What meditation felt like for the first time in Ubud

At the end of 2024, I took myself to Bali.

One of the experiences I had been looking forward to most was a meditation class. It was my first time trying meditation.

Before the class, I had no idea what meditation was supposed to feel like. I was full of questions and confusion.

What exactly was meditation?

Was it simply a matter of closing your eyes? Could closing your eyes somehow transport you into another world?

I had asked people around me who knew something about meditation, but no one could explain clearly what it actually was. They only told me that meditation was a wonderful experience, that I should practise it often, and that it would give me strength.

I signed up for an Active Consciousness Meditation class at Yoga Barn, a chakra-based meditation led by Punnu.

Before attending, I had read many mixed reviews online. Some people found the experience powerful, while others thought it made no sense at all.

At the end of the session, when Punnu invited everyone to share how they felt, some people said they had been sleepy or bored.

I, however, had spent almost the entire class sobbing uncontrollably.

So many images flashed through my mind during the meditation.

It felt almost unbelievable. When I closed my eyes, the darkness in front of me turned into a screen, projecting scene after scene.

Looking back, perhaps those images were the conflicts and questions hidden in the deepest part of me, finally appearing clearly in my mind.

The images did not solve my problems. They simply appeared before me with complete honesty.

In daily life, the mind is constantly active. Thoughts and emotions arrive all at once - sadness, fear, uncertainty and confusion.

When certain feelings become too difficult to face, we often choose to avoid them. We try not to think about them and pretend they are not there.

Yet the pain and conflict remain, slowly turning into an endless cycle of emotional exhaustion.

Meditation did not give me an answer.

Instead, it laid out everything I had been avoiding and fearing in front of me.

When my awareness returned to the present, those things no longer seemed quite as frightening. The answers and solutions I had been searching for also began to feel clearer, perhaps because they had already been somewhere inside me all along.

So this was what it felt like to enter a meditative state.

I want to recall the process of the chakra meditation class in detail.

For anyone who would like to try it but worries about not understanding the instructions, knowing the basic structure beforehand may help you stay focused during the session rather than becoming distracted by what the teacher is saying.

You can simply place your attention on your breathing and the chakra scan itself, which may allow you to have a deeper experience.

The class lasted around an hour, with everyone sitting cross-legged in a circle.

Punnu, who led the meditation, was humorous and engaging.

During the first half hour, he explained what chakras are, where the seven chakras are located in the body, what each one represents, and how we would breathe during the meditation.

He reminded us not to be afraid of anything we might see.

We should simply allow everything to happen - even if we saw ourselves falling into an abyss or being eaten by a tiger.

Then we closed our eyes and began paying attention to our breath.

Following Punnu’s instructions, we quickly adjusted the rhythm of our breathing. The background sound was his own chanting, and we breathed rapidly in and out through seven rounds, with each round corresponding to one of the seven chakras.

We began with the root chakra and gradually moved upwards through the body until we reached the crown chakra.

During each round, we followed the chanting, breathed quickly and focused our awareness on the corresponding part of the body.

After several minutes, Punnu would guide us through one long, deep breath, signalling the end of that round before moving on to the next chakra.

I found it difficult to keep up with the breathing rhythm, but I tried my best.

Gradually, my legs began to feel numb. The sensation moved upwards into my arms, almost like a faint electric current.

By the time my attention reached the third-eye and crown chakras, I could feel an intense tingling sensation, like ants crawling along the pathways of my neck, across the right side of my face and towards the top of my head.

Around the third round of breathing, I began to cry uncontrollably.

I could feel the tears streaming down my face, but my mind was still completely dark.

When we reached the throat chakra, a huge white elephant appeared in front of me. It was glowing against the darkness, repeatedly crashing into something I could not see.

From that point on, my tears fell like heavy rain.

I had no idea why I was crying. I only knew that I could not stop.

When the breathing practice ended, the background music changed. We entered what seemed to be a calmer state of meditation, followed later by a gratitude meditation.

During this part, the white elephant in my mind became two versions of myself.

One was trying to fall into an abyss. The other was trying to walk towards the light.

They struggled against each other, yet neither could take the next step.

The images that came after that have already faded from my memory.

After the meditation, nothing had changed.

Life continued exactly as before.

And yet, something had shifted quietly.

My mind seemed a little lighter, and I felt more willing to take action.

Of course, meditation was not a cure for the confusion and uncertainty in my life.

It was more like a tool - one that helped me face what I had been avoiding rather than continuing to run away.

The real cure could only come from me.

Before attending the meditation class that afternoon, I had gone to Wizard Ubud Bali to have a chakra reading with a shaman named Sina.

Yes, my time in Ubud was largely spent searching desperately for answers.

I had naively believed that the confusion and chaos in my life might be instantly resolved through spirituality or mysticism.

But life is not a maths problem with one correct answer.

Meditation, spirituality and therapy are all simply tools that help us understand our true selves more deeply.

The answers still have to be written by us, slowly, through the uncertainty and trials of life.

Some people consider chakra readings a waste of money, while others find them deeply meaningful.

For me, the 40-minute conversation with Sina felt more like a spiritual spa treatment.

What amazed me was how she seemed able to see a version of me that I had buried deep inside, without even looking directly at me, and then gently guided me towards facing her.

At the beginning of the reading, Sina asked me to write my full name on a piece of paper.

She told me to relax and sit in a comfortable position.

After that, we had no further conversation. She did not ask me anything else about myself.

Apart from holding both of my hands for a short while near the end, there was almost no physical contact throughout the session.

As she sensed my energy, she wrote down what she saw, moving through the seven chakras in order.

The scanning itself lasted around ten minutes.

Afterwards, Sina began with the crown chakra and explained what each chakra represented, along with what she had seen in mine.

Some of the things she said felt strangely accurate.

She sensed that there seemed to be an injury in my back. Not long before the trip, I had suffered a sudden spinal disc problem so severe that I could barely get out of bed.

She saw that I had once been very confident, but had recently begun to lose that confidence.

She also said that I knew I was a powerful person, but that I was afraid of my own power. I feared losing control, and that fear had caused me to hesitate and hold myself back.

Then she said to me: “You are afraid of your light, not your shadow.”

The sentence went straight through me.

It was true.

I was afraid of standing at the centre, so I procrastinated, avoided action and hid in the shadows.

At the same time, I deeply wanted to be seen and to become someone who shone.

That contradiction trapped me in endless internal conflict.

By the end of my healing journey in Ubud, I still had not found the solution I had been searching for.

The confusion remained. My problems were still there. Life continued in the same familiar cycle.

But I seemed to have become more courageous and honest.

I no longer wanted to run away from the version of myself who had both flaws and light.

And when I became more honest with myself, I began to catch a glimpse of the answer I had been searching for all along.

It had always been hidden somewhere deep inside me.

And perhaps it would eventually lead me to the place I wanted to reach.