Gifts of Gratitude and Balance
Growing up in the spotlight was a way of life for Mariel Hemingway. The granddaughter of the famous author, Ernest Hemingway, she couldn’t avoid public recognition. However, it was when she was 13 years old that she started forging her own road to fame by starring in her first movie. Thirty films would follow, and one would even earn her an Oscar nomination. She went on to appear in the medium of television, as well.
Mariel has immersed herself in her passion for health and yoga over the last two decades, leading wellness retreats across the United States. Today, she is acknowledged as a steady voice of balanced health and living, and generously shares her insights on movement, nutrition, yoga, silence, and home.
The granddaughter of a prolific author, it should come as no surprise that Mariel is an accomplished author herself. The subjects of her books are about those things dearest to her heart. She wrote her memoir, Finding My Balance, which was a bestseller, to record her life’s journey through the lens of meditation and yoga. These were both tools that played an integral part in her own life as she’s coped with fear, loss, uncertainty, and difficult times requiring great decisions or life-altering changes.
Her second book is a how-to guide to help people achieve balance and wellbeing. Entitled Healthy Living from the Inside Out, in it Mariel offers self-empowering techniques to assist people in finding wellbeing, health and balance in all areas of their lives using self-acceptance and self-love.
Health, the environment, spirituality and community are some of Mariel’s favorite topics, and she is working on some documentaries that highlight some of these subjects.
The first step in becoming aware of the health and wellbeing of the environment around us is a healthy mind, body and spirit. A subject of vital important to Mariel, in her book, Healthy Living from the Inside out, she beautifully defines what living with environment awareness in the world today means. It all boils down to our own internal ecology, or environment. That’s where we have to start.
Mariel feels that community is becoming ever more important. An important topic to her, she speaks passionately and frequently about family and ritual. She believes that we need to embrace gratitude and live lives full of appreciation. When we live life from a place of consciousness and awareness, this occurs naturally. Gratitude, then, is a natural extension of becoming aware, of becoming conscious.
Mariel has become a spokesperson of sorts for the two most powerful healing techniques today: self-love and self-acceptance. It’s important to recognize that we don’t have to change everything at once if we’re looking to improve areas of our lives. We can take just a few things and by developing new habits in those areas, we can effect change in our lives. It all begins with a shift.
