As you do this work,
that's why that relationship internally with yourself is
crucial
because you're all you got.
Hello, and welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a
podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute.
My name is Sadie Hanna, and in this
podcast, you'll hear real conversations and stories with
graduates about their courageous journey inward and how
their love and light are living in the
world around them. Love's everyday radius.
Thank you for being here and welcome.
Hey everyone, and welcome. I'm here with Brian
Daly, who is a Hoffman Process graduate. He's
also someone who
has really had his
roots in the ground of transformation.
And so I've been looking forward to speaking
with you, Brian. Thank you for being here.
Thanks, Sadie. I'm so glad to be here.
It's,
touches me to be asked to come and
do this. Yeah. And as we were
speaking about your episode and this conversation,
one of the things that we began with
is what do you do in the world,
but also like, who are you? And those
are very separate things.
So before we go into what you're doing
in life and in the world,
tell us a bit about who you know
yourself to be as you sit here today.
Yeah, that was the funny part is I
love now when people say, what do you
do?
That was very important,
is what is the output?
Because the output defines
who you are
in a lot of our world. And so
it's like, what do you do? And my
best answer is I be.
I just do my best to be
me and be the most authentic version of
myself.
And from that place,
I act.
I think in Hoffman, there's a
be, do, have.
It was one of the my favorite things
that came out of Hoffman, and I would
just keep it on my desk.
And it's really been
the guide over the last two and a
half years
if I'm my authentic self.
And I do
from the place of authenticity,
then I will have the life that I
wanna have. And I think that has been
proven to me
beyond my wildest dreams.
So what does that look like now?
I had done twenty five years of work
in Alcoholics Anonymous,
in therapy,
in spiritual studies.
So I kinda really thought I had scooped
under
everything you needed to scoop under, and then
Hoffman blew that wide open.
I really spent the better part of the
next two years almost monk like. I went
into deep, deep, deep study
around how I can
bring this work
more into the world in whatever forms
were meant for me to do.
What I hear is that you came into
taking the process
with twenty five years of
self reflection, discovery and change
and that you discovered there's
even more.
Yeah. In fact, I think it was on
day two,
one of my teachers who I love dearly,
I went up to and I said, teacher,
there are people that have real trauma here.
And I feel guilty
for coming
when their stuff was so tragic.
And he stopped, and he looked at me,
and he said, Brian, I read everything you
wrote in your application coming here.
Yours may be worse
because you weren't allowed to have it.
And it rocked my world.
And I felt it in that moment when
he said it.
I allowed myself to experience what I had
been holding
since I was five years old.
From that point forward, we were in the
work.
That was my introduction. You know, I I
went to Hoffman to support
someone else. I went to Hoffman because the
person I was in a relationship with,
was at a point where she really needed
something, and she agreed to go. And my
reason to go to Hoffman was she said
if I go, I want you to go
too.
And as someone who loves personal work, I'm
like, yeah. I get to go to camp
for a week? Fantastic. Right?
But
then I got there, and then I got
in the process, and I was like, oh
my god. There's so much I missed.
There's so much I missed.
And in one way, it rocked me. On
the other hand, I was so excited because
I knew,
you know, with every contraction, there's an expansion.
And I knew we were gonna get into
some stuff, and on the other side of
that was gonna be something really special. And
that was my experience.
When you were there, it sounds like that
one of the first things that you did
is say, I don't really have a valid
reason or permission to be here because other
people are having such a harder time.
I come from a background where
everything looked really good on the outside.
So much so that I think other people
would be really hard for them to comprehend
that you might have
traumatic experiences
when you come from
a world that other people would think is
the destination.
How I handled that from a very young
age was
really, really keeping it inside,
creating a mask that showed that everything was
okay,
and then kind of just escaping out of
the top of my head into creative realms.
I was a writer from a young age,
and I was able to somehow morph a
reality
that I could survive in.
My journey was a journey of embodiment.
My journey was about how you go
deep in
to
see those parts of yourself that's been carrying
that for so long
and
kind of removing
all of
the false narratives,
all the protections
to let him have a voice
and to let him come online
and to develop a relationship with that part
of myself that I had denied for most
of my life.
So I call that the ground game. It's
going deep down. It's excavating out the things
that don't serve me.
And in that, the embodiment
is I now can pull in
those creative forces
into this container,
which can now hold it.
And that is where the authenticity comes in
because I'm no longer creating
as a way to change reality.
Creativity is now as a way to express
authenticity,
express truth.
What was it like in that moment to
have your teacher
see you?
That five year old felt seen
for probably the first time in a purely,
purely,
like, I got you way.
It was like
all the weight I had been carrying
got a moment
to just let go
and allow him to feel that.
Touching that in that way after all the
stuff that I had done, all the work
that I had done
shocked me
that he never felt fully, fully seen on
that level.
So, yeah, so that was beautiful. And I
think
the gift I was given
in that moment is a gift I love
to give others.
I love
to create the opportunities
for others
where I could show up with full presence,
with full attention on them to allow them
to touch that part too, because I know
that that's where the medicine is.
That was one of the things in your
process week that you said blew you open,
feeling that little five year old and what
he'd carried
all that time.
Did it make you look back at your
past twenty five years differently?
Yes.
I talk about
addiction, which has been a big part of
my journey.
It's still a huge part of my passion.
Alcoholics Anonymous and doing
work in sobriety and sponsoring other people and
speaking and doing groups, all those things was
always really, really important to me, but there
was always something that I felt was like
I wasn't reaching.
Like, I wasn't getting all the way under
it.
So when that happened
and I saw under it, there was, on
one hand, a huge relief.
On another hand, it opened up a lot
more questions.
My journey
through
sobriety
was a major gift,
and it saved my life
from, you know, my early twenties when I
was really, really abusing drugs, and
they saved my life.
And I'm eternally grateful for that. But as
more and more time went on, I noticed
more people as they had more time starting
to suffer.
And there's just some things that we now
know in this world
that we have access to
that can really help. And Hoffman and the
somatics
and the combination of early childhood development work
and expression work and visualizations
is
are tools that weren't there fifty years ago
as much. So I'm a big believer in
weaving together all of these things. Like, so
in my world now,
I don't delineate.
Much like religions, you know, they're all based
in the same spiritual essence, I look at
it and say, there's so many tools available,
and
Hoffman gives us
a beautiful
set to work with.
This is one of the things we speak
about on the last day of the process
that you're not at the end, you're at
the beginning.
How has that all
woven together with what you came in knowing
this missing piece that you've described around embodiment,
around inner child?
How did that unfold
post process for you?
Leaving Hoffman
was the beginning of the world that I
knew completely falling apart. The relationship,
the
So the relationship you came in
hoping to repair
fell apart?
Yes. Yes. It was
a devastating
period of time.
I love this idea that leaving Hoffman, it's
not that I went to Hoffman,
and in a week,
I was transformed
to the point where I'm like a finished
product.
It
was the beginnings of getting in touch with
that authentic
part of me,
which I had always, like, kind of took
go backwards a second.
I was in entertainment industry,
I had a very successful career, a very
successful company.
While in that, there was this thing in
me that knew there was something else for
me. I couldn't name it. I couldn't know,
but I knew that I had to
move on to find it. And I'd sold
my company, and I was on the board
of a nonprofit at the time
to do social transformation work. And I ended
up becoming a member of a think tank,
which worked on social transformation work, and I
thought, okay. At least I'm getting closer, but
it still wasn't
a bull's eye. It was closer, and I
liked it. And there was something unfolding, but
it wasn't quite there.
When I got to Hoffman, I had kind
of been phasing out of that work.
And I was in this relationship, and it
was really I was madly in love, but
it was a very challenged relationship,
which is now has shown me to be
the greatest teacher I have ever had. I
think it
to the ends of the earth because
that was
absolutely
the greatest mirror I've ever had. Because when
you love that deeply,
the stakes are super high.
And when the stakes are super high,
it brings everything up.
Though we did not do a good job
of being able to navigate through that together,
what it taught me was
there were parts of myself that I was
so good at tucking away.
That I couldn't even see them,
and I would say that the process
touched them.
Part of this work is bringing
those things into consciousness.
So the minute they're brought into consciousness,
they can no longer be ignored.
They have to now bubble up. So I
would say
Hoffman allowed that bubble up process to start,
but it also
started me on the scent
of that thing that had been there for
so many years that I wanted so badly.
I wanted to be driven by whatever that
little spark was inside me that I couldn't
get to.
When I touched that
five year old self,
when I saw the stuff that was in
the unconscious rise to the conscious,
so did that flame.
So
then through that,
I touched my authentic self, and that allowed
me to guide me into purpose in my
life in a whole new way.
You sound like you're speaking about something
that inspired you to keep being more real?
Yes.
After Hoffman,
I went into
my personal work
at, like, a full time job.
When I launched my company, I'd worked sixty,
eighty hours a week.
I went into this
personal
internal transformation
work
like a full time job. And I knew
that
whatever
the purpose was for how I would live
the rest of my life started there.
So, yes, it was chasing that scent, and
then soon it wasn't a chase anymore. It
started to just grow. The more I was
in touch with my authentic self, the less
that was in shadow, the less of patterns
that I was in, the more
that just naturally started to grow.
And that led me into
becoming a somatic practitioner,
deep into different spiritual practices,
finding a community of other people in this
space, and
and really, really becoming a student again. And
I go back to when I started my
first company, I had done every job
in the entertainment
industry and entertainment advertising
industry. So when I started my company, I
knew how the wheel worked.
So I knew a reference to where I
wanted how I wanted to change it, and
which is what we did. We we changed
the way that a part of that industry
was working, and it and it worked out
really well.
When I saw this spark that I now
actually wanted to create
kind of a a healing program, a personal
transformation program
that was largely based in somatics,
I needed to go back to school. I
needed to go back and learn
every rung of the ladder because that's just
how I choose to do things is to,
like, really understand what every single person is
doing.
But I also found a real passion
for working with individuals, for working with groups,
men's work, and men's teams. And, you know,
it gives me so much
joy
to allow
other people
to tap that part of themselves and to
start expressing and to shedding and all of
that work. So yeah. So it's
what? It's been two and a half years,
and I feel like I'm just beginning.
So it sounds like you bring all parts
of you into consciousness,
inviting in
these parts of you that you'd shut down,
gave you a sense of what was inspiring
for you, that spark, that scent.
I think that's really
important for grads to hear
because there is this fear of I'll lose
this
shine, the Hoffman high. I'll lose this over
time. It sounds like in your case, it's
grown.
Yeah.
So I knew how to conquer.
I knew how to win.
I knew how
to use all my skills to get the
outcome
that I thought needed to happen.
The unlearning of that because when you're going
to be in the be, do, have model,
it doesn't work.
There's a patience that I had to develop
to allow
what's meant to unfold to show up in
front of me and then meet that thing
each
level of the rung
versus saying,
I need to create this,
and I'm gonna make that happen.
It's a
weird yoga.
It's a dance.
And when I'm in alignment,
they present themselves,
and then I step into them
versus
the opportunities
the opportunities, the person,
the company,
the whatever,
they show up, and then I meet them,
you know, in presence
versus going,
you know what? I'm getting older
and so much to do,
and I haven't done it all yet, so
I'm gonna make that happen today.
What happens is,
especially when
you're practicing
presence and authenticity,
is those things move further away.
It's like a reverse magnet.
So then you'd have to lean in more
and chase more.
So that's, I would say, for
anyone in the program
who's coming out
who is kinda saying, I know there's something
else for me. I'm not sure what it
is yet, but I feel like this is
the start. I would just say
the more you lean into that conversation
with that inner part of you,
the more you develop the relationship with your
authentic
self, with your essence,
and do the work.
That answer will come
in its own time.
I'm lucky. I
am someone who left a really, really prominent
position
at one point in my life
where people thought I was insane
because
why would you give up that identity? And
because there was this thing telling me I
have to in order to get the next
thing.
As you do this work,
that's why that relationship internally with yourself is
crucial
because you're all you got.
You know, it starts there,
then you build from there, and you have
to do it with support, and you have
to do it with community.
I have
two of my best friends
went through Hoffman with me, and I never
met them before.
But they're in my life on a weekly
basis, sometimes a daily basis.
I don't do any of this alone.
And from that, I have found
incredible communities of people all about their own
internal work and,
you know, some are other practitioners and some
are just really
beautiful people who
believe in this work.
I think that it starts with that internal
dialogue,
having community that supports it,
that reinforces it,
is kind of the path
to finding
the destination that you don't even know that
you want yet. I love that you said
patience. There's a patience in
I'm just going to
be authentic
and see what unfolds like a surrender and
a patience in that.
Have you experienced a softening and a space
for more things to grow?
Giving up
control
because I was good at it. I was
really good at control. It was a superpower,
I would say. And I don't mean that
in a malicious way.
That's why I'm so grateful for somatics.
I have hip issues.
My hips tell me
when I am rigid.
They tell me when I'm controlling.
And it's not even externally controlling. It's controlling
me.
And so the more I soften, the more
I kind of breathe into those hips
and listen to them for a minute, they
tell me
what's going on.
Then I can let go of that thing
and soften
again
because
it's a
practice. And the practice gets easier and easier
and easier
as
you encounter more moments that used to trigger
you into
ways that weren't serving me,
the more I encounter them and listen
to my body,
it will tell me what I need to
know,
and then I'll soften into that. So it
sounds like somatics,
embodiment,
and relationship with self are a big part
of your practice
post process.
I love sound baths. I love ecstatic dance.
I love
spiritual
ritual.
All those things are amazing.
I believe in them
as very necessary, but I think without fully
grounding,
without doing the deep work where you're
I believe in the chakra systems
and your lower chakras first and second and
third are the ones that get neglected the
most
without those being cleaned out and fully grounded.
Jumping straight into the fun stuff,
celebratory
stuff can be a bit of a bypass.
So I joke with people that I'm all
about the ground game. It's what I'm passionate
about because I trust. I trust that once
the foundation
is right,
that the container fills beautifully
with all the good stuff, all the magic.
I'm a big believer in life force. I'm
a big believer in Kundalini energy, all those
amazing,
incredible things, but it all starts with the
ground gate.
Hoffman,
especially for people who have not done a
lot of this, it is such an amazing
introduction.
You've taken a sharp
turn into a different
realm of your professional life. You mentioned
somatics. You mentioned
men's circles. You mentioned one on one work.
What do you see as next for you?
I did a plant medicine experience, which
I had this experience where
all my life's experience,
every moment of it, from the work that
I did and the conquering and the, you
know, beautiful creative work I got to do
and running companies and and all that stuff.
It all came back.
As I was doing this
healing work and everything, I was shown that
actually it's come back in, but it's come
back in in a new way. I'm in
a trustworthy
position again
within myself to take back the skills of
building
my passion.
I'm writing, which has been something I've been
doing
since I was 10.
I'm working with groups. I'm doing all that.
But really, my passion is creating another type
of personal transformation
platform,
which would be
where you're
doing deep retreat style work, but also matching
that back into community centers and in major
cities.
Because the one thing that I need is
when I go and do this work, I
need to come back and have it reinforced
in community.
It's like frequencies that wash over you. When
you're at Hoffman,
you're getting this dose of frequency over these
five or six days, which just starts to
transform you.
And the more we stay in those types
of connections and environments, the more alchemizing
it is to our systems.
So
I want to put together what I call
a healing collective
of practitioners of all different types that
work with participants but also have a community
for themselves. Because
often the people that find themselves in this
work are the ones that also need a
tremendous amount of support.
You don't find this work unless you're sensitive.
You don't find this work unless you're tapped
in.
But because you're
sensitive and tapped in, that means you had
a lot of work to do too to
get ready to serve others. So I think
creating kind of
communities for people
who are doing this work. And then the
hope is is that you do this work
and you come home and you have a
secondary community. You start bringing your primary community
around, and they start seeing your transformation, and
then we can start spreading this
transformational work as wide as possible. And I'd
love to just be a part of that.
Community
was a really important part of your process.
That moment of being seen by your teacher
for really what you'd carried since childhood
and welcoming that part in
your two best friends who are still in
your life two and a half years post
process are important
in your community.
You are out in the world with a
purpose, a mission to create a healing community,
a healing
collective,
and that that was such a relevant part
of your own experience.
Yeah. Creating
the the world and community that he wants.
That little five year old, you mean? Yeah.
That's what he wants, is to be part
of a
growing, growing, growing community. And why I think
I was
writing at,
you know, 10, 12 years old was
I wanted to relate.
I wanted you to connect with what I
was feeling, and I wanted to connect with
what you were feeling.
And so now I just don't have to
do that in the fantasy land. Now I
get to do that in real life. So
I actually wanna come back to something, and
that is you
describing what it was like to see your
five year old
differently
and how that changed your relationship with yourself.
And I know you have a son.
What have you noticed since
that shift within you?
My relationship with my son in the last
two or three years has
not that we had a bad relationship, we
always had a really, really close relationship.
But
where we are now
is beyond
my wildest dreams of being able to
show up really authentically.
My son's 22 now. He's a young man.
And more importantly, I let him fully be
himself.
For me at Hoffman,
really one of the most important things
is doing generational trauma work.
My father, who is amazing, his father died
when he was around six.
My dad was the youngest of five siblings
by about ten years, I think. So he
was really this, like, baby. In a strange
world in Brooklyn,
where everyone was a cop and a fireman
and very tough, and he he didn't have
his dad,
that trauma
that he carried, you know, that generation didn't
do this type of work, so it stays
within the family system.
So when I was at Hoffman, I saw
it. I saw that I was carrying this
generational
trauma
and
there's a lot of forgiveness
to my dad, to my mom and dad,
but really
an understanding and compassion
for his experience
and this gift of being the generation
that actually shifts
the course of a family.
I have seen that with my son.
I was an authority figure
to my son.
I was the rule keeper.
He's 22, so it's different. But even
two, three years ago,
it all changed.
He sees me
in my full
authenticity.
I see him in his full authenticity. There's
no topics off limit.
I talk to him every single day.
And
I have a beautiful relationship with my father
who's still alive and 89 years old. I
love him and accept him for exactly who
he is.
This is a big part of the work
that I now do is something that I
call quantum reparenting.
It is this ability to go back
through your whole life at all the moments
that were hard. And now as
your full adult self
be there to support
yourself, your young self through all these painful
moments and in a weird way alchemize them,
transform them so that in your current life
you're no longer carrying those scars.
But without Hoffman, I I can't imagine that
process for me not beginning and I can't
imagine
having
such a beautiful relationship with my son.
I do hear many grads say,
wow, I wish I had done this work
earlier when my kids were younger. Now that
I see how this is passed on, I
feel terrible
about how I've passed this on to my
own children.
But you mentioned you have gone back and
been there for yourself,
reparented yourself differently as well.
That's the beautiful part is actually you don't
have to do anything
for anyone else. You don't have to fix
them or try to change them.
You just
do this internal work on yourself and be
there for yourself, and you show up
in that more healed state.
And it has this
crazy impact
on
that energy
emits
and changes dynamics
outside of you without actually having to do
anything.
I could go on and on. It sounds
really like the definition of a ripple effect.
Like, you just gave a perfect example
of how something central to you
has made waves of positivity in other places.
And I think that's a really wonderful thing,
and thank you for sharing.
Thanks, Sadie.
What is one thing you would like to
leave the listeners with about
maybe a personal insight,
favorite practice?
Well, I'm a big somatic expression person.
So I think that all the tools that
you get
coming out of Hoffman,
everything from
the meditations that you get to do every
day
to the expression work.
I love
all types of somatic expression.
I guess my
advice to anyone who's gonna go is a,
trust the process,
but use the tools
and also
make a few connections.
Treat them well,
make time for
people that got to see you in such
a true state, such a raw state, and
keep them in your lives because it will
remind you of
who you are,
of those moments, and, also, it will show
you as you continue to grow.
It will remind you of how far you've
come.
Again, that community that can really see you
for being the authentic you,
and I love to hear how that's showing
up in your world. Thank you so much
for sharing yourself, your being,
for being here with me today. Thank you,
Sadie. Love you. Love 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 Rassie Grassi,
Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute
Foundation.
Our mission is to provide people greater access
to the wisdom and power of love. In
themselves, in each other, and in the world.
To find out more, please go to hompaninstitute.org.