By Amina Zamani
If you’re reading this at a moment when you’ve quietly admitted to yourself that something needs to change — this is for you. Not for the version of you with a plan. For the version of you who has made plans before and is exhausted by how little they seem to touch the thing that actually needs touching.
The Question Nobody Asks
I am not someone who goes to plant medicine retreats on a whim.
I work in neuroplasticity and behavior change. I study the gap between what people know and what they actually do — which, if you’ve spent any time paying attention to human beings, is the most important gap in existence. I have spent years building frameworks around why intelligent, self-aware people stay locked in patterns they can clearly name and cannot seem to break. I have read the research. I have lived versions of it myself.
So when I arrived at Rythmia Life Advancement Center in Guanacaste, Costa Rica — the world’s only legally licensed plant medicine facility of its kind — I was not there to escape. I was there because a growing number of researchers, executives, and serious thinkers I respect had stopped whispering about this place and started speaking about it plainly. Because the published data on psilocybin and ayahuasca coming out of Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Imperial College London had become impossible to dismiss. And because I had heard enough about the man who built Rythmia — Gerry Powell — to be genuinely curious.
Curious is the right word. Not credulous. Not converted. Curious.
What I found was something I did not expect from a wellness retreat: rigorous, uncomfortable, and structurally sound thinking about how change actually works. Not how we want it to work. Not the Instagram version. The real version — the one that involves sitting with things you have been running from for a very long time.
Who Is Gerry Powell, and Why Does He Matter?
Before Rythmia, before the speaking stages, before the thousands of people who travel to Costa Rica each year to sit with him — Gerry Powell was, by his own account, a man who had everything and felt like he was dying on the inside.
He built a supplement company called Organica Naturals from scratch and sold it for over $100 million. He had the money, the status, the external scaffolding of a successful life. He also had a substance use disorder that was quietly destroying him. He had been through the standard-issue attempts at getting well — therapists, programs, willpower, shame, more willpower, more shame — and he had come out the other side of each one essentially unchanged.
He was not lacking information. He was not lacking resources. He was lacking something else.
In 2012, following a profound experience with plant medicine, something in Powell shifted at a level that conventional intervention had never reached. He would later describe it as the moment the conversation finally went deep enough — past the behavior, past the story about the behavior, all the way to the structure underneath it.
That experience became the blueprint for Rythmia. Not a retreat designed to make people feel good for a week and then send them home to the same life. A center designed to help people see the architecture of their own patterns — clearly enough that the patterns lose their grip.
It opened in 2015 in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste province, a landscape of volcanic mountains and Pacific coastline that holds the kind of silence that makes internal noise harder to ignore. Today Rythmia operates as a medically licensed, physician-supervised facility — an important distinction in a space where rigor is not always guaranteed. Guests work with plant medicine ceremonies alongside yoga, breathwork, massage, and integration sessions designed to help people make meaning of what they experience.
Tens of thousands of people have walked through its doors. Founders. Athletes. Mothers. Veterans. People whose external lives look successful and whose internal lives are held together with increasingly thin wire.
The Death Spiral (And Why Discipline Isn’t the Answer)
Powell has a name for the pattern he sees in almost every person who comes to Rythmia.
He calls it the death spiral.
It works like this: A person is in pain — emotional pain, stored trauma, a conclusion they drew about themselves at seven years old and have never examined since. They find something that numbs it. Alcohol. Work. Food. Scrolling. Overachievement. The numbing creates consequences. The consequences create shame. The shame intensifies the original pain. So the numbing increases.
Round and round.
“I see it all the time,” Powell told me. “People know what they should do. But they can’t do it. And the reason they can’t do it isn’t discipline.”
This is where he parts ways with most of the self-help industry, which is largely in the business of selling discipline — new systems, better habits, more willpower, smarter schedules. All of which addresses the surface while leaving the structure completely intact.
If I could translate this into neuroscience terms: when a person’s nervous system has organized itself around a threat — a belief, a wound, an old conclusion — the limbic system overrides the prefrontal cortex. It does not matter how much the rational mind wants to change. The survival brain is running a different program. And it will not stop running that program because someone downloaded a habit tracker.
The spiral is not weakness. It is the brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect you from the thing that once felt dangerous, even when that protection has become the danger itself.
What Powell is doing at Rythmia — and what plant medicine, when administered in a supported, intentional context, appears uniquely capable of enabling — is creating the conditions for the brain to interrupt that program. Not suppress it. Not override it. Interrupt it, see it, and begin to reorganize around something different.
The research supports this. Studies from Johns Hopkins and NYU on psilocybin-assisted therapy show measurable reductions in depression, anxiety, and addiction after single guided sessions — with effects lasting a year or more. The leading hypothesis is that psychedelics temporarily reduce activity in the default mode network, the brain region most associated with the rigid narrative self. When that noise quiets, old patterns become visible in a new way.
Powell arrived at this conclusion through his own experience before the research caught up. That is either remarkable intuition or the clearest possible evidence that lived experience sometimes precedes scientific language.
Probably both.
What Michael Pollan Got Right (And What a Week at Rythmia Adds)
In How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan wrote about psychedelics with the careful curiosity of a journalist who had spent a career studying what humans put in their bodies and why. What struck him — and what strikes anyone who approaches this territory honestly — is how poorly the psychedelic experience fits our existing categories. It is not recreation. It is not medication in the conventional sense. It is something closer to what he called “a reboot of the system.”
Pollan wrote about ego dissolution — that unsettling, occasionally terrifying, sometimes ecstatic experience of the sense of self temporarily loosening its grip. He noted that for many people, this loosening is precisely what makes it therapeutic. The rigid story they’ve been telling about who they are and why they behave the way they do simply… relaxes. And in that relaxation, something else becomes possible.
What Rythmia adds to this picture is structure.
Plant medicine without integration is like surgery without recovery. The ceremony opens something; what happens next determines whether that opening heals correctly or closes back on itself. This is where Powell and his team operate — in the space between experience and meaning, helping people build a new story from what they’ve seen.
I want to be precise here, because precision matters in this territory: Rythmia is not promising enlightenment. It is not promising that one week in Costa Rica will solve decades of accumulated pain. What it is offering — and what I witnessed — is a rigorously held container for a kind of looking that most people genuinely cannot do alone.
The week I spent there was the most uncomfortable I have been in years. It was also among the most clarifying.
Three Frameworks That Actually Work
Beyond the plant medicine, Powell operates with a set of mental frameworks that I found — as someone who builds behavioral frameworks professionally — unusually sound. They are not original in the way that nothing is original, but they are integrated in a way that most self-help content is not. He does not just think about these things. He lives inside them.
1. Six Months Is Tomorrow
Before committing to anything meaningful, Powell asks a single question: What will this look like in six months?
If the result is not worth the cost, he drops it. If it is, he commits — fully — and stops renegotiating the decision every time it gets hard.
Most people experience the future as abstract and optional. They know intellectually that choices compound, but they feel it as a concept rather than a reality. Powell does something neurologically interesting: he collapses the temporal distance. He makes six months feel immediate. And when the future feels immediate, daily decisions carry actual weight.
Small choices are no longer small. They become votes for the version of yourself that is arriving faster than you think.
This is not motivational language. It is a description of how the brain processes threat and reward over time — and how deliberately shortening that horizon changes behavior at the level of actual decision-making.
2. Thinking From the End
Powell does not evaluate decisions from where he currently stands. He starts at the outcome.
What does the finished version look like? The healthy body. The clear mind. The business that actually works. The relationship that is honest. He sees that end state first — clearly, specifically, emotionally — and then works backward to today.
In the language of behavioral science, this is called mental contrasting, and the research on it is solid. People who vividly imagine a desired future state and then work backward through the obstacles required to reach it are significantly more likely to follow through than people who rely on either positive visualization or willpower alone.
Powell is doing this intuitively, at scale, in his own life and in the lives of everyone who comes to Rythmia.
3. Emotional Ownership Before Material Reality
This is the one that will make the rational mind most suspicious, and also the one I find most interesting from a neuroscience perspective.
When Powell sets an intention toward an outcome, he does not wait for evidence of progress to feel ownership of it. He feels it first. He installs the emotional experience of having arrived before he has actually arrived.
“I felt like I had things long before I actually got them,” he told me.
From a pure behavioral standpoint, this is consistent with what we know about the brain’s inability to perfectly distinguish between vividly imagined experience and actual experience — particularly in the emotional and motivational systems. When the feeling is installed, the brain begins organizing behavior toward the outcome. Not because of magic. Because that is how motivated cognition works.
He is not delusional about timelines. When things take longer than expected, he has a belief that protects him from interpreting delay as disqualification: If it’s not here yet, it’s just temporary.
That belief keeps him in the work when other people quit.
The Root, Not the Symptom
Underneath most destructive patterns sits a belief. Not a conscious one. A structural one.
I am not enough. I am not worthy. I am going to fail anyway.
Once that belief takes hold — usually in childhood, usually in response to an experience the child had no framework to contextualize — the brain begins organizing behavior around it. From the outside, it looks like self-sabotage, laziness, or lack of discipline.
From the inside, it is protection.
The brain is not broken. It is doing what it learned to do. It is running the most sophisticated protective strategy it could generate with the data it had at age six, or nine, or fourteen — and it has been running that strategy on autopilot ever since, long after the original threat is gone.
What Powell understood — through his own experience and through watching thousands of people move through Rythmia — is that you cannot fix this at the level of behavior. You have to go to the belief. And you have to go there in a way that the body feels, not just a way the mind understands.
This is where plant medicine, done correctly, does something that years of talk therapy sometimes cannot: it creates an experiential disruption of the pattern at the level where the pattern actually lives. Not cognitive insight. Somatic reorganization.
I have studied this mechanism professionally. I have now experienced it personally.
The research and the experience point in exactly the same direction.
Why This Matters Right Now
There is a particular cruelty to January.
We greet the new year with the most ambitious version of ourselves — the list of things we’re going to finally fix, finally start, finally stop — and we do it before we have addressed the reason we didn’t do those things last year. And the year before that.
The resolution is not the problem. The gap between the resolution and the action is not the problem either.
The problem is what we have been unwilling to look at.
Gerry Powell has built his life and his work around a simple, radical premise: that most people are not broken. They are running old protection strategies that have outlived their usefulness. And that once a person can truly see the structure of what is running them — not understand it abstractly, but see it clearly, feel it, and begin to release it — the behavior change they could never manufacture through discipline begins to happen naturally.
That is not a small claim.
It is also not an untested one. The outcomes data from Rythmia — internal follow-up surveys, combined with the broader body of peer-reviewed research on psychedelic-assisted therapy — suggests that something real is happening here. Not for everyone. Not as a guarantee. But consistently enough, and significantly enough, that serious people are paying serious attention.
A Practical Map for the New Year (Whether or Not You Go to Rythmia)
You do not have to travel to Costa Rica to begin this work. But I will tell you plainly: the container matters. The structure matters. The guidance matters. And for many people — especially those who have tried the conventional approaches and found themselves circling the same drain — the immersive experience of a place like Rythmia is not a luxury. It is the thing that finally makes everything else possible.
If you cannot go yet, here is where to start:
Stop asking “why can’t I do the thing I know is good for me?” Ask instead: What am I protecting myself from by staying here? The behavior is not the problem. The behavior is information about the problem.
Pick one outcome and make it viscerally real. Not a goal on paper. A feeling in your body. What does it actually feel like to have arrived? Stay there long enough that it begins to feel like memory rather than fantasy.
Collapse the timeline. Six months is tomorrow. The choice you make at lunch today is the person you are in June. Not metaphorically. Neurologically. Treat it accordingly.
Find the belief underneath the pattern. This is the hardest part to do alone, and the part where real support — whether therapy, ceremony, breathwork, or a week in Guanacaste with people who do this work seriously — becomes less optional than we pretend.
Stop renegotiating. Once you decide something is worth doing, the decision is made. The debate is over. You are not evaluating anymore. You are executing.
The Invitation
I started this piece describing myself as curious. Not converted.
I finish it differently.
I am not asking you to believe in plant medicine. I am not asking you to suspend your skepticism about retreats, or healing, or any of the vocabulary that gets weaponized in the wellness space and drained of meaning. Skepticism is healthy. It kept me asking better questions.
What I am asking is this: What if the thing standing between you and the life you want is not a lack of discipline, but a belief you have never clearly seen?
That question is free. You can sit with it right now, wherever you are.
But if you are ready to go deeper — if you have tried the apps and the therapists and the programs and the willpower and you are tired of meeting yourself at the same wall — I would encourage you to look seriously at Rythmia Life Advancement Center. Not because it is exotic. Not because plant medicine is having a cultural moment. But because Gerry Powell has built something rare: a place where the work actually goes deep enough to matter, held by people who have done it themselves and take your healing as seriously as their own.
The new year is a story we tell ourselves about permission. Permission to begin. Permission to try again. Permission to finally ask the question we’ve been circling.
Here is your permission.
Not from me. From the version of you who already knows it’s time.
Go find the thing before the thing.
About the author
Amina Zamani is a neuroplasticity specialist, executive coach, writer, and global speaker who helps individuals and organizations rewire limiting beliefs, unlock emotional resilience, and step into visionary leadership. Born in Pakistan and raised across cultures, she bridges neuroscience, soul, and systems thinking to catalyze both personal and generational transformation.
Amina has worked with Fortune 500 executives, award-winning creatives, and founders across venture-backed startups. Her upcoming book—rooted in her passion for financial literacy and equity for women—explores the neuroscience and spirituality of money: how early emotional trauma shapes our financial behaviors, beliefs, and capacity to receive. She has been featured on CBS, USA Today, and Lifestyle Magazine, among others. Through her writing, media, and workshops, she champions a future where visibility becomes medicine and belief becomes biology.
Learn more about Rythmia Life Advancement Center at rythmia.com. Gerry Powell’s frameworks and philosophy are available through Rythmia’s programs, retreats, and online content.