Virginia Madsen on intention, health and longevity

Actor Virginia Madsen talks about her experience in ski school [Yes, Virginia, by Karen Breslau, More Magazine]:

Her third day on skis [Breslau writes], she persuaded her instructor to take her to the top of a black-diamond run — the kind inevitably named Devil’s Gulch or Dead Man’s Curve. She wanted to test herself.

“I was hurling myself down that mountain with a purpose,” says Madsen, recalling the run five years ago at a Utah resort. Luckily, she didn’t wind up in the ER. Instead, she picked up some life experience. “It wasn’t just about skiing,” she says. “It was about living with intention, like, I am going somewhere. I’m on a path.”

It’s hard to imagine that Madsen, lean and fit and radiating energy, was only a few years back debilitated by postpartum depression, suffering from migraines and back pain, and by her own admission, self-medicating with food, drink, and painkillers.

Although Madsen managed to hold it together for her young son, she says every other part of her life suffered. “I was sad, weepy, blank,” she says. After a doctor finally determined that Madsen’s hormone levels had dropped far below menopausal levels after Jack’s birth, she began, with the aid of hormone replacement therapy, to recover.

She started Pilates, took up hiking — and kamikaze skiing — and Boogie-boarding with Jack. She went back to acting school.

And she started working out with a 74-year-old trainer. “He helps me to imagine the kind of 60- or 70-year-old I want to become,” she says.

“To be ready for old age, you need to start becoming strong now. Getting in shape is like putting money away for retirement. Beauty has to come from within,” she says. “You can be in the greatest gene pool in the world and still mess it up if you don’t live right.”

Wayne Dyer (author of The Power of Intention) clarifies in a beliefnet interview that intention does not mean “a pit-bull attitude and nothing’s going to stop me and nobody can get in my way… that’s really the ego at work. And the ego is the thing that really separates our selves from our source.”

Programs by Wayne Dyer and many others are available at ConsciousOne and Nightingale-Conant.

Talent Development Resources has a lot of material on depression and dealing with it – see the section Depression and Creativity. [Note - the ski photo is not Madsen.]
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