S11e12: Medical Panel – Healing, Hoffman, & Finding Safety Within

Carrie, do we have a capacity to change how we take responsibility for our inner experience of safety? I think we have to. I don't know that anybody else can do that for us. Hello, and welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute. My name is Sadie Hanna, and in this podcast, you'll hear real conversations and stories with graduates about their courageous journey inward and how their love and light are living in the world

around them. Love's everyday radius. Thank you for being here and welcome. Some of the conversations in this episode touch upon health, and we want you to know that what is shared is strictly for informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Please always seek the guidance of your physician or any other qualified health professional with any questions you have regarding your health or a medical condition. Thank you.

Thanks for joining us today. I am so excited to share with you a panel of graduates who also happen to be medical professionals and this discussion around really connecting the dots between emotional health and physical health, the mind body connection, and so much more. Make sure that you stick around until the end because there's some lighthearted fun and just spontaneity that comes through that I think you'll really enjoy.

So let me take a moment to introduce each one of them, and I'll give you each a moment to introduce yourself as well. We'll start with doctor David Hanscom. David, tell us a bit about who you are. So I'm an orthopedic spinal deformity surgeon. So I was one of the surgeons in Seattle who took care of people after five, ten, 15 operations before they got to me. And I was seeing so many people having surgery on normally aging spines that would be be destroyed by a really bad spine surgery.

And I quit my practice in 2019 to bring healing principles into the public domain, including the medical world. So HOPEN was a big part of my process in 2009. I had gone through a severe burnout of fifteen years. I had 17 different physical and mental symptoms, and they came out of that in 2003. But when I did Hoffman in 2009, I it's an integration process, and I came out of it like a laser beam. And I haven't deviated one millimeter since then.

So since Hoffman, I've written four books. I've written multiple lectures, teaching, watched hundreds of patients go to pain free, and the Hoffman process really moved things forward in a really dramatic way. Wonderful. Thank you. We will actually mention any of your publications in our show notes. Carrie Levine, we'll go to you next. Yeah. I was trained as a certified nurse midwife, and people hear the word midwife and

think, well, I'm not having a baby. So I'm not sure how you can help, but I haven't actually attended birth since 2006. And at that time, went to a world renowned clinic called Women to Women where I first learned about Hoffman.

That was the first place where sort of mind, body, spirit had room in the exam room where I could spend an hour with a new patient and see women from all over the world who had had all the executive workups and hadn't really been helped often because it was a right road, left road issue at the core and have since referred many, many, many people to Hoffman even before I went myself a couple years ago just for those women who were not able to implement the changes that

they wanted, not because there was a knowledge deficit, but because there was something in the way. And my own experience at Hoffman was mostly a stop in a lifelong journey of seeking to live authentically and move from my heart, both in the exam room and out of it. Wonderful. Thank you for being here. And we have a returning guest, doctor Kash Trivedi, who you may have heard in a previous episode on his own personal journey. Would you introduce yourself? Yeah. I'm,

my name is Kash Trivedi. I'm a clinical gastroenterologist currently in private practice, transitioning out, actually, a private practice. I've been in practice for a little over fifteen years. My development or interest in gastroenterology actually came from neurology. I studied neuroscience as an undergrad.

And in medical school, there was something about the neurology of the gut that was so confusing and interesting and all encompassing and involving so many facets of human life that I developed an interest in and and kind of kept an interest in that in practice and witnessed so many people where everything is normal testing wise, but they have severe gastrointestinal symptoms. I've seen and I believe a lot of that has to do with emotional trauma, childhood

trauma. And these are things that Hoffman helped me process myself so that that I could actually just return to connecting to patients again. As David had mentioned, I think I had burned out about 35 times during the course of practice and training. And so after Hoffman, there was an ability for me to actually connect at a different level to the people that were coming to me seeking advice and help. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you all for being here.

I've asked each of you to be here on this episode because I get the sense that in some way, your personal journeys through understanding the whole human that you are has impacted how you practice medicine. And I also am a medical provider. I'm a pediatric nurse practitioner with Stanford, and I have found this really interesting nuance to my clinical practice the more I understand about the emotions, the body, the spirit. And so that's why I wanted to have this conversation.

Many students come to the process looking for deeper connections, mainly in their relationships. But one of the most common things that I hear from graduates is that they leave feeling this sense of interconnectedness. And our listeners will know if they've done the process of the quadrinity. Who can give me a quick rundown of the quadrinity as you understand it? I think I've done the process most recently. So the quadrinity are like the four aspects of our being as through the lens of Hoffman.

There is the body and our sensations and what we feel corporately in our body. There's our intellect, that part of our mind, which helps us navigate the intricacies of the world and helps us calculate and do the things we need to do to get things done. The emotional aspect, I see it as our inner child, our feelings of happiness, sadness, and the whole range in between that bandwidth is in the emotional realm. And then quarterbacking it all, ideally, is our spirit.

Living from spirit is something that we're always course correcting like an airplane towards. It's in that experience of living in the spirit through Hoffman that I've started to understand a little bit about my authentic and and true self. Wonderfully said. Thank you. And so this integration of all aspects allows us to be a whole human being.

My experience is that medical science wants things to be clear and direct and linear and the mechanics of medicine where we end up treating symptoms or treating a piece of a person. I'd like to talk a bit about that, about some of the inherent problems in that and what you've learned about the connection between all aspects. The mind body connection, we hear that term. Carrie, would you tell us what does that mean? I mean, I don't even know that I would say I think that there's a connection

in my mind. It is. They're inseparable and integrated. One doesn't do without the other in any way on any level, in my opinion. And I think that being rooted in the labor room somehow connected me to spirit in a way that I have been able to carry with me my entire career. I often think about internal rotation when a baby will rotate internally so that their shoulders will clear the mother's pubic bone, and you can see the sutures in the baby's

skull turn. And I can remember looking at that moment and being like, who thought of that? And how is it possible that that works? Right? Most of the time. And that wonder and that mystery, I feel privileged that my practice has been infused with that. And this sense of not knowing and this sense of fostering integration for patients, I'm using air quotes, patient is a complicated term.

More often than not in the labor room, you have someone who is integrated because you cannot get through that process if you are parsed out in pieces. Like, it requires everything to be present in the same moment. So I feel lucky in that way to have been privy to that, to witness that over and over and over again. And so for me, it's irrefutable that it's all connected. I can't really approach anybody in any other way. Thank you for sharing.

And I was actually gonna ask, David, could you share with us a story where you really came to know about this integration? Well, it sort of came later. I went into chronic pain in 1990 with a panic attack, and I did not emerge until 2003. I had 17 different physical and mental symptoms, depression, anxiety, OCD, skin rashes, migraines, stomach issues, back issues. It was unbelievable. So the body chemistry is profound. I agree with Carrie completely. She said it

beautifully that it's just a unit. You can't fly a major airline without a computer, and the human body has 30,000,000,000,000 cells, where a Boeing jet only has 2,000,000 parts. So just an integrated unit with the brain being a relay system. So it's about the physiology thing. So what happened with me once it happens all about processing anger, forgiveness, and letting go. And so I didn't even know I was angry until 2003.

I had no clue. I was right, I was perfectionistic, I was so critical, but I wasn't angry. And so what happened is that I crossed that bridge badly by the way, but in six months all my symptoms disappeared, all of them. So including the crazy thought patterns, every symptom is gone and has stayed gone for over twenty years. So at Hoffman in 2009, I still remember saying, well, you know, medicine is in trouble, and I had sort of a anger about it. I was gonna turn that anger into something good.

Their problem is you're a zealot, and people don't respond to that very well. So I remember very distinctly at Hoffman on the I lifted up the hood of a car, and there was this angry burning engine that I simply took it out, replaced it with love. Totally different. I'm not burning energy. I don't get tired anymore, which drives me and my wife crazy. But when you use it so like a reaction, it doesn't stop. So my own personal story is profound, and I

never would have thought that. I never would have thought going from a major spine surgeon with structural emphasis to the physiology of disease is just blowing me away. So you're speaking about a transformation about some repressed anger criticism and then transmuting it into love. Is that correct? Correct. Kash, how about you? Is there a story you could share? What comes to mind is a fairly recent story

of someone that came to see me. I've been seeing them for a long time for some liver issues, but they developed severe, severe pain in the upper abdomen, epigastrium. This landed her in the ER multiple times. When I encounter someone who has gone from being relatively fine to not fine, I'm always curious about the trigger. Well, that happened to start right after her mom died. Like many people, she was convinced that she had a huge gargantuan ulcer in her stomach or whatever.

What I told her was, well, I wouldn't be surprised if everything looks okay, but that doesn't mean that nothing is going on. And so when I took a look, when I did an endoscopy and took a look in her stomach, it was pristine. I'm still struggling, I think, a little bit with how to talk to people about this mind body connection in a way that doesn't come off as sort of preachy or belittling. I try hard not to do that.

Ultimately, we use medications, but I think that connection between this very traumatic, stressful event and her symptoms helped her over the course of weeks get back to the point where she wasn't on medications anymore.

So that's just kind of one story amongst many, many stories of people that I've seen where despite the medical technology and the data and the internet and everything where you have all these concrete things of why someone may feel a particular way, those often don't give the answer, especially for people with a chronic debilitating illness. Yes. And I think in some ways, you're speaking to the difficulty in actually naming that there may be more here than just one component.

I think on some level, we all want to be seen as whole. We want someone to understand the intricate nature of who we are. And at the same time, it can be a little bit difficult to have somebody say, could this be related to grief? Carrie, did you wanna say something about that? Yeah. Two things. One of the things that came to my mind listening to Cashtack was broken heart syndrome.

And I have a dear friend whose husband dropped dead on a run, and she found herself in the emergency room with, you know, heart palpitations and PVCs. There is, I think, some data in the research about people experiencing cardiac symptoms after the passing of a loved one with no physiologic alteration where it really is a physical manifestation of an emotional experience. That was one thing that I wanted to

say. And then the other thing that I was thinking listening to you, Cash, was just sort of, you know, it's an interesting thing, I think, to try and talk with patients, air quotes, in a conventional clinical model and suggest to them that perhaps how they're feeling how they're feeling with their heart has something to do with how they're feeling with their body without dismissing someone as sort of hypochondriac or

whatever it is. I take care of a lot of perimenopausal women, and that is a fascinating convergence of mind and body. You know, I'll talk to people. You know, what does your life look like? What does work look like? What do your relationships work like? What does sleep look like? What does your nutrition look like? And they'll talk about maybe a stressful thing in their life, and I'll talk to them about how big a piece of the puzzle

that may be for them. And then I will say to them, which is not me saying it's all in your head. Right? Because that's the risk, I think, of acknowledging a mind body connection. Right? Is patients feeling marginalized and being told it's all in their head because I take care of only women, so I bring that bias to this conversation. But goodness knows women have been told for too too long that how they feel is in their head.

So this integration thing can be a little bit of a slippery slope for us as practitioners, particularly those in a conventional model. And that actually speaks to the silo that is the water we swim in, where it is either physical or it's in your head. So broken heart syndrome, I mean, I would love to speak more about that, but I also wanna talk about what is psychosomatic symptoms and why is that so threatening for people to hear, David?

First of all, there's a term in medicine that started in 2002 called medically unexplained symptoms, m u s. That means we know you hurt, we know you have your symptoms, we can't find anything wrong, so have a good

life. So it's a disastrous diagnosis because it takes away hope, and we look at the physiology of disease, everything's explained, it should be medically explained symptoms because under threat physiology, your neurotransmitters get excitatory, your inflammatory markers go up, your nerve conduction doubles, your stress hormone goes up, fuel comes out of your cells. So every chronic symptom, by the way, is explained by the body's physiology.

So mentally, you have thoughts or input, you have your physiology as the result and so physiology creates physical symptoms. So once you start calming on the physiology, symptoms disappear. So I've seen hundreds and hundreds of patients go symptom free but comment on the physiology. So medicine has it absolutely backwards, that's part of it, but the other half that's even worse is that in threat physiology, your body

breaks down, in safety, your body heals. So a key factor in medicine is patient doctor relationship, your patient had to feel safe with you and feeling safe with your doctor is out of luxury, is a necessity. Without that basic link of feeling safe with your clinician, nothing else matters, It just doesn't matter.

So that's always a starting point. And so, anyway, I actually quit my surgical practice because we're so obsessed with structure and we've ignored the physiology, we're really hurting people. Yes. So, Cash, you had a comment on that as well.

Oh, yeah. In terms of what I've been sort of contemplating is I'd imagine if I were in the audience, it would be like, well, this is great, you know, if you can pay cash to see a concierge doc who can spend three hours with you, but what about the average person? And what I learned, like after Hoffman, is that I was surprised at how it doesn't take much time.

Because the question is how can we as medicine, as practitioners, as people who are in the healing profession, bring back this sense of love and care and connection to the people that are seeking help from us? The things that I learned in Hoffman or actually started doing at Hoffman, like actually looking in the person's eyes and honestly saying, you know, I see you're suffering.

And that doesn't take much time, but just doing that can kind of break that shell that people have around themselves when they're in fight or flight mode, as David said, and when they're not feeling safe. So many providers, you know, the burnout rates you hear, however you define that seventy percent, eighty percent in all aspects of health care. How to bring that that care and that connection back is, I think, something that I've been wondering and contemplating.

What are the physical consequences of a unprocessed emotional hurt? Emotional hurt is physical hurt. They can't actually be separate. And you're speaking about something here, which I think is really important, the experience of safety, the experience of threat and fight or flight. And one of the things that I know love to be is an attunement with someone that lets them know they're safe. It's what we always wanted. This is the gift of presence.

It doesn't have to be in medicine. It can be anywhere. Would you like to say something about that, Carrie? It doesn't have to be big. Right? Like Cash was saying, you know, I think about where's the computer, and where am I looking, and how do I greet someone, and do I shake their hand and make physical contact, and how much talking am I doing relative to how much listening am I doing? That's a big one.

My new patient visits are sixty minutes and just listening relative to the standard seven to fifteen minute visit, you know, women will be like, I just feel heard. And how does anybody embark on a healing journey without feeling like their practitioner heard what their concerns are. And it's like these tiny little nuances. I mean, for me, it's also like, is there a window? Is there daylight? I'm not wearing a white coat. I'm not wearing a stethoscope.

You know, like, there's no drop ceiling. There is no enclosed exam room. And for women, specifically, again, who come here, you know, many of them have experienced medical trauma, and they have not sought care for decades. And they walk in, and my clinic is home based in my barn, and just the physical environment changes the dynamic. I ask them what's on the top of your mind today so that they're driving the

agenda. They're driving the conversation. I don't walk in trying to control what the interaction is gonna be. So some of these things are harder in a conventional environment, but some of them are so small. Like Cal said, do you look someone in the eye? Do you look up from the computer? What presence, as you were saying, Sadie, do you bring when you walk into the room? Did you take a breath before you walked into the room? Did you

look at the chart? Right? So that you even know what you're walking into, so to speak. So that fracturing can happen with us. And that actually can allow us to present a different part of ourselves to interactions, and others can feel that. That's what I'm hearing. 100%.

And I think that was a big motivator for me going to Hoffman was just, like, really wanting to bring all of myself to encounters with people because I think that does set up a greater level of healing potential that is bidirectional therapeutic reciprocity. So big. It's when I learn and grow because of the relationships that I have with my patients, and they learn and grow because of their relationship, right? Like it's a wheel.

And it's ideal. And it's so beautiful, and my patients teach me so much, not just clinically, but about being human. So grateful for that. So segue into being human. I wanna talk about the experience of childhood because I think that's where so much of this begins. And a normal part of childhood is that at some point, things outside can be really overwhelming or we have really big feelings inside.

And we learn over time to either shut down what's trying to come out of us or to shut down and block the world out. And I think that's where some of this begins. David, you mentioned that you had this sense that there was anger that needed to be moved through so that love could come in. And that takes a certain amount of courage. In the anger, there's also a grieving for what we didn't feel in terms of safety from early, early on. The root of the word cure,

there are two. One, the Latin root means care. The Germanic root is actually sorrow. Is it possible, Cash, that in order to cure someone, there is feeling some degree of sorrow for loss? Feeling sorrow, feeling anger, feeling anything. I just saw a person yesterday who was engaging in spiritual bypass as a patient, meaning I'm having all these symptoms, but I should be grateful that I am not starving in India. And I told them, wait a minute. There's a middle piece.

Hoffman taught me this. This was a huge missing piece. And that is you need to feel that anger, that suffering, that pain, rage, whatever it is, that needs to move through you before you can get to the reflection and self compassion and all those things. Going back to just disease, chronic illness, I find that there's a sense that I get that there's so much anger and hurt underneath all these symptoms that are coming up.

The key, I think, is expression. It is so critical, but it is society wise so frowned upon, especially in our subdivision of being medical practitioners because doctors, nurses, surgeons, they're supposed to be even keeled, not feel, but perform. It's the opposite that's gonna actually kind of help us move forward. So, Carrie, what would you say the body can teach us about being whole, and how can we be more present to our own healing?

Well, I'm I'm struck by what Cash was talking about in terms of feeling because I think about how much time people spend trying to not feel, especially the hard things. Right? Like, whether that's addiction or disordered eating or whatever, shopping, gambling, sex, like, all the things that we do to try to avoid feeling either the hard things or even for some of us the good things because we think we're not worthy. Right? What how could I possibly feel joy? How

could I possibly feel loved? I couldn't possibly be worthy of having the life that I've worked for and created. So feeling is, again, a sort of so fundamental and so difficult, both as practitioners and just as humans in in this world that we live in. If our body is showing us a physical symptom, how can we meet that? I think the thought that was going through my head with your first phrasing was something along the lines of what can the body teach us

about being whole. The thought that was running through my head was everything. You know? Because whatever is coming up, right, whether it's stomach pain or headache or fatigue or digestive issues or body pain or hormone imbalance or whatever, there is likely to be an aspect of that symptom that is emotional. And I think often about a pie pieces of a pie. You know, I think about genetics. There are pieces of the pie. Emotions are pieces of the pie. Our physical

environment, pieces of the pie. And I say to people, I don't really know how big a piece of the pie this particular aspect is, the emotional aspect is, but we would be remiss if we did not bow to the fact that it is very possible that this emotional piece, whatever it is, stressed out at work or difficult relationship or a kid with particular needs or whatever the emotion may be, that it has a piece of the pie. And I often tell women, it's for you to decide how big a piece of the pie is it.

I don't know. In the same way that I don't know how big the genetics are, I don't know how big the nutrition is, but we have to address all aspects for the best potential outcome. David. So my approach is a little different. I think emotions are everything. So if you look at emotions at your physiology, either in safety or threat or in between, your body can react to the environment in a way to keep you safe.

So I try to depersonalize emotions and say this is your body being triggered and I ask them to read their body, so for instance I had 17 different symptoms, so if I'm triggered sometimes my feet start to burn or a skin rash pops up or my back start to hurt, so they're just symptoms of being triggered and so your survival reactions are gonna protect you, you are never ever gonna get rid of anxiety and anger, it's necessary for life, they are gifts.

So as you learn to become aware of these things, you learn to work with your survival physiology. And so it's about the key issue, the key word that keeps coming up over and over again is the word awareness. And this little book I give to all my patients, my colleagues, my fellows, called The Way to Love by Anthony de Mello. He defines love as awareness. Carrie and Cashew talked about listening is a key issue of being aware. You have to connect yourself to be aware of what their issues are.

So when you're angry, the physiology shows that your thinking brain actually goes offline. You can't even think correctly. So you have to bring your brain back online in order to actually break it up. So the keyword is awareness and awareness breaks that link of the automatic survival reactions. So you develop a working relationship with your survival physiology, that's over here, then who you are is who you choose to be when you're not reacting to your survival physiology.

So you learn to develop a working relationship with your survival physiology, which is there every day. You get to choose where you want to go. Again, that's where Hoffman comes into visualization. So they're two separate skill sets, but they're linked. As again, Hoffman brought that up for me in a really big way. So, again, I've watched hundreds and hundreds of patients go to pain free, completely pain free. And so another interesting link there is you're using the word survival physiology.

In the process, we come to recognize patterns as actually evidence of that survival physiology and the neurobiology of needing to survive, needing to reestablish the connection and the safety. Patterns are actually a state of fight or flight on some level. Cash, is it possible to bring presents enough that you can feel anger and not go offline? I believe so. I've been kind of experimenting with myself because as I get further away from Hoffman, I don't want to lose any of the teachings.

And so one thing that I have noticed is that when I am triggered First of all, I'm just triggered all the time and having, as David talked about, some awareness of a sensation. So I think everyone has a tell. And so my tell is tightness in the chest and in the throat. For some people, it may be headache. It may be upper abdominal pain. It may be diarrhea. It may be whatever.

But immediately, as soon as I can in my own space, and I think I mentioned before, I go to the bathroom where I don't, you know, nobody's around. And I literally feel that anger. That moving through me, but not coming out, leaking out with my interactions with patients hours on end afterwards allows me to just reset and kinda go back to a present space. So it's acknowledgment, as David had mentioned, awareness, and then really getting to the point where you express and

feel it in a safe way. You're speaking to the value of feeling the anger or whatever the emotion is and moving through it. What I'm hearing the three of you say is that there's a connection between feeling those difficult feelings and the other side of healing, coming through that and actually healing. What is the value of feeling and expressing in a way that is healthy? What can that offer the body's physical symptoms?

One quick thing. So first of all, repressed emotions actually shrink the hippocampus of your brain because addiction issues, depression. So not feeling is actually disaster and the essence of these unwanted thoughts is suppressing survival emotions. So feeling them is really tricky, but when you're in angry state, you're thinking brain's offline. So the one phrase we've used over and over and over again is no action in a reaction.

So if you're triggered, you just have to intellectually know I'm triggered, my thinking brain isn't correctly working and don't do anything. Get out of the room, cleanse your jaws, just get out of there. So the key issue is take action when your thinking brain's online. It take a minute, it may take a day, it may take a week, but the key issue is no action in that reaction. There is unconscious anger or maybe even historical anger that just explodes out and really is destructive.

I think there's a link between what you said, Cash, around feeling your body sensations and letting your body anchor you here and now in the present moment. So then you can say, I feel anger, but it's not me. It's actually indication of something else going on and maybe there's hurt under that. And already, the nervous system is slowing down. The body can be an incredible tool to withstand intense emotions, Carrie. Yeah. I mean, 100%. I think seeing a woman having a baby

is a really good example of that. I mean, it's a little bit extreme and a little bit of a bubble, but the emotions can be a really helpful compass if we can stay connected to them, and they can guide us toward ourselves. To me, that's the value in the feeling. The feelings are, that's me. That feeling is what makes me me. I appreciate someone else may not feel that way in this situation or because of that, but this is how I feel. And that is part of my authentic self that makes me

me. If I can stay out of judging, whatever that feeling might be, that's where the rubber hits the road for me. It's not judging the feeling, but acknowledging and allowing it to be whatever it is. That is part of the expression of my authentic self. People know Mrs. Myers dish soap, but it comes in a variety of different scents. And my husband was giving me a hard time like you really love scented dish soap, don't you? And I was like, I really do. I really do. If I'm gonna do the

dishes, I want it to smell good. That's part of me. It's somewhat trivial manifestation, but that is in fact part of what makes me me. It can be challenging to feel the parts that make us uniquely ourselves as we compare, as we judge, as we think we should be different than exactly as we are. Yeah. Cash, what would you like to add? Yeah.

A brief comment is that, personally, I've seen the capacity to feel and feel a range of emotions and identify them and realize that I'm not gonna die because I feel x, y, or z has given me capacity. Capacity to handle other people's emotions. So when I am triggered and I have somebody that I'm taking care of and they are upset or angry, I am not going to be able to respond in a really healthy way like I want to, like my spiritual self.

But if I have done enough expression, I have made this cauldron that I can hold people. No matter what they throw at me, there will still be love coming out. Multiply that by 8,000,000,000, and maybe we'll start doing something positive, you know, worldwide. Yeah. So we're talking in some ways about this theme of feeling safe versus feeling stressed or fight or flight or triggered or judged in some way. David? So people think that stress is psychological.

Most people think that. It is absolutely not, it's just what you feel when your body feels threat. That's what stress is, stress is adversity, it's threat, it's how you feel. It's not psychological, it's your body's response to a threat. Second thing is thoughts have no power. Thoughts are just thoughts. I mean, they're not real. The only reason they're real is because we give meaning to them with a physiological response.

So the reason why thoughts have so much power is that they fire up the body's physiology and that's where awareness breaks that link. So thoughts are not the physiological link are nothing. There's a reaction to the thoughts that create so much havoc in us in the world. With repetition, we develop an identity or mental rigidity, and look at the harm done in the world by concepts and philosophies being defended by people and societies. They're just thoughts.

By the way, mental pain has been well documented to be worse than physical pain, you cannot escape your thoughts, we're trapped. So we have a human species problem of being trapped by our thoughts, so you separate from them and train to be less reactive and then visualize a different future, that's where the Hoffman process can do about five years of my work in about a week. So it's feeling the patterns, not reacting to them, putting your brain where you want your brain to go.

And with neuroplasticity, you literally develop a new nervous system. The healing occurs as you move forward with your vision. So healing occurs as we create a nervous system that can feel safe in various situations. Carrie, do we have a capacity to change how we like, to take responsibility for our inner experience of safety? I think we have to. I don't know that anybody else can do

that for us. I mean, people can make it easier or harder just like the practitioner who walks in the room and either does make eye contact or doesn't. But, ultimately, I think it's on each of us as individuals to do what we can and whether it's the kind of techniques that David is talking about or the techniques that Hoffman has to offer or some other, you know, Buddhist. Right? There's a whole world of techniques out there to try and cultivate safety within ourselves, I think it's on us.

So I think we're saying safety on some levels required for healing. I think that we're also saying that on some level, healing requires, Kash, you said, I see you're suffering. What would you like to say about that as we come to wrap up? A big turning point for me as a physician was understanding that I am not completely responsible for my patients' betterment or getting worse or suffering or whatever.

When I just saw myself not as the director, but rather I'm a part of this person's journey, that took so much pressure off that it allowed whatever healing was gonna happen in whatever way happen. In the health professions, we tend to feel like we are so responsible for everyone's well-being. Like Karouzin, we can help create the environment. But ultimately, everyone's on their own journey. If we can create safety within our own physiology and our body can be a tool for that.

What's one takeaway that you'd like our listeners to hear, David? The focus is on skills. It's always multi pronged. There's ever one solution. You have ways of prostitution adversities. You have ways ways of caring for your nervous system like diet, exercise, and sleep. There's ways of regulating physiology. It's a learned skill set that taking responsibility for learning those skills yourself, you're the only person that can do it,

is absolutely a game changer. And what the world needs for each one of us to do is for each one of us to heal. And as each one of us heals, the world can and will change. Carrie. I'm a fan of breath because I always have it. It's always with me and nobody else necessarily needs to know about it. It's a great little touch point for my mind to weigh in on to get a sense of how am I doing. You know, am I short of breath? Am I breathing deeply? Am I breathing freely?

And I can use it certainly personally in my own life when I feel myself becoming dysregulated and wanting to self soothe, and I can also use it in a therapeutic encounter if I find myself reacting to the person I'm listening to either because there's transference or because they're I'm moved by their pain or I'm relating to their pain or I'm jealous of something.

You know? Like, all of the human emotions that can come up in encounter with someone, I can always have a touch point with my breath and bring myself back to myself and sometimes calm myself if that's what's needed or bring myself back to presence. And a callback to what David mentioned around awareness, even just coming to what's happening in my breath brings you into your body, into the moment. Can you breathe yourself into a place of safety? 100%.

Yeah. I mean, I think that there is centuries and centuries and centuries of people practicing breath work as a means of spiritual practice and health and healing. David, you wanted to make a comment on breath work. Yes, please. Well, I mean, what you're doing is stimulating the vagus nerve, which is anti inflammatory. So humming, rubbing your forehead, certain music, breath work, all stimulate the vagus nerve, which is highly anti inflammatory. And again, not psychological, physiological.

That's one part of the healing process is stimulating your body's physiology to the parasympathetic nervous system. So breath work is really very powerful. A tool where you can use your physiology in collaboration with the rest of you. Thank you. Cash, how about you? What is a way that we can bring more safety, more healing to our physical bodies? Use whatever tools are available to you to engender safety in yourself.

What I do is what I learned really at Hoffman was this hand on heart and holding it there, that kind of being a habit. And, you know, if you're in public, you can just kind of like pretend you're scratching your chest or something. We know, and the HeartMath Institute has done so much work on how connecting with the heart, the touch and using one's body body can't tell if someone's hugging us or we're hugging ourselves, right?

Giving ourselves the physical touch, love that we need to enter a state where we can connect to spirit again, where we can be safe. It's hard to get there if one hasn't expressed the underlying muck of the moment to get to that place. So expression and, ultimately, you know, love and compassion for oneself. And a physical gesture of you're safe. I'm holding you. Yeah. I got you. You're okay.

Tell us one moment you absolutely fell in love with the body or medical science where you were like, this is it for me. I remember when I was an undergrad and I was undeclared. I was gonna be in the sciences, something. I just nothing really appealed to me. But then I learned that there was a neuroscience major.

When I started delving into neuroscience, the fact that we are like the only beings that can actively change our own physiology, we can literally change what proteins are being made and synthesized and how we're using glucose just based on our thoughts. What that gave me was hope for myself. Yes. Maybe there is a way to change that physiology to be happy, you know? Cool. I was telling my daughter this because she's doing a report on cells, and it has

to be all handwritten. And I was drawing for her the cell membrane, and, you know, it's this phospholipid bilayer. And so I'm drawing it, and then I I'm showing her how a receptor works. And I remember sitting in biology and the teacher explaining this and it's like this little thing's floating around and it just happens to fit perfectly right there. And then this whole cascade of events, this entire amazing cascade of physiology that happens because it happened across

the perfect fit. And I was like, this is magic. This is actually spirit. Yeah. I remember reading the relaxation response by Herbert Benson, who was a Harvard trained psychologist. I don't know. He studied transcendental meditation, and I suffered from terrible insomnia as a kid. And I don't know what kind of weirdo I was that I found this book, The Relaxation Response, like, in 1983 at some used bookstore. I was like, oh, maybe I can use my thoughts to help

me sleep. I don't think that was, like, my pivotal moment, my moment. Probably my moment was hearing a conventional trained OB GYN and a locally trained herbalist speak on the same stage at a conference together, and I was like, It's not either or. It's both and depending on the individual and what they need in the given moment. That was probably it. But I was also, like, a weird kid reading books about crystal healing. Like, I was a weirdo.

I love that. Part part witch, part nurse midwife, part part author. Truth is out. So I met doctor Steven Porges on the polyvagal theory. He and I started a round table together in 2020, and we meet twice a month. And his wife is Sue Carter who looks at the peptides as sort of the chemical equivalent of the autonomic nervous system. And we have over a 120 talks from the deepest scientists in the world about a chondral DNA, neuroimaging, etcetera.

And the complexity just started to emerge just blew me away beyond words. Then I get into the consciousness thing, reflecting physiology. Here's one little detail that blew me away is that if you see a bully walking across the street, your body's chemistry has already reacted and your thoughts come one to ten seconds later. So your body's incredibly powerful. My cat doesn't need a mind actually to survive, and neither do we.

So in this human consciousness thing that's laid on this incredible machine. So anyway, in this study group, the complexity of the human body, we don't know anything. I mean, we just don't know anything. It's so incredible. So that's why I get a little bit frustrated because all we can do is allow the body to heal itself, and anything we do can help it along a bit, but we can't make that much difference compared to the body's capacity to heal.

So as we allow people to get out of their own way of healing, it takes care of itself. It's just beyond comprehension to me. Yeah. I think we need to create a rehab for medical perfectionists. Thank all of you for being here. Cash, David, Carrie, thank you so much for participating in this conversation. I hope for so much more. Yeah. Thank you. This is wonderful. Thanks, Sadie. Thanks, Carrie and David. It was great talking to you guys. Wonderful. 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 Ingrassi, 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.