Carrie, do we have a capacity
to
change how we take responsibility for our inner
experience of safety?
I think we have to. I don't know
that anybody else can do that for us.
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.
Some of the conversations in this episode touch
upon health, and we want you to know
that what is shared is strictly for informational
purposes only and should not be considered medical
advice.
Please always seek the guidance of your physician
or any other qualified health professional
with any questions you have regarding your health
or a medical condition.
Thank you.
Thanks for joining us today. I am so
excited to share with you a panel of
graduates who also happen to be medical professionals
and
this discussion
around really connecting
the dots between emotional health and physical health,
the mind body connection, and so much more.
Make sure that you stick around until the
end because there's some lighthearted
fun and just
spontaneity
that comes through that I think you'll really
enjoy.
So let me take a moment to introduce
each one of them, and I'll give you
each a moment to introduce yourself as well.
We'll start with doctor David Hanscom.
David, tell us a bit about who you
are.
So I'm an orthopedic spinal deformity surgeon. So
I was one of the surgeons in Seattle
who took care of people after five, ten,
15 operations before they got to me.
And I was seeing so many people having
surgery on normally
aging spines that would be be destroyed by
a really bad spine surgery.
And I quit my practice in 2019
to bring healing principles into the public domain,
including the medical world.
So HOPEN was a big part of my
process in 2009.
I had gone through a severe burnout of
fifteen years. I had 17 different physical and
mental symptoms,
and they came out of that in 2003.
But when I did Hoffman in 2009,
I
it's an integration process,
and I came out of it like a
laser beam. And I haven't deviated one millimeter
since then.
So since Hoffman, I've written four books. I've
written multiple lectures, teaching, watched hundreds of patients
go to pain free,
and the Hoffman process
really moved things forward in a really dramatic
way.
Wonderful. Thank you.
We will actually mention
any of your publications in our show notes.
Carrie Levine, we'll go to you next.
Yeah. I was trained as a certified nurse
midwife, and people hear the word midwife and
think, well, I'm not having a baby. So
I'm not sure how you can help, but
I haven't
actually attended birth since 2006.
And
at that time, went to a world renowned
clinic called Women to Women where I first
learned about Hoffman.
That was the first place where
sort of mind, body, spirit had room in
the exam room where I could spend an
hour with a new patient and
see women from all over the world who
had had all the executive workups and
hadn't really been helped
often because it was a right road, left
road issue at the core and
have since referred many, many, many people to
Hoffman even before I went myself a couple
years ago
just
for those women who
were not able to implement the changes that
they wanted, not because there was a knowledge
deficit, but because there was something in the
way.
And my own experience at Hoffman was mostly
a stop in a lifelong journey of seeking
to
live authentically
and
move from my heart, both in the exam
room and out of it. Wonderful. Thank you
for being here. And we have a returning
guest, doctor Kash Trivedi, who you may have
heard in a previous episode on his own
personal journey. Would you introduce yourself? Yeah. I'm,
my name is Kash Trivedi. I'm a clinical
gastroenterologist
currently in private practice,
transitioning out, actually, a private practice.
I've been in practice for a little over
fifteen years.
My
development or interest in gastroenterology
actually
came from neurology.
I studied neuroscience as an undergrad.
And
in medical school,
there was something about the neurology of the
gut that was so
confusing
and interesting and all encompassing
and involving so many facets of human life
that I developed an interest in and
and kind of kept an interest in that
in practice
and
witnessed
so many people where
everything is normal testing wise, but they have
severe gastrointestinal
symptoms.
I've seen and I believe a lot of
that has to do with emotional
trauma,
childhood
trauma. And these are things that
Hoffman helped me process myself
so that
that I could actually just return to connecting
to patients again.
As David had mentioned, I think I had
burned out about 35 times
during the course of practice
and training. And so
after Hoffman,
there was
an ability for me to actually
connect at a different level to the people
that were coming to me seeking advice and
help.
Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you all for being
here.
I've asked each of you to be here
on this
episode because I get the sense that in
some way, your personal journeys
through
understanding
the whole human that you are
has impacted
how you practice medicine.
And I also am a medical provider. I'm
a pediatric nurse practitioner with Stanford,
and I have found this really interesting nuance
to my clinical practice the more I understand
about the emotions, the body, the spirit.
And so that's why I wanted to have
this conversation.
Many students come to the process
looking for
deeper connections,
mainly in their relationships.
But one of the most common things that
I hear from graduates is that they leave
feeling this sense of interconnectedness.
And our listeners will know
if they've done the process of the quadrinity.
Who can give me a quick rundown of
the quadrinity as you understand it? I think
I've done the process most recently. So
the quadrinity are like the four aspects of
our being as through the lens of Hoffman.
There is the body
and our sensations and what we feel corporately
in our body. There's our intellect,
that part of our mind, which
helps us navigate the intricacies
of the world and helps us
calculate and do the things we need to
do to get things done.
The emotional aspect, I see it as
our inner child,
our feelings of happiness, sadness, and the whole
range in between
that bandwidth is in the emotional realm.
And then quarterbacking it all, ideally,
is our spirit.
Living from spirit is
something that we're always course correcting like an
airplane
towards.
It's in that experience of living in the
spirit through Hoffman
that I've started to understand a little bit
about my authentic and and true self.
Wonderfully said. Thank you.
And so
this integration
of all aspects allows us to be a
whole human being.
My experience is that medical science
wants things to be clear and direct and
linear and the mechanics
of medicine where we end up treating
symptoms or treating a piece of a person.
I'd like to talk a bit about that,
about some of the inherent problems in that
and what you've learned
about the connection
between
all aspects.
The mind body connection,
we hear that term.
Carrie, would you tell us what does that
mean?
I mean, I don't even know that I
would say I think that there's a connection
in my mind. It is. They're inseparable
and integrated.
One doesn't
do without the other in any way on
any level, in my opinion. And I think
that
being rooted in the labor room
somehow
connected me to spirit
in a way that I have been able
to carry with me my entire career.
I often think about
internal rotation when a baby will rotate internally
so that their shoulders will
clear the mother's pubic bone, and
you can see the sutures in the baby's
skull turn. And I can remember looking at
that moment and being like,
who thought of that?
And how is it possible
that that works?
Right? Most of the time.
And that wonder and that mystery,
I feel privileged that my practice has been
infused with that.
And this sense of not knowing and this
sense of
fostering integration for
patients, I'm using air quotes,
patient is a complicated term.
More often than not in the labor room,
you have someone who is integrated because you
cannot get through that process
if you are parsed out in pieces. Like,
it requires
everything to be present in the same moment.
So I feel
lucky in that way to have been privy
to that, to witness that over and over
and over again. And so
for me, it's irrefutable that it's all connected.
I can't really approach anybody
in any other way. Thank you for sharing.
And I was actually gonna ask, David, could
you share with us
a story where you really came to know
about this integration?
Well, it sort of came later. I
went into chronic pain in 1990 with a
panic attack, and I did not emerge until
2003.
I had 17 different physical and mental symptoms,
depression, anxiety, OCD, skin rashes, migraines,
stomach issues, back issues. It was unbelievable.
So the body chemistry is profound.
I agree with Carrie completely. She said it
beautifully that it's just a unit. You can't
fly a major airline without a computer,
and the human body has 30,000,000,000,000
cells, where a Boeing jet only has 2,000,000
parts. So just an integrated unit with the
brain being a relay system.
So it's about the physiology thing. So what
happened
with me
once it happens all about processing anger, forgiveness,
and letting go.
And so I didn't even know I was
angry until 2003.
I had no clue. I was right, I
was perfectionistic, I was so critical, but I
wasn't angry.
And so what happened is that I crossed
that bridge badly by the way,
but in six months all my symptoms disappeared,
all of them.
So including the crazy thought patterns, every symptom
is gone and has stayed gone for over
twenty years. So at Hoffman in 2009,
I still remember
saying, well, you know, medicine is in trouble,
and I had sort of a anger about
it. I was gonna turn that anger into
something good.
Their problem is you're a zealot, and people
don't respond to that very well. So I
remember very distinctly at Hoffman on the I
lifted up the hood of a car, and
there was this angry burning engine that I
simply took it out, replaced it with love.
Totally different. I'm not burning energy. I don't
get tired anymore, which drives me and my
wife crazy.
But when you use it so like a
reaction, it doesn't stop.
So
my own personal story is profound, and I
never would have thought that. I never would
have thought
going from a major spine surgeon with structural
emphasis
to the physiology of disease is just blowing
me away.
So you're speaking about a transformation
about some repressed anger criticism and then transmuting
it into love. Is that correct? Correct.
Kash, how about you? Is there a story
you could share?
What comes to mind is a fairly recent
story
of someone that came to see me. I've
been seeing them for a long time for
some liver issues,
but they developed severe, severe
pain in the upper abdomen, epigastrium.
This landed her in the ER multiple times.
When I
encounter
someone who has gone from being relatively fine
to not fine,
I'm always curious about the trigger.
Well, that happened to start
right after her mom died.
Like many people, she was convinced
that she had a huge gargantuan
ulcer in her stomach or whatever.
What I told her was, well, I wouldn't
be surprised if everything looks okay, but that
doesn't mean that nothing is going on.
And so when I took a look, when
I did an endoscopy and took a look
in her stomach,
it was pristine.
I'm still struggling, I think, a little bit
with
how to
talk to people about
this mind body connection
in a way that doesn't come off as
sort of preachy or belittling.
I try hard not to do that.
Ultimately,
we use medications, but I think
that connection between this very traumatic, stressful event
and her symptoms helped her
over the course of weeks get back to
the point where she wasn't on medications anymore.
So that's just kind of one story amongst
many, many stories of people that I've seen
where
despite the medical technology
and the data and the internet and everything
where you have all these concrete things
of why someone may feel a particular way,
those often don't give the answer, especially for
people with a chronic debilitating illness.
Yes. And I think in some ways, you're
speaking
to
the difficulty in actually
naming that there may be more here than
just
one component.
I think on some level, we all want
to be seen as whole. We want someone
to understand the intricate nature
of who we are. And at the same
time,
it can be a little bit difficult to
have somebody say, could this be related to
grief?
Carrie, did you wanna say something about that?
Yeah. Two things. One of the things that
came to my mind listening to Cashtack was
broken heart syndrome.
And I have a dear friend whose husband
dropped dead on a run, and she found
herself in the emergency room with, you know,
heart palpitations and PVCs.
There is, I think, some data in the
research about
people experiencing cardiac symptoms after the passing of
a loved one with no physiologic
alteration where it really is a physical manifestation
of an emotional experience.
That was one thing that I wanted to
say. And then the other thing that I
was thinking listening to you, Cash, was just
sort of, you know, it's an interesting thing,
I think, to try and talk with
patients,
air quotes,
in a conventional
clinical model
and suggest to them that perhaps how they're
feeling
how they're feeling with their heart has something
to do with how they're feeling with their
body
without dismissing someone as sort of hypochondriac
or
whatever it is. I take care of a
lot of perimenopausal
women, and that is a fascinating convergence
of mind and body. You know, I'll talk
to people. You know, what does your life
look like? What does work look like? What
do your relationships work like? What does sleep
look like? What does your nutrition look like?
And they'll talk about maybe a stressful thing
in their life, and I'll talk to them
about how big a piece of the puzzle
that may be for them. And then I
will say to them, which is not me
saying it's all in your head.
Right? Because that's the risk,
I think, of acknowledging a mind body connection.
Right? Is patients feeling marginalized and being told
it's all in their head because
I take care of only women, so I
bring that bias to this conversation. But goodness
knows women have been told
for too too long that how they feel
is in their head.
So this integration thing can be a little
bit of a slippery slope for us as
practitioners, particularly those in a conventional model.
And that actually speaks to the silo
that is the water we swim in,
where it is either physical
or it's in your head.
So broken heart syndrome, I mean, I would
love to speak more about that, but I
also wanna talk about what is
psychosomatic
symptoms and why is that so threatening for
people to hear, David?
First of all, there's a term in medicine
that started in 2002 called medically unexplained symptoms,
m u s. That means we know you
hurt, we know you have your symptoms, we
can't find anything wrong, so have a good
life. So it's a disastrous diagnosis because it
takes away hope,
and we look at the physiology of disease,
everything's explained, it should be medically explained symptoms
because under threat physiology,
your neurotransmitters
get excitatory,
your inflammatory markers go up, your nerve conduction
doubles, your stress hormone goes up, fuel comes
out of your cells.
So every
chronic symptom, by the way, is explained by
the body's physiology.
So mentally, you have thoughts or input,
you have your physiology as the result
and so physiology creates physical symptoms.
So once you start calming on the physiology,
symptoms disappear. So I've seen hundreds and hundreds
of patients go symptom free
but comment on the physiology.
So medicine has it absolutely backwards, that's part
of it, but the other half that's even
worse is that in threat physiology, your body
breaks down, in safety, your body heals. So
a key factor in medicine is patient doctor
relationship,
your patient had to feel safe with you
and feeling safe with your doctor is out
of luxury, is a necessity.
Without that basic link of feeling safe with
your clinician,
nothing else matters,
It just doesn't matter.
So that's always a starting point. And so,
anyway, I actually quit my surgical practice because
we're so obsessed with structure and we've ignored
the physiology,
we're really hurting people.
Yes. So, Cash, you had a comment on
that as well.
Oh, yeah. In terms of
what I've been sort of contemplating is I'd
imagine if I were in the audience,
it would be like, well, this is great,
you know, if you can pay cash to
see a concierge doc who can spend
three hours with you, but what about the
average person?
And what I learned, like after Hoffman,
is that
I was surprised at how
it doesn't take much time.
Because the question is how can we as
medicine, as practitioners,
as people who are in the healing profession,
bring back this sense of love and care
and connection to the people that are seeking
help from us?
The things that I learned in Hoffman or
actually
started doing at Hoffman, like actually looking in
the person's eyes
and honestly saying, you know, I see you're
suffering.
And that doesn't take much time, but just
doing that can kind of break
that shell that people
have around
themselves when they're in fight or flight mode,
as David said, and when they're not feeling
safe.
So many providers,
you know, the burnout rates you hear, however
you define that seventy percent, eighty percent in
all aspects of health care.
How to bring that
that care and that connection back is, I
think, something that I've been wondering and contemplating.
What are the physical
consequences of a unprocessed
emotional
hurt?
Emotional hurt is physical hurt. They can't actually
be separate.
And you're speaking about something here, which I
think is really important, the experience of safety,
the experience
of threat and fight or flight.
And one of the things
that I know
love to be is
an attunement with someone
that lets them know they're safe.
It's what we always wanted.
This is the gift of presence.
It doesn't have to be in medicine. It
can be anywhere.
Would you like to say something about that,
Carrie?
It doesn't have to be big.
Right? Like Cash was saying, you know, I
think about
where's the computer,
and where am I looking, and how do
I greet someone, and do I shake their
hand and make physical contact, and
how much talking am I doing
relative to how much listening
am I doing?
That's a big one.
My new patient visits are sixty minutes and
just
listening
relative to the standard seven to fifteen minute
visit, you know, women will be like, I
just feel
heard.
And how does anybody
embark on a healing journey
without feeling
like their practitioner
heard what their concerns are. And it's like
these tiny little nuances.
I mean, for me, it's also like, is
there a window? Is there daylight? I'm not
wearing a white coat. I'm not wearing a
stethoscope.
You know, like, there's no drop ceiling. There
is no enclosed
exam room. And
for women,
specifically, again, who come here, you know, many
of them have experienced medical trauma, and they
have not sought care
for decades.
And they walk in, and my clinic is
home based in my barn, and just the
physical
environment
changes the dynamic.
I ask them what's on the top of
your mind today so that they're driving the
agenda. They're driving the conversation. I don't walk
in
trying to control what the interaction is gonna
be. So some of these things are harder
in a conventional environment, but some of them
are so small. Like Cal said,
do you look someone in the eye? Do
you look up from the computer?
What presence, as you were saying, Sadie, do
you bring when you walk into the room?
Did you take a breath
before you walked into the room? Did you
look at the chart? Right? So that you
even know
what you're walking into, so to speak.
So that fracturing
can happen with us. And that actually can
allow us to present
a different part of ourselves
to interactions,
and others can feel that. That's what I'm
hearing.
100%.
And I think that was a big motivator
for me going to Hoffman was just, like,
really
wanting
to bring
all of myself
to encounters with people because I think that
does set up a greater level of healing
potential
that is
bidirectional
therapeutic reciprocity.
So big.
It's when I learn and grow because of
the relationships that I have with my patients,
and they learn and grow because of their
relationship, right? Like it's a wheel.
And it's ideal. And it's so beautiful, and
my patients teach me so much,
not just clinically, but about being human.
So grateful for that.
So segue into
being human.
I wanna talk about
the experience of childhood
because I think that's where so much of
this begins.
And a normal part of childhood
is that at some point, things outside
can be really overwhelming
or we have really big feelings inside.
And we learn over time to either shut
down what's trying to come out of us
or to shut down and block the world
out.
And I think that's where some of this
begins.
David, you mentioned that
you had this sense that there was anger
that needed to be moved through
so that love could come in.
And that takes a certain amount
of courage.
In the anger, there's also a grieving for
what we didn't feel
in terms of safety from early, early on.
The root of the word cure,
there are two. One, the Latin root means
care.
The Germanic root is actually
sorrow.
Is it possible,
Cash, that in order to cure someone, there
is feeling some degree of sorrow for
loss?
Feeling sorrow,
feeling anger,
feeling anything.
I
just saw a person
yesterday
who was
engaging
in spiritual bypass
as a patient,
meaning
I'm having all these symptoms,
but I should be grateful
that I am not starving in India.
And I told them,
wait a minute. There's a middle piece.
Hoffman taught me this. This was a huge
missing piece. And that is
you need to feel
that anger,
that suffering,
that pain,
rage, whatever it is,
that needs to move through you
before you can get to
the reflection and self compassion and all those
things.
Going back to just disease,
chronic illness,
I find that
there's a sense that I get that there's
so much anger and hurt
underneath
all these symptoms that are coming up.
The key, I think, is expression. It is
so critical, but it is
society wise so frowned upon, especially
in our subdivision
of being medical practitioners
because doctors,
nurses,
surgeons, they're supposed to be even keeled,
not feel,
but perform.
It's the opposite that's gonna actually
kind of help us
move forward.
So, Carrie, what would you say the body
can teach us about
being
whole,
and how can we be more present to
our own
healing?
Well, I'm I'm struck by
what Cash was talking about in terms of
feeling because I think about
how much time
people spend trying to not feel, especially the
hard things. Right? Like, whether that's addiction or
disordered eating or
whatever,
shopping, gambling,
sex, like, all the things that we do
to try to avoid
feeling
either the hard things
or even for some of us the good
things because we think we're not worthy. Right?
What how could I possibly feel joy? How
could I possibly feel loved? I
couldn't possibly be worthy of having
the life that I've worked for and created.
So feeling is, again, a sort of so
fundamental and so
difficult,
both as practitioners and just as humans in
in this world that we live in.
If our body is showing us a physical
symptom, how can we meet that? I think
the thought that was going through my head
with your first phrasing was something along the
lines of what can the body teach us
about being whole. The thought that was running
through my head was everything.
You
know? Because
whatever is coming up, right, whether it's stomach
pain or headache or fatigue or
digestive issues or body pain
or hormone imbalance or whatever,
there is likely to be an aspect of
that symptom that is
emotional.
And I think often about a pie pieces
of a pie. You know, I think about
genetics. There are pieces of the pie.
Emotions are pieces of the pie. Our physical
environment, pieces of the pie. And I say
to people, I don't really know how big
a piece of the pie
this particular aspect is, the emotional aspect is,
but
we would be remiss if we did not
bow to the fact that it is very
possible
that this emotional piece, whatever it is,
stressed out at work or
difficult relationship or a kid with particular needs
or
whatever the emotion may be, that it has
a piece of the pie. And I often
tell women, it's for you to decide how
big a piece of the pie is it.
I don't know. In the same way that
I don't know how big the genetics are,
I don't know how big the nutrition is,
but we have to address all aspects
for the best potential outcome.
David.
So my approach is a little different. I
think emotions are everything. So if you look
at emotions at your physiology,
either in safety or threat or in between,
your body can react to the environment in
a way to keep you safe.
So I try to depersonalize
emotions and say this is your body being
triggered
and I ask them to read their body,
so for instance I had 17 different symptoms,
so if I'm triggered sometimes my feet start
to burn or a skin rash pops up
or my back start to hurt,
so they're just symptoms of being triggered
and so your survival reactions are gonna protect
you, you are never ever gonna get rid
of anxiety and anger, it's necessary for life,
they are gifts.
So as you learn to become aware of
these things, you learn to work with your
survival physiology.
And so it's about the key issue, the
key word that keeps coming up over and
over again is the word awareness. And this
little book I give to all my patients,
my colleagues, my fellows, called The Way to
Love
by Anthony de Mello. He defines love as
awareness.
Carrie and Cashew talked about listening
is a key issue of being aware.
You have to connect yourself to be aware
of what their issues are.
So when you're angry,
the physiology shows that your thinking brain actually
goes offline. You can't even think correctly. So
you have to bring your brain back online
in order to actually break it up. So
the keyword is awareness and awareness breaks that
link of the automatic survival reactions. So you
develop a working relationship with your survival physiology,
that's over
here, then who you are is who you
choose to be when you're not reacting to
your survival physiology.
So you learn to develop a working relationship
with your survival physiology, which is there every
day. You get to choose where you want
to go. Again, that's where Hoffman comes into
visualization.
So they're two separate skill sets, but they're
linked.
As again, Hoffman brought that up for me
in a really big way. So, again, I've
watched hundreds and hundreds of patients go to
pain free, completely pain free.
And so another interesting link there is you're
using the word survival physiology.
In the process, we come to recognize patterns
as actually
evidence of that survival
physiology and the neurobiology
of needing to survive, needing to reestablish
the connection and the safety.
Patterns are actually a state of fight or
flight on some level.
Cash, is it possible
to bring presents enough that you can feel
anger and not go offline?
I believe so.
I've been kind of experimenting with myself
because
as I get further away from Hoffman, I
don't want to lose any of the teachings.
And so
one thing that I have noticed is
that when I am triggered
First of all, I'm just triggered all the
time and having, as David talked about, some
awareness of a sensation. So
I think everyone has a tell.
And so my tell is tightness in the
chest and in the throat. For some people,
it may be headache. It may be upper
abdominal pain. It may be diarrhea. It may
be whatever.
But immediately,
as soon as I can in my own
space, and I think I mentioned before, I
go to the bathroom
where I don't, you know, nobody's around.
And
I literally
feel
that
anger.
That moving through me,
but not coming out,
leaking out with my interactions
with patients
hours on end afterwards
allows me to just reset and kinda go
back to a present space.
So it's acknowledgment, as David had mentioned,
awareness,
and then really
getting to the point where you express and
feel it in a safe way. You're speaking
to the value of feeling
the anger or whatever the emotion is and
moving through it. What I'm hearing the three
of you say is that there's a connection
between
feeling those difficult feelings
and the other side of healing,
coming through that and actually
healing.
What is the value of
feeling
and expressing
in a way that
is healthy?
What can that offer
the body's physical symptoms?
One quick thing. So first of all, repressed
emotions actually shrink the hippocampus of your brain
because addiction issues, depression. So not feeling is
actually disaster
and the essence of these unwanted thoughts is
suppressing survival emotions.
So feeling them is really tricky, but when
you're in angry state, you're thinking brain's offline.
So the one phrase we've used over and
over and over again is no action in
a reaction.
So if you're triggered, you just have to
intellectually know I'm triggered, my thinking brain isn't
correctly working
and don't do anything. Get out of the
room, cleanse your jaws, just get out of
there.
So the key issue is take action when
your thinking brain's online. It take a minute,
it may take a day, it may take
a week, but the key issue is no
action in that reaction.
There
is unconscious
anger
or maybe even historical
anger that just explodes out and really is
destructive.
I think there's a link between what you
said, Cash, around feeling your body sensations
and letting your body anchor you here and
now
in the present moment. So then you can
say, I feel
anger,
but it's not me. It's actually indication of
something else going on and maybe
there's hurt
under that.
And already,
the
nervous system is slowing down.
The body can be an incredible
tool to withstand
intense emotions,
Carrie.
Yeah. I mean, 100%.
I think seeing a woman having a baby
is a really good example of that. I
mean, it's a little bit extreme and a
little bit of a bubble, but the emotions
can be a really helpful compass
if we can stay connected to them,
and they can guide us toward ourselves.
To me, that's the value in the feeling.
The feelings are,
that's me. That feeling is what makes me
me. I appreciate someone else may not feel
that way in this situation or because of
that, but this is how I feel.
And that is part of my authentic self
that makes me
me. If I can stay out of judging,
whatever that feeling might be, that's where the
rubber hits the road for me. It's not
judging the feeling, but
acknowledging and allowing it to be whatever it
is.
That is
part of the
expression
of my authentic self.
People know Mrs. Myers
dish soap, but it comes in a variety
of different
scents. And my husband was giving me a
hard time like you really love
scented dish soap, don't you? And I was
like,
I really do.
I really do. If I'm gonna do the
dishes, I want it to smell good. That's
part of me.
It's
somewhat trivial
manifestation,
but that is in fact part of
what makes me me.
It can be challenging
to feel the parts that make us uniquely
ourselves
as we compare, as we judge, as we
think we should be different than exactly as
we are. Yeah.
Cash, what would you like to add? Yeah.
A brief comment is that,
personally, I've seen the capacity
to feel
and feel a range of emotions and identify
them
and realize that
I'm not gonna die because I feel x,
y, or z
has given me
capacity.
Capacity
to handle
other people's emotions.
So when I am triggered
and I have somebody that I'm taking care
of and they are
upset or angry,
I am not going to be able to
respond in a really healthy way
like I want to, like my spiritual self.
But
if I have done enough expression,
I have made this cauldron
that I can hold people.
No matter what they throw at me,
there will still be love coming out.
Multiply that by
8,000,000,000,
and maybe we'll start doing something positive,
you know, worldwide.
Yeah. So we're talking in some ways about
this theme of feeling safe versus feeling
stressed or fight or flight or triggered or
judged in some way.
David?
So people think that stress is psychological.
Most people think that. It is absolutely not,
it's just what you feel when your body
feels threat. That's what stress is, stress is
adversity,
it's threat, it's how you feel. It's not
psychological,
it's your body's response to a threat.
Second thing is thoughts have no power.
Thoughts are just thoughts.
I mean, they're not real.
The only reason they're real is because we
give meaning to them with a physiological response.
So the reason why thoughts have so much
power is that they fire up the body's
physiology
and that's where awareness breaks that link.
So thoughts are not the physiological
link are nothing.
There's a reaction to the thoughts that create
so much havoc in us in the world.
With repetition, we develop an identity or mental
rigidity,
and look at the harm done in the
world by concepts and philosophies
being defended by people and societies.
They're just thoughts.
By the way, mental pain has been well
documented to be worse than physical pain, you
cannot escape your thoughts,
we're trapped.
So we have a human species problem of
being trapped by our thoughts, so you separate
from them and train to be less reactive
and then visualize a different future,
that's where the Hoffman process can do about
five years of my work in about a
week. So it's feeling the patterns,
not reacting to them, putting your brain where
you want your brain to go.
And with neuroplasticity,
you literally develop a new nervous system.
The healing occurs as you move forward with
your vision.
So healing
occurs as we create a nervous system that
can feel safe in various situations.
Carrie, do we have a capacity
to change how we like, to take responsibility
for our inner experience of safety?
I think we have to.
I don't know that anybody else can do
that for us. I mean, people can make
it easier or harder just like the practitioner
who walks in the room and either does
make eye contact or doesn't.
But, ultimately,
I think it's on each of us as
individuals
to do what we can and whether it's
the kind of techniques that David is talking
about
or the techniques that Hoffman has to offer
or
some other, you know, Buddhist.
Right? There's a whole world of techniques out
there to try
and cultivate
safety within ourselves,
I think it's on us.
So I think we're saying safety on some
levels required for healing.
I think that we're also saying that on
some level, healing
requires,
Kash, you said, I see you're suffering.
What would you like to say about that
as we come to wrap up?
A big turning point for me
as a physician
was
understanding
that I am not
completely responsible
for
my patients'
betterment or getting worse or suffering or whatever.
When I just saw myself
not as the director, but rather
I'm a part of this person's journey,
that took so much pressure off
that it allowed
whatever healing was gonna happen in whatever way
happen.
In the health professions, we tend to feel
like we are so responsible
for everyone's
well-being.
Like Karouzin, we can help create the environment.
But ultimately, everyone's on their own journey.
If we can
create safety within our own physiology
and our body can be a tool for
that.
What's one takeaway that you'd like our listeners
to hear, David?
The focus is on skills.
It's always multi pronged. There's ever one solution.
You have ways of prostitution adversities.
You have ways ways of caring for your
nervous system like diet, exercise, and sleep.
There's ways of regulating physiology.
It's a learned skill set that taking responsibility
for learning those skills yourself, you're the only
person that can do it,
is absolutely a game changer. And what the
world needs for each one of us to
do is for each one of us to
heal.
And as each one of us heals, the
world can and will change.
Carrie.
I'm a fan of breath
because I always have it. It's always with
me and nobody else necessarily needs to know
about it. It's a great little
touch point for my mind to weigh in
on to get a sense of
how am I doing. You know, am I
short of breath? Am I breathing deeply? Am
I breathing freely?
And I can
use it certainly personally in my own life
when I feel myself becoming dysregulated and wanting
to self soothe, and I can also use
it in a therapeutic encounter
if I find myself reacting to
the person I'm listening to either because there's
transference or because
they're
I'm moved by their pain or I'm relating
to their pain or I'm jealous of something.
You know? Like, all of the human emotions
that can come up in encounter with someone,
I can always
have a touch point with my breath
and bring myself back to myself
and
sometimes
calm myself if that's what's needed or bring
myself back to presence.
And a callback to what David mentioned around
awareness, even just coming to what's happening in
my breath
brings you into your body, into the moment.
Can you breathe yourself into a place of
safety?
100%.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that there is
centuries and centuries and centuries of people practicing
breath work as a means of spiritual practice
and health and healing.
David, you wanted to make a comment on
breath work. Yes, please.
Well, I mean, what you're doing is stimulating
the vagus nerve, which is anti inflammatory. So
humming,
rubbing your forehead,
certain music, breath work, all stimulate the vagus
nerve, which is highly anti inflammatory. And again,
not psychological,
physiological.
That's one part of the healing process is
stimulating your body's physiology to the parasympathetic
nervous system.
So breath work is really very powerful.
A tool
where you can use your physiology
in collaboration
with the rest of you. Thank you.
Cash, how about you? What is a way
that we can bring more safety, more healing
to our physical bodies?
Use
whatever tools are available to you to engender
safety in yourself.
What I do
is what I learned really at Hoffman was
this hand on heart
and holding it there,
that kind of being a habit. And, you
know, if you're in public, you can just
kind of like pretend you're scratching your chest
or something.
We know,
and the HeartMath Institute has done so much
work on
how connecting with the heart, the touch and
using one's body
body can't tell if someone's hugging us or
we're hugging ourselves, right?
Giving ourselves
the physical
touch,
love that we need
to enter a state where we can connect
to spirit again, where we can be safe.
It's hard to get there if one hasn't
expressed
the underlying muck of the moment
to get to that place.
So expression
and, ultimately,
you know, love and compassion for oneself.
And a physical gesture of
you're safe.
I'm holding you. Yeah. I got you. You're
okay.
Tell us one moment you absolutely
fell in love with the body
or medical science where you were like, this
is it for me.
I remember
when I was an undergrad and I was
undeclared.
I was gonna be in the sciences,
something. I just nothing really appealed to me.
But then I learned that there was a
neuroscience
major.
When I started delving into neuroscience,
the fact
that
we are like the only beings that can
actively change our own physiology,
we can literally change
what proteins
are being
made and synthesized
and how we're using glucose
just based on our thoughts.
What that gave me was
hope for myself.
Yes. Maybe there is a way to change
that physiology
to be happy,
you know? Cool.
I was telling my daughter this because she's
doing a report on cells, and it has
to be all handwritten. And I was drawing
for her the cell membrane, and, you know,
it's this phospholipid bilayer. And so I'm drawing
it, and then I I'm showing her how
a receptor works.
And I remember sitting in biology and the
teacher explaining this and it's like this little
thing's floating around and it just happens to
fit
perfectly right there. And then this whole cascade
of events, this entire amazing
cascade
of physiology that happens because it happened across
the perfect fit. And I was like, this
is magic.
This is actually spirit.
Yeah.
I remember reading the relaxation
response by Herbert Benson, who was a Harvard
trained
psychologist. I don't know. He studied transcendental meditation,
and I suffered from terrible insomnia as a
kid. And I don't know what kind of
weirdo I was that I found this book,
The Relaxation Response, like, in 1983
at some used bookstore.
I was like,
oh,
maybe I can use my thoughts to help
me sleep. I don't think that was, like,
my
pivotal moment, my moment. Probably my moment was
hearing
a conventional trained OB GYN
and a locally trained herbalist
speak on the same stage at a conference
together, and I was like,
It's not either
or. It's both and depending on the individual
and what they need in the given moment.
That was probably it. But I was also,
like, a weird kid reading books about crystal
healing. Like, I was a weirdo.
I love that. Part part witch, part
nurse midwife, part
part author.
Truth is out.
So I met doctor Steven Porges on the
polyvagal theory. He and I started a round
table together in 2020, and we meet twice
a month.
And his wife is Sue Carter who looks
at the peptides as sort of the chemical
equivalent of the autonomic nervous system.
And we have over a 120 talks from
the deepest scientists in the world about a
chondral DNA,
neuroimaging, etcetera.
And
the complexity
just started to emerge just blew me away
beyond
words. Then I get into the
consciousness thing, reflecting physiology.
Here's one little detail that blew me away
is that if you see a bully walking
across the street, your body's chemistry has already
reacted and your thoughts come one to ten
seconds later.
So your body's incredibly powerful. My cat doesn't
need a mind actually to survive,
and neither do we.
So in this human consciousness thing that's laid
on this incredible machine.
So anyway, in this study group, the complexity
of the human body,
we don't know anything. I mean,
we just don't know anything. It's so incredible.
So that's why I get a little bit
frustrated because all we can do is allow
the body to heal itself,
and anything we do can help it along
a bit, but we can't make that much
difference compared to the body's capacity to heal.
So as we allow people to get out
of their own way of healing, it takes
care of itself. It's just beyond comprehension to
me. Yeah. I think we need to create
a rehab for
medical perfectionists.
Thank all of you for being here. Cash,
David, Carrie, thank you so much for participating
in this conversation. I hope for so much
more. Yeah. Thank you. This is wonderful. Thanks,
Sadie.
Thanks, Carrie and David. It was great talking
to you guys. Wonderful.
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.