Living wild in nature helped me heal from my divorce and gave me a bright new future.
By Luana Ribeira
Back in 2017, I truly hit rock bottom and had no real idea how to pick myself back up again. I was going through a painful divorce and had also been through a difficult situation where I was scammed out of money by someone I had trusted.
As life as I knew it disappeared, I started to feel really constricted, like I was suffocating. I didn’t know who I was or what I was meant to be doing. I felt like a bird in a cage. I began craving space and somewhere new. I knew I needed a change of scene and really wanted to be around nature so I could start to heal, reset and rebuild my life.
In a conversation with my business coach, I kept coming back to the idea of leaving where I was and going somewhere new. In the end, I decided to visit my friend, Al, who had just moved to Portugal, and my coach even offered to pay for the flight so I could make this happen.
When I first left my three-bedroom detached house in Leeds for Portugal, I looked for a similar home out there. I found a wonderful four-bedroom house with a lovely big garden, and at one point, I was living happily there with Al, my kids, my ex-husband, his girlfriend at the time, three dogs, and seven cats. It was a madhouse, but it was a happy chaos.
However, I still felt something wasn’t right. I had effectively just replaced what I had in the UK with something similar in Portugal. Yes, the weather was better, and I was enjoying the lifestyle and culture, but effectively nothing much had changed. I still felt constricted and lacked purpose.
Desperate for space and answers about my life, I accepted my business coach’s invitation to come and stay with her in Australia. I ended up going there for five weeks, and during my time in Australia, I took a trip to Fiji. What was initially meant to be a break from the usual routines ended up changing my life. Fiji transformed me. I fell in love with the place, the way people live their lives, and their values. I finally started to get clarity about what I really wanted from life and what I should do next.
The biggest thing I kept asking myself was: what do I actually need? I had thought what I needed was freedom, but I had already thought I had found that simply by moving to Portugal. When I asked myself again and dug deeper, I realized that what I actually wanted was to get away from the walls, which were making me feel caged. I wanted to live wild, get back to nature and give myself time to truly rediscover myself.
I rang Al and told him my plan, even though I thought it would sound crazy to anyone else. I wanted to find a way to live without walls, and I wanted his help. Before I arrived in Portugal, he had been living on a piece of land he was working to turn into a retreat space, so he invited me to live there with him, without any walls holding me back.
When I returned to Portugal from my trip to Australia, we put our plan into action. By this point, we had also fallen for each other and decided to turn our friendship into a relationship.
My new home was actually a muddy ditch with no running water, electricity, or heating. It was winter in Portugal, and the only protection we had from the elements was a polytunnel. While our new setup would probably be most people’s idea of a nightmare, it ended up being exactly what I needed at that point in my life.
I had very few of my possessions with me and lots of time to think. I realized I needed to be in nature and reach my surrender points. Instead of trying hard to figure things out, I allowed myself to just stop. And at this point, I started to trust that the answers would come to me.
On a practical level, life was challenging—it was muddy, there were no creature comforts or luxuries. At night, it was freezing, and we only had a gas burner for cooking and a double bed to sleep in. But it was also simple, calm and peaceful. I allowed myself a month of doing nothing—no work, no big plans, just peace. I gave myself complete permission to just rest and reset. No more trying to force things or fix problems.
Every day, I would go and sit at the edge of the forest and spend time looking at the trees, breathing in the fresh air and simply reading. This space and freedom allowed me to really start thinking for myself again and gave me the courage to be able to move forward.
In the end, I lived wild in that muddy Portuguese ditch for three months, and it was a pivotal point in my life. Not only did it allow me to grieve for my marriage and my previous life, but it also powered me on to build a new future for myself. While I was in the ditch, I came up with the idea of starting my own PR agency, which has now evolved into a multi-six-figure business known as Dauntless PR.
And my relationship with Al has grown even stronger—we now have a child together, and we have started a new adventure, this time moving to Thailand.
I truly love my life now, even if I did have to hit rock bottom and live in a ditch to get where I am today.
Luana Ribeira is a bestselling author, speaker, actress, and founder of Dauntless PR, where she books personal brands for TV, radio, podcasts, magazines, and the news. This helps experts boost brand awareness and credibility and become the leading voice on their topic.
She has appeared on Forbes, OK Magazine, FOX TV, ITV, BBC, Channel 4, Teen Vogue, Insider and many others.
