Sometimes you can feel a little bit woo
woo. You know, you're too far out there,
and you know your experiences have been powerful.
But, like, who do you tell those experiences
to, and who will appreciate
how powerful they were?
And that was, I found, really very
important
for me in the process
of connecting with other people.
Welcome, everybody. My name is Drew Horning, and
this podcast is called Love's Everyday Radius.
It's brought to you by the Hoffman Institute
and its stories and anecdotes
and people we interview
about their life post process
and how it lives in the world radiating
love.
Please be aware that this episode references
intense emotional content,
racism,
and
suicide.
If you or someone you know is suicidal,
please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention
Lifeline
at +1 80273
+1 802738255,
or message the crisis text line at 741741.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Hoffman podcast. Jim
Bonilla is with us. Welcome, Jim.
Good morning. Or I guess it's good morning.
Yeah. It is. It is great to have
you on the show today and to
have you tell your story a little bit.
And you were just sharing that in preparation
for this interview, you what did you do?
Well, I was thinking about who I was
pre Hoffman,
what the experiences were during Hoffman,
but also then post Hoffman. A couple of
things I would say about pre Hoffman.
What's called a Nuyorican, a New York born
Puerto Rican.
New Eurecan.
Yeah. I had congenital cataracts, so I couldn't
see out of my left eye at all
because of the cataract. And my right eye
had pretty good vision. And this is you
as a kid? This is me as a
kid. I was born with congenital cataracts. And
then at about age
nine,
long story, I got sent to a Catholic
boarding school slash reform school,
and a kid who was losing badly to
me in horseshoes
thought it would be funny to throw the
horseshoe at me, yelling, hey, speck.
And, unfortunately, I didn't catch it
except with my eye, my one good eye,
my right eye. And that hemorrhaged, and I
ended up becoming legally blind for the next
ten years. I lost most of the sight
in my right eye.
And so from about age nine to 19,
I took services
from, you know, the New York Association for
the Blind, and I write about this in
the memoir.
At 19, they couldn't do surgery on,
young eyes back then because the cataract grows
on the lens of the eye, And they
would try then removing the lens, but because
the fibers are so strong, they couldn't do
surgery on young people, only on really old
people. But then they came up with this,
I call it the, Dyson
vacuum machine, which basically they used ultrasonic
sound. This is before lasers
to shatter the lens of the eye.
And then they had this little tiny vacuum
where they scooped out and vacuumed off the
disease lens,
and now I wear contact.
I'd already started getting involved in sit ins
with the early disability rights movement.
But then when I got my eyesight back
in my right eye, I still don't see
out of my left.
I got involved in doing community organizing
and
ended up becoming a social justice educator, activist,
and professor.
So that's the short story.
There's something important about those ten years
of no sight. Oh, yeah.
This is what's often surprises people.
When I was in the hospital at age
19,
I was having a real crisis.
I was not sure I wanted to get
my eyesight back because I had become sort
of a, in my mind's eye, a poster
child for a well adapted
blanket. I'd gone to London school. I'd gone
to college.
I'd been the first
blind counselor at this camp for the blind.
So I felt like, hey. I got it
together. What am I doing?
And it was really the the kindness of
a night nurse
who basically just helped me chill out enough.
And then then, of course, once I got
the eyesight back,
the taxi
drive
through Central Park
on the way home from the hospital,
it was like somebody I had dropped acid.
Everything
was pulsating, and I thought the taxi cab
driver had painted his
cab psychedelic yellow. A friend of mine gave
a great analogy. She said, you know, she's
bisexual. And she said, you know, when I
was with my first husband,
sex was fine. It's like watching a black
and white movie. But then when I had
my first female lover, it was like seeing
in technicolor.
You know, that's the title of the chapter
in my memoir about getting the eyesight back,
seeing in technicolor.
So you readopt
a new
identity now as a sitting person,
albeit only out of one eye. You engage
in
social justice movement. You become a social justice
educator
and then a professor
at Hamlin University.
And what happens next?
So what happens next is my wife had
attended Hoffman
ten years earlier in 2010,
and now we're at about 2017.
And I've retired. I've been retired for three
years. I've been working on a novel.
Trump was being elected into office at January,
and I kinda didn't wanna be around for
that. So I said, okay. I'm gonna just
gonna do Hoffman. Finally, it took me seven
years to overcome my own resistance.
And I was also diagnosed with diabetes for
the first time. So I said, I need
something to shake up the house.
And that's how I ended
up going to Hoffman in January
2017,
and it was, you know, life changing. Continues
to affect
how I am in the world.
Yeah. So you're sitting in those chairs the
first couple days. What was it like for
you? How do you feel
as you're in this experience at the beginning?
I had been doing social justice work for
a long time,
and I did work about multicultural organizations.
And I'm looking around the room.
And as far as I can tell,
I'm the only person of color,
Latino,
otherwise,
in the place.
I could feel I was starting to close-up.
And then I got introduced to my leader,
Lisa, who has a strong Italian accent, and
she spoke, like, seven languages.
And I knew right away
that this woman
would understand the experience
of otherness.
And I just was able to relax into
that. I mean, how
I got
sent to her as a leader,
spirit was watching out for me, I guess.
So that really released a lot of my
initial terror.
As you settled in
seven years after your wife had gone acknowledging
some resistance,
what's it like to
work on patterns and things that had gotten
in the way when
part of your lived experience was also
out of your control, stuff that
you didn't choose blindness. You didn't choose to
be
attacked on the playground
as a nine year old. How do you
sort through that at Hoffman?
One of the things that I found really
helpful
was thinking about the notion of shame.
In my memoir, I sort of have a
chapter where I talk about shame and how
shame is different from guilt. Guilt is something
that you did
and that you can maybe atone for.
Shame is something that you can't change.
And I think a lot of my shame
issues
stemmed from and I didn't realize this until
Hoffman,
from abandonment issues I had with my mother
who turned out to suffer from
pretty significant mental illness.
I don't wanna give away too much of
the book, but the the opening sentence in
the book is I'm five years old and
I'm being chased around our apartment in Queens
by my knife wielding mother.
But my father also left when I was
five.
And, you know, children tend to internalize and
say, well, it must be me.
And I had never really made that connection
before until I got to Hoffman
that not only was I dealing with Shane,
but that the source of that was
about abandonment.
So that was a big for me.
I had been working on this novel,
and, you know, they tell you write what
you know. That's different than the memoir. Right?
Oh, yeah. The novel was about the small
town in Minnesota
not dealing with its increasing diversity.
Because I was a first time novelist,
I made the heroine of the the book
Puerto Rican, but a Puerto Rican lesbian.
And it and it never really worked.
The novel went to 300 pages.
On my way to Hoffman, I had sent
it off to,
an editor.
But I just sort of knew in my
bones that this really wasn't gonna fly. So
part of what I think Hoffman's gift to
me was to be able to say,
dealing with my patterns allows me to be
free
to offer all my potential and gifts.
I mean, I had thought of a memoir
before,
but I talked about it being the memoir
would focus on my being blind
and being Puerto Rican and dealing with those
things.
And I never really said,
I need to deal with mental health issues,
not just my mother's, but also my own.
And that was also an issue of shame.
Like, I didn't wanna admit that my family
had mental health issues,
nor did I wanna
admit my own college. I almost committed suicide.
And so the Hoffman process allowed me to
be able to let go of some of
that shame and say, I think that might
be helpful for people to understand.
Yeah. So deeply
embedded
shame was almost as a part of your
identity.
Yeah. And layered. Shame about being blind,
but not being blind enough because I was
partially sighted. So people wouldn't know right away
that I was blind unless I was carrying
a cane, which I did later on.
Shame about being Puerto Rican.
The nuns told my mother when I was
in fourth grade that I had a speech
impediment,
and they were gonna put me into a
special class. Well, they put me into the
special class, which was basically for slow children.
Well, you know, you put a kid who's
not slow into a slow class, and I
found ways to entertain myself. That got me
kicked out of Catholic school
and sent to the reform school, which is
where the accident happened.
The other thing that I found out years
later, you know, when I was an academic,
was they had done research
and found that literally tens of thousands
of children
who had accents
were tracked into slow classes.
When those children were then a section of
them were retested by bilingual
specialists,
those kids tested often not just out of
being slow,
but being smarter than average.
I came to realize that back then, I
had fallen into this
pattern of difference being seen as deficit.
Let's slow it down. Difference
being seen as deficit.
And so much of what you faced was
sort of a product of the times and
the systemic
nature of boarding schools, of discrimination,
of our educational
system.
At the time that I was going to
school,
80%
of the Puerto Rican kids in the New
York City school systems
never graduated.
And that was, again, a product of
difference being interpreted
as deficit
and lower expectations.
I mean, kids rise or don't rise to
the expectations.
And so that was part of what became
obvious to me, but only in retrospect.
And I'll say one more thing about that.
I'm interested in the intersections of my different
identities being blind, being Puerto Rican, having mental
health, family issues.
One of the things that I came to
realize is, well, how come it was that
I wasn't in that 80%?
And what happened was because I had the
eye accident
and I lost most of my sight.
At the time, the New York City schools
had just been required
to provide
services
for disabled children.
Before that, they didn't do that at all.
As a matter of fact, there's a great
book written by a woman named Judy
Heumann called Becoming Human.
She's one of the leaders of the early
disability rights movement. She was in a wheelchair
and
she had to sue the state of New
York or the city of New York to
get services. They said, we can't have you
come to school here. We should be a
fire hyzer.
So she won the suit. And because of
her work, I got special services.
And, again, here the lesson is
you take a kid who's considered not very
quick, but you give them some attention,
like I got because of these special services,
and I flourished.
So, you know, it's one of those examples
of sometimes the multiple identities. In this case,
working for me could have easily worked against
me, but
I was again you know, spirit was watching
out. Thank god for Judy's courage to stand
up to the systemic
discrimination
associated with being different.
Yeah. Judy would go on to San Francisco.
There's a great documentary by Barack Obama called
Crip Camp, c r I p
camp. By the way, we'll put all of
this in the show notes. Great. And it's
basically a documentary about this camp in Upstate
New York where Judy went to when she
was a teenager.
She and a bunch of the campers that
were there ended up going to California
and starting
the disability rights movement.
And I ended up going to California,
and I ended up taking over Jerry Brown's
office in I don't I think it was
1977.
But there was this
wellspring of activism that came out of this
camp, which I ended up working at. At
that point, I had my eyesight back, but
I ended up being a counselor.
And even then, it infected me, and I
went to California.
Just thinking about you in your process, I
imagine
so much of your history gets digested
during your week at Hoffman.
Certainly,
my patterns, you know, I talked a little
bit about the shame one. But also the
flip side of that, being able to get
in touch with how
nature
was one of the things that helped me
heal
from my wounds, you know, certainly helped me
heal mental illness.
I have very strong memories.
Was it White Sulphur Springs, the old campus?
It was. Yes. Up in Santa Elena, California.
I remember walking early in the morning before
things started. There was still a fog
through the redwood grove there. There was some
just majestic
trees, and there was a labyrinth. And
in the process, I came to realize
and start to think more explicitly about how
nature in my own life had been such
a healing force, which I incorporate
into writing in my memoir. There was an
expression
by the idea of spiritual
reparenting.
That became part of what happened for me
at Hoffman.
I think the definition that they gave of
spirit was
your spiritual self is who you are without
your patterns.
Nature
throughout your life and definitely at Hoffman has
been a real source of strength.
Oh, yeah. There's several stories I tell about
nature coming to my rescue.
But the most vivid, I think, is when
I'm in college having a really hard time
dealing with the racism and being blind and
my parental,
Michigas.
And I ended up standing on a ledge
of a 10 story dorm,
and I'm, like, one step away.
And also in this red tail hawk
comes swooping so close to me that I
look up and you can see the red
of its tail
with the sun in the background. It lights
up, and the color red was basically
stop.
But there's several
stories that I tell in the course of
the memoir about how nature just saved my
fat from the fire.
Why do you think it is about nature?
Like, the synchronicity,
the overlay
of spirit
and nature.
Why did those two create such potency together?
I think some of it has to do
with awe.
Getting us out of seeing ourselves as the
central
character in the cast of the movie and
seeing, you know, we're just a small part.
And for me, the larger nature was a
benevolent force.
My wife and I went out two nights
ago because the northern lights
here
had been so intense.
And, you know, we go to bed early.
We're we're at the age now. We don't
stay up until three or four in the
morning to see northern lights. But these were
intense at 09:00 at night, and our mouths
are open because the reds and the greens
and the pinks.
I mean, I'd seen northern lights before, but
this was the whole horizon.
So I think there's something about
being open
to nature and the sense of awe that
it can inspire
in spirit.
I love that.
What happens as you move towards the end
of your week at Hoffman
as you begin to synthesize
and bring together so much of what was
occurring?
One of the things I just noticed in
going back over my journal was one of
the last quotes I had was,
if you don't have a vision,
your worries
become your vision.
And it really made me
think very intentionally
about, okay,
what's next for Bania?
And it turned out that a number of
things happened. One was
my wife and I had been living in
Saint Peter, Minnesota. We had basically bought an
old abandoned
farmhouse and farmstead that hadn't been
used at all. And we spent twenty years
rehabilitating
not just the house,
not just the the barn,
but we basically planted 600 trees
and bushes. We planted two
native
prairies,
which, you know, made the bees very happy
and the butterflies.
But my wife had taken a position
about two hours away.
And at the same time,
we were realizing that the city had moved
around us, so we were now sort of
this little
island.
It was not the same place. And so
part of what I
came to realize right after Hoffman was it
was time to let go.
It was time to let go of the
land and my sense of territoriality.
I hated it when people trespass.
So that was a big, big shift for
me. The other big shift after
Hoffman
was I went from thinking about writing this
novel
to being much more
vulnerable and writing
a memoir that included
my struggles with mental illness, my family struggles
with mental illness.
And, you know, I had thought, well, geez,
you know, writing a novel about blindness and
Porter that's
enough. But I realized that there was a
lot more to the story. And so I
was feeling
emboldened
to go there. And the other thing that
this has to do with my diabetes,
right, when I left
Hoffman and we left Saint Peter
for Winona,
I started swimming
and playing water volleyball and lifting weights pretty
regularly. And that's helped
keep my diabetes
in check so far, knock on wood.
I often will
wake up in the middle of an IP
as my brain's going and then I can't
calm it down.
There's a Hoffman process that I use
where I force myself to say three things
from that day that I was grateful for
and three things
about myself in the course of that day
that I was grateful for.
And it often becomes more, but it also
does something
psychologically,
physiologically
that relaxes me and usually allows me to
go back to sleep.
The other thing that I do almost every
day
is there's that wonderful Hoffman
meditation tape, the Quadrinity.
Yeah. That's become part of my
daily routine.
The quadrinity check-in.
And it sounds like the gratitude practice,
the things that you appreciate about the day
as a way of being with yourself
in the night when you wake up. Yeah.
This night can be a tough time for
most folks, so
I'm no different in that regard.
Yes. The patterns can emerge
in the
darkness.
The other thing that I realized at Hoffman
was and this has to do with my
father. My father left when I was four
or five.
He had his own struggles. He had been
in the Korean war. They didn't have this
language then, but he suffered from PTSD.
You know, he didn't work for a long
time. He struggled with alcoholism.
And, you know, when I turned 21,
he wrote me this lovely letter that he
had met this woman who he had known
when he was seven. They used to walk
together
to church in Puerto Rico. She was three,
he was seven, and he would hold her
hand and walk her. And he had stopped
drinking and he had married her.
And, you know, there was a rebirth of
our relationship.
It also though made me aware of,
I had joined
men's groups in the past,
but I hadn't really understood why it was
such a driving force, why I needed those.
And I became much more clear
after Hoffman
that that was part of the abandonment issue
and that when we came to Winona, I
organized
a men's group here. I write about Latino
men's groups that I've been involved in. So
that was part of the reentry
process for me.
The last thing I would say about leaving
Hoffman was
I was always aware that writing was very
difficult for me. I tend to be a
social person
and it's a can be a very isolating
individualistic
thing.
I struggle with that, honestly. I would go
through long periods of not writing.
When I moved to Winona, I got involved
with not one, but two writing groups
who really helped me move my memoir
from pretty bad shape to a decent shape.
And I even joined a book group. So
the idea that
that pattern
of loneliness and withdrawing,
which could feed into a writing block really
well,
got interrupted. And I think, again, that was
a insight that I got in the process
of
understanding my relationship with my parents, particularly my
father.
Wow. And you had
all these things that systemically,
the PTSD
your father was navigating, the
racism of being Puerto Rican,
the discrimination
coming from blindness, the
mental health struggles
of your mom so much out of your
control
as a little being,
and
so much
that has been
changed over time, the educational
system, some of the awareness around race, some
of the awareness around mental health, and certainly
PTSD
now.
So much a product of the era in
which you were raised.
Yeah. And I would say that certainly,
particularly with this draconian budget cuts, a lot
of mental health programs have been severely impacted.
The cuts to Medicaid
disproportionately
fall on
disabled people.
So I feel like we've made some progress
and now it feels like we're sliding backwards.
I tend to be optimistic,
but I also tend to be realistic that
things have,
in some places, gotten better.
You know, the anti Latino sentiment is not
toned down very much.
So, again, that difference
as being seen as deficit
is sort of haunting us again as a
culture.
Yes.
What was it like
for you to
review your workbook and pull that out again
in preparation for this conversation?
First of all, damn it. I didn't know
I had so many patterns.
And also seeing
that I had been able to address quite
a few of them,
but they're still there. Certainly around eating and
diabetes, I have to be really,
really careful. I noticed that
we had a couple of launch events for
my book. And leading up to those, I
was just eating my feelings.
It doesn't go away.
You get better at learning how to recognize
them and then
manage them. So
It is a true I mean, part of
being human is to have patterns. So then
what's different is that we have more resiliency
to them. We're not a victim
when they show up. We can bounce back
to
their grip. Yeah. That's been my experience.
I haven't seen a whole lot of new
patterns.
You know, you you do something different like
write a memoir, and then all of a
sudden you realize, oh, I have some patterns
I hadn't thought about. Damn it.
Yeah. Has it been nice for you and
your wife to have both attended?
She went in 2010.
Has it been nice? Yes. She would tell
me about it.
And, you know, I was like, well, that
sounds interesting. But I had I didn't have
any motivation.
But there was just enough stuff coming
to a head in 2017
that I said,
she's still in touch with one of the
people
or maybe two of the people from her
Hoffman
retreat.
I didn't have that kind of connection, but
I take a lot of the Hoffman classes,
the webinars, and they're really helpful. And they're
not too long and
some really talented
instructors.
And sometimes, you know, it's again, spirits watching
out for me. I'm getting ready to do
the first launch event. There's a thing about
moving into your creative self, and it's, like,
perfect. It's like, okay. Universe is having a
smile because
Vania needs this. Let's send it to him.
You know?
There's something you're talking to, Jim, which references
something about
feeling like the universe is supporting you.
When we're in pattern, it can feel like
the universe is conspiring
against us.
But do you feel like the process supported
you in in feeling like,
oh, the universe is watching out for me.
It's perfectly timed. Oh, this
is such good fortune.
Yeah. There's no question that
going into
the process
you know, I had had several and, you
know, I write about this in the memoir.
Several experiences where I felt like nature really
just
came to my rescue or
materialized in a way that became
so obvious that even I could get it.
In the Hoffman
experience,
I was connecting with instructors and other people
who tell about stories
about how nature
and spirit
had combined
to really be
benevolent forces in their life.
So there was something about having
my experience validated
by others.
I was raised Catholic, so there was not
a lot of tolerance for let's talk about
spirits in nature, except for Saint Francis. Other
than that.
You're referencing something about the power of group
work
where other people
inspire you
in spirit. I love that. Inspire.
And the shared experience
becomes part of the power of the experience.
Yeah. Because it's sometimes you can feel a
little bit
woo woo. You know, you're too far out
there.
And you know your experiences have been powerful,
but, like, who do you tell
those experiences to and
who will appreciate
how powerful they were?
And that was I found really
very
important
for me in the process
of connecting with other people. What's it like
to remember your process so long ago,
some nine years ago?
In preparation for this,
you know, you gave me homework.
So I had to go back and find
my journal, which took me, like, half an
hour. But I found the journal, and I
started reading through it and Your student workbook.
No. No. No. No. I had a a
separate journal. A separate journal. I see. Yeah.
It's it's the writer in me. Right? And
it was in the journal that I really
was able to mine
and realize how many gems
had come from the experience and also where
I struggle with it. But, yeah, I would
recommend anyone who does the process definitely do
the workbook.
But I would encourage you to keep a
journal because there's so much going on that
it's hard to record it all. As much
as patterns come up for you around writing,
you something happens for you in
when you write, you you love it. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. And I have journals dating back
to
1972.
I use some of them for my memoir.
And my next project is to do a
memoir about
the land that we lived in in Saint
Peter, which we had basically brought back.
It was a twenty year process.
And, you know, you forget
some of the experiences.
I would have experienced
I'd be out clearing a trail
for walking in the woods, and I'd look
up and there'd be a great horned owl
just
looking at me like, what are you doing?
What are you doing?
So there was
encounters that if you don't write them down,
they just escape you. Jim, I'm so grateful
for you sharing your story, giving us some
insights from your process, from the memoir,
and this next project sounds exciting.
I didn't know a lot of things about
the writing process, but I found that in
the publicizing
and doing outreach for a memoir or any
book, it's like a full time job.
So I had thought, well, while I'm doing
that, I'll also start working on the second
installment of the memoir working on the land.
And I've not been able to. So I'm
looking forward
to there being a lull where I can
get back to it. I've already been talking
with my writing groups about how do I
get back into it. The title is an
I e y e
for an I,
letter I.
Growing up with blindness,
bigotry,
and family mental illness.
So an eye for an eye growing up
with blindness,
bigotry, and family mental illness.
It's available through the University of Minnesota Press.
So thank you for letting me do that.
Jim, thank you for this conversation.
My pleasure. Appreciate it.
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 hompaninstitute.org.