The guardians at Jiwa Damai

On our wide-spread premise we house several stone statues made by local Balinese stone carvers. It is a Balinses tradition and necessity to put up stone figures as well as special offering statues/ places on the entire grounds. These statues are meant for protection and to keep away the evil spirits.

The lion is facing to the east,  guarding the entrances.

Lion statue

The elephants, female and male are the guardians of the whole place.

elephant

Elephant in the garden

The water goddess is the guardian of the "Home of the Water Angel", our secluded meditation spot in the midst of lush nature.

Water goddess

Organic bananas from Bali

At Jiwa Damai we have about 150 banana plants, spread all throughout the permaculture garden. The bananas are harvested green and then covered in a box to ripen. We do have about 8 different kinds of bananas in our garden. Their taste is so incredibly aromatic and sweet.

Bananas

They ripen throughout the whole year and can be harvested at different times.

We also dry the banans in our food drying oven - these dried bananas are very delicious as well.

Dried bananas

Rainy season - overflowing rivers

Downpouring rain

The rainy season has arrived - but these downpouring rains cause us some problems.

Due to the incredible powerful rains, our little river swelled to a ripping torrent. Many trees along the river were uprooted. Those trees which remained standing, lost most of the supportive earth and now their roots are stretched into the air.

river

To prevent other tree losses, the sand bags were placed directly around the roots to prevent possible future torrents from uprooting more trees.

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Balinese tooth filing ceremony

The Tooth Filing Ceremony (Metatah ceremony) is one of the biggest Hindu rituals on Bali. This ceremony is executed by smoothing down the incisor and eye-tooth. The ceremony is performed on young adults. In the Hindu culture when a person turns 18 he or she is to be considered well on the way to adulthood. To help make this smooth transition from adolecent into the first phase of growing up, the young will have to take part in a teeth filing ceremony

Sugik, one of our appreciated team memebers at Jiwa Damai, had his tooth filing ceremony recently.

Sugik

Metatah ceremony is aimed to kill six enemies (Sad Ripu) in people who are often considered the enemy within ourselves. Sad Ripu include:

• Kama (lust)
• Loba (greed)
• Krodha (anger )
• Mada (intoxication)
• Moha (confusion)
• Matsarya (jealousy / envy)

This ceremony is performed on a certain day based on the Balinese calendar.

Sugik

Ceremony Sugik

Bee hives at Jiwa Damai

Bee hive up in the tree

Some of our readers might already know about the Balinese bee hives that we set up some time ago in the organic garden.

We started out with only few bees living in these traditional Balinese bee hives located in different locations all over the garden.

After a few months we were able to harvest the first honey. It was quite difficult to extract the honey from these traditional bee hives and the men doing it had to operate with a lot of care.

(complete post: First honey harvest in Jiwa Damai)

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Since then, the bee population has increased, thus more honey is being produced. To give more space to the bees and to facilitate our honey production, we decided to move the bee family from the traditional Balinese bee house  into a new house. In this classical, western bee stock it will be much easier to extract the honey.

Bee hive

Bee hive

Bees

Bee hive

The relocation of the bee family was not an easy task.

But now they are living in the new bee stocks and we are excited to see how much honey can be produced.  We will keep you updated !

Rainy season on Bali

Downpouring rain

Lately it has been raining a lot here on Bali.

The rains come all of a sudden and disappear the same way. The raindrops are warm but sometimes so hard that they destroy our young plants in the gardens.

The waters of the ponds become alive withe the rain drops dancing on it.

Rain

Saraswati our goddess of arts, culture and education remains majestically still, no raindrops can disturb her.

Shiva in the rain

Sacred temple snakes

Tropical snake

Last week we discovered two large beautiful snakes on the ceiling above the dining area.

After checking with the local priest, we were told that these are sacred temple snakes which usually only live in temples. He meant that obviously the energy at Jiwa Damai seemed attractive to them.

Actually they are nocturnal animals. Being concerned about our guests fears, the priest suggested to use burning incense to move them from the spot on the roof where one had gone to sleep. Low and behold, they moved away into the roof of the building.

Snake

Tomato blessing

Fresh tomatoes

Our fertile lands at Jiwa Damai produce delicious tomatoes.

Since we can not eat all these tomatoes at once, we regularly process them into other products.

We use our fresh tomatoes to make Balinese Sambal. We already shared our recipe for original Balinese Sambal in one of our older posts. Click here to read the post.

The sambal is cooked and then filled into plastic bags, sealed and frozen.

Balinese sambal

Another option is to dry the tomatoes (with our raw food oven). This is an excellent method to conserve fruit and vegetables.

Dried tomatoes

Butterflies in our garden

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These are just a few of the many beautiful butterflies that live in our gardens at Jiwa Damai.

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Homemade basil pesto

In the permaculture garden we also grow basil - Balinese lemon basil as well as western basil.The land at Jiwa Damai is blessed with fertile grounds - and the basil bushes are growing really well !

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We use the basil to make basil pesto - Today we want to share with you the recipe for our old fashioned basil pesto.

Fresh Basil

For our flavourful pesto we use the Balinese lemon basil from the garden, combined with stronger flavored Italian basil. At first all the leaves have to be cut in tiny pieces.

Cutting basil

Once the basil is cut, we add garlic, olive oil and shredded parsley. Et voila - the pesto is ready to be eaten.

Basil pesto

Enjoy with fresh pasta !

Selamat makan!