Our Founders
Nuša
Nuša’s path to yoga began quietly and naturally, inspired by her mother, whose lifelong practice made yoga a familiar presence from an early age. What started as curiosity slowly unfolded into a deeper calling during her university years in Zagreb, where she explored different yoga styles while learning to listen more closely to her body and breath.
She found a sense of home and community at Shanga Yoga Studio, where she discovered a practice rooted in awareness, integrity, and connection. In 2018, she completed her 200-hour Vinyasa Yoga Teacher Training with the Spanda Yoga Institute, marking the beginning of her teaching journey.
Nuša began teaching at Nitya Studio in Zagreb, while continuing to deepen her own practice through ongoing yoga and pranayama workshops. She is currently enrolled in advanced teacher training with the Spanda Yoga Institute, allowing her teaching to evolve alongside her personal practice.
Her classes are gentle yet grounding, inviting students to move with presence, breathe with intention, and soften into stillness. Nuša holds space with warmth and sensitivity, creating an environment where each person can reconnect with their inner rhythm and rediscover a sense of ease — on the mat and beyond.
Ilijana
Nada
Nada is the quiet root of this retreat.
A mother, artist, and lifelong yoga practitioner, she has lived the practice for decades — long before it became something to teach or define. Through her, yoga was passed down naturally, woven into daily life, creativity, and care. By profession an art teacher and by nature a creator, Nada gently opens space for intuitive expression, inviting moments of play, making, and connection rather than structured classes.
A devoted lover of nature and an unstoppable force outdoors, she also brings her deep relationship with food and nourishment into the retreat. While meals are supported by a dedicated cook, some carry Nada’s personal touch — simple, seasonal, and made with the kind of care that feels like home. As host, she holds the space with warmth and steadiness, grounding the retreat in roots, lineage, and lived presence.
Her presence is subtle but essential — felt in the rhythm of the days, in shared meals, in creative pauses, and in the quiet knowing that you are being cared for by someone wise, strong, and lovingly human.
Ilijana began her yoga journey during her university years, starting with Hatha Yoga. She completed her first formal training in 2014 (RYT 200) and became a certified yoga teacher in 2016. After years of practicing Ashtanga and Vinyasa Yoga, she discovered Dharma Yoga in 2015 — a tradition she has remained deeply devoted to.
She completed her advanced RYT 500 training in 2019 at the House of Dharma center in Zagreb, and in 2022 finished the 500-hour Life of a Yogi Teacher Training in New York under the guidance of Sri Dharma Mittra. Ilijana is also certified in Transformative Yoga Wheel and trained as a Kids Yoga teacher.
She continues to deepen her knowledge through workshops with teachers such as Sri Dharma Mittra, Camilo Garcia, Yiannis Muktis Om, Andreas Acosta, Shir Shemesh, and others.
Ilijana has been teaching yoga regularly since 2015, and in 2022 she opened her own studio, So Ham Dharma Yoga, in Pula. Each summer, she leads workshops on the island of Hvar. Her classes emphasize breath, mindful movement, and the healing vibrations of instruments she plays to support deep relaxation and inner awareness.
Alongside yoga, Ilijana’s great love is music. She is a trained music teacher, pianist, and composer, finding harmony and inspiration through the intertwined paths of yoga and sound.
{our story}Nusha and Nada, mother and daughter, shared a love that had always been woven through yoga. Nada passed her practice on to Nusha when she was young, but as the years moved on, life filled with responsibilities, noise, and distance — not emotional, but the kind that comes from never having enough time.
After many years, they found themselves together on a yoga retreat far from home, hoping to reconnect, to pause, and to remember the freedom they had been quietly missing. In the quiet moments between practices — by the sea, over simple meals, and in shared silence — they realized something profound:
everything they were seeking on that retreat already existed in their everyday world.
The calm. The beauty. The space to breathe.
Soon after, Ilijana — their sister-in-law, a musician and yoga teacher — arrived with her own dream: to open a yoga studio in their family home. The three of them instantly recognized the thread that bound them together. Yoga wasn’t just a practice. It was their meeting point, their language, their way back to themselves and to each other.
And so, the idea unfolded naturally —
to create a place where others could experience the same sense of returning home, to themselves and to what truly matters.
This is how Wonder Yoga Retreat was born:
from connection, from family, from love,
and from the realisation that wonder begins the moment we slow down enough to feel it.