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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Goldie Hawn. Goldie Hawn is a director, producer, singer, and critically acclaimed actress. She has appeared in over 30 films, including Butterflies Are Free, Private Benjamin, The Banger Sisters, and Cactus Flower, a film for which she received the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. Goldie recently appeared in the 2017 film Snatched, alongside Amy Schumer.
In 2003, Goldie created The Hawn Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind MindUP™, an educational program that is bringing mindfulness and meditation practices to over six million children across four continents. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Goldie and I spoke about how she first became interested in meditation, and how she has grappled with claiming her true self versus what other people project onto her. We also talked about teaching brain basics to kids, and some of the most important neuroscientific findings about what creates emotional resilience in children, and how to introduce these brain basics into the classroom. We talked about how Goldie introduces these same teachings to her own grandkids, and why love and family have always been her number one priority. Here’s my conversation with the very generous Goldie Hawn.
Goldie, many of our listeners I’m sure know you as an Academy Award winning actress, a producer, and a director, but what they might not know is that you’ve actually been meditating and interested in meditation since the 1970s. To start, I’d love to know, how did you first become interested in meditation?
Goldie Hawn: Well, during the ’70s, in the beginning—like, ’72 was when I was initiated to TM [Transcendental Meditation]—it was a time in my life, first of all, that was not necessarily tumultuous, but it was a time when my life was changing dramatically. I had a lot of areas of uncertainty, if you will, and also that big quick rise to fame really takes a lot of looking at. It can create anxiety, discomfort in many ways, people knowing you and feeling that they know you, and they don’t. Aspirationally, I never dreamed of being a star, I was a dancer. All these kinds of ideas of who we are and where we’re going and how life is going to turn out for us, these expectations we have sometimes don’t work out the way you expect them to, as funny as that sounds.
They say, “Oh, isn’t it great? You’ve become a star.” The actual truth is, I just still was me, and the “me” and the “star” didn’t necessarily go together. Looking for ways to create more clarity, that was a time when it was a big thing to do a meditation, that’s when it kind of started with The Beatles and so forth. I thought, “This is what I want to do.” I was very drawn to this approach, so that’s the reason I actually started into my life, really, of meditation, and the path that it’s taken me.
TS: Tell our listeners a little bit about how TM meditation helped you in terms of that rise to fame and the anxiety that you were experiencing at that time in your life, during that tumultuous period.
GH: It creates a sense of calm. You know, oftentimes we live outside of ourselves a lot, and there’s a part of ourselves that just only lives from looking out. When you look out, you can create all kinds of projection, you can create things that actually aren’t there, your perception can take you, in many ways: sometimes over-determining a situation or expecting more, or actually projecting less, which of course is not good. So half glass full, half glass empty, all kinds of things, in relationships, work-related, etcetera. But looking inward is not something that people often think about doing, you know at first it seems scary, it feels like you’re excavating an unknown territory.
For me personally, I really was interested in experiencing and having an internal experience. When that happened to me, when I had my first experience in meditation, that very first day, it was a revelation, in the sense that I met myself. I got back to me. I got back to my heartbeat, and I can’t express the joy I felt to be connected back to me, because we put so much out there and we don’t look to our self. That was one of the experiences I had, and of course it helped me a lot, because without really understanding the brain then as I do now, what I was experiencing then was obviously peace, a sense of calm, and an amazing ability to become more of a witness, rather than engage in things that actually I couldn’t change. That was one of the, I would say, very positive effects of meditation for me.
TS: You know Goldie, I imagine people who know you from your movies, from the outside, and think, “God, I’m so interested. This is so curious. I didn’t know this side of Goldie Hawn.” And I wonder what that’s like for you. People have all these ideas about who you are from roles that you’ve played, and yet here you’re talking about what’s really important to you, your internal life and your sense of calm, groundedness, meaning, those kinds of things. I wonder, that gap of people’s projecting onto you versus your own sense of who you are, how you work with that.
GH: Well, you know this happened early on, because when I first got very very successful, just sort of the first onslaught of that, I saw a psychologist. This is before my meditation. I really wanted to find out why I was anxious, why I wasn’t feeling joyful, like everyone around me was all excited for me. I thought, “This is great, I’m happy, this is cool. I mean, I’m on a TV show, how did this happen? I was just dancing five minutes ago.” The truth is that I wasn’t comfortable, and it was destabilizing for me, because obviously I had planned on a different life, I was going to be a dancing teacher, go home, get married, be happy, have children.
That didn’t work out, and my perception, believe it or not, as we’re talking about other people’s perception of me, my perception of the Hollywood scene and the people in it—obviously because of all the things that you hear—was that everybody was all screwed up. I didn’t want to be screwed up, I didn’t want to have eight marriages, I didn’t want to not live in a house with a white picket fence and a lovely kitchen, and family and all that. I looked at them and I thought they would drink, and they did this… I mean it was just a perception, OK, and it frightened me. It’s not what I wanted for my life. I had all these ideas, and I was now in the middle of it, so I saw a doctor.
The doctor really helped me open windows in my mind, understanding my relationship to my family, my relationships in my early, early years, even remembering when I was a child and when I was in a crib. I think going back into your life to find what were the pillars? What did you have to stand on as a child? And with that, you learn to forgive your parents, because sometimes they didn’t always do the right thing. They’re just people. You begin even, in the process of going through an analysis, you really begin to look at the landscape of your childhood and of your life and of your choices.
When I went and became a meditator, it gave me even greater ability, in fact, I could go deeper with less fear into that place of me, that place of my own system, if you will. It was very comfortable for me. When other people would come up to me and say, “Oh, I love you,” or, “I don’t like you,” or one time I remember a terrible review, “Her performance is as flat as her chest.” This is back early days, terrible things as well as wonderful things. But I think we all need to learn, and I did then, is that the joy that you feel that someone else is happy to see you is one thing. But if you take it as if it’s just about you and it builds your ego, then that’s not right. Because it isn’t just about you, it’s how people view you, it’s their perception, not yours.
Beginning to separate that is really important, I think, in terms of where we go in life and how we actually help ourselves become more clear and more able to make much, much better decisions, when we take ourselves out of the center of it.
TS: I also feel really grateful, Goldie, that you’re willing to let the listeners of this podcast and other people who read interviews about you get to know you a little bit, and what’s really happening on the inside. You wrote a memoir that gave people a window into who you really are. I just want to say I’m grateful for that, you didn’t have to do that, you don’t have to let us really know you.
GH: That’s so sweet, yes. You know what, there’s a fearlessness about who you are. The other thing is that when you spend a lifetime of … not searching, but I call it “going to the university of you,” I think there’s no hiding, there’s no fear of discovery. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to do that, just as it is a beautiful thing to go up to somebody in a room, who you don’t know, and put your arms around them and say hello.
TS: Now, one of the things I’m curious about is how you came to the conclusion, if you will, through the Hawn Foundation, to focus on educating young children in brain science and mindful awareness and social and emotional intelligence through the organization MindUP. What I mean by that is, often people who have a lot of resources, a lot of success, they want to give back, and they do a kind of analysis of the world situation and where their heart really resonates, and they say, “This is where I want to give, this is how I want to make a difference.” I’d like to understand how MindUP and its educational programs became your choice.
GH: Well, you know my philanthropy has always been for children, and an unhappy child is a pretty tough thing to watch. For me, after raising my own children, I could see some of the deficits that these kids have to go through. After 9/11, the world for all of us had changed forever, and we knew that our children were going to, in some ways, be the spoils of that. Because parents are frightened, kids are feeling a level of uncertainty and what they call “silent distress.” You know, we had a big turndown in the economy. All children feel the anxiety of their parents, and children feel everything, and they’re stressed. And I started looking at some of the symptoms, the symptoms of unhappiness.
I was doing, at that time, starting working on a documentary on happiness and the causes for happiness, and this is a bit before anyone even talked about happiness itself as a subject matter. At that time, it was not an easy thing to get people to wrap their heads around. “Well, what do you mean?” I said, “Well, I think that we need to really revisit the very things that make us happy.” Because I look around and I don’t see enough smiling faces in America. I see more smiling faces in India. I travel to third-world countries, and I see people living in circles and tribes and very, very humble abodes, sometimes on the street, but they’re not looking like we look in the mall and in the cars and our neighborhoods.
After this happiness issue, 9/11 came along and it was definitely not a time for me to be doing a happiness documentary, people would think I was crazy. In keeping with this, I looked at our children and said, “Too many suicides of these little ones, too much violence and aggression in the classroom, dropping out of school, a lack of empathy, apathetic behavior, and because of all the technology, an inability and a growing decreased inability to focus.” What I learned over these years was about—because I’m interested, because meditation and understanding the brain go hand in hand. And I believe mindfulness is a very important practice. And getting underneath it is also important, which is, “What is the meaning of it all?”
Brain science to me was the secret sauce, which just created the alchemy that I believe [we] needed to bring into schools. If a child understands how their brain works, then they’re able to understand and connect their emotion: “What is going on when I’m angry? What is going on when I’m happy? What happens to my brain and how can I control my own brain with my own intention?” Quieting the mind, we call them “brain breaks” in the classroom, we do three times a day, sometimes four if the kids take a test. It calms their brain down, but they know what part of the brain is being calmed, they know about the amygdala, they know about the executive function prefrontal cortex, they know about their hippocampus.
In doing so, it’s a much more holistic, in my view, [way to] train our children to have tools for the future, for their lives, and for school. We have to know that education today isn’t just about math and science, it’s also about preparing the child to learn, and giving them a sense of control, and opening their minds for learning. This is why I put a four-pronged program together, with the help of—obviously—scientists and neuroscientists and positive psychologists and so forth, teachers. And now we have a four-pronged program. MindUP is the name of our program, we’re at over six million children now globally, and we have 15 lessons; it’s very simple.
Interestingly enough, it came to me after we created it in 2003 or four, and it literally was 250 pages. And I held it and I looked through it and I went, “Wait a minute, we have to reduce this down for teachers.” They can’t hold this in their right hand. I want them to be able to hold this booklet in their right hand, so they can know mindfulness is very easy, and the idea of learning the brain is not learning full-on neuroscience. It’s learning parts of the brain, and then having them do mindful exercises in the classroom and wrapping their curriculum around all of it, such as perspective-taking and acts of kindness and gratitude. This has changed our children tremendously, we researched it right away.
I wouldn’t go out as Goldie Hawn, who was looked at a certain way, as we talked about before, with a certain perception around her, for anyone to say, “Well, what does Goldie Hawn know about education?” I wanted real proof before I went out and did this, and we got stellar results, stellar results. In fact, they said they’d never seen changes like this in children over such a short amount of time, says our researcher. That’s when I felt armed to go out and say, “Hey, I’ve got a new way of teaching, you know it’s mixing all of it together and putting it in a classroom.” That was about 13 years ago.
TS: Goldie, what I think is so genius about your approach is nobody can really argue with the value of teaching brain science. Of course people can argue we’re bringing meditation into the school system, that sounds religious or something like that. But bringing brain science into the classroom? Of course. I think that’s very strategic in terms of how you’re entering the world of education.
GH: It really was, because you know, a brain break is something we all need, everyone understands that the brain needs a break. As we do our breathing or we follow our breath, then we listen to a bell and we have this quiet time, what they’re learning is what’s going on in calibration of the left and right hemispheres. We know every brain needs to sleep, every brain needs a rest, it recapitulates the day and gets us ready for the next day. During the day we need a break, and what is interesting is that parents will say to me, “We need this.” It isn’t just for children, it’s for all of us. It’s not just for inner-city kids, it’s for children of affluence, who by the way, studies show are much more at risk, because our children of affluence are given too much, and they don’t have the resilience or the ability to say, “I’m going to do this,” to get out of the situation they’re in. They self-medicate more, they are really … they need help too.
When you look at a charity—charities are beautiful things that we do, very important. Research. Cancer research, genetic research. We’re also helping children in Africa, and food and shoes, and some organizations are giving diapers. But there’s something about me that says, “To change the culture, we have to change the minds and hearts of our children.” Because they are the ones who are going to carry this to create a new world. They’re going to come with tools to be able to manage their emotional construct, their reactivity, to become better listeners, better leaders, ideate better, problem solve better, and have some dignity, some level of humanity that they have learned throughout their early education.
I do believe that early brain development is extremely important, and this is where I think every school—I’m going to say in America, I’d like to be the forerunner there of saying “every school in America.” But we’re now in 11 countries, and I would like to see the world be able to change the way we educate our children.
TS: Now you said something interesting, Goldie, that it’s not just kids who need to understand brain breaks, but that we need this as adults. And you also mentioned that children feel the anxiety of their parents and of the larger context they’re in. Whether it’s for adults or for kids, what are the brain basics that we need to know? You mentioned we can learn about the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex, and the hippocampus, and I daresay that I bet some of our listeners feel like they could learn your pith instructions on those three parts of the brain and what we need to know.
GH: Right, well that’s a very good question. The parts of the brain, you know our brain is a symphony, it’s an amazing symphony, and I know just enough not to be dangerous. It’s a very complex organism, we have many many parts of our brain which are extremely important. But to try to create a simple image, we obviously have a brain stem, we have three brains inside of our head, and two of them are a very primitive parts of our brain, sort of the reptilian parts. We can’t live without them. We have the stem cell, which is our breathing and our heart rate, and everything is ruled by that; it’s autotomic, I think it’s called. It comes right—this is when you’re born, this is what you’ve got.
Then the next development was the limbic system, which is where you have your emotions, part of the emotional construct of our brain. What we talk about is, rather than looking at things like the hypothalamus, which obviously gives an understanding of how these messages come through—we don’t want to complicate it too much for our children, and for the teachers, frankly, they can go on a deeper dive if they want. They learn that these two little kidney-shaped things on the side of the brain called the amygdala, these amygdalae, really, are the part of the brain that receives these messages. This is when there were lions and tigers and bears, and it was fight, flight, or freeze, and that’s what we have every day.
We are born with it, it’s there to help us. We can smell bad gas, and that amygdala goes off and we know we’re smelling something bad, and we know we have to go on alert. That was very important when we were really primitive beings. We needed it, it saved us, it showed us, it kept us on alert. It’s really looking for what’s wrong. But now we don’t have lions and tigers and bears. Now our amygdala is very reactive; but it also reacts to many things. It reacts to anger, fear, it reacts to anticipation, it reacts to love, it reacts to hate—it’s a reactive part of the brain. When that is on alert, kids come home from school, their parents are splitting up, they’re hearing an argument, the world is going around—you know hurricanes are on television 100 times over. They come in anxious. Some children come in thinking they’re going to be shot on the way to school.
There’s so much they hold, and we’re not aware. When we come into the classroom, our children have to calm down. They know now that when their amygdala is on fire and they’re all … We call it the dog barking. When that dog barks so loud, we have to quiet it down. Because the prefrontal cortex is our really really big brain; that’s the part that makes the decisions, that’s the part of the brain that learns and actually has a connection to the hippocampus, so we can remember, as does the amygdala. The point is that these kids learn that they know how to breathe and focus and calm, and they know then that their prefrontal cortex lights up.
That wise old owl now can think and can function, and can make much, much better decisions and remember things better, because they’re not all frenzied, and as some of the kids call it, “so crazy,” and they can get better results by having that. We do that for creative things, we do it for test taking, we do that every day anyway, to calm them down from the playground. Some children will talk about their gratitude during that time. It’s been an amazing process. Because they also know that dopamine is emitted when you’re feeling joyful, when you’re feeling grateful, when you do an act of kindness, they know we do the dopamine dance, because the dopamine is like the greatest neurotransmitter that gets emitted when we do these positive things.
This is the kind of feeling that they know that they need to sit quietly. And now our kids will say, “I need to take a brain break.” Or they’ll say to their mom and dad, “I’m feeling nervous, I’m feeling like this, I’m just going to go take a brain break.” They’re seven and eight. Contextually, we’ve given them an image, they know that their brain [has] plasticity, that if they practice something over and over again, they’re going to change the way they think. It’s really powerful stuff, and knowledge is power.
TS: You know Goldie, in terms of understanding the brain in a way that I can remember and have it be useful, I have to say, the explanation that you’re giving here—and also throughout the book, 10 Mindful Minutes, that you wrote—it really works for me. I’ve interviewed a lot of neuroscientists, and I get lost. I can’t really remember anything, I try to find the takeaways, but …
GH: I know.
TS: … to be honest with you, it’s not the part of my brain that works so well, to remember all of the specifics. But when I think of the amygdala as a dog barking, I get that. I get the wise old owl in the brain being the prefrontal cortex. I think this is really useful for all ages, just to have the clear takeaways.
GH: They are clear, you know. I’ll bring neuroscientists in and so forth, and then they talk about the corpus callosum and they talk about the thing and they talk about the bridge between the left and the right brain. These kids don’t need that. Once they start understanding and they want to go into neuroscience, they can. The one thing that I’m looking to bring into the curriculum—and it is our seventh and eighth grade curriculum, because we go up to eighth grade—is I think they need to know about their endocrine system. I think it’s really important that our teenagers today learn why they’re up one minute and down the next, why they feel crazy and alive and great and everything, and then the next minute they’re totally zombied out.
They need to know why they’re feeling the way they’re feeling, and they need to understand the endocrine system is a huge thing that’s happening to create the adult them. When we start looking at all of the frenzy and all of the things, the brain actually is starting like a lawnmower, going over all these connections in your brain. It’s why you forget things, it’s why you’re kind of [inaudible 00:30:48], like teenage, right? They need to know why. It’s OK, but you need also to know that there’s stupid things that happen, which means you might get into a car where somebody’s driving and they’ve been drinking. You shouldn’t do it, and you know you shouldn’t do it, but that’s unfortunately part of what happens.
When you become mindful of what’s going on in your own brain, then you can actually be mindful about what your actions are with a level of understanding as a witness. I think parents need to really look at this— I’ve read some books on the brain and the teenage brain, they’re too dense. It needs to be a simple, simple way of explaining what’s happening. Because then parents won’t be so reactive, they’ll be more understanding. My grandson is 13 and he’ll come and he’ll do his thing and he’ll whatever, blah blah blah. I’ll look at him and I’ll say, “OK, don’t go teenage on me,” and he knows exactly what that means.
TS: What does that mean when you say, “Don’t go teenage on me.”?
GH: That your brain is actually recalibrating. You’re literally going to be talking one minute, you’re going to feel angry the next, I know how the brain goes, and we all do. When the kids understand it, which my grandson does clearly, you get the fact that they’re all over the place. To blame them for that is not fair. To be with them on it is the way we nurture them through this very difficult period. By the way, being a teenager is really hard, I mean don’t we all remember that? I do.
TS: When you say to your grandkid, “Don’t go teenage on me,” does he have a sense of, from being exposed to these brain basics, of how to work with himself at that moment, and what does he do?
GH: Yes, he understands it because we talk about it, and Kate talks about it with him. By the way, all my grandkids meditate. I have pictures of one of my four-year-olds who was meditating on the back of his father while his father was sleeping. He was in the lotus position with his hands. I mean that is so cute I can’t handle it, but they do it. Now three of my kids actually go to school in Ambasal. That is a full-on MindUP school. They came home the first day of school to the ranch, where we are in Colorado, and they came back with a little paper that said, “The amygdala does this,” and you’ve got to draw the connective lines to it, “The prefrontal cortex does this.” The first day of school, they started learning about their brains and doing brain breaks three times a day. Now of course, as a grandmother and as someone who created this before they were even born, I just sat down and cried. I said, “Oh my God, this has happened.” My children, as it turned out, are having my program, something I dreamed for children before they were even here. It’s sort of like on a personal level, I can’t explain the joy that I have when I go into a classroom of children who are experiencing this. There’s nothing like it, nothing, nothing, nothing. For me, all the work that I’ve done, my movies, amazing, you name it, nothing comes close to that except the birth of my own children and my grandchildren and my family.
When you talk about what do you do and what have you given back, and what are the choices we make as people—just as you, just as a person—what are those choices we make? They mean everything, and when I made this choice, I made it out of love: love for children, love for humanity, a dream for a better world. And I thought if you change one child, then I did OK. I never expected this program to go this far, and it’s now at critical mass, so it’s continuing to roll forward at a fast pace. When I sat in my meditation room and this came to me in my meditation, which was, “What am I going to do for the world?” I thought globally, I dreamed it globally, it was my vision. I never expected it to get there. I wanted it so much to go into the Middle East, and it’s there now.
TS: Goldie, when you saw that vision, did you at that point in time understand that it was about teaching people brain basics, or was it different? Was it about emotional intelligence? What did you see as the original seed?
GH: Yes, really good question. It was actually giving them greater emotional intelligence, and finding ways in which to deliver that. Because I had been at several conferences and so forth with Mind & Life and been to Dharmasala, and had gone up there with Richie Davidson and seen his research and realized—you know, understanding more about the brain—I realized at that point that mindfulness and this sort of thing is really good, but it didn’t quite ring the bell for me for kids. Even though it’s very important for them, I think they need to know more about what their brain is doing. After all, we ask them to use it. It’s a muscle, it’s brain fitness.
No school ever thought of it. When in fact we say, “Use your brain, pay attention,” children don’t even know what attention is. We can go to the man on the street and ask them three parts of their body, organs, but I’m quite sure that most of them wouldn’t know three parts of their brain. That’s what we’re trying to do, and we have seven-year-olds now explaining how the brain works for them, in our simple version.
TS: Yes. Now, I’m curious to know, in your own parenting and grandparenting, some stories about how you’ve drawn on this curriculum successfully, maybe some times when it didn’t work and that gave you some interesting feedback.
GH: Well, you know they’re little, and now I finally have a 10-year-old, and I have, I think he’s eight now, I’ve got a six-year-old, and I have a four-year-old. My four-year-old goes by herself and meditates, because she sees her brothers doing it, and she sees her father do it. He has taught them. He has taught the children, and I have as well, meaning, “Let’s just sit down and get quiet, let’s meditate for a while.” Or “Take some breaths before you act,” or “Calm down.” You know, they get over-excited, I’ll sit with them and say, “Let’s take some deep breaths before we figure this out.” In terms of giving them an understanding of brain, this is something that they have little books on, and that sort of thing that we do. But the other part of it is that when they’ve gone to this school and done this, and then when Ryder comes home, Ryder and I talk about this all the time. And Ryder is 13, and so he’s well aware of it.
Also my other grandson is very much aware of how important it is for him to quiet down. Now, learning the brain at four is tough, so we start at kindergarten, we start usually at five or six, and even then you start very small, little integration. Then when they get into first grade, then it starts to become a real thing. The brain is part of our children’s lives. In other words, we talk about the brain, we talk about, you know, “How does your brain feel today?” So it really gets them connected to it. We do, and you know it’s one of those things, grandma doesn’t live with them, so when we do, the good news for me is that my children are great parents and they do that. That’s the amazing thing, when I see my kids, with Oliver, who meditates, and they sit with him. This is what’s important.
TS: Now, your book, 10 Mindful Minutes, in which you really go into quite a bit of detail about how to introduce brain basics into a classroom or into a family, and then also how to work with various mindful awareness practices. The foreword to the book is written by Dan Siegel. As I was sitting with the book, a question came up for me, and I’m really curious about this, Goldie, which is, you know Dan Siegel is an expert on many things in the field of interpersonal neurobiology, but also on the importance of healthy attachment. I was thinking that if children don’t have healthy attachment early in their life, in the first couple of years of their life, parents who really turn towards them and attune to them, even if they learn these brain basics from kindergarten on, there’s going to be this kind of wound inside that is really hard to heal. I’m wondering what your thoughts are about that, and how as a culture we can help heal these early attachment wounds.
GH: Right, I mean I think that’s a huge problem, because children do come in with these attachment issues—the lack of attachment, sometimes too much attachment. The problem here is that all mental disturbances are not part of MindUP, which means that we cannot go in as that kind of a program. We can only go in to give them what they’re going to need in order to facilitate it at some point as their life goes on. It’s not going to fill the hole, just as mindfulness doesn’t fill the hole of any child or anybody who’s suffering from attachment problems. The problem with that is that it does create narcissism, and what is unfortunate is that the less attachment that a child has, the more potential narcissism can take place.
Narcissism, as we know, it’s not like, “Oh, he’s so narcissistic ….” Narcissism is a real condition, it’s a real personality disorder. It just breaks my heart, because all these narcissists who come out who are nasty, and they don’t like criticism, and they’re offensive, and they can be abusive—that’s a sad story, because these little guys and women didn’t come out that way. That’s what happens when you don’t have attachment to your parents and nurturing, it’s just awful. I would say this is a parent program, not a children’s program, and that program needs to go into the parents before they even have a baby.
These kind of things could be taught in high school, or you can obviously reach out and speak to parents everywhere, you know put up a website, write books on all of it in simple ways. I mean, the simple way is the best way, because it’s very hard to understand all this stuff, when you look at what are the connections of the brain that don’t get connected, what are the areas of empathy that don’t get expressed, why is it that when a child blah blah blah doesn’t feel this, they could lack empathy, you know, whatever. Also, you’re not doing what you promised, you bring a child into the world, that’s a big responsibility. It asks a lot of you.
That’s why I wrote 10 Mindful Minutes. Become mindful first, before you can ever expect to have a mindful, loving child. I think it’s a parent outreach.
TS: OK, in part of 10 Mindful Minutes, you talk about optimism being cultivated both in the school system and within our families, and you write that optimism acts like a resiliency vaccine. I wanted to hear more about this, and I’m just going to be vulnerable here for a moment, Goldie. As I was reading the book, I asked my wife of 16 years, I said, “Do you think I’m an optimist or a pessimist?” And she said, “Clearly Tami, you’re slightly pessimistic, but you’re less pessimistic than when I met you.” I think that’s true, I would say she’s slightly an optimist, but it just got me thinking about how pessimism can run pretty deep, and it’s a hard thing to change. I wanted to hear what you had to say about that, about how we can raise optimistic kids.
GH: Right, well first of all, the one thing our brain does is it looks out for danger. Especially you’ll find out a lot, and I’m going to go back here for a minute, but in men, and I think maybe a lot of women can relate to this, is that men are always … It’s like they’re more negative than you’d like. In other words it’s like, “Oh boy, see now that’s going to happen there. I knew that was going to happen, and now look at the downside.” It’s like I look at Kurt and he would look up and he’d say, “That plane is just way too low.” It’s sort of like, “Well, I know, but maybe the plane really isn’t going to crash, maybe it’s just taking off, or maybe it’s in a holding pattern,” whatever.
The brain is attuned to that, so it’s not that they’re necessarily pessimistic, sometimes it’s they’re looking for the danger side. In order to shift that, it’s like a muscle. I call it sort of the Grand Canyon of negativity. That’s the way everything connects in the brain, so it’s how the neurons fire, or they say, “Whatever fires together wires together.” So you literally look at supplanting the negative. So when you become aware of your language, “That will never happen, never.” You name those words, and you say, “Oh, look what I just said.” Awareness—which is what we’re trying to get our kids to become, self-aware and aware of others—awareness of self is very important, because then you can rephrase it [with] a more positive phrasing.
You supplant your negative thought with a positive thought, and we have some of that in the classroom, which is, “I’ll never do the test,” it’s self-talk. My self-talk is, “I can’t do the test, I’m not smart enough, I won’t get an A,” this is all the fearful self-talk. Then when it goes off through the brain and they understand what they’re doing, and it goes up through and passed through the amygdala, what would your higher brain say? Men, it’s like, “I can do the test, I feel I will do the best I can. I won’t worry about what my mom says, I’m going to do the best I can.” Down below, it says, “My mom will kill me.” It’s a way of rephrasing every time you say something, “I can’t do that, I’ll never do that.” Say, “Nope, I can do that, I will always be that way.” You know what I mean, “I will always … ”
The other thing, and my father said this to me—it’s such a cliché—but I was running through the house, I had the kids, I was going to the thing, I was younger, and I was on the phone and the thing and I was producing and … I wasn’t in the moment. My father was having coffee in the kitchen, and he looked at me and he said, “Go! Stop, stop, smell the roses, honey, you can’t do this.” I’ve never forgotten it, and every time I take a walk, I smell the roses, and obviously bring in my dad, because that’s the stuff that changes our mind and changes our brain. We strengthen our brain for more positivity. By the way, overly optimistic people are just as dangerous.
TS: I was going to bring that up, incidentally, but yes, I’m glad you are.
GH: Yes, because when you’re overly optimistic, you don’t see the world right either. I think that’s somebody who’s just not looking in the right direction. So it’s really about clarity of mind, and realizing that you’re finding more negative during the day than the positive, and it could be like the way you name something. I just look at it and I think, “OK.” And I’ve witnessed myself how I would approach a problem or approach a person, or that I’m frustrated because things aren’t going well, and I’m using the wrong words. You come back and you go, “Wait a minute, I have to rewrite this.”
TS: Now, I think being aware of our language, that’s very important, and I think that can give us a lot of insight into how we’re thinking. One of the things, though, that concerns me is if we just replace positives for negatives, can we be covering up how we’re really feeling, and kind of sugar-coating shit, so to speak, just to say it bluntly. That’s problematic.
GH: I know, that is problematic, that’s a different thing. Here’s the difference. The difference is, what your feelings are, as long as you’re in control of them, is you become less reactive. Becoming less reactive doesn’t mean that you’re less angry, but anger begets anger, it does not turn into anything good. When you are angry and you feel this anger, you have to sit with yourself to realize that the best thing to do is to understand why you’re angry, and then move into a way of approaching the subject so you have a modicum of calm. One of the reasons is, for me—I’m going to speak just personally, and I’ve lost it, but it takes me a long time to lose it, a long time, because I’m very aware and I’m very patient—what I realize is it doesn’t make me feel good.
I walk around then with a bad feeling, because I didn’t get it out on that person, and I look at this and I think, “No, I got it out on that person by sharing with them what I’m really feeling.” When you’re angry, you can say you’re angry, but you don’t have to yell and scream and lose your own ability to think, because you become reactive. That reactivity is actually more destructive than what made you angry in the first place. Anger is a really interesting thing, or your true feelings. I mean, I can know when I was with a man once and I didn’t want to be with him anymore, and it was very dangerous, it was not a good situation, not dangerous but dangerous to stay in something that isn’t good.
You approach it after thinking about it and concerning yourself with how you’re going to handle this. At the end of the day, sitting down and saying, “Look, we had the best time, but right now, I know something, and that is that I can’t be here anymore. This is about me, it’s not about you, and it’s not about blame. You’ve done things that aren’t good, I’ve done things that aren’t good.” Was I angry before that? Over time, yes, I’ve been angry, but I handled it differently. I handled it with respect and love, and I got exactly what I wanted, which was freedom, but freedom without hurting someone—you know, attacking them, abusing them verbally.
TS: Yes, makes sense.
GH: Our emotions are ours, they’re not anybody else’s. And when we want to look at how we’re going to have an optimum experience, then we have to look at our emotional construct really clearly and say, “How am I going to look at this day, and how am I going to face this problem? I’m going to tell him how I feel, but I’m not going to be angry.”
TS: Yes, that makes sense to me, and you explained it very clearly, a kind of clean anger without the charge.
GH: Without the charge. Oftentimes other people want to be angry. I remember somebody called me once years ago, and he’s well-known, and this was like the ‘70s, but I remembered it. He said, “Did you tell so-and-so that I [thing], because when I tell you something, I want it in privacy, and I don’t want to be repeated, and you know blah blah blah blah.” I listened, and I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that was confidential.” He paused for the longest time and said, “Wow, I really respect you for that, I really do.” He said, “Most people are defensive and they get angry, and I really appreciate that.” It was so interesting to see how it quelled his anger, because I listened and I owned it. It’s kind of a dance, but I think it’s actually a mindful dance.
TS: Goldie, there’s just a few other things I want to squeeze in here and talk to you about. I’m just going to squeeze them in quickly, because I’m so impressed that MindUP currently is reaching more than six million children, and at the same time, there’s this force I think working against mindful awareness in children, which is the force of technology and iPhones and all of our gadgets and always being on our phones instead of present with the people we’re even having a meal with. I wonder, how do you see this force of technology and MindUP’s recommendations to educators and parents?
GH: Well, it’s actually a double-edged sword, because there are many things on these devices that are helpful. On the other side, this addiction is like enormous, we all feel it. I mean, I leave the house now without my phone, as long as somebody has a device. But I traveled across the country with my children in a van, I never had a phone. You realize today, they’re in the car, they’re in the thing, people aren’t conversing, they’re at tables looking at their phones—I mean, it’s stealing many aspects of our intimacy, our humanity, our ability to look each other in the eye and have empathy—for our wonderful thing called mirror neurons, which is you’re able to be with someone, feel the glow and the energy in their eyes, and then you emit the same thing.
I mean, what are we doing? What we try to do is just with the phones, we have a very serious program in terms of what we do in the classroom, which is where we talk about the phone. And the phone has to stay off and in a certain place, because it steals what we’re doing and it actually confuses the brain. We have a bit of talk on that in the classroom, especially as they get older. This is something we have to become aware of, to teach kids about it and parents, but honey, I don’t see how we’re going to change it, I really don’t. I think the only way to change it is through personal self-awareness and how it’s taking you away from community, rather than connecting you to community, because it just does.
Sitting in a circle in a classroom is so much better than being on the social media, but we’re just fighting an uphill battle, I’m telling you. I just think the idea of continuing to talk about it, make it a thing, watch families, children, you know you’ve got so much time you want to be on that and then you’ve got to be off, done. The reason is not because I don’t like you, but here’s what this can do. I’m not being mean. Other than that, honey, I have no idea, I really don’t, it’s a conundrum for me.
TS: Now, Goldie, when I was preparing for this conversation and learning more about your life, something really struck me. What struck me was just how you’ve found a way throughout your life, and this is my own language, to find a position of empowerment, to find empowerment in your life, whether it was starting to meditate when you felt anxious and it was a time of upheaval, or becoming one of the first women to direct and produce films, here now starting MindUP from a vision that you had about expressing your heart to help children. I mean, this is amazing to me, and I wonder what it feels like on the inside when it comes to finding a place of personal power in your life, what does that feel like on the inside?
GH: You know, it’s really interesting. I’m not aware of it, and this is not me being humble. I’m just not aware of it. I hear you say that and it brings tears to my eyes, because it’s a recognition that I never think about, and the reason is because I never set out in life to be anything but a dancer. In other words, I didn’t have lofty goals that I felt that I couldn’t achieve. What’s happened to me is this feeling—as this began, as my life began—that I was fearless. That’s the one thing that I was: fearless. And practical. When I started producing, I produced because I could, because I felt just for a practical reason that women were not getting the roles that they should get, and we need to develop them. And I felt that because I was sort of a specific kind of character, it was much better to develop movies that meant something, because certain things mattered to me, social issues, women’s movement, a lot of things mattered to me, along with comedy.
I took that step fearlessly. And destiny is an interesting thing, because then that parlayed into other things: producing for other women, writing, directing. And then came a time when I wanted to write a book, but I didn’t want to write a memoir on my life, because that wasn’t about anything, “Oh, you know and my mother did this ….” What I wanted to write was how this story can help people, it was really about that. That’s when I wrote Lotus in the Mud, my first book, because I wanted my experiences that weren’t always good, that came out … what I learned from them. It was a teaching. Then came what I’ve done with the children and all of this, because it needed to happen.
I just went out there, like I said, one child maybe, but obviously I had a bigger dream on that one, and I’ve just put one foot in front of the other, honey, that’s it.
TS: Yes, but being fearless is not a small thing, I think many of us have a lot of fear and it stops us.
GH: It does.
TS: Maybe we go a little bit, but then it stops us.
GH: It does, it can. I mean, it is the idea, And you know it runs in many ways. Like these are big things I did because it was my life, so yes, I was already acting, so one step in front of the other, but it’s also, “What do you believe in?” Because it has to do with what you believe in, what you care about. When we look at our lives and we get stuck, or we go to the office, you know sitting in a cubicle, what is it that you care about that will matter to you? I mean, some people are concerned about the aged, some people are concerned about children, some people are concerned about dogs and their lives and animals, there are many many things to care about, and the environment, gardening. What is your passion?
To me, that’s the first thing you have to find. Because that’s what brings depression, when people don’t feel useful, they start to wind down because they don’t feel that they matter. And every person matters and every single idea that you can say, “What do I care about?” Ask yourself the question. That is what matters. One step in front of the other, is that you’re going in a direction that matters, and that’s how I felt, movies about something with women in it mattered. Comedy mattered, it relieved stress, it made people happy. That mattered. Doing books about things that would help other people; that matters. And creating programs for children today, that’s everything to me, that’s everything.
Yes, I’m going to do a TV series and I’m doing this and I’m doing that, and it’s all going to be fun, but my big question is, “What is it about?” What is that TV series about? Funny, yes, women of a certain age going out there, doing her thing. It’s going to be funny and fun, but what is it about? That’s what I want to know.
TS: Goldie Hawn, thank you so much for moving forward step by step in a direction that matters to you, because it’s given such gifts to all of us. Thank you, thank you so much.
GH: Thank you it was so much fun talking to you, Tami.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Goldie Hawn, the founder of MindUP. If you’re interested to know more: mindup.org. SoundsTrue.com, many voices, one journey, thanks for listening.
