Why an island that goes silent once a year might know something the rest of us have forgotten
Once a year, the entire island of Bali goes silent.
Not metaphorically. Not in the way we talk about “switching off” while still checking our phones under the dinner table.
The airport closes.
The roads are empty.
The internet shuts down.
Shops, lights, movement – all of it stops – collectively and completely – for twenty-four hours.
Even tourists, regardless of where they’re from or what they had planned, stay inside.
This is Nyepi. The Balinese Day of Silence.
I have been living in Bali for six months now and the first time I heard about Nyepi I just couldn’t grasp the concept.
I kept thinking “surely it’s not as extreme as they make it sound. Surely some restaurants remain open for tourists and some people are allowed to leave their homes and hotel rooms.”
The idea that the whole island could literally pause for a whole day was just unimaginable to me, and a part of me still can’t picture what this will look like.
But I can tell you that I’ve spent the last few months in pure anticipation, keen to experience this centuries-long tradition.
I’ll be honest – initially I thought I’d still be spending some of the day working from my place.
Maybe writing a blog, sending the usual Thursday newsletter, posting on Instagram.
Because I didn’t seem to be able to allow myself to truly embrace a day of doing nothing at all.
Of switching everything off.
Of drinking tea from my sofa in front of the rice fields and simply enjoying the silence and the stillness.
That resistance, I’ve come to realise, says something about how I live my life and how difficult I find pausing.
But before we dive into that a bit more, there is something else about Nyepi that I find incredibly interesting. It’s what happens the night before.
You Cannot Rest Until You Have First Let Something Go
The evening before Nyepi, Bali does the opposite of going quiet.
The streets are filled with people.
Enormous effigies called Ogoh-Ogoh are carried through villages by torchlight.
These hand-crafted figures – which have been made over the course of weeks – are towering and elaborate, representing negative forces, the accumulated weight of everything that no longer serves. They are paraded through the streets with music and fire, and then they are burned.
The following morning, the silence begins.
And I think this symbolism is just perfect.
The burning first. The stillness after.
And how rarely most of us do exactly that and in that order.
We try to rest while still carrying everything.
We take a holiday and bring the anxiety with us.
We book a weekend away and spend half of it mentally at our desks.
We tell ourselves we are pausing, but what we are actually doing is pressing pause on the surface while everything underneath keeps running.
You cannot genuinely arrive at stillness if you haven’t first released what you were holding.
Three months ago I wrote about the importance of pausing before rushing into a new year – about reflection as a practice, about noticing what needs to be left behind before deciding what comes next.
Nyepi takes that idea to the next level. It builds the release into the ritual.
The Problem With Rest That Depends Entirely on You
Here is something worth sitting with: how often do you actually give yourself permission to stop?
Because coming back to me, I keep telling myself I deserve a break and then spend the break thinking about what I have to do the following day while feeling vaguely guilty about everything I’m not doing that day.
Genuine, unconditional, unearned permission to be completely still is something I really don’t seem to be able to experience these days.
My own resistance to fully embracing Nyepi — that initial instinct to keep working, keep posting, keep being useful in some way — is the evidence of exactly that.
Even while living in Bali, surrounded by a culture that has protected stillness as a collective practice for centuries, I still struggle to give myself permission to simply stop for one day, 24 hours in total.
I don’t think that is a personal failing.
I think it reflects something real about the culture most of us have been shaped by – one that has made productivity a virtue and rest an indulgence, where the pressure to be available, visible, and constantly in motion is so ambient that we barely notice it anymore.
Nyepi works, in part, because it removes the question of permission entirely.
You don’t have to decide to stop.
Stopping is simply what is happening, everywhere, all at once.
The structure holds the rest so that you don’t have to hold it yourself. You are not falling behind.
You are exactly where everyone else is.
Most of us will never live somewhere that builds that into the calendar.
We have to create our own version of that structure – which is significantly harder and requires something that does not come naturally to a lot of women I know.
The willingness to ask for it, and to receive it, in community.
Building Your Own Version of Collective Permission
What would it actually look like to stop waiting for permission that is never going to arrive on its own?
Not as a productivity question – not how to optimise your rest or schedule it more efficiently – but as a deeper question about what it takes to genuinely release the version of yourself that is always managing, always holding, always one step ahead of the next thing that needs your attention.
In my experience, it rarely happens alone.
But there is something about being witnessed in your stillness, about being in a space where everyone around you has also chosen to stop, that makes the stopping feel real in a way it simply doesn’t when you are alone trying to rest while mentally composing tomorrow’s to-do list.
Community, it turns out, is not just good for connection.
It is one of the most powerful structures for rest that exists.
When the people around you have also committed to being still, your own nervous system finally gets the message that it is safe to follow.
This, I think, is what the Balinese have understood while most of us are still figuring out: that rest is not something you can fully access through willpower alone. It needs a container. It needs other people.
And it needs, almost always, something to be released first.
If an Island Can Pause, So Can You
I am writing this on the eve of my first Nyepi.
Tomorrow, the island goes silent and – for the first time in longer than I can remember – I have no choice but to stop completely.
No work, no internet, no inbox.
I find myself genuinely curious about what a full day of that will feel like. And a little nervous, if I’m honest. Which probably tells me everything I need to know about how much I still need it.
If something in that resonates — if you recognise the exhaustion of rest that never quite reaches you, or the guilt that follows you into every pause you try to take — know that A Pause in the Season is a retreat that was built with that in mind.
Six days in Ubud, this November, for women who are ready to stop waiting for permission.
And to rest – genuinely, deeply – held by land, by stillness, and by the kind of female community that makes stopping feel safe.
A Pause in the Season