When Netflix released the docuseries Aaron Rodgers: Enigma in December 2024, viewers expecting a standard sports documentary got something different. Alongside footage of the quarterback rehabilitating a torn Achilles, the series followed Rodgers to the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, where he sat in Ayahuasca ceremonies at a retreat in Esterillos.

Rodgers has been open about the practice for years. He has credited his work with the medicine as a factor in his back-to-back MVP seasons in 2020 and 2021, a connection Fox News and ESPN have covered at length. In the series, he describes the experience in blunt terms: “It’s the hardest medicine I’ve ever tried.”

He is far from alone, and that is the story. Costa Rica has become a destination of choice for a specific kind of traveler: high performers under high pressure, looking for something their training staff, therapists, and executive coaches have not been able to give them. Retreat organizations such as Behold Retreats have become part of this expanding wellness landscape, drawing international visitors interested in transformative experiences that combine personal development, healing, and self-discovery.

The names keep coming

Rodgers traveled with company. NFL safety Jordan Poyer joined him at the Esterillos retreat and has spoken about how the medicine helped him confront alcoholism and repair his marriage, as reported by The Tico Times. Linebacker Von Miller has also made the trip. Boxer and YouTube entrepreneur Jake Paul has said an Ayahuasca ceremony in Costa Rica gave him clarity ahead of his fight against Mike Tyson.

And for every public name, retreat operators describe a longer list of guests who will never appear in a documentary. Founders, executives, surgeons, fund managers. People whose work demands constant performance, and who have run out of conventional tools for the weight that comes with it. Welcome to the era of biohacking.

Why Costa Rica

Part of the answer is regulatory. Ayahuasca is not scheduled as an illegal substance in Costa Rica, which allows retreats to operate openly and professionally rather than underground. That distinction matters enormously for safety. Research bodies such as the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies have long pointed out that open operation is what makes medical screening, trained facilitators, and emergency protocols possible, rather than improvisation.

Part of it is the country itself. Costa Rica built its global reputation on biodiversity, on the Blue Zone longevity of the Nicoya Peninsula, on having no military, and on a national identity organized around wellbeing. The Costa Rican Tourism Institute opened 2026 with the strongest first quarter on record, with national air arrivals climbing close to 13 percent over the same period a year earlier. Wellness travel sits close to the center of that growth, and the country’s tourism leadership continues to name it as a national priority.

The infrastructure has matured with the demand. The retreat Rodgers attended is operated by Behold Retreats, a company running guided plant medicine programs in Costa Rica, Portugal, and Mexico, with medical screening before acceptance, weeks of psychological preparation, and integration support after guests return home. Their formula for ethical work is their small, intimate groups, which provide the ideal setting for surgical precision work. That structure, closer to a clinical intake than to spiritual tourism, is precisely what draws a clientele used to vetting everything they touch.

Not a casual decision

None of this makes Ayahuasca a casual experience, and the people who run serious retreats are the first to say so. The medicine is physically and psychologically demanding. It interacts with common medications, including certain antidepressants, and it is not suitable for people with particular cardiac or psychiatric conditions. Costa Rican health authorities have noted the risks of unregulated ceremonies, and the gap between a vetted operation and an improvised one can be the difference between healing and harm.

That is, in a sense, why the professional class keeps arriving. The same instinct that makes a quarterback study film or a CEO audit a balance sheet makes them choose the operator with the screening process, the medical staff, and the track record.

Rodgers put four entries in his passport to sit with the medicine on this coast. The athletes and executives following him are making the same calculation. If you are going to undertake the hardest inner work of your life, do it where the work is taken seriously.

Read about: Ayahuasca: Unlocking the Mind’s Healing Potential

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