From Student To Teacher

Elena Brower and Amy Ippoliti first met when they were young yoga students studying to become teachers themselves. Now, they’re leading and mentoring the next generation of students and teachers. We caught up with the yoginis as they sat in Brower’s New York City living room to talk about lineage, mentorship, and what they agree is the key to strong leadership: studentship.

- Meghan Rabbitt

Elena Brower answers her mobile phone excitedly when I call. Sure, the busy New York City–based yoga teacher, life coach, and businesswoman is eager to talk about topics she’s passionate about—leadership, mentorship, and studentship—but she seems downright thrilled to announce on speakerphone that her dear friend, Amy Ippoliti, a Boulder, Colorado–based yoga teacher, is sitting right next to her.

Brower and Ippoliti go back 20 years, when they met as students of Cyndi Lee. Both would go on to study with John Friend, the founder of Anusara Yoga whose school crumbled in 2012 after allegations of unethical and illegal behavior. (They each turned in their Anusara certifications soon thereafter.) The pair leaned on each other after publicly denouncing their teacher’s behavior and as they figured out how to keep their lineage in mind while they struck out on their own.

“I saw it as an opportunity for all of us to go and do what it is that we were always meant to be doing,” says Brower, “which was to teach the finest of what we’d been taught and to lead by example. Even though we couldn’t go forward in the paradigm we had known at that point, I think we paved new paths for ourselves, elegantly. Each of us took what resonated with us about the [Anusara] methodology and the heart space in which we were held for a long time, and we walked forward with it.”

“It’s true,” adds Ippoliti. “We evolved the teachings by bringing what was valuable and infusing our own individual work.”

THE ART OF STUDENTSHIP