I wanted the layers of the onion to
come off. I wanted to go back to
not the innocence. It wasn't really that I
was after. I just wanted to go back
to those things that really gave me joy.
I wanted
to see what I could do when I
truly lived who I actually was.
Hello, and welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a
podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute.
My name is Sadie Gardere. I'm a Hoffman
teacher, and I am your host for today.
This podcast is about love and about the
courage it takes to journey inward. Thank you
for being here and welcome.
Before we get started, I'd like to mention
that this episode
mentions sexual abuse
and child sexual abuse.
Please use your discretion.
Hey, everyone, and welcome. I'm here with Jan
today. Jan is a Hoffman Process graduate.
She is also
a woman who has
such a vision for herself in the world.
I'm excited for you to get to meet
her. Janet. Welcome.
Thank you, Sadie. I, I don't know about
my vision, but,
I'm excited to be here. Would you begin
just by telling us a bit about who
you are? You can start anywhere.
I'll start with what I'm doing
right now. Actually, as we're speaking, I'm in
Mexico.
I'm down in Cabo, just in San Jose
Del Cabo, and I I live off grid
when I'm down here. Totally
solar powered truck in my water,
but I'm also right by the beach, so
I get to watch the whales.
They give birth out here for about three
months of the year. So it's a it's
a spectacular place if you enjoy the desert
and you enjoy marine life, which I absolutely
do. So I work from while I'm down
here.
My other home that I'm at is on
Vancouver Island, and,
I really up there, I focus on a
business that I own.
It's a cidery, a distillery,
a eatery, a tourism place, an orchard. It's
an all encompassing
vertically integrated business of which I've been doing
for many years, but it's,
it's a really fun business.
It's very action packed,
and I love it. So it's part of,
I think, what we spoke about before.
I officially, by Canadian standards,
became a senior citizen
about a week ago. Congratulations.
Thank you. It's a very it's very weird.
Man, I sure don't feel 65. I really
don't.
And in that sort of time period of,
like, after well, before Hoffman and the whole
process of I ended up at Hoffman,
I was going through some very deep thinking,
reflection on whether or not I wanted to
continue on with my business
because of some major things that had happened
in my life. And I decided, no. I
really wanna carry on because there's some things
that I really wanna do with my business,
and I'm so I'm so far from done.
I think I'm another good decade before I,
pack it in or or maybe I'll never
pack it in. I don't know. We had
a pre call before this episode and I
was
really
lit
from the inside,
just an inspiration
by some of the passion that you spoke
about your life with. So
where did you get that passion and what's
happening
in your world with it? You know, Hoffman,
the process itself, you go back and and
you spend a lot of time, obviously, in
that first part of your life,
those first nine years trying to
reconnect with your spirit and going through that
quadrinity
check. And I think what really became very
clear for me is that spirit of who
I am. It was obviously there before I
went to Hoffman, but it really helped me
to get clarity on it while I was
there. And the passion, I don't know. I've
always had it. I I feel like I've
always wanted to make a difference in life.
And exactly what when I was young, I
wasn't like, I'm gonna own a cidery when
I grow up. That was not on my
radar because who actually grows up with, I'm
gonna own a cidery at a distillery, but
I always felt like I wanted to make
a difference.
I think I always wanted to be an
entrepreneur.
I think that was very bred into my
bones.
I think I might have told you I
was adopted and didn't know my parents
at all until much later in life. As
it turns out, my birth father was very
much an entrepreneur
doing many different businesses actually in Mexico because
he was Mexican, recently passed. And my adopted
father was also, I would say, a bit
of an entrepreneur. So that was kind of
built into me. And as I learned,
I also found out about my Mexican father.
Also really wanted to make a difference in
life. It was important to him to do
certain things. So I think that was bred
into my bones. I think there was a
socialization, but also, you know, a genetic as
well as a nurture nurture versus nature. That's
interesting. So you feel the sense that there
was on a DNA level, some type of
desire to make a difference. Very much so.
And even this whole thing of nature versus
nurture,
when I first found my birth father and
I went to this big luncheon
that was with a bunch of my uncles
and cousins.
And I walked into my uncle's
house, and he shows me this massive
portrait
of my grandmother,
his mother. And there she is sitting playing
the piano. She was a concert pianist.
It's just so crazy because the first part
of my life, I sang and danced on
a television show from when I was nine
to about 17. And there was none of
that in my world that I grew up
with, but somehow I ended up there.
It's a very interesting experiment in some ways
because I had no connection
to my birth family. But when I found
them, I'm like, oh my god. This circle
of life
has become so connected for me. How do
you think that happens?
Somehow being
called toward
performing,
probably unconscious of why,
very unconscious of why. I just know from
a very early age, I was was fascinated
in watching old movies and musicals.
I was fascinated with music. I listened to
it all the time.
And I actually thought
when I was a little girl that I
was gonna be a singer.
No reason for me to think that. Again,
you know, I wasn't in any groups at
that point. My family wasn't musical that I
was being brought up by.
I really thought I was going to be
a singer. So
when this musical director came out to the
schools looking for people to join this show,
it wasn't an arrogance, but I just like,
oh, yeah. No. That's I'm I'm getting that.
And I didn't tell anybody. I just felt
like, yeah. I'll be I'll be in that
group. And I was, and I wasn't shocked
by it, but it honestly, there was no
arrogance in it. It wasn't, it wasn't that
at all. It felt like this inner knowing
of what I was gonna do.
Often
students that are in the process,
especially with a history of being adopted,
really know nothing
about
their biologic parents or know very little.
And there can be some question of like,
is it really worthwhile
to do work around this, to have the
question, what is the legacy
in my life? What's been your experience with
that? Oh, I think you're quite right. I
mean, in Hoffman, but in general, you know,
a lot of people, they don't have the
opportunity to make the connection because the information
isn't there. It's hard to
find, or they don't want to, which is
also valid and fair.
For me, I had a burning desire. I
went through a divorce,
two divorces, my first divorce. And at that
point in time, it was like, I
need
to find my parents. I need to find
my birth parents.
And so I started on the process locating
them. It actually took a long time to
find my mother. But once I found my
mother, it wasn't so hard to find my
father in Mexico because of searching for him.
He has a very, Anglo Saxon name. So
finding him in Mexico wasn't
actually that hard.
So the two came together very quickly for
me. But the experience for me in finding
them
was incredibly grounding.
It was
a massive thing to my life to be
able to connect the dots.
And this was no reflection on not loving
my adopted parents at all. I love them
both, but it was,
oh my god. This just makes so much
sense
as to who I am, as to why
I can't sit still, as to why I'm
always on a mission to do something. I
think probably that passion that you talked about,
I've always got this deep rooted, like, I'm
just I gotta go do this. I've gotta
make this thing happen. It started making sense
to me when I met these two people.
I'm like, oh, yeah. This just makes total
sense to me now. So you were recently
through your first divorce and you felt this
burning desire to find them, to have some
understanding of this missing piece of what makes
up who you are.
Take us to that period of time. What
was happening? How are you moving through life?
And this I'm guessing is pre process, right?
I've done two divorces. So it was the
second divorce
that led me to the path of Hoffman.
And that was really the big
moment because at that point in time,
there was a lot of
trauma that was going on. My Mexican father
died.
My adopted mother died, and I had been
taking care of her for quite some time.
She had dementia, and she died.
My daughter, whom I love deeply,
I'm gonna get a little emotional here,
She was going through her own trauma.
Anyway, she decided that it was best to
cut off our relationship.
That was hard.
And then I went through a divorce,
and that happened very abruptly after twenty eight
years of marriage. And then I went through
restructuring of my business
deciding to buy him out
and go through all of that. And that
was all in about eighteen months.
So it was just like, ping, ping, ping,
ping, ping. And at that point in time,
I was seeing a a therapist. She was
helping me through this amazing woman. Her name
is Janice Bell. I have to say her
name out loud because she's so absolutely fabulous.
I said to her, you know, I need
to go back and look at things from
my past. I know there's things in my
past that I haven't dealt with. I need
to dig in. I need to reflect.
And her advice to me at the time
was,
oh, yeah. You do. But not now.
You can't take all of this all at
one time. It was the best advice because
she was 100%
correct. I needed to deal with the actual
logistics of what was happening in terms of
the finances, in terms of setting things up.
Then once I kinda got through it all,
I was like, okay. Now? And she goes,
yeah. Now you go to Hoffman. Okay. Now
I go to Hoffman. Alright. Didn't even really
question what Hoffman was. You know, I did
go on the website and I I see
this. I can go virtually or I can
go full in. And I thought virtually would
be far better because I'm so busy with
my business and I have so much going
on. And I said, I think maybe I
should do it virtually. And she said, oh,
no. Not yet. You need to go full
in. And I went, oh, okay. Full in.
So I trust her completely. I went full
in. So it to me, it was kind
of funny because when I got there, there
was all these people talking about the research
they did. And I went,
oh, maybe I should have researched. I didn't
research. I just went. And when I got
there, I was like,
oh, I wonder if I'm too old. I'm
you know, all those thoughts then started going
through my head. But they never went through
my head before I actually
was landing in the airport. That's kind of
sort of the same thing. There was just
sort of a knowing of, I need to
go.
A time of massive transition
and a lot of hurt.
You tabled it for
a while
so that you could survive what was happening.
It sounds like.
Very much so. And again, that's, I think
the innate thing and I think that's there
for all of us. I think I'm lucky
enough to
have that voice. It doesn't speak super clearly
to me, but it's in there somewhere. And
I think it's there for all of us
that tells us like this, you can handle
this now, maybe not this now.
And that's what the process was for me.
And it wasn't again, it wasn't conscious. It
was just like, oh, yeah. If I had
tried to deal with Hoffman at the same
time as doing all these things,
either I wouldn't have gotten out of it
what I did get out of it,
or it wouldn't have been as
successful for me as it was. Sounds like
it was the right time and that you
had some
discernment
about it.
Very, very much so because
in Hoffman at the process
is going back
to where those behavioral patterns begin.
And that was also very, very traumatic for
me. There was all an awful lot of
pain around those initial periods.
And I'll share just briefly.
One was the adoption.
I had never admitted to myself that there
was ever
anything other than
pure love for my adopted parents. They did
the best they could. They were wonderful, but
I never admitted
that
my birth parents actually had a place in
my life and there were things that came
out of that.
So there was that to discover.
And then there was also a lot of
sexual abuse that went on for me when
I was very young by a family member
that was continuous for a very long period
of my life.
Although those memories were not hidden for me,
I never really allowed myself to feel those
memories. It was a total shutdown. Again, my
body just shut it down. And in Hoffman,
going for that full on experience,
I didn't have the choice of shutting it
down. It was just cool, just all there
in front of me,
which was great,
painful,
hard.
So much so that by my third day,
I,
because you don't have the phone. Right? So
I went to, like, I need to go
get check-in for my flight. No. What do
you you don't need. I'm like, oh, no.
No. I I'm going tomorrow. Right? My brain
has so convinced me because it was like,
well, this is hard. I think it's time
to access. I was like, oh, wow. I
just unbelievable. Right. You
need to calm down. There's more to come.
You speak to a really important point. The
person
has to be ready
and you also speak to the courage it
takes to really feel
your way through the healing.
It does. It does take a lot of
courage. And I think to your point, we
have to let people take their own journey
and we want to help, you know, a
good portion of my life has been, I
need to fix it. I need to help.
I need to it's who I am. It's
kind of built into my DNA,
but I need to let people take their
own journey. And so wanting our loved ones
to take the Hoffman process, they have to
be ready. They have to want to, and
otherwise they don't get what they need out
of it.
What
were some of your intentions?
What did you really want to get out
of the process?
I wanted to live my very best life.
I wanted to know who I really am.
I felt like years and years I had
been hiding myself. So even before,
you know, going back and going to those
behavioral pieces of which I've been putting layers
upon layers upon layers, I wanted the layers
of the onion to come off.
I wanted to go back to
not the innocence. It wasn't really that I
was after. I just wanted to go back
to those things that really gave me joy.
I wanted
to see what I could do
when I truly lived
who I actually was. And that was really
my main intention and it's still my main
intention. And I think, you know, we spoke
about it in my business. I call it
a for profit social enterprise. And what does
that mean? It means that you care about
the environment. You make money. Everybody needs to
make money. We all need to eat. We
all need to live. So it's not about
not giving it all away, but it's about
making sure you're taking care of your environment,
making sure you're taking care of earth. So
I do things organically.
My processes are organic. My farming is organic.
There's a number of things that I I
try to enact with that. The people are
super important to me, the community that I
live in and the bottom line and the
profit is giving back. And that's so important
to me, giving back. Like, whether that be
charities that I believe in and not just
giving money, but actually getting involved in the
charity in in some way and making sure
that it's a place for my community to
come.
Because in this whole reflection of, do I
want to continue to do this business? I
realized like, yeah, I do. I love this
business
because this is a platform in which I
can do this other part of myself
that I haven't really, really sunk my teeth
into.
And so
that's what it's giving me in sort of
in terms of that personal side of me.
So when people say, oh, it's just your
business. It's just doing business. I'm like, no,
my business is deeply, deeply personal to me.
It's a place where I wanna show that
one can do business. And I think probably
particularly in this day of age where everything
is kind of upside down
and wondering what's going on in the world.
I know I can't change what's going on
in the world, but I can change. I
should say I can't change what's going on
in the world. I can change little parts
in my backyard,
and I am a firm believer in that.
You know? What you do in your own
backyard, if we all were really practicing those
things,
you're you're not gonna get it right all
the time. But isn't that great? You know,
because then you would change the world. You
would change the world because you'd be doing
these little things of making a difference in
your community, making a difference for the people
you're leading,
making a difference in collaboration.
It really sounds like it's less about what
you're doing and so much about how you're
doing it and what comes from
the consciousness of that. Yeah. You're quite right.
It's really important to me, but it's more
important to me. Like, how is that process
taking place?
There's no compromising with
suppliers
or
the ingredients we use or the process we
use or the people that help make it.
It's all about that
rather than, you know, looking at the financial
statement. Don't get me wrong. I look at
my financial statements. You need you need to
do that while running a business,
but I don't want it to be just
about the financial statements and to trust
that I will make money. The money will
be there because if we're doing it right,
the money's gonna be there. So if this
is a metaphor for life and how you
live,
how did you come to know that
coming into the process, knowing you have to
face a lot of pain?
What did you learn? What was your experience,
and how is that now fueling this new
awareness that you have?
Well, the pain
you come out of pain.
You know?
You can walk through it.
And if you've got a support system
and if you've got love for yourself,
I didn't have a strong love for myself.
I had a love for myself, but not
as strong as when I left and as
strong as the journey continues on.
If you have that, then you always get
through the pain. You always know there's a
new day.
You always know that there's steps you can
take. You feel the pain,
but you will get through it. And to
me, it's about my community.
I met some really great people and I
still stay in touch with some people from
Hoffman,
but I have really good friends and I
have really good family and I know they're
there.
So
feeling the pain
is something that I know that I need
to do when things are kind of crappy.
It's like, I can't avoid it. I gotta
go through it because it's really part of
the process.
But I will come out.
I know I have this inner
belief that I will always come out. And
that gives you the courage to go there.
Yeah. It gives me the courage to go
there. I think it's like anything in life.
Everyone has trauma
and we have two choices.
I hope this doesn't sound cliche, but there
is always something to learn.
And those failures, those trauma is our opportunity
to learn as ugly as that sounds.
The sexual abuse that I went through as
a child, and I know people will probably
think this is a bit weird,
but I learned so much from that. I
don't wish that on anybody, of course, ever.
It's not a great thing to go through,
but I did.
I learned strength from that. I learned how
to stand up to this person. Was I
lucky that I could or that I got
the opportunity to? Yeah. I think there was
a lot of luck in that. We have
an awful lot of luck that comes in
life,
but I learned, I learned and those situations
made me stronger to know that I could
always get through.
And it started young for me. The knowledge
of your strength started young? Yeah. Because I
was given these in a weird sense opportunities
to learn from the trauma.
Take us to a moment in your process
that
is still with you
around self love sense of self
a moment that was a turning point or
an insight. I I don't know if I
can get through this, but I will try
because it's my daughter.
That is the most painful.
She also went through trauma
and I didn't save her from that.
So huge amount of guilt
around that.
And the process helped me
to realize how much I love her
and how I was wounded myself
and still not healed.
And that I needed to forgive myself.
I needed to give myself love,
that I needed to give her grace
to leave me,
to do whatever she needed to do to
heal.
And in doing so, I could heal and
love myself.
So I don't know if that explains it
to you, but that happened for me at
Hoffman.
And it's still a process because my door
is open to her,
but I don't know if she'll ever walk
through it.
But I'm resolving
in my brain.
It will be her journey,
and I will love her no matter what.
She will feel that love on some level,
but I am going to let her go
with grace.
And that allows me to have love for
myself because it allows me to
stop the guilt
and recognize
that I did everything I could with what
I had at the time.
And with this, I move forward.
I do hope she may come back,
but I'm not hanging on to that hope.
Like someday she's going to be there. So
I'm leaving my life in suspension
because I don't think that does her any
good on one level
because I think she feels this on one
level,
but she knows that I'm there.
Even though we're not connecting.
In the process,
we see how much
hurt happens. And as parents, I can realize
how much we've hurt our children
without ever intending to
and not be derailed from your own healing
and to hold both at once, I think
is really tricky. And I think that's really
important.
It is. It's really tricky. And I think
that's where it's so important to have a
really good support group,
Because
as a mother, you are hardwired
to take care of this child
and you will do things for your child
where you sacrifice your life. You will. And
then to find out that what you did,
wasn't always great for them. And you're like,
but I just so tried so hard to
make it happen, to realize that you're valuable,
to realize that
you didn't do it and that's life.
And it's hard not to, to go down
with that. It's hard not to feel so
guilty and to have so much pain and
to beat yourself up. I guess that's where
it sort of wraps into some of the
mentoring or to spend time with younger women
and to spend time with my female friends
to get that strength
of
you're good. You worked hard. You did your
best. You could. And
to reassert loving yourself, having a community that
helps you with that is paramount.
Thank you for
the strength, the courage,
the willingness to share yourself
so openly.
Yeah. Well, thank you very much for listening
for your time and, letting me share this
so vulnerably.
What's next for you?
I'm exploring.
I'm exploring some things with my business,
partly mentorship
and not necessarily in a formal way, but
potentially could be in a formal way with
women.
I love
giving
mentorship
or just the opportunity to have those discussions
with women that are trying to juggle their
busy lives,
because I know how difficult it was for
me as a mother of three children and
really wanting my career and never feeling I
was in the right place at the right
time.
Not till later in life, realizing like, oh,
you mean you can't have it all at
the same time. You can have it all,
but not at the same time.
So, you know, being able to be supportive
of that.
For women, it's still a struggle of how
do I navigate being a mother and navigate
having a career.
I just really enjoy spending time with
younger women and assisting, mentoring,
just talking, you know?
I have this other passion, which is gonna
sound a little crazy, maybe to some, but
I'm seriously in love with dogs.
So part of my brand at my business
is dogs. So I encourage all the customers
to bring their dogs. We have barcuterie boards,
you know, sit outside with picnics, bring your
dogs.
And I'm kinda looking into whether or not
I'm going to rescue senior dogs and give
them a safe place to see out the
rest of their lives. I've got a fairly
large chunk of property up on Vancouver Island.
So, yeah, there might be some little rescue
spot going on there.
And I wanna continue on in my business
in making sure it's a place for the
community
and continuing
to show that business can be done with
heart, that you can lead with heart
and that it can follow that for profit
social enterprise
and be healthy and survive.
Those are what I'm looking at.
What a beautiful
way to move through life.
Yeah. Because
life is actually very good with all the
trauma, with all the pain. I mean, isn't
it great? At my home here and being
off grid, I'm looking outside right now at
the ocean and every now and then a
whale will pop up with this baby. I'm
like, oh my god. How lucky am I?
I wake up most days thinking life is
beautiful. That doesn't mean I don't have sadness.
I do. But there's always beauty in the
moments.
And so if you can stop and find
those moments and I try to focus on
those. I really try to focus on the
moments.
And if I'm struggling finding them, I go
outside,
get into nature,
phone a friend,
all those things that just can help you
like, oh, yeah. Thank you so much for
taking the moment
to be here, to share this journey of
self love, self forgiveness,
and your purpose
and how that's moving through the world. Thank
you. Thank you to Hoffman.
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.