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Hello friends!

Over the last few weeks there have been quite a lot of new people joining Drip, Drip, Drip the Bucket Fills, so perhaps a small intro is in order.

Welcome!

You might be wondering why this Substack is called Drip, Drip, Drip the Bucket Fills. That’s what my Buddhist teacher, Gelek Rimpoche, always said to help me develop patience and curiosity. Over the last 40ish years this reminder has helped me stay steady along the course of my spiritual life.

Drip, Drip, Drip is a good reminder that our aspirations don’t manifest in one big dramatic starburst. Step by step, breath by breath, we create the path we walk on.

So here I write about how meditation practice shows up in real life and enriches my ordinary days here in Santa Fe, NM. As best I can, I unpack the teachings behind mindfulness, compassion, self-compassion and loving-kindness that I have studied all these years. Sometimes I offer you a practice to try out.

And, of course, yoga! I’ve written 1 memoir and 5 yoga books and my latest is Long Life Yoga.

After many years of traveling around the world teaching yoga and meditation, I don’t have much of a jones for long distance travel these days. Unless it is really special. And last month was really special.

Brad and I took a 3-stop trip: Berlin, Cheltenham and London where I taught yoga workshops based on Long Life Yoga.

It took us two days to get to Berlin. We slept for 12 hours the first night and woke up fresh and free of jet lag. Our hotel was blissfully quiet despite being on the same block as Checkpoint Charlie, a major tourist attraction that was once the spot where brave, frightened people passed from East to West Berlin in the Cold War. Our room even had a little balcony overlooking a lush green courtyard in the middle of busy Mitte. (Totally recommend it: Wilde Aparthotel)

After some strong German coffee we went to see Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Erotic Epic at Gropius Bau. The museum promoted Nude with Skeleton as the main event.

I really wanted to see this piece, because I assumed that it referenced the traditional charnel ground practices found in Buddhism. We entered a large room crowded with people all focused on a naked woman lying on her back on a large platform. Placed on top of her was a skeleton in the same supine position the woman was in, something similar to a savasana.

There was no movement and after 30 seconds you basically saw what there was to see. Nevertheless, people walked around the piece as you might circle a statue, pausing here and there to see it from all angles.

But there was nothing more to see and I didn’t experience any kind of emotional hit at all. The atmosphere was not charged with the fear or panic you would expect when spending the night in a charnel ground, a.k.a. cemetery, alone and naked. Or perhaps, not alone but with a corpse or dirty skeleton with a few strands of hair, perhaps a few teeth left, mouth frozen in rictus. This exhibit of a perfectly immobile woman and a clean skeleton were too sanitized to honestly convey what it is to confront one’s death through physical communion with a skeleton.

Yet, over the days ahead I found myself coming back to this seemingly empty experience.

On Sunday, I went to Yoga Sky in Kreutzberg where I have been teaching for 25 years. The students were greeted by my beloved yoga/dharma friends, Hans and Detlev, who welcomed them and made tea for everyone. Over the years, many of the workshop participants had taken 200-hour TT, 300-hour TT, Meditation TT and Yoga Body, Buddha Mind, so it was a grand reunion!

The joy level was very high! When I started to say the Dedication of Merit, 37 people from Iceland, the U.K., Poland, the Czech Republic, the US and all over Germany joined me in this OM yoga tradition that means so much to us.

Next, Brad and I flew to London on the way to Cheltenham. I loved that when I was offered tea, the flight attendant gave me a tray not just with a cup of tea but with a scone, strawberry jam and clotted cream. YUM.

Orange Yoga in Cheltenham, owned by Ian Davis, is one of the best yoga studios anywhere. After the pandemic, he restructured the studio and made it a non-profit. The vibe reminded me of NYC yoga studios in the 90s. Nothing fancy. No shop. No juice bar. Just a kitchen where everybody brings homemade cookies and makes tea for each other.

The practice rooms are simple, open spaces with potted plants, a couple of lamps on the floor and windows that open nice and wide. You can tell Orange Yoga is all about community and I felt that warmth and friendliness during the four days I was there.

When Ian collected us from the train station we immediately got into a conversation about how the yoga community had changed since I was last in the UK in 2019. He told me that less people are coming to yoga classes, but there is a growing interest in curated experiences such as sound baths, intuitive soul healing or receiving an egg reading.

The Tibetan word for practice is “gom” which means a process of getting familiar, and I wondered if one can get familiar with their mind, body, heart, and habitual patterns by letting someone else do a practice to or for you.

And my thoughts about Nude with a Skeleton popped up again, my mind seeming to find a connection between curated experiences at yoga studios and museums.

The next day I taught a class called Sati, Gom, Cho, Saddha and Sustainable Yoga. Yes, I know that title is too long but anyway… the class takes people through a process of developing a personal practice. Many newer students only know how to practice exactly the way they learned from their teacher. I suggested that is just the launching point of a lifetime of evolving your own multi-layered practice of “getting familiar.”

I began by asking them, what is a practice? I told them about a friend of mine who had a serious, dedicated yoga practice for many years as well as a practice of teaching yoga. Then she moved across the country and began a practice of bike riding, flying very fast down huge hills. The experience of velocity intrigued her and she began to explore ways to express speed through her painting practice. Eventually she shifted to slow walking, which allowed her to see the subtleties of the earth, and this became her walking practice.

So… is everything we do a practice? Do we actually have to do something or is it still a practice if it is something we receive? Of course, my answer is that activity and receptivity are both practices. Who am I to say that a soul healing is not a practice?

I googled Marina Abramovic’s Nude with a Skeleton and found a video of her doing this piece in a more involved way. She is lying on her side, almost spooning the skeleton. She is holding hands with the skeleton and slightly animating it through her own deep breathing. You can really feel the power of her death contemplation. It is intimate, engaged, mobile and completely personal.

https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3132

I also taught Long Life Yoga Teacher Training for the first time. I had worked out some class plans before this, but being with a group of eager students shifted everything. The ideas I wanted to explore around specific pacing, rest intervals, combining the pillars of movement with anti-inflammaging—well, it came alive and really resonated with the students.

My particular way of layering instructions helps yogis maintain attentional balance and avoid glucose spikes. The dynamic of “not too fast, not too slow” cuts through goal-oriented striving, which also keeps your nervous system balanced. The students especially liked exploring letting go without dropping out.

I got the same enthusiastic feedback in London, too. The students told me they were inspired and excited to have a new approach to yoga.

These teaching experiences were nourishing for me, and I realized that I’ve come up with a timely and valuable offering. Long Life Yoga has a different emphasis, yet it is still very much a yoga practice.

Practice. All along I kept thinking about practice. How it changes? How it changes us? What is required for something to be a practice?

I took this to heart when I got back home to Santa Fe. Brad and I practiced Conscious Resting, a.k.a. napping, walking around the neighborhood, slowing unpacking and doing the laundry, and eating out at our favorite healthy gluten-free restaurant.

After three days I felt my molecules reintegrating and got on my mat. Then I knew I was home.

When my students asked me to define practice, I said practice has structure, boundary and requires commitment.

What do you think?

(I LOVE reading your comments and always respond to every.single.one.)

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Practice Opportunities:

A Year of Mindfulness Retreating

It’s not too late to make a commitment to meditation practice and sign up for all 4 retreats. Each session will be different. You will learn more about meditation, dharma and yourself in 20 minutes/day.

You can also sign up for just one or a package. All sessions will be recorded.

Learn More & Register

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in August

Almost full!

Wednesday, August 5 — Sunday, August 9

Menla Retreat Center & Spa

Phoenicia, NY

Lifting the Gaze is an opportunity to withdraw from the demands of your life and gather yourself together within the beauty of Menla and the warmth of community.

Traditionally, a spiritual retreat is a time to touch your mind and touch your heart. It offers you a concentrated period of practice to help you get familiar with who you are, as you are, right now.

Personal practice is never about being better or different. It is not about rejecting any part of you, no part of your body and no part of your mind, your emotions, your anger or your love. It’s about opening to the basic goodness that lives inside you right now.

We will use the tried and true practices of yoga and meditation to experience the traditional benefits of joy and ease.

• MORNING SESSIONS will include silent meditation, a dharma talk, Q & A and sustainable yoga practice.

• AFTERNOON PRACTICES will include pranayama, restorative yoga, group discussions and outdoor walking meditation

• ONE EVENING SESSION will offer a silent guided meditation.

During the retreat you will:

• develop your mindfulness/shamatha practice,

• strengthen your practice commitment by recognizing and relaxing your obstacles; and

• gain the skills and awareness to bring your innate goodness into the rest of your life.

Together we will connect the dots between why we practice, how we practice, and the results of practice.

We will show up for ourselves and we will show up for each other…and we’ll make it fun!

All levels are welcome. Modifications will be offered to support those with injuries or physical limitations.

Learn More & Register

I’m Coming Back to New York City!

Souk Studio, NYC
August 1 - 2

Join Cyndi Lee for two workshops at Souk Studio in NYC: Long Life Yoga Intensive on August 1st and The Dharma of Engaged Yoga on August 2nd. Sign up for them individually or join for the whole weekend.

Learn More & Register

Long Life Yoga Reviews 🙏

Thanks to all of you who pre-ordered the book and for all the positive feedback! It means the world to me. Can I ask another favor? If you bought it from amazon can you leave a review on there? It helps with sales and exposure.

Upcoming Posts:

• Why You Might Be Breathing Wrong

• 8 Walking Meditations

• Yogic vs Buddhist Breathing Techniques

• How to NOT Pick Your Meditation/Breathing/Yoga Guru

You can save $50 off Multi-Day passes with the code JOINME.

Hope to see you there!

Love,
Cyndi

We’re honored to welcome renowned meditation teacher Cyndi Lee to the 2026 Berkshire Yoga Festival lineup.

A pioneer in modern yoga and meditation, Cyndi was among the first Western teachers to integrate yoga asana with Tibetan Buddhist practice. Founder of the influential OM Yoga Center in NYC and author of the classic Yoga Body, Buddha Mind, she has helped shape the way thousands of practitioners approach meditation and mindful movement.

This is a special opportunity to learn directly from one of the most respected voices in yoga and Buddhist practice. We can’t wait to welcome Cyndi to the mountains this June.

Register

Subscribe now

But, my editor also told me that her whole team really wanted to work with me and, would I be open to some new book ideas from them? Well, gee, that made me feel pretty good and of course, I said yes. When they came back with the suggestion of a book about yoga and longevity I was thrilled.

I had been working with Dr. George Papanicolou from the UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA for a few years and he taught me a lot about longevity: what supports it, what prevents it, what causes premature aging. I knew that inflammaging was a factor and I knew how to avoid that. But I also knew there was much more to learn and I dug in eagerly.

Yoga is not the only thing that can help you feel good, stay strong, mobile, alert, nimble and healthy but it can do a lot to move those needles in the right direction. Movement is the #1 anti-aging intervention and if you blend that with yoga’s guidelines for balanced living, you will have a mind/body practice that supports you NOW and as you age.

It’s not just for old people. Every day we get one day older. The sooner you start doing yoga in a way that keeps your glucose steady, avoids adrenal fatigue, and balances your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, the sooner you will live these benefits. You will feel more steady, confident, and positive all the time.

It’s all in the book. I hope you like it and that it brings you JOY!

Pre-Order on Bookshop.org

Pre-Order on Amazon.com

Substack tells me that more people will see my posts if you ❤️ and/or comment. It really means a lot to me to hear from you! Thanks!

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Or, scroll to the top or bottom of this article to ❤️ this post.

Long Life Yoga Classes and Workshops

Orange Yoga, Cheltenham, UK - Waiting List Only
May 1 - 4

Sign Up for Waiting List

HOMEWellness, London
May 7 - 10

Join Cyndi for 3 different workshops (one of them a two day intensive!) at HOME Wellness in London.

Learn More & Register

Berkshire Yoga Festival, Massachusetts
June 11 - 13

Join us for an unforgettable gathering filled with yoga, meditation, music, hiking, aerial yoga, and more at the stunning Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock, MA. Whether you come alone, with friends, or with family, the Berkshire Yoga Festival has something for everyone to enjoy!

Learn More & Register

Souk Studio, NYC
August 1 - 2

Join Cyndi Lee for two workshops at Souk Studio in NYC: Long Life Yoga Intensive on August 1st and The Dharma of Engaged Yoga on August 2nd. Sign up for them individually or join her for the whole weekend.

Learn More & Register

More Ways to Practice with Cyndi

Morning session sold out.
4 spots open for afternoon session.

The day includes two separate workshops, Sati & Sustainable Yoga and The Dharma of Engaged Yoga, exploring mindfulness, embodiment, and interdependence through meditation, breathwork, contemplative reflection, and medium-paced, alignment-based vinyasa practice. Emphasizing awareness, resilience, and purposeful movement, these sessions introduce the Three Tenets of Engaged Yoga and offer practical tools for developing a sustainable practice that supports clarity, stability, and compassionate engagement with the world.

Learn More & Register

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in August

Only 8 spots left!

Wednesday, August 5 — Sunday, August 9

Menla Retreat Center & Spa
Phoenicia, NY

Lifting the Gaze is an opportunity to withdraw from the demands of your life and gather yourself together within the beauty of Menla and the warmth of community.

Traditionally, a spiritual retreat is a time to touch your mind and touch your heart. It offers you a concentrated period of practice to help you get familiar with who you are, as you are, right now.

Personal practice is never about being better or different. It is not about rejecting any part of you, no part of your body and no part of your mind, your emotions, your anger or your love. It’s about opening to the basic goodness that lives inside you right now.

We will use the tried and true practices of yoga and meditation to experience the traditional benefits of joy and ease.

• MORNING SESSIONS will include silent meditation, a dharma talk, Q & A and sustainable yoga practice.

• AFTERNOON PRACTICES will include pranayama, restorative yoga, group discussions and outdoor walking meditation

• ONE EVENING SESSION will offer a silent guided meditation.

During the retreat you will:

• develop your mindfulness/shamatha practice,

• strengthen your practice commitment by recognizing and relaxing your obstacles; and

• gain the skills and awareness to bring your innate goodness into the rest of your life.

Together we will connect the dots between why we practice, how we practice, and the results of practice.

We will show up for ourselves and we will show up for each other…and we’ll make it fun!

All levels are welcome. Modifications will be offered to support those with injuries or physical limitations.

Learn More & Register

Subscribe now

Several years ago, my friend, Ramit, invited me to guest teach a class at her studio, Jaya Yoga. It was—and still is—one of the best yoga studios in Brooklyn. I love teaching there because the dedicated community is serious—in a light hearted way—about their practice. They understand what yoga is and they apply themselves. They are also really friendly and over the years I’d gotten to know a few of the regulars, including the local rabbi who always showed up incognito in his shorts.

Even so, I wasn’t sure that my new class was going to hit the spot for them. I know I’m not the only yoga teacher who tends to teach what they are practicing. It has to be that way because you really can’t teach something that you are not at least working on. In those days, my practice exploration was more about being on the floor than doing standing poses. No surprise. I didn’t know it yet but 7 months later I would have my first hip replacement, the second one coming just 90 days after that.

So I set myself an unusual assignment: could I create a class that only had one standing pose, which was Downward Facing Dog? Could I create an entire floor class that still included what we call in yoga teacher training, the “required elements” of a mixed-level class? Of course, I could and I did.

It was a warm, humid NY summer evening when I arrived at Jaya and the joint was packed like sardines. The mats were between one and zero inches apart, side to side and top to bottom. I prayed this would work because the class would involve a lot of props which also take up space.

But, ya know, Brooklyners are used to tight squeezes and they know how to make space by making friends. And yogis are like that, too. Generous with each other, they scooched this way and that and no one got grumpy or kicked in the head.

The students were game for this unusual yoga practice and willingly engaged in earth-bound forward and backward bends, twists, inversions, planks, pigeons, downward dogs and a delicious down-regulating savasana. As always, I ended with the Dedication of Merit.*

After the class, a few of my regular students set out for dinner, with Ramit and me tagging along in our Jaya trucker caps. As we stepped out onto the busy streets of Park Slope, Ramit turned to me and said, “That is how we should all be practicing.”

I agreed, and that was the beginning of Sustainable Yoga.

Despite the crowded room it had been a stressless yoga class. Does that seem like an oxymoron? Well, I know that there are some yoga methods that create stress on purpose—loud music, very dim lighting, no ventilation—based on a notion that if you can do intense yoga in an aggressive environment, then you can handle anything in the real world.

I say, Bah! Isn’t life stressful enough? My cortisol spikes just reading the New York Times every morning.

Back in the heyday of NY yoga, we practiced vinyasa, which has it roots in the ashtanga practice of Pattabhi Jois. The Prince of Mysore invited him to teach yoga in the gymnasium of the Mysore Palace. The classes were mainly attended by teenage boys—ashtanga was perfect for their raging teen boy hormones.

Hormones. This is what I really want to talk about. If you are not a teenager anymore, you know that your hormones have changed.

Your whole body changes but it happens slowly, and not all the parts change at the same time. We don’t notice it, until we start to feel uncomfortable, or creaky or bloaty or different from how we used to be. That is because your hormones, which control everything, change whether you are paying attention or not. (i.e., brain fog…)

If you do pay attention, you can flip that scenario so that instead of your hormones making you feel ways that you don’t like, you can make them work for you.

Let’s take cortisol.

Did you know that if you exercise hard when you are tired that it spikes cortisol? So can intense physical activity. If you engage in strenuous activity frequently, more than 2-3 times a week, without significant recovery time, your cortisol will remain elevated. This is when your body might start breaking down muscle, instead of building it. You may experience fatigue, slower recovery and be at risk for more illness. This is called stress.

Back in the day, we used to practice vinyasa yoga with high energy, passion and vigor. It was fun! But, eventually, it wasn’t sustainable because our cortisol baseline remained too high. Many yogis began to have chronic injuries and found their yoga practice to be more exhausting than energizing.

It’s not a huge surprise that all of my vinyasa/astanga teachers now focus on other physical practices. Some do weight training at the gym to keep up their muscle strength, or slow flow variations of the Surya Namaskar. And one of them has returned to her dance roots, doing 15 minutes of ballet barre daily.

This is exactly what is recommended. If you can avoid overtraining—training too hard or too frequently—you can get the uplifting benefit of cortisol without getting stuck in flight-or-fight.

Sustainable yoga fits the bill perfectly. It’s the kind of practice that regulates your cortisol, leading to a lower baseline and decreasing your risk for disease down the line.

And it’s fun, too! Moving with clarity, ease and finely-honed attention engages the parasympathetic nervous system which will keep your energy balanced post-practice.

What I Mean by Sustainable Yoga

Sustainable Yoga is a vinyasa practice that is not too fast and not too slow. It is focused and precise in order to get the benefit of the work. This active movement will make your glucose spike but when you come into savasana your glucose will lower—this is how you want your hormones to work for you.

One of the most powerful aspects of Sustainable Yoga is that it is non-performative. I have been in yoga classes where people will applaud when another student demonstrates an asana. To me, this is the anti-thesis of what yoga is about. If we are using our yoga for external validation, we are missing what it means to have a practice.

For 18 years, my life as a modern dancer in New York City was built around performances. There were three phases in my life: pre-performance, performance, post-performance. I lived this cycle constantly. The anticipation and the follow-up were the biggest parts of my life. I was nervous about the future, and critical of the past. Talk about glucose spiking and crashing! Eventually, the rare evenings of performing when I felt vibrantly present weren’t enough for me to continue that life.

Now that I practice Sustainable Yoga, I am much more stable. Because it is non-performative, every class is intimate and interesting. Can I be in the pocket of my energy today? Can I have a fulsome conversation between mind, body, energy, ambition and being present with how everything keeps changing?

Every kind of asana is practiced and our tools include strength-building through longer holds and reps, flossing the joints, expanding the possibilities of balance and most importantly, consistency.

The Sanskrit word, Saddha, is often translated as practice, but it really means faith or confidence. This is how you will feel when you step onto your mat. No adrenal rush, no stress, no glucose highs and crashes.

Sustainable Yoga is not just a class. It is a real life practice. It has no end and every day is a fresh start.

Practice like this now and keep practicing like this when you are 80. Sustainable yoga will become your #1 anti-aging intervention.

Substack tells me that more people will see my posts if you ❤️ and/or comment. It really means a lot to me to hear from you! Thanks!

Leave a comment

Share

Or, scroll to the top or bottom of this article to ❤️ this post.

Ways to Practice Sustainable Yoga with Me!

The day includes two separate workshops, Sati & Sustainable Yoga and The Dharma of Engaged Yoga, exploring mindfulness, embodiment, and interdependence through meditation, breathwork, contemplative reflection, and medium-paced, alignment-based vinyasa practice. Emphasizing awareness, resilience, and purposeful movement, these sessions introduce the Three Tenets of Engaged Yoga and offer practical tools for developing a sustainable practice that supports clarity, stability, and compassionate engagement with the world.

Learn More & Register

Join Cyndi for 3 different workshops (one of them a two day intensive!) at HOME Wellness in London.

Learn More & Register

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in August

Only 8 spots left!

Wednesday, August 5 — Sunday, August 9

Menla Retreat Center & Spa
Phoenicia, NY

Lifting the Gaze is an opportunity to withdraw from the demands of your life and gather yourself together within the beauty of Menla and the warmth of community.

Traditionally, a spiritual retreat is a time to touch your mind and touch your heart. It offers you a concentrated period of practice to help you get familiar with who you are, as you are, right now.

Personal practice is never about being better or different. It is not about rejecting any part of you, no part of your body and no part of your mind, your emotions, your anger or your love. It’s about opening to the basic goodness that lives inside you right now.

We will use the tried and true practices of yoga and meditation to experience the traditional benefits of joy and ease.

• MORNING SESSIONS will include silent meditation, a dharma talk, Q & A and sustainable yoga practice.

• AFTERNOON PRACTICES will include pranayama, restorative yoga, group discussions and outdoor walking meditation

• ONE EVENING SESSION will offer a silent guided meditation.

During the retreat you will:

• develop your mindfulness/shamatha practice,

• strengthen your practice commitment by recognizing and relaxing your obstacles; and

• gain the skills and awareness to bring your innate goodness into the rest of your life.

Together we will connect the dots between why we practice, how we practice, and the results of practice.

We will show up for ourselves and we will show up for each other…and we’ll make it fun!

All levels are welcome. Modifications will be offered to support those with injuries or physical limitations.

Learn More & Register

Ways to Meditate with Me

It’s not too late to make a yearlong commitment to meditation practice and sign up for all 5 retreats. Each session will be different. You will learn more about meditation, dharma and yourself in 20 minutes/day.

You can also sign up for just one or a package. All sessions will be recorded.

Learn More & Register

Subscribe now

Last week I wrote about how You Cannot Ruin Your Meditation based on a question that came up in the February Mindfulness Meditation mini-retreat.

Here’s another really good question which was asked by one of the meditators in that retreat.

He said that when he is meditating he has lots of thoughts. Most of them are in the categories of planning, thinking and judging.

So he tries to reset his attention by saying to himself—almost like a mantra:

no planning
no thinking
no judging
no planning
no thinking
no judging

He wanted to know if the “no planning, no thinking, no judging, no planning…” chant was a good way for his mind to reset.

He was trying to sort of pull himself back into the project of meditation by reminding himself of what he didn’t want to be doing right then.

Kind of like loudly saying to yourself, “SHHHHHHHH!” And then when the room of your mind has quieted down, you can start meditating again.

He was looking for an experience of gathering himself together by identifying the main culprits of his wandering mind and sending them on their way. He called this a reset.

Fortunately, there is a reset already baked into the technique of mindfulness meditation and it’s really easy. Here’s how it works.

Sit down to meditate. Place your attention on the sensation of the breath.

When you are meditating and a thought pops up, you wordlessly acknowledge it.

But you don’t need to engage with it. Neither pull it in or push it away.

And guess what? Poof! It goes away on its own because thoughts are like every other single thing—they are impermanent.

This exact moment when a thought has ended and another one has not begun yet…

is called Presently Aware.

This is what we want to get familiar with.

It’s this space—or gap—that is really the gold and you don’t want to miss it.

So we have a practice within the practice for that.

It’s called Touch and Go.

Presently aware is a second or two of spaciousness. It’s as if you just dove up through the surface of a deep ocean and felt the air again. It’s refreshing, uncomplicated, ordinary and natural.

Touch into that. Touch into the feeling of that brief experience. The energy of it. The simple, settled being-ness of it.

This is the pre-verbal experience of being aware that you are present and relaxing with things as they are.

Then… because right now you are engaging in an exercise called meditation, you let go of that Touch, and you Go. Go back to placing your attention on your home base: the feeling of your breath.

You might be tempted to try to extend this flash of being presently aware. But it’s not called Grasp and Go. Touch it without comment or agenda. The Go will happen naturally, too.

The tremendous value of Touch and Go is that you will start to discover how it comes up in your life all the time.

Normally our minds feel like a waterfall of thoughts. And we are so good at judging ourselves, “Oh, I have so many thoughts. blah blah blah…” When we obsess on our thoughts, we can easily miss this experience of simple spaciousness, bright openness.

Not only can you not ruin your meditation, you can expand it, open it up, get to know the feeling of your settled mind just as much as your busy mind.

You know how they say, “If you want to be happy, notice when you are happy?” Well, if you want to have an alert, spacious, aware mind, notice when it happens all on its own.

“When we can graciously hold the wholeness of a moment without pitting any of the parts against each other—and then relax there—a sacred alchemy occurs.”

—Justin Michelson

Upcoming Retreats

It’s not too late to make a yearlong commitment to meditation practice and sign up for all 5 retreats. Each session will be different. You will learn more about meditation, dharma and yourself in 20 minutes/day.

You can also sign up for just one or a package. All sessions will be recorded.

Learn More & Register

Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training: A Self-Guided 2-Part Program is a course Cyndi Lee designed to help meditators of all levels learn a new approach to meditation or refresh and deepen their existing practice. In the second part of the course, you’ll learn how to teach meditation and listen to enriching dharma talks from Cyndi that will inspire both your practice and your teaching.

Learn More & Register

Join Cyndi for 3 different workshops (one of them a two day intensive!) at HOME Wellness in London.

Learn More & Register

The day includes two separate workshops, Sati & Sustainable Yoga and The Dharma of Engaged Yoga, exploring mindfulness, embodiment, and interdependence through meditation, breathwork, contemplative reflection, and medium-paced, alignment-based vinyasa practice. Emphasizing awareness, resilience, and purposeful movement, these sessions introduce the Three Tenets of Engaged Yoga and offer practical tools for developing a sustainable practice that supports clarity, stability, and compassionate engagement with the world.

Learn More & Register

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in August

Only 9 spots left!

Wednesday, August 5 — Sunday, August 9

Menla Retreat Center & Spa
Phoenicia, NY

Lifting the Gaze is an opportunity to withdraw from the demands of your life and gather yourself together within the beauty of Menla and the warmth of community.

Traditionally, a spiritual retreat is a time to touch your mind and touch your heart. It offers you a concentrated period of practice to help you get familiar with who you are, as you are, right now.

Personal practice is never about being better or different. It is not about rejecting any part of you, no part of your body and no part of your mind, your emotions, your anger or your love. It’s about opening to the basic goodness that lives inside you right now.

We will use the tried and true practices of yoga and meditation to experience the traditional benefits of joy and ease.

• MORNING SESSIONS will include silent meditation, a dharma talk, Q & A and sustainable yoga practice.

• AFTERNOON PRACTICES will include pranayama, restorative yoga, group discussions and outdoor walking meditation

• ONE EVENING SESSION will offer a silent guided meditation.

During the retreat you will:

• develop your mindfulness/shamatha practice,

• strengthen your practice commitment by recognizing and relaxing your obstacles; and

• gain the skills and awareness to bring your innate goodness into the rest of your life.

Together we will connect the dots between why we practice, how we practice, and the results of practice.

We will show up for ourselves and we will show up for each other…and we’ll make it fun!

All levels are welcome. Modifications will be offered to support those with injuries or physical limitations.

Learn More & Register

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Two weeks ago, a lovely group of meditators gathered together for the first of the six mini-retreats I am offering in 2026. Even though each session was only 20 minutes, those 20 minutes were substantial. We focussed on the practice of shamatha, a reliable meditation technique more commonly known as mindfulness or calm abiding.

We practiced this technique every day for 10-15 minutes and I also answered questions.

One really great question came from a lawyer who is also a yoga teacher. She teaches meditation classes for her attorney colleagues, who are overloaded with way too many cases to handle, strategies to figure out, people to call, papers to file. She said the work never stops!

So she has suggested to her class that they bring a pencil and paper to the sessions and if an urgent thought arises while meditating, they can take a break and write it down. Eventually she expanded that instruction by inviting the participants to write down their 6 most pressing issues before the session started so that those thoughts wouldn’t intrude on the meditation session and ruin it.

She wanted to know, is this ok? I had to tell her that it is not recommended. I always say, if you have an idea for the great American novel when you are meditating, don’t worry about it. If it’s really that brilliant, it will be there after the bell rings. But, let’s face it, most of our thoughts do not need to be captured.

And, let’s face it, you don’t have to be a lawyer to have a busy mind. If you don’t believe me, ask any mom, school teacher, doctor, shop owner, writer, fashion designer, college student, farmer, dog trainer, car mechanic… you get it. Even if we wrote down our most pressing thoughts before meditation, they would still pop up. And, if miraculously, we were able to banish those thoughts while meditating, you can be sure that other thoughts would rush in there to take their place.

It’s hard at first, for people to understand that meditation is not about escaping to a pleasant state of mind. How nice it would be to be able to flip a switch and be in an energetic, mind massage. Sometimes people try really hard to make that happen.

Brand new beginner meditators will often raise their hand and say something like, “I had an amazing experience just now. My mother came to me and just as she called my name, I saw a purple light and then I dropped through a portal in my belly button, walked under a waterfall and arrived in Shangri-La.”

This is my response: “Hmm. Did you notice that and return to your breath?” I am trying to help the student understand that we are not avoiding thoughts, but we are also not engaging in them. We are resting our mind, like the hub of a wheel, as thoughts circle around and around.

It is also a challenge to understand that we don’t reject any thoughts, either. Instead of that, we are creating a new relationship to our thoughts. Thinking about sending a rose to your mother or eating ice cream or shunning your neighbor—these are all just thoughts.

So, there is no need to try to get rid of your thoughts. Meditating without thoughts would be like doing yoga without a body.

Chogyam Trungpa said:

“Good and bad, happy and sad,
all thoughts vanish,
like the trace of a bird in the sky.”

This is why we practice shamatha—it is the foundational method for all other meditations, because it is a concentration practice. If you can’t hold your mind, you won’t be able to remember a mantra, focus on a visualization or count your breaths. Your mind will be too wild. Even the blandest person will discover that their mind is like an untamed horse, full of energy, running all over the place.

Shamatha involves a specific 3-step protocol that trains your wild mind/horse. It needs to be done gently and patiently, so your horse doesn’t feel pressured and start to buck and resist. You can train your mind/horse so that it enjoys being strong but also stable and clear.

This practice is sometimes called making Friends with Your Mind. After you practice a while, you realize that you have more energy because you are no longer pulled around by your restless mind, chasing after every thought. Now you can concentrate on what you want, whenever you want and you can also choose to let your mind float to the past, make plans and dream whenever you want.

This is why thoughts cannot ruin your meditation. The only thing that can ruin your meditation is if you just don’t do it. If you simply don’t sit down on your cushion at all, or if you do, you just space out instead of engaging in the technique. If you do sit and apply the technique, whatever happens will be fine and interesting… or even boring. But always worthwhile.

Shamatha is a practice of receptivity.

Letting go of agenda.

Being open to whatever arises with steadiness and clarity.

This is how shamatha leads to a level of spiritual maturity and gives you confidence in your own mind.

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Every time you sit adds up. Drip, drip, drip.

That’s why I love retreats.

Your life might not accommodate a daily practice.

But you can do 20 minutes in a group with a teacher (me) and that experience will give you a lot to chew on until the next retreat.

And I really want to support you in that.

We have 5 more Mindfulness mini-retreats in 2026.

It’s not too late to make a yearlong commitment to meditation practice and sign up for all 5 retreats. Each session will be different. You will learn more about meditation, dharma and yourself in 20 minutes/day.

You can also sign up for just one or a package. All sessions will be recorded.

Learn More & Register

Upcoming Teaching Tour

Yoga Sky, Berlin, Germany
April 26

Only 8 spaces left!

Learn More & Register

HOME Wellness, London, UK
May 7-10

Learn More & Register

This week I discovered the perfect yoga practice for adjusting to daylight savings time - RESTORATIVE YOGA

Do you love restorative yoga? So much so that you’d like to teach it to others? Or perhaps you’d simply like to add more restorative postures into your home practice, but you’re not quite sure where to start. In either case, we have the course for you! Join world-renowned teacher Cyndi Lee for a comprehensive restorative yoga teacher training program.

Sign Up

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in August

Only 9 spots left!

Wednesday, August 5 — Sunday, August 9

Menla Retreat Center & Spa
Phoenicia, NY

Lifting the Gaze is an opportunity to withdraw from the demands of your life and gather yourself together within the beauty of Menla and the warmth of community.

Traditionally, a spiritual retreat is a time to touch your mind and touch your heart. It offers you a concentrated period of practice to help you get familiar with who you are, as you are, right now.

Personal practice is never about being better or different. It is not about rejecting any part of you, no part of your body and no part of your mind, your emotions, your anger or your love. It’s about opening to the basic goodness that lives inside you right now.

We will use the tried and true practices of yoga and meditation to experience the traditional benefits of joy and ease.

• MORNING SESSIONS will include silent meditation, a dharma talk, Q & A and sustainable yoga practice.

• AFTERNOON PRACTICES will include pranayama, restorative yoga, group discussions and outdoor walking meditation

• ONE EVENING SESSION will offer a silent guided meditation.

During the retreat you will:

• develop your mindfulness/shamatha practice,

• strengthen your practice commitment by recognizing and relaxing your obstacles; and

• gain the skills and awareness to bring your innate goodness into the rest of your life.

Together we will connect the dots between why we practice, how we practice, and the results of practice.

We will show up for ourselves and we will show up for each other…and we’ll make it fun!

All levels are welcome. Modifications will be offered to support those with injuries or physical limitations.

Learn More & Register

Pre-order my new book, Long Life Yoga!

In this essential guide to health and well-being, world-renowned yoga teacher Cyndi Lee provides simple, empowering yoga practices to help you feel your best at any age.

Yoga has proven benefits at every age, including increasing one’s lifespan. Set yourself up for success by starting your yoga practice for longevity now[JT1] . Whether you’re dealing with aches and pains, stress, sleep issues, or simply looking for ways to feel healthier and more fulfilled, these pages are brimming with techniques proven to improve the quality of your life.

Featuring hundreds of helpful illustrations paired with expert tips and sidebars featuring accessible meditations, breathing exercises, and relaxing rituals, Long Life Yoga makes it simple to enrich your daily routine with proven well-being techniques to live a long, healthy, joyful life.

Pre-Order on Bookshop.org

Pre-Order on Amazon.com

Subscribe now

One of the first things I learned in my Zen Buddhist chaplaincy training was how to recognize and avoid burnout. In the past when I was running a big yoga studio and traveling the world leading yoga teacher trainings, I experienced burnout a lot. I got crabby, frustrated, and frayed around my edges.

Even now, the way that my life is built means that I work pretty much every day. And, as is my way, I still tend to say yes, which is what I have done recently when presented with a short list of compelling opportunities.

None of it is too hard and I’m glad I said yes, but each commitment requires a daily juggling of details that are unrelated to each other. It reminds me of my college boyfriend’s Las Vegas act where he literally juggled a bowling ball, an M & M and a hatchet. He made the audience gasp when the bowling ball fell on his head — hahaha — it was made of styrofoam!

Just like that, my various projects can be a lot to keep track of, and I get a sense of urgency to wrap up all those dangling participles, e.g., commitments. As soon as I get one thing organized, another thing flies up in the air and if I’m not paying attention, it will hit me in the face.

It’s all about momentum. I know that all of my practices—meditation, pranayama, yoga, walking—are highly effective methods for slowing down or even stopping the habitual momentum of saying yes. I lean toward things that can be done alone in an effort to lower my glucose and stitch myself back together. My recurring fantasy is to go to a cabin in the woods or a bungalow on the beach and let the relief of isolation wash away my stress.

But instead of doing that, Brad and I went to Palm Springs for four days. I almost didn’t want to go because those dangling deadlines were still… dangling.

When I called my old friend Goodwin to tell him we were coming to town, he said, “I’ll meet you at the airport.” Of course, he did. In 1978, he also met me at JFK when I moved to New York City. This math means that we haven’t seen each other for approximately 47 years. But just because you don’t see a person very often doesn’t mean you aren’t still good friends.

He drove up to the PSP arrival curb with Nanette in the passenger seat. I have only seen her two times in the last 47 years. We were all dancers together in The Moving Company, a SoCal based modern dance company. Maybe it’s just easier to make new friendships when you are younger, but my memory is that we bonded from the very first rehearsal together.

Goodwin gave us a car tour of some Palm Springs highlights such as the robot park, and the next thing we knew we were sitting around a table in a Frank Sinatra-esque restaurant sharing a pu-pu platter and laughing like we had just been together yesterday. As the days went by this feeling grew. No need to catch each other up on all our latest accomplishments. Hanging out was enough.

Each evening as I lay in bed in our little wooden cabin, I felt refreshed from being with these old friends who knew a part of my life that was a part of their life, too.

And this phrase from the Meghiya Sutra came to me:

Friendship is not half of the spiritual life, it is the whole of spiritual life.

This sutra tells the story of Meghiya, who went into a beautiful mango grove to practice meditation alone and in peace. But he found that his mind was a thick knot of negativity, craving, and befuddlement. Meghiya reported back to Buddha about this disheartening experience.

Buddha responded by giving this pep talk:

“Five things induce release of heart and lasting peace. First, a lovely intimacy with good friends. Second, virtuous conduct. Third, frequent conversation that inspires and encourages practice. Fourth, diligence, energy, and enthusiasm for the good. And fifth, insight into impermanence.”

Buddha explained further that these five things are nested within each other: A lovely intimacy with friends leads to virtuous conduct, which leads to inspiring conversation, etc.

This famous teaching makes it clear that friendship is the most important element of the spiritual path and everything else naturally arises from there.

How I have missed these friends all these years. I missed Nanette’s quirky bursts of laughter. I have missed Goodwin’s special blend of silliness and caring. We are already planning another get together. Friendship was the reminder and the medicine that I so needed.

Sangha comes in all shapes. It forms out of all kinds of circumstances. People come together for shared purpose, safe havens, common goals, group storytelling. Sanghas stay together from trust, kindness, support and love.

Nanette and Goodwin and me. Over these decades we’ve each created our own unique life. Of course, we did. We had a lot of practice making things like dances—some which were choreographed and some we spontaneously improvised as part of the show.

We shared the stage and stage fright and applause from the audience and the great relief of making it through every show. We were professional dancers, comrades-in-tights, who spent hours exploring movement, rhythm, comedy, expression and relationships in time and space. That’s not the kind of friendship you forget. It nourished me then and it nourishes me now.

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Sangha and Friendship Opportunities

A Year of Mindful Retreating starts next week! It’s not too late to make a yearlong commitment to meditation practice and sign up for all 6 retreats. Each session will be different. You will learn more about meditation, dharma and yourself in 20 minutes/day.

You can also sign up for just one, or a package of 3. All sessions will be recorded.

Learn More & Register

Join Lifting the Gaze Sangha

We are going to study Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening by Joseph Goldstein. Even if you don’t read the whole book, you will still learn so much about The Four Foundations of Mindfulness, The Four Noble Truths, The Six Paramitas, and the Eightfold Path. You will make dharma friendships and be inspired.

Join the Sangha

Upcoming Teaching Tour

Yoga Sky, Berlin, Germany
April 26

Only 10 spaces left!

Learn More & Register

Orange Yoga, Cheltenham, UK
May 1 - 4

Learn More & Register

HOME Wellness, London, UK
May 7-10

Learn More & Register

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in August

Over 50% full already!

Wednesday, August 5 — Sunday, August 9

Menla Retreat Center & Spa
Phoenicia, NY

Lifting the Gaze is an opportunity to withdraw from the demands of your life and gather yourself together within the beauty of Menla and the warmth of community.

Traditionally, a spiritual retreat is a time to touch your mind and touch your heart. It offers you a concentrated period of practice to help you get familiar with who you are, as you are, right now.

Personal practice is never about being better or different. It is not about rejecting any part of you, no part of your body and no part of your mind, your emotions, your anger or your love. It’s about opening to the basic goodness that lives inside you right now.

We will use the tried and true practices of yoga and meditation to experience the traditional benefits of joy and ease.

• MORNING SESSIONS will include silent meditation, a dharma talk, Q & A and sustainable yoga practice.

• AFTERNOON PRACTICES will include pranayama, restorative yoga, group discussions and outdoor walking meditation

• ONE EVENING SESSION will offer a silent guided meditation.

During the retreat you will:

• develop your mindfulness/shamatha practice,

• strengthen your practice commitment by recognizing and relaxing your obstacles; and

• gain the skills and awareness to bring your innate goodness into the rest of your life.

Together we will connect the dots between why we practice, how we practice, and the results of practice.

We will show up for ourselves and we will show up for each other…and we’ll make it fun!

All levels are welcome. Modifications will be offered to support those with injuries or physical limitations.

Learn More & Register

Subscribe now

If you have started to dip your toe into Buddhism by reading books, you are not alone. I first tested the dharma waters as a “Book Buddhist,” too.

I started reading “spiritual” books in earnest when I was 22, four years in to my yoga practice. This was during my gap year between undergrad and grad school when I had a job at the Capezio store in Costa Mesa, CA. The shop was in a brand new mall which was almost completely empty during my evening shifts, perfect for an avid reader and autodidact, like me.

I remember sitting low behind the cash register, hoping no one would come into the shop so I could devour The Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda. His story: finding his guru, meeting Babaji, astrotraveling, all of it sparked a yearning for a deep spiritual connection. I never doubted a word of that book including learning about Giri Bala, the woman who never ate. I drank it all in and wondered about where my own life was going, stuck in a shoe store in a shopping mall.

Could I find a guru? Fly through space and time? Gain an understanding of who I am and what my purpose was? This longing was intangible, yet it was strong and had been part of me for as long as I can remember.

From a young age, I would sit in the church pew and watch everybody drop their chin to their chests as the minister said, “Let us pray.” I didn’t bow my head. I looked at my mother next to me, with her eyes closed in prayer and I wondered, Where did she go? What is it that she feels? Because I didn’t feel anything and I definitely didn’t feel like I wanted to bow my head. I just didn’t get it.

But when I started taking yoga at the age of 18 there was a quivering, a filament deep inside me that began to vibrate. It was like being an alien trying to make contact with their planet. I sat on the beach in the midnight dark, breathing with the sound of the waves. I laid awake naked on my roof, trying the feel the full moonlight beaming directly into my chest so that I could be the moon. My mind climbed that moonbeam up, up, up. Like Yogananada, I wanted to astrotravel. I wanted to fly.

Although my yoga teacher taught me asana, pranayama and kriyas, I hadn’t figured out how to connect those practices with my inchoate urges. I had no teacher or sangha to help me thread together my reading, my longing, and my practices.

And, I hadn’t yet learned the Buddhist wisdom: Study and practice are the two wings of the bird and you need both to fly.

Then, my great mentor and famous dance historian, Olga Maynard, who always saw more in me than I could see in myself, gave me a book by Sybil Leek. Another book that I inhaled, in “Diary of a Witch” Leek instructs, “If you want to be a witch, just say ‘I am a witch three times.” I did that over and over. I closed my eyes and tried to feel a feeling. It was the start of having a practice that might lead to a new state of being.

As soon as I arrived in New York, I saw an ad in the Village Voice for a shop called The Magickal Childe. I was in that shop for less than five minutes when Rhea walked up to me and invited me to join a new coven she was forming. She told me she immediately recognized me as a member of the as-yet-unformed coven. In fact, I was the first person she invited to create this powerful coven of professional New York women: actor, lawyer, bike messenger, business owner, therapist and me… a dancer.

But after several years, the vibe at The Magickal Childe started to feel creepy. Rhea and her wife opened their own magick shop in the East Village, but then broke up and the whole thing fell apart. I still knew how to do white magic but I had lost the high priestess and the practice container. Practicing on my own with only books was a bit of a dead end.

So I started reading Buddhist books. I found some in the East Village branch of the New York Public Library and even more in the slew of tiny used book stores that ran through the EV and all along Fourth Avenue (until the greedy people of the Strand Bookstore put them all out of business).

I paid $2.50 for The Light of Asia by Sir Edwin Arnold, a Tibetan Buddhist teaching published in 1925, and $40 for a beat up first edition of Essays in Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki, Professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Otani University in Kyoto. He later became a professor at Columbia University from 1952-57, famously influencing many artists including John Cage and Agnes Martin. But he didn’t influence me because I couldn’t decipher his teachings.

At Samuel Weiser’s, I paid $15 for Lama Govinda’s book, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism which has chakras and deities and the meaning of OM but was also a bit beyond me at that point.

I preferred Lama Govinda’s memoir, The Way of the White Cloud: A Buddhist Pilgrim in Tibet. I read it every night, while drinking Tension Tamer tea and soaking my aching dancer’s body in a hot bath. “… thus the pilgrimage in the outer space is actually the mirrored reflection of an inner movement or development, directed towards a yet unknown, distant aim.” That unknown, distant aim was calling me.

In fact, the books that really gripped me tended to be biographies and memoirs, not just because they were easier to understand but because without consciously realizing it, I was also on a spiritual quest. I read a lot of books by American Zen students who sat grueling retreats and Tibetan Buddhists who walked through freezing snow mountains into India to escape the Chinese.

I know now that Zen Buddhism is full of kindness and compassion, but in my readings the stories seemed to be targeted at achieving satori, a lightning bolt moment of awakening. That felt like a lot of pressure, like having a public orgasm on command. Tibetan Buddhism seemed softer, and based on the memoirs I had read of the great teachers who had escaped from Tibet, yet held no anger toward their captors, it was very much about the compassion I was needing to experience at that time in my life.

One day, I was talking to a dancer friend on the phone and I told her about my reading and she said, “Well, you know they offer free meditation instruction at the Shambhala Center on Tuesdays at 5.” It just happened to be a Tuesday at 4 and so I hung up the phone and raced up to the center. I received meditation instruction and in that moment, moved from being a book Buddhist to a seeker on the path. Within a few months, I had met my guru, found my sangha and received guidance on what books were good for beginners.

Nowadays—35 years later—there are many more Buddhist books, memoirs and biographies, but also traditional teachings made accessible by contemporary Western and Eastern teachers who have studied deeply and spend years living the teachings.

Beginning on February 18, my online sangha, which is called Lifting the Gaze, will begin a year long study and practice based on the book called Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening by Joseph Goldstein.

This is his practical and quite accessible commentary/explanation of the Satipatthana Sutra, the Scripture on Mindfulness.

It includes so much: The Four Foundations of Mindfulness, The Five Hindrances, The Seven Factors of Awakening, The Four Noble Truths, The Eightfold Path and more. It is the perfect book because it leads you through the Buddhist path in a logical sequence.

Goldstein’s book is easy to read and sangha members are really enjoying it. If this sounds like something you might like to do, it’s not too late to join!

You can join the sangha for one month and if you like it, continue and if you don’t, you can easily cancel your membership.

This is a way to begin or grow your study of basic Buddhism, connect with a friendly group of meditators,

AND to put it in action in your everyday life.

Learn More About Lifting the Gaze Sangha

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Practice Opportunities

So many of you have been showing up for my 15-minute retreats! It is wonderful to see how even just those few minutes a day of practice has such a positive and long lasting impact.

Just think if we did this on a regular schedule!

That impact would grow and before you know it, you would have your own Mindfulness Meditation practice.

So, in 2026, I am offering 6 Mindfulness Meditation mini-retreats. Every other month we will sit together for 20 minutes, 5 days in a row… (except August when we will do 30 min.)

At the beginning of each session I will give you a meditation tip—how to work with obstacles, refreshing your posture, working with the breath, the gaze. You will have a chance to refine your meditation technique—so that you can gain confidence in how to practice.

And the why? When you meditate regularly, you will discover for yourself the why. You will begin to experience benefits of stability, clarity and strength of mind, equanimity of spirit. You will find that you are more responsive and less reactive. You will more compassionate to yourself and others.

You won’t notice this on the cushion but you will start to see these results pop up in your every day life.

That might seem like a lot of goodness from such a simple practice but consistency and commitment add up. Or as my guru always said, Drip, Drip, Drip, the Bucket Fills.

If you want to start 2026 by committing to growing your meditation practice, here’s your chance.

Open to everyone, beginners welcome.

Cost

• Each mini-retreat costs $45.

• Sign up for all of them for $225 and relax in the confidence that you will be showing up for yourself and your world.

• Sign up for 3 of your choice for $115. You can always sign up for more later if it fits your schedule.

• You can also buy a Year of Meditating or even one retreat as a GIFT for your favorite meditator or meditator-to-be.

Register

Mark Your Calendars!

Upcoming in-person practice opportunities:

Yoga Sky, Berlin, Germany
April 26

(Already 50% Full!)

Learn More & Register

Orange Yoga, Cheltenham, UK
May 1 - 4

Learn More & Register

HOME Wellness, London, UK
May 7-10

Learn More & Register

The Dharma of Engaged Yoga

April 26 — Yoga Sky, Berlin
May 4 — Orange Yoga, Cheltenham
May 7 — HOME Wellness, London

Long Life Yoga Teacher Training & Intensives

April 26 — Yoga Sky, Berlin
May 2-3 — Orange Yoga, Cheltenham
May 9-10 — HOME Wellness, London

Sati & Sustainable Yoga

April 26 —Yoga Sky, Berlin
May 1 — Orange Yoga, Cheltenham
May 8 — HOME Wellness, London

See My Full Calendar of Events

Speaking of books, you can pre-order my book, Long Life Yoga

In this essential guide to health and well-being, world-renowned yoga teacher Cyndi Lee provides simple, empowering yoga practices to help you feel your best at any age.

Yoga has proven benefits at every age, including increasing one’s lifespan. Set yourself up for success by starting your yoga practice for longevity now[JT1] . Whether you’re dealing with aches and pains, stress, sleep issues, or simply looking for ways to feel healthier and more fulfilled, these pages are brimming with techniques proven to improve the quality of your life.

Featuring hundreds of helpful illustrations paired with expert tips and sidebars featuring accessible meditations, breathing exercises, and relaxing rituals, Long Life Yoga makes it simple to enrich your daily routine with proven well-being techniques to live a long, healthy, joyful life.

Pre-Order on Bookshop.org

Pre-Order on Amazon.com

Subscribe now

In 2020 when everything changed for everybody, everywhere, I did what many yoga teachers did and started teaching online. But as I began to put together a syllabus for a 300-hour Yoga Teacher Training, the world changed even more.

George Floyd was killed, the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, and hundreds of people were dying alone every day. People were stuck in lockdown, feeling destabilized, helpless, powerless to effect any change.

My chaplaincy training led me to ask new questions: How can teaching yoga be a practice of chaplaincy? How can we yogis walk alongside?

The Dharma of Engaged Yoga emerged as a way to offer direction for all of us who were asking, What can I do? How can I do it? Is there a path through dharma that can help us recognize our suffering and find a way to take skillful action?

There are those who argue that the sole aim of Buddhist practice—and maybe yoga practice, too—is to engage in social justice.

I don’t want to argue about that because:

1. it is not exactly accurate;

2. the political is personal and the personal is political;

3. non-violent social justice grows from understanding interdependence and impermanence, and

4. you have to start with yourself.

But what can one person do that matters? Today, in the midst of confusion and suffering facing all of us, we are once again asking this question.

This question is exactly where you start!

That is your motivation, and without a clear motivation, you can’t do anything except make a mess or get burned out.

Start with yourself because you can’t start with someone else. You can’t change the world or even one mind or heart until you have a clear motivation. Otherwise, you can’t do anything except make a mess or get burned out.

My training in this work comes from the Upaya Zen Center Chaplaincy program from which I graduated and was ordained in 2018. A chaplain is someone who “walks alongside.” That means that we can all be chaplains.

The following Three Tenets of Engaged Practice are derived from the teachings of Roshi Bernie Glassman and Engaged Buddhism, which is a practice of recognizing the deep connectivity of all that is.

1. Not Knowing

Not Knowing is a practice of being grounded in uncertainty. This is very alive for us right now in 2026.

Being in Not Knowing requires non-reactivity. It asks us to remember that everything that arises is impermanent. That means we can learn to enter a situation and remain stable, without immediately reacting to our feelings and thoughts.

This is why we start with meditation practice, so we can get familiar with our own mind. In mindfulness meditation technique, you are specifically practicing not-reacting. You learn to stop fighting with yourself, wishing you were different, or resisting the truth of how life is and isn’t. You understand that you cannot control everything because every single everything is changing all the time.

Meditation and concentration practice develop attentional balance because your energy is no longer scattered. When your attention is bouncing around, it takes a lot of glucose to reset and this causes exhaustion.

Not Knowing is not a bliss state or a nothingness. It is about being present and meeting the moment.

Not Knowing doesn’t mean you don’t know anything. It means that we can tap into our capacity for curiosity, discovery, even play.

Some people question this, too. They ask, what difference can you effect in the world if you are sitting on a cushion?

One of the most powerful skillful means that we can all apply to our world is non-violence. Any time someone models non-violence it has a powerful effect.

You can see this by watching the Peace monks. All they are doing is walking with a motivation to radiate peace in the world. Their simple non-violent actions have planted seeds of peace in thousands of people.

2. Bearing Witness

Like a Russian doll, each of the three tenets includes the ones before it, so Bearing Witness includes the sense of presence and non-reactivity of Not Knowing.

Not Knowing is opening your mind.
Bearing Witness is opening your heart.

Opening the heart doesn’t mean you have to get all mushy. It means opening to ALL your feelings. Again, starting with yourself, practice getting familiar with your emotions, including the ones you don’t like, because those are usually the ones that fester. They are the ones you stew over… until you remember that feelings only do one thing—which is change.

This acceptance allows you to practice inclusivity with yourself. Open to your joy and anger and love and fear and boredom and beauty. Self-inclusivity is the template for being inclusive of all beings.

When you get familiar with your suffering, then you more readily recognize the suffering of others. This is the beginning of really feeling inter-being-ness.

This is not about over-identifying with others. It is about learning how to let your heart open and feel more. Because this is a place of vulnerability, we need to practice it so we can learn to be upright within uncertainty.

We just have to because if we don’t, we get stuck or tight or frozen and will not be able to walk alongside anyone. This work is not theoretical. It’s about emotions and caring and heart—everything that has rhythm and pulse.

This emotional balance is built on the bone-deep understanding that we are not separate and our motivation is clear.

Bearing Witness is about holding space. Being stable and open at the same time. This is the recipe for Active Compassion.

3. Taking Compassionate Action

Compassionate Action is built on Not Knowing and Bearing Witness, open-mind and open-heart.

Compassion means “with passion,” a genuine place of caring, of feeling close.

Compassionate action means being open to what might serve—and this is important—without trying to control the outcome or making it all work out for your own agenda.

This about being responsive, not reactive. Exactly what you have been practicing in meditation.

This is also how you learn to be responsive, not just to narrative, but to the feeling. The key is to remember that all suffering is worthy of compassion.

Sometimes suffering shows up as confusion, ignorance or even trivial complaining. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to understand it or judge it. Just recognize suffering and offer support. You don’t necessarily need to fix things or make it all better or make the problem go away right now.

Compassionate Action comes from a place of sanity, clarity and caring. A listening ear. Asking the right questions. Holding space.

You never know what the results of your Compassionate Action will be. It probably won’t be the end of things but part of a bigger dance. It’s the opposite of figuring out something concrete, and then checking it off your list and you’re done.

We are always in relationship, which means there will be an element of surprise. Like good parents who pay attention to what lights up their child and supports what is alive for them, rather than shaping them in the way they want.

Openness, stability, attentional and emotional balance allow us to be nimble and meet situations as they arise, shift, and require new responses.

These three tenets can be your road map. Just start. I hope this helps.

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In-Person Practice Opportunities

Sati & Sustainable Yoga

Yoga is always about being integrated — with ourself, with each other, with the world. Yet we forget this all the time. Sati is a practice of remembering: our motivation, our basic goodness, and our inter-being-ness.

The practice of Sustainable Yoga: medium-paced vinyasa, precise alignment and mindfulness of feelings gives us tools for embodying Sati. We remember that if we move in ways that nourish, strengthen and create physical resiliency, our yoga practice becomes self-renewing. As we move breath by breath, step by step, we will develop sustainable presence, stability, nimbleness, and integration with all that is.

The Dharma of Engaged Yoga

The Dharma of Engaged Yoga is a vibrant approach to practice that flows from the understanding that all beings everywhere are interdependent. What we say and what we do has consequences; acknowledging this is the foundation of Engaged Yoga.

Cyndi will introduce the Three Tenets of Engaged Yoga and we will explore them through meditation, pranayama and contemplative journaling. A Sustainable yoga practice of purposeful movement: simple stretching, medium-paced vinyasa, precise alignment and paying attention will help us to further embody this work. Some restorative work might happen, too.

Learn More & Register

Orange Yoga, Cheltenham, UK

May, 2026

Learn More & Register

Mark Your Calendars!

All upcoming in-person practice opportunities:

The Dharma of Engaged Yoga

April 26 — Yoga Sky, Berlin
May 4 — Orange Yoga, Cheltenham
May 7 — HOME Wellness, London

Long Life Yoga Teacher Training & Intensives

April 26 — Yoga Sky, Berlin
May 2-3 — Orange Yoga, Cheltenham
May 9-10 — HOME Wellness, London

Sati & Sustainable Yoga

April 26 —Yoga Sky, Berlin
May 1 — Orange Yoga, Cheltenham
May 8 — HOME Wellness, London

Pre-Order My Book!

In this essential guide to health and well-being, world-renowned yoga teacher Cyndi Lee provides simple, empowering yoga practices to help you feel your best at any age.

Yoga has proven benefits at every age, including increasing one’s lifespan. Set yourself up for success by starting your yoga practice for longevity now[JT1] . Whether you’re dealing with aches and pains, stress, sleep issues, or simply looking for ways to feel healthier and more fulfilled, these pages are brimming with techniques proven to improve the quality of your life.

Featuring hundreds of helpful illustrations paired with expert tips and sidebars featuring accessible meditations, breathing exercises, and relaxing rituals, Long Life Yoga makes it simple to enrich your daily routine with proven well-being techniques to live a long, healthy, joyful life.

Pre-Order on Bookshop.org

Pre-Order on Amazon.com

Online Practice Opportunities

So many of you have been showing up for my 15-minute retreats! It is wonderful to see how even just those few minutes a day of practice has such a positive and long lasting impact.

Just think if we did this on a regular schedule!

That impact would grow and before you know it, you would have your own Mindfulness Meditation practice.

So, in 2026, I am offering 6 Mindfulness Meditation mini-retreats. Every other month we will sit together for 20 minutes, 5 days in a row… (except August when we will do 30 min.)

At the beginning of each session I will give you a meditation tip—how to work with obstacles, refreshing your posture, working with the breath, the gaze. You will have a chance to refine your meditation technique—so that you can gain confidence in how to practice.

And the why? When you meditate regularly, you will discover for yourself the why. You will begin to experience benefits of stability, clarity and strength of mind, equanimity of spirit. You will find that you are more responsive and less reactive. You will more compassionate to yourself and others.

You won’t notice this on the cushion but you will start to see these results pop up in your every day life.

That might seem like a lot of goodness from such a simple practice but consistency and commitment add up. Or as my guru always said, Drip, Drip, Drip, the Bucket Fills.

If you want to start 2026 by committing to growing your meditation practice, here’s your chance.

Open to everyone, beginners welcome.

Cost

• Each mini-retreat costs $45.

• Sign up for all of them for $225 and relax in the confidence that you will be showing up for yourself and your world.

• Sign up for 3 of your choice for $115. You can always sign up for more later if it fits your schedule.

• You can also buy a Year of Meditating or even one retreat as a GIFT for your favorite meditator or meditator-to-be.

Register

The Mentor Sessions Podcast

We Don’t Want AI Yoga with Cyndi Lee

Listen to the Podcast

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in August

This retreat is now MORE than 50% full!!!

Wednesday, August 5 — Sunday, August 9

Menla Retreat Center & Spa

Phoenicia, NY

Lifting the Gaze is an opportunity to withdraw from the demands of your life and gather yourself together within the beauty of Menla and the warmth of community.

Traditionally, a spiritual retreat is a time to touch your mind and touch your heart. It offers you a concentrated period of practice to help you get familiar with who you are, as you are, right now.

Personal practice is never about being better or different. It is not about rejecting any part of you, no part of your body and no part of your mind, your emotions, your anger or your love. It’s about opening to the basic goodness that lives inside you right now.

We will use the tried and true practices of yoga and meditation to experience the traditional benefits of joy and ease.

• MORNING SESSIONS will include silent meditation, a dharma talk, Q & A and sustainable yoga practice.

• AFTERNOON PRACTICES will include pranayama, restorative yoga, group discussions and outdoor walking meditation

• ONE EVENING SESSION will offer a silent guided meditation.

During the retreat you will:

• develop your mindfulness/shamatha practice,

• strengthen your practice commitment by recognizing and relaxing your obstacles; and

• gain the skills and awareness to bring your innate goodness into the rest of your life.

Together we will connect the dots between why we practice, how we practice, and the results of practice.

We will show up for ourselves and we will show up for each other…and we’ll make it fun!

All levels are welcome. Modifications will be offered to support those with injuries or physical limitations.

Learn More & Register

Subscribe now

Last week, I was joined by a dedicated group of meditators for three mornings to mark the small bardo, the between time, from 2025-2026. We didn’t make resolutions or the currently more popular intentions, goals or trackable plans.

We sat and contemplated and practiced:

• letting go,

• noticing what it feels like to be presently aware, and

• taking a fresh start.

This process is baked into mindfulness meditation/shamatha technique. It is very specific and works best if you can be both gentle and precise. It’s not difficult to do, but it requires practice in order to experience the after-effects of stability, clarity, and equanimity.

Letting go and taking a fresh start are two fairly subtle actions, which together form a kind of rhythm. By riding this rhythm you can create a harmonious relationship with how your mind actually works. It moves around and then sometimes it naturally becomes still.

One way to think about all this is that you are getting familiar with the pulse of impermanence.

Every thought that arises will dissolve.

Your practice is to notice this.

Also, to notice your impulse to hold onto a thought, or react to a thought by rejecting it, or to criticizing yourself for having that same old boring repetitive thought.

As you observe this natural cadence of arising and abiding and dissolving, you sit, upright and stable. It’s a feeling of being the hub of a wheel.

This is how your relationship to impermanence can become refined, creative, sustainable and much more comfortable.

It is well established that in this life we experience discomfort, anxiety, frustration, chafing, dis-ease, all of which get lumped under the category of suffering.

This the first Noble Truth that Buddha taught, and then he went right on to explain that we are the cause of our own suffering when we resist the natural flow of change.

Even when we know we are in the midst of a transition—say, from one year to the next—we still tend to shy away from freely experiencing the continuous mutating of time, energy, thoughts, opinions, bodies.

We would prefer to be in control.

Each of us has our own particular way of doing that by trying to lock down things or ideas or status or money.

We create and then get attached to structures.

My husband likes to wear the same thing every day. In the winter, it’s a waffle shirt with jeans. For the summer he has ten t-shirts that are exactly the same, which he wears with one of three identical cargo shorts. This makes him happy.

In Ann Tashi Slater’s book Traveling in Bardo, she writes that when she became a young adult, she set up her home in Tokyo. After her tumultuous childhood in the U.S., she felt safe in the highly structured culture of Japan where there are clear rules and everyone abides by them.

She explains: “When people leave the house, they say ittekimasu (I’m leaving and will come back safely): and when they return home, they say tadaima (I’m home).”

I love this comforting custom, and at the same time, I am bone-deep frightened at the thought of returning to Japan after having lived through the 9.0 earthquake and Fukoshima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011.

Living with a false notion of unshakeable security—or the opposite, living in fear and avoidance—offers a false dualism. There is always a third thing, third perspective, third approach.

Remember the image of sitting in meditation like the hub of a wheel? In Buddhism, there is a concept of sukha, which means “good space”. This is an ancient reference to the axle hole on a wooden cart. If the hole was well carved, nice and smooth, it created a “good space,” providing the rider with a good ride. If the axle hole was uneven, the rider would experience dukkha, a bad ride.

Sukha, good space. Dukkha, bad space. But a third thing can always happen. A rider in a cart with a lumpy axle hole might actually relax, and let their body wave and sway with the bumps. It’s like the advice given for fear-of-flying: Instead of white knuckling your armrests, relax your body, letting it ebb and flow with the plane’s movement. The third choice is experiencing a dukkha situation with a sukha attitude.

Opening to the unpredictable movement of impermanence does not mean “just go with the flow, baby.” We don’t have to roll over when something is harming us or just not a good idea. The rhythm of letting go and taking a fresh start is active, not passive.

We can remain bright and observant within transition, sudden shifts, or when unexpected realities occur. Sickness, earthquakes, losing your job, missing your flight. None of these are hoped for experiences, but when they happen, you know you can deal with them if you are not stuck in hopes from the past and fears about the future.

Perhaps we can flip our resistance to impermanence. Instead of regarding it as what makes our life feel out of control, we can look at impermanence from the opposite lens.

That rhythm of letting go and taking a fresh start offers us an opportunity to be clear about what’s what, including what choices we want to make to move forward.

Being in harmony with impermanence allows us to evolve and to manifest. (Or as my friend said: womanifest.)

No need to try to make impermanence solid with those same old intentions, year in and year out. Unless they have evolved, too.

Riding the waves of impermanence is what allows you to be more fully alive, more fully yourself as you, too, change and morph.

If you liked this article, please scroll down to the bottom and “like” or comment. Substack tells me it helps more people see this post when that happens. Thanks!

Leave a comment

If you found this article valuable, please feel free to share it with your friends!

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Practice Opportunities

So many of you have been showing up for my 15-minute retreats! It is wonderful to see how even just those few minutes a day of practice has such a positive and long lasting impact.

Just think if we did this on a regular schedule!

That impact would grow and before you know it, you would have your own Mindfulness Meditation practice.

So, in 2026, I am offering 6 Mindfulness Meditation mini-retreats. Every other month we will sit together for 20 minutes, 5 days in a row… (except August when we will do 30 min.)

At the beginning of each session I will give you a meditation tip—how to work with obstacles, refreshing your posture, working with the breath, the gaze. You will have a chance to refine your meditation technique—so that you can gain confidence in how to practice.

And the why? When you meditate regularly, you will discover for yourself the why. You will begin to experience benefits of stability, clarity and strength of mind, equanimity of spirit. You will find that you are more responsive and less reactive. You will more compassionate to yourself and others.

You won’t notice this on the cushion but you will start to see these results pop up in your every day life.

That might seem like a lot of goodness from such a simple practice but consistency and commitment add up. Or as my guru always said, Drip, Drip, Drip, the Bucket Fills.

If you want to start 2026 by committing to growing your meditation practice, here’s your chance.

Open to everyone, beginners welcome.

Cost

• Each mini-retreat costs $45.

• Sign up for all of them for $225 and relax in the confidence that you will be showing up for yourself and your world.

• Sign up for 3 of your choice for $115. You can always sign up for more later if it fits your schedule.

• You can also buy a Year of Meditating or even one retreat as a GIFT for your favorite meditator or meditator-to-be.

Register

Practice and study dharma in a wonderful group of dedicated meditators. We meet 3/x month for meditation, contemplation, group discussions. If you can’t attend every session, there is always a recording.

Starting in February, we will work our way through Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening by Joseph Goldstein. It is his very accessible, clear, and inspiring teaching/commentary of The Four Foundations of Mindfulness.

Learn More

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in August

This retreat is almost 50% full already!

Wednesday, August 5 — Sunday, August 9

Menla Retreat Center & Spa

Phoenicia, NY

Lifting the Gaze is an opportunity to withdraw from the demands of your life and gather yourself together within the beauty of Menla and the warmth of community.

Traditionally, a spiritual retreat is a time to touch your mind and touch your heart. It offers you a concentrated period of practice to help you get familiar with who you are, as you are, right now.

Personal practice is never about being better or different. It is not about rejecting any part of you, no part of your body and no part of your mind, your emotions, your anger or your love. It’s about opening to the basic goodness that lives inside you right now.

We will use the tried and true practices of yoga and meditation to experience the traditional benefits of joy and ease.

• MORNING SESSIONS will include silent meditation, a dharma talk, Q & A and sustainable yoga practice.

• AFTERNOON PRACTICES will include pranayama, restorative yoga, group discussions and outdoor walking meditation

• ONE EVENING SESSION will offer a silent guided meditation.

During the retreat you will:

• develop your mindfulness/shamatha practice,

• strengthen your practice commitment by recognizing and relaxing your obstacles; and

• gain the skills and awareness to bring your innate goodness into the rest of your life.

Together we will connect the dots between why we practice, how we practice, and the results of practice.

We will show up for ourselves and we will show up for each other…and we’ll make it fun!

All levels are welcome. Modifications will be offered to support those with injuries or physical limitations.

Learn More & Register

Subscribe now

Hello friends and Happy New Year!

The turning of the year is naturally a time of reflection. But if your mind or your energy is scattered, you might find that your reflecting turns into rehashing and the big picture fades away.

I am so grateful that Rimpoche taught me the 4 Rs, a traditional Buddhist contemplative practice for reflecting on your speech and actions over the past year and consider how you might shift some of your unskillful habits.

This practice, just like meditation, contemplation, yoga, pranayama/breath-work, is a tried-and-true method for slowing down or even stopping the momentum of our unconscious habitual patterns.

We are talking about dispositive habits which are manifestations of our kleshas—afflictive emotions such as anger, jealousy, craving and attachment. 

These human emotions are not innately bad, but when they spontaneously pop up and affect our speech and actions in regrettable ways, well, we regret it.

Also, sometimes this happens. We are not perfect and sometimes we say or do things that we wish we could take back. 

Please note that the Buddhist approach to making resolutions is that it is NEVER about getting rid of the old you and being a better you. In fact, that kind of thinking is considered a subtle act of self-aggression.

Instead, the practice of the 4 Rs is about becoming more aware, more connected, more compassionate and more equanimous. These qualities are already part of you so the 4 Rs is not a self-improvement program, but rather a way to help you refresh and enliven your relationship to your natural wholesomeness.

The structure of the 4 Rs does this by creating a sense of lucidity, clearing, kindness and a way to move forward.

The 4 Rs are:

1. Review & Recognize

2. Regret

3. Reliance

4. Resolve

Here’s how to do it:

• Read through the 4 Rs practice below,

• Sit for 5-10 minutes in Mindfulness Meditation

• Read and contemplate the 4 Rs. OR, you can listen to the guided meditation that I recorded for you.

• Return to Mindfulness meditation for another 5-10 minutes.

It’s important that you nestle the 4 Rs contemplative practice, like a sandwich, between these short shamatha/mindfulness sessions which serve as a kind of sorbet, cleansing the palette of the mind. This way your mind will be stable as you begin and end the 4 Rs.

Reminder: eyes are open for mindfulness meditation but you can close them to contemplate the 4 Rs.

Option: If you prefer to practice contemplative writing you can do that while listening to the guided meditation recording.

The 4 Rs:

Review & Recognize

Let your mind float back through 2025.

You will recall some wholesome thoughts, speech and actions that happened and some unwholesome thoughts, speech and actions that happened. Just observe and note.

You might experience feelings in your body, or places where your mind almost feels snagged on something.

Try to avoid getting lost in memories or storylines. You don’t want to relive the heat of the moment. Stay clear and focussed.

Let the memories come back to you but try to maintain your openness and clarity. Sit with stability and steadiness.

Just observe and note.

Regret

There is no need to feel bad or guilty for anything. Rimpoche once told me that there is no word for “guilty” in Tibetan. He said, “Guilty is not necessary, but regret is ok.”

Feeling guilty is heavy with unnecessary self-judgement, another habit we can learn to release. When we feel guilty for doing something “bad,” we can start to feel like we are a bad person.  

The emotion of guilt can even cause us to think we don’t deserve to be happy. In this way, guilt is considered an obstruction to your spiritual development.

As opposed to guilt, regret is intelligent and constructive.

Regret is likened to the way we would feel if we found out that something we had swallowed was poisonous. 

Fearful of becoming sick or losing our life, we would drop everything and rush to the emergency room to have the poison pumped out of us.

Engaging in negative actions, like taking poison, is toxic and something we want to remove from our life.

We know that we don’t feel good when we lie or hide the truth, steal someone’s time, or just lose it and spew our klesha dramas all over the place. These are habits we want to weaken, not strengthen.  

Feeling regret helps us see the words we wish we hadn’t said

and the actions we wish we hadn’t taken

and gives us the space to ask,

“What can I do to remedy it?  

The first step in genuine regret is to feel compassion for ourself.

Take a few breaths here and touch into your tender heart.

Then expand that feeling of self-compassion and extend it to others, which leads us to the next R.

Reliance

Reliance, first of all, refers to our practice. It is a reminder that we can depend on the Buddhist practices.

The Buddhist path gives us a clear outline:

First, recognize suffering, and then recognize the cause of suffering,

Contemplate this for yourself.

Notice what comes up when you think about suffering.

Does the word suffering seem like too much? 

How about anxiety, stuck-ness, chafing, dis-ease, dis-comfort, low-level irritation, pervasive worry?

The good news is that once we allow ourselves to acknowledge suffering and the causes of suffering, we can change it.

Buddhism offers us a path to being free from all that. Knowing we can depend on that path allows us to take the first steps.

The second part of Reliance is that we must rely on other people—those we have harmed and those who have harmed us—to help us expand our capacity for compassion.

Start by thinking about those you have harmed. You know you don’t like being lied to, gaslit, ignored, or ripped off.

So it is probably natural for you to regret having caused that kind of harm to another. Your regret opens the door to generating compassion towards those you have harmed, intentionally or unintentionally.

And! We also can try to have compassion for those who have harmed us.

This can be a challenge. Maybe you lost your temper and dumped on them and maybe there was a reason. And right now you still feel attached to that reason and the energy around it, which can make it tough to drum up love and compassion for them.

Try not to relive the heat of that moment or get caught in a thought-loop about how much you can’t stand that person.

This is sometimes a tough ask. If compassion is not available to you right now, you can start by just considering the possibility that you could feel it in the future.

Think about it now and then just do your best.

Resolve 

How to move forward? 

Begin by simply resolving not to engage in those unwholesome activities again.

Even though you know you might, you are working toward avoiding harm, and even that makes a difference.

The recommendation is to make your resolve something that is attainable. 

For example, resolve not to engage in harmful speech or action for 24 hours, or one week or whatever you think you can manage. 

You will get the benefit of strengthening your compassion habit by giving yourself compassion and patience as you work with your resolve.  

This approach is called Positive Effort or Whole Hearted Enthusiasm and it is said when you live like this, it brightens your mind and brings you joy!

That makes this practice a win/win all the time.

Finish your practice by sitting in mindfulness meditation for 5-10 minutes.

I hope the 4 Rs can help you look back on 2025 and move forward into 2026 with clarity, curiosity, kindness and positive inspiration.

You can listen to my guided meditation here:

If you liked this article, please scroll down to the bottom and “like” or comment. Substack tells me it helps more people see this post when that happens. Thanks!

Leave a comment

If you found this article valuable, please feel free to share it with your friends!

Share

Practice Opportunities

So many of you have been showing up for my 15-minute retreats! It is wonderful to see how even just those few minutes a day of practice has such a positive and long lasting impact.

Just think if we did this on a regular schedule!

That impact would grow and before you know it, you would have your own Mindfulness Meditation practice.

So, in 2026, I am offering 6 Mindfulness Meditation mini-retreats. Every other month we will sit together for 20 minutes, 5 days in a row… (except August when we will do 30 min.)

At the beginning of each session I will give you a meditation tip—how to work with obstacles, refreshing your posture, working with the breath, the gaze. You will have a chance to refine your meditation technique—so that you can gain confidence in how to practice.

And the why? When you meditate regularly, you will discover for yourself the why. You will begin to experience benefits of stability, clarity and strength of mind, equanimity of spirit. You will find that you are more responsive and less reactive. You will more compassionate to yourself and others.

You won’t notice this on the cushion but you will start to see these results pop up in your every day life.

That might seem like a lot of goodness from such a simple practice but consistency and commitment add up. Or as my guru always said, Drip, Drip, Drip, the Bucket Fills.

If you want to start 2026 by committing to growing your meditation practice, here’s your chance.

Open to everyone, beginners welcome.

Cost

• Each mini-retreat costs $45.

• Sign up for all of them for $225 and relax in the confidence that you will be showing up for yourself and your world.

• Sign up for 3 of your choice for $115. You can always sign up for more later if it fits your schedule.

• You can also buy a Year of Meditating or even one retreat as a GIFT for your favorite meditator or meditator-to-be.

Register

Long Life Yoga

I’m so excited to share that my new book, Long Life Yoga. It will be released on April 7, 2026. And… you can pre-order it now:

Long Life Yoga - Bookshop.org

Long Life Yoga - Amazon

It’s about longevity! Learn how yoga can enhance, support and contribute to lengthening your health span. My book has 7 full yoga practices and a number of contemplations to help you maintain the pillars of longevity. Balance, Strength, Anti-Inflammaging, Relaxation and more.

Yoga philosophy through the lens of longevity practice will give you much food for thought and inspiration.

I’m so proud of this book!

I will be teaching my first Long Life Yoga workshop in the U.K. in May, 2026. Info coming soon on that and keep your eyes out for more.

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in August

This retreat is already 35% full!

Wednesday, August 5 — Sunday, August 9

Menla Retreat Center & Spa

Phoenicia, NY

Lifting the Gaze is an opportunity to withdraw from the demands of your life and gather yourself together within the beauty of Menla and the warmth of community.

Traditionally, a spiritual retreat is a time to touch your mind and touch your heart. It offers you a concentrated period of practice to help you get familiar with who you are, as you are, right now.

Personal practice is never about being better or different. It is not about rejecting any part of you, no part of your body and no part of your mind, your emotions, your anger or your love. It’s about opening to the basic goodness that lives inside you right now.

We will use the tried and true practices of yoga and meditation to experience the traditional benefits of joy and ease.

• MORNING SESSIONS will include silent meditation, a dharma talk, Q & A and sustainable yoga practice.

• AFTERNOON PRACTICES will include pranayama, restorative yoga, group discussions and outdoor walking meditation

• ONE EVENING SESSION will offer a silent guided meditation.

During the retreat you will:

• develop your mindfulness/shamatha practice,

• strengthen your practice commitment by recognizing and relaxing your obstacles; and

• gain the skills and awareness to bring your innate goodness into the rest of your life.

Together we will connect the dots between why we practice, how we practice, and the results of practice.

We will show up for ourselves and we will show up for each other…and we’ll make it fun!

All levels are welcome. Modifications will be offered to support those with injuries or physical limitations.

Learn More & Register

Subscribe now

• Two Big Announcements!

• Two Perfect Gifts for Your Favorite Yogi and Meditator!

A Year of Meditating

So many of you have been showing up for my 15-minute retreats! It is wonderful to see how even just those few minutes a day of practice has such a positive and long lasting impact.

Just think if we did this on a regular schedule!

That impact would grow and before you know it, you would have your own Mindfulness Meditation practice.

So, in 2026, I am offering 6 Mindfulness Meditation mini-retreats. Every other month we will sit together for 20 minutes, 5 days in a row… (except August when we will do 30 min.)

At the beginning of each session I will give you a meditation tip—how to work with obstacles, refreshing your posture, working with the breath, the gaze. You will have a chance to refine your meditation technique—so that you can gain confidence in how to practice.

And the why? When you meditate regularly, you will discover for yourself the why. You will begin to experience benefits of stability, clarity and strength of mind, equanimity of spirit. You will find that you are more responsive and less reactive. You will more compassionate to yourself and others.

You won’t notice this on the cushion but you will start to see these results pop up in your every day life.

That might seem like a lot of goodness from such a simple practice but consistency and commitment add up. Or as my guru always said, Drip, Drip, Drip, the Bucket Fills.

If you want to start 2026 by committing to growing your meditation practice, here’s your chance.

Open to everyone, beginners welcome.

Register

Cost

• Each mini-retreat costs $45.

• Sign up for all of them for $225 and relax in the confidence that you will be showing up for yourself and your world.

• Sign up for 3 of your choice for $115. You can always sign up for more later if it fits your schedule.

• You can also buy a Year of Meditating or even one retreat as a GIFT for your favorite meditator or meditator-to-be.

Dates

February 23 - 27
12:00 - 12:20 pm ET (20 min)

April 13 - 17
12:00 - 12:20 pm ET (20 min)

June 22 - 26
7:00 - 7:20 pm ET (20 min)

August 17 - 21
12:00 - 12:30 pm ET (30 min)

October 12 - 16
12:00 - 12:20 pm ET (20 min)

December 7 - 11
12:00 - 12:20 pm ET (20 min)

Long Life Yoga

I’m so excited to share that my new book, Long Life Yoga. It will be released on April 7, 2026. And… you can pre-order it now:

Long Life Yoga - Bookshop.org

Long Life Yoga - Amazon

It’s about longevity! Learn how yoga can enhance, support and contribute to lengthening your health span. My book has 7 full yoga practices and a number of contemplations to help you maintain the pillars of longevity. Balance, Strength, Anti-Inflammaging, Relaxation and more.

Yoga philosophy through the lens of longevity practice will give you much food for thought and inspiration.

I’m so proud of this book!

I will be teaching my first Long Life Yoga workshop in the U.K. in May, 2026. Info coming soon on that and keep your eyes out for more.

If you liked this article, please scroll down to the bottom and “like” or comment. Substack tells me it helps more people see this post when that happens. Thanks!

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More Ways You Can Give the Gift of Dharma:

A Membership to Lifting the Gaze Sangha

Sangha is a Sanskrit word that means “bring together.”

In Buddha’s lifetime, the sangha was officially composed of monks and nuns who committed to a lifetime of renunciation.

To participate in the Lifting the Gaze Sangha you do not need to be a renunciate. You do not need to be a Buddhist or take Buddhist refuge vows. You do not need to be an experienced meditator, a vegetarian, or anything different from who you are right now.

That’s the point of practice - getting familiar with who you are, as you are. This is not about rejecting any part of you, no part of your mind, your emotions, your anger or your love, or any part of your body. It is about opening to the basic goodness that lives inside you right now and very gently, over time, letting that goodness come forward and guide your life.

Click Here For More Info

Do you love restorative yoga? So much so that you’d like to teach it to others? Or perhaps you’d simply like to add more restorative postures into your home practice, but you’re not quite sure where to start. In either case, we have the course for you! Join world-renowned teacher Cyndi Lee for a comprehensive restorative yoga teacher training program.

Learn More & Register

Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training: A Self-Guided 2-Part Program is a course Cyndi Lee designed to help meditators of all levels learn a new approach to meditation or refresh and deepen their existing practice. In the second part of the course, you’ll learn how to teach meditation and listen to enriching dharma talks from Cyndi that will inspire both your practice and your teaching.

Learn More & Register

Cyndi Lee’s Teaching Pranayama: The Basics will give yoga practitioners and teachers, bodyworkers, and health professionals the tools to enrich their own pranayama practice and learn how to effectively share it with their students, clients, and patients. This three-day training will include practicing and teaching breath awareness and breath manipulation techniques, such as sama vritti, ujjayi, nadi shodanam, viloma, and kapalabhati. Sessions will include simple stretching, dharma talks, practicing pranayama techniques in reclined and seated positions, and designing pranayama classes.

Learn More & Register

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How Mindfulness Meditation is Good for You

I recently read a post on a Substack to which I don’t subscribe, in which the author asked the question, Can mindfulness make you sick? It goes on to discuss how mindfulness can be harmful, and at the very least, it is certainly not good for everyone.

Well, if that is true, we are all in a lot of trouble because the very description of how one’s mind works is mindfulness. I suspect that this writer does not understand the difference between mindfulness and mindfulness meditation.

Mindfulness means placing the mind, which is what we are all doing, all day long and all night, too. Your mind can never be nowhere, it is always placed on something—a dream, a plan, a response to a lovely aroma, a revenge scenario, a story you want to write down or a story you want to forget.

None of this is a bad thing, nor is it harmful. It is the natural way that your mind works.

Your attention is like a bird that flies through the sky and lands on a branch. In a little minute, it flies off to join another bird onto another branch. Together they fly over to a tree with some yummy seeds. You get the idea.

Like a bird, your mind flies and lands and flies and lands, seduced by interesting thoughts that dissolve on their own.

Flitting from thought to thought, regrets and redos, rehearsals and plans, our mind is mostly placed on the past and the future.

But sometimes there are moments your mind naturally comes to rest, and this is when it is in the present. Just like the two birds in the tree get into an animated chat, chirping away, then they stop. Their conversation ended, they lift off and fly silently through the sky. We consider this behaviour a part of a bird’s nature.

In the same way, mindfulness is a natural human phenomenon; being lost in thought, coming out of thought and noticing a moment of spaciousness. This is the innate rhythm of your mind.

When you start to observe this pattern, you are beginning to practice mindfulness meditation, which is defined as consciously placing the mind, or placing the mind on purpose.

With practice, you will begin to notice when your mind has been diving deep into a mental soap opera. In fact, the exact moment that you recognize that, is when the thought has stopped. You have organically come out of your reverie and reawakened into a moment of pure awareness.

Mindfulness meditation is about getting familiar and comfortable with the feeling of a busy mind and with the feeling of a gap in our discursive thinking. You start to understand more about how your mind works through experience, not just theory.

As you practice tracking this activity, you get better at it. If your mind is scattered, you get better at gathering it together. If your mind feels lethargic, you are more able to refresh your energy and become more alert. You can also choose to notice various qualities of your mind: sluggish, dense, or spacey, without feeling a need to change them. That’s why this is called Making Friends with Yourself. Any time you can be more friendly toward yourself is a good thing. It’s good medicine.

Meditation practice, or any practice, has structure, boundary, purpose and requires commitment. This allows us to organize—or what it sometimes called train or tame—the mind. This mind training, in turn, allows us to become more grounded, more confident, and less afraid.

Here is one of the MANY way that Mindfulness Meditation Has been HELPFUL to me:

Have you ever noticed your mind spinning like the rainbow wheel on a computer? It’s when something happened which disturbed you but you aren’t yet conscious of it. Perhaps you said something you regret or someone is withholding a truth from you or you can’t stop feeling embarrassed by a harmless faux pas you inadvertently—but, very publicly—committed. This inner dialogue is like background noise that you might ignore until the micro-obsessive thought wears itself out. As you know, that can take a while, mostly because you don’t want to face whatever is chewing at you.

Mindfulness meditation has changed this game for me. I am much more aware of my discursive thinking and when the rainbow wheel starts turning, I can feel something ticking, like a scratched record playing. Something is stuck.

I check in to see what is unsettled. I can look at it, work it through, figure out if there is an action to be taken. I can also just let it go because mindfulness meditation has taught me that not all thoughts need to be entertained, not all attitudes need to be validated and just because a thought is seductive does not mean I want to spend my time being seduced by a repetitive klesha attack.

Having a habit of noticing my thoughts and noticing the spaces in between thoughts has allowed me to disarm the energy of thoughts. It has given me the confidence to face things knowing that I can deal with whatever is bothering me, big or small. As Trungpa Rimpoche always said, “Everything is workable.”

This is the definition of Spiritual Maturity and the Path to developing compassion.

Notice I used the word “path.”

Just as in yoga practice, you don’t start with an advanced pose like headstand. You start at the beginning, standing on your two feet. Whether you are tall or short, curvy or straight, old or young, strong or weak, this is how you begin. You learn to be a mountain. You learn how to do that with clarity, stability, integration and presence. After a long time spent developing this work, you can start to think about turning it all upside down into a Headstand.

In the same way, Mindfulness meditation is a foundational practice. Like yoga, you come as you are. Over time your relationship to your crazy, heavy, bright, percolating, sweet mind moves away from judgement and toward kindness and curiosity.

We are all like sponges; when we get squeezed, what comes out is what we have practiced. This is how mindfulness practice provides you with the steadiness needed to move into the tender work of heart-based practices. It creates the ground for safe and effective engaged work, e.g., protest marches, social justice efforts, engaged dharma, caring for the sick and needy—all the myriad ways we can “walk alongside” our fellow beings.

Mindfulness Meditation Practice Opportunities

Holiday Mindfulness Mini-Retreat

Wednesday, December 31 — Friday, January 2
12:00pm — 12:20pm Eastern Time
20 minutes a day

What better way to ride through these liminal days that end and begin our years.

Meditation practice is the perfect vehicle for consciously letting go rather than rejecting, denying or grasping for what once was.

Buoyed by the Buddhist practice of Fresh Start, we will step into a new year together, sharing the warmth of community

All this in just 20 minutes a day!

Register Here

Join Lifting the Gaze Sangha

Sangha is a Sanskrit word that means “bring together.”

In Buddha’s lifetime, the sangha was officially composed of monks and nuns who committed to a lifetime of renunciation.

To participate in the Lifting the Gaze Sangha you do not need to be a renunciate. You do not need to be a Buddhist or take Buddhist refuge vows. You do not need to be an experienced meditator, a vegetarian, or anything different from who you are right now.

That’s the point of practice - getting familiar with who you are, as you are. This is not about rejecting any part of you, no part of your mind, your emotions, your anger or your love, or any part of your body. It is about opening to the basic goodness that lives inside you right now and very gently, over time, letting that goodness come forward and guide your life.

Click Here For More Info

Want to know the best gift you can give your favorite yogi (who might be YOU)?

Do you love restorative yoga? So much so that you’d like to teach it to others? Or perhaps you’d simply like to add more restorative postures into your home practice, but you’re not quite sure where to start. In either case, we have the course for you! Join world-renowned teacher Cyndi Lee for a comprehensive restorative yoga teacher training program.

Learn More & Register

Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training: A Self-Guided 2-Part Program is a course Cyndi Lee designed to help meditators of all levels learn a new approach to meditation or refresh and deepen their existing practice. In the second part of the course, you’ll learn how to teach meditation and listen to enriching dharma talks from Cyndi that will inspire both your practice and your teaching.

Learn More & Register

Cyndi Lee’s Teaching Pranayama: The Basics will give yoga practitioners and teachers, bodyworkers, and health professionals the tools to enrich their own pranayama practice and learn how to effectively share it with their students, clients, and patients. This three-day training will include practicing and teaching breath awareness and breath manipulation techniques, such as sama vritti, ujjayi, nadi shodanam, viloma, and kapalabhati. Sessions will include simple stretching, dharma talks, practicing pranayama techniques in reclined and seated positions, and designing pranayama classes.

Learn More & Register

Subscribe now

Hello, friends,

My apologies for going silent these last few weeks. My little dog got really sick and passed away. I have been so sad and unable to write anything. Soon I will write more about what happened but for now I hope you might enjoy this post that I wrote last year at this time. It’s about so much including how to find a dharma teacher and about gratitude for the dharma.

I’ll be back with some new Drips soon. In the meantime, I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving—even if you don’t live in the US—because everyday, even if you are sad or tired or wish things were different or you are overworked or in love or lost or surrounded by family with all its complications and goodness—it’s always good to touch into your capacity to be thankful.

Here is a Zen prayer you can say before your meal.

First, let us reflect on our own work and the effort of those who brought us this food.
Second, let us be aware of the quality of our deeds as we receive this meal.
Third, what is most essential is the practice of mindfulness, which helps us to transcend greed, anger and delusion.
Fourth, we appreciate this food which sustains the good health of our body and mind.
Fifth, in order to continue our practice for all beings we accept this offering.

So I thank you... for reading and supporting Drip, Drip, Drip. It means a lot.

Cyndi

Practice Opportunities

Last meditation retreat of 2025:

This retreat will be all about meditation practice. How does the practice of shamatha, mindfulness meditation, actually impact your life? What is the technique and how does it relate to my thoughts and actions off the cushion? A daily dharma talk, short discussion and practice will help us integrate meditation into the wholeness of our life.

Great for beginning meditators or anybody who wants a refresher.

December 1 - December 5

15 min/day
12:15-12:30pm ET

Learn More & Register

Paid subscribers, and Moon and Stars sangha members: You can redeem your $40 discount pricing using the button at the bottom of each retreat’s registration page.

Lifting the Gaze Retreat

Menla, New York
August, 2026

One thing that has buoyed me is looking forward to my retreat in August, 2026 at Menla. The retreat has just now opened for registration. I know it is a long time away but the attendance is limited for this one and it’s already over 25% full. If you register early you have more room options, too!

Learn More & Register

Shopping for a Teacher

Quite a few new subscribers have recently joined Drip, for which I am so grateful. And it’s occurred to me that it might be a good time to share more about something else for which I am deeply grateful—the opportunity to have met the teachings of the Buddha and my root teacher, Gelek Rimpoche.

When I first met Rimpoche in the late ‘80s, I didn’t know anything about how to find a legitimate, authentic spiritual teacher. I didn’t understand the significance of knowing who my teacher’s teachers were, or to even ask how this teacher had learned what he was teaching.

If you are interested in meditation or Buddhist teachings, this is very important. These days, our social media is swamped with offerings for meditation apps and recorded meditations that are mostly “band-aids.” For example, do this meditation to reduce stress, or anger or fear. Even to lose weight, make money or Think Like a Monk.

It’s really important that before you waste your time and money on something that is making a guarantee which cannot be guaranteed, it is worth your while to find out who is teaching and their qualifications.

Just as dentists and doctors hang their diplomas on the wall so their patients can see their qualifications, it is important to educate yourself about the credentials and experience of your meditation/spiritual teacher.

My teacher, Gelek Rimpoche, was among the last generation of lamas to be educated in the monasteries in Tibet. He was recognized as an incarnate lama at the age of four, discovered by Pabongka Rimpoche, widely considered the most influential Gelugpa Buddhist lama of the 20th century.

Gelek Rimpoche lived at Drepung Monastic University from the age of 4 to twenty, studying alongside the young Dalai Lama under the tutelage of Trijang Rimpoche and Ling Rimpoche—both of whom had studied under Pabongka.

Did you follow that? It’s like a family tree:

Pabongka
Ling & Trijang
Dalai Lama & Gelek Rimpoche

When Rimpoche was 20, he and many other Tibetans walked through the Himalayas into India, escaping the Chinese invasion. Eventually he moved to Ann Arbor, MI and founded his center, Jewel Heart, with a mission to “translate the ancient wisdom of Buddhism into contemporary life.”

For me, Rimpoche absolutely did this. Over the years, no matter how much I failed as a disciple, he never gave up on me. He used all his skillful means: guiding me, nudging me, pushing me, confronting me, hugging me—to help me connect the dots of my chronic irritation, confusion, discomfort and low-level anxiety with the innate capacity of my mind to recognize and change those patterns; to become more stable, confident, clear and steady. Like putting a tea bag in hot water turns the water into tea, he steeped me in the teachings of the Buddha and I became a different person.

In my next Drip I will write more about the things that I learned from my beloved guru. But for now, let’s look at what a spiritual lineage means.

Lineage refers to the line of teachers that came before you. All of these teachers have maintained the purity and spiritual potency of the teachings in several ways:

1. They have directly experienced the depth, vastness and realization of what is called the primordial state of awakening: enlightenment.

2. They understand fully that every one of us has the potential to experience this, too.

3. They know how to transmit this heart essence of Buddhism through the wisdom of the teachings and their capacity to connect to anyone.

4. Their motivation is pure. It should never be something like making a lot of money or getting famous. (Again, see Think Like a Monk by Jay Sheety.)

Gelek Rimpoche’s entire life was devoted to his students, helping us develop through whatever skillful means. Up until almost the very last minute that he died, he was available to us.

Although he gave up his monk’s robes he was always a rimpoche and never lost his commitment to sharing the wisdom of the lineage. He did this in America by removing all obstacles between us. He learned American English by watching soap operas. He learned American customs and slang so he could communicate clearly with us. He lived with his wife in the burbs, with a car and big back yard, where they invited everyone over for picnics. He made it easy for us to be with him, learn from him and understand the teachings in real life situations.

How can you find an authentic teacher that is right for you?

Here are some traditional guidelines.

1) Look at the teacher’s students.

Are the students friendly? Are they clique-y? Does the teacher have an entourage isolating them from other students? Are the students welcoming, joyful and relaxed? Their energy and attitudes will reflect that of the teacher.

Before I met Rimpoche I had two friends who were his students: Philip Glass and Rudy Wurlitzer. They both really encouraged me to meet Rimpoche. I knew Philip and Rudy as generous, supportive, smart, creative and deep people. I thought, “I’ll have what they’re having!” I trusted them and knew I could trust Rimpoche. The first time I went to his teaching, I felt completely welcomed in by him and all of his students.

2) Shop around.

When you find a teacher that you like, stick with them for two years. Try to follow their guidance. If they give you a practice, do it as best you can. But, as Rimpoche always said, “If they ask you for money or sex, turn and run 500 miles!”

Gelek Rimpoche was my root guru on this earth for over 30 years and even though he died in 2017, he is still my guru forever. His teachings guide me every single day.

I have also received teachings from many other wonderful Buddhist teachers, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Eido Roshi, Enkyo Roshi, Sensei Alan Senauke, Roshi Bernie Glassman and Roshi Joan Halifax. I was ordained as a Buddhist Lay Chaplain by Roshi Joan in 2018, from whom I also received Jukai, the process of entering into the Zen lineage.

Gelek Rimpoche always said it is ok and good to study with more than one teacher. But your root guru is your root guru, the one who transmits direct teachings to you. Rimpoche did this for me in formal ceremonies and everyday conversations. No matter what, he never gave up on me. We had a commitment to each other that will last forever.

To learn more about Gelek Rimpoche and see a 7-minute film about him called American Rimpoche: https://www.jewelheart.org/gelek-rimpoche/

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My brilliant husband, Brad, spent his professional career in academia. He was a Professor of Economics at Grinnell College for 20 years and Provost at Denison University for six years. In 2013, he was named the President of Randolph College, a small liberal arts college in Lynchburg, VA. Being the president and president’s wife of the college held a big profile in a small city which meant that everyone knew who we were and they loved to gossip about us, even if they didn’t know us.

We lived in the “President’s House.” It was owned by the college and located in a neighborhood of large stately homes with expansive yards. After about two years of living in this relatively quiet neighborhood, the next door neighbor’s son started playing the drums. Those wide open backyard spaces allowed sound to travel easily and I remember sitting on my bed listening to this beginner drummer banging away for hours while I tried to read or write.

Although I had been meditating for a few decades, I was not mellow about this. I allowed myself to get deeply annoyed. I wondered why his parents didn’t get him isolation headphones that allow the drummer to protect his ears and his neighbor’s ears. I wondered why they chose to build him a special room to practice his drumming which abutted our yard, faced our bedroom and obviously had no soundproofing. I wondered why they did all this after Brad knocked on their front door at 10:00pm asking if their son could please stop playing the drums now. His parents apologized profusely, saying they had no idea we could hear it.

Yet now that they knew we could hear it, the drumming continued—except when he needed to take a break, and then he went out to his personal basketball court which was also built by his dad and also adjacent to our yard. He played basketball for hours. Bounce, bounce, bounce. Then his dad built him a skate board pipe which made a loud clacking sound every time the board hit the cement.

Within this soundscape, I sat on my couch and imagined that this boy would grow out of the desire to make loud sounds. Based on Shakti Gawain’s book that I read in 1983 called Creative Visualizations, I began to envision this boy sitting in the shade of his backyard reading poetry and playing the flute. In desperation, I ginned up a fantasy that, at the very least, he would become a great drummer and some exciting solos would pour forth, but that never happened.

Bounce, bounce, clack, clack, drumdrumdrum. Cymbals!

I started having negative, unkind thoughts, which formed into a daydream about knocking on the neighbor’s door and being somewhere between polite, aggressive, or totally losing it.

This delusional reverie occupied my mind for a few years.

Eventually I got so bored with this mental spin cycle that I sat myself down for a wake-up chat. “You know you are never going to go over there. If you do that everyone in town will talk about how horrible you are and it will reflect on Brad and you’re just never going to do that.” Sigh.

The good news is that even though it took way too long, this realization was a breakthrough. My self-imposed suffering had become such a drag that it was a relief to admit to myself that I had become addicted to the cycle of drumming = annoyance = revenge fantasy. Rinse, repeat.

Looking back, I see now how unhappy I was living in Lynchburg. I was disrespected and unseen and criticized just for being different, which made me feel helpless and frustrated and really lonely. This package of discomfort was a perfect match for the drummer situation. I couldn’t voice any of my other feelings, but I could justify being annoyed by my neighbor. This is called righteous anger and it’s a very popular hook for creating one’s own suffering. It gives you a guaranteed recipe for satisfaction because your anger is theoretically on the side of right.

But ultimately it is not satisfying. It is like a spiritual keto diet that starts to eat you from the inside out.

This moment of clarity was like a cool washcloth on my forehead—a refreshing release of that stinky baggage.

But, to be honest, my epiphany wasn’t the only reason that my inner drama vanished. After a weekend of pre-prom photos with his girlfriend in the backyard, the drummer went off to college, leaving behind a delicious silence.

The conditions that had spurred my obsessive mental grumbling were no longer. Of course, I contemplated this with not a small amount of disappointment in the effectiveness of my long-time meditation practice. I regretted that I couldn’t have held my mind more stable, that I had succumbed to the seduction of righteous anger, that I hadn’t been able to work with the situation in a more positive way. I vowed to be more disciplined.

In the quiet days that followed I remember taking my beagle, Little Bit, out in the yard and relishing the tranquility while I watched my little hound dog girl follow her nose.

She found the scent of the silver fox who lived behind our garage and the baby deer who was born under the big tree. Little Bit wasn’t real smart. She was elderly and pokey, but when she picked up the scent around the boxwoods, she knew enough to stay away from the cute, aggressive groundhogs who lived there.

This pastoral scenario was unexpectedly broken one day by the familiar drumming. The kid had come home for the weekend!

As my silence was interrupted, I made a choice. Perhaps the interval of quiet plus my commitment to not being so easily triggered had cut my old habit. I decided to create a new practice. Whenever I heard the drums and felt the urge to be reactive, I stood on one leg.

This was just challenging enough to hold my mind. No fancy tree pose. Just lifting one foot up and organizing my postural alignment around that position so that I could stay upright on our wobbly brick walkway. And, as every yogi knows, balancing poses are very effective for training the mind because if your attention strays, you fall over.

This one-legged balance practice was so simple and effective that it shifted my perspective. The whole thing was no big deal. This was the deeper insight—that finding peace and retaining my equanimity shouldn’t rely on the perfect conditions. Real equanimity can withstand any situation.

So I cultivated equanimity and balance from the outside in, leaving no purchase for those worn-out thoughts. I took refuge in my body. Spiritual refuge is not about escaping from reality but having the confidence to pull yourself together and meet the moment.

This is clarity. Seeing things as they are. When you can do this, then you can respond in a myriad of ways. You have choices.

I chose not to ever say anything to the drummer’s mother and I also chose to give myself some peace by taking refuge in my practice—in this case, getting out of my head and into my body.

There are a lot more important things in the world, but the point is that rather than avoiding reality we can actually take refuge in the reality of a situation. We can work with it, not by separating ourself but by opening up. All the sounds and smells and emotions and physical sensations are constantly moving. When we try to hold on to or control anything, we begin to separate ourselves, like I did. My body was in my house while my mind was focussed on someone’s else activities and my reactions. Separating is how we create our suffering, which likely leaks out onto those around us.

When I gathered my body together, I also gathered my mind together. This was a huge gamechanger. When you stop separating yourself, your world expands and there’s room for everyone.

If you liked this article, please scroll down to the bottom and “like” or comment. Substack tells me it helps more people see this post when that happens. Thanks!

Leave a comment

If you found this article valuable, please feel free to share it with your friends!

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Practice Opportunities

This retreat will be all about meditation practice. How does the practice of shamatha, mindfulness meditation, actually impact your life? What is the technique and how does it relate to my thoughts and actions off the cushion? A daily dharma talk, short discussion and practice will help us integrate meditation into the wholeness of our life.

Great for beginning meditators or anybody who wants a refresher.

December 1 - December 5

15 min/day
12:15-12:30pm ET

Learn More & Register

Paid subscribers, and Moon and Stars sangha members: You can redeem your $40 discount pricing using the button at the bottom of each retreat’s registration page.

As the holidays near it is the perfect time to engage in these wonderful down-regulating practices.

Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training: A Self-Guided 2-Part Program is a course Cyndi Lee designed to help meditators of all levels learn a new approach to meditation or refresh and deepen their existing practice. In the second part of the course, you’ll learn how to teach meditation and listen to enriching dharma talks from Cyndi that will inspire both your practice and your teaching.

Learn More

Do you love restorative yoga? So much so that you’d like to teach it to others? Or perhaps you’d simply like to add more restorative postures into your home practice, but you’re not quite sure where to start. In either case, we have the course for you! Join world-renowned teacher Cyndi Lee for a comprehensive restorative yoga teacher training program.

Learn More

Subscribe now

My friend, Mark Stephens, recently asked my opinion on the use of AI in yoga. The only experience I have had of AI was when I was working on my upcoming book, Long Life Yoga. The illustrations for the book were charming but not as accurate as I needed them to be, so I looked online for examples to send to the illustrator. This is when I discovered two things: you can find out almost anything you want about any yoga pose; and, the current degradation of yoga is much worse than I realized.

For some time now, I have bemoaned the yoga that I see on social media. Of course, it is not the entire world of yoga, but it might be the part of the yogaverse that has the most influence these days. I cringe at the yogis demonstrating their “fun” new “flows” with no understanding of how to create a yoga sequence that will be helpful, or at least not harmful, to practitioners.

It’s true that yoga can be a lot of fun but the yogis I know have a wide-ranging definition of fun, which includes deeply studying the foundations of yoga: functional alignment, the relationship between categories of postures, Sanskrit words that explain basic yoga ideas. We think it’s fun to explore the fundamental concept of yoga, which is about relationship, integration, and interdependence of all that is. We think it’s fun to get on the mat and try to experience how we can embody the integration of movement, alignment and mindfulness.

I don’t think you can gain the wisdom, language and deep experience of this powerful, ancient practice from AI. Nor can you really learn yoga from a book or a video or YouTube or IG or TikTok. Even though I have written several yoga books—including Yoga Body, Buddha Mind, which offers a lot of insights and specific instructions—it is simply not as good as learning from an experienced teacher.

This matters because yoga and meditation are oral traditions known as “mouth-to-ear” lineages. Your teacher “whispers” in your ear. You receive these instructions and then you work on them. This is how you gain a personal practice that means so much to you that it becomes the tentpole of your life.

This is a path that can last a lifetime, and if you are lucky, you will have a teacher who sticks with you and continues to “whisper” in your ear. When they leave this earth, you can keep the thread going by passing it on to the next generation.

There are real reasons why some people have rejected this system of learning and teaching. I understand that and have genuine sympathy for those who have been hurt by a trusted teacher. But the fact remains that there are still many great teachers who have remained trustworthy, compassionate guides for their students. I am lucky to be one of those students.

So I was struck by the loss of archival knowledge when I searched the internet for some accurate photos or drawings of standard yoga poses such as Trikonasa (Triangle Pose), Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Dog), Bhujangasana (Cobra), Ardha Matsyendrasana (Half Lord of the Fishes or Half Spinal Twist ).

My training in yoga practice and teaching is not identical to everyone’s, nor is it the only right way. But it is pretty easy to see when a pose is done in a way that does not offer any benefit, or even worse, can be harmful.

My Iyengar-trained, Astanga-trained, and Sivananda-trained yoga friends all practice differently from each other and from me, but we know why we are doing each pose the way we do it. It’s not arbitrary. It’s not because it’s more fun. It’s not to go deeper. We know the difference between the full expression of a pose and the modifications one can work on while gaining strength and flexibility.

Online I saw way too many people demonstrating a shape that was labeled as a specific pose but was actually a modification. Modifications are meaningless without the original pose for reference. Does it sound like I am getting into the weeds here? OK, maybe so. But I grieve the loss of educated, experienced yoga teachers having more of a presence than an AI yoga bot.

Yes, we lost a lot of studios during the pandemic, and the teachings have been diluted through Zoom and the times are the way they are. I’m also a senior person and I can hear my dad’s voice in my rant.

When I was in first grade, the delivery system for our report cards got changed. Instead of having us kids carry them home, the school decided to send our report cards to our parents through the mail. My mom was like, ok, whatever. My dad was outraged! He said, “I never heard tell of such a thing.” So I may have inherited the gene for what the opposite is of an early adopter.

While I was writing this post a large tranche of my emails went missing. I tried everything I could to figure it out and finally I had to ask Google for help. You can send in a question and their bot will respond with a generic answer that is not helpful because it doesn’t exactly match your specific issue.

And it reminded me that someone told me I could have my very own yoga bot which would respond to any questions from my students by magically extracting the answers from my online teachings. I imagine that would be about as helpful as the Google bot, i.e., not helpful at all and even worse, frustrating.

Are we going to learn yoga from AI now? The thing that most bothered me when I searched for poses online is that AI had a lot of the most correct examples of yoga poses. I didn’t want that to be true. Because if that is how we are going to learn yoga from now on, that makes AI our guru.

This is also problematic for studying Buddhism because there are misquotations attributed to The Buddha all the time. Did you know that you can check that out by going to realbuddhaquotes.com? The thing is that AI doesn’t know the difference, so if you are studying Buddhism that way, you will not necessarily learn the real teachings. AI is not a lineage holder in either Buddhism or yoga.

Yesterday I got an email from my book agent telling me that an AI company is being sued because they used 400,000 texts for training their AI without paying the authors or publishing companies. There is a chance that I have at least one book that is in this list of 400,000 titles and I was invited to send in the details of my books, ISBN number, publisher, etc. If one or more of my books were used, you can be sure they were the instructional yoga books. Maybe that is why AI had good examples of poses—did they take them from my books?

Does that mean AI is your teacher, or possibly I am your yoga teacher?

In any case, please feel free to send me any questions you have about yoga or meditation. I personally will answer you. My email is cyndi@omyoga.com.

Here are some books I read recently and really liked. They are all written by real human beings.

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Practice Opportunities

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in Taos, New Mexico

Still a couple rooms available!

LESS THAN ONE MONTH AWAY!

We love retreating at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos. But 2025 will be our last year there. If you are thinking about it, I say go for it! Please feel free to send me any questions or concerns—just respond to this email.

Learn More & Register

This retreat will be all about meditation practice. How does the practice of shamatha, mindfulness meditation, actually impact your life? What is the technique and how does it relate to my thoughts and actions off the cushion? A daily dharma talk, short discussion and practice will help us integrate meditation into the wholeness of our life.

Great for beginning meditators or anybody who wants a refresher.

December 1 - December 5

15 min/day
12:15-12:30pm ET

Learn More & Register

Paid subscribers, and Moon and Stars sangha members: You can redeem your $40 discount pricing using the button at the bottom of each retreat’s registration page.

Subscribe now

Back in the early ‘90s, when Tricycle magazine first came out and I was a new, eager Buddhist practitioner, there was a little cartoon that I found funny and clever. One person says to her friend, “Why are you so grumpy? I thought you were a meditator!” And the friend says, “You should have heard me before I started meditating!”

This cartoon taught me a valuable lesson about meditation practice. It might not get rid of all your undesirable ways, but it can lessen their frequency and maybe even give rise to self-awareness.

Isn’t this what we all want to know? Is my meditation practice helping me act better, feel better, be better?

In my last post I wrote about the value of doubt. It’s absolutely worthwhile to ask yourself if your practice is working, because if you don’t notice any benefits, it is hard to keep going just on faith.

So how can you tell if your practice is working?

Like the cartoon meditator, many people have told me they notice changes in their thoughts, speech and actions. They report little things such as, “I’m nicer to waiters now,” or, “I’m more patient.” These things really aren’t so little, and once you recognize them they give you the motivation to continue practicing. It doesn’t take much for these small shifts to boost your confidence—in your practice and in yourself.

But it does take one big thing: consistency. Right away I want to add a caveat to the word consistency, because these days there are way too many people pushing the 5 a.m. club, which tells you that unless you get up every.single.day at the crack of dawn and sit quietly for 5 minutes, do breath work for 5 minutes, drink 2 glasses of water, go for a solitary silent walk, etc. etc., you will never get out of your unsatisfying ruts.

If this works for you, wonderful! But if it doesn’t, don’t worry. There are a lot of ways to be consistent.

Let me introduce you to my husband, Brad. Brad read one of my books after we met and began meditating on his own. Our first date was a dharma talk with Enkyo Roshi and Tenzin Palmo. I wanted him to meet my dharma mothers.

Once we got together, he began attending retreats. He has gone to Zen sesshins, several Tibetan Buddhist retreats, and every single meditation retreat I have taught in the last 13 years, which is a lot if you include online retreats. Each retreat feeds him in a certain way and he chews on his experiences and insights until the next retreat. He also reads a lot of dharma books.

I can’t say he has become nicer to waiters because he is already naturally kind and thoughtful. But I don’t think he would mind if I said he has become more patient.

And then yesterday we had a big incident that showed me a profound benefit that Brad has received from his consistent practice.

We were driving home from Oklahoma City to Santa Fe. It’s an eight hour drive and particularly along the Texas panhandle, there are very few other vehicles. After many empty miles of road, Brad said, “There’s something you don’t see often. A gigantic RV towing a cute little sports car.” I said, “Uh huh,” and went back into my nap.

Suddenly I was jolted awake by Brad slamming on the brakes and yanking the wheel hard to the left. The RV was rapidly pushing into our lane which caused the sportscar it was towing to swerve in an arc aimed directly at the front of our car.

Brad cranked the wheel more but there was no shoulder and nowhere left to go except into the metal lane divider. He pumped the brakes as the sports car veered within inches of us and it was all happening at 80 miles per hour.

It was very possible that things could have gone a different way, but Brad never lost his focus; was never overtaken by fear or anger or panic. He rode the situation second by second, monitoring every minuscule change and responding in the right ways that saved us from a devastating highway accident.

This frightening event must have lasted 30 seconds and then it was over. The RV/sportscar barely slipped by us and then back into the right lane. We drove past it and on toward New Mexico. Brad wasn’t mad or panting or holding on to the drama of it. Of course, we talked about what happened and processed it for a couple minutes, but that’s all. It was done.

I looked at Brad in awe. My lovely husband, who takes care of many things in our life and is most often somewhat soft spoken, looked calm and powerful to me. I said, “Brad, you really held your mind. Thank you for that masterful piece of driving. You saved us with your strong mind.”

That strong mind is the result of his years of consistent meditation practice. Because of that he was able to hold his mind in the face of a life-threatening situation. This is exactly why we meditate. To develop your mind, to strengthen and stabilize your mind, so that you can call it up as a resource when you need it, even on a second’s notice.

The combination of shamatha—precise concentration—and vipassana—clear seeing and understanding—is what Brad manifested in that moment, because he has been practicing it for years.

Consistency doesn’t require you to do the same thing every day at the same time. One dictionary definition of consistency is, “steadfast adherence to the same principles, course, form.” But the thesaurus offers synonyms for consistency such as firmness, flexibility, suppleness and solidity. Your practice has to fit your life and that is how it will shift your life.

Consistency refers to both your commitment to practicing, questioning it without quitting, and observing the results over time. It also refers to the texture of your mind and heart. Can you hold steady and still be spacious and loving? Can you be nimble and meet situations in the moment with clarity and stability? Can you hold that space for others, too?

This Substack is called Drip, Drip, Drip the Bucket Fills, which is what I remember Gelek Rimpoche saying. He was paraphrasing a quote from Buddha which comes from The Dhammapada:

“Drop by drop is the water pot filled.
Likewise, the wise man, gathering it little by little, fills himself with good.”

Here are some ways for you to become consistent with practice and study:

• Attend retreats. I lead 4 online retreats annually and there are still two more in 2025 PLUS an in-person retreat in October. See below for details and feel free to write me with any questions.

• Take some private meditation lessons. There is much more to meditating than the basic instructions. If you are feeling stuck or bored or frustrated in your practice, working one-on-one is a good way to reconnect to your practice and learn more about it and yourself. At this time, I have 2 openings for private students.

• Read a dharma book. A great one to start with is How to Meditate by Pema Chodron.

• Join a sangha. A sangha is a community of other meditators and is considered one of the three jewels or methods for developing your practice. My sangha, Lifting the Gaze, meets 3x monthly for dharma talks, discussions, connections and group meditation practice. All are welcome, no experience necessary.

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Practice Opportunities

This retreat will be all about meditation practice. How does the practice of shamatha, mindfulness meditation, actually impact your life? What is the technique and how does it relate to my thoughts and actions off the cushion? A daily dharma talk, short discussion and practice will help us integrate meditation into the wholeness of our life.

Great for beginning meditators or anybody who wants a refresher.

September 29 - October 3

30 min/day
12:15-12:45pm ET

Learn More & Register

December 1 - December 5

15 min/day
12:15-12:30pm ET

Learn More & Register

Paid subscribers, and Moon and Stars sangha members: You can redeem your $40 discount pricing using the button at the bottom of each retreat’s registration page.

Also, you can purchase both retreats (September & December) for $80:

Both Retreats: $80

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in Taos, New Mexico!

LESS THAN ONE MONTH AWAY!

We love retreating at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos. But 2025 will be our last year there. If you are thinking about it, I say go for it! Please feel free to send me any questions or concerns—just respond to this email.

Learn More & Register

Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training: A Self-Guided 2-Part Program is a course Cyndi Lee designed to help meditators of all levels learn a new approach to meditation or refresh and deepen their existing practice. In the second part of the course, you’ll learn how to teach meditation and listen to enriching dharma talks from Cyndi that will inspire both your practice and your teaching.

Learn More & Register

Some photos from last year’s Lifting the Gaze retreat!

Subscribe now

No matter how long you practice meditation, you will always have questions. Even though you might feel quite settled in your practice, it can happen that one day a deeply embedded element of your practice just feels weird. This grabs your attention and you start to wonder if you are doing it right, if it makes sense anymore, if you should continue to follow your teacher’s instructions.

This is actually considered good progress on the path. Questioning what you are doing, and why and how you are doing it, is the beginning of really making the practice your own. In fact, when you start to dig into your practice by investigating your doubts about it, you begin transitioning from a person who sits on the cushion and watches their mind, to a person who sits on the cushion, watches their mind and has insights about the process and about themselves. These two stages are called Shamatha, calm abiding and Vipassana, insight.

Recently, someone who has had a long-time eyes open meditation practice had a good question. They had attended a guided meditation with a teacher who said, “Close your eyes.” So, they did. And it was soothing and relaxing and so pleasant. “So,” they asked, “do I have to keep meditating with my eyes open?”

No! You do not have to keep meditating with your eyes open. It just depends on why you are meditating and what results you want from your meditation practice.

So, ask yourself why you liked closing your eyes. There’s certainly nothing wrong with feeling relaxed. Then ask yourself if that is the result you want from your meditation practice. And maybe it is… sometimes.

What about when you want to feel relaxed and spacious, but also alert and present? Certain meditation methods suggest opening the eyes, but casting the gaze slightly downward to achieve this.

There are a host of contemplating, breathing, visualizing, chanting, movement and guided intentions that are labelled “meditation.” Each one of these has a particular set of instructions and usually offers the promise of a specific result, or the least a reason to give it a try.

Think of meditation like modern dance. Under this broad category there is Martha Graham, Twyla Tharp, Alvin Ailey, and many others. Each of these seminal choreographers developed a specific approach to dance movement by asking a specific question.

Martha Graham wanted to create movement that was the opposite of classic ballet, so she evolved a technique called Contract and Release, which is earthy, organic and deeply expressive.

Merce Cunningham wanted to make non-story or non-representational dances that were about dance itself: movement, space, and process. One way he did this was by throwing the I Ching to determine the structure of each performance by chance; no beginning, middle or ending was ever the same.

Alvin Ailey wanted to fill a gap in dance culture by creating a world class dance company, featuring black dancers and work which reflected the vast depth of black culture and expression.

Each of these great artists asked different questions and came up with different answers, but they are all what we call modern dance.

Meditation is the same way. Each method asks a question and offers a path for exploring that question.

For example, shamatha is a method for getting to know your own mind better, developing a habit of non-reactivity and growing self-compassion, which expands into compassion.

A mindfulness meditation practice session is just that, practice. It is not about ginning up any kind of experience in your meditation session. It is a mind training exercise so you can develop stability, strength and clarity. It’s training for real world life, which is why it is best practiced with eyes open.

I like this quote from Dan Zigmond, that popped up in my inbox today from Daily Tricycle:

Meditation is really about what happens when we stop meditating. A big part of why we practice mindfulness in a quiet room away from distractions is so we can draw on that skill when we’re in a noisy office surrounded by chattering coworkers.

If you are interested in the opposite—a temporary respite from your world—even for just 15 minutes, then it makes sense to close your eyes.

Closing the eyes is also nice for pranayama practice: exploring the movement of the breath as it passes through the nostrils, into the lungs and expands the ribs. Sometimes closing your eyes can help you connect to sensation.

There are also practices invoking a specific deity and their qualities of compassion or love or peace or fierceness. Closed eyes can help visualize these qualities pouring into you.

So, you can see, that the answer to open or closed eyes depends on the result you want from your practice. Of course, you can do a different practice every day depending on your mood. But I want to be clear that doing that is NOT recommended.

What IS recommended is to explore a variety of practices and then pick one. Stick with it for at least a year. Don’t expect a big hit of magic right away. Try to be consistent, which does not mean you have to do it every day. (next Substack will talk about how to do this.)

If you want to let someone else guide your attention or offer you an intention, that’s fine, but know that guided meditation will not lead to you developing your own practice.

If you want to rest your eyes, get a massage, do some breath work, or restorative yoga, that is great. Do it!

But try to keep your shamatha as your base practice. This is the only way you will get results. Keep up your practice, even with your doubts. This is how your practice ripens and the results become more clear.

But, hey, you don’t have to trust me! Why don’t you try it out for yourself.

Even the Buddha told his followers not to take his word. He said:

“Do not believe in anything (simply) because you have heard it;
Do not believe in traditions, because they have been handed down for many generations;
Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumored by many;
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books;
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept and live up to it.”

Meditation Prompt

Sit for 3-5 minutes, contemplating your motivation for meditating. Your “why” and your “what.” Why do you want to meditate? What results would you like to cultivate?

You can do this by thinking or you can do it as a journaling exercise.

Think of this question like a sculpture. In your mind, walk around it, look at it from every angle. Consider every aspect of these questions: why do I want to meditate. What is my motivation? What do I want to develop in my mind and in my life?

Notice when your mind strays. If you go off on a tangent, that’s ok. Gather your mind and bring it back to the question… again and again.

After your contemplation, sit quietly for 2 minutes.

Even if you are an experienced meditator, considering your motivation is always an enlightening practice.

If you liked this article, please scroll down to the bottom and “like” or comment. Substack tells me it helps more people see this post when that happens. Thanks!

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Practice Opportunities

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in Taos, New Mexico!

ONLY ONE MONTH AWAY!

We love retreating at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos. But 2025 will be our last year there. If you are thinking about it, I say go for it! Please feel free to send me any questions or concerns—just respond to this email.

Learn More & Register

This retreat will be all about meditation practice. How does the practice of shamatha, mindfulness meditation, actually impact your life? What is the technique and how does it relate to my thoughts and actions off the cushion? A daily dharma talk, short discussion and practice will help us integrate meditation into the wholeness of our life.

Great for beginning meditators or anybody who wants a refresher.

September 29 - October 3

30 min/day
12:15-12:45pm ET

Learn More & Register

December 1 - December 5

15 min/day
12:15-12:30pm ET

Learn More & Register

Paid subscribers, and Moon and Stars sangha members: You can redeem your $40 discount pricing using the button at the bottom of each retreat’s registration page.

Also, you can purchase both retreats (September & December) for $80:

Both Retreats: $80

Some photos from last year’s Lifting the Gaze retreat!

Hello friends!

Thank you! You did it! After two years of publishing Drip, Drip, Drip on Substack, I now have 101 paid subscribers out of a total of 12,665 subscribers. I didn’t know it was a thing but as soon as Drip hit 100 subscribers, Substack sent me an email telling me I was a Best Seller and offered me lots of advice to keep growing. And, to be honest, your support really does motivate me to keep going.

And to that end, I’m going to extend the discounted price for the yearly membership price until Sunday, August 31. When you sign up for the yearly membership you also automatically receive a discount for my four annual online mindfulness retreats. This is my effort to support you by making it easier to commit to a meditation practice.

Subscribe now

I started this Substack because, well, I’d been sending out newsletters to my students for over 15 years. During that time, I wrote a book called May I Be Happy and nearly 200 magazine articles. I wrote a monthly column in the Shambhala Sun, now called Lion’s Roar. I wrote the first vinyasa column for Yoga Journal followed by the beginner’s column and then the masters column. I wrote for a column in Real Simple for three years and numerous other pieces in Tricycle Magazine, Natural Health, Self, Cooking Light and Yoga International.

My work was primarily that of teaching yoga and meditation, but writing has always been part of my work, too. So it felt natural to expand my reach from an OM yoga school newsletter to a wider audience that might be interested in meditation and Buddhist wisdom.

I wanted to show how Buddhism can enrich everybody’s life—no incense, bells, or fancy mudras necessary. Unless you are an ordained monk, shaving your head and winding rosaries around your wrist are not just show-offy—they are beside the point. Instead of calling attention to yourself, we can learn to pay attention to others.

If you are an ordinary person, like me, who goes to the grocery store and gets grumpy trying to find a parking spot and falls asleep in front of the TV and doesn’t always think kind thoughts about your neighbor, Drip is for you. We can have an ordinary life yet not feel stuck. What I have learned from my guru is that an ordinary life is a fantastic way, if not the best way, to practice dharma. Drip is my effort to share this wisdom in a way that is relevant and hopefully, helpful to you.

Reaching 101 paid subscribers has inspired me to reflect on my past as a writer and in that process I came across one of my favorite pieces. Lions Roar commissioned me to write this small piece—less than 500 words, which is not so easy—as part of a round-up of writings on impermanence.

Since my birthday was just a couple weeks ago it also struck a chord for me. I wrote it when I was 58 and now I’m 72! Some women I know like to take a picture of themselves in a bikini on their birthday and post it on instagram. Me, I like to roll out this little piece of writing and think about it. It makes me smile and I hope it will make you smile, too.

P.S. Happy Birthday to Ben Heath, too! He is the guy behind the scenes who makes Drip, Drip, Drip look good and he also suggests good titles. Feel free to say Happy Birthday to him in the comments!

Embodying Change

It wasn’t easy to find the right spot for my Tibetan OM tattoo. My first choice was the little space between my inner ankle and heel. But my tattoo artist put the kibosh on that idea, telling me up front that the skin in that area is tough; the tattoo wouldn’t heal well and in the end, I’d look like I had a jailhouse tattoo.

Damian was a serious tattoo artist and he inspired my confidence. Like taking a waiter’s recommendation for the best meal on the menu, I let him advise me as to the best options near the inner ankle/heel. He suggested going just above the ankle or higher up toward the more fleshy part of the outer calf. Or I could consider such popular sites as the sacrum or back of the neck.

These last suggestions received an immediate no. Feeling like I was mature enough at 58 years to finally get a permanent mark on my body, I wasn’t going for a secret tattoo only known to my lover or the other yoginis in my studio changing room. I wanted my tattoo to show!

I put on my glasses to more carefully consider my options. This is the same body that I touch every day in the shower, that I stretch and twist every day on the yoga mat and that I usually dress in at least three different outfits before finally settling on the clothes for each day. But with my glasses on—whoa! My hands were looking way too much like my mom’s and she’s 85. My upper arms were out of the question, looking strong but squishy, too. And I wasn’t crazy about my calves, either.

Using a finger to keep my glasses on my face as I bent over, I took a closer look at the top of my feet. Even they were getting wrinkled and dry. For a moment, I thought, maybe I am just too old for this; my body is too crinkly and blubby and flakey and wrong. Then I got a grip. My feet have wrinkles because I’ve been articulating my phalanges and stretching my metatarsals all day for the last 40 years. And it’s winter and my feet are dry and so what?

I took off my glasses and told Damian to put the OM on the top of my right arch. It cracked a little bit during the healing process, especially where my foot bends as I stand in a fierce Warrior One Pose. But when I come out of that pose, the top of my foot smoothes out again, clearly exposing the symbol of OM; the union of Body, Speech and Mind. How perfect that my tattoo flexes, stretches and changes just like the rest of me.

If you liked this article, please scroll down to the bottom and “like” or comment. Substack tells me it helps more people see this post when that happens. Thanks!

Leave a comment

If you found this article valuable, please feel free to share it with your friends!

Share

Practice Opportunities

Lifting the Gaze Retreat in Taos, New Mexico!

ONLY TWO MONTHS FROM NOW! We love retreating at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos. But 2025 will be our last year there. If you are thinking about it, I say go for it! Please feel free to send me any questions or concerns—just respond to this email.

Learn More & Register

This retreat will be all about meditation practice. How does the practice of shamatha, mindfulness meditation, actually impact your life? What is the technique and how does it relate to my thoughts and actions off the cushion? A daily dharma talk, short discussion and practice will help us integrate meditation into the wholeness of our life.

Great for beginning meditators or anybody who wants a refresher.

September 29 - October 3

30 min/day
12:15-12:45pm ET

Learn More & Register

December 1 - December 5

15 min/day
12:15-12:30pm ET

Learn More & Register

Paid subscribers, and Moon and Stars sangha members: You can redeem your $40 discount pricing using the button at the bottom of each retreat’s registration page.

Also, you can purchase both retreats (September & December) for $80:

Both Retreats: $80

If You Are Feeling Stressed, I Recommend:

This is for anybody. There are two full restorative yoga practices, with modifications and lots of inspiring teaching.

Learn More

Cyndi Lee's Teaching Pranayama: The Basics will give yoga practitioners and teachers, bodyworkers, and health professionals the tools to enrich their own pranayama practice and learn how to effectively share it with their students, clients, and patients. This three-day training will include practicing and teaching breath awareness and breath manipulation techniques, such as sama vritti, ujjayi, nadi shodanam, viloma, and kapalabhati.

Learn More

Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training: A Self-Guided 2-Part Program is a course Cyndi Lee designed to help meditators of all levels learn a new approach to meditation or refresh and deepen their existing practice. In the second part of the course, you'll learn how to teach meditation and listen to enriching dharma talks from Cyndi that will inspire both your practice and your teaching.

Learn More

Some photos from last year’s Lifting the Gaze retreat!