He used to talk about expanded states of consciousness from meditation and shamanic journey as divine and mystical experiences that we could tap into as humans. And he's got closer to leaving this life. He began to teach that these states are really just human experiences. They're not mystical. They're not magical. They're not fantastic.
They're simply human. So it became important to him to get folks to see that we all have a capacity for expanded states of consciousness as humans because we are divine, but also because we are human and being human is sacred. 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, I wanted to just share a little bit about today's episode. Nita Gage comes on as our director of faculty, and she shares about a relationship and a connection she had with Lee Lipsenthal. Lee passed on in 02/2011. But in this conversation, Nita relates the value he brought, the passion he felt for helping the medical profession find ways to care for themselves. It was a radical idea back then.
Lee loved the Hoffman process, and Nida shares the experiences she had with him, the valuable work he brought to the field, his passion for Hoffman, his own loves everyday radius. Nida Gage, welcome to the Hoffman podcast. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. Well, we're happy to have you. Nida is the faculty director at Hoffman and engages in helping the faculty, wrangling the faculty into a cohesive unit so that we can do the work we do as successfully as
we do. So thank you, Nita, for your service to this faculty body, which is can be challenging sometimes. Yes. But it's very rewarding too. It's my privilege. It is your privilege. You and I also trained together more than ten years ago to be Hoffman teachers. You've had a whole life prior to that, and we're here today to talk about Lee Lipsenthal. Why Lee? Why are we even having this conversation, Nina? Well, I think we're having the conversation because Lee was extraordinarily
influential in the world of physician wellness. He's a physician himself. He got to the process at one point in 02/2006 and was a convert. And then after that was involved with being a consultant to the board of Hoffman and really talked to everybody about Hoffman at that point. He and I had been prior to that leading week long intensive workshops ourselves. So for him to then go to Hoffman and then he talked me into going. I didn't really want to and I'm a
little bit kicking and screaming. I'm one of those people like, I don't need another workshop. But I went and of course, here I am, you know, seventeen years later. So I was working for a major healthcare corporation and I was the product development director. We were looking for ways to provide new, wellness programs to members so that they didn't always have to be on antidepressants, essentially. And at that time, I was aware of
Dean Ornish's work. Dean is a physician who did all of the incredible work to do lifestyle change for people with cardiac issues. So that he's the one that brought in, and this was like thirty five years ago when he started, brought in the notion that if you change your lifestyle, that if you meditate, that if you eat better and then you really deal also to some extent with your emotional issues. He was very aware of ACEs, Adverse Childhood Events and childhood trauma.
He made a lot of changes in Medicare, but he created a week long workshop for people with who had had heart attacks and help them turn around their lifestyle. So I thought, oh, great. This is a perfect person to connect to to do lifestyle changes for this corporation I was working for, this healthcare corporation. So I called him, talked to him for a while. He was gracious, but he said to me, you know who you really need to talk to is my medical director, Lee Lipsenthal.
So I did. Lee and I, I went to his office in Sausalito and Lee and I often joke that it was sort of intellectual spiritual love at first sight between us. And we really connected, like, immediately, like, soul recognition. And we tried to make some changes at this large corporation I worked for. We did not succeed. We stayed friends. And we both were just so I was really burnt out working for corporate health care. I was ready to just leave.
And he liked his job with Dean, but he was wanting his passion was physician wellness. He wanted to change the way medical schools train physicians. He wanted to change the way they train their humanity out of them. So that was kind of his passion that he was hoping to get into. And we met several times and eventually, we both quit our jobs with no plan, either of us.
I had been working leading week long workshops using shamanic breath work, a way to access deep states of consciousness and altered states without substances. And he had been wanting to do physician workshops. And so one day I just said to him, hey, I do this workshop in Molokai. Do you wanna do one with me? That's kind of how that started. And then we did them for the next, I don't know, eleven years together, at least once or twice a year.
He, at the same time, was doing a lot of training at medical conferences, going around to hospitals, physician groups, really teaching about lifestyle change for physicians. And I think what he connected to the most deeply with the work I was doing was the intensity of diving into emotional material, to spiritual material. I remember he once said to me that physicians are really shamans. It's just been trained out of them. He'd tell me, look, physicians are highly intellectual.
We all know that. They're highly intelligent and they're high and caring for people. Because most people go into being a position because they care and they wanna help people. At the time I've been working with a lot of corporate physicians. I've gotten a little cynical about physicians motivation. So he really helped me understand. No, most of them really wanna help people. However, they go to medical school that gets trained out of them because they get trained to shut down their emotions
and really for good reason. You do not watch your position in the ER or in the operating room having an emotional breakdown. So what his goal in life was, was to help physicians come back to their heart, come back to their center while they really went into medicine. I then got involved with him with a couple of large physician organizations, the American Board of Holistic Medicine and a couple others and I would go with him to do some
things at large conferences. But the thing that he loved was going to Molokai and he would bring, I don't know, he'd recruit 10 or 12 positions who'd sign up for this workshop. And the interesting thing was is that at Hoffman, we tell you to turn in your phone and your computer and all that. Well, in Molokai, there was no cell service and no Internet service. So there was no there weren't gonna use those things while they were there, and it was a bit challenging.
And he worked up a beautiful program outlining the neuroscience of what happens in medical school, what happens to physicians, and why they're so far away from their heart and their soul. And then one day during that, we would do a day long intensive shamanic breath work session. Shamanic breath work uses music and deep breathing and intention to really dive into altered states. We'd spend the first two days with him doing the neuroscience with the physicians and all that, and
then we do that. And what he soon discovered was a couple of things. These physicians were not interested in the neuroscience. They knew it inside out. They were interested in the experience. And then he began to to understand that physicians can be experienced junkies. Like a lot of them are going to South America and doing Ayahuasca, which is wonderful, but what he wanted them to learn was how to integrate.
And so that's really what we ended up doing together in Molokai for years and then around the country in conferences. For a while, I was the executive director of the board of holistic medicine, so he and he was the president, so we were doing a lot there. He loved going to the island of Molokai and completely unplugging. And he was pretty steeped in Buddhist teachings, I would say, but he also really loved Judeo
Christianity. He was a very spiritual guy. And the other thing we really discovered that that high ability to care for people that physicians have, the shadow of that is codependency and it was killing them. So we focus a lot on helping them recover from codependency and work addiction, by the way, because physicians are so highly rewarded for addictive work behaviors. I remember one guy saying to me, one of the physicians at the workshop sort of were teaching him about work addiction and he's
going, oh my god. Oh my god. I'm getting it. But I love my work. It can't be an addiction. And I just because I have no filter, just said to him, well, heroin addicts love their heroin too, but it's gonna kill them. You know, that became Lee and my running joke. That was the journey we did together. And we then started doing workshops, you know, in Italy. That was really fun. And then in February I believe it was 02/2010, he was diagnosed.
And so you love doing your workshops, and it feels like part of what Lee brought was attention to the caregiver. Most people were focusing on the recipient of it, and Lee sort of said, wait a minute. Let's look at these doctors coming out of medical school, what they're trained to do, and how do we help them connect back to their heart, take care of their body, understand their emotions. For people listening, that might sound kind of obvious now, but back then, it was
somewhat radical. Was it not? Yeah. It was extremely radical. He was certainly one of the leaders in that. And, also, there wasn't a lot of sympathy for positions and their feelings because, you know, there was just a sense of, well, they make a lot of money. That's what they're trying to do and all that, And not a lot of understanding of the toll it actually took on them and Lee was acutely aware of that. He had a big impact on changing curriculum
in medical schools even. I mean, you're right, these days there's a lot of physicians coming out of medical school who have spent time learning meditation, have been learning self care. That was not going on then. It was really the opposite. And there were several people on the scene that started making a difference with physician wellness, which is really why the American Board of Holistic Medicine was even created.
So at the same time, physician wellness and also the recognition that holistic medicine had to come in because physicians recognized that they're great at acute medicine. They are great at it. They are great at fixing things. They're great at that. And yet chronic illness, not so much because chronic illness really is a whole person issue.
And his feeling was in order to make that change in medicine, physicians had to understand that they're whole people, that they have a shadow, that they have their own pain that deserves attention, that they have their resentments, they can, you know, show up and work. And it's okay that they're pissed off at their patients. It's okay. I mean, he really wanted to normalize them as people. And it was enormously liberating. And for all the physicians that he touched,
and everybody loved this guy. And I think it's important to say that his love for people was palpable and fairly unconditional, and you could feel it. And at the same time, he was the first one to talk about people's shadows. So he really was into the whole person. Does that make sense? Yeah. It does. You know, one of the things he did is bring attention to the research that had been done around patients when they're with doctors who open their hearts.
Too often, doctors were making it a clinical intervention. It was just about the diagnosis. They had a clipboard in their hand. It was a quick visit. Insurance was speeding things up here at the time. And he sort of said, wait a minute. If doctors show up in their hearts making eye contact, being open, there's so much they can do that can actually create better outcomes for patients if they stay in their heart. I'm really
glad you're bringing that up. That was such an important discovery, which has now been incorporated into a lot of physician training. And, yeah, there's a whole body of research on it that there are better outcomes. You know, he was the perfect person to do it because he so believed it. You know, I must say there was a whole cadre of physicians who basically began to really change how they practice because of their connection with doctor Liptonthal
and their respect for him. And for those listening who've taken the process in Petaluma at the Hoffman Retreat site, that formally was IONS, which is what Lee also had a big connection to. And IONS was still is, doing beautiful work of integrating spirituality. How would you describe what IANS does, Nida? Well, let's give the the name of it. It's the Institute for Noetic Science. And Noetic is looking at events that are outside the ordinary understanding.
Ions was, I believe, actually created by an astronaut, and his name is slipping my mind right now, but but he had this incredible experience as he came around and saw the Earthrise, which was why they named the Eons Retreat site Earthrise initially before Hoffman purchased it.
He was also on their board, he was a medical director or HeartMath for anybody that's aware of that organization that does deep research and to heart rate variability and how that impacts our consciousness which is really related deeply to why recycling works, why self compassion works because it's not just to feel good, it's actually changing brain chemistry. So he was involved with that and he brought a lot of that work in to what we did. Give me two seconds and I'm gonna tell
you how he got to Hoffman. He was on an airplane flying to Kauai. We were gonna meet there and do some kind of medical workshop. And he was sitting next to Randy Perkins who was on the board of Hoffman at the time. They got to talking, Randy kinda realized, oh my gosh, this guy does similar work that I do. Randy ended up coming to the workshop and Kawhi and then he really wanted Lee to see what the Hoffman process is. Neither Lee or I
ever heard of it. I don't know how I missed it all those years, but I had never heard of it. And he actually gifted Lee the process because they wanted his involvement. So he went and did it and that's when he tried it back to me and said, oh, you gotta do this. It's really, really good. He loved the process and the thing for him was a couple of things for him. He recognized that really being able to release the emotional material from your childhood
was so important. You couldn't just talk about it. You couldn't just know about your childhood issues. You had to actually work on releasing energy that really changed his life in huge ways. Yeah. I mean, that's really important as a former therapist trained in psychotherapy. Insight was kind of the gold standard. If we can just help our patients get more insight, then all things will change. Well, this sort of says insight is not enough, doesn't it?
No. It's not enough. And, you know, I don't think he'd mind me telling the story. He had been struggling with his weight all his life. He's a hefty guy. Got sick of trying everything. And at the Hoffman process, he discovered, that's what he told me, he discovered that he was overweight as a way to punish his mother. And I would I'm here to tell you, he lost the weight in the ensuing years. He lost it, never regained it. Profound. He shared that story with a lot of people. Yeah. And so then
something happens, Nida. How do you find out this next very important piece of his life? He called me and told me that he had had a lump in his throat, went to the doctor, and found out it was esophageal cancer. This was on the telephone because I was in Hawaii and he was in California at the time. And he pretty quickly told me, he goes ten percent chance of living more than two years. So I'm a physician I know, he said, I really, I don't know that I even wanna go through all of the chemo and
radiation. Said, I, I'm okay. He was only 54, about 53, the diagnosis. But all those years of teaching that if you live for the moment, if you live fully, he liked to quote this, phrase that that I had told him about once that native Americans say that today's a good day to die. And of course, what they mean is if you live well, it's a good day to die. So that became kind of his mantra. He did choose to do some chemo and so forth and he lived for a couple of years.
True to Lee though, I mean, he just continued to walk his talk that it's okay to die. I've had a full of beautiful wife, two fabulous, beautiful children. So it wasn't nothing. He was in the middle of writing the book when he got the diagnosis and then he wrote the book, which is titled Enjoy Every Sandwich, Live Today as Though It's Your Last. Very popular book at the time and he spent the next couple of years, we continued to do workshops together.
He continued to teach that love is the answer to everything. Love more. Love your family. Love people despite their Hoffman people. We call them patterns. He just said, love them despite their flaws. He meditated more and lived fully, right, to the end. Nida, in his book, Enjoy Every Sandwich, which, by the way, Warren Zivon, ten years earlier or maybe eight years earlier, had shared in a conversation with David Letterman. And Warren Zivon also died of esophageal
cancer. He said, enjoy every sandwich. And Lee wrote a book called Enjoy Every Sandwich. And in one of the sentences in the book, he says, at any moment, in an instant, life as we know it can change. Our mortality waits for us, sometimes patiently, sometimes not so patiently, but our mortality is always there, undeniable, and closer than any of us wants to admit. When he died, you you wrote and read a eulogy to him. Would you be willing to to read it
now how you finished it? Yeah. Lee's teaching fundamentally didn't change after his diagnosis. He walked his talk, lived his teaching. However, there was one subtle yet powerful shift in what he taught that showed up at the last few months he was alive and it was this. He used to talk about expanded states of consciousness from meditation and shamanic journey as divine and mystical experiences that we could tap into as humans. And he's got closer to leaving this life.
He began to teach that these states are really just human experiences. They're not mystical, they're not magical, they're not fantastic, they're simply human. So it became important to him to get folks to see that we all have a capacity for expanded states of consciousness as humans because we are divine, but also because we are human and being human is sacred.
And Lee wanted folks to know that you can experience life fully by understanding this simple truth that life is temporary and it's always sorry. It's always a good day to die when you live with a grateful heart and know that truly all you need is love. He was truly one of my best friends as well. He really exemplifies that statement that I kinda hate that the good die young, but my goodness, they do. I saw that his wife is still practicing in the Bay Area. His son is now a psychotherapist.
Yes. Lee would be so thrilled. I mean, he was his son was Will was just starting college when Lee passed, and Lee always used to say he was a closet therapist, you know. But if he had had it to do over, that's what he would have done. So that's very exciting. He has two grandchildren now. And One of the things we haven't talked about, but that you're such a proponent of, and Hoffman is such a advocacy around, which is music.
He had this dream of wanting T shirts that doctors would wear that would say, we'll work for music. He loved music. You guys loved music. There was really a power in music, wasn't there? Yeah. Definitely. He was a complete music fanatic, and he did spend a lot of years helping musicians who couldn't afford health care. He was passionate about it. He would work with them, but he'd also hook them up with physicians around the world that would work with them for free. That's
why I wanted the t shirt. He was he was really gonna start a movement. That was one of the future plans. He loved it. He was brilliant about music of all types. I used to tease that he was my personal Shazam mechanism. I mean, he could listen to anything and tell me what it was from classical to rock to everything in between. And I think that's one of the reasons he loved the shamanic breath work because it involved a lot of use of music to stimulate healing and states of consciousness.
Mhmm. And I read that he he was over the moon about iPods because he didn't have to carry around CDs or albums that there was so much available in this one little piece of technology that he could listen to so much music, and it was just a dream for him. Absolutely. Yeah. He was always the first one to have the iPods. Yeah. He was obsessed obsessed with music. It was a wonderful thing, and he played a bit himself, played guitar,
and loved it. You know, every time I was visiting with him, any music thing that was going on, he'd wanna drag me to. And, I mean, I went. I like music too, but he was definitely obsessed and had friends all over the country that were musicians,
that love music. Yeah. You know, so much of who he represents as a human being, what he's done in the field, it seems to align so much with Hoffman and his deep capacity to do two things at once, which is to love and lean in with an open heart and to understand and not be afraid of shadow. That is our calling card at Hoffman. We do both owning, embracing spirit, and going right to shame and vindictiveness and the dark side. Lee held both those beautifully, didn't he? He
did. One of his favorite quotes was Carl Jung's, do you wanna be good, or do you wanna be whole? And being whole involves that, embracing the shadow. And I credit him for why I actually became a Hoffman teacher. He'd already passed before that happened because when he was dying, he made me promise to carry on his work.
So I did for quite a while. And then I rolled into doing Hoffman and I also recognized I often think of him when I'm at the process very often, almost every time and just kind of thank him for leading me to this path because it really is an opportunity to do all that he taught and believed in. And of course, many physicians now come to Hoffman. And in fact, when we were doing our workshops in Molokai, well, you know, he lived another five years after he did Hoffman.
We frequently encourage physicians to go to Hoffman after he and I both done it. So they come to our workshop. They kind of treated it as initiation into self awareness and spirituality and all of that, and then we'd encourage them. And a few of them did, and a couple of them that did went on to be big leaders in physician wellness as well. And he also loved the Beatles. Who did he like on the Beatles? John Lennon. I mean, Lee's, you know, of a different generation than me.
So not quite Beatlemania generation, kind of the next one, but he really loved them and was very aware of all they did for music in the world. Yeah. He loved John Lennon. He was kind of like to think of himself as a sort of a John Lennon type, you know, disrupting the medical world like John would disrupt and wanting to bring peace on Earth. He wanted to bring peace to medicine. Yeah. And this simple adage of all you need is love. Yeah. He really
believed it. And interestingly enough, even Dean Ornish, circling back to that, Dean Ornish is one of his books. I don't know that it was his last, but certainly one of his books is called Love and Survival in which he talks about he had been focused on be a vegan, meditate, exercise. And in this book, he points out, yeah, that's all really important but love is the number one healer.
It's the number one healer and the American Board of Holistic Medicine that Lee was president of their tagline was love heals. So that coming around to recognize self love and compassion for yourself, love for yourself and compassion and love for others heals. Absolutely. We'll put in the show notes much of what we talked about. So for listeners who wanna dig into Lee a little bit and this work and Nita and the work they did together, we'll put some links in there. Nita, well, let me say this.
Lee, thank you. Thank you for Nita for bringing Nita to Hoffman and the impact she's had. And Lee, thank you for the work you've brought to this world. Nita, thank you for channeling Lee today and helping us understand this incredible human and the impact he had. Thank you, Drew. It was really beyond a joy to be able to talk about him. It's been a long time. He died in 02/2011, so it's been a long time. So thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you for listening to our podcast. My
name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and president of Hoffman Institute Foundation. And I'm Rassie Grassi, Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute Foundation. Our mission is to provide people greater access to the wisdom and power of love. In themselves, in each other, and in the world. To find out more, please go to hompaninstitute.org.