163: Mariel Hemingway: Mariel Hemingway talks about navigating the pandemic, her acting career and how self care and mental wellness have become a major force in her life… She’s remarkable.

August 6, 2020

Mariel Hemingway

What have Mariel Hemingway and her significant other Bobby done to anchor themselves in Southern California during the he COVID-19 pandemic? “We are very careful how we spend our time outdoors, whether we are meditating, the kind of food we’re eating, and all of these kinds of things. So, our lifestyle really hasn’t changed that much. Our connections to other people obviously have dramatically changed. I think what has been the most challenging is probably not seeing my daughters enough, or something like that. For us, it’s about staying focused on being the best we can be physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. We focus on our food. We focus on our exercise. We focus on connecting with nature.”

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Mariel Hemingway, Actress and Expert in Mental & Physical Health in the areas of mindfulness, grounding and earthing. Mariel Hemingway discusses the three main circles of her life, her family life, her acting life, and her self-care around mental illness life. How does Mariel approach self-care and her yoga practices: “When you talk about my family. When you talk about acting. When you talk about mental health, see I think all of those things are kind of interconnected anyway because the first thing that you have to do in life is to look at your story, your history, where you come from. Once you look at your story, your history, your patterns, your heritage, you can then determine the choices that you have been making your entire life.” 

Listen to “Mariel Hemingway: Mariel Hemingway talks about navigating the pandemic, her acting career and how self care and mental wellness have become” on Spreaker.

What You Will Learn:

Mariel Hemingway talks about what the process of earthing means to her. “I’m very big into ‘earthing,’ grounding, literally taking my shoes off and going for hikes every single day out on trails with no shoes on, because I believe it is one of the great ways to stay literally grounded but to also help with anxiety, help with the uncertainty of times.”

How does self-care play a role in her daily life?  “Self-care is health care. More than anything, taking care of ourselves is our responsibility and it also needs to turn into our joy because our lifestyle is everything. What we do in the morning, our morning routines. Whether we watch a sunrise and ground. How we make our coffee in the morning. Whether we make it with intention. Whether we are quiet and still and present doing the things that we are doing.”

How can we rethink bad memories so they don’t keep getting in our way? “Memories can’t hurt you. They can inform you of what you have been doing and the choices that you have been making. So, once we look at those stories, then we are on the path to our own recovery, and the recovery is from worrying about what has already happened. And you can’t worry about what has already happened, and you can’t worry about what has already happened, because it has already happened, and you can’t worry about is going to happen because we don’t know.” 

Mariel Hemingway’s family has had seven suicides in it, including her paternal grandfather, the great American author Ernest Hemingway. How has she worked with her daughters to prevent them from falling into a similar cycle? “I think there is always somebody in a family that says, ‘I’m done. I’m changing this. We’re not going there anymore,’ and I think I made that choice. I think I made the choice to say, The buck stops here. I don’t want to hand this off to my children. It doesn’t mean that my daughters don’t have problems and don’t have issues.”

Regarding her documentary “Running from Crazy,” how did she get Oprah Winfrey to produce it? “I have this really close from Lisa Erspamer. She worked for Oprah for years. She had her show on ABC. She was also one of the creative directors over at the OWN Network. We were really close and one day she looked at me and said, ‘We need to do a documentary on your family and your family’s life.’ And I said, ‘What are you crazy? They are nuts. No.’ She goes, ‘That’s just the point.’ She said, ‘We have to do it because everybody has a story. Everybody comes from something imperfect.’”

Doing the Movie Lipstick

Mariel talks about her older sister’s drug and alcohol issues and her sister feeling overshadowed by Mariel’s acting success. “She was seven years older than me. I was this young girl and she invited me to play her little sister in a movie, and it was her dream to be an actress. In retrospect, thinking about it, it was heart wrenching because it wasn’t until years later that I realised her whole life she just felt like she was second best. She wasn’t Ernest Hemingway and then I came along and I got really good reviews. I get nominated for things and my career starts.”

Mental Health

During this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, Mariel Hemingway also address es mental health and suicide. “What is critical about mental health for me, especially suicide, is that there are solutions and I think that people think that when they are going through highly anxious times or depressign times that there is nothing that they can do and that is simply not true. There are many, many different solutions, and again it is our physical health, our mental health is the same way.” 

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