Titles and schedules don't follow you into the jungle. On Life of Flow, I sat down with David Villanueva, founder of Sukia Travel and a wildlife guide on Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula, and Michel Reijnen, a Dutch vascular surgeon who went through David's 10 day expedition. The problem underneath the whole conversation: high performers are rarely where they are. They're always planning the next thing or replaying the last one.
10 Day Jungle Crucible
David Villanueva and Michel Reijnen on the 10 day Jungle Crucible, the FORGE protocol, and why hardship only changes you if you reflect on it.
Watch The Episode
10 Day Jungle Crucible, LOF #132 of Life of Flow, hosted by Dr. Lucas Ferrer and Dr. Miguel Montero-Baker.
Mud Is The Great Equalizer
David has guided in the Osa for about 10 years. He says he leads around 2,000 tourists a year. Some went home changed. Others arrived stressed and left stressed.
He wanted to know why.
Part of the answer is simple. Put a doctor and a lawyer in the mud long enough and they're equals. The status falls away, and that leaves room for something to shift.
The FORGE Protocol
David never sat at a desk and designed it. It grew out of watching people. He calls it FORGE:
- Leave the familiar frontier.
- Meet a real ordeal: humidity, mosquitoes, river crossings, nights in a hammock.
- Reflect and reframe, through journaling, meditation and working through it as a group.
- A symbolic gateway the group crosses together.
- Go home with a personal code you write yourself.
His warning is the part I'd pay attention to. A frontier and an ordeal on their own just give the ego another trophy. People survive the jungle and come back the same. Reflection is what turns the discomfort into meaning.
Roughly 100 Kilometers
Participants fly into Drake Bay on a small plane, about 45 minutes, and the phones go off. Over 10 days they cover about 100 kilometers. One day runs 30 kilometers through the jungle, with river crossings.
Then there's the Witch Hill, the only cloud forest in the area. It's misty and steep, and David says people get lost there all the time.
He'd know. The first time he went out to explore the route, his group got lost up there with no clean water. They filtered water from a pond.
The trip uses screening. It's physically and psychologically demanding, and it isn't medical care or therapy.
Michel's Edge
Michel had looked for a real jungle experience in Ecuador and Colombia before he found David. He trained hard for it.
For him, the shift started when he turned off his phone. For decades, he said, his mind had been somewhere else: the next conference, the next surgical procedure, a complication he kept replaying. In the jungle that habit puts you in danger.
So David gave him a tool for the moments his mind wandered. Name three things you can see and three things you can hear. Michel used it a lot.
He came home without a single photo.
The Takeaway
David calls himself an anti-guru. He says the biggest coach is nature itself. Sometimes it's silence.
He treats fear the same way: you recognize it and process it. You don't deny it or muscle through it.
His measure of the trip is simple: what you carry home.