A Hippie Haven

After six months working at a hostel in Sydney, Australia, the time had come to take the mandatory backpacker’s trip to Byron Bay, a town of surfers, dreadlocks, and hippies recently returned from Thailand sporting hair wraps and beaded anklets. Hoping to save some cash, I searched the Couchsurfing website for a host to take me in for the week - it was there that I found Samaya’s Ashram.
Though located farther outside the city than I had planned, Samaya’s promised a wealth of natural beauty, daily meditations, communal meals, and an opportunity for learning and growth. Having recently had my heart broken by a whirlwind international romance, and my liver broken by six months of hostel drinking culture, I decided it was the ideal location to nurture my heart, and my body, back to full health.
I arrived at the ashram prepared for a week of hippie commune-dom, dressed the part in my jangly gaucho pants, and Samaya’s did not disappoint. During my seven days there, the other residents and I planted seedlings, cooked meals, participated in daily yoga, meditations, and conversations about love and life. We swam naked in the river, cried in each other’s arms, improvised music, jumped on a hidden trampoline, danced in a barn, and held hands under the full moon. Every person there impacted me in meaningful ways and I have retained a strong friendship with my ashram roommate, a girl from New York who was similarly enthralled by the magic of our shared experience.
I can’t imagine how different traveling must have been fifty years ago, before resources like Couchsurfing and countless others were available. I was lucky enough to stumble upon Samaya’s Ashram because I regularly utilize these websites while traveling and probably never would have found it otherwise. Rather than ending up the typical tourist in an overrated surf town, I had the chance to experience something totally new and authentic.
With every community I have lived in since this experience, I have searched for a piece of Samaya’s Ashram. My expectations have been driven woefully high and have kept me constantly on the lookout for a comparable community. But sometimes the magic of traveling lies in those experiences that you know will happen only once, that you will never find anywhere else. The ashram had its flaws, and perhaps I would have discovered more of them had I stayed longer than a week. But in that time and place, it was exactly what I needed: the perfect send-off from my life down under.