Updates from Brenda Di Bari

The yes you give before you finish deciding.

Brenda Di Bari

You know the one.It came out before you had a chance to think. Before you checked in with yourself, before you looked at your calendar, before you asked whether you actually wanted to. Someone made a request and your mouth opened and yes came out and

Mindset work has a limit.

Brenda Di Bari

You can use mindset work to build something genuine. You cannot use it to think your way out of a truth your body is already telling you.That is the limit. Everything else is detail.The mindset framework is genuinely useful. The idea that you are not

The moment before you say yes.

Brenda Di Bari

You already know which yes I am talking about.The one that closes your chest as it leaves your mouth. The one you said before you finished deciding. The one that came out of you automatically, the way it always does, because yes is what you do and no

Grief doesn't live in stages. It's more like a fault line.

Brenda Di Bari

The stages became the story and you absorbed them without questioning them.Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. You have heard them so many times they feel like fact. They are not fact. They are a framework developed in the 1960s from i

The difference between privacy and secrecy.

Brenda Di Bari

They are not the same thing. They get used interchangeably. They are not interchangeable.Privacy protects you. Secrecy protects the thing that is hurting you.That is the whole distinction. Everything else is detail.Privacy is the boundary you draw ar

The midlife question isn't "who am I."

Brenda Di Bari

It is what am I still holding together that I no longer believe in.The "who am I" question sounds profound. It has an entire industry built around it. Retreats and journals and personality assessments and therapists and coaches all orbiting

Rest is not a reward.

Brenda Di Bari

You have been earning it your whole life.You will rest when the project is done. You will rest when the kids are older. You will rest when things slow down. You will rest when you have done enough to deserve it. You will rest when everyone is taken c

The cost of being the strong one.

Brenda Di Bari

You became the strong one so gradually you did not notice it happening.It started as a practical matter. Someone had to handle things and you were good at it. You were capable and clear-headed and you did not fall apart when other people did. So the

What your body already decided.

Brenda Di Bari

The decision is already made.You do not know it yet. Or more accurately, you know it and you are not ready to say so. There is a difference between those two things and most women spend months, sometimes years, living in that gap.The body decides fir

The woman you built was not a mistake.

Brenda Di Bari

She got you here.Think about what it took. The competence you developed because no one else was going to handle it. The smile you learned to put on because the alternative cost too much. The way you got good at reading a room before you walked into i

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Meet Brenda Di Bari

I am a coach, writer, and keynote speaker in New York City. I work with women on the gap between knowing something is off and actually moving it.

My clients are capable women who know something has to change, whether or not they can put words to it yet. We work through the mind, body, and soul together, with Core Energy Coaching, SOMA breathwork, and conversation that does not skirt the thing.

I write here every couple of weeks. I am also the author of the memoir Nothing Can Be Darker Than Midnight.

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