It is an honour to meet you! I’m Kaya.

I have been working as an integrative body-oriented psychotherapist, Movement Medicine teacher and facilitator, mentor and lecturer in Croatia and abroad for many years. I am one of the four founders of Center Meleta.

This work has been my calling for as long as I can remember. It has also been my personal practice that keeps on enriching my life as I offer it to you, our communities, and to different parts of the world. 

I am deeply curious about us human beings and passionate about living a fulfilled life, aligned with who we are and our purpose. For me, that means to use the time we have to do the best we can with what we’ve got, including each other.

I hope my journey can be of service to you and to the empowerment of Life on Earth in all its exquisite forms. 

The Essence of My Work

My work draws from many years of experience in body-oriented psychotherapy, movement, dance, education and educational systems as well in teaching philosophy, sociology and logics and in working with different companies.   

If I can choose one thing that is common to my entire personal and professional journey, it would be learning and teaching how to move with whatever arises - moving with what life brings to us, finding the medicine in that and finding ways to live a meaningful and fulfilled life. 

I am also passionate about finding what really drives us, what really matters to us, and about leaving this place at least a bit better than we found it. I see my part as supporting others to make enough space in their lives to do what they came here to do with love, strength, respect, and kindness. 

And that is spirituality for me - to be in touch with who we are and bring it into our everyday life practice and relationships that we have.

In my opinion, it’s not about hard work. It’s about dedicated work. It’s about having the courage to look inside of ourselves over and over again, to learn about who we are, who we choose to become, and about how to accept whatever we find on the way. 

It is about the choice to be (self)responsible, to find beauty, freedom and empowerment in it, and it is about the choice of what we want to build with it. 

My Story

Looking back, I can see how my entire history, the journey that I had so far, the experiences and challenges, and the beauty of life I had all led to where I am at this very moment, personally and professionally.

I started my conscious self-development journey at a very early age. As a 13-year old, I was looking for therapy that could help me soothe my pain and give me answers I was craving for. Like many others who get into personal development, I did not have it easy. A decade of panic attacks, severe depression, and feeling overwhelmed with the life around me, I was walking on the edge between leaving this Earth and staying. Years later, I understood that it is not that I did not want to live. I just needed to find a way to live a different life than the one I had.

At the same time, that impulse to find a way out, to move through the experiences that I had, and to make meaning out of it was very strong. So my quest to find help for myself took me on a lifelong journey of exploring the practices and modalities that support us human beings in this incredible thing called life. What started like reading every book I could get my hands on continued as finding my path through the practice of body-oriented psychotherapy and later on through Movement Medicine. The guidance much deeper than my conscious knowledge took me to amazing teachers and these two practices. I realized that in order to get where I wanted to be, to feel comfortable in my own skin and open to receive and enjoy the life around me, I needed to explore all the levels of my being – my psyche, my mind and heart, my body and spirit.

The experiences that I had have given me strong lessons. As I was learning to navigate my personal history through the lens of psychotherapy, the death of my father and getting ill was the beginning of my conscious spirituality. For me, spirituality has many ways, but it is always to do with connecting with something much greater than us, living our truth, living through the heart, and following our own path grounded strongly in everyday life and relationships that we have.

Even in the hardest of times, my heart was always looking for ways to support others too. Whether through teaching in schools or working with children and adolescents, or working on art projects that included emotional awareness, or any other way I could find. Quite soon along the way, still studying philosophy and literature, the dots started connecting – my desire to support others found the embodied conscious practices to offer it through. 

Today I can see how the challenges I had pointed me in the direction I needed to go. They made me feel a hunger for knowledge and understanding of the human psyche, our emotions, patterns, the way we are wired and why we suffer, and a deep love towards finding ways of how to feel whole, how to shift what we got in our advantage, how to heal places in us that got hurt, how to show up with strength and dignity and moreover how to live a present, rich and fulfilling life.

I can also see how my story became my medicine and how much love and appreciation I have for all life on Earth.

I feel deeply honored and grateful for all the remarkable people I had the chance to work with over the last 10 years. Whether I was a part of your journey in 1:1 therapy sessions, ceremony and dance classes, or teaching in therapy schools or different settings, your presence really mattered, and my heart is bigger for knowing you.

I trust that our journeys teach us in many ways, but what I find incredibly freeing and rewarding is the beauty of self-responsibility that comes with it, the learning to work through our stories to the place where our person becomes strong enough to dare to be who we truly are. And that is absolutely awesome. 

And as for my story… may it stay in balance of giving and receiving, enjoying my time here, alone and with the ones I love, doing what I love, and with all the beauty of this world.

Education and Training

2021-2022, ASSISTING PROFESSIONAL TRAININGS - School of Movement Medicine, UK

2016-2019, MOVEMENT MEDICINE CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT – School of Movement Medicine, UK (CPD Heart & Seer, CPD Ritual, CPD Phoenix, CPD Initiation)

2016-2018, BODY-ORIENTED PSYCHOTHERAPIST (ADVANCED PROGRAM) Center for Integrative Development, Croatia, 2-year training

2015-2016, MOVEMENT MEDICINE TEACHER AND FACILITATOR – School of Movement Medicine, UK

2013-2015, MOVEMENT MEDICINE APPRENTICESHIP PROGRAMME – School of Movement Medicine, UK, 2-year training & a lifelong journey

2010-2014, BODY-ORIENTED PSYCHOTHERAPIST – Center for Integrative Development, Croatia, 4-year training program in Integrative Core Dynamics (ICD)

2011-2014, MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Croatia

2007-2010, BACHELOR OF SOCIOLOGY, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Croatia

I feel deeply honoured to have had many extraordinary teachers on my journey, teachers with incredible heart, mind and spirit and amazing dedication to Life. My work today has been grounded through those relationships - through their teachings and their love and support. I also feel deeply honoured to have had an opportunity to learn from the indigenous teachers in the Amazon and from the Forest itself.

For All Our Relations.