Interview with a Yogi:
Cyndi Lee

By Peter Fenderson

Cyndi Lee is the founder of OM yoga, which has centers in New York City and East Hampton, New York. She leads classes and teacher trainings at home and abroad, combining yoga and Buddhist teachings.

She is the author and artist of the OM Yoga series, including many books, CDs and DVDs. Cyndi has written for Tricycle, Dance Magazine, BalletTanz, Cooking Light, and SpaFinder and from 2000 to 2003 she wrote the yoga column for the Shambhala Sun.

Cyndi is a frequent guest on television shows and the subject of many national magazine articles. Rod Stryker has called her one of the “great real‚ presences of ancient yoga in the United States right now.”

Yoga Body, Buddha Mind is Cyndi Lee’s fourth book and her most spiritual effort yet. Author Peter Fenderson spoke to her from her retreat in East Hampton, New York.

HGJ: How and when did you start practicing yoga? And when did you discover the teachings of Buddha?

CL: I started yoga when I went to college in 1971 in Southern California. I went to a college where you had to take a P.E. class if you can imagine (laughs), and so I took yoga. And though it was interesting and really easy, and better than volleyball, there was no real magical thing happening. But then I kept going with it and around that same time I started learning about Buddhism. Eventually, I went to the teachings of the Dalai Lama, studying with him for two weeks, and from there I really started looking for a teacher. That was the very late eighties.

HGJ: Cyndi, for anyone who is uninitiated in Buddhist philosophy, how is an individual’s mind part of the universal mind?

CL: You’re talking about emptiness, which is part of connectiveness. Everything is connected, even in the yoga language we chant, ‘Om,’ at the beginning and end of every class, and when we do that we’re sounding our breath. Just those two things are manifestations of how everything is connected. One person’s exhale is another person’s inhale. So that is a very immediate way that we really know we are one being. And the sound of Om, you can hear it riding on a wave, it’s like a pulsation, everything pulses. Everything is moving, everything is pulsating, oscillating, and we’re part of that. Every person is part of that too; there is no person that is not part of that, so you can call it ‘mind.’ Some people would say everything is a manifestation of mind, and there are many words for that sense of complete interdependence.

HGJ: So it’s part of waking up to our own thought processes and how they relate to others?

CL: Well, I’m thinking of it more like energy. Everything just keeps turning into something else. Right now it’s winter and the leaves have fallen off the trees, but will turn into new things in the spring. Everything keeps morphing and interacting and evolving with everything else. Nothing is isolated. If something dies and dissolves, that’s not the end of the story. So I think of how we’re connected, which you could call mind, as everything. Matter being a manifestation of mind.

Also, thoughts often turn into speech, which turn into action and that’s when your thoughts can really affect other people and create waves of action. I think meditation practice is extremely helpful for that because you begin to recognize that when thoughts arise, you should practice letting go of that, and maybe create a gap between a thought and a response. Because thoughts are natural, and there are good ones and bad ones. It’s when we start to act on those thoughts that consequences arise.

HGJ: Can you tell us about your work with kids in the inner city? How does yoga help them?

CL: It’s just so amazing. What they’ve told me is that it makes them feel valuable. It gives them confidence and the one thing they are learning is that they can do it. They can do this [yoga] practice, but no one can do it for them. And they’re starting to learn that there is power in that. They’re learning that in order to put forth their own confidence and their own power, they have to put forth effort. So they’re learning that if they do the yoga and they are doing it for themselves then they really feel good about themselves. There are ways for them to feel good and confident without depending on anyone else, and then in turn, no one can tell them that they are not valuable. Because they can create and connect to their own self worth and their own goodness. This seems to be the big thing for them, because they come from communities and environments where they haven’t felt worthy.

HGJ: That’s really awesome.

CL: I know, I cried. You know the teacher they had said, “You have goodness inside and the good feelings that you have when you finish your yoga, you can share those feelings with other people, and wish those feelings for other people too.”

HGJ: Yoga Body, Buddha Mind is your fourth book. Can you tell us about it?

CL: It’s really what I’ve been teaching naturally from doing yoga and teaching yoga for a long time. A lot of what I learned just naturally came out when I was teaching, and it seemed that the two practices were completely natural together, so they became very integrated. So that’s what this is—it’s really an integration of how to explore the Buddhist teachings in your yoga practice. Its not separate, where you meditate and then do some yoga, but really it’s learning how to watch your own mind and work with obstacles, work with your feelings, and develop some passion in your yoga practice. This integration then becomes a bridge practice of how to be in your life. I broke it down into a structure that starts with meditation instruction, which would be comparable in Buddhism to the Hinayana, and then it moves more into connecting your heart, which is the Mahayana, and then working with the world, like the Vajrayana. Really looking at the world in a different way and realizing that nothing is fixed or solid and how to work with that.

HGJ: Cyndi, what is your current passion, what inspires you to do what you do?

CL: My current passion is my dog and knitting (laughs).

HGJ: Knitting?

CL: Really, these are my two favorite things right now. I’m really into it. I feel like an old grandma or something, but I find it extremely relaxing. Actually knitting is a lot like yoga. There is a rhythm to it that is very compelling, it kind of keeps my mind in my body. I like knitting because I’m just learning it and I make a lot of mistakes and I have to rip it out and start over, which you never want to do but I do it anyway. There seems to be some really interesting process of letting go and taking a fresh start, which is what we have to do all the time. We do it with our mindfulness, we do it with any of our habitual patterns which we are trying to shift. So it’s an interesting process.

Also I got a little doggie this year, and I never took walks without a destination before, but my dog has reconnected me to nature. It’s interesting how one of these things is getting me out into nature and the other is allowing me to be very still. I guess my yoga is really still the middle path, because it’s contemplative and inner, but it’s also really active, so I’m really finding a balance in my life with these three things.

Peter Fenderson, MA is a Detroit based freelance writer and yoga enthusiast. His novel A Separate Karma will be published in October of 2005.