Eight months pregnant, Christy Turlington was doing yoga headstands. Nine months pregnant, walking meditation. Overdue two weeks, acupuncture to bring on the labour. And once in the delivery room, the only painkiller the yoga devotee indulged in was her own breath. “I did yoga breathing, which is very deep and rhythmic, the whole time,” she says of the 12 hours she spent in labour with her daughter Grace, now four months. “The pain would come in waves.
As long as I was breathing with the contractions and not pushing against them, I felt better. That idea is fundamental to yoga, to feel pain and not to resist; to go towards it. It is an incredibly spiritual practice.”
Not what you expect to hear from a supermodel who ruled the Eighties as part of a one-word quartet — ChristyCindyNaomiLinda (Turlington, Crawford, Campell, Evangelista). In those big money, big shoulder days of fashion, Turlington’s finely chiselled features and feline eyes were everywhere — advertising campaigns for Maybelline, Calvin Klein among them. One would think the hype and glamour that comes with strutting the catwalk and shooting magazine covers would fulfil any woman’s dream. Except Turlington, 35, says that amid the frenzy of paparazzi and marathon flights to exotic locations, she was looking for a guide to living, for peace of mind. She found it in yoga.
Understandably, she has taken some heat for being a model on a spiritual quest — one critic called her a dilettante in underwear — but sitting before me over breakfast she is earnest, articulate and breathtakingly beautiful. Tucking into a bowl of muesli with milk, she smiles knowingly as I watch her eat. “People always think that if you eat anything as a model it’s amazing. I used to tease them and say, you know I’m going to throw up afterwards, ” she says.
Turlington, who married the actor/director Edward Burns (Saving Private Ryan, The Brothers McMullen) last year, wanted to start a family immediately. “I was 34; we started late. Although, I hope there will be more.” She was treated by a GP who also practises Chinese medicine and acupuncture, ate organic foods and drank no alcohol. During pregnancy she practised yoga and Pilates, and two months post partum she was doing headstands. Her lithe 5ft 10in body, once her calling card — she stopped modelling at 26 to go to university, though she still appears in Calvin Klein perfume ads — is back to its pre-pregnancy weight after gaining 18kg (40lbs). A combination of breastfeeding, yoga, an organic diet and her fast metabolism did the trick.
“Even though I am back to my normal weight, my body feels different since having the baby. And when it comes to yoga, I feel like I am starting from scratch. My teacher is now correcting me on things I used to do so easily. Everybody kept saying, your body is going to change so much after the baby, and I said good, I welcome that. I never understand why people have children and then insist on living as though nothing has shifted. Yoga teaches that life is about change, you shouldn’ t resist it. If you flow with it, you get more from it.”
Clearly, Turlington didn’t learn to expound on the philosophy of resistance hanging around the runways of London and New York. Rather, it’s the result of 17 years of practising yoga, coupled with a recommitment to Catholicism nine years ago. “Spiritual practice initially gave me a way of centring myself. Then it taught me how to focus, to be fully present in life,” she says.
Turlington, the daughter of a Pan Am pilot and a flight attendant, was discovered in California by a photographer at 14. Her rise to the top was rapid, yet she harboured discomfort that her success was built on her genes, not her brains. And she says she felt catapulted into womanhood. “Some people like chaos and others structure. I like the latter. And because I was on my own so early, I had to create it for myself.” Not easy in the air-kissing, jet-set fashion world. But yoga, with its emphasis on quieting the mind and developing physical stamina spoke to the teen. “Yoga gave me the ability to calm down,” she says of why she adopted it so readily.
By the time she left the catwalk in the Nineties to get a BA in comparative religion at New York University, she was meditating daily and taking yoga classes three times a week. Once a disciple of ashtanga, an intensely vigorous form of yoga, today she practises Iyengar, a school of yoga that emphasises body alignment. Her faith played a lesser role. When she settled in New York, she began attending church every Sunday. “I loved the feeling it gave me of belonging to a community,” she says, “and the ritual, the music, it’s such a sensual experience.” She recommitted at 26. “So much of religion is exegesis,” she says. “I would rather follow in the footprints of Christ than all of the dogma.” She sees no conflict in this devotion to both the Church and yoga, insisting that the practices dovetail. “Yoga is not a religion to me, it’s a practice you can apply to any belief system. You can meditate and focus on the homily,” she says.
All this talk of yoga and faith could allow you to think that Turlington had abandoned the temporal life. Hardly. The former supermodel has morphed into super-entrepreneur, launching the skincare line Sundari (the company has since been sold) and Nuala, a line of yoga lifestyle clothing, in association with Puma. Recently she introduced Mahanuala, a capsule line for yoga practice. “I call it clothing for contemplative sports,” she says. She also created, with designer Marc Jacobs, a yoga bag that costs £250.
When you ask how she reconciles her spirituality with capitalism, it’s the only time the beautiful smile fades and she goes on the defensive. “There are certain things in life that are necessities and business can supply those needs,” she says, clearly frustrated. “Business can also be an incredible way to communicate. I looked at Nuala as, first there is a need for this and, then, when it gets to a place where it is successful, I have every intention to give back.
” (Nuala already contributes to Adopt-A-Minefield and CancerCare.) As for a “designer” yoga bag, which sounds like an oxymoron — isn’t spiritual practice about taking off labels, not putting them on? Turlington is at pains to point out that all sales went directly to charity.
Over time, yoga led Turlington to alternative medicine and now she takes only herbal remedies, such as echinacea, when nursing a cold, and her daughter Grace, who she intends to breastfeed for a year, is under the care of a homoeopathic paediatrician. “I believe natural is best. I haven’t taken antibiotics for years.”
