ep 47: How My Spiritual Awakening Helped Me Heal The Shame Of My Affair
Seven years ago, I would have rolled my eyes at everything in this episode.
I thought crystals were bollocks. I thought energy healing was bollocks. I thought past lives were definitely bollocks. I was a rational, logical, practical TV executive, and nobody could have convinced me otherwise.
And then my life imploded, and I got desperate. And desperate women do things they never thought they'd do (like spend over £800 on a two-day retreat in a converted chapel in East London, covered in sage smoke and quartz crystals, surrounded by complete strangers).
And within about forty minutes, I was sobbing on a yoga mat, having never cried in front of a stranger in my life.
That was the beginning of something and I had no idea what. Something that would take years to understand, and that I still don't fully understand now. A spiritual awakening that wasn't rainbows and unicorns… it was bloody terrifying. A complete dissolution of everything I thought I was.
In this episode, I share all of it. The card that was pulled at that retreat - the goddess Kali, the beginning of the end. The synchronicities I couldn't explain. The ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon that broke me open and showed me things I still can't quite believe. The moment the plant told me that the fear I'd been carrying in my body wasn't even mine (it was my mother's). And the conversation with my mum, weeks later, that confirmed every word of it.
This isn't an episode that will tell you what to believe. It's an episode about what happens when the life you've controlled falls apart, and something else (something you didn't expect) starts to appear.
In this episode, we explore:
Why I walked into that retreat as a complete sceptic, and left sobbing on a yoga mat, surrounded by strangers, for the first time in my life
The Kali card, and why even without any spiritual belief, I knew in my body that it was true
What a spiritual awakening actually feels like (spoiler: nothing like the Instagram version)
The dark night of the soul - the terrifying in-between of who you were and who you're becoming
Why I kept swinging between "maybe there's something more" and "Alex, you're being ridiculous"
The ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon - what happened, what I heard, and why it broke me open in ways nothing else had
The moment I was shown that the fear I'd been carrying in my body was ancestral, and what my mum said when I told her
How I met Adam and why I believe, genuinely, that it was not a coincidence
What it actually means to stop controlling and surrender - not as a spiritual concept, but as something you have to practise in real time, in real relationships
The question that changed everything for me: what if your life isn't over? What if you're standing in the middle of a chapter, not the end of a book?
If this episode landed
If something in this episode cracked something open. If you've been white-knuckling your way through the aftermath, trying to think your way out, trying to control your way back to safety.
Sometimes we need to sit with other women who can see possibilities we can't yet see for ourselves. Women who have been in the middle of it and come out the other side. That's why The Sanctuary exists.
It's my private community for women in the aftermath of an affair. Not a programme. A room. A place where you don't have to tidy yourself up before you walk in.
The door is open.
