I Went to Bali to Heal and Joined a Cult Instead

At a yoga teacher training in Bali, one traveler searched for catharsis, connection, and clarity after family trauma — but discovered you can’t manufacture enlightenment, only real friendship.

My forehead, damp with sweat in Bali’s humid air, was pressed against a stranger’s. We hadn’t even exchanged names. A sob drew my eyes sideways. Two women were crying, their faces crumpled, tears streaming. They’d felt each other’s souls, they explained.

“Oh my god,” I thought. “I’ve joined a cult.”

We were all dressed in white—30 strangers enrolled in the same yoga teacher training—gathered around a flower mandala. I was desperate to make eye contact with someone, anyone who also found this absurd. A fellow skeptic ready to raise an eyebrow, suppress a smirk, offer some small signal of shared disbelief. No one did.

We’d barely arrived before being handed candles and told to form two lines, holding hands. Then we climbed the stairs into the shala, a thatched open-air pavilion. Its curved bamboo ribs rose above us, sunlight slanting across the polished wooden floor in long golden stripes. We snaked through the room in silence, maintaining eye contact with each person we passed.

I’d come to Bali straight from Jakarta, where I’d seen my father for the first time since he left when I was 14, almost half a lifetime ago. I had no expectations. That’s what I kept telling myself. And honestly, the visit was tolerable. Polite. He introduced me to his wife. She looked my age.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Thirty-three,” my dad said. “So she’s three years older than you.”

“I’m actually 27,” I said.

She was the one who asked about my life, who tried to get to know me, who shared stories about their two-year-old son. My dad mostly typed away on his laptop and phone, just like when I was a kid. We didn’t talk about the past–or anything, really. I left feeling untethered, like I’d braced for impact that never arrived.

I’d planned two months in Bali to decompress. Time alone, a chance to finally sit still after a childhood spent in chaos. I’d just lost my job and subletted my apartment. Yoga teacher training cost $2,000 for three weeks, meals and housing included–cheaper than living in New York, and maybe I’d return with some clarity.

Back in the shala, the first step toward clarity was staring into candle flames until our eyes watered. Feel the energy, our teacher said.

I felt nothing except a persistent ache in my lower back.

The rituals continued. Yoga nidra became my favorite—not for spiritual reasons, but because I could nap without judgment. We’d lie on our backs while the teacher guided us through a story designed to induce deep relaxation. I was unconscious within seconds.

This had become a running joke. I swore I’d stay awake for the next one.

Afterward, someone said, “Wasn’t that beautiful? When we swam with the dolphins?”

I perked up. “Wait, what dolphins?”

“The dolphins in the meditation,” another woman replied. “And then we flew through the clouds, and there was a rainbow—”

I looked around, waiting for someone to crack. “You’re messing with me.”

They weren’t. They were dead serious.

While everyone else was swimming with dolphins through rainbow skies, I’d been drooling onto my yoga mat.

Then came active meditation. Fifteen minutes of jumping, shaking, flailing. The floor vibrated under 30 pairs of bare feet. Pure physical chaos meant to release trapped emotions. Full-body, guttural wails ricocheted around the room.

I kept jumping, waiting for the floodgates to open. Nothing happened.

Where was my catharsis? What was wrong with me? I felt something close to envy watching these women crumble so easily, like they’d found a release valve I couldn’t access.

One afternoon, we sat in a circle for an optional sharing session. People volunteered their deepest traumas. Things I wouldn’t tell my closest friends, let alone 30 strangers I’d known for a few days.

They bawled.

I said nothing. Not because I had nothing to say, but because the idea of performing vulnerability on command made my skin crawl.

This wasn’t my first attempt at transformation. Two weeks earlier, I’d been at a luxury healing retreat, the kind with cacao ceremonies and overpriced smoothies. I’d chosen the “deep healing package.”

A Balinese shaman dumped a bucket of cold water over my head, as thick incense smoke obscured the courtyard. I waded through the Tirta Empul temple pools in a sarong that clung to my thighs. I ran into the ocean at dawn while a woman chanted.

I didn’t feel healed at all. I just remember thinking: “I’m so sick of being wet.”

Other women said they felt transformed. Lighter. That the water had cleansed something deep inside them. I wondered if I was broken.

I’ve done years of therapy. Reiki. Craniosacral. Microdosing. Still, when therapists ask where I hold emotions in my body, I never know what to say.

Now seemed like the right time to get unstuck. I’d just lost my job. Seen my estranged father and felt nothing resolve. Spent my childhood helping my mother breathe through panic attacks and managing her suicide threats. I dealt with cops and social workers and mandated court counseling. So I showed up in Bali wide open, ready to be fixed.

Spoiler: I couldn’t do it.

I told a friend about it later. She couldn’t stop laughing. Finally she sputtered: “The funniest part is that you actually wanted to join the cult. You just couldn’t.” And she was right.

Throughout training, active meditation eluded me. The dolphins never appeared. I’d longed for a glimpse of a stranger’s soul. But I couldn’t manufacture the breakthrough everyone else seemed to experience like clockwork.

Part of me found the whole thing absurd—the crying on cue, the instant “soul connections.” Another part wondered if I was the problem. Was I just not in tune with my emotions? Not enlightened enough? These women had been practicing yoga for years, consistently, devotedly. I’d go for a few weeks, then forget about it for months. Maybe they could access a euphoria I simply wasn’t disciplined enough to reach.

The two women from the opening ceremony, the ones who felt each other’s souls, became inseparable. They did everything together and ate every meal side by side.

Until day four, when they had a screaming fight and stopped speaking entirely.

Despite all of this—the performative emotions, the failed New Age rituals—I did make real friends. We’d visit Ubud during our time off, lounge by the pools, and stay up late talking. These women came from all over the world, each carrying wildly different stories that led us all to the same Balinese shala.

On my birthday, one of the girls had the cooks bake me a secret cake. They surprised me, taking turns singing Happy Birthday in their languages. I was thousands of miles from home, had just met these people, yet they made me feel like I mattered.

So what was real? Did those two women actually entwine souls, or were they just caught up in the ritual? And can you manufacture epiphanies, authenticity, and intimacy?

Research suggests you can. Collective gatherings can create real emotional states, according to a 2020 Frontiers in Psychology article. Shared attention and synchronized movement trigger what psychologists call “perceived emotional synchrony.” We had all of it—the group rituals, the collective focus, the physical coordination. For some women, maybe the experiences were genuine. For others, maybe the ritual created an illusion of kinship, however fleeting. I’ll never know. I just know I couldn’t tap into any of it.

But yoga is built on oppositional forces. Strength and flexibility, effort and surrender.

I wanted to join the cult but couldn’t. I found the rituals absurd but envied those who didn’t. I couldn’t manufacture enlightenment but made genuine friends. Maybe that was its own kind of balance. Turns out you can fail at joining a cult and still have a good time.