Cyndi Lee
David Bowie died this week. He was only four years older than me and I learned from the New York Times that we lived on the same street, so I took it personally. It could have been my door that was knocked on; my time that had come. And it will be one day. In the meantime, I am continuing to grow older, which is not exactly the same as just being older, because it includes the part about growing.
We tend to think of growing as a self-improvement situation; a straight line that leads directly to a better place. This might not be wrong but it might not be right either. From a Buddhist perspective, growing comes under the category of impermanence. That word tends to conjure up images of decay—leaves falling from trees, rotting into the ground, and creating mulch; not our usual idea of a growth scenario. But impermanence can also mean letting go of fixed notions, such as what age is good, what age is bad, where joy and fulfillment are found and lost, and how scary and isolating it is to be older than many, as opposed to younger than most. This letting go creates openings for new ideas and experiences to arise.
Buddhist teachings thus offer a circular perspective on impermanence; all things arise, abide, dissolve, morph into something else, and so the cycle continues. The circle includes things with form and those without form, such as thoughts, ideas, joy, and sorrow. Instead of being stuck in fear, self-judgment, and mourning for that which has passed, these teachings invite us to directly focus on the fullness of impermanence. It’s not just loss. It’s change and renewal. We start to see this all around us.
The deep realization of impermanence ultimately becomes the seed for appreciation of one’s precious human life, as it is right now. This, in turn, creates the motivation to experience life fully, moment by moment. If only we can remember this.
A Real Yogi
During a recent OM yoga 200-hour teacher training class, I flipped through a copy of my first book, Yoga Body Buddha Mind, which was published in 2002. I was looking for a reference picture I could use to demonstrate the energy and alignment of chaturanga dandasana. Since that photo shoot happened thirteen years earlier, I couldn’t remember if the book included a photo of me doing that pose or if it was demonstrated by one of my yoga friends who was also photographed for the book. But there I was, not only jumping into chaturanga but rocking bird of paradise, dandasana, titibasana, and a handful of poses I haven’t done for several years now.
I noticed right away that I was much thinner than I am now, which is ironic since I remember that the first day of the photo shoot was an “I-feel-fat-day” for me. In preparation for getting my picture taken, I’d gone on a very tight eating regime. No wheat, dairy, or sugar of any kind, not even beets or carrots or corn. Green veggies were okay but no salad unless I skipped the salad dressing. Needless to say wine was out. I had been living on green beans and salmon for weeks.
Then, the night before the shoot, I went out to dinner. Normally this was not a problem because I had learned how to make my diet work in restaurants. But this night I caved a little. I really wanted to eat a friendly, warm meal and not worry about it. I’d been so stressed about all that it took to prepare for this shoot, including writing my very first yoga book! I was ready for a reward and this meal was that. A couple of glasses of red, a salad with dressing, and a yummy fish dish later, I felt satisfied. And also, guilty. I realized that this reward should have happened three days later, after the photo shoot was finished.
Looking back, there was something familiar about this scenario. When I was a dancer, I’d done the same thing before opening nights. After an intense period of hypervigilant dieting and exercising, I would eat a real meal and then feel bad that I hadn’t waited until after the show’s run was over. Somehow I didn’t trust myself to make it over the finish line, or maybe I didn’t think I deserved to look “perfect” or maybe I secretly thought I looked fine already. Maybe I was just really hungry. I’m not sure if this was self-sabotage toward my body or my mind/heart. Either way, I felt slightly bloated during the photo shoot and couldn’t stop obsessing on the poochy feeling of my belly with each new pose. I didn’t yet realize that impermanence meant that however my body felt that day was just happening that day and wasn’t really a big deal.
Thirteen years later, I look at those pictures of my slimmer self and envy my own previous body. I can clearly see that I was not fat that day. But what struck me most was not how my body had changed. Over a decade later, I’m okay with that … mostly.
The thing that caught my eye and tugged at my gut was how much my practice has changed. Since a shoulder issue a few years ago I haven’t done chaturanga. For the same reason, upward facing dog, (urdhva mukha svanasana) got dropped from regular rotation along with binds. I avoid arm balances because they stress the part of my wrist where I once had a cyst. The problem with doing wheel (urdhva dhanurasana), began when my dog, Leroy, got diabetes. This led to blinding cataracts that made him afraid to go down the stairs. A zillion times a day my right hand scooped up fourteen pounds of furry love and hauled him up and down two flights of steps. After a few months of this, he got his eyesight back and I ended up with a thumb injury.
Wow, this list depresses me. Even my dog is growing old. My practice used to be a refuge, a laboratory for getting to know myself, my own personal renewable energy source. But the physical obstacles to fulfilling my notion of practice have begun to defeat me. There is a voice in my head that says, “To be a ‘real’ yogi, you have to practice asana every single day no matter what.” Asana practice has always meant plenty of surya namaskars with full-on jumps from chaturanga; inversions; big backbends, and delicious deep twists with binds. For fun, I might play with bakasana into sirsasana B straight down into chaturanga and through a vinyasa sequence. I was never consistently able to jump from down dog into crow pose and stick the landing, but I wasn’t afraid to try it. Now I am. If I get injured, it will take a long time to recover.
Perhaps it’s not the practice that is defeating me but rather my fixed notion of how a “real yogi” practices. These days my work on the mat involves all the elements of a yoga class: standing and seated poses, balancing work, twists, backbends and forward folds, as well as inversions, but much of it is supported with blocks and I especially like supine poses. I tend to work within my comfort zone and I no longer practice every single day. Does this mean I am lazy? Or, maybe after all these years I’ve gotten bored with asana. Sometimes I miss doing a strong, juicy vinyasa practice, but I find that meditation, walking, and biking feel more friendly on my body.
So I find myself in an in-between state, a liminal space of neither wanting to push myself to work harder on the mat nor wanting to quit practicing asana all together. Thirteen years after that photo shoot I do sometimes remember that the law of impermanence applies to me, too. That just like hairdos and skirt lengths, my practice needs to evolve as I age. But sometimes I don’t remember that and then I feel semi-guilty for not fulfilling my commitment to yoga.
My Hair Was on Fire
My first yoga class was in the dance room at Chapman College in 1972. It was the best option for fulfilling my P.E. requirement since I was a disaster at group sports. My yoga teacher gave us asana classes, taught us meditation, led us through kriyas including fasting, and even took us on a spiritual camping retreat in Joshua Tree Desert. I wouldn’t say that rockets went off when I discovered yoga. It was just a completely natural thing for me to be doing. We practiced in a gentle, easy way with savasana in between postures.
When we were assigned to read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, a friend told me she thought the book was a bunch of baloney. “You don’t believe that stuff about Indian saints auto-transporting, do you?” It had never occurred to me to question anything in that book. It all made perfect sense to me. Yogananda’s story filled me with what I later learned was called, tapas, a burning desire to practice yoga. My fire was more drawn to the yoga beyond asanas. I wanted to have a peak experience; preferably an out-of-body moment where I felt intimately connected with all that is. A natural meditator, I spent my late night hours sitting on the roof of my storage-space-turned-apartment, eyes closed, breathing in the rays of the full moon. Being raised in a liberal religious environment, I knew there was something behind the veil of our materialistic life; the samsaric cycle of suffering. There was a natural knowing within me that yoga offered the key to that mystery and I wanted to touch it.
After college I moved to New York City and began a modern dance career that sustained my creativity and social life, but not my pocketbook. So I taught yoga on the side because I was terrible at waitressing, the dancer’s typical money gig. When I met my Buddhist guru, Gelek Rimpoche, in the late 1980s, my dances started incorporating Buddhist lessons and my mind turned more in the direction of mindfulness and compassion practices. Dance was losing its grip on me. Bookings and grants were highly competitive and the scene was becoming more about how you looked, who you knew, and the level of your schmoozing skills. I stopped going to dance classes and only went to yoga classes, mostly right around the corner at the original Jivamukti Yoga Center, on Second Avenue between Ninth and Tenth. I also studied at the Iyengar Center and Dharma Mittra’s studio on Third Ave.
I had fallen madly in love with vinyasa yoga and practiced it regularly with great passion and total commitment, or, as Buddhists would say, “as if my hair was on fire.” The juiciness of vinyasa yoga satisfied my dancer movement jones. The alignment aspect was similar to the precision of ballet training, only better because it is based on safety, rather than on Louis XIV’s idea of beauty. Spending so much time on the mat also led me to the discovery that the body is the perfect vehicle for meeting the mind and the exactly right starting point for cultivating mindfulness, awareness, compassion, courage, and joy—everything I was learning about in my dedicated Buddhist studies with Gelek Rimpoche.
Even the teachings on impermanence were starting to make sense as a cyclic thing that was neither good nor bad. But this understanding was mostly conceptual and outside of myself. I didn’t yet understand in my bones that I was changing, too. My body, my mind, my abilities, my ambition—none of it was going to freeze at the exact moment of peak excellentness. It was all in play all the time even if I hadn’t noticed that yet.
By 1994, I had retired from dancing and was teaching yoga full-time. After several years of schlepping from gyms to studios to privates in apartments all over Manhattan, I opened OM yoga Center on West Fourteenth Street. The studio became a mecca for dancers, actors, and everybody else who was looking for a safe and fun way to keep in shape. The yoga boom was just starting, and I was often interviewed about why yoga was getting to be so popular. I talked about how so many people were at an age where their lives were changing. People in their mid and late forties were seeing their children grow up and move away. Or they were stuck in unsatisfying jobs and their lives felt equally stuck. Yoga offered them a light spiritual touch mixed with a healthy sense of groundedness and clarity.
This was my answer because that was my story. I was forty-four when I opened the studio. The success of OM yoga Center brought me some attention, and soon I was being invited to write for respected yoga and Buddhist magazines.
Nothing Is Poison
One day I was complaining to my friend, Melvin McLeod, editor-in-chief of the Shambhala Sun magazine, about the images used on current yoga publications.
“Melvin, I’m sick of all the yoga cover models being young and thin. I’ve heard the party line from the publication powers-that-be who say they are presenting aspirational images. But what kind of aspiration is that? ‘I aspire to look like that yogini and be able to do that impossible pose and then I will be happy.’ No, thanks. We all already have enough ‘If only…’ scenarios messing us up. Anyway, I know I’m not the only person in the greater yoga community who began practicing in the seventies. We don’t want to be told we should aspire to be like someone who is younger than we are.”
By this time, I was a regular columnist for several yoga and meditation publications as well as doing feature articles for others, including mainstream magazines that were starting to dabble in yoga-lite pieces for their readers. The articles were usually accompanied by a headshot of me, approximately 1" x 1". I was consulted on who would be a good yoga model for my sequences, because evidently, at the age of 44 +, I was too old to be photographed demonstrating yoga poses.
This was frustrating because I felt like I could do a great job demonstrating the poses I was writing about. Like me, my practice was maturing and my asanas were only getting stronger, more balanced, and clear every day. I didn’t think I was unattractive and, in fact, people usually thought I was younger than my age. Not that that mattered to me. I’d already stopped dying my hair, which didn’t make me feel old. My gray hair made me feel liberated, empowered, and pretty cool, actually.
My yoga library books were full of photos of older yogis, respected as sages and revered for their experience and dedication to practice. I didn’t look at them and see wrinkles or feel sorry for them that they were old. I saw wisdom and contentment and thought, I’ll have what they’re having.
According to Heinrich Zimmer in his great book, The Philosophies of India, there are four stages of life in India.19 First, young people devote themselves to studying with a spiritual teacher in preparation for the next stage, which is that of being a family man or woman. This phase involves raising children and fully engaging in the life of the community. When the children become adults and start running the family business, the parents retreat from societal affairs and return to the forest, entering a spiritual quest to find their true Self. This quest ultimately leads to the fourth stage, when one becomes a bhiksu, a wandering beggar, who lives fully in spiritual practice with no cares or concerns for the material world.
Perhaps this tradition explains why numerous great Indian yogis have also had more worldly careers. Both Swami Satchidananda and Goenka were businessmen before they became enormously beloved and influential gurus. In the fourth stage of life, these sages become the teachers for the young people in their first stage of life who study yoga as a ground for having a family and worldly livelihood. This is called lineage. The teachers are impermanent but the teachings remain a consistent thread, passing from one generation to the next. Yoga is an ear-to-mouth tradition, and, in fact, the only way you can really learn it is from another teacher; one who has walked the path toward which they are leading you.
And this was the case with me. I was especially inspired by my studies with female American yoga teachers who were senior to me, both in age and experience. Lilias Folan’s teaching is elegant and simple, teaching me that a true yogini is kind, straightforward, and full of wonder at any age. Judith Lasater offers a balance of intelligence and joy, reminding us that just because yoga is important doesn’t mean we have to get all serious about it. As I was coming into my own as a yoga teacher, I was fortunate to study with these women, who are soulful, smart, gracious, and spend a lot of time on the floor, which keeps them real. And how about Patricia Walden? For her sixtieth birthday, she gave a yoga demonstration of sixty backbends as a gift to her community. That definitely made me say, “I’ll have what she’s having!”
All of these women have been on the cover of prominent yoga magazines, at various ages in their careers, but now the business of yoga was changing and it seemed that my timing was off. My star was rising but so was my age. No matter how adept her asanas or wise her teachings, a forty-something female yoga teacher was not the media’s idea of the up-and-coming face of yoga in America. Part of the spread of mainstream yoga was due to it being moved off the spiritual shelf and redirected to the fitness media space, where it is commonly believed that using images of young, and primarily white, women, successfully amounts to sales. This is not India, after all, but America, and in America being happy about growing old would be a pretty hard sell.
So I was kind of disappointed. As a middle-aged yoga teacher in her second career, I simply fell through the cracks of these changing times. For quite a while, I didn’t fully understand that my age was the reason I was being overlooked, because this ageism was unspoken until it wasn’t. Finally, one editor plainly said, “You are too old to be the model. But you are very welcome to come to the photo shoot and help the model with her alignment.”
They wanted my wisdom, my mind, and my teachings. They even wanted my story about how I let my hair go gray, but they didn’t want to see a picture of it. I got the message that my body was not aspirational. And I started to believe it. Over time, I started to feel like these magazines were not for me or people like me. It wasn’t that different from when I dropped out of dance. It seemed to be becoming more about how one looked and not about how one felt.
Then Melvin explained something that completely changed my understanding: “Magazines are not in the business of promoting yoga or anybody’s yoga career. They are in the business of selling magazines.”
Oh. Of course. Even if I didn’t necessarily like that answer, it made sense to me. I understood that they have done a lot of research to find out which images magnetize people to buy their magazine and they did not particularly feel a responsibility to promote contemporary feminist culture or provide a corrective to the patriarchal history of the world. They were skewing younger because that sold their product.
I understood this because my yoga studio was also a business. In fact, being a “real” business, as opposed to a nonprofit with tax-exempt church status, was part of my mission statement. I felt that it was valuable to the growth and acceptance of yoga in our culture for OM yoga Center to offer a model that did not separate spirituality from livelihood.
This was another question that arose frequently during the fifteen years that I owned, operated, and taught at OM yoga Center in New York City. Interviewers tried to be provocative by asking, “Isn’t it a contradiction to run a business that is about yoga? Aren’t yoga and business diametrically opposed?”
My initial outer answer was, “I don’t think it makes sense to assume that every business person is spiritually bereft. Or that every person who does yoga is unable to balance a spreadsheet or work in today’s marketplace.” It seemed like a naive question to me. But, of course, that’s why I loved it. It gave me the opportunity to give a little yoga teaching to journalists from the Wall Street Journal or Slate or CNN.
I explained that yoga is about union, connection, relationship. We manifest this physically in every asana class. Press down to reach up. Reach in two directions to find balance. Feel your breath in your front and back at the same time. Yoga actually cannot be divided. If you have yoga, you have everything and everyone and all that is, throughout all space and time. And that includes business.
My inner answer, the one that I didn’t share with journalists, was drawn from the Tantric teachings, which tell us that nothing is poison. Just like chocolate, alcohol, shopping, sex—pick your pleasure—business is not innately bad or good. The vehicle of business can be used for selfish purposes or for compassionate action. Although I knew this and I even had my own business, I was stuck on labeling the yoga industry as “other.”
I knew that contemplating interdependence, impermanence, and loving-kindness for self and others was the path to transforming apparent poison into beauty. But it was easier to blame something outside of myself for my feelings of disenfranchisement. As always, practice only works when we remember.
Selfie@Sixty
Then, one day, some unexpected inspiration arrived on my Facebook doorstep, in the form of a blog piece about how yoga selfies had gotten out of control. My pal, Ramit, sent it to me, accompanied by a question, “Have you read this already or are you actually engaged in life instead?”
Up to that point, I had definitely been more engaged in life than in yoga selfies. I had neither participated in nor followed any Instagram yoga selfie challenges. Frankly, I had mixed feelings when I saw the photos. Handstands in bikinis on the beach at sunset. Hanumanasana in front of the Taj Mahal. It was easy to judge this as outsize ego stuff that was inappropriate, touristy, and attention getting. But the truth is that I felt out of it; as if the yoga selfie fad was also not for people like me. Like the magazines, it was more a game for the young and perfect people.
But this day something shifted inside me. As I began to read the blog, I felt the dormant germs of discomfort, self-pity, and rejection starting to wake up. Feeling resentful or left out was my old news; an entrenched thought-habit that had once been a regular and important part of my personal narrative. But since writing my last book, May I Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Yoga, and Changing My Mind, I had applied my meditation practice to this pattern by recognizing it when it arose, gently letting it go, and coming back to now.
It was during the process of writing the memoir that I had finally committed to never hating my body again, no matter what. The book, originally titled “I Hate My Body,” was the story of how I learned to be kind to myself as the template for being kind and loving to others.
Near the end of the editing process, I met a very nice man in the airport outside of Tokyo. We bonded because that’s what happens when you are in a foreign country during the biggest earthquake in recorded history and you find another person who speaks your language. As people who have survived natural disasters together tend to do, we kept in touch off-and-on for many months. Eventually, we connected again and—flash forward four years—we were living together in central Virginia.
I was happy. He loved me and my body, my gray hair and wrinkles, my squishy bits and my strong bits—he loved it all and so did I. In fact, it had to start with me. The first time we were going to be intimate, naturally I was nervous. At fifty-eight years of age, it takes confidence to literally reveal yourself without embarrassment or apology. So I said to myself, “Okay, Cyndi, you can’t write about loving yourself and then be embarrassed about your body. Right now is the moment to finally drop all negativity toward yourself and be free and honest. If he likes me, great, and if he doesn’t, okay.” So I took a breath and opened to love and joy, and on the day Ramit wrote me, I woke up beside this man, feeling grateful and confident, loving and beloved.
I dissolved that habitual negativity bundle with an exhale, sat up in bed, and took a fresh start. I also included a sense of forgiveness toward myself, understanding that we all have a tendency to blame our discomfort on others.
In this case, the “other” was the yoga media whom I blamed for aging me out and making me feel bad about my physical appearance. But the truth was that I have never liked getting my picture taken because of ego-clinging reasons. I came up in the theater and dance world where photo shoots were big deals, involving much attention to hair and makeup, lots of lighting, and a two-week crash diet. As a professional dancer that diet consisted of cigarettes and diet coke. As a yogi, I got good at the aforementioned regime of no red wine, sugar, wheat, dairy, animal products, chocolate, or salad dressing.
So the thought of a selfie—a picture that shows me as I am right now, today in this moment, without the beauty support system? Well, that gives rise to tiny anxieties that might easily grow into larger self-esteem issues. Best just to avoid photos altogether, right? The article sent by Ramit agreed. It said that contrary to the claim that gorgeous yoga photos inspire others, yoga selfies actually promote this very lack of confidence. Some of us feel defeated and so we don’t join in. The blog said this is because the yoga selfies are of skinny minnies, hyper-flexies, and celebri-yogis and not us real people who are curvy or older or less adept in our asanas.
It was encouraging to learn that I was not alone in my feelings. But feelings do nothing but change. Physical feelings, as well as emotions, are completely impermanent. And so are photos. The old days of dance photo shoots where you were happy to get one good picture after two full days of shooting and that picture was the one that would make or break your career—well, that was then and this was now. I suddenly had a new perspective on selfies as perfect, full-blown expressions of the Buddhist teachings on impermanence—this fleeting moment will never happen again, so let’s taste it deeply.
What I had labeled as “poison” was simply a vehicle that can be used in any way. Instagram doesn’t have a requirement that one be a certain size, shape, color, gender, or anything else. In fact, Instagram is radically inclusive and it was me that had frozen it into something else, based on my own fears and insecurities.
So, I decided to start my own Instagram thirty-day series called Selfie at Sixty. It would show a real yogini at the age of sixty. My husband took my picture every day, so maybe that’s not really a selfie situation, but it’s okay. The point was that what I felt rejected by—the public arena of yoga that seemed to promote youth and fitness—became the vehicle for me to reconnect to my personal practice.
The Tibetan word for practice is gom, which translates as “getting familiar.” These thirty days became a way for me to refamiliarize myself with myself and with a new asana practice that works for me now. Some days I felt kind of awesome, but some days I was just tired. And this gave me that path to discover what a sustainable yoga practice was for sixty year old me. It wasn’t about doing all the poses I used to do, but what nourished and supported me at this point in my life. It was not about feeling guilty but about applying the yogic directive of svadyaya: self-study through paying attention to what is actually happening, as opposed to what you wish or hope was happening. Seeing things as they are is the heart of Tantric practice. Instead of retreating into our comfort cocoon, we can transform our stuckness into liberation, in the process expanding our comfort zone.
The Selfie at Sixty practice also brought my yoga practice more into my everyday life. My husband and I were on a working road trip for much of the thirty days, half of it relating to his work and half of it to mine. So he took a photo of me in parighasana in front of the Washington Monument; doing parivrtta trikonasana in high heels on a dock in the Chesapeake Bay, and viparita karani on a park bench in red sneakers with my red bike parked next to me.
Then there was the day that we drove four hours for my weekend workshop at Willow St. Yoga in Maryland. I felt stiff and toxic from being in the car for so long but when Brad said it’s going to take two trips to get all our stuff in the hotel, I said no way. So I piled briefcase and mat on two suitcases, tossed my purse over my shoulder, grabbed the handles and took a warrior’s stance. Click, road warrior two became the most popular post of the series.
To my surprise, this daily photo of a mature yogini became a friendly reminder of the preciousness of human life. What can we do with our days and nights? Our every action will impact others, and our own suffering arises when we are too focused on self-importance and caught up in thinking about how we are good or bad.
It’s so easy to create our own suffering. And ironically, the very thing that we think is causing our suffering—business, the youth-obsessed publishing industry—can also be the vehicle for our awakening, our honesty, our joy. The Buddhist teachings tell us that all suffering is worthy of compassion and that sharing our story is not selfish but an act of generosity. Turns out that the Selfie at Sixty project not only cheered me up but spread cheer to others via the previously dreaded Instagram. I didn’t know what would be gained from this project but I did know what needed to be lost.
Here is the aspiration that naturally arose as I wrote my first Selfie at Sixty blog entry:
“Let me finally release some of this boring vanity and simply open to each day. I want to cultivate more gratitude for my life and the whole, big, beautiful world; for my body and what I can do if I take good care of it. This is not a contest or a challenge. It’s a practice. Let’s see what practice looks like at sixty years of age.”
And that’s exactly what happened.
Cyndi Lee is the first female Western yoga teacher to fully integrate yoga asana and Tibetan Buddhism. She is the author of Yoga Body Buddha Mind and May I Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Yoga, and Changing My Mind. She is training to be a Zen Chaplain, emphasizing service in areas of women’s health and happiness. Website: www.cyndilee.com. Author photo by Lisa Parks.
19. Heinrich Zimmer, The Philosophies of India (Bollingen Paperbacks, 1969).