Yesterday, I woke up wondering why I had canceled my flight back to NYC. I was tired of living out of my suitcase and surfer life immersion. I had racked up $750 in data roaming charges. The weather forecast only looked bleak. Hello, Island of the Gods, were you sending me the wrong signal to stay? Did you mean go?

Now that I’m in Amed, I get it. The spiritual part of my journey is really only beginning. My Uber driver picked me up from McDonalds in Jimbaran, and we began our winding 3-hour drive, mostly in silence, me with my phone in airplane mode, reflective, hurt, and ready to move to the next phase. I had been emailing with a hotel called Meditasi earlier in the morning, and they told me to just show up, and I could see the options. It sounded like a perfect hideaway right on the beach with meditation, yoga, and good snorkeling. “I am on my way,” I wrote them from the McDonald’s parking lot before shutting down my phone connections.

The car passed through villages, mountains, and rice terraces. I started to feel better, a bit more distant.

Amed, on the far northeastern tip of Bali, is not really one place but a collection of small seaside villages that we passed through, some right on the beach and others up on higher ground. Amed Village, Jemeluk, Banutan, Lipah, Lehan, Selang…finally, Aas, home of Meditasi. I tentatively peeked through the gates of Meditasi and noted that it was quite…rustic. Immensely beautiful but rustic. Water flowed suddenly through the walkway, and I had to quickly jump the stream to avoid getting wet. There was a noisy building under construction. Everyone looked scarily friendly. I mentioned that I had emailed them earlier in the morning.

Suddenly, a strong figure with a headband and longish hair jumps out of the construction zone with a clove cigarette in hand. “Yes, I show you.” He brings me to a large gated bungalow right behind the new building.

“OK…how much is it?” I was somewhat unsure about this situation. “I give you discount because of the construction. 250,000 rupiah. You stay one night, one month, or one year. However long you want. Free meditation and healing. You read about it.” He pointed to a black binder on the terrace. He was a 4th generation Balinese healer.

“….OK? OK…” I said. That’s $18-19/night. I think I could handle the beach creatures and al fresco shower. I did miss the SPG club lounge experience. In the end, it was the generosity of the immediate discount when I was clearly trapped with nowhere else to go that yielded the instantaneous yes.

I got my bag and settled a bit. I laid down on the mosquito-net covered bed and stared out into the ocean, the cacophony of waves crashing and jackhammer drilling in a Schoenberg-like beauty. Objectively good but hard to listen to nonetheless.

I went down and chatted with the owner, and he asked if I wanted to do meditation and healing. We agreed to meet at 9pm after dinner. I asked him what his name was (there are only 10 first names in Bali based on birth order and, to a very limited extent, gender). I expected to hear Wayan or Made, the two most common names.

“Smiling Buddha!”

Uh WTF okay. I made a mental note to just call him “Hi” or nothing at all. “Pray for no rain. In front of water, there is good energy [for meditation]. We go there tonight.” So I did oblige and said a prayer, to what god I really don’t know, but I guess someone must have heard me because it did not rain that night for the first time in a while.

I went down to the beautiful deserted black beach lined with fishing boats and walked around before 5pm yoga with his sister, Ketut. There were a few hotel guests smiling widely at me and one local fisherman who also drummed up conversation. I felt defensive and vulnerable. Why are people being so nice to me? Don’t hurt me! The fisherman invited me to have a clove with him and chat, which I did for some time, but glossed over his offer to take me snorkeling the next day.

Then it was time for yoga. Rain sprinkled down as we did some chilled out hatha in a grassy knoll by the beach. At the end, Ketut led us in bouts of crazy laughter as a form of meditation, the penultimate step in our practice. I threw all self-consciousness out the window, and soon enough, Ketut, myself, and the French couple were howling insanely in laughter that was intentionally expressive and yet not wholly forced. Hilarious.

Time to find wifi before dinner and my healing / meditation session. I walked out of my room with my laptop in my bag.

“Grace.” A voice in the darkness. I looked down from my terrace and saw Smiling Buddha beyond the gates.
“Yes.”
“Your problem is your aura. We need to do a cleansing. Can we do that?”
“Uh…okay.”
“You can have dinner before or after. And then healing. And then meditation.”
“Sure.”
“You have a sarong?”

Clumsy conversation around what exactly we were going to do and what I needed to wear ensued. Only a sarong? I really wasn’t sure.

“Wear the sarong for the cleansing. If you need to shower, do it now. No shower after cleansing.”

Eventually, I just decided to show up in a sarong and go along with it. So much for the wifi session. I agreed to eat dinner first and then we would start the cleansing at 7:30pm.

After an amazing dinner of a cut-up spinach and garlic type curry with mahi mahi, I was ready for the cleansing ceremony.

He guided me to an elaborate gated altarpiece type setup. We faced each sitting on pillows, and he asked me to tell him about my problems. I decided to go for a short series of heavy but accurate – almost clinical – bullet points. “I have no physical pain. Just a lot of emotional problems,” I said bluntly.

There was an involved set of water rituals, incense burning, prayers. I was handed three sticks of burning incense and told to think about everything I wanted to leave behind from the past. I felt myself getting dizzy as I entered a sort of trance-like state. All the while, he had his eyes closed praying. Then water blessings on my head, me drinking from cupped hands, and a few other rituals. For a few minutes, he placed his hand on the top of my head. I felt something, but I was really unsure of what to make of it all. Afterwards, a bowlful basically got dumped on my head. Whoa. I guess I understand now why I had to wear the sarong.

“Smiling. Laughing. No matter what sadness there is. That is the cure. Dark attracts dark. Light attracts light.”

I went back to my room to change for meditation. We went out to the beach with pillows and a yoga mat. It was the night before the full moon, and the light reflected around us illuminating the dark rocks. Against the backdrop of the roar of the sea, we faced each other and meditated with the theme of focus. I breathed in and out at his command, focusing on the tip of my nose. “In. Oooout. Iiiiin. Ooout.” We set the timer for 15 minutes.

He smiled, “Now, we drink. You want to drink?” Well, I didn’t, but I was curious, so I said okay. He brought back a cocktail made of arak, lime, and sugar. “Caipirinha!” Explosive laughter. Is this guy hitting on me? I didn’t think so, so I stayed. He’s chatting, telling me about his partying days and how he found balance doing work and healing during the day and only drinking after 9pm at night. I nod and say “mmhm” or “yes” or “interesting” periodically to be polite.

“You’re always this quiet?” he asked. I said sometimes, feeling defensive and then decided to open up. I explained my time in the Bukit and said that I had been drained of energy.

I said the friend I had stayed with in the villa had yelled at me and that I had stayed with him for a week, every day getting more and more silent. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s stressed,” I said offhandedly. “Why stressed?” he asked.

“Well, he had some Russians staying at his house, and they said they were going to stay for 3 years, but they just left after a month.”

He starts laughing. “Hahahaha. Yes, he’s stressed! They just leave?”

“Yes, with one day’s notice. They said they would fill the electricity but then he came back to his house with no electricity and a refrigerator filled with rotting fish.”

We both start laughing now. Then it all came spilling out. The Australian women whose villa he was watching left without any plans for the dog, so he inherited a third dog with no food or instructions. One of his friends sold his $20K tractor in Oregon and burned all of his possessions because he got addicted to drugs. A woman he had invested $7K with for an illegal marijuana farm operation just got busted by the cops. Then he has me to babysit and tenants to find. A new tenant, an American guy, moved in with him over the weekend, and he had to get him set up. He was communicating with a Russian couple who wanted to move in with him as well, but they wanted to wait a week until their newborn baby was born. Then there would be 5 of them, including a newborn, under his roof plus the three dogs, one of them a stray. As I realized how much shit had come down raining on him over the course of a few long days, we were both bowled over laughing so hard our sides hurt. I explained that he yelled at me for making too much noise one morning. We laughed. I told him that the only thing he fed the three dogs every day was a single bowl of white rice for them to share – one big dog and two little ones. We laughed hysterically. I explained that at a certain point, we got to a stage where we didn’t look at or speak to each other. Laughing like crazy. “You think he’s stressed?” I asked. Now I’m the oblivious one. “Yes, he’s stressed!!!” We both cackled. Yes, laughing felt good.

We talked under the moonlight. He asked me about my work, and I explained that I had quit my job and was traveling and doing some thinking and writing. We talked a bit about my blog and my journaling.

“You know Elizabeth Gilbert? She write Eat, Pray, Love. She my good friend. She stayed here a long time and write book. I didn’t know. Sometimes one month, sometimes two weeks. Every night, we sit together here and meditate and drink.” I hadn’t known that before booking. I guess Amed hadn’t really been featured the way that Ubud had in her book and in the movie. Thank god, as Amed remained so desolate and beautiful in a way that I know it won’t be in a few years time, most likely. The notion that he had trouble filling his 8 rooms seemed absolutely ridiculous.

“Tomorrow, if my friend the fisherman catches a mackerel, I invite you to eat dinner together in the restaurant. Pray that my friend catches a mackerel.” We prayed. He also had a bottle of champagne that his friend in Ibiza had brought him 9 months ago. We agreed to have a full moon fiesta.

There would be a ceremony for the completion of the new building on July 29, and he wanted me to come back to be the model for the booking.com photos. I said I could probably do that, but I really wasn’t sure of my plans at this point.

We prattled on. We talked about our lives, the specialness of this hotel location (ocean in the foreground and the mountains in the background), past loves, and all sorts of random other topics. The butterfly tattoo I got when I was 16 and how I loved the beauty of metamorphosis. For him, the butterfly painting in his restaurant. “When butterflies come in the morning, I know there will be visitors,” he explained. Eventually I said goodnight, and we rolled up the yoga mat and pillows and headed back in under the moon and stars, climbing under a fishing boat ledge, over some rocks. I entered my new thatched home hoping I wouldn’t get devoured by nature creatures.

In the morning, I came out and greeted Smiling Buddha.

“Tonight, we have mackerel!” he said. Success.

Let’s see what this full moon brings.