Leza Lowitz

Leza Lowitz is the Founder and Director of Sun and Moon Yoga, which she opened in 2003 as an act of Seva. Leza is credited with introducing many styles of yoga in Japan, including Restorative Yoga, Yin Yoga, Vinyasa Flow, Partner Yoga, Tibetan Heart Yoga, Tibetan Bowl Sound Healing, Community Charity Yoga, etc. She also helped spread the practice of Lovingkindness meditation in Japan.  Her desire was to make yoga accessible to as many people as possible, building community and trying to do good in the world.

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For the past two decades, Leza has encouraged students to open to life and to devote themselves to helping others. She has trained thousands of Restorative Yoga teachers and mentored hundreds of yoga teachers. She has taught Academy-Award winning actors and directors, Grammy winning musicians, knights, soldiers, ninja, newscasters, famous comedians, and thousands of ordinary people. She has shared yoga at Google Japan, Grand Hyatt Tokyo, Park Hyatt Tokyo, Ritz Carlton Tokyo, Rakuten, Merrill-Lynch, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Goldman Sachs, Imagination, Co., Ltd, Beacon Communications KK, Mindshare Ltd., Unilever Japan, Efficiency Capital Advisors KK, Deutschebank, Citibank, Nestle, Temple University Japan, American Embassy of Japan, German Embassy of Japan, Polaroid, KAIS, ASIJ, Canadian School of Tokyo, and more. Leza has offered popular retreats in Japan, the U.S., Bali, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand. 

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Leza’s passion is Tibetan Buddhism, which she has been studying for 35 years. She graduated from a seven-year intensive program in Vajrayana Buddhism in 2013. She is a certified Mindfulness Meditation Teacher through the Awareness Training Institute and the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley. Her main teachers were Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach.

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Her mindfulness practice has supported her writing, and she considers yoga and writing to be life-saving tonics that offer a path to self-discovery, love, joy, creativity and community. She has written for the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Yoga Journal, Yoga Journal Japan, Yogini, Yoga International, Elephant Journal, Shambhala Sun, wanderlust.com, Asana, the Manifest-Station, Origin, Mantra, Glomad, and the Japan Times. She has published 20 books, including the #1 best-selling: Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By, Sacred Sanskrit Words (w/ Reema Datta), Jet Black & the Ninja Wind, a yoga memoir In Search of the Sun, and Up from the Sea (a young adult novel about Japan’s 3-11-11 disaster). 

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Leza has taught writing at Tokyo University, Rikkyo University, and San Francisco State, and has presented at the Sharjah International Book Festival (UAE), the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, the Bali Spirit Festival, the Hong Kong Literary Festival, and the Japan Writers Conference.   Awards received from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, the California Arts Council, PEN, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, SCBWI, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission.

Leza is the proud mother of a teenage boy and two rescued wolf-dogs.