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. 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.
Career
Boccio founded the Empty Mountain Sangha and the peer-led Tucson Mindfulness Practice Community. He teaches, lectures, and gives workshops and retreats in the Americas and Asia on mindful yoga, integrating modern yoga and Buddhist vipassana mindfulness. He has written articles for magazines including Tricycle, Yoga Journal, Shambhala Sun, Spring Wind, Namaskar, Elephant Journal, and Experience Life. 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 with the practice of yoga asanas, and chapters in various anthologies on the connection of yoga and Buddhism.
Reception
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 monkThichNhat Hanh. It found the four sequences of asanas in the book somewhat hard to follow, making the book more suitable for established practitioners. 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'."
