Ari Weller is in the Happiness Business

Picture the executive director of a retreat center. Specifically, a Jewish retreat center that, depending on who you ask, is either the heart of a transdenominational revitalization of Judaism or the kind of hippy-dippy groovy place that engenders eye-rolling. You’re probably imagining a guy in his fifties, earnest but harried, maybe soft around the middle – wouldn’t be out-of-place at a Grateful Dead show, if there were such things anymore. Right?

Not Ari Weller. He doesn’t look the part (at least, not as I’ve just described it), and his background doesn’t match it either.

Ari Weller’s journey has taken him from advertising sales, to bodywork and personal training, through integrative movement conditioning and the Embodied Judaism project, to working as the executive director of the new Elat Chayyim Center for Jewish Spirituality at Isabella Freedman in Falls Village, CT.

Elat Chayyim has long embodied both the potential, and frustrations, of the Jewish spiritual world. On the one hand, it hosts brilliant teachers and is a place where real transformation occurs. On the other hand, it has long had a tendency toward wacky programming and the disorganization typical of the nonprofit sector. After it nearly went bankrupt this year, many are looking to Weller to salvage what’s best about the institution and jettison the worst. This is a tall order.

He’s an unassuming and fairly soft-spoken guy. When we met at the new Elat Chayyim earlier this year, he seemed a little bit dazzled by the way this new turn in his life has unfolded. But in conversation it becomes clear that there’s a narrative throughline that allows his disparate experiences to cohere.

It’s also clear that he regards himself, on some level, as a man on a mission. He’s in the happiness business, and he’d like all of us to come along for the ride. – RB RB: So, we’ll get to the retreat center part in a bit – but how did a nice Jewish boy end up becoming a personal trainer? AW: I worked in advertising for five and a half years after I graduated from college, and that work took me from Tucson to Phoenix to San Diego to New York. There was a high level of turnover in my field but I was the #1 sales person at the largest radio station in America, Z100 in NY, and I was 25 years old. RB: That’s pretty intense. AW: I got to a place of realizing I was unhappy with the work that I was doing. So I took three months off. I was trying to find myself, find what my purpose was and what kind of work I should be doing.

I’d been an athlete growing up, so I was always very into working out – even when I was working in advertising I always looked forward to the end of the day when I could go do something physical. I was a member of Equinox, which was a posh gym chain, and when I was working in advertising I used to show up there every night in my suit and tie. But now that I was unemployed, I was showing up during the middle of the day. I bleached my hair blond! And people there noticed I was showing up at a different time of day, noticed I looked different, and they asked what was going on with me. They saw my skills, my knowledge of the body, and asked if I wanted to train there to work for them.

My ego was telling me I wasn’t going to become a personal trainer – I was the kind of guy who hires the personal trainer! But when I put ego aside, I realized this was something I was genuinely interested in. It doesn’t sound like much now, but it was a mind-blowing thing, to realize that I could make money doing what I loved. RB: I hear that. AW: But the gym worked me like a dog and paid next to nothing. So we parted ways. I took my client base, and ran my own personal training business for ten years.

In the ad business people would beat you up all day long to get a better rate out of you, and then at the end of the day they were still beating you up, even if you delivered what they were asking for. But in physical training, I felt I was helping people. I was in the business of happiness.

Initially I was interested in working with people on the aesthetic level. But then I had a major shattering of my physical vessel – in the span of a year and a half I tore my left rotator cuff, double left hernia surgery, left knee surgery. The reality was, I’d been trained by a bodybuilder, and the techniques I was using created aesthetic results, but it was all very superficially. The inside could no longer support what was happening on the outside. RB: An embodied metaphor. AW: People wanted this kind of training from me, and my ego was being strengthened by it, so I went with it. It wasn’t until my own body broke down that I realized I was damaging myself, and teaching that to others as well. That was the beginning of my spiritual awakening. Recognizing that there’s more to life than looking good and feeling good and having people desire you. I started doing a lot of inner work, studying with people who’d studied with Joseph Pilates, and doing Feldenkrais, and learning from yoga masters. I put together a system to heal my body, and then taught that to the people I was working with. And that’s what I was doing for 10 years until I got this job! RB: Say more about what you’re doing now, and how it arose out of what you were doing before? AW: As part of this spiritual search I became interested in eastern spiritual paths. That’s what I was drawn to. The Judaism I grew up with in Plano, Texas wasn’t filling my needs. RB: I grew up in San Antonio, so I think I know what you mean. People up here always ask me, ‘There are Jews in Texas?’ And I say sure there are Jews in Texas, but I never found the kind of progressive Jewish community there that I’ve sought and found in my adult life here in New England. Do you think the trajectory of your journey would have changed if you’d had access to some of Judaism’s wisdom teachings about the body when you were a kid? AW: No, I don’t… As a kid, spiritual moments were lying in bed fearfully contemplating the emptiness of death – bobbing up and down in my swimming pool for minutes at a time, creating a Yogic breathing technique – and most importantly, retreating to the local creek and tree house for time alone to just be with running water, tadpoles, and soft shell turtles allowing my brain to think, or not think, freely without parental or social conditioning. Those were doorways to my childhood wisdom.

But when I was growing up Judaism didn’t seem to have an answer for me. So I looked at the Eastern paths. By then I had met the woman who would become my wife, who was raised with no religion; her mother had been a Buddhist in Vietnam and her father didn’t have a religious practice. So when we got engaged I had one request, that we learn together a little bit about Judaism so we could give our children a little bit of a Jewish experience.

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That grew, in time, into her wanting to convert to Judaism. At which point I thought, ‘Oh shit, the ball’s in my court now!’ So I went to the bookstore and started to look through these Judaica books. And of course I didn’t want to read the traditional ones, I wanted The Jew in the Lotus, Niles Goldstein, stuff like that. Of course, The Jew in the Lotus involved a lot of stuff about the interaction of Judaism and Buddhism, and I was just blown away. I thought, ‘Wow, there’s people out there doing this!’ RB: Everyone I know who inhabits this corner of the Jewish world has a story like that, of finding the book or the teacher that startled us out of what we thought Judaism was, and into a realization of what Judaism actually can be. AW: David Ingber and I were both being trained to teach gyrotonic in New York. He was interested in creating an integral Judaism, and he lent me God is a Verb by David Cooper. I read the book, and I was blown open. I thought, maybe some of the answers I was looking for were in a Jewish path. I didn’t realize this thought process, this consciousness existed in Judaism. Then a friend accidentally left a David Cooper CD, Kabbalah 101, at my house. And literally the next day, a catalogue arrived at my house from Elat Chayyim. I’d never heard of the place. And on the second page was a listing for a silent retreat with David Cooper. I thought, ‘This is bashert – I have to go to this retreat.’

And that meditation retreat was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

At the end of that first retreat, I met Jay [Michaelson] and we started a sitting group together in New York. Somewhere along the way, Jay concocted this idea of Embodied Judaism. ‘We can use my Jewish knowledge and your body knowledge and bring a kind of embodied Judaism to Elat Chayyim!’ That’s how that all unfolded. RB: Now that you’re at Elat Chayyim – given that you initially came to the place as a seeker – what’s it like to work there, to be responsible for creating a container for others to have the kind of experience that you had? AW: I’m standing outside right now, talking to you on the cordless phone – I’m literally 100 feet from the 2 lakes that we have here. I’m looking up at the hills, at the Teva kids working in the distance, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m in heaven.’ It’s such a gift. I’m truly humbled by the position that I have, because I realize how much responsibility is in my hands. And, of course, this is an amazing place to raise my son – knowing he’s going to grow up in these surroundings.

In my last job I intermixed the physical, the spiritual, and the business side of things. I was very much a business person at my training business, and that’s one of the things my clients liked, that there was an integration, it wasn’t just ‘he’s good with the body but doesn’t show up for appointments.’ But this – this is what I was seeking and lacking and yearning for in my last job. Integrating the physical and the spiritual in my own practice is great, but I wanted to make a deeper impact on a larger number of people. I’m still in the happiness business, but on a deeper level. RB: Every time I visit Elat Chayyim I’m a little bit awed by what the residential community creates. What’s it like having a son who will grow up in this kind of community? AW: In the Jewish context we don’t see this very often, maybe on a kibbutz, but this kind of intentional community does exist in other contexts, and it was a major part of our decision-making. We kept thinking, ‘How cool is this going to be for [my son] Jacob, it’s like a village!’ There’s always somebody there who wants to hold him, to play with him, to laugh with him, sing with him. It’s incredible. He’s going to be introduced to ideas, to teachers, to ways of being I wish I’d been introduced to a lot earlier! He’s going to love it. At least, I hope he is. Maybe he’ll say, ‘Why’d you leave New York?’ RB: Yeah, just wait until he’s twelve or thirteen and jonesing for live music and all-night diners. AW: He’ll be wanting McDonald’s and cigarettes. RB: One of the phrases I see a lot of, when I read about your life and work, is b’tselem elokim – ‘in the image of God.’ What does that mean to you, what does that evoke for you, how does that tie into the work that you’re doing? AW: That’s a tough one. Part of me wants to say, what is not in the image of God? Everything is the image of God. No matter what anyone’s work is, what anyone’s purpose is, whether you describe it as being in the image of God or Buddha or Vishnu or whatever, it’s all ultimately part of this Oneness of everything that is. And what we tried to do in Embodied Judaism is just say, no matter what it is, if everything is part of this Oneness, you can find God in it. So why look any further than the easiest place for you to access, which is the body?

So start there. Start where you are. It was my starting place, so it made sense to me. I didn’t realize until things started to fall apart in my own body that I needed to seek deeper health. I think that’s the case for most people, when it becomes obvious to them that death is on the near horizon, the body spurs something, a search for divineness.

And that’s the work we do here at Elat Chayyim, too. We provide this retreat center, a physical place to try to access something deeper. A place to get away to, to step outside of the proverbial box of your life, put aside your habits, put aside your everyday mind and look deeper to what this can mean, this idea that God is One, God is everything.

We provide the space for people to do the work of answering that question. I don’t have an ultimate answer, and I’m fine with that. But I know that we need to step aside from ordinary life in order to answer the question.