On the first night of the dance retreat, I went to my room, which I shared with a woman named Layla, an Indian woman and Tantra instructor who lived in Dubai. I sat there lying in the dark, but my mind was racing. What was I doing here again? Why couldn’t I go enjoy Bali like a normal person and sit on a beach? But I had done that. I’d island hopped for the past month and a half, and while it was unbelievably beautiful, I still felt restless and unsettled (Sure, the hospital stint hadn’t helped). But I was searching for something, some way to feel more of a sense of inner stillness.
I sat there lying in the dark, wide awake. After I was sick of being alone with my thoughts, I decided to see if Layla was still up, so at least I’d have some company while I went insane. “Layla,” I whispered. “Are you also extremely anxious right now?” She turned to me in the dark. “Anxious? No, not at all. I’m very relaxed.” I sighed. She told me to come over to her bed.
We had only met a few hours earlier, and hadn’t really spoken, but we sat there cross legged facing each other, and she took my hands in hers. “What are you anxious about?” I told her my concerns. This all seemed a lot more intense than what I had signed up for. I just wanted to dance by the ocean. She nodded. “This week is about shadow work. Being aware of the parts of ourselves we’re afraid to face. It’s not easy. Just take it day by day.” Also, I probably should have read the details of the program more closely.
I didn’t sleep all night. Instead, I just sat there, doubting my decision. I was still awake when I heard the pounding of a drum outside my window. I didn’t know what time it was since they had taken my phone, but it was still dark out so it had to be around 5am. This drum was our wake up call each morning. I jumped out of bed, happy to distract myself and leave this room after feeling anxious in it all night, and followed the sound of the drum. I ended up by the ocean, where the other eighteen participants sat meditating. I joined them.
Afterwards, we watched the sun rise, and swam into the ocean together. This is how every morning would go.
I would soon find that the days were packed, hour to hour, with activities like this. The only time I was able to sit and rest was when I was asleep. After our morning sunrise meditation, we’d meet in the Shala for a dance lesson with Jasmine, who was assisting Malaika. The afternoon activities would be a mix of dance and what felt like intense therapy. If you looked around, someone would often be in tears (including me). And then, later in the afternoon, we would dance it out. Each day, the dancing or daily teaching was organized around a different element - air, earth, water, fire, and ether- culminating in a combination of all five on the final day.
I loved being able to meet and learn from people from all over the world — participants had come from Japan, Poland, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, and more. One couple from Costa Rica had even flown to Bali, then were turned away for visa reasons, had to fly back to Turkey (where they had a layover), and then returned to Bali all for this retreat. I felt very lucky to be able to be there. Interestingly, a lot of people came to see Malaika because they had met her in Costa Rica, or because she had led ecstatic dance there (even at Envision, the festival where I was introduced to this type of dance in the first place). It was starting to feel like I was in the right place after all.
I won’t go into every activity we did, but once I committed to embracing the fact that I was there and would, indeed, stay, I began to get more out of it. Even when the days got really challenging, and I wanted to run again.
This was especially true the day we did family constellations. If you have never done one before (I never have), it is essentially a therapeutic technique where, in this instance, two other strangers role play as your mother and father, and you are able to resolve some traumas that come up. In this instance, we would turn to face these strangers we had barely spoken to, and treating them as our parental figures, complete the sentence “What I need to tell you to feel complete is” ____. I watched everyone go, breaking into tears. I thought, what have I done? Why are we not dancing? This is definitely not dancing. But I told myself I would stay. I would not flee, even though I was incredibly uncomfortable.
When it was my turn, and I really gave it a chance, I wasn’t filled with anger or resentment, but found myself apologizing. I was sorry for how sick I had been the past few years, and I couldn’t understand why my parents wanted to help me so much, again and again. I didn’t think I deserved it. It’s hard writing this, even now, because I genuinely don’t feel this way anymore. But I’d be lying if I said that these feelings don’t come up in waves sometimes. I just treat them with more compassion now.
When you’re chronically ill, you need to rely on others. You simply cannot go it alone. And that shouldn’t be regarded as a weakness - helping the ones we love is one of the most beautiful parts of life. It’s what makes us human, and allows us to be vulnerable and demonstrate that love. As someone who has, in the past, deeply valued my independence and had a hard time being so open and relying on others, this was a really hard thing for me to learn.
But when I reflect on what I am grateful for with my illness, one of the biggest things is always that it has cracked my heart wide open. And sure, sometimes there are the lingering feelings from when I was sick that I am a bother, or I am bringing others down by asking them for help, but now I learn to let those feelings come up, and then let them pass. Those that want to help will always truly help because they genuinely want to be there for you. You don’t need to feel guilty. They’re there because they want to be.
Later that day, I thought back to a moment a few weeks earlier, as I traveled by boat from Lombok to Komodo Island. It was a four day journey, and on the first day, I sat next to this girl named Shirley. She was from Hamburg, and we had just met, but we immediately shared about our lives openly, because we were stuck on a boat together, what else were we going to do?
She asked if I had dated anyone seriously this past year, and I told her I hadn’t. I explained that my life was so focused on my health and getting better, I didn’t really think I was able to date. I told myself that no one would want to date me until I was healthier, or in a better place. My life, at one point, was just going to doctor’s appointments every day. It was too messy.
But she was shocked to hear this. “If your illness is chronic, then it’s a part of who you are. You don’t have to wait for it to be over. You find someone who will accept you as you are.” Hearing her say that really changed something in my mind. For the first time, I didn’t see my illness as something to hide from people I was dating. It was simply a part of me, and a part I had to learn to love. It has made me resilient, and opened my heart. If I met someone else with this condition, I wouldn’t reject them because of it or move along. I’d treat them with compassion and try to understand.
But doing this family constellation, and remembering my moment with Shirley, made me realize how much shame I still held onto around my condition, no matter how hard I tried to let go.
And then, finally, we danced. We danced to let out all these newly surfaced emotions, and I had never felt so present in my body. I had no phone to distract my thoughts. I was cut off from the outside world, for a brief moment. I could just sit with my emotions, and then drop into my body and feel them, deeply. It was a high unlike anything I felt before. My mind felt so clear. It didn’t feel so different from the clarity I felt after meditating.
Although I hadn’t made it to Nepal to study in the monastery as I planned, maybe this is what I needed. A different way to feel this stillness by being more in touch with my body. As we danced each day with Jasmine and learned new techniques, I found myself moving parts of my body I had never tried moving before. It was like discovering and playing with my body for the first time.
What changed everything for me was watching one woman named Sujata dance. She was from Japan, and I thought she was the most beautiful dancer I had ever seen. Mainly because no matter what she did, even if she was simply gliding her hand through the air, every single movement was made with deep presence and intention.
In the past, sometimes I think I would dance according to how other people were dancing, or what I thought looked attractive to others. But now we were learning to really feel the music, and be deeply present so that instead, your body can lead you. I could turn my mind off, and allow my body to be my guide. Being someone who has always lived more in my head than my body, this was terrifying for me, and incredibly liberating.
At lunch one day, I knew something had shifted. I felt so much happier and lighter, and realized it was because I was more present than I had been in weeks. And the way I realized this was when I ate my lunch, I felt fully there, mindful of each bite. As I traveled, it had become a signifier of how present or content I was. If I really focused on my meal, and used that time to be grateful for my food, I didn’t feel the need to be distracted by my phone or reading a book while I ate. I could just enjoy the act of eating.
There were other moments that had a profound impact on me. One day, we were asked to wear bathing suits, and then walk around and cover the parts of our bodies that we felt self-conscious of in clay. It was striking to see all these body parts covered in clay, when all I could keep thinking was how beautiful everyone looked to me. It broke my heart to think about how ashamed we get of our own bodies, and then to have it feel so public. At the end of it, we celebrated our bodies, full of clay, and what else could we do? we danced.
The most life changing experience, however, came on our second to last day. One afternoon, we were asked to write down our limiting beliefs and innermost fears that we tell ourselves. Then, we found a partner. I gave my partner, Jasmine, the list of fears and afterwards was blindfolded. Music began to play and we were asked to dance while our partner spoke these limiting beliefs at us, to feel how it affected our bodies. I was horrified.
I was very close to ripping the blindfold off and running off. It truly felt like torture. But the strange thing was, what she was telling me wasn’t new. I was used to saying all these things to myself for years. But to hear them come from a different voice other than mine, and not just let these cruel words live in my head, but be voiced out loud, was shocking. The whole time, I just thought, what a fucking horrible way I’ve been speaking to myself. I can never speak to myself this way again. Before this moment, I’d say my biggest problem has always been that I’ve been too hard on myself. I’ve tried being easier, or saying nice things to myself in the mirror, but it always felt inauthentic. Like I was just going through the motions, but didn’t really mean it.
Only now, I got it. Life is hard enough as it is. I don’t need to be so mean to myself on top of all that. The least I can do is love myself, and appreciate myself for how hard I try every single day. The least I can do is speak to myself kindly and build myself up. Malaika saw how shaken we all were, and reminded us, we gave our partners these scripts to read. Which meant we also had the power to change it.
When it was my partner’s turn, something interesting happened. After I spoke out her limiting beliefs, instead of crumpling under the cruelty of it all, she fought back. And one of the things she said was, “I am not afraid to create the life of my dreams.”
For the rest of the day, I wondered, what was the life of my dreams? Why was I so afraid to go after it, and if I did, what did it even look like? I went off on my own that afternoon, and thought about what held me back from creating this life. It’s funny, sometimes in Bali, I was so far away, and in a land that was so foreign to me, it felt like I had dropped into an alternate timeline of my life.
Now that I was here, I felt I needed to take advantage of this new chance, to decide how I wanted this reality to look and feel like. But something was still holding me back. I still cared about what others expected of me. I still had these notions of the type of life I thought I was supposed to live. But what if that all fell away, and I could really feel, deep in my bones, what it was I wanted for my life? What if this moment in time was a turning point to create something entirely new? I closed my eyes, and I opened my heart.
Later that night, I sat with Jasmine at dinner, and told her what an impact her words had on me. It really had me thinking about what I wanted for myself, for my life. After meditating on it, I had a vision. I told her how when I closed my eyes, I saw something very clear. I was walking towards the ocean, with the mountains behind me. I was barefoot, and living in a small town, with a tightly knit community. As I walked down the street, I knew almost everyone, and then eventually headed to some kind of market. When I finished telling her this, she smiled. “That sounds exactly like Byron Bay, where I'm from in Australia. You just described my daily life there. They have a bunch of farmers markets a few times a week, you would love it.”
I laughed, and told her maybe I would go. But it felt good to know that maybe my vision could become a reality someday soon. Regardless of where this place existed, it felt good to see it in my mind, to know that I was headed in the right direction. I felt closer to knowing what it was I wanted, I just wasn’t sure where to find it.
On our last day, we danced and combined all of the elements we had learned about. We were given our phones back, and I called my mom. She had been extremely worried, mainly because before giving my phone in, my last text to her was “They’re taking my phone. Any last words?” When we spoke, I remember her telling me my voice sounded different.
Aside from the worried texts, I also saw to my surprise that two friends I had been traveling with in Thailand in February had just gotten to Bali. This was part of what I loved the most of traveling - everyone you met seemed to circle back around some way or another.
While most of the people at the retreat would stay on for another two weeks with Malaika to deepen their ecstatic dance training, I felt the urge to go back out into the world. At this point, I was planning to leave Bali in a week, and wanted to make the most of my time left here. A lot had shifted for me after this experience — I saw myself differently, and how I wanted to move through the world. I was excited to take on each day with presence, to love myself fully, and let the rest fall into place.
Thank you, as always, for reading and coming along with me on this journey!
Love,
Julia