Shailene Woodley Is Convincing Me to Talk to Plants

There’s no right way to “do” wellness, but Marie Claire’s Doing Well offers a glimpse into the self-care mantras, therapies, and affirmations practiced by industry trailblazers.

Roughly around the same that Shailene Woodley rose to fame for her role as Amy Juergens in The Secret Life of an American Teenager, she was candid about her homemade natural toothpaste, aluminum-free deodorant, and bone broth. Circa 2008, those were considered woo-woo practices. Now? They’re “mainstream.” As Woodley’s career grew, so did her connection to her body, mind, and soul.

The actress’s IMDB page reads like a list of what to binge: The Descendants, the Divergent series, The Fault in Our Stars, and Big Little Lies. The latter earned her a Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy nomination. Simultaneously, Woodley was honing in on Ayurveda practices and studying herbalism off-screen. Her connection to nature isn’t lip service. The Snowden star doubles as an environmental activist, serving as a Greenpeace Ocean Ambassador and a member of Conservation International’s Leadership Council.

Through a Zoom screen, Woodley tells me about her holistic approach to everyday life—and why I should start talking to plants.

I feel quite allergic to wellness trends. Anytime you try to commodify something good for you, it defeats the purpose of it being good for you. To me, wellness is just a lifestyle. A friend of mine once said: I don't understand this idea of going on vacation. You go on vacation to catch up on sleep, relax, connect with your lover, and de-stress. It’s such an American mindset. Why don't we curate a lifestyle where those things can be a part of our everyday lives? That's sort of how I see wellness trends.

Ten years ago, the word “woo woo” made sense. Now, the lines are so blurred that I don’t know what it means anymore. I used to think of wellness as something outside of myself. Something that I think other people might think is weird is that I actually find just being a really direct, honest, truthful person to be one of the best things you can do for yourself and for the people around you. There's no confusion. There's clarity to what you’re thinking and what you feel. We're so hyper-aware of the world around us, and yet, we often don't have true clarity in our Western cultures.

I'm a big believer in manifestation and intuition. I'll put a question or quandary out into the universe, and somehow, the answer will find its way. I believe that's how energy works.

It involves abhyanga. I learned about it through Ayurveda. It's the practice of rubbing oil all over your body. You start with your head, and then you move down toward your heart, from your feet up towards your heart, and your arms up to your towards your heart. It's something that I do every day. What I don’t do every day—because it’s a mess—is oil my whole head. I make my oils at this point. My grandma’s a naturopath, and I studied herbalism in my teens and early 20s, so I grew up around alternative practices. If I don’t have time to make my own, I’ll use Surya’s Cooling Oil or Calming Body Oil, depending on the time of year.

The idea that you have to have this smoothie from this place, you have to have these Lululemon pants, and you have to go to this class—it's all these ideas of having to be something other than what we are. The thing that's not talked about a lot in wellness, because you can't really make money off of it, is just truly sitting down, connecting with yourself and figuring out what wellness means to you. For some people, that means praying to a God. For some people it's meditating. For some people it's driving really fast in a car, on a deserted road, blasting music, and smoking a cigarette out the window. We all have different ways to connect with ourselves. The most important thing we can do is connect with ourselves—without judgment.

Buying the Surya oil. It's expensive, but it's worth it. Having that one product elevates my entire connection to my body, my connection to self-love, and my connection to acceptance of what my body looks like without clothes on. All of the things that we struggle with so much as women living in a world of comparison and competition stem from false ideas of what beauty looks like.

My connection to wellness has always been rooted in nature. When studying herbalism, I remember one of my teachers telling me to pick a plant and sit next to it. Instead of researching what that plant can do, I was supposed to sit next to it and see if it would intuitively start speaking to me. That was the first time that I thought about the idea of intuitively picking up on the world around me instead of constantly staring at the phone trying to digest information. The first plant that I did that with was stinging nettle. Still, to this day, when I travel, I don't travel with just clothes. Half my suitcases is filled with oils and dried plants, and a millage of random tchotchkes.

I'm pretty dialed in, but Martha Soffer [founder of Surya] is my go-to person when I don't have answers myself. When I was younger, I looked to many herbalists like Rosemary Gladstar or Susan Weed. I also did a lot of women's circles and women's festivals or gatherings all over the world. Usually, I was one of the younger ones. You'd camp or you would stay in cabins together and exchange information. You’d see a bunch of women running around naked and suddenly, you wouldn't feel as insecure about your own body because you saw everybody's bodies and you realized we all looked different.

I dig water. When I'm in a relationship, one of the first things I tell the person I'm dating is that if I’m ever in a bad mood, I just need you to run me a bath and light a candle—I'll come out such a kind person. If I'm feeling stressed out, I'll sit in the bath. If I don't have a bath, I'll take a long shower. If I can't take a long shower, even sitting with a cup of tea will ground me.

Happiness isn't my constant. I can find joy anywhere, though. I'm the person who can find joy sleeping on the ground in the middle of nowhere. I can find joy in a room full of people or by myself. There's really no situation I can't find joy in. The thing that takes away my happiness is when I'm trying to be in control of a situation that I actually have no control over.

I’m not trying to please people or sugarcoat anything. I’m not trying to worry about what someone else will think about me if I say or do or am something different than what they want me to be.

I'm happiest when I make choices that align with who I am. In the past, I’ve made choices or spent time around certain individuals who have very different values than I have or tend towards narcissism. That's when my nervous system gets totally dysregulated.

Basti therapy. Look it up.

I'm a huge supporter of therapy. I think therapy is wonderful, and it's completely changed my life. Both my parents are therapists, and I appreciate the modality. Yet, I think there is a danger at the moment in our Western societies of being over-therapized and using words and terms against one another instead of having true conflict resolution.

I just feel like everyone's offended today, to be honest. I think that that has bled into the wellness world. There's this double-edged sword of if you don't look a certain way if you don't do a certain thing, if you don't have this certain product or practice, then you are not enlightened or you're not evolved. I think that that's a really sad way to approach wellness because it's very isolating and it's actually the antithesis of what wellness is. We're all just searching for how do we get back to being human beings again instead of these sorts of puppets of stress and anxiety and low self-esteem and low self-worth.

I don't say this in a pretentious way at all, but when I was 15 or 20, I was talking about things and people looked at me like I was an insane person. I would talk about bone broth or medicinal mushrooms, my own natural toothpaste, or natural deodorant. I received the funniest labels in the world for what I said, and now it's so mainstream. I would just tell my younger self not to stress and to follow your heart.