And then there's also this centering practice that helped me feel like my ancestors, in spirit, have my back. It reminds me of this lineage of courageous women. If I'm nervous about whatever in the day, I can think about what they did and just right size the situation I'm facing and realize that I have that courage in me too. 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. Please note that this episode references genocide and the child's experience. Please use your discretion as you listen. Hey, everyone, and welcome to the show today. I'm here with Nicole Olivier.
Nicole is a Hoffman graduate. Nicole, welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you. It's always a gift to connect with you. Nicole and I first met at a q two. A q two is one of our graduate programs. It's a three day on-site program where you can come to deepen the work and past childhood into your current life. Nicole, maybe we begin there. What is something you'd like to share or
a highlight from your recent q two? I think that the grounds that Hoffman selects is just an example of every choice made to design the process is so amazingly perfected. The site was really ideal in regards to just having this amazing setting for the work. And I had been at the initial site, White Sulfur Springs before a wildfire destroyed it. And I would say the same about that one. And I chose to go a few months after my dynamic French mother passed away. It was a great thing to do
at the start of a new chapter. Okay. So you were coming after a process of saying goodbye to your mother. After a process of saying goodbye to her in physical, but it's been amazing the signs and connection I've continued to have since she moved on to spirit. When did she pass away? 07/07/2025. Did you come into the Q2 knowing that was some of what you were carrying?
I came into the Q2 just feeling like it was a new chapter and I did feel like it was a great space to tap into some feelings that as a person who is wired to be pretty positive and optimistic, seeing the bright side and everything, It offered me the space to really tap into a part of missing her physically being here. It's part of the process. Yeah, I could see that. And how being in a group setting might help create a container to really drop into some of the grief or the loss of her?
Well, every exercise is so brilliantly designed to tap into different parts. And so, yeah, there's definitely room for everything to come up and it just was so supportive. So speaking of what you're carrying as you come in, I know that you have an interesting history and sense of lineage and ancestry. Where would you like to begin?
I think a good starting point is to share a bit of background that both my mother and father's families were part of the resistance during World War two, and my maternal grandparents escaped the Bolshevik revolution. So I grew up with stories about extraordinary moral courage and the value of being service oriented. And also there's intergenerational
trauma from those wars. And they say your issues are in your tissues, but the issues from your ancestors due to epigenetics are in your tissues too. So you feel a physical sense of this living on in your life now. It's something that I've worked on and somatics and the physical part of the process were really extremely helpful in this. Yeah. But my father, he was in Norway during world war two. He was experiencing trauma from his father being away for the duration of the war.
And his mother passed away from scarlet fever when he was seven, his grandfather then passed away from a heart attack. This is all while his father's away. So at this really young age, he experienced a lot of loss and also a lot of scarcity. So then in my mother's case, she was born in Nice and she was really vivacious and dynamic out of the gates. But she had two parents that were part of the wave of people who escaped Russia during the
Bolshevik revolution. I learned when I was 13, when I asked my mother if she had any secrets, she finally told me that her father was a count. And his experience passed on through her nervous system as well. His terror of basically nearly escaping the Bolshevik revolution by running through the countryside, hiding in ditches, seeing thousands of people being killed right before his eyes as he's fleeing to safety.
And then her mother was also from nobility and sent to France to a boarding school so that her life would be stared and ended up being orphaned because her family was killed in Russia. So she's got this mother and father that have their trauma. They get married. They're not together for long. And then there was world war two brewing.
So she was a niece during that time and was staying with her aunts and uncle who was this really kindhearted preacher while her mom was in Paris writing for this French resistance newspaper. She had the positive influence of her uncle and the faith and their lives that were really focused on service, but they're at risk daily because they were hiding 12 Jews
for the duration of the war. And Nice was one of the most dangerous places in France to hide Jews because one of the most violent SS officers was stationed there three minutes away from their home. And they also had traders that live next door and kids who were in families that were part of the resistance were recruited for secret assignments because nobody would expect a kid to be part of the resistance.
So at this incredible risk of being stopped by the Nazi, my mom, as a little child in her little child size shoes, would deliver messages across the countryside to other French resistance members. So she's passing these stern grown men in uniform with rifles. One of her friends was taken to a concentration camp. So, you know, the fear was real. Here she has these shoes with messages to resistance members. So all of this is registering in her nervous system.
How old was she at this time? Do you have any idea? Yeah. She was around eight. And again, she was such an optimist and she created this club with her cousins called Le Club de Triomphe, which is the club of the triumphants. And I really feel like child members of the French resistance are unsung heroes and her family. They had rationed food, you know, the small amount they had with these 12 people that they were hiding without thinking
twice. And by the end of the war, they were almost too weak to get out of bed because they were starving. Wow. For many graduates, there's a sense of something being inherited, but it's not always quite so explicit where you actually have stories. What's that been like for you now? How do those issues and those stories blend for you?
Well, it's helpful, very helpful to have backstory and we all have backstory and we all have some kind of intergenerational trauma too, but I definitely noticed that my nervous system would be more apt to be jumpy if I was startled and sort of you're, like, wired a little bit more nervously, really. So I found that I would need ways to just calm myself and ground myself, but it allows for a lot of context and understanding and also self compassion.
Not only is there the nervous system part, people who went through the history that my parents had, they also are more apt to be worried, you know? So you have these people that are both potentially worrying about certain things that may be just
anticipated risk rather than real risk. But with my mother as well, if you're running across the countryside with messages in your shoes, when you're eight years old during World War II, when your child is eight, you're not too worried about them going out to play and just coming back when it's dark, like kids were told to do in the seventies. So it's an interesting combination of things. And there are so many stories that would just make your jaw drop. To me, that's also
what was normal. You do things to help others when it is not easy because that's a value. And also you're not always going with your plan a. And I think sometimes we have an idea of what our plan a is, but then life circumstances cause a reason to revise it. When my plan a changes so I can be of service, I noticed that miracles and grace happen afterwards, and it makes up for the time that I was actually setting aside to be of service. And aside that, I really do.
When I put my hand on my heart and I tap into my spirit self, that's what I want my life to be about as well. You mentioned the need to come. When did you know you needed that? What did you do? So I guess that would probably take us to the formative years when I was growing up as a kid. I was born in Palo Alto, the first year the term Silicon Valley was used as a nickname for the area. And I grew up in this very French environment. My mom who knows six languages herself
really valued knowing different languages. She taught me French before English. Her accent remained just as strong throughout her life. My dad wasn't home much. He was working at IBM on their first few things of AI, though it didn't catch on at that point. He worked a lot and they separated when I was three and a half. So that's when I started feeling the freeze and flight mode. Those responses to a lot of fight mode, I saw in my immediate environment just due to the circumstances. It did
cause some fear of authority as well. So if you look up the YouTube videos of fainting goats, even if they get excited about what they're going to eat, if their nervous system feels startled, they freeze and they pretty much topple over. They're pretty hilarious, but I have compassion for the goats. So, yeah, during the divorce process, there was a lot of change and uncertainty. My mom moved us to Seattle with our pet rabbit, Peter, in the car, and she was up against a lot of challenges
in that time in the seventies. It was, I guess, when we moved two years after one woman could apply for credit and she was trying to buy a house without credit history and it wasn't until 1994, that woman could legally get a mortgage without a man in The US. So women were up against a lot and she was the single mother. And then my father had visitation rights and they were going through this custody battle.
And in the interim, during that nineteen seventies era, young kids were put on planes alone as unaccompanied minors. And I was sent from Seattle to San Francisco at roughly five or six years old with knots in my stomach. You know, there's a reason that's not allowed anymore. It's not appropriate for a kid to travel on a plane at that age by themselves.
And then in the first full year in Seattle, my mom who was amazing was looking for a job as a French teacher and it took a while and it challenged her faith and it strengthened it. What did it feel like to be five years old and afraid on an airplane? It felt really lonely. And also on a cellular level, I felt numb. I pretty much had no feeling in my body. I was pretty much petrified.
And that is a feeling that when I get into that freeze mode, flight mode, whatever might trigger it, That's really the feeling that comes back. I could see how you and your mom might have a similar experience, even though being on a plane on your own at five is very different. That total fear. How did you come to manage that at such a young age? How did you learn to calm yourself?
Oh, okay. So with all the upheaval and everything in the family and my mother also, because she was trying to accomplish so much, she was getting her masters. She was working full time. She was even writing a book about being positive during a divorce. I was left to my own devices a lot. And I was also really overwhelmed with this idea since my mother was a single parent and a public school teacher. I knew I had to pay for college myself. So there was like this weight of
the world. And I started working when I was really young as a latchkey kid. Also, I would sit by the stereo speaker with the record player on, And I always had this passion, this love for writing. So I would have my face so close to the journal that I would see the blue ink just bleed into the paper through the crisscrosses of the fiber of the paper and this blue line that I'd be writing on. And I would, in my imagination, basically dive into this blue line as if
it was the horizon of the sea. And then I would be in this other world and these stories would just channel through me and I would write them down. And so that really offered me so much calm and it was actually, I think, a really positive form of escape for a bit. And it brought me a lot of peace. So here you are holding presence, holding service and heroic bravery, and also an overwhelm response in your adult life. What happened for you carrying that into your process week?
I guess maybe I also wanna cover a little bit that the first time I had terror without, you know, this colossal level in in regards to family was when I was a junior in college. And I recontacted my father after twelve years of not knowing him. And I had no tools really at that point, except maybe for the writing. That was probably one of the most frightening things I've ever done in my life to this day. I just wanted to know who this man was on my own instead of what I was guessing about him.
He had his own emotional history and he was quite guarded. I would say that I see that love is mainly a verb and that everyone is doing their best at any given point in time. But to me, he was this, you know, very scary person in my mind. So I forgot he had a Norwegian accent. He was this man who left when I was three and a half. So I share that because this is also part of my process about, again, goes back to this fear of authority.
When I went into the process week, I had these touch points, including when I was in advertising and my career life. I was there during a transition period where the industry still had the glass ceiling and it was 3% female creative directors to 97% men. And I really wanted in my personal life to get more strength and more courage. I had some great mentors along the way that showed me a contrast.
So you you're saying you came to the process wanting more strength and courage and knowing you had this fear of authority. Yeah, it really, it really could affect, you know, every area of my life. And so I wanted to step into more strength. The writing showed up again when I had this feature script that just channeled through me one day in the course of seven days. And I felt again like this was the work that I was meant to do. I submitted it to this competition of sorts
that Sundance has. I submitted twice projects and it made it to the second round twice, which is roughly a 150 submissions out of 3,000. And that gave me the sense of belief that what I was doing was good, but I wanted to have the courage to face the challenges that come ahead with making any project come to life and just in any area of life facing authority. So I came into the process because the universe kind of hands you exactly the situations you need to grow. At least it did
for me. And I would just get really overwhelmed by strong personalities. I also needed to recognize that I was being a willing participant and that I needed to create better boundaries and I could choose the people that I was interacting with. And I do wanna say that at the same time, I have a lot of compassion for what people call the bully, and I wish you know, that I know that shorthand, but it's really just a person in fight
mode that stems from trauma too. I love this quote from A Course in Miracles. Anything is either love or a call for love. But a few respected people that I know in psychology had recommended the process. Dave Rico, who wrote this book, When the Past is the Present, along with some other books. My somatic therapist, Pawan Baresha, she helped me with this nervous forest animal feeling and panic attacks. So if you are nervous about authority, you tend to also want to make sure you're in good
hands. So then I landed at the process. So take us to your process week. What happened for you there? What did you learn? Gosh so much, but I wanna start off sharing that one of the first things you do with the process is to pick a spirit guide. I thought mine would be something more angelic looking, but when I closed my eyes, when I was tapping in seeing what would come, what came was out of this mist with these bushes that looked like I was
at white sulfur springs. And then I hear these hooves clopping on cobblestone. And then all of a sudden I see this goat, it's a goat and his name is Louis. And my spirit guide was Louis, the talking goat. And whenever Louis would give me wise guidance, it would be in the sound of a goat, like, well, Nicole. Like it was blind. So it offered some levity. I think people arrived to the process kind of nervous. They're not sure what's
ahead. So that gave you some comfort. And it sounds like also a symmetry to that experience of the freezing goat when you felt the sense of overwhelm and here's this like talking goat of wisdom. Yeah. Unexpected. I was not expecting that, but for me with basically my wife's work emotionally being about building courage. Hoffman helped me
with so much. It's really hard to pick one favorite thing because each exercise was so helpful, but the expression piece for what I needed to work on, it helped me to create better boundaries and to tap into my strength. And I also learned about bioenergetics, how, if you have an intention, something you're working on while you're doing a certain exercise and bodied work to change it, it really has a more lasting effect.
And I also have these really viscerally powerful experiences to look back on that in a moment, if I'm feeling like I'm facing challenge, I just have this vision of the strength that I tapped into. And so that really helped me. And then there's also the centering practice that helped me feel like my ancestors in spirit have my back. It reminds me of this lineage of courageous women.
You know, if I'm nervous about whatever in the day, I can think about what they did and just right size the situation I'm facing and realize that I have that courage in me too. It helps a lot. So would you say that you've found a level of courage that you didn't know before? What did you discover? A certain situation that I faced post process was to me, such a great personal triumph and given my old patterns that I had around fear and standing up for myself. And this situation
took an extraordinary level of challenge. I'd say if I rated it from zero to 10, it felt like a 20, and it truly took all my courage. And I connected to my power and my spirit guide and prevailed. And that was to me really I'm speechless in a way, because I would not have been able to do that pre process again. You know, it goes back to just recognizing from those expression exercises, the strength I had in myself.
And then also in the process, there were exercises that were about worth and about deserving your space on this planet. And that just really underlined, like I need to stand up for myself. And since I was setting these new courageous ways into being the extra support of the coaching calls were really wonderful. I mean, these are things that I'm trying to change after a lifetime. So that was really so reinforcing.
So fast forward now, as we begin to wrap up your with your mother, as she's nearing the end of her life, We know ultimately you end up at the q two. Is there anything that you wanna share around integration, around your power post process? Well, it kinda circles back to a personal example of when plan a changes and being service oriented when it isn't easy,
it can be a right road choice. I mean, sometimes I think people feel like being of service, if it's really a big ask is losing yourself, but not always for sure. So not too long after I did the process, first there was COVID. And then on the coattails of that, at the age of 89, my vibrant French mom had a stroke that impacted her balance.
She was really lucky. You know, she had this outlook that how lucky to have one's balance affected instead of one's thinking, but because of her high fall risk and the blood thinner, she needed 247 assistance. So I chose to put my career on pause to help her for another three and a half years So she could stay in the comfort of her own home. And she did until she passed away peacefully at almost 93. The daily wisdom she shared in her final years that could only be developed after nine decades of
a life we'll live. They were such golden nuggets and I jotted down at least four quotes and anecdotes each day about faith, courage, and a lot of dry humor. So this time that I put aside to help my mother, it also is inspiring a film about her life. One example of her wisdom is when I shared concern about current politics, she said that in her lifetime, Europe was being overtaken by the Nazi, but they were defeated.
Germany also went on to take down the wall between east and west and that so much can change in a relatively short period of time. Very, very comforting. That's so comforting, especially given all that's happening now. Let's end on this. If there were a message you were carrying in your shoes, as you cared for your mother, what would it be? Trust in your inner knowing. Absolutely. And know that your angels do have your back.
There was this one time since my mother passed where I get messages daily, but during the pandemic, we would go walk up to Coit Tower. So one of these days after her passing, I'm going up to Coit Tower and I see written in the cement for the first time ever that I've done this path so many times, my mother's name, Tanya in cement on a staircase. And on the way down, I said in my thoughts to her, I love you.
And not a moment later, I looked to the pavement and in chalk written out in all caps is love lips. Oh, that's beautiful. Nicole, thank you so much for sharing your story with listeners, with me speaking it out loud. I appreciate you. I appreciate you all so much. Every teacher, really. You're all so amazing. Thank 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 Razi Ingrassi, Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute Foundation. Our mission is to provide people greater access to the wisdom and power of love. In themselves, in each other and in the world. To find out more, please go to hoffmaninstitute.org.