Severe health challenges in childhood, mainly affecting the lungs, made Daniella conscious from early on of her own healing journey. Without knowing it at the time, Daniella learned to drop into meditative states, and in time to meet each struggle for breath with stillness and peace.
Time on the sidelines, away from games and sports, became time to observe: the root, as Daniella sees it now, of an ability to take in the bigger picture and ask profound questions.
Later, against most conventional advice for someone with compromised lungs, the water called. Daniella became a scuba instructor in the Red Sea, and then an underwater photographer, diving the deep drop-offs of the Sinai coast.
Diving and freediving taught her to regulate the breath and stay calm at depth, and somewhere in those years her lungs healed. What had defined her childhood became her greatest strength, and that underwater life carried Daniella, in time, to Mexico.
The instinct carried through her life, to turn inward, to question the accepted way and look for a truer one, has shaped everything 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?
Fifteen years have gone into answering it in different forms. The most significant evolution of Daniella’s career came with Sanará, the boutique wellness hotel built on the beach in Tulum in 2014, and with the Real Coconut, born within it. The Real Coconut’s recipes went on to fill shelves across the United States and Canada, and the pages of the cookbook Nourish Yourself, Nurture Our World. By Daniella Hunter, a lifestyle and clothing collection, gathers skincare, clothing and personal pieces for a conscious, minimal way of living. And now phytovive: a project championing the marine microorganisms that first breathed life into this earth.
This season Daniella is curating the Sanará experience at La Zebra, Tulum, in the original Sanará rooms and spaces on the beach.
The forms kept changing. The question never did.