Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Elena Brower. Elena is a yoga instructor, designer, and artist based in New York City. Devoted to cultivating meditation as our most healing habit, she’s created potent online coursework and produced On Meditation, a film featuring personal portraits of renowned meditators. She started Teach.Yoga, a virtual home for yoga teachers worldwide, and has contributed to the Huffington Post, mindbodygreen, and Yoga Journal.
With Sounds True, Elena Brower has created several audio programs including a program called Grounded and Free and The Return Home. She’s also coauthor with Erica Jago of an underground-bestselling book called Art of Attention, a yoga workbook and that has been translated into six languages.
Elena has also written a new book scheduled for release in September of this year called Practice You: A Journal where she invites us to gather our own wisdom through writing, self-inquiry, and reflection.
In this episode with Insights at the Edge, Elena and I spoke about her process of identifying her own addiction to marijuana and cigarette smoking, and the energy, clarity, and mental stability she discovered in dropping this addiction and committing to her own inner dignity. She also shared a writing prompt from her new book Practice You, in which Elena writes to herself as a child at various ages in order to comfort that child in her journey. Elena also talked about how when learning, it’s possible to be utterly present and a student to the end. She talked about feminine approach to spiritual discipline—what it means to be soft yet firm. Elena let us in a guided meditation for releasing our love into the world. Here’s my conversation with Elena Brower.
Elena, you’ve written a new field notebook, a journal workbook, art book called Practice You. I think one of the invitations in Practice You is for people to become more and more honest with themselves about right where they’re at. I wanted to start first by talking about this process of self-confrontation and self-honesty. I know it’s just in the last few years that you’ve become public with a recovery from addiction process and that that involved—it seemed at least to me from the outside—with a certain confrontation, a certain self-honesty. I wonder if you can share some about that and how you think it might have related to the creation of Practice You.
Elena Brower: Well, when I first started to get clean and sober, my main addiction was marijuana and tobacco, and often together. I didn’t go public about it for quite some time. I kept it to myself for as long as I needed to in order to feel like there was no going back. When I finally became more vocal about it, it was really in the service of helping friends and colleagues who I know were going through and some are still going through the very same thing that I was—where they’re lying to themselves every day—”Today is the last day, tomorrow is the last day, today is the last day, tomorrow is the last day,”—and constantly disappointing themselves and constantly degrading that feeling of authority that they might over themselves, which lends to their credibility as a teacher. I was really there becoming vocal about it in service to the friends that I knew who were suffering in the same way that I have been.
Practice You came about almost two years after I got clean and it was partially in response to my recovery. It was partially in response to the death of my mom that had happened just a few years prior to this idea germinating. It was partially a response to the fact that I’ve spent my entire life creating notebooks of what I’m gathering and learning. I constantly go back to those notebooks. If I never took another note in my life, I’d be perfectly sorted out from this moment—46—until the day that I die. I’d be perfect. I don’t need another thing to come into the field of my awareness.
But, the fact that I constantly go back to my own notes and find gems there that I had no idea about at the time of writing them. They morph into other things, evolve into other things based on my own evolution. That was what lit me up about the possibility of doing a journal because that’s where people get a chance to leave their mark for themselves. Almost like they’re leaving a trail for themselves so when they go back to it in a week, in a month, in a year, in a decade, there will be wisdom there waiting for them.
TS: Elena, when you talk about your addiction having been smoking marijuana and cigarettes, I’m sure a lot of people might say, “Oh come on, it’s not like Elena found herself on the bathroom floor someplace or in a prison cell. It’s a little heavy to call that really an addiction.” How did you become clear, “Oh, I have an addiction that I need to be resolve”?
EB: It was just day after day of saying to myself, “OK, I’m going to do this, I’m going to stop, this is it, this is the last day.” Then I would wake up the next day and I would do it again and I kept looking at myself in the mirror—stoned or not stoned—and just saying, “Who are you? Why do you keep doing this to yourself?” It’s so torturous.
Then of course, the ramifications: When I’m not stoned I’m much more volatile, I’m much more angry, I’m much more temperamental. My son needed me much more sane and steady than I was able to be with all of that coursing through my poor liver.
After seeing this play out for at least a year almost daily of in the morning after dropping all the boys off—of going up to the roof and getting stoned again—I thought, “You know what, this is an addiction, this is a problem. I can’t stop.” Yes, I’m completely comfortable and yes, I’m not on the street. I’m not destitute. I’m not sick in a hospital. But I can see how slippery the slope is and I can see how that one time a day would have easily become two times a day were it not for the fact that I had a job that required me to be outward-facing, going in teaching; were it not for the fact that I had a child home who deserves my care, my love as best possible. Those things were keeping me from going down the very deepest end.
TS: Now, for some people their addictions may be subtle. It may be an addiction to eating in a different way. Each day the person says, “I’m going to eat more healthy food,” oh, and then the day passes and it doesn’t really happen. Or other kinds of addictions that are accepted by our culture. I’m wondering how you think the act of journaling and working with self-confrontation can help people become honest enough to see what their addictive patterns might be and then most importantly, make a change.
EB: Well, throughout Practice You, at the end of each chapter, I have a page where I have the reader go ahead and write a letter to themselves at a certain age. I started doing it myself of course. And when I started writing the letters to myself at certain ages, I started to see how very addicted I was from 15 all the way through my twenties and to my thirties. I started to see how insidious and actually divisive it was because I was really in the public eye and in my heart of my heart, I was really this one person.
I cared so deeply about my work, about my teaching, about my students. The folks who would come to see me—my teachers. But yet, in private, I was still degrading my own integrity time and time and time again. I was able to see that with the advent of just writing letters to myself—just reaching out to myself, really reaching back into the past, in this case, to take care of myself, welcome myself back in. There was something very profound about it when I tried it myself. And so I thought, “This is the right way to go at the end of each chapter.” And the remainders of the chapter—all these very incredible, provocative, potent prompts to get people to start to think about what they have the capacity to do.
One that stands out in my mind that I always talk about is some part of me knows how to heal this. There’s another page that says, “This is how I practice inner dignity.” There are these prompts that if I was in the middle of the throes of an addiction—even if it was as mild as something like marijuana—that would be very difficult for me to write.
TS: That’s beautiful. “This is how I practice inner dignity.” That word carries such a communication.
EB: Yes. I devoted a two-page spread to it. “This is how I practice inner dignity,” and then just across, “Inner dignity feels like this.” That was in Chapter 4, which is relegated to the heart. “This is how I give myself love. This is how my heart breaks,” or, “How have my heart breaks helped me find my tribe?”
TS: Tell me a little bit more about the letter-writing exercise. Maybe you could give an example of how the letter-writing in your own life was illuminating for you.
EB: So, I’ll ready you the prompt for the letter in Chapter 3. “Consider a moment when you felt challenged, afraid, or sad at the age of nine. See yourself hugging that child you were. Now, from your perspective today, write a song, a poem, a letter, or a story that gives that child insight into the ways in which you will soon learn to know yourself, believe in yourself, and to bestow dignity upon yourself by trusting yourself.”
I wrote—this was the beginning of the letter and it’s a little sad. I think I can hold it together. “You,” I wrote. “You have no idea how blessed you’ll feel when you one day far into the future are sitting at a book expo in New York City at the Javits Center, signing your book while your gorgeous ten-year-old son is at a beautiful school and his beautiful dad and step-mama heal the world. Your man—your partner in life—is a gem at work making beauty while he supports you emotionally, loves you entirely, truly worships you, and loves everything you are. Any time you feel low or off or out of sorts, or sad, or afraid, know that your life will be utterly blessed. Love yourself and also love your mom. She’ll die when you’re 45.”
It’s like: what else is there? What else is there? To reach back and hold that person’s hand.
Sorry. It’s just such a beautiful act for yourself to take care of yourself in that way.
TS: I’m curious to have a better understanding of how—when you wrote these letters backward in time to your former self—how it helped you see the pains that you had at those ages and create healing in your current life at your current age?
EB: Well, we know this scientifically. We all carry so much of our childhood pain into the situations in which we find ourselves today. In that example, when I look back at myself at nine and I look down and I see the little jean culottes that I was wearing and my little sandals, and my little t-shirt I can remember so distinctly, and feel the pain of the things that I was going through at the time—the rejection, the remorse related to my family, things that were real traumatic.
Then also, the feelings of acceptance and the friends that I had—I can feel that person when I start to write to that person. I can feel the sadness that lived in her. I can feel the elation that lived in her. I can feel the little tiny skinny legs and the glasses on the face, and the pigtails, and the hair. Just talking to her and comforting her, and telling her that it’s all going to work out so beautifully.
It truly, Tami, feels like there’s no time. It feels like there is no time. You can travel through time, you can handle that person, you can heal that person, and you can help that person bring forth into right this moment more solace and more confidence. At least, that was my experience.
TS: Now, Elena, later this year Sounds True is going to be hosting a [Psychotherapy and Spirituality Summit], and we’re going to be looking at how practices like yoga and meditation, when combined with psychological approaches, can be complemented, enhanced and amplified, and take us someplace where we very much need to go as a culture. I wanted to talk to you about that because it seems like you are not staying within the boundaries, if you will, of strictly teaching yoga and meditation, but that you’ve brought in to your own life’s unfoldment information from the field of coaching and other disciplines. And you’re really seeing how yoga and meditation can be complemented by these other approaches. I’m curious what you think about that.
EB: Well, it’s true that the practices of yoga and meditation alone can get us only so far. That has been my experience. Now that I’m studying more assiduously with Yogarupa Rod Stryker, I have a better idea of what is possible in terms of creating of the yoga and meditation pranayama practice—a steady mind and a stable self. I didn’t have that prior to really working with him and starting to unveil what he works on regarding the tantra, regarding the breath work that really does serve to positively stabilize our mental state as well our physical.
I didn’t have that prior to working with him. I found that through coaching. I found that through self-observation, fourth-way work. I found that through psychotherapy. I found that through group work.
I feel you’re obviously right on track that this is something that’s so important because I think yoga and meditation are phenomenal. They were my doorway to all of this work. But, without the other work, I don’t know that we can really have a full picture of what’s possible. I don’t know that we could actually make it to an extremely stable, steady, calm resilience that I have found with all these other influences.
TS: What are you learning with Rod Stryker that’s proving to be so meaningful for you?
EB: It’s precisely what I talked about. First of all, his presence and his studentship are two of the main things that I’m learning—just how to be utterly present and remain the student until the end. When he teaches, he’s teaching from a Sri Vidya lineage. He’s teaching for—like I said—mental stability. There’s so much value in finding breath practices that actually do calm all the vrittis and attenuate the vāsanās—all the misunderstandings. How can I attenuate those using the practice of my breathing every morning so that none of them can start to infect and invade the rest of my day in all the different ways in which I’m perceiving the world?
The work that he does toward that end is keeping me very close to both him and his teacher, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait. They do tremendous work, and it’s the simplest work. It’s the most ancient, in a way, basic, and in a way, very complex—but really more basic than complex practices. This is the stuff that was written about. It’s not that difficult to learn. It just requires a lot of practice and the results are palpable. He always says, “What is the actual aim of yoga? It’s really to quiet all these twists and turns and churnings in your mind, and attenuate all the misunderstandings that you have about yourself and other people.”
TS: Well, let’s talk more about this mental stability. I think it’s something that most of us yearn for and would like. How do we work with the breath in the midst of our life to have greater mental stability?
EB: Well, the first thing I would mention that I’m aware of is lengthening one’s inhale and holding it. It’s actually a very—I have found for my own experience—a very effective way to calm my mind and bring myself a little bit closer to myself. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t be thinking about other things when you’re taking a moment to pause and hold prana in your heart space or in your belly space.
But, then also to exhale and remain empty for just a short moment helps me in another way to manage my energy and change the way that I see myself in some very interesting way. It’s very internal—the practices that both of them are teaching—and we’re weaving all the threads of spirituality via the breath into the fabric of every single day and starting to experience a little more of the sweetness and the—let’s say—abundance of a good feeling, of a good interaction, of a kind moment shared between two people.
TS: Now, you mentioned that in your experience yoga and meditation are not enough in and of themselves, and that these other areas of self-growth have been helpful to you. I’m curious: when it comes to integrating the experiences and insights that you get from yoga and meditation into the rest of your life—into being a mom, into all of your responsibilities—how does that integration work for you? What do you lean on?
EB: Well, if I may, I just want to correct one thing that you said, which is that for a long time I thought that yoga and meditation were not enough, because the way that I had learned them, it was not enough. It was just movement or it was just sitting still and being quiet and watching the show of my mind as it were.
Upon studying in earnest with Rod and Panditji, I know understand that in fact when it’s taught properly, yoga and meditation is actually more than enough.
TS: OK.
EB: When it came to pass, that before really delving into his work, to their work, I found coaching. And at that time I found self-observation—the fourth-way work—I had no way to look at myself other than what I was being presented in yoga class. When this fourth-way work came along and when practices of self-observation came along and when coaching came along, it was more of a conscious design of my attitudes and my ways of being that I had never engaged before. For me, that was crucial.
To integrate these understandings, let’s say, into my life is still a moment-to-moment process. When it comes to my kid, I have to actually use my practices in the morning to nourish my softness through prayer because in the moment that he is—whatever—not listening, acting like he’s 10 or 11 now almost. Well, how do I deal with this? I’m not going to blow up like I was taught. I’m not going to go and hide like I was also taught. I’m going to stay there. I’m going to remain soft and I’m going to remain firm at the same time, and speak what needs to happen without a charge.
Those are the moments where the practice is proven to be effective. Those are the moments where the practice has the power to affect the quality of my life.
TS: Can you tell me more about this “remaining soft” and how you do that? How do you notice that you’re not soft, first of all, and then what do you do?
EB: Well, I’ve just witnessed myself so many times. It was much worse when I was in the throes of addiction. I’ve witnessed myself so many times just going off the rails for no reason whatsoever, really not commensurate with the matter at hand. If I am trying to raise a child who is resilient, who knows how to handle himself when things become challenging, I cannot then demonstrate for him this utter lack of inner dignity—as we said before—this volatility that is not serving anyone.
Remaining soft is actually part of my dharma code that I’ve designed under the tutelage of Yogarupa. It’s a willingness to stay one more moment without reactivity. It’s a willingness to sit there not weakly, not meekly either, but to hold my ground and yet to remain available to a shift in the fabric of this moment so that everything can get a little bit sweeter and softer.
TS: Do you attend to your body and breath in some way as part of softening?
EB: I do. It’s easy to repeat my dharma code when I’ve had my half hour to an hour in the morning to meditate and do my breath work. In the mornings now I do a little bit of movement and right now, I’m really steeped in this practice of Prana Dharana, which is a way to focus the breath and the body to bring it to a certain area of the body, particularly Ajna chakra—the sixth chakra, the third eye—and actually keep a quality, a softness in the midbrain. [An] hour or two later, when I’m presented with some very normal, natural parent-child communication, I actually have the presence of mind to be able to recall I’m starting to actually build up these accumulations of moments in that spacious sensitivity, let’s say, to the light that’s available in this moment.
When my kid is acting like himself and confronting me and resisting me for any reason, I’m able to look and listen and know this is not personal. This is a boundary check from a very normal and healthy ten-and-a-half-year-old who’s looking for more autonomy. Whereas, I think in my life when my parents had an 11-year-old, they were not 46. They were 34. They had no teacher. They had only some wisdom as to how to handle it and they handled it quite differently. That’s perfectly normal and no blame is even being launched in any direction at all. I love them. They did such a fantastic job.
The truth is if we have a practice, when the moment comes and the hard edge would normally be thrown up into the space, we can actually stay quite soft and yet hold our ground. And that’s the value of the work that I get to do now.
TS: When you were discussing you’re continuing yoga studies, you mentioned that there was an environment of studentship among the teachers and there’s a quote from you that I really like and, “It’s the best students make the finest teachers.” I wonder if you can talk about that in this idea of we’re all always students in a sense—is what I take from it. But, I’m curious for you to unpack that a bit.
EB: Well, I think as a student—think about for a second, if you’re listening to this; think about when you go off and you designate a few days to study with your teacher and suddenly, you are not doing dishes necessarily or not handling anything around your home. You’re off somewhere else. You are with your notebook and your pen and your open mind, and you’re ready to learn—ready to take in what you think might be relevant for the coming months until you can meet again with your teacher.
Now, as a person in that position, we’re just going really to see if there’s any wisdom about that will help us to understand ourselves—that will help us to see all the positivity, the negativity, the patterning, the potential that we have. That understanding—whether it comes in the form of tantra or acupuncture or intuitive counseling, however it comes—that understanding is what sets us free.
When you have a teacher who is actually engaged in those processes more than once a year, you have somebody who is available to the momentum and the energy of self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-observation. That, I see, is very powerful and valuable to me as a student and I want to be around that.
TS: Now, Elena, in your new journal, workbook, art book Practice You, you talk about how there can be an approach to practice that’s a feminine approach to discipline versus what could be considered a masculine approach to this idea of practice or discipline. Can you talk some about that? What’s a feminine approach to spiritual discipline?
EB: That page—I’m just turning it to right now. It’s one of my favorites, actually. “How can discipline . . .” and it’s a question that I pose to the reader. “How can discipline be a surrender to the feminine? How can discipline be a surrender to the feminine?”
I think, as a person in recovery from anything—whether you’re recovering from codependency or an addiction of any kind—your job is to discipline yourself. Your job is to deal with everything in life with affection, with love, and with kindness, yet holding and hosting a feeling of vigilance and diligence that’s not—it’s not overbearing.
There’s some balance that has to happen. What is the highest form of the feminine? Highest form of the feminine holds the masculine clearly and yet is completely capable of affection, and love, and kindness, and equanimity, which I see as very feminine qualities.
That kind of was the prompt for that. I want all of us to think about that in any moment, in any circumstance, in any context. How can discipline really be a surrender to the feminine and not this hard edge that we put ourselves through?
TS: Elena, can you describe more for me what that looks like in your actual practice life? I mean, if you’re setting your alarm for an early hour, do you think, “Oh, this is still the feminine approach to discipline at work”? How do make sense of that in terms of this feminine approach?
EB: I think the first thing I did—I mean, if we’re talking about a day-to-day conversation, just getting clean and sober. I now no longer need an alarm. I’m on the cycles of the sun and the moon. I wake up right around 5:00 in the summer, right around 6:00 in the winter. I do my practice. That to me is the greatest surrender to the feminine there ever is because if it weren’t for my practice, I would still be this very masculine, angry force in my son’s life and he doesn’t need me to be that.
That’s the first thing that came to mind. I’m sure there are more examples day to day but that’s the most glaring of the examples that I can think of.
TS: Now, when you say you surrender to the feminine, what do you mean by that in terms of: what’s the surrender part?
EB: For many years, I struggled to have a practice at all and I would, in fact, do exactly as you said. “I’ll set an alarm. I’ll get up, I’ll do it. I’ll do it, I’ll do it, I’ll do it, because I have to, because I should, because I must.” When really, the surrender part is, “Oh, my goodness, how would I ever not let myself be swept into this space of meditation each morning and give up the opportunity for this softness to be manifest in me?”
TS: Beautiful. OK. There’s a page from Practice You that I’d love to read and then we can talk about. It’s about three-quarters of the way through the journal. And you write, “Today, I tell the truth. I write a little. I create one piece of art, no matter how small. I remember myself at least once. I grow my spine tall. I love myself inside and out a few moments at a time. I lean on the universe with my honesty. I ask for signs. I receive them gratefully.”
EB: It’s fun to hear you read that, Tami. Thank you.
TS: There’s a beautiful picture of a tree.
EB: Yes.
TS: When I saw the beautiful picture of the tree, I thought of a couple of lines from this entry. One, “I grow my spine tall.”
EB: Yes.
TS: I wonder if you can talk about that. Seems like that’s part of Practicing You for Elena Brower.
EB: It is. There’s so many times where I’ve felt so out of sorts and so fraudulent, particularly when I was not treating myself well and taking in all that substance. To wake up every day and do these things, tell the truth and write a little and create a piece of art even if it’s small, and remember myself and grow my spine tall. These are the things that I have to actually be diligent about and proud of. These are things that help me be a better mom and a better lover and a better employer and a better sister [and] a better daughter. There’s not much more to it than, “How can I just be standing up to this moment with dignity and with grace?”
TS: Now, is there something you do physiologically, if you will, to grow your spine tall whether it’s in meditation and yoga, or just throughout your life? I’m curious about that. Like if you’ve ever noticed like, “Oh, I’m slumping in this moment.” What do you do?
EB: I have another set of teachers. Yogarupa is—I would consider him one of my several main teachers. There are two women who are named Nevine Michaan and Abbie Galvin. Nevine is the founder of a—let’s call it a style or tradition of yoga called Katonah Yoga, which is really based on all of her studies that ranged from Ashtanga yoga, Iyengar yoga to the Tao, to Chinese medicine, to Rudolf Steiner, to Goethe, to Espinosa. Her work is so much about geometry. And Abbie’s one of her main students, and has also started to really be a voice for this method.
The “growing the spine tall” actually has to start with placing your perineum—if you’re sitting on the seat, or if you’re standing, orienting it so that it’s facing the earth directly—which means, in certain cases, you have to actually move your sitting bones back and find where the center of your perineum is. Normally, if we’re sitting in a chair, if you’re sitting right now and listening, you’re probably sitting on the back of your perineum. If you roll forward and find the front of your perineum where your pubic bone is, that’ll be too far. But, if you go somewhere right in between the two and you place yourself right on your root, from there your spine immediately rises and unfurls.
That’s what I mean when I read that. That’s what I think about it. “I grow my spine tall.” I make myself available. Physiologically, I do what I just described. Then I make myself available to the delight that is surrounding me.
Yes, there’s a lot of darkness. Yes, there’s a lot of grief and a lot of pain in this world for sure. I am here doing my part to contribute to the ways in which people who need it most are being served, to serve my kid ,whom I think is going to be another lighthouse, and to try and help whomever I can to do their great work of leading.
TS: I love that. Put your perineum face-down to the ground. That’s very powerful.
EB: It’s very powerful work and that in context and combination with the work of Yogarupa—and a little sprinkle of kundalini has proven to be really effective and efficient for my body. I feel better at 46 than I did at 26.
TS: Now, there’s another line in this journal entry, if you will—this prose poem that I really like. “I lean on the universe with my honesty.” There’s the image of the tree; it partially made me feel like you were leaning against the tree. I don’t know if you meant that. “I lean on the universe with my honesty.” Tell me what that means to you.
EB: I can’t lean on her any other way. I tried as a liar and it didn’t work. It didn’t feel good and I was a wreck. “I lean on the universe with my honesty,” really means like if I’m going to ask for something or if I’m going to offer things, which is what leaning is about to me, I’m going to get closer to things. I’m going to do it with—tell it with truth-telling to the best of my ability.
That’s new for me. I spent years telling all these little white lies and not taking care of myself and then putting forth this picture that I was. And we’ve all been there. For me to put this out there—”I’m leaning on the universe with my honesty now,”—this is so comforting to me. May it be of great comfort to someone who reads it. I can’t think of any other explanation other than I just want to be somebody who tells the truth and does my best.
TS: I’ve noticed another thread throughout your work—both in your previous book, Art of Attention and in Practice You—which is that part of leaning on the universe with your honesty means being willing to apologize when it’s needed, and being willing to grant forgiveness and ask for forgiveness. Now, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how that relates to your honesty.
EB: The one thing I’ve learned and read a million times over when it comes to raising a child is that if you can’t be honest with the child when you make a mistake, then just apologize. Make it clear to the child that there’s safety in an apology. There’s safety in a forgiveness. If you can’t teach a child that, then the child’s going grow up thinking that lying is perfectly cool and fine—that if they get found out and they do something wrong, better to hold it in, chin up, and don’t apologize. Don’t admit weakness.
I feel that apologizing to my kid when I’m overbearing or overwrought, overcompensating—it’s actually has been really good for us. He trusts me implicitly. He knows that I’m here for him. When he’s feeling resistant in any way and I overreact, he knows that I’m going to come to him and say, “I’m really sorry.” The space between us is very safe. He also knows how to forgive me and he sees me forgive him. He himself, by my example, comes to me when he similarly is over-reactive in any way. He comes to me and says, “Mom, you know what, I’m really sorry. I’m sorry I did that. Would you forgive me?” I’m, “Of course, this is the way of the world.” This is how we design our emotional landscape. This is how we create humans and send them out into the world with the feeling of being heard, seen, and expanding.
TS: Now, you’re in New York City and we can hear the alarm behind you—the siren.
EB: Yes.
TS: What I’m curious about, as you’re talking, is you said, “You know, being a liar didn’t work.” One of the things I’m curious about is some people seem to be bold truth-tellers by nature and other people come to it later in life. What created that transformation for you? Like, you obviously, previously, there was some sense of posing or something.
EB: There was this moment that—I don’t why, it just came to my mind. But there was this moment, when it was right before I got sober and clean. I was in the hospital with my mother and I wrote this down at some point right around that time—just a little tiny poem that was only a few lines. I think it was, “Every moment, I just want to get back to the same presence I had when my mom collapsed in my arms.”
That was the turning point for me. It was like, “Oh, my God! What if this is it? I’m holding this woman. Her eyes are rolling back in her head. I don’t know if she’s having a stroke, a heart attack, or what. What if this is it and I’ve just been lying to myself and to so many people for so long?”
Sure enough, within two weeks—I think—was the letter that I wrote to dismount—let’s say—to disengage from Anusara yoga when John Friend was found to . . . anyway, have all that weird thing happened. I was able to sit and write this very lucid letter—articulate letter—to remove myself from that whole process and body of work, and move forward. That was the beginning of me learning how to just be honest instead of being too proud to tell the truth and being afraid of what other people would think.
TS: Was there a certain risk involved for you at that moment? Would you be able to summarize what it was that you were risking when you did that?
EB: I imagined my reputation—I guess, I don’t know. I mean, at that time I thought—I don’t know what I would’ve done had my mother not been in the hospital, had she not collapsed in my arms the way that she did so dramatically. I knew for sure that there was no more me posing to help somebody who shouldn’t be helped. I knew for sure there was no more lying to protect anyone else or myself. What I was risking was my standing in that community, my standing in the yoga world at large. I think I was risking also my own understanding of where I belonged in the world. You know what I mean? I didn’t know myself outside of that little body of work.
It was a big change for me at that time. That was around 2012. It actually took me a longer time—I quit for a little while around that time, everything, while y mother was in the hospital and then I fell back. Once I quit in 2013, that was it.
TS: Elena, I think I’m going down this direction of truth-telling and taking risks and the courage to stand in our truth. I’m going down this road so far because, well, Sounds True is called Sounds True. I place such a high value on truth-telling. I want to help people who are maybe wishy-washy about it, but see the potential, but are maybe afraid. I think you’re an example of someone who has had the courage to come out as a strong truth-teller in the past few years. I’m wondering how you can address that person who’s maybe in that wishy-washy place to help them move forward.
EB: There is the value of the practices that we do and whatever you’re doing, whether you’re reading, you’re meditating, you’re studying, you’re practicing yoga. The value of all these little practices is that they each allow us to gain and to gather insights into our own mind, our own patterns—like we said before, behaviors that aren’t helpful. These practices are also meant to elaborate and amplify the behaviors that do help us.
We begin to see that lying to ourselves or other people, pretending, is an unhelpful pattern. As we gain and gather insights into where we’re not really helping ourselves, where we’re actually hurting ourselves, we can start to design the ways in which we can help ourselves and bring ourselves to that sort of restful steadiness that we talked about earlier—that sweet stability of mind, heart, and body.
I think that’s the most important part. Even if you’re afraid of telling the truth about something—OK, how can you use your practice, whatever it is, to see the patterns that you’re continuously exercising that aren’t helpful and just start to do what is helpful. Start to work on what will be beneficial to you and to other people near you. If you do that, that’s the beginning of telling yourself the truth. Maybe someday you’ll tell other people but to start with, just bring your focus to your own self-awareness, healing and nurturing your own instrument, and let’s see what happens from there.
TS: Now, you have one more line in this prose poem in Practice You that I want to underscore. You write, “I love myself inside and out a few moments at a time.” Elena, you’re part of an upcoming online summit from Sounds True that’s called The Self-Acceptance Summit.
EB: Yes!
TS: As part of that summit, you talk about self-care as an altruistic act.
EB: Right.
TS: I thought that was such an important idea. I mean, so often we think of self-care as something for us that we need to do. Tell me how you understand it as an altruistic act.
EB: Well, you know, as a parent, it’s particularly highlighted because if I don’t take care of myself, if I don’t do the little things that I do to help myself be this steady beacon for my family, I’m no use. Straight up, I’m just no use. I’m temperamental. I’m all the things that we talked about earlier. When I do take care of myself though, it feels like I’m doing something. It’s not just generous for myself but it’s altruistic for my family and that feels really important to me. It feels like that—the word momentum again comes to mind. It feels like that’s important momentum to be offering to my family.
“I’m taking care of myself and look how I am when I do this,” versus, “I’m not taking care of myself. Look how I am when I do that. I’m not happy. I’m not sane. I’m not effective. I’m not efficient. I’m not kind. Mouths off.” Just the—I think the act of taking care of oneself is actually the most important generosity that we can express not just to ourselves; it’s really very selfless and it helps everybody who loves us, everybody near us.
TS: Now, you also ask in Practice You—you asked this question as an inquiry—”Where is the confluence of self-care and service in your life?” I thought that was a very creative inquiry. Tell me what’s behind that question for you.
EB: I think it’s also similar, but it goes, it radiates out from the family to your friends, to the folks you serve in your work, your students, your teachers. When you’re taking care of yourself, you’re also able to—we know this—you’re also able to serve really beautifully and well and creatively and nourish others. If in the absence of self-care, you really can’t. The confluence from me happens where my good—my great—work, my best work is able to come forth when I’m caring about myself the most, when get my six to seven hours of sleep, when I keep my appointments to go to acupuncture, when I make sure that I am donating ample funds every month to the causes that I care about. [Those are] all acts of self-care that actually serve.
TS: Now, to end our conversation, Elena, as part of Practice You, you offer a lot different guided meditations that people can do and then write about their experience. I wonder if you could just take us into one short meditation that seems appropriate for our conversation.
EB: I usually do this. I just opened the galleys to—I said, “OK, whatever chapter I open to, that’s the one that I’m going to do.” I open to the green chapter, the love chapter.
Take a moment to just sit quietly and arrange yourself so that you’re—indeed, your perineum is facing the floor. You can close your eyes if you wish and let your hands rest on your thighs. You can bring your palms up if you like so your heart is a little more available. Then you can bring the tips of your ring fingers to touch your thumbs. Let your spine rise tall. Then breathe right into the center of your heart, which is where all that love is held.
Let your breathing rise and fall very naturally. Let that sensation of love lift and be amplified in all directions. As you breathe, I’m going to read to you a few—just three—gentle contemplations that you can consider as you listen to the sound of my voice and continue to follow the cadence and the sound of your breathing. Throughout your listening, just hold a sweet light in your heart’s space.
When have you felt truly loved and cared for, whether by yourself or by another? In the first picture that you arrive at in your mind, let’s say, just let it unfold a little bit. When have you felt truly loved and cared for, whether by yourself or by another?
Now that you have a sense of where that is and when that was and who that is in your body, where does that feeling of love live? If you wish, you can even put your hand there and take a few breaths there.
Then, as a result of that feeling in that space, what thoughts arise from the sensation of that love? Finally, how and with whom could you be more available to receive love? Equally, how and with whom could you be more available to give love? Those answers come pretty quickly, and you can put a little smile on your face. Then very gently release your hand if it’s on your body in that space, and take a nice, deep breath in as you open your eyes once again.
Nice. And then exhale. Through each of the contemplations, Tami, I basically wanted to bring us together into a space where we were both completely safe and breathing, and nothing too complex. Also, really thinking about these very useful, pithy considerations. Where is this located in my body? Or, how could I be a little bit better at this? Or, where have I really experienced this fully, and what can I gain from recalling it, re-experiencing it?
TS: Elena, in conclusion, what’s your vision for Practice You for people all over the world picking up this journal workbook and how they’ll be interacting with it? What do you see in your mind’s eye?
EB: This is actually the fun part. For me, I really think that this can be useful for ages from 8—7 or 8—all the way to 88, 98, 99. I think that this is a useful resource for university classes, poetry classes, self-observation work. I feel that this is great for writing classes. Then we can get into the obvious, more obvious, yoga teacher trainings. I think these are great prompts for people to start to really look into themselves in different ways and it’s all—so much is here together in one place. I did organize it so that all different populations would find it helpful. Already at the BookExpo, when I was there a few weeks back, I had two different school district administrators come to me and say, “I’m going to order this for my public school district.” I thought that is an absolute manifestation. That was my dream.
From kids all the way to kids in college, all the way to adults. A lot of moms and daughters were picking this up and falling in love with it. I think it’s going to go far and wide, wider than even I can imagine right now.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Elena Brower, and she’s created a new book called Practice You: A Journal. It’s a field notebook for your unfolding journey.
With Sounds True, she’s also created the audio training series The Return Home: Essential Meditation Training for a Vital, Centered Life. With coauthor Erica Jago, she created the underground bestseller—a book called Art of Attention: A Yoga Practice Workbook for Movement as Meditation.
Elena, thank you so much for being such a creative human and such a truth-teller. Thank you so much.
EB: Thank you for having me, Tami. It’s a real honor. Thank you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
