From holy-water purification and flower baths to jungle yoga, traditional healing and sound baths where someone hits a gong while you lie on the floor, Bali has wellness covered from the deeply spiritual to the slightly woo-woo.
My first experience of Bali was anything but wellness. I was young, stupid and so thoroughly unenamoured with my travel companion that I ended up getting so drunk I bought a horse. But that’s a story for another time.
It took a few decades for me to return to Bali, this time with two kids in tow. And of course, I nixed the vodkas and pony-purchasing for green juices and wellness, embracing some of the island’s offerings, from massages and spa treatments at the spectacular Ayana and Four Seasons to more traditional Balinese experiences.
It turns out Bali is very good at this wellness thing. In fact, Bali has also spent the past few decades turning wellness into an industry so enormous that sometimes it feels as though every second building contains a yoga studio, vegan café or someone offering to realign your chakras. But underneath all that modern wellness is something much older. Balinese Hindu traditions have long placed importance on purification, ritual, balance, nature, food and healing, and many of those traditions are still very much part of life on the island.
There is also the modern stuff, which ranges from a massage that costs less than lunch and a drop-in yoga class to multi-day retreats where you surrender your phone, your worldly possessions and an alarming amount of money. The best thing is that you don’t have to choose just one version. And if you’re travelling with family, wellness doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning everyone at the kids club and disappearing into the spa, because there are plenty of experiences you can do together.
So whether you’re after a serious reset, a bit of spiritual woo, something you can squeeze between sightseeing or the full bells-and-whistles luxury retreat, these are some of the best wellness experiences in Bali.
Get a traditional Balinese massage
Wellness doesn’t need to be complicated. The traditional Balinese massage is one of those things that requires very little explanation. You lie down, somebody who knows what they are doing works their way through your muscles, and you emerge 100 per cent more relaxed. Balinese massage traditionally combines techniques including acupressure, stretching and long, flowing strokes, often using fragrant oils.
The best bit is that you don’t need a luxury resort or a five-day retreat to try one. Bali is packed with spas and massage shops at almost every price point, from very simple neighbourhood places to luxurious hotel spas. Tamiang Spa in Ubud offers hour-long massages from around Rp100,000 (roughly AU$10), and similar prices are easy to find across Seminyak, Canggu and Ubud. Nur Spa near Ubud’s Monkey Forest does both a good massage and a flower bath in the same visit, no five-star spa menu required.
Take a yoga class in Ubud
Ubud and yoga have been attached at the hip for a long time. There are studios everywhere, with classes ranging from traditional Hatha and Ashtanga to Yin, Vinyasa, Pilates, breathwork and meditation. You can book a single class rather than committing to a week-long retreat, which makes it an easy addition to an ordinary holiday.
The Yoga Barn is one of the best-known options, with a huge programme of yoga, meditation, movement and healing classes. You don’t need to be particularly bendy. You don’t even need to know what your chakras are doing. Just turn up, roll out a mat and get your downward dog on.
Melukat: a traditional Balinese water purification ritual
One of the most interesting ways to experience Balinese wellness is to forget everything you’ve been told about wellness and go back to something much older.
At Tirta Empul, a Hindu water temple near Ubud, people come to take part in melukat, a traditional Balinese purification ritual involving holy spring water. Participants bathe beneath a series of water spouts, moving from one to the next as part of the ritual. It isn’t a spa treatment as such, and it isn’t a tourist attraction invented to make good Instagram content.
The purification ritual has religious meaning, so visitors need to treat it accordingly, including dressing appropriately and following the temple’s rules. Since April 2025, the Bali government has also required visitors to be accompanied by a licensed guide to take part in the water purification itself, so it’s worth booking ahead rather than turning up and hoping for the best.
There is something rather lovely and genuinely restorative about wellness as an act of spiritual ritual rather than something you buy in a jar. No infrared sauna or signature massage can quite replicate the feeling of standing in cold, sacred water, following a practice that’s been observed for centuries, with intention rather than a treatment menu. It’s wellness stripped back to its original purpose… renewal.
Try a sound bath (sound healing) in Bali
If yoga requires too much movement, there is always sound healing. A sound bath generally involves lying down while a practitioner uses things such as gongs, singing bowls and other instruments to create layers of sound around you.
It is undeniably woo-woo, but that is part of the appeal. You don’t have to understand exactly what is supposed to be happening to enjoy lying still in a darkened room while somebody makes beautiful noises and your only responsibility is to breathe.
For anyone travelling with teenagers, this might also be the closest you get to convincing them that lying on the floor doing nothing is a good idea.
Learn to make jamu, Bali’s traditional herbal tonic
Bali’s wellness culture isn’t just yoga and massage. There’s also jamu, the traditional Indonesian herbal drink made from turmeric, ginger, tamarind and other herbs and spices, used for generations across Indonesia for everyday health and wellbeing.
Ubud is the easiest place to find a jamu-making experience. Dapur Usada runs workshops guided by Chef Agus, where you learn to make drinks like Jamu Kunyit Asam and Loloh Cemcem. Bali Nature Herbal Walks pairs a jamu class with a herbal walk through the rice fields. And Capella Ubud’s Art of Jamu experience has you picking the ingredients from the resort’s organic garden before making the tonic with a local farmer, finishing with a picnic lunch in the rice paddies. It’s a good family option, and a reminder that wellness doesn’t have to mean abstaining from everything enjoyable.
Take a Balinese flower bath
Bali has also perfected the art of making a bath look ridiculously good. Flower baths use warm water filled with colourful petals and are offered at spas and wellness retreats around the island. Some are simple treatments, while others turn the whole thing into an elaborate ritual with flowers arranged into patterns around you.
They’re not purely decorative, either. The practice has roots in Balinese purification rituals, where flowers and warm water were used to cleanse body, mind and spirit long before anyone thought to photograph it. There’s something to the physical side too: warm water immersion is known to ease muscle tension and lower stress, and the petals themselves are often chosen for their calming, cooling properties.
It is relaxing, gloriously pretty and considerably more achievable than becoming a person who meditates for an hour before breakfast.
Walk through Bali’s rice terraces
Sometimes the best wellness treatment is simply putting your phone away and going for a walk. Around Ubud and other parts of the island, paths wind through rice terraces, villages and tropical landscapes. You can join a guided walk or simply explore established paths, depending on where you are staying.
There is no special equipment, no booking and no wellness practitioner required. Just walking through the landscape, watching farmers work the rice fields and listening to the sounds of village life is a pretty good way to slow down. It is also one of the easiest wellness activities to do with children or teenagers because nobody has to sit quietly and contemplate their inner selves.
A women-only wellness retreat in Canggu
If what you actually need is to disappear for a week and have somebody else make all the decisions for a while, Escape Haven might be your kind of Bali wellness. This women-only retreat in Canggu runs seven-day, six-night programmes covering everything from yoga and Pilates to Ayurveda, surfing, fitness, healing and, because getting older seriously deserves its own retreat, menopause. There are also longevity, detox and adventure options.
It is very much the luxury end of the wellness spectrum, with accommodation, daily yoga and meditation, spa treatments, meals, cultural experiences and airport transfers included. There is also a recovery centre with facilities including an infrared sauna and cold plunge.
The programs cater to different ages and experience levels, so you don’t have to arrive as an experienced yogi who can fold herself into a pretzel. And if you’re travelling with your daughter, Escape Haven even offers mother-daughter retreats because sometimes the best wellness experience is spending a week together somewhere neither of you has to cook, clean or remember where anyone left their bloody water bottle.
A Balinese-style women’s wellness retreat
If Escape Haven sounds a little too energetic, Goddess Retreats takes a softer, more traditionally Balinese approach to the women-only retreat. It has been running women’s wellness retreats since 2003, with retreats in Ubud and Seminyak combining yoga and meditation with spa treatments, nourishing food, cultural experiences and Balinese healing.
What makes it particularly interesting is the cultural side. Depending on the retreat, you might take part in a melukat water purification ceremony, have a traditional treatment or flower bath, learn about Balinese culture or simply spend a week being very deliberately looked after.
There are also more specialised options, including surf, fitness, Pilates and longevity retreats, so it isn’t necessarily all sitting cross-legged contemplating your inner goddess.
I rather like the idea of a retreat where you can arrive alone, spend time with other women when you feel sociable and disappear for a massage when you don’t. It is like the adult version of hiding under the doona, except somebody brings you healthy food and there is a pool involved.
A yoga and music retreat in Ubud
Literally. Soulshine Bali in Ubud was founded by musician Michael Franti and brings together yoga, music, wellness, creativity and community. The retreat is surrounded by rice fields and offers yoga and wellness programmes alongside healthy food, movement and plenty of opportunities to slow down. It also hosts retreats involving music and, at times, Franti himself.
It is a different proposition from the more prescriptive wellness retreats. There is something much more social and creative about the idea of combining yoga with live music and hanging out with people who are there for much the same reason you are.
Doing morning yoga, eating something virtuous, staring at a rice field or two and then potentially finding myself hanging out with a muso is my kind of wellness.
Bali’s high-end wellness resorts
And then there is COMO Shambhala Estate, for those times when a beach massage and a plate of nasi goreng simply aren’t going to cut it.
Hidden in the jungle above the Ayung River near Ubud, COMO Shambhala takes Bali’s love of wellness and turns the dial all the way up. There are private yoga and Pilates sessions, Ayurveda and Chinese medicine, hydrotherapy, cold plunges, infrared sauna, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, personalised nutrition and enough wellness diagnostics to make you wonder whether you’ve come to Bali for a holiday or an extremely luxurious medical assessment.
Its multi-night wellness programs are properly structured, with consultations, body composition analysis, daily treatments, personalised meals and private sessions. There are also more traditional Balinese elements woven through the high-tech wellness machinery, including water purification ceremonies, meditation and nature-based experiences.
Ayana’s Thermes Marins spa at the Ayana Resort in Jimbaran plays a similar game with a different toy: one of the world’s largest Aquatonic seawater pools, filled with 700 million litres of warmed Indian Ocean water pumped through 12 hydromassage stations and more than 60 therapeutic jets. It’s thalassotherapy rather than biohacking, but the same basic idea applies. Wellness as spectacle, with a price tag to match.
At Sofitel Bali Nusa Dua it’s French flair meeting Balinese tradition. The signature “So Exhilarating” massage uses premium oils and is performed on beds modelled on Sofitel’s MyBed concept, with treatments set to original music composed for the spa. It’s proof that even a proper Balinese massage can come with a side of European polish if that’s what you’re after.
Down the coast, Four Seasons Jimbaran leans hard into ritual with its Jimbaran Waters treatment: a full ceremony that runs from traditional healing and yoga through to a Balinese gong sound bath, finishing with a Balinese Hindu priest performing a purification blessing with holy water and sacred flowers. It’s basically several of the experiences on this list, melukat, sound healing and a proper massage, folded into one oceanfront ritual.
Basically, if your idea of roughing it is a room without a complimentary robe, these are probably the best Bali wellness experiences for you.
Kids’ and family wellness experiences
If you’re travelling with family, some of Bali’s wellness experiences work surprisingly well together. Kids can join in too, with family-friendly resorts increasingly offering spa treatments and other pint-sized wellness experiences designed to help younger travellers slow down and relax. You can find some of the best kids’ spa experiences in Bali here.
What are the best wellness experiences in Bali?
The answer depends rather heavily on what you think wellness actually means. You can keep it simple with a massage, a walk through the rice fields or a yoga class in Ubud. You can go deeper with a Balinese purification ritual, jamu or traditional healing. Or you can lie on the floor while somebody plays a gong at you, have a flower bath or spend a week at a women-only retreat. If money is no object, wellness can even come with a side of private practitioners, personalised programmes and enough technology to make your body feel like a research project.
That’s the beauty of wellness in Bali… you can spend thousands of dollars having your entire existence professionally optimised. Or you can get a massage, drink some jamu and go for a walk. You can sign me up for either.
Looking for more real wellness travel inspiration around Asia? Try these…
Wellness Experiences in Cambodia
Japan’s Best Wellness Experiences
Thailand’s Best Wellness Retreats
Singapore: A view to wellness in Swissotel The Stamford’s Vitality Rooms
An award-winning travel writer and photographer, Aleney de Winter was fresh from school when she first set off to explore the far reaches of Australia with a two-man tent and a beaten-up Kingswood for company. Three decades, and two kids later, and she's still on the go, with her itchy-footed offspring in tow. 