One of the most invaluable things for me
about having gone is being known.
When I talk to patients about my experience
at Hoffman, I talk about how there is
nobody on earth who knows the good and
the bad and the ugly of me, as
well as the teachers.
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.
Before we get started, I'd like to mention
that this episode mentions death of a child
and
suicide.
Please use your discretion.
If you or someone you know is suicidal,
please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention
Lifeline
at 80273
(800)
273-8255,
or message the crisis text line
at 741741.
Hey everyone, and welcome. I'm here with Keri
Levine today. Keri is a Hoffman Process graduate.
She's also a return guest to the podcast.
You may remember her from our medical panel.
Carrie, I first heard of you when you
came to my attention from your teacher who
was like, this woman is deep and you
need to talk to her.
And then in our
preparation for that medical panel,
I truly fell in love with this wisdom
that is within you. And I wanted to
hear more about your story. So thank you
for coming back
to share. Thank you for the invitation
to share.
Yeah. So really, this is a place where
we can begin anywhere,
but the idea is like, tell
the listeners a bit about
who you are.
I often start by saying I was a
really weird kid because I grew up in,
affluent
Boston suburb.
And
my parents divorced when I was 13, which
is a tough age to have your family
infrastructure
fall apart. But I also remember
sitting on my dad's lap, my dad who
was a very
challenging,
wounded guy
and saying to him,
if this is gonna make you happier,
then
that's great.
From there
I mean, I don't even know if it
was from there. It must have been right
around there where I had a long history
of
sleep challenges, and I can remember going to
a used bookstore and finding
The Relaxation
Response by Herbert Benson, who was
a Harvard trained transcendental meditation guide. Right? And
this would have been, like, 1983
when I was 13. And, like, how did
I find that book and whatever
drew me to it? I don't know.
And I can remember
once my parents split and we moved to
Brookline
and lived with my mom who was you
know, had been a stay at home mom
who moved to a working mom, I can
remember being like, I think I wanna go
to a yoga class. Do you wanna come
with me?
And, again, this was sort of back in
a time before yoga was yoga, and I
can remember us going to a nighttime
yoga class somewhere on the outskirts of Boston.
And
I can remember there was
a crystal
healing store in Brookline Village, and I can
remember taking the money that I made at
the deli where I waitressed to the crystal
healing store and buying
a book on crystal healing and buying Chris.
And so, like, I was weird. I don't
even know
where that stuff came from.
And then I I had what I would
say was probably one of the most pivotal
life changing experiences
of my life.
I got a bee in my bonnet that
I wanted to bike on Nova Scotia.
And I found a program called Longacre Expeditions
that was a six week program that was
backpacking and canoeing and
rafting and rock climbing and two weeks of
biking on Nova Scotia.
I can remember showing up with my backpack.
One of my dearest friends I met on
that trip, so he has been a friend
for a very long time, and he really
likes to give me endless amounts of grief
about how I had a blow dryer in
my backpack because that's how much I did
not understand about what I was about to
do.
And I had
a change of clothes for every day because
why wouldn't you? And I had my blow
dryer. And
the foundation of that program was actually the
Johari's window,
which for listeners who are not familiar with
that model, it's like this idea that we
have
aspects of ourselves that are known to self,
known to others, unknown to self and unknown
to others.
And every evening, there were sort of what
was called group where we talked about some
logistics
and like who was on dish duty and
that sort of thing. But then there were
these exercises that were were designed
to increase
our self awareness
and
to learn how to give and receive really
hard feedback.
That was the first time in my life
where I felt like
I was received
for who I was, not how I looked.
How old were you when you did this
program?
I was 15, the first one that I
did.
I know. Like, crucial timing. Right? So crucial.
And that kind of
I don't know if it set the groundwork
or
tapped me into
a different way of being than most of
the people around me. And I sort of
already came to it with this weirdness, but
it was the first time I'd ever, like,
received feedback about myself. And it's funny the
story that you tell about Mark saying she's
really deep because one of the first pieces
of feedback I got
on that trip was
you're so deep.
You always look so serious.
You look like you're mad
all the time,
which
was really fascinating. And it has feedback that
I have received in the meantime.
And I have a son who is also
a deep thinker and a deep feeler, and
I can see the look on his face
that likely he absorbed in part from me.
And I'm just like, oh, I see
that angry pissed off is. I
recognize that in and I know that he's
not. It's just a funny
resting face. So that
I don't know. That program sort of dialed
me into
a more thoughtful way of moving through my
life, and I
and that sort of got fed along the
way by,
junior year English teacher who taught stream of
consciousness journal writing,
which is a practice that I have maintained
since that first outdoor trip at 13. Like,
I still have that journal
that I kept that summer on that trip
and then learned this stream of consciousness writing.
And then, you know, there were lots of
other sort of waypoints along the way that
led me toward a life of
deep thought inquiry,
seeking
sort of deep soul connection with people, not
being very good at
cocktail party, small talk kind of things, not
very good at being superficial, not being very
good at
not being in alignment, which is truly a
blessing. But I think about, you know, my
profession
and
being a nurse and working in a hospital
and not
sort of being aligned with
a lot of conventional medicine and then working
in a hospital and
working as a, quote, mid level practitioner and
feeling like
being overworked and underpaid and feeling like, I
could make more money as a nurse. Like,
what am I doing, and can I continue
to work
more for less? And so it's just sort
of been an interesting
theme
that started at a weirdly young age, you
know, all of which
fed my interest in
going to Hoffman and doing that work,
being curious about any kind of
deep exploration,
that being sort of the most comfortable place
for me to be. So it's not a
big surprise that I work with women one
at a time
for an hour at a time or sometimes
two hours at a time.
And having these,
what feel to me, deep, meaningful conversations about
the real substance of their lives and how
that informs their health.
Yeah. So I know that you are in
integrative functional medicine, that you are an advanced
practice nurse.
I love that you called out this weird
title of mid level
practitioner.
I love that you said I'm not good
at not being aligned.
The fact that you can look back and
see
from early on
how that was not something you were willing
to do or tolerate.
I think about that 13 year old girl
on your dad's lap and the courage
and empathy
that it took to say, if this is
what makes you happy, do it.
I mean, it was a relief, honestly, Sadie.
Right? Like, he was such
a angry, domineering presence. Like, the thought of
not having to live with him every day
was a true relief.
So there was that aspect as well.
Our relationship was
long and complicated and fascinating in that he
was a real Horatio Alger's kind of guy,
like,
born in Brooklyn, was a Jewish guy,
slept on the fire escape in his apartment
because there wasn't really room for him
in his
apartment. His dad died when he was young.
He put himself through Brooklyn Polytech,
then he put himself through
MIT as an aeronautical engineer, then he put
himself through Boston College and was, like, the
first Jewish guy to graduate from Boston College
with a degree in business and then was
an entrepreneur
during the late eighties. I mean, so he
was simultaneously
super challenging and fascinating, and he
had a healing crisis. He developed a brain
tumor when I was
21,
and that sent him
on a healing journey that involved
moving to Asheville, North Carolina to be near
his macrobiotic
community
and doing a lot of spiritual healing. And
so we actually
had this
interesting point of connection around
health and healing toward the end of his
life, and I ended up being his primary
caregiver and his power of attorney, and he
ended up having a second brain surgery for
a tumor that he never left the hospital
from. And,
I mean, it was still a challenging, of
course, strained relationship, but I was also able
to sort of honor his light
through his end of life transition
and
honor him in the best way
possible
given all the realities of his personality and
marriages and
complicated relationships
and all of the things
that were him. So,
yeah, he he's an interesting
an interesting character and a a funny little,
like, convergence of our worlds was
when I left being a hospital based nurse
midwife and moved to a clinic, a world
renowned clinic in Yarmouth, Maine called Women to
Women that was
pioneering in women's health and functional medicine.
I was doing a training with one of
the specialty
lab companies
to review someone's test results with a test
that I was unfamiliar with to try and
make sense of what it meant and how
to make a treatment plan. And I get
on the call with this
naturopath, and she's like,
is your last name Levine?
And I was like, yeah. And she's like,
are you related to Steven Levine by any
chance? And I was like, yeah. He was
my dad. And she was like,
yeah. We dated a couple years ago.
So it was just
a funny
his healing journey and my moving toward this
kind of health care
happened simultaneously.
You know, he also was like a super
deeply spiritual guy. You know, he would send
me
poems and,
you know,
complicated,
like most parents.
Complicated,
challenging.
It definitely sounds like you found some healing
and
that it was an important part of your
journey in how that relationship evolved.
Yeah. And ongoing, of course, the healing.
Right? That's not over.
I'm curious about how and when you decided
to go into medicine. I'm curious about how
and when you decided to come out and
where in
the journey with your dad you went to
Hoffman.
Tell us a bit more about both of
those things.
So I was the kid who was a
horrible standardized test taker,
like, terrible, terrible, terrible,
like, barely broke 800 combined on my SATs
pre and post SAT prep class.
So that really
influenced where I thought about going to school.
I ended up at Umaine Orono, the University
of Maine in Orono, thinking I was gonna
be a psych major
because super interested in psychology
and could not get through statistics
and ended up
changing my major. During that time, I ended
up doing a semester in New Mexico
because I had done another outdoor trip when
I was, like,
16 or 17 that took me to New
Mexico to the Taos Pueblo where I felt
this
unbelievable
energy,
draw,
fascination.
I just was so drawn to the culture,
to the Earth centric,
Earth loving
culture
there and then, of course, the beauty of
the Desert Southwest.
So ended up doing a semester exchange to
New Mexico
and had a small group communications professor. I
had done a lot of trip leading in
the outdoors, and so I had done a
lot of, like, women's climbing courses
and backpacking courses.
So this is 1988
just for context, and I got very interested
in gender communication.
Must have been right around the men are
from Mars, women are women are from Venus
time. I'm not sure I actually ever read
that book, but was super interested in gender
communication, particularly
in the outdoor
world, which was largely male dominated,
obviously.
This small group communications professor said to me,
he was like,
what are you doing at Umaine or Orono?
Like, if you wanna study communications, you either
go to Syracuse or you'd go to you'd
go to Northwestern. And I was like,
okay. So I looked at those schools, and
then I looked at the majors, and there
was nothing there that really lined
up. And I had very poor guidance, and
so I ended up at Syracuse
as a public relations
women's studies major. And I like to joke,
I knew I was never gonna
work
in PR in New York City, and I
work in PR every day.
So it's not like that education
was lost on me.
When I was at Umaine Orono,
I had a job
at the women's health clinic
as a peer counselor, and so that was
really my foray into
other than my own
navigating my own health care as a teenager,
that was my first foray into
a clinic kind of environment or a
structured
health care model. And
the director of the women's health clinic at
the time was a woman named Ruth Lockhart
who was starting simultaneously
in Bangor, Maine, a feminist health center that
is still in existence called Mabel Wadsworth women's
health center. And they had a day long
conference called health in our hands.
And the keynote speakers
at that conference were Christiane Northrop,
who was one of the founding mothers of
Women to Women, who has written many, many
powerful books on women's health, like women's bodies,
women's wisdom,
and Deb Sewell, who is a local herbalist,
the founder of a herbal apothecary in West
Rockport, Maine called Avina Botanicals.
Deb is still deeply steeped in the earth
and deeply steeped in
some of the science around plants and deeply
steeped now in permaculture and regenerative
farming and a whole host of things.
And those two women
stood on the podium together,
this
OB GYN
and this herbalist,
both whom I had
read books and taken courses and yada yada.
And and that was my moment of
it's not either or.
It's both and.
And it depends on the situation, and it
depends on the person and how she wants
to take care of herself.
And, like, it's for each of us to
decide how we wanna do it.
So when I was finishing my degree in
Syracuse, I went back to Ruth,
and I was like, Ruth, I think I
wanna go to school for some kind of
health care. I don't really know what I
wanna do. Do I wanna be a naturopath?
Do I wanna be a yoga teacher? Like,
I wasn't sure.
And she said, how long do you wanna
go to school for, and how many loans
do you wanna have?
She was so great and practical, and she
was like, what about being a nurse practitioner?
In the state of Maine, we're licensed to
practice independently. We don't need physician supervision. Like,
you can be your own person.
And I was like,
oh,
yeah.
Because I didn't wanna be a physician's assistant
because I didn't want to have to answer
to anybody else, and I really wanted to
be independent.
And I really wanted to be able
to embody that continuum that I saw on
that podium of both and.
So I looked at programs
nationwide,
got through my GRE
and ended up at Case Western Reserve in
Cleveland, Ohio.
I thought I was on a women's
health nurse practitioner track, but when I got
there,
there were a bunch of women who were
all gonna be midwives.
Still friend, a Seattle based still friend,
was doing a doula training. So training people
to be labor assistance.
And I got a job on labor and
delivery at the Cleveland Clinic. And so
I had that job, and then I did
a doula training. And the nurses at the
Cleveland Clinic would throw me into the labor
room to be with women when they had
to run around and do other stuff. Because
what I found was that
being in the labor room
was not unlike helping women
climb mountains
or rock climb.
It was this incredible
transference
of skills
and of presence and of empowerment,
and it was really,
I wanna say, easy for me to be
in that space with a laboring woman who
didn't feel like she could do it
and
take care of her.
And so there was this really
beautiful
transference of skills from being a outdoor experiential
educator to the labor room.
So became a nurse midwife, and my boyfriend
at the time, now husband, was like, I'm
out of Cleveland.
And at the time,
there was a program called the community nurse
midwifery education program, which was a distance education
program before distance education was a thing out
of Heiden, Kentucky,
which just had the most unbelievable
legacy
of a senator's daughter
falling in love with the hills people in
Kentucky,
traveling
on horseback.
She and her team of
nurses
would travel through the hills of Kentucky
and teach the hills people like,
oh, if you're washing your laundry at this
spot in the stream,
you might wanna get your drinking water from
above that spot.
Really
basic
foundational
public health lessons.
These nurses would end up
attending births to the health people and then
coming back and checking on the babies to
make sure that, you know, everybody was well.
And so there was something about that legacy,
that public health legacy. Right? Like, some of
those really
basic
teachings that
still speak to me in terms of teaching
people about
nutrition and exercise, like, really basic stuff that
that gets lost in the shuffle, right, in
in the noise of what is health on
Instagram, you know, the the minutiae. Like, we've
lost some of the really basic things.
I remember that first day,
we had to go to Kentucky for a
couple of weeks, and then they had a
relationship
with
CASE. And so it was my master's is
from CASE, but my certificate was from Frontier,
which is now Frontier Nursing University.
But I remember
one of those first days being in the
classroom in Kentucky with people I had never
met and all of the different disciplines that
midwifery
draws from, whether that's social work, public health,
herbalism,
medicine.
I just felt the deepest sense of I
am in the right
spot
because by nature,
it is sort of an interdisciplinary
practice.
One of the great things about this program
was our clinicals were in the communities where
we lived. And so that was a way
to begin to
integrate us into our communities and to develop
professional connections and yada yada. So
I lived in Maine and did a lot
of and obviously did my clinicals here. And
when I finished school,
the only midwifery job in the state
was at the community hospital in Damascada,
which was called Miles Memorial Hospital and is
now Maine Health Lincoln, I think.
And this area where I still live is
a place where
my husband
grew up summering, and both grandparents
had a place and had a very specialized
kind of high school that sort of had
always been his dream.
So this job opened up, which was full
time.
There was a job at the high school
that opened up, and then within two weeks,
found out that I was pregnant with my
son. And so all of that happened
very quickly.
And that launched me into
working full time as a nurse midwife with
50%
call and having a nursing baby,
which should not go very well.
So you find yourself in this place,
you
accompanying women
to climb mountains.
And then in the labor room, you accompanying
them to step through a threshold that changes
them as a human being, as a woman.
And at some point you found yourself
depleted.
That's a kind word.
Burned out.
Crazy. Those are other words that come to
mind.
During my seven and a half years at
the local hospital, my call
took all different kinds of formations. At first,
it was 50% because it was a very
small service.
Then they integrated midwifery call with family practice,
so then I was one in five.
Then they returned to a full midwifery service,
and I was one in three. And, of
course, the volume of births in the practice
changed through that time.
I had two children
during that time,
and I had always been looking for
a different job. I knew
that
the sleep deprivation
was
no good for me and my health. And
I was doing that not only at work,
but also at home breastfeeding my own kids.
The sort of climate of health care was
changing for us mid level practitioners at that
time where we were
being asked to do more and more and
more for less and less and less and
less. At least that's how it is in
rural Maine.
I imagine
still
is. Again, like, bumped into my integrity of
just, like,
any person with a reasonable self esteem would
not
work
like this
for this amount of money.
And it wasn't
just about the money. It was also about
my mental health and
the extent to which
I felt I could show up the way
that I wanted to show up for my
own family.
The being on call and the sort of
constant
sympathetic nervous system activation
of always being on the ready, and I
can remember
the moment that I was like, okay. It's
time for me to find a different job
was
my pager went off in the middle of
the night.
And
I think simultaneously,
there must have been a kid who needed
something.
I call the woman
who called to the answering service, and she's
trying to figure out whether or not her
water broke. And I am
irritated with her. I am irritated, and I
am like,
okay,
Carrie.
Who are you serving right now? Like, you
are not serving
anybody.
No one. And so I started to look
for
work that did not involve being on call
and found this job at Women to Win.
So you are speaking about a shared experience
that a lot of parents have where there's
a certain value
to what you earn, what you provide, the
professional
part of your life.
And that has a pull.
Being present and loving and self
loving,
being resilient as a human being doesn't seem
to carry as much weight or
value in the world, and that can be
a really difficult tug of war.
Don't you think that that's the challenge of
our generation of women? I'm putting us in
the same generation not knowing for sure that
we are.
But, you know, I remember when I showed
up at Women to Women, so I still
had call, but it was only for, like,
can you refill my birth control pills? Or,
you know, I never had to go anywhere,
and I never had to be up all
night, and I never was gonna
have to leave the house. So when the
kids were like, when are you gonna be
back? I never had to say, I don't
know.
But I can remember sitting with women at
women to women and woman after woman after
woman
showing up with a diagnosis of anxiety
or
bipolar,
which really to me was misdiagnosed
often, not always, often misdiagnosed
premenstrual syndrome. Right? There was like a cyclic
pattern
to
the mood, the energy, the weeping, like all
the things. And at the same time, I
read a book
called Perfect Madness, Mothering in the Age of
Anxiety,
written by Judith Warner, who was a New
York Times
writer, and she chronicles her own having a
baby in France
and the policy infrastructure that's in place for
women and families there and then moving to
Metro DC
and what it was like to have a
baby there. And I thought to myself,
that whole idea of you can have it
all,
bunk.
Yeah.
You know, you said our generation is actually
feeling, what can we do about it? I
would love to hear how you, at some
point, decided to embark on your Hoffman
journey and what
led you there.
When I was at Women to Women, the
the last of the founding mothers and the
sole proprietor,
Marcel Pick,
I don't know how she heard about Hoffman,
but she went and she came back and
she was like, everybody's going. And the business
dissolved before that was possible because
at the time that she mentioned it, I
was like,
how am I supposed to pull myself out
of my life
for a week
from work? And how about my family life?
Like, it was unfathomable
to me, both the time and the money.
I was like, I just don't see that
that how that happens.
But that's when the seed was planted, and
I honestly referred people to Hoffman for years
before I went
when I would talk to women about their
health challenges
and,
you know, that it was clearly not a
knowledge deficit, that it was that they just
kept bumping into their own behaviors.
I would talk to them about going to
Hoffman. I was like, look, you know
what is standing between you and your optimal
wellness and that you're not able to get
yourself there is not an uncommon experience. And
maybe
this deep emotional work
will allow you
to do what you quote, unquote know
is good for you. So, I mean, I
wrote letters of recommendations,
and I would talk to women when they
came back, and I would hear about it.
And it always
was of interest to me.
And then, finally, the nest was empty,
and
I have, you know, my own
challenges of stuckness that I live with.
Did you see yourself in that where there's
something
that's standing in my way that is related
to my own behavior, not the knowledge deficit.
Oh, hell yeah.
Of course. And, you know, tried this and
tried that and read this and wrote that
and, you know, like, did all the things,
and I was finally like,
okay. It's time.
And,
and went and
found it to be one of the most
unbelievable
experiences
of my life in terms of
doing pattern tracing and taking a deep dive
and looking at beliefs and tracing them to
parents.
I read No One is to Blame
by Bob Hoffman
when I first heard about it, and, honestly,
that book carried me
a long way and probably really helped. It's
interesting my dad died
six weeks after I started at Women to
Women, eight weeks after I started at Women
to Women,
not long.
And I wanna say, I guess it must
have been after he passed that I read
no one is to blame.
And I was just like,
oh,
okay.
I get that. I get, like, it's totally
his fault, and it's totally not his fault.
And now I have all these learned behaviors,
and I'm very much like my dad in
many, many, many ways,
some that are positive, some are less positive.
And
was seeing them play out in my own
family with my own children and, you know,
thinking about the generational
transference
of
hurt and wounds and wanting to do what
I could to minimize
that.
And that was two years ago that I
went, and I still refer people almost every
week
when there's clearly, like, a deep
pattern
that women return to that they are just
have yet to have been unable to shake
themselves from,
and or I think that someone will benefit
from getting pulled out of their life so
that they can have time to think about
themselves. Right? Because that's one of the challenges
in my mind for
women
and or women who work and or women
who work and are parents is just like,
where in the day
is there even a moment
to have a thought, to be able to
think this through, to try
and trace it? Where does this come from?
What is this about? How is this playing
out in my life now?
And how can I
transform it? Can I transform it? Sounds like
one of the challenges
of going, but also one of the gifts,
the space.
Oh, right.
I mean, getting pulled out of the day
to day life and the house and the
cooking and the bills and the juggling and
the driving and, like, all of the things
that retreat
environment
is priceless
in my mind.
And to be cared for. Right? Oh my
god. Like, I don't have to prepare a
meal? Like, what?
To be fed and nurtured?
Yeah. I mean, it's also interesting, right, as
a health care practitioner. Right? The things that
people project onto us as being a health
care practitioner.
And
one of the most valuable things for me
about having gone to Hoffman, I am still
in
many of the same patterns, and they are
in some ways the same and in some
ways super different.
And I
have that many more tools
to acknowledge them, work with them, accept them,
transform them.
And one of the most invaluable things for
me about having gone
is being known.
When I talk to patients about my experience
at Hoffman, I talk about how
there is nobody on Earth who knows the
good and the bad and the ugly of
me as well as the teachers.
And that
knowing that having been seen,
being
heard, being held,
still being cared for
as
a care provider
is tremendous
beyond words.
Your
journey, your story that you've shared really
is
a living example of both and.
Part of that was
accepting the both and within you and having
that scene and having it still be worthy
of love.
What has happened for you since then? How
do you see that
in your life now?
The absolution of shame
is no joke
in terms of healing.
You talked about healing through
acknowledging
shame and letting it go. And I'm curious
how your relationship to that has changed
or how you see it in your life
now.
I think self compassion
was
huge,
and kindness
toward
self
is huge for me
and is something that is reinforced in my
work with women every day. You know, the
extent to which we are hard on ourselves.
And I'm I'm not saying that that's exclusive
to women. I'm just saying that that's who
I spend my days with for the most
part. So that's who I listen to.
Just being
just a little bit gentler
with myself, just being a little bit
kinder, just a little bit softer, and having
slightly more ease with myself
when I find myself patterning
or I find
hard or uncomfortable
emotions
coming up,
hand on heart,
visioning light,
and being able to dial into that
is
much more a part of my everyday practice
since Hoffman than before Hoffman,
not to mention recycling in the shower. One
of my groupmates
shared the story of doing that and, like,
you know, there's, like, the ball, and there's
these different ways of doing it. Right? And
I often find myself thinking about it in
the shower and just, like washing it down
the drain, which is super satisfying.
That's a great way to bring it home
with you. For those listening that haven't taken
the process or don't know what recycling is,
it's a brief visualization
where you
see one version of how you show up
in a pattern,
and then there's kind of like a letting
that go. And I love the idea of,
like, washing it down the drain. But then
you envision it again
showing up as your best self as your
spiritual self.
It truly can shift as you
show up differently,
a really powerful
practice.
I have another question that might be a
tricky one. What do you see as or
hope your legacy of love to be?
Legacy of love. Like, I guess I'm not
even sure what does that mean.
Legacy
of love. Well, I'm thinking about your impact
in
your work, like what it means to a
woman
to be
listened to
and
accepted for both and
your son,
the places where you touch people.
Your depth is an invitation
into
a deeper place.
And I don't know if you've considered it,
but I guess I'm asking you too. Yeah.
I guess so the things that come to
my mind, right, wrong, or otherwise,
are,
you know, I hope that my children
are
a legacy of my love.
I have a daughter who passed in 2018
at 15 years old in a car accident,
and I
carry her love light forward.
And that language is I wanna credit Rosemary
Traumer, who is a very beautiful poet who
also had a child take his life by
suicide, and she writes a poem about carrying
his love light. And so
I carry Isabel's love light with me and
carry her legacy in that way. And so
there are things that I do
in her honor, and that's sort of a
running joke in our house. Like, if we
do something that we know Isabelle would do,
like watch too much TV or eat too
much candy, we like to say Isabelle made
us do it. So there's that.
And then my son who
has a deep reverence for the natural world
and is a deep thinker,
you know, I hope that he
lives a life of alignment.
I guess what I would hope
that I'm able to do is inspire people
to live
aligned
with
their souls
or their authentic self or their divinity or
whatever word works for people in that place.
Cause that's really what I do at work
is try and
facilitate
a process of women understanding
who they really are and what really makes
them
feel well and help them identify that and
then get there.
And so that happens in the context of
the clinic. And I think that was really
a big motivator for writing
the book that I wrote was so that
women who
can't access a practitioner who facilitates that kind
of
process, they could have it and they could
read it,
and they could consider for themselves that all
of their selves matter, like mind, body, spirit
matters,
and that all of the things that they
feel are connected
and that
being in alignment with self is crucial
to wellness. And without that alignment, it's not
actually
possible
to be in optimal health.
Your book, it's the whole woman
A Guide to Creating Wellness
for Any Age and Any Stage. We'll put
that in the show notes. We'll also put
in the show notes what you mentioned about
the different programs
and the Johari's
window.
I think it's a really
great reminder
about
allowing you to be a whole human and
then moving from a place of alignment with
that. It's an incredible legacy, and I'm really
glad that you
exist, that you're doing the work that you
do, the mothering that you do, that you're
being the beautiful woman that you are. And
thank you so much for being here with
me today.
Thank you for your discernment
of
extracting
the legacy, because I don't know that I
would have been able to see or articulate
it that way, and that is a gift
to me. Thank you, Sadie.
Yes. Absolutely. Thank you so much.
Thank you for listening to the Hoffman podcast.
My name is Matt Brannigan. I'm the CEO
of the Hoffman Institute Foundation and a Hoffman
teacher. Our mission is to provide greater access
to the wisdom and power of love within
ourselves, in our relationships,
and in the world.
To learn more or to support our mission,
we invite you to visit hoffmaninstitute.org.