Pura Vida Collective
Pura Vida Collective
A small circle, kept deliberately small, so that every woman is truly held.
Susan's path to the jungle was not a straight line. Born in Washington, D.C., she built a first life inside Western systems: systems analyst, mediator, and arbitrator; an entrepreneur who founded and ran an international business where cross-cultural fluency was a daily requirement; a real estate investor; and a philanthropist whose humanitarian work has carried her through Latin America and Africa. Decades spent learning how people, structures, and conflict actually work, and how they heal.
What that life could not explain was the lineage she carried: a line of medicine women whose knowing ran through her long before she had language for it. The medicine path claimed her fully in Costa Rica. She has spent the last decade at the intersection of psychedelic medicine, somatic healing, and applied neuroscience, becoming a positive-neuroplasticity practitioner and a certified instructor of yoga, meditation, and breathwork. Today she leads Pura Vida Collective as Founder and trauma-informed Sacred Medicine Practitioner: an integration specialist whose containers are built on safety, integrity, and deep listening.
What guests notice first is harder to put on paper. Susan reads the terrain on both sides of the threshold: the inner landscape a ceremony opens, and the everyday life waiting on the other side of it. She guides people through both with uncommon depth and uncommon safety. And she continues to sit with the medicines herself, in the humility of knowing that we are all just walking each other home. One conviction rests at the center of everything she holds: these medicines are not an escape from your life. They are a return to it. Fear to Freedom.
Sacred Medicine Practitioner
A registered nurse with over a decade of experience, including years in the emergency department, McKenzie came to this work through her own healing: from military trauma, depression, and the search for relief that pharmaceuticals never delivered, until plant medicine in Costa Rica changed the course of her life. Today she is a trauma-informed Bufo and Kambo facilitator, trained with Kambo Collective, weaving meditation and mindfulness into her facilitation. Her medical expertise holds the container safe; her own journey holds it warm.
Kundalini Activation Process (KAP) Facilitator
Anne offers a dynamic and deeply transformative energy transmission through Kundalini Activation Process, guiding each woman into direct connection with the primal life force within. Woven into the medicine journey as a support for integration and energetic alignment, her sessions move on a soundscape of tribal beats and cosmic frequencies, inviting spontaneous movement, deep release, and an embodied return to Self: a bridge between the medicine work and your own inner awakening.
Around the core team gathers a widening circle: longevity professionals, scientific collaborators, medical advisors, research partners, visiting faculty, and guest facilitators who bring their instruments and their disciplines into the sanctuary. If your work belongs in this room, we would love to know you. And as new guides, facilitators, and visiting professionals join the sanctuary, they will be introduced here, in the circle where they belong.
Join the Widening Circle