One of the most invaluable things for me about having gone is being known. When I talk to patients about my experience at Hoffman, I talk about how there is nobody on earth who knows the good and the bad and the ugly of me, as well as the teachers. 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. Before we get started, I'd like to mention that this episode mentions death of a child and suicide. Please use your discretion.
If you or someone you know is suicidal, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 80273 (800) 273-8255, or message the crisis text line at 741741. Hey everyone, and welcome. I'm here with Keri Levine today. Keri is a Hoffman Process graduate. She's also a return guest to the podcast. You may remember her from our medical panel. Carrie, I first heard of you when you came to my attention from your teacher who was like, this woman is deep and you need to talk to her.
And then in our preparation for that medical panel, I truly fell in love with this wisdom that is within you. And I wanted to hear more about your story. So thank you for coming back to share. Thank you for the invitation to share. Yeah. So really, this is a place where we can begin anywhere, but the idea is like, tell the listeners a bit about who you are. I often start by saying I was a really weird kid because I grew up in, affluent Boston suburb.
And my parents divorced when I was 13, which is a tough age to have your family infrastructure fall apart. But I also remember sitting on my dad's lap, my dad who was a very challenging, wounded guy and saying to him, if this is gonna make you happier, then that's great. From there I mean, I don't even know if it
was from there. It must have been right around there where I had a long history of sleep challenges, and I can remember going to a used bookstore and finding The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson, who was a Harvard trained transcendental meditation guide. Right? And this would have been, like, 1983 when I was 13. And, like, how did I find that book and whatever drew me to it? I don't know.
And I can remember once my parents split and we moved to Brookline and lived with my mom who was you know, had been a stay at home mom who moved to a working mom, I can remember being like, I think I wanna go to a yoga class. Do you wanna come with me? And, again, this was sort of back in a time before yoga was yoga, and I can remember us going to a nighttime yoga class somewhere on the outskirts of Boston.
And I can remember there was a crystal healing store in Brookline Village, and I can remember taking the money that I made at the deli where I waitressed to the crystal healing store and buying a book on crystal healing and buying Chris. And so, like, I was weird. I don't even know where that stuff came from. And then I I had what I would say was probably one of the most pivotal life changing experiences of my life. I got a bee in my bonnet that I wanted to bike on Nova Scotia.
And I found a program called Longacre Expeditions that was a six week program that was backpacking and canoeing and rafting and rock climbing and two weeks of biking on Nova Scotia. I can remember showing up with my backpack. One of my dearest friends I met on that trip, so he has been a friend for a very long time, and he really likes to give me endless amounts of grief about how I had a blow dryer in my backpack because that's how much I did not understand about what I was about to do.
And I had a change of clothes for every day because why wouldn't you? And I had my blow dryer. And the foundation of that program was actually the Johari's window, which for listeners who are not familiar with that model, it's like this idea that we have aspects of ourselves that are known to self, known to others, unknown to self and unknown to others. And every evening, there were sort of what was called group where we talked about some logistics and like who was on dish duty and
that sort of thing. But then there were these exercises that were were designed to increase our self awareness and to learn how to give and receive really hard feedback. That was the first time in my life where I felt like I was received for who I was, not how I looked. How old were you when you did this program? I was 15, the first one that I did. I know. Like, crucial timing. Right? So crucial.
And that kind of I don't know if it set the groundwork or tapped me into a different way of being than most of the people around me. And I sort of already came to it with this weirdness, but it was the first time I'd ever, like, received feedback about myself. And it's funny the story that you tell about Mark saying she's really deep because one of the first pieces of feedback I got on that trip was you're so deep. You always look so serious. You look like you're mad all the time, which
was really fascinating. And it has feedback that I have received in the meantime. And I have a son who is also a deep thinker and a deep feeler, and I can see the look on his face that likely he absorbed in part from me. And I'm just like, oh, I see that angry pissed off is. I recognize that in and I know that he's not. It's just a funny resting face. So that
I don't know. That program sort of dialed me into a more thoughtful way of moving through my life, and I and that sort of got fed along the way by, junior year English teacher who taught stream of consciousness journal writing, which is a practice that I have maintained since that first outdoor trip at 13. Like, I still have that journal that I kept that summer on that trip and then learned this stream of consciousness writing.
And then, you know, there were lots of other sort of waypoints along the way that led me toward a life of deep thought inquiry, seeking sort of deep soul connection with people, not being very good at cocktail party, small talk kind of things, not very good at being superficial, not being very good at not being in alignment, which is truly a
blessing. But I think about, you know, my profession and being a nurse and working in a hospital and not sort of being aligned with a lot of conventional medicine and then working in a hospital and working as a, quote, mid level practitioner and feeling like being overworked and underpaid and feeling like, I could make more money as a nurse. Like, what am I doing, and can I continue to work
more for less? And so it's just sort of been an interesting theme that started at a weirdly young age, you know, all of which fed my interest in going to Hoffman and doing that work, being curious about any kind of deep exploration, that being sort of the most comfortable place for me to be. So it's not a big surprise that I work with women one at a time for an hour at a time or sometimes two hours at a time.
And having these, what feel to me, deep, meaningful conversations about the real substance of their lives and how that informs their health. Yeah. So I know that you are in integrative functional medicine, that you are an advanced practice nurse. I love that you called out this weird title of mid level practitioner. I love that you said I'm not good at not being aligned. The fact that you can look back and see from early on how that was not something you were willing to do or tolerate.
I think about that 13 year old girl on your dad's lap and the courage and empathy that it took to say, if this is what makes you happy, do it. I mean, it was a relief, honestly, Sadie. Right? Like, he was such a angry, domineering presence. Like, the thought of not having to live with him every day was a true relief. So there was that aspect as well.
Our relationship was long and complicated and fascinating in that he was a real Horatio Alger's kind of guy, like, born in Brooklyn, was a Jewish guy, slept on the fire escape in his apartment because there wasn't really room for him in his apartment. His dad died when he was young.
He put himself through Brooklyn Polytech, then he put himself through MIT as an aeronautical engineer, then he put himself through Boston College and was, like, the first Jewish guy to graduate from Boston College with a degree in business and then was an entrepreneur during the late eighties. I mean, so he was simultaneously super challenging and fascinating, and he
had a healing crisis. He developed a brain tumor when I was 21, and that sent him on a healing journey that involved moving to Asheville, North Carolina to be near his macrobiotic community
and doing a lot of spiritual healing. And so we actually had this interesting point of connection around health and healing toward the end of his life, and I ended up being his primary caregiver and his power of attorney, and he ended up having a second brain surgery for a tumor that he never left the hospital
from. And, I mean, it was still a challenging, of course, strained relationship, but I was also able to sort of honor his light through his end of life transition and honor him in the best way possible given all the realities of his personality and marriages and complicated relationships and all of the things
that were him. So, yeah, he he's an interesting an interesting character and a a funny little, like, convergence of our worlds was when I left being a hospital based nurse midwife and moved to a clinic, a world renowned clinic in Yarmouth, Maine called Women to Women that was pioneering in women's health and functional medicine.
I was doing a training with one of the specialty lab companies to review someone's test results with a test that I was unfamiliar with to try and make sense of what it meant and how to make a treatment plan. And I get on the call with this naturopath, and she's like, is your last name Levine? And I was like, yeah. And she's like, are you related to Steven Levine by any chance? And I was like, yeah. He was my dad. And she was like, yeah. We dated a couple years ago.
So it was just a funny his healing journey and my moving toward this kind of health care happened simultaneously. You know, he also was like a super deeply spiritual guy. You know, he would send me poems and, you know, complicated, like most parents. Complicated, challenging. It definitely sounds like you found some healing and that it was an important part of your journey in how that relationship evolved. Yeah. And ongoing, of course, the healing. Right? That's not over.
I'm curious about how and when you decided to go into medicine. I'm curious about how and when you decided to come out and where in the journey with your dad you went to Hoffman. Tell us a bit more about both of those things. So I was the kid who was a horrible standardized test taker, like, terrible, terrible, terrible, like, barely broke 800 combined on my SATs pre and post SAT prep class. So that really influenced where I thought about going to school.
I ended up at Umaine Orono, the University of Maine in Orono, thinking I was gonna be a psych major because super interested in psychology and could not get through statistics and ended up changing my major. During that time, I ended up doing a semester in New Mexico because I had done another outdoor trip when I was, like, 16 or 17 that took me to New Mexico to the Taos Pueblo where I felt this unbelievable energy, draw, fascination.
I just was so drawn to the culture, to the Earth centric, Earth loving culture there and then, of course, the beauty of the Desert Southwest. So ended up doing a semester exchange to New Mexico and had a small group communications professor. I had done a lot of trip leading in the outdoors, and so I had done a lot of, like, women's climbing courses and backpacking courses. So this is 1988 just for context, and I got very interested in gender communication.
Must have been right around the men are from Mars, women are women are from Venus time. I'm not sure I actually ever read that book, but was super interested in gender communication, particularly in the outdoor world, which was largely male dominated, obviously. This small group communications professor said to me, he was like, what are you doing at Umaine or Orono? Like, if you wanna study communications, you either go to Syracuse or you'd go to you'd go to Northwestern. And I was like,
okay. So I looked at those schools, and then I looked at the majors, and there was nothing there that really lined up. And I had very poor guidance, and so I ended up at Syracuse as a public relations women's studies major. And I like to joke, I knew I was never gonna work in PR in New York City, and I work in PR every day. So it's not like that education was lost on me.
When I was at Umaine Orono, I had a job at the women's health clinic as a peer counselor, and so that was really my foray into other than my own navigating my own health care as a teenager, that was my first foray into a clinic kind of environment or a structured
health care model. And the director of the women's health clinic at the time was a woman named Ruth Lockhart who was starting simultaneously in Bangor, Maine, a feminist health center that is still in existence called Mabel Wadsworth women's health center. And they had a day long conference called health in our hands.
And the keynote speakers at that conference were Christiane Northrop, who was one of the founding mothers of Women to Women, who has written many, many powerful books on women's health, like women's bodies, women's wisdom, and Deb Sewell, who is a local herbalist, the founder of a herbal apothecary in West Rockport, Maine called Avina Botanicals.
Deb is still deeply steeped in the earth and deeply steeped in some of the science around plants and deeply steeped now in permaculture and regenerative farming and a whole host of things. And those two women stood on the podium together, this OB GYN and this herbalist, both whom I had read books and taken courses and yada yada. And and that was my moment of it's not either or. It's both and. And it depends on the situation, and it depends on the person and how she wants to take care of herself.
And, like, it's for each of us to decide how we wanna do it. So when I was finishing my degree in Syracuse, I went back to Ruth, and I was like, Ruth, I think I wanna go to school for some kind of health care. I don't really know what I wanna do. Do I wanna be a naturopath? Do I wanna be a yoga teacher? Like, I wasn't sure. And she said, how long do you wanna go to school for, and how many loans do you wanna have?
She was so great and practical, and she was like, what about being a nurse practitioner? In the state of Maine, we're licensed to practice independently. We don't need physician supervision. Like, you can be your own person. And I was like, oh, yeah. Because I didn't wanna be a physician's assistant because I didn't want to have to answer to anybody else, and I really wanted to be independent. And I really wanted to be able to embody that continuum that I saw on that podium of both and.
So I looked at programs nationwide, got through my GRE and ended up at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio. I thought I was on a women's health nurse practitioner track, but when I got there, there were a bunch of women who were all gonna be midwives. Still friend, a Seattle based still friend, was doing a doula training. So training people to be labor assistance. And I got a job on labor and delivery at the Cleveland Clinic. And so I had that job, and then I did
a doula training. And the nurses at the Cleveland Clinic would throw me into the labor room to be with women when they had to run around and do other stuff. Because what I found was that being in the labor room was not unlike helping women climb mountains or rock climb. It was this incredible transference of skills and of presence and of empowerment, and it was really, I wanna say, easy for me to be in that space with a laboring woman who didn't feel like she could do it and take care of her.
And so there was this really beautiful transference of skills from being a outdoor experiential educator to the labor room. So became a nurse midwife, and my boyfriend at the time, now husband, was like, I'm out of Cleveland.
And at the time, there was a program called the community nurse midwifery education program, which was a distance education program before distance education was a thing out of Heiden, Kentucky, which just had the most unbelievable legacy of a senator's daughter falling in love with the hills people in Kentucky, traveling on horseback.
She and her team of nurses would travel through the hills of Kentucky and teach the hills people like, oh, if you're washing your laundry at this spot in the stream, you might wanna get your drinking water from above that spot. Really basic foundational public health lessons. These nurses would end up attending births to the health people and then coming back and checking on the babies to make sure that, you know, everybody was well. And so there was something about that legacy,
that public health legacy. Right? Like, some of those really basic teachings that still speak to me in terms of teaching people about nutrition and exercise, like, really basic stuff that that gets lost in the shuffle, right, in in the noise of what is health on Instagram, you know, the the minutiae. Like, we've lost some of the really basic things. I remember that first day, we had to go to Kentucky for a couple of weeks, and then they had a relationship with
CASE. And so it was my master's is from CASE, but my certificate was from Frontier, which is now Frontier Nursing University. But I remember one of those first days being in the classroom in Kentucky with people I had never met and all of the different disciplines that midwifery draws from, whether that's social work, public health, herbalism, medicine. I just felt the deepest sense of I am in the right spot because by nature, it is sort of an interdisciplinary practice.
One of the great things about this program was our clinicals were in the communities where we lived. And so that was a way to begin to integrate us into our communities and to develop professional connections and yada yada. So I lived in Maine and did a lot of and obviously did my clinicals here. And when I finished school, the only midwifery job in the state was at the community hospital in Damascada, which was called Miles Memorial Hospital and is now Maine Health Lincoln, I think.
And this area where I still live is a place where my husband grew up summering, and both grandparents had a place and had a very specialized kind of high school that sort of had always been his dream. So this job opened up, which was full time. There was a job at the high school that opened up, and then within two weeks, found out that I was pregnant with my son. And so all of that happened very quickly.
And that launched me into working full time as a nurse midwife with 50% call and having a nursing baby, which should not go very well. So you find yourself in this place, you accompanying women to climb mountains. And then in the labor room, you accompanying them to step through a threshold that changes them as a human being, as a woman. And at some point you found yourself depleted. That's a kind word. Burned out. Crazy. Those are other words that come to mind.
During my seven and a half years at the local hospital, my call took all different kinds of formations. At first, it was 50% because it was a very small service. Then they integrated midwifery call with family practice, so then I was one in five. Then they returned to a full midwifery service, and I was one in three. And, of course, the volume of births in the practice changed through that time. I had two children during that time, and I had always been looking for
a different job. I knew that the sleep deprivation was no good for me and my health. And I was doing that not only at work, but also at home breastfeeding my own kids. The sort of climate of health care was changing for us mid level practitioners at that time where we were being asked to do more and more and more for less and less and less and less. At least that's how it is in rural Maine. I imagine still
is. Again, like, bumped into my integrity of just, like, any person with a reasonable self esteem would not work like this for this amount of money. And it wasn't just about the money. It was also about my mental health and the extent to which I felt I could show up the way that I wanted to show up for my own family. The being on call and the sort of constant sympathetic nervous system activation of always being on the ready, and I can remember
the moment that I was like, okay. It's time for me to find a different job was my pager went off in the middle of the night. And I think simultaneously, there must have been a kid who needed something. I call the woman who called to the answering service, and she's trying to figure out whether or not her water broke. And I am irritated with her. I am irritated, and I am like, okay, Carrie. Who are you serving right now? Like, you are not serving anybody.
No one. And so I started to look for work that did not involve being on call and found this job at Women to Win. So you are speaking about a shared experience that a lot of parents have where there's a certain value to what you earn, what you provide, the professional part of your life. And that has a pull. Being present and loving and self loving, being resilient as a human being doesn't seem to carry as much weight or value in the world, and that can be a really difficult tug of war.
Don't you think that that's the challenge of our generation of women? I'm putting us in the same generation not knowing for sure that we are. But, you know, I remember when I showed up at Women to Women, so I still had call, but it was only for, like, can you refill my birth control pills? Or, you know, I never had to go anywhere, and I never had to be up all night, and I never was gonna have to leave the house. So when the kids were like, when are you gonna be
back? I never had to say, I don't know. But I can remember sitting with women at women to women and woman after woman after woman showing up with a diagnosis of anxiety or bipolar, which really to me was misdiagnosed often, not always, often misdiagnosed premenstrual syndrome. Right? There was like a cyclic pattern to the mood, the energy, the weeping, like all
the things. And at the same time, I read a book called Perfect Madness, Mothering in the Age of Anxiety, written by Judith Warner, who was a New York Times writer, and she chronicles her own having a baby in France and the policy infrastructure that's in place for women and families there and then moving to Metro DC and what it was like to have a baby there. And I thought to myself, that whole idea of you can have it all, bunk. Yeah. You know, you said our generation is actually
feeling, what can we do about it? I would love to hear how you, at some point, decided to embark on your Hoffman journey and what led you there. When I was at Women to Women, the the last of the founding mothers and the sole proprietor, Marcel Pick, I don't know how she heard about Hoffman, but she went and she came back and
she was like, everybody's going. And the business dissolved before that was possible because at the time that she mentioned it, I was like, how am I supposed to pull myself out of my life for a week from work? And how about my family life? Like, it was unfathomable to me, both the time and the money. I was like, I just don't see that that how that happens.
But that's when the seed was planted, and I honestly referred people to Hoffman for years before I went when I would talk to women about their health challenges and, you know, that it was clearly not a knowledge deficit, that it was that they just kept bumping into their own behaviors. I would talk to them about going to Hoffman. I was like, look, you know what is standing between you and your optimal wellness and that you're not able to get
yourself there is not an uncommon experience. And maybe this deep emotional work will allow you to do what you quote, unquote know is good for you. So, I mean, I wrote letters of recommendations, and I would talk to women when they came back, and I would hear about it. And it always was of interest to me. And then, finally, the nest was empty, and I have, you know, my own challenges of stuckness that I live with.
Did you see yourself in that where there's something that's standing in my way that is related to my own behavior, not the knowledge deficit. Oh, hell yeah. Of course. And, you know, tried this and tried that and read this and wrote that and, you know, like, did all the things, and I was finally like, okay. It's time.
And, and went and found it to be one of the most unbelievable experiences of my life in terms of doing pattern tracing and taking a deep dive and looking at beliefs and tracing them to parents. I read No One is to Blame by Bob Hoffman when I first heard about it, and, honestly, that book carried me a long way and probably really helped. It's interesting my dad died six weeks after I started at Women to Women, eight weeks after I started at Women to Women, not long.
And I wanna say, I guess it must have been after he passed that I read no one is to blame. And I was just like, oh, okay. I get that. I get, like, it's totally his fault, and it's totally not his fault. And now I have all these learned behaviors, and I'm very much like my dad in many, many, many ways, some that are positive, some are less positive.
And was seeing them play out in my own family with my own children and, you know, thinking about the generational transference of hurt and wounds and wanting to do what I could to minimize that.
And that was two years ago that I went, and I still refer people almost every week when there's clearly, like, a deep pattern that women return to that they are just have yet to have been unable to shake themselves from, and or I think that someone will benefit from getting pulled out of their life so that they can have time to think about
themselves. Right? Because that's one of the challenges in my mind for women and or women who work and or women who work and are parents is just like, where in the day is there even a moment to have a thought, to be able to think this through, to try and trace it? Where does this come from? What is this about? How is this playing out in my life now? And how can I transform it? Can I transform it? Sounds like one of the challenges of going, but also one of the gifts, the space. Oh, right.
I mean, getting pulled out of the day to day life and the house and the cooking and the bills and the juggling and the driving and, like, all of the things that retreat environment is priceless in my mind. And to be cared for. Right? Oh my god. Like, I don't have to prepare a meal? Like, what? To be fed and nurtured? Yeah. I mean, it's also interesting, right, as a health care practitioner. Right? The things that people project onto us as being a health care practitioner.
And one of the most valuable things for me about having gone to Hoffman, I am still in many of the same patterns, and they are in some ways the same and in some ways super different. And I have that many more tools to acknowledge them, work with them, accept them, transform them. And one of the most invaluable things for me about having gone is being known.
When I talk to patients about my experience at Hoffman, I talk about how there is nobody on Earth who knows the good and the bad and the ugly of me as well as the teachers. And that knowing that having been seen, being heard, being held, still being cared for as a care provider is tremendous beyond words. Your journey, your story that you've shared really is a living example of both and.
Part of that was accepting the both and within you and having that scene and having it still be worthy of love. What has happened for you since then? How do you see that in your life now? The absolution of shame is no joke in terms of healing. You talked about healing through acknowledging shame and letting it go. And I'm curious how your relationship to that has changed or how you see it in your life now.
I think self compassion was huge, and kindness toward self is huge for me and is something that is reinforced in my work with women every day. You know, the extent to which we are hard on ourselves. And I'm I'm not saying that that's exclusive to women. I'm just saying that that's who I spend my days with for the most part. So that's who I listen to.
Just being just a little bit gentler with myself, just being a little bit kinder, just a little bit softer, and having slightly more ease with myself when I find myself patterning or I find hard or uncomfortable emotions coming up, hand on heart, visioning light, and being able to dial into that is much more a part of my everyday practice since Hoffman than before Hoffman,
not to mention recycling in the shower. One of my groupmates shared the story of doing that and, like, you know, there's, like, the ball, and there's these different ways of doing it. Right? And I often find myself thinking about it in the shower and just, like washing it down the drain, which is super satisfying. That's a great way to bring it home
with you. For those listening that haven't taken the process or don't know what recycling is, it's a brief visualization where you see one version of how you show up in a pattern, and then there's kind of like a letting that go. And I love the idea of, like, washing it down the drain. But then you envision it again showing up as your best self as your spiritual self. It truly can shift as you show up differently, a really powerful practice. I have another question that might be a
tricky one. What do you see as or hope your legacy of love to be? Legacy of love. Like, I guess I'm not even sure what does that mean. Legacy of love. Well, I'm thinking about your impact in your work, like what it means to a woman to be listened to and accepted for both and your son, the places where you touch people. Your depth is an invitation into a deeper place. And I don't know if you've considered it, but I guess I'm asking you too. Yeah.
I guess so the things that come to my mind, right, wrong, or otherwise, are, you know, I hope that my children are a legacy of my love. I have a daughter who passed in 2018 at 15 years old in a car accident, and I carry her love light forward. And that language is I wanna credit Rosemary Traumer, who is a very beautiful poet who also had a child take his life by suicide, and she writes a poem about carrying his love light. And so I carry Isabel's love light with me and
carry her legacy in that way. And so there are things that I do in her honor, and that's sort of a running joke in our house. Like, if we do something that we know Isabelle would do, like watch too much TV or eat too much candy, we like to say Isabelle made us do it. So there's that. And then my son who has a deep reverence for the natural world and is a deep thinker, you know, I hope that he lives a life of alignment.
I guess what I would hope that I'm able to do is inspire people to live aligned with their souls or their authentic self or their divinity or whatever word works for people in that place. Cause that's really what I do at work is try and facilitate a process of women understanding who they really are and what really makes them feel well and help them identify that and then get there. And so that happens in the context of
the clinic. And I think that was really a big motivator for writing the book that I wrote was so that women who can't access a practitioner who facilitates that kind of process, they could have it and they could read it, and they could consider for themselves that all of their selves matter, like mind, body, spirit matters, and that all of the things that they feel are connected and that being in alignment with self is crucial
to wellness. And without that alignment, it's not actually possible to be in optimal health. Your book, it's the whole woman A Guide to Creating Wellness for Any Age and Any Stage. We'll put that in the show notes. We'll also put in the show notes what you mentioned about the different programs and the Johari's window. I think it's a really great reminder about allowing you to be a whole human and then moving from a place of alignment with
that. It's an incredible legacy, and I'm really glad that you exist, that you're doing the work that you do, the mothering that you do, that you're being the beautiful woman that you are. And thank you so much for being here with me today. Thank you for your discernment of extracting the legacy, because I don't know that I would have been able to see or articulate it that way, and that is a gift to me. Thank you, Sadie. Yes. Absolutely. Thank you so much.
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 hoffmaninstitute.org.