When I Met Mother Earth: A Co-Founder’s Story
By Amanda Schmidt, Co-founder of Moonwake Retreats
I didn't set out to start a retreat company. I set out to heal myself. And somewhere in that process, Moonwake Retreats was born.
This is my personal why as a co-founder. The experience that cracked something open in me and made this mission feel not just possible, but necessary. If you're hearing about us for the first time, or you've been curious about the story behind our wellness retreats, this is where it began for me.
The Journey
It all started with a conversation I had with Mother Earth. I know that might sound strange. But it's the honest truth.
In 2023, I traveled to Peru to participate in an Ayahuasca ceremony. I had never experimented with plant medicine before, but my healing journey had been long and hard. I'd spent years navigating PTSD and major depression, and while I'd made a lot of progress through meditation, movement, spirituality, and self-Reiki, I still felt like I was falling short of who I knew I could be. Peru felt like the next right step.
That week, my Indigenous healers introduced me to Pachamama, or Mother Earth, and the belief that her spirit was especially alive in the Sacred Valley where we stayed. I arrived thinking of Pachamama as a beautiful concept or a metaphor. That changed quickly.
During my first ceremony, she appeared to me as a living presence. Part woman, part mountain, draped in moss and white light. She immediately erased my fears. She made me feel safe, held, and like I truly belonged. And in that feeling, I understood something for the first time: I was never separate from the earth, the water, the sky, or any other living thing around me.
Over the next several hours, she taught me about myself, and she used the elements to heal me. Water moved through me to soften my joints. Fire showed me my own power. Air reminded me that even in the most difficult moments, my breath is always there. The earth held me the way it holds everything: completely and without condition.
Pachamama reminded me, over and over: there is no separation. She showed me the river and the leaf, the sky and the sun, the pain and the joy and said: this is you. And that's when I saw it. That I had never been apart from her, and how I had always been a piece of something bigger.
The Truth I Came Home With
What I experienced in that ceremony was the healing power of nature. Its love, its intelligence, its deep capacity to restore us when we let it in. And what became clear to me is that so much of what we struggle with today comes down to one thing: we've lost our connection to the natural world.
And in losing that, we've lost ourselves.
We don't walk barefoot on the earth anymore. We sleep out of sync with the sun. We've moved indoors, onto screens, into a pace of life that has nothing to do with our natural rhythm. We've lost our relationship with the cycles that once guided us: the phases of the moon, the turning of the seasons, the intelligence of the elements. These aren't poetic ideas. They are the things we were built to live in relationship with. And when we cut ourselves off from them, our minds, bodies, and spirits feel it.
Disconnection from nature is disconnection from self. It shows up as burnout, fatigue, anxiety, depression. That persistent gut feeling that something important is missing.
Nature knows how to heal us. It always has. The grounding vibration of the earth beneath bare feet, the way moving water slows the nervous system, the reset that happens when we simply step outside and stay there. These things work. Not because they're mystical, but because we are nature. When we return to it, we're not discovering something new. We're remembering something ancient.
Why Moonwake
That's what Moonwake is built on.
We didn't create it to be anyone's healer. We created it to build the space, the environment, and the community that puts people back in contact with what already knows how to restore them. I took what I experienced with Pachamama — the elements, the connection, the sense of deep belonging — and designed the conditions for other people to feel it too.
And while this experience came to me through plant medicine, you don't need plant medicine to access it. It's all around us, available to anyone willing to slow down enough to receive it. When you sync with the moon, honor the changing of the seasons, sit with the elements, you aren’t doing something mystical. You're coming home.
At Moonwake, we travel to some of the most alive places on earth. We gather in community with people who are ready to remember. We use the five elements, Water, Air, Fire, Earth, and Stardust, as a framework for reconnection. And we create the space for nature to do what it has always known how to do: heal us.
That's what I felt in Peru. And that's what I want for every person who walks through this experience with us.
— Amanda
Ready to come home to yourself? Learn more about our upcoming retreats and reserve your spot.