The Joy Design Club
For the person who has decided that ambition and peace are not opposites — and is ready to live that way, season after season.
This is not a course. It is not a community of strangers cheering each other on with fire emojis. It is a curated, private container for people who have already done enough growing — and are now ready to design the life that reflects it.
The Joy Design Club is built around one belief: that the most powerful thing a high-functioning person can do is stop white-knuckling their way through each season and start architecting it instead. Every retreat, every workshop, every resource in the Club exists to support that single shift.
Before you apply, let's be honest about what this is.
The Joy Design Club is not a digital community with weekly Zoom calls and a Slack channel full of unchecked notifications. It is not a self-paced course you will buy and never finish. It is not a subscription box. It is not accountability coaching. It is not another thing to manage.
It is a private membership with a small, carefully curated group of people who understand the particular exhaustion of doing too much of the right things — and who are finally ready to stop.
Membership is by application. Not because we are being precious about it. Because the experience only works when the room is right.
What you are actually joining.
Retreats
The anchor of the Club. Intimate, curated, and held in spaces chosen for their capacity to restore rather than stimulate. These are not networking events with a yoga class bolted on. They are designed experiences — built around the Joy Architecture framework — where you step entirely out of your life for a few days and return to it changed.
Monthly Architecture Workshops
Between retreats, the work continues. Monthly workshops are live, intimate sessions focused on a single architecture challenge: releasing an obligation that no longer belongs to you, redesigning a relationship structure, auditing your energy by season, building a joy inventory from scratch. These are working sessions, not lectures.
The Resource Library
An evergreen, growing collection of guides, frameworks, audio practices, and tools drawn from the Trick Yourself Well method. Yours for the life of your membership.
The Community
Small by design. A private group of peers who are ambitious, thoughtful, and done pretending that everything is fine. The kind of people you will want to know — and who will want to know you.
Choose your season.
Both tiers include full Club access. The difference is retreat frequency — and the rhythm that comes with it.
Platinum and pearl members begin their membership with a 30-day baseline period — a guided pre-retreat window using a recommended wearable to establish your nervous system's starting point. Your data does not go anywhere except into your own hands. It simply ensures that when you arrive at your first retreat, we are not starting from scratch.
Biyearly Retreats
Two retreats per year — roughly $3,250 each.
Pearl is the entry into a life designed with intention. Twice a year you step away entirely — away from the calendar, the obligations, the roles — and into a curated experience built around rest, architecture, and the kind of clarity that only comes when you stop moving long enough to think.
Between retreats, you have full access to monthly workshops and the resource library. The community is yours year-round.
Pearl is for the person who is ready to begin. Who knows something needs to change and wants a container that will hold them while they figure out exactly what.
What's included:
- 2 curated retreats per year (spring and fall)
- Monthly live architecture workshops
- Full access to the Joy Design resource library
- Private membership community
- Priority notification for Platinum openings
Annual membership. Application required.
Quarterly Retreats
Four retreats per year — roughly $3,500 each.
Platinum is for those ready to live in full-season rhythm. A retreat each quarter means you are never more than three months from a reset. From a recalibration. From a return to yourself.
This is not an indulgence. It is an infrastructure choice. The same way your highest-performing clients invest in their physical health, their legal counsel, their financial architecture — this is the investment in the interior structure that makes everything else possible.
Platinum members are our most committed practitioners. The application reflects that.
What's included:
- 4 curated retreats per year (one per season)
- Monthly live architecture workshops
- Full access to the Joy Design resource library
- Private membership community
- First access to new programs before public release
- One private 20-minute check-in call with The Architect per quarter
Annual membership. Extremely limited capacity.
This is not a wellness weekend. It is a full-body return to yourself.
The Container
Every Joy Design Club retreat is a designed experience — not a schedule of activities, not a content delivery weekend, not a personal development conference with a spa attached. It is a container. Built to hold you while you put things down.
Each retreat is shaped around a seasonal theme drawn from the Joy Architecture framework and held in a venue chosen specifically for its capacity to restore rather than stimulate. Attendance is intentionally small — never more than twelve people — because real work requires real space, and real connection cannot happen in a crowd.
What to Expect
"What happens inside a retreat is partly designed and partly organic to the people in the room and the location we find ourselves in."
- 01An arrival diagnostic — a quiet, guided process to locate exactly where you are when you walk through the door.
- 02Deep facilitated sessions — identifying what is running in the background and designing what comes next using the Trick Yourself framework.
- 03Embodied practice — movement, breath, and sensation-based work facilitated by our curated practitioner team.
- 04Intentional skincare and sensory ritual — curated by a master Reiki healer to bridge the physical and energetic.
- 05Unstructured time — genuinely unscheduled hours. Rest as architecture, not reward.
- 06Shared meals — unhurried, nourishing, and designed for deep conversation.
- 07Seasonal design session — leaving with a P.O.A. (Plan of Action) for the season ahead.
Location and Excursions
Retreat venues shift with the season and are selected for beauty, intimacy, and distance from the ordinary. Members receive location details well in advance of each retreat.
Where the location allows, we incorporate curated local experiences. These excursions are member-informed and always optional. They emerge from genuine conversation about what this particular group of people might most need.
Private & Intimate Venues
The Practitioner Team
Our retreats are not solo-facilitated. The Architect leads the life design work, and she is joined by a curated team of practitioners whose work she trusts with her own interior life — not just her clients'. That is the only standard that matters here.
Every practitioner in the Joy Design Lab circle was chosen because Denden trusts their work deeply. Their shared belief: that you cannot architect a new way of living from the neck up.
The Energetic Healer & Skincare Ritualist
A master Reiki healer, bio-scan specialist, and founder of a natural and organic skincare line built on the principle that what touches your skin should restore your nervous system. Her work bridges the physical and the energetic — bringing a layer of healing to every retreat that goes deeper than conversation can reach.
The Somatic & Breathwork Facilitator
The body holds what the mind cannot yet articulate. Our somatic facilitator uses breath, movement, and sensation-based practice to release what years of high-functioning survival have stored in the nervous system. Members consistently describe this work as the most surprising part of a retreat — and the most lasting.
Denden Girmay — The Joy Architect
Denden leads the Architecture Diagnostic sessions, the retreat framework, and the Joy Design Club. She is the architect. The team are the Structural Engineers, the Foundation Repair Specialists. Together they hold a container where real change becomes possible.
"When you join the Joy Design Club, you are not getting access to one person. You are entering a container held by a team of practitioners who have each done — and continue to do — their own interior work. That is what makes the room safe. That is what makes the change possible."
"You will not be asked to perform a breakthrough. You will simply be given enough space and enough quiet that one becomes possible."— Denden Girmay
You might be ready if...
You have done the therapy. You have read the books. You understand yourself well. You are ready to actually redesign something.
You are tired of being the most capable person in every room and the most depleted person in your own home.
You want to be around people who do not need you to perform strength — because they recognize it and are not impressed by it anymore.
You are ready to invest in your interior life the way you have always invested in your career, your home, your children.
You understand that the retreat is not a vacation. It is a working experience. And you are ready to work on the right thing.
A note on the application.
We ask you to apply because the Club only works when the room is right. Not right in terms of credentials or income or impressive titles — right in terms of readiness. We are looking for people who are done performing and ready to design.
The application takes about ten minutes. There are no trick questions. We are simply trying to understand where you are and whether this is the right next step for you.
If it is not the right moment, we will tell you honestly — and point you toward the offer that fits where you actually are right now.
The season is always now.
There is no perfect time to begin designing your life. There is only the moment you decide that the life you have been maintaining deserves to finally include you.
If something in this page felt familiar — that recognition is the beginning.