The Femme Cast
Welcome to The Femme Cast—the podcast for women who are truly ready to break free from toxic relationship cycles, choose themselves, and become a magnet for the love they deserve.
I’m Maria Rei, aka The Femme Coach—Master Energy Healer, Radical Self-Love Leader, and Relationship Mentor. I’ve been where you are, stuck in cycles of chasing love, waiting for validation, and abandoning myself in the name of relationships. But I turned my pain into purpose, and now I’m here to help you do the same.
Each week, I share personal stories, actionable insights, and a blend of spiritual and practical tools to help you heal from past wounds, reclaim your self-worth, and rewrite your love story. You’ll hear everything from vulnerable truths about my own journey to breaking toxic patterns to empowering lessons that will guide you toward creating the healthy, loving relationships you crave.
Join me as we say goodbye to self-abandonment, people-pleasing, and unhealthy dynamics, and hello to radical self-love, emotional freedom, and true empowerment.
It’s time to choose yourself and step into the love you were always meant for. Ready?
Let’s do this.
The Femme Cast
From Breakdown to Breakthrough: The Night My Sacred Reclamation Method Was Born on a Stormy Beach in Thailand
What if the chaos you're resisting is actually the medicine your soul's been asking for?
In this raw, soul-cracking episode of The Femme Cast, I take you behind the scenes of a moment that changed everything—the night I was trapped by a tropical storm on a remote beach in Thailand, no way out, and nowhere to hide… not even from myself.
Cut off from distractions, coping mechanisms, and the outside world, I had no choice but to face the tidal wave of emotions I’d buried for years: heartbreak, betrayal, rage, grief. And what erupted was the beginning of something powerful—my Sacred Reclamation Method ™ —a transformative framework that sees our emotions not as burdens, but as portals to radical healing, soul evolution, and quantum-level change.
This episode is part memoir, part medicine. I’m dismantling the toxic spiritual idea that we "attract" negative experiences because we’re broken, flawed, or not healed enough. Instead, I invite you to see your storms as sacred initiations—DNA-deep invitations to shed, shift, and alchemize the parts of you still clinging to survival, so you can step into the woman you were always meant to be.
Inside this episode:
- The true story of my heartbreak healing trip through Thailand and Bali
- How a wild storm on the edge of the sea cracked me wide open
- Why your emotions aren’t the problem—they’re the pathway
- What spiritual bypassing gets wrong about “positive thinking”
- How soul fragments get lodged in the body and attract experiences that beg to be healed
- The real alchemy that happens when you stop fixing and start feeling
- How emotional chaos can become your greatest catalyst for becoming
This isn’t just a story about travel. It’s a story about truth.
Whether you're in the thick of your own storm or still trembling from the last one, this episode is a permission slip to stop resisting the chaos—and start asking the real question:
How is this storm here to evolve me?
🎧If you’re ready to meet the version of you that’s forged in fire and freedom, press play. This one is for the woman who’s tired of pretending she's fine and is ready to rise—wild, weepy, worthy, and whole.
Stop begging to be chosen. Choose yourself instead.
You’re not here to beg, chase, or perform for the bare minimum.
You’re here to reclaim your power and become magnetic to real, soul-aligned love, success, and abundance.
Reclaim the version of you that never had to beg to be chosen.
Book your 90-minute Sacred Reclamation Intensive.
But fair warning—authentic connections, aligned opportunities, and breakthroughs in love, money, and purpose are inevitable.
Hey guys, what is up? Welcome back to the show. I'm so excited and grateful to have you here. Welcome if you're new.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:A while ago, I did a special series on some of the tools and techniques for, you know, moving through the storms in life, right Weathering the storms, moving through difficult times, moving through chaos, change, transformation, upheaval Sometimes that is way beyond our control. I wanted to take that a little bit deeper this time, because I'm actually moving through a storm right now as we speak. It is not my first storm. It will not be my last.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Okay, I do believe that as we move through our healing, evolution and transformation, the storms come. They present themselves as an opportunity for us to evolve and grow. And I do believe that without these storms that come into, they shape us, they mold us, they help us to purge what we no longer need, they help us to see what patterns, what behaviors or beliefs we're ready to let go of. They're literally transforming us at a DNA level when we move through these storms, and the worst thing that we can do is, you know, fight them, resist them, fix and over process mentally. You know, it's literally an alchemist, an alchemical process of feeling the experience, allowing it to move through you and asking yourself how is this here to help you evolve? Who is it helping you to become? What is it that you need to heal, let go of, learn, do differently, believe differently. What's outdated, like there's so many things that you know get transformed from these difficult moments in our lives. You know, a diamond is, you know, created under enormous pressure, and I do believe that that's what these storms that you know sometimes life just brings to the table are here for. And I think one of the most toxic beliefs that I've actually heard out in the spiritual community and the personal development community is oh well, you know, if it's happening to you, then you know, obviously you attracted it. So if you attracted a negative experience sometime, then obviously you're feeling something negative. Yes and no right. Like, yes, there's something in you that needs to be healed. Like, yes, there's something in you that needs to be healed, and that's why this storm, this chaos, this upheaval, has kind of shown up for you. Of course, yes, like, I mean, that's a given. But instead of making it mean that you're bad or you're wrong, or you've done something wrong or you're not good enough, which is oftentimes how a lot of these messages tend to land. We get to look at this as okay. Well, how is this here for me? How is this asking me to evolve? How is this asking me to heal something within myself and come out better, stronger, more evolved on the other side and we don't always get it right, we don't. You know, sometimes it's hit or miss. Sometimes, you know, two steps forward, 10 steps back. There's no linear timeline when it comes to your healing, but it is important to move through these storms and see the blessing in these.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:After I had gone through you know my heartbreak era, which I've talked about a lot, you know a lot of lying, a lot of cheating, a lot of manipulation, gaslighting, just a lot of emotional abuse and toxic relationship dynamics and I went, you know, I started on my you know whole self-love era and I went to Asia for six months and you know the first few months I was there. Well, the first month I was there, I basically did nothing because I was terrified. So it took me a few weeks to just kind of get acclimated. So, you know, I spent my first few weeks in northern Thailand, in Chiang Mai. My first few weeks in Northern Thailand and Chiang Mai, um slowly got my sea legs and my travel legs on and slowly started to get out there and and and you know, live this experience that I'd been, you know, longing for for so long. But you know, when I got there, I was literally like a hamster and, like you know, when you let the hamster you know that's experiment you keep a hamster in a cage long enough, then you let it out of his cage and it's still walking within like like I don't know, a 12 inch radius. That was me right when I first got there.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:But slowly and surely I started to kind of step out of my comfort zone and I started to go out and I started to do things and then, a month after I had arrived, I decided to go to Bali, where I had been before, and so I didn't have to do a lot of sightseeing when I was there because I had kind of been there, done that. I just wanted to go and kind of loaf by the beach in my favorite spot in Bali, and just kind of loaf for as long as I could. And I kid you not, like I was there for four weeks, I would have been there longer but the universe kind of stepped in and said no, you're leaving. And the reason why I think that this, this was, it was all just such a divine design, you know, and this was really, it was really the birthplace of emotional energetics was this trip. And so, like I really want to illustrate how important sometimes, these difficult moments and periods and seasons in our lives can shape us and mold us in ways that we've never dreamed possible. So, like I said before in a previous episode and I've said it a thousand times I knew I was meant to go on this trip. I didn't know why and I didn't know what was waiting for me on the other side. I just knew it was important for me to go and so, anyway.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So I get to Bali, and you know, suddenly, like I'm making all these new friends, we're partying till dawn, I've met all these amazing people, I'm dating a shit ton of guys again, even though I promised myself I wasn't going to do this. And you know, like it just felt, like you know, it was on for like four weeks that I was there and I was like, oh my God, that's it. I'm going to stay, I'm going to spend the rest of my like five months here, or six, four months, however, months. I had left at that time. I'm like, I'm not leaving, I'm just going to stay in Bali.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Sure enough, my visa. There was apparently two different kinds of visas that you can get when you land. One of them is easily extendable, the other one is not. I had the one that was not easily extendable, so I was basically forced to leave Bali and then, and then, you know, I had the option to come back and get another visa when I returned. So a lot of people would do that they would go away for the weekend and then they would kind of come back and they would extend their visas.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:But for whatever reason, I kind of felt like my time there was done, even though I didn't want it to be done, and I was crying as I was leaving and I was just having like the biggest freaking tantrum because I was having such a good time there. But you know, there I was back on a five-hour flight back to Thailand, but this time I was going to stay in the South and I guess maybe the reason why I didn't go back is because there was so much for me to see and do in the South and you know, all these beautiful beaches and amazing food. And I was like, okay, you know all these beautiful beaches and amazing food. And I was like, hey, you know what? Let me just see what this has for me. Um, and I did meet some amazing people and I started to meet some amazing friends and I did a meditation retreat, my second one, while I was there.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Um, it was actually a shit show. That's actually a story for a whole other day. But anyway, we ended up running away from that meditation retreat. Um, it was bad. It was so bad. It was not the Land of Smiles meditation retreat that you read about online, that's for sure.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So, you know, long story short, you know, I was kind of like bumping through the South and kind of going, you know, hopping from island to island and homestay to homestay. And then I met up with these amazing friends when we left the meditation retreat and we really clicked. And it was so funny because in the meditation retreat we were like, you know, we were forced to be silent, obviously, for the nine days or 10 days that we were there. Again, we didn't stay for the full duration of the meditation stay, but the whole time. We're like passing notes to one another, right, so we had actually, and then we would go back to our rooms and we would kind of, like you know, whisper and share snacks because we weren't supposed to eat after, like I think it was 11 am in the morning every day. Anyway, long story short, we became really close and then we all ran away together and we just started beach hopping together.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So we went to this amazing beach, just kind of on the I think it was the east coast of Koh Phangan, and you know, I always my rule for travel is always this always ask the locals where to go, because they know the spots that the you know, the tour guides and the Lonely Planet sometimes just don't know right. So we went to this amazing beach that this local family recommended for us. We had the best time. It was, it was, it was a bit it was, it was. It was really really really remote. Like the only two ways to get there were jungle Jeep or, sorry, mountain side jungle Jeep or what's it called, um long tail boat from the Harbor. So there's no, like there's no regular roads to actually get to the spot that we were in. So, anyways, um, we stayed there for a few days. It was great, we were having a great time.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:But then, um, the other two girls that I was with had to kind of make their way back to the Harbor because they were um kind of going to like the North of the island, I think, or they were going across to another island. I needed to get back to the mainland but I couldn't because the boats in the mainland had been cut off due to rough waters. There was like a storm that came in a couple of weeks prior. So you can only kind of stay like you can only move around between these like two or three islands that were really close to one another. There was no boats going back to the mainland at this point. So we were kind of stuck right, we couldn't go anywhere, and so I didn't want to go to the island that they were going to and I didn't want to stay kind of in town in the resort that we were staying at. It was just, it was too, it was just too touristy for me and I just kind of wanted to. You know, I kind of wanted to be with the beach bums, right. So we went there, we spent a night or two there and then I ended up going back to where we were staying. I we had met some friends there that were amazing. I totally was crushing on this guy who I was hoping was still there.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Anyway, I get back to this place guys gone, friends are gone. Suddenly I'm here on this remote beach in the middle of fucking nowhere, I know, no one. I am trying to make friends but for some reason this time around it's feeling a little tricky, so I'm feeling very isolated on this beach. The sea has, you know, gone from. You know, maybe like three or four foot waves, to now what we're looking at is like six or eight foot waves. I mean, it's now. It's now like like full on stormy waters and at night they would get really high. We're talking like maybe like 12 or 12 foot waves, which is really high for Thailand. Um, bali, okay, yeah, you see this, but not in Thailand and certainly not at the place where I was staying. Um, so we're kind of stuck on this beach. Um, it's been raining, so the the jungle Jeep is it's hard to get onto, the boats are not coming, um, and so I'm stuck and, you know, the harder I try to make friends, the more awkward it starts to feel, the more alone I actually start to believe that I am and the room that I was staying at was no longer available, so I had to stay at this other room, which was crazy expensive.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:It was actually a cabin for a family, not just like one person, but it was this beautiful cabin and I still remember it had. It was so, if you can imagine, it was like a long, it was a sandy beach cove, but then there was rocks and cliffs on either side. So this cabin and these rocks are like I'm talking like ginormous boulders, okay, like literally like lining the coastline. This cabin was built on one of these boulders so you can actually see the formation of the boulder and the and the cliffs within the cabin. They kind of built it around the boulder and the cabin cabin, uh, the, the cliffs, um, so there's like trees in my cabin, there's like the side of a rock in my cabin and the cabin's kind of built around it and it's beautiful, breathtaking bathroom, beautiful like wooden terrace with like a hammock right over the boulder and then the sea is literally crashing into, like on the rocks where the cabin is built on. So it was beautiful during the day.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So I kind of spent some time there and I was just kind of journaling and meditating. You know I was, I was, I was because I had just left a meditation retreat. It's funny, like everything was this perfect storm Because, you know, I had run away from my life and all the pain that was there. I, you know, I had run away from my life and and all the pain that was there. I, you know, tried to numb my pain in Bali. But also, what was unique about Bali was the toxic patterns that I was perpetuating and how, uh, you know, didn't matter where you went or what you did or how far you traveled. You know your shit comes with you, your patterns come with you, your beliefs come with you and that was really shown to me on that trip. So I had, you know, just ran away from my life. I had just seen all my worst patterns and shadows and demons and experienced them in Bali, either trying to numb them or perpetuating them.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Then I go on this meditation retreat and, you know, get triggered as fuck because it was like it was just so crazy. I have to tell that story on another episode. But, you know, because I had been meditating for so many days, from morning till night, and, you know, eating a really like, really, really, really clean plant based diet. For so long, you know, my channels were really clear, um, and my connection to my intuition was like it had never been stronger than than those weeks following that meditation retreat. Um, because, you know, meditating a lot, resting a lot, um, quieting your thoughts and and not talking too much. And you know, not being distracted by social media and computers and all these things, right, not being distracted by social media and computers and all these things, right, because they took our gadgets away as soon as we arrived and really only having like a journal to you know, communicate with yourself, right, and then eating the super clean plant-based diet while you're there and actually going through these long, long drawn out periods of intermittent fasting. My channels had never been more, like, more amplified than they were in that period where I found myself in that cabin.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:And then there was that, you know, there was that perfect storm of the storm outside and then the storm of, you know, wanting to latch on to friendships or this guy that I was crushing on, and suddenly everybody was gone and I was just left in that dark cabin alone with the storm going on outside, and I couldn't really go outside when it got late because the wave started to literally crash over the path. So I was kind of stuck there Like I couldn't leave. I couldn't leave my cabin. It was, you know, quite a ways from the cabin next to me and you know, wi-fi was down at this point because the storm was getting so bad outside and because the waves were getting so high and this cabin was built on these boulders. The waves are now crashing on the boulder and it's sounding like a bomb is going off. Every time one of these waves crashes.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:I am petrified, I am starting to panic, I am starting to feel all of this stuff out of nowhere that I couldn't explain what was happening to me and suddenly I was alone with my thoughts and my feelings, and I literally had no escape. Not only did I not have an escape, all I had left was the memory or the experience of all the triggers that happened to me in the days leading up to this trip and where I found myself in that moment, and even the months before I even took this trip. Suddenly everything started to bubble to the surface and everything that I had been holding beneath the surface for so long started to bubble. And suddenly I start to feel all these emotions that are not part of this experience that I'm having right now, like physically, right now, in this cabin. I could understand fear.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Where was the rage coming from?
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Where was the anger coming from? Where was the anger coming from? Where was the resentment coming from? Where was all these feelings that had nothing to do with this moment coming from? And I had nothing left to soothe them? Nothing, there was nothing. There wasn't a wifi signal, there wasn't um, there wasn't anybody to communicate to, there wasn't anybody to reach out to, there wasn't any like substance to take that would numb it at this point, other than my cigarettes that I had with me at the time, um, which really weren't cutting it at this point, um, and so there I was, and, and every time one of those waves hit the boulder and I felt that I heard that explosive sound of the wave crashing and my cabin shaking, every emotion I felt in my body suddenly intensified and I was just as a ball of anger, hate and rage and resentment, and I didn't even know where it was coming from, and all I could do now was scream. I rage screamed for what felt like hours. For hours I screamed, I cried, I sobbed, I tried to get into a bath. I screamed and sobbed harder, to the point where I started to lose my voice and I knew nobody could hear me and for the first time there was this freedom. Because I think, you know, even when we do this rage work, sometimes you know and I always say, you know, scream into a pillow or, you know, let it out like rage on a page, let it out and, you know, let it out of you. But you know, there's always that part of you that's always afraid that someone's going to hear you. There's always that part of you that's afraid that someone's going to pick up and read your journal. One day you don't think what kind of fucked up person are you? But I didn't have that. It was just no one could hear me and I felt both the danger of where I was, the trigger of where I was, but also the immense freedom to just finally fucking let it all out and not have to worry about somebody hearing me or judging me or wondering what the fuck is going on in the room next to them. You know, because no one could hear me and there was a beautiful fear in that, because it's like something happens to me now nobody would ever know. I'm like on my own here, but there was also a deep, sacred liberation that took place in that moment, because I had never been able to just do that, to just let it out like that and not have to worry about scaring somebody or somebody thinking that I'm crazy, or you know finally being able and I'm crying now as I think about this moment, because it's very, it's now that, as I'm talking about it, it's now very visceral in my body and I can feel it to finally be able to let out everything that I had been holding on to for so long, from years of abuse, from years of emotional manipulation, from years of, you know, being feeling disempowered in all of my relationships, not being able to speak my truth, to stand up for myself, to fully be myself, and to constantly be waiting for other people's approval and doing everything I felt I needed in order to get that approval, and then only becoming angry and resentful when I was met with the exact opposite, always feeling like I wasn't enough, always feeling like I was being taken advantage of, always feeling like I was. You know and I remember saying this so many times you know, being treated like I was something that someone stepped in on the way into work one day. You know it was that kind of feeling and that deep level of just unworthiness. All the times that I loved someone and they ghosted me without a second thought. All the times that I gave my heart to somebody only to have them like, throw, like, just break it into a million pieces by, you know, nonchalantly, just you know, cheating on me with someone else, like and and and, literally like blindsiding me after all the love and trust that I put in this person bosses and and and, and. You know people at work sexually harassing me and getting away with it because they were in position of power and I couldn't do anything about it, you know, and always feeling silenced, always feeling like I didn't have a voice to stand up for myself, to say you don't get to treat me that way. You know, and every time that I did do that, the only thing I was met with was, you know, pushback or retaliation or just being. You know being made to feel like. You know my rage, my anger, my wanting to stand up for myself and and set a boundary and and say, no, you don't get to treat me that way, was now somehow worse than how they hurt me. You know there was always that perception of. You know I was the bad guy for standing up for myself. I was the bad guy for setting the boundary. I was the bad guy for saying no, no, no, you don't get to treat me this way. Setting the boundary. I was the bad guy for saying no, no, no, you don't get to treat me this way. You know, rather than looking at the, you know the emotional abuse, the cheating, the two-timing, the. You know emotional neglect, or you know the ghosting, or the breadcrumbing that I was saying no to, and even stuff you know from childhood, from abuse that I experienced in daycare to later. You know when I was, you know, a teen. You know all the struggles that you know I experienced during that time, which was very tumultuous time for me. All of it was now here at present and in the room, and now all these unhealed parts of myself are screaming and crying. And in that moment was when I discovered emotional energetics and what became evidently clear to me is because I was a people pleaser and, you know, overgiver, and you know constantly self-abandoning and, um, you know, suppressing how, what I needed and what I was feeling, um, in order to do the right thing, do the nice thing, do what I think that people needed me or wanted me to do, or what I had to do in order to be loved. You know I suppressed a lot of emotion. A ton of emotion was. You know, you think it's gone and you laugh throughout your day and you giggle and you make jokes and people think that you're this like, you know, you know fun person to be around, but what they don't realize is everything that you're carrying beneath the surface of all that and a lot of. You know what I was carrying beneath the surface was a lot of fucking rage, a lot of rage, a lot of hate, anger, resentment and pain. And that stuff doesn't go away. We think it does because we think if we're laughing and we're having a good day and we wake up feeling happy or grateful that we've somehow let go of that stuff, and people always say, you know, you just got to let it go, you just got to move past it, you just got to think positive. That is actually the worst fucking advice you can give somebody who's holding onto emotional, unprocessed pain, because the reality is that stuff just lives inside of you and it stores up in your body and it creates, you know, there's this, there's, um, there's this thing that we, you know, we call them the spiritual, spiritual community. It's called the soul fragment, right, and whenever we experience something very difficult and very painful, it creates a soul fragment which is basically you know, it's basically like a trauma response. It's like there's a part of you that's frozen in that experience. There's a part of you that's frozen in that emotion and is stuck there. And what's happening is because your soul, your soul is hardwired to heal, your soul is hardwired to evolve. So, when you have these soul fragments that are holding on to rage, pain, anger, resentment, hate, hurt, sadness, grief, what ends up happening is you end up these soul fragments within you. They're all a part of you, they're all a part of who you are. What they start to do is they start to attract people, places and things into your reality that are going to trigger them, so that you can feel them. Your emotions want to be felt. This is a power that has been hidden from us for centuries. You guys, your emotions were meant to be felt. They were meant to be fully experienced and almost birthed into, into existence, but not uh, how do I put this Like you know it's it's not a, it's not something that you get, it's not something that you're creating, it's not something that you're creating or perpetuating. I want to make this clear there's a, there's a. There's a very powerful whoops, hit my mic. There's a very powerful distinction between feeling your emotions and allowing them to move through you and perpetuating them. You know, when we get stuck, sometimes in the discomfort or we get into the feeling of the emotion, suddenly we make a story around it, we make ourselves the victim around it, we start to play the blame game around it, we start to make it believe something, make ourselves believe that, make it make believe something, make ourselves believe, make it make I can't find my words make that experience mean something about who we are and assign a story to it. Right, and so that's the part that we want to try and avoid, right? That's where we get stuck. So we're either completely repressing it and ignoring it, or bypassing it by trying to think positive, smile and practice our gratitude, or we're completely, um, you know, raging out, holding onto it, spewing it on our relationships and our experience around us, making everyone else like, bleeding over everyone else who didn't cause that pain, um, and creating all this toxicity and turmoil in our lives and in our relationships. The path to healing is in feeling these emotions fully and allowing them to be there and allowing yourself to cry and move through them and acknowledge them and love them and appreciate them and then understand why they're present. What is it that they're trying to help you see? How is it that they're trying to help you evolve? What do they wish you would have done differently in that moment? And how can you apply that to your life today? That's what the emotions are there for. And then, once you feel them, and you feel them fully, and you feel like you have nothing left to feel, like you've done your feeling and you feel complete, then you look at the lesson, then you look at what they're trying to teach you. Then you start to think, okay, how can I apply this to my life today? And then you can start to move into love and gratitude. The problem is, we try to bypass all of that emotional feeling and processing and move into love and gratitude, and that only ends up storing the emotion somewhere within us until we get so full that we end up exploding over the people that we love, and that is not what we want and this and we're going to talk more about this in episodes to come but when we do this process, there's an alchemical process that happens at a DNA level that shifts your vibration and actually creates miracles in your life. But you have to have the courage to go into the trenches with everything that you've been avoiding, so I'm going to leave that here. Let me know wherever you're seeing this in the comments below, in the podcast or on socials, or wherever what part of this you're taking away and what really resonated for you, and if you love this episode, please, please, leave a positive rating and review wherever you're seeing this. Until next time, you guys, massive love.
