Entrepreneurs and Executives at Rythmia: Why Leaders Come

The Rythmia Way program which integrates ayahuasca plant medicine as a core modality is increasingly sought by high-performers seeking clarity, creativity and reset. Rythmia's guests often include CEOs, entrepreneurs, and visionaries, with distinguished leaders serving on its board of directors.

The Paradox of Success

From the outside, success can look pretty straightforward. You have an idea, you bet on yourself, and before you know it, you're running a full-fledged business. Your team grows, revenue climbs, and your calendar starts to fill up fast. Over time, the velocity of your life speeds to a pace you once only dreamed of.  

And yet, somewhere along the way, an emptiness begins to take hold.

That emptiness is a common experience for many entrepreneurs on the path, and it often manifests at the height of success, right when you think you’ve accomplished all of the key achievements you’d set out for. Many high performers describe the same strange paradox at the pinnacle where, yes, everything is working, but something fundamental feels missing. The drive that once fueled growth starts to feel exhausting, creativity starts to plateau, and decisions that were once easy become heavier. 

You can’t help but wonder, Is this all there is?

More and more leaders are beginning to acknowledge this gap between external achievement and internal fulfillment. Traditional tools like vacations or coaching can help for a while, but they often only soothe at a surface level, only for the core issue to come back time and time again.

This is one reason why many entrepreneurs and executives are turning toward deeper forms of personal exploration, including plant medicine experiences like ayahuasca.

At Rythmia, a luxury ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica, high achievers and executives are able to step away from the constant noise of leadership to reconnect with a sense of alignment that can’t be found on a balance sheet.

On the other side of the week at Rythmia, they often find that the healing doesn’t push them to abandon their ambition, but, rather, to remember the deeper reasons that ambition existed in the first place. Many of our guests often return to their passions with a renewed fire, mindset, and new levels of creative flow.

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The Entrepreneur Behind Rythmia

For many of Rythmia’s guests, Gerry Powell’s story feels surprisingly familiar.

In 2004, Gerry looked like the definition of success. He had built and sold his company for $89 million. On paper, he had everything most entrepreneurs spend their lives chasing. But privately, his life was unraveling.

Despite the wealth and outward success, Gerry found himself struggling with deep unhappiness and crippling addictions that had taken hold over the years. The momentum of his career had carried him forward for a long time, but once the deals officially closed and the dust settled, he was left alone with the one thing he’d never been able to outrun: himself.

What followed was a period of profound despair. The external markers of success weren’t helping with the deeper pain he was experiencing, and, in his own words, life began to spiral toward a place of grief and even intrusive thoughts of suicidal ideation.

When a friend introduced him to plant medicine, he went all in, despite never previously hearing of that as a healing modality. 

His experience with iboga, a sacred indigenous medicine from Gabon, Africa, became a turning point on his path. Instead of masking his pain or distracting from it, the ceremony allowed Gerry to confront the truth of what was happening in his life, and why. It finally opened a path toward real, authentic, healing that standard treatment programs, and rehabs, never came close to.

However, the experience also revealed a problem, and a greater pain point.

Like many people seeking plant medicine at the time, Gerry had to travel deep into the jungle with very little preparation, medical oversight, or structured support. The healing was powerful, yes, but the environment wasn’t built to safely guide large numbers of people through such a potentially life-altering process.

During the ceremonies, Gerry received profound insights that planted the seed for what would eventually become Rythmia, a place designed to make these transformational experiences safe, accessible and structured, so that people can achieve real change in an environment that fully supports their journey inward. Iboga guided Gerry to use ayahuasca at Rythmia, because it is a more gentle, motherly, guide to higher awareness, unlike Iboga, which can be a lot more intense.

Why High-Performing Leaders Turn to The Rythmia Way

For entrepreneurs and executives, the challenges rarely look dramatic from the outside, in fact, they may not even appear on the outside. They show up more subtly. For instance, decision fatigue that clouds what used to feel instinctive, or a constant pressure to perform that starts to blur into burnout.

Over time, many leaders develop what could be called emotional armor. It’s useful at first because it helps you push through uncertainty, but eventually, that same armor can limit authentic connection, and empathy, which are some of the core qualities that define great leadership.

This is where The Rythmia Way offers something fundamentally different.

Rather than focusing only on performance, it creates space to step outside of it entirely. Through a combination of ayahuasca ceremonies, breathwork, integration classes, and a highly supported environment, guests are guided through an experience that goes beneath surface-level thinking and awakens a deeper intuition.

Ayahuasca, in particular, has a way of cutting through noise. Many leaders describe gaining a level of clarity that feels immediate and undeniable, like seeing patterns in their decisions and understanding what’s been driving them subconsciously.

At the same time, The Rythmia Way ensures that these insights don’t just remain abstract or vague. The dynamic integration process helps translate those breakthroughs into real-world applications, so they are practical, long-lasting, and stick with you for the long-haul.

For high performers worried that the result may make them lose their edge, the truth is that the experience will only refine it. Imagine what becomes possible when clarity replaces overthinking, authenticity replaces armor, and the gap between external success and internal meaning, like the one Gerry experienced so deeply, begins to close in a way that is both grounded and sustainable.

Neuroplasticity, Creativity, and Breaking Out of Rigid Thinking

One of the more interesting reasons entrepreneurs and executives are drawn to ayahuasca is its potential impact on the cognitive process itself. At a certain level of success, many leaders begin to notice their thinking becoming repetitive. They rely on the same assumptions and decision-making algorithms that once drove results but can eventually start to feel limited in a constantly changing world. 

This is why neuroplasticity becomes especially compelling in the context of the medicine. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself and form new connections or perspectives. In high-performance environments, success can actually reinforce rigid thinking, creating a worldview that has been validated over and over again. But as Dr. Jeff McNairy, Rythmia’s Chief Medical Officer, often points out, rigidity is frequently rooted in fear and the need for certainty and safety. These are qualities that may help in business, but can also limit creativity and exponential growth.

Through The Rythmia Way, which combines ayahuasca ceremonies with breathwork and guided support, many guests describe stepping outside their usual mental loops and seeing their lives, decisions, and identities from an entirely different perspective. Problems that once felt complicated can suddenly appear clearer, while new ideas and creative solutions emerge without force. Just as importantly, the experience can reopen something many leaders don’t realize they’ve lost over time: openness itself. The willingness to question assumptions, think differently, and reconnect with a more intuitive way of approaching both life and leadership.

A Board Shaped by Excellence

One of the more unique aspects of Rythmia is the caliber and diversity of the people helping guide its vision.

The board of directors isn’t made up of just one type of leader. It brings together powerful individuals from the worlds of business, spirituality, social impact, and high-performance industries; people who have operated at the highest levels of success and understand, firsthand, the pressures that come with it.

You have someone like Kelly Slater, an 11-time World Surfing Champion, who represents longevity and discipline. Jack Canfield, widely known as “America’s #1 Success Coach” and co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, who has spent a lifetime teaching personal transformation at scale.

Michael Beckwith, founder and CEO of the Agape International Spiritual Center, and Rev. Dr. Iyanla Vanzant, a 6-time New York Times bestselling author and spiritual teacher bring a deep understanding of human connection.

From the business world, Toni Ko, founder of NYX Cosmetics, built a global beauty brand from the ground up, while Earl Koskie, founder of Pharaoh Ventures, has helped steer companies to over $500 million in revenue. Their presence reflects a grounded understanding of leadership at scale.

Voices like Martin Luther King III and Frank Biden bring a lens of social impact and human rights, expanding the conversation beyond individual success into collective responsibility.

At the center of it all is Gerry Powell, Rythmia’s founder and CEO, alongside Dr. Jeff McNairy, Chief Medical Officer, ensuring that both vision, intention, and care all remain aligned.

This group is aligned by their high-level achievements, yes, what truly binds them is a shared belief that true leadership isn’t only about external success, it’s about personal, and planetary, evolution.

Real Stories from High Performers Who’ve Experienced Rythmia

It’s one thing to merely talk about transformation in theory, but it’s another, more exciting thing to hear it from people who have already lived high-performance lives, yet still felt called to something deeper.

In the documentary Ayahuasca: A Journey into Alternative Healing, several accomplished individuals share their firsthand experiences at Rythmia, offering a grounded and honest look at what this work actually does.

Mike Sarraille, a retired Navy SEAL and keynote speaker, came carrying a heavy mental burden, the memories of war, the responsibility of leadership, and the profound grief of loss. What he was searching for was a way to make that weight lighter, and to return home as a better human being.

Xande Ribeiro, a multi-time world champion in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, arrived at a different kind of crossroads. After a career defined by discipline and achievement, he was stepping into a new phase of leadership, and looking for confirmation that he was on the right path. He found renewed clarity to lead with purpose.

Reality star, Shep Rose, known for his role on Bravo’s Southern Charm, came with a more subtle realization, that the lifestyle he had built, while exciting from the outside, wasn’t sustainable. Beneath the surface, he recognized patterns that needed to change, and a deeper desire to live more intentionally, and find a healthy balance.

While the three personalities are radically different, they are all people who are used to being in control of their careers, and yet, each of them chose to step into an experience that asked them to let go of that control, even briefly, in order to see themselves more clearly.

The perspective they found didn’t come in a single answer, but the insights were incredibly valuable.

For many leaders, perspective and insights into the greater why is where the real transformation happens.

If you’ve built everything you set out to create, but something still feels unresolved, it may be time to step outside of the systems, and thought patterns, that got you here.

Rythmia offers a structured, medically supported experience designed for people ready to go deeper, and create a new foundation. You are the ultimate ROI, and your transformation begins the moment you say yes.

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