From BBC World Service Fb page: Lithuanian singer Rūgilė Daujotaitė spent years searching for peace through New Age spirituality. Little by little, she was falling apart. When Rūgilė Daujotaitė competed to represent her country in the Eurovision Song Contest, her life seemed great. She was dressed as a Thunder Goddess on TV, with a white tunic and red cape, famous and successful - but inside she was struggling deeply. "I felt tortured emotionally," she says. "I felt a kind of depression. I felt strange influences in my physical and spiritual body, like maybe I was possessed." Lithuania is a predominantly Catholic country, but Rūgilė's mother and grandmother were drawn to New Age practices - a set of beliefs combining Eastern religions, alternative healing, meditation, astrology, and mysticism. Surrounded by these ideas from a young age, Rūgilė began searching for answers. "New Age is make your own truth. Make your own God. People believe that they can themselves determine what is truth," she says. As an adult, Rūgilė moved to Amsterdam in The Netherlands to study jazz. She became involved in shamanic practices and began taking ayahuasca, a powerful psychedelic drug. Back in Lithuania, her fame grew - but she was living two lives, performing in public during the day and taking part in intense rituals at night. All dressed in white, she would stand in a circle with fellow practitioners, dancing and singing for 10 hours or more while taking the drug – which is illegal in Lithuania, and can lead to vomiting and convulsions. "I was getting worse and worse. Inside, I was tortured emotionally, spiritually, mentally. I had hysteria sometimes. I felt terrible. I could not control my emotions," she says. She teamed up with another shamanic leader in Lithuania and began offering retreats teaching others how to find happiness. She felt like a liar – a spiritual leader falling apart on the inside. Rūgilė she says that most New Age practitioners are gentle and peaceful, but she couldn't understand why the same people came back to her year after year - and seemed worse each time. She started to read the Bible, and questioning her beliefs. At a retreat in Tenerife, Spain, she told her group not to drink ayahuasca - there was something really wrong with it. Now, she says becoming Catholic has transformed her life. She says she feels a deep trust in God – and rather than believing she is on the road to enlightenment, she accepts herself as the imperfect human she is. Hear more on Heart and Soul: https://bbc.in/4chOafy
