It was so intense. There was so much to work through in a week. I mean, I came out of that floating on air. It was really incredible. And my kids saw it immediately. They were young, you know, and they're like, dad, you've lost your stress face. Welcome, everybody. My name is Drew Horning, and this podcast is called Love's Everyday Radius.
It's brought to you by the Hoffman Institute, and it's stories and anecdotes and people we interview about their life post process and how it lives in the world radiating love. This episode contains graphic descriptions of trauma, substance abuse, and reproductive grief. Please use your discretion. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Hoffman podcast. Steve Chechu is with me. Welcome, Steve. Thank you, Drew. Nice to be here. How are you doing? I'm doing really well, really
well. I just came back off a weekend with my daughter who was at a ski competition and, she did well and she was, skied with joy in her heart. And that's what I was hoping. And in kind of a consequential ski event called free ride, big mountain, where she's jumping off cliffs and tight trees and very hard event to watch as a parent. Just praying for her safety and she had a great result and, and it was really, it was great. It's great for the family.
Ma was there with my wife and we just got back. And so, yeah. Wonderful weekend. Thank you. Beautiful. So, Steve, it's a bit ironic that your daughter's doing all this big mountain skiing, jumping off cliffs, because you have quite an experience you had many years ago, didn't you? Yes. I did. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Yes. I was caught in an avalanche in a helicopter ski trip outside of Revelstoke, British Columbia. We were skiing in a group of 12,
but we're skiing in the trees. And, you know, you each have a partner in that particular accident. My partner was killed and I survived kind of miraculously. I still to this day, don't really know. Can't comprehend
how that happened. When you're skiing in the trees in Canada, you're in these kind of bowling lane size openings where you ski for a while and can make maybe five, seven, 10 turns, And then you'll come to what's called a tree fence where the tree is really narrowed down and then you have to make either very short turns to get around that tree fence. And then that bowling lane size alley will, will open again for you. And that can go for, you know, a 1,500
vertical feet. And so when the avalanche hit, my partner had gone first and I was getting ready to go. We had gotten roughly two feet of no new snow overnight on top of what was very cold snow that had been sitting around for two weeks. In that condition, you get what's called surface horror, which is a, dangerous bad layer so that that new snow can slide off that layer. But typically in the trees, the trees anchor the snow. So that doesn't happen.
Partner goes first. I was gonna start in his track, but the snow started to solidify, get a little bit warmer and a little too fast. So I said, you know what? I'm gonna just hike around these two little small pine trees and find my fresh line, which I did. And And as soon as I made one turn, I hear the scream avalanche and I look over my right shoulder and I thought it was just gonna be slough coming through the trees, maybe enough to
knock me down. Instead, I see these giant blocks, which are slabs, you know, they're two feet high and they're going at an enormous rate of speed and they're hitting the trees and they're exploding and they're just like this thud. And I look over my right shoulder and then over my left as I'm skiing and I see that the slide has, has progressed further on the left side. So I basically make a snap decision to
ski one big sweeping turn. And I see a group of old hemlock trees, large growth hemlocks, and I come right in behind it, drop my poles and I lean back and the slide hits the trees, goes right around me. And I think, oh, I'm gonna survive. Like it just went around me. But instead it came underneath me and picked me up like a hovercraft about 10 feet in the air. And then I start going straight down the slope in the middle of the avalanche. So I'm on my back. I've got both my skis
on. I dropped my poles to down my pole straps on, which thank God, because you can't really swim if you're holding on your poles. And I started doing the backstroke to stay up on top. And as I'm doing the backstroke, the trees are whizzing by my head. And I'm, I'm saying to myself mentally, I'm like, wow, this is, you know, really dangerous because these are removable objects. If I hit one, it's gonna be consequential.
And as I started to pick up speed, I realized that I had to hit one because if I didn't, the next one after that would kill me for sure. So I still had the, some directional capability because I had my skis on. So I'm doing the backstroke and I see this giant hemlock and I'm like, that's the one I've gotta hit
this tree. And I kind of steered my way into it and put both feet out in front of me and I hit the tree and I literally saw my right leg do a three sixty spin to the right and a three sixty spin to the left, but kept going. And so now I've got a broken leg and I'm continuing to swim and I'm like, okay, I'm picking up speed again. It slowed me down just a hair. So I'm coming down and I get through one tree fence. And then the next tree fence I come to,
I'm like, okay, this is it. Like, Like, I'm not going to get through this one. This one's going to take me out for sure. And everything goes dark and I can't remember. I just don't recall how I got to the other side. And to this day, I still don't remember how or why or what happened, but I get to the other side and I continue down the slide and, you know, we've gone probably 600 vertical feet and I see another tree and I try to grab it with my left arm.
The snowpack is so deep there. The top of that tree, like it was 15 feet, but there's 15 feet of snow. So that's a 30 foot tall tree. And I try and grab the top of it with my left arm, almost pulled my shoulder out of the socket, continue to go down the hill and I'm still doing the backstroke. And then finally it starts to slow down. I'm like, okay, I think I'm going to make this. And oddly started to feel protected, like some powers over looking and I'm not going to
die. And so I start to slow down. And then, when I, I finally come to rest, I've got the snow under my armpits with my arms up above. I have my left leg kind of like a contortionist with the ski tip facing my right shoulder on my left leg, completely bent behind me. And then my right leg is, is broken is off to the right, but I'm compacted and snow. I cannot move. My brother was on this trip and he saw me go by him and he's like, swim,
swim. Swimming is the stroke people do in the really only thing you can do to try and prevent yourself from being buried by an avalanche. You swim to stay up on the surface. Like if you were in the big ocean wave and you get pounded by that wave, you're constantly trying to swim to the surface, right? It's the same kind of feeling. And while that snow is moving and there's a lot of air in it, no problem. But as it starts to consolidate it, basically all the air goes out of the snowpack and
it turns to cement. So when you finally come to rest, you're hoping that you're near the surface. And if you are, you're gonna try and punch a hole around your face and get your hands to create a cup so that you can breathe so that you don't breathe in your own CO2. And that's what kills a lot of people if you're buried. Now I was super fortunate that I wasn't buried. I was just up to my chest and my armpits. So the swimming, you know, saved my life, for sure.
I've never done anything so animalistic and difficult in my life. Like, you know, when you're gonna die, you're like, okay, you do everything you can not to. It worked out my favor that way. So my brother then comes down to me and was like, Hey, I broke my leg. I broke my leg, but my left leg feels like I'm gonna get snapped in two because I'm so out of position. And so he digs me out, gets my left leg free, takes that ski off. And then we continue to dig and dig around
my right leg. And I looked down and I'm like, okay, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen with my own body. My right leg is at a 90 degree angle to the right at the boot top. So I have to pick up my boot and straighten my leg in an intense amount of pain. And I could, you know, just feel the bones kind of grinding on one another as I do that. So now I'm, I'm like completely discombobulated. I'm frantic. And then we're like, where's Steve?
He was in front of me. So other people start to finally come around and they start looking for, for Steve. And he turns out to be about a 100 feet below me over a rollover and I can't see him. And so my other friends in that group, they're performing CPR. They dig him out. His hand was up above the snow. That's how they found him. Other helicopter companies come through. They ski past me with these big orange boxes with defibrillators and they race past me and they're like,
what are your injuries? I'm like, I broke my leg. They leave me and they go into one that's more life threatening and they're down there trying to revive Steve. And my brother goes halfway down to that rollover and he's looking down at our other friends and he's, he kind of puts thumbs up, thumbs down and he gets the thumbs down and, you know, he lets me know that Steve had perished. And so obviously incredibly emotional, very distraught at this point.
Now I'm like, okay, how are they gonna get me out of here? It's snowing very hard. It's, somewhat of a blizzard. We hear a helicopter approach. They put me on a gurney. They drop a long line from this hovering helicopter. That's a 100 feet and the line's not long enough. It can't reach the gurney.
So they fly away and I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't think I could handle being in a sled behind, you know, one of these guides trying to navigate me through the trees and in Canada, they're not allowed to administer pain medication on the slope. So I had no pain medication. So it had been three hours and I literally thought that my leg was cut off inside my boot. I couldn't feel it anymore. I was telling my brother, I think I cut my leg off. He's like, no, no, it's still attached.
And I was pretty much delirious. So then the helicopter goes away and I think, oh my gosh, it's not gonna come back. And then fifteen minutes later, you hear the thud of the rotors and it comes back with 150 foot long line to give you a sense of the size of these old growth trees are that tall. Right. So he drops the long line down to the gurney. There's a guide that actually holds on to
the cross bracing of this. It's like a triangulated cable goes to each edge of the gurney and he stands on the gurney and holds it. And so they start to lift me up out of these trees. And as we get to the top, the trees are swaying in the wind and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna get ping ponged off the tops of these trees. The helicopter pilot just pulls me straight up like a beautiful maneuver. And I didn't hit any of the trees.
And now we start to fly to what I'm thinking is either in a hospital or an ambulance or whatever. And we're literally 3,000 feet above the valley floors in between these giant mountain ranges. The cable that's holding the, to the helicopters in this big C shape and I'm just going, oh my gosh, like if that thing snaps or the bolt lets you go, I'm gonna fall to my death. And like, I couldn't handle it. I was just about freaking out here.
They land the helicopter and put me into a smaller helicopter, which he calls an A star where they pull out the seat next to the pilot. And they had to wedge me in, in the gurney in this helicopter and my feet got pushed up against the dash and basically passed out from the pain. So wake up in mid flight land and there's an ambulance waiting on some county road. That's, you know, like an hour from the hospital and I get into the ambulance and they finally have laughing gas that they can
give me. And I'm I'm sitting there and I put the mask on and I, I felt like dark fate. I was just like, you know, sucking in this laughing gas, trying to, you know, give me some relief. And I get to the hospital and they're like, okay, we're gonna pull your boot off. And I was like, oh, they're gonna cut it off with a saw. And they're like, no,
we gotta take it off. And so my brother and, and when two other people on the trip, you know, they open the cuff and they pull the boot off and I pass out again. And then the third time I pass out is when he sets the leg. So then we, it turns out that I'm, you know, I'm in the hospital. They tell me that they can't perform the surgery.
And this is where the story is quite wild because my wife was there and normally this is a boys trip and Steve, who was one of the, you know, it was my partner who was killed, who organized this trip. He's like, you know, I told him, I said, Hey, we've been trying to get pregnant. We've been having difficulty. My wife's the happy lady. And she wants to come. And he's like, you know, the rules, there's no wives, no girlfriends. Like, if you wanna make babies, go to the beach.
And I was, you know, upset about that. I was like, no, you know, I've paid and I'm going. And my wife was like, I'm going to, and I'll just come and stay in a different hotel and they won't know the difference and you can come visit me at night. So that's what we did. That was our plan. So it turns out that she's there. She's a nurse and I had her emotional support and it was amazing and incredible that she was even on this trip. We find out that the weather
is getting worse. It, the snow had turned to rain. Avalanches are coming in from all sides of the highways and they're closing down this little town of Revelstoke and there's no way in or out. And they say like, this is our last weather opportunity. You can get in this helicopter and go right now. I was in a hospital gown. I had no, you know, no clothing on other than this hospital
gown. I'm sitting on a bare bottom of a helicopter, not in the seat because my leg is extended because it's in an air cast and she's got her back to me and my back is to her so that she could support me because she's a nurse. They gave her the ability to actually inject me with Dilata as needed for pain. So we fly from Revelstoke to Kelowna. We get a private airplane that comes up from Telluride that will fly me to Aspen for surgery.
I get to Aston at twelve midnight, and they perform surgery at one in the morning. And they did what's called a nail surgery where they insert a nail down my tibia, which was a compound tibia, fibula fracture where the where the bone had actually broken the skin. And that's why I felt like I'd lost my leg because it actually had penetrated the skin. There was a fair amount of blood in the boot and everything else. And they did that surgery. So I'll fast forward.
We conceived the night before the accident. I was like, wow, this is the silver lining, a soul for a soul. If I can get anything out of this, what's that sign from the universe? And that's what we thought it was. Three months go by a difficult recovery and we lose that pregnancy. So I'm starting to hit some really deep depression. I'm also starting to get some really significant survivor guilt over the accident because why did Steve die? Why did I live? How did I make it through there? He had
two children. I had no children, you know, all these things. And then we had this little argument before we ski just over something silly about turn shape. I make a big turn shape and I take up room and he was like, you're taking up too much room. You're not leaving me on track powder. And I said, okay, you go first. I'm so sorry. Like you go, I'll go second this time. And so he goes
first and he gets killed. So I'm starting to think like all these things are, what if I had stayed home and did go to the beach instead of going on the strip, would that have been a different outcome? So I'm starting to really have these heavy survivor guilt emotions that are taking over. So again, fast forward further down the road, now we're, we get fourteen years away from this. And I still don't realize
how much this is weighing on me. I'm now starting to develop a home for sale and in a market that I saw was improving, but started to stall and started to have some really heavy dark thoughts. You know, I had that. And then I also had a relationship with my father that wasn't really close. It wasn't that there was really any problems. It was just that we never had a relationship where we could talk to each other, where I could call him up on the phone and say, Hey, I'm struggling with
this. Or can you help me with that? Or, or, or he would ask me what's going on in your life and how are you doing? And it just wasn't that relationship our entire lives. I left home when I was 18, I moved to Aspen. You know, she didn't approve and I just never had the ability to get to the bottom of what the issue was. So all these things are starting to compound. And my wife is like, you're not doing well. We need some type of intervention. We need something
to help you move through these issues. And she had discovered the Hoffman process. A friend of hers had gone through it. She introduced that concept to me. And I was like, Hey, whatever I can do to help. Cause our relationship was struggling and my parenting was struggling and all these things. And I think what happened was the stress of this decision to build a home and to risk financially a lot by collateralizing a lot of the assets that we had to fail.
It could be almost catastrophic financially. So all this started to weigh on me to the point where I was like, I have got to do something. And so Hoffman was what we decided and I just decided all of a sudden, look, I'm all in. I'm going to go into this thing with nothing but good intentions and go a 100%. I had realized that drinking was creating depression for me. I would drink one day later, I'd be fine. But two days later,
I would be depressed. And I could almost identify how bad the depression was by what alcohol I was drinking. Baku was the worst. Then I went to tequila and it was like tequila is fine. And then it wasn't fine. And then beer wasn't fine. And finally I decided that alcohol wasn't serving my highest and best purpose and I quit cold turkey on my 50 birthday. So
that was good. Cause going into Hoffman, I, I was not drinking, not imbibing in anything and went in there with a clear head and said, okay, I can do this without any kind of crutch without any kind of, outside influence. So whatever I feel is is truly what I'm gonna feel. And I think that was really important for me to do that. Take us to Hoffman. You're there. Maybe even take us to a moment in time. What's happening in your week?
I think it was the second day. I don't know if I've ever been sadder in my life where I realized that this relationship with my father was so poor that I just didn't have the ability to talk to him, you know, man to man and, and have this relationship. And it saddened me because he was now in the throes of dementia and Parkinson's. The writing was on the wall that I could never have that conversation with him. It had passed. And so that realization hit me like a ton of bricks.
It was from that moment of like being at the lowest of lows that I was able to build myself back up during that week. And, you know, I had a tremendous coach in Kevin. So we worked through that. You know, there were moments in the Hoffman where during that week where I was able to tap into my spirit self. I have a belief in the afterlife, and I think that it's been informed by certain
things. And one of those things in that avalanche was when Steve's body was being taken out, you know, on a sled behind a guide, there was a person that came to visit me in the hospital that was one of the participants in the trip. And he was a good friend of mine from Telluride. And he comes to me and he says, he goes, Steve, I don't even know how to tell you this, but I'm just gonna tell you. And I don't know why the guide came to me, because this is the
first time I've been on this trip. You know, you've been on this trip with all these other friends. You've been doing this for ten years, but he came to me and I'm coming to you to tell you this story. The guide picked him out and he said, I'm not a religious man. And I'm just gonna tell you what I saw. I've taken Steve's body out. I come around the tree and there he is. He's standing right in front of me and he says, tell my girls I'm okay.
So this is the ski guide that said he saw your partner, Steve, standing there. Well, the guide's not the stranger. The guide had skied with him before. He says to the guide, tell my girls I'm okay. So now the guy's got this story. He tells it to the new guy on the trip. Yeah. Who comes to the hospital and tells me. I see. Tell my girls I'll be okay. Wow. So you're referencing that you believe in some higher power more than what is happening here.
I definitely believe in a different dimension, 100%, because other things have happened that I can explain to you that came out of Hoffman from the relationships that I made. And one of them was in that week, you can try and tap into your higher spiritual power. When there was this one event where I just got absolutely
lit up, Like I've never been before. It was as close to seeing my higher power in real life, you know, with my eyes closed that I could, and I drew a mandala of it, you know, and I will send that to you. We'll put that in our show notes in case people wanna look at what you drew. So I kinda crossed over the plane just a little bit, and I go outside and there's I I'm just seeing things like I've never
seen them before. They've clarity of which I was seeing the color and the trees and the, I go on this hike and I, I mean, it was just like mind blowing how visual and how in tune and how present I was. It was one of the greatest moments I've ever had. And then come back and, and go through this whole week long process and really, really feel like I've met my depression head on and I've been, taking antidepressants
and trying several different types of medication. I could never stay on them, but the side effects were just overwhelming and I couldn't do it. To this day, those practices we did at Hoffman is what cured my depression. I've never been in the black hole since that trip. It's been 2019. So we're going on seven years. Wow. When you say the practices and tools, what stands the test of time all these years later after doing the process? There was a a moment in that process
where I could visualize depression. I could actually identify it. There was a a specific tool that was given to me. I could see it. I drew a picture of it, and then I was able to overcome it. I mean, literally pulverized it into the ground. And then once it was done, it was over. Identifying the dark side and conjuring an image and then engaging in expressive work, it's a huge piece of the process. Have you been able to go back and tell Steve's daughters that he's okay?
You know, I haven't. I'm writing a memoir. And in that memoir, I hope to share with them. How are his wife and his kids doing? Well, he's divorced. He had a girlfriend at the time. His kids are now probably in their thirties. One of them has a child. The other one just got married. So we were at both weddings and had chances to visit with them and the grandchild. And so we're still close. They don't live in Telluride, but when they come visit, we often get together. So that's
great. Tell us a little bit about what motivated you to sort of take the intensity of that memory, your Hoffman experience, and fishing, and write a memoir. I wanted to take a metaphorical journey about fly fishing stories of fish that I've caught in my lifetime ever since I was a little boy, big fish that I've lost. Really incredible stories. One of them in Mexico with a, with a guy that I met that got tied into a blue marlin in, in a 16 foot aluminum panga, you know, that took us out into the
ocean. I've been in, in New Zealand and, and tied into like the biggest brown trout I've ever seen. And these fish that I've encountered with, it's just kind of this connection that is oddly similar to this fleeting moment of hanging onto something and then losing it. So I just wrote this story that intertwines not only Steve, but I basically have lost five of my closest friends in my lifetime. Five? You've lost five friends? Yeah. Five friends in five miscarriages.
Five of your close friends have died, including Steve in the avalanche, and you and your wife have had five miscarriages. Yeah. And now we have two daughters. So with those 10 losses, plus it sounds like you wove in lots of fish that you lost off the line. I imagine there's a some felt sense of loss. Yeah. It's this connection. It's the loss of the connection, or you just wanted to see something so desperately and hold it in your hand for a second. I release everything I
catch. So it's not like I'm gonna eat it. It's just that moment of like, oh my gosh, like I've just been connected to the most beautiful thing in nature. Well, how do you make sense of that? Those losses and navigating, moving on from them, making sense of them. That's the journey of how do you overcome this? It's really missing these people so much and not having the conversation and the laughter and the times that we got to enjoy together. So a lot of it is just memory.
A lot of it is I visit with them. I have this place that I hike to locally and there's this little meadow that I go when I sit and I chat. You commune with them, if you will. You live near Telluride? Yeah. I live in the town of Telluride and I have a great hike right out my back door called the Judd Movie Trail. And there's this place on the Judd Movie that I go and I sit or every time I pass it, I say, hello. I just keep them in my heart.
It was so intense. There was so much to work through in a week. I mean, I came out of that floating on air. It was really incredible. And my kids saw it immediately. They were young, you know, and they're like, dad, you've lost your stress face. And so they could really tell it. When I learned so much about modeling, I was like, oh my gosh, this tension, this anxiety, this depression, I'm passing this on on my kids. I can't do that. They were in those impressionable years of seven, eight,
nine years old. And I knew that I just couldn't do it anymore. Like that was just such a bad parenting thing for them to see that the relationship I have with my girls now is just remarkable. It's remarkable. I'm so blessed. And I truly put so much of that on the ability to work through those things. Had you previously been one to express your feelings, name your feelings, work through your feelings?
No. I've internalized them, held onto them. They would build up and build up and build up and then either have blowups, that type of thing. Very rarely does that happen anymore. The ability just to talk through things and to look at myself and to label things and say, okay, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. I gotta work on it and improve. So those are really things that I was able to improve upon personally. Not expressing feelings, pushing them away
doesn't really make it better, does it? No. Not at all. Identify it and confront it and move through it. You know, that's another tool that I've I've been able to help utilize. I don't journal the way I did. I journaled for a long time. You know, I did my projects for close to a year. I still do them mentally, but now writing the memoir, a lot of that kind of comes back. It somewhat takes the place of that to some degree. What's it been like to put pen to paper and put words to so
much of what's happened to you? How has that experience been? It's been cathartic. It's been great. It's been hard. I can write about fishing a lot more easily than I can. You know, vulnerable stuff like issues that I had with my first wife, for instance, or, you know, issues that I, I had confronting my depression and things like that. You
know, it's just vulnerable. You know, I'm writing this and, you know, my clients are gonna read this and people that I've been working with and, are gonna go, oh, gosh, you know that about you or whatever. But at this point, I think it's important for my kids. What do you hope your kids take from reading what has happened, the stories you've written about? What's the possible takeaway that they might get from it?
That I hope that they see that their dad's vulnerable, that he's being authentic, that he's had a lot of difficulty in his life, but he's got back up and he's been resilient. He's marched forward in, in the face of a lot of loss and still has a lot of joy. He's kind of trying to put his right foot forward all the time and lead a good life. I think we do that as a family. I think our relationship with nature is wonderful. Like my kids love being outdoors. They love
to ski with me and my wife. They love to fish. They love to hike. So we have this really wonderful connection with nature and they see that and they feel that and they realize how blessed they are to have this kind of life. They've done some travel. My oldest is now in a curated gap year. She's currently in Africa and she just continually come back and say how grateful she is for the way she was raised and what she's seen and and how she can incorporate that into her life.
How does the book end? I'll tell you one story. So one of the friends that I met at Hoffman introduced me to an intuitive. How would you describe an intuitive? Someone who can connect you with the different dimension. And it was just this random thing where he said, I had this appointment and I can't make it. Do you want it? And I said, Yeah, absolutely. Because I, I wanna be able to see if I can connect with Steve, my partner. Because I had to resolve, was that survivor guilt?
Was there truth in my feeling of like, Hey, I didn't go first. You did. What if I went first? This would be a different outcome. And I wanted to find out if that had anything to do with the accident. So she was amazing. And she opens up this channel and we have this conversation and he's like, absolutely not. And she was able to tell me what he's doing in the afterlife, which is this incredible building of community and tearing it down and having these meetings with these incredible souls. You
know what I've done? I mean, it was really wild stuff. I'm asking questions and he's answering them. He's like, don't feel guilty. It had nothing to do with you. Zero. And I'm actually upset at you for feeling this way for this long. You've been wasting all this time and all this energy on that that had nothing to do with it. And so it was his journey. So the the next thing I ask her is I say, okay, well, I'm, I'm through that. But I felt oddly protected
during this avalanche. I'm going down. I think I'm gonna die. I don't die. And then I feel like I'm protected. And I'm like, was that God protecting me? And she says, no, it was your angels. And, you know, I started to get all choked up. And I was like, well, who were my angels? And she said, well, it was your great grandfather who you never met who died in a car accident when my father was eight. And then she says your two unborn daughters. What was that like to hear that?
You know, I, it, you know, to this day, it just makes me just feel so grateful. Sorry to get emotional about it. All the loss that we had, the five miscarriages, it all started to make sense. It was like, okay. Those were just these little journeys that those children were on that they were only supposed to be on that journey for this really short period of time. But that wasn't the journey that they were supposed to fulfill in this lifetime.
And that the two girls that we have, they were the ones that we were supposed to have. I truly believe they chose us. When you're ready and we're ready, we're gonna come. Both those births were at home in a birth tub, and my wife delivered naturally. And I was in the tub with her and two of the most beautiful experiences of our lives. So we have all this loss, and yet we have this incredible gain. It's just remarkable. That's beautiful, Steve. The gain, the loss, the progression.
What's it like to reflect on the book, on your life, on these losses, on these two beautiful beings? The whole thing, what's it like to talk about it here? It's this immense gratitude every day. How did I
live this life? This you know, I wanted to be a skier as a young kid, and I live in this town, and I live across from the ski area, and I can go up on any day and and ski and be in nature and enjoy that and and get this just like soul fulfilling wonder in my heart from being outside and its incredible beauty of this place we live in. I'm just so grateful. I can go back and connect these dots and they all line up.
You know, and I still have my challenges and I still have my problems and I still have the things that I have to work through on a daily basis and the petty shit that we all deal with. But when I can just separate myself from that and say, stop, you know, just look at what you have in these beautiful girls and my wonderful wife, you just have this gratitude. And it's really what keeps me going when all the little shit becomes a little
overwhelming. I just go back to that and I just go back to my gratitude practice and say, okay, the rest of it's bullshit. Doesn't mean anything. It just keep stacking the gratitude. And that's just, you know, the way I like to lead my life and it's been remarkable. So I'm, I'm truly, truly blessed But to all the things that have happened, I'm just feel like I'm the luckiest man in the world. For that luck and for your stacking of the gratitude, I love that, Steve.
Thanks very much for this conversation. I'm grateful for your sharing. Thank you, Drew. I appreciate you pulling that out of me. It's hard. Like, there's a lot of emotions still. I would bet there are so many emotions. And I'm grateful for your parents. They're, wonderful people. They were a big part of my career. I have a lot of gratitude for them, and I loved your parents. You know, they
were really, really special to me. It's the funny part of our story that I've known about you, Steve, for decades, literally decades. You're friends with my parents. And then two months ago, somehow you and my mom were talking, and you found out I was a Hoffman process teacher. She found out you had done the process and that you were writing a book about it. Amazing. Isn't it? My again, just the dots in life. Such synchronicity, Absolutely. I also call it synchro destiny.
The people who you meet that you didn't know at the time how important they might be in your life. All these little moments that come together, they can be life changing. Beautiful. Well, thank you, Steve. It's an honor. The Hoffman process changed my life. I'm eternally grateful, and I can recommend it to more people. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Hoffman podcast. My name is Matt Brannigan. I'm the CEO of the Hoffman Institute Foundation and a Hoffman
teacher. Our mission is to provide greater access to the wisdom and power of love within ourselves, in our relationships, and in the world. To learn more or to support our mission, we invite you to visit hoffman institute