MEXICO CITY (proceso.com.mx).- Under the premise that the heart has its own intelligence, the expert in “mindfulness” and meditation Cynthia Zak invites us to accompany her and delve into such quantum thinking with her, through the cordial reading of his new independent literary adventure of 247 pages: “Enciende tu corazón”.
In addition to being a yoga teacher, songwriter, and speaker, this globetrotting writer created the international Yomu mindfulness system.
Now, Cynthia Zak shares with us in her volume “Turn on your heart” a total of 77 rituals to follow, to embark on the path of spiritual healing towards the knowledge of the inner being that awaits in the privacy of our knowing silence.
Analogous to the volume “Ignite Your Heart”, Cynthia Zak has created an auditory and multisensory journey available on all digital platforms with 13 songs and meditations, in addition to the podcast for the reader to complete this self-help experience in pursuit of the liberation of the soul ( visit and
Next, we offer our readers the introductory section that the author herself has entitled “Why a book of rituals to light the heart?”, taken almost at the beginning of her recent book.
presentation passport
I come from a Jewish, Argentine, atheist and left-wing family.
With these labels you can imagine that rituals were not commonplace for me. They did not exist in a real or subjective way: religious festivals were not celebrated, there were no candles or Christmas trees, there was no prayer or prayer, no blessing, much less belief in invisible beings, in a time out of time or in magic of the present moment.
Inside me there was a hole full of questions and the clear and absolute conviction that the family discourse was limited, for me that had no foundation. I didn’t set out to swim against the current, but it came naturally. Because what I felt and saw affirmed the complete opposite: there are thousands of intelligent universes that surround us, life is a miracle that something superior has touched, we are more than matter, we are unlimited.
I knew it from a very young age and reading was my ally on the path I began to follow. The magicians Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe (if you have never read them, I recommend them) confirmed my certainty that there is a power that lives within one, that we all have a mission and a purpose, that we can reach out and bring down magnificent realities. , invisible to the doubtful eye and obvious to the believing eye.
I was 12 or 13 years old when Carlos Castaneda’s books came into my hands;… If you don’t know them, look them up, hurry up to read them; if you already have them, reopen them, on each of its pages the truth is waiting for you. I could say that they changed my life, but it was only the beginning: the perfect platform for intellectual understanding of everything I knew instinctively.
Almost at the same time, one night I went into an alternative cinema to see a film about which I had no information: “Encounters with Remarkable Men” (1979), directed by Peter Brook (if you saw it, go back to it; if not you know her, run to look for her and observe what you feel). It is about the spiritual life of the teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. The film shows his journey through Afghanistan until he reaches a dervish Sufi monastery in the middle of the mountains, where he is trained in spirituality and then sent to teach in the West.
I can remember absolutely everything from that moment: my clothes, the room, the smell, the indescribable emotion, once again the certainty and confirmation that teachers and guides are everywhere when the time comes to find them.
From then on, I consciously began to search for the practitioners of the Gurdjieff method, the dervish Sufis, the yogis, the Buddhist lamas, all those who belonged to spiritual lineages far from charlatans and close to the source.
I studied journalism in Córdoba and went to live in Buenos Aires with my actress friend, the great Mariana Briski, and then I moved to Madrid, where I ended up living for several years. There I began the daily practice of yoga, guided by a great teacher of the Sivananda Tradition, Danilo Hernández. Simultaneously I found guides from Native American traditions, shamans who taught me the secrets of my personal power, the fire in my heart and the symbolic message of the Tarot cards.
Even with all this learning and my inner conviction, I knew that there was still a long way to go… We moved to the United States (with Adrián, my partner in these searches and father of my three children), the chosen point was Arizona, to understand and experience depth the native rituals, the strength of the owners of that land, the ceremonies, their worldview and ancestral medicines.
The season in the desert was magnificent; from there we jumped to the East Coast, to the Atlantic Ocean, to my beloved Miami, to live by the sea. Here were waiting for me the work and groups of Mr. Gurdjieff, the meeting with my Sufi teacher who lived in Mexico, Mrs. Noor, and the dervish spiritual practice of the Mevlevi Sufi tradition, by the hand of my shaykh, Peter Cunz Efendi.
I learned to spin like the dervishes, to pray like the Sufis, to practice and direct the Zikar (Sufi mantras) and the Sema (whirling ceremony). I immersed myself fully in the world of yoga until I became a meditation and yoga teacher with the training of the great yogi Swami Brahmavidyananda Saraswati, who is part of the International Yoga Federation, and I met the Buddhist teachers of the Mahayana tradition (under the direction of spirit of Lama Zopa Ripoché). Despite all this knowledge and a firm inner conviction, even today I feel like an apprentice amazed by the immense beauty of these discoveries.
After maternity, I decided to undertake my own projects to be available to my children and, at the same time, develop all my creative ideas, always with the conviction that the only thing that transforms us is work for the community, daily practice and constant of mantras, meditations and yoga.
In 2001 I founded in Florida a service newspaper for immigrants that still exists: “El Paracaidista”, I am the exclusive correspondent in the United States of Cadena 3 of Argentina; I create music for “mindfulness” (I have studied music all my life and have composed more than 150 songs), I wrote three books and devised the international system of “mindfulness” Yomu, which today expands in the world.
In each scenario, in front of hundreds of people or rural schools, in the most prosperous and in the most vulnerable areas, the rituals that I share in this book accompany and protect me, they are a compass to feel the other, to understand where I come from now. Where do I go, to know that nothing separates us and that we are truly one.
In everything created, looked at, investigated and explored, rituals became direction and north. In guidance and sense. They gave me and give me structure to my practice and freedom to spread my wings. These rituals are not mine, I am a channel to transmit them, they are yours and everyone’s. They belong to the group, they belong to this team that we created together.
I have been practicing them for more than 30 years and it is time to put them into words so that they expand to the world and benefit many. Without the product of personal experience, of making them with dedication and amazement, with curiosity and joy, they are born with daily practice and perseverance to keep my vision and mission alive.