In the meantime, as the selection process rolls on, I accept an assignment to do some travel stories in Indonesia for a newspaper.
The trip is a deep dive into the world of luxury hotels, villas, butlers and swimming pools. The wellness industry is booming – particularly in Bali, where the spiritual-industrial complex keeps a large segment of the tourist and long-term visitor market ticking over. Zoom in closer on Google Maps, and there’s Ubud – wellness ground zero. It has everything you could want, from the traditional healers to the upmarket yoga classes, all of it cheap as chips for Westerners. And so we go and binge on it. Which is what I planned to do, too.
When I land, it’s minutes to midnight and a young Balinese guy called Mus collects me from the airport. We bounce along the back roads, our way illuminated by torchlight and a slow-moving procession. There is a giant papier-mâché bull on the tray of the ute in front of us and Mus says there’s a body inside the bull. They are bound for a cremation ceremony.
It’s my first trip to Bali and I feel like I am decades late to the party. Bali was a place you avoided if you had any sense. It was somewhere you flew over on the way to Europe. Bogans went there for cheap beer and T-shirts. The streets were full of drunk Aussies with braided hair, tattoos and sunburn. That’s what I thought, anyway, before I found myself on this road, inhaling what I now recognise as the quintessentially Balinese smell: jasmine, frangipani, sewage and rotting garbage. I’ve only just landed and already the place is blowing my mind. It seems mysterious, complex and unknowable in a similar way to India. Australia by comparison feels two-dimensional, washed out with too-bright sun, box-like and functional – a Howard Arkley painting to Bali’s Paul Gauguin.
Mus wears frangipani flowers tucked behind his ears, blasts Justin Bieber and asks what I do. On hearing that I’m a journalist bound for Ubud, he says, ‘Just like Liz Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love.’ I bridle at this. No – I’m not looking for love in Bali. But I suppose that, like Gilbert, I am looking for serenity and balance. It was – unsurprisingly – hard to find in New York.
After only a few days I realise it’s impossible to have a wholly material experience in Ubud. The spiritual is everywhere – not just in the remarkable ceremonies that fill the streets, weaving around and sometimes absorbing the tourists, but also in the religion itself. Around 90 per cent of Balinese are Hindu with a unique strain of animism, despite the predominantly Islamic population of mainland Indonesia. In Ubud and the surrounding villages, there are temples on every corner – sometimes tiny, family ones, others open to the public, so open that you can join a ceremony and for a brief time be folded into the religion. From the women making delicate offerings to appease the spirits each morning to the ravens for sale in the marketplace for evil spells – the inhabitants of Ubud have one foot in this world and the other foot in another.
The tourists I meet here are also of the spiritual-seeker variety. I overhear two Australian women at an organic cafe in Ubud: ‘Have you done breath work? Oh my God, you fall down on your knees, you scream, you shake, you laugh, like that thing in Adelaide – you know that thing? Well, they do it here.’
The woman next to me has barely drawn breath. ‘I’m getting a colonic tomorrow. The only ones I could get into are on Thursday and Monday. Dry skin brushing – who does that? My name is down for the Tantra workshop.’
I’m drinking a delicious juice of orange, carrot, papaya and basil, wanting the woman to stop talking, wanting her to keep going. I’m meeting lots of people like her in Bali – working on the great project of self, gathering in the health food shops and vegan cafes that are everywhere here, gorging themselves on cheap therapies.
Wellness in the West doesn’t come so cheap. Back in Sydney you have to be a millionaire to practise wellness to the full. But here in Bali you can have this millionaire’s wellness lifestyle – the organic food, the juices, the yoga, the meditation classes and the therapies – at a fraction of the cost. So the part-time models and yoga teachers and student naturopaths flock here. This cohort, clutching a turmeric juice as if it were the elixir of life, are easy to mock, and tender prey to those offering a variety of New Age treatments that are at best a waste of time and at worst cause harm. But hadn’t I gone to see a palm reader up a rickety staircase in Covent Garden? And hadn’t I seen the elderly tarot card reader who operated from a park in Yangon? Did I not, on some level, believe?
After a few days eavesdropping in juice bars, I decide to become more open to the spiritual side of Bali. When in Rome, and all that … Anyway, Ubud’s tourism-creating spiritual-industrial complex is where the real and vivid energy in the town can be found. It’s not the scant nightlife (everything seems to shut down around 10pm), or the terrifying monkeys that hiss then relieve you of your iPhone on Monkey Forest Road. The main game here is the spiritual one. It’s word of mouth and secret doorways, a kind of all-you-can-eat buffet for seekers.
The main religion in Ubud for white people is yoga. And the place where they come to worship is the massive Yoga Barn, with its cathedral-in-the-tropics ceilings, polished floors and open-air cafe. It runs classes from dawn until dark, seven days a week, with instruction in English, offering everything from hatha to ‘sound healing’ workshops. The crowd is the global yoga set, a mixture of tourists and expats with tattooed, toned bodies, who you might also see at retreats in Mexico, Goa or Costa Rica. The teachers hail from around the world, but in my week there I am taught mostly by American instructors.
We are packed in rows, with a soothing view of green palms and a pond just beyond the glass-panelled walls that can be opened to let in a cooling breeze. All around us are rice paddies and jungle.
In the first class I take, yin yoga, we are given tennis balls to put under our hips and thighs to roll on. We are encouraged to talk, which I find to be a great distracter from my pain.
‘Why does it hurt so much?’ I bellow from the back.
‘Who asked that?’ says the vaguely intimidating, heavily tattooed instructor.
‘Me!’
‘Fascia and tissue. Trauma, particularly fear, is stored in the legs. Remember when you were young and just learning to walk? And your parents were saying, “Be careful!” Well, you can store that fear in your legs.’
Around me, grown men are groaning as if they are giving birth. I am finding rolling around on a tennis ball close to unbearable. I must be storing a lot of trauma. I wonder if this is why people come to Ubud for a holiday and stay for years – they discover pain they didn’t even know they had, and the quest to fix it isn’t quick.
The next day I try a different yin class (the slow, gentle yoga that I favoured so much before I did the vinyasa-heavy Modern Yogi project), this time at a place called Radiantly Alive. The vibe is mellow. A sign says, ‘For karma points put your shoes on the rack.’ Everyone here seems to know each other, and there is a lot of kissing and cries of ‘Oh my God, haven’t seen you since Seminyak!’
At the end of the class the instructors invite us all out to a bar that night to see some African drummers. There is a slipstream here, one that would be easy to fall into: Bali Buddha for a juice, then cross the road to Radiantly Alive for yoga, then African drumming … repeat. If you want to stay, like, forever you go to a place behind a juice shop and up some rusting stairs to a room where a Swedish woman who keeps envelopes fat with rupiah and US dollars on a card table, also cluttered with paperwork and passports.
I find a room for twenty-seven dollars a night above a Sufi meditation centre. Gloria, her white hair pinned up with frangipani flowers, is my host and meditation guide. Before moving to Bali she’d been a psychotherapist in Austria for more than thirty years. We pass pleasant morning hours drinking coffee in the garden, talking about the world and its problems.
I pump her for information. Is there one universal problem or theme that keeps cropping up? Is there one mistake we’re all making over and over again? Gloria reckons the root of many people’s problems is that they are not bold enough: th
ey fall in love with someone but cannot tell them, they want to quit their job but they’re too scared, they wish to leave their marriage but are frightened about being alone. If only we were brave, we might suffer less.
Some who do leave their husbands or are searching for some sort of better life end up in Bali. The place is lousy with divorcées. They pass through the guesthouse on their way to enlightenment, asking for directions to the Eat, Pray, Love healer Ketut’s house or seeking the recommendation of decent healers or psychics.
‘I think that stupid book ruined Bali for me,’ says Gloria, being uncharacteristically negative. ‘Women come to Ubud looking for a handsome Brazilian and they get a small Balinese and they are not happy.’
I’m not expecting romance. The vibe is off. In a place where everyone is working on themselves, the energy is curiously sexless. It’s all focused inward.
*
Seeking serenity, I attend three meditation sessions guided by Gloria. The Sufi meditation we do as a group on the roof of her building, under the stars, is my favourite. It’s like a mixture of prayer and dance, designed to rouse the soul and spirit and drop attachments to materialism. There are nine of us high above the treetops – all women, all wearing white, spinning and whirling to trance-like music with an accordion and a steady drumbeat that invokes some faraway souk.
Gloria tells me that movement meditations, not Vipassana (sitting meditation), are most suitable for the uninitiated. ‘They are more appropriate for Western people, who have a hard time calming their minds. By doing action, the mind becomes focused on that – the breathing and the movement calms the mind and gives it a glimpse of peace.’
I tell her about my patchy, undisciplined history with meditation, the difficulty I have diving right down and staying there, my love of technology, my appetite for distraction. ‘Meditation is essential for sanity,’ she says. ‘I am convinced no therapy works without meditation. You can go to a psychiatrist for twenty years but only meditation will heal neurosis.’ And only meditation will get you to a place of serenity. She also believes that ‘every psychic problem not resolved will usually show up in your body as an illness. Usually it’s way later.’
Errr … okay. I like the talk about meditation, but not this. The leap is too big, and anyway, there’s no science there. Yet it’s a dark belief held by many people I know – even the most sensible and secular of my friends. They’ll hear of someone getting cancer and they’ll nod and say, ‘Well, yes, she was always stressed.’
*
An Australian businessman who runs a luxury hotel in Uluwatu in the south of Bali tells me he employs the services of healers for everything from stopping the rain at weddings to finding a lost master key. Another, very sensible, Englishman I speak to is convinced a healer has put a bad spell on his iPhone. A woman I meet who had a long-term stomach complaint says she was cured when a healer poked her in the foot with a stick. Then there is healing of the emotional kind.
People I meet in Ubud talk of a visit to the healer being an emotionally cathartic experience. The healers, they say, have the unnerving ability to stare deep into your heart and pull out your most submerged desires … sometimes. A Bostonian I meet tells me she had lined up for hours to see a healer who was recommended highly on TripAdvisor. When they finally came eyeball to eyeball he told her, ‘You have a big secret you are keeping.’ She looks pissed off as she tells me, ‘I’ve done a lot of work on myself. I don’t have any secrets.’
Gloria recommends a healer but the experience apparently involves being ‘shaken’ for two hours a day in order to completely reconfigure my cells, so I pass and instead opt for someone more conventional. Riki is recommended by a friend of a friend. We meet in the tropical garden of a nearby hotel, and when he arrives he is wearing an enormous black motorbike helmet with the visor up. We walk to a daybed at the bottom of the garden and sit on it awkwardly, and he takes off his helmet.
‘So, this healing lark, not really sure about it, but hi-ho let’s go and all of that …’ I mutter.
Riki asks me to draw a number of objects on a piece of paper (a snake, a house, a fence, a door), which he then interprets, not very convincingly. Then he gives me some life advice, some of which is good, such as not to read the comments at the bottom of my articles. He follows this with a palm reading that sounds like an optimistic early-morning traffic report: all clear on the road ahead, a smooth journey awaits. Then he waves his arms in front of my body and, after a few minutes, looks very sad and says he really can’t help me too much because I have too much doubt in the process.
I exhale, somewhat relieved, and settle into just talking to Riki. He tells me he’s just making a name for himself, but has a knack for intuition, particularly with foreign women. He offers to throw in a chakra reading. We are losing light in the garden; the session has gone for two hours. I’m bored. It has been like a pantomime he’s put on for an audience of one. Not a word of it feels true.
Riki asks me to close my eyes and lie down on the daybed. He looms above me – I can smell tea and cigarettes on his breath. I sense his hand, or at least the heat of it, travelling around my body. Once I sit up he tells me quite matter-of-factly, ‘Your head is good, your heart is so-so, but you need to energise your sex chakra.’ He offers to have sex with me to unblock it. ‘It will make you clear,’ he says clinically. With that, he stands up, puts on his helmet, gives me a hug and tells me to call him to arrange a time for the ‘treatment’. The cost is around twenty dollars.
I am outraged and bewildered. It’s Eat, Pray, Love through the mirror darkly. I stand in his hug like a lump, my heart racing, and after he leaves, I keep turning around in the garden as if there might be someone else there. But I’m alone. In the distance is the foreboding sound of a gamelan, an instrument I can seemingly hear constantly and am beginning to hate. I don’t know what rankles the most – Riki’s assessment that I am sexually frustrated, that my heart is ‘so-so’, the blatant sexual harassment, the grim thought of having sex with him, or the suggestion that I would have to pay him.
*
I’ve chosen a retreat in Ubud. Doing it with me are sixteen other women ranging in age from their early twenties to their sixties. They have come from offices and deadlines, from personal crises or uncertain health. They have caught a Melbourne, Tokyo or Moscow red-eye and thrown their yoga mats in the overhead lockers. In the yoga pavilion where we sit in a circle and introduce ourselves, there is an air of nervousness but also of fatigue.
Having stayed before in retreat centres where the carpet is stained and the curtains traumatised, where the beds are a punishment and the food a form of self-flagellation, this venue is like a palace. There are Toblerones and Bintang beer in the bar fridge and two swimming pools with beanbags and daybeds. Our hosts are urbane and generous – and in a way are models of the good life. We do a lot of meditation and yoga but wine is brought out at dinner, and we are invited to a cocktail party at the nearby royal palace with weak martinis and golden sparkling wine. Bali is meant to be all about balance – and so it is here.
But, I wonder, how on earth do you integrate all this stuff when you’re in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence? Is it even possible? It’s a question I come back to time and time again – my samsara.
On the second night of the retreat we are given a white sarong and a white shirt with long sleeves. We put on these garments and are driven to a nearby temple for a purification ceremony. In single file we sink into the waist-deep water, our white robes floating up, twisting and dragging like sheets in a spin cycle. We then line up and move between ten fountains, ducking down and fully immersing our heads at every one. Each time we go under we must make a wish or let something go. Balinese come here for fertility rituals but also for purification. If something bad has happened to them or their family, this is the place to let it go.
Afterwards, my fellow retreat ladies and I sit in an area covered in grey headstones. It’s getting on towards midnight. We make an offering a
t a shrine, and sit next to a group of Balinese who are singing low and quiet in tones that to my ears sound like the hymnal melodies of Christian missionaries. A priest moves along our row, scattering holy water on us, and presenting us with rice. Cats without tails move over the grey stones and the almost-full moon is as bright as a lamp, the air hazy with the smoke of incense, flowers crushed all over the ground. This and the singing, the darkness and the incredible stillness give the night some sort of ancient cast. I have to remember to breathe.
At some time, maybe around 1am, we go back to the car park. A TV is bolted to a pole and blasting some Indonesian soap opera; groups are still coming in to bathe, children in their parents’ arms. We have some tea and eat some sweets and take the vans back to the retreat, our soaked clothes in bags at our feet.
I feel uneasy about the ceremony. Sure, the ritual is beautiful, and the aesthetics of the entire evening – the white gowns and the full moon and the graveyard – feel like a Bill Henson photograph. But ritual without religion? That seems strange, like it’s been unclipped from history and the things that gave it meaning, and now it’s just there, a free-floating form without substance – like a plastic bag. Are we in the West so bereft of our own traditions, and so arrogant about the traditions of others, that we think we can just put on a white robe, visit a temple and siphon some of the healing powers from someone else’s god?
Yet by the end of the week, something strange has happened that leaves no room for cynicism or even rational thought. It’s one of those rare moments, a consciousness-blowing experience that you only have once or twice in your life – if you are lucky! – and is utterly indelible.
On the last day, when everyone is tanned and floppy with a complete lack of stress and worry (so different from how they were that first night), we sit in the yoga pavilion and are told to write down the things we want to let go of. Each woman gets up, one by one, and throws her paper into the fire.
Wellmania Page 21