The Hosts at the Heart of the Ishq Retreat Center
Most retreat centers in Kenya are run by managers. Ishq is not. Ishq is held by Heath and Jana, the people who built it. We live here. We facilitate here. We are usually the ones who greet you when you arrive.
That is what we mean when we say Ishq is our home. It is not a brand line. It is the operational reality.
Heath & Jana
Heath
Heath grew up in Kenya and spent most of his career in the Middle East. He was a software entrepreneur for many years and has since grown closer to the inner work than the outer. He still advises on innovation, impact investing, and social impact startups. The work that shapes Ishq is the other work.
Years of inner practice. Years of Avalon retreats with Alanja and the team. Years of learning to lead himself before trying to lead anyone else.
He comes to Ishq with curiosity, not a teacher. What he brings is the willingness to be in it — to be honest about what he is still learning, to hold truth and gentle clarity in difficult moments, and to sit alongside people doing the same work.
Jana
Jana is the anchor of Ishq and is your primary contact to plan the perfect retreat experience. She also runs her own work at Ishq and through partnerships with facilitators we trust.
Where Heath holds the structure of the work, Jana holds the relational field — the part that cannot be designed and cannot be faked. She brings the spirit of home and all of Ishq reflects this care and attention.
She is a somatic and relational depth practitioner. Trained in Internal Family Systems and Kundalini Yoga. Years of practice. Years of holding space for individuals, couples, and groups. She is the reason the container at Ishq feels safe enough for participants to actually go where they came to go.
How We Work Together
When facilitators bring their own groups to Ishq, we are often present without being the leads — available if needed, out of the way if not. That posture is something we have learned over years. It matters.
Why We Built a Retreat Center in Kenya
About the Name
Ishq is an Arabic word that does not translate cleanly into English. It means love, but not the ordinary kind. Not preference. Not attachment. Not the warmth we feel toward what is comfortable.
Ishq is the love that pulls you out of yourself. The love that is larger than your history, your patterns, your conditioning. The Sufi poets used it to describe the force that draws the soul toward the divine, and in doing so, toward the most honest version of itself.
We chose this name because it describes what happens to people when they spend time at this Kenya retreat center. Not always comfortably. Not always in ways they expected. But something in that direction — a drawing toward what is most true.
How It Began
This was a home before it was anything else.
Heath spent twenty-five years in East Africa and the Middle East, working at the intersection of entrepreneurship, technology, and inner development. He founded companies in Kenya and Jordan. He built incubators and innovation hubs across the region — a pivotal mover in both the Middle East’s and East Africa’s tech ecosystems. He worked with the UN Foundation. He moved capital into impact investments. And along the way, he kept asking the same question, often uncomfortably: do the structures we build in the world reflect what we truly we carry inside ourselves?
That question changed his work. It also changed his life. He came to this land not searching for a retreat center, but as someone who had done enough of his own work to recognize a place that held something real.
Jana came to Ishq through years of practice in somatic and relational work. She co-leads the Avalon retreat globally where her path into that leadership unfolded naturally — through years of doing the work, meeting herself deeply, and allowing her own transformation to guide the way.
From a place of numbness, she has journeyed into aliveness. Reconnecting with her body. Her truth. A deep sense of compassion. This lived experience shapes the way she holds others — with presence, honesty, and care.
She is trained in Internal Family Systems and Kundalini Yoga. Her work invites people into authentic living, where connection, responsibility, and inner truth become the foundation. She works full-time with Avalon, facilitating retreats, circles, and one-to-one sessions.
She is based in Kenya, where she is creating Ishq alongside Heath. She is the one who, more than anyone else, makes the container at Ishq what it is. Where Heath holds the structure of the work, Jana breathes the spirit of home into it. The two together is what makes this a place where the inner work can actually land.
The land found them. They built what was needed. The home came first. Then the shala. Then the cottages. Then, slowly, the realization that what they had made was not just for them.
That is how Ishq was born. Not by plan. By recognition.