Supermodel Christy Turlington on the Secret Behind the Balance in Her Life
She’s one of the most famous cover girls of our time. Christy Turlington’s career has spanned over 35 years, and she shows no signs of slowing down. In this interview, Christy reveals her true love of yoga and how it’s helped her create balance throughout her life. She also opens up about her father’s illness and how she was able to cope with becoming a caretaker. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
At the end, a priest came around and he did, like, lost rites.
And my dad didn't have any of the sacraments, so he woke up.
One of the moments of clarity that he did have was kind of like, what?
And I think it was more about the Catholic priest than it was about the rites.
It was kind of like, what?
Who are you?
Oh, they were right.
Shoot!
And they were right.
I guessed wrong.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Yes.
We've got in this show a wonderful yoga teacher, Christy Turlington Burns.
Christy Turlington is known to many of you as a cover model, a woman who's been very active in the fashion industry, has a couple of own companies.
We'll talk about that.
But what a lot of us know her for now...
Is her yoga.
She's been on the cover of magazines doing yoga.
I noticed her a couple years ago on a Time magazine cover being pretty difficult to get into asana or pose.
And I began to think of how cool it was that women who were beautiful in another walk of life as a fashion model were finding beauty in the inner health that's given to you by yoga.
Yeah, she's still extraordinarily beautiful on the outside too.
We were on a panel together at this Donna Karan conference on alternative medicine.
And her father had lung cancer and she had been his caregiver.
So we're talking about caregiving and that role and how important it is in a society because it brings closure to illnesses.
But she spent a lot of time talking about yoga and how it helped her get through the process.
And in many ways, I gave her the tool for meditation.
I must say, personally, I find that very helpful.
Well, you use yoga all the time.
I think you do yoga every day, don't you?
I do.
I get up in the morning.
Everyone gets up in the morning, I guess, except my children, who get up in the early afternoon sometimes.
And I do yoga because it loosens me up.
It's five minutes just to myself where I can just get my head together around what I've got planned.
But I don't actually think about what I have planned.
I just think about what I'm doing.
I think about the sensation of my hip, my back, the stretching of my hamstrings, little bits of aches and pains that I may have incurred from battling Oliver the night before.
In some psychotic game.
And these all sort of come back to me, and then I sort of melt away into my body.
And then about five minutes later, I've done my little routine.
By the way, my routine is on Oprah.com.
We took pictures of it, and I shot a video of it now.
So how long would that take if the listeners wanted to do a little bit of morning yoga?
How long would it take?
Five or seven minutes is no longer.
It really isn't difficult.
And it's also not a program that's supposed to wear you out.
It's a program that can be challenging.
The thing about yoga that I love the most is you can go as deep as you want to go.
So it's the same routine.
You just do it a little more deeply if you want to work out a little bit more.
So for example, I may do extra push-ups then The listeners may do, or they may do more than I do, but that's not an important part of yoga.
The important part is sun salutation, for those of you who are yoga practitioners, which is just to do your routine every day, and in doing it, have a certain amount of meditative element to it, in addition to a little bit of a physical activity, just to get the blood rolling.
And that's one of the reasons that yoga has been so health-effective for me is because it gives me the ability to go as deeper as I want to go and allows me to meditate because I can't just sit back and meditate by myself.
My mind starts to race.
Like I think a lot of folks' minds would race.
So getting into a simple routine gives you the ability to meditate to what your body's doing and the warm-ups that exhaust you actually allow that blood to turn around and make you feel like you're doing something.
But what you're really doing is conning your mind to pay attention to you.
So we've got in the studio Christy Turlington.
Hello.
How are you?
And we started talking a little bit about...
Your father.
And at the Donna Karan conference, the panel that we shared together was primarily around caregiving and what medicine could do better in helping folks cope with illness.
And I was with a colleague this morning who was speaking about the fact that we have sort of a tripod of wellness.
We have treatment, we can diagnose, but then you have the, you know, what do I do tonight problem, which is the acute issues that often families are best able to help us with.
And particularly in the context of integrative medicine, how did you wake up to the realities of what medicine did right and did wrong through the illness of your father?
Well, I guess yoga is a practice that I sort of, it's a path that I started on as a teenager, actually.
I was lucky enough to, at 18 or 19 years old, be introduced to Kundalini Yoga.
And at the time, I wouldn't say I was totally yogic and healthy at the time.
I smoked cigarettes off and on as a teenager.
I was working a lot in the beginning of my career as a model, and I was traveling all over the world.
But I still held those initial kind of skills that I learned from Kundalini Yoga, meaning mantra repetition, some meditation skills that would help me when I was jet-lagged or when I was tired, and I kind of used them for myself.
And then when I could, when I wasn't traveling, I would take a class here and there of yoga.
Chrissy, who exposed you the first time to yoga?
A boyfriend that I was dating, somebody that I met that I then was with for a long time, but what impressed me or what was attractive to me about him was that he had this meditation practice.
And this is the only good thing about him is that he had a meditation practice.
Don't say his name.
I have to say he did.
I mean, I have to thank him for that, that he introduced me to this.
So he had this incredible every day in the morning, 45-minute meditation practice, asanas as well.
He ate vegetarian.
I mean, like really, really clean lifestyle.
And I was really drawn to it.
And I sort of went back and forth with it for a while until I could make it my own and ultimately did it.
Just to interrupt you again.
I'll do that a lot.
I apologize.
I've always wondered how this happens.
How does someone who's so spiritually aware, they can do their meditative exercise, they spend so much time with themselves, they get comfortable in their own skin, still not be able to carry on meaningful relationships?
Well, it was my first relationship.
So I think part of it was just not having had a relationship before that I might have gone down that path.
And because there were these obvious signs that were positive ones, that were healthy ones, I think I was attracted to those for the right reasons.
But then the other kind of, you know, games and manipulations that people do.
You know, I was young, and also he was a little bit older than me.
And so I think, you know, just young and naive, I would say.
Impressurable.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Impressionable.
I quit at 19 the first time.
So I knew at that point already, and it was only a few years that I'd been smoking, that I was addicted and I needed to stop.
So I tried every different kind of cessation, but the first one that I used was hypnosis, and it worked for two years.
And at a certain point I thought, oh, mine never mattered.
I could probably have a drink socially with a glass of wine.
Of course I couldn't, and I went back to smoking a lot every day.
So...
Again, I quit probably three years later, and I quit for good, and that time I did a quick cold turkey.
Dr. Woodson Merrill was my doctor from an early age, also from probably the age of 20. So I had him as my kind of health coach, I would say, on the side, who would give me acupuncture when I went to see him, would give me other tools to help, and then ultimately I quit.
So I quit before my father was diagnosed with lung cancer, which was a blessing.
And was your dad a smoker?
He was a smoker, a lifelong smoker from sort of the age of 12. And he also had a heart attack at the age of 50. And he had angioplasty.
And he was an airline pilot.
So when he had his angioplasty, it was new at the time.
And he wasn't able to fly anymore.
So that was the thing that he loved.
And I watched that.
I sort of saw, oh gosh, he's having to sacrifice the thing that he loves most in life because of this thing that he's doing to himself.
So we moved home to California from Florida.
And, you know, I sort of watched him sort of battle smoking off and on for a number of years until he had lung cancer later on.
More questions after the break.
You've got a long-term interest in health arenas and involved in two successful businesses I wanted to ask you about.
One is called Nuala and the other one Sundari.
And you had a couple other names of companies.
I must say, none of these are easy names.
And I'm just curious.
I know they all mean things.
Some of them are acronyms.
Some of them stand for wonderful Ayurvedic or terms of healing and wellness.
But they're a little bit of a challenge to pronounce.
Why do you pick those words?
Well, names are so difficult to get through the legal process.
Names that are internationally not derogatory in some way.
It's really, really hard.
In New Alla, I started in 1999, I guess, with Puma, the athletic company, as my partner.
And it's a line of...
You know, clothes that were around the lifestyle of yoga.
At first they were sort of more about the asanas, and then they sort of became more lifestyle.
So weekend wear, I mean traveling wear, you know, you could sort of wear it everywhere.
And then a lot of it's made with like bamboo and organic fabrics, but a lot of it's just really nice quality fabrics that aren't your typical athletic wear, you know, that are a little bit sort of, there's no branding, it's really kind of just nice clothes.
What gave you the idea?
Well, in yoga, actually.
I actually went back to school at 26, to NYU. And while I was in school, I really had a great yoga practice because I was living in New York all the time, and I would go between classes, and I was studying Eastern philosophy and religion.
And so my yoga practice took this whole new life because I had it sort of all around me.
So when I was about to graduate, I was thinking about, you know, what am I going to do?
Am I going to go back to working as a model full-time, which I wasn't interested in doing?
Or could I sort of take my career and my reputation and sort of build it to something else with my interests that were, you know, sort of around me all the time?
So yoga clothes seemed like the perfect thing because I thought, you know, nobody's making anything specifically for yoga at the time.
Everyone was wearing their boyfriend's shorts or sweatshirts, and it just didn't work for the practice.
So I approached Puma with this concept, and they were, you know, happy to give it a try, and so we developed it together.
Why Puma?
Why not Adidas or Nike?
Well, I went to Puma because they had a relationship with Jill Sander, who's a designer, and I thought they know, they understand the sensibility of fashion and working with more of a fashion brand than just athletics.
So I approached them, and I also approached Fila at the time.
But Puma got it.
They got it more easily, and they were willing to just like, let's go, let's try it out.
So we've sort of done 14 seasons, I guess, at this point, and it evolved a lot.
The name, though, we had a really hard time with names, and it's because Puma is a German company, so everything that I passed through legal...
They couldn't pronounce them.
So hard.
Well, actually, Nuala...
Nuala!
Nuala!
It's actually Nuala, but everyone calls it Nuala because of the way that it's spelled, and it's an Irish name, actually, and it's a nickname.
So I just threw it in like, oh, you know, it's the last thing to try.
And then I made an acronym out of it, which means natural, universal, altruistic, limitless, and authentic.
And it became sort of pillars that the brand was around.
Was it your nickname?
Yeah.
And it means there's no real reason for it other than I have a lot of Irish friends and they just sort of threw that name at me.
And so it became sort of an affectionate nickname.
So did you enjoy working in the fashion industry, making products more or being a model more?
Making products.
To be honest, my real love is doing things like art direction and set design.
And so doing our shoots and all of our marketing stuff around the brand, that was the most fun.
Because I was able to take an idea that I started and then completely kind of control it or manage it.
So aesthetically, I had such a great time.
It was a great expression.
It has been a great expression for me creatively.
And I learned so much being in the industry for 22 or 23 years now.
You know, from working with the best of the best of the fashion business.
So I was able to put all of that in.
You know, it was really fun to actually get to exercise some of the stuff that I'd learned.
Talk about modeling, especially as a young woman, I mean a girl, becoming a model today or even when you were doing it.
I suspect there's some health issues.
We had Andre Leon Talion recently.
We're talking a little bit about how thin models were.
And this is just around when the Brazilian rules changed and forced women to at least have a body mass index that was compatible with bipedal ambulation.
I must say, it seems that thinner and thinner is the way everyone goes.
I'll speak for the average guy, because I'm sort of an average guy, I think.
But most men don't want women that are that thin.
They actually want a little bit of body mass.
It certainly sends signals that there's fertility involved, which is something that, whether we admit it consciously or not, it is definitely...
The two things that men look for are healthy women...
And good skin.
Because skin means that a woman is healthy.
And that's not because they want to look for it.
That's just instinctively across all cultures when we do surveys, seeing what does an Asian man, a black man, a white man desire.
It's the same kind of sensibility, which is a healthy person who can produce offspring.
And without seeing sexist, that's not an unreasonable thing to desire.
But that's not often what the models seek to portray.
It's certainly with regard to their present body fat.
Well, you know, again, I'm sort of removed now from the real industry, but there's always been the conversation about are models too thin?
I mean, I would say initially that coming into the business, I was 15 or 16. So at 15 or 16, you are thin.
And most of the women that I knew or the young women that I knew at that time were thin as well.
There was nobody, no peer of mine.
I'm sure there were others in the industry, but in terms of the people, like the supermodels and the people that were the most successful and they were around, those were not people that were unhealthy.
And some of them exercised, some of them didn't, but a lot of the time it was just genetics.
This is no way defending anything because I do think there is certainly, I mean, I would find from season to season, depending on what the trend was, that clothes would get smaller, you know, or a new designer would come into power at a design house and all of a sudden things were really tiny.
And around the more successful models, people would make accommodations.
They would change the clothes.
They would make them bigger.
They would make it work for you and they wouldn't be rude to you about it.
But there were times, you know, I found myself fluctuating, especially if I was smoking or not smoking.
Yeah.
And so I would sometimes feel that pressure.
I wouldn't know necessarily what my weight was until I went in, you know, to do the couture shows in the summer, and then I thought, oh, that thing that fit me last year, it doesn't work anymore.
So I removed myself from it because of that.
I really was like, you know, 25 years old.
I'd quit smoking.
I thought I wanted to go back to school for a long time, so I'm going to remove myself.
I don't want to have to change my body and who I am because I made this healthy choice to not smoke.
I don't want to be subjected to this.
But there were editors, magazine editors of big magazines that weren't okay with that.
But I was confident at that point to do what I wanted to do.
Now that there's this whole issue, I mean, I don't see models flesh to flesh.
I just don't see them anymore.
But I can tell in magazines that people are getting thinner, and I obviously have read all of the horrible stories about anorexia.
And I think that it goes beyond the industry.
I would say from anyone that I know who does have any eating disorders, there are disorders that have started at a really early age.
They start more emotionally within their family structure, that dynamic.
Of course, the industry isn't great because it then promotes that thinness, so it doesn't help you to take care of yourself any better.
But I think that whatever those issues are, they have to be starting earlier than even 16 and 17, I would think.
So when you were 20 years old, What would you eat during the modeling season?
Well, I would eat whatever.
I mean, I've always ate fairly healthy, but I would eat, you know, if I would go out a lot at that time.
So if I ate and I was out late, I would eat like a teenager.
You know, I would come home and I would eat a hamburger.
Or I would eat, you know, I ate a lot, a lot of times a lot.
Would you diet?
I mean, were you hungry?
No, I never dieted, but I did go every now and again to a spa or a healthy kind of place like, you know, Canyon Ranch on my time off.
I would do something like that that was more of like a, you know, lifestyle, kind of try to get yourself back into a, not unlike what I do now.
I'm not excessive in anything that I eat now, but I would say that every now and again, if I feel, I just feel energetically not my best, then I might do a cleanse for a couple of days, like a nutritional juice cleanse and lots of green juices and a healthy cleanse.
Are you vegetarian?
No, I'm not.
I have tried vegetarianism, and I would like to be, but I'm not.
It's not my— You don't feel well on it?
Particularly pregnant, yeah.
Yeah, a pregnant heart.
I'd say I tried it before I was pregnant, and then pregnant, I felt more like I needed red meat than I ever have, and it's kind of stayed through my two children.
Lisa, you've been vegetarian for a long time.
Almost 30 years, but we don't have to talk about that.
So don't you ever feel like you crave meat once in a while?
I have lots of extra insulation.
I have some reserves to draw from that she doesn't have.
What about your kids, though?
Being a vegetarian, did you want them to be vegetarians, or did you think that it's better to have them make that choice themselves?
I let them make that choice.
I don't serve them meat at home, but yeah, it's their choice.
It's not something that...
I'm not going to yell at them if they have a hot dog at their friend's house.
They actually peer pressure themselves.
Some of them do.
So Zoe, the third one, she's a flint heart of the family.
She'll take out Oliver because he had meat.
And she'll chastise him for it.
And he's become a militant vegetarian, I think, Oliver.
He gets mad if you eat meat.
He does get a little...
Cigarettes.
You've mentioned it several times, and obviously having watched your father die from cigarette-related disease, but obviously after you finish your modeling, did you ever smoke to stay thin?
Was I conscious?
No.
Not at all.
I started smoking before I was modeling.
My dad smoked, so I'm sure on some level I was emulating him.
But a lot of my friends did, too.
And then I'm the only one of my girlfriends at school that became a model.
So, I don't know.
I think it's one of those things that, unfortunately, young women are smoking a lot.
And my sisters also, they smoked at a young age.
We all smoked at different times and at different degrees.
But I was the only one that I would say was sort of...
Because again, it was promoted.
I went to work and I was working with people who...
There was no parent around necessarily after a certain point.
Nobody that I worked with was there to be my parent.
So no one was going to say, oh, you really shouldn't do that.
Everybody else was smoking at the time.
And this is, again, a long time ago.
When you first...
Maybe I should have asked that question.
Your first introduction to modeling is a potential career.
How did that happen?
I used to ride horses competitively.
My sister and I did.
And a photographer saw us riding our horses one day training and asked my mom if he could take our picture.
And my sister was two years older and she was kind of intrigued by the idea and they kind of dragged me along.
And I had braces.
I was really, you know, I was 5'8", 12 years, or 13 years old.
I was not so graceful.
Yeah.
But somehow, I guess because of my height maybe, somehow I was the one that was kind of encouraged to keep going and my sister wasn't.
So I would never have expected that it would go more than a couple of years and it supported my horseback riding hobby at the time.
Do you still ride?
I don't anymore.
I have a horse.
I got a horse when I was pregnant the last time thinking, okay, if I get a horse, I'll start the whole thing again because I really love the lifestyle.
But I haven't yet.
I haven't really gone back in.
But I hope to.
I want my girls to or my kids to.
So we've had a lot of pro-athletes on the show.
I think Christian is the first model we've had.
Is that true?
I think so.
Yeah.
If I had a model, I didn't know they were a model.
So pro-athletes, I always quiz them about their knowledge of their body because in order to perform at the levels they've had to perform at, they've had to understand how subtle things influence how their body behaves.
It's one of the reasons I think we can learn so much from people who use their body for their living.
And so let me ask you as a model, were there insights you gained in how your body functioned through modeling that you can share with America?
I would say, I don't know, I think probably more as a yogi because I was doing it simultaneously.
I would have obviously learned a lot more about that.
But in terms of testing your body and travel and different time zones and, you know, working right off of the plane and that sort of knowing that hydration was like the most important thing I could do for myself all the time, but especially when traveling, especially, you know, I don't really suffer from jet lag and I think it's because of that.
You know, going sometimes, you know, just, I mean, I learned kind of how to take more rest, you know, to take trips, you know, when I took long trips from far to far away, I would come back and I would just block myself out, go someplace where I could, you know, totally rejuvenate myself.
So I guess in terms of pushing myself and then feeling the aftermath of that, I kind of learned that.
But nothing else.
And how about through yoga?
That's a fair amount of insight.
As someone who began to practice yoga, you probably gained additional insights.
Yeah, I mean, I know that yoga is really the main thing that I use through my labors.
I birth both my children naturally in a birthing center.
Did you have any morning sickness, by the way?
I did with my son.
I didn't have it with my daughter.
I did mint tea and things like that.
I didn't really have any other really useful tricks.
That's okay.
We had a guest on recently who spoke about the fact that in most agrarian societies, women don't have morning sickness.
It's only about 20% incidence.
And in the West, it's closer to 80%.
And they attributed it to some of our dietary differences.
This, by the way, this gentleman is a nationally recognized expert in obstetrics.
So it was a fairly reputable source.
Interesting.
I know, I mean, I was really tired the first time, but I know that to keep active was the best way.
A lot of times, you know, you feel so tired that you don't want to move around, and I think that's the worst thing to do in that stage in those first months, I think, to keep active and keep walking and doing whatever if you could.
So yoga, I did yoga through both pregnancies, both labors, and I would say in terms of pain management, my breathing, my sort of inhaling and exhaling at a very measured rate was the best thing I could do to kind of manage.
Pain and sort of that, you know, dealing with tolerance on that level, which I never had any experience with.
Yeah, no, I do think yoga works for that.
And it certainly soothes the senses, especially when you've got a lot of anxiety going on.
There's a lot more to come after the break.
We were on a panel together at Donna Karan's conference recently in New York City, and we spoke a little bit about caregiving.
And I didn't finish this with your follow-up, so I wanted to come back to this a little bit.
For your dad, you ended up becoming the caregiver as he was suffering through cancer.
You told us today through angioplasty, earlier than that.
What did you learn about the health care system and the role we have to play in it from the supportive position you had to play in helping your dad?
Well, had I not intervened with my dad and got him to Mayo Clinic and then found the group of doctors in San Francisco for him, he would have been just kind of led by the system.
He had an HMO, so he would have had to get whatever treatment there was available in their rural part of Northern California.
Not that it would have changed the outcome per se, but he wouldn't have had the level of care that I was able to put together for him.
I would say that that's the big thing, like the fact that he himself would not have been able to navigate that himself.
He would have taken what he was allowed to do and he would have gone that route.
How'd you learn it?
You know, again, I guess from having a doctor that was...
Well, I don't know.
Part of it, I guess, is access.
You know, living in New York City, having a group of friends that had great doctors.
Somebody passed on Woody Merrill to me when I was young.
I asked Woody then, when my dad was sick, you know, oh, you know, what other...
What kind of alternative treatments would you advise?
You know, what about...
I was reading a lot on my own.
What kind...
You know, would you advise shark's cartilage?
Would you advise green tea?
You know, like, what are the things that I should try?
And he gave me all kinds...
Here, there's this, this, and this.
And my dad was open.
He was the kind of patient that sort of let go of his control, and I took on to it.
So I gave him everything.
And then I was going to school full-time, but I had days off, so I would commute to hold his hand for chemotherapy in San Francisco.
So I commuted from New York to San Francisco for six months' time.
They'll take the wind out of your sails for sure.
Well, both of my sisters had small children at the time, so I felt like, you know, I wasn't married, I didn't have children, it was my, and, you know, I needed to help him in that way.
And it just became the way that our relationship was going to go.
I wanted to prove to him the way that I felt about him, and that became a really hands-on kind of care.
In fact, the last day of the Zen Urban Zen panel, the women's group, and I was talking about how just holding his feet for me, it made me feel really good because I was able to give him this kind of care.
And I don't know any Reiki or anything like that per se, but I felt like I was able to give him a certain kind of calm through massaging his feet, holding his feet.
So I don't know.
It was an amazing experience, actually.
I would say that it was really a big teacher in that I was able to see how much I cared about him, show him, and then be there for him no matter what he needed.
And at the end, because we sort of thought things were getting better, and then suddenly we're in the hospital again, in the end...
I felt like that was the one thing I could contribute, that sense of control, of leadership amongst my family who weren't willing to, you know, it was too scary for everybody else.
So one of us had to step up, and I took that role.
You know, suffering has been defined by one of our past guests, Richard Rohr, as a Catholic theologian, and I'm going to ask you about your Catholic upbringing.
In a second, as when we lose control, when we have to come to grips with the fact that not everything that happens is something that we can ordain.
And for many of us, that comes in the context of pain, illness, and of course death.
So was the end for you, for your father, a tragic time for you?
Was it a time of closure?
Were we able to let go?
How did that happen?
Well, I felt very present throughout it.
Because of my yoga practice, because of going to school where I was doing a lot of writing about the experience, I felt incredibly clear throughout it.
I had some...
It didn't feel like failure when he died for me, but it definitely...
I read the Tibetan book of the living and dying afterwards, and I thought, oh no, he shouldn't have been in a hospital.
There was all these things.
I had panic.
He could still maybe hear me longer than I realized.
There were certain things that I just didn't know.
I didn't know until I went through it, or hospice care even for that matter.
I read an article in the New York Times when I came back from his death.
I thought...
Wow, if I knew more about hospice care, maybe he could have been more comfortable at home for longer.
You know, there were those kinds of options that, again, you know, you don't know until you go through it how else you could do it, you know?
But I think...
I mean, I did the best that I could, given, and I felt okay about it.
I mean, I felt my father was a bit over-medicated at the end, so he was in a coma, and I was a little bit sad about that.
It happened so quickly when he got into the hospital, and because he was in a lot of pain at that point, that they did that.
But I felt like he wasn't very clear at the end, and that was something that wasn't the best.
You know, I would have liked him to not be in pain, but to be a little bit more alert.
You know, or just clear about what was going on.
I felt like there was a lot of fear on his side.
Were you with him when he died?
Yeah.
My whole family was.
We were all around his bed.
But we were in a Catholic hospital, and this is kind of a funny but not so funny story.
He wasn't Catholic.
My mother was Catholic.
And the Catholic hospital wasn't really a choice.
It kind of, you know, for whatever reason, the ambulance picked us up, and that's the hospital that they brought him.
Maybe for insurance.
I'm not sure.
Maybe it was his doctor, actually.
And...
At the end, a priest came around and he did, like, lost rites, and my dad didn't have any of the sacraments, so he woke up.
One of the moments of clarity that he did have was kind of like, what?
And I think it was more about the Catholic priest than it was about the rites.
It was kind of like, what?
Who are you?
Oh, they were right.
Shoot!
And they were right.
I guessed wrong.
And they were right.
But it was also surprising to me how long it takes, like, once we made the decisions.
And we have...
My dad had five children.
I have two sisters, but he had two children from another marriage.
You know, to have six people involved in making the choices of to resuscitate, to not resuscitate, that was a bit tricky.
Just, you know, everybody had different ideas of what he might want, and he wasn't clear about what he wanted.
So...
Once again, for myself, I learned a lot.
I have everything very clear.
I have my affairs in really tight order because the idea of giving that to a family member who's already so emotionally distraught, to have to then make choices like that about your life and your well-being after the fact is a lot.
It's a big burden.
Do you have a do not resuscitate order?
I think I have...
Oh, gosh.
I don't know if I have that, actually.
I ask, because it's sort of hard to say when you're young and healthy what's going to make you want to not stop living.
That actually definition changes.
I find with patients that a lot of folks who are 85 years old We'll say, you know what?
Don't save me.
Not because I want to die, but because I've lived my life.
You know, all my friends are gone.
The things I wanted to do, I've done.
I'm finished.
You know, it's okay.
And so my threshold for suffering pain to come back and live is very different than if I'm 40 years old and I've got young kids and I'm just in the middle of things.
It's not my time yet.
Keep me going.
So I've always felt that a healthcare proxy, although it's difficult for the loved one, you can pick someone who's a little bit cutthroat.
And I hate to say that very honestly.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I know.
I mean, I feel like, I don't know, there's all these levels.
You know, brain dead maybe is something different, but I still feel like you don't know until you are in that position.
There might have been a time, like, we all thought, you know, he would not want to be hooked up to some kind of machine.
He would not.
I mean, already the quality of life was greatly compromised because of the chemo, and he had other health things that went on during the chemo.
But the idea of, like, there was just no way.
I knew that.
And he wasn't Catholic, so I knew he didn't have that set of concerns.
It is tricky to know.
I've heard other people's accounts of almost near-death experience where they say they didn't think that.
They changed their mind and they could hear people talking about that and even knowing that they'd said that, but not feeling that way anymore.
And how do you know?
How do you really know?
You don't always know.
You mentioned that the Tibetan Book of the Dead would indicate he shouldn't have gone to the hospital.
Where should you die?
Damn.
Well, they were just saying how institutions, and it's really kind of what Urban Zen was really about, the fact that institutions are so harsh and so cold and so dirty.
Dirty not in the sense of, like, visible dirt, but germs.
And so people get sicker in the hospital, and that was the case for my dad.
So I guess it's the idea of dying in an institution.
And it actually was a beautiful room, and there was beautiful views of San Francisco, but...
Ultimately, I think it would have been nicer for him to have just remained home and just to have had hospice care come to him to try to do some pain management through that way as opposed to totally putting him under to the point that we couldn't really recover.
So part of this initiative that you were spearheading with Donna Karan, the Urban Zen meetings, which were two weeks long, it was really a pretty spiritual process.
I mean, most of these meetings are a day or two or three, you know, two weeks in a row.
There's a lot of talking and a lot of listening at a spectacular location, by the way.
Did it manifest what you thought it would?
Well, I think we're still working on what the real outcome is.
We had people participate.
We basically had the community, you know, as many doctors and nurse practitioners and then, you know, healers, intuitives, body therapists, all invited.
And then out of that came these dialogues within these different groups.
And I think there's a lot of networking that went on, a lot of just sharing experiences.
There were physicians that maybe had never had acupuncture, talking to acupuncturists and so on and so forth.
So what we wanted was to create a dialogue, and then we wanted to get a sense of what the community would support.
Where could we help?
Donna's had a similar experience with my dad.
Her husband died from lung cancer.
Although her husband had this very long, drawn-out illness.
How can we...
What things can be changed?
Can hospitals be changed?
Can the experience for a patient who comes in who's not well, how can that get better?
And I feel like on a very basic level, the physical environment can change.
Maybe if the hospital didn't look like a hospital, I wouldn't feel so bad about...
Having my father die in a hospital or, you know, when I chose to have my kids in a birthing center, it was a big part of it was because I didn't want to have a baby in a hospital room.
So if that changed, if that looked a little bit better, if you felt a little bit safer and cozier in that environment, maybe they wouldn't be so bad.
And I think that Donna is going to be able to make some of those changes in hospitals, at least in New York City.
And hopefully that will sort of, you know, encourage other hospitals to make those changes as well.
Yeah, I think that would be the high mark.
I must say, one of the biggest challenges I feel exists is that we actually know a lot of the answers.
It's hard to get them done.
You've got financial pressures that hold institutions back from making commitments to integrative medicine.
There are wonderful leaders like Woody Merrill, who you've mentioned.
I was a great friend and a wonderful physician who has huge insights into how to provide better health care, tends to actually work better off in an office setting than in a hospital setting, in part because in an office you don't have to have square footage competing with cath labs, which are just much bigger revenue generators for hospitals, but they may not generate the best outcome for you or us as a people.
And that's always one of the challenges.
That we face when we try to revise medicine and try to take it in a more integrative approach.
Let me end with one last question to you about your Catholic upbringing and yoga.
I mean, how do you see them jiving?
Because there are a lot of folks out there listening who say, you know, I've had some people, honestly, tell me that yoga was the work of the devil.
So it goes to the other extremes as well.
So I want to ask you that question.
But yoga tradition...
I think is compatible with the spirituality of Catholicism, Christianity, Judaism, and the like.
How do you make that piece happen?
Well, I wrote a book actually called Living Yoga, Creating a Life Practice, and it kind of answers a lot of the things, you know, about the practical sense of yoga and how you can incorporate it in your life and how it doesn't compete with those other ideas.
I find, you know, actually it predates religion.
It's so old yoga that it actually doesn't fall under one particular religion.
And what happened is the earlier Eastern religions, obviously, they learned it faster because they were closer to its origins.
And they were able to use it and understand the value of it.
Again, in India, you go and not everybody practice yoga or they practice a part of yoga, but it's not the physical part.
They practice service, community service.
That's a big part of my yoga practice is community service.
So that's one of the main tenets of yoga.
The physical postures are great for a lot of different reasons in terms of circulation, in terms of oxygenating the blood.
All of those simple things that we talk about doing and how important exercise is in terms of preventative health and wellness.
But what it does is it brings you closer to who you are, closer to your belief system, whatever that might be.
So if you are Hindu, it's going to bring you closer to that.
If you're Catholic, it's going to bring you closer to that.
It just provides clarity and an understanding of what it is that you want as opposed to information coming from outside of yourself.
And so that's where I feel like, you know, my Catholicism is a part of my life, but it was always, you know, one parent was, one parent wasn't, and it was always something that I had to kind of, like...
What works for me?
What doesn't work for me?
And the yoga's actually brought me to the part that I really like and the part that resonates me are the positive sides of religion, the part that we all share, as opposed to those things that create separation.
Is there one short routine you can share with everybody that you do that particularly gets you to that location?
I guess, you know, just being in the seated posture, a half lotus or, you know, baddha konasana, which is sitting on your seat but with the soles of your feet touching together and your knees open.
Butterfly pose.
Yeah, butterfly pose.
To sit in that position with a very straight back and just to breathe, you know, eyes closed or not, but to breathe and to really just follow your inhalations and your exhalations.
Right.
And have a pause.
You know, a sort of inhalation, exhalation, pause.
Inhalation, exhalation, pause.
And I, like you, in meditation, I think of a million things.
But to me, that's also yoga.
It's a way of, like, participating in your thought process as opposed to the thoughts kind of taking over you.
It's a way of like, okay, you know, yeah, I do have to look at those things.
I have to do this and that and that today.
But it kind of, you look at them and they kind of move on.
