Eliza Lay Ryan - Author, "Supermindful: How to Tap Into Your Creativity"

Eliza Lay Ryan

A speaker, teacher, and performing artist, Eliza Lay Ryan (MFA and CYT) has led acting programs and taught supermindfulness practices to people from all over the world. She collaborates in teaching and researching with leaders in neuroscience, business, wellness, and education.

In her new book, Supermindful: How to Tap Into Your Creativity”, she marries insights from science and the arts to offer practices that support greater creativity, resilience, and connection. Her goal is for as many people as possible to be supermindful. Can you imagine a world where everyone is more easily and fully connected to their wholeness and imagination so they can be more limitless, empathic, and innovative?

The world around us can be a catalyst for creative inspiration anytime, anywhere, if we know how to see it that way. Learn to connect with your own genius more deeply and shift into new ways of seeing, and fold this ability to wonder and engage curiosity into your everyday life.

Eliza teaches us how to cultivate supermindfulness, giving us greater access to the ability to be both present to our own experience, and open to new ways of thinking, feeling, and being so we can respond dynamically and authentically to life, shift our perspective, access our wholeness more fully, and connect with each other more wholly.

I’m so excited for you to connect with Eliza Lay, check out her work, and follow along as she continues to cultivate a curiosity and zest for life by blending her own background in the arts and partnering with leaders in business and the arts to offer intuitive practices that help people spark creativity and empathy, increasing vitality, connection, and innovation. 

I'd love it if you'd introduce yourself, what you do, and what you're working on.

Thanks! I’m Eliza Lay Ryan and my work explores how we can all make being present and shifting perspective easier, so we can be more fully engaged in our own lives and with the people around us. 

Life offers us a lot of challenges and my passion looking at how we can engage with these challenges in such a way that we become stronger, more resilient, more creative, and wiser. I call this work supermindfulness because I draw on mindfulness frameworks, but also on insights and research from science, business, and the arts to give people experiential practices that ignite creativity and wonder in the flow of their lives. 

My book Supermindful: How to Tap into Your Creativity, published by Panoma Press, just launched, and my company, Supermindful, offers workshops and programs in the business, education and wellness spaces, and a growing bank of recordings that people can subscribe to, to support their supermindfulness. A barrier to entry with mindfulness is that people don’t feel like they have the time to take out of their day to do practice, which is often true! I have a toddler, so I know! So, these recordings are only 2-4 minutes long and are meant to be done with eyes open anytime, anywhere, so people can just fold these practices of greater presence and more possibilities, greater awareness and more imagination, into the fabric of their lives. 

How did you get started?

My background was in theater, acting and teaching, and I was teaching for The New York Film Academy at Harvard. People from all over the world would come to take these classes and many of them were non-actors. They had never experienced the practices actors use to be present to the moment as it is, allowing it to unfold with new, creative possibilities, and the practices actors use to stand in another person’s shoes, to shift perspective. The students said that they found these practices to be very helpful in their lives, beyond acting, and I thought “why should only people who happen to take an acting class get to learn these tools?” And I started looking for ways to make them accessible to anyone. 

What inspired the work that you're doing?

So many things!

One catalyst was that I was constantly reading articles about how people needed to be able to access greater empathy, to be able to collaborate better, to be able to innovate. There was a great call to action, but no tools to make it happen. And I thought “these tools exist! I have to share them.” 

Another was my own curiosity. Why in one setting, a creative one, were people able to be infinitely present and infinitely flexible where in life it’s often hard for people to be where they are as they are and open to new points of view? I wanted to understand this better. 

What is your biggest passion? Do you feel like you're living your passion and purpose?

Oh totally. I feel so grateful that I get to do this work. My biggest passion is helping other people’s hearts shift in relationship to themselves and each other. To give people tools that allow them to experience themselves and each other in ways that create new creative possibilities where otherwise there would be none. The psychologist Mahzarin Banaji says it really well, she says, “My favorite word is ‘understanding.’ I know it’s somewhat colder than the word ‘compassion’ or ‘empathy’… I believe that when you understand, you are left with no option but to change in some way.” I love giving people tools that help them experience new understandings. 

What is your joy blueprint? What lights you up, brings you joy, and makes you feel the most alive?

My favorite things is when I am with other people collaborating towards an end that none of us yet know the outcome of. This could be in a rehearsal process, in a workshop, or just in a conversation. When a group of people come together to ask questions and collectively live into the answers, each contributing their unique voice so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and everyone gains new understandings, that is just the best. 

How do you live intentionally? Are there tools/resources/practices that you rely on to help you stay mindful and grounded?

I go through a progression of asking “how”, “why” and “what” a lot. (Also drawn from actor training used in real life.)

So-and-so is behaving in such a way, how do I feel in response?

Why is so and so acting this way? 

What is their true need? 

Or 

How and I feeling? 

Why am I feeling this way? 

What is my true need?

This is really helpful, I find, in both learning from my own experience and opening up to see a situation from a new perspective. These two components, being present to what is and open to what else might be, in dialogue are fun and helpful ways to stay grounded and engaged and help life spark curiosity. 

What would your younger self think about what you're doing now?

That’s a great question! These are all great questions actually! I think she would be proud of me. My younger self wanted to make theater that would reach into people’s hearts and give them an experience that would change their minds. And that is what I am doing, but just in a different form. I think she would want me to still be acting and dancing more, and I want that too. So, we are on the same page. 

Do you have a go-to mantra or affirmation?

It’s not so much a word, but two actions. And those actions are to pause and to wonder. I guess it could be expressed in the phrase “don’t just do something, sit there.” An invitation to not react right away, or just take action for the sake of quelling anxiety, but to sit there for a second and see what actually needs to and wants to be done. What the actual, next best move is. 

Another is the phrase “when in doubt, zoom out.” We can often get stuck seeing a particular situation as isolated from the history and future of our lives. We can get stuck in our like or dislike of it which causes us to feel powerless, and that’s also fine and good…we have feelings and they aren’t a problem…powerlessness can give us a little slump, a little rest, sometimes, but when we are ready to we can then shift to look at the situation as part of the larger whole, a larger continuum, to play around with thinking about what led to it and what we can do to help it move in a good direction.  When in doubt, zoom out. 

What is your biggest dream?

My biggest dream is for curiosity to be our default setting instead of judgement and defensiveness. For creative engagement to be our go-to way of living: A world where an orientation of curiosity, wonder, and creativity in the small and large moments of our lives is the norm.  

To learn more about Eliza and her work visit her website https://www.supermindful.co and on Instagram @supermindfulness and you can find her new book, Supermindful: How to Tap Into Your Creativity, on Amazon here

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