The work begins with how we live.
About Our Family
Suma Kallay is our family home in Southern Costa Rica. The rhythm, relationships, land, and responsibilities shared through each immersion are part of our life here with our children.
We came here to build a life from the ground up.
Why Costa Rica
We moved to Costa Rica in 2016. Each of us had been drawn here independently by the beauty of the land, the abundance of nature, and a culture that keeps family life close. Pura vida, pure life, expressed something we both wanted to live more fully.
We wanted to grow food and sacred plants, raise our children in nature, and build a homestead with our own hands. We were moved by the closeness we saw between generations, with children, parents, and grandparents often sharing daily life.
Our aim was to create something real and lasting that our children could participate in and one day inherit. The land continues to give us a place to work out our own lives: to develop rhythm and simple routines, care for our health, and learn what it means to live well together.
Ceremony needed more room around it.
How the work developed
After years of studying with and assisting an Inga elder through hundreds of ceremonies, I began noticing a pattern. People often arrived carrying the speed and noise of their daily lives, had a profound experience, then returned almost immediately to the same conditions. There was little room to settle before ceremony or live with the experience afterward.
Five years into my apprenticeship, he encouraged me to begin holding ceremonies myself. With his permission, I began working with the plants I had cultivated and inviting people to stay longer on our land with our family.
Time in the jungle and space on both sides of ceremony allowed people to slow down beforehand and bring the experience into their daily choices, relationships, and routines afterward.
Over time, I came to understand that family, land, rhythm, relationship, and direct participation were not simply supporting ceremony. They were central to the work. Plant medicine remained important, held within a larger way of living.
One foundation. Distinct roles.
Michael and Yara
Suma Kallay grew from the family life we created together and continue to build with our children.
Michael
I lead the intake, personal guidance, coaching, structured practices, medicine decisions, and ceremonial work within most individual immersions.
My background includes eleven years with plant medicine, including a nine-year apprenticeship with an Inga elder, six years in regenerative health coaching, and seven years as a professional ceremonial musician. My work also includes relationship guidance and mentoring young men through life’s natural transitions, including coming-of-age immersions centered on responsibility, purpose, and the movement into adulthood.
I am a husband and father before anything else. My devotion to Yara and our children is at the center of how I live. My days are practical and hands-on: growing food and plants, woodworking, welding, building, repairing, and caring for the land.
Yara
Yara is a co-creator of the homestead, family culture, and way of living each participant enters. Her involvement in individual immersions develops naturally through shared meals, conversation, family life, time on the land, and creative work.
She is a ceremonial artist and weaver. Her work includes beadwork, sacred objects, plant relationships, and creative processes grounded in ceremony and lived experience. Her background also includes leading retreats and coaching women around health, reproductive cycles, fertility, birth, relationships, and other areas of their lives. That work remains separate from the immersion.
For couples immersions, we guide the experience together. Yara takes a more active role throughout, drawing from her own experience and from the marriage, family life, and homestead we have built together.
The highest expression of love is shared in a circle.
Suma Kallay
We chose the name Suma Kallay with the help of an Inga elder we both studied with, a native speaker of the language. He described suma as the highest expression of something and kallay as sharing love. He taught us that the highest expression of sharing love is to share it in a circle.
For us, the name expresses what we want our life and work to serve. It is both an intention and a standard: love shared in relationship, with each person present and taking part.
Enter the life behind the work.
The immersion
Each one- or two-week immersion is completely private and shaped for the individual, couple, or family who comes. Rhythm, guidance, participation, and ceremonial work come together within the life described here.