Bali Grief Trip: April 2025

These photos bring back all the memories from our April Bali Grief Trip, and scrolling through them still makes me a little emotional. This was one of those weeks where a group of people who had never met walked in as strangers carrying loss, and walked out as something closer to family.

Bali holds space for grief in a way that is hard to find at home. It is woven into daily life here: offerings on doorsteps, incense in the streets, a quiet cultural acceptance that death and loss are simply part of being alive. For a small group of grievers, being somewhere that did not require grief to be hidden or explained changed the whole texture of the week.

Our days moved between grief workshops, sharing circles, and long stretches of unstructured time to simply be together. Nobody was pushed to share more than felt right, but by the second or third day, people were saying things out loud that they had never said to anyone. That is what happens when everyone in the room already understands loss from the inside: the usual social rules about grief just fall away.

There was real joy in this week too, the kind that catches you off guard. Long dinners, easy laughter, the particular lightness of not having to perform being okay for anyone. Grief and joy sat right next to each other, over and over, and nobody treated that as strange.

Midway through the trip we gathered for a Balinese fire ceremony, offering up whatever each of us had been carrying and watching it transform into flame and smoke. It is one of the most quietly moving parts of any Bali Grief Trip: a physical, ritual reminder that grief does not disappear so much as it changes shape, and that moving forward was never about forgetting anyone.

By the end of the week, this small group had shared their people, their stories, and their grief with each other in a way that most of them had never done with anyone outside their own families. These photos are a small window into that week: proof that healing does not always look like healing while it is happening, and that sometimes it just looks like a group of people, finally understood, laughing on a terrace in Bali.