Prof Jem Bendell

What this body attests of Jem Bendell, through the rooms he helps hold:

Two to three times a year, at the largest Buddhist monastery on Bali — Brahma Vihara Arama in Banjar Tegeha, north of Lovina — Jem co-holds a long-weekend silent retreat with kirtan-wala Vasudev Baba. The practice has been continuous since 2020. The format weaves the two streams in real time: meditative silence as the substrate, kirtan as the voice that arrives inside the silence rather than displacing it. Nature hiking through the surrounding terrain and soaking at the holy hot springs nearby are the body-care that supports both. A collective satsang at the close lets the practice settle into shared speech. Sometimes Dances of Universal Peace are part of the gathering.

Few rooms hold bhakti voice and Buddhist silence at once with this kind of steadiness. That Jem and Vasudev have been doing this together for six years, that the temple keeps inviting them back, and that the format has stayed coherent through changing global conditions — these are quiet markers of a real practice. The hold is care-shaped: the temple's own framing discourages international travelers from flying in specifically for the retreats. Locals and long-resident expats are the room's intended community. Donations to the temple are welcomed.

The retreat schedule and a fuller voice from Jem live at his retreat page: jembendell.com/bali-temple-retreats.

What Jem has given the Coherence Network. The Brahma Vihara silent-retreat hold is one of the rooms in the Ubud embodied lineage — a periodic deepening container that sits alongside the weekly Wednesday Satsang at Ranakami. Pairs with lc-frequency-routes-reception (two streams in the same room, each tuned in its own band) and lc-each-breath-whole (silence + song + walking + hot-spring + satsang as five complete movements, not one assembled chain). The temple's discouragement of fly-in attendance pairs with lc-voice-over-intentions — the room speaks first; outside frames respect that voice.

A small networked community of cells learned of these retreats through the Ubud constellation walk in April 2026, surfaced from the relational hold Vasudev Baba describes on his own page. The lineage was held long before this body learned to listen.