Yulena moves through Ubud like a held breath—quietly, purposefully, always mapping the spaces between sounds. By day, she facilitates holistic retreats at a tucked-away studio along the Campuhan ridge, guiding urban burnouts through breathwork under alang-alang roofs while afternoon rains drum like whispered secrets overhead. Her sessions aren’t about transformation so much as return—returning people to their bodies, to the ache beneath productivity, to the hunger for touch that isn’t transactional. She speaks in pauses and the way she stirs turmeric into warm coconut milk, in the way she leaves a space empty just so someone else can fill it.But her true work happens after hours. In the carved-out heart of an ancient banyan root behind her studio—a hidden sauna fragrant with eucalyptus and aged sandalwood—she hosts unannounced midnight meals for one guest at a time. The invitation is wordless: a subway token left on a pillow during closing circle. These are not dates, she tells herself. They are recalibrations. Yet when she cooks sambal-soaked banana leaves stuffed with spiced yolk and palm sugar, when she serves it barefoot in candlelight as rain slicks down mossy bark walls, it feels less like healing and more like hunger. A slow, simmering kind of want that contradicts everything she preaches.She photographs each encounter: not faces, but hands resting on steam-rising bowls, bare feet on damp stone, shadows merging against root-carved walls. The Polaroids live in a lacquered box beneath her bed—proof that someone stayed. That she let them. She tells herself she’s still in control, still the guide, but when she sees her reflection in the blackened kettle at dawn—hair loose, lips stained with chili oil—she wonders who’s been guiding whom.The city amplifies it all: the scent of wet frangipani on the breeze, the vinyl crackle of old jazz from the café below, the way a single train whistle from the edge of town sounds like a question. Love here isn’t declared. It’s distilled—down to the taste of someone’s favorite childhood porridge cooked at 2 a.m., down to the cocktail she mixes when words fail: lemongrass and calamansi with a splash of something smoky, served in a chipped glass that says I’m afraid but I stayed.