I AM a Multidimensional Woman

Let’s be real: the world doesn’t need another “put-together” woman who’s mastered pretending. It needs you—whole, honest, luminous, messy, intuitive, powerful-as-hell you.

That's why we're bringing back this special episode -- straight from the Vault!

G goes all in—sharing raw personal stories and client transformations to show you the sacred evidence of what’s possible when you stop hiding parts of yourself. Light and dark. Joy and rage. Fire and softness. All of it belongs.

This episode is your reminder (or wake-up call) that being fully expressed isn’t a luxury—it’s your lifeline. Especially if you’re navigating mental health shifts, heavy relational dynamics, or the never-ending mental load of modern womanhood.

Here’s what you’ll walk away with:

• What it actually means to lead with your heart

• How to feel more grounded in your truth—even when life feels like a lot

• Why emotional range = personal power

• A new definition of “strength” that lets you breathe easier

• A soul check-in: Are you living the Woman Way… or still shape-shifting?

Hit play now. Let it land. Let it stir you. Then share it with the women who need it. And if it moves you? Come join the Phoenix Revolution. We’re not here to play small anymore.

Get more support to create your masterpiece of a life

CREATRIX: a 4-day on-demand for the woman who wants to reconnect to and amplify the feminine magic and empowered mindset that allows you to easily create everything you want in your life.

You are not the same every single day. And while you can become outwardly successful with values like perfectionism, discipline and hustle—I can show you a better way. An easier way

Inside this four-day on-demand course, you'll learn:

• What keeps us stuck in cycles of shame, self-doubt, over-doing and feeling disconnected from our whole Woman and how to connect back to Her.

• The role conditioning plays and how to undo it.

• How to use your Creatrix magic to let go of your death grip on control and invite in more joy, pleasure, connection, presence.

• A process for breaking cycles of toxic narratives and life patterns.

• An empowered mindset that allows you to trust yourself more.

• And so much more…

https://www.gervasekolmos.com/creatrix

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More Free Resources

• Download Gervase’s free gift, the Trust Yo’self hypnosis track: https://bit.ly/3xKuaPv

• Connect with Gervase on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/gervasekolmos

I AM a Multidimensional Woman

Episode Full Transcript

Hi friends, Gervase Kolmos here, the host of the Modern Phoenix podcast, and you are going to love today's solo episode. We're bringing it back from the vault. It's from a couple years ago, and it's called I Am a Multidimensional Woman, and I'm pretty picky about podcasts that I repub. Like, I'm not just trying to take any old thing and put it in here. I'm always checking in with the frequency and the energy and the inspiration and the intention that something was created with. This one is straight fire, so I think you're really going to like it. If there's any references that seem out of date, this was, I think I did it three years ago.

And because as I was listening to this, it inspired me to go back in to products I've created and kind of give a facelift, give a little glow up to one of my products called the Creatrix. Now the Creatrix, it's something I talk about in this podcast a lot, and it is now for sale. $97 gets you this four-day on-demand course. It is such a cool course. I remember that when I was creating this course, the idea was like dropping women out of their logic-bound brains and their limited mindsets of like who they are and what they're capable of and the right way to woman and dropping them like deep into their feminine magic and their souls. Like this is a very spiritual, energetic transmission from me. There's a lot of feminine energy. There's a lot about doing things the woman way. I give a lot of personal examples from my life. Like I really believe in the value of this mini course. So I really think if you didn't grab it when it was available three years ago, go ahead and grab it at the link in the show notes now.

There's four modules in the Creatrix. The first one is called I Am a Mind, Body, and Soul. The second one is I'm Here to Break Cycles. The third one is I Am Light and Dark. And the fourth one is I Am the One I've Been Waiting For. And I think those kind of speak for themselves. So I hope you enjoy I Am a Multidimensional Woman. I hope you remember that you are a multidimensional woman. I hope that you give the Creatrix four-day on-demand course a try even just to get you back connected to your truth, your power, your soul, your feminine energy, your magic.

It is exactly what it sounds like. Creatrix, the word itself to me, carries an energy that feels really activating to me. And I hope that that's what it can be for those of you listening. I think a lot of content for me that I purchase or listen to, it's almost like a transmission for me. It's like when I have forgotten something. It's like a Gervais in your pocket. It's like, you know, a sermon. It's whatever you need to reattune, realign to your magic. And the part of you you've forgotten. The part of you that's playing small, limited, like, you know, thinking within the realms of logic and forgets that you get to be a Creatrix. You get to be multidimensional, light and dark, mind, body and soul, breaking cycles, recreating yourself, evolving, phoenixing, and also the one you've been waiting for. The one with the power to change your life and make it what you hope it will be. Over and over and over. Up and around the spiral we go. If those of you who have been in my containers, you know I always teach about the spiral of evolution. And so, yeah. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this episode. And check out the Creatrix mini course.

I'm really excited to talk to you about today's topic. I'm going to have a solo episode for you coming in hot. And I really hope that I convey everything that is, like, bursting out of my heart and soul right now. Because this always happens when, you know, I know you guys know I'm a human design projector. So my energetic pattern is always sprint, rest, sprint, rest. And this is something that I took the time. It was very intentional that I really wanted to learn this about myself. Because when I got energy, when inspiration and creativity is flowing, it is like a well that will not dry up. And then when I feel complete, I really need to kind of go into a cave and hibernate.

And so some of you guys had messaged me on Instagram and been like, where have you been? And I just have been really kind of hibernating and focusing on my work and behind the scenes stuff that I've been preparing for the moment that we are at right now. And now I'm in a sprint. And in a sprint is when everything that I engage with, every piece of content I watch or read on social media, every client conversation leaves me bursting with something I want to say in response. It leaves me bursting with like a teachable moment and like a message, like a really important truth that I am pulling out from these conversations that I want to make sure that I share with you in a way that you can really hear it, that it can really land for you.

So anyway, as I am recording the videos and like mapping out all the content right now for the Creatrix, that starts May 9th and runs through May 12th. And the link to join us to register for this free mini courses live and people have started joining. And so I'm feeling the energy of this and I have so much I want to say about it because I'm in this Creatrix energy. And so I want to share with you some examples from a couple of client conversations I've had in the last 24 hours. And it's funny because these have shaped day one of the Creatrix of what you're going to learn inside this free training and the free video series that comes out for days one through three. It's like videos of me teaching you on these concepts. But I wanted to give you a snippet here on the podcast. You can kind of understand what this is about.

So if you're here, you likely consider yourself a modern woman. I know I do. I know all of my clients. There are some of them who come to me and they're like, I don't even know why I feel drawn to you, why I'm in your world. But like, I just feel like there's something that you are reflecting to me about myself that I get to have, or maybe a piece of myself that I've lost connection to that I want to learn from you. And I want to tell you, yes, you as a modern woman are so much more than you have been taught to believe. You as a modern woman are here to be a Creatrix. You are here to not only make babies, be productive, do, partner, create, but also to dream, make magic, to see things that other people don't understand, to see solutions to problems, to feel intuitively from your inner guidance system, your intuition, or your soul, or your heart, or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Answers to things in this modern world that you can't get from your logic brain.

So I want to talk to you about the truth that you are a multidimensional woman. I am a multidimensional woman. And it is really easy, particularly in this day and age, to look around, particularly with the internet, and see a woman and decide she's that kind of woman. You might look at me and say, oh, she's whatever. She's woo-woo, or she's, you know, wears lipstick, or she's the married type, or she's the suburbs type, or she's the jungle type, whatever. You might make a quick assumption based on just a tiny bit of data that you know about me and say, I'm this kind of woman. And it's totally fine. Like, we're all doing this. We're all making assumptions. But I want you to notice how much this limits your own ability as a modern woman to create the life that you want, to create the results that you want, to be all that you are.

Because when you decide, let's say, I'll use myself as an example, when I started this journey, so I've been a coach for eight years. So at the beginning of my journey, my business, sorry if this is recap for some of you, was called Shiny Happy Human. And there was periods in between each word because I was grappling with this reality that I was shiny and I was happy. But I also had this very human side to me that didn't quite fit in this identity that I had made for myself. And the problem with this was anytime I started experiencing very normal, natural feelings that were, quote unquote, dark, my depression, overwhelm, you know, the wounding, like my mother wound, any like mom guilt I started to feel or cognitive dissonance between the mother I was and the life I had and the one I wanted to be in a life I wanted to have. Any cognitive dissonance between shiny and happy Gervais started to mean something. I started to make it mean something about me.

And so what happened here is I forgot that as a multidimensional woman, I am darkness and light. We are all darkness and light, just like the earth, just like the moon, just like the seasons of nature. There is winter and there is spring and you need both. There is medicine for you in both. There is productivity and worth in both of those. And so what happened for me at the beginning of my coaching journey is I was starting to play with, oh, I am shiny, happy and human and talk more about the human stuff and the human side. But what was really happening is I was experiencing depression on and off, which I had carried on from early in my life. And I had a lot of shame about it. And I was hiding it. And I wasn't really talking about the depression. I was talking about, you know, the human anxiety. That's so popular. It's so mainstream to be anxious, right? I was talking about, you know, fights with my mom and whatever mom guilt and, you know, the kind of surface layer stuff. But I wasn't talking about the true source of my shame. The thing that I had really hidden from myself and from the world was my depression because I had a lot of feelings about it and I had a lot of stories about what that depression meant about me.

And the problem with this is that I wasn't bringing my full self to my life. I was allowing the shiny, happy version of me to sit at this table, to have a voice in my brand, to be present as a mother in my marriage, in my closest friendships. But the depression, like that was like, ooh, let's just tuck that away. Let's just like, you know, we'll get help for that, but we won't talk about it because how embarrassing, how weird that I have this darkness.

And I did this group hypnosis training for a friend of mine for her community. And one of the women on this call at the end of the training was sharing how hypnosis had been so powerful to help her drop out of her anxious, depressed mind into her body and how she had struggled with anxiety and depression for a really long time. And her question to me during the hot seat coaching part of this training was, how do I control my depression? How do I control my anxiety? And I was struck by her choice of words, by her need as a multidimensional, multifaceted, like magical woman to say, yeah, but this I need to control.

I want you to feel the energy of the word control. I want you to feel the intention of the word control. And maybe just for yourself, start to play with this idea that what's a word that feels better? Why does allow and accept and work with my depression, my anxiety feel so much better than I need to control it? This is the difference between my interpretation of the feminine and the masculine. It is not because we don't desire and crave as humans stability and structure and management of ourselves and our lives. But control serves a very different purpose than how do I work with this? How do I blend this into my life? Okay. So that's just something for you to notice. That's a different conversation about why as women, we have been brainwashed to believe we need to control the parts of ourselves that are not cookie cutter, that don't fit in this perfect little identity box that we have been handed. As modern women, this is what you get to be. This is what a good mother looks like. This is what a devoted wife, this is what a successful woman looks like. Just something to notice, something to bring your awareness to start being an active participant in the words that you use and consume and decide if that works for you or not. Okay. And we're going to kind of get into that in the creatrix.

But going back to the story, when this woman said this to me, I reflected back to her. I said, you know, I want to point out the use of the word control and for you to question that. And I want to share my experience with depression and share with you that my depression didn't lose its grip and control on my experience of my life until I stopped trying to hide it, shame it, or control it. And I just allowed it to be part of me. It's all me. The depression and the shiny, happy Gervais. It's all me. And that's okay. And I started to really challenge this notion that this depression didn't have something to teach me. That this depression didn't have something to bring to the dynamic, dimensional experience of me.

Because I know personally, when I am connecting with another person who is one-dimensional, who is only allowing the shiny and happy part of her to be present, I'm a little bored. I'm a little bored. That like GPS system inside of me as a magical, multidimensional woman that knows every human has depth and layers is kind of like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Where's your dark? Where's the stuff that makes you interesting? Where have you been? What have you been through? What do you come from? What are you working for? What's hard for you? What are you learning? And for me, my depression had so much of that to teach me.

And from there, I'll share. I was with a VIP client on the phone yesterday. And she was having a similar experience with her darkness. And saying like, yeah, I just want to understand why I have these two versions of me. This version of me that I feel is like at her worst, like just crazy. She's just, you know, I hide her. I'm so embarrassed by her. I just feel like she just assumes she's bad. You know, she's the cause of everybody's problems. Like if there's a fight, it's my fault. And I should just, you know, remove myself from this situation. And I'm bad and it's all bad. And it's always going to be bad and it's bad. And then this other version of me that's like so normal, it's so calm, collected, grounded, healthy, thriving, vibrant.

And we started to bring in the same conversation. This like, what does it look like for you to, instead of controlling or hiding your darkness, to welcome her and allow her to be part of you? Instead of trying to figure out why do I have this? What trauma is this from? What wound? What happened to me? What if this is just a piece of you? What does it look like instead of hiding it for you to welcome this piece of you and say, okay, you get to be here. Okay. You're feeling a lot of feelings right now. Okay. What do you have to teach me? Let's talk about it. Let's bring this into my conversation with my partner, but not from a place of wobbly insecurity, from a place of, I know this is a part of me and she gets to be here. And how are we going to work through this? What is she trying to tell me?

You know, often the women who have like the women, especially the women that I work with are very much like me. It's like canaries in the coal mine. It's not that there's something wrong with you. It's that you are just breathing in the poison of a situation and you're not as tolerant. You know, your ability to withstand constant being controlled and put into a tiny little box is less. And that's good. That is like you are gifts to the world because we need people to call out the bullshit. That is modern women being told you are one dimensional and this is how you get to be. Right. And so I reflected back to this client. I was like, I just want you to know why I love you is not because of that other polarity of you that is, you know, happy and calm and grounded and composed. That is not what I love about you. I love that you are hungry to heal and explore and know more about yourself and to have deeper, more real and true relationships with your partner and your parents and your friends. I love that you are vulnerable and honest and wanting to go to the root of your life's experiences and hold yourself to this high standard of putting yourself at the center of your life. Putting yourself as I am responsible for creating what I desire in my life. I love your shadow and how it works and complements and dances with your light. I think that's what makes you you.

And I feel like the more that you can just bring all of you to every conversation, relationship, challenge, the less suffering you will have. The more you stop trying to control your depression and anxiety and just allow her to be here. Like stop making it such a big deal. Stop trying to figure out where she came from or why she's here and just say like, oh, this is who I am. Okay. What if that was just okay? What if what gets to be the standard for a woman is who you actually truly are? What if you bring her, all of her to your life from this place of total worthiness and trust and belief that like only then will you feel the most powerful version of yourself. Only then will you be able to solve the problems that have felt unsolvable.

As women, we have so many magical superpowers that we can't see that sometimes tell us so much more about what we need and how to quote unquote balance it all as a modern woman than our logic brain or a book or a blueprint ever could. Right. Right. We don't just get shit done. We don't just do and create and do the fucking dishes and the things that we put on our to-do list, the mental load. We are so much more than that. What about what we feel? What about what we sense? What about what we intuit? What about when we kind of just know in our bodies like, oh, it's time for me to change the kids clothes from winter to spring. This is like a really mundane example, but it's like, what about when we just kind of know it's time for a change for my kids school? Oh, it's just, it's time for me to start pouring into myself more. I'm out of the season of hard. I'm out of the trenches. Oh, it's time for me to whatever. The things that we know, not because somebody told us, not because we read it in a book, not because Gervais said so, because we feel it from the wisdom of our soul, from our beings, because we are creatrixes.

And these layers of light and dark, these multidimensional layers that we're going to get into in this training, but like for today, just let's talk about the shadow and the light. That is part of like the composting process of our life, which as cycling women mirrors nature. And how does nature just know when it's time to bloom or when it's time to compost, when it's time to lose the leaves and when it's time to grow new leaves? How does nature know when it's time to rain? Like it just fucking knows. Of course, there's like the science behind it, but it's like, how do the animals into it when it's time to fly? Like there's so much magic in nature and in the world and our bodies and our beings as women mimic, mirror these cycles and knowings of nature.

But we aren't even allowing ourselves to tap into that, to be aware of it, to see it, to make it count just as much as so-and-so's, what she said makes a happy household. What so-and-so says makes you a good mom. What this parenting technique and this organizational blah, blah, blah. And I'll end with this example, like another conversation I had with a client this morning. She was talking about this book that I'm sure lots of you have read and heard about, Eve Rodsky's book about the mental load. Fair play, fair play. And if you haven't read this book, I haven't read it because I kind of talked to enough people about it, heard about it, and I kind of ascertained like what it was about. And I feel like I got this.

And this client was sharing how in this book, there's all of these cards. I don't know. I'm just going to, I'm going to do this disservice, but I'm going to try. Basically, everything that a woman carries in her mind, you put it on a card so you can see the task. And then you can bring that card to your relationship and lay it on the table and talk about it with your partner and even out the load. And one of these cards is like the unicorn card that gets to be like, what is the thing you're doing for you? Where's your joy? Where's your whatever? How are you like having time for fun? How are you making time for your marriage? And I understand that most modern women resonate with this system. I understand that modern women are carrying such a mental load that feels like they just don't know how to do it all without burning the fuck out and being resentful, anxious, divorced, like really not having time for themselves, not feeling space. I understand that. And I love that they exist.

And I also want to point out. And I said this to this client. So I think that's a lot of people that I'm going to be taking all of the anxiety of women, validating it, making it manifest in the physical form and using that as the way that you communicate your needs to your partner, which to me takes all of the magic, all of the intuition, all of the opportunity for true heart-to-heart connection. And not, here's what's on my to-do list. Between partnerships, between partners, and vice versa. And when women are taking on so much of this mental load, we need to talk less about, well, what's on your to-do list? And let's put it on cards and let's balance it out. And more about, what's on your to-do list? What's on your to-do list? Oh, I feel like I'm in a season that requires this of me.

What about strengthening not your ability to manifest your anxiety into a to-do list that you then share with your partner, but more about strengthening that other muscle that we're not strengthening, that other layers, the other dimensions of us, the things that we feel and know that we desire. And talking about your desires and talk about that with your partner. Because there's going to be seasons where you do the dishes every day and there's going to be seasons where he does or she does. And that's not what this is about. The mental load is a symptom of our disconnection to ourselves. The mental load is a symptom of our inability to accept that we are more than our productivity, that we are more than our clean house, and we are more than our perfectly behaved and dressed children. The mental load is a byproduct of our inability to accept and allow ourselves as multidimensional women who are both light and dark, who both get shit done and feel and sense in our hearts and intuitions other things that need our attention.

And if we can't feel and sense and intuit from our souls, like where we desire to be and what we need to compost out of our life. And if we're only over here in the logic brain, in the light, look, I am grounded and composed and I've got it all together. We're missing the opportunity for deeper connection, deeper transformation, deeper understanding of self, better conversations, truer to-do lists, truer partnerships that aren't about like, are we doing things equally, but are we tending to each other as partners? Not are we making time for a date night? Like what's in your heart right now, in this season of your life, what's true for you?

Because I promise you the times when I've been carrying my partner on my back, but then we sit down and he takes the time to be with, be present and hear me and see me and hold space for my full multidimensional woman. I don't fucking care about the mental load. I feel held. I feel held emotionally. And that matters so much more. And if we're not creating a conversation and a narrative and an awareness that we are so much more than this one dimensional, oh, well, it's all got to get done. Somebody's got to do it. Who's got to do the kids? And if we're not creating an awareness and a culture that leaves space for the depth and the winter seasons and the hardness and the darkness and the things we can't see and the things about a woman that make her herself, like all of us, if we're not bringing our full embodied womanhood to every area of our life, the world is missing out. Our partnership is never going to be what it could be. Our life, our careers, our dreams, our mothering, our experience of our life is never going to be what it could be because we're missing the darkness, the compost stage.

And what I'm relating here is like your darkness gets like when it's like soil that's tilled, right? It's like it's turned into compost. And then something new and beautiful grows from that, that you couldn't have even imagined. Like again, Disney reference, if you've seen Encanto, which like I fucking hope you have. It's like when the girl who does the planting, she's like, I want to plant something new. It's like, we know you can make roses. We get it. Roses are pretty. Everybody likes the roses. They're perfect and symmetrical and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, what if you could take all that anger and resentment that you're feeling and like work through it and like channel it into something? And then what would grow? And then she starts to grow these like jungle plants and these cacti. And she feels so alive. It's like that aliveness.

And when we bring our full selves to our womanhood, when we accept and allow, instead of control and constrict and balance out and, you know, do our checkbook of, okay, is everybody, is it all even? Is it all fair? And have I done everything that other people told me I should do? That's when we get to feel the most alive, the most us, the most fully, like I go through my life now with being a person who resonated so much with depression. And I'm like, oh, that shame and judgment has been composted into power, into the me you see here who can talk about it and just be like, feel nothing but power. Feel nothing but trust that that was medicine for me. And there was lessons for me. And I grew from that. A new version of me grew from that composting. And it all belonged. It didn't come from controlling it and hiding it, from being perfect or being one way. It came from making space for all of me, all of my womanhood.

And I hope that this gives you permission, maybe even just awareness of where you might not be doing this in your life to do the same, to bring this aliveness, this intention for aliveness for versions of you you don't even know exist into every area of your life. And trust that like, that is something that only you know how to do. And it only happens when you tap into not just like your organization, time management bullshit. That's fine. We don't have a problem with that. Like we don't have a problem with that. Look around. When you tap into this other part of your feminine being, the part that mimics nature, that mimics mother earth, that mimics the moon, you work in cycles, sprint, rest, sprint, rest, and you don't panic about the rest period. You just shore up your energy. You just know you drink your fucking water. You take your vitamins. You know, you're going to sprint again soon. And when you do, if you're like me, it's going to be like, boom. Create tricks time.

If you haven't signed up for the create tricks, I am inviting you to join us. It's four days. It's totally free. The link is gervasekolmos.com/creatrix. C-R-E-A-T-R-I-X. It's going to be, I've never done a free training this way before, and I'm so fucking excited about it. It's going to be so powerful, so potent, and it's totally free. I can't wait to see you inside there. The last day, day four is this live group call training, which starts with a guided hypnosis and a rapid fire coaching. It's going to be so good.

And the core of this training, the core of being a creatrix is accepting and seeing and acknowledging that you are a multidimensional woman. You came here to be all of it, to be more, so much more than you think. You've been brainwashed to think you only get to be this small, this tiny version of you that society would allow. You are so much more. There is so much depth and layers and power and ideas and creativity and problem solving and magic in you. I can't wait to help you unlock it.

Okay, that was it. What did you think? Did you enjoy it? I would love to hear from you. Message me on Instagram. That's the place I like to play at @gervasekolmos. And let me know what you thought. Where do you stand on this whole like being multidimensional nonsense? Are you like, yes, I feel you. I want this, but I don't know how. Or are you like, yes, I am already in the fire, Khaleesi-ing with you. You know, I find myself at all stages of this journey at every turn around the spiral.

So I hope that you enjoyed that older episode. And again, check out the Creatrix four-day on-demand course. It's $97, which is like seriously a steal. And it is such powerful, empowering content that you can listen to whenever you want, like this podcast and have forever. I love you so much. Please share this podcast episode with somebody that you think could use the Gervais church, the sermon, the return to their multidimensionality and their magic. And thank you so, so much for being here and spending your precious time with me. I will see you back here in two weeks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

It's Not Your Job To Make Other People Happy

How often do you hold back, soften your words, or twist yourself into knots just to make sure no one gets upset? Whether it’s navigating a tough conversation with your partner, setting boundaries with your kids, or simply taking time for yourself without guilt, many of us have been conditioned to prioritize other people’s comfort over our own truth. In this episode of The Modern Phoenix, Gervase is sharing a behind-the-scenes look at a live coaching call from The Phoenix Revolution, where she explored the deeply ingrained belief that your peace depends on everyone else being okay.

If you’ve ever found yourself walking on eggshells, silencing your needs, or measuring success by how well you "land the plane" in a tough conversation, this episode is for you. You’ll hear real coaching, real breakthroughs, and a powerful shift in how we approach boundaries, self-trust, and standing in our truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why so many of us feel unsafe when someone is upset with us (and how to shift this pattern)

• How placing your power outside yourself keeps you stuck in people-pleasing patterns

• The sneaky ways perfectionism and control show up in relationships

• What it really looks like to stand firm in your truth, even when it’s uncomfortable

• A new way to approach difficult conversations that centers your needs, not just theirs

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Tired of bending over backwards to keep the peace? Are you curious what it would feel like to burn people-pleasing patterns away and stand in your own truth, powerful and calm in the face of chaos, or other people’s expectations?

It starts with a Soul Shift:

• The Soul Shift Intensive was created for the woman who is ready to leave behind the stories society has conditioned her to believe, and instead embrace the calm and clarity that comes with being connected to soul wisdom.

• Check it out here:  https://www.gervasekolmos.com/the-soul-shift-intensive

Did someone mention Pleasure?

• Summer may be over, but the Summer of Pleasure free Masterclass is timeless:

• Read more here: https://www.gervasekolmos.com/summer-of-pleasure

Follow Gervase

• Connect with Gervase on Instagram: www.instagram.com/themodernphoenix

• Visit her website: www.gervasekolmos.com

Resources:

• IG Reel: It's Not Your Job To Make Them Happy

• Book: The Science of Getting Rich

It's Not Your Job To Make Other People Happy

Episode Full Transcript

Hi friends, it’s Gervase here, and I want to cue you up for this episode of the Modern Phoenix podcast because it’s going to feel and sound different than past episodes. This is actually an excerpt from a live coaching call I had with a group of my long-term clients. What you’re about to hear wasn’t recorded with the intention of being a podcast, so it’s a little more off the cuff and casual. You can tell I’m in a really intimate relationship with the people I’m talking to. I have more of a potty mouth—if that’s even possible—because some of these women have been with me in coaching containers on and off for like five years. You’re going to notice that when you listen.

This episode is my response to a common theme I heard in the group that day. The group is my alumni coaching container, The Phoenix Revolution. Often we do hot seat coaching, though sometimes I’ll do riffs. We do mindset, embodiment, circle work—it’s really high touch. One woman had been echoing a theme I’d heard before that day. She shared a personal story of going through a triggering situation, talking about money with her husband, and moving through stages where first she felt super triggered and overwhelmed. She reached out to the group on Voxer and we were all chiming in, coaching, and supporting her that way. Then she followed up: “It actually went really well because I focused on landing the plane. I knew I had to land the plane well. He received what I had to say in a really calm way.”

We all know what this is like: the conversation went really well because I bent myself into a pretzel to make sure the other person was super comfortable. “Things are going well because externally I have proof.” But what we do in this coaching container—and on this podcast and in everything I do—is teach a woman to feel her power from the inside out, to know her boundaries from the inside out, to focus on recreating neural pathways and habits that give her not just permission but courage and literal capacity in her nervous system to feel through: What’s right for me? What would feel like a success for me in this conversation? How do I want to show up? What’s my boundary? Where’s my line? What’s my yes and my no? And then feel stable, grounded, and strong enough to be okay with whatever the other person’s reaction is. Holding space for the humanity of the people we love is a big part of this work.

I jokingly referred to this as a sermon; it really highlighted that theme. We all felt it was a valuable riff to share on a broader platform so you could have the same mindset shift—and to give you a sense of what it’s like to be in a coaching container with me. A lot of women who come to me for private coaching come from the podcast. You’re discerning customers—which I highly recommend. Really know, like, and trust the person you’re working with. Listening to this gives you an example of what it’s like to be a fly on the wall on a group coaching call. It’s very different from one-on-one, where I definitely talk way less.

I’d love to hear what you think. Did this topic resonate for you—this idea of placing our power inside of ourselves instead of outside of ourselves? What did you learn? Would you like more episodes like this? Hit me up at @gervasekolmos on Instagram or email us at hi@gervasekolmos.com and let us know topics or very relatable relationship challenges you’re bumping up against in real life. You are not the only one. You’re never the only one. And you’re not supposed to just know how to do this. We learn how to rework the way that we woman together in community, because the conditioning tells us to do it the other way. That’s part of what I was letting this client—and all my clients—know on this call: it’s not your fault that you were manipulating the situation to do it this way. This is what women have been brainwashed to do. Not anymore. Not on the Modern Phoenix. I hope you love this episode. Please share your feedback. Without further ado, here we go.

Welcome to Gervase Church. The thing you said that is so relatable—that everyone can relate to in a different way—let’s fill in the blank like Mad Libs: “I needed to land this so I could say it to my husband and he wouldn’t freak out. And my win came because I said it to my husband and he didn’t freak out.” Of course we understand this. We want to set the boundary with our child without them hating us. When you set a boundary and they say, “You’re the worst mom ever,” and they storm off—yet they observe the boundary but are mad at you—that doesn’t feel good. Our job as parents is to set firm, loving boundaries. That’s it. Their job as the kid is to feel however they want about that boundary—and honor it.

We can see this clearly in parenting. We can fill in the Mad Libs blank and see all the ways we do this: we put our power and our safety outside of ourselves. “I can only do the hard thing I need to do—set this boundary—if my kid isn’t mad at me. But as soon as they push back, I don’t feel safe, so I can’t set the boundary.” Then everything falls apart, because we need those boundaries for the kid to thrive. We need our own boundaries. We need moments where we are the rock. It’s critical to creating what we want in our lives.

Another example I heard recently: a client said, “I took a break from my desk and did this thing for myself—I went to a workout class—and I was nervous my boss would email while I was away and I’d get in trouble. But it was okay because I came back and nobody noticed.” So it was okay because the boss didn’t find out. Never mind that she’s a boss-ass bitch who deserves to take an hour for a workout; it doesn’t affect her quality of work. It’s framed as a win if her boss didn’t get mad. The goal is: you do the things because you honor yourself. These are boundaries of self-honoring, self-protection, self-care. You set those boundaries with your boss even if it’s uncomfortable, because there will be a time when someone’s looking for you while you’re at Pilates. They’ll be pissed because they wanted you right now. “I bet you wanted me right now. I was unavailable. I’m here now, ready to do my best work. What is it?”

Now let’s take it to our husbands, ladies. We all want to do things in a way that is pleasing to our husbands, because when they’re mad at us, it feels really bad. “I can’t feel safe if my husband is mad at me.” The patriarchy says, “If he’s mad at you, he’ll kill you.” There are literally countries where that happens if you’re not pleasing to your husband. I do not believe we are in one of those countries—hope not. So we have to explore the edges of our excuses around our own boundaries, where we say, “I have to figure out a way to make them okay so I can be okay.” This places our power outside of us. Once we do that, we will never get it back. We won’t feel calm or safe or in control. And other people—even those who love us, like our kids and our husbands—won’t know that we matter, that we have our own power, knowing, desires, and wants.

The ultimate flex is catching it and going, “Oh, I’ve put urgency on landing this plane just so, so I can be me and make sure he receives it calmly so I can feel good.” Can we get curious and ask, “How can I be calm right now no matter what, with what I’ve got—this group, Gervais, my tools, my body, embodiment, resourcing? How can I be okay right now?” That frantic feeling—“I need them to be okay so I can be okay”—is my conditioned mind. It’s a lie from a culture that tells me I’m only as good as the people I make comfortable and serve: happy kids, happy husband, boss who gets everything they want, friends who can reach me anytime, clients who never wait an hour for a Voxer message. I don’t think that’s true. It can’t be the best way for a culture to thrive.

We understand why we have this conditioning as women—deciding our power, safety, and okayness depend on others not being mad. It’s complex; there are real reasons. We’re not here to gaslight ourselves. There are ways to resource ourselves and remind our bodies that safety and security are right here: “I am unshakable.” Now I’m going to talk to my husband. Now I know the difference between “I’m grounded and uncomfortable” versus “he’s ungrounded and uncomfortable.” He gets to be that way. He gets to be him, and I get to be me. This might take a while, especially if we’ve never done it before.

In the last six months, I’ve had some very interesting money conversations with my husband. We used to not have these at all. We started like most women: we just won’t talk about it. We’ll hope it works out, or it never comes up, or I never spend a little too much or make just not quite enough to make him uncomfortable with the number in our bank account. We’ve been through periods where that bank account was literal zeros. You want to talk about money work—I have done money work. It was fascinating this last time we talked about money because I was like, “I am here. Let’s talk about the bank account and all the reasons it looks the way it does and all the plans and solutions going forward.” We were both solidly resourced in ourselves, having a conversation. I thought, we think we know it’s working when there’s a million dollars in the bank. But to me this was our final money test: we’ve come so far we can have this conversation. Spiritual psychology teaches it’s constant earth lessons on the same topic until the trigger comes up and you’re not triggered. “Huh. My body feels unshakable, but this external thing is telling me I’m not safe—the bank account, this person. How am I now?” I said, “Here’s the plan. Here’s what I feel and know. Your turn.” He said, “Same.” Both a little uncomfortable, but okay—hold hands, take another step. Here we go.

That’s where we want to go, because the money will always be changing. We think there’s a magic number; there’s not. We say, “There will be a time when the car’s not breaking or we don’t want to pay for that program.” There’s not. We’re here. In The Science of Getting Rich, he talks about this: we’re here to express the full expression of being alive. We do this through money. Life will keep doing its thing. The earth stackers will keep showing up. So how do we relate to this so I’m safe no matter what? I know my boundary no matter what. I don’t like it when my husband’s mad at me. Also, my work—this has been big—has been shutting up and letting him be however he is. Being in charge of my vibe: who am I being, how do I feel, where is my power and safety, where is my water? Focus on minding my own business, staying in my lane, resourcing. Come back to the conversation—because we live in the real world and still have to pay bills together.

That’s a beautiful reminder of how the slippery slope can get out of hand. We can feel like, “My whole life is out of control. I have no power and don’t know what to do.” That is uncomfortable. Of course we want to strengthen that inner steadiness. Everyone strengthens this by, “Where’s my water?” Feel how you feel, but don’t move into action. When we feel how we feel and immediately call the person, send the text, have the conversation, make the decision—we’re perpetuating the same chaos. When we feel and then ask for resource, we can say to our husbands, “Could you hold me? Could we have a hug?” Our partners get to be part of our resourcing. We’ll know if we’re avoiding discomfort or if it’s, “We’re not ready to talk, but can you hold me?” Or we can send a text: “I love you.” The more we practice feeling the uncomfortable and resourcing our bodies, the more we create new neural pathways that build strength, stamina, and capacity to be with a husband’s energy.

Where’s your water? Because he ain’t it. I know you think he is your water—he’s not your water. He doesn’t have to keep you alive to be your partner. Partnership is a beautiful place for healing, resourcing, mirroring, working on your stuff. And also—the Phoenix way, the “It’s All Me” framework—is, “Oh, it’s my work again.” I had a whole coaching session months ago: all my husband’s fault. Then I was like, “Wait—nope. Didn’t clean up my side of the fence yet.” But I’m so evolved! Nope—same old stuff. Great. It was a great opportunity, and I’m changing that. It feels so good when you realize, “I don’t have to control them or make sure they’re not uncomfortable. I just have to work on my stuff.”

Thank you for coming to this sermon. Thank you for coming to church today. I did a dance class before this, and apparently I am very resourced and have a lot to say. It’s interesting: when you’ve ignored pleasure so long, you have zero clue what that could be. Then trying stuff out, seeing how simple pleasure actually is. Sunshine. Sometimes it’s microdosing pleasure. Five minutes of sunshine when you’ve had zero for five years makes a big difference.

All right, that wraps it up. What did you think? What are you taking from this episode? At the end of my sessions, I always ask: what is your takeaway? After that group coaching call, here are some of the things the women said. I type them in the chat so they have the note of their transformation or aha moment.

“Can someone teach a class about how it’s not about making other people comfortable and happy? A majority of my life and marriage I thought that’s what I was supposed to be doing, and now I’m like, what on earth was I thinking?” (This inspired a reel we’ll link in the show notes—I was like, I’ll teach a class about that.)

“It's okay to not know everything. Your body is still learning it.” Yes.

“It’s all practice, and it’s all okay. Wherever I’m at is okay.” I love that. It’s something I’m always reiterating and having women embody.

A couple other comments: “Keep practicing. No one knows everything already.” And: “My hard thing is I ‘should know this already.’” Do you relate to any of these? They’re brilliant, wise, and honest. When we give ourselves space, permission, and communities to have these wild perspective shifts, everything changes. The way we relate to everything can change.

I hope this gave you another way to reflect on how you set boundaries, where you place your power in relationships and otherwise, what holds you back from taking care of yourself, and what internalized conditions you may have accepted as facts and truth. Maybe—just maybe—you can change your life one brave decision at a time. I am here to help you. The Modern Phoenix Podcast is here to help you. I hope you’ll meet me back here in two weeks. I love you so much. Till next time. Mwah. Mwah. Mwah. Mwah.

Thank you.

Why Women Don't Like to Cry (And Why You Should Start)

Have you ever been told that you’re too emotional? Or do you avoid crying at all costs because you don’t want to look weak? In this week’s episode, Gervase flips this narrative upside down, offering a powerful reframe that reveals why crying is actually a profound act of healing, as well as an opportunity for connection and growth. Listen in as she breaks down the societal indoctrinations and personal barriers that make us resistant to feeling our emotions, as well as the physiological and intuitive benefits of crying, making a case for why embracing your tears is a radical and necessary practice.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why the fear of being "too emotional" is costing us authenticity

• How patriarchy, capitalism, and even feminism condition us to suppress emotions.

• How allowing emotions to flow can deepen our relationships and create a bridge to our intuition

• The physiological benefits of crying, including access to soul-wisdom

• Why creating safe, intentional spaces to feel is key to emotional health

• How women's circles, somatic healing, and working with a trained facilitator can help you access your intuition, soul wisdom, and deeper clarity

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Are you ready to stop suppressing your emotions and start accessing your inner wisdom? Start with a Soul Shift:

• The Soul Shift Intensive was created for the woman who is ready to leave behind the stories society has conditioned her to believe, and instead embrace the calm and clarity that comes with being connected to soul wisdom.

• Check it out here:  https://www.gervasekolmos.com/the-soul-shift-intensive

Follow Gervase

• Connect with Gervase on Instagram: www.instagram.com/themodernphoenix

• Visit her website: www.gervasekolmos.com

Why Women Don't Like to Cry (And Why You Should Start)

Episode Full Transcript

Today I want to make a case for crying and give you all the reasons why you may or may not be afraid of your emotions, super resistant to crying, and why it’s actually good for you. Let’s start by talking about the systems. If we think about our culture and society at large, what are the messages that are in the systems—in the water we drink, in the air we breathe?

First, patriarchy. Our internalized patriarchy has made it clear that crying is a sign of weakness and that weakness will not be tolerated—also in men. Reminder: patriarchy doesn’t just negatively impact women; it also negatively impacts men. We’re operating within a system that tells us emotions, feelings, tears are weak.

We’re also in a capitalistic society that values, prioritizes, and glorifies time and money. Crying is a waste of time and crying does not make us money. So what’s the point? Now let’s also look at feminism. With all of the positives it has offered, it’s also put an extra rock in our backpack: we have to be super strong no matter what. It gave us resilience and empowerment to fight the good fight. But what we picked up from that was the message that vulnerability in any form isn’t going to get us where a man goes. We’re trying to play a man’s game. Because we’re in patriarchy, men don’t cry. Feminism reinforced that strong, empowered women don’t cry. It’s helpful to see all the ways we’re conditioned to not feel our feelings.

On top of this, in the micro: you might be in a partnership where your partner feels uncomfortable with your tears. You might be consuming motherhood content that tells you “don’t project your feelings onto your kids; your kids aren’t responsible—tuck that away.” You might have been raised by emotionally repressed parents, which is true for many of us, and so you internalized the message “don’t show your kids any emotion.” Also not to give it back to your parents as a child. Your childhood trauma might literally be to not show emotion because it makes everybody uncomfortable. It’s inconvenient. It’s bad or wrong. Everyone would agree crying in the corporate workplace is frowned upon. We have narratives around “hysterical women,” “emotional women,” “don’t be too sensitive.” This makes sense why women avoid their emotions at all costs. We resist the urge to cry no matter what.

This is maybe a gross parallel, but I had the stomach bug last weekend. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but I noticed: you know when you have to throw up and you know it’s coming but you’re like “no, no, no, I don’t want to,” and you hold off as long as possible—and then your body does the work for you? That’s like crying for most women I work with. They feel the emotion inside them and will do anything to prevent it from coming out in almost any scenario—even feeling deep fear and vulnerability with a loved one. Because of all these factors—add a dash of childhood trauma, pick your cocktail—we’ve been conditioned not to inconvenience others with our feelings, not to feel our feelings, to distrust our feelings, to believe our feelings make us weak, and to keep them in no matter what.

We also live in a society that intellectualizes everything. When you feel emotion, or as you’re feeling it, or after, we’re never noticing “how did that feel to my system? What was that like for my body?” We’re just like, “Why did that happen? What was that about?” We’re always creating a story about the tears. We’re always trying to figure out “why am I crying? Why do I feel sad?” instead of just releasing the pressure valve and allowing ourselves to feel sad.

Let’s talk about what this does to us as women. We know all the reasons why we don’t; let’s talk about why it’s damaging. If we go back to the vomit example: one of my children had the stomach virus at the same time I did. Because they’re young and have less experience managing nausea, they didn’t make it to the toilet on time. When you have all that stuff building up, it needs to come out. But you don’t have a hygienic, disciplined practice. You don’t have practice of doing it in a healthy way, in a healthy place. You throw up in your bed. You throw up in the middle of the classroom. You throw up in the sink. Parents, I know you feel me. If we take this parallel and apply it to our emotions: so many women have the experience of “I have these outbursts, but it’s always at the wrong time—when I’m super triggered, or with my children. It can’t come out in a professional setting.” This makes sense. There’s a reason it’s happening: your body isn’t being given a predictable, reliable outlet to release emotion, so you lose control of it entirely.

Nobody wants to be totally out of control with their emotions. It’s possible to feel your feelings fully without judgment while also feeling a sense of integrity. You knew it was coming. You expected the big collapse after a big high or whatever’s going on. You made space for yourself or you’re working with someone like a professional to hold space for you. You have proper outlets to process it.

Aside from exploding at the wrong time—and I say that with love and compassion because who hasn’t exploded at their kid in the grocery store—we’re also holding in our authentic selves. We’re not giving our loved ones and relationships our best selves because we’re contracting and hiding a part of ourselves to stay safe, to keep it together, to not metaphorically throw up no matter what. Doing that costs us authenticity. Then we wonder why so-and-so doesn’t know us. Well, we haven’t allowed ourselves to be known. We haven’t allowed ourselves to be seen. That hinders connection. It hinders relationships. It hinders repair because one never lets oneself get “out of control” and feel feelings fully. We also miss out on amazing creativity and connecting to and hearing our inner voice.

A lot of the bridge I create for women is the bridge between “here are these external symptoms of feeling like a boiling pot of water” to “what is the wisdom on the other side of that?” There’s a reason we want to do this for our bodies: it creates physiological balance. It releases anxiety, depression, stress. We’ll get into that in a second. But it’s also the bridge to hear your intuition. It’s the bridge to soul wisdom. Every single time I have someone on a session releasing a little emotion, when it’s complete, we access a deeper truth—deep soul wisdom you could never have come up with if you were just talking in talk therapy or intellectualizing. If you do this with a trained facilitator, you’re gently and masterfully guided through your emotion so you can release it in a way that allows your body to release stored trauma and process it in a soulful, intuitive way instead of just from the mind.

Wow—all these things we’re blocking ourselves from by not allowing ourselves to cry, not to mention our healing. We cannot heal what we are unwilling to feel. I know why we’re unwilling to feel it. But what would you do differently if you knew that is the path to healing? You want to heal your childhood trauma? You have to feel your childhood trauma. And it gets to feel your childhood trauma. It does not have to be huge, exhausting, devastating. A trained somatic practitioner will gently guide you through emotion and any trauma the body is storing, releasing the pressure valve, accessing soul wisdom, and starting the healing process in a sustainable, resourcing way. If you’re having explosive releases and then you’re exhausted and there’s no transformation, get curious about that. That doesn’t need to be the way.

Now we know how we’ve been conditioned not to feel, why this hurts us and damages our relationships, what’s on the other side, and how this is the bridge to healing and soul wisdom. I also want to give you a couple benefits of crying. I googled this—I kind of knew it but double checked. Crying releases oxytocin and endorphins, which ease physical and emotional pain. Those are the endorphins that make you feel good and balanced. It lowers cortisol levels—cortisol is the stress hormone. Raise your hand if you’re not stressed. Everyone’s stressed. Modern life is stressful, packed, busy, overwhelming. We need easy ways to reduce stress. Releasing this pressure valve is one of the easiest ways your body knows how to self-soothe, self-regulate, and reduce stress.

It also creates connections. I read something recently—didn’t double fact check—but it said when you are crying and being witnessed, your tear will fall very slowly because the longer it’s visible to the other person, the more empathy and compassion it builds, the more connection between two people. We were designed to be a connected, compassionate, feeling society. Humans, pre-patriarchy, understood community was vital to survival. This is why everybody feels the epidemic of loneliness. One way this plays out, for a complex web of reasons, is lack of vulnerability, lack of being witnessed, lack of witnessing others.

This is why I do women’s circles. Because witnessing, being witnessed, and witnessing each other in your humanity, vulnerability, and power is such a powerful way for your system to feel connected to another system. That feeling of belonging, that feeling of connection cannot be overstated. You can’t buy it. There’s no hack. You just have to be willing—and curious—about being in community and allowing your authentic self to be seen, knowing that tears are medicine and connection points. This is how you build authentic relationships.

Does this mean every time you get into a women’s circle or with friends you need to be crying to create connection? Absolutely not. But if you’re bubbling over with emotion and you go to be with women and you don’t feel it’s okay to share that with the circle, it might be a supportive resource to find circles where that is normal. On my group call today, a couple of women said, “I’m not usually that vulnerable, but I love doing it in the circle.” It’s not always appropriate to be vulnerable and crying in a professional networking event. Nobody’s saying go out into the modern world and start crying. However, your body physiologically needs to release your emotions—anger, sadness, fear, grief, whatever—in a sustainable, healthy, healing way. It’s your job to find the places where that is normal and actually pleasurable, resourcing, and delicious, that also create this web of community—which is probably also the thing you’ve convinced yourself you don’t get to have, but somebody else does. Authentic, connected community happens through vulnerability; via vulnerability comes authenticity. In that space, feelings happen. Humans have lots of feelings. If we’re honest and have a place where we share deeply—“How am I really? Who am I really today?”—emotions may arise.

When you’re in a well-tended container or circle where feelings don’t need to mean anything, you don’t need to intellectualize or get to the root, you know how to resource and support each other, witness and be witnessed, and then let it go and rise in your power. To me this is the most ancient and easy intelligence available. I’m always like, “Where’s the low-hanging fruit? Oh, a good cry? Yeah, I could do that.” Do I have an hour for a class? Not all the time. Sometimes crying is going to be it. Sometimes crying in community. Sometimes crying with a facilitator, guide, healer. Sometimes walking, holding yourself through this process. I’ll share my own experience: I hold myself through waves of emotion all the time now. It’s part of my life—like washing my hair, having a cry, brushing my teeth. My clients can do this too now. Eventually you’re not afraid of the emotion. You don’t feel terrified of yourself and what’s inside lurking beneath the cool, controlled surface. You understand this is a resource—physiologically supportive, with health and mental health benefits, creating community and all these things. It becomes not a big deal. It becomes part of your routine as needed. Tending to the body, accessing soul wisdom.

When I have hard questions I’m trying to get answers to, or when I feel very triggered—all my insecurity and childhood trauma stuff coming up—what do I do? I work through the emotion. I allow it to move through me. I have a ritual for it. At the end, that’s how I hear my soul. That’s how I hear the truest thing I need to hear in that moment—which is not all the thoughts swirling in my head, which is not something logical, which is not what somebody else thinks I should do. Unless you’re my coach or a deeply wise friend I connect with this way, I don’t want somebody else’s advice. I need my own inner voice. I need my own advice. That’s confusing sometimes—how do you get your own advice? You allow the emotions and sensations to move through you and you practice doing this in a healthy, resourcing way. Accessing your own somatic and soul wisdom becomes second nature. It becomes the language you speak. It’s gratifying and satisfying. Nothing makes me feel still and clear like having moved myself through a trigger or wave of emotion, gotten to the other side, listened for the deep inner wisdom, written it down, taken deep breaths, done movement, and gone about my day. I’m like, wow, I feel like a magician. I’m not playing this game. And you don’t have to either. The way you do it doesn’t have to be the way I do it. We live different lives, have different personalities, responsibilities, and gifts. We get to do it the way that makes sense for us. The story we tell ourselves is, “She can do it because X, but I can’t.” I’m letting you know: feeling your feelings is your birthright. Your body was programmed with this when you came into this world. It’s a stress release programmed into you. I can teach you to use it masterfully, gently, sustainably, as a bridge between all the thoughts, obligations, and conditioning swirling in your head and what you really want to know—what you need to solve that problem, have that conversation, keep going one more day. That is the deeply wise counsel you’re only going to get from yourself. If you know how to hold yourself through a good cry, you’ve got you. There’s nothing you can’t do. That is the vibe of the Modern Phoenix, and I want that for every single woman I meet.

If that sounds like a journey you’d like to go on, I’d be honored to support you. We don’t have to cry, but we probably will—let’s be honest. It always makes me chuckle when a woman comes in and says, “I’m not going to cry today. I’m not a crier.” I say, “That’s totally fine.” Then 20 minutes in she starts crying. “This has never happened. I don’t know why.” Considering this has happened to me about 20,000 times, I’m going to go ahead and say it’s not an accident and you’re here for a reason. Your mind knew I was the resource your body needed to make it safe and okay for you to experiment—even just 20 seconds of tearing up. Take what feels too much and make it right size for you. That’s how we work. That’s how any trauma-informed practitioner should and will work.

I would be so honored to support you in a Soul Shift Intensive. We’re no longer selling the Somatic Soul Sessions—that was just a special for January—but I do have spots for private coaching I’ll be talking about until they’re full. Your first step to explore that and see packages I haven’t advertised online yet is to book a 90-minute one-on-one with me. I’ll support you through this process and talk about what it could look like. You have a gut, an instinct, an intuition guiding you all the time. I invite you to trust it, honor it, make it normal, get curious about it, lean into it, explore it, and get to know who you truly are. I love you so much. See you in two weeks.

My mental health story & what therapy couldn’t “fix”

When it’s deeper than talk therapy, it needs a mind-body-soul approach. This week on the Modern Phoenix, Gervase shares insights from her mental health journey turned full-blown personal evolution. Listen in as she opens up about how transitioning from mind-based therapy to soul and body-centered practices like focalizing, somatic healing, and nervous system regulation opened new paths to healing and inner transformation. As she recounts pivotal moments that shaped her understanding of herself, she shares the profound power of trauma responses, intuition, inner child healing, and more, inviting you to look beyond conventional therapy practices and consider your own unique path to healing.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The strengths and limitations of talk therapy that led Gervase to explore mind-body-soul healing

• The role of somatic practices and nervous system regulation in mental health

• What it means to understand and address trauma responses through body awareness

• Why shifting from self-fixing to self-tending is crucial for healing

• The importance of integrating mind, body, and soul in any healing journey

• How to embrace the complexity of healing and look beyond conventional therapy practices

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New to the idea of Mind-Body-Soul integration? Start by dropping into your body wisdom with a Somatic Soul Session:

• For the first time ever, current, past and new clients can enjoy a 60-minute session with Gervase to set intentions for the New Year, get clear and focused when you feel stuck and overwhelmed, or address any persistent problems that keep recurring.

• Get unstuck and tap into your body wisdom. On sale through January. Buy it now, use it any time this year: https://gervasekolmos.podia.com/f1c7c21a-5772-4222-bf65-7bac78672c33/buy 

Follow Gervase

• Connect with Gervase on Instagram: www.instagram.com/gervasekolmos

• Visit her website: www.gervasekolmos.com

My mental health story & what therapy couldn’t “fix”

Episode Full Transcript

Hello, my loves. I want to invite you to grab a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and join me because I’ve got a cup of tea for a little story. I did a post on Instagram this week talking about my journey of healing. And I mean, the word healing gets thrown around—I don’t even know what that means sometimes. It can be so subjective.

I know that when I am getting to know and like and trust other teachers, guides, and mentors, it’s really important for me to know their story. So when I did this post, I felt inspired to go back down memory lane and even remember my own story of how I got here and why I’m so passionate about mind, body, soul healing and inner transformation. Because I did it first. Because it was the thing that healed me.

I said something like, I healed myself back to wholeness. And I stand by that—it feels true. But we know healing is not linear. It’s a spiral of evolution. That’s why the phoenix is the imagery for this podcast. That’s why I want us all to embody the phoenix: to understand that the idea of “how I healed” is actually a falsity rooted in systems we’re going to talk about today—the idea of arriving. Really, what my journey has taught me is constant evolution.

Some of you might relate to my story of starting in the mind with talk therapy, moving into intuition, spirituality, the soul, inner child healing, shadow work, and then ending in the body with somatic healing, nervous system regulation, and my focalizing training. So, grab your tea, and let’s begin.

I’ve shared parts of this before in masterclasses, but never the entire story in one place. I’ll start where I always start: when I was 18 years old, I walked myself into a therapist’s office. I told her I wanted to heal. I said I was there because I didn’t understand why I felt responsible for everything and everyone, and also like it was never enough. Nothing I did was ever enough.

In therapy at 18, I began to unravel and unpack my family of origin, my ways of coping and relating that I had created as a child. The psyche develops between ages seven and nine, and I had created an entire way of relating to others that left me feeling I was never good enough, that I was carrying the world, that I had to mother everyone, and that I still wasn’t doing a good job. Some of you may relate to that.

I think we all come from childhood with unique wounds. The point is, I started where most people begin: in the mind. I began in therapy. I think everyone could benefit from therapy. I’m a huge advocate for it.

Fast forward: when I was pregnant with my second child—so from age 18 to 32—I had been on and off in therapy, taking breaks but having pivotal moments in my twenties. My brother passed away. I was on and off antidepressants. I was grappling with what I’d call chronic depression, though that’s not technically a diagnosis. I’d feel paralyzed in my mind and body, trapped in negative thoughts. I didn’t know to call them intrusive thoughts. I just thought: I’m sadder than other people, I have a more negative view of myself, I can’t get out of bed.

A friend in college once gently said, “I think you might be depressed.” Between 20 and 30, I had big defining moments—motherhood, loss, breakups, life changes. I was still in the clinical world of therapy, antidepressants, mainstream culture’s identity of wellness and healing. It was great in many ways. I really tackled my mother wound then. My relationship with my mother—no secret—was the biggest thing I wanted to figure out. I’m proud of the work and the internal shifts from that time.

At 30, after having my first child, I discovered life coaching as a career. When I understood coaching was helping people untangle challenges, family dynamics, stuck situations, I thought: oh God, I’ve spent a decade doing that in therapy. I’ve always been fascinated by it. I thought I’d be a therapist or psychiatrist in college, considered majoring in psychology, but I didn’t love school and didn’t want more years of it. Now I see my intuition was guiding me elsewhere.

So, with ten years of therapy experience as a client, realizing those same things made me uniquely qualified to hold space for others, I began life coach certification. Then I got pregnant with my second child and felt that familiar weight of prenatal depression. I had a knowing: what got me here won’t get me there.

Many women come to me from therapy. They say, “Therapy was amazing—we worked on the mind, the stories, the beliefs. But I wasn’t progressing. I was circling the same stories.” That was my experience too. I felt depression again but also felt: there’s more out there.

At this time, I had entered entrepreneurship, joined a mastermind, done a program full of self-help and spirituality, met friends who thought differently, not from mainstream therapy. I connected with a now-dear friend, Cora Poash, a life coach trained in spiritual psychology. My first interaction with her on a retreat was like a meeting with my intuition, a deepening into my soul. Something mystical became tangible. I knew I had to work with her.

So at 32, for the next five years, I went on a journey of the soul and intuition. Spirituality light. I have a rich inner spiritual world, but I also know spirituality can turn people away who actually need it. So listen with discernment: this part of my journey was about the universe, manifesting, soul, spiritual psychology, earth lessons. I dove into a deeper understanding of life, gained a higher perspective, a higher meaning.

The biggest thing happening then was my intuition coming online. The deepest work with Cora was inner child healing, which was so therapeutic. I learned how much I had shamed myself for depression. I saw the ways it was normalized yet still stigmatized for me. I did soul work, intuition work, and asked: what if depression is partly a symptom of paralyzing beliefs? Of disconnection from spirit and intuition? What could I learn from it?

I began creating a next-level relationship with my intuition. It became an obsession because I started seeing evidence—times I zagged when the world said zig, and my life actually made sense when filtered through intuition. The old filter—dominant culture, external metrics—had been causing suffering. Freedom came when I made my inner knowing the authority.

This was radical. Easier to gaslight yourself when using the world’s rules. But once you decide your discernment is the authority over what’s “normal” or what other moms are doing, you feel intoxicating freedom. Of course I had pain before—I was trying to fit into wrong-shaped boxes. But releasing that pressure, I felt lighter, freer, with less inner friction.

At this time I also explored human design. My intuition screamed at me to do a reading. I learned I’m a 5-1 Splenic Projector—20% of the population. My authority is my spleen. I started making the intangible tangible, aligning my life with my energy. Energy is in the realm of soul and spirituality: you feel it but can’t see it.

This second part of my journey was the intangible, the mystical. It made everything make more sense, with or without the spiritual lens. For me, intuition is sometimes interchangeable with God, sometimes its own thing. It doesn’t matter—try it on for yourself. Take what resonates, leave the rest. We’ve been brainwashed to think we must accept entire religions or else it’s flawed. But life is nuanced.

Down the intuitive path I went. But another thing was happening: even as I healed and felt lighter, sometimes I went into trauma responses—fight, flight, freeze, fawn. I got curious about trauma: big T, little t, childhood trauma. I realized my childhood experiences, though not “big” enough to label trauma, still shaped my nervous system.

When faced with failure, financial instability, relational rupture, my body shut down. Freeze: I’d get depressed. Fight: I’d attack. Flight: I’d disappear. Fawn: I’d perform, pretend, abandon myself.

This tied into my sober curiosity journey. Had I been drinking to numb, freeze pain, or to fawn and fit in? Yes. Was it bad? No. But now I saw it. Healing is seeing deeper layers—like more of the Matrix online. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

So even as things improved, I saw my nervous system pattern. I remember one scenario: relational uncertainty with someone, talking it out with my husband, and I went into a panic attack. Hysterically crying, on the floor: why do I feel things so deeply? That’s always been my story. An ocean inside me, painful, scary, big emotions. I thought nobody else felt this way.

Part of me saw maybe this wasn’t balanced. Another part of me saw I was gaslighting myself. It’s actually okay to be emotional.

Then came focalizing—a somatic, nervous-system-based trauma training created by Dr. Pacucci. I trained with Nick Werber and Joanna Miller (both have been on this podcast). I learned about the body, the limbic brain, trauma responses, how trauma stores in the body. In the animal kingdom, trauma organically releases. Humans can too, but conditioning gets in the way.

I dove deep into somatic healing for my big emotional bursts. I also realized I’d been addicted to fixing myself for two decades, convinced I’d solve the riddle of what’s wrong with me and then I’d change forever. Subtle, unconscious, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I shifted from mind—“Why is this happening? What’s wrong with me?”—to body: “What resource is needed?” I started stabilizing and regulating my nervous system sustainably. At the same time, I was unlearning systems of oppression, strengthening intuition and soul as authority, practicing not making any parts of me bad, incorporating parts work and family constellations.

You can see why I now can’t encourage healing that doesn’t include mind, body, and soul. Where I stand today: I’m still not perfect. I still spiral sometimes. But I have deep safety in my bones. My nervous system feels safe. Because of that, everything else is manageable. Life will keep life-ing. It’s never about perfect conditions. That’s the lie from the mind.

Exclusively solving problems in the mind leads to binaries: good or bad, right or wrong, success or failure, good mom or worst mom. Black-and-white processing. But healing includes nuance, intuition, regulation in the face of chaos.

I also reflect on generational patterns. Have we swung too far in blaming the generation before us and trying to make things perfect for the next? That pursuit of perfection is internalized patriarchy, white supremacy—even in healing.

So it’s complex. It deserves an integrated mind-body-soul approach to get to the place where you feel safe no matter what. Where you can resource yourself, meet discomfort with intention, and try—even if it’s messy.

Many clients realize “trying” is itself a strategy. It’s nuanced. It doesn’t promise outcomes. It just says: I’ll do my best. And the truth is, there’s an intelligence moving through the world creating conditions we can’t control. Each person is responsible for themselves. You can try, but you can’t predict or control their response.

That is the beauty of relationship. That’s why the phoenix inspires me—it’s constant evolution. Ego death after ego death, identity crisis after identity crisis. Parts of you die—parts that gave you validation or value—and you rebirth again.

For me, my identity was being good at fixing. But sometimes things don’t need fixing; they just need tending, love, compassion, safety. I used to picture “digging out the rotten part” of myself. I don’t do that anymore. There’s a gentler way, which has led to less self-shaming, less depression, fewer trauma responses, more authenticity, more trust in myself and my intuition.

I went from vacillating between fight-flight-freeze-fawn to a steadier nervous system. From loud negative mind chatter to: “Oh, that’s programming. That’s your American individualism, your colonizer mindset. That’s your body needing sleep. That’s you trusting someone else over your intuition.” Seeing it clearly.

This has created a beautiful life. Am I “healed”? Probably not. I hope to always have mentors and guides. But I’m always seeking support to see my blind spots, to resource myself, to keep evolving.

If you feel ready for your own inner transformation, I’d be honored to support you. Your first step is to book a Soul Shift Intensive. You can still book a Somatic Soul Session (a 60-minute one-on-one) through the end of January at $299. We can focus on a sticking point, do coaching, somatic healing, visualization—whatever you need.

Remember: dominant culture will tell you there’s no time, that you don’t deserve healing, that it’s selfish or irresponsible financially. As someone who’s prioritized healing for two decades, I can say: the only investments I’ve never regretted are those tending to my mind, body, and soul. They change everything. They give clarity, calm, and control no matter what. Because you know who you are. You know your tendencies, your mind’s patterns, how to tend to your body. You don’t freak out at mistakes or setbacks. You keep building what you want, inside and out.

Knowing yourself, having the resilience to honor her, changes every relationship and your mental health. And I know I could never have gotten here with therapy alone. I needed to go deeper, to tend the roots, prune the old, grow new shoots.

It has been such a gift, a joy, a pleasure. And I’d love to invite you to give it to yourself.

Thanks for sharing tea with me. If you love this podcast or find value in it, please give it a five-star rating on Apple. Share it with a fellow Phoenix going through her unlearning so she can rise. I’ll see you in a couple weeks. Thanks. Bye.