Kimberly and Jason did not come to this work from the outside. They came from inside the same experience their guests are navigating.
From the outside, their lives looked like success. Kimberly held an executive corporate leadership role. Jason spent nearly two decades as a firefighter and paramedic, holding the hardest moments of human life every shift. They had a home, a family, two children they loved deeply. Sage was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at four years old. Harper with celiac disease shortly after. They learned early what it meant to carry constant vigilance around health, layered on top of everything else.
On the inside, something was quietly breaking in both of them. Kimberly was moving through a deepening depression she could not name or reach. Years of therapy, medication, and the quiet use of alcohol to get through it. She understood her patterns intellectually. Nothing was touching what was underneath. Jason was suffering in his own silence. Nearly two decades of witnessing trauma as a first responder had accumulated in his body in ways he had no language for. He came home disconnected, exhausted, unreachable to himself. Holding it all as a father, a husband, a professional, while something essential in him went quiet.
Ayahuasca had been calling Kimberly for ten years. And for ten years, fear had kept her away. It was desperation that finally moved her. When she felt she had tried everything else, she followed the call to the Amazon and sat with the Shipibo-Konibo people. What happened there reached places nothing else had. The physical sickness that had settled into her body began to lift. The endometriosis that had carried unresolved trauma at its root began to heal. But more than the physical, something deeper returned. A sense of aliveness. A clarity about who she was and what she was meant to do. Her teachers told her not everyone receives this calling. They encouraged her to answer it.
She left her corporate career and began training. Plant medicine integration. Somatic trauma therapy. Sound healing. She kept sitting with the medicines and learning. And as her path clarified, she could see more clearly what Jason was carrying. The same silence she had lived in. The same disconnection. The same unreachable place beneath the surface.
Is this the life we are meant to live?
The question that changed everything.
In 2022, Hurricane Ian destroyed their home. In the wreckage of that moment, Kimberly asked Jason a simple question. What would make you happy? His answer came without hesitation. Move to Costa Rica.
She had seen that look before. She had worn it herself. The sadness, the quiet desperation, the longing for something that felt more true. She listened. They gave up what remained of the life they had built, and they moved their family.
Building Ananda Lodge.
Kimberly had resisted building a plant medicine sanctuary. She understood the gravity of it. The responsibility. The weight of holding people at their most vulnerable. But the calling kept returning. Every time she brought it to her Shipibo teachers, they were clear: not everyone receives this. Answer it.
The land in Playa Grande found them the way things find you when you are paying attention. A hummingbird arrived. It has always been Kimberly's spirit animal, the symbol of transformation, now at the center of Ananda's identity. In that moment, what had felt terrifying became clear.
As soon as we fully decided, the teachers came. The mentors came. We knew we never wanted to do this alone.
Ananda Lodge was not built by investors or a hospitality group. It was built by a family who had lived the experience of being unseen inside large programs, of having breakthroughs that faded without real support, of needing something intimate and deeply held that did not exist anywhere they could find it.
They built what they had needed. Small by design. Every room private. Preparation and integration treated as essential, not optional. Guardians who know your story from the first call to the last. A place that guests consistently describe as arriving at a family member's home. That feeling of being seen, of being safe, of the nervous system finally being allowed to rest. That is what Ananda was built to provide.
Our Costa Rica move, on national television.
Jason and Kimberly's leap to Costa Rica was featured on an episode of HGTV's House Hunters International. A camera crew followed the family as they searched for the home and land that would eventually become Ananda Lodge.
What the show captured was only the beginning: a family trading the life they knew for one built around healing, intention, and service.
