Why go on a Yoga Retreat to Bali - the island of Gods

The Journal · Retreat · Editorial N° 6

The first thing you notice in Bali is not the beaches or the rice terraces. It is the small palm-leaf baskets on the ground. Flowers, a pinch of rice, a stick of incense, placed on doorsteps, on scooters, at crossroads, in front of shops. Every morning. Everywhere.

They are called canang sari, and for me they hold the whole secret of why this island is so good for practice. In Bali, the sacred is not something you visit on a Sunday. It is woven into the most ordinary moments of the day.

The Balinese call their home Pulau Dewata: the Island of the Gods. After many visits, I understand why.

An island that practises

Bali is the only island in Indonesia where the majority of people follow a form of Hinduism, shaped over centuries into something entirely its own. There are said to be more temples than houses. Every village has its temple festivals, every family its shrine, every day its offerings.

What moves me is not how exotic this looks. It is how normal it is. A woman places an offering on the dashboard of her car before driving to work. A shop owner sprinkles holy water on the doorstep before opening. A farmer pauses at the small shrine at the edge of his rice field.

In my last editorial on ritual, I wrote that rituals are habits made holy. In Bali, you see a whole culture living that sentence. And something in you starts to remember that this is possible for you too.

Three kinds of harmony

At the heart of Balinese life is a philosophy called Tri Hita Karana, a Sanskrit phrase that means roughly “the three causes of well-being”: harmony with the divine, harmony with other people, and harmony with nature.

You can see it in the land itself. The famous rice terraces are watered by subak, a cooperative irrigation system run through water temples for more than a thousand years. Water is shared, not owned. Planting follows the temple calendar. UNESCO recognised the subak landscape as World Heritage precisely because it expresses this philosophy.

I find Tri Hita Karana a beautiful map for any retreat. Most of us come with one of these three relationships out of balance. Too much doing, too little connection with what is sacred. Too much screen, too little real contact with people. Too much city, too little earth, water and sky. A good retreat quietly restores all three.

Water that cleanses

One of the most powerful rituals in Bali is melukat, a water purification. You stand under a stream or spring at a temple, with a priest guiding the prayers, and let the water pour over your head. It is done for new beginnings, after loss, before important decisions, or simply to come back to yourself.

I have watched hard-working, very rational women stand under that water and start to cry. Not from sadness. From relief. Something that had been held for a very long time finally allowed to let go.

We include a sacred water blessing with a local priest in our retreats, and it is often the moment people talk about years later.

Why a retreat, and not a holiday

A holiday gives you rest. A retreat gives you a reset. The difference is not the location. It is what you do with the time.

At home, practice has to fight for space. Between the inbox, the family, the deadlines, the twenty minutes on the mat are always the first thing to go. On retreat, the structure carries you. Practice in the morning, practice in the evening, real food, real sleep, no decisions to make about any of it. After three or four days, the nervous system stops bracing. That is usually when the real work begins.

And then there is the group. Something happens when you share a week with people who came for the same reason you did. You laugh at breakfast, cry in a circle, sit in silence by the pool. By the end of the week, strangers have become a sangha, a community of practice. Many of the friendships I treasure most began this way.

How to travel to Bali well

I want to be honest here, because Bali is also an island under pressure. Overtourism, traffic, waste and a flood of “spiritual” offers that have little to do with the culture they borrow from.

So when we travel there, we try to do it with care. We stay in places that work with local people. We learn from the Balinese, not about them. We dress respectfully in temples, follow the guidance of priests, and remember that the ceremonies we are invited into are not a show. We are guests in someone else’s sacred home.

Traveling this way does not make the experience smaller. It makes it real.

A small practice

You do not need to fly to Bali to begin. Try this tomorrow morning:

• Before you open your phone, place one small thing somewhere visible: a flower, a candle, a leaf, a stone.
• Hold it for a breath and name one thing you are grateful for: to the divine, to a person, to the earth.
• Set it down. Leave it there for the day.

Three kinds of harmony, one small offering. That is how the Island of the Gods begins every day.

Om Swastiastu,
Alexia

References

• UNESCO World Heritage List, Cultural Landscape of Bali Province: the Subak System as a Manifestation of the Tri Hita Karana Philosophy (inscribed 2012)
• On canang sari, melukat and Balinese Hindu practice: teachings from Balinese priests and teachers met on our journeys