The Bali Experiment

Oh January, you bleak and brutal beast!

Since our return from Bali you have frozen us, whipped rain on our faces and made the dog's football so hard that it's like kicking a canon ball across the garden. You've reminded us of log-fires, hygge living-rooms, snuggly socks, warm blankets and what deep winter in England is all about.

The last few weeks since coming back (two weeks? three? time feels strange in January) I’ve spent a lot of time inside. Not just physically, but inwardly too. Recovering from jet lag. Slipping back into work rhythms. Knocking about with my journal and my dog.

Mulling.

Over.

Things.

I haven't been rushing to articulate what I learnt in that mad Southern Hemisphere ride we just went on ... but instead have allowed it to settle into my life at its own speed.

In this time I have realised, gradually and unmistakably, that I haven't come back with fragments of insight from Bali but instead, I've somehow been given a coherent map. It's a philosophy that has begun to organise itself quietly across everything I already knew in my coaching work, my Jungian studies, my relationship with dreams and the unconscious, my personal practices, my lived experience of "leap, collapse, rebuild, and flourish again".

Gradually, the more I've thought about it - and journalled about it - what has emerged is a re-ordering of how change, "flow" and manifestation actually work.

For most of my life - and certainly for most of my work with manifestation, psychology, and personal growth - the emphasis is almost always on the mind first:

Change your thoughts.

Upgrade your mindset.

Clarify your intention.

Shift your identity (who you're being) = shift your habits (what you're doing) = create your results (what you're getting).

This model is so familiar that we rarely question it. You might even notice how instinctive it feels to reach for willpower or mental effort when something isn’t moving.

But what Bali clarified for me is that this sequence can be - and perhaps should be - inverted.

In Balinese philosophy, the relationship between Sekala (the seen, the structured, the material) and Niskala (the unseen, the energetic, the subtle) is explicit: the unseen responds to how well the seen is tended to.

Structure first.

Care first.

Containment first.

Only then does energy move. Only then does alignment happen. Only then do things begin to flow—luck turns, synchronicity appears, momentum gathers.

As I sat with this, I began to notice how often we ask life to deliver something our lives aren’t yet built to hold. We want our business to expand, yet we're already run off our feet with demands and our diary has no space. We want to feel more connected and cultivate inner peace, but everything from our eating patterns to our sleep and coffee-drinking habit screams chaos. We want to invite abundance and beauty into our homes, but we're rarely there long enough to throw the washing in.

We've been taught by the coaches and the manifestation teachers to think, want, desire, cosmically order and intend ... but how on earth can these things even begin to move into our lives when the containers that will hold them are neglected and frazzled?

And so THIS is the idea I am going to experiment with for the next twelve months. Rather than setting goals and aiming to actualise my aims from the mind outward, I’m going to live as if the primary work - and the only work I need to worry about - is the container itself.

Instead of asking, “What do I want to call in?”

I’m asking, “What can my life actually hold?”

This is the idea that came to me in the temple on the Dark Moon. This is the idea that has seeded and begun to sprout ever since.

For twelve months I am going to continually return to these questions:

What happens if I align my body, my home, my work, my rhythms, my relationships, and my spiritual practice with the principle that change emerges from the conditions that hold it and not from force, willpower, or constant intention?

What shifts if I treat manifestation and life design as something that responds to structure, steadiness, and care, rather than desire alone?

And if I do this, how will it:

Meet my body and health?

Reshapes my home and where / how I live?

Change my relationship with work, money, visibility, and creativity?

Affect my spiritual practice and understanding ... not as something separate, but as something embedded in daily life.

In some ways, this feels like a challenge. In others, not at all. Over the years I’ve done physical challenges, coaching challenges, comfort-zone stretches, and social media experiments. But this feels different. It asks for an inversion rather than an effort. Less push. More tending.

It feels exciting. Daunting. And somehow inevitable too.

Mainly it feels simple. How the simple act of asking a different question and being willing to live inside it long enough to see what answers emerge, could change things.

So this is where I find myself on this blowy, grey, steel-skied January day.

Back home.Grounding in.

And perhaps, if you’re reading this, you’re somewhere nearby (in thought and energy), noticing your own containers, and what they might be ready to hold if you decided to really start tending them well.