The Mountain Is Me: What Peru Burned Away (and What It Gave Back)
What if “retreat” isn’t a luxury—but spiritual hygiene? In this raw solo, Gervase shares what happened on her Peru retreat in the Sacred Valley: the fire ceremony that helped her release an undercurrent of fear (10% at a time), how she anchored the steadiness of her inner mountain in her body, and why healing in circle, not solo, changes everything. Expect real talk on motherhood, anxious attachment, resourcing from nature (instead of numbing), and remembering the joyful, dancing essence beneath all your roles.
Listen now and then DM RISE on Instagram for the episode link + retreat details. If this landed, share it with a woman who’s ready to meet her inner mountain.
Listen to this episode to discover:
🔥 The grief/fire ceremony that helped Gervase let go of fear and anxious attachment (in doable 10% increments)
🏔️ “The mountain is me”: how to anchor steadiness from land and nature into your nervous system
🤝 Why we need relational healing and community containers (and how to stop DIY-ing your deepest work)
💃🏽 Remembering your essence beneath the roles: ancient and joyful can both be true
🧭 Retreat as sacred time: signaling to your body and calendar that “this matters”
🧰 Discernment in healing (including Human Design intuition + choosing the right intensity for your system)
This episode is for you if:
You feel like a woman with her hair on fire and want grounded steadiness instead
You’re carrying fear or “buildup” from hard seasons and don’t know how to move it
You keep trying to heal alone and crave circle, ceremony, and nervous-system-safe support
You want to feel more alive, on-purpose, and resourced in everyday life (not just on vacation)
Pull Quotes:
“I sat at the fire and gave it 10% of my fear. I ugly-cried—and it was holy.”
“Stop DIY-ing your healing. We’re wired for circle, not solo.”
“Under the roles lives my essence: ancient—and a joyful, dancing puppy dog.”
“Retreats aren’t indulgent. They’re spiritual hygiene.”
Resources Mentioned:
Medicine for the Modern Soul (retreat host: Tracy Rulaine Roberts)
Gervase’s Human Design note: Splenic Projector (using intuition as a green-light threshold)
Join us:
The Phoenix Retreat — Charleston, Nov 6–9 (oceanfront house, ceremony + circle). Two bunks left—Gervase is in the bunk room too: https://www.gervasekolmos.com/chs-retreat
Planning an international retreat in spring and another in fall 2026. Tell us where you want to go and what you’re craving!
Work with Gervase:
Book a Soul Shift Intensive: gervasekolmos.com/the-soul-shift-intensive
Free gift: Trust Yo’self hypnosis track
Follow Gervase
📲 Let’s hang out on IG: http://www.instagram.com/gervasekolmos
✨ Want to go deeper (and get juicy discounts)? Sign up to Gervase’s newsletter: https://www.gervasekolmos.com
The Mountain Is Me: What Peru Burned Away (and What It Gave Back)
Episode Full Transcript
Hi friends, Gervase here, Inner Transformation Coach and host of The Modern Phoenix Podcast. I’m coming to you from one of my many satellite studios this season. There’s someone upstairs cutting tile for the bathroom, and I just can’t seem to find a quiet place to record. So there might be noise, we might get interrupted, and I’m not exactly tech savvy, but I’m here because I have so much to tell you.
This is going to be one of my more unhinged episodes—which, I think, we like those, right? We want to sprinkle in all the different dimensions of a woman into this space. Today I want to come to you off the cuff to tell you about the experience I just had in Peru. As many of you know, I just returned from attending a retreat in the Sacred Valley of Peru. I got home Friday at 2 a.m., and by Saturday at 2 p.m. I was at my cousin’s wedding, which went until 2:30 a.m., then another wedding party Sunday, and by Monday I crash-landed back into real life—work, the podcast, clients. We had our first Mother’s Circle call on Wednesday, and I’ve just been like, whoa.
I really want to share while this is still fresh what I just experienced in Peru, or at least the parts that will be relevant. I’ve been sharing more of the intimate details with my one-on-one coaching clients and my alumni containers, because they’ve been asking specific questions. Even last night, my husband said, “So you haven’t told me about Peru. How was it?” I just stared at him like, “You’re going to have to ask a more specific question.” I was gone for eight days, and I feel absolutely transformed—and I say that lightly because I’m still the same old G—but I really did get what I went for and more.
When Kevin asked me to “sum it up,” I told him I couldn’t, but here I am summing it up for my community on the podcast, so that’s what we’re doing. Let’s start with why a retreat, why Peru, and why now.
After my brother died about seventeen years ago, I knew I needed a soul quest. I’d already been feeling before he got sick that I wanted to shake things up. I felt disconnected from myself, a little depressed, like, is this it? I was a sophomore in college, and I’d been looking into traveling abroad. I didn’t want to go somewhere typical—I wanted a real experience, a cultural immersion, to integrate with a totally different culture. That’s why I was drawn to South America, and since my father is Colombian, I wanted to connect with my roots. Speaking Spanish makes me feel so alive. It’s such a big part of who I am. I love hearing it. It makes me so happy. So, again and again, I’ve been drawn to South America and Mexico and Spain—it feels ancestral to me.
After my brother died, I went on my first spiritual quest to Peru. I volunteered in a low-income daycare called a Wawa Wasi and had a truly life-changing experience—contributing, being part of that culture, and feeling so alive. I think this is important because there’s a fine line between escapism and being plugged into your full vitality, your aliveness. I’m not anti-escapism—sometimes I love just binging The Summer I Turned Pretty—but there’s something about traveling, especially retreats, that taps me back into that soul-level vitality. It feels like a spiritual journey.
So I went to Peru a long time ago, and life happened—I got married, had three kids, started a business, bought a house, all the things. A year ago, I had this realization: how have I not been to South America in sixteen years? It’s such a huge part of who I am and what lights me up, and I hadn’t been in so long. That felt like a wake-up call. I knew I had to go back. That opened the portal: I’m going back to South America.
One of my really good friends from a mastermind, Tracy Relain, runs a business called Medicine for the Modern Soul and hosts retreats. She’s an amazing facilitator. I’d been watching her retreats for years. People often say to me, “You’re a coach, spiritual, curious about Peru, so of course you’ll go do ayahuasca.” But I’ve always been intentional about my relationship with plant medicine. It’s very trendy right now, and when something’s trendy, a red flag goes up for me. I thought, sure, I could do ayahuasca, but I didn’t feel called to. My life already feels like a sweat lodge or ayahuasca ceremony sometimes—I don’t need that kind of intensity for my nervous system. What I did need was a space to drop in deeply with myself.
When Tracy announced a retreat in Peru, I knew instantly: right place, right time, green light. It felt like the perfect type of retreat to give me what I was craving—connection to myself, the culture, the land, and the language—with just the right amount of intensity. That discernment is so important. People think there’s one template for healing or going on retreat, but there isn’t. You know yourself. You know your limits and what your nervous system needs. Trust that.
I’m so glad I trusted myself and said yes to Peru. We stayed in the Sacred Valley. I’ve been to Peru before but not this exact area. It felt brand new. Tracy’s work is all about “making life a wild and sacred adventure,” and that resonated deeply with me. That’s why I went.
There were also two other things happening in my life that made this retreat feel perfectly timed. First, I think of retreats as an opportunity to immerse myself in the work, to carve out sacred time and space. Like, I go to Pilates a few times a week because I know I need a dedicated time and place to do it. Sure, I could do Pilates at home—I even have the app—but I don’t. We all know that carving out sacred time and space signals to our bodies, minds, families, and calendars: this is important. So this retreat was that for me. It was sacred space to focus inward, to have guidance and community, and to ask myself what was dying, what was being born, what needed attention.
That’s the Phoenix path: endings and beginnings, shedding and blooming. Focalizing has taught me to live with intention, to know my intention in every space I enter. Going on retreat with intention makes it powerful and potent.
Also, this was emotional and spiritual hygiene for me. I facilitate retreats myself—I have one coming up in November—so it would feel inauthentic to tell other women to invest in that work if I didn’t do it myself. I walk the walk.
The other thing happening at the same time was my daughter’s health journey. I’ve been open about her PANDAS diagnosis. It started in second grade; she’s now in fourth. That experience changed me. Watching my child be that sick created an imprint of fear and trauma in my body that I’ve been working through ever since. I knew there was an undercurrent of fear that wasn’t truly me. I didn’t come into this world afraid. That fear had to be tended to and released, but I couldn’t do it alone. I knew I needed the right container—Tracy, the land, the group.
So that was my intention: to let go of the fear, the anxious attachment to my child, and to reconnect to what was blooming inside me. And I invite you to consider what’s going on in your life. What season are you in—grief, endings, beginnings? What’s calling for space and support? Healing happens in community. It’s not natural to do it alone. Relational healing is part of it. When you’re supported by a circle of women and facilitators, something alchemical happens. You don’t have to do it all yourself. Even letting go ten percent is enough.
There was a lot of resistance getting to Peru—schedules, packing, life logistics—but I knew that resistance didn’t mean “wrong way.” It meant I was stretching into something overdue and important. I’m a Splenic Projector in Human Design, so I know my intuition hits immediately: know and go. That intuitive hit got me over the threshold. Going to Peru felt like a threshold moment—a before and after.
So, what happened there? It was the combination of everything—the land, the ceremonies, the community, the safety—that created transformation. I texted my husband before coming home: “I will never be the same.”
There were several ceremonies where we reflected on what we were there to release. For me, it was fear—the fear I’d carried as the mother of a sick child. During the fire ceremony, I sat in front of the fire and felt everything my body had been holding. It wasn’t bad or wrong; it was just old. It was slowing me down, clogging my system. I committed to letting it go, even ten percent. I ugly-cried into that fire. It was visceral, intense, and deeply cathartic.
How often do we have space to notice what our body is holding, to release what has accumulated? Everyone carries pain, stress, and buildup. We need ways to move that energy so our true essence can lead—so we can live our purpose. That’s what the retreat gave me.
There’s something about being in-person with women that makes you drop out of small talk immediately. We did an exercise where we looked into each other’s eyes and asked, “Who am I?” My first answer was surface-level, but the second one just dropped in: “Ancient.” I felt it in my body like a mountain. Later, looking at the mountains outside, I realized: the mountain is me. I wasn’t on drugs, I swear—but the interconnectedness of life and nature was so clear. I anchored that sensation in my body.
I’m an ocean girl—I live by the beach, I’m a Pisces—but the mountains showed me something different. I learned to resource from the land instead of numbing out with Netflix, sugar, or wine. When you let nature, community, and ancient wisdom fill you, it connects you to a sense of aliveness nothing else can touch. That’s what happened to me in Peru.
Another thing that struck me was how freeing it was to just be as I am, without performing. We wear so many masks every day—roles, expectations, personas—that disconnect us from who we truly are. In that space, I remembered my true medicine in the world. Yes, I’m skilled at what I do. I’ve spent a decade mastering the craft of holding space. But underneath all that is who I’ve always been—the playful, joyful, dancing puppy-dog Gervase. That part of me came through. Feeling both the deep mountain energy and the light, playful energy inside me gave me such a sense of wholeness.
That’s what I brought home: a burning away of fear, of anxious patterns, of performance. A remembering that I’m both ancient and playful. That wholeness stays with me, even as life gets loud and chaotic. It’s spiritual hygiene—cleaning out what accumulates. And it’s ongoing. Next year there will be new things to release, and that’s normal.
Taking this time has made me more authentic, vibrant, and grounded—in my mothering, my coaching, and my daily life. I want the people in my communities to feel that. We don’t need more women running around with their hair on fire. We need women who know their inner mountain, who can access that steadiness and joy inside.
When I first opened my window at the retreat and saw that stunning mountain view, my first thought was, “Oh my God, I don’t deserve this.” And immediately I knew that was an old voice. The truth was: “Of course I deserve this.” We all do. The more we say yes to this kind of work, the more our bodies learn: we deserve it. This is what being alive is for.
That’s why I’m so fired up to bring more retreats and in-person connection to our community. Our Charleston retreat is November 6–9. We’ll have fire ceremony, community work, release, intention-setting, and joy. Two bunk beds left—I’ll be in that room too. It’s going to be like a luxurious, soulful sleepover. We’re also planning an international retreat in the spring, and another in the fall of 2026. Now that my kids are all in school, I feel ready to do more of this work. The medicine that happens in person is unmatched.
So tell me—what do you want? Where do you want to retreat? What times work for you for circles? What experiences are you craving? Message me on Instagram at @gervasekolmos or email hi@gervasekolmos.com. I’m staring right now at my future she-shed in the backyard—it looks abandoned but it’s going to be so cute soon—and I’m dreaming of all the magic I’ll create there for us.
Thank you for being here, for sharing your stories with me, and for being a safe space where I can share my own process. I’m with you on the Phoenix Path—always evolving, learning, allowing endings and beginnings to swirl together. I want it to feel safe, normal, and even fun for all of us to do this work together—dance parties and ugly cries in front of fires included.
I love you so much. Thank you for being here. Check out the show notes for all the upcoming programs, and don’t be a stranger. Love you, and I’ll see you in two weeks.