Pictures: Top right: Ratu's mother who shakes at age 98; A baby I enjoyed; The Ratu Bagus Ashram is a community comprising permanent, resident Balinese people and, on average, around 50 to 60 Western visitors who come to stay for shorter or longer periods of time for spiritual training and/or healing. Many of the Balinese residents are long-term Ratu students who came to the ashram because they were very sick and as they got better, they decided to stay on to help with running the ashram. They look after the cooking, cleaning and building maintenance, and they also help new students with their training and assist them in any crisis they might experience. Foremost among them are Ketut and Sukri, who are Ratu’s most senior students. They have devoted their lives to serving Ratu and they are the first line of defence in any energy- induced crisis. Their energy body is apparently very clear and Ratu trusts them fully and often uses them as mediums. Then there are Nyoman Alit and Ayu, who give excellent, if painful, energy massages; Mbok Jaya who cooks for the Balinese community and goes to the market every morning to ensure there are enough supplies in the kitchen. And there are the women making the offerings – little decorations woven from palm leaves and filled with multi-coloured flowers. 300 of these offering baskets are woven each day and carried three times a day to the four corners of the ashram, and to the many smaller temples and sacred sites within, in thanks for the protection of the sacred energy that reigns within the ashram, and in prayer that the space may keep its integrity. It all seems to work without anyone bossing anyone else around. All the Balinese seem happily devoted to being here and doing what they do.
Here's Sukri's Story: Mystery of life.
Before I met Ratu, my father was very ill. I went to a traditional healer, asking him to help with different kinds of medicine, but nothing worked. I don’t exactly know what my father was suffering from because we had no money to take him to hospital for a diagnosis. He became more and more sick and nobody could help him. He lost more and more weight because he couldn’t eat or drink anything. At that time my niece told us about Ratu. She had had a severe attack of psychosis, but was healed after seeing Ratu. There was no more hope for my father, and someone said he had only one more day to live. We were desperate and so, trusting what my niece had told us, we prepared to take my father to the ashram the same day. My father couldn’t walk any more, so we had to carry him all the way. When we arrived we just put him down on the floor. An hour later, Ratu came to see him, but I did not know that this was him. Ratu just looked at my father, touched his head and gave him a glass of blessed water to drink. My father, although he had not been able to swallow anything for a month, drank the water. I was very surprised to see this. I immediately believed in Ratu’s healing powers. Without Ratu, my father would have died. Instead, he gained strength again and is well and alive today, 18 years later.
From this experience I wanted to learn about Ratu. I came to live at the ashram permanently. Before then, I had never learned anything about spiritual matters. I soon started to feel energy vibrating in my body and as a result, many complications started to wake up. I had been very ill during my childhood. At one point, my father thought I would die, but he just accepted that if I was meant to live, I was going to live; If I was meant to die, I would die. I eventually recovered but during my healing process in the ashram, my old sickness returned. When I started to feel the energy, I noticed my blocks being removed one by one. After I became better, my 2 year-old brother became very sick. We took him to the local cottage hospital but they refused to accept him, because his illness was too contagious. I then brought him to the ashram and Ratu also helped him. He recovered completely and stayed on in the ashram until he was 6 years old. One by one, all my family suffered severe illness. With Ratu’s help, all of them recovered and are very well to this day. I became more and more interested in what was happening to my family. I kept a positive frame of mind about all their illnesses. I came to realise that my family’s problems were a trigger for me to understand myself and to show me the way for my life. Slowly my life and that of my family changed. We became more happy and peaceful together.
Many sick people came to the ashram, asking for Ratu’s help and I learned more and more about different kinds of illness, and where the energy blocks causing their sickness were. I helped looking after them and motivate them to get better – not to think about their illness, but to concentrate on getting better. Ratu’s healing was always done by purely natural means. He never used any kind of medicine. Everything he used for healing came from nature – water, pieces of wood, stones, leaves – and he asked people to feel the energy from these objects. I felt then, and now I can see, that Ratu works with the divine. Everything Ratu gives to the people makes them better. I could see this happening in front of my eyes and I was wondering about who he is. Why can he do this? I still would like to understand more about how he can work these miracles. I look forward to learning more and more about his mystery and the mystery of life. Sukri (Bali)
I saw Sukri literally turn into the Monkey God, Hanuman, one day when Ratu brought her up to demonstrate in the Taman and later, when I told her how amazing she was, she said, "That wasn't me. It was the energy.
And then there are the children. They are the offspring of the Balinese residents, but some of them are also brought to the ashram because they come from afflicted families where there may be a history of sudden infant death, or other risks to their well being, and the parents ask Ratu to look after them. Thus the ashram is impossible to imagine without the sounds of children playing together, of their laughter and their crying, though in all the time I was at the ashram I only saw a child cry twice. It seems like such a great, safe way to grow up and the parenting seems shared by the whole community.
Most of the Balinese are married but they live kind of collectively at the ashram and go home to their families when they want to be together and make babies. They apparently manage to do that as the children are many and part of everything. The kids go to school from 7 am til noon and then are delightfully around and part of things, riding their bikes around the pathways, swimming in the pool with us, helping out with little projects and often joining their parents in the evenings in the Taman to shake along with everyone. At the first sigh of Ratu, they all run to the front of the Taman to receive a sweet cracker from him and a blessing on their heads. Sometimes they would stay for the talks and nod out in groups or in the laps of their parents.
Balinese children are named for their birth order in the family. The first child is Putu, or Iluh, or Gede or Wayan; the second is Made, or Kadek, or Nengah; the third is Adi, or Komang or Nyoman or Koming; and the forth is Ketut. One of my roommates, Kishuri from Paris, who will be at the ashram all year, looks after Kitchen Ketut's third and youngest boy, Adi, during the days and it's been sweet for all of us to have him playing and napping in our room. There are one or two very small babies and I have enjoyed watching their mothers preening and caring for them in some of the nooks in the Taman. They seem to take such calm pleasure in nursing and massaging and tending to their babies. It was a beauty to behold. Kishori was saying that couples are not very demonstrative here. They don't seem to hold hands or cuddle and we were thinking that it's because they truly get all the babying they need when they are little.
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