‘Vida’ Star Cara Santana on Feeling Centered, Beating the Blues, and Owning Her Sexuality

Season 3 of “Vida” premiered on Starz last week, and star Cara Santana is celebrating with a beautiful cover shoot for Retreat magazine!

In the interview, Santana, 35, talks about the power of feeling centered in these trying times, revealing, “Given that the total landscape of our world has changed, it’s been a really interesting time to reflect and reconnect… My mom sent me an article from Business Insider about universities offering free courses, which I thought was a bit of my mom trying to get me to go back to college like she always wanted me to do. Yale’s most coveted course is the course called ‘The Science of Well-Being’ by Dr Laurie Santos, and it takes scientific research and data to prove that we can have an impact on our well-being… and it has been fascinating. I’m so grateful for this time to be able to do it.”

As happy as she considers herself to be, Santana was in for a rude awakening! “I took the course’s happiness test,” she said. “I thought I was going to get a 10. I got a 3.5, so there is so much more that I could be doing to create a much more centered well-being for myself.”

One key to contentment? “A good orgasm. To give yourself a good orgasm,” she said. “That’s what it is. To be able to have the power to own your sexuality.”

Bouncing back from setbacks and disappointments is something we all must learn to do, and Santana was talking about that in terms of her 16 years of sobriety, as well as telling Retreat that her advice for conquering a bad mood is “consistency and doing things that keep you from getting to a place where you need to reboot.”

She went on to say, “Something that I’ve been doing for a while now is morning pages. Every morning when I get up before I do anything, I write three pages of just free thought, whatever comes out. When I don’t have anything to write, I write that I don’t have anything to write and suddenly something comes. That’s a great way of cleansing any anxiety that I’ve woken up with and allows me to get everything that’s been garbled in my mind out so that I can start the day fresh. At night before I go to bed, I have a journal at my bedside and I write a gratitude list. They can be big or small, like I’m grateful for my dog or I’m grateful for the opportunity to shoot the cover for Retreat magazine, or whatever it is just to remind me of the things that I do have in my life. When I go to bed at night, I’m going to sleep with positive thoughts.”

The new issue of Retreat is on sale now!