Meet the world
with wonder.
Retreats and experiences that stir the heart and still the mind.
Intimate retreats in extraordinary locations that replenish the soul.
WHAT IS DEYÀ?
DEYÀ creates retreats and experiences for people who suspect that the life they are living and the life they are capable of living are not quite the same thing.
We bring together practitioners at the height of their craft, places of uncommon beauty, and the kind of unhurried time that most of us never give ourselves. All that is asked of you is to trust what emerges.
"And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed."
— Pico Iyer
2026 RETREATS
UBUD, BALI
Sanctum
Amy Finlay-Jones and Alla Demutska guide a four night deep dive into the science and practice of self-compassion at a private riverside estate in on the outskirts of Ubud, Bali.
April 22-26, 2026 | Sold Out
DEIÀ, MALLORCA
Essencia
Join Amy Finlay-Jones, Anna-Alexandra, Mar Gracia, Maria Roca and Henrietta Balnaves for a four night immersion in creativity and contemplative practice at Son Rullan, Mallorca.
May 26-30, 2026 | 2 Places Left
BATURITI, BALI
Soma
Steven Harper and Amy Finlay-Jones lead a six night journey in compassion cultivation, Gestalt practice and somatic enquiry in the lush highlands of Baturiti, Bali.
Aug 1-7, 2026 | 2 Rooms Left
There are moments that feel like a coup de foudre. When something — beauty, or grief, or the quality of an afternoon light — breaks through the surface of the ordinary and for a brief moment we are awake to everything.
WHY DEYÀ?
Somewhere between the land and the conversation and the quality of an unhurried afternoon, you will find yourself falling back in love with being alive.
OUR APPROACH
Most of us have learned, without quite meaning to, how to move through the world without being touched by it. We have our routines and our competencies and our carefully managed days, and somewhere inside all of that we have stopped noticing: the solemnity of a churchbell, the honeysweet promise of a day full of sunshine, the wet sky writhing like a fretful child. We are not unhappy, exactly. We are insulated.
DEYÀ began with the belief that intimacy with life is what we are born for. We seek out places that restore in you the capacity to meet the world with wonder; to wake you up to the beauty of life as it is. To notice what you had stopped noticing. To feel what you had learned to manage. And above all, to meet yourself again - with presence, kindness, and a little more intention.
Into these places we bring people whose craft is inseparable from their humanity — contemplative practitioners, writers, artists, philosophers and therapists — who know how to bring us back into dialogue with the land, with each other, with the parts of ourselves that have gone quiet.
The days have space in them: mornings for contemplative practice, afternoons that belong entirely to the person, evenings around long tables where conversation finds its own depth. The groups are small. Every element — the collaborators, the location, the food on the table — is chosen for the particular magic it brings. Because this — the land, the table, the people, the unhurried hour — is what the meaningful life is actually made of.
DEYÀ is for people who suspect that the life they are living and the life they are capable of living are not quite the same thing. Who are ready, for a few days at least, to close the distance.
THE EXPERIENCE
THE PEOPLE BEHIND DEYÀ
Dr Amy Finlay-Jones
Amy is a therapist, meditation teacher, and Associate Professor who has spent two decades asking what it takes for a person to feel genuinely alive to their own life. Her training is in psychology — which she understands, at its deepest, as the study of the soul — but the questions that animate her work reach beyond the consulting room: into the body, the natural world, and the less attended realms of ecology and spirit that she believes are essential to any real understanding of human flourishing.
Her research and practice have centred on compassion and creativity as the two great generative forces of a meaningful life — not as achievements to be reached but as capacities that already exist in each of us, waiting for the right conditions to emerge. Creating those conditions is what she has given her working life to.
She holds a PhD in compassion-based practice, is lead editor of The Handbook of Self-Compassion, and is certified in Compassion Cultivation Training and Mindful Self-Compassion. She is also the founder of Kindful.
CO-FOUNDER · FACILITATOR
Michael has spent much of his life living and working in places of extraordinary human depth. Through his work across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, he has learned from cultures whose capacity for compassion, community and shared life is profound.
These experiences have shaped DEYA and our desire to create retreats that honour the places and cultures they move through as fully as the people who attend them. Engagement with land, food, art, ceremony and local story is not incidental, but part of the experience itself.
Michael brings to DEYA a belief, shaped by close contact with people for whom community is life, that compassion is not only a personal practice. It is relational. It is one way we learn to be in the world with greater care.
Michael van Koesveld
CO-FOUNDER
01
Every element — the venue, the collaborators, the timing, the meals — is chosen for the particular magic it brings. Through attention to detail, we create the conditions in which something unexpected can emerge.
Intention
02
Our practitioners bring decades of experience and training in psychology, contemplative science, somatic practice, and creative work. Above all, they embody the very practices they teach.
Integrity
03
We choose our locations with reverence. Places where the landscape echoes, in its own language, the same things we are trying to teach: how to pay attention, how to be present to what is actually here, how to meet the world with wonder.