An Interview with
Mariel Hemingway
Mariel Hemingway is the granddaughter of author Ernest Hemingway. She gained success early, at age thirteen, for her part in the film Lipstick . Four years later she was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Woody Allen's film Manhattan .
Her childhood, however, was not a happy one. Members of her family fought the challenge of living up to the legacy of Ernest Hemingway, the expectations of others, drug abuse and themselves. Early on she became her mother's caretaker. Seeing the chaos and how it affected her family taught her early to look to herself for ways of coping with the world and maintaining her sanity.
Married since she was 23, Mariel now has two teenage daughters, is a yoga instructor and continues to be an actress and model.
The coping tools she has learned and developed through her life are shared in Healthy Living from the Inside Out (HarperSanFrancisco, 2007). There she spells out her 30-Day Quickstart Program for renewing our energy, tuning into ourselves and living an active life while remaining in balance. She will be speaking at Seaside Center in Encinitas July 20. See end of article for more.
As you will see in this conversation with her, she is clear and focused, while fun and delightful to speak with.
Steve Hays: You mention in your book that you noticed the importance of food and how that helped keep you steady and sane early in life.
Mariel Hemingway: Well, I grew up in a household of (Laughs) , well it was not the happiest family—my mother had cancer, my—father had heart disease. So I knew very early on whether or not I was making good choices or not. That's a whole other issue. But I felt as though food was one of the key ingredients to having a healthy life. I knew that inherently.
I went through a lot of different journeys with food programs—this and that and the other thing—to find what I know now works for me. In that process of years of trying to find the right thing for me, I realized that everybody has a path that suits them.
Everybody has a religion, everybody has a sense of their highest good, and it's about tuning in and finding that voice that speaks to you and that way of eating that brings out the best in you, the most energy, the most vitality, the most'health. Even though the book says, “Every woman's guide,” it certainly was not designed just for a woman.
Because I did it for my husband who had cancer and we together kind of came to what is now his food program so that he would no longer make cancer cells. That was through my early understanding that there was something related to the fact that my mother had cancer and to her food and lifestyle. Even though she ate fairly well, there were other issues. The home, silence, the connection to God wasn't strong. So those were other elements that we came across just in my husband's journey.
When I went to the food section in your book I think I was expecting to discover which system that you had accepted. But you aren't really trying to convince people that yours is the best way or saying, “This is the one and only way.”
I believe everybody has their own system. I think that there are scientific reasons that back up eating less sugar, or less caffeine, those kinds of reports. But some people can be vegetarians. Some people can be more protein-oriented. It's getting very clear on what are, bar none, unhealthy foods. It doesn't mean you never have them. But you're very aware of what they are and you keep them in your life in moderation.
That's the key. It's about moderation. It's about seeing what suits you, and honoring who you are as in the individual—but not just in food. In your exercise, in the way that you create a home that soothes you and makes you feel peaceful, calm, centered and closer to your being.
And all these four things have the ability to transform your life in a simple and easy way because it's your life, your choices. It's based on your history, genetics, belief systems, all of it. Because that's what you have to deal with.'So it's not about me saying, “Oh, eat like me.” ‘Cause if somebody ate like me, they would be going, “Ugh.” (Laughs) Whack job.
But, I think it's great.'Now my husband doesn't eat like me. He eats the way that suits his system. He exercises in a way that suits him. He takes silence every day in his way, for his belief in the infinite. You know what I mean? It's all about a personal journey.
Yes. I loved the sentence in your book, “I realized with something of a shock that I could be an expert on me.” And that's really what you're saying, become self-aware, discover yourself and become an expert on you.
It's a wonderful thing when you realize that nobody knows you better than you and that you sometimes put that in the background. So when I discovered that I was actually the best person to doctor me, to feed me, to exercise me, to do whatever for me, it was such a liberation. It was like, “I don't need to go out and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars—over years –giving my power over to other people telling me what to do with my life, when actually if I got quiet enough I could figure that out for myself.” Not as a philosophy, but as a reality of who I am.
The other beautiful thing about the journey towards wellness and healthy living is that it never ends. It's like your search for your spirituality.'It's a constant.'It's shifting and changing and getting deeper and you're learning more about yourself as you get older, as you have more experiences. So it's a constantly shifting thing.
That's the beautiful part about life, when you start to realize that living in the present is the greatest gift that you can come to because that's when you're really experiencing your life instead of your life experiencing you. (Laughs)
One of the attractive things I noticed about your program was that you can keep adding new pieces; and also that you treat it as an experiment by trying new things on a regular basis—trying different things on for size in a sense—to see how they work for you.
Exactly.
I think one of the hardest things for many people—for myself—is when we say, “Okay. I'm going to try this new vitamin or stress relieving technique and see how it works for me.””But then after a while, when evaluating how well it worked, there just seems to be too many variables to really evaluate how well it worked.
Well, that's what I'm talking about that it's constantly shifting. Sometimes your body requires supplements and sometimes it doesn't. It's about honoring the fact that it'll work for a while, but then you can get to a place where you go, “You know what? I just don't think this is working for me anymore,” and it's actually kind of beneficial to quit doing it, to quit taking the supplements, to change your program a bit, make different choices, try new foods, new real foods.
Our cells are constantly moving. We're constantly in flux. We should be aware of that when we make the choices we make for our health.
Can you give a specific example of what it looks like when you're tuning into your body'to see what works.
I think the key is that first of all—and I talk about this in the book—is getting rid of the noisy foods: foods that we can all agree on that aren't healthy for us, too much caffeine, processed foods, sugar, processed flour, white food, anything that's not natural, no hormone-induced anything. Basically, cleaning up the noisy food.
It doesn't mean it's forever out of your life. But if you don't clean that up, your signaling is going to be messed up. You're not going to be able to hear what your body has to say, because the signals will be off track.
So in order to get clear signals of what your body likes, it's best not to be. You don't necessarily have to be completely free of caffeine, but at least cut back by half.
It would be nice not to have diet soda in your system. Because these things, these foods and drinks that are filled with chemicals and hormones and things like that, are going to mess up the signaling. It's going to mess up your ability to see what does work for you.
So my first recommendation for anybody—and I don't tell anybody what to do, because they'll feel it if they try it as an experiment. So say, for a week, I cut my caffeine back, and then the next week I cut my caffeine back and I cut out diet soda. Then the next week I've cut my caffeine back, I've cut out diet soda, and I'm not going to eat any fast food for a whole week.
Well, by the fourth week, your system is fairly clean and you can start putting in foods. I would say do the four weeks of cleaning up, and then start to really observe how you feel when you eat a certain way. You'll be able to tell that if, in the morning, you have your traditional bowl of cereal—which may not be a bad bowl of cereal—but it is a carbohydrate and it is broken down to sugar. You'll be able to feel if that makes you feel good or if that actually makes you lose energy very quickly.
But you have to clean those noisy foods up first, because the body can't process all that information. Because noisy food, by its very nature, has a lot of stuff that creates chemical imbalance. That's my recommendation. Then you can say, “Okay. You know what? When I dip at 4:00 in the afternoon, if I had a handful of almonds and a piece of string cheese, or I have some almonds and a half an apple, I feel cleaner and better than if I go and have a Snickers bar. I like the way I feel for five minutes on the Snickers bar, but then 45 minutes later, I've dipped even lower than I was before.”
But you won't be able to tell that until you've cleaned up the mess first.
You can't redecorate your home and see what it looks like if you've got boxes filling up every space. You won't be able to see what it looks like. You see what I mean?
Oh, yes. Absolutely. (Laughs) I'm actually doing something like that. In changing my house around. In order to start I have to clean up, throw out and create space so that I can do something different. So I have to get rid of the clutter—or the noise, as you say it—first to be able to redo things.
Exactly. Exactly.
When you talk about exercise in your book you and talk about “no pain, no gain.” Tell us your feeling on that.
Well, initially I needed to do everything from the standpoint that if it didn't hurt then it wasn't really working.'So then it became very clear that just isn't the case. Less is more. Our bodies actually respond quite well to softness. We tend to think that if we overdo it's better for us. But as you get older, less is more. You don't have to do so much.
Doing exercise with intention is far more powerful than doing anything for an hour and a half to two hours every day£if you're not thinking about it.'If you go into your exercise program and you have an intention to have a deeper sense of your breath, to have some more flexibility, to be aware of nature as you're walking—if you just have that intention, it will totally change the outcome. You will see results because you have intention, because that's what you're doing it for.
You asked the question, “Which would improve the quality of your life more, being busier and more productive, or under-standing yourself and relating better to loved ones and finding joy in what is already around you?” Balancing fast-paced lives and our rapid technologies with quiet time can be a challenge.
The thing is, we're not going to get rid of our technology, and we're not going to get rid of the things that are making our lives more efficient, speedy, and all that stuff. It's not going away.
In fact, it's a beautiful thing. It's a great gift. But knowing where that gift is in your life and knowing that it has its place and its time, and a time to back away from it, to put it aside and get quiet and get still.
Because we need that in order to connect with our highest good, we need to be more quiet. We need to be more calm. Acknowledge yourself as yourself instead of running all the time. When we're running all the time, we don't experience our lives. Our lives sort of happen and we don't feel it.
So my thing is just take some time in silence just to tune into what you feel like. You can't really tune into how you feel when you eat a food if you're running all the time. And it's not taking hours of meditation, or even anything more than five to 20 minutes a day where you just slow yourself down, or in the middle of the day you just take some time to say, “Oh. Let me just tune in here and see how I feel.”
You mention feeling good a lot in your book. When I read the section dealing with our home or space, I again thought you might have some particular system you embraced with design, but you don't. Rather than explaining a particular system of design, you're again really asking people to look at what makes them feel good. Is that a good way to say it?
Yes. And there's nothing wrong with feeling good. (Laughs) We try to think, “If it doesn't hurt, then it's not good for me.” I did too. The fact of the matter is it's contrary to that. I mean, we initially tend to think, “Yeah.“But I like all my junk food and it actually does make me feel good.””But if you get rid of it, you actually realize you feel better when you're cleaner. Then you start to understand that you feel better being more healthy.
Then when you have an experience where you say, “I'm going to have a piece of chocolate cake and I'm really'going to enjoy this”—you give yourself permission. But you don't do it all the time.'The pleasure you get from that experience, the feeling good that you have from that experience, is'so much better than if you have it every day.
You tend to lose it. It's like they always say that drug addicts are'always looking for their first hit. I don't know. I don't do drugs. (Laughs)
But I know from my life, that when I really liked something and I went on an excessive craze with it, I never felt as good as the first time. I was always searching for that.
So when you learn a life of moderation, when treats become treats and you do things in moderation and you do them once in a while, they have such pleasure for you. Because when you do them you really appreciate it. Your senses are wrapped around it and it's an experience instead of a habit.
So we just kind of reprogram ourselves to experience our lives and to experience whatever it is, if it's exercise or whatever it is.
How has slowing things down and taking the noisy things out and getting in touch with yourself impacted your life—your personal life or your professional life?
Oh, it's been the most powerful thing to change my life. I mean, taking time for silence has been the thing that helps me understand who I am. For me, I have a deep connection with God, and it helps me connect with God. When I connect with God, I realize that my problems are not so big—that everybody has problems, that I'm a little fish in a big ocean—but it's actually a relief to know you're not alone.'So that silence for me is my connection to God. That silence for somebody else might be a connection to what they believe in, and they may not call it God. They may call it whatever they call it. Who cares? It's your connection to a sense of divine.
When you control your life and connect with the divine and really start to observe yourself, not judge yourself—because we all have stuff —you change your life.—You make different choices based on that because you realize that you don't have to make choices to get out of pain, because those choices actually aren't getting you out of pain.'They're just pushing pain away.
The more you push pain away, the more it'll come back and haunt you. So you don't push it away. You observe it and you don't make anything that happens wrong. But you can only do that in silence. You can't do it when you're running around all the time.
And it doesn't mean heaps and heaps of silence. It means just taking a little time for yourself. It's giving yourself permission to be nice to yourself, to acknowledge that you're the best person for you, the only person that can take care of you. Nobody else can. Nobody else will. And if you don't give yourself permission, you just keep searching for another person outside yourself to take care of you when it's you that has to be taken care of by you and by your connection with whatever moves you.
There are many examples in your book of ways to gain silence. You mention things that you can do for a few minutes or things you can do longer, but it's not about building towards meditating for an hour and a half. It seems to be more about ways to fully live in the moment, all the time.
Exactly. I mean, if you pay attention to how you make your tea in the morning, that's a meditation. That is your silence. If you go out for a walk for 20 minutes and you don't have your iPod on—not that that's not an option, because I do that sometimes, too—but when it's not every day, when you actually are walking and looking and smelling and feeling and observing the walk, that's meditation. It's a beautiful thing.
And that is what you offer in your 30-Day Program, many ways and choices.
Mariel Hemingway: Yes. The 30-Day Program is something that you can do once and then in a couple months say, “I'm going to do it again, and make different choices.” It's something that you can take off your cabinet and go, “Gosh.“I want to do this again. I just want to do it differently. I want to clean up again. I want to feel differently. I want to make different choices.” Because we're always shifting. I have to do it, you know? All the time.
Okay. I saw that one of the people you acknowledge in the front of your book is Paramahansa Yoganada. I'm sure you know his Self-Realization Fellowship is in Encinitas, but didn't know if you knew that it's very close to the Seaside Center where you'll be speaking.
Yes, I love it down there. I've done a couple projects in San Diego, and taken some time to go over there [SRF] and it's so special.
Yes, a lot of people in this area appreciate SRF being here and love to visit the gardens there.
Oh, I bet they do. That's so cool. I appreciate you saying it. It's brings a smile to my face.
Mariel Hemingway's latest book is Healthy Living from the Inside Out (HarperSanFrancisco, 2007). She will be speaking at Seaside Center for Spiritual Living in Encinitas on Friday, July 20 at 7pm. Her talk will be on “How to Experience Your Life.” For more call 760/753-5786 x848 or go to www.SeasideCenter.org.
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