I remember having a conversation, my intellectual body having a conversation with my spiritual body, which at that point, it was I was talking to God. Just like, what's wrong with you? You're just schizophrenic. What is your name? Are you Buddha? Are you God? And then I burst out laughing, and I just had so much fun clearing up a mystery for myself. And after that, I grew up. 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. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Hoffman podcast. Claudette and Ade Faizon are here. Great to have you. Welcome. You two. Thank you. My community of people. Yes. Super super excited for this conversation. You all did the process how long ago? I think, like, '95 or in the early nineties. And all day?
I did it first, and I came home and I was buoyant and radiant. And Claudette said, oh, this must work. Look at you. She was having a party at the house with her girlfriends, and I just came in and joined the party like I've been there the whole day. And that was quite different for her experience of me. Usually, I was just be in the background waiting for an opening, but I created an opening. I was in the party as soon as I got there. You remember that, Claudette? No. I
don't. But I do know that, I spoke with Mike Wick, who's a board member, I believe, of Hoffman. And we were having tea one Friday afternoon, And there was something about him, and then I just kept seeing something around him. And I explained to him what I was seeing, and he said, well, you know Raz? I said, yeah. I know Raz. He said, well, he's doing great work. And because we're in the same kind of transformational work, at that time, it was with youth at risk.
And now it's unlocking futures where we work with families and young people in the margins, giving them tools and gems that will decrease or eliminate generational trauma. And so after I spoke with Raz, and he knew what we were doing because he knew the youth at risk program has been around since '83. He offered for us to do the work to see if it was, something we wanted to partner with. And that's how Ade got to go first because it was, hey, Mikey. You try it out, and then you come
back and tell me how it is. He was the guinea pig, and there were three of us on staff. It's Ade, myself, and Kathleen Morris. We still all know the distinctions and the elevators and just great work. And yeah. So we come to you from the same transformational background with Bob Swartz transformation as Landmark, whatever you wanna call it, and committed to the same work that you do at Hoffman. Different population, same result. And do you see the through line between your work at Hoffman?
You had already been doing that work with unlocking futures. Right? Yes. So what happened for you all during your week a little bit? I'm curious. Such an intense immersive experience, and yet so many years ago that you took the process. What was it like for you? I can recall getting in touch with the patterns. The patterns just kept coming. Maybe there were 200 of them, and I couldn't believe that I had picked up on so many patterns. And then the opportunity to let them go, it emptied me out.
So I was available rather than all the patterns. So I got to flush. Am I right? I got to take a big flush. And so when I came home, I was present rather than the patterns being present. There was nothing between my love for Claudette and people that was getting in the way for me to hesitate to enter into the party. The little party and the metaphorical party that was your life post process. Exactly. And what I can recall, three specific things.
I remember when we were expressing in fashion, what was great about that was my mom and my dad who about that time, they probably were both deceased. You know, my mom definitely. But when I could feel that they were partnering with me, they were supporting me together to bash out the patterns that didn't work for them, that they gave to me, that I was passing down to like, so it wasn't bashing my parents, but was bashing their patterns and my patterns, and we did it collectively.
They were right on my shoulder cheering me on each time, like, yes. Yes. No more of this. So that was one experience. And another experience was I remember turning into a little girl, and we were fashion. And one of the teachers came up behind me, and I don't know what they said. But it was I was getting in trouble for a lamp broke while there were six of kids. Six kids, we're gonna break something.
And that experience came up, and I remember saying to the teacher, I was just a little girl playing, and that just left. And the funniest part of the process that I remember when we were doing the quad talk, my spiritual self, my emotional self, my physical self, and my mental self, whatever the quadrinity is. And I remember having a conversation, my intellectual body having a conversation with my spiritual body, which at that point, it was I was talking to God. Just
like, what's wrong with you? You're you're schizophrenic. What is your name? Are you Buddha? Are you God? And then I burst out laughing, and I just had so much fun clearing up a mystery for myself. And after that, I grew up. Wow. Those are memorable experiences. I can feel it. Oh, absolutely. I'm doing a program today, and we'll talk about the work that we brought to unlocking futures.
But I love when I'm working with people, and we're talking about the patterns and when they get that they don't even exist. Like, the bunch of patterns have taken on their behavior and their their conclusions about life, and perhaps you don't exist with these patterns. What do you do then? Yeah. So you get to the end of the week. The two of you go separately, but then you're integrating into life post process.
Does it change your work at all, or does it modify how you are doing your work in unlocking futures? Well, we did partner much later. We did partner with Hoffman. We thought we were gonna do more work with them last year, but we'll see. We're open to it. It took about two years for Hoffman to understand what we were doing. We already understood what Hoffman was doing, but marrying the two curriculums, our curriculum.
So we weren't replacing our curriculum nor were we adding them to our the work of Hoffman to our curriculum. We actually created a next level. We called it an advanced course. The quantum leap process. You know, when I was early teaching, I joined one of those and became a teacher with you, Ade, just South of San Francisco.
What an incredible experience to bring both adults and adolescents together to do some of the integrated work of unlocking futures and Hoffman over the course of, I think, four days. And it sounds like at some point in the future, there are plans to do it again. One of the young women, Dejana, maybe she was there with you. I'm not quite sure. Maybe a month ago. I said, how are you doing? She said, well, I'm I'm not doing well, but I'm still doing my elevators. For me, I'm my first student.
I'm my first client. That's how I live life. And so I can tell you what anything that I have that I participate in that gives me freedom to be, not to do, but freedom to be, freedom to be present. Anything that I have, I wanna share it and give it away. And the course of miracle says the more you give away, the more you receive. Giving and receiving are the same. It couldn't be that we were now different.
It had to impact what we were doing even if we weren't using the same words to talk about things differently. But as I said, we free people up to be present, to be here now. Why we did this as the advanced course because the clients we work with had to be grounded, and we wanted to make sure given they were receiving scholarships, we wanted to make sure that there was 100%
buy in. And so the all of the mentors and the young people that participate in this program had been with us for nine months or more. So we knew they were hungry for the same thing we were hungry for, which is freedom to be. Dave, what do you notice when she says that freedom to be? The opportunity to build relationships, that I think is the key for me. That in every challenge, underneath the challenge is the opportunity to expand on what we have and to build new relationships.
And that, for me, is why we're on this planet. And we build relationships with those that are different or at least who look different when it's an illusion. The illusion needs to be broken up. You know? It it needs to be dissipated. There is a difference. There is just one human being on this planet, and that human being is the quadrinity. And what I love about relationship is I tell everybody the first relationship you have to build is the one with yourself.
In the work that we do, Hoffman and unlocking futures, that's where it all starts. Who are you or what are you? What's your relationship with you? Hurt people hurt people. Loving people are generous. I believe everyone wants access to their generosity and to their humanity. So everyone that comes through Hoffman or comes through Unlocking Futures, as I said before, they are hungry, and they know something else is possible. At Hoffman, you know, we bring people to
a site. We guide them through an experience. What does it look like at unlocking futures? It's a there's more varied, nuanced. I know there's some travel. How does it work with unlocking futures? Well, it's quite similar. Yours is much more plush, but we take them to a campsite where they sleep in on bunk beds. But we always pick the campsite based on the food. Hungry teenagers mean angry teenagers, and no process is gonna get through. So
we do take them away. When we started, we took them away for ten days. As we realized that we didn't have to get it all done in ten days. So now we do it in four days with a six to nine months follow-up, and we're looking at changing that model currently. And the reason we wanna change the model is we wanna be able to reach many more families and have many more graduates that can go into the quantum leap program Mhmm. The program with Hoffman and unlocking futures.
Tell us a little bit about the population you serve. How do you find your people, and where do you bring them from? As I said, we work with families in the margins. So it would be families, where there's an incarcerated parents or children of incarcerated parents to the extreme of first generation college graduates. In the nineties, in the early two thousand, it would be first generation high school graduates, young parents between the ages of 13 and 24, teen parents,
kids who are in foster care. And working with that population is a little bit more difficult when it comes to where did you get that pattern because they've been bounced around so many times. Yeah. That's a great point. So what do you do what do you do with that? We ask them first who do they say raise them, but we do an exercise. Just recently, we had a adopted child and her parents at the meeting, and we do something that we call track your biological history.
We knew and the parents knew the biological mother's history. When they looked at the behavior patterns of the young person who is now in my program, it was clear that she was living with her adopted parents, but she was acting as the biological family. The negative behaviors that they were engaged in, she was still doing that. Although she had lived with this family, by now she's been adopted for fourteen years, but she didn't pick up these patterns.
So we have a process where people can begin to see even though they didn't live with their biological parents, perhaps they are still carrying some patterns that they picked up somewhere from their parents. And how did that go? What was it like for this adolescent to come to terms with that it wasn't just her adopted parents, that it was also her biological parents? Here's what I could tell you. This young woman, her stand is I'm tough, and I don't cry.
When we made that distinction, can you see that you live here, but you act like you live there? It was the first time you can see some acknowledgment of either regret or sadness that broke something up. Did it make her perfect overnight? No. But she can now begin to understand patterns and historical and generational patterns. What's the effect on these kids as a result of this work?
When you track them and stay with them or they come back to you in some future moment, what do you notice that the work ends up creating? Well I can say we did an alumni event maybe a month and a half ago. And we called that program Futures Unlocked. And this young person was this old person now showed up with a wrestling belt across his shoulder. He was a wrestling program promoter. He was expressing his promotion, right, at at this alumni event. And we were like, what what are you into?
And what he said was, I used to be shy. I couldn't stand in front of people. I couldn't say anything. He said, but look at me now. That he could do that, he gave that to unlocking futures. And what I remember him saying, every young person or every parent that we work with, something is sustained. They remember something. I wouldn't be doing this. You could call me missus Moses right now because Moses wandered in the wilderness for forty
years. And the first program I did, the youth program that we deliver was October. So I've been wandering in the wilderness for forty years. So you could call me missus Moses this year. I wouldn't have done that if it wasn't successful, if we weren't successful that we see sustainable results. They break generational cycles. Generational cycles are broken. They surpassed their colleagues, their friends.
You could see the difference in them. And so I may have had them when they're teenagers and whatever the issue they came with was arrested. It stopped. You know, when I see them, I say they still need more. Even if they're adults, even if they're 30 or 40 years old, they need another moment. So I know with Hoffman, Hoffman likes working with our current young people.
But it'd be also great if inside of Hoffman, we bring the adult youth, you know, and have them have in another experience to take them to another level. That's a great idea. Yeah. Because growth is always necessary. Right? It's just ever learning, ever unfolding. I could say the person I was before I went to Hoffman wasn't the person I left as. And that changed also over the years, and that's the same thing that occurs in our work with
the young people. To see young people now take the fatherhood program, And they were incarcerated, many of them, when they first heard of the fatherhood program. And they came out of incarceration and joined our program willingly, then these were fathers. So now they had the opportunity to create family And to see them now show up with their children, some of them with their spouses, I mean, it's a miraculous
thing to see that. So it's that they left the patterns behind, but now as Claudette is saying, they could use a refresher. They could use an advanced course so they could see there's more to what we say you are the possibility of all possibilities. Well, there's more to it than what you can just see. That's the nine dots that we always work with, the nine dot puzzle. And we always say, yeah. You can solve that puzzle for those nine dots, but soon as you break out of those nine dots,
another bigger nine dot shows up. So now what are you gonna do? And, yeah, we are looking at that very closely. And we're also looking at how do we reach more people, which now brings us to the newest piece, which is we were with a group of freshmen at Lehman College, and their major distraction was their iPhones, their devices. I mean, it was the FOMO thing, you know, you can't do without it. It was so incredible. It was like cement to get through
to them. And these are college freshmen who are wedded to their iPhones. And for us to take a look at that, we'll we got well, wait a minute. All that we do in this course room, if we could put that on an animation and put that on their iPhones, then they could go ahead and be with their iPhones and their Androids and because they would be getting what we are attempting to share with them from the front of the
room. So that's given us a whole another domain to walk into, which is to put our work in animation form. So what would that look like if your work is in animation form? There's some story being told? It would be scripted. We actually have four animations, and that then turned into four books, hardcover books and ebooks. And we can see every distinction, every process is a story. We can make it a story.
But I wanna go back to one what, they were speaking to when we work with young people when they were young with that particular behavior that put them at risk. When they don't have that behavior anymore, what they could still be missing, not all of them, but what they could still be missing is the next question. What's next? Now what's next? That kind of question, that kind of fulfillment is missing for me in some of the young people.
We'll put this nine dots links about unlocking futures and also more information on the nine dot quiz. I'm fascinated. I'm gonna look it up after this conversation. In our show notes, we'll put it in our show notes so people can check it out and find more about who you are, what you do, some of the work you guys engage in. This is important, isn't it? This work you're doing with this population, with this group of teenagers. It's important, isn't it, in a time like this? More today than ever.
One of my key statements today is that there are no victims, just volunteers. You may have been victimized, but that doesn't make you a victim. The people that we work with have been conditioned for generations and centuries, been conditioned to feel not important, not valuable. Given what's happening in this country at this moment, we call those conditions. We call those lies. They've been lied to about who they are. Everywhere, they've been lied to.
You know, when I speak to people who are working with people in the margins, I say, today, I feel our mission is stronger today. Today is not the day to give people fish. Today is the time to give people the rod and the worm and teach them how to fish more than ever because nobody's given you anything today. So fishing inside. Go inside and see what fish, what fish is inside of you that will feed you and give you the stamina and the willingness to erase the lie, to to stand on top of that lie
that says I am not. I am not. I'm not worthy. I'm not smart enough. I'm not white enough. Whatever that lie is, you have to begin to know it's a lie. And once you realize it's a lie, the thing that I love about the work that we do, you don't get angry. You know, finding out that you've been lied to, most people get angry. They lied to me, baba. The the work our process is you've been lied to, and you bought it. So who are you gonna be mad at? That you've been lied to or you bought it?
But it doesn't even go there because now that you know you've been lied to, let's discover the truth about you, and that's what keeps them engaged, learning more and more the truth about their and I'm not talking about racial magnificence. I'm talking about humanity, What it is to be human, what it is to be a human being, what it is to have desires, what it is to be creative, what it is to have a goal other than I wanna go to college so I can have some money to live. There's something
bigger than that. Yeah. And I'd like to just say that it has less to do with the roles that we have been given. So even the man woman role, the black white role, black white, yellow green blue role, the worker, capitalist, you name it. Whatever the ism is, these contain roles, and it's something that we are looking for here for people to take a look at that's beyond the role. That you are the possibility of all possibilities. You are whole, perfect, and complete just as you are.
You are that quadrinity process. You are that. Now the choice is up to you. Do you accept that, or do you accept the illusions? Beautiful. So all those lies about who they are, the roles they play, the patterns they believed, the experience of being at the margins, racism, poverty, and then that kind of work you put them through must be quite transformational for them to begin to see that they are not these things that they thought maybe that they used to believe.
And what's great about you know, starting the eighties, we would say that the youth risk program now unlocking futures, we were really the distinction America because the kids may have been people of color, but the mentors, each one of these young people have a mentor for six to nine months of the program to teach them how to integrate what they've learned in the the weekend or the ten day or the four day. But how do you integrate that in your life? Many of those mentors were
not people of color. They were Asian. They were white. They would be Jewish. They would be all these different races, French people, Australian people. Both the mentor, the adult, and the young person learned the same thing. And I remember if Kathleen was here, she'll she's 90 years old, and she'll still cry when she says and when this young black males turn to her and said, you're white, but you're just like me, and I love you.
And what the white people would get was working with these young people, open their heart to humanity. They would get that everything they thought about the race wasn't true. So they would have to drop their pattern of what they learned about who black kids were, who Latino kids were, who Mexicans were. They would have to drop their own belief pattern that someone conditioned them to believe. It's beautiful when it's beyond color and it's only about humanity.
Beyond gender. I could remember the time when we were in this group, and it was the last day of the retreat. People were choosing the mentor and mentee relationships, and we call out his name. And the young man jumped up and he said, oh, no. Not the gay guy. Not for me. He was in the 1995 program. I want you to know that black guy and that white gay guy are still together today. Yes. In fact, we discovered the youth's father died of the virus, HIV.
But what we discover, his father and his white gay mentor were born on the same day. The father and the mentor were born on the same day, same year. The other thing is when this person, the young person, who, by the way, is retiring from the police department, retired this year as a detective in the police department, he has three children, and all three of his children called his white gay mentor grandpa. You can't make this stuff up, Drew. I'm
telling you. It is remarkable what we have witnessed over these forty years. Just remarkable. Both of those people, the guy is a Hoffman graduate. That's right. And this guy here is a Quantum Leap graduate. That's right. And the Quantum Leap program is the collaboration between unlocking futures and Hoffman. Yes. People ask us all the time. One of the many questions we get is, hey. When are you guys gonna do an
adolescent program? Because my teen or I know some teens, it's just a need out there, isn't it? Well, why not get it a little earlier is part of what the question is asking. Well, the thing is, Drew, with us, we never coerce any of these young people to be in our program. We do an enrollment with them so that they get to see that there's something that they can see, that they recognize for themselves that makes them want to join the program.
And then we ask them, if you wanna join the program, you have to go ask your parents for permission to be in this program. So rather than the parents pushing kids into a program, we have people ask their parents for the permission to be in this program. And that, I think, is what makes a qualitative difference in the outcome. I also wanna just talk about my life, not just the the youth program.
After the program, I could see where my children were taking on some of my negative love syndrome stuff. And I and I could say to them, that's my pattern, and it doesn't work for me. Please don't take that one on. So, yes, I could put it in my work, but I put it in my life. And then described it to your children so that they wouldn't take it on as well. Beautiful. You know, that's my pattern. I do that. You don't need to do
that. It doesn't work for me. And you guys have been working together for forty years? Maybe twenty. Prior to that, we knew each other from the work I was doing in theater, which is where I met her. Anything else you wanna add in as an anecdote? The other thing is I do coaching. I coach people, and these are people who are very, very successful people. And in 2023, I sent two of my clients to Hoffman. Even though I haven't done Hoffman courses for a very long time, it's still a resource
that I will refer people to. And we've just started doing BIPOC q twos. Okay. That's cool. We used to do the I remember the community get togethers before COVID hit here in New York City, and that was sweet to come to. I don't know if you still do them. Yes. We do. The Hoffman monthly meetings, grad groups. Well, you guys, I'm I'm so grateful for this time for people to hear about our collaboration and your program that's been going strong for forty plus years unlocking
futures. We'll put a bunch of the information in the show notes so people can check it out, and I look forward to what's happening in the future between us and our programs. I like that. I like that. Yeah. Quantum leap. It's time for another quantum
leap. And it'd be great if it's teenagers, young people, regardless of them being at risk or at risk of not realizing a possibility all coming from a affluent family, that would be a wonderful opportunity for them to get that they're all on the same page, and they all have the same concerns, and they go about it differently, and they all have patterns. Mhmm. Even a mixed group would be phenomenal.
Integration of all of that. And then you're different from me, but as this one grad said that you mentioned, you're just like me. Yeah. We used to be different, but now we're the same. We used to be different, and now we're the same. There's something humanity needs that seeing the similarities rather than the differences. Right? Oh, man. Tell me. And that what we do to each other, we do to ourselves. What we do to each other, we are also doing to ourselves. Beautiful.
Thank you too. It's great to see you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you for listening to our podcast. My name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and president of Hoffman Institute Foundation. And I'm Razi Graci, Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute Foundation. Our mission is to provide people greater access to the wisdom and power of love. In themselves, in each other and in the world. To find out more, please go to hoffmaninstitute.org.