Marta Hobbs, originally from Szczecin, Poland, sought refuge in the United States at 13, fleeing oppression. Overcoming challenges of assimilation, she fervently pursued the American Dream. A prosperous TV Production career in NYC preceded her co-founding of CheapCaribbean.com, a multi-billion-dollar venture, with husband Jim. A Paris moves and company sale at 38 preceded her transformative journey through panic attacks, anxiety, and health issues. Marta’s path towards holistic well-being encompassed yoga, meditation, therapy, and personal growth. As SoulCare’s founder, she now guides others towards heart-centered living, reminding that answers lie within.
Your journey from being a political refugee to a successful entrepreneur and founder of SoulCare is truly inspiring. Could you share some of the key moments or experiences that shaped your resilience and drive to pursue “the American Dream”?
Initially, as an immigrant teenager, what drove me was simply the desperate need to fit in, to belong, to have friends. I was 13 when I arrived in America, and I did not speak English nor had I any idea of how different the culture was from what I had experienced in childhood in Poland (this was the 1980’s so I couldn’t just “google it!” lol). It was like the rules of the games had changed along with the landscape. I had to observe, figure it out and adapt. This was really the key skill I developed that allowed me to do so many things in my life – this ability to take a broad view of my environment, study it and the people in it and then basically to shapeshift to become a part of it.Later in life, when I realized what an opportunity coming to America was, it was simply the desire to prove to others (and also to myself) that I too could do big, bold and amazing things. I love a good challenge, I’m a creative thinker and a hard worker, so once I mastered the language, it was just a matter of figuring out what I wanted and then going after it. Initially there was a pain underneath it, because as an immigrant I was often made to feel like I was somehow less than those around me – so I wanted to prove my worthiness – to everyone around me but most of all to myself. I was driven, but the drive was the pain that I felt like an outsider and a foreigner – I wanted to prove that feeling wrong. Now I know that no outside success and accomplishments can do that – it is all an inside job – inner work. And now, after a decade of healing, searching, seeking, self-discovery and growth what drives me is the desire to help others who are struggling with some of the things I faced and overcame in my life.
CheapCaribbean.com became a multi-billion-dollar business, and its success must have been a remarkable accomplishment. What were some of the most significant challenges you and your husband, Jim, faced in building the company, and how did you overcome them?
One of the earliest challenges was constantly being told that what we were trying to do just wouldn’t work. We heard it everywhere. First, many people were surprised that Jim and I started the company together (as a married couple), telling us that in one year, we would most likely be divorced. Then, the fact that online travel wasn’t normal back in 2000, many of our early customers just did not trust the process of booking vacations that way (can you even believe that?!). It was challenging to get a company to process credit cards online for us. It was tricky getting airline contracts as a small online business and some hotels did not like the fact that we used the word “cheap” in our company name. So, you could say that right from the very start most people did not believe in us, in the concept. The way we overcame that was believing in ourselves, in our vision and in our partnership. This was the key to our success, in my opinion. Also, not taking “no” for an answer. ☺
After the sale of CheapCaribbean.com, you experienced a personal crisis that led you on a healing journey into holistic wellness and spirituality. Could you tell us more about that pivotal moment and how it shifted your perspective on life and well-being?
It shifted everything for me. I was 39 and we had just sold the company and moved to Paris, France with our children. So much change at once – it was a shock to my system. Biggest reason for the personal crisis was a loss of identity. I was so tied to my identity as COO and Founder, that when the company sold and I no longer had to play those roles, it was really disorienting. I poured myself into my kids, our house, cooking and baking, volunteer work, travel – but all I was doing was desperately trying to stay busy enough not to feel what was rising up within me.And what was coming up to the surface was old pain from my childhood, the trauma I never got to process. Not just from immigration but also from my early years of growing up in communist Poland. I had used striving, succeeding, achieving, staying busy as a coping skill not to have to face the feelings I wasn’t able to integrate while I was young. At 39, life presented an invitation to go back, to heal. It came in the form of paralyzing anxiety, panic attacks and depression. I tried to run from that as well because who wants to face the pain they have been avoiding for the majority of their life?! But I was simply too exhausted… This started my inner journey and my walk on the spiritual path. It felt messy and painful and confusing. I felt lost and alone. I didn’t understand what was happening. It took several years to get my feet under me and I felt like a broken woman. I completely fell apart. And this was where the magic began. In the allowing of the breaking open, I discovered that there was a whole other way of living and being which nobody told me about! Life became all about discovering this, following little clues here and there, going from book to therapist to healer … I left no stone unturned. And I found my way back – back to my heart, back home to myself. My life then became about helping others who are on this path – to be the support I so much needed but did not have myself a decade ago. I believe that our well-being must involve all – mind, body and spirit. And so I do what I can, to bring people back to their souls, to help reconnect them with the sacred part of who they are, the one that gets lost along the way in our desperate chase of success.
SoulCare seems to be deeply rooted in the principles of self-discovery and healing. Can you explain the core principles and practices that you teach to help individuals slow down, reconnect with their souls, and live a heart-centered life?
There are three core principles to SoulCare. First is safety. We all walk around with various levels of trauma, mostly unaware of this fact, and so the first thing I do in a session with a client is ensure that they are feeling safe – not just in the room we are in, not just in my presence, but in their own body. I use breathwork, somatic experiencing, and other trauma-informed exercises to ensure whoever I am working with is fully embodied and feels safe.The second pillar of SoulCare is wholeness. I really wanted to create and environment where clients can come to be seen, heard and validated in their entirety. We so often compartmentalize our lives and fragment who we are into smaller pieces – being one way with family, one way with friends, one way with colleagues, yet another way on social media. This is so unhealthy and creates so much anxiety, but we all do it. I call this “wearing masks” and in doing so, we are always repressing parts of ourselves. I want my clients to know that all of who they are is welcome – even parts of themselves they are ashamed of or embarrassed about or don’t even like. We focus on not holding back anything, not repressing anything, allowing whomever I am working with to feel free to come with all the complexities of who they are. This is so freeing!The last principle to SoulCare is love. I do not judge anything in anyway. My only role is to hold the entirety of my client’s experience in love. My job is to be fully there, fully present, fully aware of the other person – and allowing their journey to unfold, while holding it all in love.SoulCare is the practice to slow down the mind, get back into the body, quiet the mind and then I guide the client on an inner journey – simply by asking them to imagine being in certain places. We journey together, through the means of breathwork and visualization, into the Inner Castle, the sanctuary of the soul. And it is there that my clients have the most beautiful experiences – reconnecting to their true selves. It is truly an honor and a gift to me to hold these sessions with others.
Your approach to finding happiness, love, health, and purpose as an “inside-out job” is intriguing. How do you guide others in tapping into their inner wisdom and unlocking the answers they seek in life?
By starting them on a spiritual path. There is so much more to life than the external, the material, the physical plane. There is a whole internal landscape just waiting to be discovered and explored. It is there that everything awaits – love, forgiveness, acceptance, compassion, abundance, belonging, even success – we just don’t talk about this way of “achieving.” We are taught that everything on the outside of ourselves should make us happy – a partner in life, a good job with a large salary, a nice house and a fancy car… but most of the time – it only leads to us wanting more – attempting to feed the hungry ghost, forever chasing the next, bigger thing. I believe that our external world is a reflection of our external world. So, if you feel love, peace, abundance, fulfillment and joy within you – life will only reflect that to you on the outside – in the things you attract into your life and your experience. So, I guide others to reconnect with their true selves, their souls, their very essence – and find everything they are seeking there – in their own hearts. That unlocks all the answers and taps us into our inner wisdom. The soul is always calling us home – we just can’t hear her whispers because we are too busy doing instead of simply being.
Throughout your healing journey, you explored various modalities such as yoga, meditation, breathwork, and somatic work. How do you integrate these practices into SoulCare, and how do they contribute to the overall well-being of individuals?
Yes, like I said, I am a hard worker, and I am detail-oriented and driven. When healing became the next project – I went all in! I tried everything and I searched for answers everywhere. It became my purpose, knowing that I am not just doing the work for myself, but that eventually I would be able to share my learnings and discoveries with others. Breathwork, somatic experiencing, meditation, yoga, my years of studying trauma, the nervous system, human anatomy, neuroscience, psychology, child development, attachment theory and experimenting with various healing modalities all have contributed to SoulCare. I experimented with what worked for me (as well as with some things that didn’t) and I took what helped me to feel safe, calm, regulated, connected, held and fully present and from there I explored the connection to the divine, to the sacred. This is how SoulCare came about, really the work of my own healing and discovering what made me feel good in my body and what gave me a sense of complete inner peace and a sense of being supported by some larger force that orchestrates all things in life. There I discovered bliss and I wanted to share it. So, I packaged all this up and I knew I needed to offer it others. I started doing it during Covid to help friends with fear and anxiety and the practice expanded and morphed into what it is today. Once we feel at home in our bodies and connected to our souls – we feel like we can stop the war on life. We can stop the fighting, the forcing, the chasing… life becomes a dance – we receive, we give, we soften, we relax. We trust that everything is working out for us, all of the time… who doesn’t want to feel that way?!
As an author, what message do you hope to convey through your writing, and how do you think your personal experiences enrich the wisdom you share with your readers?
We all suffer. Life can be hard. What I hope to bring to my readers is the message of hope. I want people to know that pain is something that we all experience. Suffering is something we all have in common. I want to normalize talking about it rather than putting on a strong perfected façade and saying, “I’m fine.” This isolates us from each other making us feel like we are so lonely and alone with our struggles.In my book I talk about the hardest parts of my life, I share my heartbreaks, my darkest times and my toughest pain. Because there has been a lot of that in my life – and at the same time my life is beautiful and remarkable and simply extraordinary. I have been given a lot to overcome so that I can encourage others that they too can make it, they too can create a life they love, despite their present or past circumstances. I share how I completely transformed my life, several times, to guide others and encourage them and offer companionship, compassion, understanding and a way forward.
It’s evident that your spiritual walk has brought forth deep insights and wisdom. How do you ensure that your teachings and guidance remain accessible and applicable to people from diverse backgrounds and belief systems?
I am not concerned about that. Actually, I know that what I share and the way I have made meaning of my life and how I choose to live in the world today, isn’t for everyone. And that’s okay. But those who resonate with my message, those who are ready to hear what I am sharing, the hearts that are deeply touched by reading my story and relate to what I say – I am here for those people. In this space, backgrounds and belief systems are irrelevant – the depths to which I am speaking and the part of us that I am addressing is underneath all that. This conversation happens at a soul-level. But it requires an awareness on the part of the listener/reader – an awareness that this part of them exists, or at least a curiosity about it.
You emphasize the concept of remembering our true sacred and whole nature. How can individuals begin this process of remembrance and align their external lives with their internal state?
The first step is really the acknowledgment that as human beings we are mind, body and spirit. Anything less is simply incomplete. If we are repressing or denying any part of the whole – not caring for it, neglecting it – it affects our overall health – mental, physical, emotional and spiritual. Wholeness is about embracing it all and living in balance and harmony.The process of becoming aware of our internal landscape comes next. Most of us live lives on the outside, for the most part. We focus on the physical, the material – the stuff, the jobs, the things. We think the goal IS the external reality, so we chase, we accomplish, we set goals and aim to succeed – completely ignoring what’s going on inside, how our hearts are. Slowing down and taking time to pause in our busy lives is key. Setting aside 10 minutes a couple of times a day to close our eyes, sit in quiet and stillness and just breathe – feeling our feet on the ground, taking up space in our body, letting the breath move through us and focusing on nothing but that experience – this begins the exploration of the internal state. What are we sensing? What are we feeling? What’s present when we tune in and turn our gaze inward? Very often what we find there are old wounds and pain we’ve been avoiding for most of our lives. It is getting through that, which is the most challenging part – the stuff we’ve picked up along the way that blinds us from seeing our sacredness; what blocks us from living out of the truth of who we are. The mind kicks in and we hear our old stories, our limiting beliefs, our inner critic – it’s very noisy inside at first! But it all slows down and quiets down. And SoulCare was created for this very bit – how to get through the chatter and tap into the whole and sacred part of us – the soul. Once you visit this still, quiet and loving space within – your inner sanctuary – you get the glimpse of who you truly are – your essence. And when living from that space and this identity, when living soul-led – you don’t need to align the external life to your internal life – it all falls into place. All you keep doing is coming back within – living by this compass. The goal is to stay aligned there – and allow the external life to take care of itself. This is what is often referred to as living “in the flow.” You just allow life to flow through you – total freedom. Complete inner peace.
SoulCare’s emphasis on inner work and spiritual growth aligns with the rising interest in well-being and mindfulness. How do you envision the future of holistic wellness practices, and what role do you see SoulCare playing in that landscape?
SoulCare is the missing part of holistic wellness.When I set out on my healing journey, I found that there was a lot of health and coaching advice for the body – how to stay fit, get skinny, bio hack your way to your best physical shape. There was a lot of nutritional advice and various opinions on how to best nourish yourself with food. I even found so much for the mind – mindfulness, meditation, all kinds of tools to help care for our mental health. But I had to dig deep for the spiritual self-care tools. I didn’t find many, especially in the mainstream.It is not holistic wellness, if it excludes the spirt. In my opinion, this is the biggest issue in the wellness industry – we aren’t addressing our spiritual needs and our spiritual health. We’ve disconnected from it creating a compartmentalized and fragmented picture and experience of who we are as human beings. Repressing our spiritual selves, cuts us off from creativity, our imagination, our intuition, or dreams, visions, inspiration, and the beauty of mystery in our life. My goal is to bring that back into wellness and offer something to supplement the huge strides we have made recently in self-care by adding in a way to re-connect with and care for the spiritual aspect of who we are.
As someone who has faced and overcome significant challenges, what advice would you give to those who might be going through difficult times and seeking hope and inspiration for a better future?
You are not alone. You are surrounded by people who are also suffering inside (no matter how well-put together they look on the outside) – start sharing your broken heart with them! It is a radical and counterintuitive thing to do, but what if giving voice to your pain not only relieves you from having to carry it alone, but gives others permission to share theirs?Open your heart wide and start telling your true story. What hurts. Why it hurts. How you feel alone. How there is sadness and grief. How lost and confused you sometimes are. How you think no one gets you or sees you. I guarantee it – everyone you encounter has felt this way before. This is actually a very normal part of the human experience that’s somehow become taboo.
We have been taught that there are good feelings and bad feelings and if we aren’t in “high vibes only” mode – there must be a problem. So, we set out to fix it – becoming an endless self-improvement project. But there isn’t anything that needs fixing except for the part that we are repressing something very natural within us! Sadness, loneliness, grief, are all part of the human experience. They come and they go, just like happiness, joy and excitement. We are here to embrace and embody the full spectrum – both extremes and everything in between. So, talk about your grief and don’t hide it away.
Don’t isolate from others with your sorrow. Don’t paint over it with a perfected external façade – crack your heart open and share it with others. We are wired for connection. Connection heals and co-regulates us. We have just forgotten this. We have become so connected online but super disconnected in relationships – with ourselves, with each other, and with the Divine (the Universe, God, Source – whatever you call it!) The key is the returning home – to our souls – who know all this. So, re-connect with your own heart and take a risk at living a soul-led life. Love yourself first and see how that changes your life – every aspect of it. My book “Unraveling” and my SoulCare practice are all tools to help you on your journey. I have lots of free resources located in the last chapter of my memoir as well as on my social media channels. They are there to light the way along your path.