There was something about Hoffman and the experiential nature of it to kind of get beyond that really start feeling because I had lost the ability to tell you what I felt. If you were to ask me, how do I feel? My response was fine. And I literally couldn't tell you anything else. It's like, I'm fine. But I couldn't tell you I'm sad, that I'm frustrated, that I'm angry. The capacity to feel had just been lost. Hoffman gave that back to me.
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. Hey, everyone, and welcome. I'm Sadie. I'm here with Doctor. Cash Trivedi. Cash is a Hoffman grad. He's a gastroenterologist
for the past fifteen years. He owns his own private practice. He's a husband. He's a father. Cash, welcome. Oh, Sadie, I'm so excited to be here with you. Yeah. So good to see you and hear you. Yes. Thank you for being here. What I was appreciating about our connection, both of us having a background in medicine, this could be bridging the two. Hoffman is this experience of emotional presence, spirituality, which are often really not part of medical practice.
Beginning with this, what would you like for our listeners to know about you? Well, I consider myself a regular person. You know, I have listened to nearly all of the Hoffman podcasts. And before I did Hoffman, I really tried to learn as much as I could about it without actually learning the specifics about it because I wanted the unique
experience. But, you know, I think what you're saying in terms of there's so much actually the potential of spirituality and the potential of, especially, mental health and how we see that all the time and how it affects our bodies. It's kind of gotten a bit more clear since Hoffman. But personally, for me, I came to Hoffman for my own personal journey, and then whatever seems to bleed off into the professional
sense is kind of crazy. But, yeah, I see so much mental health affecting gut issues and people with severe belly pain or gastrointestinal issues. And, you know, there's so many people out there where you do every test and everything is negative, but this is kind of beyond the realm of objective data. And sometimes there's just not a test, and it seems like and I do explain this
to patients. I'm like, as many tests as we have, it's so common for us to do our procedures and take a look and do the test and everything is normal, but it's not normal. You know, more and more, I in myself, I see it. I think sometimes it's a kind of a healing of the spirit that needs to happen, kind of an awakening to one's quadrinity using Hoffman speak. I don't mean to be woo woo about it. Right? But for me, the real impact of Hoffman was personal, and that's kind of what brought me there.
Yes. So let's go there first. Tell us a bit about where you were before you came to the process. How did you know it was the right choice for you? What was happening? As long as I remember, I've struggled with depression, anxiety as well, but the anxiety aspect of it, for some reason, really started spiking. After I turned 50, maybe it was a midlife thing. I don't know. Just kind of a recalibration of what am I doing, where am I
at. I felt disconnected from myself. I felt disconnected from my work. I didn't like myself. I couldn't relate to my inner child anymore, though I tried doing various practices or whatnot. I knew something was there regarding childhood. I knew that there were some patterns there that I just was not able to unearth and no amount of therapy or sort of self investigation really seemed to touch it. So nowadays, when in doubt, ask ChattGPT. You said I knew I'd lost connection to
my inner child. How did you know that? What led you there? About a year ago, I started doing somatic therapy. So there's different kinds of psychotherapy. There's cognitive behavioral therapy and then DBT. There's a lot of different kinds, EMDR, for example. But I had tried a couple of those, and I don't know. It felt like that there wasn't any lasting positive effect. I mean, I'd feel better for a while, and then I would kinda go
back to my same patterns. My wife had done somatic therapy, and I said, why not? Let's just go ahead and do it. Somatic therapy has an experiential aspect. That's actually a big aspect about it, which is totally unlike what I do. I'm a intellectual guy. I stay in my intellect a lot, and that leads my solutions for everything. And I couldn't break out of that. I remember one time I was doing a session with my somatic therapist, and it involved visualizing
my inner child. And I remember just sitting on a bench. I was me, and I remember seeing my boy, and he was, like, six. And I wanted nothing to do with him. I felt so disconnected and almost disgusted by this little boy that was me, but I was just so absolutely disgusted by this kid. I remember years ago when I was doing some kind of therapy, I had asked that practitioner, what would happen if you killed your inner child?
Because I knew he was directing so many of my patterns, but I didn't know how to resolve that. And so when I was sort of trying to look for the next best thing, you know, it's always searching for a new way of resolving one's spiritual crises. I happened upon Hoffman, and I looked, I was like, I had never heard of this. What is this? What is the Hoffman process? And so I started looking it up. And fairly quickly, I was like, I need to do this. I need to do this yesterday.
It give me hope, and so I delved into it. You know, the wait list is, like, I think, six to seven months, and I was willing to go to Canada. I was like, I don't care. I had some time set aside maybe for a trip or something at the beginning of the year. So at least I wasn't booked then, and so it was a perfect opportunity. I happened to be called a couple of weeks before, the session started, and I was asked if I wanted to go to Petaluma
instead. And since I live in California, I said, of course, you know, I'd rather not deal with Calgary weather. So that's kinda what led me to Hoffman, but I was in a deep state of constant, constant disconnectedness and anxiety. It's like I felt the flight response and the freeze response, It's like I felt the flight response and the freeze response were just so daily and intense. And, you know, during my day, you know, I don't think most of my
patients or my staff could tell. In health care, we have to put on this mask because the people that we're seeing are hurting or afraid or scared, and we have to take it upon ourselves to be strong for them. They find out the person taking care of them was falling apart. The assumption is, oh my god. I can't do my job. But it was so exhausting to have to pretend all the time. It's an interesting thing you're describing, being comfortable as an intellectual and find the solution.
And you're describing a disconnect from your emotional aspect, your emotional child, and even sounds like a disconnect from body which led you to somatic therapy, and yet I can walk through my career and function as an intellect and no one knows. It's actually like a reflex. It's almost easier.
It's easier to be distracted by the ups and downs of a busy practice and almost not have to think or think in a different way, you know, think in an intellectual way rather than sort of sit there with all the discomfort and the confusion and the hurt and the anxiety and the depression. Yeah. It just this maelstrom. And you mentioned the flight and freeze experience within you. Can you tell us more about that? You know, for my entire life, I've always been seeking, like, okay. Why am I this
way? Why do I respond by distracting myself? Why do I feel like I can't connect with people? Why do I not like or love myself? I was always exploring this ever since I was young, and I had gotten into learning more about trauma responses and kind of investigating that a little bit more and learning about that. And it became pretty clear that my response was freeze, flight or freeze or fawn. You know, I'm not a fighting kinda person. So that would be my coping strategy.
As now I realize that as a young boy, I would distract myself or I would to be able to cope with not having parents there or having parents that were disconnected from me, I would ingratiate myself to them so that they know, like, I'm proving myself to them that I am lovable because inherently, I didn't feel lovable. And so these things would just kinda continue on and and manifest in adulthood. And I knew that and I could see that. I just didn't know how to kinda get beyond
it. And being so much a a person that lives in their mind and their intellect and felt like reading books or listening to books or podcasts or going to therapy sessions once a week would help me slowly break out of this quagmire. I realized I just needed something really experiential and safe and intensive and had the capacity to reset. Now I had
done retreats before. Like, there are these meditation retreats, Vipassana retreats, where you're silent for ten days and you meditate eight hours a day. I love those. And the Cloud nine kind of feeling lasted for a couple of weeks, but then life just intruded in and my patterns just sort of intruded in. But there was something about Hoffman and the experiential nature of it to kind of get beyond that, really start feeling because I had lost the ability to tell
you what I felt. If you were to ask me how do I feel, my response was fine, and I literally couldn't tell you anything else. It's like, I'm fine, but I couldn't tell you I'm sad, that I'm frustrated, that I'm angry. The capacity to feel had just been lost. Hoffman gave that back to me. It's an interesting thing. I hear a lot of people say I'm fine. I'm good. I'm okay. It's actually code for I'm really not okay. For you, it was I'm fine. I'm numb.
That's what it means. There was also a lot of shame with that too because here I am, a physician. I'm supposed to be on top of things. I'm supposed to know myself, know my patients, be able to take care of whatever comes up with them. Same thing with my staff and my colleagues. And I felt so not prepared or able to do that, yet I had to do that. I constantly felt like a flawed, broken person.
Could you take us to a moment in your process where you encountered your child and describe that experience? You know, I remember one part of the process where I wanted to share something. It was my boy coming out saying, hey. I'm excited to share something to the group. And I wanted to share, and I felt so excited to share. I felt like a little boy. And I was told, not right now. Kind of let's we need to kind of keep moving along, and maybe
we'll get back to you. And it never got back to me, and so I didn't have that chance to share. And it broke me, That boy and I was that boy at that time. I wasn't my adult self. I was this boy, and I was so sad and hurt and angry and disappointed, feeling kind of this unwantedness and not being loved. What it was was that shell of me that was keeping those feelings from coming out breaking. And I remember talking to Joe, who was my coach, about that and about how to kind of process this.
I was crying, and I felt just absolutely torn and ashamed and small, but it was what needed to happen for me to recognize that this was all the pain and suffering my boy was having and to hold it with kind of love and tenderness and to acknowledge it and to say it's okay, and for other people to say it's okay, and for me to be honest with it, and for me to, as a boy, be open to being hurt. Having the courage to say, but what about me? Oh, you don't have time for me.
But still coming out rather than hiding in the shadows and saying nobody wants to hear from me. Actually coming out and saying, hey. I want to be heard. And when that didn't happen, I survived it. The feelings hurt, and I survived, and I was fine. And the boy was fine, and he was still lovable, and he was still the sweet, innocent, precious thing.
That was one of many experiences, but one of those where I realized how resilient this boy was and has been and had to be, it allowed me to be able to visualize and then hold this boy and say, I got you. I got you. And I do that now. I catch myself, and I feel ashamed, or I feel unworthy, or I feel lost or confused. I will go to the bathroom at work and lock the door and just for, like, thirty seconds put my hands on my chest saying, sweetie, I got you.
And I would see myself not ignoring that boy on the bench, not running away from him, not hating him, not despising him, but just grabbing him and hugging him saying, sweetie, I got you. And I do. And my spirit has him, And then I forget, and then I do it again. And it's not a permanent process, but that is there. That resource is there where I can be gentle and kind to my boy. And it's allowed me to be gentle and kind with my real boy, my son, who's gonna be 10 this month.
Because the same struggles that I had with not being able to connect to my own little boy, I had problems connecting with him. There were times where I knew that I was gonna have to take care of him, like my wife was busy or whatever and it was me, that I wanted to run away. I did not want to hang out with him because I did not know how to connect or relate with him. It was my son was being the surrogate
of my own child. Right? And I was kind of behaving the same way to both, and it was very exhausting and uncomfortable. I would have trouble hugging him or being sweet with him, and I knew he felt that. And he was, I think, feeling the same rejection that I felt during episodes when I was young, you know, with my dad, with my stepmother. And those are things we delve through in Hoffman quite a bit. But after Hoffman, it is now
such a joy. I grab him, and I kiss him, and I hold him saying, sweetie, I love you. We're different together. And my wife has seen it. He's seen it saying, papa, I love you. When are you coming home? He hadn't done that in the longest time. But now he's like, hey, papa. When are you coming home? Or, like, hey. Let's hang out together. And, yes, sweetie. I wanna hang out with you. I wanna be with you. That has been one of the biggest transformations
that Hoffman has given me. One of the gifts is that I can connect with him in that way, and I'm like, damn. I wish I would have done Hoffman earlier. Because he's now gonna have to go to Hoffman to deal with the crap that he's had for me, which is which I get. But, the whole process wound up being so experiential and personal to feel those feelings with my boy so that I could actually feel what it's like to love your son in a way that's so connected and loving.
Not that he doesn't annoy me sometimes, and I don't annoy him. You know, it's not like everything's cloud nine. But the sweetness and gentleness with I have with him, the fun that comes out, the ability to play with him, like, I really wasn't able to access is now easier to access. You're describing something in mirroring. I think that's a really common experience
for parents that prevents connection. It's like if I meet you, my little one, in full on joy, I have to acknowledge where I've not allowed that in me. I have to confront how uncomfortable I am feeling my own emotions. Yeah. Totally. And on top of that, my boy was to my son, he was like, how dare you get all the love and the connection and the sweetness and the time because I didn't get that. If I didn't get it, you should be able to get
it. So he was jealous too. But holding all that stuff, you know, I mean, noticing and not sort of approaching it with like, god. How freaking stupid and shameful. But it's just like, ah, man, that must hurt. That hurts a lot. The hurt is another piece I wanna come back to because you described this moment of reconnecting with your child within you, it does give me the sense of, like, emotions are bursting out and we contain.
Yeah. Totally. I just had this subjective sense that I told my somatic therapist before I did Hoffman saying, you know what? I feel my spirit is like a coconut. It is so and you know how hard, you know, just coconuts from the tree are to open. Man, those things are, like, impossible. I was like, nothing is cracking that shell. And it was containing all these emotions and feelings and, like, how many Kleenex boxes I went through. Like, I hadn't really cried and emoted or felt such joy and
just the ups and downs in decades. Like, I don't remember ever feeling that as intensely as I did with Hopin. It was like all this stuff just needed to really be experienced because it was it was so forgotten almost. Do you think there's a connection between holding emotions in and a physical manifestation of that? Thousand percent.
If I reflect back on specific patients who are so ill, I mean, hospitalized every week because something in their body has just gone terribly wrong, pretty much all of those patients have had some sort of horrendous trauma as a child. Physical, sexual abuse, neglect, they've all had that in a really bad severe way. That trauma response
manifests especially in the GI tract. And how it manifests with what I see is somebody comes in and they are convinced they have a horrendous bleeding ulcer or a stomach cancer because it hurts so bad, like, in the pit of their stomach. They're crying and they're it's like and it was like, so this started at x time. Right? Maybe it started three weeks ago. Tell me what happened in your life three weeks ago.
My mom died, or it was my mom's funeral, or that's when my child left for college and I didn't have my kids at home, or something like that. Not always, but very, very often, something like that. So we do our due diligence. Right? I mean, you know, in Western medicine, there are a lot of limitations. The first thing is make sure you're not dying. Make sure you don't have something horrendous like a horrendous bleed, horrendous infection, a cancer.
And then after that, we may or may not be able to do anything. A test may or may not be able to find what's going. Invariably, these people who are having these symptoms, I do a scope on them. I take a look. We do all these tests. The scope looks pristine. The labs look pristine. Everything looked pristine. So at that point, I, as a clinician, sort of have a choice on how do I approach this. And
my approach has now been that look. Things look normal, which is good news, but also bad news because I don't have a lesion. I don't have a thing to explain this. But I will tell you what you're having is real, and what you're having may not be able to be detected by the tools that we have. But I see it all the time, And it doesn't mean you're faking it. It doesn't mean you're making this stuff up. It's very possible that these things have manifested
in this way in your body. Some people get horrendous headaches. You know, some people get neurological symptoms and they can't walk. And in your case, you being this hypothetical patient, it's this horrendous pain. And then we work on ways to try to at least medically deal with it. And then if they're able to get some maybe mental health help and, you know, kinda refer
there. But now I've also started incorporating kind of some of Hoffman's stuff without saying it's Hoffman about telling yourself just, hey. I got you. This one patient kinda comes to mind where he has been exploring a lot of trauma that he had during his work before he retired and all the GI symptoms that are coming
up at that. And then when I did that exercise with their hands on your heart and just taking a deep breath and just giving a hug to that little boy that's in them, they're like, oh my god. I just feel so much better. Not all these people, but a fair number of them will come back to me couple weeks, couple months later as time has gone on. And we're able to go down on the medications, and a lot of them wind up being fine. So to me, that aspect of medicine is the fertile exciting ground.
Moving on in terms of what I do, that's definitely an exciting potential place. It's a new frontier. What an amazing way to practice self compassion. And for you to model that for your patients, it is a frontier. It's like the old becoming the new again. Thousands of years ago, whichever the way shaman or before invention of modern technology, healers diagnosed and treated things through sensing auras or energy. I mean, I know it sounds kind of ruru, but there is
something there. And I think with the experiential nature of Hoffman, the Hoffman process allowed me to feel that light at times. And so I think it goes without saying that it's not like everything is right now. It's like things are roses and unicorns, you know. We've heard about the high that comes out after Hoffman. You know, after a couple of weeks, that high feeling wasn't there anymore. And it was hard to connect with, what am I feeling right? I was kinda going bad. I was kinda freaking
out. I was like, oh my god. I'm going back to what it was like before. But the Hoffman community that has been created, the ways we can continue through Hoffman and engaging the process, the various kinds of refreshers that they have, they always bring me back and get me that feeling of that place when I was there. What's great to know and really experience is the fact that what was there and what I found at Hoffman has always been there and will always be
there. What was there has always been there will always be there, and you have in your experience now, I've got you. I've got you. This is not a problem. This happens. I've got you. If you weren't afraid or, or wobbling, you wouldn't have the ability to come in and hold yourself Are doing that not only for yourself, for your son, for your patients in so many ways. What's also really great about that is I become my own resource.
Because for my whole life, I've always looked externally for affirmation, for doing well in school. Oh, wow. You're so smart. Oh, you're you're gonna be a doctor. Oh, that's great. You know, patients, they love you. I'm looking for these dopamine hits. Right? But they're all external to feed this void. Right? But now, just with Hoffman, I'm starting to learn, like, what is it like to be the kindest, sweetest, most loving parent or guardian figure that you can to
yourself. What does that look like? And be that to myself. It's a new place. I mean, obviously, I'm still learning and trying to engage that, but the tools that I learned at Hoffman and then practice, they allow me to come there easier.
It reminds me of that definition of love that we share on the first day around love flowing first to myself and then to others in my life because so much of what you've shared is around how you are present to your son, your patients, but coming from you holding that little boy on the bench that you didn't wanna look at. And I'm so glad, and thank you for sharing your story with us. Thank you. God, it's been a pleasure, an honor, and a joy to see you and to talk to you again. And, yeah,
it's been great. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to our podcast. My name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and president of Hoffman Institute Foundation. And I'm Rassen Grassi, Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute Foundation. Our mission is to provide people greater access to the wisdom and power of love. In themselves, in each other, and in the world. To find out more, please go to hompkinsinstitute.org.