‘I could feel that I was getting stronger’: Secret behind how Simone Callahan survived trauma

Simone Callahan reveals what got her through the shock death of her ex-husband, Shane Warne, and how focusing on herself – and a personal passion – helped her overcome tragedy.

Simone Callahan. Picture: Damian Bennett for Stellar

Simone Callahan has spent much of her life being defined by her relationship to her late ex-husband, the great spin-bowler Shane Warne.

But after building a 68,000-strong Instagram following through sharing inspiring messages alongside videos of herself doing yoga and ocean swimming, the 54-year-old admits she’s nervously stepping into the spotlight.

It’s not because she seeks fame. Rather, after struggling to find a sense of identity as a wife and mother, she has found her life’s calling.

Ironically, it started during a frenetic cricket tour of India with Warne in 2001. Having left their young children with Warne’s parents back in Melbourne, the couple were staying in a hotel near a temple. “I’d wake early to the sound of rhythmic chanting,” she tells Stellar.

“The sounds and vibrations resonated with me and brought a sense of calm, which I connected to yoga.”

Picture: Damian Bennett for Stellar

Picture: Damian Bennett for Stellar

Set against the noisy cricket stadium, the contrasting experiences were like yin and yang. On a visit to a bookstore on the same trip, Callahan was drawn to a volume called Yoga: The Path To Holistic Health by yoga guru BKS Iyengar.

“I read about how these yoga postures can transform your whole being,” she recalls. “At that stage of my life I had two kids and I was travelling with Shane and I sort of lost myself a bit.”

Four years later, Callahan announced that her marriage was over. She felt broken and alone, but in those awful days in the media spotlight, she learnt to rely on the one thing that brought her peace.
“Thank God for yoga,” she wrote in her diary at the time. The practice, she continued, “helps me feel OK about it all, coming to the realisation it’s all over and as sad as I feel, [I] need to believe that it wasn’t meant to be and I’ll be OK and everything happens for a reason.”

For someone who deeply values privacy, including such a personal diary entry in her new book, Growing With Grace: A Journey Into Self-Discovery, Wellbeing And The Art Of Living Consciously, is emblematic of Callahan’s new-found self-confidence and acceptance. It also telegraphs the hope that in telling her story, she can help others.

While she’s largely written a guidebook for a more balanced life, flickers of memoir reveal the joy of young love, the thrill of travelling, the contentment of motherhood, the agony of infidelity, the challenge of loneliness, and the sucker punch of grief that came with Warne’s sudden death in 2022, leaving their children, Brooke, now 26, Jackson, 24, and Summer, 22, fatherless.

“In life, everyone suffers,” she says after her Stellar photo shoot, during which she shows a poise that eludes many in front of a camera.

“We all suffer different things, but I knew with yoga, I had a sense of myself and I was doing the work that I needed to help me improve my wellbeing. I could feel that I was getting stronger.”

Back when she and Warne began their relationship in the 1990s, WAG culture was not yet a thing. But unlike her colourful and outgoing husband, Callahan struggled to raise a family and keep up with the combined travel and social demands of the cricket calendar.

Years later she would learn that she was an introvert; she started taking yoga classes in Melbourne as a way to cope.

Read the full interview with Simone inside Stellar on Sunday. Picture: Damian Bennett for Stellar

“Just doing the postures, inversions and back bends opened up my body and mind,” she says, “but it also brought me back to myself.”

In 2003, when Warne was banned from playing cricket for a year after he tested positive for banned diuretics, he was able to do more at home, freeing Callahan to journal, meditate and engage in pranayama, the Sanskrit name for breath control.

“Without it,” she admits, “I’d probably be in a rocking chair or wearing a white coat somewhere.”

Those daily rituals allowed her to handle the whirlwind of packing up the children to move to England in 2005, then returning to Australia amid global headlines over Warne’s cheating. “I’d always tried so hard to protect the kids and mask how I was feeling internally,” she says. “They were eight, six and four, so I didn’t want them wondering why I was sad. I still had to show up for them. I felt like I’d failed my marriage and failed my kids because you don’t go into marriage thinking you’re going to get divorced. I felt like I had let my kids down. They weren’t going to have the same family values that I had growing up, so I was sad for them that they were going to miss that.”

The couple were early adopters of conscious uncoupling even if they didn’t call it that.

“It was so important that going forward we had a strong connection with ourselves and the kids and we put our differences aside so we could give the kids as much stability as we could,” she says, adding that as a result, “They’re probably stronger and [have] more grit than if we were together. Growing up in the public eye, they had to have a strong backbone.”

Being physically and mentally flexible allowed Callahan to maintain a friendship with Warne amid his many sex scandals, and they even briefly reconciled before they split in 2010. “I think women forgive but they don’t forget,” she says.

“But when you practice yoga, you’re also practising non-attachment. You’ve got to learn that nothing is permanent and there’s no certainty in life. The more you practice non-attachment the more you allow forgiveness into your being. Otherwise, you carry that and you’re the one that suffers.”

Callahan started training to become an instructor in 2017, and two years later found herself working at a studio on the same street where she had taken her first class 17 years earlier. She’s also maintained her connection to India all these years later, travelling there many times, and leading her own women’s retreat there as this piece went to press.

Now, aside from work, the “very much single” empty nester living on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula still prioritises her children. March 4 marked the second anniversary of Warne’s death, aged 52, from a suspected heart attack in Thailand, and Callahan admits seeing the three of them thrive without him is bittersweet.

“It was so sad when they lost their dad,” she says quietly. “It was so shocking how it all evolved and I just wanted to be there for them.”

Yet another gift from her practice is pragmatism.

“Death happens to all of us,” she says. “It makes you even more grateful, when you’ve experienced it, to live for yourself and the people that you love. That’s what we try to carry with us from Shane’s passing. If I hadn’t gone through [what I have], I wouldn’t have had the life lessons, and I might not have been as strong as I am now. It’s taught me to stand in my own power and have the courage to keep moving forward. You’ve got to feel it to heal it.”

Growing With Grace by Simone Callahan ($39.99, Simon & Schuster Australia) is out on Wednesday.

Originally published as ‘I could feel that I was getting stronger’: Secret behind how Simone Callahan survived trauma