Hello Bali. It's nice to finally meet you.
As I got off the plane in Bali, I immediately felt a sense of calmness, with a hint of subdued excitement.
When you’ve been wanting to go to a place for about five (or more) years, it never seems quite real when you finally arrive. It’s kind of like you’re living in déjà vu land, but it’s actually happening. Real life seems like a blur and everything is happening so slowly, yet so animated.
When I decided I wanted to take a yoga teacher training, I had three main requirements:
It would be in another country (one to which I hadn't yet traveled).
It would be an immersion experience.
It had to be a highly reputable program.
While I could expand on all of those areas, once I started digging into all of the options for yoga teacher training, things naturally settled out; I added in some more requirements to my personal list, but the first three still held strong. There are a lot of options when choosing a yoga teacher training program and, unfortunately, it’s not a highly regulated industry, which can make it harder to make a decision.
That stated, making my decision actually wasn’t too difficult. I wholeheartedly decided that I would attend Yoga Teacher Training in Bali, Indonesia with Zuna Yoga. I had spoken with a couple of students and a teacher with Zuna Yoga to get some of my questions answered prior to officially signing up. I was pleased with what I had heard, plus I loved their intense curriculum description, with a strong focus on yoga history and philosophy, meditation and pranayama.
Major Bonus? It was in Bali, Indonesia - a place I’ve wanted to visit for a long time, but had yet to journey to that part of the world.
Making big decisions doesn’t usually come that easily for me, it usually takes some time to ponder, weigh out my options, consider the investment and many other factors. However, when I connected with Zuna Yoga, I not only completed their online application right away, I knew I was a FIRM YES to this program, my yoga teacher training experience and the investment for not only the program, but to journey across the world and take time off of my business for a couple of months.
When I found out I was accepted into the program, I was thrilled; I honestly couldn’t wait to send my money their way (this is not normal for me, I usually hold on to my money pretty tightly). I was CONFIDENT in my decision. I signed up six months in advance, which, if you know me, I don’t plan anything that far in advance, so that’s another reason why I knew it was all meant to be and truly the right opportunity and timing.
Arriving at my Balinese hotel near the airport late in the evening, I was exhausted from a day of travels. (I had started my journey a couple days earlier, leaving Seattle and spending two nights in Hong Kong, then flying through Malaysia before finally landing in Bali close to midnight.) Fortunately, I was able to stay at the same hotel as some of my soon to be new yogi friends. The next day we would journey together (by van) from Denpasar to Ubud, where our yoga teacher training would take place.
The morning we left for Ubud, Bali’s cultural and spiritual center, we were introduced to the dense tropical Balinese rain (a torrential downpour). There’s no gutter system or really any solid infrastructure to hold the rain, so the streets become shallow cobblestone rivers. The small hilly country roads flowed like miniature waterfalls; the locals were covered in thin plastic ponchos as they navigated their scooters through the flowing water filled streets. This was daily life on a small tropical island.
It was almost as if the rain was clearing away all of the unwanted energy from our lives as we patiently sat inside of our van watching everything naturally unfold around us. The Universe was preparing us for this new cleansing experience.
As I made my way to yoga teacher training in Ubud, a new door of opportunity and continued deep learning was opening before me.
Truthfully, I had no expectations. I trusted that the experience would be exactly what I needed; I was ready to flow with everything and embrace it with a positive attitude, curious heart and open mind.
Life gives us exactly what we need when we’re open to fully receiving it (and if we’re not fully open to receiving it, it will continue to offer opportunities to experience it again and again).
