There's this imprint.
There's this
somatic
felt
body
sense
imprint
of love in me
that it will never go away.
And, you know, the patterns come and
the world, you know, just everything can it
happens all around me.
And I forget myself, but I have access
to come back to this
deep
imprint
of self
love. Welcome everybody. My name is Drew Horning,
and this podcast is called Love's Everyday Radius.
It's brought to you by the Hoffman Institute
and its stories and anecdotes
and people we interview
about their life post process and how it
lives in the world radiating love.
Please be aware that this episode references
reproductive
grief.
Please use your discretion.
Shedin or AZ.
Nice to have you on the Hoffman podcast.
Thank you for having me, Drew. I'm super
excited to be here. I was just asking
how to pronounce your name, and you said
Oresi
like crazy.
That's right. So when I was a kid
in elementary school, I went to elementary school
here in The US, and the kids would
call me Crazy Areze.
The harshness
of elementary school kids.
That's right. Yeah.
Tell us a little bit about
who you are and why you took the
process.
Absolutely. So,
Shirin
and Namaki is a addition that I'll introduce
post process, and we can talk a little
bit about that.
I was, born in Iran, and we immigrated.
I was seven years old when we immigrated
to The US, and I spent elementary school
in The US, went back to Iran for
middle and high school, and then came back
again
to The US for college and have been
here ever since. So a lot of back
and forth
kinda traversing to very, very different countries.
I also have traversed very different careers.
So I, initially started off
off as an electrical engineer because that's what
a good girl does.
And then I went on to start my
own agency, and, I've been doing that for
about twenty years. We do
research and marketing
and,
at a bit of a transition point post
Hoffman, you know, really
discovering what's next for me career wise.
What's it like to be in that space
of
transitioning from old to new and yet not
even aware of what the new
is. I can tell you that there's the
distinct difference
before Hoffman versus post Hoffman.
So I'll tell you that before I took
Hoffman,
as I was kinda early on into navigating
this transition phase, there was so much
of
my old patterning
around
whatever is next, it better be successful.
And I better know exactly what I'm doing.
And as a result, this kinda
sphere of imagining was so tight because imagine
if your vision for what's next has to
be done right and perfectly, you can't possibly
dream.
You can't possibly take risk.
And how I am being with this transition
post Hoffman is
just in a state of
wonder,
in a state of
experiment.
Actually, I find a lot of
talking to myself as if I'm a little
kid.
I scare myself. Like, for example, we're, you
know, hopping on this conversation today, and I
have a thought that, like, maybe this is
part of my career path next to, you
know, get into coaching and helping bring other
people home.
And I noticed all this energy was building
up, and I was like, oh, I'm am
I do I have all the right stories,
and where is this gonna go?
And I just sat myself down on the
couch right before,
and I was like, okay, little one.
Let's just talk to you.
You're gonna be okay.
This podcast is gonna go how it's gonna
go. And as long as you come back
to me,
we're all gonna be okay. And sometimes I
go into the world and do that, and
it feels awkward and weird, and I don't
feel okay. And then I just sit with
with myself on the couch and we're like,
oh, how did that feel? Ouch. That hurt
or something different. And I'm just being with
myself. And this idea, as long as you
come back to me,
and the me is this spiritual self that
is deeply loving and kind and
unconditional
in its support of you.
That's right.
Yeah. Absolutely.
I think one of the things that's
really beautiful about the Hoffman experience
and I'm sort of a I don't know.
I love this sort of stuff, so I've
been doing variations of this for, like, a
good ten years. Yeah. I've done a lot
of you can say I'm a little bit
addicted to this stuff. But I think what
I really love
about Hoffman
specifically was that
there's this imprint.
There's this somatic
felt
body sense
imprint
of love in me
that it will never go away.
And, you know, the patterns come and
the world, you know, just everything can it
happens all around me, and I forget myself.
But I have access to come back to
this
deep
imprint
of self love.
Shouldn't when you talk, you talked about the
somatic imprint, and you can come back to
that. You won't forget it because it's a
somatic imprint.
And when you did that,
your voice cracked, and there's emotion.
Are those two connected, the somatic imprint
and the emotion that emerges as you talk
about it?
Yes.
It goes here we go again.
How it's connected,
I come back into love
and all the masks
that I've learned to wear
as an Enneagram three,
they go away. And so when the masks
go away, I'm I'm in the presence
of love, and there's this
vulnerability.
It's almost like
being naked in a way.
Right? You're you're that vulnerable.
And, yeah, I just
notice when I get in touch with it,
I I
I either start crying or I crack up
or
just I don't know. I don't know why
it happens, but it happens.
You have such good access to your emotional
landscape.
Tell us a little bit about
why you signed up for the process and
your journey
towards Hoffman and
in Hoffman.
Yeah. So I'll tell you first why I
didn't sign
up. Because it took a good five years
that I was like, I knew about so
I I'm part of this group, Conscious Leadership
Group. You actually interviewed Diana Chapman, who's been
my coach for the past six years.
And it, you know, was part of this
group with lots of people doing Hoffman. Like,
I think I was maybe one of the
last holdouts
in in our group.
And
what was really interesting is that I resisted
it at one part because I was like,
well, I think Hoffman's for people that have,
like, a lot of trauma around their parents,
and I don't think I really have trauma.
It turns out I had to go to
Hoffman to realize that I actually have a
minimizing
pattern
where I minimize any, like, trauma or pain.
And then the other thing that was stopping
me from going was I was like, okay.
I see people going to Hoffman. They come
back. They're, like, glowing, and there's it's amazing.
And then eventually, over time, I see their
patterns coming back. And, like, I'm like, what's
the point
of going if you can't be perfect? So
my perfectionist
pattern coming into play. And it really took,
you know, going to Hoffman to see these
patterns at play.
But what ended up
being the reason that I went, it wasn't
an epiphany. It wasn't a single moment.
It was actually a gradual build up.
For those five years that I was resisting
going to Hoffman, in parallel, I was
resisting going to Hoffman,
in parallel,
I was, doing IVF treatments,
because my husband and I were planning on
having children. And
for five
years, seven rounds of IVF,
hundreds of needles in my body,
four miscarriages,
three girls, one boy.
I was so certain that we can make
this work, and I was seeing physicians all
over the country.
And
nobody was certain, like, what what in the
world is going on. And I was so
certain that we can make this work that
I started reducing my time at my agency
in preparation for having a family.
After five years in our last miscarriage,
I found myself
with a complete vision lost of having a
family
and,
a lot of time on my hand
because I'd reduced my time at the agency.
And I kept
struggling
to vision what's next because this perfectionist
pattern
was driving me that I must be successful
in what's next,
and I thought Hoffman could help.
So
that journey of all those needles, all those
years,
and the striving,
if only I try harder or find the
right doctor
shit in? What what was that like to
go through that?
You know, in hindsight,
I can see
how little compassion
I had for myself
because there was this almost bully
driving me
harder,
do it more,
you know,
and
it was as if it was running my
body, running my existence
with this notion of
you got this. You you this is no
big deal. There's no trauma. There's no pain.
Like, this my minimizing pattern was also at
play here
of you're gonna get to the other side,
and it's only, like, one more implantation. It's
just around the corner.
I think in hindsight, what I realized is
that
not only this IVF journey, but a lot
of my path
and career wise
has been the same thing.
You know? Like, I wanna grow the agent.
I wanna I wanna make it bigger. I
mean, it's it's this constant chasing
of a vision
somewhere out there
and having it never be good enough.
It wasn't until, like, early, I think within
our first day or two of Hoffman
that they give you this list
of core shame messages.
So not good enough, and I'm like, oh,
shit.
Oh my god.
This has been running me.
You know, my whole life has been this
chase
of if this happens, like, I will be
finally good enough.
You remember the work we did around shame
at your process.
Shame is not an easy feeling to
welcome in. There's so much shame around shame.
We've interviewed some experts on shame over the
previous seasons here on the podcast.
But for you,
what was it like to
make the connection between so much of what
has been driving you
and this notion that it is shame
and it is, in particular, you are not
good enough?
Heartbreaking?
Like, how mean?
Like, wow.
Like,
I could be so mean to
this, like, beautiful,
beautiful being,
you know,
to tell her this message,
to push her
and push
so many needles in her body and
just this constant,
yeah, bullying of her.
Shouldn't, whereas you talk, I'm just aware of
this contrast between
innocence
and bullying,
the way in which you talk about bullying
yourself through the shame messages
and in contrast, this beautiful, innocent little being.
I imagine at your process,
you really connected with that innocent
little girl.
Yeah. I'll tell you.
The first moment
that I connected
was, you know, in Hoffman, you get these
little binders for your work for the week.
And literally on the binder,
it's spelled Namaki,
which is my childhood nickname. And I swear
to god, I saw the word Namaki, and
something just lit up
in me.
Like,
oh, I remember
her.
And this essence of
just
me. Me.
And I'll tell you a fun story. So
Shirin in in Farsi
means sweet.
And Namaki, which is my childhood nickname,
means sort of salty, like, but spicy, like,
in in a fun loving way. Like, somebody
that's, like, spicy. And something went off where
I'm like, oh my god. There's this kind
of parallel universe
of
this
innocent
spicy child,
Namaki,
that's been with me all along.
But
Shereen, the sweet layer, has come way on
top with the bully
and has been driving sort of the operating
system.
It was just so delightful. Like, people, like,
as they would call me Namiki because nobody
knows your real name. So I had one
whole week
where I was nothing but Namiki
to people
and to myself.
And that just kind of reinforced
that this path back home,
which was just delightful.
The path back home
through
being called by your childhood name.
One of the many things that happened that
week, but
one of them was just that all week
long, you weren't shit in. You were Namaki,
spicy, feisty Namaki.
Yeah.
So one of my earliest
childhood memories, and this is before we immigrated
to The US,
was that Namaki,
you know, this five or six year old,
very young, my parents would have dinner parties
all the time. And I would literally have
40 grown adults
sitting in a circle formation. I would get
up in the middle of the circle. I
would take a cucumber and make it my
microphone,
and I would put on shows.
I would make fun of people. I would
do all of that. And that was that
is the spirit of Namiki. She is so
such a courageous,
confident,
fun, loving little girl.
And then through the Hoffman process, I was
able to see how
when we immigrated to The US
and my first day of school
as I distinctly remember holding my mom's hand
and we got lost
on our way to school. And I remember
there was this massive green field,
grassy green field, and the feeling of the
water from the grass
and holding my mom's hand and then thinking,
my mom has no idea how to get
to me to school. We are
so, so lost.
And this fear of
just knowing that
we're immigrants,
we don't know our way around this country.
I didn't know a single word of English.
I'd they've just told me emergency, and I
would use it when I wanted to go
to the bathroom because it was an emergency.
But this
felt sense of fear
that came over Namaki.
And then within a few weeks of being
in school, I have another memory of,
you know, we had a homework assignment,
and the teacher put a check mark.
And I went to the only other Persian
kid in class, and I was like, what
does this check mark
mean?
Because I had no idea.
And he's like, that means you did good.
And I swear to god, Drew, it's as
if the light bulb went off. It's like,
Okay. This is how we secure ourselves.
And so, literally, Shereen
went on this journey of, okay. The only
way I can secure myself
in this new environment
is if I succeed and I achieve.
And so I would get straight a's, and
straight a's turned into, okay, now I'm gonna
go to engineering school. I do all the
things that a, quote, unquote,
successful kid would do
with me chasing this sense of safety
and leaving them behind.
You know,
I love that story
of the field
and the wet grass.
Do you think that
that came to you
during your Hoffman week? So on some level,
that feeling of, oh, shit. My mom,
she can't be trusted. I'm kind of on
my own.
Do you think that the trauma of that
moment
got
rewritten
on some level during your week? In other
words, you almost allowed yourself to regress
to that younger age as a way of
healing
that little girl
who,
still lived inside you
on some level.
Yeah. I and I think part of that
was
to discover that I have this minimizing pattern.
It's what kept me from Hoffman. It's like
and there's this whole theme of
I minimize
anything. There's no problem. And it wasn't until
I was able to see that I have
this pattern
and welcome it
that I were able to see all the
places in my childhood where I had some
sense of
trauma, lack of safety, something's not okay.
And
instead of
just being with it,
which which I
and this is me.
Just
being with it's not okay.
Just sitting with it, it's not okay.
I had never done that.
Yeah. So,
yeah, it's almost like I,
was able to go back
in adult form,
get Namaki,
and then find all the things that happened
to Namaki that were not okay
along the way,
to start this healing process.
You know, this is in part an immigrant
story
that there's our common themes that
immigrants face when they come to The US.
They come to a new country. They don't
know the language. All you can say is
emergency
as your first word. I mean, think about
that.
And,
that the process helped you
sorta continue the immigration process and settle in
here as a rightfully
claimed
citizen,
and
this is your country.
You are home here.
I'm home everywhere.
I love The US because I've learned so
much, and I've grown so much here. And
I obviously love
Iran because it's my country of origin.
But I think
it was through my IVF journey and this,
like, massive, massive blow
of, you know, not being successful
that I got to
experience.
I don't know how to say it, but
it's this notion of
falling back
into trust
with
my place in the world
that I don't get to control all these
things that I've been trying to control.
And
there might be a bigger way, way, way
bigger arc
for my life story
than the one that my bully or
Shireen is trying to carve out.
I kinda rested in this I don't know
what's next,
but I'm gonna rest and trust that it's
part of my life story.
And so it's this
connection,
I think, with with a way, way bigger
sense of self
that then doesn't need a country to belong
to.
Yeah. There's a transcendent
piece.
Namaki,
let me ask you a question.
So
you come out of the process
and you take this IVF journey.
You feel the transcendent
nature of the process.
How does the process help you move forward?
What happens
next in this chapter post process?
Yeah. So I've been a an engineer
and a scientist,
and I've seen this kind of gradual transformation
to the woo woo land.
But I've started to, like, believe that, you
know, it's a fun game to play that
maybe things aren't a coincidence.
And so, literally, on my first night
coming out of Hoffman where, you know, you're
kinda in this period by yourself, I went
and took myself to dinner, and I'm sitting
at dinner.
And out of the blue,
this woman who's a documentary filmmaker that
actually created a documentary called thought inspired by
our IVF journey,
she walks up to the same
restaurant.
I was part of the documentary that she
created.
And I was like, oh, woah. Well, that's
a really
interesting coincidence
here.
And so
I started just
paying attention
to these different moments that are not you
know, but what if there's a serendipity in
it? And
one of the things that
has happened post Hoffman is I noticed that
I'm gravitating
much more to a place of wanting to
share my true journey, which includes my suffering
and my heartbreak
through this IVF journey and just being a
human
as opposed to my success.
It's a really interesting turn because all of
my life was around
look at me and how successful I can
be versus
no. I wanna deeply connect with other humans
from the fact that
I am an imperfect human
going through an imperfect process.
Yeah. So that was, like, a fun little
twist
right out of Hoffman.
Yeah. So you were in her documentary,
and then there she shows up, And you
take it in part as a message
that keep pursuing this
story, this journey that you went through of
IVF and not being able
to have children.
And so how has that progressed
in the time since you left Hoffman?
I'm actually helping just promote and create more
awareness
around the documentary.
So we're, you know, just bringing it to
different
women's groups, especially
entrepreneur groups or, like, instances where, you know,
women might be holding off on having children
until later in their life, and I definitely
have a passion for it. But I'm also
noticing that there's just a deep felt passion
not only about IVF, but just people going
through
some nature of
transition
slash
suffering. So I'm now supporting friends that are
going through divorce.
And even though it's some not something that
I have a direct experience of, but I
feel like
because I've had this felt experience
of
going through a really difficult transition
period in my life and having lots of
learnings from it that I wanna kinda be
in in that space and hold that space
for other people,
going through difficult transitions in their life.
You know, we can talk about pivoting and
that everybody
goes through transitions,
but
this isn't easy stuff
to have
a vision for a child or a vision
for a marriage
and then to have those things end and
die.
And
to be in the space of grief and
loss
and to help people rebuild something after that,
after divorce,
after
the dream of having children,
That's not easy stuff.
Shenan,
what do people need in that space
that you work with?
So this actually comes from,
some of the work that I've done on
the research side, which I'm also really passionate
about, like, just the research around psychology, positive
psychology, behavioral science. And there's actually research that's
come out of out of, like, a couple
years ago
that shows that
if you actually view your life as a
hero's journey,
then you're gonna actually end up having a
lot more
both patience, but also life satisfaction. And so
think of a arc of a hero's journey.
We
you know, going around our way, we have
this big obstacle. It could be this transition.
It could be divorce. It could be IVF,
etcetera.
But
embedded in it is such a pregnant space
for learning.
I think what I see is a lot
of times, whether it's trauma,
suffering,
pain in our lives,
we might have a tendency to wanna
walk around it
and not go through it.
And it's the going through it like a
hero does
where all of the beautiful learnings
come in.
So I wanna be a sidekick
to the hero, which is, you know, my
friend going through a divorce or other people
to walk alongside them
in this change, in this transformation. And I
think there's something deeply beautiful that gets imprinted
in you
when you have gone through that.
My husband and I love doing adventures, nature
adventures, and we have a vision of visiting
all the national parks before we die. We're
about 28 parks in. But one of my
favorite parks is Denali National Park. So one
of the things that's beautiful about Denali, it's
one of the only national parks in our
country
that there are no paved paths.
You have no hiking route.
So, like, literally, you go in, you get
a backcountry permit, and they give you, like,
a, you know, square footage mile by mile,
and you're like,
go hike here. So you literally are paving
your own path as you go.
And I still have this
memory
of we had a simple river crossing. And
had there been a bridge across the river,
we would have literally crossed this little river
in, like, two minutes, maybe. It took us,
like, an hour and forty five minutes of
us trying to figure out how in the
world are we gonna traverse this river
without a bridge.
And there's something that gets imprinted in you
when you've had to traverse
life
without a clear path,
but being willing to go through the river.
My experience of Denali National Park is forever
transformed
relative to somebody that might be seeing it
on a tour bus because I got to
experience
the humbling,
humbling experience of crossing a river that took
an hour and forty five minutes.
And so I think that's part of what
makes life beautiful.
You know, when you talk about that, you're
I'm imagining the swift moving
water and the need to find solid footing
on the rocks underneath
and then the temperature of the water, the
fact that it is so cold, it just
was snow
maybe a few hours ago,
and
the depth of it. And it's coming up
to your knees and maybe
above your knees, and then it's to your
waist. And
the visceral
experience of crossing a river
is so much a part of your being
that from the tour bus, you would have
no idea.
And this idea of inner landscape
and outer landscape and how that outer landscape
of the river
is also
this inner landscape,
Namaki, that you're talking about of crossing
and transitioning to new areas and new ways
of being in your life.
Wow.
What do you notice in that matching of
those two?
It sounds cliche,
but it's this deep
appreciation for the journey of it all.
And this realization
that, you know,
is the journey of crossing the rivers, the
journey of overcoming
these obstacles with myself,
with my husband, etcetera,
that makes my life
so unique and beautiful
and just embracing it. One of my favorite
quotes is Teddy Roosevelt.
The credit belongs to the man in the
rain. Time and time again, goes in and
is bloodied and bludgeoned, but, like, keeps going.
And I think that's the beauty of life.
And I sit and wonder thinking,
why is it that we have such a,
I don't know, weird relationship with suffering where
we don't want to experience suffering.
It's not easy,
but it's beautiful.
Like, it's
profoundly
beautiful
part of the human experience.
It redefines
perfectionism,
doesn't it, from this antiseptic
kind of
purification,
whitewashing
of the human experience
to the messy,
beautiful,
deep,
and
the river crossing that is perilous
and fantastic at the same time.
Yeah. And I'll say, I think another beautiful
realization that's gonna come out for me is,
you know, having struggled
so much
to bring life,
I have this
sort of deep felt appreciation
for life.
It's,
they say I was an accident,
which kinda makes sense logically. My two sisters
are nine and 12 years older than me.
And Your parents said you were an accident?
Well, they haven't said it, but it's kinda
I'm pretty sure I was.
I mean, my two siblings are nine and
12 years older. My mom was in college.
Like, I don't think there was any planning
of me coming along.
You know, one way to look at it
is like, ah, it was an accident. I
wasn't meant to be. And another way to
look at it is like,
hot dang.
Life wanted to happen,
and life wanted to happen in this beautiful
way.
And just like this
wow.
Despite all the ads,
when I connect to that part,
there is this connection of
going back to, you know, earlier where we're
talking about, like like, visioning and
okay. So if life meant to happen through
me,
then
what do I wanna do with it? How
do I wanna move
life through?
Yeah. I think, to me, it's the biggest
gift is to walk
by people's side as they cross that river.
Sharin, what's it been like to
tell your story here to reflect on
life before, during, and after your process to
share this?
What do you notice?
Mhmm. I just had a vision of my
grandfather
pop up.
I'm the last grandchild. So on my mom's
side, I'm the I'm the very last intro.
And, you know, there was a period before
all of this Hoffman and everything where I
felt like, oh, I'm not extending his lineage,
by not having a child.
And
I feel like I've
I've reconnected
through Hoffman, and a lot of it has
been just reconnecting with my roots.
I reconnected
with his spirit
and how it runs through me.
And it is a spirit of adventure, and
it is a spirit of being in service
to people.
And
I think
had I had children, I would probably be
pretty focused on
one life or maybe two lives.
And
in a beautiful way, I get to now
be in service
to many lives.
And so I kinda had this vision of
almost my grandfather just
setting me free into the world to be
of service to many lives.
So grateful for this conversation.
Thank you, Drew. Likewise.
Thank you,
Shiden,
and thank you, Namaki.
Mhmm.
Thank you.
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 Razi Ingrassi,
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 hoffmaninstitute.org.