Bliss and Stars

Four and a half hours north of Cape Town, the Doring River runs through a valley the city's lights have never reached. Here, on 1,350 hectares of private land in the Cederberg, Daria and Heine built Bliss & Stars. They had traded Copenhagen for the valley, and they built the place on a plain belief: what matters most asks very little in complication and a great deal in attention.

The arrangements are small by design. There are six private chalets, no more than ten guests per retreat, one long communal table and no Wi-Fi. Meals are vegetarian or vegan, drawn largely from the property's gardens and local farmers. There is no coffee or alcohol, which the kitchen says is mostly about sleep, so mornings begin with cacao and rooibos.

Daria Rasmussen, a somatic practitioner and mindfulness teacher, leads the body-based work: breathwork, somatic sessions and meditation. For the Inner Leadership retreat she draws on Buddhist philosophy and a method called BARE, developed from Somatic Experiencing, breathwork and Buddhist tradition. Heine, an astrophotographer, supplies the other half of the place. He owns one of the largest privately held telescopes in South Africa, with a 20-inch aperture, and takes guests to it each evening.

The retreats run three to seven days. They include silent retreats, the signature Rest & Thrive, a Do Nothing Retreat, the Bloom mushroom and microdosing retreat, separate retreats for women and for men, and a couples programme refined with guests since 2021. Orion's Odyssey pairs astrophotography with a plant-based tasting menu from Chef Aphelele, each course built around an astronomical phenomenon. A cooking retreat teaches knife work, fermentation and open-flame cooking.