On the Path of Yoga An Interview with Maggie Norton Abstract: In an interview, Ms. Norton describes the evolution of her practice of yoga as a spiritual as well as a physical discipline. She describes the practice of awareness of the breath, as taught in yoga traditions, as an awareness of “the river of life, in which we are all held or carried within the same stream of aliveness, of consciousness.” This interview appeared in Religion East & West, Issue 7, October 2007. Religion East & West: Did you go to church when you were a child? Maggie Norton: I did. I was raised in Scotland by parents who were quite strongly Christian. We went to the Episcopalian Church, which in Scotland was the closest to the Church of England. I was baptized, christened in the church, went to Sunday school and church classes, and continued in that tradition into my teens. REW: Did you have a strong belief, or were you just going along with what other people were doing? MN: I’ve always had a strong sense of spirit, a sense of there being a connection between us all, a connection that is something other than what I can see. I think that I’m still influenced by my Christian upbringing, although my upbringing doesn’t necessarily fit with how I experience the world now. I don’t really believe that there is a supreme being. The notion of God no longer fits for me, although it was certainly very strong when I was a child. REW: What led you to abandon that notion? MN: Perhaps the strongest influence was the Presbyterian school I went to until I was fourteen. There was no local Church of England school, so my parents sent me to the Presbyterian school. They didn’t see that as a problem as long as the school had a Christian core. The Scottish Presby
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terian Church is very strong and very punishing in many of its beliefs, or at least it seemed so to me at that time. There was very much a sense that if in any way you turned your back on God, you were never going to be forgiven. There was not a lot of forgiveness. I was probably in my teens when I started to be not so sure that I belonged in that context. I was just less and less interested in going to church. I was definitely a little rebellious and wanting things to be less narrow. I didn’t want things to be imposed on me by school and church. REW: So that Christian experience oriented you to the concept of spirit, but the way it was presented didn’t persuade you? MN: That’s a great way of putting it. It was probably my grandmother, my father’s mother, who oriented me to the concept of spirit. She was actually raised as a nonreligious German Jew. She then had a vision when she was a young person and became a very dedicated Christian. Her children were brought up as Christians, and because of her connections with a Judeo-Christian organization, the family was able to leave Germany, just in time. She was very committed to her church but was also incredibly generous in her ability to accept a broad range of beliefs and a broad range of people, perhaps partly because of what happened to her in Nazi Germany. She was absolutely determined not to have narrow views. I absorbed her sense of the possibility of having a strong religious and spiritual core to one’s life without being as narrow as the church appeared to me to be in Scotland. Just to give you an example, she must have been in her early eighties when there was a controversy about yoga in her church, which was Church of England, and she reported to me that she actually stood up in her local congregational meeting and defended yoga—she didn’t practice it, but she knew that I did. She was just appalled that people in her church were condemning yoga and saying that it was of the devil. She thought that was ridiculous. With her very strong Christian beliefs, she wasn’t interested in being part of any other spiritual tradition, but she defended other people’s right to worship or practice in their own way. REW: How did yoga come to replace Christianity for you? MN: I’m not sure that it did. At least, I didn’t see it that way at the time. I became involved in yoga in two different ways—on a spiritual level and on a physical level—although I didn’t understand the spiritual level initially. From a pretty young age there was a sense that yoga spoke to
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something much deeper than just my body. When I was seventeen and eighteen years old, there was a TV program in which a gentleman, who I think was an American, taught yoga. My religious education teacher at school had also taken an interest in opening up a fairly narrow school curriculum to teach us the other spiritual traditions around the world. I still find it remarkable that he was interested in that and was allowed to teach it. He taught some very simple yoga postures and a lot of deep breathing, and he described it as a spiritual tradition from India. When I went to university in the city of York, I attended yoga classes for a while, but then stopped practicing regularly, although during my last year in university I had what we would call here a roommate, and she studied yoga. She was very disciplined: she would get up at seven o’clock every morning and practice her yoga before going to college classes, and she would sit up on the floor very erect while she ate her meals. This had an influence on me. She now also teaches yoga and is still a good friend. When I moved to London when I was twenty-three, I started going to a regular class in the Iyengar School of yoga. B. K. S. Iyengar is an Indian master who has been one of the main yogis to bring traditional hatha yoga to the West. He’s written many books, including the classic text called Light on Yoga. He’s in his late eighties now and lives in Pune, India, and he has traveled to the West many times. In London I started studying his tradition, Iyengar Yoga, at adult classes given by the London Education Authority, and I’ve never looked back. I started teaching yoga in 1983. I have been lucky enough to go to India twice to study at the Iyengar Institute, which just oozes spirituality to me, the whole atmosphere. But I would say that in my experience, the majority of teachers I’ve been taught by in the West do not express the tradition in a spiritual manner. They describe it and teach it in a way that is much more about the physical body. My main teacher in England managed to hold on to being a pretty strong Catholic while being a yoga teacher, and I really admire her for that, but still, it seemed that she perhaps denied the spiritual aspect of yoga in order for her to be able to do it. REW: In what way is yoga spiritual? MN: Yoga is a way of practicing with the body that acknowledges the body as the temple of the spirit. The word yoga is often translated as “yoke” or “union,” which is the bringing together of body and spirit. The breath is seen as the spirit, so the practice is really connected with an essence within the physical being—an essence that is not personal, is not restricted just to this body or that body, but is something that connects Issue 10, October 2010
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us all. In a yoga practice done with that perspective, one comes to be in touch with something that is both deeper and broader than one’s individual being. REW: Can you say what it is that you’re in touch with? MN: I don’t know if I can describe it. It’s so difficult to put these things into words. REW: Does it have a name? MN: For me, at this point in my life, I don’t think it does. What I’m talking about is not a notion of God or a supreme being, although it may have been that for me at one time. But I do have a sense of our manifestation being a manifestation that is the same in all life. Without denying the uniqueness of you or me or any other living being, there is some way in which we are all held or carried within the same stream of aliveness, of consciousness. REW: Do you find that the breath that yoga cultivates is connected with this idea, or this experience? MN: “Yes” would be the simple answer to that. I would say that in yoga the breath is what connects me. It’s like an anchor. It allows yoga to be a much more meditative experience, so that it becomes a sort of meditation in motion. Without an awareness of the breath, this is much less likely to happen. So the breath is a representative of that flow of life, and it allows one to drop below the level of the more conscious mental and emotional activity of being human. The breath is the river of life, and yoga allows one to connect to an awareness that both observes and is a part of that river of life. REW: On a more specific level, would you give an idea of how much time you spend doing yoga? MN: I spend some time doing yoga pretty much every day. I do have days where I lapse or where other aspects of my life are more pressing. But I would also say that on the broadest level, I consider everything I do to be a form of spiritual practice. Not that I can pretend that I am always present and always aware, but I like to think that my spiritual practice allows me to live my life more consciously, more fully, more from the
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heart, rather than my practice being something separate from the rest of my life. I try to integrate it into the way I act in the world. It might just be in very small ways, but at least in my aspiration, I want everything—how I interact with somebody, a conversation I have waiting in line at the store—to be an extension of my practice of both yoga and meditation. So the way I live my life is very much influenced by my yoga postures and by the way I breathe. I keep returning to the idea that my body, through my yoga practice, is a place where I can come back to my deeper sense of life’s purpose and connectedness—just by coming back to a simple awareness of the breath or taking notice of my posture, my feet on the ground, or a sense of uplift in my spine. But I try to teach in a way that doesn’t assume that everyone coming into a yoga class is necessarily interested in a Buddhist or a Hindu perspective. If they’re interested in that, they can follow up on it, but they can also have any spiritual belief, or none. I teach the postures of hatha yoga as a form of stress reduction and of connection to self and others. At this time on this planet, and in this culture, that’s very valuable. I am also influenced by my studies with Jon Kabat-Zinn, who introduces mindfulness as a powerful tool for caring for one’s own well-being. It can also be a doorway that leads people to a spiritual practice they might not have come to had it been billed as such. REW: What I have observed about your manner of teaching is that your spiritual practice presents itself in a sense of calm, and also in a sense of centeredness, which can be heard in your voice. I wonder if people are attracted to your classes as much to be in the presence of that as for the actual postures. MN: Well, there’s the old cliché that one teaches what one needs to learn. That’s certainly true of me. I’m incredibly grateful not only for my practice but to have the privilege of teaching, because teaching calms me and centers me and brings me back to the core of the yoga practice. My practice allows me to teach in that way, and teaching deepens my practice. Having the privilege of being able to communicate it to other people helps me to find a way to communicate it to myself. I’m able to experience it more deeply. REW: Let’s go back to a branch a little farther down the tree. How was it that you became interested in meditation? MN: When I was in my early twenties living in London, I encountered an Issue 10, October 2010
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organization called the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, which offered meditation classes. This was in 1979, when that was still something unusual. I was already aware that there was a spiritual element to yoga, even though I didn’t understand what it was, other than that it was quite different from the spirituality I was raised with. So meditation did not seem too strange to me. Also, my personality is quite an anxious one, although I couldn’t have acknowledged that when I was in my twenties. Perhaps I was drawn to meditation for that reason also. I found it quite calming. I went to a few retreats and classes, learned some basic techniques, and had a very erratic home practice. I read a little bit of the literature, although I’m not at all well read in the Buddhist texts. After those few years in London, I moved to a part of the country where there was nothing like the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. I was more involved in those years in politics and feminism, although I retained my yoga practice, trained to teach, and became a yoga teacher. My main job for many years was teaching social and political education in colleges. I didn’t come back to a regular, formal meditation practice until I moved to California and started learning about the mindfulness and insight tradition of Buddhist meditation. I’ve stayed with that for these last fifteen years. REW: Do you practice meditation every day? MN: Yes. It could be for ten minutes or it could be for forty-five minutes to an hour. And then I go on a silent retreat once a year for a week or ten days, although I’d like it to be longer. REW: You said earlier that you didn’t believe in a supreme being. So would you say that you practice spirituality without practicing religion? MN: Yes, although so much depends on how one defines those terms. My thinking is still evolving, and even now at the age of fifty, I’d say that I’m still reacting to two things. I’m reacting to some of the narrower sides of the religious upbringing that I had, and also to the unfortunate connotations of religion in this current time on the planet and in this part of the world. I don’t really find myself feeling at home in a very particular belief system and a particular way of practicing that one must adhere to. So whilst really valuing a sense of spiritual discipline, I don’t easily take to what I so far have discovered in any specific religious school. I’m drawn to the Buddhist cosmologies, but I can’t say they’re something I believe in. I went through a phase in my life when I was drawn to
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spiritual practices with the feminist perspective, actually quite drawn to a more pagan-based practice. I would meet with friends at the solstices and equinoxes, and we would do some pretty simple rituals, including some meditation. It’s a way that someone may be more in connection with nature. What you said about practicing spirituality without practicing a religion—I think that’s not quite true. A lot of people I know would say they are spiritual and religious because of their sense of community. They have a particular set of beliefs as well as a very particular set of people with whom they can share that aspect of their life. This is a very human need. In Buddhism it’s called the “sangha.” I also have this sense. I choose to go back to the retreats led by the same insight meditation teachers (Christina Feldman, in particular) not only because I find the silence and the teachings inspiring, but also because some of the same people attend this particular retreat each year, and so there is a sense of community there. I like our monthly meditation meetings at the yoga studio with the monks from Abhayagiri Monastery for some of the same reasons. I can’t think of a supreme being without it being my rather narrow view of what it might be. For me it’s more a sense of aliveness and connection. Thich Nhat Hanh uses the term interbeing. We are all connected. There is only an infinitesimal difference between your DNA and my DNA, and human DNA and the DNA of slime mold is fifty percent the same. This is not just a connection between you and me and other human beings, or even animals. Very occasionally, for some tiny fraction of a second, often coming very directly out of my meditation practice, there’s what I would say is almost a visual experience of that, of a sense that there is no difference. I’m looking at you now; you are very distinct from each object in the room, but on another level, I have a sense that that’s not true. Very occasionally, I’ve had that experience on a cellular level, viscerally. I believe some people are able to experience this without any training or practice, but for me, the practice is what has allowed me to understand it. Perhaps there was already a little bit of that in me which drew me to the practice. REW: What is it about meditation that opens you to this experience? MN: I don’t know if I can answer that question, but I’ll try. My main meditation practice is very simple—not easy, but simple. It’s a mindfulness practice. It starts out with a kind of concentration, using the breath as an anchor on which to rest my attention. Usually I’m in a seated posture. There is a kind of dignity in the posture. Whilst one is paying attention Issue 10, October 2010
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to the breath, one calms the body and the mind and comes to a sense of spaciousness and ease. Then with that foundation, expanding, one seeks to maintain a sense of centeredness. Mindfulness can be described as a moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental attention. Of course, to step outside the judgmental mind is almost impossible most of the time, at least for me. But going back to just sitting on the cushion, what I do is to expand my field of awareness to include the arising of different events within my experience—be they physical sensations, mental activity, feelings coming up, sounds around me—without being totally drawn into them or being distracted into the story of them. It’s that part of the practice that can spill over into my awareness during the rest of my day. REW: Can you say what you mean by “nonjudgmental”? MN: My understanding is that in a human body there’s always a sense of things as being either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. That’s naturally going to happen; one can’t change that. However, this doesn’t have to be where our primary attention is—not that mine isn’t! REW: Your practice is not to follow it? MN: It’s hard to describe to people without sounding very dry and rather removed from life. It’s as if you’re being carried by the river and you are the river watching. You’re dropping deeper down inside in order to expand and become a part of the world. You’re paying attention in the narrow way in order to be much more alive and present. Somebody said to me, “Just imagine that you had all the money in the world. What would you do next week?” This was the week before I was going on a retreat. I said, “Actually, I would do exactly what I’m already planning on doing next week.” I guess I’m bringing that up because of a sense of what the meditation practice and the yoga practice have given me. I don’t think I have ever received a greater gift than these practices. I just don’t know how I would survive without them. That sounds very dramatic, but it’s actually true. It’s gotten me through times that have been very difficult. Part of the practice is a certain self-acceptance, a sense that who one is, just as one is, is fine. This is the loving-kindness practice, which is to accept oneself and be kind to oneself as a fundamental part of one’s spiritual life.
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Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection and The Practice of the Presence of God Fr. Robert Hale, O.S.B. Cam. Abstract: Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, a humble seventeenth-century shoemaker in a large Parisian abbey, developed a remarkable practice of constant mindfulness of the presence of God. His letters were collected and his sayings recorded by a theologian who carried on a conversation with Brother Lawrence over a period of decades. The result was The Practice of the Presence of God, which is still cherished as a classic among books about Christian prayer.1 This article appeared in Religion East & West, Issue 7, October 2007.
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rother Lawrence of the Resurrection, the seventeenth-century Discalced Carmelite brother, proposed that nothing can better transform the life of a Christian than the presence of God, if one consciously acknowledges and reverences that presence by abiding in it in faith and love. This simple yet profound teaching, preserved in The Practice of the Presence of God, a compendium of Brother Lawrence’s writings and sayings first published in 1693, has been embraced by countless Christians through the subsequent centuries. Brother Lawrence’s recommendations for practice continue to enjoy a wide appreciation today.2 The renowned Catholic spiritual writer Fr. Henri Nouwen, for example, writes in his introduction to a recent edition of Lawrence’s book: When I was exposed to his thoughts for the first time, they seemed simple, even somewhat naïve and unrealistic; but the deeper I entered into them and the longer I reflected on them, the more I became aware that Brother Lawrence’s advice to walk constantly in the presence of God is not just a nice idea for a seventeenth-century monk but a most important challenge to our present-day life situation.3
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