“Things were happening to me,” Jesse said. “I saw this demon and I kept trying to throw the demon away.”
Jesse Lally has been seen struggling to save his faltering marriage to Michelle Saniei Lally on The Valley.
That’s how he ended up attending a spiritual retreat where he claimed to Michelle he “literally died,” in a new preview for The Valley Season 1, Episode 9.
“It was plant-based medicine mixed with hardcore meditation and breathing,” Jesse said. “But it was so overwhelming and it came on real hard.”
Michelle, meanwhile, considered the reborn Jesse 2.0, and she noted a change.
“He just has, like, a completely different energy,” she said.
What did Jesse Lally do on his retreat?
Before the premiere of The Valley, airing Tuesdays at 9/8c on Bravo, Jesse and Michelle, who have a 4-year-old daughter, announced they were calling it quits.
Filmed months before that announcement, the series captures the couple’s marital struggles as well as a meeting with a life coach. That connection led Jesse to a spiritual retreat to focus on self-improvement.
Jesse’s attitude about the experience became eye-opening for him.
“I go into every situation, whether it’s a therapist, a coach, ‘How can I manipulate this?’” he said.
But the retreat was different, he claimed.
“Things were happening to me and I was like, ‘All right, I accept it. I’m gonna go with it.’ That’s not my personality,” he said. “It was pretty profound.”
The impact appeared to last until Jesse got home.
“You seem very calm,” said Michelle. “It’s kind of freaking me out.”
Jesse then detailed what went on at the retreat.
“I’m so aware. It was plant-based medicine mixed with hardcore meditation and breathing and it was the most unbelievable experience,” he said. “But it was so overwhelming and it came on real hard. Everybody turned into energy, like, the hillside, the grass. I saw this, like, demon and I kept trying to throw the demon away.”
The experience got more head-spinning.
“Everybody was so pixelated. I mean I died. I literally died,” he said. “Once I had some apple juice I kind of realized that it was all beautiful.”
At the end of the trippy adventure he was left with a profound self-realization: “I was, like, Jesse’s enough.”
Michelle asked if the effects were long-lasting. “How do you feel now? Do you feel different? Do you feel like a changed person? Do you feel completely different?”
Jesse reflected: “I think when I say I died I think it was, like, an ego death.”
Michelle seemed a tad skeptical.
“An ego that big is really hard to kill,” she said in a confessional.
But she couldn’t help being impressed by Jesse’s efforts.
“He just has, like, a completely different energy. So maybe it did work,” she said. “I asked Jesse to be a different person and he kind of came back a different person. That makes me happy.”
“I was blind and now I can see,” Jesse told her.
In a confessional, Jesse expressed his hope that it might be the first of more healing steps in the tattered marriage.
“I feel like I was here, Michelle was here. Michelle was just starting to run and run and run further away,” he said. “So I kept chasing and chasing and chasing. Hopefully, we can come back to the middle and figure out the future.”
It appears that the middle ground remained elusive. Michelle recently confirmed she is seeing financial advisor Aaron Nosler. In April, Jesse walked the red carpet with his new love interest.