There was something about Hoffman
and the experiential nature of it to
kind of get beyond that
really start feeling because I had lost the
ability to tell you what I felt. If
you were to ask me, how do I
feel? My response was fine. And I literally
couldn't tell you anything else. It's like, I'm
fine. But I couldn't tell you I'm sad,
that I'm frustrated,
that I'm angry.
The capacity to feel had just been lost.
Hoffman gave that back to me.
Hello, and welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a
podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute.
My name is Sadie Hanna. And in this
podcast, you'll hear real conversations and stories with
graduates about their courageous journey inward, and how
their love and light are living in the
world around them. Love's Everyday Radius.
Thank you for being here and welcome.
Hey, everyone, and welcome. I'm Sadie. I'm here
with Doctor. Cash Trivedi.
Cash is a Hoffman grad.
He's a gastroenterologist
for the past fifteen years. He owns his
own private practice.
He's a husband. He's a father.
Cash, welcome.
Oh, Sadie, I'm so excited to be here
with you. Yeah. So good to see you
and hear you. Yes. Thank you for being
here.
What I was appreciating
about our connection,
both of us having a background in medicine,
this could be
bridging the two.
Hoffman is this experience of
emotional
presence,
spirituality,
which are often really not part of medical
practice.
Beginning with this, what would you like for
our listeners to know about you?
Well, I consider myself a regular person.
You know, I
have listened to
nearly all of the Hoffman podcasts. And before
I did Hoffman, I really tried to learn
as much as I could about it without
actually learning the specifics about it because I
wanted the unique
experience. But, you know, I think what you're
saying in terms of there's so much actually
the potential of spirituality
and the potential of,
especially, mental health and
how we see that all the time and
how it affects our bodies.
It's kind of gotten a bit more clear
since Hoffman. But personally, for me, I came
to Hoffman
for my own personal journey,
and then whatever seems to bleed off into
the professional
sense is kind of crazy. But, yeah, I
see so much
mental health affecting
gut issues and people with
severe belly pain or gastrointestinal
issues. And, you know,
there's so many people out there where you
do every test and everything is negative, but
this is kind of beyond
the realm of objective data.
And sometimes there's just not a test, and
it seems like and I do explain this
to patients. I'm like, as many tests as
we have,
it's so common for us to do our
procedures and take a look and do the
test and everything is normal, but it's not
normal.
You know, more and more, I in myself,
I see it. I think sometimes it's a
kind of a healing of the spirit that
needs to happen,
kind of an awakening to one's quadrinity
using Hoffman speak. I don't mean to be
woo woo about it. Right? But for me,
the real
impact of Hoffman was personal, and that's kind
of what brought me there.
Yes.
So let's go there
first.
Tell us a bit about
where you were before you came to the
process. How did you know it was the
right choice for you? What was happening?
As long as I remember, I've struggled with
depression,
anxiety as well, but the anxiety aspect of
it, for some reason, really started spiking.
After I turned 50,
maybe it was a midlife thing. I don't
know. Just kind of a recalibration
of what am I doing, where am I
at. I felt disconnected from myself. I felt
disconnected
from my work.
I didn't like myself.
I couldn't relate to my inner child anymore,
though I tried doing various practices or whatnot.
I knew something was there regarding childhood. I
knew that there were some patterns there that
I just was not able to unearth and
no amount of therapy or sort of self
investigation
really seemed to touch it. So nowadays, when
in doubt, ask ChattGPT.
You said I knew I'd lost connection to
my inner child. How did you know that?
What
led you there?
About a year ago, I started doing somatic
therapy.
So there's different kinds of psychotherapy. There's cognitive
behavioral therapy and then DBT. There's a lot
of different kinds, EMDR, for example.
But I had tried a couple of those,
and I don't know. It felt like that
there wasn't any lasting
positive effect. I mean, I'd feel better for
a while, and then I would kinda go
back to my same patterns. My wife had
done somatic therapy, and I said, why not?
Let's just go ahead and do it. Somatic
therapy has an experiential
aspect. That's actually a big aspect about it,
which is
totally unlike what I do. I'm a intellectual
guy. I stay in my intellect a lot,
and that leads my solutions for everything.
And I couldn't break out of that. I
remember one time I was doing a session
with my somatic therapist,
and it involved visualizing
my inner child. And I remember just sitting
on a bench.
I was me, and I remember seeing
my boy, and he was, like, six.
And
I wanted nothing to do with him.
I
felt so disconnected and almost disgusted
by this
little boy
that was me,
but I was just so
absolutely
disgusted by this kid.
I remember years ago when I was doing
some kind of therapy, I had asked that
practitioner,
what would happen if you killed your inner
child?
Because I knew he was
directing so many of my patterns,
but I didn't know how to resolve that.
And so when I was
sort of trying to look for the next
best thing, you know, it's always searching for
a new way of resolving one's spiritual crises.
I happened upon Hoffman, and I looked, I
was like, I had never heard of this.
What is this? What is the Hoffman process?
And so I started looking it up.
And fairly quickly, I was like, I need
to do this. I need to do this
yesterday.
It give me hope, and so I delved
into it. You know, the wait list is,
like, I think, six to seven months, and
I was willing to go to Canada. I
was like, I don't care. I had some
time set aside maybe for a trip or
something at the beginning of the year. So
at least I wasn't booked then, and so
it was a perfect opportunity.
I happened to be called a couple of
weeks before, the session started, and I was
asked if I wanted to go to Petaluma
instead. And since I live in California, I
said, of course, you know, I'd rather not
deal with Calgary weather. So that's kinda what
led me to Hoffman, but I was in
a deep state of
constant,
constant
disconnectedness and anxiety. It's like I felt the
flight response and the freeze response,
It's like I felt the flight response and
the freeze response were just so daily and
intense. And, you know, during my day,
you know, I don't think most of my
patients or my staff could tell. In health
care, we
have to put on this mask
because
the people that we're seeing are hurting or
afraid or scared, and we have to take
it upon ourselves to be strong for them.
They find out the person taking care of
them was falling apart. The assumption is, oh
my god. I can't do my job. But
it was so exhausting to have to pretend
all the time. It's an interesting thing you're
describing,
being comfortable
as an intellectual
and find the solution.
And you're describing a disconnect from your emotional
aspect, your emotional child,
and even
sounds like a disconnect from body which led
you to somatic
therapy, and yet I can walk through my
career
and function as an intellect and no one
knows. It's actually like a reflex.
It's almost easier.
It's easier to be distracted
by
the ups and downs of a busy practice
and
almost not have to think or think in
a different way, you know, think in an
intellectual way rather than sort of sit there
with
all the discomfort and the confusion and the
hurt and the anxiety and the depression.
Yeah. It just this maelstrom.
And you mentioned the flight and freeze
experience within you. Can you tell us more
about that?
You know, for my entire life, I've always
been seeking, like, okay. Why am I this
way? Why do I respond
by distracting myself? Why do I feel like
I can't connect with people? Why
do I not like or love myself? I
was always exploring this ever since I was
young,
and
I had gotten
into learning more about trauma responses
and kind of investigating that a little bit
more and learning about that. And it became
pretty clear that my response was freeze,
flight or freeze or fawn. You know, I'm
not a fighting kinda person.
So that would be my
coping strategy.
As now I realize that as a young
boy,
I would
distract myself
or
I would to be able to cope with
not having parents there or having parents that
were disconnected from me, I would
ingratiate myself to them so that they know,
like, I'm proving myself to them
that I am lovable
because inherently, I didn't feel lovable.
And so these things would just kinda continue
on and and manifest in adulthood. And I
knew that and I could see that. I
just didn't know how to kinda get beyond
it. And being so much a a person
that lives in their mind and their intellect
and felt like reading books or listening to
books or podcasts
or going to therapy sessions once a week
would help me slowly break out of this
quagmire.
I realized I just needed something
really
experiential
and safe
and intensive
and
had the capacity to reset.
Now I had
done retreats before. Like, there are these meditation
retreats, Vipassana retreats, where you're silent for ten
days and you meditate eight hours a day.
I love those. And the Cloud nine kind
of feeling lasted for a couple of weeks,
but then life just intruded in and my
patterns just sort of intruded in. But there
was something about Hoffman
and the experiential nature of it to
kind of get beyond that, really start feeling
because I had lost the ability to tell
you what I felt. If you were to
ask me how do I feel, my response
was fine,
and I literally couldn't tell you anything else.
It's like, I'm fine,
but I couldn't tell you I'm sad,
that I'm frustrated,
that I'm angry.
The capacity to feel had just been lost.
Hoffman gave that back to me.
It's an interesting thing.
I hear a lot of people say I'm
fine. I'm good. I'm okay.
It's actually code for I'm really not okay.
For you, it was I'm fine.
I'm numb.
That's what it means. There was also
a lot of shame
with that too because here I am,
a physician. I'm supposed to be
on top of things. I'm supposed to know
myself, know my patients, be able to take
care of whatever comes up with them. Same
thing with my staff and my colleagues.
And
I felt
so
not prepared or able to do that, yet
I had to do that. I constantly felt
like a flawed, broken person.
Could you take us to a moment in
your process
where you encountered your child and describe that
experience?
You know, I remember one part of the
process where
I wanted to share something.
It was my boy coming out saying, hey.
I'm excited to share something to the group.
And I wanted to share, and I felt
so excited to share. I felt like a
little boy.
And I was told,
not right now. Kind of let's we need
to kind of keep moving along, and maybe
we'll get back to you. And it never
got back to me, and so I didn't
have that chance to share.
And it broke me,
That boy and I was that boy at
that time. I wasn't my adult self. I
was this boy, and I was so sad
and hurt and angry
and
disappointed,
feeling kind of
this unwantedness
and not being loved.
What it was was
that shell of me
that was keeping those feelings
from coming out breaking.
And I remember talking to Joe, who was
my coach, about that and about how to
kind of process this.
I was crying, and I felt
just absolutely
torn and ashamed
and
small,
but it was what needed to happen for
me to recognize that this was all the
pain and suffering my boy was having
and to hold it with kind of love
and tenderness and to acknowledge it and to
say it's okay,
and for other people to say it's okay,
and for me to be honest with it,
and for
me to, as a boy,
be open to being hurt.
Having the courage to say, but what about
me? Oh, you don't have time for me.
But still coming out rather than hiding in
the shadows and saying nobody wants to hear
from me.
Actually coming out and saying, hey. I want
to be heard.
And when that didn't happen,
I survived it.
The feelings hurt, and
I survived, and I was fine. And the
boy was fine,
and he was
still lovable,
and he was still the sweet, innocent, precious
thing.
That was one of many experiences, but one
of those where
I realized how resilient this boy
was and has been and had to be,
it allowed me to be able to
visualize and then hold this boy and say,
I got you.
And I do that now.
I catch myself, and I feel
ashamed, or I feel unworthy,
or I feel lost or confused.
I will go
to the bathroom
at work
and lock the door and just for, like,
thirty seconds put my hands on my chest
saying, sweetie, I got you.
And I would see myself not ignoring that
boy on the bench,
not running away from him, not hating him,
not despising him, but just grabbing him and
hugging him saying, sweetie, I got you.
And I do.
And my spirit has him, And then I
forget, and then I do it again.
And it's not a permanent process, but that
is there. That resource is there
where I can be gentle and kind to
my boy.
And it's allowed me
to be gentle and kind
with my real boy, my son, who's gonna
be 10 this month.
Because the same struggles that I had with
not being able to connect to my own
little boy, I had problems connecting with him.
There were times where I knew that I
was gonna have to take care of him,
like my wife was busy or whatever and
it was me,
that I
wanted to run away. I did not want
to hang out with him because I did
not know how to connect or relate with
him.
It was
my son was being the surrogate
of my own child. Right? And I was
kind of behaving the same way to both,
and it was very exhausting and uncomfortable.
I would
have trouble hugging him or
being sweet with him, and I knew he
felt that.
And he was, I think, feeling the same
rejection that I felt during episodes when I
was young, you know, with my dad, with
my
stepmother. And those are things
we
delve through in Hoffman quite a bit. But
after Hoffman,
it is now
such a joy. I grab him, and I
kiss him, and I hold him saying, sweetie,
I love you.
We're different together.
And my wife has seen it. He's seen
it saying, papa, I love you. When are
you coming home?
He hadn't done that in the longest time.
But now he's like,
hey, papa. When are you coming home? Or,
like, hey. Let's hang out together. And, yes,
sweetie. I wanna hang out with you. I
wanna be with you.
That has been one of the
biggest transformations
that Hoffman has given me. One of the
gifts
is that I can connect with him
in that way, and I'm like, damn. I
wish I would have done Hoffman earlier.
Because he's now gonna have to go to
Hoffman to deal with the crap that he's
had for me, which is which I get.
But,
the whole process
wound up being so experiential
and personal to feel those feelings
with my boy so that I could actually
feel what it's like to love your son
in a way that's so connected and loving.
Not that he doesn't annoy me sometimes, and
I don't annoy him. You know, it's not
like everything's cloud nine. But the sweetness and
gentleness with I have with him, the fun
that comes out, the ability to play with
him, like, I really wasn't able to access
is now easier to access.
You're describing
something
in mirroring.
I think that's a really common experience
for parents that prevents connection. It's like if
I meet you, my little one, in full
on joy,
I have to acknowledge where I've not allowed
that in me.
I have to confront
how uncomfortable
I am feeling my
own
emotions.
Yeah. Totally. And on top of that,
my boy
was
to my son, he was like, how dare
you get
all the love
and the connection
and the sweetness and the time
because I didn't get that. If I didn't
get it, you should be able to get
it. So he was jealous too. But holding
all that stuff, you know, I mean, noticing
and not sort of approaching it with like,
god.
How freaking
stupid and shameful. But it's just like, ah,
man, that must hurt. That hurts
a lot.
The hurt is another piece I wanna come
back to because you described this moment of
reconnecting with your
child within you,
it does give me the sense of, like,
emotions are bursting out and we contain.
Yeah. Totally. I just had this subjective sense
that I told my somatic therapist before I
did Hoffman saying, you know what? I feel
my spirit is like a coconut.
It is so and you know how hard,
you know, just coconuts from the tree are
to open. Man, those things are, like, impossible.
I was like, nothing is cracking that shell.
And it was containing all these emotions and
feelings and,
like, how many Kleenex boxes I went through.
Like, I hadn't really
cried and emoted or felt such joy and
just the ups and downs in decades. Like,
I don't remember ever feeling that
as intensely as I did with Hopin. It
was like all this stuff just needed to
really be experienced
because it was it was so forgotten almost.
Do you think there's a connection
between holding emotions in and a physical manifestation
of that?
Thousand percent.
If I reflect back
on
specific patients
who
are so
ill, I mean, hospitalized
every week
because
something in their body has just gone terribly
wrong,
pretty much all of those patients have had
some sort of horrendous trauma as a child.
Physical,
sexual abuse, neglect,
they've all had that
in a really bad severe way.
That trauma
response
manifests especially in the GI tract. And how
it manifests
with what I see
is
somebody comes in and they are convinced
they have a horrendous bleeding ulcer or a
stomach cancer
because it hurts
so bad, like, in the pit of their
stomach.
They're crying and they're it's like and it
was like,
so this started at x time. Right? Maybe
it started three weeks ago.
Tell me what happened in your life three
weeks ago.
My mom died,
or
it was my mom's funeral,
or
that's when my child left for college and
I didn't have my kids at home,
or
something like that. Not always, but very, very
often, something like that. So we do our
due diligence. Right? I mean, you know, in
Western medicine,
there are a lot of limitations.
The first thing is
make sure you're not dying.
Make sure you don't have something horrendous like
a horrendous bleed, horrendous infection,
a cancer.
And then after that,
we may or may not be able to
do anything. A test may or may not
be able to find what's going.
Invariably, these people who are having these symptoms,
I do a scope on them. I take
a look. We do all these tests. The
scope looks pristine.
The labs look pristine.
Everything looked pristine. So at that point, I,
as a clinician,
sort of have a choice on how do
I approach this. And
my approach has now been that look. Things
look normal, which is good news, but also
bad news because I don't have a lesion.
I don't have a thing to explain this.
But
I will tell you
what you're having is real,
and what you're
having
may not be able to be detected by
the tools that we have.
But I see it all the time, And
it doesn't mean you're faking it. It doesn't
mean you're making this stuff up. It's very
possible that these things have manifested
in this way in your body. Some people
get horrendous headaches.
You know, some people get neurological symptoms and
they can't walk.
And in your case, you being this hypothetical
patient, it's this horrendous pain.
And then we work on ways to try
to at least medically deal with it. And
then if they're able to get some maybe
mental health help and, you know, kinda refer
there. But now I've also started incorporating
kind of some of Hoffman's stuff without saying
it's Hoffman
about
telling yourself just,
hey. I got you.
This one patient kinda comes to mind where
he has been exploring a lot of trauma
that he had during his work before he
retired
and all the GI symptoms that are coming
up at that. And then when I did
that exercise with their hands on your heart
and just taking a deep breath and
just giving a hug to that little boy
that's in them, they're like, oh my god.
I just feel so much better.
Not all these people, but a fair number
of them will come back to me couple
weeks, couple months later as time has gone
on.
And we're able to go down on the
medications, and a lot of them wind up
being fine.
So to me, that aspect of medicine
is the fertile exciting
ground.
Moving on in terms of what I do,
that's definitely an exciting potential place.
It's a new frontier.
What an amazing
way to practice self compassion. And for you
to model that for your patients,
it is a frontier.
It's like the old becoming the new again.
Thousands of years ago, whichever
the way shaman or
before invention of modern technology,
healers diagnosed and treated things through
sensing auras or energy. I mean, I know
it sounds kind of ruru, but there is
something there. And I think with the experiential
nature of Hoffman,
the Hoffman process allowed
me to feel that light
at times. And so
I think it goes without saying that it's
not like everything is right now. It's like
things are roses and unicorns, you know. We've
heard about the high that comes out after
Hoffman.
You know, after a couple of weeks, that
high feeling
wasn't there anymore. And it was hard to
connect with, what am I feeling right? I
was kinda going bad. I was kinda freaking
out. I was like, oh my god. I'm
going back to what it was like before.
But the Hoffman community that has been created,
the ways
we can continue
through Hoffman and engaging the process,
the various kinds of refreshers that they have,
they always bring me back and get me
that feeling of that place when I was
there.
What's great to know and really experience is
the fact that what was there and what
I found at Hoffman
has always been there and will always be
there. What was there has always been there
will always be there, and you have in
your experience now,
I've got you.
I've got you. This is not a problem.
This happens.
I've got you. If you weren't afraid or,
or wobbling,
you wouldn't have the ability to come in
and hold yourself
Are doing that
not only for yourself,
for your son, for your patients in so
many ways.
What's also really great about that is
I become my own resource.
Because
for my whole life, I've always looked externally
for
affirmation,
for
doing well in school. Oh, wow. You're so
smart. Oh, you're you're gonna be a doctor.
Oh, that's great. You know, patients, they love
you. I'm looking for these dopamine hits. Right?
But they're all external to feed this void.
Right?
But now,
just with Hoffman, I'm starting to learn, like,
what is it like to be the kindest,
sweetest,
most loving
parent or guardian figure that you can to
yourself. What does that look like?
And be that to myself.
It's a new place. I mean, obviously, I'm
still learning and trying to engage that, but
the tools that I learned at Hoffman and
then practice,
they allow me to come there easier.
It reminds me of that definition of love
that we share
on the first day
around
love flowing first to myself and then to
others in my life because so much of
what you've shared is around how you are
present to your son, your patients, but coming
from you
holding that little boy on the bench that
you didn't wanna look at.
And I'm so glad, and thank you for
sharing your story with us. Thank you.
God, it's been a pleasure, an honor, and
a joy
to see you and to talk to you
again. And, yeah,
it's been great. Wonderful. Thank you so much.
Thank you for listening to our podcast. My
name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and
president of Hoffman Institute Foundation.
And I'm Rassen Grassi,
Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute
Foundation.
Our mission is to provide people greater access
to the wisdom and power of love. In
themselves, in each other, and in the world.
To find out more, please go to hompkinsinstitute.org.