That's the goal. The goal is freedom. The goal is your own happiness. The goal is joy. And it's hard to have as much joy and lightness as you can if you're holding on to old resentments. 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. Hello, everyone, and welcome. I'm Sadie, and I'm here with Simbi Hall. Simbi, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So let's dive right in. Tell us a bit about who you are, whether that's personally, professionally. So I will share that I'm Hoffman grad, obviously, and I did the process in November 2022. And it was a hundred percent one of the best things
I've ever done. It's the kind of thing that I wish I could give to everybody on the planet. Professionally, I'm a screenwriter, director, and a producer, but, you know, but it impacts everything in your life, you know, once you do the process. So, Simbi, before we began recording, you were sharing a really touching moment of sitting in front of your father who has not changed, and he did not hold the same charge for you. What experience you had inside of you is different. Let's begin there.
Maybe we start at the end of the story and go backward. One of the major I don't even know if the word is result of doing the Hoffman processors. One of the things that I've been working on was the relationship with my father. I have had a very complicated relationship with my father mostly because I wasn't raised with him and I felt, you know, very abandoned by him, You know, known him, but I could pretty much count on my hands how many times I've actually seen him.
And so I have resentment around that because I also have a lot of half siblings, you know, on his side that have had very different relationship with him. Not easier or better, but different and present. And I feel that up until, you know, recently, you know, you idealize what you don't have. You know? That's something I've discovered that I do, that I think, oh, it's this way. If you had a father, it would be like this. If only if only that. And because I didn't,
then x y z are true. And it's really been the homework of my life because I started in the the self awareness journey or the, like, really trying to fix things is really what I was doing. Trying to fix things from when I was a a small child. I had my own subscription to Psychology Today from when I was seven. And always coming from my head and always trying to analyze and figure things out. And so to cut to what happened this past Father's Day, and
my birthday is always around Father's Day. So my birthday has always been a bit of a trigger because it's the duality of, like, yay, it's my birthday, and I don't have a father. It was always a pair. One of my brothers, his daughter was graduating from Stanford, and so he was FaceTiming the whole family. So I was calling it, like, Nigerians around the world because people just kept popping up from all over the place to, you know, be present for this incredible graduation.
My father was on the FaceTime, and it was the first time, Sadie, that I talked to him or looked at him, and there was no resentment. There was no and or but, however, you didn't. It was just, oh, I love him. You know, what I was saying to you before is that he hasn't changed. He is a 100% a Nigerian narcissist. You know? So it isn't like, oh, there's been some big transformation. The transformation was me, was just in what I was somehow able to just let go of. I started crying.
It sounds like it took you by surprise. Yeah. It did. I wasn't expecting to get the FaceTime, so it wasn't like I'd done any big preparation for it. So that was by surprise. And I wasn't expecting that emotion, and I wasn't doing any, like, quote unquote work before to prepare for anything. It just happened, and I recognized it, and I felt it more than intellectually recognized it because I was just crying, and then I felt lighter and joyful.
And then what was really wild, he ended up talking to my mom a couple times. Like, I think they talked the next day and then a a few times that week. She didn't have any resentment. I love what you've shared this moment of realizing there is no resentment. But what is there? Tears. Yeah. Lightness. Yeah. Joy. And the fact that you were surprised by it, it speaks to a spontaneity of that as this sort of spontaneous fill in the blank. What is it? This spontaneous
Just awareness of love. Like, he loves me. And that and it makes me wanna cry because I ain't gonna cry because and I don't, like, I don't have, like it's it's not like some perfect experience, but this feeling that people can love you and it not necessarily look the way you think it ought to look, and that evolves, and that people have various capacities. We all do. I'm not coming at this like I'm perfect and your capacity is less than mine. I don't mean it
like that. But I mean, nobody can perfectly meet all of your needs as you're having them. And I think that often with our parents, we expect that even once we're adults. What I feel like maybe I did was I held on to you owe me from then because you didn't do anything, and you could have, in my opinion.
And now it's like, that's the resentment. It's like holding all the old stuff of what hadn't been done, and then you're just constantly piling it on because there's no way really to make up for that. And so then you're the one carrying it. And one of the really incredible things that happened during the process that I sort of realized after one of the exercises that we did, I remember writing out this whole story of, like, why could it have been this way? Why could
it have been this way? And it's just you journaling what you might wanna say or what might have happened in their life. We don't know. And then finding out later that a lot of what I'd actually journaled about was very close to how it was, like, emotionally. Like, it just made me feel like, oh, there's, like, this reservoir of knowledge if we get curious about a situation rather than just reacting and responding based on our own space and projecting out.
And then thinking, like, somebody should behave this way or that way, and if they don't, it necessarily means they don't love me. They don't care. They're whatever they are. And then responding from your assumed idea, it's it's transference. You're describing a perspective, a way of understanding your own unmet need around his presence that has evolved since you first took the process.
And I've heard you say no one can meet every need as it's arising real time, and that doesn't mean he didn't or doesn't love me. How did you come to that? How did you get there? Because that's an incredible ending. How did you even know that you needed to do the work? I have always known I needed to do the work. I had a good childhood. It wasn't like I was in some trauma laden dynamic all the time. But even as a child, your parents can't possibly meet every need you have as it arises. They don't
know it. They don't recognize it. They don't have the skills, whatever. It doesn't mean they're bad parents. They're just human beings. I feel like I've always been doing the work, and because my family didn't look like other families, then as a kid, I was like, well, what's going on? Why is this one different? So I was raised by my mom and my nana, who was technically my step great grandmother. So she wasn't biological, but that obviously didn't
matter. She was my nana. She was so those were my parents, and I had a dog who helped in raising me. And so, you know, this was a funny family, as as one of my cousins said to me as a kid. But as an adult, the work continued, so I was on
my own quest. Then I went to therapy, and then I've been a practicing Buddhist the majority of my life and I feel like that daily work of self reflection, chanting Nam myoho renge kyo to bring out your highest potential and everyone around you to be sort of acting from what we call in Buddhism, our Buddha nature, what we call in Hoffman, our higher nature, our lightened self. That should be the team
leader. When we do the quad checks, when you have that part of yourself, really acknowledge the other parts and kind of take them on like a divine mother in a way more than a human mother can do. And say, okay, emotional self, I hear you. Okay, body, I hear you. Okay, intellect, I hear you. Here's how we're gonna do this day. And so I think from being consistent and doing all of that work, then things get to evolve, and it doesn't have to be hard.
Because I think also when people hear the word work, it sounds like, like, deep effort, and you're working through, you're fighting through something. And I'm not saying there's not that part of it too, but I think when you sort of laid a foundation, then you have the tools to meet whatever situation comes your way. And then you can if you're self reflecting, you're able to see how you're meeting it now versus how you might have met it ten years ago or more.
You're describing having a foundation that sounds deeply spiritual and finding a through line with what we call at the Hoffman process, your spiritual self or the light that's within you, and that being the foundation for growth to evolve as opposed to something you force. This foundation and this knowledge that you wanted to fix something. You spoke about getting psychology today when you were seven. So something within you saying, we need
to address this. You also spoke about your awareness of what was missing in feeling abandoned by your father and how you were in some ways looking for that throughout your life. If only this then that. Can you give us one example of how you saw that playing out for you before you came to the process? The body can become the battleground between the
intellect and the emotion. So for me, one of the largest battleground moments in belief systems about, because I don't have a father, here's this thing that's happening, or because of him, here's this thing that's happening. So I had a kidney problem growing up. It wasn't
discovered. I actually discovered it in junior high school because I was in an advanced science program where we got these case histories that we got to study, and then we were able to go to the medical school nearby and see the med students working on these cadavers of the case studies that we had been studying. So as divine intervention would have it, one of them that I had was this woman who had passed away. She's like 80 some year old lady, and she had some symptoms in her history
that were like mine. And I remember sitting on my mom's bed doing my homework, and I was like, this is what I have. And it was a simple enough thing that the tube from the kidney to the bladder was too small. The ureter was too small, and it was backing up and killing the kidney. A simple blue dye test would have shown this. Because I had that case study, now my mom could say she has this and, like, go and force them to do the blue dye test. And in fact, that's
exactly what it was. And so then from '14 to '21, I had a kidney surgery or some kind of surgery almost every year to fix it, and they ended up taking it out. So this is, you know, inherited from my father's side. Somebody else in the family that we found out later had that. In my mind, even before we knew that, in my mind, I felt like this is about my father.
This is about not having a father. And if I just had the family history, in theory, you go to a doctor and you say, there's this family history. Can you please check this, this, and this? And they do it and you find it, and maybe it could have been fixed when I was a child. I have a friend whose daughter had something similar, and they were able to fix it as a kid, and so she has both her kidneys. I didn't have that. And I'm fine. My left kidney does all the work, and so you can't even tell.
I only have one, and we can live with three quarters of one. So it's fine. But for years, I was just so upset, and it felt like such a punishment. It's like I'm already being punished by not having a present father. And now because of your effed up genes, this is how I thought about it. I've been through all this pain because by the tube being too small and backing up and killing the kidney, I was having consistent kidney infections.
So I was in a tremendous amount of pain all the time, and it got to where I now still have a very high tolerance for pain because of that, which is good and not good because you can ignore things that you shouldn't. So as an example, when they were doing one of the kidney surgeries, I got a terrible infection and they had to put ice sheets on me. They actually thought I was gonna die or that
I was gonna become septic. And my mother called my father to tell him, and he said, by the grace of God, she'll be okay, and then didn't call back for three years. So that was hardcore proof that you don't care. You don't love me. I have nothing to you. Like, who doesn't call back for three years? One of the things I realized during the process was, well, maybe he was scared. Maybe he was scared. Maybe he was ashamed. I don't know. But it doesn't have to mean that I'm unlovable.
And I feel like that is one of the main takeaways is that we're always telling ourselves stories, and we're assigning meaning to things to work with the story that we've married ourselves to. We have no idea really why anybody does anything. For me, it's like I thought, well, I don't have all the information. I can talk about how somebody made me feel. That's real and valid, of course.
But I don't have to assign a meeting that means I'm never gonna have what I want, or nobody is ever going to love me, or whatever. You don't have to make something mean more than it is. Those are the facts of what happened. Why they happen? I don't know. That's up for debate. But I now feel like the story I've been telling myself since that happened of, like, see, there's proof he doesn't love me isn't true. Even if it were true, that doesn't mean that I'm unlovable.
Regardless of what's true for him, you know what's true for you. Your relationship with him has not changed. Are you saying it's not required to in order for you to feel free or to heal? I've been through many, I wanna say, like, iterations of this relationship. The little girl, Simbi, just wanted a dad even though she never would have said that. Then there was the teenage simby who felt very divorced from her body because
of all the stuff I just said. There's so much to impact in the teenage simby of just feeling, in general, rejected by men, but definitely starting from the father stuff. Then there was the angry part where I really and that's why I went into therapy because I was really just wanted to, like, physically hurt him because, again, I was blaming my physical pain from all the kidney stuff on him. And I'm like, I would like to give you a little bit of of a
taste of this. So there was, like, the vengeful thing, and there's so many other stories of him physically closing doors in my life to access to him and just being just not available. And then, of course, there was also the part that wanted an apology, that wanted an acknowledgment and an apology, and that that would fix it. Not for me. I'm not saying for anybody else that that is not valid and required, but I didn't get it and realized that I probably never will.
And now from where I'm sitting now with the experience that I just shared earlier, I also feel like it doesn't matter. This is wonderful because I'm not waiting for somebody else to make me feel better. I love this image of the divine mother that you mentioned. You are such a strong woman. What have you come to know about that? Because there is also this positive legacy that our parents leave. That's right. That's right.
About being a strong woman, I have mixed feelings about it because I feel like it's, kind of like a black woman trope and expectation to be a strong woman. Black women in general have a different level of weight to carry in this society. So you build muscles when you do heavy lifting or you fall over, you know, and you're out, and I'm not about to be out. So you just have to be strong. And I even used to have resentment, and maybe I still do. I don't know. Resentment about that.
What I am that I'm proud of is I'm resilient. I keep going. And so I'm resilient in all the ways, emotionally, physically, spiritually, intellectually. I'm always a, okay, and the store closes, and what else are we gonna do? How do you see your strength showing up for you in this understanding of your father that you've recently come to? That, I was strong enough to keep moving forward. Even just taking the FaceTime I was telling you about, I could have not accepted it.
I could just hide and be like, door closed. And I did that for years. I didn't talk to him. And that was part of this process where I really was at a place at that time where I felt like this isn't healthy for me. I'm not gonna engage in it. And I think that sometimes you have to do that in relationships.
But the reason that I did that, it was for self protection because I was still believing the story of if you disappoint me, if you treat me a certain way, if you say a certain thing, I'm assigning the meaning still to myself of I'm not valuable, lovable, whatever. But if I remove that meaning, you can still choose to not have people in your life that aren't meeting how you wanna be treated, of course. And, yes, we should.
But if somebody calls me stupid, that's not gonna hurt my feelings because I know I'm not stupid. But if somebody abandons me, then because I had the belief system, that's just always what's gonna happen. That is painful because I believe that to be true, that I'm going to be left. You know, I believed that. So then when it shows up or it feels like it's gonna show up, that is hurtful. But I feel like what's happened with him is I've unplugged his actions from
that belief system. Like, I'm not walking around believing that anymore. So then I'm free of that, and I can just be present in the moment that we're in rather than waiting for the abandonment to happen or the hurt to happen. I love what you've said. There can be some strength and anger. And we talk about this at the process. There is a strength in that. What you've just described beautifully though, is the strength to question your own narrative, the strength to ask what happened to him.
Maybe he was scared. Maybe that's not true, but it sounds like you're enjoying the benefit of freedom of unplugging the connection. Right. Because that's the goal. The goal is freedom. The the goal is your own happiness. The goal is joy, and it's hard to have as much joy and lightness as you can if you're holding on to old resentments. It's taking up too much space. And, again, it's not saying, like, just let
people treat you however they want. No. You can still not have them in your life and not carry the resentment. Whatever you want, just drop the resentment some kind of way. Your description about writing what may have happened to your father and then finding out later that some of that was not far from the truth. How do you describe that? I feel like on a cellular level, we're all connected, especially if you're talking about, like, in your
actual DNA lineage. We have epigenetics, so we have information that's passed on to us through our ancestors into ourselves, and they express themselves in various ways that we have no idea, even though they've done some studies. And then I feel like on a creative level, just as a writer in general, I feel like writing is a form of channeling.
I would say that if you are doing emotional investigative work with someone who is in your DNA lineage, you're going to get answers, whether it's in a dream, it's in a feeling, you meet somebody, and they present something. You're like, well, that could be the case, what however it comes. For me, it was through writing that can give you an answer or give you another perspective even if it's not an answer. It can give you another perspective or give you a question that can lead you to an answer.
So I feel like if you're open and seeking, you can get guidance from a stop sign. You know, like, really. It's also evident of this connection. Even though he wasn't there for you growing up or, you know, you said you've seen him a handful of times in your life, there was still a presence in his absence even in an emotional level that you were able to access what you spoke of as reservoir of knowledge. Coming to a sense of peace around that, what do you think that offers you going forward?
With him, I feel like, specifically, it offers me an ability to just enjoy him for what he is without having a filter on and always referring to the past of what wasn't done, hasn't been done, whatever, and just being present. Like, we talk about, like, just being able to be just in the moment.
I think for other relationships, just the exercise of being curious as to why someone is behaving in a way that we don't enjoy rather than making a story about what that must mean because we're always so certain. And being curious and then deciding again how you're gonna process it and how you're gonna respond. I just keep coming back to the you're not worthy or lovable because those are some of my things. I had something very interesting happen just recently with two long term friends.
One is a mom person in my life, you know, around my birthday, and we were gonna have a birthday party, and it was canceled. And then I went to I can't trust anybody. That stuff, that narrative came right back up because the patterns still exist. However, they're not so deeply rooted. So as soon as it came up, I was like, well, that's not true. And it was almost kind of, like, surprising that that even came up.
And then other friends were upset and had their feelings about it and felt like, you know, indignant and mad for me. And then rather than cutting that person off, wouldn't do because I love her, and also that wanting to cut things off is really like the protective coating. Again, the little girl thing. Rather than doing that, I just, like, went and saw her, and all of that melted away. And I saw, like, oh, she's just not okay right now. And she said that, and it was like, not a big deal.
I don't even care about the party. It was just the trigger of it thinking and being not thought of or discounted in some way. And I thought to myself, this is how wars start. People have old hurts. We talk about transference, you know, in the process. People have old hurts. Something happens or somebody reminds them of something from however long ago, and then they respond to this person or this situation from the old hurt, usually respond badly.
And so I was really proud of myself that I didn't stay in that belief system for any real amount of time and that I didn't let it color our relationship. It just didn't take roots. And I credit the process for that because I think what it does is it does uproot those narratives. And by maintaining some of the tools that we learn there, you're continually weeding the garden. You're continually pulling those things out because because things in life are gonna come up and you're gonna be like, no.
That's a weed. That's not true. Let's take it out. Versus if you don't do any work, life has been just giving miracle grow to those belief systems. What I really am hearing from you is this curiosity about another person's experience when something's hard rather than evidence that I'm not lovable. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing. Is there any last thing you'd like to share with us before we go? Anything that you didn't say that you'd like to?
As a storyteller, I feel like that has always been who I was before I knew that that was a job and that I did that with my Barbie dolls. And so it always had a sense of play. Like, everything that I'm doing now, like, I was doing with Barbies. Like, I would have my friends come over, and I would tell them the the script, essentially, of the play that we were gonna enact with the dolls, and I was directing and and world building. Like, it's all the same
things. And I'm saying that because I feel like to be happy, I need to be as much of that little girl as possible. I feel super lucky in that what I was doing naturally as a little girl, I'm doing in the adult version of my life. And then also Hoffman helped me recognize it in a different way because of the element of play. Even the being curious about, like, what's going on with somebody else that can be done in a playful way, like by yourself. They
don't even have to be involved. Obviously, it's more fun if you're with somebody else, But just to just take it as way, like, well, let's pretend. Like, maybe it's this, and it can be ridiculous and outlandish. And then suddenly you're you're laughing about it. And then some of the sting of whatever story you've been telling yourself gets unplugged if you can play with it. This is brilliant.
So recognizing in a way you're authoring or building your own story, and if some part of that is hurting you or leading you to the conclusion that you're not lovable, you can question it. The strength to question that, to play with it, to be curious, and to write a new narrative. Drop the mic. Yes. Beautiful. Oh, my gosh. You're radiant. Thank you so much for being here with me. Thank you so much. Thank you for all of your help and support. I love you. I love you.
Thank you for listening to our podcast. My name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and president of Hoffman Institute Foundation. And I'm Rassie Grassi, Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute Foundation. Our mission is to provide people greater access to the wisdom and power of love. In themselves, in each other, and in the world. To find out more, please go to hompaninstitute.org.