The move that changed everything

THE MOVE THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

Posted by Christina Zipperlen on September 15, 2026

I thought I was choosing a place to live. I didn't know I was choosing a place that would teach me how to live.

Nearly 18 years ago, I landed in Bali heartbroken and somewhere in between worlds.

I was in my mid-twenties, at a crossroads between going back to the kind of corporate life that made sense on paper, or following a pull I couldn't quite explain. A pull towards something slower. Towards listening, creating, and making more space in my life.

I also had a lot of healing to do. And then I landed here. Something in me knew…

This was going to be home.

I had no idea how I would make that happen. Moving to Bali wasn't particularly easy back then, and very little about the decision made rational sense.

But my body seemed to know something my mind didn't yet.

HOW I ARRIVED

I found myself drawn to Ubud, whose name comes from the Balinese word ubad, meaning medicine.

There is a place here called Campuhan, where two rivers meet. I spent a lot of time around those rivers in my early years here, and there was something about that place, and Ubud itself, that felt incredibly potent to me.

Bali has a way of bringing things to the surface.

I've watched people come here and have experiences that completely change them. Sometimes their worlds seem to crack open. They receive whatever it was they came here to receive and eventually return home to integrate it.

And then there are some of us for whom, somehow, this place becomes home.

There is something very humbling about living somewhere that doesn't seem to let you push things under the rug for very long.

Slowly, things came up.
To be felt. Mourned. Forgiven. Shed.
And slowly, I changed.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

WHAT BALI HAS TAUGHT ME

The lessons I've absorbed over these 18 years have been spiritual and completely ordinary at the same time.

Many are simply part of everyday life for the Balinese people around me. But for someone who grew up in Germany, they opened up entirely different ways of understanding what it means to be human.

I came here thinking I had healing to do. I didn't realize how much I was also here to learn.

MAKING SPACE FOR DARKNESS

One of the things that changed me deeply was witnessing the way Balinese Hinduism acknowledges forces that I had been taught to separate into light and dark.

If you've spent time here, you've probably seen the small offerings placed everywhere. Some are placed higher, at temples and shrines, while others are placed directly on the ground.

There is an acknowledgment within these practices that darkness exists. It isn't all love and light.

There are forces we welcome and forces we don't. There is creation and destruction. Beauty and suffering. Life and death. Living alongside this for so many years has changed something in me. I don't feel the same need to make darkness disappear.

There is grief. There is fear. There is loss. There are parts of being human we would rather not experience. Perhaps the work isn't always to overcome them. Perhaps sometimes we acknowledge them, give them their place, and keep living alongside the light.

DEATH

The way death is held here was particularly profound for me.

When someone dies in Bali, their body will often remain within the family compound while loved ones come to visit. What follows can include days, months, and sometimes years of ceremonies and rituals as the person and their family move through different stages after death.

Death isn't quickly removed from view.

When my mother died in Germany, her body was picked up almost immediately and taken away.

There was a funeral later.
But that was largely it.

I was young when I lost her, and years later I found myself living somewhere where death was approached in a way I had never experienced before.

There was somewhere for the grief to go. There were things to do with it. People gathered. Offerings were made. Ceremonies marked what had happened. The person who died continued to have a place within the family and its rituals.

Death wasn't hidden away from life, it was woven into it.

GIVING GRIEF A PLACE

This became even more apparent to me through the way ancestors are honored here.

During Galungan, a ten-day Balinese holiday that comes around every 210 days, families honor their ancestors and welcome them home.

Offerings are made. Homes and temples are decorated. Ancestors are remembered and thanked. There is a place for those who are no longer physically here.

Years ago, I was sitting with a Balinese goldsmith when he told me about a client whose son had died. He spoke about how deeply she had disappeared into her grief. It was almost, he said, as though she had died too.

That conversation stayed with me. Not because grief isn't allowed here, acutally quite the opposite: Grief is given room. There are rituals. Ceremonies. Days devoted to remembering. Ways of maintaining a relationship with those who came before.

But there is also, eventually, a return to the living. Grief is given a place without being asked to become the whole of a life.

For me, having lost my mother so young, and having gone through periods in my own life when I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to be on this planet, witnessing this was deeply profound. In its own way, Bali taught me something about choosing the living.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

BECOMING SOMEONE NEW

None of this changed me overnight. It was slowly, slowly, in tiny, daily doses. A return to myself, but also the shaping of a self who hadn't existed before.

Because I don't think healing means returning to some original version of who we were. Often we are genuinely changed by what we encounter.

The people here changed me. The land changed me. The ceremonies, the spirituality, the relationship with the unseen, the ways of honoring life and death changed me.

I became slower. I began noticing other people more. I began noticing my own nervous system more. And there is a funny contradiction in saying that, because anyone who has lived here knows Bali isn't simply some peaceful tropical paradise. It can be incredibly intense. The traffic! The noise! The pollution! The density… the constant sensory input.

Bali didn't give me a regulated nervous system. It taught me to notice mine. And somehow, among all those contradictions, I kept noticing more what that inner voice of truth was saying. My own little voice, nobody else’s.

This is where my journey led. Where something inside me knew I needed to be in order to become more of ‘Christina’ in this lifetime. Being taught to honor has taught me what a true honor it is to be alive.

ALMOST HALF MY LIFE

At this stage, there is no version of me as I am today without Bali. This island is woven into who I have become, and now into who my daughter is becoming too. Sometimes that stops me in my tracks.

A decision I made as a heartbroken woman in her mid-twenties eventually became the place where I would build my life's work, where I would become a mother, and where my daughter would begin her own life. I couldn't have known any of that when I stepped off that plane.

Sometimes I wonder if my mother had something to do with it. Whether, from wherever she went after leaving this life, she was somehow gently guiding me to keep going. To make the bold choice. To cross another ocean. I don't know..and perhaps I don't need to.

I also don't know who needs to read this, or what might be calling you right now. A place, a person, a decision, a way of living that doesn't entirely make sense yet. I don't believe every impulse needs to be followed. But I do think there are things that keep tugging at us, quietly asking for our attention.

And sometimes we only understand what they were leading us toward once we've lived far enough beyond the decision to look back. Perhaps that is one of the great mysteries of a life.

We make a choice without knowing everything that choice is choosing for us. I thought I was choosing a place to live. I didn't understand that I was choosing a place that would teach me how to live. I didn't have a rational case for making Bali home, and yet soon it will be where I've spent half of my life.

My body knew before I did.

And 18 years later, I have the pleasure of living inside the beautiful consequences of having listened.