Charlotte Church reveals her surprising reaction after taking magic mushrooms: 'When you see that you can't unsee it'
The singer, 39, spent her teenage and young adult years in high-demand, performing in loud arenas across the country with little rest.
But now Charlotte is living a quieter, family-orientated life with her partner and three children at her home on the outskirts of Cardiff.
The Call My Name singer even opened a green wellness retreat in 2023 in her home-country to help people 'reconnect with themselves and the natural world.
In a new appearance on This Natural Life, a BBC Radio 4 podcast with Martha Kearney, 67, Charlotte opened up about appreciating nature as she gets older.
'My relationship with nature started to blossom partly when I had kids and then partly when I first took magic mushrooms for the first time,' she said.
'When I took magic mushrooms, everything, everything in nature just opened up and began communicating.
'When you see that you can't unsee it.'
Martha then quipped: 'And there is a debate about the benefits and the harm, but we needn't go into all of that.'
Magic mushrooms are a type of hallucinogenic drug which can affect a person's thoughts. They can either be eaten or made into tea.
Charlotte previously revealed that she first took the drug more than a decade ago.
In an interview with The Skylark, she said: 'When I was about 27, I took magic mushrooms for the first time. That experience created a different sort of connection, a deeper understanding, far more intrinsic and connected to patterns.
'You can never unsee or unfeel that connection once it happens. Ever since then I've been diving deeper and deeper into my spiritual journey - the idea of the unseen world, the wonder, awe, and power of nature.
'I had such a four-walls, boxed-in life, and so did my ancestors before me for quite a long time. When you're a working class family, the majority of your energy is spent doing the survival dance rather than the sacred dance.'
In tune with Charlotte's new-found love of nature and the beginning of her spiritual journey was her decision to open her plush wellness retreat at a £1.5million mansion in the Elan Valley of mid Wales.
The singer had to battle through a series of planning disputes before officially opening the resort in 2023.
The makeover was turned into a documentary series on the Discovery Channel, titled Charlotte Church's Dream Build.
The 'Dreaming' experience offers three day long stays both on the weekends and during weekdays. Guests are offered a wide selection of wellbeing activities.
The activities include yoga, a sound healing ceremony, foraging, mythic storytelling, star-gazing, cold water immersion, singing at dawn, den building, sensory portal building, painting, dance, dreamwork, outdoor cinema, herbalism, woodwork, meditation, Qi Gong, silent disco and night time forest bathing.
Speaking about what people can expect when coming to the retreat during an appearance on Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett's Dish podcast in 2023, Charlotte said people can 'pick and choose' which activities they do to discover what their bodies need.
She went on: 'Everything's supposed to be very much that you, it's like a buffet. You pick and choose. When you come there, you drop into your body and you, and you start to really feel out, what does your body need? What do I wanna do?
'For some people, they just need total radical rest 'cause their nervous systems are burnt out, for other people they need to go and explore and like really be captivated by nature, and almost return to that childlike wonder and awe.
'So, it's nature connection, sound healing - I'm a practitioner there and I go and do sound journeys and I do singing to the land.
'And then the third pillar of it is ceremony in terms of like rituals and ways of being, living really close to the land, and really seasonally.'
Touching on why she decided to set up the retreat, Charlotte said she has been an activist for years and wanted to channel her 'values' into her work projects.
She said: 'I really care about the future and the future of the planet, you know, I really think that we can turn things around and so I wanted to be involved in projects and I wanted to start projects, which was living my values really, and living my activism.
'We've got a water source heat pump and we've got the hydro mill, and we're gonna have a huge food growing project.
'So this year we'll have about an acre, an acre and a half of land in which to grow food, and then, In the next two or three years, that's gonna grow to like three or four acres.'
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