Why I Chose Canggu Over Ubud to Teach

I trained in Ubud. Vonny Stella taught me there in 2019, the last stage of my Master Teacher training after Chiang Mai. I owe that town something real. But when it came to choosing where I would actually teach, I chose Canggu, and I have never once wondered if I got that wrong.

I trained in Ubud myself

Ubud has carried spiritual tourism in Bali for a long time, and plenty of what happens there is genuine. Good teachers work in that town, in yoga and in healing, and I learned something real there myself. This is not an argument against Ubud.

It is an argument about scale. A place that has spent two decades as the destination for "finding yourself" ends up full of people who are shopping for an identity rather than a skill. They want to go home able to say they did a sound bath and a Reiki attunement in the same week, and to wear both. That is not a judgement on them. It is just a different errand to the one most of my students are running, and it changes what a class of six people in that town actually wants from a teacher.

The difference in who walks in the door

Canggu has its own version of tourism, mostly surf schools and people on three-month visas. It is not quiet. But the person who seeks out a Reiki teacher here, specifically, tends to be doing something more ordinary than the Ubud crowd. She has a job, or just left one. She has children or a business, or both, often while living here long enough to need a routine rather than an experience.

Canggu also holds a different mix of foreigners than Ubud. More people here are running a business from a laptop between school pickups, or working remotely on a longer visa, than are here purely to look inward for a month. That is the room I end up teaching in, not a retreat crowd passing through for a week. She is not on a gap year and she is not trying on a new personality. She wants to learn something she can use, on a schedule that fits around the rest of her life, and then take it home and actually use it.

A second act, not a souvenir

Most of my students are women between forty and sixty-five, often at a turning point after a career, after children, or after a loss. They have already done hard things. What they want from training is not a mystical experience, it is a credible skill for whatever comes next, the kind of thing a woman takes up at fifty the way she might once have retrained for a new job.

I would rather a student arrive with accurate expectations than romantic ones, and that is exactly the kind of student Canggu tends to send me. Training runs in groups of no more than six, often one to one, with dates arranged around each student rather than a fixed calendar. Nobody here is squeezing a Reiki certificate between a retreat and a flight home. For what each level actually involves, I have set it out properly on the training page.

A craft, not a costume

In a town built around collecting spiritual experiences, I think a Reiki certificate can end up as a kind of souvenir: proof that something happened on the trip. The students who find me in Canggu want the opposite. They want to know they could stand in front of a client or a family member and actually do this competently, which is a craft built level by level, not an experience to tick off.

I still teach the whole arc, from Level 1 through to Master Teacher, in English or German, live in person or live online, never as a recording. I am not trying to talk anyone out of Ubud. I would simply rather teach six people who are going to use what I hand them than sixty who are collecting it, and Canggu, for whatever mix of reasons, keeps sending me the first kind. If you want the longer version of how I ended up here, it is on my about page.