Money, which a lot of people attribute to being part of the physical life, I don't. It's not materialist per se. You can use financial energy to create whatever you want in your life. So it's just a natural, normal thing for me to help people meet their goals energetically using money. 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 its 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. Patrick Belle Isle is with us. Welcome, Patrick. Thank you, Drew. I'm really happy to be here.
Damn. We are happy that you are here because you take on an important role in the nonprofit Hoffman world, and that is you care for our future by providing the means to keep us up and running. How do you describe yourself? I guess, chief fundraiser, philanthropist? I'm both a mystic and a fundraiser. Yes. It's true. I'm I'm one of a kind on that front. No. That's right. I'm the director of philanthropy is my official title for Hoffman,
but spiritual seeker from way back when. So I I merged those two worlds in a Hoffmanesque sort of way. Beautiful. And we'll get to that. But let's just talk a little bit about who you are. You've identified, as you just said, and used the words practical mystic. You've studied with the Benedictine monks in Minnesota and in Thailand. You've been to India. You and your wife have traveled around the world for a full year around North America for another three years in deep search
of the meaning of life. Both of you have graduated from Hoffman in 02/2022. You live in Charlottesville, Virginia. And as most people in our world, you've also become a Hoffman employee who's done the process, who's a graduate. What else would you add to that? Well, I used the word spiritual seeker before.
Hoffman was sort of the what I'll call the pinnacle or the the most recent version of my self exploration and and quest for the understanding of the purpose of life and and the meaning of it all. I was raised Catholic, as you said, at Minnesota. Even that was very meaningful to me, and I was very earnest, I guess, in my approach and looking for the meaning of life. And even then, I realized it was all
about love. Went to Catholic college, and the monks at my Benedictine College in Minnesota that first exposed me to some of these ideas of the East, meditation and reincarnation and all sorts of stuff. Who knew that the cast of monks would be talking about that? But it led me into a broader spiritual search that led to me and Jane, as you said, taking our one year trip around the world, meditating with Buddhist monks in Thailand. And we went to the Osho Commune in Pune, India
for a month. It was there that I had this mystical experience that I reference often. How would you describe a mystical experience? What is it? Well, for me, it was it came about through breath work that I was doing. It was actually a California teacher over in India who was leading us through this thing called pulsation therapy in a group called opening to emotions. And we were doing some work in my case, when she said, you know, bring into your imagination someone with whom you have unfinished
emotional business. I think like most men, I brought my father in, and I had this beautiful conversation with him, and it was very real. I don't know if you've done breath work before, but but when you're in this altered state of consciousness through breath work, it feels very realistic. So I had this conversation with my father. You know, why can't you tell me that you love me?
You know, I'm I was crying and laying on the floor like the other 15 people in the room doing this conversation in my own mind, weeping and just really being vulnerable, exposing all my inner emotions. And the teacher at one point said, now become the other person and answer yourself. So my dad came in, and, of course, it was me, but it felt very realistic. And I said, hey. I was raised on a dairy farm. You think I got emotional
language from my dad or my parents? You know, I knew that my dad loved me when he got up before sunrise every morning and went and milked the cows. Anyway, it was this beautiful sense of compassion, much like what we get in the Hoffman process when we do some compassion work with our parents. I had an advanced view of that in this breath work exercise. You know, at the end of that conversation in my mind, I just felt so light. I was laughing
uncontrollably like I'd been crying before. After the laughter, I just was in this beautiful state of peace. In that state of peace, spontaneously, this beautiful bluish purple light just washed in and it was just pure unconditional love and oneness. I disappeared, you know, the ego of me disappeared and I could see everything in that room in this bluish purple light even with my eyes closed and, had a sense of what was
going on with everybody in the room. And I knew in that moment that only love exists and that everything is okay, that we're all taken care of. And it doesn't matter if we're king of the world or in prison that everything is okay. It was this beautiful touchstone that I've gone back to a million times since then that that only love exists and that we're all part of that unconditional love. Maybe just a a quick fast forward for a second.
As grads who are listening, who come out of the process, who've had these kind of beautiful moments, obviously, not in the exact way you did, but some sort of transcendent moment or moments during their process, and then they go back to real life, it's not over. You can access those moments. You can call them back. Right? Is that part of what you're saying? Absolutely. Yeah. That's right. Integrating that experience, like the process, into your real world is the real work,
let's just say. You know? I I feel really blessed to have had both my mystical experience and my Hoffman experience, but in and of themselves, that's just the beginning. You know? Then the work really begins.
I'm grateful that Hoffman has the wisdom to have that integration weekend, for instance, right after the process because you can really start to see yourself going back into your life and figuring out how to apply the tools and get through the work situations, relationship As you talk about that, you know, there's some people who who maybe don't choose Hoffman because they've done so much work or wonder, should I choose Hoffman given I've done so much work?
How was your experience, given that you had really committed your life to personal growth and spiritual discovery? Did it feel redundant at Hoffman, or were you able to actually continue that journey during your process? Oh, absolutely. Continuing the work. Yeah. That's and that's a great way to say it. It's supplemental, and it brought me from a certain level up to a new level for sure. No. I would I would definitely not say that if you've done previous spiritual work that you should not come
to Hoffman. Absolutely. It's gonna be beneficial to everybody. In my case, once I had gotten back into my work life and my home life, inevitably, stuff comes at you. You know, I I talk about it being as if I were a lighthouse trying to shine my light out into the world, and people keep throwing mud at my light. And, my lens gets,
a little dirty over time, let's say. So both me looking out at the world is a little darker, let's say, and the folks out there aren't getting as much light from me with all my crap on my my lighthouse lens. So Hoffman, in so many ways, helped me clear off that lens or or clear off the dirt and shine my light more brightly out into the world. I also talk about it, Hoffman, that is, as a new lens to look out from inside yourself out at the world. And everybody just looks different after
Hoffman. You know? They're full of potential and good intentions. You can look past the ego into the, I don't know, the spiritual self of other people. At least I can. It really helped me in that way, sort of like what we do with our parents, coming to know that they've done their best and having compassion for them. I could do the same thing with my colleagues, with my wife, with people around me. So it's I think it's super useful.
I just wanna stay here for a second because the process is really a peak experience, and we try and dissuade them of it. But some people have the the illusion that they can live from this place and that when they inevitably come down from it, they feel like a failure or the process didn't work. And so I just wanna stay with this and ask you from your transcendent moments both at your process and in the experience you just described in India, how do
you keep it alive? How do you access that for your everyday practical day to day life? Yeah. Well, it's a great question. And I'm I'll just say I'm so grateful to Hoffman in particular for keeping the tools so readily available to all all of us through the app, through the Instagram quad checks, offering refresher courses around the country. I've been to a few of those, including one with you in Boulder, and I was at one in New York and one in Los Angeles.
They're just great at helping you brush off the tools and and reincorporate them into my life. I haven't yet done the q two. I'm really looking forward to that, but I've heard really great things about that. So, again, I'm grateful to Hoffman for keeping those tools offered in front of us. In terms of my day to day, like, one day at a time kind of thing, it's a good question because I inevitably get sucked into the drama of life and do
forget about the tools. Even working at Hoffman, I have to be reminded to get back into the swing of things. How do you do it? I feel like Hoffman is a, in a way, paradoxical experience because it offers big 30,000 foot large scale perspective taking, seeing the world and oneself in a very, very different way, seeing the common humanity, exploring what it is to be human. These big questions get held and answered
and explored at Hoffman. And on a very granular level, there's the concrete, very practical tools and steps. As an example, I think I put my hand on my heart probably six times just because for me, it's like, oh, I have a body. Breathe. Check-in with my body. Oh, there are feelings here. Check-in with the feelings. Slow it down a little. Whenever I get sped up, I know I'm on the left road. I know I may be in pattern in more reactivity.
So just for me, the the very practical step of hand on heart can shift so much. That's a beautiful way to do it. And, you know, because Jane and I have both gone through the process, she'll remind me once in a while, you know, if I can't see that I've caught up in something, she'll gladly remind me that
I'm caught up in something. You know, one time we were on our way to a party to see some friends that we knew sort of pushed our buttons in certain ways, And so she suggested we do a pre cycle on the way to the party, and we did. And it was a huge
help. When we got there and the people were doing what they do, instead of going into the vicious cycle, we were able to stay on our right road and respond in ways that we just couldn't have foreseen, let's just say, that ended up being really constructive and and wonderful. So, yeah, it helps to have a friend or family member that knows
the tools too. It's funny. Another thing I'll just mention is I have his friend David here in Charlottesville who I didn't even know was a Hoffman grad until we got together for lunch one day last year, and I saw he has a quadrinity symbol tattooed on his forearm right at his wrist. And I was like, David, you're a Hoffman grad? He's like, oh, yeah, man. Changed my life. And I said, I guess so if you got a tattoo of it. He said, that's what reminds me to do my quad check
at least twice a day. You know, it's always in front of me, literally. That is commitment. Wow. That is commitment. So thank you for those shares, and there is something about the partnership of a mutual shared path towards the light. But I wanna ask your transition from grad to employee, how did that come about? Right. Well, so you know Raz Ingresi, obviously, one of the two founders with his wife, Liza, of the Hoffman Institute Foundation.
I had met Raz about five years ago when I was doing a fundraising workshop for organizations that were vaguely involved in spiritual seeking. He came up to me afterwards and said, man, the way you talk about money is financial energy and fundraising in general. He said, you'd be a great fundraiser for Hoffman one day. And I said, well, thanks for saying so, but I don't know anything about Hoffman Institute. So
I looked into it, of course. And when I was ready to leave my other job working for Edgar Cayce's ARE, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, I called Raz, and I said, okay, Raz. I'm about to leave this job after fifteen years. I think it's time for me to do my Hoffman process. He said, great. Why don't you come out here and and do it in June 22? And if it goes well, and we can start talking about the possibility of you working
here one day. And I said, great. But he said, don't let that idea get in the way of you doing your work. You know, you gotta do your process. So I really appreciated that. And then, you know, after it did go well, we started talking. And it was about a year later, actually, that I ended up coming on board full time. I've been doing some consulting and sort of building that relationship, the trust and rapport and all that with Raz and Liza and the whole organization.
So yeah. So I started full time July of twenty twenty three raising money for Hoffman. How do you describe the work you do? You know, why why is it so important? Well, it's so important for obvious reasons. We all love the Hoffman process and wanna get it out into the world best we can. So I was really motivated to help make it accessible to everybody who wants to do it, not just the process, but all the programs, really. So scholarships have been a huge thing that I've been involved
with creating an endowment. Hoffman's never had an endowment, which gives financial stability to organizations. You know, Hoffman's been around for forty years or so and yet never had an endowment, so we wanna provide that long term financial stability for the organization. The way I do the work, though, is all through relationship. It's meant to be a natural fit. I'm just a channel for financial energy, which we all have at some level and Hoffman needs, and some people wanna
give to what Hoffman needs. So I just meet with them and hear what their goals are and stream it right through to Hoffman. It's meant to be a win win in every every situation. Previously, when people wanted to give, it was a more circuitous route to financial abundance and their desire to give. That win win was a little harder to achieve. And with you there now, I'm imagining that you're in touch with people on some level who already have the means,
who already have the desire to give. You facilitate both of those, their means and their desire. That's exactly right. Yeah. There was a a new grad last year that called me and said, this changed my life, and I wanna give to people like single parents who might not be able to afford the full process. Heck, even getting a week off of work and flying to California or Connecticut, wherever they do their process, Even that is a huge commitment, getting childcare
and all of that. So they said, you know, I wanna help give a full ride scholarship to folks like that who can't afford the process. And so I'm like, hell, yeah. We can your goals are our goals. We we want the same thing, so let's do that. I'm talking to some folks now who wanna make sure we make it more accessible to BIPOC community. We're working on ways to make that happen. So, yeah, that's that's a huge motivation.
And, of course, the next thing in addition to scholarships and endowments is we just bought a new campus, as you know, in San Rafael. We bought it from some Dominican nuns. It's called Santa Sabina Retreat Center. We're gonna be starting renovations on that here in the next couple months. Gotta do those relatively quickly and get in there in next year, 2026, move in and start doing the process there. So we we have to raise, I don't know, 10 or $12,000,000 at least to make it the home we need.
When you talk about that, it sounds like people can make restricted gifts, which is we will follow their guidance and choose the area in which they decide is important, or they can make general gifts, in which case we'll use it in the best case scenario and the best fit as we see it. Do you see it in those two terms? Yeah. No. That's exactly right, Drew. I mean, as I said, my goal is to listen to the donor grad's goals and
make sure that it's a good fit. Some people love the teachers, and they wanna help us with our teacher training, which also donations go for. And some people love the building stuff. Some people love endowments. So, yeah, we have we have lots of opportunities, lots of different pots into which they can stream their financial energy. I'm curious about what it's like for you to do this work given people love their experience so much. You've been involved in fundraising in other areas.
What do you notice in the difference and also just in this work with Hoffman grads? Well, I tell everybody that I feel like I have the best job on the planet because I get to go around the country meeting with wonderful people who've been transformed by this wonderful organization and help them meet their goals to help other people. I mean,
what could be better than that? So, yeah, I I literally have sat across just in the year and a half, I've been part of Hoffman on staff, I've sat across the table from people who have told me that Hoffman saved their marriage. Two people have told me that Hoffman saved their lives. I mean, super dramatic and powerful and real. This one woman told me that when I asked her what Hoffman did for her, she said, Hoffman took away my lifelong depression. And I said,
you mean it decreased your depression. Right? I I didn't think any depression could go away. She said, well, mine did. She was, I'd say, in her sixties. I mean, I get to hear all these amazing stories about how Hoffman has changed their lives. When I was meeting with this one guy out in California, his wife, who's not a Hoffman grad, came over to me while we were meeting to say thank you to me for giving her husband back to her.
I get credit, or I get to hear about it anyway, for the work that you and your fellow Hoffman teachers have done. So it's a great job. I mean, maybe this is an obvious question, but why is it so transformative? Why is it so powerful? Well, you've seen more people go through the process than I have, of course, in your role. But from my point of view, I've come to think of the Hoffman process as a modern day spiritual initiation. So many of us don't belong to organized
religion anymore. And even those of us who do, there just aren't many initiation processes that are available to us as humans, and and we really need those kind of things. When I did my Catholic confirmation at age 14, that was something similar but nowhere near as intense and meaningful as Hoffman. Hoffman's so powerful because for a lot of people, it's really the first time they've come to realize that they have a spiritual self. They know about the body. They know about
the mind. They know about the spirit kind of idea, but they've never experienced it in a way that Hoffman allows us to. So that that's a huge part of it for me. You reference the word experience, and they they know it conceptually maybe about spirit. But to have an embodied cellular experience, it's a different ballgame, isn't it? Absolutely. And that's I tell people that all the time
too. You know, when when I worked for Edgar Cayce, we have tons of conferences and classes, workshops, but very, very few that are experiential. It's almost all feeding the intellect even at this spiritual organization. That's where Hoffman is hugely different from pretty much anything I've ever experienced. It is pure experience. You know, it's not somebody telling you what you should do or what you should believe.
It's all internal. The stuff you take away from you is something that happened inside of you, not that someone gave you from the outside. It came from the inside, and that that makes a huge difference. Yeah. I got goosebumps there. I love it. You know, there's something too about belonging.
And you talk about your belonging to the Catholic faith and belonging in the communities you belong to, but it it seems like we're yearning to have that kind of belonging to the human race, to our sisters and brothers, to this experience of being a human in this time, and we're missing that.
Yes. We are. Yeah. And I I have to say, you know, one of the beautiful things about the Hoffman community, and I would say even more than being Catholic or having gone to my college, my alma mater, we relate to being those things as people. But for me, being a Hoffman grad takes on a whole different level.
When somebody tells me that they're a Hoffman grad, I feel like I have a deeper connection with them than I do just because they went to my college or happened to also have been raised in the same faith. Somebody says to me, they're a Hoffman grad. All of a sudden, I'd invite them over for dinner or stay at my house or you know what I mean? There's an automatic connection, a sense of belonging because we've had the same experience. It's it's beautiful. We're yearning for that. It's a
I don't know. In this moment, as we talk, it's both transcendent and wonderful and a little heartbreaking that we're siloed alone yearning for connection. It's true. Yeah. Well and I hope, you know, people after the process can take the lessons we learned from there and bring it into their own life. You know, I think about me and Jane, my wife, we really love connection and but wanted to bring more of it into our lives. And so we we're like, okay. What do we like? Well, we like
good food. We like music, and we love good people. So we put together a party at our house on the second Saturday of every month called second Saturday Rendezvous, where it was a potluck dinner. And then we'd invite people to bring their instruments, guitars or harmonicas or whatever they brought. And some people would perform a song or two and then, you know, sort of inevitably become a big jam session, and we'd all sit around and laugh and talk and make music all night. Oh my gosh.
In Hoffman, we learn to make those playful connections around music and food and joy, silliness, playfulness. So I hope other people do that same kind of thing and find ways to bring those levels of joy and play into their lives. How long have you been doing this? We did it for eleven years. Wow. I know. It's it's kind of a crazy thing, but we we just love people and, like I say, music. So And what do you hear from people about what it means to them, why they come back, what they experience?
I mentioned that most of us, at least in my circles, don't belong to organized religion anymore. And a lot of people say to me, this is the way for them to break bread together and sing together. But this is way better because you don't have any of the dogma. It's just just pure joy and connection. Another thing is from single people in the community, they'll say, this is such a great way to meet people organically. It's not going to the bar
or to church or whatever else. So we've had anywhere from 15 people to 70 people show up at Rendezvous. We average between thirty and forty, I'd say. It's been very popular. Just becomes friends of friends. You know, people invite other people. I'm thinking of David Brooks in his book, The Second Mountain, talking about the experience of Sunday dinners where he would go to those kinds of evenings and how it, in a way, changed his life being a part of those weekly dinners.
Absolutely. Well, David came to Charlottesville last year, and we went to hear him. And he was talking about, basically ways to create relationship and get along with others. He's on the same wavelength. Pat, he'd be a good Hoffman grad. We
gotta get him in here. Patrick, all of this conversation and raising money go hand in hand, and the ease of bringing the beauty of the Hoffman experience with the desire to raise funds in support of that experience, that just flows naturally for you, doesn't it? Yeah. Well, I mean, yes. The short answer is yes. Because I've come to see the entire universe as just being energy, different forms of energy. And so money, which a lot of people attribute to being part of the physical life, I don't.
It's not materialist per se. You can use financial energy to create whatever you want in your life. So it's just a natural normal thing for me to help people meet their goals energetically using money. In fact, it's funny. I'll I'll tell you a quick story from my last place of employment at the Edgar Cayce's ARE. There's a gentleman that had called in to say he wanted to make donation to our prison outreach program. I said, that's wonderful. His
name is Richard. That's wonderful, Richard. How much are you thinking about? He said, $10,000. I said, wow. That's a beautiful gift. And here's where it's different, Drew, than most people. Most people would say, you know, what's your credit card number, and thank you very much. But instead, knowing that he was really expressing a a deep desire from an energetic perspective, I said to him, Richard, let me ask you this, because I said we don't get calls like this every day.
What inspired you or what motivated you to give at that level? Why do you love this prison outreach program so much? Silence. And then he said, because I spent a year in federal prison for tax evasion. And he said, I met so many guys in there that have given up hope that I came to understand that or believe that Edgar Cayce's readings, these ideas are the best thing to get them to
turn their life around. So my goal is to get as many Edgar Cayce books into the hands of prisoners as I can before I die. And I said, Richard, that's my goal too. We can work together to make this happen. And I said, theoretically, could you do that every year for the next five years to create an endowed fund that will generate revenue in perpetuity forever to put books into the hands of prisoners? And he said, yeah. Let's talk about it.
And so the long and short of it is he ended up giving us about $2,000,000 over time. He endowed a prison outreach fund. He helped us build a building, and it's all because I I heard him expressing something beyond $10,000. It was his desire to really be useful and be helpful to other people in ways that my organization was doing. So that same thing has happened already with Hoffman. There's a couple up in Napa.
He his name's Hal. Hal was one of the first Hoffman teachers with Bob Hoffman back in the seventies, and his wife, Sonia, said that Hal has always thought of Hoffman as a a little bit like his religion. And so they were the first people to set up an endowed scholarship fund this last year, and it was all because they just love Hoffman and believe it's the best thing out there to help people change their patterns, their children's patterns, and as you said early on, change the world.
What's it like for you to talk about this, your work experience, your personal journey, talk about Hoffman? What do you notice? I notice how I feel connected to everybody. So many boundaries that I used to have that kept me apart from others have just dissolved. And whether that's through talking about love or talking about money or or just feeling more love for other people. I I don't know. But it's a wonderful way to go through life.
Yeah. The money is energy. If it's energy in the spending of it, it's also energy in the saving of it. In your work, there's energy in the giving of it. Absolutely. It is in giving that we receive, someone said. It's true. In fact, if anybody's interested in learning more about these ideas, that was my next question. What next steps for people? The first place I learned about the concept of financial energy was in a book called Money and the Meaning of Life by Jacob Needleman,
and he was great. He just he really put it into useful terms for me. And then the second book a few years later was by Lynn Twist called The Soul of Money. And, of course, Lynn is a friend of Hoffman. She's on our advisory board and just a wonderful human being. So she also talks about money as financial energy. So if folks are interested in learning more about how that can be a useful
concept, go to her. And we'll put all of these links in our show notes for these two people you recommended their books and also for David Brooks. And for people that wanna give, I know it's it can be obvious, but what are your thoughts around how they should go forward with their desire to help out Hoffman? Yeah. That's a great question. Yeah. I mean,
that is the first thing. If they feel genuine as we might see in Hoffman, if they feel an authentic drive, internal drive to help, they can reach out to me, patrickb@hoffmaninstitute.org. That's probably the best way. They can call Hoffman as well. They can reach me that way and just start the conversation. That's always the best way. You like it to be
a conversation, don't you? Absolutely. It's all about relationship and me listening to what they wanna achieve, as well as what we need for Hoffman and finding that fit. So, absolutely, conversation's where it's at. One other thing that folks could do is we just this last year started a Hoffman legacy circle, which allows people to put Hoffman in their estate plans. You know, again, we've been around a long time, and,
we're gonna be around a long time. And so people putting us in their wills or making us a beneficiary of a retirement account or investment account is super useful to us and can help their family sidestep estate taxes and all sorts of good things can come of it down the road. So lots of good options. Lots of options. Patrick, I'm super grateful for your time, for your heart, for you sharing your journey, and explaining how money and energy and Hoffman all kinda
go together. There's so much taboo around money, and I see you as, like, the taboo slayer of money. Oh, that makes me feel really good, Drew. Thank you. And I guess I'd better mention now too that I've taught sexuality education for a couple years to teenage Unitarian kids. So I take on sex and money. The two biggest taboo topics. Bring it on. Again, Osho is a big influence on me, and he brings all of that right into the light. So thank you, Patrick. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Drew.
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 Rassen 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.