Hi there!

I’m Eli Walker

Belonging Expert.

Performer. Social

Wellness Entrepreneur.

The person who created the world’s first yoga drinking game, then turned that viral phenomenon into a methodology used by leaders from Fortune 500s all the way to communities in rural Africa to build culture.

I help organizations and individuals build belonging on purpose.

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Past clients

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My Story

I grew up in rural Wisconsin, which is a great place to dream about belonging somewhere else.

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 combined yoga with wine and turned it into a live social event.

Drunk Yoga

Drunk Yoga® was born — the world's most unlikely social wellness experiment.

And then something unexpected happened: it worked. Press picked it up. It went viral. We got a Times Square billboard, a book deal, years of sold-out events in New York, Dallas, and LA.

But underneath all the chaos and the press and the somewhat chaotic branding, I was quietly obsessing over a different question entirely: why did it work? Why did strangers who showed up alone to a wine-and-yoga event leave feeling like they'd made actual friends? What was it about lowering the stakes, adding some play, giving people permission to be a little ridiculous together — that cracked belonging wide open?

I spent years trying to answer that. I researched it, tested it, refined it across hundreds of live experiences. And then the pandemic happened — and suddenly the whole world was living inside the question I'd been asking for a decade.

That's when it crystallized. Belonging isn't something that just happens when the conditions are right. It's not a byproduct of proximity or shared calendars or good catering. It's something we have to build — deliberately, intentionally, every time we walk into a room together.

In 2023, I launched The Uplift Center — a school for belonging — and developed the P.L.A.Y. Method (Place, Language, Acknowledgment, You)

The P.L.A.Y. method: a framework that translates the theatrical devices I'd been using for 20 years into something any facilitator, leader, or organizer can put to work immediately. It's the methodology behind every keynote, every workshop, every experience I design. And it's the thing I wish someone had handed me the first time I tried to make a room full of strangers feel like a community.

The Uplift Center

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Now I travel the world as a keynote speaker, emcee, and solo performance artist — bringing that methodology to stages at organizations like Google, Spotify, Porsche, TikTok, Intel, and Mastercard. I also perform my one-woman show Kill the Buddha, which is about spiritual burnout and self-help culture and the quietly exhausting project of trying to belong to yourself.

When I'm not on a stage, I'm hiking in the Hudson Valley (my home base), writing about social wellness, and doing the occasional collaborative work with UN Women on storytelling for social impact — which still makes me pinch myself a little.

The throughline in all of it — the Drunk Yoga era and the keynotes and the one-woman shows and the belonging research — is the same idea I've been circling since I was a kid dreaming about a city I'd never been