An Essay: The Ground Beneath Our Mats.
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 ever since I stumbled on this book Vincent Bevins' The Jakarta Method, through Instagram of all places, and started reading it. While it didn’t surprise me, I 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
Bali is probably the most recognizable yoga destination in the world. The images are everywhere. The famous Bali swing, temple ceremonies, yoga poses with coconut trees behind them. Often marketed as a place to slow down, to dive deeper into your yoga, to connect with self, to explore, to heal.
When I read The Jakarta Method, and learned what happened there in 1965 and 1966 when a US-backed coup, led by General Suharto's military mass murdered between 500,000 and one million people. 80,000 of these people, were in Bali, on the beaches of Seminyak, where some of the most photographed retreats, resorts and hotels now stand.
And the tourism industry that we now participate in?
Well, it wasn't an accident. After Suharto came to power on the back of the massacres, his government with World Bank funding deliberately built Bali into an international destination. A 1971 masterplan created the airport, the Nusa Dua resort complex, the infrastructure that made "spiritual Bali" possible. Robert McNamara, who had just finished briefing President Johnson that US military assistance helped eliminate the Indonesian Communist Party as an effective political organization, resigned as Defense Secretary in 1968 and became President of the World Bank which then began investing in Bali's tourism development.
So the tourism that retreat industry participates in is constructed on top of the graves. And then the graves were made invisible, because tourism required it.
If that was not enough, the descendants of those who were killed were frequently barred from government jobs under Suharto's regime. Many were funnelled into the tourism industry instead. The very industry built to erase their own history.
It makes me sad knowing that the people serving at these retreats are, in many cases, the grandchildren of people who were killed to then make "yoga retreats" available in the first place.
II.The Book That Changed How I See This
What Bevins does in The Jakarta Method is document a pattern. Not just what happened in Indonesia, but how it happens, and how it disappears afterward. He spent years in archives across twelve countries, interviewing survivors. The Indonesian Communist Party, before 1965, had three million members and twenty million people affiliated with its linked organizations from farmers' collectives, trade unions to women's groups. A mass collective movement for economic reform.
Within months, an organized and popular left movement in a resource-rich country who was considered a threat to US interests, gone.
The most haunting line in the book comes from a survivor he interviews, Winarso. When Bevins asks how the United States won the Cold War, she says simply: "You killed us."
I read that and had to put the book down.
Anjali Rao, in Yoga as Embodied Resistance, writes that yoga has never been politically neutral. That every spiritual practice carries the imprint of the power structures that transmitted it. The Bali retreat industry to me is one of the most visible examples of what she means.
III. The Architecture of Erasure
Here's what Bevins is really documenting in The Jakarta Method and why I think it matters so much for us specifically, as yoga teachers. It's not just that violence happened and was then forgotten.
It's that the forgetting was structural. Intentionally built even.
Kwame Ture spent his life arguing that the job of the conscious is to make the unconscious conscious and what he meant, in part, was this: the most effective forms of oppression are the ones that don't look like oppression at all. They look like paradise, a beautiful destination, an invitation to heal.
Writing this scares me a little.
The pattern Bevins traces isn't unique to Bali. It appears across twelve countries. It goes like this: mass violence suppresses a movement for economic or political self-determination. The international community usually with Western backing, supports it, funds it, or simply looks away.
The violence is so complete that it becomes, over time, invisible. And then a new economy rises over the same ground: development, investment, tourism, cultural projection. A superstructure of beauty and spiritual sorts layered directly over what was destroyed.
The thing is, we do feel something when we are there. The temples are real and the ceremonies too. And so is this:
"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
An architecture that was built not just to make money but to make a particular kind of forgetting feel like spirituality. To turn the site of mass graves into a place where people go to find themselves. And to do it so completely that the people most harmed by the original violence end up serving the economy that buried it.
IV. So What Are We Doing?
I want to be honest about what I'm not saying here.
I'm not saying that going to Bali makes you complicit in a massacre. I'm not saying loving a place is the same as endorsing its history. I include myself in all of this. I learned this history recently and it shook me, and I'm still figuring out what it asks of me.
What I am saying is that when someone tells me they want to experience a culture through the lens of the people closest to it, that's not just a nice sentiment. It's a refusal of the architecture. It means being willing to ask whose story has been left out. Whose labour built the retreat you're resting in. What happened on that ground before it was made beautiful for you.
The first yama is ahimsa, non-harm. The second is satya, truth. You can't practice non-harm without first being willing to see what harm is being done. And you can't see it if the whole industry around you is organized to make it invisible.
So here are some questions to sit with. And like you, I’m always going to be inside these questions. And if you are too, I’d love to hear from you.
When we go to places like Bali, Peru, Puerta Vallarta, Guatemala what would it look like to actually honor the history of that ground, not just escape to it?
What's the difference between a retreat that consumes a culture and one that is accountable to it?
If the "spiritual" quality of a place was partly manufactured to bury what happened there what does that mean for how we receive it?
What would we build if we started from the question: who does this serve, and who does it erase?
Further Reading
The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins (PublicAffairs, 2020).
Yoga as Embodied Resistance, Anjali Rao (North Atlantic Books, 2025).
Skill in Action, Michelle C. Johnson (2nd ed.).
"On Bali, the Holiday Vibe Masks Memories of a Massacre", Hannah Beech and Muktita Suhartono, The New York Times (2025).
The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, trans. Edwin F. Bryant.
"Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) at the University of Georgia, Part I" - Lecture, University of Georgia, 1 February 1979. Uploaded by Brown Media Archives, YouTube, 2022
Written in March 2026. All historical figures relating to the Bali massacres are drawn from documented scholarly and journalistic sources. If you want to discuss these questions with your yoga community, consider sharing this and opening the floor before your next class.
