Dealing with severe health challenges in childhood, mainly affecting the lungs, I was conscious from early on of my own healing journey. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I learned to drop into meditative states and eventually, instead of struggling for breath, to become still and peaceful.
Not being able to participate in games and sports also gave me the opportunity to sit on the sidelines and observe, which I now credit for my ability to take in the bigger picture and ask profound questions.
Later, and against most conventional advice for someone with compromised lungs, I was pulled to the water. I became a scuba instructor in the Red Sea, and then an underwater photographer, diving the deep drop-offs of the Sinai coast.
Through diving and freediving I learned to regulate my breath and stay calm at depth, and somewhere in those years my lungs healed. The thing that had defined my childhood became the strongest thing about me, and that underwater life carried me, in time, to Mexico.
The instinct I have carried through my life, to turn inward, to question the accepted way and look for a truer one, has shaped everything I’ve built since. It narrowed over time into a single question: how do we nourish ourselves at the deepest level, while caring for the world we share?
I’ve spent fifteen years answering it in different forms. Sanara, a boutique wellness hotel that I built in Tulum. The Real Coconut, created around nutritionally supportive low-impact crops, first in Tulum and later on shelves across the United States. A cookbook, Nourish Yourself, Nurture Our World. And now phytovive, a project championing the marine microorganisms that first breathed life into this earth.
The forms kept changing. The question never did.