It can be hard to do things you know are good for you. In this 2001 instruction from the Lion’s Roar archive, Cyndi Lee offers advice and a sequence of yoga poses for pushing through your own resistance. What do the following things have in common? Meditation practice, doing taxes, getting up in the morning, going to bed, making the bed, exercising, admitting I'm wrong, [...]
About Cyndi Lee
Take Refuge in Your Body
When the storms of life hit, your body can be a place of refuge and healing. Cyndi Lee says it starts with making friends with your body. My beagle, Little Bit, can sense a storm gathering. The reason I know this is because Little Bit uses the language of her body to communicate her fear. From just the slightest shift in air pressure, her chunky little body starts quivering. [...]
Make Friends With Your Body
On or off the meditation cushion, we can be friends with our body—just the way it is. Yoga teacher Cyndi Lee shows us how to sit with relaxation and ease. Pairs of yogis face each other, press their palms together, and shyly bow their heads. Wearing baggy sweat pants and sexy yoga tops, bike shorts and faded t-shirts advertising local breweries, they are somehow all [...]
Yoga to Open the Heart
Yoga teacher Cyndi Lee offers a set of movements that open the heart, helping to foster a connection to yourself and the world around you. The summer before my marriage broke up, I cried a lot in yoga class. It didn’t happen until we lay down for final relaxation. Then tears would pour out of the sides of my eyes. It was almost as though I wasn’t crying, but leaking, and it [...]
How to Practice Embodied Mindfulness
You don’t just practice mindfulness with your mind. You practice it with your body too, indeed, with your whole being. Well-known yoga teacher and Buddhist Cyndi Lee teaches us how. Today I took a long walk through the high desert woods of the Cerro Gordo Mountains. I’ve never taken this walk before, so I stepped cautiously around gnarly tree roots, keeping my attention bright [...]
Breathing Room
Pranayama is sometimes translated as "to release life energy from its bounds." When we can free the breath from both mental and physical constraints, it's as good as opening a tight belt after Thanksgiving dinner. Cyndi Lee, founder of the OM Yoga Center in New York, discusses our relationship to the breath and gives four poses that will help us recognize our “authentic [...]
Halloween Hatha
From "The Pentacle" to Corpse Pose, yoga teacher Cyndi Lee invites you to open up and watch the movie of your mind. “Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well." Last Halloween, one of the teachers here at OM Yoga Center began his evening class by inviting the students to request the yoga poses they found scary. He was not [...]
Never Too Old – Embrace Change
Embrace Change: ten leading Buddhist teachers and writers offer personal stories, teachings, and meditations to touch our hearts, open our minds, and help us embrace the change in our lives. It wasn’t easy to find the right spot for my Tibetan OM calligraphy tattoo. My first choice was the little space between my inner ankle and heel. But my tattoo artist put the kibosh on [...]
Start With Your Body
A panel discussion with Phillip Moffitt, Cyndi Lee, Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Reggie Ray. Introduction by Anne Carolyn Klein. When we hear words like “meditation,” “mindfulness,” or “mind training,” we often assume we’re working with our minds alone. But nothing could be further from the way it really is. Meditation, mindfulness, and mind training are full-being [...]
Go With the Flow
You’re mostly made of water, says Cyndi Lee, so why not act that way? Yoga students frequently ask me what they should feel in this pose or that pose. Although every yoga asana is very precise in how it activates certain muscle groups, heats up and purifies inner organs, and creates specific energetic circuits that affect the nervous system in beneficial ways, I don’t know [...]
