From Silence to Spirit: Maruis Aldridge on Trauma, Healing and Finding His Light

Content note: This article includes references to childhood sexual abuse, suicidal thoughts and mental-health crisis. It also discusses plant medicine and spiritual healing as part of Maruis’s personal experience. These experiences and beliefs are presented as his own and are not medical advice.

“Maruis, you don’t need Christ consciousness. You are Christ consciousness.”

That is what Maruis Aldridge says Jesus told him during a plant-medicine retreat in Exmoor National Park.

He remembers a beautiful face, striking blue eyes and the sensation of Jesus taking his face in both hands. Then, almost as quickly as the figure appeared, he was gone. Maruis looked around at the clouds, the moon visible in the daytime and the nine other people on the retreat. He felt connected to everything.

For Maruis, it was not simply a vision. It changed the way he understood his entire life.

“Everything is perfect as it is, including the imperfections,” he told me. “Whatever happened to me in my primitive years was supposed to happen for me to be able to stand exactly where I was at that point in time.”

His words should not be read as suggesting that a child is ever responsible for abuse. Maruis was describing the meaning he has made from what happened to him, not excusing the people responsible.

His encounter also took him back towards a faith he had spent years trying to reconcile with who he was.

When silence was the only power he had

Maruis was born and raised in South Africa during the final years of apartheid. He grew up within a white Afrikaner culture that he remembers as deeply religious, proud of its heritage and oppressive in ways he could see around him.

He was also a gay child trying to hide who he was.

Alongside the racism he witnessed and the pressure to conform, Maruis says he experienced sexual abuse for five years. He learnt very young not to draw attention to himself.

“Silence was the language that I spoke best,” he said.

Later in our conversation, he described silence as the only power he had. He did not understand it that way as a child. At the time, it was survival: keep his head down, hide parts of himself and carry things no child should have to carry.

At 19, a door opened. His best friend Brenda and Brenda’s aunt Daphne helped make it possible for them to travel to the UK.

“Your souls are way too big for South Africa,” Daphne told them.

Moving did not instantly heal everything, but it gave Maruis more room to express himself. The childhood he had survived continued into adulthood through shame, fear and the patterns he had developed to stay safe. By his mid-thirties, he had experienced panic attacks, psychiatric admissions and suicidal thoughts.

There was family rejection too. Maruis spoke about being raised Christian and then suppressing his Christianity for around two decades because he could not understand how he was supposed to worship a God who, according to what he had been taught, rejected him for being gay.

For a period, he felt closer to Buddhist principles. He would tell people that his religion was kindness and compassion. Today, he is not terribly interested in squeezing himself into a neat religious label. “Spiritualist” is probably the closest, but his real conviction is that the divine is not separate from us.

That is a very different understanding of God from the one that caused him so much conflict when he was younger.

Choosing healing — more than once

Maruis is open about the fact that there was no single miraculous moment that fixed his life. He spent roughly 15 years exploring different ways of healing.

“There’s no one thing that is going to help you heal and fix you,” he said. “It’s a combination of lots of things that you have to do to become more your authentic self.”

One of those experiences was plant medicine. On his first journey, which he attended with his husband, Grant, Maruis says he was taken straight back to the abuse and oppression of his childhood. Two understandings came from it: he did not have to be perfect to be loved, and what happened to him as a child was not his fault.

He says he came away feeling 15 years younger, yet something continued to nudge him to go deeper. Five weeks later, he attended a four-day retreat and set an intention to experience what he calls Christ consciousness. That was where he had the encounter with Jesus.

Four days after returning home, he began to write.

He had never planned to become an author, but memories he had suppressed began returning with an extraordinary clarity. He wrote chapters out of sequence—chapter 12, then chapter three, then chapter 24—entirely on his phone. His husband would remind him to do something else and Maruis would reply, “No, I need to get this out now.”

The manuscript took four months.

When he finally read it from beginning to end, he was amazed that the chapters interlaced. Maruis believes the book was channelled through spirit. A reader may understand the creative process differently, but there is no doubting how immediate and consuming it felt to him.

The result was From Broken to Brilliant: The Unscripted Journey to Finding Wholeness.

He calls it “a love letter to light”. It begins with South Africa and moves through the darkest parts of his life, but becomes lighter—and, he promises, funnier—as it reaches the man he is today.

“Your wounds don’t cancel who you are,” he said. “Healing is possible, but you have to choose it. You have to choose yourself.”

The therapy that opened another door

Before the book, Maruis encountered Spiritual Response Therapy, usually shortened to SRT. It is a spiritual practice developed by Robert Detzler which uses a pendulum and a set of charts. Practitioners believe they can work with the Higher Self and access information held within the Akashic Records—described in some spiritual traditions as a kind of energetic record of a soul’s experiences.

This is not a scientifically established therapy, and its ideas will not fit everyone’s worldview. For Maruis, however, his first session felt profound.

The practitioner focused on what he describes as inner-child wounds. Maruis remembers crying, shivering and sweating—“snot everywhere”, as he put it—before leaving the session feeling light and unable to stop giggling.

He wanted to understand it immediately. A week later he experienced what he calls spiritual restructuring, then completed basic and advanced SRT training. Today, he works as a practitioner and teaches alongside the woman who first introduced him to it.

Maruis describes SRT as an “identify, clear and replace” system. In a session, he prepares himself through a ritual of connecting with his Higher Self, asking his ego to step aside and visualising a protective bubble of light. Using the charts and pendulum, he looks for what he interprets as negative programmes, limiting beliefs, inner-child blocks or past-life influences. He then asks spirit to clear those energies and replace them with something more helpful.

He is also careful about the word healer.

“Although I’m an energy healer, I’m not healing anybody,” he said. “I’m basically just facilitating the right space and frequency for you to heal yourself.”

I had not experienced SRT before, so I kept asking the obvious questions. What does connecting to spirit actually feel like? How does he know that an impression is not simply his own thought?

For Maruis, it is physical. He may sweat, feel suddenly cold or see pictures in his mind. Goosebumps down his neck and spine are what he takes as confirmation. He calls his strongest intuitive sense claircognisance—clear knowing.

There was a wonderfully unscripted moment when I asked him for an example of information he could not have known. He told me he had quietly done a clearing on me before we began recording.

“You are joking,” I said.

He was not.

He said the subject of learning had come up: the more I learn, the more I realise how much more there is to learn. That landed, because before recording I had told him I did not completely understand why I was making these podcasts beyond wanting to learn and share. What I had not explained was how difficult I sometimes find it to absorb knowledge. I can turn one page and feel as though another 75 million chapters have appeared.

Then our conversation became even more spontaneous. I told him that, as a child, I would see what I understood to be spirits around my bed. I became frightened and demanded that it stop. Part of me has wondered whether I created a block that remains in place, even though I now want to explore mediumship again.

Still holding his pendulum, Maruis checked his charts. He interpreted the answer as a block within my conscious mind and performed a brief clearing there and then.

“All done,” he said.

I could only reply, “My word.”

Jesus, religion and a love beyond words

The most personal connection between us came when Maruis described the love he felt during his encounter with Jesus. It reminded me of a dream I once had.

In the dream, I was not in human form. I felt like a ball of energy, floating, when a presence I understood to be Jesus cradled me like a baby. I am a nearly 50-year-old man, yet that is exactly how it felt. The love I woke with was almost too much to contain. The closest comparison I have is the extremity of grief after somebody dies, except this was not painful. It felt eternal.

Maruis recognised it immediately.

“Words are not enough to describe the love and the unity that I felt as a soul,” he said.

Neither of us can prove what those experiences were. Dream, altered state, spiritual contact, something arising from within us—people will reach different conclusions. What was real was the effect. For Maruis, the encounter helped transform Christianity from a source of rejection into an understanding of love over ego and service to others.

His spirituality now extends into beliefs about reincarnation, soul contracts and past lives. He believes that souls incarnate alongside familiar groups, taking different roles in order to learn. He also believes he once lived as a gay Jewish man who died at Auschwitz, an interpretation he reached through SRT after years of feeling drawn to the history of the Holocaust.

That claim needs to be held with particular care. It is Maruis’s spiritual belief; it is not something that can be independently verified, and the historical suffering of Holocaust victims should never be treated casually. Maruis connected the experience with patterns he sees in his present life: queerness, oppression, racism and physical pain in his knees. Visiting Auschwitz in September 2022 affected him deeply and, he says, accelerated his spiritual awakening.

He believes he has lived 5,876 lifetimes and that this will be his final incarnation. When I asked what comes next, he replied that he plans to create planets and manage galaxies.

That made me laugh. “In conversation with Maruis: what’s he doing next? He’s going to design and manage the galaxies of the universe.”

His certainty and my curiosity do not always occupy precisely the same place, but that is why these conversations interest me. I do not have to turn every unusual experience into established fact to listen properly to the person who lived it.

The man who chose himself

Away from charts, soul contracts and galaxies, I wanted to know what brings Maruis joy in the life he is living now.

His answer brought us back to his life today: Grant, the husband who understands and supports him, and their two cats.

There was still room for one more past-life story. During regression therapy, Maruis was told he had once been an Egyptian belly dancer who seduced wealthy men and kept 13 cats. He suspects that may explain a few things about his present life. I rather loved that answer.

Then I asked him to look at the distance between the child who survived through silence and the man speaking so openly today. What was he most proud of?

He paused.

“That I chose myself, and that I came to a realisation that I don’t need to be perfect to be loved—and that I am love itself.”

There is a great deal in Maruis’s spiritual framework that readers may accept, question or interpret in their own way. The human journey beneath it is clear. A child learnt that silence kept him safe. An adult reached a point where life felt unbearable. Healing did not arrive as one tidy answer, but through years of searching, support, spiritual exploration, writing and the difficult decision to choose himself.

At the end of every interview, I ask my guest what single message they would leave with the world from everything they have experienced spiritually.

Maruis did not need time to think.

“You are a divine being full of love and light, and where there is light, there can’t be darkness.”

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on my interview with Maruis Aldridge for the Anthony Larkin Podcast. In the full conversation, we explore his childhood in South Africa, his experience of family rejection, Spiritual Response Therapy, the Akashic Records, his encounter with Jesus, past lives, soul contracts and the writing of From Broken to Brilliant.