Frank Jude Boccio (born 1956 [1] ) is a teacher and one of the originators of mindful yoga. He is known both for his teaching in centres across America, and for his 2004 book Mindfulness Yoga: The Awakened Union of Breath, Body and Mind, which describes a practice that combines yoga as exercise and Buddhist meditational practice.
Frank Jude Boccio began practising Buddhism in New York at the age of 18. He read Buddhist Studies at the University of Sunderland, obtaining a graduate-level diploma but deciding not to write a thesis and hence obtain an M.A. In 1989, he began a period of study under Lyn Fine and Patricia Hunt-Perry in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh; in 1997 he was ordained into the Tiep Hien order. He then studied under Samu Sunim, who ordained him as a dharma teacher in 2007. [2]
He studied a variety of styles of modern yoga including Iyengar, Anusara, Ashtanga, Integral and Kundalini. He is a certified preventive and rehabilitative yoga teacher and therapist via the Bateman Institute. Georg Feuerstein has certified him for the Yoga Research and Education Center's 750-hour teacher training program. [2]
Boccio founded the Empty Mountain Sangha and the peer-led Tucson Mindfulness Practice Community. [2] He teaches, lectures, and gives workshops and retreats in the Americas and Asia on mindful yoga, integrating modern yoga and Buddhist vipassana mindfulness, [2] at centres including Kripalu. [3]
He has written articles for magazines including Tricycle, [4] Yoga Journal , [5] Shambhala Sun, [6] Spring Wind, Namaskar, Elephant Journal, [7] and Experience Life. [2] He is the author of the 2004 book Mindfulness Yoga: The Awakened Union of Breath, Body and Mind which integrates Buddhism's Four Foundations of Mindfulness (Satipatthana) with the practice of yoga asanas, [8] and chapters in various anthologies on the connection of yoga and Buddhism. [2] [9]
Phil Catalfo, reviewing Mindfulness Yoga for Yoga Journal , wrote that it was not surprising that many yoga practitioners also studied Buddhist practice, as the traditions have common roots, but that Boccio's was the first "successful book-length discourse" that properly integrated the practices. In Catalfo's view, Boccio shows that Buddhist practice "is itself a form of yoga, presenting a meditational approach to asana practice". [10] He writes that the book consists mainly of four sequences, each of some dozens of "familiar poses": "Body as Body"; "Feelings as Feelings"; "Mindfully Aware"; and "Dharmas in the Dharmas", the headings intentionally reflecting the Anapanasati Sutta which combines mindful breathing with the direction of the attention to these four areas. [10]
The yoga and meditation teacher and author Anne Cushman, reviewing the book for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review , noted that "Sneaking Hatha Yoga into a Buddhist practice used to be a guilty pleasure, like nibbling a secret stash of chocolate during a meditation retreat." [11] Obstacles to combining them included Buddhist masters' warnings that hatha yoga's focus on the body encouraged a dangerous obsession with something that inevitably decayed, while modern yoga's energetic workouts did not look like serious spiritual practice. However, in the 21st century, hatha yoga is, she writes, regularly forming "an integral part of the schedule at Vipassana, Zen, and Tibetan Buddhist retreats". Cushman writes that Boccio "solidly locates hatha yoga practice in Buddhist history and philosophy, emphasizing the mindfulness techniques laid out in the Anapanasati Sutta and Satipatthana Sutta ". [11] She calls the book "the most erudite" and "the most philosophically comprehensive" of the three works on the topic that she reviews, tracing the origins of yoga to the life story of the Buddha, "himself a wandering yogi" in India. The book then provides a "dense but readable summary" of the core teachings of Buddhism and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, before offering four complete, illustrated, meditational asana sequences, paying attention both to the physical postures and to their lessons "about the deepest truths in our lives". [11]
The Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health called Boccio's book "the first to apply the Buddha's mindfulness meditation teachings to asana practice". [3]
Publishers Weekly described the thesis of Mindfulness Yoga as "both novel and logical", since Buddhism "grew from Hindu-yoga roots", while modern yoga, especially the American kind, needed "greater appreciation of its spiritual significance." The review noted Boccio's debt to the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh (who wrote the Foreword). It found the four sequences of asanas in the book somewhat hard to follow, making the book more suitable for established practitioners. [12]
In 2008, Nora Isaacs noted in Yoga Journal that Boccio and others such as Janice Gates, Cyndi Lee, Phillip Moffitt, and Sarah Powers, had "each, independently, discovered the benefits of merging mindfulness with asana", leading to "something we might call 'mindful yoga'." [13]
Boccio has two daughters, one 36 years older than the other, and lives in Tucson, Arizona. [2]
Meditation is a practice in which an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.
The Noble Eightfold Path is an early summary of the path of Buddhist practices leading to liberation from samsara, the painful cycle of rebirth, in the form of nirvana.
Yoga is a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines which originated in ancient India and aim to control (yoke) and still the mind, recognizing a detached witness-consciousness untouched by the mind (Chitta) and mundane suffering (Duḥkha). There is a wide variety of schools of yoga, practices, and goals in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and traditional and modern yoga is practiced worldwide.
Vipassanā (Pāli) or vipaśyanā (Sanskrit) literally "special, super (Vi), seeing (Passanā)", is a Buddhist term that is often translated as "insight" or "seeing clearly". The Pali Canon describes it as one of two qualities of mind which is developed in bhāvanā, the training of the mind, the other being samatha. It is often defined as a practice that seeks "insight into the true nature of reality", defined as anicca "impermanence", dukkha "suffering, unsatisfactoriness", anattā "non-self", the three marks of existence in the Theravada tradition, and as śūnyatā "emptiness" and Buddha-nature in the Mahayana traditions.
Haṭha yoga is a branch of yoga which uses physical techniques to try to preserve and channel the vital force or energy. The Sanskrit word हठ haṭha literally means "force", alluding to a system of physical techniques. Some haṭha yoga style techniques can be traced back at least to the 1st-century CE, in texts such as the Hindu Sanskrit epics and Buddhism's Pali canon. The oldest dated text so far found to describe haṭha yoga, the 11th-century Amṛtasiddhi, comes from a tantric Buddhist milieu. The oldest texts to use the terminology of hatha are also Vajrayana Buddhist. Hindu hatha yoga texts appear from the 11th century onwards.
Ānāpānasati, meaning "mindfulness of breathing", paying attention to the breath. It is the quintessential form of Buddhist meditation, attributed to Gautama Buddha, and described in several suttas, most notably the Ānāpānasati Sutta.
Yoga nidra or yogic sleep in modern usage is a state of consciousness between waking and sleeping, typically induced by a guided meditation.
Buddhist meditation is the practice of meditation in Buddhism. The closest words for meditation in the classical languages of Buddhism are bhāvanā and jhāna/dhyāna.
In Buddhism, kammaṭṭhāna is a Pali word which literally means place of work. Its original meaning was someone's occupation but this meaning has developed into several distinct but related usages all having to do with Buddhist meditation.
The Vipassanā movement, also called the Insight Meditation Movement and American vipassana movement, refers to a branch of modern Burmese Theravāda Buddhism that promotes "bare insight" (sukha-vipassana) to attain stream entry and preserve the Buddhist teachings, which gained widespread popularity since the 1950s, and to its western derivatives which have been popularised since the 1970s, giving rise to the more dhyana-oriented mindfulness movement.
Sati, literally "memory" or "retention", commonly translated as mindfulness, is an essential part of Buddhist practice in which one maintains a lucid awareness of bodily and mental phenomena or dhammas, a spiritual or psychological faculty (indriya) in which one 'remembers to observe'. It is the first factor of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. "Correct" or "right" mindfulness is the seventh element of the Noble Eightfold Path.
The Ānāpānasati Sutta (Pāli) or Ānāpānasmṛti Sūtra (Sanskrit), "Breath-Mindfulness Discourse," Majjhima Nikaya 118, is a discourse that details the Buddha's instruction on using awareness of the breath (anapana) as an initial focus for meditation.
Paṭikkūlamanasikāra is a Pāli term that is generally translated as "reflections on repulsiveness". It refers to a traditional Buddhist meditation whereby thirty-one parts of the body are contemplated in a variety of ways. In addition to developing sati (mindfulness) and samādhi (concentration), this form of meditation is considered conducive to overcoming desire and lust. Along with cemetery contemplations, this type of meditation is one of the two meditations on "the foul" or "unattractive".
Sampajañña is a term of central importance for meditative practice in all Buddhist traditions. It refers to “The mental process by which one continuously monitors one’s own body and mind. In the practice of śamatha, its principal function is to note the occurrence of laxity and excitation.” It is very often found in the pair ‘mindfulness and introspection’ or ‘mindfulness and clear comprehension).
In the oldest texts of Buddhism, dhyāna or jhāna is a component of the training of the mind (bhavana), commonly translated as meditation, to withdraw the mind from the automatic responses to sense-impressions, "burn up" the defilements, and leading to a "state of perfect equanimity and awareness (upekkhā-sati-parisuddhi)." Dhyāna may have been the core practice of pre-sectarian Buddhism, in combination with several related practices which together lead to perfected mindfulness and detachment.
Meditative postures or meditation seats are the body positions or asanas, usually sitting but also sometimes standing or reclining, used to facilitate meditation. Best known in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions are the lotus and kneeling positions; other options include sitting on a chair, with the spine upright.
Buddhānusmṛti, meaning "Buddha-mindfulness", is a common Buddhist practice in all Buddhist traditions which involves meditating on the virtues of the Buddha, mainly Gautama Buddha as the meditation or contemplation subject. Later Mahayana sects like Pureland Buddhism focused on Amida Buddha instead, mainly to pray for rebirth in the Western Pure Land.
Anne Cushman is a teacher of yoga as exercise and meditation, an author on the intersection of those topics long thought to be distinct but now widely called Mindful Yoga, and a novelist. Her novel Enlightenment for Idiots was named by Booklist as one of the top ten novels of 2008.
Mindful Yoga or Mindfulness Yoga combines Buddhist-style mindfulness practice with yoga as exercise to provide a means of exercise that is also meditative and useful for reducing stress. Buddhism and Hinduism have since ancient times shared many aspects of philosophy and practice including mindfulness, understanding the suffering caused by an erroneous view of reality, and using concentrated and meditative states to address such suffering.
Cyndi Lee is a teacher of mindful yoga, a combination of Tibetan Buddhist practice and yoga as exercise. She has an international reputation and is the author of several books on her approach.