Seven Days That Changed How I See Everything: A Week at Firefly Retreat, the Bali Yoga Retreat I Almost Didn't Book

I almost talked myself out of it. I had the tab open for three days, hovering over the “Book Now” button, convincing myself I was too busy, too inflexible, not zen enough for a proper bali yoga retreat. Then, on a rainy Thursday evening, I pressed confirm, typed in my card details, and booked seven days at Firefly Retreat in Ubud. It was, without question, one of the better decisions I have made as a travel writer.

What follows is my honest account of the week. Not a press trip, not a promotional arrangement. Just a solo traveler who showed up with a carry-on, a stiff lower back, and no idea what to expect.

Balinese excursion

Sunday: Arrival, and the Table That Changes Everything

I landed in Denpasar mid-afternoon and took a taxi north toward Ubud, watching the city dissolve into terraced rice fields and dense jungle canopy. Firefly Retreat sits on Jalan Suweta in the Br. Sakti area, and when the driver pulled up, my first impression was of how quiet it was. Not the kind of quiet you find in a luxury hotel lobby. Quieter. The kind that settles in your chest.

Check-in was from 2 p.m., and by 6 p.m. all twelve guests had arrived. What happens next is the detail that makes Firefly work: every single guest arrives on the same Sunday. Not a rolling check-in, not staggered arrivals. Everyone starts together.

The introduction meeting was held before dinner, and it was the most effective icebreaker I have ever witnessed. The twelve of us sat in a loose circle and, one by one, said our names, said where we were from, said why we came.

There was Clara, an environmental lawyer from Hamburg who had not taken a real holiday in three years. Next to her sat Emma, a secondary school teacher from London who had booked the retreat on the recommendation of a former student, which she found both touching and mildly embarrassing. Erik, a quiet architect from Oslo, had come alone and looked the least certain he wanted to be there, right until he started laughing at something Emma said, after which he never stopped talking. Giulia, a restaurateur from Milan, had closed her trattoria for a week for the first time in six years. Soo-Jin, a yoga teacher from Seoul, was taking a week away from teaching to remember what it felt like to be a student. Marco, a freelance photographer from Toronto, was shooting a personal project on wellness culture in Southeast Asia and already had his camera out before the introductions were over. Then came Sophie and Lena, two occupational therapists from Melbourne who had booked the retreat separately, discovered they were both attending when they crossed paths in the same Facebook group, and arrived at Firefly together already halfway to being friends. From Singapore, there was Rachel, a financial analyst who described her job in two sentences and then said she was there specifically to not think about it. Yuki, a product designer from Tokyo, had the best posture in the room and said she had come because her doctor told her to slow down. Rounding out the group was Anna, a nurse from Rotterdam who had spent the previous year working long shifts in a busy hospital ward and who, she said with complete simplicity, needed to remember what rest felt like.

And then there was me.

By the time dinner was served, we were not strangers anymore. That first meal together set the tone for everything that followed.

Monday: The Rice Paddies as Classroom

At 7 a.m., before the heat had settled in, we rolled out our mats on the open-air yoga shala. Sunrise yoga at Firefly is gentle, intentional, and accessible to any level. The instructor worked slowly through postures, paying attention to each person in the room. Nobody was performing. Nobody was competing. For someone who had previously found yoga classes slightly intimidating, this was a relief. Even Erik, the Oslo architect who had confessed at dinner he had never done yoga in his life, moved through the session without a trace of self-consciousness.

After breakfast, we laced up walking shoes and stepped out into the rice paddies for a guided morning walk focused on Balinese natural medicine. This was one of the sessions I had expected least from, and it ended up being one of the most memorable hours of the week.

Our guide walked us along narrow earthen paths between terraces of bright green rice, stopping at plants most of us had walked past without a second glance. He held up a leaf and described its traditional medicinal uses. He showed us a tree whose bark had been used in Balinese healing practices for generations. He explained how Balinese people do not draw a strict line between food, medicine, and ritual. Everything in nature has a purpose and a relationship to human wellbeing. Anna, the nurse from Rotterdam, asked questions for most of the walk, drawing parallels between Balinese herbal practice and Western pharmacology with the ease of someone who had spent years thinking about how plants become medicine.

Midway through the route, we stopped for twenty minutes at the Pyramids of Chi. At that hour of the morning, with no session running and the grounds largely empty, it was a different kind of quiet from the retreat itself, more open, more exposed to the sky. We sat with our coffees in the shade of the pyramid structures, catching our breath, watching the light filter through the surrounding trees. Nobody talked much. Nobody needed to.

The walk ended with something none of us had anticipated: a descent down a steep canyon path to cross a river at the bottom. The trail narrowed considerably, the ground turned uneven underfoot, and the group that had been strolling along in loose conversation suddenly needed to concentrate. We helped each other down the steeper sections. Giulia, in sandals, accepted Erik’s hand without ceremony. When we reached the river and crossed it, wet-footed and slightly breathless, there was a round of quiet laughter from everyone. It was the kind of small shared challenge that, without any announcement, makes a group of people feel like a team. By the end of the walk, I was looking at the world around me differently.

The afternoon brought canang sari making. Canang are the small handwoven palm leaf offering baskets you see placed on doorsteps, on altars, and at the base of trees across Bali. To make one is to participate in a daily act of devotion that Balinese Hindus have performed for centuries. Our instructor taught us the structure and the symbolism, the meaning behind each color of flower, the way the offering connects the maker to something larger than themselves. Giulia, the restaurateur from Milan who worked with her hands every day of her professional life, finished hers first and helped Yuki with the folds of hers. I was terrible at the weaving. I finished mine lopsided and slightly loose. I was still proud of it.

Sunset yoga followed in the late afternoon, and then meditation as the sky turned orange over the paddies.

Tuesday: Into the Village of Bali yoga retreat

At 8:30 in the morning, a car pulled up outside the retreat and we piled in. Tuesday at Firefly is excursion day, and this week it meant a drive to a traditional Balinese village that few tourists ever reach on their own.

The next five and a half hours were among the fullest of the week, in the best possible sense.

We were welcomed by a local guide who walked us through the village with the patience of someone who genuinely wants you to understand, not just observe. He explained the layout of a traditional Balinese compound: the placement of the family temple, the orientation of buildings relative to the sacred mountain, the logic of each space and its relationship to the spiritual life of the people who live in it. He showed us a ceremony in progress, explained its purpose, its structure, what each element meant. Standing there, watching something that has continued uninterrupted for centuries, is one of those moments that makes you quiet in a way that is difficult to explain afterward.

Then came the demonstrations. We watched coconut oil being extracted using traditional methods, slow and manual, nothing like the industrial process we know from the label on a supermarket shelf. We watched coffee being prepared the old way, from raw bean to cup, and tasted the result. Marco photographed everything. Rachel, who had arrived skeptical of anything she could not put in a spreadsheet, kept asking questions and writing things in her phone’s notes app.

In an open kitchen space, we were shown how traditional Indonesian food is made, and how the small ceremonial cookies that appear on offering trays are shaped and prepared, each one pressed by hand into wooden molds carved with floral patterns. The smell of the kitchen, palm sugar, spices, coconut, warm rice dough, is one I have not forgotten.

The afternoon brought the rice fields. We walked out into them in a loose group, took off our shoes, and planted rice by hand, pushing seedlings into the soft mud one by one. It is slower work than it looks. The water was cool. The sky was enormous. At some point, without anyone organizing it, we had all gone quiet and were simply working, side by side, in a field in Bali.

Lunch was served right there, among the paddies. Fresh coconuts first, then a full meal laid out in the open air. We sat on low benches and ate with the rice fields stretching out around us. By the time we finished and climbed back into the car, it was 2 p.m.

On the drive back, someone pointed out that yoga was not until 5 p.m. and that we were about to pass through Ubud. The idea traveled through the car quickly. We asked the driver to drop us in the center of town, thanked him, and scattered in small groups into the market streets. Some of us browsed the stalls, others found a cafe, a few just walked. At around 4:30 we made our own way back to the retreat on foot and by scooter taxi, arriving just in time to roll out our mats for the evening session. It felt like the right kind of Tuesday.

Wednesday: Cooking, Jamu, and the Joy of Learning with Your Hands

Wednesday was the fullest day of the week, and I mean that as a compliment.

The morning cooking class introduced us to Balinese cuisine from the ground up. We gathered in the kitchen and learned to prepare a traditional jackfruit curry, working with spices and ingredients sourced locally, understanding not just technique but the cultural logic behind the food. Giulia stood at the chopping board with the focused calm of someone who speaks the language of kitchens, but she was the first to admit that Balinese flavor combinations were genuinely new to her. Balinese cooking is labor-intensive and specific. There is a reason everything tastes the way it tastes. By the time we sat down to eat what we had made, the meal tasted different from anything I could have ordered in a restaurant because we understood it.

Clara, the lawyer from Hamburg, said over lunch that she had not cooked anything more involved than pasta in the past two years. Yuki photographed every dish before touching it, which Giulia found either charming or professionally insulting, depending on the moment. She took three helpings of the curry.

In the afternoon, we learned to make jamu. This is the traditional Indonesian herbal drink, produced from fresh roots, spices, and natural ingredients, consumed across the archipelago for centuries as both medicine and daily ritual. We ground ingredients by hand, mixed proportions, tasted as we went. There is turmeric, ginger, tamarind. The flavor is sharp, earthy, alive. We took home the recipe. I have made it twice since returning home.

Sunset yoga in the early evening was a welcome way to close a full day.

Thursday: Nine Teas and What They Taught Us

This is where I want to return to the point for those who came here searching for a bali yoga retreat that offers something beyond the mat. Thursday at Firefly is your exhibit A.

The day centered on a medicinal tea tasting session that turned out to be something of a full circle moment. On Monday morning, we had walked through the rice paddies and been shown the plants growing along the path: leaves, roots, and bark whose names and properties our guide had explained one by one. On Thursday, those same plants arrived on the table as nine separate teas, brewed and lined up for us to taste in sequence.

Nine teas. That sounds pleasant. It was educational, which is a different thing.

Some were genuinely delicious: warm, complex, with flavors that lingered. Others were bitter, earthy, or sharp in ways that made several people set their cups down and look at each other. Nobody was pretending otherwise. Our facilitator was clear about this from the start: the point was not to enjoy every cup, it was to understand what each plant does in the body and why it has been used in Balinese healing traditions for generations. Once you know that a particular bitter tea has been treating digestive complaints in Bali for centuries, the bitterness starts to feel less like a flaw and more like the point.

We worked through all nine. Anna, with her medical background, was in her element, connecting each plant’s traditional use to mechanisms she recognized from pharmacology. Soo-Jin said that several of them were used in Korean traditional medicine under different names. The conversation that grew up around the table was one of the better ones of the week. We tasted, discussed, asked questions. The atmosphere was closer to a seminar than a spa service, and I appreciated the respect it showed for the subject.

Between sessions, there was time to sit, write, nap in the afternoon heat, or talk with other guests. Erik had found a spot at the edge of the garden overlooking the rice fields and was doing nothing at all. He had been doing variations of nothing at all since Tuesday and looked, to put it plainly, like a different person from the man who had stepped off a plane four days earlier. Sophie and Lena, the Melbourne occupational therapists, were deep in conversation about how they might bring some of what they had learned about Balinese herbal medicine back to their clinical work.

The slower rhythm of Thursday felt intentional. After four full days of activity, the body and mind needed space to absorb everything that had landed.

Sunrise and sunset yoga continued their daily rhythm, a reliable frame around each day that I had already come to depend on more than I expected.

Friday: Chocolate, Freedom, and a Conversation I Did Not Plan

Friday brought one of the lighter and more joyful workshops of the week: organic chocolate making using locally sourced Balinese cacao. If canang making had required patience and the cooking class had required focus, the chocolate workshop required only enthusiasm. We learned about the journey from cacao pod to finished product, worked with raw ingredients, and produced small batches of chocolate to taste and take home. Marco photographed every stage of the process and then ate most of his batch before it had properly set.

The afternoon was largely free, which by Friday felt like a gift. Emma and Erik rented scooters and explored the surrounding villages. Clara and Rachel walked into Ubud town to visit the market. Yuki sat in the garden sketching. I found a shaded corner with a good view of the rice fields and stayed there for two hours with a book and an uninterrupted cup of Balinese coffee.

It was during this free afternoon that I had what turned out to be one of the more meaningful conversations of the week. Soo-Jin, the yoga teacher from Seoul, and I ended up sitting together as the light changed, talking about why we had both, in our different ways, been running too fast and needed to stop. She said something I have been thinking about since: that she had come to Bali expecting to teach yoga to herself and had instead remembered how to be a student.

That evening, someone suggested we go out. Not for a quiet dinner at the retreat, but out, into Ubud, for a proper goodbye. Everyone agreed immediately. Ariel, the founder of Firefly, organized it and came with us.

We found a bar, ordered drinks, and stayed far longer than any of us had planned. The conversation moved the way it only does when people have already spent a week being honest with each other. We talked about our lives back home, about why we had each come, about what we were going to do differently when we returned. At some point I looked around the table and thought: this feels like a group of old friends. Not people I had met six days ago.

Ariel sat at the head of the table and, as the evening loosened, told us something of his own story. He had come to Indonesia eighteen years ago as a refugee. He had attempted the journey to Australia by boat. The boat sank. Indonesian fishermen pulled him from the water and brought him to shore. He stayed.

Eighteen years later, he runs a retreat in the rice fields of Ubud where every week, a group of strangers arrives on a Sunday and leaves on a Saturday as something else entirely.

I have interviewed a great many people in this profession. Few have told me a story that landed quite the way that one did. Not because it was dramatic, though it was, but because of what he had built from it. The warmth of the staff, the care put into every activity, the particular attention to making solo travelers feel safe and welcomed from the first evening: all of it makes more sense once you know where he has been. He understands, from the inside, what it means to arrive somewhere alone and be received with kindness.

We walked back to the retreat late. Nobody wanted the night to end.

Saturday: The Departure That Feels Too Soon

Checkout at Firefly Retreat is at noon on Saturday. Everyone leaves the same day, which means the last morning carries a collective weight that solo departures never quite produce.

Breakfast was quieter than usual. People exchanged contact details and Instagram handles. Anna, the nurse from Rotterdam, hugged everyone twice. Sophie and Lena, already planning a second retreat, asked the staff about availability for the following year before they had even finished their coffee. Giulia promised to cook Balinese jackfruit curry at her trattoria in Milan and send photographs. Erik, the architect who had arrived not quite sure he wanted to be there, left having already told Clara he wanted to stay another week. Marco had filled two memory cards with photographs and said this would be the personal project he had been trying to start for years. Yuki left with a sketchbook full of drawings and a quietness about her that had not been there on Sunday.

I watched the staff say goodbye to each person with the warmth of people who have seen this happen before and still mean it every time.

I carried my bag out past the rice paddies, past the plants whose names I now knew, and got into a taxi heading back toward Denpasar.

A few months later, I received a message. One of the guests from our week was getting married in Spain and had invited the group. Most of us went. We stood together at a wedding in a country none of us had been to together, among people we had known for precisely seven days in Bali, and it felt completely natural. Before the reception dinner, someone took a group photograph and we sent it to Ariel with a short message: thank you for making us friends.

He replied the same day.

What Firefly Retreat Actually Is

Firefly Retreat does not claim to be something it is not. The website is transparent: this is a budget-friendly retreat, not a luxury one. The rooms are simple and air-conditioned. The surroundings include insects and geckos, because it is built in the middle of rice fields and that is what rice fields have. The price, 350 euros for a shared room or 482 euros for a private room, covers six nights of accommodation, all meals, all activities, a daily coconut, and a one-hour Balinese massage.

What it offers in return for that price is not a spa experience. It is something harder to commodify: a genuine week, with genuine people, inside a culture that takes wellness seriously not as a trend but as a way of life.

Groups run from about ten to fifteen guests, which is small enough for everyone to know everyone else by Monday evening. The cohort model, everyone arriving Sunday, everyone leaving Saturday, is the structural decision that makes everything else possible. Without it, the community that forms would not form. It is that simple.

For solo travelers in particular, Firefly solves a problem that most retreats do not even acknowledge. Arriving alone to a place where everyone else seems already settled is socially exhausting. Arriving to a place where everyone else is also arriving, all at once, on the same day, with the same nervous energy and the same open curiosity, is something else entirely. A lawyer, a teacher, an architect, a restaurateur, a yoga teacher, a photographer, two occupational therapists, a financial analyst, a product designer, and a nurse walked into a rice field in Ubud. Ten women and two men. By Saturday, none of them wanted to leave.

A Final Note

I covered wellness travel for years before this trip and have sat through many retreats that delivered considerably less than they promised. Firefly Retreat delivered more than I expected, specifically because it did not try to be everything. It tried to be one thing: a well-run, community-centered bali yoga retreat rooted in genuine Balinese culture, with enough structure to feel purposeful and enough space to feel free.

If that is what you are looking for, the address is Br. Sakti, Jalan Suweta, Ubud. Every Sunday, a new group of strangers sits down to dinner together. By Saturday, they are not strangers anymore.

You can find out more and check available dates at fireflyretreatbali.com