Mariel Hemingway
Finding some quiet time in your life, I think, is hugely important.Collection: Time
It's not that I don't believe in miracles, but I never quite trust that they're real.Collection: Trust
Self-Realization Fellowship seemed like training. It was the training ground for finding a sense of peace in myself. Because that's my job. It's no one else's.Collection: Peace
I think that growth and spiritual awareness come in slow increments. Sometimes you don't know it's happening.
I believe that everybody comes from pain and a certain amount of dysfunction.
Yoga teaches you how to listen to your body.
A lot of exercise is mindless; you can have music or the radio on and not be aware. But if you're aware in anything you do - and it doesn't have to be yoga - it changes you. Being present changes you.
But the experience that I had, which was basically just feeling loved and taken care of in a room full of thousands of people I didn't know, seemed to be a pretty strong sign that what I was doing was a good thing.
Cancer came back into my life twice in order for me to understand something, and I guess I still wasn't getting it. And my husband wasn't getting it, either.
Everybody needs a way out of that pain. Many people choose drugs and alcohol. Some people obsessively exercise or develop strange dietary habits, which is what I did. At least it got me toward a path of healthier living.
For me, first, it's finding quiet in my life - and I do that through yoga and meditation. It's also been a matter of changing the way I eat, because I think what we eat can inform who we are; food is a chemical and a drug to a certain extent.
I began by doing physical yoga, initially just for the workout, as exercise. I would get peaceful and calm at the end of it, and I was curious about that.
I did Star 80, which was a magnificent experience as well, but still, I was at the height of my career at the beginning. Then I had to jump down the ladder and climb back up again, which I didn't understand. That was very hard.
I don't have to go to church. The church is within me and the experience is my own. It's my life experience.
I don't take myself terribly seriously. It's why I can be incredibly honest about my life.
I enjoyed doing Lipstick, but it scared me. I was very nervous. I couldn't wait for it to be over. It was very real, and I was just a kid.
I felt I had to share Idaho with my friend from New York because he'd shared New York with me, so I was going to share the beauty of nature with a man who went to museums and clubs late at night. But there was nothing to do where I lived at night.
I got back into the position of taking care of my husband, which is what I'd learned that I couldn't really do: you can love and make things okay to a certain extent, but you can't fix. I didn't quite learn that until the kayaking incident. It became so clear then.
I loved acting when I was doing it, but getting the jobs I didn't understand because I'd never had to do it. That was a difficult lesson for me. It was very humbling and very bizarre.
I think we should be passionately curious about what we do.
I thought my book was done, then we went to Hawaii and the whole last chapter happened.
I wanted out of my pain and that silliness, but I wanted an easy out. That's before realizing that there is no easy out. Before accepting that you just have to do the work.
I wanted to share the experience of how yoga and meditation have transformed my life, how they have enabled me to observe who I am, first in my body, and then emotionally, and on to a kind of spiritual path.
I was taken by the romanticism of being thought of as an adult and living in a world that was completely new to me. I fell in love with acting then.
I'm not that old, and I haven't lived a life so far from the ordinary, really.
I've known for years that you're supposed to be present. I know that thinking about what's happened or thinking about what I want is not going to get me anywhere, but until I quit doing it I'm not present.
Manhattan, though, was an entirely different ballgame in a whole different kind of world, with a man who was brilliant and at the same time terribly charismatic.
My problems aren't so different from anybody else.
Starting out in a beginner class and really understanding the fundamentals of yoga is really important.
The experience of getting my Kriya, which is the meditation process that I do, was very powerful for me - though, as I explain in the book, I was really suspect of that kind of thing.
The other thing is surrounding yourself with people that care for you. These are simple things, but they're powerful, and they've completely transformed who I am and how I perceive myself.
We're taught to take care of people we love, but sometimes you can't.
Well, I was passionately curious about what my body was doing, and when I got the lessons on how to meditate, it seemed really solid to me. It seemed real.
What I wasn't prepared for were the feelings of anxiety that it stirred in me. I wasn't prepared for the initial feeling of I don't want to have to do that again. I was scared.
What they were giving me seemed incredibly real to me, so I'd react to it in a very real way. That was frightening for me, especially because of the subject.
When child actors act well they're just reacting to situations, and they're acting very real because their life experience is so short; there's no history to fall back on.
Having been through a tremendous amount of emotional pain, to process it properly, to be able to have it make sense and then move it through your body, your mind, your spirit, and be done with it, you really have to address it head-on. Being able to really have the courage enough to truly face it, to truly look at it, to truly feel it.Collection: Pain
If you don't step across the threshold of what you already know into the world of challenges, you never truly measure yourself.Collection: Challenges
I think that things like curses or whatever - those labels - come from belief systems, universal belief systems. So when you get a global consciousness of something, then that becomes a quote-unquote "truth" for everybody. You know, "This is what happens in the Kennedy family." "This is what happens with the Hemingways." And the more people believe in it, the more it kind of resuscitates the problem; it keeps bringing life to this idea that a curse exists that you can never get out from under.Collection: Believe
There's no doctor in a white coat that's going to save you, or a system or a pill - it's always going to be you and the choices that you make.Collection: Doctors
Each second is a second you can make a new choice, a better choice, a healthy choice, a present choice.Collection: Healthy Choices
In old interviews I was still worried about being judged. I think my life was about how can I keep myself in control. How can I just get through this and be okay? And, you know, you turn the corner. You realize that you're not imprisoned by your life or your circumstances or your genetics or anything. I really believe that we all have the ability to come out of our story. But you have to tell your story first in order to come out of it.Collection: Believe
We do have the ability to shift our paradigms - by shifting our belief systems, by working on ourselves, by looking very closely at how we show up in the world. It's why I'm into health and wellness. It's why my partner and I are very focused on creating a life that is about being connected; it's about being present. Because my life was probably so much in the past. I was so fearful. I was so fearful of the future because I was so scared of my past. So if you can work towards being present, then you can shift.Collection: Past
You have to have a little faith in people.Collection: People
We live in a society that is afraid of ways of being it doesn't understand.Collection: Way
The 'Hemingway curse' was such a huge, awful thing for me to have to deal with. . . . The reality is, because there are genetic tendencies toward mental illness, you need to be aware of them.Collection: Reality
Living a simpler life has turned out to be one of the keys to being more awake and healthy.Collection: Keys
I do a lot of work with mental health and wellness, which I also believe has a lot to do with your lifestyle as well - what you're eating, how you're living, what you're thinking. How you live your life can affect your mental state.Collection: Believe
Whatever it is that you do in your life, you're your own guide.Collection: Guides
We live in a society running from pain through alcohol, through too much exercise, through sugar, through drugs - as opposed to realizing that these things come up because they are lessons. It's a way to wake you up.Collection: Running