From Outerwear to Inner Peace

She spent years, as an editor at Glamour, teaching women how to dress. Then, in middle age, Suze Yalof Schwartz discovered meditation. And it completely changed her life. (And then, eventually, mine.)

Suze Yalof Schwartz, CEO of Unplug

Every practitioner of meditation I’ve ever met or read about has a story of transformation. The moment that broke them. The moment they suddenly saw the light. The moment when they realized if they didn’t make some sort of radical change to escape the noise of their buzzing, churning, obnoxiously loud brains in order to fully inhabit the present moment, life’s struggles—instead of providing the rich fertilizer for the end of struggle—would break them.

For Ram Dass, it was meeting a barefoot hippy in Kathmandu. “Don’t think about the past,” the hippy kept telling him, whenever Dass started blabbering. “Just be here now.” (Yes, that is where the phrase originates.) For Ekhart Tolle, it was a bird chirping outside his window during a moment of deep despair. For Thích Nhất Hạnh, it was a school trip with his classmates, where he had a chance encounter with a hermit. For Pema Chodron, it was meeting a monk on a trip to the French Alps in the wake of her second divorce.

For Suze Yalof Schwartz, former Dos and Don’ts Glamour editor and now CEO of Unplug, it was a conversation with her mother-in-law.

Linda Schwartz

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—a psychotherapist and the grandmother of Suze’s then three young sons—noticed that her daughter-in-law, who was at the time working as Executive Fashion Editor-at-Large at Glamour, seemed to be suffering from general anxiety after a move out west for her husband’s job. In a nutshell, relocated-to-LA Suze was tired, stretched thin, and stressed out, having to travel often between LA and New York in her frequent role as on-air makeover expert on Good Morning America and The Today Show.

Suze’s main job back then (she was also doing a bunch of spots for Lord & Taylor on Taxi TV) was to find fashion-challenged women out on the street or in the TV studio audience and then to magically transform their outward appearances. Meanwhile, inwardly, she felt like a discombobulated mess. She had no time to herself, growing doubts about where both her life and the magazine industry were heading, and no way to manage her stress or her loud inner monologue and complicated feelings.

“Try meditation,” Linda urged her. The health benefits of mindfulness were, even then, as well documented as the health detriments of stress. It was a no brainer, meditation, and literally at that: emptying the brain of its inner noise lowers stress, aids with sleep, boosts the immune system, staves off chronic illness, and provides both a bedrock of calm and the means with which to re-find it, should we lose it.

So Suze, being Suze, went all out. She booked herself into a four-day Vedic meditation course, followed by a six-week mindfulness course at UCLA, followed by four 21-day challenge sessions with Oprah & Deepak Chopra.

Suze as a fashion editor on Oprah. Later, she would learn to meditate with Deepak Chopra.

Meditation was a revelation! Life altering, really. But having to learn its tenets back then was too expensive for most, not to mention time consuming and complicated to navigate. How, Suze wondered, could other stressed out people like herself learn to meditate with knowledgeable teachers easily, quickly, and at a fraction of what it had cost her?

“I wanted the Dry Bar of meditation,” she told me. A place you could go, sit for thirty minutes with a teacher trained in guided meditation, and move on with your day, transformed. But back then, such a thing did not exist. (See our interview about her journey, in further detail, below.)

In 2014, Schwartz turned her dream of a drop-in meditation studio into a reality, renting out a raw space near her house and calling it Unplug, which she filled with some of her favorite teachers. The studio, featured in the New York Times a few months after its launch, was an instant success. Turns out? She wasn’t the only one craving the present (un)tense. Busy TV executives sat together on mats with stressed out parents, A-list actors, struggling actors, and a roomful of other inner-peace-seeking humans from every walk of LA life. People who just wanted to quiet the noise in their heads, learn how to regulate their breath, let go of stress, and transform.

I paid a visit to Unplug later that year during a work trip to LA: the first time I’d done any sort of formal meditation whatsoever. Like Suze, I found the act of meditating revelatory and calming, but I didn’t live in LA, and I was too busy solo parenting and working full-time, I told myself, to find a half hour a week, let alone a half hour every day, to focus inward on my breath. Even when copycat meditation studios started sprouting up like mushrooms all over New York.

Then I hit a wall: my own annus horribilis

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, 2021, when I realized that, without a daily dose of mindfulness and meditation, without learning how to control my breath and live in the moment, my life would continue to feel like one long, ongoing slog instead of what it feels like today, no matter its setbacks: peaceful, love-filled, joyful, and rich in gratitude. (Even when I went deaf last summer, I was able to breathe through both the loss of my hearing and the $8000 loss of income to the cost of hearing aids and those surprise surgery copays. It’s just my hearing, I told myself. Not my life. I can adapt. Then: It’s just money. I can work harder and make more. Then: I’m grateful I still have my sight.)

What was the event that triggered my own personal transformation? No, not a run-in with a hippy or a chance encounter with a monk or a conversation with a mother-in-law but more of an unusually thick stack of setbacks, one after the other in rapid succession. In other words, each one on its own would have probably been manageable. (I guess?) It was the onslaught that finally kneecapped me.

In 2021, my then partner and I were forced out of our home by a landlord who suddenly wanted to reclaim his apartment. (Yes, this was probably illegal, pre-vaccine, but we didn’t have the energy, funds, or will to fight him.) Then my sexual harasser was pardoned by Trump. Then my relationship combusted into a raging pyre. Two hours after discovering a love letter from my live-in partner of four years to a woman who was not me, I got an email from a lawyer making fallacious claims about my work that would eventually empty my bank account and pummel me into a concessionary pulp

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An hour after receipt of that email, I was hospitalized with an elevated heart rate of 176 beats per minute that refused to lower, absent a steady stream of Lorazepam mixed with Zofran to stop the lava flow of emesis from the twin shocks. You can actually see the effects on my heart from that one-two punch in a single day on my watch: the love letter discovered at noon, the email from the legal representatives of the business associate received two hours later.

July 15, 2021, a no good very bad day ©Deborah Copaken

A few weeks after that, I was on a trip with some girlfriends to cry, swim, and heal. As they slept back on land, the stand-up paddle board I’d rented for the afternoon started blowing out to sea. With me on it. And no way to get back.

Alone on that flimsy board, struggling to return to shore and exhausted by my futile efforts, I finally had my own moment of revelation: you can’t fight wind. You can only accept that it exists and submit to its—life’s—vagaries. Shifts in wind are inevitable, in other words, but my reactions to them were within my control. I could continue exhausting myself and stressing out my heart fighting the wind, or I could lay down on that board and surrender.

I chose surrender. I lay down on the board and stared up at the sky, noticing the beauty of its deep blue. I felt the the sun on my skin, strobing in and out of the clouds. I listened to the soothing splash of seawater. Then, to keep myself from panicking as the shore continued to recede, I practiced what I’d learned in Suze’s studio seven years earlier: breathing in for four counts, holding for seven, breathing out for eight. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. Rinse, repeat.

The Unplug studio in action

Eventually, the wind shifted and died down, as winds inevitably do before they start up again. That’s the nature of wind and other forces beyond our control.

Calmer now, in tune with my breath, I stood up, paddled back to shore, and vowed to make breath work and meditation a daily part of my life. Most days I do this while walking, as Thích Nhất Hạnh suggests. When I’m too busy for a walk, I use the app Suze created, because it has guided meditations of all lengths: everything from one minute long, when I have a busy day, to a full hour when I have more time. (A guide to the app in video form is below.)

It’s now been a year and a half from that fateful afternoon, lying down on the stand-up paddle board, and I have to say this: just as I return to my breath every time I get stressed out, I also return to the memory of that board whenever I want to remember what’s important or need to make a life decision. As life hacks go, “You can’t fight wind” works pretty well. Is a spouse or romantic partner not giving you what you want or need, even when you spell it out and ask nicely? You can’t fight wind. Has a friend ghosted you? You can’t fight wind. Is your toddler having a temper tantrum? You can’t fight wind. Is someone at work making your life miserable? You can’t fight wind. Was your parent not the parent you wanted or needed? You can’t fight wind.

Instead, the best thing you can do, in any battle with any wind, is to accept that life has other plans for you, change course, and move on.

Suze would say the same. Trying to make her cross-country life as a fashion editor work was like fighting the wind: unwinnable and misery-making. Lucky for her studio’s loyal practitioners, she breathed in and out, quieted her mind, adjusted her sails, opened a studio, created an app, and turned her interest in meditation into her life’s mission.

What’s keeping you from tuning into your breath and transforming your life? Or, if you have found a meditation practice, I’d love to hear about what it is and how it’s helped you in the comments below.

1. In the interest of full disclosure, Linda Schwartz is one of my mom’s best friends, in whose home I was left whenever my parents went on vacation. In fact, double full disclosure, it was I who set up Suze, a friend of my ex’s, with her husband Marc, Linda’s son, on a total lark I thought might work, having known him all my life, and thankfully did.

2. A phrase made famous by Queen Elizabeth in 1992, when Windsor Castle burned down, three of her four children’s marriages were shown to be shams, Princess Diana’s memoir was published, and photos of a topless Fergie having her toes licked by an American financier were splashed all over the international press.

3. NDAs preclude me from expounding on this, but just know—as if you didn’t already, post #MeToo—that financially bullying women into silence is both real and a blight on our legal system.