MARTA HOBBS - From External Success to an Inward Exploration of the Soul

Marta Hobbs

From Adversity to a Life of Fulfillment

Marta's inspiring story unfolds from adversity to a life of profound fulfilment.

Raised in a politically restrictive environment and immigrating to the U.S. at 12, she faced bullying and challenges but worked hard to achieve success at NBC TV in New York City. Co-founding CheapCaribbean.com allowed for early retirement to Paris at 39.

While the external seemed perfect, internal struggles emerged—anxiety, panic attacks, and a heart condition. Marta's soul beckoned her inward, leading to a transformative spiritual journey over nine years.

Now, her business reflects her belief that external lives mirror internal states. Through bestselling books, SoulCare meditations, workshops, and mentorship, Marta guides others to discover their true essence.

Join Marta as she shares her profound transformation—a journey from facing political restrictions to immigrant challenges, culminating in rediscovering freedom within. Marta's story is an invitation to embark on a path of self-discovery and fulfillment.

A narrative of transcending corporate confines, navigating the intricacies of identity, and embracing the profound depths of self-discovery.

Can you share the pivotal moments that led to your spiritual awakening and the realization that your identity is defined by who you are and not what you do?

There was one key pivotal moment for me, but it was almost as if it had several aspects woven into it.

It was nearly a decade ago now, when I had just sold the company I started with my husband, after 15 years of running, growing and building it. At the same time, we moved to Paris, France and I was taken out of the familiar way of living – racing through life on autopilot by following the agenda carefully laid out on my planner.

My children started new schools and the way of life in Paris allowed for more independence on their part versus relying on me. I was further away from my parents, who normally lived just a few minutes from us back in the United States. As my husband and I stopped working together – there was also an end to the usual way we had been relating to one another up until then (we had met at work so from the start we always worked together, even before our company).

Lastly, there was suddenly more free time in my schedule as the roles I used to define myself slowly started to fall away.

Change was in the air – but at the time I didn’t see it at all. I was just focused on the next thing – tackling the move of our family to a foreign, unfamiliar country.

At first, when I found myself with more open slots in my calendar – I habitually tried to fill them up with things. Volunteering at church, homeroom parenting at school, hosting book clubs, throwing dinner parties, creating a new social life for us and setting up our home – I simply did not know how to be still. I needed to stay busy – it was the only way I knew myself to be. It felt “comfortable” and “normal”.

The next year, when we travelled on a Caribbean vacation to celebrate the sale of the company (which meant retirement for me at 39) I suffered what I thought was a heart attack at the end of this epic trip. It came out of nowhere, after our last dinner, while getting ready and packing for our flight home the next day – being rushed to the hospital and spending the night, there which delayed our return home. It sure was a memorable trip – just not in the way I had anticipated. Similar to my early retirement being epic – but not how I thought it would go either. While I was ready to start enjoying all the things I had been working so hard to achieve, to finally sit back and savour life– the Caribbean heart scare episode was just the beginning of everything falling apart for me.

It turned out to be my first panic attack, which made way for depression, paralyzing anxiety and daily episodes of panic. It was a crack in the outer shell of me – prompted by the immense pressure from within. I was suddenly stricken with fear and terror – which made absolutely no sense to me! I was strong, tough, resilient. I was the glue that held everything together – in business and family. I was the one who could do anything, get anything done, juggling many things at once to the amazement and awe of friends and colleagues. This was who I was, after all? This warrior woman knew no fear!

But when I was faced with the inability to do ANY of what normally came so easily – I started to wonder. If I am not an entrepreneur and COO when I am not a mother, a wife, or a daughter… who am I then?

Am I less valuable and worthy when I am sick, messy, exhausted, confused and depressed in my bed then when I am productive and successful? If the only change was my inability to do for others what I was used to doing – was I worth less? And if those roles did not define who I was – because I stopped doing them all and there I still was – then who was I really? There must be more to my identity than my jobs, the masks I wear, the roles I play, the things I learned so well to perform… here had to be something underneath all that “stuff” which was the essence of me. And the journey began simple as that – the way I had been functioning and living just stopped working. I had no choice but to set out on a quest to find the answer to this question that begun haunting me – “who am I?” This changed everything to me. I started to understand that there is so much more to life then I knew. There was so much more to me.

What challenges and internal shifts occurred during your spiritual awakening?

It was a complete change of direction of my life. Since everything changed – the focus of my life for the next decade, for example – it deeply affected my family and everyone around me. This challenge presented an opportunity – to start talking about what I was experiencing. I found this difficult because I wanted to shield my children from worry, fear and pain. I wanted to provide them with stability and security and here I was completely falling apart. I did not want this to be hard on them too.

At the same time, the dynamic between my husband and myself changed completely as well. While I was used to him leaning on me for certain things – this became no longer possible.

I needed help from him instead – and not only did I not know how to ask for it, I also did not know how to receive it. We had to navigate a lot of discomfort as a family. I also had to learn not to feel the tremendous guilt and shame that came with this – this idea that I was to blame for all the pain I was suddenly causing my loved ones. The internal dialogue and battle within me was so painful – and that wasn’t helping anything, least of all myself and my healing.

The only way to deal with it was something I had never done before – instead of managing, controlling and fixing – I had to allow myself to completely surrender, come undone and fall to pieces. I had to do the one thing I had been trying so hard to prevent. It was unnatural and counterintuitive. And the only reason I finally gave in was because I was just too exhausted and too weak to function the old way. This made way for a completely different way of seeing everything in life – especially the purpose of why I was here, to begin with, and what was the true definition of love.

How do you help others discover the truth that answers can be found within our hearts, from your best-selling book to your workshops and mentorship offerings?

I help others by first and foremost sharing my own experience, sharing how I came to believe this truth and what this journey looked like for me. I wrote my memoir “Unraveling” with this very purpose in mind – to be a guiding light for others on their journeys of searching for answers. While I also searched for answers outside of myself – believing that things, people, places, achievements and relationships would make me feel fulfilled – ultimately, I have learned that the only lasting way to accomplish this was to find that feeling within my own heart.

If I can find true love, happiness, inner peace, meaning and purpose within me; if I show up wherever I go “already full” – everything else is just a bonus; an overflow of the thing itself already within me. The external world is my mirror – it only reflects to me what is already in me internally.

I describe this in detail in my book. I talk about this very openly in the workshops and talks I give around the USA and in Europe. I help others get to this place within themselves by teaching a spiritual self-care practice I have developed called SoulCare. SoulCare is a guided meditation into the sacred space of your own internal castle – the sanctuary of your soul – to help you encounter the truth of who you are, your own essence – the silence, stillness and solitude within.

And from that calm, centered, grounded place filled with love and abundance one can recreate herself and build a life she absolutely loves living. I call this living soul-led and that is at the heart of everything I do - my mentorship spaces as well as my one-to-one private retreats in Paris.

How did growing up in communist-era Poland and later fleeing the country shape your resilience and determination to create the life you love?

This was probably the biggest and most important lesson my parents taught me – if things are not how you wish they were where you are – change them. They taught me that we have the power to change our own circumstances and change our lives by taking charge of our destiny.

This was such a powerful thing to witness as a child. First, they tried to create that change by standing up against what was unjust and unfair – speaking up against the corrupt government. When it started to cost them their safety and the safety of their children – they did the scary thing of packing up and leaving, leaving without telling anyone. It was such a lesson of standing up against what’s wrong, what’s toxic, what’s intolerable. They wanted to give their children a better future.

They wanted their own lives to look differently. They followed their dreams. So, I grew up refusing to accept anything as a rule I couldn’t break, if it was harmful for me. I grew up with a tough skin, a tolerance for pain but also very aware of the power I had within me to change anything that I did not think was working.

Some of that resilience and power was dimmed when I arrived in America as a teenager and was met with ridicule, abuse and disrespect as a foreigner. Some of it came at the cost of shutting down my heart just a little bit in order to protect myself. There was this dance between the toughness and the tenderness that I had to navigate and the waters around were sometimes murky. The path forward wasn’t always clear. I could get “too hard” sometimes and get lost in the harshness of life. But then I fell in love with my husband and opened my heart. Then I had my daughter and then my son – and they each reminded me of the tenderness and warmth f love that was within me.

While the normal and more comfortable ways of operating were often in the masculine energy of doing, achieving, and chasing – the love in my life would always remind me to soften and lean into the feminine. I am a beautiful balance of both these energies within me – the masculine and the feminine.

Resilience and love. Strength and tenderness. Those two forces came out of that experience.

How did you overcome the challenges and discrimination you faced as an immigrant in the United States?

Mostly by sitting with a lot of pain and learning how to get back up after being knocked down, how to mend my own heart after heart-break after heart-break. It was resilience and a deep inner knowing that I deserved more. A deep belief that I was worthy of the life I dreamed of one day living. So, I put my head down and I worked hard. I learned the language. I studied the culture. I became like the other girls my age – I observed and copied, like a chameleon, blending in to fit in.

At the time I did not know it, but the method became to lose all foreign parts of myself because I learned they weren’t deemed worthy – life showed me evidence of it. So I worked hard to become American, to succeed, to prove to others (but most of all to myself) that I could do it. I took care of my younger sister, I cooked and cleaned to help my parents, I took on part-time jobs – all of this while studying with a dictionary and falling asleep on top of my books at night. It was not easy.

This was where I took on the roles by which I learned to define myself later on in life. Of course, I couldn’t see it back then, but by repressing the parts of myself that made me different from other teenage kids, I was actually repressing my true self – getting further and further away from my own essence and my soul. But that’s how it often goes in life – we do this to survive and eventually, the tools and techniques we use to ensure our survival end up preventing us from further growth. There comes a time to let them go – and that’s what happened to me after that first panic attack. Life asked me to release the identity of the survivor and embrace the return to my authentic self.

How did anxiety, panic attacks and a heart condition serve as a catalyst for your inward journey?

All of it stopped me in my tracks. Had this not happened, I am pretty sure I would have just continued the way I had been going – racing, running, chasing, achieving, pushing through and getting through life by being a warrior. I don’t think I would have made it that much further because obviously it was taking such a toll on my body and physical health – my heart was showing me the truth – that this way of living was simply not sustainable.

So it all served as a wake up call – a chance to take a long hard look at how I had been living and why and decide how I wanted to move forward. I really believe that my soul had been whispering to me for a long time – telling me that a change was needed – but I simply did not listen. I was too busy and too important! Lol. And so my soul had to take drastic measures to get my attention! And it certainly worked.

Now I spend my time telling others that it does not have to come to this if we live life in balance and harmony of all aspects of what it is to be a human – mind, body and spirit.

Can you share the key methods or practices that helped you heal old childhood trauma and rediscover your true self?

I went back and looked at what I had been avoiding for most of my life – what we all avoid – and that is the pain of our childhood. The unmet needs, the less-than-ideal circumstances, the broken hearts we pretend are ok, the trauma we minimize because “others have it so much worse…” I took a time-out from life to honour my path to that very point – how I got there and what it cost me along the way. In doing so I learned so much about myself – who I had become and WHY I became the way I was. This enabled me to see that much of my personality was formed as a result of something that happened – as a way to cope with whatever that was.

I started to understand that this was not really me but a way the human part of me learned to deal with a world that often caused her pain – the protection mechanism.

And if it was developed this way – I could certainly change it, if it no longer fit who I wanted to become – someone who’s free from the wounds of her past.

Understanding how a child develops and how a personality is formed was such a big key and a great starting point. The second was feeling all my unprocessed pain – it was stuck in my body, my energy, my nervous system and the way forward was to hold all of it with tenderness and compassion in order not to repress or resist it – but to allow it to simply dissolve. That’s what happens when we learn to sit in the discomfort of our pain – it simply loses its power over us. Somatic work – learning to experience what the young child had no tools to process was a process I relied on. It freed me from all the layers of pain and hurt I carried which prevented me from seeing the truth of who I was. Not the woman fighting for survival but a sacred, whole, tender soul having a human experience.

I spent a lot of time reconnecting with the body, realizing how much of my life was spent up in my head – thinking about life versus really living it. Breathwork, yoga, moving in a way that felt good and listening to my body and her needs – all new concepts to me that allowed me to finally take up residence in this sacred vessel I was placed in as a soul - my own human flesh and bones.

Caring for this body by nourishing it well, allowing it to rest, and being gentle with it – really I was learning not just self-care but self-love. I had spent so much of my life loving others so deeply but never loving myself. And from there, my heart simply kept opening more and more to the point that all I could feel was love everywhere – and that’s when I started to realize that this LOVE – this is who I am…

I am simplifying the journey, but it was both brutal and beautiful at the same time. Truly living for the first time…

How did moving to Paris at 39 years old become the freedom you sought, allowing you to continue your journey of self-discovery?

Paris awakened something within me that I had disconnected from – the feminine essence within me. Rather than rushing through the day, the French are so great at what they call “joie de vivre” – the joy of living. I slowed down and started to savor life, to thoroughly enjoy its experiences. Then, being surrounded by beauty all around – the architecture, the clothes, the flowers, even how fruit is displayed in the market – was such a gateway for me. It noticed it everywhere to the point of being so moved by it that tears would come. I realized one day that this beauty all around me is just a reflection of my own beauty within – but I needed it as a reminder because for so long I just could not recognize my own.

Paris made me fall in love with life, with who I was in it. Something opened, softened and it was as if the external façade and my protective wall simply melted. It was this reconnection to myself, how I opened into allowing others to hold me and care for me while I struggled with my health, that also reconnected me to a community in a deep way.

Paris became the freedom I sought because finally, at last, I discovered that freedom within myself. This is why the work I now love doing most is holding my private one-to-one retreats in the City of Light. Something comes alive in women in this magical place – and I love witnessing and guiding the transformations that take place here during these life-changing retreats.

What message do you want to convey about the importance of self-discovery and living a life aligned with your true self?

You are, and have always been, that which you are seeking.

The sooner you turn your gaze inward, and search for it within, the sooner you will find fulfillment in life. Until then you will place tremendous expectations on others, you will be disappointed by jobs, places and things - and you will wonder why. This is living life as a victim of your circumstances and all it takes is a shift for your life to transform - a shift in seeing.

All the power resides within you and taking radical responsibility for how incredible your life can be is how you get to create and live a life you love. Allow yourself to be so connected to who you are at your core – love, peace, abundance – that the external world simply reflects to you everything that you already are within. That is true manifesting.

That is living soul-led. And it is simply magical.

May Marta's story serve as a testament to the boundless capacity of the human spirit to navigate through adversity and emerge in the brilliance of self-discovery. Let her journey be a reminder that, in the tapestry of life, every thread, no matter how challenging, contributes to the beauty of the whole.

With heartfelt gratitude, we extend our sincere thanks to Marta for generously sharing the intricate chapters of her life. Your story is a beacon of inspiration, illuminating the path of self-discovery and resilience for all who encounter it.