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Cyndi Lee was raised on the idyllic Puget Sound where she grew up playing on beaches and climbing trees in the forest. While attending the University of California Irvine as a dance major, she discovered yoga (or it discovered her), and she immediately delved into all its practices, learning asana, transcendental meditation, chanting and kriyas.
Eventually, she opened the legendary Om Yoga Centre on 14th Street, an institution that started the yoga boom in New York City. She met her guru, the recently deceased Tibetan lama Gelek Rimpoche, in the late 1980s and went on to become an ordained Lay Buddhist chaplain. Today she merges Buddhism and yoga in her personal practice and on her teacher trainings.
In this episode of triyoga talks, Cyndi shares her personal experiences from being at the forefront of the yoga explosion in Manhattan in the 1990s, the differentiation between mindfulness and meditation, mindfulness as a gateway to deeper study, western insights on Buddhist philosophy and her take on the increasing popularity of meditation across the globe.
When discussing state of mind during meditation, Cyndi said, “Everything arises, bides and dissolves on its own. The thoughts that we have are results of the causes and conditions of our life. So the idea of trying to get rid of our thoughts is considered a self aggression… We are training ourselves to be stable within this swirl of thoughts and to get familiar with it and become friends with it.”
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