How Goldie Sees The World

Stars Talks About Memoir, 'A Lotus Grows In The Mud'

(CBS) 

Hawn says, "I look at him as if it's the first time I've ever seen him. I pretend that I just met him. I do all kinds of things, because everything becomes so humdrum. It's very interesting about depression, not that this could lead into that, but repetitive things, like living in the same living room, or doing the same repetitive motion, or going to the same job, or getting in the same car and driving on the same road and doing all of these things, actually can lead to a low-grade depression. That's what happens to the brain."

Today, she says she is studying more about neuro-science and why we do the things we do, as well as "learning how to re-create new neuro pathways in the brain which, I guess, we can do because of brain elasticity," she says. To think that her career started as a dyslexic blonde in "Laugh In."

Hawn recalls mixing up her words the first time they showed her the cue cards to read. "I have so much self-humor that I started laughing. I asked them to please let me do it again. They say, 'No, that was just fine, Goldie.' So I went, 'Oh, OK' And that's how, I guess, this career was born," she says. "It was hard though because I had to be me a lot. I had to pretend I was dyslexic when I actually did read the words properly, so it became a different muscle I had to work."

The book ends with Hawn's account of a trip to a Buddhist monastery in Dharamsala, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, with her sons Oliver Hudson and Boston Russell, a practicing Buddhist and Buddhist scholar then in his final year at the university. She reveals the lesson learned there that served as the inspiration for the title of this memoir. She also offers her reflections on the joys and agonies of letting go of her daughter-Kate Hudson-and watching her become her own person, experiencing life on her own terms.