For many years, I was very good at expanding, feeling more, accessing more emotions, and reaching higher levels of consciousness. I could access more joy and pleasure, and I could also go deeper into difficult emotions and understand where they came from through therapy, movement and different forms of personal development.

But something was still missing.

Even though life was exciting, it was still volatile. I wasn’t stable. It was difficult to slow down, commit, and regulate myself without intensity.

Through my trainings, my own therapy, and the mirroring of teachers and supervisors, I started to understand that having the capacity to feel a lot wasn’t enough if I kept losing myself in it. I was specifically challenged by my teachers around how easily I became my younger parts and repeated old patterns, instead of actually being able to hold what was coming up.

At first, this was uncomfortable and came with shame. There was also another kind of discomfort, because sometimes it actually feels nicer to cry in someone’s lap or dissociate a little than to stay present with everything that is going on inside.

I learned to metabolize what was moving within me by staying in my body instead of leaving it. I also learned that my capacity and window of tolerance were much smaller than I had thought. I was simply used to going beyond my limits without realizing it.

Through slowing down, staying with my feet and meeting the present moment, I started accessing my adult consciousness more clearly, and something shifted completely. I became calmer, projected less onto others, caught myself much earlier, and it felt like I finally got it.

One of the most difficult pieces to meet was realizing that I was going beyond my capacity while doing some of the things I loved the most: holding space, dancing and making love. This is why learning to grow up is not only about meeting our pain. It can also mean changing how we live, and sometimes even parts of who we have believed ourselves to be.

Understanding attachment was also very important along this journey. But what became most important to me was seeing that we are not an attachment style. Attachment patterns are connected to needs from childhood that are still unmet underneath our survival strategies. And before we can let go of an old pattern, there needs to be another, more adult part of us present to meet what is underneath it. Otherwise, the pattern keeps repeating.

This missing piece, understanding the underlying needs and learning to step into our adult consciousness, our midline, became one of the foundations of Grow Up.

The work is not necessarily about understanding or healing what happened in the past, even though that is part of it. It is also about practicing being the grown-up who can be here now, and learning how to come back when we lose that place.