The team

Held by people you'd want to know.

Two resident teachers, two visiting facilitators a year, plus the kitchen team, the gardeners, and Pak Made who guides the Wednesday hikes. The whole property is fourteen people. Most have been here since the gates opened in 2018.

Founder · resident · vinyasa
~ Resident teacher

Wayan Suartana.

— Founder, vinyasa lead, runs the morning practice on every retreat

Wayan grew up in the next village, the second of five children of a temple priest and a textile weaver. He found yoga at university in Yogyakarta and went to Mysore for the first of nine pilgrimages in 1998. Taught in Tokyo for nearly a decade through the early 2000s, then came home to build his first retreat in 2011.

Mawenu is the third small school he's built, and the smallest. He teaches a moderate vinyasa with a long warm-up, an unusual emphasis on footwork, and a quiet deep-pose practice in the closing fifteen minutes. He is fifty-four, walks the river loop twice a week, and has not missed a sunrise practice on a retreat day in eight years.

"The point isn't to make you flexible. The point is to make a body that can hold whatever life is, when life finally lets go."
Practice since
1991 · 35 yrs
Pilgrimages
9 to Mysore
Lineage
Krishnamacharya
— Speaks Bahasa Indonesia, Balinese, English, Japanese
~ Resident teacher

Ines Vasquez.

— Co-founder, yin and meditation lead, runs every silent retreat

Ines is from Lisbon, trained as an architect, practiced the trade for fifteen years building affordable cooperative housing in Portugal and Mozambique. Found Vipassana on a long sit at Dhamma Mahi in Burgundy in 2004 and never quite came back the same. Joined Wayan at Mawenu in 2018 and began co-teaching the silent retreats in 2020.

She teaches a slow yin with long holds, a body-scan-style guided meditation, and a particularly rigorous closing shavasana. Most repeat guests come back specifically for one of her weeks. She is forty-eight, paints in oils on her days off, and runs the small library that lives off the kitchen.

"I trained as an architect. The frame matters less than the light it lets in. A retreat is the same — what we build is space, and it's empty on purpose."
Practice since
2004 · 22 yrs
Vipassana sits
17 long courses
Lineage
Goenka · Theravada
— Speaks Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, basic Indonesian
Co-founder · resident · yin
Visiting · two retreats a year
~ Visiting facilitator

Maya Sutanto.

— Restorative and yin specialist, returns twice a year for the yin weeks

Maya is based in Jakarta and visits Mawenu for two of the six retreats a year — the July yin week and one of the silent weeks. She trained in restorative yoga with Judith Hanson Lasater in Berkeley in 2011, and has been teaching yin for fourteen years across Southeast Asia. Mother of two, runs a small studio in Jakarta's Menteng district, and writes about yoga for Indonesian Vogue.

Her yin practice is unusually slow, with a heavy emphasis on internal sensation and a closing fifteen-minute sound bath using bronze singing bowls cast in Java. Best week of the year for guests recovering from injury, burnout, or a hard run of grief.

Practice since
2008 · 18 yrs
Specialty
Restorative · yin
Returning
Twice a year
— Speaks Bahasa Indonesia, English, Mandarin
~ Cultural guide

Pak Made Sukarsa.

— Born in the next village, leads every Wednesday excursion

Pak Made was born in Banjar Sebatu, a kilometer down the road, in 1968. He's been guiding visitors through these hills since 1989 — first for a small trekking outfit out of Ubud, then independently from the early 2000s, and exclusively for Mawenu since 2019.

He leads every Wednesday excursion (the rice-terrace walk, the temple loop, or the Mount Batur sunrise hike), and the Friday afternoon temple ceremony. He knows every plant on the trail, the name of every farmer in the next two valleys, and the location of the better warungs. Speaks softly. Walks fast. Carries everyone's water.

Guiding since
1989 · 37 yrs
Specialty
Trail · ceremony
Born
Banjar Sebatu
— Speaks Balinese, Bahasa Indonesia, English
Cultural · trail · ceremony
The kitchen + garden

The other people who make the week.

Putu Wirajaya

~ Head of kitchen

Trained at the Tugu Hotel in Tabanan, runs the Mawenu kitchen since 2019. Designs every menu around what comes back from the morning market. Quiet. Rigorous. Makes the best sambal matah on the island.

Sari Adnyani

~ Sous chef · pastry

Sari joined the kitchen team in 2020 from a small warung in Sukawati. Specializes in Balinese sweets and the morning bread. Makes the cardamom kahve coffee on Sundays.

Ketut Geriya

~ Head gardener

Born on the property's bordering paddy. Has tended the Mawenu garden since the first villa was built in 2017. The medicinal jamu garden is his project; he writes the garden notes for the journal each month.

A short history

Mawenu, briefly told.

Mawenu — the word means "the long quiet" in old Balinese — is the third school Wayan and Ines have built together. The first was a single-villa retreat outside Yogyakarta in 2011. The second was a teacher-training school in Chiang Mai that ran from 2014 to 2017. This is the smallest, and the one they think of as theirs.

Built by hand over fourteen months in 2017 and 2018 with eight craftsmen from Banjar Sebatu. Has run six retreats a year since the gates opened. Has hosted, at the time of this writing, exactly 1,184 guests.

~ 2011

The first retreat in Yogyakarta

Wayan returns from Tokyo. Builds a single-villa retreat near Borobudur with a Mysore-style morning practice. Runs nine retreats over two years.

~ 2014

Chiang Mai teacher training

Wayan and Ines meet at a Vipassana retreat in Chiang Mai. They open a small teacher-training school the following year.

~ 2017

Construction begins in Sebatu

The land is purchased from Wayan's uncle. Eight local craftsmen begin work on the first three villas in November.

~ 2018

The gates open in March

The first guests arrive on a five-day soft-opening retreat. Forty more retreats run before the end of 2019.

~ 2026

Eight years in

1,184 guests through the gates. 47 retreats run. The garden, finally, looks the way it was drawn in 2017.

Be a guest

The teachers are half the reason people come back.

Six retreats a year. Twelve guests at a time. Every retreat is led by one of the three teachers above with the rest of the team in support. Most fill four to six months ahead.

See the 2026 calendar Reserve your week