Hi, I’m Eli.

Founder of The Uplift Center &
Drunk Yoga®

I created The Uplift Center to make it easy to build belonging through playful, human-centered live experiences.

It started in 2017 when I married my background in theater (BFA, NYU Tisch) with a decade of teaching yoga to create something that broke all the rules: Drunk Yoga® (my subversive, viral yoga drinking game). What I discovered while I scaled this social wellness experience through worldwide events and teacher trainings was bigger than a yoga party. I'd stumbled onto a methodology for sparking belonging and engagement through play.

This became crystal clear when my team and I had to pivot Drunk Yoga® to virtual classes during COVID. At the start of the pandemic, it was tricky to encourage participants in team-building events to turn on their Zoom cameras. But, if they didn't turn them on, we couldn't do our jobs - foster camaraderie through cheeky, interactive games: Lose your balance? Take a sip. Mix up your left and right? Say something you're grateful for. Spill on your neighbor's mat? Give them a compliment. Last person to put your cup on your head? Make up a dance move for everyone to do.

If we couldn't see people, we couldn't play. And without the games, people were simply sipping and stretching in their living rooms alone, and that wasn't the point of the class.

So I did a deep dive: How do I get people to want to engage in something bigger than themselves? How do I make them want to turn on their cameras?

Through research, trial and error, testing and retesting, all signs pointed to one thing: create belonging.

I quickly learned that community is what we have (people in a room with something in common), engagement is what we want (community members feeling accountable for their own experience), and belonging is the vehicle that gets us from one to the other. Play is the gas in the tank (ritual, gamification, curiosity, exploration, silliness, presence and connection).

I'd also road-tested this “playbook” on myself when I moved upstate one day before lockdown in 2020. When I started a monthly storytelling open mic night, I brought my people to me, and rebuilt community from scratch. That’s when I realized that social wellness requires strategy, not luck.

Once I saw this, I couldn’t unsee it, and in our modern world, stakes feel to high not to share what I learned. I want to live in a world where people dig into hard conversations instead of running from conflict, where we lead with curiosity instead of fear, and where we prioritize community over individualism so that we may get over ourselves and actually engage with what matters: each other and planet we live on.

This vision turned Drunk Yoga® into the P.L.A.Y. Method, which evolved into The Uplift Center, where my team and I help humans and those who lead them build sustainable belonging through live experiences and trainings.

When I'm not delivering talks or curating experiences, you can find me working on my one-woman shows, hiking the Hudson Valley, surfing in Costa Rica, or geeking out on astrology.