Something happened in the jungle
- Allison Guilbault
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
As you may know, I recently ran my first retreat in Bali. It was powerful, raw, and unequivocally life-changing. The women who arrived were not the same women when they landed home.
In Bali, the air is thick with gratitude, levity, and personal awakening.
One of the experiences I shared was a Melukat Ceremony, a water ceremony at a sacred temple, unknown to tourists, tucked deep in the lush jungle, and accessible only through a local guru.
Our guide shared with us that the water held a special power, and that if you screamed into it, it would take from you all the gunk that has been stuck in your throat and lodged in your soul: anger, grief, expectations, exhaustion, regret, shame…
Whatever was inside of your scream, it would be absorbed and taken away by the water, with finality.
If all I did was stop was stop at that metaphor, I think we can all take a collective moment and appreciate the sentiment.
But there is no way I can possibly describe the feeling of what happened next.
As we descended the 150 stone steps to the mouth of the falls, I felt, with some surprise, the weight of what the women were carrying.
In a habit she wasn't even aware of, each women, in her own right, was calculating:
how much time she could take without compromising the queue
how to navigate the pool without getting in someone's way
how much she could scream without seeming attention seeking
how to have the full experience without being too much for someone else
At the foot of the temple, I took each of their hands and asked them to pause.
I asked the women to invite in this experience as an opportunity to do it differently - to give themselves full permission to take what they need and let it end there.
No rushing.
No worrying about anyone else's needs, time, or experience.
Full audacity to be too much.
One by one, I watched each woman enter the crisp water without retreat.
As they approached the waterfall and disappeared under it, the screams filled the air - rich in authenticity and the ripe in the permission to let it all fall out.
Some of them sobbed.
Some of them laughed.
All of them released.
And if you don't believe me, you can have yourself a listen here.
I left that ceremony the same way I left my first: positively transformed and with a deeper understanding that there is a direct correlation to the depth of an experience and the audacity to have it.
While I cannot take everyone back to a waterfall in Bali, I can continue my mission to make every women more audacious.
Which is why this summer, I am opening another portal.
UNCAGED™ is twelve weeks of feral permission to call home everything you were taught to hide and the audacity to seduce the life you want out of hiding.
We will speak our who-do-I-think-I-am dreams out loud.
We will scream into the metaphoric waterfall.
We will leave with a larger, more powerful sense of freedom and strong imagination for what is possible.
Because I know, that in no uncertain terms: the life you actually want is not living in your head.
But it can't wait to have the audacity to be too much.
xoxo, Allison
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