AELYS Host & Founder | Steffi Grube

To the Moon & back

I have spent most of my adult life inside the world of wellness. It has given me some of the most important practices of my life - and some of the beliefs I later had to unlearn.

Over the years, teachers I admired disappointed me. Systems I had learned from began to fall apart. Stories that had been presented as ancient truths turned out to be much more complicated.

I found out that the wellness bubble can damage you in quiet, lasting ways - while the practice, offered by the very people who harmed you, can save your life.

So I didn't lose my practice.

I learned that I don't need to believe in the person who gave me a practice in order to pay attention to what that practice does. I can question the system and still keep what gives me something. I can hold contradiction without needing to resolve it.

So I found my own way of practicing, my own recipes of energetics, writing and creative practices.

Over the years, my work has taken many forms: writing, teaching, coaching, building businesses, opening a yoga studio. Through all of it, I kept returning to practice.

I know this world too well to believe everything it tells me. And I love practice too much to simply walk away from it.

That tension is where AELYS began.

I am also a trained journalist and have always written about what I observe. Writing is how I investigate, make sense of things and integrate what I find. My work moves between essays, radio pieces and longer bodies of work.

I am currently writing RUBY, a book that reimagines the ancient Greek myth of Zeus abducting Europa.

Un-learning Wellness

What is all this inner work for if it doesn't bring us back into the world?

I believe in practice. I believe in rest, meditation, breathwork, movement and the strange things that sometimes happen when we give ourselves enough time to pay attention.

But I don't believe our lives should become an endless healing project.

At some point, I started wondering whether wellness can become another way of preparing endlessly for a life we could already be living. Another practice. Another tool. Another thing to regulate. Another reason to go inward.

But going inward is not the destination.

Sometimes the practice is there to calm you. Sometimes it is there to wake you up. To give you enough ground to make the decision, write the thing, start the business, have the difficult conversation, take up space.

Un-learning wellness doesn't mean throwing everything away.

It means staying curious enough to ask: Is this actually helping me live — or has the practice itself become the point?