About Me

Hi, I'm Elizabeth Engelman (but most friends call me, Lizzy).

I was awarded the 2019 Nilsen Literary Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press and the 2017 Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. My essays have been published in The New York Times and Endeavor Magazine, a publication of the American Society for Deaf Children. I received my MFA from the University of Tampa, where I was honored with the Outstanding Graduate Award. I also hold an MA in Poetry from Lancaster University.

It took me ten years to write my first novel, The Way of the Saints, a story about childhood and ancestral trauma. Through the writing process, I began to heal old narratives. Yet, as Bessel van der Kolk reminds us, the body keeps the score. My own body held onto chronic immune disorder and pain—signals I could no longer afford to ignore.

As the mother of a profoundly deaf son, I dedicated the decade of my 30s to learning American Sign Language. Sign Language is a three-dimensional language, unlike English, which is two-dimensional and linear. In the process of learning sign language (an embodied language), I began to understand that I had spent my whole life deaf to the language of my own body. For the majority of my life, trauma had left me dissociate from my physicality, in my head, and disembodied.

That’s when I turned toward yoga, a somatic practice that has radically transformed my life, healed my autoimmune symptoms, and my relationship with my body. 

The poet Rumi writes, "The wound is where the light enters," and for me, yoga has illuminated my mind, body, and spirit in ways I never would have imagined. 

I received my 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training with Yoga Den Mandarin in Jacksonville, Florida and my 300-hour Ayurveda Yoga Teaching Training with the School Yoga Institute (SYI) in Tulum, Mexico. My teaching style integrates yogic philosophy with modern neuroscience and quantum physics, for a practice that truly seeks to help you remember and connect with your True Self. 

In Jungian terms, our True Self is the essence behind the veil. Persona is a “mask.” From its Latin origin, the word "person" means “mask,” or “character role.” It is a reference to the Roman theater and the masks actors used called personae. Each mask is a strategy for survival. It is like a costume stitched together from memory, conditioning, and collective expectations.

Stepping on a yoga mat means stepping on the path of unmasking. 

For me, yoga is not simply about fitness– It's about learning to align with your True Self, your most authentic divine expression. Carl Jung named this process Individuation, Abraham Maslow described it as Self-Actualization, and Sri Ramana Maharshi called it Self-Realization.

Though their languages and cultures differ, the goal is the same: to awaken to our true nature and live in alignment with the source of All That Is. 

Yoga has always considered itself a science, not a religion. As A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada writes in The Science of Self-Realization, “the prime necessity of life…is to regain our lost spiritual identity” (33). And we do this by engaging the technology of the body.

Today, I'm passionate about learning and sharing yogic philosophy, modern neuroscience, and somatic healing modalities for those on the path of healing and Self-Realization. 

As the Catholic mystic and author Richard Rohr reminds us, the spiritual journey is not a self-improvement project but a radical unveiling. You are not here to become something. You are here to unbecome everything that is not you. And it’s my belief, that when you align with your True Self, life is no longer one of struggle and resistance—it is a life of surrender and flow.