I’ve known Elena Brower since 2012, when a voice woke me from a deep sleep at Burning Man telling me to go to the Temple. I obeyed without question and got on my bike. It was the morning after my grandmother had died in my presence. I had asked my mom if we could delay the service because I felt I needed to go to the dust. It was an odd and selfish request, but somehow, we all understood it.
I rode to the Temple before dawn and saw Elena. We had never met, but we had spent years side by side in spirit, training in the same rooms and loving the same people. Our friendship was immediate, and that morning became one of the major pivots of my life and the reason my world soon shifted to New York City.
From the moment I began teaching at Vira, Elena’s Soho studio, she has relentlessly supported my work and the work of countless others. Generous is too small a word to describe Elena as a sister and as a teacher moving through the world.
Her new book, Hold Nothing (available for pre-order) is a living, breathing expression of her generosity. True to form, as she launches this book into the world, she turns her light outward by interviewing friends and highlighting their voices in conversation about what it truly means to hold nothing.
The following is a conversation we had inspired by her book.
E: In this season, what does it mean to you to hold nothing?
Ally: In this season, to hold nothing for me is an active practice of talking to the people in my life when something is coming between our closeness. Finding explicit, uncomfortable, but relieving ways to let them know what’s up for me, and actively hear what’s up for them. If a dynamic needs to change, if I am quietly resenting, overly pleasing, or accommodating things that are creating distance or a lack of honesty - holding nothing for me means clearing the air. Taking accountability, letting them know my hidden narrative, and seeing if we can hold it together so it has a chance to become an honest nothing - rather than just an unspoken something.
Perhaps, for me it’s being really curious about what I call “nothing.”
An earlier version of me will write things off, pretend they don’t matter, become “resilient and capable.” The relational work of becoming more honest and revealed is always my work, but I am honing in on things I call “nothing” that are actually hidden, unconscious, and at times painful. Ascertaining where, when and with whom I do this.
An interesting paradox, these words, “hold nothing.” The impossibility of being actually able to hold nothing is the eternal koan, I imagine.
Elena and me teaching during the Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim, circa 2019.
E: How does this contemplation dovetail with The Work, your work, the work of our world in this time? (Reader: This is in reference to Byron Katie’s Work)
Ally: With perfection. The Work is a constant meditation on the question “what am I holding?” The story I hold of you, of me, of life, of God.
What I hold against myself and the stories I hold against us all.
The holding of unchecked, unquestioned narratives, painful in their nature, guarding my heart, separating me from Love.
The work doesn’t ask us for insight, it asks us to honestly sit, quietly, patiently, with the armor of the ego, and allow it to be held by the eternal wisdom available in each moment we are genuinely willing to ask - what’s up, is this true, really true?
If it’s not, is it helping more than it’s hurting. If there is a crack in the truth of this that my mind could open up to, if I can feel it all the way to its inception, could I open to the possibility that at its core is nothing but vague memory scar tissued by story and identity?
That at the core of what hurts, truly nothing exists. I genuinely believe we cannot let go of anything until we understand the nature of why it lives. Why it hurts, why we’ve held onto it for so long - I don’t believe this needs to be a long and arduous process - just a dedicated and curious one to know the nature of what shapes us, what we hold, and why. I believe that what we each hold is sacred - our stories, our painful pasts that shape our bodies and our lives, is our sacred material used to awaken is so special. For this very reason, to follow it back like breadcrumbs to see how that at the birth of whatever has hurt or caused stress is usually something so tender, so genuinely practical that our body and identity have held on to, that to see it in its true nature, allows it to be genuinely released.
Photo: Pete Longworth.
E: What is emerging in your understanding of the practice of meditation? Any insights recently fortifying or scaffolding your practice?
Ally: As it goes, I understand less and less the more silence draws me into her fold. What I am understanding is how easy it is to allow covert control to sneak into a daily practice and then call it meditation.
Wanting to know what is going to happen, wanting to control how my mind and body show up to the unknown, etc. Meditation practice has allowed me to deeply understand myself and regulate through 25 years of practice, and at other times, I use it like a security blanket - as if I believe it could protect me from ths fragility of life. Covert control shows up for me in mediation when I start to want to know things more than I want to just be with things.
Personally, I am bookending my practice with a lot of energetic hygiene and prayer. I find that at the beginning of my sit, if I get really in my body, anchored, surrounded and protected by my intention, then the eddy line I cross toward silence feels a little smoother. Whatsoever happens in the space that I call meditation is then held by the prayer at the end to just let it be helpful - to my life, to my pain, to my dream, to anybody I interact with, to anybody who’s ever held me, hurt me; to anybody I’ve ever held or hurt.
I just pray someway, somehow, quiet awareness helps.
Additionally, today’s audio is a 20-minute meditation to land in the generosity of the moment. When the arduousness of life makes you feel tested, depleted, or like Persephone pushing the stone, this practice invites you to rest in what is given and available in each moment.
