Thailand: Bali

Let me start by saying exactly how high my expectations for Bali were.
Two summers ago, I read Eat, Pray, Love for the first time (I’ve read it twice since). It completely changed my life. It changed how I felt about relationships, it changed how I saw religion, it fueled my desire to travel, and, mostly, it changed how I understood writing. Never before had I read something so philosophical and intelligent and thought-provoking. I mean, truly, it was smart. Elizabeth Gilbert is a writer who could probably sum up all of Einstein’s theories in some neat, funny little chapter, if she wanted to. Whether you’ve read it or not (or seen the movie—which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t do the book justice), you might already know that the ‘Love’ part of Eat, Pray, Love takes place in Bali. Since reading the book, it had been my dream to go to Bali alone, like she did.

The thing about this dream was, it was far-fetched. It was so ridiculous to me, in fact, that I’d all but forgotten it, as if my mind said, ‘Okay, we’ll go back to that when you’re older’. I wasn’t in any way actively pursuing it, and, honestly, it felt as out-of-reach as becoming a famous movie star or going to the moon.

So it seemed a little bit like Fate when, last week, I realized I had this exact opportunity to fulfill this dream to travel alone to Bali, like I’d imagined.

Actually, no. Not just Fate. Fate implies that it was the universe, or something of which I had no control, that got me to Bali. But that is not true. I was able, at 23-years-old, to seize this opportunity for myself; I was an active participant in the fulfillment of this dream. I was able to do something that, a year ago, I’d only romanticized as something I might do by the time I was 30. I mean, on Tuesday, my coworkers said to me, “Did you know we have six days off next week? I guess they’re using the school as a parking zone for parents during the University’s graduation. So you can travel, if you want.”

Tuesday night, I’d said casually to my mom on the phone, “You don’t think… I shouldn’t, I don’t know, go to Bali, right? I mean… that’s ridiculous, I know. I can take a few trips around Thailand instead. I don’t need to leave the country.”

She’d replied, “Why not? You’re close to Bali. It’s cheap… much cheaper than from here. Why not go?”

On Wednesday, I booked my plane tickets.

On board the plane to Bali, I sat beside two Asian women, one Malaysian and one Thai. The one who sat beside me sat in a meditative position, eyes closed, for almost the entire 4-hour duration. As I ate a snack, as I binge-watched episodes of Nashville and The Bachelor, as I read my book… she sat. Finally, as the seatbelt sign turned on and the pilot told us to prepare for landing, she opened her eyes and smiled at me.

“So, how long are you here teaching for?” She asked me, resuming a conversation I thought we’d ended 3.5 hours ago. This time, rather than quickly turning away from her after I answered her question to signal that I’d really rather not talk, I took the opportunity to ask her: “Were you just… meditating?”

She nodded and smiled before telling me about a program she did 40 years ago, called transcendent meditation (or something like that) and how she’s been meditating ever since.

“Right,” I paused, wondering if I could ask my next question in any sort of polite and non-idiotic way. “But, can I just ask… what’s the difference, between you sitting there with your eyes closed, meditating, versus me… sitting here, and just closing my eyes?”

She replied after a moment, “You, just sitting there… That is resting. You only know about 3 stages of life—you know about sleeping, dreaming, and being awake. But, once you reach a certain stage in your meditation, you will see that there are actually 7 stages to enlightenment. Me sitting here and meditating, I am getting twice as much rest as you are sitting there.”

The other lady chimed in. “And, you know, there have been scientific studies about how meditation can actually change how your brain works. Before I started meditating, I was always looking for ways to be happy: hanging out with friends, going out, travelling, like you are. These things still make me happy, but now… I can find the deepest level of happiness I’ve ever experienced, just by sitting here and closing my eyes. It is truly bliss.”

Of course, then they both proceeded to tell me that this “program” I can do, to learn how to meditate, is $500 for Americans.

We exchanged names and emails and numbers (and I taught them how to put names and emails into their phones, and also, where their ‘note’ section was). The lady beside me said, “Isn’t it lovely, how nature had a plan for us to meet all along? Nature has brought us together, you know.” I loved that she avoided any mention of God; it was intuitive of her, to skirt around the whole who’s-God-are-we-talking-about issue but simply replacing the word with ‘Nature.’ Besides, it seemed fitting, landing in Bali, a place with so many unknown and unnamed spirits and so much appreciation for the natural world.

Then I asked, because I couldn’t resist, “I’ll definitely sign up for that workshop about meditation, but could you maybe just give me the gist on how to meditate? And how to reach the fourth stage, after sleeping/dreaming/waking?” Which is really just so American of me, anyway—like, could you just really quickly tell me the way to reach spiritual enlightenment? I’ve got 10 minutes.

She didn’t tell me, of course. She just said, “You must be trained.”

As we exited the plane and walked towards customs, one of the ladies, walking in front of me (wearing all white—they both were), suddenly turned, searched through the crowd for me, and, finding me, enveloped me in the biggest hug. “I hope your stay in Bali is blissful,” She said sincerely.

And this is how I began Bali.

Honestly, I could have gone and laid in the grass at the airport and been completely content. I was just so happy to be there, and so happy to see that the nature outside the airport windows already was not disappointing. The grass was a different shade of green than I’ve seen; I could see palm trees and coconut trees and banana trees with three-foot-long leaves; it was all just so green, compared to Thailand, which feels, at least in the towns and cities, like it is all covered in a thin layer of orangey-brown dirt.

As I’d discussed with my friend Gabi the weekend before, who had studied abroad in Indonesia: There are two ways I could do Bali.

I’d done plenty of research. I’d drawn maps and graphs and timetables and schedules and emailed Yoga studios and tour guides and hotel managers and read blogs and news articles and watched Youtube videos. I’d eventually decided to do 3 days in Ubud, since it was the ‘cultural capital’ and their major city (although ‘city’ sounds pretty urban—more like a very busy hippie/vegan town), and then 2 days on Gili Air, the Gili Island that is relatively empty, but still has more restaurants than Gili Menu, which is more suitable for honeymooners.

To say I was prepared for Bali was an understatement. I had six days to cover everything, and I was ready to do exactly that.

Gaby supported this. She said: “You can do Bali that way, if you like. You can get up at the crack of dawn and see the sunrise over the rice fields before making your way to the temples and the markets; fitting in a day-long bike tour; doing yoga in the evening and making sure to stumble across all the top-rated restaurants; getting a massage and facial at night; seeing the dance festival after that, etc. etc. You can do Bali that way.

Or.” She’d said. “Or… you can sleep in. You can wake up when you want to wake up, and lazily have a smoothie for breakfast from some random place, and maybe make your way to a yoga studio. And get a massage in the afternoon. And read in a café for a while. And do some meditation at night, and get some ice cream if you feel like it, and go to bed. You can do Bali that way, too. Whichever you like.”

Sri Bungalows, Ubud

When I am travelling, I am most always person A. I am the person who makes sure I see every square inch of land that I can within 24-hours: sacrificing sleep, sacrificing money, to make sure I am signed up for every temple-visit, Bike-tour, wine-tasting, spiritual-awakening, and overnight-hike the country has to offer. And I’d planned on doing Bali this way, too.

As soon as I saw my bed, which was a beautiful white canopy with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking rice fields, I wavered. Okay, I thought, I can sleep in. Just tomorrow. To enjoy the bed.

I woke up around 9. I read my book for an hour before remembering breakfast ends at 10:30. So I ate breakfast at the hotel, and finally asked the front desk how I could walk to the Yoga Barn.

As I walked, I realized: I will waste all my money, and all my time, this vacation if I am constantly thinking about what’s-next-what’s-next-what’s-after-that. I mean, my god: I was in the Spiritual Motherland of Being-In-The-Moment.

These people, this is how they live (at least, as far as I could see, from my extensive experience driving past them): They sit. They relax. They meditate and pray. They eat when they want to eat. Then they sit some more, in the same spots, talking to the same people, believing to their core that this is where they are meant to be.

So, by the time I found the Yoga studio, I’d made my mind up. I was going to do Bali the Balinese way: relaxed, unplanned, leisurely, doing only what I really wanted to do in that moment. (Granted, I do understand that my experience was not at all a ‘true’ Balinese experience: I know the Balinese are not typically getting high-quality massage-and-facial packages, or paying $10 a class to sit and do Yoga, or paying $20 for a 4-course meal at a 5-star Italian restaurant, or stopping to pay for fancy juices with chia seeds and organic kale… I do know this; but still. I guess I was trying to emanate their spiritual beliefs, in my own nice, cozy tourist-bubble).

So I did yoga (an odd yoga, called Yin Yoga, in which I was supposed to just sit in uncomfortable positions for long periods of time and “enjoy the pain.” Not my favorite, but still).

I thought about asking them where the nearest temple was, after this; or if they knew of any cultural museums in the area. Instead, I approached the front desk and said, “Do you know where Taksu spa is?” I’d written it down in my notebook after finding some blog article about it.

I walked to Taksu and signed up for a Balinese massage (because I was trying to get into the culture, of course), and a facial. In total, it was $40, for a two-hour treatment. The first hour, I had a full body massage. After that, I sat for another hour for a deep-cleanse facial. Then, I sat in their garden, drinking a smoothie, included in the package, and read my book.

By now, it was about 4:30 p.m. I decided to make my way to the Palace and a temple, since I was feeling guilty for hiding away in this spa when there was so much of Ubud I hadn’t seen yet. So I walked, and saw the ‘Palace’ (which was pretty grungy looking, and crawling with tourists and selfie-sticks and loud chatter), and this beautiful temple (which was right beside a Starbucks, and again, crawling with tourists and selfie-sticks), and I realized I had nothing to feel guilty about. These places might’ve been nice to visit, but they certainly weren’t do-or-die… they were just tourist spots, and felt a bit empty of meaning.

Pura Taman Saraswati Temple, Ubud... (The one near Starbucks)

I walked into a few shops. I can best describe most of the shops in Ubud as California-surfer-esque (keep in mind, I’ve never been to California): surfer-shops with swim trunks and bikini tops, shops with odd wooden trinkets, cheap shops with tank tops that say ‘Yoga Love’ or with elephants on them, and shops with expensive jewelry and aromatherapy oils.

After about an hour, it started to pour. It had been cloudy all afternoon, but this was something else. Within 30 seconds, it was raining so hard I couldn’t see anymore. I came across a lady selling umbrellas for probably way-too-much, and bought one on the spot just so I wasn’t blind anymore.

Then I went to an Italian restaurant called Kebun Café, where Gaby had recommended, promising me it had “the best gnocci of my life.” I had tea and a salad (with beets! And spinach! I almost died of happiness) and gnocci with pesto (she was probably right… and I lived in Florence). Then I walked home through the rain, read some more, and went to sleep in my little canopy bed.

Kebud Bistro

The next morning, I woke up at 7 a.m. to begin a bike tour I’d signed up for with the Eco-Cycling Company in Ubud. It was a great deal: I paid $50 to be picked up at my hotel at 8 and eat breakfast overlooking Mount Batur, visit a coffee plantation and try some coffee/tea samples, visit a traditional Balinese family compound, see rice terraces including the infamous Tegalalang rice terrace, bike 22 kilometers through towns, see a 500-year-old Banyan tree, and eat traditional Balinese food for lunch before being dropped back off at my hotel.

Tegalalang Rice Terrace

We started, like I said, at Mount Batur. The mountain, because of the shifting of the Earth over thousands of years etc. etc., has become two volcanoes separated by a beautiful lake, much like the lakes I’d seen in Europe. It is one of the 10 biggest craters in the world. The black part of the volcano, which you can see in the picture I'll post below, is actually lava (the volcano erupted in 1963 but no one was killed, because it took 2 years for the lava to move down the mountain); it is still black, all these years later, because the Balinese mine the area and use the coal for different reasons, such as construction to build houses.

The black is lava... but it is still black because it is mined every day, while the top of the volcano, which is not mined, is green again.

The bike ride was easy. It was entirely downhill, and I barely moved my feet; I mostly just glided. My favorite part of the trip was our experience stopping at a Balinese family’s compound. The compound consisted of a few small, dilapidated bare white buildings, mostly empty of furniture apart from a mattress or a pot above a coal fireplace.

Where the wedding takes place

Here’s a story about romance/marriage for a typical family in Bali, according to my tour guide:

“So, the youngest boy in the family needs to stay on the compound for his whole life to take care of the parents when they get old. When he gets married, the wife will move here. The oldest son is allowed to move away, if he wants, to another house or compound. The daughters must move where their husbands live. If a family does not have any sons, the oldest daughter must stay to take care of her parents. This can get pretty complicated, as you might imagine. If the youngest son falls in love with the oldest daughter of an all-girl family, the youngest son will have to ask the oldest son to take his responsibility of taking care of the parents; if the oldest brother says no, the youngest brother will have to break up with his girlfriend."

"The wedding takes place here,” our guide said then, pointing to a small outdoor ‘porch area’ in the compound, “And then, for one week, the parents move out of their bed and sleep in another bed in the compound… one of the children’s… while the newlyweds spend their honeymoon in the parent’s bed. They get to sleep there for one week. Then, they move back to the child’s bedroom.”

As if this wasn’t enough to take in, he added, “Oh, and we do teeth filings, the day of the wedding, to file away the bad demons.”

He walked us over to the kitchen. This ‘kitchen,’ was a small, very dark room, with a single black coal pot sitting on a hole, under which were some sticks for the fire. This was their stove.

“Every day of our lives, our mother cooks us breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” our guide, who must’ve been at least 25, said. “But she only makes one meal per day, and we just eat it whenever we get hungry. She wakes up at 5 a.m. to get to the market to get our food. People from Bali love breakfast, because it’s the only meal of the day that is fresh. After that, our food sits in the kitchen all day. We don’t do family meals like you do in other countries—we are together in the compound every day of our lives, so I can just go talk to my parents if I want to talk to them, I don’t need to organize a time to sit together."

"So, when I get hungry, I just walk into the kitchen and eat some more of whatever my mom prepared that morning. We obviously don’t have microwaves or refrigerators, so we definitely have some hygiene problems, but we have built up a high immunity.” He said casually, unfazed.

Their meal for the day

As we exited the compound we passed a rooster stuck in a little straw cage, and our tour guide pointed to him and said, “We are going to have a cockfight at the end of the month. To sacrifice rooster blood to the spirits. That part is legal. But we will also be gambling, which is illegal.”

I don’t want to say any of this with too much pity, or too much wow-aren’t-we-lucky reflection, because 1. It’s been done before, and 2. I don’t really think I saw enough to generalize anything about what it is like to live in Bali (what if someone took you to a random house in rural Texas, for instance, and said, ‘This is how all American families live’).

I will just say that I was shocked, to see how little some of these Balinese people had, because—my god, they seem so happy. As I biked past them, every single person came to the doorway of their shop or compound, or looked up from the ground they were laying on or from the river they were washing clothes in, and smiled ear-to-ear without a trace of bitterness or dejectedness or defeat, shouting out to me: “Hello! Good morning!” Their days seemed so monotonous, and terribly hopeless, without any promise of variation. I just kept thinking—what do they have to ‘live’ for? I don’t mean that question in a religious way, or any deeply philosophical way. I simply mean: What dreams can they entertain for themselves? What goals can they work to achieve? Is there any serious reward for their hard work, besides the same meal on the table every morning?

Perhaps this is why religion, or spirituality, can be seen everywhere. Bali’s predominant religion is Hinduism. I didn’t know much about Hinduism when I arrived. Here’s all I know after my trip: Everywhere I went, each morning, there were small baskets filled with fresh incense and flowers (the car, the walkway, the restaurant, the hotel, the table, the chair, the pool), and each offering was meant for a different spirit/reason (for instance, when I asked at the hotel, the receptionist said, “Oh, the offering is for the spirit of this land”; when I asked at the coffee plantation, a worker said, “Oh, it is for prosperity and good luck”; then, when I asked about the identical-looking offering in the front seat of the van, my tour guide said, “Oh, that’s for whatever evil spirit might be in the van. Each offering has a different purpose, depending on where we put them.”)

Besides the offerings, they have temples everywhere. Each house has it’s own family temple, and it would be ridiculous to pray at anyone else’s temple, because each family temple is for that family’s ancestors. Sometimes, I would accidently walk through someone’s ‘backyard,’ to take pictures of some beautiful statue or artifact, just to look to my left and see a family staring at me out their house window. But the family temples were my favorite temples—must more impressive than the ones over-hyped by tourists.

And then, besides the temples, they simply have a spiritual language. For instance: “I hope you have a blissful time in Bali; Would you like to come and get a massage, so I can rearrange your chakra energies? Would you like chia seeds in your smoothie… it is good for the soul. Everyone, can you please breathe in, and when you breathe out, breathe out all of the evil spirits that reside within you.”

And, perhaps most fascinating: the word for ‘artist’ and ‘human being’ is the same in Bali. They don’t have a word for ‘artist’ because everyone is an artist. Art is simply a devotional prayer to the gods.

Anyways, so we biked past rice fields and through little towns and saw an authentic version of Bali. There were just two other Asian women with me on this trip, making things a little awkward. But they were nice, and we sat together at lunch and made small talk about travelling and teaching and what it is like to live in America versus Malaysia.

After the bike tour, I went to this fantastic place called Kafe for dinner, and got a sweet potato/beet/spinach/walnut salad with some healthy smoothie and hummus on the side. It was probably the best meal I’ve had in all of Asia (that’s terrible, I know. I feel guilty for saying it. Okay, okay… the fried rice is good, too).

Then I walked, again through the rain (it’s ‘rainy’ season in Bali… glad I was warned), went to some shops, and ended up buying gelato at some fancy hotel. I sat on the porch and talked casually with the Balinese worker who’d scooped my gelato for me. He told me that this is how all Balinese people learn English: they speak to tourists. Considering I didn’t need to know a single Indonesian word (not even hello!) the entire time I was there, I was impressed by this. Clearly, the Balinese seek out challenging conversations with tourists because they see the necessity of learning English, for their businesses and their day-to-day interactions, since their consumers are often foreigners.

Gelato shop

I apologized for not knowing any Indonesian, but the man shrugged it off. “We should learn English. It is the language of the world. It is not just for speaking with Americans… it is how we speak with Europeans, Chinese. Everyone.” Still, I thought about how difficult it would be for me, if I had to learn Spanish through random exchanges with foreigners on the streets of Boston, and I told him again how grateful I was that he was trying.

The next day, I got up early, took a van to the harbor (during which I was given the ins-and-outs of American politics, from a 40-something New Yorker and his friend, both of whom knew a lot about politics and Trump and the people in the Senate and ‘how things used to be’), and then a fast ferry across the ocean to Gili Air.

Seeing as every other person on the boat got off at Gili T, I understood quickly just how secluded I’d be on this island. And it’s what I’d wanted, originally: seclusion, a chance to lie on the beach and do nothing and tan and read.

The only problem was—rainy season, remember? So it was cloudy when I arrived on Gili Air, and started raining within minutes. And what, exactly, are my alternative options on Gili Air, if I am not lying on the beach?

First, I spent three hours reading in my hotel room. I took a nap. Then I woke up and considered just staying in my room the rest of the day. I know, that’s pathetic. But I was so tired from moving around, and also, the rain was depressing. Thankfully, I found the energy to get up (and the motivation: I promised myself a snack, if I could get out the door). I ate some yoghurt with fruit, overlooking the ocean (which definitely has a different kind of beauty, in the rain), and was extremely well attended to by two boys who live on the island and work at my hotel; since I was the only customer, they stood near me the whole time I ate. I liked their company.

There were other people, of course: mostly serious scuba divers, from Australia or Europe; a few serious Yogis; a few Australians who had actually moved to the island and worked there year-round (why? WHY?); and the locals. One young local boy got off his bike and began walking beside me as I was walking in the direction of the yoga studio. We began chatting, and he told me that he’d gone to elementary school on the island, but he’d left to attend high school on the mainland, since they didn’t have any high schools on the island. Now he was back, to help his family with their restaurant. I couldn’t imagine the level of boredom, being stuck on this small island and also not being able to afford any of the tourist luxuries (i.e. restaurants, spas, yoga studio, scuba classes).

After my snack, I took an hour and a half candlelit yoga class. It was peaceful, for the most part, and filled with at least 30 other tourists (no idea where they’d all been before, or where they went afterwards). The Australian lady who worked at the Yoga studio was kind of rude (maybe you would be too, if you lived here). When I asked her how to meditate during yoga, she barely smiled at me and said, “Wait for class.” Then, afterwards, I said, “Do you have any suggestions of restaurants for dinner?”

She responded, “Just go where your heart tells you to go,” kind of snippily, and then walked away.

Really? Okay, well, my heart has never been here, and it really doesn’t know. That’s why it was asking you.

So then I wandered, and ended up at some random place because it was selling pasta.

I was trying not to attract any extra attention (feeling a bit like some strange loner girl as it was, reading her book and not really talking or looking at anyone, while mostly everyone else was here with a boyfriend/girlfriend), when this cat came to my table and just wouldn’t stop meowing. Meowing is an understatement—this cat was screeching, right at my table. I kept smiling at it and kind of shooing it away before going back to my book, thinking, Please leave me alone, I cannot be the girl who sits by herself and feeds the stray cats.

But the cat wouldn’t shut up, and people kept looking at me like, Uhm, can you please control your friend, so finally I just pushed some of my pasta onto the seat beside me and the cat shut up, happily eating his share.

So that was Gili Air. I left the next morning. Overall, I can’t say it was my favorite part of the trip. But I will say one thing: I felt lucky, that I had the opportunity to be disappointed by a place. I mean, if I’d done the whole office job back in America, and had accepted a quick 10-day trip to Asia as my consolation prize, my night on Gili Air would have felt disastrous, like But this was 1/10^th of my trip! Instead, it was just a mediocre solo adventure to an island, (which I know I would’ve regretted had I skipped), and one of many adventures I will have in Asia before my time to leave.

The last thing I will tell you about is my experience after arriving back from Gili Air on Monday afternoon. I was staying near the airport, and my flight wasn’t until Tuesday morning, so in classic “Me” fashion, I began thinking about what I could do in the 5 hours I had left (before sleeping). It dawned on me that I felt very unfulfilled with what I’d done in terms of following in Liz Gilbert’s footsteps—I hadn’t meditated once, I hadn’t fallen in love, and I hadn’t visited a Medicine man. Seeing as only one of these was something I could Google (and not waste $500 learning how to do), I found a Medicine man, not too far from the airport, and emailed him. This is what he emailed back:

After receiving the, er, 'go-ahead', I grabbed myself a taxi from the airport and was dropped off 20-minutes later on this desolate side street. All I could see on this street were two men sitting on the front stoop of a random white building.

“Ah,” I stepped toward them, my taxi driver still watching. “Bali Chy Healing?”

They pointed down the street.

“Okay, thanks.”

My taxi driver asked me to get back in the car, but I said, “Oh, no, it’s okay, I can walk,” so, instead, he just followed me with his car… which is nice, I guess.

Eventually, I waved him on, assuring him, “No, really, I can find it.” 30-seconds after he disappeared from view, I heard beeping. I turned the corner to find a sign: Bali Chy Healing. I guess my taxi driver began beeping when he saw it to alert me, though I’m not sure how he thinks I would’ve missed it.

I entered this 'shop' and sat down in a chair while I waited for an older (mid-60’s?) dark brown Balinese man to finish his conversation with another patient. The Balinese man looked sweet, with large, thin-rimmed square glasses, a wide smile, and black hair graying around the ears. Like a grandfather, maybe (not mine, of course).

While I waited, I read a pamphlet about him. It said: “Sami is a traditional Balinese healer and doctor known as Balian Usada. With his holistic treatment he is able to diagnose and find solutions to physical ailments, emotional trauma, and spiritual consciousness issues… Besides his skills and knowledge passed on from generation to generation in his Balian Usada family, he draws on his ‘Panca Mayakosha’ holistic healing concept which he developed over many years and in which he combines the doctrines of the far Eastern and Western medicine with the traditional Balinese arts of healing. Sami had the opportunity to meet high spiritual beings (for example Sri Chinmoy), who regarded him as a superior being as well… He is now a very wise man.”

I skipped a few (boring) parts. On the front, it said he could do energy balancing, reading and life coaching, kinesiology… and some other stuff, mostly stuff I’ve never heard about. I thought about what I wanted and decided my ‘energies’ probably needed balancing, and I probably needed some life coaching, since I was here and all, and paying $70 (I’m embarrassed to admit that… my co-teachers all laughed when I told them how much I’d spent, and said, ‘I could’ve told you how to be happy for free! I could’ve balanced your energies for a discount!’)

An older, bigger woman, with jet-black hair and a sweaty face, suddenly appeared in the doorway. “Come, come!” She said, motioning for me to follow her. “You have appointment?” She asked.

“Uh, sort of. I emailed,” I said. She nodded, and that was that. (Note: if you’re ever in Bali, just say you have an appointment, even if you don’t. They never officially check.)

“Lie down,” she pointed to a bed behind a curtain, and then said, “But first, take off all your clothes.”

I did as she said and lay down on the bed. She explained that, first, she was going to give me a massage and do some acupressure to ‘get my energies flowing.’ For the first 15-minutes, as she worked, I asked various questions, like I was writing some research report on the whole thing. “How did you become a healer? He trained you? Who trained him, though? Wait, what are you doing now… can you feel the energies? Are there different energies in different parts of the body? How will we know when they’re balanced… can you feel the imbalance right now? Also, just curious… can the Medicine Man tell me my future? Can he read my mind?”

Finally, as I relaxed, I quieted. Actually, I probably pretty much fell asleep. It felt really nice. If nothing else, the $70 got me a great massage.

After at least 45-minutes, she finally called the man in. She told him, through the curtain, that I was “ready.” He came in and said, “Just relax, Caroline. Don’t think. Close your eyes.” I did as he said and there, in the dark, he put both sets of fingertips on my head and kept them there.

For a while, I stayed relaxed. My mind was still thinking ferociously, as it always does (it gets worse, I’ve found, when I try to think, ‘don’t think of anything! Be in the moment! Relax!’ When I tell my mind not to do something, it tries really hard to do the opposite).

They put me behind this curtain for the 'healing process'

After a while, my mind drifted and I thought about how much trust I was giving these people. Then I really thought about it. I mean, wait a minute. My bag, with my purse and debit card and credit card and cash, was sitting right beside him, not me. And I’m lying here, in the dark, on some random road on a deserted street, with my eyes closed. What the hell is keeping him from stealing from me? I thought, and then, even worse, Oh my god, what the hell is keeping him from KILLING me? Seriously, why hasn’t he stabbed me ALREADY? It would be genius. Stab me, put my body in the backyard… no one in the entire world knows where I am anyway… take all my debit cards/credit cards etc., and you could probably make a pretty good life for yourself… for at least a month or two… in Bali. And no one will ever know.

As I’m thinking this, I opened my eyes (just to check, you know… that he doesn’t have a knife in his hand, or something), and he said, like he was reading my mind, “Okay. We are done.”

I met him in the front room, right by the road. I had no idea where the woman went—I never saw her again.

He smiled at me and took out a big book and said, “So, Caroline. What is your problem?” I realized he meant what is my physical ailment—why am I even here in the first place—and I know I can’t really say, “Oh, I don’t have one, I just want you to tell me my future like someone in Bali told Elizabeth Gilbert hers. And maybe also tell me my purpose in life, and anything else you think is fun I should know.”

So, instead, I said weakly, “Oh, I don’t know. I wanted my energies balanced…” I have no idea what that even means… “And, also, I want to be more in-the-moment, I guess?”

He nodded and said, “You think a lot. You worry. You are very self-critical. You get stressed. You have a lot of knowledge… but you are not wise.”

He drew a triangle on a piece of paper and turned it to face me. Then he wrote, at the top of the triangle, the word ‘Spirit.’ Below, in the middle, he wrote, ‘Mind.’ Finally, at the bottom, he wrote, ‘Body.’

Then he drew a chart and wrote ‘Emotional,’ with all those really nice attributes he’d given me below (stress/nerves/anxiety/self-critical); on the other side of the chart, he wrote ‘Think.’

“You are also very active. Very creative. Very innovation.” (English is his second language; let’s bear in mind). He wrote these words below ‘Think’. Then, randomly, he drew a bunch of + signs under ‘Think’.

“You think too much. That is your problem. When you think too much, you are not in the moment. To be happy, you must be in the moment.”

“Yes, but… how?” I asked.

He looked up at me, exasperated. “I just told you!” He said, laughing, but sounding frustrated. “This is what I’m talking about. I told you!”

“Oh… Okay! Okay! I see now!” I said conciliatorily (Did he tell me? Was I not listening close enough?).

After a moment, he continued. “See, you want to know Who you are. You want to know Where you are. You want to know How to be happy. You want to know Why life is like this. You want to know What can make you happy.” He wrote these questions in the corner of the page.

“You are 23, Caroline. 23. You don’t need to know. Step-by-step, yes?”

“Okay,” I nodded. “Okay.”

“You want to know how to be happy… To be happy, you must be Healthy. You must be Aware of yourself. You must be Present. You must be Positive. And you must be Yourself. You see! It spells Happy!” He showed me on the paper, and then said, kindly, “You can keep this, by the way.”

I continued to nod. I mean, I didn’t really know what else to say (I certainly wasn’t going to ask him any more questions—I didn’t want him exploding on me again, and ripping up the paper in frustration, or something).

“You cannot reach your spirit until you calm the mind. Stop thinking. Just be happy. When you reach the spirit by being happy, you can find inspiration (he wrote in-SPIRIT-ation on the paper), from the universe. Do what makes you happy, help other people, and find inspiration—and you will be happy.” It began sounding a bit like circular reasoning to me (you know, X is true because of Y, and Y is true because of X), but still, the more he said it, the more I could believe it really was that simple. It felt a bit like he’d taken a burden off of me. If my only ‘homework’ from him was to be happy… well, that’s a fun thing to focus on, isn’t it? Much better than becoming some meditative guru and spending hundreds at a retreat, or something.

When I asked, “To find my spirit, should I meditate or pray?” He shrugged and said, “You can. Or, you can just be happy.”

Okay. I think I can do that.

The crazy thing about this whole trip was, I didn’t have to sit at a desk for 5 years to save up for it. I didn’t have to land a book deal or go through some traumatic mid-life crisis. I didn’t have to try all that hard, really… the opportunity more or less just fell into my lap. And that in itself is CRAZY to me. I mean, Bali? Indonesia? What do I even know about Indonesia? I don’t think it really hit me, how lucky I am, until I realized just how graspable the whole world feels to me right now. It’s all so much more within reach than I’d realized.

May of last year, I’d stopped researching work opportunities abroad and, instead, I’d begun emailing colleges in the local Boston area looking for Admissions Counselors because I figured I could travel that way (in the local area, to local high schools). Then, in June, I began researching opportunities to be an event planner in Boston, because I figured I could travel to different venues around the city.

Looking back, I feel sorry for that girl who, for even a brief period of time, narrowed her dreams so severely out of practicality and convenience… And out of some obscure pressure from this imminent ‘Real World.’

This is just as much a ‘Real World’ as any other. I get a salary at the end of every month that pays for my rent and my food and my transportation; I wake up and drink coffee from 7-11 to save money; I get tired and frustrated and my motorbike breaks down and my packages get sent to the wrong post office and all of it is real life.

But then, on a random Monday in January, a little over a year since I talked to someone from a Boston company about being a travel agent to help other people travel the world, and a little over 2 years since I read Eat, Pray, Love for the first time, I ended up in front of a medicine man in Bali.

I’m living this life that scares me sometimes, because I don’t always recognize it as something I’ve prepared for or studied for or navigated before; but, at the same time, there are moments like my trip to Bali where I can look up and recognize exactly where it is I’m headed. I've realized just how much I’m capable of doing, not just someday, but soon, now. And it makes me a lot less afraid of whatever the ‘Real World’ has in store.