Claudia Spahr is a business mentor, best-selling Hay House author (Right Time Baby, The Complete Guide to Later Motherhood) and Best Business Woman Award winner. As an internationally acclaimed wellness trailblazer and status quo disruptor, Claudia founded and built a beach resort in Goa, India 2008, with a ten week old baby, setting a precedent for yoga beach holidays. She then went on in 2013 to birth HolyMama, offering retreats for mothers to reinvent themselves as women, gathering with other mothers and children, to vision and manifest new possibilities and realities. The HolyMama movement has revolutionized the landscape for matrifocal wellness retreats.
Claudia has since 2018 mentored retreat leaders in over 45 countries. She’s led 100s of transformational retreats around the world, inspiring tens of thousands via her books, retreats and online programmes. Prior to her two decades in wellness, she worked as a broadcast journalist and foreign correspondent for TV and radio, reporting for CNN, BBC, Swiss National TV and independent TV channels. She has been featured in Psychologies Magazine, Happinez, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Huffington Post and now GOSS.
Tell us about yourself, especially the parts that are not so known from your online presence?
I have a great sense of humor. It’s the kind of humor that’s very dry and self-deprecating because I grew up in the North of England. This comes with its challenges when you work in the personal development, retreats and mentorship space, because self deprecation, especially for women, can be confused with lack of self worth. It’s a fine line, so you need to use nuance, and any jokes are best understood when spoken out loud to get the tonality across. When used correctly it’s a potent pill in a space where people can sometimes take themselves too seriously.
The second thing that I don’t talk about often on social media is that I’m a survivor of domestic violence. I experienced both financial and psychological abuse, which is insidious and soul destroying, and there is always the threat of physical violence lurking in the shadows because that is part of the ‘grooming’ process that has you walking on egg-shells.
I’d like to emphasize that abuse is not about good people and bad people, or women versus men, it is about unhealed trauma and mental health. I believe that what is awakening on the planet – and was accelerated during the 2020/21 Covid lockdowns – is the importance of mental health: It underpins everything. The old systems of sick-care are failing many people, with a lack of focus on integrative and preventative medicine. As we reshuffle the planetary power dynamics, I see a huge possibility for entrepreneurs, especially women, to step up. Women distribute wealth differently, maybe because for generations we have experienced financial oppression and have been patronized around having our own money. Let’s be honest, millions of women on the planet still experience financial abuse in their relationships, and in the US it was only 50 years ago that women could apply for credit cards without a male cosigner.
What brought you into the field of healing, and emotional intelligence / personal development?
It found me. The month I left my TV foreign correspondent’s job 20 years ago, I went to see an Indian astrologer. He told me I would leave London and never work for anyone else again. He also said that I would change lives but he couldn’t put his finger on how I would do it. Either way I saw it as my ticket to freedom and skipped out of his tiny ramshackle office, running down the stairs like they were a red carpet to my future. With the pay-out I received by insisting on my rights, in a final showdown with four male bosses in suits, I booked myself on a detox retreat in Thailand and spent three years traveling the world. I temporarily ‘settled’ in Goa with a ten-week old baby boy to build a beach yoga resort. I’ve incidentally been self-employed and radically ‘unemployable’ ever since I was ‘booted out of Patriarchy’. in 2013, pregnant with my 3rd child, a daughter, her spirit guided me to create a concept of retreats for mothers and children. Since 2018 I’ve been training retreat leaders in over 45 countries and as a movement HolyMama has revolutionized the landscape of retreats for matrifocal and child-centered wellness.
When it comes to your own personal journey of deep healing and liberation, what has been the catalyst for your growth?
I often say that your greatest suffering is directly related to your highest potential. It is healing work, and the liberation it brings that becomes the catalyst for your growth. This happens when you deepen into the lessons, and see each challenge as a gift. Every ’I-want-to-throw-in-the-towel’ moment is especially relevant for entrepreneurs, because it’s usually the moment you question everything, that has you breaking through to your next level. Healing is never a linear progress, it spirals. The deeper you go into your own healing work in a ‘let’s get curious and play’ way, the more it amplifies your power, when you get to the other side.
Advice to your younger self? Other women that are “stuck”?
Be bold. Be daring, Be courageous. Be audacious. Do it your own way. Surround yourself with people and places that give you energy; that give you hope. People are not always going to get you, and that’s the whole point. If everybody got you and everybody agreed with you, there would be no trail to blaze. You would just fit into the status quo. You would repeat generational cycles and curses. You would not be able to break out of the victimhood that women have been conditioned to accept for centuries. You have the opportunity to stand on the shoulder of giants, and your grandmother is smiling in her grave as she watches you rise. Your daughters and sons will be celebrating the bold moves you made for their freedom.
Walk us through your offers and enrolments for women who want to join your space?
The foundation of my work is retreat leader training. All of my programmes and courses have a spiritual and personal development approach, whether it’s the retreat leader certification, my marketing and messaging programmes, offer creation courses, or launching and selling signature programmes. There are options at every price point and proximity level. While getting divorced and going through the deepest pain of separation from my children, I have steadily, methodically and organically built a multi-seven figure, femme-pire. Making the right strategic moves now for increased visibility, it could easily become an 8-figure business.
A good place to start in my offer suite is the Retreat Business Accelerator. Adding retreats and in-person events to your business is the best way to scale via increased visibility, impact and income. Retreats increase your authority and lead to better results for your clients, due to the close proximity they have to you when you meet in-person.
MANIFEST WITH US : What are you actively calling in now?
A TEDx talk by spring 2025, an updated version of my book, Right Time Baby, with Hay House; plus a children’s book dedicated to my daughter and a spiritual guide on creating wealth within the wellness industry. With the money generated from these books and my online offers, I want to inject cash into a fund bringing retreats to places where they are most needed; for women and children recovering from trauma, whether it is abuse or war. One project is already taking shape in South America and details will be revealed soon.
Balance : how do you intentionally claim it?
To find balance I jump in the ocean and dance in the forest. I wail at the moon, watch the sunrise and the sunset. It’s basically surrounding myself with things that are flowing and beautiful. It’s hugging my children and cooking for them. Food has been one of the medicines I used to create balance over the last years of intense post-separation abuse. Balance is like finding the midline in a pendulum that is constantly swinging back and forth. It’s standing in a place of real stillness; a zen- like space. I see it as ‘black light creation’ energy; a void of nothingness. It can feel really uncomfortable because it is so still, but it’s actually from this place, when you are balancing the polarities, that you birth the new. The momentum comes from a spark of inspiration, a breath (in-spire = to breathe in) which fuels the fire that sets things in motion. We are of the same elemental forces that make up the universe.
Photography by Masha Kart
