Why Yanua?
The term “Yanua” comes from Sanskrit for “path”.
We all possess a life purpose and the ability to find it. By reconnecting with nature, rooting ourselves in our biological origins, we reconnect with our inner guide. This enables us to reset our body rhythms and discover our self-regulating tools. If you are faced with a major decision or seek a life change, we propose a weeklong or 3-day purpose quest.
To explore your purpose and achieve greater meaning, we use gentle immersion in nature that serves as your guide, allowing you to reset your biological rhythms, and glimpse the answer to questions, as well as better discern your gifts and longings, to walk a more fulfilling life. This is done via Sacred Biology, created uniquely here, in and with Yanua.
You will be comfortably lodged and looked after in a diverse environment within a family farm where we foster projects that promote the wellbeing of the landscape, the local community and its visitors.
Contemporary experience and ancient wisdom show that rebuilding our bridge to nature allows new ideas to flow from within that are more difficult to access otherwise.
The week-long purpose quest is an individual retreat with a guide who walks you through the preparation and integration of this personal experience. It possesses characteristics of the better-known vision quest that is practiced in various cultures. However, each person has their own needs, and this search for purpose is adapted to your situation at this moment in time. Check our Retreat and Workshops tab under Our Services.
Based on our guests’ experiences, we can confidently say that a stay amongst us in Yanua will provide you with the following:
Opportunity
To remember your intimate relationship with nature and your authenticity. With our presence, we will help you be drawn to your own roots.
Guidance
Guides will be on hand to help you heal your connection with nature, lead you towards introspection, encouraging inner listening so you can better answer your needs.
Nourishment
We prepare healthy meals with fresh organic/local ingredients during workshops & retreats. We cook consciously so that your body gets good nourishment in a space where rest is provided.
Nature
A natural and diverse environment of 20 hectares with fruit trees, vegetables, aromatic and medicinal herb gardens, forest, ponds, a small lake, streams and animals with modern accommodations. Connect to the sentient beings that surround us in Nature.
Inspiration
When we say goodbye, you will have received the opportunity to feel a sense of renewal. You can take with you newfound wisdom to return to daily life in the best possible way.
What is Sacred Biology for those seeking deeper meaning and wellbeing in their lives?
Our toolkit at Yanua is 3-pronged. It uniquely combines Gestalt therapy within an experiential, hands-on ecopsychology context, as well as conscious body movement practices, rooted in a dance background, combined to other body disciplines, including Tai chi and Qigong. Custodian of the land at Yanua, co-living within a natural setting, we cultivate not only plants, but foster a deep connection with nonhuman sentient beings, the wide diversity that we find on our farm and in our forest. Our immersion and grounding in natural surroundings, and use of ceremonial practice, means that what we transmit to others also carries energy and expression from the land: it is not created by us, but cocreated with us, and through us in part only, where the land also expresses its part and to which we invite a listening ear. We do not teach theories or textbook information. Yanua and Sacred Biology are above all experiential. This practice ultimately is a guide to understanding better one’s own truth, and realise this is the ultimate purpose: to live meaningfully and with a raised awareness, in a deep, rooted way within the world.
Anne Lanevschi
I am a Sacred Biology guide at Yanua. More widely, I am also a partner, daughter, sister, mother, teacher, dancer, and scientist. Combining decades of experience as an artist, author and scientist, I have developed a 3-pronged approach to help those seeking a fundamental change to reconnect with our inner nature and Earth, to walk a more meaningful life. I comanage Yanua with my partner of more than 30 years, Diederik, and as a team, we can be sometimes seen as a right versus left brain partnership where “right brain” creativity, intuition and holistic thinking meet “left brain” logic and analytical thinking. But our view is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Diederik Pietersma
I am Yanua’s research scientist and farmer, using both my decades of academic training and generations’ long family farming background to blend hands on work with scientific rigour and logic to analyse the conditions of Yanua’s environment. This allows us to create and implement solutions that, while listening to the land, foster soil regeneration, biodiversity and sustainable agricultural and forestry practices. More widely, I am also a partner, son, brother and father: with children of our own, I am passionate about “improving futures”, learning and exploring within and together with our natural laboratory, factoring in measurable changes such as in the climate locally, or the effect of conventional farm practices that have eroded diversity, and problem-solving adaptations for a common, healthier tomorrow.