First, a favor, a review, and a FREE VIRTUAL EVENT TODAY, Sunday.
Hold Nothing might make some lists, and I’d love to invite you into this monumental moment with me. Purchase more than one book or leave a review to join me for a live virtual workshop THIS TUESDAY, to be recorded and will be sent your way. With each order, you’ll receive gifts; redeem here. Thankful for your presence in this project.
“This is not a book about perfection or enlightenment. It is about honest self-inquiry, unclenching, letting the heart tell the truth, and learning the art of staying. Staying with our history, our longing, our grief, our love, our boundaries, our becoming.
“Elena’s writing is devotional without being dogmatic. She offers questions that act like doorways. Practices that anchor the body when the mind wants to flee. Reflections that invite us to release the weight we’ve been carrying without realizing it. Her language is spacious, tender, and lit from within by someone who has walked through her own lineage of hurt and chosen healing.”
—Michelle Dowd, Forager Field Notes
TODAY Sunday, November 23rd, 2pm Eastern Time, FREE, virtual. Join me with Carrie-Anne Moss, actor, author, dear friend, on what it means to hold nothing in this season of our lives. Click the image below or here.
Tour update.
Spending two weeks on the road this month, in Florida then New York, something clicks, a glimmer of connection within myself that’s been brewing. Landing in the arms of longtime friends at Eudemonia Summit, then making my way to New York City that embraced me in a long, swaying hug, I found myself at a dead stop. It was wild.
As in, walking in the same high heeled clog boots from six years ago, shined like new, my inner conversation has somehow disappeared. As in, even in the joys: Getting dressed each day, like a little girl, playing, there was no negative self-talk. Organizing myself to be five minutes early everywhere, I see how my past was all this striving, fighting, racing against time; now I feel weirdly relaxed and softened.
And while I’m not quite getting enough sleep, trying to be comfortable ignoring email, the layer of “i must” and “i should” has dissolved. Now I’m just doing it, my very best, no darkness. I literally don’t recognize the quieter mind with which I’m walking these familiar streets.
Brief interlude: James took this pic of me in my favorite pieces from Eyn Vas, and the image reminds me of my boundless gratitude: to Ally Bogard for hosting our first few nights and for our unforgettable adventure. To Robert Louey for arranging our time uptown, the warm welcome from the staff at the Carlyle, and those FLOWERS. To Michelle Martello for showing up, every day with detailed help, and Zane for the hugs. To my heart sister Rima at Souk for hosting our epic old-school class, David Greenspan for your trust, Paulette for your endless care, Divya for that delicious tea, and for four meals in six days at abcV. That place still magnetizes me.
To all the friends, students, colleagues for two decades and more, you know who you are, making the effort to show up to squeeze me and thank me—THANK YOU for your presence. You have no idea how full i feel from being in that room with you.
But perhaps most importantly, and maybe a whole separate post, to Yung Pueblo for your generous depth of inquiry and practice. Our seamless, timeless conversation at The Strand with 150 hearts exemplifies why we prioritize sitting, and I will never forget the feeling of looking for some thread of nervousness within myself, and not finding it.
Have you ever felt that? Does it last?
The gentleness with myself comes and goes, but it’s there, more accessible than in the past.
This week’s micropodcast.
On equanimity as fortitude, bringing your full self to the moment, transmuting grief into growth, and finally realizing there’s nothing to fix.
Jeff Krasno is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform for personal and societal well-being. He hosts the Commune podcast, interviewing a wide variety of health experts and luminaries from Andrew Huberman and Marianne Williamson to Matthew McConaughey and Gabor Maté. Jeff pens a personal weekly essay titled “Commusings” that explores spirituality, wellness and culture and is distributed to over one million subscribers every Sunday. Jeff is also the author of Good Stress, a collection of wellness protocols that he developed to reverse his diabetes, lose sixty pounds and reclaim his health at age fifty.
Jeff and his better three-quarters, Schuyler Grant, own and operate Commune Topanga, a 10-acre wellness center and production lab where they host regular retreats together featuring yoga, cold plunging, sauna bathing, lectures and story-telling. They also have three beautiful daughters, Phoebe, Lolli and Micah, whom I’ve known since we were all children and breastfeeding and jumping on couches spilling the takeout. They currently live in Los Angeles, California.
Our conversation covers a good deal of personal ground; may it serve you in your process. The piece from Jeff that we reference is right here.
With a paid subscription, you’ll be able to view all posts, comment, attend Live Gatherings, and access archives. Subscriptions will be donated to support local food depots for the foreseeable future. If you have financial need, I offer a handful of scholarship subscriptions each month; message me.
Thank you so very much for being here.
