Brave Amanda Lino fighting her way home

THIS week in “The House of Motherly conversation, we visit the Gym with Amanda Lino the first South African woman to become a double-division EFC Champion, a world-title holder, and a professional MMA fighter and coach.

- JANE LINLEY-THOMAS

A woman whose life has unfolded inside her body, inside external expectation, inside shifting identity, inside the public gaze, inside the cage, and ultimately, inside her own return home. Lino speaks with striking honesty about the season of her life where she felt lost, misaligned, and strangely disconnected from herself.

Her inner world, her body, and her spirit were not speaking the same language, an almost disorientation that at some time or other has felt is familiar to many of us those moments where the stories we've told ourselves no longer fit.

But the journey back was not linear. Nor was it soft. Nor was it slow. Lino’s homecoming required unlearning, confrontation, and the kind of deep, rigorous interrogation of self that many of us postpone for years, even decades.

Her physical journey back to strength, discipline, and honesty became the doorway not to perfection or external validation, but to belonging and I not belonging to a title, a role, or an expectation, but belonging to herself.