Lily Boiko shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Good morning Lily, it’s such a great way to kick off the day – I think our readers will love hearing your stories, experiences and about how you think about life and work. Let’s jump right in? What are you being called to do now, that you may have been afraid of before?
I’m being called to return home — to Ukraine — not when it’s safe, not when the war is over, but now. When your evolution becomes your priority — not comfort — you naturally begin to make decisions that stretch you, challenge you, and expand you. That’s exactly what happened to me.
Moving back before winter, at a time when Russia is once again attacking power plants to make survival harder, is a step my past self would never have taken. In fact, this was the exact reason I left for the U.S. three years ago — I moved right before winter because we had the same power outages then, and I was terrified of living through it. Today, for example, we had only three hours of electricity. Following the curfew rules, hearing air-raid alarms, watching the sky flash with explosions from air defense — or with the strike of a missile or drone when it couldn’t be shot down — none of this feels like a reason to run anymore. Instead, it feels like an initiation.
I’ve transformed my relationship with the outer world so deeply that what most people would consider horrific no longer defines my reality. These situations test the solidity of my inner peace. They ask me: Will your eternally fantastic state survive here? Will your love for life hold when the ground shakes? And every time, the answer is yes. In fact, it becomes even stronger.
And the deeper I live into this new reality, the more I’m stunned by what I witness around me. After living in Kyiv during the war for over a month now, I’m still shocked by how efficient all public services are — destroyed buildings, power plants, and roads hit by missiles are restored in just a couple of days. But even more astonishing is how people continue to live fully — not seeing themselves as victims, but showing incredible inner peace and emotional strength.
Ukrainians who live with the possibility of death have learned what many in peaceful countries are still searching for: the ability to live fully. There is something extraordinary happening here. Even foreigners who visit can feel it immediately — a completely different reality where people wake up, emotionally and spiritually, because life itself demands it.
Living in Ukraine right now is a daily reminder of the most radical truth: life is unpredictable. Any day can be our last — not only here, but anywhere. So why would I waste a single moment on fear, worry, or anger? Being here makes me fall in love with life more fiercely than ever before.
Returning to Ukraine is not just a homecoming for me. It’s the boldest expression of trust in life. It’s a declaration that fear no longer leads my decisions. And it’s my invitation to others: you don’t need a war to wake up. But you do need to stop waiting for “someday.” Life is now.
I even tattooed the word Now on my arm back in 2022, when the war began — and its meaning feels even more powerful today.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m a Paradigm Shifter, Inner Transformation Guide and a Co-Founder of Eternally Fantastic — a global movement, a borderless country of limitless humans uplifting each other through their unique gifts. It’s a new way of living, where challenges become catalysts and every experience becomes a doorway into your highest potential.
My own transformation began the moment life stripped me down to nothing. I lost my home in the war in Ukraine, my business, and a 15-year marriage — all at once. What looked like devastation from the outside became the most powerful rebirth of my life. Starting over from zero forced me to meet myself, truly, for the first time. From that place, a new purpose emerged. A new identity. A new way of being. I share this journey in my book Eternally Fantastic, which is both a memoir and a guide for anyone standing at the edge of change.
Today, I help others navigate their own turning points — the moments when fear grows loud, when clarity seems far away, when life demands a deeper version of you. My work is about guiding people back to themselves, transforming breakdowns into breakthroughs, and creating a life that feels aligned, expansive, and deeply true.
Within Eternally Fantastic, everything we create is interconnected — a living ecosystem designed to support your evolution from the inside out. It’s not just a set of offerings; it’s a pathway. A frequency you step into.
Our educational spaces — the books, podcasts, courses, retreats, and events — form the heart of this journey. They’re crafted to shift perception, to help you see yourself and your life through a new lens, and to guide you through the inner transformations that change everything on the outside.
From there, the path deepens into the EF Club, a private sanctuary for honest reflection and real-time support. It’s where people gather to share breakthroughs, ask difficult questions, and grow alongside others who are also committed to conscious living. It’s a space where you don’t have to pretend, where your evolution is witnessed, held, and celebrated.
Our creative arm, EF Media & Publishing, amplifies the voices and stories that spark awakening — not just my own, but those of creators whose work has the power to elevate collective consciousness. It’s our way of contributing to a world where truth, depth, and awareness become mainstream.
And because transformation touches every aspect of life, we created the Conscious Store — curated essentials for high-vibration living. From conscious fashion to sacred homeware and wellness tools, every object is chosen with intention, reminding you of who you’re becoming each time you use it or wear it.
Finally, our long-term vision expands into Unity City — a blueprint for conscious communities of the future. And we’re not just imagining it. We’re already beginning to build the first Unity City near Kyiv — a living, breathing example of what’s possible when people come together with shared values, shared awareness, and a shared commitment to elevate humanity.
This is the world of Eternally Fantastic.
Not a brand. Not a business.
A movement. A field. A frequency of becoming.
And it’s an open invitation to return to your truth, rise beyond your limits, and step boldly into the life that only you can live.
Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
That is the most important question any of us can ask. Because who we are today — or who we think we are — is often nothing more than a collection of inherited fears, expectations, and invisible rules we never chose.
From the moment we are born, we begin absorbing the world around us like a sponge. We take in our parents’ beliefs about safety, success, money, love, and worthiness. Their fears become our fears. Their limits become the walls of our inner world. Even their wounds become our patterns — not because we did anything wrong, but because this is how human conditioning works.
Then culture adds another layer:
what is “acceptable,” what is “normal,” what a good girl or good man should do.
Religion adds another layer:
what is right, what is sinful, what is allowed, what is forbidden.
Society adds more:
how quickly we must achieve, how we must look, how we should behave to belong.
And if we marry young — as many of us do — we unconsciously merge with the worldview of our partner. We bend, adjust, shrink, or shape ourselves into who we believe we need to be to sustain love. Slowly, without noticing, we fit ourselves into a box that was never ours to begin with.
By the time we reach adulthood, we are often living as a collage of other people’s expectations — disconnected from the truth of who we were before the world began teaching us who to be.
But life has a beautiful way of guiding us back.
For some, it happens gradually — a quiet discomfort, a sense of misalignment, a whisper that says, This isn’t me.
For others, it’s triggered by major transitions: divorce, loss, war, illness, a career ending, or a life chapter collapsing. When the structures that once defined us fall apart, we finally have space to ask the deeper questions:
Who am I when I am no longer performing for approval?
Who am I without the roles I’ve been given?
Who was I before life taught me to be afraid?
And that is where the journey back to ourselves begins.
We begin remembering the version of us that existed before conditioning — the child who knew joy without reason, who followed curiosity without fear, who moved toward love without hesitation. We reconnect with the authentic self that was always there beneath the layers: intuitive, expressive, unfiltered, unapologetic.
My work — and the work of Eternally Fantastic — is about guiding people through that remembering. Helping them peel away what was inherited so they can finally meet the person they were always meant to become.
Because awakening is not about becoming someone new.
It’s about returning to who you were before the world told you who to be.
What fear has held you back the most in your life?
Every fear that ever held me back — fear of failure, fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough — all came down to one root fear: the fear of death.
It’s the foundation hidden beneath almost every human limitation.
The fear of lack? That’s really the fear of not surviving.
The fear of the unknown? That’s the fear of losing control over what keeps us alive.
The belief of “I’m not good enough”? That’s the fear of being unworthy of love, support, or belonging — which in ancient terms meant you wouldn’t survive outside the tribe.
99% percent of people carry this silent belief of inadequacy without realizing it’s actually a subconscious survival mechanism. And as long as we are unconsciously afraid of death, we stay in survival mode — playing small, choosing safety over truth, comfort over evolution.
To transcend the smaller fears, you have to transcend the fundamental one.
For me, this journey began before I returned to Ukraine. I went on a pilgrimage across Asia with my guru and partner in Eternally Fantastic, Mira Uniat — a journey I was called to make after my awakening in 2024. One of the most powerful initiations happened in Varanasi, India, where bodies are cremated openly on the banks of the Ganga. Watching a human body turn to ash in a matter of hours changes you. You suddenly see how temporary all of this is — the skin, the story, the identity. The body is just a jumpsuit we use for a while. Its death is not the end of the soul but the continuation of a natural cycle.
In that moment, death stopped being something to fear.
It became a transition — a return, a release, a doorway.
And when you stop fearing death, you stop fearing life.
You stop restricting yourself with self-imposed limitations.
You stop negotiating your dreams.
You stop shrinking to fit into someone else’s expectations.
You start living fully, boldly, unapologetically — because you realize how little time you truly have.
Coming back to Ukraine during the war deepened this even more. Living with the proximity of death — hearing air raid alarms, seeing the sky flash with explosions — reinforces the same truth Varanasi taught me: life is fragile, sacred, and fleeting. And strangely, that makes it more beautiful, not less.
Many people only awaken to this truth after a near-death experience, a loss, or a war. When mortality becomes real, life becomes real too.
That’s why being in Ukraine — and experiencing our inner transformation programs here — is unlike anything else in the world. You feel life more intensely. You see your fears more clearly. And you awaken more deeply, because the veil between life and death is so thin that you can finally see beyond it.
When you stop fearing death, you stop fearing being who you truly are.
And that is where your real life begins.
Alright, so if you are open to it, let’s explore some philosophical questions that touch on your values and worldview. Where are smart people getting it totally wrong today?
Surprisingly, some of the most intelligent, educated, high-achieving people are getting life completely wrong in one fundamental way: they’re chasing the wrong things.
After living in North America, I saw it everywhere — people caught in a relentless cycle of earning, spending, upgrading, insuring, and maintaining. Not because they are greedy, but because the system requires a constant flow of money just to stay afloat. Rent or mortgages that never stop rising. Groceries at premium prices. Endless types of insurance — which, ironically, all feed on fear. And beneath it all, a quiet panic: If I stop running, everything will collapse.
In that cycle, there’s no time to pause and ask the one question that could change everything:
Does any of this actually make me happy?
A bigger house, a newer luxury car, another designer purchase — smart people often assume these things will finally give them the feeling they’ve been chasing. But possessions don’t bring fulfillment; they only offer temporary hits of excitement. And the moment the feeling fades, they run toward the next thing.
Don’t get me wrong — I love comfort. I love beauty. I love abundance flowing easily. But I refuse to struggle for money ever again. I used to “manufactured manifestation,” forcing outcomes, chasing money, trying to make things happen. Now I live from a different place: attraction.
When you follow what your soul wants, when you act from alignment rather than fear — money finds you effortlessly. Opportunities find you. The right people find you. Because you’re no longer blocked by survival mode.
At the end of life, no one remembers the things they owned. No one thinks about how many zeros were in their bank account. We remember moments of love, the people we touched, the courage we acted from, the dreams we dared to follow, the truth we lived.
And here is the irony: even the things people buy — they’re not buying the item. They’re buying the feeling they hope it will bring.
But when you truly know yourself — when you’ve done the inner work — you realize that feeling was always available inside you. You don’t need to endlessly purchase things to feel whole. You don’t need to chase anything externally to feel peace.
Smart people get it wrong because they’ve mastered the outside world and forgotten the inside one.
But when you reverse that — when inner alignment becomes your priority — everything else falls into place.
Without the chase.
Without the fear.
Without the endless striving.
This is the shift the world is craving.
And it begins the moment you question what you’re really running after — and what you’re actually longing to feel.
Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. If you knew you had 10 years left, what would you stop doing immediately?
If I knew I had only ten years left, the first thing I would stop doing is waiting. And the truth is — it doesn’t matter whether you have ten years, ten months, or ten days. Maybe you won’t wake up tomorrow. You never know. And yet most people live as if their life is endless, postponing their deepest desires for a future that isn’t promised.
We spend so much of our lives postponing our desires, convincing ourselves that “one day” will be a better moment to follow what we truly want. But life never gives us guarantees. And the longer we wait, the more disconnected we become from our inner truth.
For years, I carried this belief that I couldn’t return to Ukraine until my son finished school. He’s eleven now, and he chose to remain in the U.S. with his dad — for the moment. I offered him the chance to come with me, but he wasn’t ready yet, and accepting his choice wasn’t easy for me as a mother. Yet I realized something important: being a good parent isn’t about clinging, sacrificing yourself, or suppressing your own desires out of guilt. It’s about showing your child what it looks like to live honestly, courageously, and in alignment with your soul.
Now I see a much more expansive path for him — one that I couldn’t see before my inner transformation. I envision him spending part of the year in the U.S., attending an American school, and part of the year in Ukraine, immersed in his roots. This lifestyle will forge him into a unique human being: adaptable, emotionally mature, globally minded. Living between two cultures, traveling often, being exposed to different worldviews — this will broaden his horizons more than any single place ever could. And because he is naturally patriotic, he’ll carry the best of both worlds: bringing American practices to Ukraine and Ukrainian values back to the U.S.
But before my evolution, I couldn’t imagine this. My mind was trapped in the story that a “good mother” has to be physically present all the time, and that following my desires was selfish. So I waited. And every time I waited, I delayed my own happiness. What I didn’t understand back then is that presence has nothing to do with proximity. You can live with someone and still be emotionally distant. Or you can spend less time together but make that time deeply meaningful, intentional, and connected.
Choosing myself wasn’t abandoning my son. It was becoming a more alive, fulfilled, grounded version of myself — so I can guide him from a place of clarity, not fear.
If I had only ten years left, I would never again postpone my soul’s desires. I would stop waiting for perfect timing, for perfect circumstances, for everyone else’s approval. Because the truth is: a life lived later is a life that may never happen at all.
I want my son to learn this too — that life is not meant to be postponed. It’s meant to be lived fully, courageously, and now.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://lilyboiko.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/boikolily/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boikolily/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@EternallyFantastic
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