The story behind the studio, from Eli.
Hi, I’m Eli.
I'm a belonging design strategist, keynote speaker and solo-performance artist, and I've spent the last decade obsessed with one question: what makes a room full of individuals feel like they belong there?
The short version: theater taught me how to design a live experience for belonging. Yoga taught me the relationship between #selfcare and #communitycare. My own life taught me how badly I wanted to feel at home with others. And my unexpectedly viral social wellness brand Drunk Yoga® is where all of it collided. Through scaling this subversive yoga drinking game, I learned that belonging is born from the facilitator of it: the person skilled enough to hold the space between themselves and everyone in it.
That realization became The Uplift Center, where my team and I create the conditions for belonging to happen anywhere, and teach other people to do the same.
The Drunk Yoga® Story
In 2017, I married that theater background and those years of teaching yoga into something nobody asked for but a lot of people (thankfully) turned out to want: Drunk Yoga®. It went viral through some press, and as I scaled it around the world through events and teacher trainings, I realized I'd stumbled onto something much bigger than a yoga party. I'd found a recipe for sparking radical belonging and engagement through play.
…I just didn't know that's what it was yet until the pandemic showed me.
The moment the yoga drinking game turned into a recipe for belonging
When my team and I had to pivot Drunk Yoga® to virtual classes during lockdown, we hit a wall: we could not get people in our corporate team-building events to turn on their Zoom cameras. Which was a real problem, because the whole magic of Drunk Yoga® lived in its 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 one to balance your cup on your head? Invent a dance move for everyone to do.
Without cameras, there were no games. And without the games, people were just sipping and stretching alone in their living rooms. Which was, to put it gently, not the point.
So, out of pure necessity, I went down a rabbit hole with one question: how do you get a person to want to engage in something bigger than themselves? Through a lot of research and even more trial and error, every sign pointed to the same answer. Belonging.
Community is circumstantial. It's just people in a room with something in common. Engagement is what we're really after. And belonging is the vehicle that gets us there. Play, it turns out, is the gas in the tank.Once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it. And in a world this lonely and disconnected, stakes felt too high to keep it to myself.
Enter the case for P.L.A.Y.
In 2023, I evolved Drunk Yoga® into the P.L.A.Y. Method, and the P.L.A.Y. Method soon became The Uplift Center. It's where I now teach all kinds of people leaders and community gatherers (not just yoga teachers) how to build belonging through human-centered live experiences: through talks and workshops, consulting and social wellness activations for team-building, corporate retreats, conferences and brand activations in NYC, the Hudson Valley and beyond.
Turns out, the magic was never in the yoga (or the wine). It was in the recipe. The way I'd built the experience worked within any room, for any purpose, because a live experience designed for belonging is the threshold to sustainably healthy cultures, teams, communities and personal relationships. Belonging is the fuel that drives engagement, purpose and loyalty, the exact qualities our frictionless, everything-on-demand world diminishes. The good news, and the reason this whole studio exists, is that belonging can be designed back in, in small, deliberate doses. Over time.
Why "The Uplift Center"
People ask about the name. The Uplift Center earned its name in part because Drunk Yoga®’s tagline was “Lift Your Spirit(s).” So, “the uplift” is a nod to the felt experience of being supported by those around us. One layer deeper, I believe belonging asks two things of us simultaneously: to feel uplifted and centered. Belonging is our natural state, but to experience it, we must be deliberately, decidedly centered in our circumstances (the space around us and the people in it). We find our center-in-circumference by cross-referencing ourselves against the collective. Situated in this place of the conscious belonging-chooser, we feel buoyant (ahem, uplifted).
More simply put, belonging doesn't live exclusively inside us, and it isn't waiting to be found “out there” in the perfect group of people, either. It lives in the space in between. Navigating that space between the self and the world is like, our whole thing. It's what I design, and it's what we help community and organizational leaders to design too.
Our Mission
I built The Uplift Center to help cultures (organizations, communities, teams and the people inside them) work together better: to collaborate with kindness, navigate healthy conflict, play well in community, and stay engaged in something bigger than themselves while maintaining personal wellbeing. What I want is a world where people carry these skills into all of their interactions, so they can make the positive impact they desire and most importantly, enjoy the process.
Beyond the work
I moved to the Hudson Valley from New York City the day before the world locked down, which was either terrible timing or the best decision I've ever made, depending on the day. Because I moved alone, I put my P.L.A.Y. Method to the test in my personal life so I could make new friends. I started hosting a monthly storytelling open mic night, which quickly turned into a thriving performing arts community of friends and local collaborators, making Beacon, NY feel like home. This proved once again that we don’t “find” our people. We cultivate them. When I'm not delivering talks or curating live belonging-building experiences for companies, you'll find me writing and performing my one-woman shows, hiking and camping in the woods and hosting playful-yet-meaningful gatherings for my own community upstate.
The unofficial resume, for the ‘Eli-as-a-human’ curious:
I've spent time volunteering in Ghana, which shaped a lot of how I think about the power of live storytelling as a tool for community engagement.
I grew up as a competitive gymnast, where, one could argue, I first learned that we attempt braver things when someone's there to spot us. Which is more or less what I do now (minus the chalk, of course).
I spend my winters living the “digital nomad life,” working from someplace warm like Costa Rica or Bali, where shoes are optional and seeing new perspectives through other world travelers is required.
Find me on Instagram and LinkedIn + check out my speaking and performance website.
See you in the space in between
-Eli
