Dan’s Papers August 12, 2011 house & home guide danshamptons.com Page 89
Women of the Healing Arts
Photo by N. LaGarenne
was the old Tony’s Luncheonette and served macro meals she cooked at home to people like Paul Simon. Sitting on her comfy wicker couch in her kitchen, Eliot explained what she believes heals people. “When you love, accept and include everything about yourself, then you are whole.” She practices yoga six days a week and teaches at the Springs Presbyterian Church. She has incorporated her love and belief of yoga and metaphor into her therapy. “People are living in pain,” she says. “The bottom is a bed of nails. You can choose to get comfortable there or scramble, fight and try to climb out, but wind up on the bed of nails anyway. You can’t skip the suffering. Try to get comfy and furnish your own bed of nails.” As far as yoga goes, “Life is a warrior pose,” says Eliot. “Figure out how to make yourself comfortable in it, noodle around until you feel it,
don’t fight it. Yoga is a metaphor for life. Holding the pose, literally.” Eliot wrote “Yoga Off the Mat” for Psychology Magazine. Yoga for her has been “a transforming experience. You have to be silently talking to yourself in your own mind. Yoga forces you to be in the now and people always want to be in the future.” Eliot was trained in Addiction and Eating Disorder Counseling as well as Psychodrama Counseling and Client Centered Therapy. She explains that this means a person need not go every week to a therapist. “You can get effective therapy based on the client’s needs – financial, time-wise, etc.… As long as you can connect with your therapist by e-mail, phone, you are getting the proverbial hug on the other end that you need. Right away.” (continued on next page)
THE HAMPTonS’ InTERIoR DESIgnER Eve Eliot
By Nanci E. LaGarenne Once upon a time, they were mostly women. Healers, midwives, botanists, alchemists and sages. Think of your grandmothers. How they knew just what to recommend for your physical healing or mental clarity. Maybe they gave you a cup of fennel tea for a tummy ache or a right-to-thepoint suggestion for your love life. Today we have broadened the scope and we can find—if we are lucky—amazing women whose job, talent, gift, whatever you prefer, is to heal. The list is too long to mention all of them that I have encountered in the last 22 years on the East End, so I will focus for now on two. Eve Eliot is a psychotherapist specializing in women’s issues, seeing clients out of her home in Springs. Eliot appears at the door of what seems like an enchanted cottage with lace-covered windows. She is a sprite – a beautiful fairy-like woman with short dark cropped hair and wise chocolate almond-shaped eyes. She pulls no punches yet knows what nurturing is all about. Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, she found her way out here in 1988, making herself over from a busy city copywriter to a Shiatsu practitioner, trying to make a living in East Hampton. She started cooking and counseling people about macrobiotic food and she hosted community dinners once a week in her cozy kitchen in Springs. She rented the space that
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