It was so intense. There was so much
to work through in a week. I mean,
I came out of that floating on air.
It was really incredible. And my kids saw
it immediately. They were young, you know, and
they're like, dad, you've lost your stress face.
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 it's stories and anecdotes
and people we interview
about their life post process
and how it lives in the world
radiating love.
This episode contains
graphic descriptions of trauma,
substance abuse, and reproductive
grief.
Please use your discretion.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Hoffman podcast.
Steve Chechu is with me. Welcome, Steve.
Thank you, Drew. Nice to be here. How
are you doing? I'm doing really well, really
well. I just came back off a weekend
with my daughter who was at a ski
competition and, she did well and she was,
skied with joy in her heart. And that's
what I was hoping. And in kind of
a consequential ski event called free ride, big
mountain, where she's jumping off cliffs and tight
trees and very hard event to watch as
a parent.
Just praying for her safety and she had
a great result and, and it was really,
it was great. It's great for the family.
Ma was there with my wife and we
just got back.
And so, yeah. Wonderful weekend. Thank you. Beautiful.
So, Steve, it's a bit ironic that your
daughter's doing all this big mountain skiing, jumping
off cliffs, because
you have quite an experience you had many
years ago, didn't you? Yes. I did. Can
you tell us a little bit about it?
Yes. I was caught in an avalanche in
a helicopter ski trip outside of Revelstoke, British
Columbia.
We were skiing in a group of 12,
but we're skiing in the trees. And, you
know, you each have a partner
in that particular accident. My partner was killed
and I survived kind of miraculously.
I still to this day, don't really know.
Can't comprehend
how that happened. When you're skiing in the
trees in Canada, you're in these kind of
bowling lane size
openings
where you ski for a while and can
make maybe five, seven, 10 turns, And then
you'll come to what's called a tree fence
where the tree is really narrowed down and
then you have to make either very short
turns to get around that tree fence. And
then that bowling lane size alley will, will
open again for you.
And that can go for, you know, a
1,500
vertical feet. And so when the avalanche hit,
my partner had gone first
and I was getting ready to go.
We had gotten roughly two feet of no
new snow overnight on top of what was
very cold snow that had been sitting around
for two weeks. In that condition, you get
what's called surface horror, which is a, dangerous
bad layer so that that new snow can
slide off that layer. But typically in the
trees, the trees anchor the snow. So that
doesn't happen.
Partner goes first. I was gonna start in
his track, but the snow started to solidify,
get a little bit warmer and a little
too fast. So I said, you know what?
I'm gonna just hike around these two little
small pine trees and find my fresh line,
which I did. And And as soon as
I made one turn, I hear the scream
avalanche and I look over my right shoulder
and I thought it was just gonna be
slough coming through the trees, maybe enough to
knock me down. Instead, I see these giant
blocks,
which are slabs, you know, they're two feet
high and they're going at an enormous rate
of speed and they're hitting the trees and
they're exploding and they're just like this thud.
And I look over my right shoulder
and then over my left
as I'm skiing and I see that the
slide has, has progressed further on the left
side.
So I basically make a snap decision to
ski one big sweeping turn. And I see
a group of old hemlock trees, large growth
hemlocks, and I come right in behind it,
drop my poles and I lean back
and the slide hits the trees, goes right
around me. And I think, oh, I'm gonna
survive. Like it just went around me. But
instead it came underneath me and picked me
up like a hovercraft
about 10 feet in the air.
And then I start going straight down the
slope
in the middle of the avalanche. So I'm
on my back. I've got both my skis
on. I dropped my poles to down my
pole straps on, which thank God, because you
can't really swim if you're holding on your
poles. And I started doing the backstroke
to stay up on top. And as I'm
doing the backstroke, the trees are
whizzing by my head.
And I'm, I'm saying to myself mentally, I'm
like, wow, this is, you know, really dangerous
because these are removable objects.
If I hit one, it's gonna be consequential.
And as I started to pick up speed,
I realized that I had to hit one
because if I didn't, the next one after
that would kill me for sure. So I
still had the, some directional capability because I
had my skis on. So I'm doing the
backstroke and I see this giant hemlock and
I'm like, that's the one I've gotta hit
this tree. And I kind of steered my
way into it and put both feet out
in front of me and I hit the
tree and I literally saw my right leg
do a three sixty spin to the right
and a three sixty spin to the left,
but kept going. And so now I've got
a broken leg and I'm continuing to swim
and I'm like, okay,
I'm picking up speed again. It slowed me
down just a hair. So I'm coming down
and I get through one tree fence. And
then the next tree fence I come to,
I'm like, okay, this is it. Like, Like,
I'm not going to get through this one.
This one's going to take me out for
sure. And everything goes dark
and I can't remember. I just don't recall
how I got to the other side. And
to this day, I still don't remember
how or why or what happened, but
I get to the other side and I
continue down the slide and,
you know, we've gone probably
600 vertical feet and I see another tree
and I try to grab it with my
left arm.
The snowpack is so deep there. The top
of that tree, like it was 15 feet,
but there's 15 feet of snow. So that's
a 30 foot tall tree. And I try
and grab the top of it with my
left arm, almost pulled my shoulder out of
the socket, continue to go down the hill
and I'm still doing the backstroke. And then
finally it starts to slow down. I'm like,
okay, I think I'm going to make this.
And oddly started to feel protected, like some
powers over looking and I'm not going to
die. And so I start to slow down.
And then, when I, I finally come to
rest, I've got the snow under my armpits
with my arms up above.
I have my left leg kind of like
a contortionist
with the ski tip
facing my right shoulder on my left leg,
completely bent behind me. And then my right
leg is, is broken is off to the
right, but I'm compacted and snow. I cannot
move.
My brother was on this trip
and he saw me go by him and
he's like, swim,
swim. Swimming is the stroke people do
in the really only thing you can do
to try and prevent yourself from being buried
by an avalanche.
You swim to stay up on the surface.
Like if you were in the big ocean
wave and you get pounded by that wave,
you're constantly trying to swim to the surface,
right? It's the same kind of feeling. And
while that snow is moving and there's a
lot of air in it, no problem. But
as it starts to consolidate it, basically all
the air goes out of the snowpack and
it turns to cement. So when you finally
come to rest, you're hoping that you're near
the surface. And if you are, you're gonna
try and punch a hole around your face
and get your hands to create a cup
so that you can breathe so that you
don't breathe in your own CO2. And that's
what kills a lot of people if you're
buried. Now I was super fortunate that I
wasn't buried. I was just up to my
chest and my armpits. So the swimming, you
know, saved my life, for sure.
I've never done anything so animalistic
and
difficult in my life. Like, you know, when
you're gonna die, you're like, okay, you do
everything you can not to. It worked out
my favor that way. So my brother then
comes down to me and was like, Hey,
I broke my leg. I broke my leg,
but my left leg feels like I'm gonna
get snapped in two because I'm so out
of position.
And so he digs me out, gets my
left leg free, takes that ski off. And
then we continue to dig and dig around
my right leg. And I looked down and
I'm like, okay, this is the craziest thing
I've ever seen with my own body. My
right leg is at a 90 degree angle
to the right at the boot top. So
I have to pick up my boot and
straighten my leg in an intense amount of
pain. And I could, you know, just feel
the bones kind of grinding on one another
as I do that.
So now I'm, I'm like completely discombobulated.
I'm frantic. And then we're like, where's Steve?
He was in front of me. So other
people start to finally come around
and they start looking for, for Steve. And
he turns out to be about
a 100 feet below me
over a rollover and I can't see him.
And so my other friends in that group,
they're performing CPR.
They dig him out. His hand was up
above the snow. That's how they found him.
Other helicopter companies come through. They ski past
me with these big orange boxes with defibrillators
and they race past me and they're like,
what are your injuries? I'm like, I broke
my leg. They leave me and they go
into one that's more life threatening and they're
down there trying to revive Steve. And my
brother goes halfway down to that rollover and
he's looking down at our other friends and
he's, he kind of puts thumbs up, thumbs
down and he gets the thumbs down and,
you know, he lets me know that Steve
had perished.
And so obviously incredibly emotional,
very distraught at this point.
Now I'm like, okay,
how are they gonna get me out of
here? It's snowing very hard. It's, somewhat of
a blizzard.
We hear a helicopter approach. They put me
on a gurney. They drop a long line
from this hovering helicopter. That's a 100 feet
and the line's not long enough. It can't
reach the gurney.
So they fly away
and I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't
think I could handle being in a sled
behind, you know, one of these guides trying
to navigate me through the trees and in
Canada, they're not allowed to administer pain medication
on the slope. So I had no pain
medication. So it had been three hours and
I literally thought that my leg was cut
off inside my boot. I couldn't feel it
anymore. I was telling my brother, I think
I cut my leg off. He's like, no,
no, it's still attached.
And I was pretty much delirious.
So then the helicopter goes away and I
think, oh my gosh, it's not gonna come
back. And then fifteen minutes later, you hear
the thud of the rotors
and it comes back with 150 foot long
line to give you a sense of the
size of these old growth trees are that
tall. Right. So he drops the long line
down to the gurney.
There's a guide that actually holds on to
the cross bracing of this. It's like a
triangulated
cable goes to each edge of the gurney
and he stands on the gurney and holds
it.
And so they start to lift me up
out of these trees. And as we get
to the top, the trees are swaying in
the wind
and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna
get ping ponged off the tops of these
trees.
The helicopter pilot just pulls me straight up
like a beautiful maneuver. And I didn't hit
any of the trees.
And now we start to fly to what
I'm thinking is either in a hospital or
an ambulance or whatever.
And we're literally 3,000 feet above the valley
floors in between these giant mountain ranges.
The cable that's holding the, to the helicopters
in this big C shape and I'm just
going, oh my gosh, like if that thing
snaps or the bolt lets you go, I'm
gonna fall to my death. And like, I
couldn't handle it. I was just about freaking
out here.
They land the helicopter and put me into
a smaller helicopter, which he calls an A
star where they pull out the seat next
to the pilot. And they had to wedge
me in, in the gurney in this helicopter
and my feet got pushed up against the
dash and basically passed out from the pain.
So wake up in mid flight land and
there's an ambulance waiting on some county road.
That's, you know, like an hour from the
hospital and I get into the ambulance and
they finally have laughing gas that they can
give me. And I'm I'm sitting there and
I put the mask on and I, I
felt like dark fate. I was just like,
you know, sucking in this laughing gas, trying
to, you know, give me some relief. And
I get to the hospital and they're like,
okay, we're gonna pull your boot off. And
I was like, oh, they're gonna cut it
off with a saw. And they're like, no,
we gotta take it off. And so my
brother and, and when two other people on
the trip, you know, they open the cuff
and they pull the boot off and I
pass out again.
And then the third time I pass out
is when he sets the leg.
So then we, it turns out that I'm,
you know, I'm in the hospital.
They tell me that they can't perform the
surgery.
And this is where the story is quite
wild because my wife was there and normally
this is a boys trip
and Steve, who was one of the, you
know, it was my partner who was killed,
who organized this trip. He's like, you know,
I told him, I said, Hey, we've been
trying to get pregnant. We've been having difficulty.
My wife's the happy lady. And she wants
to come. And he's like, you know, the
rules, there's no wives, no girlfriends. Like, if
you wanna make babies, go to the beach.
And I was, you know, upset about that.
I was like, no, you know, I've paid
and I'm going. And my wife was like,
I'm going to, and I'll just come and
stay in a different hotel and they won't
know the difference and you can come visit
me at night.
So that's what we did. That was our
plan.
So it turns
out that she's there. She's a nurse and
I had her emotional support and it was
amazing and incredible that she was even on
this trip. We find out that the weather
is getting worse. It, the snow had turned
to rain.
Avalanches are coming in from all sides of
the highways and they're closing down this little
town of Revelstoke and there's no way in
or out. And they say like, this is
our last weather opportunity. You can get in
this helicopter and go right now. I was
in a hospital gown. I had no, you
know, no clothing on other than this hospital
gown. I'm sitting on a bare bottom of
a helicopter, not in the seat because my
leg is extended because it's in an air
cast and she's got her back to me
and my back is to her so that
she could support me because she's a nurse.
They gave her the ability to actually inject
me with Dilata
as needed for pain.
So we fly from Revelstoke to Kelowna. We
get a private airplane that comes up from
Telluride that will fly me to Aspen for
surgery.
I get to Aston at twelve midnight, and
they perform surgery at one in the morning.
And they did what's called a nail surgery
where they insert a nail down my tibia,
which was a compound tibia, fibula fracture where
the where the bone had actually broken the
skin. And that's why I felt like I'd
lost my leg because it actually had penetrated
the skin. There was a fair amount of
blood in the boot and everything else. And
they did that surgery.
So I'll fast forward.
We conceived the night before the accident.
I was like, wow, this is the silver
lining, a soul for a soul. If I
can get anything out of this, what's that
sign from the universe? And that's what we
thought it was.
Three months go by
a difficult recovery and we lose that pregnancy.
So I'm starting to hit some really deep
depression. I'm also starting to get some really
significant survivor guilt over the accident because why
did Steve die? Why did I live? How
did I make it through there? He had
two children. I had no children,
you know, all these things. And then we
had this little argument before we ski just
over something silly about turn shape. I make
a big turn shape and I take up
room and he was like, you're taking up
too much room. You're not leaving me on
track powder. And I said, okay, you go
first. I'm so sorry. Like you go, I'll
go second this time. And so he goes
first and he gets killed. So I'm starting
to think like all these things are, what
if I had stayed home and did go
to the beach instead of going on the
strip, would that have been a different outcome?
So I'm starting to really have these heavy
survivor guilt emotions
that are taking over.
So again, fast forward further down the road,
now we're, we get fourteen years
away from this. And I still don't realize
how much this is weighing on me. I'm
now starting to develop a home for sale
and in a market that I saw was
improving, but started to stall and started to
have some really
heavy dark thoughts. You know, I had that.
And then I also had a relationship with
my father that wasn't really
close. It wasn't that there was really any
problems. It was just that we never had
a relationship where we could talk to each
other, where I could call him up on
the phone and say, Hey, I'm struggling with
this. Or can you help me with that?
Or, or, or he would ask me what's
going on in your life and how are
you doing? And
it just wasn't that relationship our entire lives.
I left home when I was 18, I
moved to Aspen. You know, she didn't approve
and I just never had the ability to
get to the bottom of what the issue
was. So all these things are starting to
compound. And my wife is like, you're not
doing well. We need some type of intervention.
We need something
to help you move through these issues. And
she had discovered the Hoffman process. A friend
of hers had gone through it.
She introduced that concept to me. And I
was like, Hey, whatever I can do to
help. Cause our relationship was struggling and my
parenting was struggling and all these things. And
I think what happened was the stress of
this decision to build a home and to
risk financially a lot by collateralizing a lot
of the assets that we had to fail.
It could be almost catastrophic financially. So all
this started to weigh on me to the
point where I was like, I have got
to do something. And so Hoffman was what
we decided and I just decided all of
a sudden, look, I'm all in. I'm going
to go into this thing with nothing but
good intentions and go a 100%.
I had realized that drinking was creating
depression for me. I would drink one day
later, I'd be fine. But two days later,
I would be depressed. And I could almost
identify how bad the depression was by what
alcohol I was drinking. Baku was the worst.
Then I went to tequila and it was
like tequila is fine. And then it wasn't
fine. And then beer wasn't fine. And finally
I decided
that alcohol wasn't serving my highest and best
purpose and I quit cold turkey on my
50 birthday.
So
that was good. Cause going into Hoffman, I,
I was not drinking,
not imbibing in anything and went in there
with a clear head and said, okay, I
can do this without
any kind of crutch without any kind of,
outside influence.
So whatever I feel is is truly what
I'm gonna feel. And I think that was
really important for me to do that. Take
us to Hoffman.
You're there.
Maybe even take us to a moment in
time. What's happening in your week?
I think it was the second day. I
don't know if I've ever been
sadder in my life where I realized
that this relationship with my father was so
poor that I just didn't have the ability
to talk to him, you know, man to
man and, and have this relationship. And it
saddened me because he was now in the
throes of dementia and Parkinson's.
The writing was on the wall that I
could never have that conversation with him. It
had passed.
And so that realization
hit me like a ton of bricks.
It was from that moment of like being
at the lowest of lows
that I was able to build myself back
up during that week.
And, you know, I had a tremendous coach
in Kevin. So we worked through that. You
know, there were moments
in the Hoffman where during that week where
I was able to tap into
my spirit self.
I have a belief in the afterlife, and
I think that it's been informed by certain
things. And one of those things in that
avalanche was
when Steve's body was being taken out,
you know, on a sled behind a guide,
there was a person that came to visit
me in the hospital that was one of
the participants in the trip. And he was
a good friend of mine from Telluride. And
he comes to me and he says,
he goes, Steve, I don't even know how
to tell you this, but I'm just gonna
tell you. And I don't know why the
guide came to me, because this is the
first time I've been on this trip. You
know, you've been on this trip with all
these other friends. You've been doing this for
ten years, but he came to me and
I'm coming to you to tell you this
story. The guide picked him out and he
said,
I'm not a religious man. And I'm just
gonna tell you what I saw. I've taken
Steve's body out. I come around the tree
and there he is. He's standing right in
front of me and he says, tell my
girls I'm okay.
So this is the ski guide
that said he saw
your partner, Steve,
standing there. Well, the guide's not the stranger.
The guide had skied with him before.
He says to the guide, tell my girls
I'm okay. So now the guy's got this
story. He tells it to the new guy
on the trip. Yeah. Who comes to the
hospital and tells me. I see.
Tell my girls I'll be okay.
Wow.
So you're referencing that you believe in some
higher power more than what is happening here.
I definitely believe in a different dimension,
100%, because other things
have happened
that I can explain to you that came
out of Hoffman
from the relationships that I made. And one
of them was
in that week, you can try and tap
into your higher spiritual power. When there was
this one event where I just got absolutely
lit up, Like I've never been before. It
was as close to seeing my higher power
in real life, you know, with my eyes
closed that I could, and I drew a
mandala of it, you know, and I will
send that to you. We'll put that in
our show notes in case people wanna look
at what you drew. So I kinda crossed
over the plane just a little bit, and
I go outside and there's
I I'm just seeing things like I've never
seen them before. They've clarity of which I
was seeing the color and the trees and
the, I go on this hike and I,
I mean, it was just like mind blowing
how visual and how in tune and how
present I was. It was one of the
greatest moments I've ever had. And then come
back and, and go through this whole week
long process and really,
really feel like I've
met my depression head on and I've been,
taking antidepressants
and trying several different types of medication. I
could never stay on them, but the side
effects were just overwhelming
and I couldn't do it. To this day,
those practices we did at Hoffman is what
cured my depression. I've never been in the
black hole since that trip. It's been 2019.
So we're going on seven years. Wow.
When you say the practices and tools, what
stands the test of time all these years
later after doing the process?
There was a a moment in that process
where I could visualize depression. I could actually
identify it. There was a a specific
tool that was given to me. I could
see it. I drew a picture of it,
and then I was able to overcome it.
I mean, literally pulverized it into the ground.
And then once it was done, it was
over. Identifying
the dark side and conjuring an image and
then engaging in expressive work, it's a huge
piece of the process.
Have you been able to go back
and tell Steve's daughters
that
he's okay?
You know, I haven't. I'm writing a memoir.
And in that memoir, I hope to share
with them.
How are his
wife and his kids doing? Well, he's divorced.
He had a girlfriend at the time. His
kids are now probably in their thirties. One
of them has a child. The other one
just got married. So we were at both
weddings and had chances to visit with them
and the grandchild. And so we're still close.
They don't live in Telluride, but when they
come visit, we often get together. So that's
great. Tell us a little bit about what
motivated you to sort of take the intensity
of that memory,
your Hoffman experience, and fishing,
and write a memoir.
I wanted to take a metaphorical journey about
fly fishing stories of fish that I've caught
in my lifetime ever since I was a
little boy, big fish that I've lost.
Really incredible stories. One of them in Mexico
with a, with a guy that I met
that got tied into a blue marlin in,
in a 16 foot aluminum panga,
you know, that took us out into the
ocean. I've been in, in New Zealand and,
and tied into like the biggest brown trout
I've ever seen. And these fish that I've
encountered with, it's just kind of this connection
that
is oddly similar to
this fleeting moment of hanging onto something and
then losing it. So I just wrote this
story that intertwines
not only Steve, but I basically have lost
five of my closest friends in my lifetime.
Five? You've lost five friends?
Yeah. Five friends in five miscarriages.
Five of your close friends have died, including
Steve in the avalanche,
and you and your wife have had five
miscarriages.
Yeah. And now we have two daughters.
So with those 10 losses, plus it sounds
like you wove in lots of fish that
you lost off the line. I imagine there's
a some
felt sense of loss.
Yeah. It's this connection. It's the loss of
the connection, or you just wanted to see
something so desperately and hold it in your
hand for a second. I release everything I
catch. So it's not like I'm gonna eat
it. It's just that moment of like, oh
my gosh, like I've just been connected to
the most beautiful thing in nature. Well, how
do you make sense of that? Those losses
and navigating,
moving on from them, making sense of them.
That's the journey of how do you overcome
this?
It's really missing these people so much and
not having the conversation and the laughter and
the times that we got to enjoy together.
So a lot of it is just memory.
A lot of it is I visit with
them. I have this place that I hike
to locally and there's this little meadow that
I go when I sit and I chat.
You commune with them, if you will. You
live near Telluride?
Yeah. I live in the town of Telluride
and I have a great hike right out
my back door called the Judd Movie Trail.
And there's this place on the Judd Movie
that I go and I sit or every
time I pass it, I say, hello. I
just keep them in my heart.
It was so intense. There was so much
to work through in a week.
I mean, I came out of that floating
on air. It was really incredible. And my
kids saw it immediately. They were young, you
know, and they're like, dad, you've lost your
stress face. And so they could really tell
it. When I learned so much about modeling,
I was like, oh my gosh, this tension,
this anxiety, this depression, I'm passing this on
on my kids. I can't do that. They
were in those impressionable years of seven, eight,
nine years old. And I knew that I
just couldn't do it anymore. Like that was
just such a bad parenting thing for them
to see that the relationship I have with
my girls now is just remarkable.
It's remarkable. I'm so blessed. And I truly
put so much of that on the ability
to work through those things.
Had you previously
been one to
express your feelings,
name your feelings, work through your feelings?
No. I've internalized them, held onto them. They
would build up and build up and build
up and then either have blowups,
that type of thing.
Very rarely does that happen anymore.
The ability just to talk through things and
to look at myself and to label things
and say, okay, I'm doing this, I'm doing
that. I gotta work on it and improve.
So those are really things that I was
able to improve upon personally.
Not
expressing feelings, pushing them away
doesn't really make it better, does it? No.
Not at all.
Identify it and confront it and move through
it.
You know, that's another tool that I've I've
been able to
help utilize.
I don't
journal the way I did. I journaled for
a long time. You know, I did my
projects for close to a year. I still
do them mentally, but now writing the memoir,
a lot of that kind of comes back.
It somewhat takes the place of that to
some degree.
What's it been like to put
pen to paper and put words to so
much of what's happened to you? How has
that experience been? It's been cathartic. It's been
great. It's been hard. I can write about
fishing a lot more easily than I can.
You
know, vulnerable stuff like
issues that I had with my first wife,
for instance, or, you know, issues that I,
I had
confronting my depression and things like that. You
know, it's just vulnerable. You know, I'm writing
this and, you know, my clients are gonna
read this and people that I've been working
with and, are gonna go, oh, gosh, you
know that about you or whatever. But at
this point, I think it's important for my
kids.
What do you hope your
kids take from
reading
what has happened, the stories you've written about?
What's the possible takeaway that they might get
from it?
That I hope that they see that their
dad's vulnerable, that he's being authentic, that he's
had a lot of difficulty in his life,
but he's got back up and he's been
resilient.
He's marched forward in, in the face of
a lot of loss and still has a
lot of joy. He's kind of trying to
put his right foot forward all the time
and lead a good life.
I think we do that as a family.
I think our relationship with nature is wonderful.
Like my kids love being outdoors. They love
to ski with me and my wife. They
love to fish. They love to hike. So
we have this really wonderful connection with nature
and they see that and they feel that
and they realize
how blessed they are to have this kind
of life.
They've done some travel. My oldest is now
in a curated gap year. She's currently in
Africa and
she just continually
come back and say how grateful she is
for the way she was raised and what
she's seen and and how she can incorporate
that into her life.
How does the book end? I'll tell you
one story. So one of the friends that
I met at Hoffman
introduced me to an intuitive.
How would you describe an intuitive?
Someone who can connect you with the different
dimension.
And it was just this random thing where
he said, I had this appointment and I
can't make it. Do you want it? And
I said, Yeah, absolutely. Because I, I wanna
be able to see if I can connect
with Steve, my partner.
Because I had to resolve,
was that survivor guilt?
Was there truth in my feeling of like,
Hey, I didn't go first. You did.
What if I went first? This would be
a different outcome.
And I wanted to find out if that
had anything to do with the accident.
So she was amazing. And she opens up
this channel and we have this conversation and
he's like, absolutely not.
And she was able to tell me what
he's doing in the afterlife, which is this
incredible
building of community and tearing it down and
having these meetings with these incredible souls. You
know what I've done? I mean, it was
really wild stuff.
I'm asking questions and he's answering them.
He's like, don't feel guilty. It had nothing
to do with you.
Zero. And I'm actually upset at you for
feeling this way for this long. You've been
wasting all this time and all this energy
on that that had nothing to do with
it.
And so it was his journey.
So the the next thing I ask her
is
I say, okay, well, I'm, I'm through that.
But I felt oddly protected
during this avalanche. I'm going down. I think
I'm gonna die. I don't die. And then
I feel like I'm protected. And I'm like,
was that God protecting me? And she says,
no, it was your angels.
And, you know, I started to get all
choked up. And I was like, well, who
were my angels?
And she said, well, it was your great
grandfather who you never met who died in
a car accident when my father was eight.
And then she says your two unborn daughters.
What was that like to hear that?
You know, I, it,
you know, to this day, it just makes
me
just feel so grateful.
Sorry to get emotional about it.
All the loss that we had, the five
miscarriages,
it all started to make sense. It was
like, okay. Those were just these little journeys
that those children were on that they were
only supposed to be on that journey for
this really short period of time.
But that wasn't
the journey that they were supposed to fulfill
in this lifetime.
And that the two girls that we have,
they were the ones that we were supposed
to have.
I truly believe they chose us.
When you're ready and we're ready, we're gonna
come.
Both those births were
at home
in a birth tub,
and my wife delivered
naturally. And I was in the tub with
her
and two of the most beautiful experiences of
our lives. So we have
all this loss,
and yet we have this incredible
gain.
It's just remarkable.
That's beautiful, Steve.
The gain, the loss,
the progression.
What's it like to
reflect
on the book, on your life, on these
losses,
on
these two beautiful beings? The whole thing, what's
it like to talk about it here? It's
this immense gratitude every day. How did I
live this life? This you know, I wanted
to be a skier as a young kid,
and I live in this town, and I
live across from the ski area, and I
can go up on any day and
and ski and be in nature and enjoy
that and and get this just like soul
fulfilling
wonder in my heart from being outside and
its incredible beauty of this place we live
in. I'm just so grateful. I can go
back and connect these dots and they all
line up.
You know, and I still have my challenges
and I still have my problems and I
still have the things that I have to
work through on a daily basis and the
petty shit that we all deal with. But
when I can just separate myself from that
and say, stop, you know, just look at
what you have in these beautiful girls and
my wonderful wife, you just have this gratitude.
And it's really
what keeps me going
when all the little shit becomes a little
overwhelming. I just go back to that and
I just go back to my gratitude practice
and say, okay, the rest of it's bullshit.
Doesn't mean anything. It just keep stacking the
gratitude.
And that's just, you know, the way I
like to lead my life and it's been
remarkable. So I'm, I'm truly, truly blessed But
to all the things that have happened,
I'm just feel like I'm the luckiest man
in the world.
For that luck and for
your
stacking of the gratitude,
I love that, Steve.
Thanks very much for this conversation. I'm grateful
for your sharing.
Thank you, Drew. I appreciate you pulling that
out of me. It's hard. Like, there's a
lot of emotions still. I would bet there
are so many emotions.
And I'm grateful for your parents.
They're,
wonderful people.
They were a big part of my career.
I have a lot of gratitude for them,
and I loved your parents. You know, they
were really, really special to me. It's the
funny part of our story that
I've known about you, Steve, for decades, literally
decades. You're friends with my parents. And then
two months ago,
somehow you and my mom were talking, and
you found out I was a Hoffman process
teacher. She found out you had done the
process
and that you were writing a book about
it. Amazing.
Isn't it? My again, just the dots in
life. Such synchronicity,
Absolutely.
I also call it synchro destiny.
The people who you meet that you didn't
know at the time how important they might
be in your life. All these little moments
that come together, they can be life changing.
Beautiful.
Well, thank you, Steve. It's an honor. The
Hoffman process changed my life. I'm eternally grateful,
and I can recommend it to more people.
Thank you.
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 hoffman institute