Lilly Bianchi

The word courage, I recently discovered, comes from the Latin root cor, meaning heart. Which is why we take heart as we prepare for something challenging or when we look for strength and confidence to continue on. What isn’t at the heart of courage is fearlessness. I don’t think we ever need to ask ourselves to be fearless. Fear is a normal, protective emotion. In the right amounts, fear makes us just vigilant and careful enough to keep safe. It’s true that it’s possi...ble for fear to become so overwhelming that we freeze up. But when we have the right balance of fear and courage, one foot begins to move in front of the other. Slowly, we find ourselves moving forward, accompanied by fear, sure, but courageous, filled with heart. So take heart. Find your courage. Make peace with your fear. And know that the beauty of this world is that you don’t have to do it all alone.

In praise of showing up. At my local pool there are a group of older women I call the pool noodle ladies. While all around them people are swimming lengths or doing vigorous aquafit moves, kids are cannon-balling into the pool, shrieking, and babies are learning to dunk their faces in the water, the pool noodle ladies sit astride their noodles and sail slowly and serenely down the pool together, like swans. All the while they talk and talk. About family, meals they’ve made..., town gossip, politics. Stories about their lives. And I admit to a fleeting feeling of judgement. Why bother, I think. That’s not real exercise. Thankfully I catch myself quickly. The pool noodle ladies have a lot to teach me about showing up. Every time I come to swim, there they are, luxuriating in gravity-free (and maybe pain-free) movement just like me. They’re moving their bodies in ways that feel good. Not caring what others are doing. And I imagine, too, that they’re feeling connected to the other ladies. Accompanied. All because they show up, again and again. I take comfort in the pool noodle ladies. They’ve helped me see that self-care doesn’t have to look any particular way. It’s more about finding your particular groove, your sweet spot. And, because it’s your unique way, you can’t do it wrong. You just have to show up. #personalgrowthcoach #lifecoach #bodypositive #findyourniche

I’ve spent much of my life nurturing the idea that there is me and then there is my body. Separate. Which of course gave me the perfect opportunity to liberally apply all the unhelpful cultural messages about what constitutes a good body or a bad body. Messages that have been faithfully stored in word-perfect order in my head’s highly secure filing system. The process of breaking free of this has been made up of many layers and is clearly going to be a lifelong project. One ...of my most important leaps of faith was following the fierce and wonderful @themilitantbaker’s sage advice to rehabilitate my social media stream. I filled it with beautiful round bodies, bodies of colour, bodies with disabilities, non-binary bodies. I followed the delightful and brilliant @virgietovar and read her book You Have The Right To Remain Fat. I followed the fearless @effyourbeautystandards and @thebodyisnotanapology. I marvelled at the painful-beautiful art of @frances_cannon. I took comfort from the scale-smashing compassion of @summerinnanen. And so many more, too many to list, but no less important (see @themilitantbaker’s website for a truly fantastic and exhaustive resource list). Social media gets a lot of flack when it comes to reinforcing destructive cultural norms. But for me it became a powerful tool. A kind of catalytic converter in my heart and mind, an emotional detox. So this is my thank you to ALL the folks who continue to fiercely, lovingly and tirelessly do this work. They may never know how much they help people like me, sitting in my little corner of the world, each day letting go of one more fragment of judgement and perfectionism. Slowly uniting my body and mind into wholeness. And, if I’m lucky, maybe helping one or two others to feel accompanied in their own process.

I heard a story about a group of people attending a retreat. At the beginning of the retreat, they were asked to write down their fears about the retreat and submit them anonymously. When the teacher read the little slips of paper, she found that over and over again the same three fears came up: being found out as a fraud, not being good enough, and not belonging. I found that story so deeply reassuring. Not because I was glad that so many people worried so much, but because ...the worries I had secretly believed were unique to me were so universal. I never felt like I belonged. I always found myself on the periphery. I always thought I was just that little bit different and didn’t seem to have gotten a copy of that Life Owner’s Manual I was convinced everyone else had read. When I came out as gay, some of that peripheral feeling was released. Being loved well and devotedly by my partner took care of some, as did the love of my kids. But strangely not all of it was gone. So, why do so many of us feel like we don’t belong? Especially when we know that most everyone else feels the same way? It’s almost funny to think of us being stuck in un-belonging when we know that at the very least we all belong to the I don’t think I really belong club. Maybe feeling like you belong is just a conscious perspective shift. Just a decision you make. I belong. That’s it.

I like to listen to podcasts while I’m walking. All kinds. You can learn a lot of interesting things from podcasts. The other day it was a talk by Buddhist teacher Gil Fronsdal. He used a lovely image to describe finding inner balance: thinking about how it feels to stand up in a small boat. To avoid losing your tenuous balance and capsizing when even a tiny wave sets the boat rocking, you place yourself in the centre of the boat. You stand in the lowest point. You let your... knees be soft so that you can absorb the movement of the boat and not work against it. You create a soft, supple, low centre of gravity so that no matter the conditions on the water, your equilibrium is less likely to be thrown off. I love this image. And of course, you’re not at all surprised that this analogy is really about life balance; being resilient and flexible in the face of all the flotsam and jetsam that float our way on the waves. And since they say that balance is a muscle, the practice of standing in the boat on calmer seas helps us become stronger and more capable of weathering those inevitable storms. #lifecoach #balance

Joy. Have you ever had that strange sensation of joy welling up inside you with no obvious explanation? Brilliant, isn’t it? But then, like every other sensation, every emotion or reaction, it turns out joy is momentary. You get a taste and then it moves on.... It’s a little like chasing your own shadow. You never catch it, but when you stop trying, there it is tucked in right beside you. Joy is sneaky like that. In my dealings with whoever it is that doles out joy, I’ve learned a few things. You rarely get a dose of joy by doing the right things in the right order, or making the right sort of circumstances fall into place. You just get these little, slippery, serendipitous gifts. And if you stop and let joy soak in, really luxuriate in it like it’s a kind of joy-bubblebath, for that brief moment you don’t care that it will slip away. You just savour, and then you add that moment into your inventory of all the good things. #joy #lifecoach #bodypostive