Posted: October 17th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Two as One Tour on Facebook
Two as One Yoga Tour, 2010: Lama Christie McNally New Events!:
Gallway, Ireland: October 18th
2:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Two as One
Partner Yoga
asana with
Lama Christie & Ian
The Yoga Shala
The Plaza Buiding
Headford Road
Galway
Contact
David Cunningham
(0) 85-1573153
info@theyogashala.net
TheYogaShala.net
7:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Magic of Love
Kirtan & Satsang
plus book signing
Carlton Hotel
Galway City
Dublin Road,
Galway City
(0) 91 381 200
Dublin, Ireland: October 19th and 20th
Paris, France: October 23rd and 24th
1) Berlin
City Yoga Association Yoga and Yoga Therapy
Dorotheenstraße 56-60
10117 Berlin
phone +49-30-44 04 59 00
e.mail mail@cityyoga.de
http://www.cityyoga.de/workshops.php#top
October 30th & 31st
Partner Yoga with Lama Christie and Ian Thorson
Saturday 30 October 2010 2pm -4:30 Partner Yoga I
Sunday 31 October 2010: 2:30 - 5:30 Partner Yoga II
Tibetan Meditation with Lama Christie
Saturday 30 October 2010: 7pm - 9:30
Cost
130 € for partner yoga and meditation with Lama Christie (8h)
50 € for a single unit workshop with Lama Christie (3 h)
45 € for a single unit workshop with Lama Christie (2.5 h)
Contact: Jone Szmania <jone@cityyoga.de
2) Munich
Jivamukti, Buttermelcherstr, Munich, Germany
(on Friday Nov. 5):
The Yoga of Bliss, a talk given by Lama Christie
contact: Gleixner Bettina <bettina.gleixner@gmail.com>
More information to come
3) Munich
Namasté Yoga Studio
Luitpoldstr. 2a
82211 Herrsching am Ammersee
Date: Saturday November 06, 2010
Price: 63 euros
Partner Yoga with Lama Christie and Ian Thorsen - 2pm- 4:30
A talk on How to Save the World“ - 6pm - 7:30
contact: Percy Namaste <percy@namaste-yoga-studio.de>;
Two as One Partner Yoga Retreat to Open your Heart:
Tibetan Heart Yoga Series 9
with Geshe Michael Roach and Lama Christie McNally
November 15-20th, 2010 in San Pancho, Nayarit, Mexico
more info: Yoga Studies Institute
Two as One Partner Yoga Retreat to Open your Heart: Tibetan Heart Yoga Series 9 with Geshe Michael Roach and Lama Christie McNally
Posted: May 11th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Questions and Answers | No Comments »
For the first time, Lama Christie McNally has agreed to answer a few questions regarding her extraordinary life and her new book The Tibetan Book of Meditation. Each week we will be sharing her answers to some very direct questions.
6) Isn’t meditation just about clearing your mind and watching your breath?
Clearing your mind and watching the breath is the first step you should take in any meditation. This brings the mind out of its busy-world mentality, and into a calm, neutral state. But just getting your mind calm is not the goal of meditation. That is merely a platform, a jumping-off point. The real goal of meditation is to transform your mind completely, which you cannot do simply by watching the breath. You must teach your mind about the true nature of things, and you must teach your heart how to love. And the Tibetans have very wonderful and specific meditations to help us reach both those goals.
7) Tell us about your yoga practice: how does it relate to the practice of meditation?
I love yoga; at this point, I can’t imagine what life would be like without it. We do yoga every single day, just after our meditation, for at least an hour and a half. This can be quite a challenge while traveling, but you can see us pulling out our yoga mats in various airports all over the world. I am getting used to the stares!
There is a practice of yoga in Tibet, and it is quite similar to that found in the Indian lineages. In the Tibetan tradition, yoga asanas were regarded as extremely high secret practices, and were not given to a student until they had been studying for something like 15 years. This is because, to the Tibetans, the asana practice is not simply a physical exercise, but a very deep method of affecting our inner body—the inner winds and channels. And it is through these subtle inner winds that we can so deeply affect our mind. For, where the winds go, so the thoughts follow, and vice versa. So we say that yoga is the outer method of taming the mind, while meditation is the inner. Both are necessary. When you are doing your yoga practice right, it should be very much like a moving meditation, like a meditation dance, where you are deeply absorbed in your object of focus as you move through a flow of poses.
Posted: May 11th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Questions and Answers | No Comments »
For the first time, Lama Christie McNally has agreed to answer a few questions regarding her extraordinary life and her new book The Tibetan Book of Meditation. Each week we will be sharing her answers to some very direct questions.
3) How much of your life do you spend in meditation?
Starting from around 1996, I have pretty much meditated every single day for at least an hour a day. This is not counting other meditative practices such as mantras or reciting ritual texts. Then in 2000, I began my deep silent retreat of 3 years, 3 months, and 3 days. After I emerged from there, I made a commitment to do two 2-month deep retreats per year, which I have done steadily for the past 6 years, in-between our strenuous teaching schedule. And whenever I am not in deep retreat, still I try to get at least an hour of deep meditation per day.
Meditation is kind of like running in that way; you have to do it regularly, day by day, for it to have any kind of desired result. And, you have to keep exercising your mind daily, in order to maintain the results you have reached.
4) For you, what’s been the main benefit of meditation?
I became a person who can really help other people.
5) What did you set out to accomplish with The Tibetan Book of Meditation?
I wanted to bring meditation to the girl I used to be, in college, the one who was searching so desperately for answers, for a path. I am hoping that this book will find its way to all those out there who are still searching.
Posted: April 27th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Author Bio, Press Resources | No Comments »
Lama Christie McNally trained in Tibetan monasteries in India and Nepal, and received extensive instruction in all the texts required for a Geshe degree, which is traditionally a 20-year course of study. From there, she immersed herself in the secret teachings of Buddhism. She is one of the first Western women to be recognized as a Lama. Through her efforts, she has begun to change the face of Buddhism that has historically been predominantly male.
She is a translator of ancient Tibetan and Sanskrit, and a professor of religious studies. She has also co-authored The Essential Yoga Sutra, How Yoga Works, and The Eastern Path to Heaven.
Lama Christie is the co-founder of Diamond Mountain University, a revolutionary effort to provide without charge a classical monastic education to westerners of all walks of life, to be used within the modern world. For the Diamond Mountain curriculum she is the author of the Bok Jinpa Series (15 Courses in Advanced Meditation) and Co-author of the Advanced Buddhist Series (15 Courses on the Diamond Way).
From 2000 to 2003, Lama Christie completed a traditional Great Retreat of 3 years, 3 months, and 3 days of silence and meditation, in the wilderness of the southern Arizona desert.
Posted: April 27th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Book Summary, Press Resources | No Comments »
The Tibetan Book of Meditation is a synthesis of all the great Tibetan commentaries on meditation, starting from Master Kamalashila and continuing up to modern day Lamas, as it was passed down to Lama Christie McNally by her holy Teachers. Lama Christie is an accomplished meditator herself. She’s spent 6 years of her life in silent meditation retreat experiencing the wisdom of the teachings and is a fluent translator of major Tibetan and Sanskrit texts on meditation. And so through The Tibetan Book of Meditation the lineage continues—from India, to Tibet, and on to the lands of the West, in an unbroken chain straight to you.
Posted: April 20th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Questions and Answers | No Comments »
For the first time, Lama Christie McNally has agreed to answer a few questions regarding her extraordinary life and her new book The Tibetan Book of Meditation. Each week we will be sharing her answers to some direct questions.
1) Buddhism (like every other religious or political institution) has been dominated by men. As a woman teaching, do you feel you are changing the face of Buddhism?
I have definitely changed things, although I really can’t take any credit for it. It was my Lama, Geshe Michael Roach, who had this vision, and he was expanding on the vision of his own root Lama, Khen Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin.
Khen Rinpoche was the first Tibetan Lama ever who taught the monastic course to women. He was an extremely high Lama in Tibet, having been granted the very highest doctorate title of Hlarumpa Geshe. Shortly after receiving that great honor, Tibet was invaded, and he fled to India along with 100,000 other Tibetans. And just after he got there, the Dalai Lama sent him to America, to teach us crazy westerners. For someone who had come from an exclusively monastic culture, what he did next was truly revolutionary. Rinpoche had the foresight to realize that, if the teachings were to succeed in this country, they would have to be offered to men and women equally.
Geshe Michael, my own root Lama, was his closest student, so how surprising is it that he took this revolutionary idea and ran with it? After we completed the three-year retreat, he literally dragged me up on stages with him to teach. I was very hesitant at first, not fully understanding the importance of what he was trying to do. But strange things started to happen—women who didn’t feel comfortable talking to a man started coming up to me to ask for spiritual advice, and I realized I was serving people by being up there. And then, I started to notice the faces of all the people in the audience, especially the younger women, looking at me and thinking, “I could do that.” Just by being up there, I was empowering them, giving them a dream.
I do not wear red robes, and I am an ordinary-looking young woman from California, and yet I too have learned these things, and learned how to pass them on to others, in perfect keeping with the ancient lineage from Tibet. So yes, I have changed things, and am changing them, mainly by virtue of just trusting my Teacher’s vision of who I could be.
It is a beautiful thing to be able to help people in this way, in an ultimate way. I am so lucky. And I am so very happy that I am part of the process of bringing these holy teachings, these precious instructions for transforming people’s lives, into the west.
2) What can you tell us about your extensive training?
Hmmm…to answer your question briefly, I have been trained extensively in all the texts that the monks in the Tibetan monasteries spend twenty years mastering, in order to earn their much sought after Geshe degree; and I have gone on from there to immerse myself in the higher teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, what they call the secret teachings. All of this I have learned from sitting at the feet of my root Lama, day after day, absorbing the lineage, just as he once sat at the feet of his own root Lama.
I could tell you in detail about all the amazing and difficult texts on philosophy that I have studied, and it would impress some people. I could talk about how I learned the Tibetan language, and all the incredible texts I have translated, and that might impress them even more. But honestly, that was the easy part.
The hard part of the training is trying to embody the teachings in your own life, in your own mind. The hard part is the day after day struggle to perfect yourself, under the eagle eyes of your mind-reading Lama. I have sat for twelve years at the feet of my Lama, and struggled, and that is the extensive training I am most proud of.
Posted: April 10th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Recent Coverage | No Comments »
Media Contact: James Connor
The James Group
(212) 243-2022 X303
jamesc@thejamesgroup.com
The Tibetan Book of Meditation
Lama Christie McNally reveals an experiential roadmap to help Westerners explore the classic meditations of Buddhism
“The real goal of meditation is to transform your mind completely, which you cannot do simply by watching the breath. You must teach your mind about the true nature of things, and you must teach your heart how to love. And the Tibetans have very wonderful and specific meditations to help us reach both those goals.”
⎯ Lama Christie McNally
April 19th, 2009 (New York, NY) Anyone who has ever wanted an easy roadmap into the deep meditation practices of Tibetan Buddhism need look no further. The Tibetan Book of Meditation is a synthesis of all the great Tibetan commentaries on meditation, starting from Master Kamalashila, who brought meditation to Tibet in 900AD, and continuing up to modern day.
Perhaps equally intriguing is the gender of the author of this book, as Tibetan Buddhism has long been dominated by men. For the past six years, Lama Christie McNally, a young Western woman, born and raised in California, has been traveling the world teaching and in so doing, changing the face of Buddhism.
“I am definitely changing things, although I really can’t take any credit for it,” says Lama Christie. “It was my Lama, Geshe Michael Roach, who had this vision, and he was expanding on the vision of his own root Lama, Khen Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin. They both saw that if Buddhist thought were to expand in the West, it would have to be offered to and taught by men and women equally.”
Lama Christie McNally is one of the best-trained Western women in the art of Tibetan Buddhist meditation. She has spent 12 years rigorously studying and translating Tibetan monastic texts at the feet of Buddhist masters, including 6 combined years in isolated silent meditation retreat.
The Tibetan monastic commentaries on meditation are extremely difficult and rarely studied by Westerners. However, The Tibetan Book of Meditation as shared by Lama Christie makes the path of meditation easy.
“I wanted to bring meditation to the girl I used to be, in college, the one who was searching so desperately for answers, for a path,” says Lama Christie. “I am hoping that this book will find its way to all those out there who are still searching.”
The Tibetan Book of Meditation is the first solo authored book by Lama Christie McNally. She is the co-author with Geshe Michael Roach of The Essential Yoga Sutra, How Yoga Works, and The Eastern Path to Heaven.
The Tibetan Book of Meditation retails for $14.00 and is available May 19, 2009 through Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. To give potential readers a taste of the beauty and clarity of the book, the first four chapters are available for free download at http://www.TibetanBookofMeditation.com. Also, guided audio meditations from Lama Christie herself are available for free on the book’s website.
About Lama Christie McNally
Lama Christie McNally trained in Tibetan monasteries in India and Nepal, and received extensive instruction in all the texts required for a Geshe degree, which is traditionally a 20-year course of study. From there, she immersed herself in the secret teachings of Buddhism. She is one of the first Western women to be recognized as a Lama. Through her efforts, she has begun to change the face of Buddhism that has historically been predominantly male.
She is a translator of ancient Tibetan and Sanskrit, and a professor of religious studies. She has also co-authored The Essential Yoga Sutra, How Yoga Works, and The Eastern Path to Heaven.
Lama Christie is the co-founder of Diamond Mountain University, a revolutionary effort to provide without charge a classical monastic education to westerners of all walks of life, to be used within the modern world.
From 2000 to 2003, Lama Christie completed a traditional Great Retreat of 3 years, 3 months, and 3 days of silence and meditation, in the wilderness of the southern Arizona desert. To learn more visit:
http://www.TibetanBookofMeditation.com
The Tibetan Book of Meditation
by Lama Christie McNally
Available May 19th, 2009 ♦ $14.00 ♦ Paperback ♦ Doubleday
