I’m Eli Walker

When I got a scholarship to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, I moved to Manhattan before I could talk myself out of it. I didn't know anyone. I didn't know the city. I just knew that I needed to be somewhere that took the question of how humans connect as seriously as I did.

Tisch gave me a BFA in Acting. But more than that, it gave me a decade-long obsession with what happens in the space between people. The electricity of a room that's fully, collectively present. The way a shared laugh can dissolve the distance between strangers in an instant. The strange alchemy that turns a group of individuals into something that actually feels like a "we."

I became a yoga teacher after graduation — partly out of passion, partly out of broke-in-New-York practicality. I loved it. But I kept noticing something: yoga, for all its wisdom about the inner life, was a remarkably solitary practice. Everyone on their own mat, eyes closed, in their own world. I kept thinking: what if it didn't have to be?

So I did something that made very little logical sense. I turned yoga into a drinking game.

And then something unexpected happened: it worked. Press picked it up. It went viral, I got a book deal, and sold out events for years in New York, Dallas, and LA.

But underneath all the chaos and the press and the somewhat chaotic branding, I was quietly obsessing over the "why" of it all; as in, why did it work? Why did strangers who showed up as individuals to a wine-and-yoga event leave feeling like they were a part of something bigger than themselves? What was it about the combo of gamification, social ritual and giving people permission to be a little ridiculous together that opened the door to belonging?

I spent years trying to answer that through research, trial n' error and refinement across hundreds of live experiences. Then, when the pandemic hit, the whole world was suddenly living inside the question I'd been asking for a decade.

Enter my "aha" moment: We've been treating belonging like a happy accident, as in crossing our fingers at events, hoping people like each other. But belonging isn't "found." It's facilitated. And once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it. Belonging isn't sparked through luck. It's designed with the same ingredients, in every room, for every human and community they comprise.