Charlotte Church spent much of her childhood hanging out in gay pubs and drag bars in her home city, Cardiff, watching her cabaret artist auntie Caroline perform. “I felt held by the community,” she remembers. “There’s just such fun and joy and play and delight and discovery and naughtiness and irreverence,” she adds breathlessly, speaking from her home in Barry via Zoom. Charlotte Church is always speaking at pace, lifting her words with helium-like fervour. Queer folk followed her throughout her career, from opera-singing child star, to noughties pop star and TV star, to – if you believed the tabloids – fallen star. They understood where she was coming from. “There’s a fierceness and an emboldenedness that I have gained from my time within the queer community. Just that real, like, being flamboyant and fabulous in the face of f**kery.” She erupts into the first of many cackles. Today, Church is more Mother Earth. Two years ago she opened The Dreaming, a wellbeing retreat of storybook proportions buried deep in the Elan Village in Powys, Wales. Rhydoldog House, a manor once owned by fashion designer Laura Ashley, is the grand centrepiece. Breathtaking views of the mythic valleys wrap around the house in a way “that feels like a giant hug,” Church explains. “You properly feel the sense that we are in greater hands here, and in my mind, those greater hands are Mother Nature.” The Dreaming is a sanctuary to “rest, restore, be playful and connect with nature”. There’s specialist retreats run by visiting practitioners serving marginalised communities, including one for “melanated women of African and Caribbean descent” and another for Muslim women. Then, there’s “Returning to the Queer Heart”, a retreat for queer people to embrace their feelings, be that heartbreak, grief, or pleasure. On paper, it sounds a little airy-fairy. But Church has seen the retreat’s transformative sorcery, never more so than in herself. “If it doesn’t sound too trite to say, it feels like coming home,” she says of her time here. “There’s been a lot of times when I’ve had to really hold the faith through so much of this project,” she admits. It was a huge financial gamble, with the plot alone costing £1.5 million. “[But] it is those stories when people write to us about how they’ve been changed by their time here, how they have been so deeply soothed in their soul when they were experiencing the most unimaginable pain, that is just what keeps me going.” Hosting a queer-specific retreat was a given. “I am a radical, and I am a deep believer in liberation for all people,” she says matter-of-factly, “and so it’s really important to me that The Dreaming is aligned with liberation principles.” Church talks at length, joyously enveloped in this mystical refuge she’s created, about the psychology behind her retreat, and how queer people are often told to take responsibility and ownership of their struggles and beat off the victim narrative. “It’s not that that’s necessarily wrong or right, but particularly with marginalised and oppressed groups, you have to understand the societal constructs, the soil in which they have been grown,” she fizzes. “If you’re with your queer folk that totally understand the complexities in which your pain, suffering, struggle, oppression has happened, then you’re going to get to much deeper places.” She co-produced the queer retreat with its facilitators, Dr. Sanah Ahsan and Daniel Sutton-Johanson, over research and development days. “Queer people are often denied the fullness of their humanity by a world that demands we fit into narrow moulds,” they tell me over email. “We are gathering together to embrace each other’s complexities without shame, giving ourselves permission to be deliciously and messily human.” Church was aware of the timeliness of the programme they were putting together – “The tides ahead are looking really tricky, and so I think as much as possible, we need to just be refilling the well,” she says – and she was enamoured with the results. “I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, I wish I was queer! I really need this,” she squeals. There’s a glint of irony about Church being the famous face behind a spiritual haven like The Dreaming, as her life has often been one steeped in very public chaos. She was 11 when she sang Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Pie Jesu” via phone-in on ITV’s This Morning in 1997. Her classical debut record Voice of an Angel arrived a year later, selling millions. In 1999, aged 13, she sang at media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s wedding to his third wife; at the Leveson inquiry into media intrusion in 2013, she alleged that she was advised at the time to waive her £100,000 fee in favour of “good press” from Murdoch’s publications. Good press did not come. As Church entered her teenage years and became a chart-bothering pop star in the early noughties, she became a fixation of toxic tabloid vitriol. They letched over her reaching the age of consent and chewed over her relationships, her weight, her working-class background, her drinking habits. At the Leveson inquiry, it was confirmed that her phone had been hacked multiple times in the early 2000s . In 2012, she settled the phone-hacking claim against Murdoch’s News of the World for £600,000. Press snipes against her are fewer today (though just a few months ago, The Sun put her on blast for the crime of going barefoot after a “wild night out” at the Attitude Awards). Her life still appears to bear some semblance of disarray, but of the far cosier kind. The day after we chat, she and her children – she has two with former husband and rugby player Gavin Henson, and one with her current husband Jonathan Powell – are off to the Sacred Valley in Peru. She sits in a beige jumper dotted with hearts, hair in mousy ruffles. She shifts about in her chair and plays with her sleeves, and there’s a throng of activity happening around her: a doorbell goes off, she waves off one of her children out the door, she lets her pet pooch, Holly, out for a wee and then introduces me to her. There’s a lot happening around Church, but it’s just life stuff. It’s hard to believe she’s only 39-years-old with so many experiences behind her, and even more inconceivable that she’s only had a therapist for the past two years. She’s always seemed like she’s got metre-thick skin, and though the tabloid attacks did wear her down – “my credibility has been blown to bits,” she told The Guardian in 2013 – it’s more the state of the world today that leaves her despairing. The climate crisis, capitalism, war-ravaged countries, stupifying technology usage, bigotry, and the impact these troubles have had over decades. “It’s almost impossible for us to hold, isn’t it?” she asks. Outer world issues combined with personal trauma makes for a potent mix. “In a way, I’d [been] putting off doing the work, feeling these feelings, because I was so scared at the enormity of what it was going to be because I’ve got a lot in the backpack, as so many of us do,” she smiles. “My big revelation with it was when I did it in community, when I did it in ritual, when I did it in sound with other people, it didn’t hurt so bad.” After more than a quarter of a century of being tabloid fodder, she frankly doesn’t care anymore. It’s a mentality she hopes to pass on to transgender folk, who she is painfully aware are being put through the press and social media wringer on the daily. “I would say to trans people that it is a very purposeful and directed shame machine that is built to break you down, and the fact that you won’t, will mean that this will stop happening,” she urges firmly. Then, with an exasperated sigh that sounds like 25 years of tension deflating: “It’s not yours. It’s not yours! None of it is yours. It’s all! Their! Sh*t! None of it is actually to do with trans people. It’s all their own weird sh*t that they cannot reconcile within themselves, and it’s all their own repressed shame and weirdness and things that they haven’t worked through. It’s not yours, so don’t take it on as yours.” And then still, a message to those perpetrating the hostile environment: “You either get it now, or you’re gonna be a latecomer, because this is the way the world is moving. This is the way that evolution is taking us.” Church’s way of dealing with negativity is aptly celestial: imagination work. “Every day you put on an energetic shield.” She holds her wrists up to the camera, both beautifully tattooed with curling snakes. “For me, mine is like a DNA helix of my snakes that rotate around me,” she enthuses. “For other people, it might be like you’re riding on the back of a lion, do you know what I mean? And that is your energetic, protective bubble.” Still, people try to pierce that bubble. “I’ve been betraying the white Ultra Christian community for quite some time now,” she says with a mordant eyebrow raise. “I get sh*t all the time for speaking out and standing for and standing with and being allies to all sorts of causes,” be it the trans community, climate activism, Palestine. “I mean, I just don’t care. I don’t care at this juncture,” she shrugs. Church has got other things to focus on: her sprawling fairytale estate, her family, her snakes and that voice, which she still uses daily, now as a tool to explore how she’s feeling rather than for commercial gain. “It’s the most aware place I’ve ever been in,” she says. “And I suppose the healthiest, but this work never really ends, you know? We’re all unbelievably complex and rich in our ecosystems of ourselves and our souls and our minds and our hearts and our emotional bodies. I’ve got so much work to do on myself, on my own path of self-understanding and self-acceptance.” Even as she recounts how far she’s go to go, breathless again, she sounds full. Returning to the Queer Heart takes place at The Dreaming from 18 to 21 April. Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.