Ariana Grande, raised Catholic, turns to Kabbalah over brother Frankie Grande's homosexuality

Pop star Ariana Grande, who was raised Catholic, has turned to the Kabbalah movement after church teachings rejected her brother's homosexuality.

"I was like, 'OK, that's not cool,' " the singer told the UK newspaper The Sunday Telegraph. "They were building a Kabbalah center in Florida so we both checked it out and really had a connection with it."

Grande, 21, and her theater singer-actor sibling Frankie Grande grew up in Boca Raton, Florida.

Ariana Grande said she first encountered Kabbalah -- a mystical offshoot of Judaism whose adherents most famously include the singer Madonna -- when she was an adolescent. "[It] sort of stuck with me. And since then my life has unfolded in a really beautiful way, and I think that it has a lot to do with the tools I've learned through Kabbalah, I really do."

Among those tools, she says, are that "you have to watch your intentions, make sure you're not giving in to your ego. You have to numb your reactive state. You have the power to change your reality. You have to take a second and breathe and reassess how you want to approach or react to a situation or approach an obstacle, or deal with a negative person in your space. That takes a lot of self-control and practice and, I guess, willpower."

Frankie Grande, 31, a recently evicted houseguest from the reality-TV show "Big Brother," joined the cast of Broadway's "Mamma Mia!" in 2007. He has just been cast as Franz in the rock musical "Rock of Ages," for a run from Nov. 10 through Jan. 18 at the Helen Hayes Theatre.