It is starting to feel like that. Ask and you shall receive. Charlotte had gone two weeks without any chiropractic or deep tissue massage help. The marathon sessions on airplanes. A couple six-mile treks. Long car rides. Heavy luggage. Turns out western style chiropractors can no longer practice in Bali – maybe all of Indonesia. I don’t know the whole story about that. There are deep tissue massage practitioners. Quite a few of them. Thanks to the internet and people who leave reviews about their experiences with each practitioner, we were able to do a lot of research. We narrowed it down. And then one person at Ubud Bodyworks Center looked to be clearly a very good pick. Mr. Ketut Arsana. You can Google him.

This morning we met the Australian photographer and his wife that live next to us. They knew Mr. Arsana and said he is the best. His hands are magic, they said.

Pak Ketut Arsana. Charlotte got an appointment with him today at noon. I waited for her in the most wonderful space at the Bodyworks. An outdoor small pavilion. Distant flute and drum music. Bamboo chimes dancing with the wind. Running water fountain. Birds. Staff quietly going about their work. On a soft bench with cushions, I sat cross-legged, closed my eyes and with a slight smile began following my breath. An hour quickly passed.

Something subtly changed. Charlotte came down the stairs from her session, followed by Ketut. Charlotte had a bit of a glow. Said the session was very good. A lot of pain, but learned a new mantra, “Embrace your pain.” I got to meet Ketut and it is so easy to melt into his presence. I am scheduled to have a session with him next week.

Although we had clearly put this meeting into motion, there was an added dimension of fortuitousness or serendipity. The sense stayed with me (us?) as we left Bodyworks and headed down the narrow sidewalk along the narrow busy street in Ubud. A driver hailed us from across the street, he wanted to drive us. It was a common proposition and we told him we wanted to walk and experience the shops along the way to the supermarket where we intended to look for a more suitable sized luggage. We told him maybe we could use a ride from the supermarket back to our place. He was up for that and gave us a decent price. We continued walking and taking in the sights of all the quite unusual shops. It was like a new age smorgasbord, vegetarian cafes, yoga studios and artistic handicrafts of all types. We walked further than we thought the supermarket was and asked someone for directions and they said we had walked too far, so we turned around to backtrack, when a Japanese couple who overheard the conversation came to us and said, “No”, they gave you wrong information. It’s another 5 minutes or so in the direction you were originally headed. We thanked them and continued on our way. Our driver had been following us apparently and caught up to us and talked us into taking a ride the rest of the way. He waited for us as we did our shopping and then drove us back toward home. There was a huge traffic jam with no cars moving, so he took a detour of about 5 km to get us home. In talking with him we learned his name is Dharma. Yes, really. It turns out he is a master woodworker. He showed us pictures of some of his work and it was impressive. He had been to San Francisco and Minneapolis. The Clintons had bought some of his work and had them displayed in the White House. He lives in a small community not far from Ubud that is famous for woodworking. He is part of a large collective of woodworkers. We arranged to meet again a few hours after the Day of Silence and he will take us to rice fields, waterfalls and his woodworking community. This is interesting in that one of our roles here is as representatives of Fair Trade Green – a business that purchases hand made products from collectives all over the world and ensures that the producers get a living wage for what they make and find a market for their products in more affluent places (Yes, even Mississippi qualifies as more affluent!)

So this evening, I am reviewing these events, and wishing that this sense of easy unfolding would continue and grow. Thinking that maybe feeding my heart, meditating, and being careful to being kind, maybe that might keep this sense of being guided alive. To have good things unfold with very little effort is such a blessing. We’ll see.

Lissa Rankin M.D. takes a close look at the role of discernment in trying to know when guidance is happening.