The Clearing
Night. A street in Canggu on the eve of Nyepi — the Balinese Day of Silence. The air is thick with smoke and clove incense. Gamelan drums pound from every direction. Firecrackers snap and echo off concrete walls. And above the crowd — swaying, lurching, lit from below by spotlights that make the shadows worse — a demon.
Not a cartoon demon. Not a Halloween decoration. A twenty-foot figure with a golden crown, ornate bracelets, wild black hair, and a cascade of red pouring from its open mouth. The craftsmanship is extraordinary — the musculature of the arms, the detail of the filigree, the way the face manages to look both ancient and alive. And it depicts the worst of what lives inside us.
There are dozens of them. Each one built by a different banjar — the neighbourhood unit that forms the basic social fabric of Balinese life. Some ride mythological beasts. Some have wings that span the width of the road. Some tower so high they brush the power lines as they pass. Young men carry them on bamboo platforms, shaking and spinning them at crossroads while the crowd roars.
I use the word crowd loosely. There's a moment when the creature nearest to us lurches sideways and the entire mass of people is suddenly pushed back onto each other. I feel bodies press into mine from every direction. People are genuinely startled. Children scramble. There's a half-second of real fear before the laughter returns.
Nobody leaves.
That's the thing I can't stop thinking about. The chaos is real — the noise, the heat, the physical danger of standing beneath something that weighs hundreds of kilos balanced on bamboo. And nobody runs from it. Grandmothers watch from plastic chairs. Teenagers film on their phones. Families with small children press closer, not further away.
Every monster in this parade was built on purpose. And by morning, the island will be the quietest place on earth.
The Part We Skip
A man came to me recently. The details have been changed, but the weight of the story is real. More than a decade in finance, in an industry where precision and pressure are the air you breathe. He was the kind of person who answered emails at midnight not because someone demanded it, but because he couldn't stop. The work was the identity. The velocity was the proof. And when the title finally came, it landed like confirmation. This is who I am. This is where I belong.
Then the floor dropped. Someone above him had been skimming — quietly, for a long time — and the rest of the leadership team had one question: how did the person closest to the numbers not see this?
And in our conversation — slowly, carefully, the way a person approaches something they've been avoiding — it became clear that somewhere deep down, he probably did know. Or at least sensed it. But he'd looked away. Because looking directly at it would have meant risking the position he'd spent his entire career building.
The breach led to departures — including, eventually, his own.
When he came to me, he wanted to talk about his next move. The next role. How to rebuild. How to get back.
But his body wasn't interested in the next move. He wasn't sleeping. He woke most mornings in a state of fight-or-flight that had nowhere to go. His son had grown used to seeing him a few hours on weekends — and even then, when the phone buzzed, his attention left the room. His wife was the one who asked him to talk to someone.
Sitting across from him, I could feel the weight of what he was carrying. Not just the loss of a title. The haunting. The slow recognition that the career he'd built had required him to become someone who could look away — from the numbers, from his family, from his own reflection. He wanted to be able to look in the mirror and recognise the person staring back.
We didn't map out his next career move. We sat with the wreckage. Later, I recommended he work with a psychologist — what he was carrying needed more than coaching could hold. But before that referral, there was a moment in our session where the room got very quiet. And he said something I keep thinking about: I think I need to stop running toward the next thing and just be in this for a while.
That's the part we skip.
The confrontation with what's actually there. The willingness to sit in the rubble before building the next structure. The admission that the version of you that got here may not be the version that gets to move forward.
He'd gripped the role so hard he couldn't feel anything else — not the irregularities in the numbers, not his son growing up in the next room, not his own reflection changing in the mirror.
Most of us were never taught to do anything with darkness except push it down and perform competence on top of it. We don't confront — we cope. We don't name the thing — we rename it. Exhaustion becomes burnout. Emptiness becomes transition. The ache of living a life that no longer fits becomes a career pivot. We have a hundred ways to manage around the dark without ever looking at it directly. And then we're surprised when it shows up sideways — in the body, in the marriage, in the 3am ceiling-stare that no amount of planning can fix.
The Balinese have a different approach entirely.
The Art of Making Darkness Visible
Every year, in the weeks and months leading up to Nyepi, each banjar across Bali begins building.
The whole neighbourhood contributes — young people bending bamboo, elders guiding, months of work. The largest ones tower over rooftops.
What they're building are Ogoh-ogoh — towering figures that embody bhuta kala, the negative energies believed to accumulate within a community and within individuals over the course of a year. Greed. Ego. Arrogance. Corruption. But also — the quieter ones. Denial. Control. The ambition you mistake for purpose.
Some take the form of Rangda, the witch queen. Others depict demons of gambling, corruption, or recognisably human vices given monstrous form. What you won't see is anything noble. Only darkness gets built.
By giving the darkness a body — bamboo bones, a painted face, a name — the community externalises what lives inside. By parading it through the streets with gamelan music and firecrackers, spinning it counterclockwise at crossroads where spirits are believed to gather, they draw it out of hiding.
This is not chaos tolerance. This is an entire culture that has built a tradition around the idea that you must make your darkness with your hands before you can let it go.
Some are burned at the end of the night. Others — built with such care — are preserved. As art. As proof that the neighbourhood faced what it carried.
I didn't grow up with anything like this. And neither did the man in my coaching room. Most of us don't build our darkness — we bury it. We rename it. We stay busy enough that we never have to look at it directly. And we hope that if we never give it a body, it won't become real.
The Balinese don't pretend the darkness isn't real. They give it a face, a name, and a night. And every morning, they place small offerings on the ground — palm-leaf trays filled with flowers and rice and incense — knowing that by evening the ants and the rain will have taken them. The offering was never meant to survive. That's what makes it an offering.
The Safest Place You've Ever Felt Afraid
And this place is one of the most peaceful I've ever lived.
Indonesia has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world — a fraction of the global average. Violent crime in Bali is so rare it barely registers. The Balinese are known, genuinely and not just in travel brochures, for a quality of gentleness that you feel in ordinary interactions — at the market, in traffic, in how neighbours speak to each other.
A culture that makes room for the dark doesn't need to be afraid of it. A person who never names what they carry has to be afraid of everything.
There's an idea from physics that stays with me: it's not disorder that breaks a system. It's the refusal to let anything move.
Not the tidy life but the honest one. Not the absence of monsters but the willingness to carry them — and set them down.
The Morning After the Monsters
What follows the monsters is something I still can't quite believe, even having lived through it. For twenty-four hours, Bali stops. Completely. The airport closes — no flights land, no flights leave. Roads are empty. Shops are dark. You don't leave your house. You don't turn on a light after sunset. You don't work, don't cook with fire, don't make noise. The government instructs mobile operators to shut down cellular networks across the island — no cell service, no mobile data, no television broadcasts. Village wardens called pecalang patrol the streets to enforce the silence. The whole island — four million people, one of the most visited places on earth — holds its breath for a full day.
The morning after, I opened my bedroom windows the way I do every morning.
And the birds were extraordinary. Not different birds — the same ones that sing every day. But the sound was startling, richer, fuller, louder. The island had been so completely still that when sound returned, it returned full. As if the silence hadn't been an absence at all, but a clearing. And everything alive rushed back in to fill it.
The monsters come out. The streets erupt. The dark gets a name and a body and a night. And then — silence. Deep, island-wide, enforced-by-tradition silence. No fire. No travel. No work. No sound.
And then the birds.
You can't skip to the birds. You can't get the morning without the night before it. You can't arrive at that quality of silence without first going through that intensity of noise. It's only there for the one who didn't look away.
You don't need a fifteen-foot demon or a gamelan orchestra. But you might need one honest morning where you name the thing. And one quiet morning after, where you open the window and just listen.
Three Practices
Name it. What are you carrying that needs a name? Not a category — a thing. The role that no longer fits. The story you keep defending. The identity you're performing on top of something you refuse to feel. Write it down. Give it a sentence on paper — that's its body.
Sit with it. Choose one disruption in your current life. Instead of managing it, spend ten minutes simply being in its presence. Don't fix. Don't plan. Breathe with it. Notice what shifts when you stop treating it as a problem.
Let it go quiet. Design your personal Nyepi. An hour, an evening, an early morning before anyone else is awake. Enter the silence — no screens, no input, no noise. And when the time is up, don't fill the space immediately. Open the window. Listen. Notice what you hear.
What would change if you stopped looking away?
— Aaron
P.S. I spent the last six months building something for the space this essay is about — when something is shifting and you're not ready to talk to anyone yet, but you need somewhere to think out loud. It's called Naya. Private, secure, and yours. naya.chrysalisleaders.com
Naya is not a therapist or mental health provider. If you're in crisis: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.