After the Waterfall

There’s a point in healing when the chaos ends — but the body hasn’t caught up yet.
I’ve done the work. I survived the fall. I can finally breathe. And still, my heart races at nothing.

The first time I went to see the healer, I was still drenched from the emotional storm. I couldn’t tell where the pain ended and I began. I was treading water — sometimes gasping, sometimes grateful just to still be afloat. Every ritual, every tear, every drop of holy water felt like triage for a wound I couldn’t yet see.

When I returned to Bali, I wasn’t drowning anymore. I imagined I was sitting on the rocks at the edge of the same waterfall I had come tumbling down from the last time I was there, watching the water rush beneath me. I could finally look at what had happened — the freefall, the panic, the impact — and feel, for the first time, that I was no longer in it.

But that’s where healing becomes its own kind of work.
Because even when the mind knows you’re safe, the body doesn’t believe it straight away. It still flinches at the sound of rushing water. It still braces for the fall.

The body’s alarm system doesn’t turn off with insight.
In trauma therapy, this is called integration — the slow process of bringing cognitive understanding and physiological safety into alignment. It’s the bridge between knowing and feeling, between awareness and embodiment.

I think of it like muscle memory. When you’ve spent years contracting — tensing against impact, holding your breath through chaos — the nervous system learns that pattern. It becomes efficient at surviving. So when you finally reach calm, your body doesn’t recognise it as home yet. It’s like asking a runner to stop mid-sprint: the legs still twitch with the rhythm of running.

Integration is retraining those reflexes.
It’s teaching the body that stillness doesn’t mean danger, that rest isn’t collapse. The brain might grasp that instantly, but the body needs proof. It learns through repetition — through breath, ritual, movement, and time.

That’s what retreat has become for me. Not escape or rescue — but integration. A space between phases. A place where the mind can soften enough for the body to catch up. Where insight becomes action, and action becomes rhythm.

Balinese healing works in that same language of rhythm. The ceremonies aren’t one-off miracles; they’re repetitions of balance. Chant, water, smoke, prayer — they remind the body how to move in harmony again. Each visit feels like tuning an instrument that has slowly drifted out of key.

When I returned to Tri Desna and the Mangku this time, I noticed how my body responded differently. The trembling that once came with every blessing had softened. My shoulders stayed low. My breath was steady. I could receive the healing without interpreting it as rescue.

That’s what integration feels like for me.
Not a surge of joy or a final breakthrough, but a quiet calibration — body and mind beginning to agree.

And then, sometimes, a crash.
The vulnerability hangover.

It’s the moment after deep emotional work when everything inside suddenly feels raw again. Like the echo after the waterfall — your ears still ringing with the sound of release. The mind says, we’re fine now, but the body needs recovery. All that openness takes energy to hold.

For me, the hangover arrives as fatigue, tenderness, and a strange quiet. It’s the nervous system returning from high alert — the biological come-down from intensity.
And it makes sense. I’ve opened floodgates of emotion, rewired reflexes, asked my body to stop sprinting. Of course it’s tired.

The mistake is thinking the hangover means I’ve gone backwards.
It doesn’t. It means integration is happening. The body is digesting change — metabolising truth into something it can live with.

That’s the practice now.
Letting calm become embodied instead of performed. Trusting that peace isn’t quiet because it’s empty, but because it’s full.

Inside me, something new is settling: the kind of tired that comes after truth. Not exhaustion, but exhale.
I realise I’m not performing calm anymore. I’m in it.

And that’s what Healing Holidays really offers — a small, sacred container for this in-between. A space to rehearse who we’re becoming while our bodies learn the choreography of safety. To map, moment by moment, how we want to be in the world — cognitively, emotionally, physically — and to give the nervous system time to believe us.

Integration isn’t a finish line. It’s a rhythm.
The muscle memory of peace, relearned through repetition, held by ritual, and softened by time.

And for some, that rhythm begins here — in Bali, in ceremony, in stillness — where the water keeps moving, and we finally don’t need to.