I want for my children and grandchildren to be able to go to my funeral and say, I really liked him a lot. He was a good father. And I think I've whatever time I've got, whether it's twenty three years or twenty three months or twenty three days, I think that I am now giving them a different impression of their grandfather and father than they had before I went to Hoffman. And that's what counts. 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. Rusty Duke, judge Rusty Duke, welcome. Thank you, Drew. I'm glad to be here with you. We're glad to have you. We're looking forward to this conversation. I just wanna introduce you a little bit. You are a retired trial judge.
You've been married for fifty two years. You have three children, nine grandchildren. You live in Greenville, North Carolina. You are counsel at a local law firm after your retirement as a judge. How many years were you a trial judge? A little over twenty five. I would say twenty six or seven, somewhere in there. And in here, you also talk about enjoying and visiting with your kids, your grandkids, traveling, and you enjoy being involved in community activities,
community service. You speak to various local civic groups, and you're caring for a local camp. What does that mean? Well, we, are interested in the facilities out there and helping them to, grow as a camp. I see. And then you just wrote and published your first book, Call Your First Case, My Stories. Welcome, Rusty. We're we're psyched to have you. Rusty, you grew up in the South. How old are you? Can I ask your age? I know that's impolite in some circles.
No. It's not impolite in the South unless it's a woman. So I would say my age is 77. I'll be 78 in August. How old were you when you did the process? It was last October, so I was, just turned 77. Okay. Well, how's a 77 year old Southerner make his way to Northern California to do the Hoffman process? My youngest son, who lives in Greensboro, he went to Hoffman in California in August of last year, and he returned very happy and much more connected, I think, with his family.
And I didn't know that his he was having any kind of happiness problems or whatever. So I was sitting on the porch at our place at Bath with my granddaughter, Sarah, and we were swinging in the swing and having a conversation. It was she was 11 at that time. I was talking with her, and she said that this is something she said that indicated that her parents sometime would have, you know, disagreements or whatever. Then I said, well, they don't ever argue
in front of you, do they, Sarah? And I try not to ask the grandchildren anything about what goes on in their homes. I mean, they can tell me, but I don't inquire or matter or anything. And she said, oh, no, granddaddy, but we know when they're not happy. And I said, oh, okay. She said, but you know, granddaddy daddy has been happier since he went to California. And I said, well, good. Meaning, the trip that he took to HOPWA. And I said, Sarah, let me ask you.
Do you think granddaddy's happy? And she said, oh, yes, granddaddy. I think you're happy, but I think you'd be happier if you went to California. And so that was on a Saturday afternoon. And on Monday, I signed up to go to Hoffman. On the advice of your 12 year old granddaughter. Yes. But she's very wise. She you know, a lot of wisdom comes out of children. They're very honest with you. And they're vulnerable. I mean, they just tell you what they think. Yeah.
So you sign up. You do the paperwork. Take us there. Like, what happened at the beginning? I had absolutely no clue about what Hoffman was or anything about it. Never heard of it. Had not really talked to my son about it. I had noticed some change, but I I really didn't have any conversation much with him except that he had a good time and enjoyed it and thought it was beneficial to him.
And I signed up, you know, to go and was doing the preprocess work, the answer to the questions, and read the brochure about the quadratic. It just was a very revealing process to me. I thought it was very good. And I have always recognized that in some way or another that people are spirit and that they are made up of a body. They have a brain that's divided into two, emotional and intellect. I've recognized that. It reveals itself over a period of years in the job that I had.
So I felt very much at home and very able to, accept what the proposition was with Hoffman. In your work as a trial judge, you know, you're in the in the courtroom deciding people's fate in a lot of ways. Did that idea of seeing people as spirits, that there is a part of them that is pure and authentic and innocent, did that show up? I think it did, of course. Everyone has a different life as you know. They have different experiences.
The number one experience that people have had who end up in a courtroom charged with a felony, that number one experience that they've had in life is that they have had no significant relationship with their biological father, and that is a huge impact on people. So you saw that over the course of your years in the courtroom. You could trace the people coming in charged with crimes and then trace it back to the fact that there wasn't a bio father presence in the family growing
up. That's right. You know, I'll tell you one very quick story that's in my book. The defendant came in. He was charged with felony possession of heroin. The district attorney called the case for trial. He did not have a lawyer, so I excused the jury pool and went over his right with him that he has the right to be represented by a lawyer. And he continued to decline the lawyer, did not want a lawyer, and he selected the jury. We went through the trial.
He played guilty to an unrelated felony possession of heroin, and I left the jury in the courtroom to observe the sentencing and the judgment and sentencing. When everything was completed and just before I would pronounce judgment for sentencing any defendant, they would be given the right, given the opportunity to address the court in any way they saw fit. I asked him, I said, where did you grow up? And he said, well, I was born in Kinston, and I grew up in Baltimore.
And I said, do you have any brothers and sisters? He said, I have a sister, and I have a brother. My sister lives in Baltimore. My brother is in jail in Washington, DC. And then I said, is your mother still living? Yes. This entire time, he's looking at me. This is all very normal, unusual circumstances involved, and and the attorney's looking at him, turned to their left because they were sitting to his right. And I said, well, tell me about your father. And when I'd said those words,
his face dropped. He looked up, and one tear, just one tear, was coming down his right cheek, very shiny tear, very slowly. And the jury was just they couldn't believe it. I'd seen it before, so it didn't surprise me, but they just were startled. And everything was very quiet. And then he looked at me, and he said, he gave me a dollar when I was four. The jury was just very impacted by that statement as I was too. I've almost become emotional when I remember that
statement and tell that story. That's just the heartbreak that you run into. And as you look at your time at Hoffman, what does it do to that story and stories like that that you've witnessed? What does your own journey inside of you? One of the major principles that Hoffman taught me and that has really give me a lot of freedom in my relationships and just thought processes is that we are not our patterns. The Bible says we're born in sin. To me, that now means
that we had sinful parents. They had sinful parents. All these previous generations were sinful people, and they had patterns. And I have patterns. I inherited those patterns mostly from my parents, but they had patterns. And as you know the process, you learn to really consider your parents, how they live, what happened to them. And you are very grateful for them, of course, but you're very sympathetic or empathetic for them. Let me ask you about that.
What did you learn, and what was that experience like for you in the exploration of the patterns that your parents learned as a result of the childhood that they had? I had already forgiven them pretty much. I I thought I had, but it brings forth forgiveness. They're human just like I am. I would want forgiveness. I very easily and very readily forgave them, although they're gone now. I was reconciled to them. Although I'd really never had any problems with it, we never had many conflicts
at all. I grew up a very happy child or thought I was very happy. I never thought about the fact that I have these patterns, and Hoffman identified them for me. And it's been very helpful in my life, in my happiness. It's a weird sort of paradox, isn't it? We're gonna spend a lot of time identifying these patterns, tracing them to your parents, but, ultimately, you are not your patterns. I think one of the secrets about Hoffman is that there's no condemnation. There's no judgment.
And as a result, you accept the pattern. You see the patterns. You can see them clearly. One of the patterns is guilt, and you can recognize guilt. I am not my pattern, and I'm gonna recycle that pattern. I'm gonna get rid of that pattern. I'm gonna replace that pattern. I'm spirit, and the Bible teaches everybody that they're spirit. Most Sunday schools and churches don't approach the situation, life's situation, the way Hoffman has for me.
And so given your son had gone before you, did you think about him during the week and wondered what it was like for him and realized that he was doing the same work on you as you were doing on your mom and dad? Yes. I did. And when I received a letter from him, a card, expressing forgiveness, expressing love for me, I then realized where that impetus for writing that letter came from, and I was very thankful for it. What was that like to read
a handwritten letter? Not something that you get very often nowadays. A handwritten letter that came in the mail from your son telling you how much he loves you. Well, of course, it was wonderful. And his mother received a a letter just like that, and it was very wonderful to her. We we probably raised our children.
They were reared in a home that was probably more, I would say, formal or more I hate to use the word unforgiving because I really feel like I have forgiven my children for any trespasses that they may have made, but we didn't have a close intentional relationship with our children like we should have. That was purple. We were parenting in the same way that we were taught by our parents. We were going through the same motion that they went through. Take us to your process.
Kinda bring us along with you, if you would, to a moment in time. Where are you? What's happening as you're in this Northern California experience called the Hoffman process. What's happening? Well, it all is just one process. I lost track of time. It was a Tuesday, but I thought it was a Wednesday. And our teacher, we had a small group meeting, and she says, well, we're halfway through the process. And I said, well, you know, really, we're we're well over halfway.
She said, no. This is the midpoint today at lunch. I said, I guess. And she said, what day do you think it is? I said, well, it's Wednesday. She said, no. It's Tuesday. That was an experience. I just couldn't believe it. I had really become immersed in the whole process to the point that I lost track of time. And the other thing, in that small group, we wrote down characteristics of the people who were in our small group. It was quite a process. We had no idea that they would be shared.
By that time, we had become really good friends with the people in our process. It was one of the most friendly weeks, one of the most friend making weeks I've ever experienced. They gave me a copy of what the people had written down as what they appreciated and saw in me. They said all this. I wrote it down, and I have it pasted in front of me right now. It's very encouraging. I put down at the bottom of this list of what they appreciated me. I put down that they told me this.
They wrote what they appreciated them before they knew I was a judge. See, as a judge, you you get used to people praising you all the time. And you have to remember, they may not necessarily be being truthful with you. These people were very truthful, and I couldn't believe it when I read these things. What was that like for you to let in these classmates of yours were seeing qualities in you that were beautiful and wonderful and powerful and naming them out loud to you. What
was that like for you? One of the things that I learned at Hoffman is it's very difficult to love other people, to really truly love other people if you don't love yourself. I never really thought about loving myself. You just don't hear that. I've never heard a sermon. I've never heard anybody stand up and say, you need to love yourself. A foreign concept, something you hadn't even heard before. It was.
And so I began to see that these other people really I mean, it was we had close relationships. They loved me, and I was being told that I need to love myself. And I was beginning to cross that bridge where I I could enter into a different relationship with myself, I guess, is what I'm saying. I don't have these voices in my head any longer. When I left Hoffman, I left all the negative voices that would come in my head all the time. They're gone. And I think that mainly they're gone because
I have a different relationship with myself. It's a relationship of love rather than condemnation and judgment. This boy is saying, oh, that was a dumb thing to do, a dumb thing to say, or you just just say it all the time. Rusty, what's that like to live from that place post process where you're living from a place of love and kindness and compassion for yourself, not condemnation? What do you notice? Well, you notice that your relationships with other people are different.
You notice that you're smiling more. You notice that you have a little extra zip in your step. You notice a difference in life and your appreciation for life. Another thing is I never had a lot of experience drinking alcohol or doing drugs or whatever. You know? Alcohol is an accepted controlled substance, I guess, what you'd say. And after Hoffman, I noticed that I really didn't have any desire for it. I had my own spirit. I didn't need a bottled spirit.
It's been very liberating and freer now than I ever have been. And I could say things to people that I wouldn't have ordinarily said. Like, what's an example of that? Well, just speaking with people and then and asking people how they're doing and inquiring into their life and enjoying their responses and laughing and talking with them and being more of a human being with people, I guess, is what you'd say. I thought I had done that in the past, but not like I do now. Do you notice
people reacting and responding to you differently? Do you see it in their meeting you when you do that? Well, of course, they're friendlier, and they're much more open. Yeah. I would say so. I really don't pay a lot of attention to that. I feel like they always have treated me very nicely. Rusty, I wanna ask a question about your
age and when you did the process. Sometimes as people experience change, they can often experience some regret or remorse or some sort of reflection back of, I wish I'd done this earlier. Why didn't I find this thing earlier? If it's so helpful now, what would have my life have been like had I done it when I was younger? And so I just wanna ask you about that. Do you at 77, did you wish you had done it earlier, or did it feel like, you know, this is actually the right time? Really? I don't.
I think that that's that would be sort of that voice that's now gone. That voice would say, well, you should've done this a long time ago. You should've done this. You ought to do this, or you you are dumb not to found out about this earlier. You know what I mean? So I just that voice is gone. I want for my children and grandchildren to be able to go to my funeral and say, you know, I really liked him
a lot. He was a good father. And I think I've whatever time I've got, whether it's twenty three years or twenty three months or twenty three days, I think that I am now giving them a different impression of their grandfather and father than they had before I went to Hoffman. And that's what counts. It's the future. I I'm concentrating on the future. So how has it been? I think I asked you this earlier when we talked about your marriage.
You kinda have an established way of connecting with someone over the course of thirty plus years. You said thirty. It's fifty. Did I say thirty? I meant fifty. Five decades, Rusty, of being together. How has your Hoffman work what happens when you came home and you're now with your wife? Well, she went too. I came home in October, and she went in January. I think that we are happier. This renewed our spirit of being, like, maybe newlyweds sort of. I'm very excited to be married
to her. Nice. It's fun. Is it a little bit of a rebirth of how you wanna be in the world, how you wanna be together in your marriage? Yeah. That's not to say that we don't have our times. And mainly because of me, but, you know, we we have a better spirit about it. Yeah. I love that comment about I don't need spirits because I have my own spirit. A spirit as an alcoholic drink, I have my own spirit.
Rusty, I wanna wanna circle back here to where we started and checking in with that on the porch, that eleven year old who thought it might be a good idea to give her granddaddy some advice that maybe he should go to Hoffman. What was it like when you connected back with her post process, now 12 year old? What happened in that connection? Well, I really love my grandchildren, and we have what we call cousins camp. My wife and I have our eight grandchildren.
The ninth one, he doesn't qualify yet. You have to be four years old and diaper trained to go to this camp. But we have a fairly close relationship with our grandchildren, I would say. And it's just renewed that, and I enjoyed remembering that swing conversation that day with Sarah. It was not unusual for her to be very conversive and very, open, sweet, sweet child. I thought I was very easy with my granddaughter before, but now I feel very, very close to all of them.
Anything else you wanna share that we didn't get to? One of the things I would say about HOPWA is the support that it has given me, really, basically, just free of charge. It's an amazing app. You have the opportunity to go deeper. You have the opportunity to listen to visualizations and relax and continuing in the renewal of your life. It has visualizations.
It has quad check, of course, and the appreciation of gratitude, recycling and rewiring and visioning and all those things that they provide for you to encourage you and to enable you to not lose memory of how you felt when you left the process center there in California. If it's a one time experience and you don't have this continual post process encouragement and help and assistance, you could easily forget what an wonderful experience it was and begin to slide back into your old life.
If you keep up the daily quadrant, which I do, and I try to remember each evening, I have it on my calendar to do the appreciation of gratitude. I think more than anything else in life, gratitude is a secret. And to sit and be encouraged to just consider your breath and what a gift it is, it makes you stop and be thankful. That is a very important thing to carry
in life. Yeah. I just wanna make sure I got that correctly, and that is that were you not to continue the tools using the app, this would be a kind of one off. But the fact that you're on the app doing the practices, the tools keeps it alive, keeps the those feelings, especially the feeling you felt when you left on Friday, keeps it as an ongoing thing in your life. And so the shelf life is extended. Yeah. And extended as long as you want as you take the time
to extend it. It's your responsibility. Another thing that I really learned in at Hoffman, and I have shared this with other people without referring to Hoffman, without really proselytizing or whatever, we have a responsibility to live life responsibly and to respond to people and respond to events and not react to people and what they say and not react to events, but think. That's really important.
Well, if you do that, then you have this app that also encourages that kind of living, that kind of responsibility. And you think, well, appreciation and gratitude, how does that help you to respond? I think it helps a lot because I think that you sit and consider the blessings that you have. It's inside those blessings. It's in a life of blessings that you respond to people. You have that attitude of appreciation.
And it encourages you also to appreciate what aspects of yourself do you appreciate. Because otherwise, you wouldn't think about it. You would just wouldn't stop and say, well, you know, I appreciate this about me. That wouldn't happen except for extraordinary people who might do that. But I learned that at Hoffman. Rusty, who's loving himself and having compassion for himself, maybe for the first time in his 77.
You know, I may have had compassion. I may have loved myself, but I certainly never thought about it Without any thought about it, I know that it had an impact because that voice is gone, the voices of condemnation and judgment. So something happened because that's that is gone. You moving out of the South to Northern California? I love California. I love this entire country. I love the whole world, everywhere I've traveled. You wouldn't be able to do your cousin's
camp down in North Carolina. They must love that. They love it. We do it on themes. One of the themes was, of Blackbeard the Pirate. And Blackbeard the Pirate legend tells he had a treasure chest which was lost. And is full of gold. So we had a a cousin's camp that was more or less centered on Blackbeard. And so we went through this three days. And one of those days, we went on a picnic to the beach, which is very near where the ruins of Blackbeard's house is.
He died 1718. Well, the day before, I buried this little chest of plastic money in the sand where they could find it. And and one my oldest grandson, he just went crazy. He said, granddaddy, I found Blackbeard's treasure. All the grandchildren rushed around. Everybody was just very excited. Of course, it was plastic, but he was very possessive of it. And his father had read the Lord of the Rings to him. So he the more possessive
he got, the more I noticed that. And I said, Jonathan, is this your ring? Is this your precious? Well, he was convicted then, you know, and he decided he'd share a little bit of the bounty. Well, the next year, the youngest grandchild, little Eleanor, we had Indian theme of local Algonquin Indian tribes that settled along here on the coast. The, university here in Greenville has this lab and had these thousand year old canoes, dugouts. One four thousand years old and another they
have somewhere else that's 10,000 years old. Well, walking out of that laboratory, they had an exhibit there of Blackbeard because they had found his ship near Beaufort, North Carolina, and it had sunk out there and been scuttled. The guy gives us a little background on Blackbeard, not knowing that we had studied Blackbeard the summer before. And we get in the car, and little Eleanor looks at my wife, and she says, grandmommy, we should've told him that we found that Blackbeard's treasure.
It really made an impression on her. And she thought she had found Blackbeard's treasure and that we should reveal it to the authorities. It was real life to her. Rusty, what's that like to sort of reflect on your life and your time at Hoffman and to be in the experience of you before, during, and after your process and talk about it? You know, I thought I was happy before, and I think I maybe was a little happy, but I'm very happy now. And I've enjoyed talking about it.
I think that you almost have to have been to Hoffman to understand how it can affect you and how it helps to give you a more real impression of life. It just brings a reality to your life, really. It helps you it encourages you to stop and listen and consider where you are and who you are and what you are. The, body, soul, that is the intellect and the emotion, and your spirit. I'm much better off post process than I was preprocess.
Rusty, thank you for your time, for sharing your stories, for being with us today. Thank you. Well, I enjoyed being with you, Drew. It's very nice. 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 Grasse, 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.