Let The Path Curve: Yoga, Agency & The Artist+ Life with Elena Urioste & Melissa White

S3 Ep.3: Violinists Elena Urioste and Melissa White of Intermission join me for a conversation about yoga, performance nerves, ditching perfection, healthier practice, artistic agency, and allowing a musical career to become bigger than one prescribed path.

This episode feels a little full-circle for me…

I first crossed paths with Elena and Melissa more than 20 years ago, back in our Encore School for Strings days in Ohio. Years later, watching them bring music and yoga together through Intermission helped me imagine something I hadn't fully seen for myself yet: that being an artist didn't have to mean following one single, narrow path.

Their work was part of what inspired me to pursue my own yoga teacher training in 2019, so getting to sit down with them all these years later felt particularly special.

In this conversation, we talk about how yoga entered each of their lives and how it ultimately changed the way they play, practice, perform, teach, and relate to themselves as artists.

We get into performance nerves, body awareness, perfectionism, healthier self-talk, and the idea that "you are your best and forever teacher." We also talk about agency: learning to trust your own body, your own artistic instincts, and your own sense of what works for you.

And then we get into the Artist + of it all.

Elena and Melissa share how Intermission began with two roommates, a Moleskine notebook, and an idea that other people didn't always understand. We talk about entrepreneurship, following an idea before you know exactly where it's going, and letting your career path curve rather than assuming you have to leave one identity behind to explore another.

For any musician who has ever wondered, "Is this all I'm allowed to be?" I hope this conversation gives you a little more room to imagine.

Maybe the path doesn't have to completely change.

Maybe it can just curve.

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