The Founders

Matthew Zoltan

Natural Meditation • 200+ Retreats • Pioneer of Mind–Body Connection

Matthew Zoltan has spent more than four decades exploring how the body and mind function as one integrated system, and how people recover when stress and trauma become held in the body.

Over the past thirty-seven years he has worked with tens of thousands of individuals through bodywork, mentoring and silent retreats, guiding processes that allow the body to release accumulated tension from difficult life experiences.

His interest began early. As a teenager working in physically demanding jobs in the Australian outback, he came into direct contact with the limits and resilience of the body. This led him into the study of yoga, massage and osteopathy, and eventually into seven years of monastic life devoted to meditation in India and Australia. Long periods of silence exposed him to traditional practices and their effects on the body and mind, while raising a question that stayed with him: how does the body resolve the pain it carries?

After leaving monastic life, he returned to Australia and worked directly with people experiencing stress-related illness and trauma, running one of the busiest therapeutic clinics in Perth. A clear pattern emerged. Many people understood their lives intellectually, yet their bodies continued to hold the effects of those experiences.

This observation led to the development of what became known as mind-body connection therapy, which later evolved into Natural Meditation. Quiet Retreats grew from this work.

Since the early 1990s Matthew has facilitated more than two hundred silent retreats internationally.

The principle guiding his work remains simple. Resolve tension by feeling it, and the body will naturally return to its optimal self.

Cate Zoltan

Co-founder Undo App • 70+ Retreats • 27 years meditating

In her late twenties she encountered Natural Meditation while working through childhood trauma. She had spent years searching for answers to deeper questions about growth, healing and the patterns shaping her life.

The turning point came during her first silent retreat with Matthew. Sitting in extended stillness, questions she had carried for years began to complete. For the first time, the relationship between pain and recovery became clear. What once felt confusing began to make sense.

With that came a realisation. The body’s capacity to heal is natural, yet rarely understood. Over the following years Cate she was able to observe what she had experienced herself repeating in others. She saw the same shift in others. People arrived with long-standing patterns that had not changed through years of effort. As they learned to feel those patterns would change. Symptoms that once seemed permanent often disappeared.

For more than three decades, Cate has attended and facilitated over seventy retreats alongside Matthew. She co-created the Undo app to extend this work beyond the retreat environment, making it accessible in daily life.

Before Quiet Retreats, Cate spent twenty-five years as a professional chef, running a cooking school and retreat venue. That experience shaped the environments she now creates, where simplicity and care support people to settle into silence.

These experiences now inform her work designing retreat environments and advising boutique hotels and spas on silence led wellbeing spaces to support deep recovery.

Listen to what our clients say about the effect of change they've experienced

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