Scott Bauer
“If you're anywhere inclined to love this place – Bali - like I do, inside you something very sattvic happens. It's like, I'm back, I'm home.”
Scott, the first question for you is how you did end up here. What led you to Bali, to founding Usada and to the path of healing? Was there any moment in your life, when you look back now, that was a pivotal moment to set you on your path?
Okay, so I'm going to skip to 2005. Let me just qualify that by saying before 2005 – precisely January 21st 20025 - my life was ruled by the pursuit of intoxication. I was what you call in Buddhist philosophy a preta, a hungry ghost. I lived in the realm of the hungry ghosts. I thought I could fix the inside with the outside, which is unattainable. It's not relevant for the question, but that's the background. So, when the pain of remaining the same became greater than the fear of change, I had suggestions from people who had been where I was and gotten out. I began to attend 12-Steps Meetings through Narcotics Anonymous (NA) in the Hamptons. I lived in Sag Harbor at the time.
At 70-days clean, I joined a meditation group, and I began to meditate with a group of other people who had been off the pursuit of intoxication for many years, some of them for decades.
A few of them were yoga teachers, and one of them was a girl named Melissa. She now lives in Hawaii. She was beautiful, and I was attracted to her, but I was attracted more to her demeanor. I asked myself: “What is she doing? She's doing something. I wonder what she's doing. She's doing something aside from these meetings.”
So, as the universe would have it, a yoga teacher moved in next to me. I had been meditating on the roof of the restaurant that I'd go to, where he'd be like: “Come to yoga, come to yoga, come to yoga. You should come to yoga.” I was a bit isolated, and I began to, as males do, notice the quality of women that were going to his yoga class in his apartment. The only way I knew how to meet women at that time was in a bar. There was no online dating back then.
So, I was thinking that maybe if I go to yoga, I can meet a healthy girl. Which I did, but more importantly something else happened - I found Ashtanga yoga. This teacher taught me in the way that Guruji Shri K. Pattabhi Jois taught him.
And, as Ulli well knows, Ashtanga yoga and Ayurveda are two branches of the Samkhya philosophy of India. About three months in, he took me to the Indian Hindu Center in Central Manhattan to see an Ayurvedic doctor Dr Naram, who is no longer with us. He was a Siddah Yoga Ayurvedic doctor who had gotten his transmission from a Siddah in Nepal who had lived to 110 years old. And I'll never forget Dr. Naram doing my pulse and shaking his head and going: “TOO MUCH PITTA”. And he gave me a protocol of herbs, and he told me: “You eat Kitchari until I tell you to stop.” I wanted to get well, so I began to eat Kitchari, to the form of buying through the provision health store 25lb. bags of mung dal, and 500 grams of Asafoetida. It was just like this thing. Because my obsession had been with getting high, now it became with getting well, with well-being.
And I began to feel change. I began to meditate more clearly. I began to breathe. I stopped smoking. As we know, this is not a switch. It’s a process. And that process took me deep into the Ashtanga world. And I got to practice with everyone, you know, because I was in New York. I met Richard Freeman, David Swenson, David Williams, Eddie Stern - all the greatest Ashtanga teachers - because it was still a small community. And then in 2009, Shri K. Pattabhi Jois died, and a few months later, a book came out called “Guruji, Through the Eyes of the Student”. It was interviews with 30 of the top Ashtanga teachers in the world. All of the ones that I just mentioned, and about twenty-five more. I read the whole book. In the book, there was a lady in Byron Bay named Dena Kingsburg. And her interview went right into my heart. I read it twice. I looked her up, found her website and sent her an email saying: “I just read Guruji. I don't know where you are, but I want to come practice with you.” And the message from her was: “I teach in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia. I teach February, March, and April this year. If you want to come in February, I have an apartment you can rent next to my shala.” So I was: “I'm coming. What's your bank account?” And I went to Byron Bay and studied with her for 45 days. I connected with Byron Bay, I connected with Dena, and then I came back the next year. We’re sitting outside on her porch that year, and because she does a retreat at COMO Uma, Bali, every September, she starts talking about Bali. I asked her to tell me about Bali. And she looks at me and she says: “If India is the tree of spirituality, Bali is the fruit that it bore.”
So, the next year I came back. I booked a flight to Byron Bay, to Bali, to Myanmar, to Java to see Borobudur, back to Bali, back to Byron Bay and back to America. And when I got home, I got off the plane in LAX, to transit. I looked at everyone, and they were gray, and their skin hurt, and nobody was smiling. I had just been in Indonesia and Bali, where people actually fucking smile, where they are polite and look you in the eyes. And I was done. Yeah, I was just done. So, I went home, put my head down for six months and just worked. And sold everything. I went to visit my brother, my sister and my niece. I went to spend five days with my dad in Arizona, and I left. I've never been back.
I came to Ubud. I’ve only ever lived in Ubud because South Bali is not Bali to me. Yeah, it's not! I can do Sanur, I can do from Tanah Lot up North, and East of Bali I love. The rest down South just doesn't sustain my ability to support myself at this time, but that may change. So, I came to Ubud and started living with a Balinese family. I have always lived in a Balinese family compound. I have never lived in a stand-alone villa. Well, I've lived in these compounds because it just feels family-like. I guess it’s because I'm somehow from a broken family. So, I pray with them, I help them if they need help. Yeah. I'm just part of the family, and it feels safe.
When I began to look around Ubud, I saw a lot of what Chögyam Trungpa refers to in his 1972 classic book “Spiritual Materialism”. I saw false prophets and people selling or importing practices without lineage. And I'm like: “Why would you come here and do something that you can do in Ibiza or the Gold Coast and not go to a Balinese Art Museum and not integrate into the Balinese culture? Why would you not want to see the amazing culture that is here, the wisdom that has roots deep into the ancient times of India and Java? Java was an amazing empire during the 11th- 13 th century. The largest Buddhist city state outside of Nalanda in India was in Sumatra. And I began to explore this incredibly rich culture which fulfilled something in me; it just filled the void in me. I’ve always liked history but American history is a bit black and white. I don't want to put it down - but let's just say that today, in 2025, I think it's pretty evident that America is as spiritually bankrupt as it gets, or at least I see it that way.
I feel enriched here. I feel enriched by the culture, I feel enriched by the cuisine, I feel enriched by my relationships with the Balinese - which are many - and I feel enriched by what we do at Usada, yeah. We give a platform to these artists, scholars and musicians. They get to express what we call in Balinese their taksu. The energy of creativity or shakti, the feminine energy in its creative form. That's taksu.
This brings us right to the second question, which is about Usada, actually. Traditional practices of healing, called usada, are deeply rooted in Balinese culture. What were some of the inspirations that you've drawn from these ancient healing practices here?
Okay, when I landed in Bali the first time for a few months, Prem and Radha were teaching Ashtanga next to Sujata’s place in Nyuh Kuning, at The Laughter Yoga Ashram. So, one night, Maria Jose Gidi & Joe Lauder from Chile and UK and I found ourselves at a full moon ceremony in Tegalalang with Ketut Arsana. We went to this ceremony or ritual, which the Balinese call upacara. I had studied Siddhi yoga a little bit when I was in New York and I read a lot of things about it. But what we experienced that night was miraculous. It was just otherworldly, like people in trance, offering fire to the lingam. And there was real Kirtan, not Ubudian Karaoke Kirtan. Like Balinese people, who could actually chant, yeah, in Sanskrit, and not singing to whales. And I was completely moved. And I made a friend there named Charlotta. Charlotta has been here 30 years, she is married to a Balinese. She's Dutch-Australian I think. But she is like the lieutenant now of Ketut’s ashram, the Om Ham Retreat north of Ubud. He also still owns Bodyworks on Jl. Hanuman. Ketut Arsana was my first teacher in Bali. Besides being a master of bhakti or devotion, he is also a fair master of asana. He's a real, true usada or healer. He understands the herbs and the healing and all that.
And so - fast forward 3-4 years later, I decided to do this restaurant project with Sayuri (now owner of Sayuri, Ubud) and I was going to name it, after Guruji, “Guru's Ayurvedic Café”.
And I was going to allow people to put the picture of their Guru on the wall. But they had to put real Gurus. It wasn't going to be a picture of your mother. Like Sai Baba, whatever, whoever your teacher was. And I told this to Charlotta, and she's like: “Do you know, there's an Indonesian word for Ayurveda. It's called usada. And I go back to my partner Martin and told him, and that was it - we named the place Usada.
The owner of this museum, where we are holding the interview - ARMA or the Agung Rai Museum of Art, is my friend Agung Rai. He's probably over there watering the grass. He takes care of all these gardens. So, I talk to him, and I talk to Tjok Gde from Tirta Usada, and I talk to a couple other people also. And yes, usada in Indonesian means traditional medicine. It means jamu and herbs and bodywork and breathwork and meditation. All these traditional indigenous healing modalities. But, actually for a Westerner that comes here, particularly from America or Australia, where it's kind of culturally fucking boring, here in Bali the dance, the smell of dupa (incense), the art, the gamelan music, the ceremonies – all of it is medicine.
In Ayurveda, and also in usada, we take in medicine and healing through the five senses, right? Something interesting happens to your mind when you come back to Bali after you’ve been gone for a while. The first thing when exiting the plane and entering the airport, is that you smell the dupa. You smell the incense and then you see the sign on the wall that tells you what Tri Hita Karana is. So then, if you're anywhere inclined to love this place like I do, inside you something very sattvic happens. It's like, I'm back, I'm home. So, this is how I perceive usada.
At Usada, we take the Ayurvedic principles - mostly, because these are documented for thousands of years, and they've been tried and tested - but we incorporate into that the Indonesian ingredients. When we first wanted to make Indian dosas, for example, I remember this conversation between Simon from Zest, who consulted with us, and Sujata. She wanted to bring urad dal - which traditionally is used to make dosas - from India. And Simon is like “No, we're so not. We're a sustainable restaurant, and we're not flying in urad dal from India.” And Simon figured out how to make dosa from red rice flour. And our dosas now are made from red rice flour and I think there's mung dal in there too, which grows allover Java. So that's not a problem. We've tried to balance that in – that the inspiration is always Balinese. The more you spend time with the Balinese and learn from them and try to practice what they show you, the more you understand, there's a hidden or secret thing to this.
We have a guy that I found late last year. His name is Putu Yudiantara. And he's a friend of Christopher D. Wallis, who wrote a book called “Tantra Illuminated”. And Putu is a scholar. He teaches often at Usada. Putu has written three books on Tantra in Indonesian. There's also another book called Taru Pramana, which I found when I opened Usada. But no one can read it because it's in Balinese, Kawi and Indonesian. So, I really want to put some money in to translate it into English. Because it's the bible of usada medicine. Yeah, it's ancient. Kawi is the language of the Majapahit Empire from the 11th-13th century from Central Java.
Wow – so possibly the name for the ancient temple outside Ubud, Gunung Kawi, comes from that?
It might be, that’s a good point. Yeah, that's the same spelling of the language. The lontar, ancient palm leave manuscripts, are written in Kawi or old Javanese. Some of them are in Balinese, but most of them are written in Kawi. And those are being translated now by another scholar named Sugi Lanus, who is in my opinion a freaking Indonesian national hero. The guy is fucking great… I love what he's doing. I tried to get him to talk at Usada but he is just like “I am too busy, I’m a scholar, I’m a document reader. I’m not going to come talk to a bunch of Westerners. Sorry, find somebody else.” But I get it, that’s the svadharma, his duty or purpose in life, and he is doing it. He is putting all the lontar information into digital form.
Ibu Robin Lim is another one. I'll just give you her story, don't know if it's relevant. When Ibu Robin came here in the 1970s, she and her husband lived amongst the Balinese, and she began to study the lontar, those old palm leave manuscripts. And there are specific things - like there's palm leaves for daily life, there is lontar for asta kosala kosali, which is Balinese architecture, there is lontar for how to do the ceremonies. There is even secret lontar, that only the Ida Pedandas and the high Nabes can read. You're not even allowed to know what it is. There is also lontar for usada, for traditional medicine. So, Ibu Robin began to investigate that. In those leaves, it was written about childbirth, and it was stated to delay cutting the umbilical cord for energetic reasons. Ibu Robin started to practice this, and she noticed the vitality of the babies began to increase. So, because she's half American, she put some science to it. And she found out, or they found out that 30% of the baby's blood is still in the placenta, postpartum, and it comes back through the umbilical cord over the next 30-40 minutes. Not only that, there are also stem cells going through the umbilical cord - both ways! The baby is sending stem cells back to the mother, and the mother is sending stem cells to the baby. When Ibu Robin is invited sometimes internationally to speak at OBGYN conferences, the doctors swarm around her because she knows more than they do.
Is she still practicing?
No, she's overseeing the work at Bumi Sehat. Whether she actually is involved in birthing anymore, I don't know, maybe a couple, but she has a whole team now. They have several clinics now - one Bali, the Philippines, in Papua, and she put one up in Aceh, when the Tsunami hit the region in 2004. This woman is a bodhisattva, this is heroic work, yeah. And so, she got that from usada lontar, that's what sprung her into her. And I'm sure she got more out of that. This is all in that lontar.
And there are still, I guess, healers that study and work with these lontars?
Across from Usada is a griya. A griya is where an Ida Pedanda, a high priest, lives. They look like something from Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. They get these big crowns on their head, and they have all these things they wear and all these jewelry and white beards. It looks like something from the Middle Earth, yeah. But they are a lineage of people that are able to read these documents and transmit some of it. Now, every griya has stacks of lontar. From what I understand, across from Usada, there are eighty lontars - not just one! I’ll show you pictures, there are stacks of these palm leaves. Sugi is the best bet, because he can put it into digital form. These things decay. Balinese compounds are not air conditioned and humidity controlled. There's a Lontar Museum in Singaraja. This is another Indonesian national treasure. And there are lontar all over Indonesia. The bugis have lontar. There was lontar allover Southeast Asia.
The bugis are the shipbuilders in Sulawesi. You know the word bogeyman? The bogeyman is in the closet, right? You know where this comes from? From the time when the French, the Dutch, the English, and the Spanish came down here in the 15th and 16th century. The bugis, who were sailors down here, with those big wooden phinisi boats with black sails, would chase them, because they knew the waters, and there was no GPS or depth finders then. They would run them onto the fucking coral reef, sink the ship, and steal everything. That's where the bogeyman came from. It came from the bugis. And the bugis have their own story of the world. It's called La Galigo and it's on palm leaves in their language. But only there's only a hundred people left on the planet that can even read it.
I would like to zoom out a bit to world politics and the state of affairs today and where the world is going. In so many countries, starting with the US, going to Turkey, I mean wherever… in the world we are living today, what do you think is the role culture and spirituality plays in helping us to maintain our sanity, both individually and collectively?
Okay, the world is upside down. There’s no doubt about it and I'm just going to give a little background and my flavor on this and how it became upside down. I went to the University of Colorado for molecular biology in the 1970s. In 1976 I moved to Aspen, Colorado. I lived in Aspen from 1976 to 1983 and I befriended the founder of Mattel Toys. His name was D. V. Edmundson and at the time, it was a transition from Carter to Reagan, and D.V. Edmondson was an alcoholic but he was also a philosopher. He was brilliant. He introduced me to amazing people. I saw Buckminster Fuller talk with him. He explained to my young 25-year-old ass that Reagan was the beginning of the downfall of civilization and he explained that in ancient mythology there were seven major sins: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth and he said that greed was the worst of all. And that what Regan was implementing would ultimately be the downfall of Western civilization. And so that's where the slide started.
Trump is just the symptom of the growing greed. This has been a long process. Even the Democrats in between, I mean we thought Obama would be different and as soon as he got in, nothing happened that was supposed to happen. So, I tend to look towards the Vedic philosophy, and after all, this is Kali Yuga. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better. And for me, I find solace, and I find relief in my practice. I have to minimize the attention I give to any kind of news or social media. When I got clean, I threw my TV away. I still have none, just a laptop and I try to pick movies late at night, just to unwind. There are maybe some brainless ones, but currently I am watching “Adolescence”. It's fucking amazing. It's making me sick because I lived that. I am that. Anyway, let's save that for another conversation.
Those of us that are going to survive and not go insane or become violent or depressed or suicidal, need a practice. We need a practice. And what that practice is, it could be walking in the rice field, it can be pranayama, meditation and asana like me. It can be bhakti yoga, it can be like Putu, who's completely into jnana yoga, like he's, he's analytically going through the scriptures to find what's helpful. We're going to start an Indonesian meditation class for the community at Usada and it’s going to be free and it's going to be for mental health because, you know, samsara is sexy, yeah. But it's also not fixable. You can't fix samsara. It's a broken system.
The American capitalist system, I think in the 1960s, maybe in the 1970s, was still a little bit fair. But now it's stacked. And, you know, if we look at Australia, it just looks at America, making a mistake and then it does the same fucking thing. They're puppets. And the election of people in other countries in Europe that are just falling in line with the Orange Muppet and Putin and others like in Turkey… I believe we need a practice so that we can help those around us the best we can. Because when the shit really starts to hit the fan, they're going to look to people who have some kind of stability and some sense of emotional hygiene to navigate what's coming. I don't know if I'm going to be alive for all that, but if I am, I want to be a stand-up guy to the best in my ability. To do that, I need to collect the tools that are necessary and important to help other sentient beings. I mean, samsara is sexy. You look at these young Balinese and a lot of them, particularly in the South, they're getting swayed into, you know: “Oh, if I build a villa and rent the villa, I'll have money and I can buy an NMAX.” You see, fucking 40 kg girls riding on an NMAX. They don't need a fucking NMAX – they are not 100 kg. Why are they riding that big bike? Because it makes them feel good.
Yeah, Bali is changing also…
We need to be here when it falls because at least the Balinese know, because most of them were still raised with the philosophy of Tri Hita Karana, which is harmony with community, harmony with nature, harmony with God, as the source of contentment or happiness. Most of them can still retreat back to their family and find some kind of solace. But there'll be others that can't.
So, the survival will be in a cave in Sulawesi, in a forest in North Bali, in Kalimantan, in Central Java. It's back to nature, where you can grow your own food and take care of your own community. And if we as individuals are no threat to the forces that are actually just fucking scared, and that way are going to probably assert their authoritarian rule. If we're just like home within our banjar and a couple kids and a goat and a fucking cow, are they going to steal our cow? Do we have anything they want? I don't know. I hope I'm right. But the safety is in practice…
In practice, yes, and also in human connection. I think Bali teaches us this so deeply: You give first before you take. All these offerings and prayers, they are still in the blood of people here. Whereas in the West, we first take, and then we pay something for it, right?
Yes, we believe in giving before taking, karmically, as followers of Vedic thought. I just saw today, I don't know if it was Peter Attia, Dr. Rhonda Patrick or Andrew Huberman. There's been an 80-year-long study in the West, like a classical study of people that give altruistically and then what came back. The statistic is, for every 1 unit you give, monetarily or whatever, eventually you receive 1.65 units in return. Somewhere, the universe is coming and giving back to you plentifully. You know, there was a teaching in 1409 in Lhasa Tibet, by Je Tsongkhapa, who was the teacher to the two tutors to the first Dalai Lama, in the great treatise on the steps to the path of enlightenment. And monks came from what is now Vietnam, Burma, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Indonesia, China, Japan and Korea…, and they assembled in Lhasa and there was this teaching. The essence of the teaching in one phrase, which I learned from the Dalai Lama in 2007, is: “When the spiritual practitioner engages in thoughts and activities directed towards the well-being or the welfare of others, their own aspirations are realized without having to make a separate effort.” You want something? You give it, and you will get it. Like in Geshe Michael’s "The Diamond Cutter. The Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life.” This is what he taught.
Before I left New York, the last Buddhist teaching I went to was in Chelsea at an old Presbyterian church arranged by my friend, Mary Beth Armstrong. It was by an old Nyingma Master who had spent 20 years in prison - the Chinese had imprisoned him. They imprisoned him with his teacher in the same cell. Somehow, he escapes, gets out of Tibet and crosses into India. He was a famous Nyingma Master and of course the Dalai Lama wanted to see and talk to him, and when they met, he asked him how he survived all those years in prison. And he said: “I prayed and practiced, so I would never loose compassion for my captors. Because if I had lost compassion for my captors, I would have succumbed, and they would have killed me. I would have gotten angry, and they would have killed me.” And then he said - I never forget this, and I teach this often to my clients: “Patience is the armor that protects the jewel of compassion.” Because if you lose your patience, you're in danger of losing your compassion and if you lose your compassion, you’re not a practitioner anymore. Patience is like the armor around the heart. Yeah, it's freaking complete wisdom.
That is a beautiful ending, Scott. Thank you for those wise words and all the beautiful stories you shared, and most importantly, the incredible work that you do.
27.04.2025 at Agung Rai Museum of Art, Ubud