Why subscribe?
Each week you will receive a post with an essay offering a Buddhist and/or yoga-inspired teaching that you can explore in your every day life. Many posts will also include a meditation, in written and audio form.
About Drip, Drip, Drip, the Bucket Fills
“Drip, Drip, Drip, the Bucket Fills” is one of the most enduring teachings that I received from my root guru, Gelek Rimpoche.
This newsletter - which is now a Substack - focusses on how we can touch into mindfulness meditation regularly. How the ordinary activities of our day offer a myriad of ways to pay attention, wake up, touch in, experience our senses and frequently gain insight about our own behaviors, habits, and potential. And, to connect to our basic wholesomeness. A little bit at a time.
I’ve written about how this happened for me when I was hemming curtains and packing for moving house and when I sit down for dinner and when my neighbor’s kid started playing the drums… and kept playing the drums for several years.
Drip, Drip, Drip is a weekly letter where I write about:
How to touch into mindfulness meditation regularly.
How to discover ways to wake up in your everyday life.
How to reconnect to your own thread of awareness
How to use what you’ve got - kids, dogs, neighbors, jobs.
How to use what you already do - cook, walk, eat, sleep, laundry, work, play.
AND you get a monthly Mindfulness Meditation Prompt for integrating practice into every day life.
THE TEACHING OF ONE BOAT
There are many meditations that promise to help you relax, energize, feel brave, gain financial confidence, root into your sexuality. Nothing wrong with any of these. These kind of aspirations or creative visualizations might help you feel better or give you some temporary mojo for overcoming an obstacle. But since the target is limited, the effects are predictably temporary.
What can be even more useful is to apply one kind of meditation to your whole life. Doing the same technique in a million different situations. I used to hear yoga teachers talk about the value of dedicating yourself to practice by saying, “If you dig a lot of shallow holes you will end up with a lot of mud. Digging one deep hole is the way to strike oil.”
In Buddhism this advice is a teaching called One Boat. Our practice is ultimately about crossing the river; going from the shore of confusion, dis-ease, craving and dissatisfaction to the other shore of wisdom, compassion and clarity. It’s about getting unstuck, feeling free from loneliness and longing and anxiety. But if If we keep getting out of the boat and into another boat, we will never make it across.
If you go to the doctor and she never finds the root cause of your suffering, you will keep getting sick no matter how many antibiotics you take. Meditation as a band-aid, as an aspirin, is like jumping from boat to boat to boat. Not getting across, just treading water.
Drip, Drip, Drips offers you one boat, the vehicle of mindfulness meditation practice, applied to your everyday life in everyday ways. A little bit at a time adds up to consistent benefits, insights and understandings.
Each week you will get a newsletter with a small teaching and once monthly I will offer you a meditation prompt.
And….
if you decide to become a paid subscriber to Drip, Drip, Drip you will also receive a discounted rate of $40 for each of my online meditation mini-retreats.
About Cyndi Lee
Cyndi Lee began teaching meditation 30 years ago with the blessing of her root guru, the great Tibetan master, Gelek Rimpoche. In 2018 she was ordained as a Buddhist Chaplain, under the guidance of Roshi Joan Halifax of Upaya Zen Center.
Cyndi is also the first female Western yoga teacher to fully integrate yoga asana and Tibetan Buddhism in her practice and teaching. From 1998-2012, she founded and ran the renowned OM yoga Center, a yoga studio and dharma center. One of the most influential teachers in the U.S. Cyndi has trained thousands of meditators and yogis worldwide.
OM yoga Center was the first NYC studio to offer Buddhist meditation classes. Cyndi’s favorite student was her dad, Allan Lee, who took meditation training at the age of 75.
Cyndi is the author of five books including the classic yoga text: Yoga Body Buddha Mind. Other books are the The New York Times critically acclaimed May I Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Yoga, and Changing My Mind and OM yoga: A Guide to Daily Practice.
Cyndi is a regular contributor to Yoga Journal, Lion’s Roar, Real Simple, and has written for Yoga International, Tricycle, and Natural Health. Recent articles include “My Slow Fashion Practice is Yoga, Too” (YJ), and “The Practice of Self-Caring” (LR).
Cyndi has found that teaching meditation online is wonderful! It turns out that it is completely possible to experience genuine connection and community this way, and we get to people we might never meet any other way.
Cyndi lives in a casita in Santa Fe, NM with her husband, Brad and her poodle, Bailey. When she is not writing, meditating, practicing yoga, or walking around the block she loves to knit, sew and read. She is a member of the Friends of the Library Board and hopes everyone joins their local library.
