My teacher Cyndi Lee on OM Yoga

OM Yoga is a kind of yoga that I have been teaching for about twenty years, which is something that arose organically from my own practice. It is made up of three parts, and one part is vinyasa. Vinyasa means to place in a special way, so it’s a flowing movement oriented kind of asana practice that has three elements: arising, abiding, and dissolving. And the dissolving of one thing is the arising of the next. And how do we pay attention to that? How do we explore one thing evolving into the next? We do it by placing ourselves, our bodies, and our intentions in a special way.

The second aspect is alignment. Alignment really means organizing our skin, our muscles, and our bones physically. But also we think about alignment as our aspiration and our action: are they in alignment? Or perhaps there is even a bigger sense of alignment, which we often experience, which is when we come to yoga and we feel kind of blah at the beginning, but at the end you are king of integrated, feel organized, feel in alignment with yourself, feel in alignment with your world.

The third aspects of OM Yoga are the Buddhist meditation methods of mindfulness and compassion. Mindfulness is always seen in the alignment, and in the placing in a special way, but we approach all of this with a round of fundamental friendliness.

Cyndi talking to the students during class: “That is exactly what happens in meditation! Did you see what happened?! She was there and then she went away… No problem, you just come back. That is the practice: coming back. It doesn’t mean you have to be perfect, it means you remember and you can come back. Beautiful! Utkatasana…  “.

And so, that fundamental friendliness is really the compassion. We start by practicing that towards ourselves as a way to extend it towards others. That package is OM Yoga.

Cyndi Lee