Retreating to Bali

Most arrive to Bali in travel mode – tired, hoping to have a break from the strain of normal life, burnt out and wanting not much more than nothing…and everything!

Bali is a sweet environment and our venue at the Santra Putra Gallery & Guesthouse is quiet and abundant with greenery and beauty. Evidence of the deep spirituality of the Balinese people is everywhere: flowers and incense sit in altars to bless and remind us that our lives are intertwined with the world all about us – the trees, the animals, the spirits, and the mystery of God. Many Balinese people want to return from the afterlife as a god. They are conscious of their mental habits, careful to have a grateful heart and hands ready to contribute. No person is an island in this culture…

We begin each morning of the retreat with sitting meditation. You hear the soft padding of feet into the room, bright eyes and upright spines ready for anything – such anticipation!  Then we begin to explore who we really are – not quite as perky as we imagined. Meditation/pratyahara is not a simple task, but it does slow us down, and the fruits of our labour start to bring clarity and sharpness of the mind.

The start of the retreat is both exciting and demanding. We explore ourselves, who we are, that we are always bumping into, either sitting on the cushion or feeling the overworking or underworking of our bodies.  Starting to notice that anything takes time.  Our culture is so used to being exhausted. We are so numbed by too much of everything that we do not know how to listen for balance and presence.

On retreat though, there is nothing much else – no shopping or driving around, going here and there, no filler really – only how each of us will approach our new experiences. There is more of a connection with ourselves, through the yoga and the inevitable moods and feelings that arise.

Of course everyone else in the room is just a breath away, doing and feeling much of the same. We begin to know them from sharing the same journey. We hear what they say and listen with our ears and heart.

All of us know now that we have gone on an inner journey, even if that was the last thing on our mind as we packed our bags and worried about everything else before embarking on our journey to Bali. We don’t often get such an opportunity, to have our food prepared for us and put on the table, rooms made clean and then to practise yoga, every day, coming back and back again to ourselves and our community.

It is a precious thing that we all do, coming away, carving out time and then putting in effort. As humans we are capable of much when we take the opportunity, and we can also do little or nothing. Choice is what illuminates a life.  Always there will be the moods and tiredness as the stretching of our beings occurs, but this is the raw material that feeds the enlargement of our real human capacities. This then, is the transformation that yoga offers us.