Sometimes you can feel a little bit woo woo. You know, you're too far out there, and you know your experiences have been powerful. But, like, who do you tell those experiences to, and who will appreciate how powerful they were? And that was, I found, really very important for me in the process of connecting with other people. 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. Please be aware that this episode references intense emotional content, racism, and suicide. If you or someone you know is suicidal, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at +1 80273 +1 802738255, or message the crisis text line at 741741. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Hoffman podcast. Jim
Bonilla is with us. Welcome, Jim. Good morning. Or I guess it's good morning. Yeah. It is. It is great to have you on the show today and to have you tell your story a little bit. And you were just sharing that in preparation for this interview, you what did you do? Well, I was thinking about who I was pre Hoffman, what the experiences were during Hoffman, but also then post Hoffman. A couple of things I would say about pre Hoffman. What's called a Nuyorican, a New York born Puerto Rican.
New Eurecan. Yeah. I had congenital cataracts, so I couldn't see out of my left eye at all because of the cataract. And my right eye had pretty good vision. And this is you as a kid? This is me as a kid. I was born with congenital cataracts. And then at about age nine, long story, I got sent to a Catholic boarding school slash reform school, and a kid who was losing badly to me in horseshoes thought it would be funny to throw the horseshoe at me, yelling, hey, speck.
And, unfortunately, I didn't catch it except with my eye, my one good eye, my right eye. And that hemorrhaged, and I ended up becoming legally blind for the next ten years. I lost most of the sight in my right eye. And so from about age nine to 19, I took services from, you know, the New York Association for the Blind, and I write about this in the memoir.
At 19, they couldn't do surgery on, young eyes back then because the cataract grows on the lens of the eye, And they would try then removing the lens, but because the fibers are so strong, they couldn't do surgery on young people, only on really old people. But then they came up with this, I call it the, Dyson vacuum machine, which basically they used ultrasonic sound. This is before lasers to shatter the lens of the eye.
And then they had this little tiny vacuum where they scooped out and vacuumed off the disease lens, and now I wear contact. I'd already started getting involved in sit ins with the early disability rights movement. But then when I got my eyesight back in my right eye, I still don't see out of my left. I got involved in doing community organizing and ended up becoming a social justice educator, activist, and professor. So that's the short story. There's something important about those ten years
of no sight. Oh, yeah. This is what's often surprises people. When I was in the hospital at age 19, I was having a real crisis. I was not sure I wanted to get my eyesight back because I had become sort of a, in my mind's eye, a poster child for a well adapted blanket. I'd gone to London school. I'd gone to college. I'd been the first blind counselor at this camp for the blind. So I felt like, hey. I got it
together. What am I doing? And it was really the the kindness of a night nurse who basically just helped me chill out enough. And then then, of course, once I got the eyesight back, the taxi drive through Central Park on the way home from the hospital, it was like somebody I had dropped acid. Everything was pulsating, and I thought the taxi cab driver had painted his cab psychedelic yellow. A friend of mine gave a great analogy. She said, you know, she's
bisexual. And she said, you know, when I was with my first husband, sex was fine. It's like watching a black and white movie. But then when I had my first female lover, it was like seeing in technicolor. You know, that's the title of the chapter in my memoir about getting the eyesight back, seeing in technicolor. So you readopt a new identity now as a sitting person, albeit only out of one eye. You engage in
social justice movement. You become a social justice educator and then a professor at Hamlin University. And what happens next? So what happens next is my wife had attended Hoffman ten years earlier in 2010, and now we're at about 2017. And I've retired. I've been retired for three years. I've been working on a novel. Trump was being elected into office at January, and I kinda didn't wanna be around for that. So I said, okay. I'm gonna just
gonna do Hoffman. Finally, it took me seven years to overcome my own resistance. And I was also diagnosed with diabetes for the first time. So I said, I need something to shake up the house. And that's how I ended up going to Hoffman in January 2017, and it was, you know, life changing. Continues to affect how I am in the world. Yeah. So you're sitting in those chairs the first couple days. What was it like for you? How do you feel as you're in this experience at the beginning?
I had been doing social justice work for a long time, and I did work about multicultural organizations. And I'm looking around the room. And as far as I can tell, I'm the only person of color, Latino, otherwise, in the place. I could feel I was starting to close-up. And then I got introduced to my leader, Lisa, who has a strong Italian accent, and she spoke, like, seven languages. And I knew right away that this woman would understand the experience of otherness.
And I just was able to relax into that. I mean, how I got sent to her as a leader, spirit was watching out for me, I guess. So that really released a lot of my initial terror. As you settled in seven years after your wife had gone acknowledging some resistance, what's it like to work on patterns and things that had gotten in the way when part of your lived experience was also out of your control, stuff that you didn't choose blindness. You didn't choose to be attacked on the playground
as a nine year old. How do you sort through that at Hoffman? One of the things that I found really helpful was thinking about the notion of shame. In my memoir, I sort of have a chapter where I talk about shame and how shame is different from guilt. Guilt is something that you did and that you can maybe atone for. Shame is something that you can't change.
And I think a lot of my shame issues stemmed from and I didn't realize this until Hoffman, from abandonment issues I had with my mother who turned out to suffer from pretty significant mental illness. I don't wanna give away too much of the book, but the the opening sentence in the book is I'm five years old and I'm being chased around our apartment in Queens by my knife wielding mother. But my father also left when I was five.
And, you know, children tend to internalize and say, well, it must be me. And I had never really made that connection before until I got to Hoffman that not only was I dealing with Shane, but that the source of that was about abandonment. So that was a big for me. I had been working on this novel, and, you know, they tell you write what you know. That's different than the memoir. Right? Oh, yeah. The novel was about the small town in Minnesota not dealing with its increasing diversity.
Because I was a first time novelist, I made the heroine of the the book Puerto Rican, but a Puerto Rican lesbian. And it and it never really worked. The novel went to 300 pages. On my way to Hoffman, I had sent it off to, an editor. But I just sort of knew in my bones that this really wasn't gonna fly. So part of what I think Hoffman's gift to me was to be able to say, dealing with my patterns allows me to be free to offer all my potential and gifts.
I mean, I had thought of a memoir before, but I talked about it being the memoir would focus on my being blind and being Puerto Rican and dealing with those things. And I never really said, I need to deal with mental health issues, not just my mother's, but also my own. And that was also an issue of shame. Like, I didn't wanna admit that my family had mental health issues, nor did I wanna admit my own college. I almost committed suicide.
And so the Hoffman process allowed me to be able to let go of some of that shame and say, I think that might be helpful for people to understand. Yeah. So deeply embedded shame was almost as a part of your identity. Yeah. And layered. Shame about being blind, but not being blind enough because I was partially sighted. So people wouldn't know right away that I was blind unless I was carrying a cane, which I did later on. Shame about being Puerto Rican.
The nuns told my mother when I was in fourth grade that I had a speech impediment, and they were gonna put me into a special class. Well, they put me into the special class, which was basically for slow children. Well, you know, you put a kid who's not slow into a slow class, and I found ways to entertain myself. That got me kicked out of Catholic school and sent to the reform school, which is where the accident happened.
The other thing that I found out years later, you know, when I was an academic, was they had done research and found that literally tens of thousands of children who had accents were tracked into slow classes. When those children were then a section of them were retested by bilingual specialists, those kids tested often not just out of being slow, but being smarter than average. I came to realize that back then, I had fallen into this pattern of difference being seen as deficit.
Let's slow it down. Difference being seen as deficit. And so much of what you faced was sort of a product of the times and the systemic nature of boarding schools, of discrimination, of our educational system. At the time that I was going to school, 80% of the Puerto Rican kids in the New York City school systems never graduated. And that was, again, a product of difference being interpreted as deficit and lower expectations. I mean, kids rise or don't rise to the expectations.
And so that was part of what became obvious to me, but only in retrospect. And I'll say one more thing about that. I'm interested in the intersections of my different identities being blind, being Puerto Rican, having mental health, family issues. One of the things that I came to realize is, well, how come it was that I wasn't in that 80%? And what happened was because I had the eye accident and I lost most of my sight.
At the time, the New York City schools had just been required to provide services for disabled children. Before that, they didn't do that at all. As a matter of fact, there's a great book written by a woman named Judy Heumann called Becoming Human. She's one of the leaders of the early disability rights movement. She was in a wheelchair and she had to sue the state of New York or the city of New York to get services. They said, we can't have you come to school here. We should be a fire hyzer.
So she won the suit. And because of her work, I got special services. And, again, here the lesson is you take a kid who's considered not very quick, but you give them some attention, like I got because of these special services, and I flourished. So, you know, it's one of those examples of sometimes the multiple identities. In this case, working for me could have easily worked against me, but I was again you know, spirit was watching
out. Thank god for Judy's courage to stand up to the systemic discrimination associated with being different. Yeah. Judy would go on to San Francisco. There's a great documentary by Barack Obama called Crip Camp, c r I p camp. By the way, we'll put all of this in the show notes. Great. And it's basically a documentary about this camp in Upstate New York where Judy went to when she was a teenager.
She and a bunch of the campers that were there ended up going to California and starting the disability rights movement. And I ended up going to California, and I ended up taking over Jerry Brown's office in I don't I think it was 1977. But there was this wellspring of activism that came out of this camp, which I ended up working at. At that point, I had my eyesight back, but I ended up being a counselor. And even then, it infected me, and I went to California.
Just thinking about you in your process, I imagine so much of your history gets digested during your week at Hoffman. Certainly, my patterns, you know, I talked a little bit about the shame one. But also the flip side of that, being able to get in touch with how nature was one of the things that helped me heal from my wounds, you know, certainly helped me heal mental illness. I have very strong memories. Was it White Sulphur Springs, the old campus? It was. Yes. Up in Santa Elena, California.
I remember walking early in the morning before things started. There was still a fog through the redwood grove there. There was some just majestic trees, and there was a labyrinth. And in the process, I came to realize and start to think more explicitly about how nature in my own life had been such a healing force, which I incorporate into writing in my memoir. There was an expression by the idea of spiritual reparenting. That became part of what happened for me at Hoffman.
I think the definition that they gave of spirit was your spiritual self is who you are without your patterns. Nature throughout your life and definitely at Hoffman has been a real source of strength. Oh, yeah. There's several stories I tell about nature coming to my rescue. But the most vivid, I think, is when I'm in college having a really hard time dealing with the racism and being blind and my parental, Michigas.
And I ended up standing on a ledge of a 10 story dorm, and I'm, like, one step away. And also in this red tail hawk comes swooping so close to me that I look up and you can see the red of its tail with the sun in the background. It lights up, and the color red was basically stop. But there's several stories that I tell in the course of the memoir about how nature just saved my fat from the fire. Why do you think it is about nature? Like, the synchronicity, the overlay of spirit and nature.
Why did those two create such potency together? I think some of it has to do with awe. Getting us out of seeing ourselves as the central character in the cast of the movie and seeing, you know, we're just a small part. And for me, the larger nature was a benevolent force. My wife and I went out two nights ago because the northern lights here had been so intense. And, you know, we go to bed early. We're we're at the age now. We don't stay up until three or four in the
morning to see northern lights. But these were intense at 09:00 at night, and our mouths are open because the reds and the greens and the pinks. I mean, I'd seen northern lights before, but this was the whole horizon. So I think there's something about being open to nature and the sense of awe that it can inspire in spirit. I love that. What happens as you move towards the end of your week at Hoffman as you begin to synthesize and bring together so much of what was occurring?
One of the things I just noticed in going back over my journal was one of the last quotes I had was, if you don't have a vision, your worries become your vision. And it really made me think very intentionally about, okay, what's next for Bania? And it turned out that a number of things happened. One was my wife and I had been living in Saint Peter, Minnesota. We had basically bought an old abandoned farmhouse and farmstead that hadn't been
used at all. And we spent twenty years rehabilitating not just the house, not just the the barn, but we basically planted 600 trees and bushes. We planted two native prairies, which, you know, made the bees very happy and the butterflies. But my wife had taken a position about two hours away. And at the same time, we were realizing that the city had moved around us, so we were now sort of this little island.
It was not the same place. And so part of what I came to realize right after Hoffman was it was time to let go. It was time to let go of the land and my sense of territoriality. I hated it when people trespass. So that was a big, big shift for me. The other big shift after Hoffman was I went from thinking about writing this novel to being much more vulnerable and writing a memoir that included my struggles with mental illness, my family struggles with mental illness.
And, you know, I had thought, well, geez, you know, writing a novel about blindness and Porter that's enough. But I realized that there was a lot more to the story. And so I was feeling emboldened to go there. And the other thing that this has to do with my diabetes, right, when I left Hoffman and we left Saint Peter for Winona, I started swimming and playing water volleyball and lifting weights pretty regularly. And that's helped keep my diabetes in check so far, knock on wood.
I often will wake up in the middle of an IP as my brain's going and then I can't calm it down. There's a Hoffman process that I use where I force myself to say three things from that day that I was grateful for and three things about myself in the course of that day that I was grateful for. And it often becomes more, but it also does something psychologically, physiologically that relaxes me and usually allows me to go back to sleep.
The other thing that I do almost every day is there's that wonderful Hoffman meditation tape, the Quadrinity. Yeah. That's become part of my daily routine. The quadrinity check-in. And it sounds like the gratitude practice, the things that you appreciate about the day as a way of being with yourself in the night when you wake up. Yeah. This night can be a tough time for most folks, so I'm no different in that regard. Yes. The patterns can emerge in the darkness.
The other thing that I realized at Hoffman was and this has to do with my father. My father left when I was four or five. He had his own struggles. He had been in the Korean war. They didn't have this language then, but he suffered from PTSD. You know, he didn't work for a long time. He struggled with alcoholism. And, you know, when I turned 21, he wrote me this lovely letter that he had met this woman who he had known when he was seven. They used to walk together
to church in Puerto Rico. She was three, he was seven, and he would hold her hand and walk her. And he had stopped drinking and he had married her. And, you know, there was a rebirth of our relationship. It also though made me aware of, I had joined men's groups in the past, but I hadn't really understood why it was such a driving force, why I needed those. And I became much more clear after Hoffman that that was part of the abandonment issue and that when we came to Winona, I organized
a men's group here. I write about Latino men's groups that I've been involved in. So that was part of the reentry process for me. The last thing I would say about leaving Hoffman was I was always aware that writing was very difficult for me. I tend to be a social person and it's a can be a very isolating individualistic thing. I struggle with that, honestly. I would go through long periods of not writing.
When I moved to Winona, I got involved with not one, but two writing groups who really helped me move my memoir from pretty bad shape to a decent shape. And I even joined a book group. So the idea that that pattern of loneliness and withdrawing, which could feed into a writing block really well, got interrupted. And I think, again, that was a insight that I got in the process of understanding my relationship with my parents, particularly my father.
Wow. And you had all these things that systemically, the PTSD your father was navigating, the racism of being Puerto Rican, the discrimination coming from blindness, the mental health struggles of your mom so much out of your control as a little being, and so much that has been changed over time, the educational system, some of the awareness around race, some of the awareness around mental health, and certainly PTSD now. So much a product of the era in which you were raised.
Yeah. And I would say that certainly, particularly with this draconian budget cuts, a lot of mental health programs have been severely impacted. The cuts to Medicaid disproportionately fall on disabled people. So I feel like we've made some progress and now it feels like we're sliding backwards. I tend to be optimistic, but I also tend to be realistic that things have, in some places, gotten better. You know, the anti Latino sentiment is not toned down very much.
So, again, that difference as being seen as deficit is sort of haunting us again as a culture. Yes. What was it like for you to review your workbook and pull that out again in preparation for this conversation? First of all, damn it. I didn't know I had so many patterns. And also seeing that I had been able to address quite a few of them, but they're still there. Certainly around eating and diabetes, I have to be really, really careful. I noticed that we had a couple of launch events for
my book. And leading up to those, I was just eating my feelings. It doesn't go away. You get better at learning how to recognize them and then manage them. So It is a true I mean, part of being human is to have patterns. So then what's different is that we have more resiliency to them. We're not a victim when they show up. We can bounce back to their grip. Yeah. That's been my experience. I haven't seen a whole lot of new patterns.
You know, you you do something different like write a memoir, and then all of a sudden you realize, oh, I have some patterns I hadn't thought about. Damn it. Yeah. Has it been nice for you and your wife to have both attended? She went in 2010. Has it been nice? Yes. She would tell me about it. And, you know, I was like, well, that sounds interesting. But I had I didn't have any motivation.
But there was just enough stuff coming to a head in 2017 that I said, she's still in touch with one of the people or maybe two of the people from her Hoffman retreat. I didn't have that kind of connection, but I take a lot of the Hoffman classes, the webinars, and they're really helpful. And they're not too long and some really talented instructors. And sometimes, you know, it's again, spirits watching out for me. I'm getting ready to do
the first launch event. There's a thing about moving into your creative self, and it's, like, perfect. It's like, okay. Universe is having a smile because Vania needs this. Let's send it to him. You know? There's something you're talking to, Jim, which references something about feeling like the universe is supporting you. When we're in pattern, it can feel like the universe is conspiring against us.
But do you feel like the process supported you in in feeling like, oh, the universe is watching out for me. It's perfectly timed. Oh, this is such good fortune. Yeah. There's no question that going into the process you know, I had had several and, you know, I write about this in the memoir. Several experiences where I felt like nature really just came to my rescue or materialized in a way that became so obvious that even I could get it.
In the Hoffman experience, I was connecting with instructors and other people who tell about stories about how nature and spirit had combined to really be benevolent forces in their life. So there was something about having my experience validated by others. I was raised Catholic, so there was not a lot of tolerance for let's talk about spirits in nature, except for Saint Francis. Other than that. You're referencing something about the power of group work where other people inspire you
in spirit. I love that. Inspire. And the shared experience becomes part of the power of the experience. Yeah. Because it's sometimes you can feel a little bit woo woo. You know, you're too far out there. And you know your experiences have been powerful, but, like, who do you tell those experiences to and who will appreciate how powerful they were? And that was I found really very important for me in the process
of connecting with other people. What's it like to remember your process so long ago, some nine years ago? In preparation for this, you know, you gave me homework. So I had to go back and find my journal, which took me, like, half an hour. But I found the journal, and I started reading through it and Your student workbook. No. No. No. No. I had a a separate journal. A separate journal. I see. Yeah.
It's it's the writer in me. Right? And it was in the journal that I really was able to mine and realize how many gems had come from the experience and also where I struggle with it. But, yeah, I would recommend anyone who does the process definitely do the workbook. But I would encourage you to keep a journal because there's so much going on that it's hard to record it all. As much as patterns come up for you around writing, you something happens for you in
when you write, you you love it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And I have journals dating back to 1972. I use some of them for my memoir. And my next project is to do a memoir about the land that we lived in in Saint Peter, which we had basically brought back. It was a twenty year process. And, you know, you forget some of the experiences.
I would have experienced I'd be out clearing a trail for walking in the woods, and I'd look up and there'd be a great horned owl just looking at me like, what are you doing? What are you doing? So there was encounters that if you don't write them down, they just escape you. Jim, I'm so grateful for you sharing your story, giving us some insights from your process, from the memoir, and this next project sounds exciting.
I didn't know a lot of things about the writing process, but I found that in the publicizing and doing outreach for a memoir or any book, it's like a full time job. So I had thought, well, while I'm doing that, I'll also start working on the second installment of the memoir working on the land. And I've not been able to. So I'm looking forward to there being a lull where I can get back to it. I've already been talking with my writing groups about how do I
get back into it. The title is an I e y e for an I, letter I. Growing up with blindness, bigotry, and family mental illness. So an eye for an eye growing up with blindness, bigotry, and family mental illness. It's available through the University of Minnesota Press. So thank you for letting me do that. Jim, thank you for this conversation. My pleasure. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to our podcast. My name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and president of Hoffman Institute Foundation.
And I'm 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 hompaninstitute.org.