So much of what I was trying to
address
was
so buried deep within me. It was like
scratching an impossible
itch and then finally I got to Hoffman
and I was like, oh my gosh, I
can reach the spot.
Wow.
This is wild, you know?
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.
Welcome
to Love's Everyday Radius. I'm here with Emma
Swift. Emma is a Hoffman grad. She's also
a musician.
Emma, thank you for being here with us
today. Thanks so much for having me. So
happy to have this conversation.
Maybe you can begin by telling us a
bit about who you are, what you do
in the world,
and any part of your journey you'd like
to begin with? Okay. Oh my goodness. Where
to begin? I'm an Australian person. I now
live in Nashville, Tennessee,
and I have done so since around 2012.
I'm married to a British person,
and that means that my accent is now
just very geographically confused.
That's a good place for me to start.
And it's in
Nashville and in The United States more broadly
that I
sort of began my self development journey that
led me to doing the Hoffman process.
I found out about the process through a
friend of mine, and we were just talking,
as friends do, about different
family stuff and struggles that we'd had. And
she was a Hoffman grad and she said
to me, you know, I really think that
you might get a lot out of
going to this kind of hippie retreat
is how she phrased it. And, and I
thought,
yeah, that sounds like a really
cool thing to do.
And I guess I filed it away in
the back of my mind
and I didn't really think about it. You
know,
the germ of the idea was there,
but it wasn't until
around twenty eighteen, I went through a blue
period.
I was in my late thirties, feeling a
little bit stuck,
a bit confused as to where my life
was going, not in a personal sense,
but in a professional sense. I felt like
I was in a rut, but I also
knew that it wasn't just about that. And
so that made me think, okay, maybe it's
time to go. So I applied
to go to the Hoffman process and I
went in early twenty nineteen
and it changed my life.
The word hippie retreat is in my mind
and I'm smiling.
Did you experience the Hoffman process as a
hippie place? I'm just curious.
No, actually I didn't. Once I was there,
you know, one of my first jobs when
I was in college, I put myself in
college through college, like
working in a crystal shop in Sydney in
Australia. So, you know, I guess though in
my mind, and I think in a lot
of people's minds, especially if you're not from
there,
Northern California
is very evocative
of
the late 1960s
and, you know, I'm in music. So people
kind of immediately think of the Jefferson Airplane
or the Grateful Dead and, and stuff like
that. So in my mind, that's what Northern
California
meant to me. And certainly to, you know,
there's definitely elements of that in the area,
but that's not what Hoffman is, but in
my head,
that's that's what it was going to be.
You know, it does have Northern California's
granola
and Birkenstocks
kind of idea. And maybe the process began
in some of that hippie era because it
began sixty years ago in Berkeley.
Yeah, exactly. And that essential message of love
and light and actually
trying to become a better person
and a more loving and a more kinder
person is
to me a part of that ethos, you
know? So like whether or not Hoffman is
that now,
it wasn't off putting to me. In fact,
it made it very appealing.
And then I didn't get there and go,
there's not as much cheesecloth and Birkenstocks here
as I like. I'm gonna go.
There was probably initially somewhat of a radical
sense of
love.
It's become so much more commonplace. It's almost,
you know, meditation
and
becoming a more loving person and personal development.
This is such an accepted part of our
culture now. I'm just noticing how that's evolved.
And isn't that a wonderful thing? It certainly
wasn't part of the culture where I grew
up
in Australia.
I grew up in the nineties. I was
a teenager in the 1990s,
but
it could have been the 1950s
for all that was going on where I
lived. Cause I lived in a small regional
town.
It was the pre internet days.
I'd never even really heard of meditation until
my best friend from college,
or school rather, she went to Nepal
and meditated for a year, the year after
we left school is kind of amazing and
way more advanced
on her journey
than I am and definitely was at the
time. So how did you end up in
Nashville? Will you take us even way back?
Oh, sure.
I fell in love with America
when I first came to visit here in
2009.
I was 27
and I rented a
car with my best friend and we drove
it through the desert. We drove it through
California
and Arizona.
And I just thought, oh, this is magical.
I really want to come and live here.
I felt very drawn to it. On a
deep soul level, I knew that I had
work here to do, but I didn't really
know what that was going to look like.
Fortunately for me, I'm a deeply impractical person.
So I just decided, oh, you know what?
I'll go to Nashville.
I play music. It seems like a fun
town.
I don't play country music, but it was
just a city and it remains a city
that's just brimming with creative,
wonderful people.
And there's lots of really good ideas in
this place. And at that time,
I'd quit my day job in Australia. I
was a journalist
and Nashville was very affordable.
So I knew that I would be able
to live off my savings until I figured
it out
Or or I could just go back to
Sydney,
and that would be fine too. Deeply impractical
but inspired
young woman moves to Nashville
playing not country music. What kind of music
were you playing?
Well, it's much more folky. It's sort of
in the indie rock folk universe. I love
Bob Dylan and I love Joan Baez and
I I love all of that kind of
stuff. I'm a deeply
old fashioned
person.
So that's the kind of stuff that I
was doing. But then I moved here and,
everybody's so creative
and it brought up, and this is, you
know, one of the things that got me
to Hoffman, you know, I moved to a
place where I didn't know anybody
and I was making new friends, but I
wasn't
in any of my old routine.
I wasn't in the city I was born
in. I wasn't near my family.
A lot of feelings were bubbling up about
who am I?
Where do I belong in the world?
Who am I in relation to
this life that I'm trying to live? Who
am I in relationship to my friends?
Who am I in relationship to my family?
What does it all mean?
I had all these feelings, but I didn't
quite know how to
express them.
I was very,
very buttoned up,
raised Catholic,
generation after generation of
feelings are to be
pushed down.
And I didn't like that
about myself.
And then as I think a lot of
people find, you know,
they get married and I got married and,
so many of my
issues came up in this really beautiful, loving
relationship
that I have.
I was like, oh, I think I've got
some work to do.
So were you already in Nashville when you
got married? Yeah. Yeah. In moving and leaving
home,
it's like a new lens on who you
are? Yeah. Absolutely.
A new lens on who you are because
I think anybody who has
been an expatriate
or immigrated,
particularly if you do it as a solo
person,
that's gonna bring up some stuff
because
it's a self imposed
loneliness. You know, it's something that you or
at least in my experience of it,
I wanted it and I craved it.
But then when I had it, I was
like, oh man, what have I done?
There's that romanticism
of that too. There's the wandering soul.
There's also the explorer.
It's not just the new lands that you're
exploring. It's the new land within yourself
where you're going, okay, what am I in
relation to this? Because
it's like when you're at Hoffman and we
don't really talk about
jobs or anything like that. When you move,
it's kind of a similar thing. You're taken
out of context. You're no longer
running into Bob, who you went to high
school with at the supermarket or
Jane, who
worked at the same job as you. You're
kind of like, okay, who am I in
this world? It's almost like you go away
and then something new emerges.
That then followed by an intimate relationship that
was loving and safe also could then mirror
back the parts of yourself that maybe you
hadn't seen.
Absolutely. Totally.
So for me, in my particular experience, what
had happened was I just thought, oh, if
I moved to a town full of songwriters,
my feelings will uncork and I will be
a songwriter and I married a songwriter. And
then I was still here and I was
still this very repressed Catholic person
or lapsed Catholic person.
And I was really annoyed at myself. I
thought I'd done all the right things. And
that was when I was like, actually, you
know, I think I might need to do
some work.
You know, that thing in the world where
you're like, oh no, I have this recurring
problem and the problem is me.
Yeah. So, Emma, how did you know you
were repressed? Is there a story or an
experience
you could describe? Like, how did you have
a sense that you were not expressing yourself?
I would just go to write and I
would sit there with my guitar and I
would sing the songs and I was just
very uncomfortable,
but I admired it so much in other
people.
And then it's that, you know, you spot
it, you got it. I would see other
people doing it and I would feel
sad.
You know, I would have that craving of,
oh man,
I long to be able to do that.
I've got this yearning to do that.
And so
that's how I knew
the most. Like I'm quite, I think, expressive
in other aspects of myself. It was more
just with my creativity that I was like,
oh, this feels a little bit too vulnerable,
too close.
I love how you described
how you see
that something you appreciate, but even long for
in someone else could create a sense of
sadness, but it sounds like you were really
realizing that was something
I knew within myself
and I wanted more permission or more expression
of
it. Yes,
totally. It was very frustrating. I was in
a real pattern of oscillating between sadness and
then frustration
because I could see it, but I just
couldn't get myself over the hump. Felt very
stuck. I think a lot of people that
are listening would resonate with seeing
it, the awareness
of it, and it's not changing.
What happened next? You decided to come.
I decided to come and I think I
must have enrolled in November or December.
And it was very nice because it meant
this is in 2018. And so it meant
that I was starting the new year
in a new way. It was very much
in my head.
New year,
new me.
I'm going to go to Northern California
and I'm just going to see what
happens.
And
it was
utterly magical
and
not at all what I expected
in a very
good way
in that I think that I was just
very, very challenged.
There was no way that I was going
to be able to fumble my way through
it. You know what I mean? You know
what I mean? Like, it's an intense experience.
It was very all in. It was very
challenging.
It's funny to to use this word, but
it's the word that I wanna use. So
I'm gonna use it. It was enjoyable
even though it was really emotionally intense.
And I think that's part of that is
because so much of what I was trying
to address
was
so buried deep within me. It was like
scratching an impossible
itch. And then finally, I got to Hoffman
and I was like, oh my gosh, I
can reach the spot.
Wow.
This is wild. You know?
To have the experience of
that frustration,
even though it may be intense
and probably at times
emotionally
difficult or painful, that that could feel like
a relief
to finally
work with it. Totally. And I mean, to
go back to the core of, you know,
the Hoffman experience, really,
because I wasn't very loving to myself.
I've got a pattern of being
part of that frustration and that sadness is
like, I'm hard on myself.
And when you're someone that's hard on yourself,
then you're hard on other people.
You're hard on the world.
That's not a very
nice
way to be.
You know, it makes me tear up thinking
about it, but it's like,
it
was so
good
for me to learn how to soften.
Is there a moment that you remember
in your process where you felt that softening?
There's quite a few moments, actually.
I mean, to me, the most standout
experience
was
the really physical
stuff,
the writing down of my mom and dad's
patterns,
and then writing my response of, do I
have these patterns or do I have the
reaction to this?
You know, it's very intense
mirror,
but then physically being able to break that
down
was extraordinary.
Having,
I think, forgiveness
and a much greater understanding
of
how little control we have over the patterns
that come up for us. It's like you're
a fish in a stream and the current's
gonna go one way or it's gonna go
the other way, but, like, there is a
current.
That was very
important for me.
The other one too was writing letters and
that stuff, getting into that imagining.
I love the metaphor of the fish and
the current. There is a current one way
or another. We all have a childhood. We
all have parents who have certain
behaviors, beliefs, patterns, ways of disciplining
that become part of your behaviors, connecting those
dots,
seeing the mirror, and then being able to
dismantle it.
To dismantle it and have
some
grace
and some compassion
around it was very,
very important
for me. And that softening
where you realize you didn't choose
to be hard on yourself or hard on
the world or repressed.
Right. Just as my parents didn't choose
their patterns either.
It was just so important for me to,
as you say, dismantle
that mirror and kind of
feel a sense of relief
about that.
What did you see? What was the perspective
shift?
I think the perspective shift that I was
just so grateful
to be in the world,
you know, to have been given this gift
of life.
I love my life and I really like
who I've grown into being as a person.
And my parents gave me that.
They gave me that gift. Did they have
limitations?
Sure.
I have limitations.
We all have limitations,
but they were just doing the best that
they could do
in the circumstances.
And that was really important for me.
And you can go back to your family
and you can maybe have conversations with people,
but like my dad had passed, you know,
he died when I was 21.
So
in many ways, I was doing the healing
for both of us
there because it was
a conversation that we were never gonna be
able to have
together.
I would
love to
have been able to see him and say,
I see you and I love you,
but I couldn't do that in like the
physical world,
but on a spiritual level, on my spiritual
self level,
I could do that.
And that really healed
something
in me because I guess I no longer
felt this sense of,
oh, it's broken and he's gone so it
can never be fixed,
which is definitely something I had been
carrying around, which I think can happen if
you lose someone
in grief suddenly,
at least in my experience of it, I
had this feeling that
there was this unresolved tension that was never
gonna go away.
And it felt very unfair.
And again, that pattern of frustration or my
other patterns of rage
really came up there.
I'm so mad at you. And you're not
here to me to say that I'm so
mad at you, but also I love you
so much. And you're not here that I
can say I love you so much either.
So it was
very helpful
for me to
actually give myself permission
to
still have that conversation.
You're speaking about a moment where you were
able to have an experience of completion
or closure
well beyond the time that he died.
Right.
And that goes back
generations too. You know, that's I can do
that for my grandparents
too. I can see the ancestral line,
you know, that tug.
You described
feeling
grateful
for the love that they gave you for
the life that you have, even though it's
not perfect.
Do you see that as a reflection
of
some of that cathartic work?
Yeah, absolutely.
I have a lot of enthusiasm
naturally in life, which has served me well.
I'm a passionate person,
but one of the challenges
of being
passionate
is that it can flicker
into rage
and to love more wholly
rather than to be like,
so angry.
It's part of like harnessing those patterns for
good in a way.
You know, that actually brings me to this
song that you've written the resurrection game.
I just wanna pull out something that really
stood out to me in the lyrics,
the eternal story we love
and we fail,
breathing in fire
and calling it
air.
Well, that whole song is it begins in
Calistoga
where the redwoods grow. I've come to excavate
your bones.
So I guess
what I realized
when I was at Hoffman
because my ego was going,
you need to
figure out your
writer's block.
You're repressed. You need to deal with this.
And then I get to Hoffman, I'm like,
oh, I have so many unreconciled
issues with my father. This is why I'm
here, I think, to do.
And I think that the line, you know,
coming to surrender to what was never there,
it's really about
loving someone for who they are
rather than for who you want them to
be.
That gap,
particularly if you have patterns of perfectionism,
like,
why aren't you like this? I need you
to be like this.
No,
he was his own soul on his own
journey
with his own patterns.
So that's what that is about.
You know, it's a really beautiful way of
acknowledging
the eternal story. Like this happens to humans.
It happens ancestrally generation after generation.
We love and we fail. You tried.
You did your best and you hurt me
at times by how you didn't meet me.
And I still love you. And I still
love you. And in doing that
and in loving you
and seeing that
not as a failure, but just as the
limits of who we are as human beings,
then I can also
love myself.
We all have moments where we wish
we'd been a better person
or a different person,
but that's part of what
growth is. It's going okay.
Well, I was just doing what I could
do
with the tools that I had at my
disposal
at the time.
Sounds like really embracing
imperfection
led you to a place of softening and
forgiveness,
maybe for yourself
too.
Definitely for myself,
everything became
easy is not the right word, because I
think in,
in some ways it's very difficult to be
a soft person in the world
can be really challenging.
And we live in very intense
times,
but it definitely made it easier. I became
a better friend.
My friendships
strengthened
undoubtedly
after the Hoffman process,
my marriage
improved exponentially
after the process.
You know, I should add there's that thing
when you're at Hoffman where they're like, you
don't have to go back and then try
and convince everybody, you know, to also do
Hoffman.
I was totally that person. I was like,
this will take too long. You should totally
do it. All that enthusiasm.
And then I, so I was sort of
saying to my husband, I was like, you
really need to go. And then he was
supposed to go. And then the pandemic happened.
And so he's never done it. I'd like
for him to, but I think that it
would have to be a course of his
choosing
rather than me saying, this is something you
need to do.
What you described about thinking you were coming
for one reason and realizing there's
so
much more that I really am here to
learn and gather.
I think a lot of people have that
experience and there is something about it being
the right time
for you to really be willing to see
all that's
there. An important part of my experience at
Hoffman is
I'll go to Hoffman
and then I'll be fixed
and everything will be hunky dory.
And we all know that that's not really
how life works.
The work that I do in therapy now,
it goes on a much deeper plan than
I just think I would ever have been
able to touch
had I not gone to Hoffman,
had I not been willing
to do that process.
In a way,
the Hoffman was like the beginning
of
the archaeological
dig.
It softened up the earth for me to
be able to get in and go, alright,
what's what's happening?
There's an exterior
shell or crust
that could be protective,
but also isolating.
Absolutely. And you know, that song that I
wrote about the experience too, you know, it's
called The Resurrection Game. And part of the
reason for that is that I really did
feel like I had a spiritual
emotional
rebirth
after
taking part. And what was especially
poetic about that for me was that Northern
California looks
like Sydney. It looks like Australia. It looks
like where I was born.
I was born in a place with tall
eucalyptus
trees and dry earth and near the sea.
And then to go and have this experience
in the place in America that looks the
most like my home country.
It was a really beautiful echo
of my life.
I know they do Hoffman in England and
because my partner's English, had it come along
at a different time, I might have been
doing Hoffman in England. But the fact that
I was doing it in Northern California,
I think is quite an important
geographical
part of the journey too.
It's beautiful
healing work.
It's so funny because I think even in
the time since Hoffman, because my process was
six years ago now, I feel like we're
so much more online than ever. I feel
like Hoffman is such an important
opportunity
for people to just
get away
from our
devices
and all of the noise,
all the clutter and all of the distractibility
everywhere.
Now I'm told
attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and
shorter.
And the whole thing
about being at Hoffman is about paying attention
and about paying attention to
the people around you
and doing this work
together.
Because that's another really important element
too,
that
you're not alone
in a room
having some kind of interrogation
process of like, so tell me about your
childhood and why are you this way or
anything like that.
You're just in a room full of beautiful
people who you've never met before,
who all for their own personal reasons have
decided that
they want to expand. They want to grow.
There's a lovely sense of community
in that. What impact did that have on
you being in that room full of other
people?
I think it was really good because it
helps you let go of the sense that,
oh, and this is why I'm this way,
or you don't know what it's like to
be me because I've had all of this.
And it's like, he has just a room
full of people that, yeah, we don't know
what it's like to be anyone
else, but we've all got parents. They've all
brought past issues.
It's a very human
thing to do
rather than feeling
like very special.
I knew that I didn't want to be
attached to my narrative.
I knew that I was doing an explorer
quest
wanderer.
You know, my parents
hadn't left Australia, so I was definitely doing
that
unlived life of the parent
traveling thing.
I think when I moved, I thought that
that was like, yep, I'm gonna solve that
problem. But then it's like, I just carried
it all with me.
Yeah. That's a really great description of sometimes
we battle against or rebel against realize you
actually are taking it with you as you
do. And it sounds like
a peace
and a welcoming
back of the good part and integration
of that.
Yeah, absolutely. And integration,
the sense of relief,
the joy that I feel in the world
now, as well as the deep sadness
that I feel sometimes too,
everything came into full color
after Hoffman.
Everything felt a little bit brighter.
I mean, there is that sense
when you've been away from stimuli,
work and obligation and all of that. And
so you do come out of the process
and feel like, oh my gosh, I'm a
freshly hatched bird and everything is really intense.
Like, I definitely felt that, but
I no longer feel like a little chicken
the way that I did on that first
Saturday or Sunday, whatever it was after Hoffman,
but I got so much greater capacity for
joy.
I've got so much greater capacity for love.
When I signed up, we had done an
information call and you had said, do you
think you need more joy? I wouldn't have
said,
yes.
I think I would have been like, oh,
no. I'm pretty good. I think I'm fine.
But I had this heart expansion.
Yeah. I can't really explain it other than
that. Yeah. Everything
just feels a lot more
vivid.
By the way, we'll put your song and
all of this in the show notes
because you've created something really beautiful. It sounds
like some of that creative block has been
removed. Plus you experienced
other things you didn't know you came for
showing up differently.
Anything else you'd like to say about that?
Sure. I mean, I think one of the
things that I found really challenging,
I'm in my early forties right now and,
I never wanted to have kids and I
still don't have kids. That's been a choice
and I'm pretty happy with that choice. But
when my friends
started having kids,
I went through this really negative pattern of
just being like, I don't know,
the boat has been rocked. I don't know
how we're ever going to be friends anymore.
And now I have
all these beautiful young people in my life
and so much happiness from that and
so much tenderness
pre Hoffman. I had gotten so out of
step with my inner child through the course
of my adolescence and adulthood and all of
that. So in repairing some of the wounds
with my inner child,
that has made that aspect of my life
easier too.
I'm grateful. I just I want you to
know that. Thank you for being willing to
share yourself for what you're creating in the
world and for being here for this conversation.
Oh, thanks, Sadie. I'm grateful too. Yeah. I
really can't
speak
more
warmly
about
my entire Hoffman experience.
I cannot imagine
my life
having
not done it.
I'm just so
happy
to have
made that call.
And also to have been drawn to it.
What a really special place.
Yeah. Well, let's wrap up with one
surprising way you've seen yourself show up in
the world
or something where you've seen your light in
the world around you that you were like,
wow, I was not expecting that. Oh, gosh.
Prior to Hoffman, I'd always kind of looked
for things externally.
That was very much part of my patterning
too. And then when I left Hoffman, I
could go, maybe I could work for myself.
I never thought I would own a small
business. Now I have a small business. I'm
like, okay, this is quite
odd.
This does surprise me actually.
If I go back and I slow down
and I think about,
say,
25 year old me, as opposed to me
who's 42 now,
there's a part of me that used to
always ask for permission.
And I don't really have that anymore.
I could see how not needing permission
could really benefit you as
someone who's creating
in the world.
Absolutely.
It's really important.
So much of being creative is about play.
And even if you're writing about very adult
things,
it's about going back to a childlike sense
of wonder
and going, oh, I don't know what's gonna
happen. Let's just see.
Getting in that really direct dialogue
of, okay, I'm gonna give myself permission
to slow down
enough
to see what comes
forth.
The slowing down is also really important aspect
of my process
because I have a tendency to go, go,
go
and allowing others to take their time to,
to not worry so much.
Yeah.
Thank you for
taking the time. We're slowing down to be
here with me for this conversation. I'm so
happy that we could connect, and thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you for listening to our podcast. My
name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and
president of Hoffman Institute Foundation.
And I'm Rassen Grassi,
Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute
Foundation.
Our mission is to provide people greater access
to the wisdom and power of love. In
themselves, in each other, and in the world.
To find out more, please go to hompaninstitute.org.