Hey there Reader
A few people have said to me in the last week, “you have grown a lot.”
And unlike me, I have not yet asked them in what way.
What are they seeing, what are they hearing, what are they feeling, what are they experiencing in me that tells them I have grown?
And if you come to know me more, you will know I will ask these questions, because I am always curious about what someone is processing, what they are experiencing, and how they are experiencing it through their senses, whether it is about me, them, others, or something else.
Because we all process differently, interpret things differently, and more importantly, pick up on things differently, and I love exploring that.
So I have been reflecting on it.
Have I grown?
Yes, I have.
Of course I have, because who couldn’t with what I have experienced in the last few months, let alone with what I naturally do.
I have changed in how I do things, how I respond, how quickly I recognize what is processing inside me, how I work with myself, how I experience truth, how I embrace and work with what is unfolding, and how much less I interpret things based on the past, create stories, move through doubt, self-talk, and neediness that once took up space in my being.
But the more I explore what it feels like within me, and what I have been experiencing, the more I know growth is not the word to describe it.
Growth for me, feels like learning, lessons, expansion, awareness, capacity, and doing things differently because you now recognize and do something you were not aware of before.
And I have done a lot of that. In fact that is such an understatement.
It has been years of growth.
But this not only feels different, I know it is different. And of course recognizing this immediately captured my curiosity and so I had to explore.
This feels more like maturing, and that was the word my knowing gave me.
Now what immediately came to mind is our human interpretation of maturing, and that was not it.
This was not maturing in the human way, where it is about age, responsibility, life stage, or becoming more adult, but maturing in the way that a part of me that was held in another time, another role, another responsibility, another version of me, is no longer experiencing life from that place in the same way.
Interestingly, as I write this, something my brother said to me at the beginning of this week now makes sense.
He asked me how I was, which I really love that he asks when he has the time to do so, and if you are reading this Johnny, you will get what I mean lol, and my response was, “I feel really strong.”
And he laughed and said, “You already were strong.”
Then he mentioned a photo of me as a little girl on a wall with the family, and a girl he did not recognize, and the reason I am saying the part about the girl is because otherwise I would not have known which photo he meant.
But now, as I reflect on that photo, I can feel what he saw.
That was me.
The true me shining through.
The qualities I had at that age were already there.
The strength, the curiosity, the knowing, the freedom, the independence, the truth and so much more.
What it feels like now, is that those qualities have had a chance to mature.
I love this process so much.
We can grow, we can learn, we can understand ourselves, we can recognize patterns, we can do the inner child work, we can reconnect with the parts of us we rejected, abandoned, silenced, or disconnected from, and we can become more responsible, more aware, more self-reflective, more able to pause, and more able to make different choices.
And all of that is so so important in our journey home to who we are.
But even with all of that growth, there can still be parts of us that are seeing, feeling, hearing, interpreting, and experiencing life from the age, role, responsibility, or dynamic where we were impacted.
So we may be fifty in age, but in a certain situation, we may still be expressing through the process of the fourteen-year-old part of us that got left behind.
We may be capable, wise, successful, loving, intuitive, responsible, and deeply aware, but when something touches the part of us we have not fully reclaimed and is operating at a certain age, we are no longer experiencing life from the age we are now.
We are experiencing it from the age or place where that part of us stopped maturing with us.
And I am starting to understand this in a much deeper way.
Because the part of me I rejected, or disconnected from, was not just a “child within,” which is my preference rather than inner child.
And I know this term helps to understand this, but for me maturing goes beyond this.
The child within, or inner child, tends to be associated with the part of you requiring healing and unraveling.
This is the soul-human part of me in its purity.
A part of me that was meant to keep walking through life with my soul and human together, as I aged and experienced.
The part of me that, at a young age, got disconnected from, and left behind.
And while the rest of me kept living, growing, learning, achieving, processing, facilitating, creating, caring, holding, and becoming, that part did not fully mature with me in the same way.
She was still beautiful.
Still pure, special and to me magical.
She has always been a part of me, because she is me.
I have done a lot of work on reclaiming her, and have been aware of this part of me as I have become more me.
But this process, has been me maturing.
And for the first time in my life, I feel like this part of me has become me at the age I am.
I recognize why this has happened now and it is to do with my mom. Yet again another gift from her, in her passing.
I know some of this is because of the release of the roles I held with Mom.
I was her rescuer, protector, and often the one who mothered her. And I did so very consciously and with acceptance.
I was also her little girl, as she called me.
Those roles have changed, because Mom is no longer here in human form, and I am now soul connected with her in a different way.
The responsibility I carried for her has released, and through the soul connection I now have with Mom, I understand that release was part of what her leaving facilitated.
And I know the release of that responsibility has created the space for more of me to come back to me.
I have also released friendships as they have been. Ones where there were threads in the friendships based on how things used to be, who I used to be, and who we used to be together.
And as those roles, responsibilities, and old threads released, space opened for me to be more me now. That combined with my processing around truth, has meant movement of a different kind.
And I can feel it. It is soul-human maturing, where the parts of me that were still operating in earlier times are moving into now.
And as I was writing about this, the sun going down reached the point where it was shining on me, and the color was amazing.
And it felt so poignant.
Because that is exactly what this feels like.
I am more visible to me.
I am more in me.
I am more me.
I am living in more of me now than I ever have, rather than just in the body of me.
And I am still finding the words for that, because it feels so clear, so centered, so real, and so familiar, like something that has always been true is no longer sitting somewhere outside of my lived experience.
It is in me.
That is the difference.
It is not that I understand more.
I have understood a lot for a very long time.
It is not that I know more.
I have known a lot for a very long time.
It is that what I have known, understood, experienced, processed, facilitated, and lived is now in me in a different way.
It is part of my being.
And I can feel how much less of me is being run by the conditioned hurt human.
There may still be remnants.
There may still be echoes sitting on the edges of some residue vulnerability.
But what I am aware of right now is that the residue doubt, the self-talk, the interpretations, the old questioning, the looking backwards into what should have happened, or forwards into what might happen, is not operating in me the way it used to.
And I can recognize it in the most daily interactions.
I am listening to what people are saying, or not saying, and there is no part of me wanting to respond from a need to explain, defend, ask more, dig deeper, or make it mean something.
Instead of moving into the old pattern of questioning, interpreting, hoping, or filling in the gaps, I am just listening, and I am still inside.
And that is where I can feel the maturing, because the part of me that would once have needed to do something with what I heard, or did not hear, is not taking over in the same way.
What I feel, hear and see more clearly now is truth.
And instead of experiencing truth and then questioning why this is happening, what it means, what I need to do, why this person did that, why that person did not, why this did or did not unfold the way I thought it should, I am accepting that it is happening.
And even the word trust feels different to me now.
Because trust feels like something the human needs while it is learning to feel safe again.
And this is such an important part of our journey, because we need to learn to trust again. Trust ourselves and our process. And especially trust our soul again, and our human.
But this feels like something beyond trust. Like trust is almost irrelevant.
It feels like knowing.
Knowing this is meant to happen and that the next part will unfold at the time and in the way it is meant to.
Knowing I do not need to move backwards into what should have happened, or forwards into what might happen, because I am here, in what is.
And maybe that is what maturing really is.
Not becoming older, or more responsible.
But becoming part of the whole of who we are.
Seeing through the eyes of now.
Hearing through the ears of now.
Feeling through the being of now.
Living from the fullness of who we are now.
So maybe this week, you could ask yourself:
🖤 When you say you have grown, what do you actually mean?
🖤 Where have you learned, changed, expanded, and become more aware, but still find yourself experiencing certain situations from a younger part of you?
🖤 What age, role, responsibility, or old relational thread might still be shaping how you interpret silence, rejection, disappointment, conflict, love, visibility, responsibility, or being misunderstood?
🖤 What part of you may have been reclaimed, but not yet fully matured into who you are now?
🖤 Where are you still understanding something, but not yet living it as part of your being?
🖤 And what would it feel like for that part of you to become current with the age, truth, wisdom and depth of who you are now?
Because maybe this next part of the journey is not only about growing.
Maybe it is about maturing.
The soul-human parts of us that were left behind finally coming home, not to stay young inside us forever, but to become part of the whole of who we are now.
Melinda xxx
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