For many in modern yoga, Cyndi Lee’s name needs no introduction. She started practicing yoga in New York with Sharon Gannon and David Life, who founded the Manhattan-based Jivamukti methodology. With both a BFA and MFA in dance, she soon decided to open Om yoga Center in 1998 (with just $800!), because the choreographed movements of the sun salutes she'd learned through Jivamukti made so much sense to her, and, to boot, the practice felt spiritual. She had fallen in love with yoga and wanted to share it with as many people as she could.

She was also falling in love with Buddhist practices, alongside people like Alan Ginsberg at Philip Glass's apartment in New York. That's just one of the threads that made this conversation so interesting. Cyndi has spent her teaching and business career weaving her yoga into Buddhism and vice versa. She has spent decades teaching—and training—students how to practice the "middle way." This is a choice, she says, that you must choose to live every day. Cyndi's intersectional lineage journey is one of the main reasons I wanted to sit down with her, and learning about where she has been, what she's doing online, and what she's most passionate about teaching right now did not disappoint.

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Terms:

  1. Gom: Tibetan word for meditation

  2. Jivamukti: a path to liberation through compassion toward all beings

  3. Sangha: community

  4. Dharma: one's duty

  5. The Brahmavihara: the Dedication (May all Beings Be Happy…)

  6. Theravada: a school of Buddhism that draws its inspiration from the Tipitaka, or Pali canon; focuses on self practice

  7. Mahayana: largest Buddhist sect in the world; focuses on the bigger view that includes compassion

  8. Vajrayana: form of Tantric Buddhism; advanced practices received in direct transmission from master

  9. Prajna: best knowledge or best knowing

  10. Tadasana: mountain pose

  11. Sadhana: a daily spiritual practice

  12. Prajnaparamita Sutra: "Without form, mind cannot be expressed; without mind, form cannot be made manifest."

  13. Upaya: skillful means

  14. Maitri: loving-kindness or friendliness

  15. Boddhisattva: enlightened beings who put off entering paradise in order to help others reach enlightenment

  16. Vipassana: a technique of mediation used to see things as they really are

  17. Jukai: to receive the precepts

  18. Shanti Deva: an 8th century Buddhist monk

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References:

  1. Cyndi Lee

  2. May I Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Yoga, and Changing My Mind by Cyndi Lee

  3. Mindfulness and Behavior Change: Harvard Review of Psychiatry study

  4. Sharon Gannon and David Life

  5. Gelek Rinpoche

  6. Philip Glass

  7. Rudy Wurlitzer

  8. Alan Ginsberg

  9. Tricycle Magazine

  10. Upaya Zen Center

  11. Roshi Joan Halifax

  12. Enkyo Roshi

  13. Richard Davidson

  14. Transcendental Meditation

  15. Santipada Monastery

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Episode credits:

Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

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