The Ground Beneath Our Mats

essays

Mar 8

People ask me all the time why I put together a Cultural Retreat in Malaysia. And honestly, it's hard to summarize. There are all these thoughts in my head that don't fit neatly into a caption. And it's not exactly marketable especially when the status quo is that retreats are "exotic," "an escape," "a respite."

But recently, someone submitted their interest form and wrote something that stopped me. They said: "I want to experience the culture through the lens of the people closest to it."

That is it. That was the whole thing.

And this is not about the Cultural Retreat. This is about a book that I stumbled on via Instagram of all places, by Vincent Bevins titled The Jakarta Method. While many of what Bevins’ wrote about didn’t surprise me, I still couldn't stop thinking about what we, as yoga teachers, are participating in.

So here’s me trying to put words (a lot of it) into it.

I. The Beaches of Seminyak

In 1965 and 1966, following a coup attempt in Jakarta, General Suharto's military carried out one of the largest mass killings of the twentieth century. Across Indonesia, between 500,000 and one million people were killed. In Bali specifically, around 80,000 which is roughly 5 percent of the entire island's population, were dead within months.

The beaches of Seminyak, where some of the most photographed retreats and boutique hotels now stand, are the same beaches where these mass executions took place. So how does that happen? How does a site of mass killing become, within a single generation, a destination for spiritual renewal? Turns out, the answer runs through Washington.

What I’m about to share is something that the book laid out and it’s important. So, let me slow this down. In 1955, the Bandung Conference brought together twenty-nine newly independent nations, Indonesia among them, under President Sukarno to build a Third World politics that refused alignment with either the US or the Soviet Union. This non-aligned, anti-colonial left was, from Washington's perspective, one of the most threatening forces in the world.

Here’s the thing, not because it was Soviet-backed, but precisely because it wasn't. It was homegrown and had genuine popular support across Asia and Africa. And it was growing. The CIA and State Department understood that containing it meant not just military pressure, but dismantling the movements underneath it and that included the trade unions, the women cooperatives, and the parties organizing the rural poor.

It’s worth noting that the book was called ‘The Jakarta Method’ because Indonesia was the test case for a US-backed coup. The Indonesian Communist Party was the third-largest in the world, with deep roots in the labor movement and the countryside. The thing is, it was what Indonesian workers and farmers had actually built for themselves, and not a proxy of Moscow. And, that was precisely the problem. The CIA then began to supply Suharto's military with lists of PKI members and organizers which led to the mass killings.

After the massacres, Suharto's government, with World Bank funding, deliberately constructed Bali as an international destination. A 1971 masterplan built the airport, the Nusa Dua resort complex, the infrastructure behind "spiritual Bali." Robert McNamara had just finished briefing President Johnson that US military assistance helped eliminate the PKI as a political force. He then resigned as Defense Secretary, became President of the World Bank, and oversaw investment in that same Bali development. First erase the movement, then build the resort on top of it.

The descendants of those killed were frequently barred from government jobs under Suharto's New Order. Many were funneled into the tourism industry instead. Yup, the same one built to bury their history. In many cases the grandchildren of people told to smile for the guests were essentially handed an economy that benefited from their family's tragedy.

II.The Book That Bared The Bones

What makes The Jakarta Method so gut-wrenching is that Bevins isn't just telling us what happened in Indonesia. He spent years in archives across twelve countries interviewing survivors, and what he's really tracing is how atrocities like this one disappear. The PKI, before 1965, had three million members and twenty million people affiliated with its linked organisations: from farmers' collectives, trade unions to women's groups. And within months, a mass movement is gone.

The most haunting line in the book comes from a survivor Bevins interviews. When he asks her how the United States won the Cold War, she says simply: "You killed us."

I had to put the book down when I read that. Oof.

Because what she's naming isn't just military violence. It's the systematic erasure of an entire way we could’ve been imagining the world. And this pattern isn't unique to Bali. The book traces this across Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, Congo, Vietnam, Iran wherever a left-leaning independence movement gained enough momentum to threaten Western economic interests. And, the sequence repeats itself so that violence suppresses the movement and becomes, over time, invisible.

III. The Architecture of Erasure

Kwame Ture said that "the job of the conscious is to make the unconscious conscious and that the most effective forms of oppression are the ones that don't look like oppression at all.” In other words, oppression that looks like paradise depends on visitors not asking what happened on the ground beneath their mats.

"We don't talk about the killings because tourism depends on Bali being a place of harmony, peace, yoga."
— Ngurah Termana, whose grandfather was killed in the 1965–66 purges

What I'm still working out is this: how do the Balinese people even begin to tell their own story when they are employed in an economy that requires their silence about it?

Anjali Rao writes that yoga has never been politically neutral, that every transmission of a spiritual practice carries the imprint of the power structures that shaped it. Michelle C. Johnson takes that further and says oppression lives in the body and the numbness we feel when we don't want to know something isn't just psychological, it's somatic, it's practiced. Edwin Bryant, who translated and compiled all commentaries of the Yoga Sutras, explains avidya: not ignorance exactly, but active misperception, the mind's tendency to mistake a comfortable fiction for truth.

I also want to be careful not to flatten the spiritual richness of the Balinese people because that would not be accurate either. The ceremonies, the rituals, the relationship to land and ancestor, these exist independently of the tourism industry and long before it. But that's exactly what makes the question harder, not easier. How do we discern a genuine spiritual encounter from an experience that has been curated for us? And even when something is real, how do we receive it honestly when the entire context around it was designed to manage what we're allowed to feel and what we're not supposed to ask?

IV. So What Are We Doing?

Here's where I want to leave this, because I don't think the point is to stop going to these places or to feel bad that you want to.

There's something real that draws people to Bali, to Peru, to Guatemala. The desire to step outside your regular life and into something that feels more connected, more intentional. I’m not here to take that from anyone.

But the problem is that the industry built to serve that desire was, in a lot of cases, constructed specifically to make sure you don't ask too many questions about where you're standing.

And for those of us who teach, who bring other people into these spaces and ask them to be present and open, what would it look like to actually honor the history of that ground and not just escape to it? Is it possible to do both, or does the escape depend on not doing the first thing?

And here is the good news, because there is some. The Balinese people, their ceremonies, their relationship to land and ancestor, their spiritual life, they exist and very much alive. Which means there is still something real to learn from, if we're willing to come as students of a living tradition rather than consumers of an aesthetic.

The Ground Beneath Our Mats

I. The Beaches of Seminyak

II.The Book That Bared The Bones

III. The Architecture of Erasure

IV. So What Are We Doing?

Further Reading

What does it mean to practice yoga under already violent conditions?