These Jordanian Sisters Bringing Wildness to Wellness Retreats

When women choose each other, season after season, decade after decade, it creates a geography of belonging which is far more powerful than any location on a map could ever be. Jordanian sisters Lara, Tania and Maya Kalla built this bond, brick by brick, from the retail shops of London to the sun-bleached contours of Amman, their home city. It is a land where the soul’s quietest whispers are heard alongside the crescendo of shared laughter, a duality they have codified, with elegant precision, into the ethos of their retreats: Wellness and Wildness. Their journey started with yoga, with a slow, persistent turning towards the light, as natural and inevitable as heliotropism. “Opportunities knock on your door. You just have to know when to grab them,” Lara tells SceneTraveller. Life, in its relentless way, applied the necessary pressure; they, in turn, became seekers. Lara found the mat first, her practice, a private anchor, until it became a public calling. “I became a yoga teacher because I was going through a difficult time in my marriage,” Lara confesses. Tania, her sister, her student, then her peer, followed. 
What began as personal solace evolved into a shared language—a syntax of breath and movement they began to teach, discovering in the process a collective gift for connection. People, they noted with a mixture of wonder and recognition, would inexplicably unburden themselves in their presence as if stumbling upon a sanctuary. They understood this as a responsibility—to widen the circle, to build a bigger room. “We love the word ‘reinvention’…you’re just layering new dimensions. Each dimension is the doorway to the next,” Tania explains.
Their venture, therefore, was an organic unfurling, a layering of dimensions, with its genius being the rejection of a monolithic ideal. When an opportunity presented itself—a chance to host a retreat on a boat drifting down the ancient, maternal spine of the Nile—they grasped it with the calm certainty of those who know the next step on a path they have long been walking. This was an expansion, a revelation of what had been simmering beneath the surface all along.
The name ‘Wellness and Wildness’ is a compact manifesto that rejects the austere, linen-clad orthodoxy of some wellness cultures and the mindless hedonism of mere tourism. It proposes, instead, a necessary marriage. The wellness is the inward journey: the dawn yoga sessions where intentions are set like delicate seeds, the breathwork that feels like mapping one’s own internal weather, the profound workshops that are about archaeological digs into the self. Lara speaks of these elements with a grounded grace; she is the steady pulse, the one who masterfully orchestrates the logistics so the soul can play. Then, the wildness. This is the exhalation, the joyous release into the present moment. It is the spontaneous dance on a sundeck under a blanket of Nubian stars, the shared feast that becomes a symphony of stories, the curated playlist that somehow finds the secret rhythm of the group. Tania embodies this spirit—an amplifier of joy, a conductor of communal energy who believes sleep is a mundane sacrifice for the altar of connection. “My character’s a bit of an amplifier. If there’s joy, I take it to even further joy,” Tania shares. It is a wildness of permission: to be silly, to be loud, to reconnect with the uncaged self that polite adulthood so often silences. Their retreats are, by deliberate design, luxurious. This luxury is not merely a matter of thread counts or picturesque locales, though these are present on their elegant Nile dahabiya and in their chosen villa in Italy. A day might begin with a gentle asana flow as the sun gilds the river, move through an excursion to a temple that hums with antiquity, and culminate in a sound healing session where vibrations wash over tired spirits. But the true architecture is human. They are connoisseurs of atmosphere, reading a room with acute sensitivity, understanding when to stick to the schedule and when to throw it overboard for a deeper, messier, more real conversation. As Tania puts it: “You do your best and you surrender to the results.”
The workshops are where their philosophy crystallises into something tangible and transformative. Consider the Japanese Kintsugi heart exercise. Participants are given a ceramic heart, meditate on their fractures—those spaces of loss, resilience, and change—then deliberately break the object and mend it with gold-dusted lacquer. It is a simple, devastatingly profound metaphor made flesh. In one retreat, tough, composed women “were weeping…It was a therapy session,” Lara shares. Here, the cracks are gilded, made brilliant and beautiful with the hard-won gold of personal truth. 
With each carefully paced retreat, their vision expands and refines. They designed their first bespoke couples' retreat, a new frontier that demands its own calculus of energy and entertainment. “Men are a different story,” Lara admits with a wry smile, outlining plans for lighthouse dinners on private islands and sunset violinists—elements to kindle romance alongside introspection. This bespoke service is a natural extension, an answer to the clients who now seek their particular alchemy for milestone celebrations.
Their horizon stretches ambitiously. Whispers of Switzerland’s alpine serenity and Greece’s azure waters float in their future plans, each destination a new canvas for their philosophy. Yet their growth is intentionally, almost devoutly, slow. “If it was faster, I think we would have been a little bit overwhelmed,” Lara admits.

Of course, the path is not perpetually strewn with rose petals. There is the palpable risk of upfront financial commitments, the dizzying puzzle of dietary preferences and personality clashes, the challenge of maintaining professional poise when faced with the occasional guest who seems determined to test every principle of compassion you hold. They have learned to navigate this with a weathered, sisterly professionalism—taking the difficult meetings in private, smoothing ruffled feathers with a deft touch, understanding that sometimes the most challenging person in the room is the one who most needs to be there. Their sisterhood is their ballast; a triangulated force of empathy, practicality, and creative fire that allows them to absorb shocks and transform friction into a different kind of warmth. “I’m not telling you that we always get along,” Lara laughs, dispelling any myth of frictionless harmony. “We fight, we argue, we see things differently. But at the end of the day, we communicate well, and we give each other space.” When asked how they stay true to their vision amidst the noise of suggestions and trends, their answer is characteristically grounded. “Being honest with ourselves, and what we can and can’t do… we will go with our intuition, and our gut feeling.” Lara speaks of the humility required to listen without being swayed, of the maturity to understand that people are “fickle” and that the true draw is energy. “People don't come on a retreat, just to go on a retreat,” she reflects, “They come for your energy… they come for you.” To spend time with them, even via a faltering internet connection, is to understand that their offering is, ultimately, themselves. You are booking an invitation into their world—a world where authenticity is the only currency, where vulnerability is strength, and where joy is considered a sacred, collective project. They have built a geography of belonging, and their retreats are the pilgrimages there. It is a journey to a place where you can, finally, lay down your mask by the Nile, dance under the same stars that watched over pharaohs, and discover that your own heart, once broken, can be pieced back together with gold—and that it will shine all the more brightly for the repair.