Even the humor in her best roles is derived, ironically, from those moments when she is completely deflated, because it’s so unexpected: The image of a wet, bedraggled Hawn on the poster for the movie Private Benjamin became a classic; simply looking at her pout cracks us up. Hawn would be the first to agree that she really was born with an abundance of natural optimism, though it’s not present all the time and has always required practice. One of her favorite sayings is: “We are born with the seed of joy; it is up to us to nurture it.” More from Prevention: 9 Signs You’re Happier Than You Think Since the 1970s, Hawn, 67, has been a practitioner of meditation and living mindfully. Through the Hawn Foundation, she has brought the concept of mindfulness to 150,000 children around the world. Today children in her MindUp program learn how they can reduce stress and anxiety by understanding where negative emotions live in the brain and taking charge of their own feelings. (She also released a book on the program, Ten Mindful Minutes, just out in paperback.) With a reclining Buddha watching over us, Hawn and I met up in her glass-walled New York City penthouse. The living room is Indochined and feng shuied to the max; the furniture is all teak and pillows, the window treatments capped off with gold elephant heads. It was hard to resist plunking down and taking a nap on the opium bed that dominates the room. But I bravely stayed vertical, and while Hawn got curled and fluffed for Prevention’s photo shoot, we discussed her secrets to looking great and feeling better. [pagebreak] It seems that anyone who owns a yoga mat considers herself a Buddhist. I’d love to know what buddhism means to you. GH: Oh, I don’t think of myself as a Buddhist. I was born Jewish, and I consider that my religion. But I’ve studied all religions, and as you learn more, you really learn that everyone’s praying to the same God. I remember thinking about this once, being in Jerusalem, hearing the prayer calls of the Muslims, the church bells of the Christians, the Jews at the Western Wall [Hawn tears up]. It’s not the idea of a particular religion that’s important; it’s the development of a spiritual life. Because spirituality creates well-being, health, and happiness. In Buddhism it’s called sangha—community. I believe having religion in your life creates the potential for long-lasting relationships. And you should know—you’ve been with one partner (actor Kurt Russell) for nearly 30 years. GH: Oh yes. Yes. But anyway, it isn’t what I think. It’s what research has shown. I think what we’re talking about with religion is connectivity. Yes, and you came quite early to meditation, at a time when it wasn’t terribly mainstream. You were one of the first people talking about it. GH: In the ’70s, yes. And you’ve spoken about how you became a seeker at a time in your life when you were quite unhappy. GH: Yes, I was anxious. Just when my fame was new. I was having what they call nonspecific panic attacks. I’d feel dizzy. My heart would start palpitating. I didn’t like to be in crowds, because I’d get nauseous. You know, I had only wanted to be a dancer—that was my life. And next thing I knew, I was on this television series [the short-lived Good Morning World, right before she really gained fame as the body-painted go-go girl on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In]. That hadn’t been the plan. My dream was to go home and open a dancing school and get married and live a happy life. And moving in the world I was moving in, people were not what I would consider normal. I didn’t want to be unhappy. I still remember sitting with my dad over a cup of coffee and saying, “Dad, I just want to be normal.” And he said, “Go, you gotta get used to something: You’re not normal.” Smart dad. GH: But I went to a psychologist because I had lost my smile. I was forcing an emotion that had been so natural to me and that now I didn’t feel. I was out in space. I was no longer authentic. This happens to a lot of us at one time or another. And so I spent many years in analysis, long after I lost that anxiety. Analysis is about self-discovery, and once you begin to answer questions about yourself, that’s the beginning of one of the best parts of your life. But it was a gradual process. [pagebreak] More recently you’ve said you wanted to bring a form of self-knowledge to kids. After 9/11, you said you began thinking about the enormous amount of anxiety facing today’s kids. So you assembled a team of researchers and created the program MindUp, with the premise that the more kids know about their own brains, the more they are able to regulate themselves and their behavior. Are you teaching them to meditate? GH: We don’t promote meditation in the class, but we do say, “Learn about your brain.” And we do teach them to take “brain breaks.” It’s a science-based program. If you learn how your brain functions, you can learn to calm down and focus when you need to. So, for instance, if you’re scared before a test, or your parents are breaking up, or whatever it is you fear, we help give them the ability to pay attention to the fear, to focus on their breathing, on the body’s reactions. By tuning in to brain function, you can train the prefrontal cortex of the brain to make better choices. I always remember this one little boy in one of our classrooms who I talked to about our program. He was 9. And I said to him, “So how does MindUp help you?” He says, “Well, the other day my best friend pushed me on the playground and really made me mad. But instead of hitting him back, I decided I’d just walk away and breathe and do a brain break. Because then I realized that I can’t hit him back, because he won’t be my best friend anymore.” [Hawn smiles with delight.] Now, that’s critical thinking! It’s making good choices. It’s quieting down your anger. But where do you make your good choices? This kid knew that you make them in the prefrontal cortex; that’s the part of the brain that can manage and regulate emotion, that can analyze and retain information. You have claimed that these methods help reduce the need to medicate kids who reportedly have attention deficit problems. GH: Oh, I have seen it for myself. But I mean, there was a class [doing the MindUp program] in Vancouver that had some very challenged children. Some had been abused, some had seen genocide. Some of the parents were drug addicts. And do you know, half the kids in the class who were on medication for attention problems were able to go off it? There are kids who need medication, certainly, but the overmedicating of kids in our society is huge. Do you practice brain breaks with your grandsons? [Hawn’s daughter, Kate Hudson, 33, recently gave birth to her second son, Bingham, and has an 8-year-old, Ryder. Hawn’s son Oliver has two children, Wilder, 5, and Bodhi, 2.] GH: Yeah. They love it. [pagebreak] You look absolutely amazing. It’s hard to believe you are a 67-year-old grandmother. You say that meditation and being mindful keeps you from holding on to anger. Has it also helped you deal with aging? GH: No, no. What helps with aging is serious cognition—thinking and understanding. You have to truly grasp that everybody ages. Everybody dies. There is no turning back the clock. So the question in life becomes: What are you going to do while you’re here? How about exercise and diet? You must be a fanatic. GH: Not at all! I do try to do some form of exercise four days a week. At home in California, I’ll bike up the mountain. Or I’ll do Pilates or Spin. And I do eat a lot of greens. I eat healthily, but I’m not a vegetarian. I like to cook, and I tend to make those one-pot meat dishes of my Hungarian ancestors. Also, I make a great Bolognese. But you know what else is important? Just knowing how to play. Kurt and I get a lot of playtime in the home we built in Palm Desert. Your character Elise in The First Wives Club famously said, “There are three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.” Well, you haven’t done any movies in about 10 years. Is that why? GH: [Laughing] No, I don’t think so. I just had such a need to concentrate on this one thing, on this foundation and on helping kids become better able to focus and organize their brains, to help them toward happiness. But now, well, recently I’ve been thinking about movies again. A lot. I’m beginning to miss that work. What do you miss most? GH: Making people laugh. Will you go back? GH: Well, I like to say, “You never know what you don’t know.” [pagebreak] If meditating seems impossible—as in, your brain refuses to shut off—here are Goldie Hawn’s suggestions: Shake hands with your brain. Hawn insists that if we know a bit about how the brain works, we can truly grasp why meditation is not just for those with a fondness for Birkenstocks and patchouli. “Familiarize yourself with the parts of your brain and their function,” Hawn says. “You will see that the benefits of meditation aren’t just in your head. They’re as physiological as the benefits of exercise on your muscles.” For example, a 2011 study found that people who meditated 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area critical to memory and learning, and a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region associated with anxiety and stress. There were no changes in the brain matter of a control group that didn’t perform mindfulness meditation. Decide you want to meditate. Making something a priority for your well-being is half the battle. Take a little time to just listen to your own breathing. “It will probably be a bit irregular,” Hawn says. Gradually, you’ll learn to regulate your breathing and your brain. Give yourself at least three “brain breaks” a day. Worried that meditating takes too much time? Research shows that meditating for 3 minutes 5 times a day is as beneficial to the body as doing it in a single 20-minute block of time. Think of meditation not as something woo-woo but as an everyday task, like brushing your teeth. It’s all about habituation, Hawn says—getting your brain and body used to the downtime. So do whatever it takes to establish a routine: Sit in a certain position, find a private spot in your home. The whole point of mindfulness meditation is to anchor your mind in the present and not allow it time to travel to the past and the future, which it does at lightning speed almost 24/7. More from Prevention: Meditation That Matches Your Personality
