The Canadian-born founder of plant-medicine project YAWN, Maddalen has found in Ibiza both a home and a rhythm - an island where nature, ritual and creative community unfold as one.

My name is <a href="https://www.instagram.com/maddalenpasini/">Maddalen</a>.
I created <a href="https://www.instagram.com/yawntogether/">YAWN</a>; it is my life&rsquo;s work. Over the years, it has pushed me to become braver, stranger and far beyond my comfort zone in ways I never anticipated. YAWN invites people into a different relationship with plants - one that moves between ritual, education and play. This takes shape through education, a card game and a clothing line whose proceeds support plant-medicine research and indigenous communities. We also curate in-person experiences that foster connection - to nature, to play and to music.
I call Ibiza home. I moved here from Canada last year with my partner.
I first encountered Ibiza as a young girl through its visual and sonic language; it spoke to me long before I ever set foot here. Photography, film, music, art and the island&rsquo;s mythology followed me throughout my life. I found myself dreaming of a place I had never visited.
Music is what first brought me to the island. It was for the birthday of a close friend in the industry - a week that, in retrospect, set something in motion. Yet music was only the threshold. What held me here, what ultimately made me stay, was the discovery of something far deeper beneath the surface: a way of living.
Ibiza does not feel like a place one simply arrives at; it feels like a state one enters. There is something otherworldly about it. The first thing that struck me was not its beauty or even its energy, but its sense of possibility &nbsp;a way of existing differently from anywhere I had known before. Time moves differently here. Not slower, exactly, but sideways, as though the island operates according to a rhythm detached from the clock.

&ldquo;YAWN invites people into a different relationship with plants - one that moves between ritual, education and play.&rdquo;

Image credits: Francesco Scotti

Ibiza reshaped me. It taught me that inspiration and freedom are deeply informed by one&rsquo;s surroundings - the landscape, certainly, but also the people who choose to live here with intention. Beyond the fact that my neighbours are goats, the creative community is open-minded and committed to authenticity over appearance. There is also a genuine investment in personal and collective healing.
What captivates me most is how <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/ibiza/we-are-the-people-angeles-ferragut-ibiza">Ibiza&rsquo;s culture</a> resists commodification. Farming communities, artists, musicians all form part of an ecosystem that prioritises regeneration over extraction. Through our *Yawning in Ibiza* series - which spans both merchandise and events - we try to hold up a mirror to that generosity: intimate dinners, gatherings with regenerative farm collectives and musical collaborations with artists such as Rhye.
Cala Pluma remains one of my favourite hidden places on the island. You walk through a quiet, almost enchanted forest to reach it, and upon arrival the rock formations feel almost extraterrestrial. I have even befriended an octopus in those waters.
I am also drawn to the work of artist Michel Vecchi, whose carved wooden mushrooms are scattered across the island, crafted from fallen tree stumps. He has created a mushroom garden at the Botanical Garden and a labyrinth at <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/ibiza/l-officiel-tedxdaltvila-finn-harries-regenerative-agriculture-sustainable-farming-ibiza">Juntos Farm</a>.
There is a profound sense of belonging here. It felt, quite simply, like coming home, as though I had lived here long before arriving.
The flavours of the island become part of you. Fresh seafood, salt in the air, farm-to-table meals, fruit from my own trees: oranges, mandarins, loquats, apricots, lemons, olives, pomegranates. The scent of rosemary, almond blossom and carob drift through the landscape. Pine forests stretching endlessly. Winters are quiet here - though never entirely still - and the sunsets feel almost unreal, the sky igniting in colour.

&ldquo;Ibiza does not feel like a place one simply arrives at; it feels like a state one enters.&rdquo;&nbsp;

Ibiza has taught me that it is not the grand, dramatic moments that move you most, but the quiet accumulation of everything; the act of living within it, the balance it offers.
When I leave the island, there is a certain heaviness. Not absence, but contrast. Being away sharpens my awareness of what I have found here - and, more importantly, what I have found within myself.

Ibiza Dreamer: Maddalen

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