Founded in 2007 in the island paradise of Palawan, Philippines, Bahay Kalipay is the oldest raw food detox, inner dance therapy, and yoga retreat center in Asia.

At Bahay Kalipay, our vision is to instill joy as one’s inner compass among our guests. Happiness or joy already exists in each individual. It is our birth right and our most natural state. Our purpose is to uncover our burdens and stresses, so that joy can spring from within like a fountain of youth, freedom, and abundance.

For sure, everyone has experienced joy at least once in his or her life. With the health and healing modalities we teach, our guests can align with their highest self, living from joy within, and through his or her own self-nourishment, relationships, work or purpose, and devotion to the Divine.

By living in harmony with your own soul, each of us comes into harmony with nature, the earth, and the sacredness that makes life worth living.

Grounded on the foundation of trust, we open ourselves to the needs of our guests and allow them to surrender to self-understanding and deep healing. By self-understanding, we mean reviving our guests’ intuition or insight, such that they acknowledge the wisdom that lies dormant within their own body and mind. These can take place through unexpected conversation, barefoot walks along the beach, or lazy afternoons in a hammock.

Meanwhile, through our detox programs, fasting experiences, silent days, nature walks or inner dance, we allow our guests to surrender to the deeper wisdom of nature within the body — through the food we eat, the nature we touch with our feet or see with our eyes, or the music and bliss we experience in our sunset dances.

With trust and surrender, our guests experience the wisdom of their own inner knowing, the wisdom of their spirit, and the wisdom of nature. This is our joy and our mission: that each guest leaves Bahay Kalipay with security within himself or herself, and within the greater context of their community and the Earth.

Since Bahay Kalipay started in 2007, Daniw Arrazola has led the groundwork in building and growing the support community of raw vegan foodists, and vegans in general. This opened the doorway to one’s inner transformation, personal liberation, and connection with Nature.

Daniw’s inner path through raw food led to her emotional and spiritual awakening, unlocking the living treasure and aliveness in oneself and the world around us. She was responsible for creating the first raw food retreat center in Palawan, in the Philippines, and in Asia, at the time when raw foodism was unconventional and nearly unheard of.

As Co-Founder of Bahay Kalipay, she organized and managed retreats and workshops in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. She received her own certification in Raw Food Preparation and Detox through a one-month course in Thailand, organized by Pure Joy Academy. Since then, Daniw established Raw Food Pinoy, her personal advocacy that offers quality information and supportive networks for individuals and families to integrate healthier lifestyle choices.

Daniw is a proud mother of five children, as she proved to herself that a woman can bear and nurture a growing baby on a raw vegan diet, and even give water birth with medical assistance only as an emergency option. Such life choices are truly liberating and empowering, as one trusts and surrenders to the Earth-old wisdom of the body.

Today, Daniw hosts retreats and programs for guests to cleanse and energize their body, while enjoying the beautiful, natural landscapes of Palawan. She’s grateful to have chosen this path and created powerful inner shifts in people’s lives from all over the world.

Since the early 2000’s, Pi Villaraza has transformed thousands of people all over the world through an awakening process called Inner Dance. How he founded Inner Dance felt like a dream, a vision, from one of his darkest days when he had nothing. He had left the corporate world of advertising and marketing and underwent a vision quest around the Philippines, where we roamed for one year in Mindanao without a single cent, and ended up as a hermit on a deserted beach on an island in northern Palawan. Little did he know that he was about to receive a vision that would raise the consciousness and life force energy of people from all over the world.

The deserted beach called Kalipay, he went through his own personal healing, eating coconuts exclusively, and this led to a powerful vibration that awoke within him. Years later, he brought this healing energy to more than ten thousand people from over 40 nationalities, founding a successful international detox center in Puerto Princesa and an international healing eco-village in Bacungan, Palawan.

His transformative work has been reported in various media in Europe, America, and Asia, where he travels extensively to give advanced energy awareness training and assist in the formation of healing centers in major cities. He has also worked extensively with medical practitioners, schools, government and NGO agencies, corporations and many institutions around the world, in healing and progressive education, deep ecology, raw food nutrition, organic food production, community development, and sustainable architecture.

Pi is an active environmentalist and is the former Philippine ambassador for the Global Eco-Village Network, which empowers communities to design a sustainable future. His well-received book Conscious Trance is available in bookstores around the Philippines and on Amazon.com. He has been training teachers from all over the world in MAIA Earth Village and around the world with his wife, Iituli.

Bahay Kalipay began in a rundown bamboo hut in the middle of a garbage-filled lot in eastern Puerto Princesa, Palawan. When Co-Founder Pi Villaraza first came to the spot, he suddenly saw a vision of a place filled with energy, where much healing is taking place.

With barely no money and just a vision for inspiration, Pi moved in immediately and for the first six months in near solitude, dove into clean up and gardening, slowly sowing the seed that would grow into the life-giving tree that is Bahay Kalipay now.

Bahay Kalipay flourished like a corn kernel that rose to the bright blue sky through our practice of Inner Dance. It is a powerful phenomenon and a flowering of the soul that emerged from Pi’s five-year vision quest in the Philippines and the United States in search for his own joy and happiness.

Later, Co-Founder Daniw Arrazola left her life in the city of Manila to join Pi by establishing a simple, raw food kitchen. The raw food cuisine complemented the regular Inner Dance sessions in the property. As friends, artists, and pilgrims came to join, our dream house Bahay Kalipay, or the House of Happiness, began to take shape.

In 2007, our doors were opened to the world, with the intention of creating a sustainable model, a place of transformation that made people return to their basic goodness, self-remembrance, and innate power. Our modest retreat center has influenced the world in simple yet powerful ways.

Bahay Kalipay was instrumental in kickstarting the raw food movement in the Philippines and parts of Southeast Asia. In seven years, Daniw consistently trained and inspired so many raw foodists and retreat centers, who gained confidence and more vitality and life that living foods have to offer.

Because Bahay Kalipay used to host the primary training ground for the Inner Dance process around the world, the many retreats and teacher trainings for healing brought a heightened level of transformation work to an integrative level. The intuitive expression and healing that Inner Dance evokes continue to attract locals and foreigners from various continents all over the world.

By combining one’s personal process with dance, yoga, meditation, and other modes of advocacy work, visitors continue to weave the story and inward journey of their own lives. And with Bahay Kalipay’s raw food philosophy, we experience living foods as instrumental elements that affect our body, mind, and spirit.

As we experience our body as vessels of human experience, it holds our existence in the everyday world. Food always speaks to us in color, shape, smell, flavor, vibration, and electricity. To become fully conscious of our body as the temple of the spirit, we consume food by being fully conscious of the vibrations we put into it, from the market to the kitchen, and to the table.