The Ultimate Balancing Act: Camille Vidal on healthy hedonism, mindful drinking and balancing life to find true wellness

(Camille vidal)

Camille Vidal defines — and teaches to others — healthy hedonism through a memory. It's idyllic and takes place in her childhood in the south of France. She grew up in a family that saw food and drink as a conduit to a genuinely good and meaningful time. “I have this amazing memory of sitting in the garden [...] with my parents and having a little drink,” she says. “Something that for me, obviously, was non-alcoholic, and for my parents it was alcoholic.” 

It’s a simple memory, but in hearing Vidal retell it, one feels the evening breeze carrying the musky scent of lavender, the hissing of cicadas, and the sigh of trees stretching. Vidal’s memory is a suffusion of not just sensory pleasures, but the kind of goodness that fills the belly, like a warm meal after a long, hard day. “Food and drink were bringing people together,” Vidal says of her memory. The vignette she describes is a picture of organic community, brought on through a celebration of humanness, which is what healthy hedonism is partly about. Hearing Vidal relate her memory, one is inclined to follow suit.  

Vidal is the founder of mindful drinking brand La Maison Wellness, a bartender, wellness and yoga teacher, and a healthy hedonist, which is a delicate balance of opposites to achieve genuine and long-lasting wellbeing. The garden memory is where Vidal’s journey toward holistic wellbeing by way of healthy hedonism begins, even if as a child she didn’t know it. 

Camille Vidal

Here is where the foundations were laid for her approach to life and work: An excess of pleasure organically flowers into genuine communal connections, but this can only be accomplished through good food and drink, and whole-body wellness, which is achieved through moderation. 

Before La Maison Wellness, Vidal worked as a global ambassador for a spirits company. During her travels as an ambassador, she realized that she needed a balance in her life. A return to the memory of her parents’ garden. 

“I started practicing yoga and meditation, and being more conscious of my drinking habits and the way that I was eating,” she says. She started to think about ways to bring mindfulness into her everyday life, and actually and actively acted on these ways. She became a certified yoga and meditation teacher and began learning about holistic wellness by studying healing and nutrition. 

“And then I realized that there was a need in the hospitality industry for opening this conversation around physical wellbeing, [too],” she says. “Because it's a really challenging job with long hours and a bit of that rock ‘n roll lifestyle of burning the candles at both ends,” she says. Vidal was inspired to inspire the hospitality industry, and thus the next chapter of her life began. 

“I really focused on how I could inspire the industry to look after their physical wellbeing a bit more,” she says. “I was teaching yoga and was sharing my journey and connecting with people.” 

“I really focused on how I could inspire the industry to look after their physical wellbeing a bit more,” she says.”

In straddling the two worlds of the drink industry and of the wellness industry, Vidal found a surprising amount of people who found healthiness too rigorous, meaning they would feel guilt every time they did something that wasn’t exactly prescribed by the specific regime they were following. 

“Healthy diets were always about restriction and not being able to enjoy life, or to celebrate with soul-nourishing food and delicious cocktails,” Vidal says. “And I felt that every time we talked about mindful drinking, it was about cutting out alcohol. It was about removing something and it was always this idea of removing joy.” Healthy hedonism, on the other hand, infuses joy back into life, the kind of joy Vidal felt as a kid.

Vidal’s career is an organic extension of her younger life. She grew up surrounded by art: her father was an artist, she grew up in the theatre, and then she went to art school. Within her has always been a well of creativity that finally found its stage behind a bar. 

“I started creating cocktails and working with flavours, and creating something that not only will taste delicious, but also will look incredible and will create this experience for people,” she says, talking about the shimmering experience of closeness felt over good food and drink. She loved crafting cocktails, for it allowed her to channel her creativity.  

“For me, a hedonist is someone who celebrates life, who finds joy and pleasure in every single moment,” Vidal says. When a slight amendment is made to hedonism, one finds oneself in pure joy: lace mindfulness through hedonism. 

“I feel that in our society, we go so much to extremes,” Vidal says. “It's like, ‘I'm going to binge drink over the weekend, but then I'm not going to drink for the rest of the week’. Actually, that's way worse for your body than having maybe a few glasses throughout the week in a more mindful way, because your body can only process one unit of alcohol per hour. So when you're binge drinking on the weekend, you're actually damaging your body so much more than if you were having a few dinners out with your friend and a few glasses of wine throughout the week.”

“For me, a hedonist is someone who celebrates life, who finds joy and pleasure in every single moment,” Vidal says. When a slight amendment is made to hedonism, one finds oneself in pure joy: lace mindfulness through hedonism. ”

For Vidal, healthy hedonism is about allowing ourselves to celebrate the little moments, in little moments. “[It’s not about] the glass being half empty, it’s actually about the glass being half full,” she says. “[It’s about] being more positive and celebrating and finding the things that you love and the flavour, and still being able to go out on the Monday night, even if you have a busy Tuesday, because you can drink something that is alcohol free.”

Ultimately, Vidal is a teacher of how to live well, and she excels in this arena best if you just witness her speak. Her words are measured and always grounded in an intuitive way in the lessons she has learned in her life. Her career has been full of self-recursive meditations, and to know Vidal is to know her journey toward knowledge and self-growth. Teaching how to live well through her own experiences is a running theme for Vidal, who speaks of her past self with respect, as though appreciative of her growth; Vidal teaches by example.   

“I realized how linked our drinking habit was and how much alcohol was too often a coping mechanism for a lot of people in the industry,” she says. In action, inspiring change for Vidal looks like shifting the conversation around what a cocktail is, what it looks like, that it can still be a meaningful glass of art without alcohol being a part of it, that moments of connection can still be forged without alcohol. She focused on creating measurable change within the culture of drinking to take people back to the reason why they might have picked up a glass of wine in the first place: to forge connections with others.

“I launched my company La Maison Wellness with this idea and this desire to create a platform to expand the conversation around mindful drinking, to introduce people to mindful drinking, and to show them that actually alcohol doesn't have to be part of the equation,” she says. 

“She focused on creating measurable change within the culture of drinking to take people back to the reason why they might have picked up a glass of wine in the first place: to forge connections with others.”

Vidal is now a mindful drinker, and contrary to the foolhardy images hedonism might bring to mind, healthy hedonism is really all about getting the most and best goodness out of any moment, feeling it to its fullest. Alcohol has a tendency to numb our senses, to buttress us against the starkness of reality, but healthy hedonism, which asks of us that we practice drinking (among other things) in moderation, frees us to bear witness to the world’s vibrancy, and continue to be well and cogent enough to do this for a while longer.

Camille Vidal hopes to empower people to feel pure joy, uncut by the mugginess that alcohol leaves in its wake. She doesn’t preach sobriety — she herself consumes alcohol — but she is a strong proponent of education, which undergirds her work in the wellness and mindfulness world, through La Maison Wellness. 

“I do a lot of pop-ups and events [in collaboration with different brands],” she says. She also conducts seminars for consumers and tradespeople, where she teaches mindful drinking. “[Education] for me is very much using the skills that I have in creating cocktails and the knowledge that I have in the mindful drinking movement, [and sharing it] to open the conversation, and to invite more people into this and to make it more inclusive,” Vidal says. 

“I feel that sometimes the mindful drinking movement can feel a bit like you have to be sober or you're out, when I actually think that there's a lot of people that want to find balance,” she says. 

“I feel that sometimes the mindful drinking movement can feel a bit like you have to be sober or you’re out, when I actually think that there’s a lot of people that want to find balance.”

“[My work is] not about telling [people] to drink or to not drink alcohol,” she says. “It's giving them the tools and the knowledge and the skills to be able to then make the decision that works the best for them. And for some of them, that's going to be cutting alcohol completely out and finding their balance in sobriety. And for a lot of other people, that's going to be being more mindful in what they drink and having the knowledge of knowing when to switch with something that is alcohol free, and knowing what they like.” 

Mindful cocktails, an idea Vidal crafted, are what she uses to help people find what they like. Many of the recipes she has up on her site are meant for people to use and share with others. Vidal’s work is never preaching or self-righteous because she teaches and provides education from a personal and humble space — her knowledge-sharing is inspired by the story of her parents’ garden, of her journey of going from the world to herself and back again.  

“Sometimes I will have a glass of wine from a very beautiful natural wine producer, and I'm very conscious and very aware of what I drink,” she says. “But I also know that I will [drink it] in such a very mindful way that I never go over my limits. I never felt disconnected to my choices. I feel very empowered in the decisions that I make, regardless if I'm drinking something that is low alcohol, or if I'm drinking something that is alcohol free.”