Madonna is opening up about a transformative spiritual experience she had back when she was in a medically induced coma while battling a severe bacterial infection.
While guesting on an episode of the Jay Shetty Podcast posted Monday (Sept. 29) — more than two years after the pop icon spent four days in a coma after being hospitalized for a severe bacterial infection in June 2023 — Madge revealed that her late mother appeared before her when she was still unconscious. “I was almost there on the other side, and I had a conscious moment,” she recalled. “My mother appeared to me, and she said, ‘Do you want to come with me?’”
“And I said, ‘No,’” the star continued. “My assistant was in the room with me, but I was still unconscious, but she heard me say, ‘No.’ And then when I did eventually wake up, I realized that the ‘No’ was about me needing to forgive and make good with people that I still held grudges against.”
One of those people, Madonna said, was her younger brother Christopher Ciccone, who died at the age of 63 in October. The pair’s relationship was strained in the years after the seven-time Grammy winner became famous, with Ciccone at one point accusing his sister of outing him as gay during an interview. At the time of his death, however, Madonna wrote on Instagram, “We did not speak for sometime but When my brother got sick … we found our way back to each other.”
On Jay Shetty, Madge elaborated on how her vision of her mother, who died when she was five years old, inspired her to mend her relationship with Christopher. “It was him being ill and reaching out to me and saying, ‘I need your help,’ and me having that moment, like, ‘Am I going to help my enemy?’” she said on the podcast. “That’s how it felt. And I just did … It was such a load off my back, such a weight that was removed, baggage that I could put down to finally be able to be in a room with him and holding his hand — even if he was dying — and saying, ‘I love you, and I forgive you.’”
The interview — which largely focused on Madonna’s spiritual journey — comes more than a year after she finished her Celebration Tour after previously having to postpone the trek due to her medical crisis. She’s been open about how difficult the recovery process has been since she developed the infection that led to her coma, telling fans at one of her tour shows in March 2024 that she wasn’t even sure whether she’d be able to walk again.
“It was pretty scary — obviously I didn’t know for four days, because I was in an induced coma, but when I woke up, the first word I said was, ‘No,’” she said at the time. “I’m pretty sure God was saying to me, ‘You wanna come with us? You wanna come with me, you wanna go this way?’ And I said, ‘No. No!’”
Watch Madonna’s full interview on the Jay Shetty Podcast above.
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