Cyndi Lee

Cyndi Lee is a yoga and meditation teacher, author and Buddhist chaplain who brings yoga asana and Tibetan Buddhism together in one practice. She describes herself as the first female Western yoga teacher to fully integrate the two. Her teaching rests on the idea of basic goodness, which she describes as getting familiar with who you are, as you are, and letting that goodness gradually guide your life.

She began teaching meditation with the blessing of her root guru, the Tibetan master Gelek Rimpoche, whom she met in the late 1980s. In 2018 she was ordained as a Buddhist chaplain under the guidance of Roshi Joan Halifax of Upaya Zen Center. From 1998 to 2012 she founded and ran OM yoga Center in New York City, a yoga studio and dharma center that was the first in the city to offer Buddhist meditation classes. She closed it after fifteen years to make more time for deepening her own practice.

Before teaching full-time, Cyndi worked in dance. She grew up in Seattle, the daughter of a Protestant minister and a tailor and ceramist. She studied at Chapman College and earned an MFA at UC Irvine with a thesis on women, spirituality and Indian dance. She then came to New York on an Art History Fellowship to the Whitney Museum of American Art and began teaching yoga in Greenwich Village. She choreographed and performed in the downtown dance scene and choreographed more than twenty music videos, including Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun". Her last concert, "Dharma Dances" in 1994, featured Allen Ginsberg, and afterward she turned to teaching yoga full-time.

Cyndi is the author of six books. They include Yoga Body, Buddha Mind, OM yoga: A Guide to Daily Practice, the memoir May I Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Yoga, and Changing My Mind, and Long Life Yoga. She writes for Yoga Journal, Lion's Roar and Real Simple, among others. She leads online classes, teacher trainings in restorative yoga, mindfulness meditation and pranayama, and retreats. She also guides Lifting the Gaze, a sangha that meets three times a month and is open to anyone, whatever their experience or belief. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she also knits, sews and reads, serves on the Friends of the Library Board and produces the Santa Fe Story Lab.