Connection Thursday: the balian, the grandmothers, and the plant wisdom we blend from
On Connection Thursday we tell the stories of the people behind the work. Today we look further back than our own workshop, to the quiet lineage of knowledge that any Balinese blend rests on: the healers, and the grandmothers, who have carried plant wisdom in Bali for generations.
A tradition written on palm leaves
Bali has a formal system of traditional medicine called usada, recorded on lontar, manuscripts inscribed on dried palm leaves and kept for centuries. The healer who reads and practices from them is a balian usada. These texts hold recipes for poultices, tonics, and the herbal pastes used to warm the body and ease aching muscles. It is a careful, studied craft, closer to a library than a legend.
One of the most familiar of these preparations is boreh, a paste of ground roots and spices such as turmeric, ginger, clove, and rice, worked by hand and applied to the skin. In many Balinese homes it was made not by a healer at all, but by a grandmother at the back of the kitchen, passing the measure and the method to whoever was watching.
Knowledge that moves by hand, not by book alone
What strikes us most is how this wisdom travels. Some of it lives on the palm leaf, but much of it moves the way recipes always have, from one pair of hands to the next: how finely to grind, how a good root should smell, when a paste is ready. It is the same kind of learning that still happens in our workshop today, where every batch is blended and poured by the people whose hands you can trust.
Utama Spice began in 1989 because Melanie Templer listened to that knowledge rather than trying to improve on it. The same respect shapes how we work now, alongside the women of Munti Gunung and the growers who supply our botanicals. We are not the source of this wisdom. We are one more set of hands carrying it forward.
So the next time you warm an oil between your palms before it touches your skin, know that the gesture is old. It belongs to a long line of healers and grandmothers who understood that care is something you make slowly, and share. If you would like to feel that lineage in a daily practice, our approach to the Balinese bath is a gentle place to begin.
