Marion Bevington used to work in IT. Now she makes a living telling people how to trump in public. It is one heck of a career change.
Marion made the move after struggling with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and working to overcome the shame she felt surrounding it. Now she coaches people not to hold in their guffs but to let them go, and with it all their stress.
From IT to IBS coaching
Marion’s journey began with her own bowel issues. Writing on her website: “Like many people with IBS, I became highly skilled at vigilance. Knowing where toilets were. Monitoring food. Monitoring stress. Monitoring myself constantly. You learn to live like that after a while. You also learn shame. Especially around the kinds of symptoms nobody wants to talk about openly.”
The stress surrounding her issues eventually got to Marion and she realised she had stopped living her life and was crippled by negative feelings. She said on social media: “The goal of Afraid to Fart is to help you to become fearless around all of the fears you have in your life.”
Teaching the art of letting go
Marion now offers people “clear, trauma-informed teaching” on how to overcome shame and fear around parping as well as other issues in their life. She said on Instagram: “We spend all our attention out trying to fix, trying to satisfy something that will help us feel better about ourselves, but where we feel better about ourselves is on the inside, so I wonder why we don’t just look inside?”
The coaching focuses on how people hold onto negativity and how that stops them from living their own lives, with Marion offering online calls as well as in-person sessions. “What we teach is the art of letting go, and letting go includes farting,” she said online. “It’s about your relationship to embarrassment, to shame, to your own farts.”
A growing community and book
Her community of ‘#AfraidToFarters’ are active online, where Marion has over 40,000 Instagram followers and shares life advice as well as other content like shopping hauls. Her podcast recently became the number one pod discussing number twos on Spotify, and she questioned on social media: “What do you do when you’ve reached the number 1 spot?”
Marion runs workshops, talks and retreats for her community offering guidance and coaching on how to bottom burp fearlessly because “not everything can be learned from a book.” She is not afraid to publicise her work, and speaking on social media about a recent retreat to the Isle of Wight commented: “How do you get noticed? You have the fart retreat running at your hotel and you have people calling your hotel the fart hotel.”
Marion’s book, Afraid to Fart: & The Fine Art Of Following Through, teaches others how to release the stress and shame they feel whether around IBS or anything else in life, and learn to live life fully again. Her website reads: “This isn’t a medical textbook. It's a deeply personal memoir about what happens when the body starts speaking louder than the mind.” Customers can also purchase ‘The Fearless Farters Famalam’ monthly bundle which includes monthly one-to-one calls with Marion and access to a private community.
Overcoming personal challenges
She has also given a TedxTalk where she discussed how she had found purpose in her travels around India and about her work helping disadvantaged children. She said: “When you stop focusing on what you’re running away from, then the body can release the stress. We can’t be brilliant when we’re really, really stressed. If you drove your whole journey looking in your rear-view mirror, you’d be dead.”
Marion suffers from an autoimmune illness that caused her to go totally blind several years ago, but she hasn’t let that stop her from helping others as she continues to offer classes and coaching. She said online: “I recently went blind - and in many ways, I’ve never seen more clearly.”
