Ubud, Bali

I left Ubud two days ago but haven’t been able to find words for everything I experienced in Bali’s spiritual hub. 

I had only planned four full days in Ubud. I knew it was the main hub but in my mind that meant “touristy” and I was reluctant to schedule too much time there. I usually try to avoid the over diluted destinations when I travel but in the case of Ubud, I quickly understood why it was the hub. 

My first couple weeks in Bali were spent in quieter villiages and I had no idea what a “city” in Bali would look or feel like. Would it be at all reminiscent of any city I’d been to in the states?  

I started my Bali trip in Jasri, a villiage on the eastern coast, for my Acro Immersion and I spent the week eating traditional Balinese food for three meals a day and settling into the culture, in a beautiful retreat house tucked away behind rice fields. From there, I made my way north to Amed. Although usually popular, it is low season in Bali and the small northern beach town was very quiet and calm. The streets were mostly lined with modest warungs offering Balinese and Indonesian food with a few spas, small clothing shops, and tourist oriented stands for things like diving and scooter rentals. I spent those days riding the town’s one street up and down the coast, stopping at beaches to nap and eat. Then a quick excursion to Gili Air, a tiny pebble of an island squished between Bali and Lombok and spent my one full day there walking the entire perimeter. It took about three hours. Then to Sidemen, a properly preserved Balinese villiage inland. As I walked the empty streets it was clear with the looks I received from the locals that I was the only out of towner in the area. My days were spent frolicking in the town river where the residents bathed and talking slow walks through the rice fields. Then to Bali’s main hub “city”. I was beyond curious.

As I arrived in Ubud, the streets were bustling with scooters, cars, and pedestrians. Restaurants and coffee shops, yoga studios and bookshops, beautiful clothing stores and tattoo shops lined the main drag. There was energy and people and life and after two weeks alone in just about empty villiages, it was everything I was craving. 

I felt the most liberated in the form of food. The Balinese and Indonesian food I had been fueling with had been delicious but my body was not used to it. At home I eat light, usually cooler meals maybe a couple times a day with snacks in between. Balinese food is always cooked and always seems to have rice. I’m just not at all used to the heaviness of so many grains and my body desperately wanted something interesting and plant based. I found vegan and vegetarian food everywhere, coconut ice cream and juice shops in excess. 

My last two full days in Ubud I received radical healing. I had so many cosmic, life changing, out of body experiences, one after the other. The two weeks prior, spending days alone in quiet, empty landscapes, prepared me to be set a flame when I arrived in the city, later to rise from those ashes. I have few words that I could string together to fully encompass what I went through and I won’t dilute the moments by trying very hard to give you all the details. 

It began with Ecstatic dance at the Yoga Barn. A shala filled with 150 people and two hours to move my body completely uninhibited. I danced and shouted and yipped and sweat. And as it was ending and we were sang to and read poetry, I sobbed. Everyone danced until our bodies melded together into one big ball of vibration and I felt myself turn into nothing and no one, just source at my core. 

From there I walked. I had so much running through my body as I regained my physical, I needed to do something with it so I walked. I wanted to grab a taxi to the nearest waterfall just twenty minutes south but felt like getting in a big machine would pop the bubble I was floating in. But I knew I wanted to be cleansed. I knew I needed to be cleansed, not just my physical body, which definitely needed a shower, but my energetic body. As I walked, I saw dark clouds creeping towards the city but kept on. It rains every day in Ubud and it’s never a light sprinkle. When it comes, it comes sideways and without reprieve. I ached for the rain to fall and wash my body and decided then to hike the Campuhan Ridge. As I walked, the rain started coming down heavy and after a few moments I was saturated. I cared little; I was already drenched so it wasn’t like I could get any wetter. I walked the ridge, rice fields and rivers on either side and due to the weather I had pretty much the whole thing to myself. 

As I walked back out of the path, I was stopped by a local who noticed my Canang tattoo, the daily Balinese offering I had chosen to stamp on my shoulder, and asked me if I had been to the holy water temple from the path along the ridge walk. I certainly had not and mentally scanned the path again, confused on where this temple could’ve been located. The path was narrow and had nothing but fields and valleys along it, certainly no temple. He offered to show me and we trekked back onto the ridge and got to walking. The rain had stopped and the sun was peaking through now and more people had begun to populate the path. We walked for ten minutes before taking a random right turn into the rice field. We passed workers and continued into the thin forest past the rice fields. No path, no signs, certainly not any way to find this unless you knew exactly where you were going. 

It’s important to note at this point that every thing I do, especially when traveling, is deeply tapped into intuition. At no point did I get a weird read or feel any off energy. So I continued. 

After a short hike, seemingly out of nowhere, large, iron gates appeared and we entered a grand water temple. I was stunned. The man showed me the first shower spickots and I rinsed my face and hair in the cool, fresh water. From there he told me he would take me to the main shower and then leave me to meditate and rinse, explaining how to get back to the path. He told me that if I wanted to cleanse in the main temple, I absolutely could not be wearing anything; I needed to be in my purest form.  So he walked me up a few flights of stairs, explaining the energy that was running through the space and why I needed to cleanse in both of the spickots that flowed into the main shower and then left. 

So here I was, completely alone and naked, sitting cross legged on a sturdy, stone step in front of two powerfully flowing spickots. I closed my eyes and asked for all the cleansing I knew I needed and was ready for. This certainly beat a waterfall and what a random series of events to find myself here. As I let the cool water pour over my body, I let it wash me in every sense. 

I thought my big moment was the ecstatic dance. But as I cleaned my energy in the holy water, I knew the ecstatic dance was just the prep; I needed to dance myself to nothing so I would have nothing to hold onto as I bathed. So that every piece of my old self and old trauma could slid off my body. 

By the end of the next day though, I understood that the entirety of Sunday was the real preparation for what Monday would bring. 

I got up early to go to Karma House Tattoo, where I would get my third and final piece of the trip. This was the only one I had planned from the very beginning. I heard about Karma House and the way they begin each tattoo with a mediation and a ceremony. 

I won’t go into much detail about the ceremony. It is something I need to keep for myself. I will say this. 

My fifteen minute mediation turned two hour therapy session as the woman facilitating the ritual and I opened our hearts and our energies completely to each other. We talked and cried and things quickly felt cosmic as we shared very identical traumas. Eventually I was lead into the meditation and breathwork and during the fifteen minutes, I felt the physical boundaries of my body dissipate and all I was, was frequency and light. I’m going to start to sound all hippy dippy but stay with me. I have never had an experience so out of body. It wasn’t even “out” of body as much as I had no body. The tingling started in my finger tips and quickly spread to my entire body. I was terrified and liberated and was sure I was going to pass out. I came out of it stunned and unable to speak, unable to even move parts of my body. Crystalle helped me move the energy and took me to the alter she had prepared. From there, she cleansed me with copal and palo santo, blessed me with oils and flowers and finally holy water, all the while following the guidance of my guardian angel, and some of you know who I mean when I say that. He was not only in the space, he was the space, telling her exactly what I needed—he always knew that best. The entire process left both of us speechless and as we took hands at the end, the dark, heavy clouds that had been violently spitting rain all day dissipated and the sun burst through the clouds and through the skylight directly above our heads and we were illuminated. We just laughed. Everything about the space was buzzing. 

Karma House begins each tattoo with a ritual to preserve the original intent of tattoos. Every time the body is opened it is an opportunity to purge old energy. I spent the next nearly seven hours getting handpoked, feeling every prick and prod. Adorning my forearm and hand I now have a trickle of plumeria and frangipani, the flowers that flood the streets here. 

I was apprehensive about Ubud from the start but maybe that was because my body knew when I planned the trip that I was not yet ready for the radical healing it would deliver me. But after two weeks alone in small villiages and beach towns, taking time to go very far inward, I was more than ready to burst into into light and be reborn again with love. 

with light and love, 

sarah