We Listened To Madonna's 135-Minute Spiritual Podcast So You Don't Have To

Look, if your reaction is "Why should I care what Madonna thinks about spirituality?" you're completely valid. This is the same woman whose career highlights include a book called "Sex" and simulating religious acts on stage. Her entire brand was built on rejecting the exact values many of us were raised with.

Here's what we can learn from the consequences of that approach: she spent three decades boundary-pushing, achieving everything the culture promised would bring her fulfillment, and ended up so empty she contemplated suicide. By her own admission, she had the career, the wealth, the freedom to do whatever she wanted—and she was miserable. Her story isn't an endorsement of her choices. It's a case study in what happens when you get everything the world says matters and discover none of it was the answer.

The Part Nobody Talks About

When Madonna came to New York City at 19, broke and ambitious, she experienced the darker side of that freedom firsthand. She was raped. Held at gunpoint. Robbed. "Really scary traumatic things happened to me," she says matter-of-factly in the interview. But her childhood had been so unhappy that she thought "whatever happens to me is better than what my life was. So I'm sticking around. I'm not going back."

Think about that for a moment. The trauma was severe enough that years later, she'd credit a "guardian angel" for protecting her. But at the time, she had no framework for processing what happened—just survival instinct and determination that her old life was worse than being violated in New York.

The interview is unintentionally honest about what came next. Madonna describes her younger self as "a meteor making her way through the planet"—ambitious, driven, knocking down barriers—but "spiritually bankrupt." She admits she was "a slave or victim of other people's opinions," despite appearing confident and audacious. The persona was hollow.

Madonna spent three decades boundary-pushing, achieving everything the culture promised would bring her fulfillment, and ended up so empty she contemplated suicide.

Then she drops this bombshell: she talks about her peers who had similar meteoric rises—Prince, Michael Jackson, Jean-Michel Basquiat. She believes they were accessing something powerful but "didn't understand the concept of what they were channeling." Her theory? They got "light with no restriction" and "that's what kills you or burns you out." All three are dead. It's a bold claim, and whether you buy her mystical explanation or not, there's something to the observation that talent without boundaries often ends badly.

Why Motherhood Terrified Her

Madonna's spiritual journey started in 1996 when she got pregnant with her first daughter. Here's the psychological plot twist: Madonna's mother died after giving birth to all her siblings. She watched her mother have child after child, seeming unhappy and trapped. "I always equated motherhood with death," she says. "I equated it with no freedom. I equated it with no life except taking care of other people."

So when she started her career, she ran from it hard. Then she got pregnant. Suddenly faced with raising another human, she realized she had survival instincts and work ethic, but zero foundation to pass on. "What the hell am I going to teach my daughter? I've just been living this completely selfish life," she says. "But honestly, I was scared shitless and I wasn't in a traditional relationship."

This tracks with Princeton research showing that wealth plateaus in terms of emotional wellbeing around $75,000 annually. More money doesn't fix emptiness. Madonna had everything and it meant nothing.

A friend dragged her to a Kabbalah class. She sat in the back for years, taking notes. Her teacher didn't even know who she was. What hooked her wasn't feel-good mantras but the ability to ask hard questions and get substantive answers. She'd grown up Catholic but found it ritualistic without understanding—her father would just say "that's what is written" when she asked why they did anything.

About a year after she started studying, she made her "Ray of Light" album. She's explicit that it was "100% influenced by my study, my spiritual practice." Something had fundamentally shifted in how she approached creating.

"I Don't Fit In, and Not Fitting In Is What Saves You"

This phrase comes up over and over, and it's clearly central to how Madonna understands her life. "I felt like an outsider growing up in Michigan. I felt like an outsider when I came to New York. I felt like an outsider when I moved to LA." Even her spiritual practice isolated her—her friend group thought it was weird.

Her point: "Having a spiritual life isn't necessarily going to make you popular. But if you're a conscious person searching for truth, then it's going to be interesting." The discomfort of not fitting in protects you from the groupthink that destroys people. "Being too comfortable in life is the downfall of a lot of people who started off taking chances, taking risks."

There's something here worth sitting with, even if you think her choices were destructive. The pressure to conform, to obsess over others' approval, to follow the algorithm—none of that leads anywhere good. Madonna's version of non-conformity took her down some dark roads. But the underlying principle, that truth matters more than popularity, that you need to be willing to stand alone, isn't wrong.

The Custody Battle That Almost Destroyed Her

The interview gets dark when Madonna talks about her custody battle with her son Rocco. She won't name what his father did, but she's clear it felt like betrayal. "Someone trying to take my child away from me; they might as well just kill me. That's really how I was thinking."

She was on tour at the time. Every night before going on stage, she'd be lying on her dressing room floor sobbing. "I really thought it was like the end of the world. I couldn't take it. I just couldn't take it." She contemplated suicide.

What pulled her through? Her spiritual practice forcing her to ask: what's the lesson here? It took years, but she eventually landed on "radical acceptance"—accepting what's happening is meant to happen, even when it destroys you. She also realized the situation triggered her childhood abandonment; her mother left her through death, and now she was losing a child. The pattern repeating.

The good news: she's now good friends with her son. But she couldn't see that possibility at the time.

The Near-Death Experience

In 2023, Madonna got a bacterial infection that put her in ICU, unconscious for four days. She woke up from sepsis—the kind that kills people. When she regained consciousness, she had zero strength or energy. As someone who sees herself as "superwoman," this was unbearable. She didn't know when or if she'd recover.

Her teacher told her: "The sooner you accept what's happening to you and that you don't know when it's going to end, the sooner it's going to end." That's the entire philosophy in one sentence. Stop fighting reality. Accept the uncertainty.

But here's the wild part: while unconscious, she says her mother appeared and asked if she wanted to "come to the other side." She said no. When she woke up, she realized she said no because she hadn't forgiven people she was still holding grudges against.

Whether you believe in near-death experiences doesn't matter—the realization itself is what's interesting.

What It Took For Madonna To Forgive

Madonna's brother, who passed away recently, betrayed her in some way she won't specify. She didn't speak to him for years. When he got sick and reached out needing help, she had to decide: help her enemy or stay in righteous anger?

She helped. When he was dying, she held his hand and said "I love you and I forgive you." She's grateful she did, though it was agonizing. She's written two songs about it: "Fragile" about her brother, and "Forgive Yourself" with the chorus "If you can't forgive me, forgive yourself."

Her takeaway after 29 years of spiritual study: holding grudges is poison. "It's like a kind of cancer," she says. It doesn't give you power—it weighs you down. And the people who hurt you most are usually people you loved deeply.

It took Madonna years of study, a near-death experience, and the death of her brother to get to this place of forgiveness. She had to learn it the hard way, through mystical texts and meditation and countless hours with her teacher. Even with all that work, she admits she still struggles with it.

Madonna spent decades searching for spiritual truth in ancient mystical traditions, finally arriving at forgiveness through years of pain and practice.

Compare that to what we saw just last week at Charlie Kirk's memorial service. Erika Kirk stood in front of tens of thousands of people, eleven days after her husband was assassinated, and said: "That young man...I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it's what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love."

The contrast is striking. Madonna spent decades searching for spiritual truth in ancient mystical traditions, finally arriving at forgiveness through years of pain and practice. Erika Kirk, rooted in her Christian faith from the beginning, accessed that same truth immediately, even in the most unbearable circumstances imaginable.

Both women arrived at the same conclusion: forgiveness isn't about the other person deserving it. It's about refusing to let bitterness destroy you. But the paths they took couldn't be more different. One required years of spiritual wandering and near-death experiences to discover what the other knew from the foundation of her faith.

There's something instructive in that difference. Madonna's journey validates that forgiveness is real and necessary—even someone who built a career rejecting traditional values eventually had to confront this truth. But Erika's example shows what it looks like when you start with the right foundation instead of having to discover it through decades of pain.

You can learn these truths the hard way, piecing together wisdom from various spiritual traditions after years of suffering. Or you can start with a faith that's already taught these principles for 2,000 years. Madonna chose the long road. The rest of us don't have to.

The Four-Step Framework

As for her process for handling challenges? Madonna's teacher breaks it down:

Step 1: Pause. When you feel inadequate or anxious, tell yourself "this is an opportunity" even if you don't believe it yet. You're just interrupting the reactive spiral.

Step 2: Sit with the discomfort. Don't immediately try to fix it. Allow yourself to feel uncomfortable. "You turn on the light when you're in a dark room. When you're in a room that's already light, there's no effort made." You can't reveal light without acknowledging darkness first.

Step 3: Challenge the script. Tell yourself "all the light I need is within me" even when every instinct disagrees. You're rewiring the mental loop that says you're not enough.

Step 4: Ask what you're supposed to learn. Not "why is this happening to me" (victim mentality) but "what lesson am I missing?" For Madonna, it's abandonment and betrayal on repeat.

This is essentially cognitive behavioral therapy in different packaging. And the distinction between "personality strength" and "soul strength" is sharp: Madonna built her entire identity on being a warrior, a fighter, an independent woman. When life threatened those abilities, she fell apart. Your worth can't be tied to external attributes because the moment those are challenged, you're destroyed.

The Parenting Struggle

Madonna has six kids and is refreshingly honest about the struggle. She's working on letting go of control, on saying nothing instead of trying to manage every outcome. When the host says "you're really getting good at it," she immediately responds "No."

Her teacher makes a point about "bread of shame"—giving someone something they didn't earn actually hurts them. Saying yes to avoid short-term discomfort plants seeds of long-term chaos. This contradicts modern parenting culture that treats boundaries as harmful, but the research backs it up: kids thrive with clear, consistent boundaries and age-appropriate responsibility.

Her biggest insight: "Trying to control all the outcomes in life and not getting the outcome you wanted is what makes you suffer. So if that lesson keeps coming back to me, then I guess I haven't learned it yet. And children are a perfect teacher for that because they're never going to do what you want them to do the way that you want them to do it."

The Manifestation Take That Cuts Through the Noise

Madonna's definition of manifestation is refreshingly not about vision boards. She talks about writing her first song and asking "where did that come from?" She had no training, no musical family. The melody just came.

Her point: acknowledge you're channeling something beyond yourself, not creating from pure ego. This is humility, not mysticism. If you think you did it all yourself, your success will eventually eat you alive.

This is where her examples of Prince, Michael Jackson, and Basquiat hit hardest. She knew them. She watched them channel incredible creative energy but believes they didn't understand they were managers of their talent, not owners. When you claim sole ownership, "you stop it."

What's Actually Worth Taking From Madonna's Interview

Strip away the Kabbalah terminology and here's what remains:

You can't escape suffering. Wealth just changes the form it takes. Accepting what's happening doesn't make suffering disappear; it stops you from adding the second layer of suffering that comes from resisting reality.

Comparison is poison. Madonna still experiences self-doubt "at least 100 times a day." The practice is catching yourself in the loop and consciously redirecting.

You need an internal life. Some practice that pulls you out of reactive mode—prayer, meditation, journaling—might be the difference between surviving challenges and being destroyed by them.

Forgiveness is self-preservation. Not because the other person deserves it, but because bitterness is slow poison.

The Bottom Line

In a shocking turn of events, this wasn't celebrity spirituality theater. Madonna's clear she's still struggling daily with control, fear, and inadequacy. Twenty-nine years of study didn't make her immune—it gave her better tools for processing.

The irony isn't lost that one of the most controversial figures in entertainment spent over two hours talking about humility, forgiveness, and recognizing you're not the source of your own talent. Whether that's genuine transformation or just another chapter in reinvention is up to you.

The irony isn't lost that one of the most controversial figures in entertainment spent over two hours talking about humility, forgiveness, and recognizing you're not the source of your own talent.

But the principles she arrived at—that suffering is inevitable, that resentment destroys you, that achievement without meaning is hollow—aren't revolutionary. They're ancient. Sometimes it takes watching someone reinvent the wheel to remember we already had one that worked.

Ariadna Jacob is an expert in influencer culture and the creator economy. She writes about fame, faith, and the hidden cost of chasing influence. She owns Creator Genius, helping businesses navigate social media marketing and produce a month’s worth of content without the burnout.