Whatever I end up being or
feeling
or whatever it is,
it is my
life that I claim.
That sense of empowerment
wouldn't have happened without the process.
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 it's stories and anecdotes
and people we interview
about their life post process
and how it lives in the world radiating
love.
Everybody, welcome to the Hoffman podcast. Diana
or Anna Bach is with us. Anna, thank
you for being here. Welcome. Thank you so
much for inviting me, Drew. I'm so
excited.
You did your process how long ago? This
was
three and a half years ago. So this
was twenty twenty two March
in California.
Mhmm. You and I have talked a little
bit, but not too much.
Where do you think we should start
this story?
Oh, I think
I want to begin
as vulnerable as I can
with
my experience
that I had,
most recently.
I used to be a postgraduate
research associate, that's just another word for research
assistant,
at a child psychiatry
research lab at Yale
Child Study Center.
I wanna start there because
that
was my most
transformative,
authentic,
and excruciating
two years of my life. So, yeah, let's
start there. Take us to
where it was most
excruciating
or a place that feels potent
enough
and describe
what's happening and where you are.
I'm closing my eyes as I imagine or
relive this experience.
I'm in my room
in the bed
just so so
scared.
I'm I'm in fear.
And in the room, there are clothes everywhere
that I don't know when I wore or
when I'm about to clean.
It's this
very
messy room
that it almost reflect my
heart or my mind
or the state that I'm in.
I'm in pieces almost.
So when you say pieces, what do you
mean? Just broken. I feel broken in pieces.
I I don't know how to describe it
other ways, but
I feel
no longer whole,
and I'm just in this
compartmentalized
zone.
In Hoffman language, my quadrinity is never in
balance along those days.
My intellect is
running. My emotional
self is
is just deeply
saddened by the state that I'm in
and also angry and, you know, upset
at myself for being in that state.
My spiritual self, I think, is crying
because
I'm getting somewhere, but I'm not there yet.
And I think my spiritual self is trying
to encourage me to push through because I
can do it, but my body is just
locked. I'm
literally
paralyzed in the bed.
I'm not able to move.
And
dissonance that I have
happened every single night.
And what's amazing is that
the next morning,
I'm able to
have this
mask on
and
go to work because there are people that
I I promised.
There are people that I want to
meet the expectations for,
and
that's the responsible side of me that wanted
to push through. But
the Ana inside me
was so, so lonely.
And I was physically lonely because
it was my first time ever living away
from my siblings, and I will share you
a whole story of my life here at
the state with my siblings.
But in this moment, you're far from home.
I'm very far from home,
alone in the room,
isolated, and
my therapist actually
said you are
living the life of a prisoner
by choice.
Yeah. That was a huge
hit in the like, I was almost, like,
struck
my head to listen to that comment because
it resonated with me in a very,
very powerful
way.
So, Anna, what happens next? You're in that
situation. You're, as she said, you're choosing it.
And then what happens? Where does it go?
I think
every single day, I
have this
emotional
roller coaster
of
feeling that I can do this. I'm at
Yale. I'm gonna achieve things. I'm gonna be
great.
There are also a great support system I
I have professionally
where the mentors that I've met were truly,
genuinely, I cannot emphasize more, one of the
most inspiring
group of
people that I got to meet.
But when I'm alone,
I was so
confused
and lost.
The next thing I did was really to
reach
out. But the more I reached out, the
more I felt
alone at that moment,
ironically. Right? And one of the things that
they
asked me is, well, why are you
here?
What is something that you want to gain
out of this experience?
The work at Yale? Right. The research.
It's such a
significant
experience you can have where
all the network is there, all of the
resource and, you know, anything that you want
to explore,
you are able to explore.
So many opportunities.
Okay. So they ask you, what do you
want and what do you say? Initially,
the reason why I wanted to be at
Yale was because I wanted to go to
their med school. It was my dream to
go to Yale med school.
It was
painful
because
when they asked me, well, then why do
you wanna go to med school?
I have all these reasons, right, my intellect
can list out hundreds and hundreds of reasons
why I wanna be in health care, why
I want to connect with the world out
there as a clinician, a physician.
But when I was alone with myself and
asked myself, okay, Anna, why do you wanna
be a doctor? Like, let's go back and
think about the very first moment that you
wanted to be a doctor.
I could not but
want to avoid that question
because I realized that it was something
that wasn't truly from me. And I wanted
this path to be about myself
and that the choice that I made to
for myself, but I realized the more I
think about this,
it wasn't for me.
So you really gave yourself permission to indulge
the question,
well, how do I wanna do this? What
do I really want? And then you indulge
it so much, you decide to go to
the origin
of the dream
to be a doctor,
and you go way back into childhood, I
imagine, where sometimes we form these dreams about
what we wanna do in our lives as
adults.
And so what do you find?
What happens when you go all the way
back? It was a long journey that I
had to track back because I've been in
this
pre med
cell for the past thirteen years of my
life. That may sound
very long, but
that's just basically the amount of years I've
been in The States. So the moment I
was
here landing
in the land of The United States,
I was 14 years old and
I already wanted to become a doctor.
Thinking about the reason why I wanted to
be a doctor, I was even younger than
14.
And there was this one night that I
was in China.
Originally, I was born in Korea, but I
I was raised in China. So during my
childhood, I was in China.
And
I received a call from
one of my family members. I think it
was my second oldest sister
telling me this really fun
conversation she had with a fortune teller.
I don't know how to bring this topic
up,
but fortune telling was actually a very, very
familiar
culture in my family.
As I was growing up, that was the
norm I perceived.
Just for context, where did you grow up?
So I
was born in Korea, but I when I
was five, I moved to Shanghai, China. So
I was in the East Asian
part of the globe.
I don't wanna generalize the whole East Asian
culture, but at least within my family's culture,
The way I
perceived life or
how the universe works or
how one should make big decisions,
my mother
used to
turn to fortune tellers and shamans.
As a regular thing? It was very regular.
I only
recently,
like, by recent, like, the past few years,
recognized that it was not the norm
of how others lived.
What did the fortune teller say to your
mom that apparently then your mom communicated to
you about your life? In order to share
this, I also may have to back up
a little
to let you know that
I was born in a very specific time
of a specific day
because that also was something my mother paid
attention to or got the advice from a
shaman. And we can explore that later on
too with my mom's childhood too. But
going back a little bit further in the
timeline, yes, the fortune teller, according to
the time that I was born,
she did a reading and she said, you
know what? You're gonna be a great doctor.
This is the courier
that you will earn
all the good things in life.
And I was in the room
receiving the call,
and they told me that according to my
barcode,
I am
destined or I will be a great doctor
out of the career
choices.
Doctor will be
the most potent job I can pursue. And
when you say barcode,
what does that mean? I think that
whole idea of being born
with the auspicious time for a better life
almost resembles what a barcode is like, where
it's
predesigned
or
predescribed
almost to explain one's fate.
That was sometimes how I felt about my
life.
This is so interesting. Your mom's giving you
these messages
through the shaman
who's telling the fortune, the future of your
life, and that's in part based on your
birth date and time.
And all of it is pointing to you
being this incredible doctor.
And so you took that to heart,
and now you're at Yale,
and you're in this internship,
and you're like, I wanna be a doctor.
And then they ask you why,
and you're like, wait a minute. Do I
really wanna be a doctor? Let me check
this story. Wow. What courage, Donna, to
be able to go back to the origin
of something
to see if it's really authentic for you.
Honestly, I don't think I would have been
able
to take this courage
had I not been in that much pain.
Right? Because I was in such such
excruciating, again, pain
that I started to question
why am I suffering so much? Why am
I in pain? Like, what is the reason
behind this much sadness and pain and fear?
And
I've come so far. I've come this far,
and I've
believed that I was
taking the right step each moment,
you know, majoring in science,
doing all these different experiences.
And I've came to Yale thinking that I
want to pursue child psychiatry,
and why am I still
in pain?
Wow.
You go back. You do all that digging.
And then
what's next? How do you get out of
the pain once you have this insight that
maybe this isn't what you wanna do?
This is when I really,
really
connected with my spiritual self.
Have you done the process yet? So I've
done the process,
which is
actually the funny part because I was at
Yale post process,
so I thought it's supposed to work. Right?
Oh, so this is interesting. So you get
out of the process and you double down
on the medical journey.
This is really good for people who sometimes
come out of the process thinking everything's gonna
change right away.
Exactly. Honestly, I don't think there would have
been a better time to go to the
process in the scheme of my life's timeline.
It does make sense that I was at
Yale after process because
Yale
child psychiatry
followed
process.
And during my visualizations
during the Hoffman process, that was when I
realized my passion for children's mental health.
Us going back in childhood
and, you know, me connecting back to my
adolescence and childhood
resonated with me in such huge
power that I realized it's psychiatry
within the field of medicine that I want
to pursue.
It's really funny because I only could see
what I know. So back then,
the only
career that I knew
was medicine or the medical field.
And
I didn't know
what other jobs can
fulfill this passion that I have for children
and the mental health journey
along the path that I've been
pursuing. And because I was pursuing medicine,
I thought I had this moment that it's
child psychiatry.
And that's where I collected this COURAGE
pieces together to, push through and reach out
to Yale. And
luckily,
I was able to be connected with an
amazing mentor.
That's why I ended up at Yale, but
I was not happy.
How I connected with my spiritual self was
that
from the tools and
the lessons I received
from Hoffman Process in 2022,
I was able to navigate my two years
research fellowship from '23 to '25 that just
ended recently.
And throughout this painful
experience,
I was able to find
the end of the tunnel
with a greater compassion
because the process
happened before.
I see. So in your process, you really
got clear that children's medicine
and mental health was where you wanted to
go,
and you interpreted that to mean to be
a doctor,
and that lined up with what your mom
and the shaman had prescribed for you. So
it was all coming together post process. You
felt great. You go to Yale,
and then
there's depression.
And
you're where you started this story, which was
on your bed, clothes everywhere. You're not sure
what's going on. And then you realize,
wait. This isn't my dream. This was
been put on me by my mother and
the shaman.
So then what happens?
So then that's
where I am now.
What I just tried to describe was my
past two years, and that realization
I had was actually this year in April.
Part of what you're saying is you got
clear
post process through a lot of
insight and work and pain.
This dream you had for yourself that you
thought the process had clarified
was actually inauthentic.
It was your left road. That's not what
you want.
And so what's it like to be in
this place where you you have clarity around
what you don't want, but are you sure
about right now what you do want?
I think
where I am right now,
as I look back,
the intention and the motivation
I had was the left road, but I
believe it was still the right road that
the process helped me
navigate because
during my times at Yale, I was able
to observe
the
clinicians
and realize that instead of psychiatry,
what I want to pursue is psychology.
I only would have learned this difference between
a psychologist and a psychiatrist
in that setting. Like, I would not have
learned the difference because I did not ever
know what a psychologist
job is like.
So you're grateful you had the Yale experience
because it helped to tease out the medical
path,
a psychiatrist
versus a psychologist.
I think it is really my spiritual self
that led me
to Yale and to perceive these differences. And
the first
few times,
I think my left road or my dark
side
prevented me from
acknowledging this
difference because I was so certain that I
will become a psychiatrist.
Why do you think your left road or
your dark side prevented you from
seeing
this insight that you now have?
I think it's
the value system I used to have, what
defines success, what defines
happiness.
You know, we always
learn about
be, do have
instead of do, have, be.
And I thought it was in order to
have
this
successful life, I had to become a doctor
first. It was a do part. And I
was fixated
and rigid minded on that one path
instead of exploring the other options
that was clearly
happening
every single day around me, but it's just
that I refuse to see what's out there.
We live in such dynamic,
colorful
life.
Every day, we get to see so much.
But if I only choose to see one
thing
and focus on one thing, immediately,
everything
else blacks out. Right? There is nothing else
you can see. And depression was something like
that for me too, like, where
I could only focus on that pain and
that dullness
and being isolated. And Darkseid always tells me
that
be in your room. Don't do anything because
if you don't do anything, nothing will happen.
And if nothing happens, you don't have any
change or anything to fear about.
And that's basically what Darkseid
how it functioned as mechanism to save me
or, like, to protect me. It used to
serve as a defense
tool,
but it doesn't anymore.
And it wants to lock me in one
state because if I'm locked in that one
state, I don't need to
explore
change or I don't need to feel uncertain.
There's this certainty that I get to fixate
on, and it will make me safe.
Certainty feels safe.
Such a good description of the dark side.
Your story is great
because we have lots of grads who come
out of the process. They feel great
and then
struggles happen.
Then
something can feel like even worse. You know,
who expects to be on their bed depressed,
not able to move, their therapist telling them
you're choosing your prison here.
You've already done the process. This isn't supposed
to happen this way.
So here's the question.
How did taking the process
prior to those struggles
actually help you navigate
the pain points that were showing up
more successfully?
I think it's just
love and compassion. I know those are really
widely used words, but
I cannot emphasize
more on
how much love I
was able to pour
onto myself
throughout this
challenging time
because I knew that there is
a part of me that I was able
to witness during the process
that was just so
unprogrammed
and so authentic and just
so loving.
And because I know that that happened
that happened, so it must be me. It
must be somewhere in me.
And, yes, I'm going through this challenge, but
that part of me is also with me.
So
I trust that. It's almost like your body
remembers the experience
that you had in your process
around
loving yourself, having compassion for yourself. Do you
remember where you were during your week?
Instead of, like, a location
or, like, a physical matter, it's more of
a feeling or a visceral certainty
that I had of
humanity
and connectedness.
I just felt so connected with not just
myself, but the community
or my group, right, that I was belonging
to. And that sense of belongingness
helped me be myself. And
even if I'm outside the process,
the community that I am
in in that current situation
will see me and love me the way
I am. So with that certainty,
I was able to reach out to my
mentors
and, you know, the peers and anyone that
I was able to reach out to. I
was a I had that
vulnerable
cry of help
because that was the most compassionate thing I
could do for myself was to reach out.
That vulnerable cry of help.
So you reached out to your therapist, you
reached out to mentors,
and you explained
what was happening in the struggles you were
having.
I wasn't able to
fully
disclose what was happening to me every single
night.
You know, the nature of child psychiatrist,
thank god, that I was around
those people was that they truly, truly care,
and they truly know what
this feels like. I didn't need to really
explain much, but they saw me. Yes.
There's a real strong sense that
when you were in trouble,
you went back to your process,
months before
and recalled the felt experience
of being loved,
the felt experience of deep compassion.
You brought that to the present pain,
and it didn't take it away,
but it did activate you enough
to get up off the bed with all
its clothes on it
and
go talk to people,
therapists,
mentors,
and have and initiate
conversations.
And definitely family.
And family as well. Your sister.
Mhmm. Nice sisters. And
and even
even tapping back into that moment,
what my mom
would have felt
as she had me.
By then, she already had two girls and
I was a third girl, and that was
a terrifying
news for her in Korea because
they favored
males over females back then in older generation.
As I was in pain of this whole
medical school journey,
I had a moment that I blamed my
mom
for letting me know of this whole birth,
time,
fate,
but to understand her in her shoes
of how anxious she must have been.
And that was the only way for her
to gain
hope and courage
to give birth to another third girl.
That was the best she could do.
That understanding
allowed me to love
myself even more
because I was again born with love.
You went back in your process and afterwards
to
understand some of the motivating
factors that had your mom set you up
for this
whole narrative that the
doctor journey was your journey,
and you got to understand it from a
much broader perspective.
Wow.
And what was the impact of that?
I think the impact
is just complete
blankness that I have now.
Right?
You know, this isn't the average interview in
the sense that not only is a lot
of the insights and a lot of the
beauty of your story post process
through lots of heartache and pain.
But, also, you're on the precipice of it's
not as if it's got a clean ending.
You're not exactly sure what's next.
You're on the precipice of
a blank slate, so to speak.
Exactly. And
I used
to drink tea with one of my mentors
at Yale, and
she would give me words of wisdom. And
I always asked her, what do we do
in this time of uncertainty?
What is something that you could share with
your wise words? Like, what do I do
with all this uncertainty?
And back then, this was before my, you
know, moment because I was always uncertain about
this medical school path. And she
said, well, uncertainty is not bad.
And what she said just struck me
because
uncertainty
feels bad. Right? Like, it feels
so,
so scary.
And I need to know the answer now,
and that's probably one of the reasons why
my mother wanted to seek fortune telling. Right?
Because they give you an immediate answer. Who
knows what's to happen, but a person telling
you, yes, it's gonna happen. No. That's not
gonna happen. That's an immediate answer.
And I was so programmed
that
somebody else telling me that immediate answer was
the right path,
the right road.
So for her to tell me, well, Anna,
uncertainty is not bad at all.
That just opened a whole new door to
my way of perceiving life.
That has been staying with me
ever since.
Again, at this blank state that I'm in
right now, there are
definitely days that I feel
fear. Right? It's not that
I I'm like, okay. Here goes my adventure.
I'm excited every day. That doesn't happen. I
am, of course,
in
fear
time to time,
but my spiritual self, as I connect with
myself again,
tells me that message and tells me that
it's okay because now you get to really,
really try to explore
what you like and what you want to
check out,
what's out there.
And that's just
excitement.
That's fantastic.
If you could name the ways in which
the process is helping you navigate that uncertainty
all the years after your process, how's the
process still living inside you in the face
of this unknown
uncertainty?
I think it gives
hope, first of all. That's really the biggest
thing I was able to gain from the
process. It's the hope. And
as we speak, certainty and certainty,
it gives me certainty
that
whatever I end up being
or
feeling
or
whatever it is,
it is
my
life that I claim.
That sense of empowerment
wouldn't have happened without the process.
How old are you, Anna? So I'm 27,
and I was 14 when I came to
The States.
What's it like to tell your story again
and
walk us through the timeline?
I feel, first of all,
raw because I think that was how I
felt
each time I try to
look back in life.
I'm so young.
I'm so young,
and it's natural to feel this raw because
I just physically don't have the data points
as much as a 50 year old. Right?
But that's the fun part because I got
to
experience
this earlier in life
and to navigate
my life with this new lens that I've
gained.
I just feel proud. I'm so proud of
myself. I'm so so proud that I was
able to listen to myself,
not others,
and able to
distinguish
what my voice was from others
because I was so ingrained
in other people's
voices and recognitions, and that was one of
my biggest patterns
depending on the external validations.
And instead of those validations,
what
I
assigned myself as value system was more important,
and
to realize that I just could not be
more proud.
I mean, I think about you where you
started the story in that
sadness state.
Do you think the process allowed you to
welcome that struggle
in
quicker, sooner,
more forcefully
as a way of altering your course
of action?
I definitely
had moments where I was crying,
and I was excited as I was crying
because I knew it was
the tears from my spiritual self
that I was letting out.
Wow.
The ability
to surrender to pain
knowing
it's the wise
right road part of you
guiding you towards
the beginning of a different path?
Initially, I just wanted to stop crying. Right?
Because crying is bad. Crying is pain.
Crying is
something what losers do.
That's how we learned the lesson.
But
as I was
becoming more and more compassionate to myself and
as I was
gaining this newfound
certainty and empowerment,
I realized that the tears that I was
shedding
was just something that I had to go
through to achieve to my next level of
me.
My next level of me.
Say a little more about right road tears
and
how you were getting those messages to let
go of the dream of being a doctor
and step into something
different.
This was just such a pivotal moment of
my
experience at Yale and this year.
So as I was letting go of my
long
adored dream
that I
had to now let go because it was
not part of me
or it wasn't supposed to be part of
me almost.
During that time,
coincidentally,
it was the commencement
season
for universities,
and
it it just the time could couldn't align
better.
And there was a commencement ceremony
happening for Yale Med School
on one morning,
and
I felt bittersweet
because as I was seeing this park
decorated for the graduating class of twenty twenty
five,
I felt like
I'm no longer
there. I will never be there.
I always thought I will one day be
in that position,
graduating medical school, becoming an MD.
And
as I was really relinquishing
this
dream,
because I was making that statement to myself,
I now
definitely knew that that part of graduating as
an MD will not be in my timeline.
I felt bittersweet, and I wanted to
avoid
almost seeing the ceremony.
And I was in my lab
that morning
because
I was working, and
I started to cry.
I started to cry in front of my
monitor and I knew that it was something
that I wasn't ready for.
So I told my professor that I may
need to take the day off.
And when I decided to take the day
off, I had to go back home, but
the park for the ceremony, the commencement ceremony
had to be
in my way
to getting back home.
So I knew
that I may have to see the graduating
class, but maybe if I wait a couple
hours,
I don't need to see them. So I
waited a couple hours deliberately
to make sure that I don't see the
graduating class because it was still too painful
to visually
encounter
the loss of my dream.
So I was in this grieving period,
back then.
As I head out from the building,
the universe
drops me in that moment where I
see the
class of 2025
walking towards the park. So
my two hours of waiting
just happened to be the waiting of
walking with the class.
So I had to go home because I
was already, you know, crying.
I had no choice but to walk with
the graduating
class with the fancy gowns that they have
for the medical school.
By
the time we've reached the park, there were
clapping,
like it sounds. Everyone's, you know, cheering,
clapping for their friend,
their daughter, you know, all the family friends
there. And
I
immediately thought
that's not for me because I don't deserve
that.
But what's funny
is that my spiritual self immediately comes in
and tells me, you know what?
You also deserve all that claps. You also
deserve all of that encouragement because you've also
come so far.
It's also your time to graduate
this chapter of your life.
And I was purely happy to be in
that moment
immediately as my
perception
changed.
I couldn't go into the park because I
I wasn't graduating, but I as I walked
around the park, I was telling myself, like,
great job. Like, yes, I can do this.
Yes. Like, I've earned this. Thank you. Thank
you. And when I went home,
I
just collapsed, and I cried and cried and
cried,
but this time, I knew that my tears
were not
sad.
I wasn't crying because I was sad. Yes.
I was grieving and I was sad,
but there was this tingling
sense of
thrill,
I wanna say, in me that I knew
that, oh my gosh. This is the last
step of my mission
that I just have to overcome. And as
I overcome this, I'm gonna be a new
me. This is a new
chapter that I'm about to embark on.
And I'm just crying and I'm so excited,
but I'm also sad and all these emotions
come in
and it was so
interesting.
That was when I knew
this is a right road here.
This is the tears that I'm cleansing
in order for me to
direct myself to the right road that I
claim.
And do you have any sense of what
that right road looks like in this moment?
Any
any plans? Or
I do,
but
I'm going to keep it to myself
because it is not the MD route, and
I am
going to
give myself time and space
and
patience and love to dwell on this
new step.
Wow. Anna, thank you for sharing that anecdote
about the park. What a metaphor
and symbolic.
The universe sort of speaking to you. Right?
I think so.
Thank you for sharing your whole story. I
really appreciate you being here.
Of course. I think at the end of
the day, it's all about connecting with everyone
else out there.
And I hope my
stories that I share
that I was able to find through connecting
myself
resonates with those
listening to this podcast
and that they are also able to connect
with themselves
through these fun stories.
Anna, thank you. Of course.
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.