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Wales Online
Wales Online
Lifestyle
Sam Cook

Charlotte Church says nature helped her recover after losing baby while 17 weeks pregnant

Charlotte Church has described how being in nature helped her after she suffered a miscarriage in 2017. The Cardiff-born singer-songwriter was talking to broadcaster Fearne Cotton on her podcast Happy Place.

In the podcast Charlotte, who is married to Jonathan Powell, talked at length about her wellness retreat The Dreaming, which is the former home of fashion designer Laura Ashley. The 37-year-old described how nature has “soothed” her over the past 10 years.

Charlotte then opened up to Fearne about her miscarriage. She previously spoke about this in WalesOnline’s big interview with her, which you can read here.

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“To be honest nature has saved me in so many ways,” Charlotte said, “It’s been a real balm during times where I’ve been going through some of the most painful grief. I lost a baby which was really traumatic and I gave birth to her at 17 weeks and that was really hard.

“I was never inside and I spent the whole summer just outside recovering and connecting. Nature just soothed me back to some sort of balance and health,” she added before describing how she has also relied on music and sound as a form of therapy.

Charlotte then told Fearne about how she’d commemorated her daughter’s life in a 'ceremonial' way. “I feel like I really allowed myself to be intuitive," she said, "I felt very wild and very feral and there were things that I just had to do. I think in grief you allow yourself all sorts and get a bit feral. I think to help us move through those spaces and be in those spaces, to be able to create a ceremony was a huge part of it for me.

“I’d never done anything ceremonial before. I didn’t know about any indigenous practices, I didn’t know about any Celtic or witchy practices, and there’s loads of things to choose from. I was going completely off this sort of intuitive drive.

“We created this funeral for her in our garden outside in nature. We had our friends and family there and we wrote all of the words ourselves and we sang. For the couple of days before I decorated all of the space which ended up being this circle. Honestly I was so far away from any of that sort of stuff, of ritual or ceremony, or understanding it, or even that being for me at all. I used to be a Catholic but I’ve got no idea about that sort of stuff.

“I think from that experience it was just like: ‘Oh my gosh, what we did there was magic’. It was almost like we imbued the ground, the earth, with such intention and power that now when we go to that place it has an energy. It really feels different to how it was before when it was just a bit of field. It’s been such a powerful thing for me and my own healing journey.”

Listen to Fearne and Charlotte’s full interview on the latest episode of Happy Place, which is available to listen to on Spotify.

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