Birthdays, wisdom, whimsy

...and other summery things

Hello everyone! I’m so glad you’re here.

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Hi! Happy August! Two weeks off the newsletter sauce and I feel like I have so much to share. How are you?

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This photo about sums up the energy of my birthday. I was manically happy all day, first at the spa with a small group of friends, then later at Tony Di Napoli’s surrounded by heaps of pasta and beautiful women.

Sojo is like an airport spa. It’s huge, impeccably clean, and requires the same amount of security to enter you’d find at JFK. I knew I wanted to take the whole day off lapping around in bodies of water, so when I put out feelers and a few friends said they were absolutely down, I was delighted. I had a slow morning on Tuesday drinking coffee in my robe, up earlier than usual with the same birthday giddiness I’ve felt every year on July 28th for as long as I can remember. I think I even got up out of bed and said it’s my birthdayyyyyy out loud. Lol.

If you’ve taken my class in the last week, you’ve heard about Terry and Gail. But the newsletter would not be complete if I didn’t also share the story here:

After locking our shoes, handing over our IDs, complimenting each other’s bathing suits and changing into robes, we began our journey in the outdoor infinity pool. While wading, we noticed two older ladies in the corner with short white hair and matching black one-pieces, looking cute and fabulous. Ugh I love them, I said. I hope that’s my future.

We collectively decided to (casually) swim closer to them. Our tactic worked. Within a few minutes, Terry and I had discovered we shared a birthday. We did that classic Leo thing of Oh my godddddd, it’s my birthday too!! while touching hands. Terry was turning 80 that day, and Gail, her lifelong bestie, was 86. They were cool as hell. We learned that they met because Gail was Terry’s kids’ pediatrician back in the day. Terry had lived all over the world, a social worker who helped children be placed with foster families. Both of them were now retired and solo, but still maintaining very active lifestyles. Terry, who lives in Minnesota, had flown in for the weekend to spend her birthday with Gail in New Jersey. They had spent the previous night out in the city seeing a show and were now here at the spa, doing the same thing I’d decided to do for my big day.

As you can imagine, we were tickled. We ending up chatting with them for nearly an hour, talking about life and husbands of years past, our own careers and dreams. At one point Gail was gesticulating and I went for it, suggesting we all hold hands for a second and make a toast to female friendship. If you’d seen us from above, we looked like a gaggle of witches circled up in the water. Before swimming away, my friend Sarah blurted out- do you guys have any life advice?! And I’m so glad she did.

Keep. Your. Friendships. Close. Community is everything, they both answered, especially your female friendships. I nodded enthusiastically, looking around at the gorgeous women in my life, knowing I’ve nailed the assignment. I was struck that the three women who’d joined me that day were all friends I’ve met through other friends of mine. Each of them are people I now hang out with one-on-one and consider lifelong relationships.

Now, bear with me. It’s no surprise to anyone reading this that I love women. Maybe more than your average person. My apartment is filled with images of the female form and I have been checking out boobs in locker rooms since the early nineties. Despite not wanting to be in a sexual relationship with my friends, I am madly in love with each of them, and have always been lucky enough to somehow be surrounded by large groups of smart, wise, kind, grounded, glorious ladiezzzz. I am a big advocate of making new friends as an adult, as well as maintaining the ones I’ve had since early puberty days. Teaching yoga definitely helps with this- it naturally widens my surface area- but I also know it’s because I have always prioritized and tended to my friendships.

Other pieces of advice were to keep moving your body, and never stop learning. We soaked up their words like plants to sunlight, talking about them for the next six hours as we moved in and out of saunas, pools with silk water and charcoal water, pools made of cedarwood and bamboo. I loved seeing all the body diversity at Sojo, other groups of friends doing the same thing we were, and of course the many couples dispersed throughout, looking wet and hot. It was my perfect day. We ate lunch in their big food hall in our robes, where everyone is also in their robe, barefoot. I laughed when my friend Leeanne told me the story of taking her boyfriend there recently- who had never been to a spa- and upon looking around at everyone barefoot in white eating, said- is this heaven?

I don’t have any photos of Terry and Gail, but their legacy is forever burned into my brain. If I am half as effervescent as they are when I am their age, I have a lot to look forward to.

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Forgive me, I am almost done talking about my birthday.

I returned home around 5pm and sat on my living room floor for an hour or so catching up on texts, relishing. I was meeting more friends for dinner downtown and needed to get ready despite feeling like a sleepy moisturized seal. I generally prefer small groups for dinner, but everyone ended up being available that night and I wanted to go somewhere that would accommodate large parties without a fuss so I opted for my tried and true Tony’s, the first New York City restaurant I ever waited tables at the summer after my sophomore year of college, a whopping 19-years-old.

They gave us a big round table right in the middle of the restaurant and I felt like a bride married to her amazement looking around at all my beautiful friends, each who I know from different life stages, feeling so grateful and loved. I sipped my dirty martini, buttered my bread, and made everyone go around the table and share an intention for their coming year because you can’t take the yoga teacher out of the bish and without this being the intention, it ended up resulting in everyone telling me what they love about me HAHA and it was very much like oh my god staaaaaahhhhp it’s too much… but also keep going??

I ended up not eating that much which is shocking for someone who can pound a bread basket by herself. I was too full of adrenaline, and happy happy happy.

Despite the slight disbelief that I am 37, I spent the ensuing days basking in all the festivities, mostly just grateful for another year.

This morning I received Jerico Mandybur’s monthly newsletter. I was moved by this particular passage, where she writes about the underlying intention behind her many creative pursuits:

I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about the arts, philosophy, psychology, ecology, spiritual practice, imagination, and the strange, symbolic ways that human beings make meaning from their lives.

From the outside, these things I do may look unrelated. I’ve never experienced them that way. To me, they’ve always been expressions of the same question.

How do we become more deeply ourselves? Or maybe a better question: How do we remember ourselves when the world has given us so many reasons to forget?

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν. Know thyself.

Everything I’ve made has been a personal attempt to stay close to that inquiry, and a public attempt to support other people and communities to do the same. Individual individuation and collective liberation.

Each professional exploration has been another doorway into understanding how people can and do grow from suffering, learn from beauty, and orient to wholeness. How our natural predisposition (under all the power structure’s programming) is towards connection and wholeness.

Conversations I’ve had with those of you who have worked with / reached out to me have taught me that beneath our different experiences and identities sit remarkably similar longings: to belong more fully to ourselves, to trust our wise inner knowing, to express meaningfully, to move through grief, to understand change, to return to a state of play, and to find language for experiences and feelings that often resist it.

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I resonate with so many things she writes here, but if I had to take just one of them in my pocket with me for the coming year it would be: how do I become more deeply myself?

I have changed and I am changing. Though this is sometimes overwhelming — and in moments tender because I often long to go back to past phases of my life and re-experience them through the lens of now, it is more hopeful than anything else. I am proud of the person I have become and excited for the self - selves- I still have to meet.

What a gift, despite bills and illness and suffering and the incessant mouth sounds some people make in public, to get to reinvent the wheel at any age we choose, if we are lucky enough to be given the chance. I don’t take being alive lightly, and I hope to never.

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As I’m writing this, I run into my bestie Hallie, and my student Larry, both who live in the neighborhood. A woman sitting at an outside table has her dog at her feet who is the shape of a meatball. In the days leading up to my birthday, I was missing Robin more than usual. This is pretty par for the course at this point; the grief tends to rear around holidays or occasions that mark time.

The day before my birthday, Hallie texted me this:

Morning my almost birthday princess pie. I had a dream last night that Robin’s spirit was always in bed with you. In the dream I saw you could see her body cuddling you but her body was translucent.

And later that night, a DM from a neighborhood friend:

I was in fort tryon today and I thought I saw you and robin laying on the grass. Looked just like you both.

The messages felt like a little wink from Robs, or at least that’s how I’m interpreting them. It goes back to that old Einstein quote about choosing to live your life as though nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle, blah blah blah. But really. I’ll take the latter.

In addition to celebrating my birth and teaching my usual lineup of classes, I have spent the last few weeks doing very fun and summery activities, some of which include: a full day excursion to Rockaway Beach with friends via ferry where I got only slightly nauseous on the way there, picnics with giant snack spreads in the park, catching up over coffee with a dear friend I haven’t seen in awhile, buying art at vintage markets, pickling my own onions, reading a lot, painting my nails cool colors, and of course, the place you can find me most: lying on the couch watching TV with the fan blowing on me.

August comes with a slight twinge of panic that summer’s end is near, but also the reminder to enjoy it. I am genuinely excited for Fall while wanting to savor the right now-ness of this season instead of anticipating what’s to come. On Thursday I fly to Charleston to visit my childhood best friend and hopefully be covered in her three dogs- Tina, Greg, and Otis- all weekend. In a few weeks, I’ll head to Cape Cod for my family’s annual pilgrimage.

For now, I am seeking out lunch before heading to teach my evening classes. Thank you for being here, wherever you currently are.

With love & gratitude,

Emma

ps- due to being away, no classes from Thursday 8/6-Monday 8/10 (monday night local classes TBD)

See you next week!!

one of the only photos I took at the spa because no phones allowed!

little glow up for dinner

Tony’s now has a photographer which is ridiculous and hilarious and my friend Meg insisted on buying me this photo of all of us, which now sits on my bookshelf. Do we look like sister wives or wut

Get yo self the type of friends who wrap your presents in New Yorker articles!

and hand you bouquets of flowers

evidence of pickled onions

and a lit beach spread (not pictured: homemade artisanal sandwiches and bean & cheese burritos)

golden at golden hour

Finally, a poem that embodies how I’ve been feeling lately <3

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PS- I have quietly launched two back-to-back retreats next April hosted at Topia Retreat Center in Baja Sur, Mexico, where I took a group this past March and fell deeply in love. The first week is full with repeaters, and I have just TWO spots left, 1 single, 1 shared. If you’d like more info, shoot me an email and I’d be happy to send you the page with all of the information. The retreat is April 9-14th, 2027!

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Local friends/students: Heights Meditation & Yoga officially moved into our permanent home on 181st and riverside! It feels so special to have a yoga studio and wellness space open again in the neighborhood. Come support the studio, or take my class on Monday nights. Would love to see you there :)

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Bali Retreat is live!! And we only have 3 more spots!

Join Steph Schwartz and I November 12-19th, 2026, at the beautiful Balquisse Heritage Hotel in Jimbaran for a week of yoga, culture, and beauty. Find all details HERE, as well as linked on my website and instagram. The retreat is half full- we’d love to have you!

ps-a former student reached out saying the hotel where we’re staying is “one of my favorite places on earth”

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