ and therefore, lived. Which made something very clear to me: wisdom doesn’t arrive when conditions are perfect. It arrives when we slow down enough to notice what life is already teaching us. Of course it’s easy to tap into a state of wisdom in a quiet retreat-type sanctuary amongst friends, but that’s not where wisdom is created. There, it can be echoed and reinforced, yes, but it is first tended to, deep within the bounds of our inner soils. Only when it’s time, does it emerge into the light.
~ why we feel so stuck right now - knowledge ≠ wisdom
Modern cultures have taught us to confuse knowledge with wisdom.
Knowledge is accumulated - transferable - teachable through instruction.
But Wisdom is lived - embodied - contextual. It’s earned through experience.
Historically, women’s wisdom wasn’t written down. It lived in hands, stories, timing, touch, presence. It was passed through kitchens, forests, sickbeds, birth rooms, and thresholds.
That made it powerful - and therefore threatening.
The persecution of so-called “witches” wasn’t so much about coming after fantasy or superstition. It came after women’s bodies and women’s knowing. Not because this wisdom was false, but because it was uncontrollable (a story for another day, perhaps).
A Note on Language
I just want to pause here to state something important…
When I speak of the Wise Woman, I’m not speaking about women as a category or identity - nor am I suggesting that wisdom belongs to one gender expression.
All of us carry multiple ways of knowing within us.
What I’m pointing to is an archetypal orientation to wisdom - one that has historically been feminized, embodied, relational, cyclical, emotional, intuitive… and therefore subjugated, suppressed, or persecuted.
This way of knowing has been carried most visibly by women - but also by queer, trans, non-binary, Indigenous, and marginalized bodies whose wisdom did not fit neatly into dominant frameworks of authority.
The Wise Woman, therefore, is not a person. She is a pattern.
~ two ways of knowing - and both are needed
Across cultures, two complementary wisdom orientations show up again and again.
One seeks clarity by stepping back - through abstraction, analysis, systems, explanation.
The other seeks truth by staying close - through embodiment, presence, story, rhythm, and relationship.
We could call these the Wise Man and Wise Woman archetypes, but this isn’t about gender. We all carry both.
And we need both.
The problem isn’t the difference - it’s the implicit hierarchy we’ve placed on one versus the other. Women’s wisdom has traditionally been dismissed as emotional, anecdotal, and unextractable.
Modern culture has elevated one way of knowing and asked the other to justify itself - or disappear.
The result?
We are living inside the consequences of disembodied wisdom.
Intense burnout, especially within the helping professions. Nervous system overload. Ecological collapse. Geopolitical conflicts. Loneliness. Over-medicalized life transitions. The loss of in-person connection.
Trauma science, somatics, and birth physiology all point to the same truth:
We cannot think our way out of dysregulation.
Wisdom has to pass through the body to be real.
Linear solutions can’t heal cyclical wounds. And surprise, surprise - life, it turns out, is deeply cyclical.
The Wise Woman has always known this.
~ reclaiming the wise woman within
What’s needed right now, is not a reversal, but a rebalancing. The resurgence of the Wise Woman isn’t anti-man, anti-structure, or anti-science. It’s about integration.
And integration is the forgotten seed of healing.
Integration asks one simple question:
How do we learn from what we’ve already lived?
Looking at the state of the world, it’s clear we haven’t fully answered that yet. This is where the world needs Wise Woman wisdom - not as an identity, but as a way of being.
The question right now isn’t:
“How do I fix this?”
It’s:
“What am I noticing - in my body, my relationships, my work, my world - and how do I tend to it?”
That type of birth work belongs to anyone willing to listen.
Are you feeling disconnected from your inner wisdom?
I offer 1:1 sessions to help you calm your nervous system, reconnect to your body, and step into your strengths—whether you’re preparing for birth, navigating postpartum, or moving through life transitions. Sessions weave together relaxation, meditation, energy work, and visualization.
Book a free call, and we can explore what might be supportive to you. Alternatively, you can reach out by email if that feels easier.