(#63) My Experience of Silence in Bali pt 2

At the end of March, I took myself on solo trip (my Mumma moon) to Bali and spent 7 days in silence at Bali Silent Retreat. 🌺

If you hadn’t heard part 1 where I share my reason why I chose to go on a silent retreat in Bali and the first 3 days, then pause this episode and go back and listen to Ep #62. 🎧

I open this episode with My Food Review, which I know you will want to hear. Food can always make or break a holiday! 

It certainly was a week of nourishing expansion. 🌟

I then lead you through the second half of my retreat and what happened afterwards. 

🌴 Day 4 - my jungle meditation walk and walk around the rice fields 
📚My review of all 5 books I read over 7 days. 📚
💧 Day 5 - The answer & deep insights I received sitting under a water meditation 
😴 Day 6 - A day of SLEEPING! 
🔥 Day 7 - Final day! Noticing a shift in energy, learning to play the Rindik. One final time at the fire pit 

🎤 How I integrated my voice back into the world 
🌱 How am I going to maintain this? 

My final thoughts:
Would you want to experience a retreat like this?
How would you feel about initiating a day of silence for yourself?

Let me know! I would love to hear your thoughts.  💬

In the upcoming ep #64, I am going to share with you my 3-step healing process I did on this retreat. Stay tuned! 

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Transcript

0:01

Hello, hello, and welcome to Alchemy Mindset. I'm your host, Anna Hasty, business mindset coach for women and a sound healer. If you are ready to become the most aligned, magnetic, and confident business woman you are worthy and deserving of being, visit Then this show is for you. This is where I share everything from mindset, energy, and spirituality, and how to embody your future self in business and life. Sprinkle that with deeply relaxing sound healings and meditations, and you have the Alchemy Mindset podcast. Hit subscribe, so you always get the latest episode. Now let's begin. Hello and welcome back. Welcome back to part two of My Experience in Silence at a Bali Silent retreat. If you haven't heard part one of my experience in silence in Bali. I suggest you pause this episode and go back to listen to episode 62 where you'll hear all about my intention as to why I chose to do this silent retreat and why I went to Bali, as well as the first three days of my experience in Bali being in silence. So just pause this one, head back there, and then you can jump back into this one afterwards. Now, I left you on day three, and I'm picking this episode up from day four to day seven. And as promised, at the end of the last episode, I'm going to start this episode talking all about the food. Now, the food was incredible. It certainly made my day. The experience, one thing that I learned about the retreat when I read a bit more about its history and its conception was that they had every intention of making sure whatever they did on the land was in alignment with the land's natural landscape. So it wasn't like they had, okay, we've got a budget and a timeframe. Everything needs to be built now. Everything was done with intention, through meditation, through insight. Through communication with the land. So a lot of the buildings that were built were according to what the land dictated. Now they've got rice fields all around, but they also built a lot of amazing veggie patches and herbal medicine gardens and everywhere there's just plants that you can tell have all been planted and done with such care, love and intention and keeping with the silent experience, there are no chainsaws or. Whippersnippers or lawn mowers, everything is done by hand. And I found that just so peaceful. And when you walk around the gardens, you can just see how much is done with so much love by the whole entire team there. Okay. So now I'm getting distracted. Let's get back to the food. So, food for breakfast would start from 8. 30 till 10. 30. Every meal was a buffet, a wide selection of different dishes, there's at least 10, and they would have them all listed up on a chalkboard so you knew what each dish was, and there was a little number obviously next to each dish. My favourite was this massive homemade and baked sourdough loaf. It wasn't really a loaf, it was this round cob thing. It was massive. And I'm not really a big bread eater. Like I don't eat a lot of bread at home. So of course, when there's bread available at restaurants or places like this, I'm going full on, I'm going to eat the bread. It was delicious. And the way people cut into it was kind of, so it started like a little bit of a wedge. So it was like almost two sides being created on this loaf, not rather than just down the middle and you know, you guess, whatever, I can't describe it anyway. If my wedge came out a little wider and a little bit thicker each time, oh well, shame. Because what you got to lather, and I literally say the word lather and slather onto those slices of bread. Was this beautifully made homemade peanut butter. Oh my God. I don't know what they put in it. There must have been something that was just highly addictive because the jar was large, right? It would start as a large full jar at the start of the day. By the end of lunch, it looked like someone had literally just tipped it upside and drank it all. Like there was nothing left, just dregs, but it was delicious. It was the best nut butter I'd had in a long time. That went on one side of the bread and on another piece of the bread, oh my goodness, another big chunky wedge of bread was this beautiful, and I've really got to figure out how they made it so I can try and replicate it, this coconut rosemary butter. So all the food is vegan, vegetarian, raw. The only animal product that is used is duck eggs. There's no dairy. There's no chicken eggs. There's honey. I think they have honey, but everything else is grown from their garden or sourced from the jungle. They do a lot of jungle foraging. And yes, they do purchase some ingredients such as flour, oil, I think some nuts and maybe some extra fruits from other places around the island or Java, but overall everything is grown from their own gardens. So breakfast was always a myriad of bread, these nut butters and butter, you could have that. This amazing granola, I don't know what was in it, it was delicious, there was peanuts and cashews and shredded coconut and something else, toasted, yummy, with all different kinds of fruit and cashew milk. And then you had two different juices to choose from, a green juice or like a fruit juice, like maybe a freshly squeezed. Dragon fruit or papaya or something like that. And then on the other side, you had sort of more like cooked kind of items. So there was always some sort of egg dish, like whether it was scrambled, fried omelet or a quiche or a frittata or something, something with potatoes or a sweet potato, some sort of. I don't know. Something, something, something, something. There was something yummy. Breakfast was amazing. But it was delicious. Oh, and there was sometimes a porridge of some sort, whether it was like red rice, black rice, some sort of mung bean porridge y thing. I generally loaded up my bowl with the granola, fruit, and cashew milk. And then I would also go and get a little picking of something that was cooked that equally looked amazing and delicious. You load everything up onto a tray and then you carry your tray up to the second level where you eat your food. And that whole act in itself makes you so consciously aware of your movements and silence and your presence. I have been told in the past that I'm a heavy walker, I'm a thumper, got told that once. And from then on, I've always been conscious of my walking and the floors are wooden. So you kind of learn how to move quietly and consciously to your place where you're going to sit your food down, as well as you're quite aware of who's like a bit of a thumper and a clanger and a banger when it comes to walking around and putting the tray down and stuff like that. I feel like silence just brings you so much awareness on your own movements and presence. I love it. So that's breakfast. Then in the middle of the day, you've got this tea station where they literally have jars of herbs that they've picked from the garden that you can brew and make all your own tea from ginger, lemongrass, there was even aloe vera, papaya or pawpaw leaf can be used in a herbal tea. There was dried lemon, dried limes, cinnamon quills, pieces of clove, pepper, salt. What else was there? And then there was a whole myriad of other herbs that I hadn't heard of or had before in a tea. They were amazing. It was a little bit for me like, Oh, I'm not even going to read the book and find out what I'm sticking in here. I'm just going to chuck all sorts of things in. I think it's called a blue butterfly pea. I think that was what it was. I feel like this is a new thing that you might see around a lot. I'm sure it was a butterfly pea, but it was blue. A blue flower, chuck that in a pot. Yeah, why not? Add a bit of lemongrass, a bit of ginger, make it something a little bit exciting. I also feel like there's actually what I would describe as a weed here in Broome that they actually said, this is a really great herb. For a plant to put in your tea to do whatever it needed to do. I can't remember. I have to ask someone if it is that plant, the one that I see here in Broome that looks like a weed, which actually in fact there, who knows if it's a weed, is actually used what they had in these tea stations. So basically it was two gas burners with a pot, fill it with water, chuck your herbs in, cook it until it boils, let it sit for five minutes, strain it, voila, you have your tea. Now in this whole area as well, they've got cookies. Chips, croutons, spinach, like kale chip things, fruit as little snacks. And I don't know how they made these chocolate coconut doughy cookie things, fricking delicious. And the cashew nut cookies. Yum. I ate a lot of them. They were delicious. And then these chips as well. What was it? A taro chip? Ugh. I, I, ugh. Yum. Yum, yum, yum, yum. So then it came to lunch. Now lunch started from 11. 30 till 3. 30 and in that time it's just a whole buffet, like a grazing buffet. So you've got carrot sticks with dips. Now the dips were like cashew, this beautiful cashew dip, avocado dip, there was another kind of dip and then there was a tamarind sauce. And all these veggie sticks. I don't know what the white veggie sticks were, but they were a bit like, it could potentially like a radish of some sort. Delicious. Yummy. Ate lots of that. Then they had, again, the bread, yes, cut me another large wedge of that. Actually, you know what, just give me the loaf and I'm going to pour the nut butter in. I didn't, but it was very tempting. And then you had, um, more of the cook section. So that was again like rice or sautéed some veg or there was potatoes, steamed potatoes, steamed sweet potato. There was these turmeric shots as well, which were really kind of cool. And I think there was a couple of other things, but they were pretty much standard every day for lunch. That was the same thing every day. Dinner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dinner, dinner, dinner was just as amazing as breakfast for me. You never knew what you were going to get. And I was in love with a particular day where I went back for seconds. They had this amazing raw apple pie. It was the most delicious thing I've ever had in my life. I went back for more. And I don't know how they cook these things, but there's like these sautéed vegetables and homemade this and raw that and stir fried kind of this and a curry and sauces and a soup. No more bread. They took that away. But you didn't need it because it was like rice and veggies and sometimes it was like these dumpling type things. It was like sweet potato mashed and then rolled and fried in this sticky rice flour doughy goodness pocket of yum. Now you can see what's happening here. Nourishing expansion is what I'm calling it. Nourishing expansion. Expansion to the point where I realized I was probably consuming more than my output of activity was. So I had to change my game a bit, particularly after I went back for two rounds of the apple pie and I literally rolled my way into bed. I was so full, but just so blissfully happy that I ate such beautiful food. So I timed it. I had to do this for self control. What I did was then from then onwards, decide that each day I had to go for a walk, a reasonable walk somewhere. Not just a stroll between my bungalow and the lodge, which was literally maybe a few meters. I had to do a bigger, longer walk and I had to make sure I limited how much I was going to eat. Now you could easily say, Anna, we'll just put smaller portions on your plate. By the time you've put like a little dollop of this and a pinch of that, and a small spoonful of that, your plate's fully loaded after 10 choices of things. Right. And you can't just stop at one. You got to try everything right. What I had to do was time it so that I'd go in the last half hour of food service, so that by the time I'd finished my meal, because they encourage you to eat slowly and mindfully and enjoy the experience, by the time I'd finished, they'd cleared away the food and I could not go back for seconds, but had anticipated that I most likely had loaded my plate up with enough food and I wouldn't have to go back. Success! That was my only way I could control this eating. Even though each time I went, I'll just take a bit of that, I'll take a little bit of that, it's still piled up on my plate, it's still piled up. I was a bit disappointed they didn't repeat the raw apple pie before I left. If it was a scheduled weekly thing, I'm glad I had it, but I wish they'd done it a couple more times. I would have appreciated that. And I have solemnly declared and sworn to myself that if my last meal on earth is a meal, If you ever had to have a choice, it's going to Barley Silent Retreat. Just give me the dinner buffet with a side portion of the granola, which is so good. Now I will say something that while I tried to be mindful of my portions, I certainly wasn't there to detox and I certainly wasn't there to lose weight. I knew this was nourishing, wholesome, soul filling food. I was expecting some sort of expansion of some sort. I don't say putting on weight, it's just natural expansion. That, when I kind of observed other people and how they served their plates, I often looked at them going, why did you just choose two things there and a dollop of that? Do you not see how delicious this food is? When in actual fact, that's how they started, but you could pretty much count how many times they went up and down those stairs for more servings. So I'm just going to put it out there. If you go, load up your plate, enjoy the food. The longer you sit there with the more food, the more you get to look out at all the animals and the birds and the wildlife and appreciate everything and journal and just sit there. And it was just amazing. I think what I really enjoyed about my dinner experience or my food experience there is that not only everything was so beautifully made and so nourishing and so delicious. But eating it and gazing out at a view that was inspiring and relaxing with no devices to distract you, no TV, no telephones, no devices. You got to really appreciate and see so many wonderful things like. These little geckos would just emerge out of the beams and the woodwork of the whole entire lodge and just scuttle along like the railings or the benchtops and kind of look at you as if to say, have you finished with that? Can you just toss me some of that here? You finished with that? And it was almost like you had this silent little conversation with them and they had these little personalities or the funny moment where there were these, like, I'm going to call it like a. Bird, a wading type bird that you would see in a rice field. It's got longish kind of legs and a little round body, not like a stalk or as big as a stalk or a crane or an egret or something like that. But a smaller one, you see them around the rice paddies. Anyway, somehow it had managed. To climb its way to the top of this big bush tree thing. And it's not really the kind of bird that you would see flying around, it's more of a walking bird that would sort of hop to various heights of things, but I felt like it was more of a ground level bird. Kind of like, you know, you'd expect a chicken really, they walk around a lot and don't really fly heaps. It had somehow made itself to the top of this tree. And I kind of felt like it was like going, how the hell did I get up here? Now, how the hell do I get back down? And I could see it doing laps of these branches and I felt like saying, dude, to get down, you've got to go down here. But just watching that was even so enjoyable. It was just lovely to see nature and just witness and see things. And. Just be while you're eating without going, Oh yeah, I must check this or text message that or scroll this or look something up. Like have that put all aside. So that's my food review of Barley Silent Retreat. I personally love the food. It's my style of food. I loved it. It gave me greater awareness of how much processed crap we do consume. As individuals and is available to us. It made me feel more inspired to want to cook more wholesome, organic, raw stuff. However, at this moment in time in my life, that may not be possible with the schedule I get to keep with Ava plus working and all the other things in between. So yeah, if I had my own personal chefs in my kitchen rolling out food like that, I'd be a very happy person. Side note here as well. You can't have coffee. There is no coffee, there is no chai, and there's no cacao. Mm mm. So, there is a very big sign that says, coffee is not allowed, if you do need coffee, please speak to reception. There is a little shop down the road, I'm sure they sell coffee, and you could probably go there, but basically there's no coffee. In terms of why, I'm not entirely sure, but I get it. I get it. Just don't have coffee. If you're the kind of person that must have a coffee, I guess you need to make your own arrangements. But if you want to detox and really be free of caffeine for a little while, it's not a bad thing. This is a great place to do it. Just know that you might need to be prepared with your Panadol or your Neurofen should you get those caffeine cravings and withdrawals. So day four, I found myself again waking up at 5am, hello to my ginger tea, and decided that I would, um, Get to the yoga bale well before the yoga class started so I could just have even earlier meditation time and I actually really enjoyed that just going a little bit earlier, sitting there in silence and just being able to listen to the world around me and just sit there and be for a little while. I really enjoyed that. I really loved as well that there was a rooster that would walk around the yoga bale at that time of the morning. And often when we're in the middle of class, he'd poke his head over the edge of the platform and just crow at us as if to say, keep going, you're doing well. Are you in silence? He's a funny character. So the yoga instructors there are a mixture of like, I'd say volunteers. And people that have been Balinese instructors that have been trained, I guess, under a yoga instructor, but they've kind of say the same spiel each time as a disclaimer that I'm not a yoga instructor. I'm here just to teach you my experience. We're here to do some stretching. It goes for 45 minutes. Then we do some 30 minutes of meditation, and then we're going to do 15 minutes of Shavasana. The stretching I would say was basically very beginner, gentle yoga. There was no pretzels, no inversions, no Deep or strong practices, no real sun salutations. It was something that was just available and accessible to everybody who could be there. And as they said in their own way, and I loved Roy, he was one of the instructors and he had the best English accent. I loved it. He was a Balinese instructor and he would be like, do as you can, do as you can, do as you can, you know, and just the way he would say things like, come back to center. I just loved his accent. It was brilliant. They just obviously say, do it as you can, like be in your own practice. Your body is your body. You be your own teacher. And it was really gentle. It was really easy. It was a lovely way to stretch and just be with the start of your morning. So knowing that I was experiencing some nourishing expansion and that I would have to do a bit more movement apart from one morning of yoga a day, I decided that before breakfast I would go on the jungle walk because I hadn't done that one yet in the whole entire complex. And they actually encourage you to do a meditation as you walk down the steps to the river. So there's 108 steps, which is a significant number in many religions. And what they suggest is that for every 10 steps, you stop and do breathing and breathing to the count of 10. And then the next 10 steps you stop and you do breathing to the count of 20, et cetera, all the way up to a hundred breaths. Or counting to a hundred. And then the last steps is eight steps and you're there at the river. Now I was like, okay, all right, you've suggested this. I'm going to give this a crack. It doesn't sound very exciting. It sounds very frustrating. I just want to walk to the river, sit and have a look and then do the circuit on the way back. What do you mean I have to stop and do all this breathing and walking and counting? So, it was quite interesting because when I first started, I was very impatient. It was like 10 steps. Oh, it's not very far. Now I have to do 10 breaths. Okay. Next steps. Next 10 steps. Oh, now I have to do 20. But what I realized within my experience was that as I kept going through the 10 steps, My breathing and my counting slowed the higher the number I had to count. So by the time I got to 108, I felt very relaxed and I felt very peaceful. And in that time while you're counting, they say, once you've done, just stop and have a look around and see what's around you. And that was really cool too, because we all know that when we walk, we're often looking at the path in front of us. So we know that we're not going to trip over or run into anything, but when you actually stop and look around. It's quite cool. So I saw things like ants crawling on a tree and massive giant leaves on trees I've never seen so big before, heard things like the river rushing and birds and crickets and frogs and just noticed so much more within just that whole experience. But the one thing that got me was how I easily slowed the longer I had to count each time. That afternoon, all right, I've done one walk, need to do another one, that afternoon, decided I'd do the rice field walk. So they basically gave me a map. It's not that difficult. It takes about 30 minutes and you follow a bit of a loop around the paddy fields and you come back and you go sort of up the main village street, up past some houses, up a little lane, over through the rice field, circle back round and come back down through the main street of the village, back to the retreat. I'll I think walking in another country and particularly a country where you're not the same ethnicity really does make you feel like you stand out. I'm a white woman, a Western woman, walking around an area that is predominantly Balinese. And it really does make you feel very conscious of yourself as a foreigner. And I feel like this is a really interesting experience that everybody should have at some stage in their life, because it gives you that understanding of what it's like to be the outsider. And to be the foreigner and to be the one that's different. And even though I'm sure that these people have seen hundreds of Westerners walk around that area and do the same walk multiple times, they don't even bat an eyelid, you still feel very conscious. And at one stage, while the walk was easy and there was no harm, and even the dogs were friendly, I was a bit panicked that the dogs would be like these rabied, vicious, You know, lethal animals. And I'd end up in hospital with rabies or something. They just looked at me and walked off. They weren't even bothered by who I was. If anything, they were like, eh, not the foreigner. I still felt like I was being watched and I still felt very conscious of myself. So when I actually did the walk for the last time, I actually put a protection bubble over me just for a bit of energetic security and put a bubble over me so that I was more. Figure walking, but non identifiable. And I actually felt more safer doing that than I had previously. And even though that was just on my walk, as I said in the previous episode, I never felt unsafe. or vulnerable or in danger being at the retreat. I always felt great for being there. So one thing I was feeling at the end of day four was just really clear and really free. I felt very light within myself, maybe because I'd slept a lot. I was taking lots of naps. I was eating beautiful, nourishing food. I was breathing so much fresh air. And I was just really having time and space just to be myself, to not really engage in anything, be distracted, move from one place to another, but just be still and indulge in the things that I felt like I wanted to do, read books. So I read overall five books in seven days. I read a book about silence by a Norwegian explorer. His achievement within his life is that he'd walked the three poles, the North, the South and Everest. And he talked about his experience of being in silence and how modern day society perceives silence. And that was a really good book. Not too long. Really easy read. I loved it. I then read Hashtag Girlboss, which I know a lot of people have seen as a series on Netflix right now. I feel like I've seen this before and I knew some of the story, so I read that and that was really good. It was a very lighthearted, bit of a business y kind of book. Things that I like. I like reading things like that. Very insightful. Very good. I then read Energy Speaks by Lee Harris. So he's someone that I sometimes follow on YouTube. He channels these beings and masters called the Zs. They all have names that start with the letter Z, so he calls them the Zs. And that book was divided into different chapters such as spirituality, family, feminine power, abundance, money, whatever, whatever, whatever. And actually I read that one more towards the end of my stay. I was a bit resistant at first, but then I was like, no, I'm going to read that. It actually applied, I think, when I read it, rather than if I'd read it first during my stay. And some of the chapters were really, really, really, really poignant, and I was like, wow, I've learnt a lot from reading this book. And I'm going to actually order it because it's got some great meditations in there. And I felt it just helped solidify. I think is the word I'm going to use here, really confirmed some of the healing that I had done and some of the intentions and the things I was wanting to move forward with in the next season of my life. And particularly around family, because we've got quite a few changes within our family dynamics coming up with my parents moving to Broome, us potentially, me and Francois. Going for baby number two. So within that, the words and the meanings and the messages from these beings really connected with me. I also read a book that was written by a Tibetan monk. It was in the 1900s. Can you believe that we can actually say that now? I read a book that was written in the 1900s. I'd say the mid 1900s, it was an autobiography about a monk and his initiation into becoming a healing monk or a medical Lama is what they would call them. And his experience in a Lamastri in Tibet and his relationship with the Dalai Lama at the time. So that was really interesting. I loved that book. It was very insightful. I did feel like the way it was titled, it was called The Third Eye. I thought it was actually going to speak more about some of the practices and how to actually do some of these techniques yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I found that there was, it was more of an autobiography rather than telling you how to do some of these things that he learned, such as in this monastery, they learn levitation, accessing the third eye, crystal gazing, telepathy, as well as herbal medicine and all sorts of things. And I was like, Oh, I'm going to learn a little bit. No, just more insightful, but it had really good meaning. And I took a few screenshots of some of the pages so I could remember that for future things. Side note, I love doing that, screenshotting things that I read. And then the last book I read was just a light hearted, easy read, because sometimes you just want something a bit mindless. It was called 50 is not a four letter word. And that was about a lady who was turning 50 and having some sort of like midlife crisis, bit of a dramedy, bit of a rom com, found it very easy to read, enjoyed it. Sometimes you just need easy things to read. It rained a lot on day six, like during the night, it just rained a lot during the night. And it was just lovely to hear so much rain come down, feel that coziness of rain, even though it wasn't even cold, it was still really warm. My bed was nice and cozy. You had sheets and a thicker doona and they even had ropes. You could even have a rope to wear within your room, which was really lovely. But as it rained more and more and more, you could hear the water running through the rice field become faster and stronger. So it went almost like from a trickling stream to a raging torrent of a river. And in some ways that had that similar sound to being near the ocean when I've camped by the ocean here in Broome. It was just really lovely hearing all these sounds. In this last few days of my retreat. I kind of received some more answers to things I was asking and one of the questions I had in the middle there was like, what else do I need to heal? What else do I need to know? And it was actually when I was sitting again, I went back to sit under that water meditation for a second time and it was during that time and I think it was in reflection from reading that book, the Tibetan book, I should say, was that when it comes to healing. This is what I want to, I want to read to you. So sitting under the water meditation, a thought and a question came through after I had been reflecting on the healing work I had done the night before. So the night before I'd gone to the fire pit, I think I went to the fire pit at least three times to do some release work. And this was after the second time. And the question was, after the healing, after forgiveness and clearing. What next? While I felt free and at ease with the healing I had done, the true act of healing is continuing the forgiveness work and living in the space of love through my future actions. In other words, healing and forgiveness doesn't just stop at that moment it has happened, It means that I still need to and must continue to do the inner work of healing, forgiveness, and being in a place of love and continue to reflect all of that within my actions. So if I'm healing and asking for forgiveness in a relationship that I have with someone, that's great that I've received it and I've created that. But I still need to act with love and compassion towards that person, therefore, afterwards. Healing work doesn't just make me a good person, it's how I act afterwards that also matters. We can often continue to be in cycles, repetitively, of doing the same things, it's a habit, let's call it, even though we've experienced and done the healing work. Meaning, we're still repeating and doing the same things without understanding that the healing work is done. It's done. Let it go. It is done. But how you move forwards is the bigger task at hand and the most important one to continue to heal. Moving through that healing and forgiveness work that you've experienced. Stop and break the cycles of repetitiveness that are creating and continuously causing you more heartache or pain or trouble or trauma. Once the healing work is done, it is done. Move forwards with forgiveness and love and continue that within your actions. That for me was a really important message that came through and one that was really important I feel for this moment and season within my life where I am, things are changing, as I said, within my family, within relationships. And I really want everything to be well received. And I guess that's one of the things that came down to my intention for being here in Bali. It was to do some healing work around certain things, certain events, certain people. So that, that wasn't no longer there as baggy, just something that was often creeping into my mind and getting me hotheaded or all caught up in different emotions. It's done. We can't go into the past and retrieve those actual moments in a physical form and plonk it down in front of us. It's just a memory. It's an experience that happened, but it's nothing tangible that we can go back in time to find to bring back into the present moment. We only have memories and memories of those experiences. What we can do is heal that in the way that is right for us, but move forwards and know that those motions and feelings. are healed and everything is okay. And if it's your intention to be in a certain way moving forward, then that is your action and that is your path and that is your goal. So that's what came through during the water meditation. It was a really quite interesting moment and I feel like it really answered that question that I had repeating from day three of what else do I need to know? What other healing needs to happen? So day six, I slept a lot. I slept a lot. I was tired. I was kind of also felt like I was cooked, like the oven timer had gone off and my body and my mind and my spirit had said. You're done. You've done what you've had to do to come here. You're kind of done. It's time to go home. So even though I had another day to go, another full day to go, this was day six, part of me was like, I'm a bit bored. I don't want to walk anywhere. I don't want to go sit under a piece of, you know, under some holy water. I'm a bit bored, so I actually spent the whole day sleeping, and it was great. I think I just needed to sleep, and often, when we need to sleep, it's a time of integration, and a time of absorption, and a time of release, and a time of processing, and that's pretty much what I did all day, till I heard the gong to say it was time for yoga, and then I knew that it was time to go get something to eat. And then followed by a short walk again around the rice fields. As soon as the dinner bell went, I took myself to do the meditation. So it meant that I would go for dinner for that last half hour, can't go back for seconds. And that felt like a really beautiful day to have just slept, did some walking, ate nourishing food, meditated, felt amazing. My last day, it's day seven, my last full day. Went to my yoga class in the morning, still raining, which I love, love, love hearing. I just love rain. I think now that I live in an area where most of the year you could say a good chunk of the year, It's pretty sunny, clear skies, and it's beautiful weather. Having rain is just such a divine experience, hearing it, seeing it, feeling it, oh, it's magic. I really appreciate it. One thing I noticed, so nothing really exceptional happened on day seven. I had done a lot of the healing work I intended to, the big stuff, but I still had some things that needed to be shifted. So I knew that after dinner, I would go down and do some release work at the fire pit for one last time. And I also wanted to use that time to set intentions for this next season coming forwards. I spent a bit of time that day, not really doing too much. I'd done my morning meditation, yoga, breakfast. I actually spent quite a bit of time sitting up at the reception area just on my phone looking at the videos Francois had sent through, just felt like I needed that little bit of connection time and just messaging him to see how he was going. I also had to confirm my pickup back to Kuta for the next day, my departure day. So I kind of just sat there and didn't scroll Instagram or anything, didn't connect to anybody else. It was just to see videos of Ava. Yeah. Yeah. Spent the afternoon reading, relaxing, just watching the rain. And then after my evening meditation, which this time was about 45 minutes. I went to, for dinner and one thing I noticed straight away was that there were so many new faces within the kitchen area and the dining area. Every day there's a new person, every day there's someone who's left, you know, after a while you go, Oh, I haven't seen that person around, they must have left already and you don't know how long anybody's here for, where they've come from or who they are. So sometimes I spent a little bit of time staring at people going, Hmm, I think you're from that country judging by the way you look or dress or something like that. And I felt like I kind of figured out who may have been an Aussie because they were carrying a Yeti water bottle. I'm sure Yeti water bottles are probably global, but I know a lot feature here, particularly where I live here in Broome. So I was just guessing, Hmm, could you be from Australia with your Yeti water bottle? Anyway, one thing I noticed was that because there were so many new faces, I actually felt all these new energy. I could tell that these people had just arrived and just sitting there in the lodge, having my dinner, I felt very uncomfortable, like, Oh, there's a lot of new people here. They haven't quite adjusted yet. This is probably how I was when I arrived. I'm not enjoying it. Usually after dinner I would spend an hour or so just sitting in the lodge on a couch reading until it was pretty much like empty. Then I'd go and make my evening cup of tea of whatever, chuck all the herbs in, boil it up, see how we roll, and then I'd go back to my room. But I felt like there was just way too many people to be around and I didn't like it. I knew I had to check my phone one last time to receive my confirmation for my pickup. So I decided that it was a reason to escape and go to the reception area up the driveway and just be there for a few minutes. Some evenings they had a local Balinese performer, I don't know if he was really a performer or who he was, but a musician, probably is a better way to describe him. And he would be there playing his bamboo. Instrument. I honestly have not looked up the name of this thing. I think it's called a gamelan. I'm going to say that, but I'm sure if you've been to Bali, you've seen them perhaps around in Balinese cultural experiences. But it's a instrument where you sit at, and it's got bits of bamboo that are cut into different lengths, almost like a piano or a xylophone, but when you play it, it has that really nice wooden do do do do do do do do kind of sound. Anyway, he was there playing that, and obviously you can go and sit with him and just listen to it as you watch the sunset, or For a bit of meditation or learn how to play. Anyway, I was the only one there. We kind of got some chatting. His English was limited. I have no Indonesian. I apologize, but I showed him that I was a sound here and this is what I did. And he actually showed me how to play it. Wow. Talk about left and right brain practice and experience. It was incredible to watch him play with three sticks. So he had two in one hand and one in the other, and he would just play these amazing melodies and songs. Oh, it was just magical. And yeah, so he showed me how to play a few tunes and practice some things while he then played the flute, which was really fun. And I really enjoyed it because it was a bit like, to me, like a tongue twister, you know, it's like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time. So I was grateful that I got there just to sit and experience that with him and play that beautiful music rather than sit in the lodge and be surrounded by all this new energy. And I felt like it was a really nice way to complete and finish my time in Bali. He did say to me, oh, shame you're leaving tomorrow. You should have come back and do more. You'd be, you'd be expert by the end of it. And I was like, yeah, I know, shame, maybe next time. So there I was, day eight, leaving day, I'm done. I feel like I'm ready to go. I'm a bit sad to leave this space. I'm not sure how I'm going to feel going back into the real world, but. I'm ready. I'm ready to go. I did my last morning of yoga and meditation in the yoga space. I didn't have to check out until 11, so I knew I had plenty of time before I had to. And one thing I had planned already in my mind was to take a very large chunky wedge of bread, slather it with some peanut butter and slather it with some coconut rosemary butter and take a few of those cashew cookies. I thought, I'm not really wanting to go by too much when I get back to Kuta. I just want to take some nourishing, some final moments of my time here at the retreat. And this is probably the easiest thing I can get away with walking away with. I didn't have any plastic containers with me. I didn't have anything else that I could, you know, get a few more veggie sticks and beautiful dipping sauce into. But this was good enough. The real world, I go. So my drive back to Kuta was peaceful and uneventful, but it was interesting watching the world unfold and get busier and busier as I headed back to my hotel. And in many ways I was kind of like, no, I don't want to leave my peaceful mountain retreat. I don't want to go back into this world where I have to navigate everything. I just want to be in that. Beautiful space where I get nourishing food and I can be silent and listen to the birds and the trees and the sounds around me and have no other expectations than that. But in all honesty, I don't think that that kind of lifestyle is for me forever. I'm not here to do that on this planet. I'm here to experience these kind of experiences and have these. Soul nourishing and enriching experiences, but not to continuously live in that way. Apart from the food, give me that food every day and I will be happy. So the question is, how did I go integrating my voice back into the world? And how did I feel moving back into the world in that energy space? Did I feel like it was jarring and severe? Did I feel like it was easy and understandable? I was a bit nervous, thought I would have those moments where I would absolutely recoil from anything. And just really feel unbalanced is what I'm trying to say. But in actual fact, I felt okay. I felt very light within myself and very clear. And that was something Francois noted straight away. He goes, you look so much more at peace and lighter within yourself. And I said to him, I feel like I've shedded some layers. And I feel like I've had the time to detox myself energetically, and I feel like I've really come back to myself and had that space and time just to be. I think sleep had a lot to do with it as well. Let's face it, sleep is so healing all in itself. Remember that. We need sleep. We cannot function without it. Using my voice again felt weird. Now there were a couple of times where I had to during the retreat, and that was one to do laundry. I had to drop my laundry off and pick it up. Two to ask for directions for the rice field walk. And the other time was when I was doing the little workshop where you learned how to do an offering and create a ceremony. Um, and experience what they do every day on a regular basis around Bali. And that obviously involved a little bit of conversation and talking. So the times that I had to, and particularly after doing that workshop, firstly, I felt like all I wanted to do was speak in a whisper or hushed tones. And I noticed that my throat was getting a bit sore and gravelly. Like I just wanted a soothing honey drop to ease my throat, my voice, but to speak felt really weird. And I think the first few times that I did speak and the first few days afterwards, my voice felt different. It felt really different. It felt more, I don't know what the word is, but it felt different. And I sounded a bit different. I think now I've returned to my normal self. And the other question I had was like, how am I going to maintain this? How am I going to maintain this experience of being in silence when I'm. Literally launching myself back into the world of motherhood, family life, work, and everything else that goes on. I'm not really sure. I don't think I am going to maintain it very well. In all honesty, life at this moment is so Up and down and unpredictable and varies each and every single day with a tiny human being that moments of silent need to be orchestrated and planned well in advance in terms of asking Francois for a bit of space this afternoon, so I can just go and be somewhere and be quiet. And that may look like sitting at the beach or going to our beautiful Buddha sanctuary in the afternoons and just sitting and resting there. I think also to have no expectation on myself is also a good thing, to not feel too pressured to create something and to maintain something is also part of it. I have my own ways of doing healing and meditation through playing my bowls and other things that I do. That I'm okay with that. And that sometimes is more than enough in all that it needs to be. Oh, I don't feel like I was too energetically unbalanced when I got back into the real world. I didn't really want to leave my hotel room initially once I checked in, but I decided that I needed to go for a walk and see something of Kuta because I'd never really seen it before and sort of have that appreciation and understanding of what it's all about, why tourists love to flock there, and And kind of see through my own eyes, all the stories that I'd heard growing up as a teenager with all my friends who would take yearly holidays with their families to Bali and they'd experience all these particular things when they stayed in places like Kuta and things like that. I think overall, one thing I did get out of this as an insight for myself is that I need to allow more time just to rest. And sometimes just do nothing and not have my phone around me all the time. Like, it's okay to leave it in another room, face down, in a drawer or turned off or on flight mode. I don't need to carry it around with me. And the same with taking more time to rest. So read a book, do something that's a little bit more creative or nothing at all, and just enjoy the time that I do get to have with Ava playing and doing fun things. I did notice when I got back that she had changed. She'd grown. Her language was different and just seeing how much she really, really, really loves having Francois with her is just a beautiful thing. And I'm so grateful that they've had this time together. Would I actually want to go back to this place and experience something like this again? Hell yeah. I feel like this could be something I would love to envision myself doing annually once Ava is older. Or just to go to some place with a similar experience, doesn't have to be Bali, maybe it's Thailand, maybe it's Germany, maybe it's somewhere here in Australia. I don't know. But to have that time and reflection and just to be for yourself, I think is really important. I feel like everybody needs to experience that moment in time of being silent. Of maybe having just one day where you don't talk to anybody, and you don't look at your phone, and your food is already prepared for you, and you don't do any cleaning, or chores, or housework, or things that you've been putting off on your to do list. You just be, without any distractions, no TV, no device, have all your nourishing food already made for you. And you just get to be in silence. I kind of feel like the world would be a little bit better if we did have a national silent day, like the Bylanese. I know some people would probably just absolutely freak out at that possibility. I'm not sure how it would roll if it was introduced into our society right now, but I feel like in some ways, maybe the world could be potentially a better place. If we had that moment to reflect and just be quiet without any distractions. As I said, and I always say, I'm so grateful for this time. I'm so grateful for this experience and I'm so grateful that I did this. I'm so grateful that this was my reward to myself for my hard work within quarter one, and I'm so grateful the timing of this and where it's falling within my life and how significant I feel this will have within my life as it unfolds over the next few months and season. I honestly loved this experience. Yeah. I'm sure you would too, if it's something that you would find enriching and challenging all at the same time. And of course, if you've got any questions or you'd like to know more about it, please let me know. I have put down below in the show notes, the link to the website so you can go check it out for yourself. I honestly would highly recommend if it's within your budget to book the wooden private bungalow. So amazing to have your own space. Go with no intentions, go with no expectations, just go with the feeling of you need to be there and see what unfolds. Go within the mindset as well that if things do come up, you have your own way of healing and dealing and moving through it as well. Because I think it is a place where healing happens. It is a special place. I felt it within its energy. I really do hope you found these last two episodes very insightful, perhaps inspiring, perhaps encouraging as well for you to experience something similar yourself. In the next episode, I'm going to share with you my three step process for self administered healing, some self help healings. I'm sure you'll find that really helpful as well. Should you ever take yourself on a similar retreat like this and you need some way to experience and move through any healing that comes up. Until that episode, I hope you're well. I hope you're having a fabulous day. Thank you always so much for listening. Please, please, please rate and review this podcast so that it can continue falling into the ears of those who need it most. Share it in whichever way. I love to see your comments. I love to see who's listening. Until the next episode, thank you so much for tuning in and listening to today's episode, please rate and review this podcast so that it can continue to thrive and reach more listeners. I love to know who my listeners are. So please screenshot this episode and tag me on Instagram at Anna F. Hastie, and I look forward to connecting with you in the next episode.