Welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute. My name is Drew Horning. And on this podcast, we catch up with graduates for conversations around how their internal work in the process is informing their life outside the process, how their spirit and how their love is living in the world around them, their everyday radius. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Hoffman podcast. My name is Drew Horning and on today's show we have Ed McClune. Welcome Ed.
Glad to be here, Drew. Thanks for asking me. You are welcome. I am excited for this conversation. For those of you that don't know, Ed has been a Hoffman process teacher for, 29 years, just about 29 years. And he is also a licensed marriage and family therapist in San Francisco with a private practice. And, today we have so many questions in your history and experience with the Institute. When when exactly did you do the process and
why? How did how tell me about your connection to Hoffman when you first showed up? It's a funny story, but it's a long one. But I I was in, I think, the 3rd or 4th, 7 at that time 7 and a half day process
that had ever happened. As many of us know the process had been put on various different formats including a 13 week non residential process, but I was like in the 3rd or 4th one and I was living in Marin County, which is sort of you know the epicenter of a lot of personal growth in the San Francisco Bay Area. Having troubled life, married with a son at the time, actually 2 kids and trying to find my own way professionally.
I actually answered a want ad in the newspaper And the woman who posted the ad said, well, I'm not gonna give you the job, but you you could really use the Hoffman process. And so, there I was, in in at this retreat center, barely knowing what I was even getting myself into. And at the time of that process, the man who created it, Bob Hoffman, came up to me sort of right around what we call play day in the process and asked me why don't you go get your masters and come learn to teach this thing?
Wow, personal invitation. Yeah, which you know my ego was really was really complimented at the time, but I think it was more about a dire need for for teachers, you know, given that it was maybe the 3rd or 4th 7 days that ever been run. There wasn't anybody. I mean, you know, when we you and I trying to teach through, it was a very long process that involved a lot more than 3 or 4 processes with these people who were teaching it obviously didn't have that opportunity.
So, at the point in time there was no way in the world that I was gonna be able to financially go back to school, get my masters and come and teach it. But I knew the process had changed my life. One of the big reasons why my life was in a breakdown at the time is I I was sort of the rebel of my family. My dad was an accountant. I was one of 5 kids and I kind of ran away to San Francisco from Los Angeles to be a hippie
and be a disc jockey. So my first line of work was on the radio and I wasn't good at it because I always attribute to like my father's voice in my head saying, When are you going to get a real job? And sure enough, a year after the process I was doing radio in San Francisco, you know, the 4th largest media market in the country at the time and Bob's invitation was always in my mind. And so I got more and more successful and those all things in radio business go.
About 4 years later that career dried up where it was becoming assembly line work and I went to the Hoffman process. They did a graduate evening one night on using the tools of the process for your career. And lo and behold the person who was teaching it was Connie Comstock who was a classmate of mine in the process 5 years earlier. She and I talked about it. I told her the story of Bob that night.
I brought home the application to the teacher training and got accepted into the master's program at the University of San Francisco and started both training for the process and training for my MFT license right away. And that's how it all started for me. Well, it's sort of a long time journey but at various different times in my life, the Hoffman process has sort of reasserted itself in very obvious ways
at different chapters. So that's how I got into this and I've been I've been grateful for it ever since. What an interesting thing to both train to be a teacher, which is an arduous journey and to start a master's program at the same time. How was that? You know, it was really good and it gave me so much more respect for the process.
And the biggest reason is, you know, when you and you know this from your own work, Drew, that when you go into a graduate program in psychology there's all these different orientations to psychotherapy, whether it's family systems or Freudian or brief strategic, all these different ways of doing counseling. And when I was looking at all these various different orientations in graduate school, there was a little flavor of all of those in the process.
So no therapist who is trained in a certain orientation could have created the process because everybody's kind of committed to their own orientation and amongst other things the process is kind of an amalgam of all various different thought moving forward and I was also just impressed with who I was teaching with that they had a facility that, you know, moved all that different thought into bringing people into the experience of the process.
So just the comparison with what I was learning in graduate school and who I was spending time with at the process and watching the effects of the process and knowing the experience I had because this I had 5 years of road testing the process before I started training in it. So I knew that it made a difference in my life. And so it was a really deepening experience of going to graduate school while training to teach.
I'm seeing this from a different perspective now, which is that part of what made Bob able to develop the the process is because he wasn't an insider in the psychology world, and so he could pull intuitively from all aspects. He wasn't committed to one orientation, as you'd say.
Is that part of it? Absolutely. And and and along the way, he did have a lot of different mental health professionals sort of consult and, create different elements of the 7 days in different pieces of the process basically. But I think that maybe the the most obvious characteristic of Bob was like certainty. This is how it is. This is what I know. This is and I and I trust this. Go with it. So, like a lot of charismatic leaders, he knew what he wanted, and this was the way it was gonna be.
His commitment to certainty and to be able to trust his own downloading or understanding of it, It's so funny as a as a therapist who took the process, all I kept thinking when I took it was, who are these people? And how did they do this? Because everything that I had talked about in therapy, the process had created an experience for. And so it wasn't just words. It was an embodied week long journey. And and I just kept thinking, how did they do this? Who did this? Who are these people?
So how did, in your understanding, how did it come about? How was it brought to fruition? The short story is that Bob intuited it. You know, Bob was a psychic. Part of his orientation to, you know, channeling was or to psychic experience was was transmedium. He was he was learning and listening to people from the other side, sort of past life regression kind of thing.
And, the myth of the institute was that a psychotherapist that Bob knew, here in the San Francisco Bay area had died and after his death came to Bob who had the psychic ability and downloaded the process to Bob. And I'm not sure how much of what we know is the process now came at that point. There's been an awful lot of work and orientation and changing and rewriting and what works and what doesn't in the modern times, but it's inspired.
I would say that Bob had inspiration and then the certainty and, the commitment, which is amazing to me, the commitment for a man who had at the point, at that point, no credentials, I mean he was a tailor by trade originally, not highly educated, and the level of commitment it took for him to bring this into the world the way it is. And in, you know, countries all over the world, it all started with him. Obviously, when you we use that line in the process when one truly commits and providence
moves too. You know, Bob had the good fortune of meeting amongst others, Claudio Norano of Esalen fame and other things, and and Claudio had a group called Seekers After Truth, I believe, at the University of Berkeley campus. Bob lived in Oakland and so the process being put on in as a group experience started with Claudia's group on the campus of Berkeley decades ago, long before the seven and a half day process.
I think there's an another we're kind of building a case for how it all came to be, and you just named another piece, which is that when it was a weekly, once a week kind of group, it, I imagine, had a chance to be tweaked and tested out on folks as he learned. He was probably learning all along the way on the path towards a week long process. Yeah. Exactly. And and really trusting inspiration along the way.
So for instance, even you know, when I took the process originally, Bob hadn't received or created anything about the dark side, which is a big part of the the process now and life after the process. That wasn't originally in it until, I think, gosh, about maybe 30 years ago, which still sounds like a long time now
that I think about it. So that's just an example of how, you know, the the process hasn't been stuck in time, although the the steps of both expression and then compassion and forgiveness is the starting plates for new behavior as opposed to I suck. When am I going to get my act together? I need to start new behavior because I suck, which we all know produces some things, but doesn't produce the kind of change that the process does.
I'm appreciating the early sort of additions and developments and learnings. And I know that is maybe a carryover now that I mean, we have a design team in our faculty that looks at and does research, and the process is continually updated and modified to reflect current understandings of what helps people change and transform. So what have you noticed? What what's it been like to been be a part of this arc,
from then to now? What have you noticed about the process and how it's changed over time? Firstly, I'm just plast that somehow I stumbled onto the Hoffman process and have
been able to teach it so long. Just to sort of take a tangent to your question, Drew, is years ago at the ceremony of integration dinner and all the all the students of the course sitting at a table together and they at one end of the table, they called me over and said, Ed, we're trying to figure out what you do when you're not doing this because you're only it's only a week long. What else are
you doing? And we they said we've narrowed it down to 3 things and you're either a minister, a therapist, or an actor. And I said, perfect. That's my job. Especially because we we do create theater, you know, the actor part. We we do lights, we do music, we, you know, do set design. But we're also, you know, deeply involved in psychology. And then the minister part is the most important part to me because that's the spirit part. That's the non rational.
And no matter how we change or tweak the process, the fundamental thing that I want to keep emphasizing through all the years is that this work is a work that doesn't give us connection to our process to our spirit so much as it reminds us that that we are spirit. We don't need to create a connection. It's already there and more and more, you know, almost all good personal growth work is through effort, commitment.
You're gonna study, you're gonna get to the gym, whatever it is, you know, it's and the process isn't that kind of effortful learning. With the process we have experiences hopefully, you know, at different points in different parts of the week, you know, different for different people. Where I experience myself outside of my old belief about who I am.
And the process isn't the only kind of experiential learning, you know, when I was young in athletics I had no idea my body could do what it did until the coaches forced me to do it. It's like, wow, I had an experience outside of running a 10 ks or, you know, Drew, I'm sure you know this being a dad. That was an experience that changed my definition of what love was in the minute, in that instant and that's not a rational learning. That's not my intellect, you know, in this quadrinity model.
That's a different part of me that's teaching me, you know. The gift of the processes that we have experiences it's not so much rational. I mean, we see people come into the process all the time who know all this stuff, you know, I learned it from mom and dad and there's a part of me that has a higher power, but knowing that, you know, it's it's not just the intellect in this quadrinity model that can do the work. Sometimes we talk about it being trying to sit on a chair with only one leg.
So the growth that's happening for the students in the process and I know I may still all these years later is what's this other faculty trying to, I don't know, teach me or give to me right now. I I really appreciate that and, know it to be true in my experience with it. And it seems like
I don't know. Just kind of thinking out loud here With with psychology being so much more mainstream, there's bazillions in self help books sold every year, and everybody has, it's just much more commonplace now to talk about your emotional world and struggles. And so maybe that problem has only accentuated because people have a a stronger understanding intellectually of what's wrong. But as we say over and over again in the process, the time is over to try of trying to fix yourself.
And so part of what you're talking about is this this let go of the intellect. Let the rest of the quadrinity do its thing, and there was nothing wrong with you all along. It's a pretty radical idea that we don't need to fix ourselves. No. I I've heard myself saying over the last couple of processes, you know, you could, to my students, you know, or to my small group, you could spend the rest of your life eating Ben and Jerry's and streaming everything on Netflix and be no less spirit embodied.
Now, we're not recommending that, but the point is that there's more to us than studying and learning. A lot of us, myself included, read an awful lot of self help books and used whatever I read in those books as evidence of why I was broken, bad, defective instead of, you know, using it to help me.
And I think that's a really, important sort of holistic point from the process too is that, you know, there's this sort of standard of what being healed or whole or good or sane that it's like you'll know it when you get there, but it's too obscure to talk about it and it's the same for everybody. You know, when you're good, when you've got this the partnership, when you've got the house, when you got the kids, when you got the money back, the retirement plan, then you'll be somebody.
Whatever the formula is. And you know, we work in the process with a lot of of people who have achieved all that and still don't feel happy, satisfied, in love with themselves. It is amazing. Wild wildly successful people that that anybody who's has any sense of things would look at them and say, wow. They have made it. And yet there's still that emptiness, that void inside.
It's like going to the bank looking for a quart of milk and then getting angry at the bank and saying I'll take my business down the street to the next bank. Looking outside ourselves for what's inside And the process at least connects us to that possibility. Just like those other examples I used connected us to some experience of ourself that's different, and that's
the growth edge after the process. Not so much as rigor and commitment and study and work again because there I'm just getting back on the achievement course. Rather than how do I experience a different form of love today? What's my relationship? How do I experience the sensation of beauty or satisfaction today or spirit? I have this dumb simple example of you know, I was saying I used to work in radio before I had my St. Paul moment and knocked off my horse by Bob Hoffman.
And I used to say, you know, what song do I want to play next? And I'd look and I'd look and I'd look and then I'd realize my hand was on the record I wanted to play. There was something in my and I know it's a really trivial example, but my body was leading me that I wasn't even listening to. And that's a great metaphor, almost an anecdote that illustrates it all. Yeah. And I think that's good for a metaphor, you know. It's like, I keep trying to channel all my experience
through, is it good? Is it bad? Is it tall? Is it right? Is it is it gonna make me look okay? Whatever. And it's like, oh, what's right here? And we all have experiences of that almost circumstantially, like, oh, something tells me I better go back into the house before I drive off. That kind of thing. But how do how do we cultivate that? And I think, you know, the process is at least an opening to go oh wait I have these other faculties available to me that's knowing.
That actually handles a lot more all the time than our intellect can ever handle. But yet we default so much to our intellect. It's really a one legged stool and it's a one legged chair. We've got these 4 faculties, why am I just leaning on that one leg? It's not gonna stand up. It's not gonna hold us. Or if it does, it's gonna take a lot of stress and strain to do it. Ed, I have a question and I wanna preface it with a share.
In the process, we have a step called compassion and forgiveness, a deeply powerful part of the process that is helping people bring compassion and forgiveness to themselves and the people around them. And it's a simple idea, and it's executed in multiple ways. But one of the ways we support students in doing that is through guided visualizations. And for those that have taken the process, they understand what a visualization
is. For those that haven't, it's like story time where you are guided through an experience by a teacher, and the class just follows along with their eyes closed in the experience. And there was, a moment in my process where I had just engaged in a cathartic activity, and then I was in this guided visualization following along, being told what to do and and what to say. And my imagination just set free on the story that I was being told, and I was the central character in this visualization.
And then at some moment, they brought in compassion and forgiveness. And, in my process, this was the breaking point where the teacher shared about love and being held and nurtured. And I felt the tears coming, and I couldn't stop them. And I just I bawled. I was sobbing because I surrendered. I mean, my body surrendered to what it's like to be loved and held. And unconditional love just was coursing through my cells, and the only thing I could do was cry.
And later, after I left the process, I I took my book and went through day by day, like, what happened? What was this thing this whole week? And I got to, that moment on that day and realized that it was your voice leading this guided visualization. And so having, been in radio for as long as you have and and having delivered so many wonderful guided visualizations, what is it about them that works?
Why do you like leading us? Your voice was there was almost something soothing and powerfully loving in how you embodied the words that I'll never forget. True. A lot of that just had to do with you and who you are and how you make yourself available to the experience. Let's just say that.
And some of it is just, you know people would say why do you have this great voice for those things and it's like well it came installed I didn't work for it you know it's just how how my body vibrates and makes a sound it's that way. You know some of the coaching I got in visualization that really helped is as well as you can to be in the experience yourself.
So when, you know, the visualization says something like, I don't know, listen for some message, When I'm reading that, I stop and I go listen for some message and I pause. If not necessarily to listen for a message, but to actually pause and go, the student, the receiver needs to have time to do this and then take them along. So I think a big part is is entering the experience ourselves. So it's again, it's not just reading words on a page, but it's, other parts of my quadrantity.
Am I having the sensation of being in the light myself at that moment? Because I want to not tell people, I want to invite them to be in the experience. I tell them to go have this experience. So it's pacing, it's being in it and then I think the balance too of how how how dramatic or how much energy to put into the words, which is sort of how to make it really great.
When I was training I remember, Stan Stefancic, who was one of the teachers at this time, saying, you know, I could have my my son just read the script here and somebody would get something out of it and I think that's true. I think I think it's experience primarily, but also pacing and time and and being grateful to be in this moment, to be taking somebody into that experience. And I think that's true with every element of the process for me.
You know, I I can always go up in front of the room and have my, you know, start of the day jitters, which is not a pattern by the way. It's just normal emotion. And then go, oh yeah. There's a group of courageous people here wanting to go somewhere with me. So it becomes not about how do I read these words on a page, right, how do I bring them into the experience with gratitude for the opportunity to do it.
You know, you referenced these courageous students, and I think it's something we we should note because to take the process is a a commitment that asks a lot of people, no phones for a week, and stepping into these experiences, they're not sure what's gonna happen necessarily moment to moment or, the next day. And so I think it's worth acknowledging the courage as you just did, the courage of our students. Do you I imagine you you feel that every time you teach.
Baba would talk about karma and sort of this idea of, you know, having to relive lives or what am I what's my karma for this lifetime or what and he'd think that the process was actually freeing our parents from their karma. Like I freed my mom and dad of teaching me to live the life that they lived
as a way of staying safe. It's like mom and dad, I don't blame you anymore and so you know there's a certain way of releasing their spirits or their souls or whatever their memory from me reenacting their script, their patterns. And so they are heroic people and they're basing what's kept them stuck and saying, you know, which is what so many of us don't have the guts to say is I need help.
And in so doing I think you know, one one Hoffman student at a time, we're changing the spiritual history of their family. And if you're just like, woah, this is what I'm committed to. There's whatever we've got, you know, a process with 28 students. We're changing some of the spiritual legacy in both directions of this family, both letting go of the parents some more and making some alternative version of reality that their parents didn't have available for that student sitting in that chair.
Ed, you you bring up a a great point there, the bidirectional nature of the process. It helps both heal the past, but also chart a new course for the future. It makes my heart just laugh when you say that. It's so simple. It was such a great concise statement, Drew. And it was like, wow. This is what we're up to. Isn't that just isn't that just hysterical? It's crazy good. This sort of bidirectional healing in a week's time. It's so good. It's so good.
You know, and as we're doing it now in COVID times and with, with the change of our location of our retreat sites, if we're doing it, whatever, 27, 28 doing a process next week and you just finished 1 or you're about to start 1, another 20 plus families, the direction of their life is freer, more creative, You know, in that sort of psychological terms the hierarchy of needs and you know my parents overcame a lot of poverty so I didn't have to have that hierarchy of need. They
was covered for me. They took care of my survival needs better than they had opportunities to when they were kids. And so the last thing their spirits would want even though they taught me to is live survival only oriented. That's oversimplified that taught me more than that but but it's like, well, they worked that hard so I could have the liberty to try to connect to spirit in a day to day life. You know, when people have to pay the bills that's a luxury it seems sometimes.
And so one of the gifts of the process is how do you de mysticism spirituality? And you know, for me, more and more oriented to the sensuality of spirituality in this moment. How does it in a light journey? How do I learn to feel connected? What does that mean? It's not rational. My rational mind's too slow to feel. Oh my goodness. Look at the view out the window or this conversation with Drew who's a hell of a man and a dad and I just get to talk to him. What grace right here.
The the sensuality of spirituality. Ed, I am looking out the window, and it's a great view and and appreciating this conversation. But, those words right there, the sensuality of spirituality, what what does that feel like in in ourselves? That's beautiful. The process, you know, it's like the sensuality of being a human, of of, having the freedom to bash the hell out of that pillow and just be lusty and alive with it, or etcetera, etcetera, cry deep tears like you were
talking earlier. Oh my goodness, such aliveness. Having experiences outside of the experiences our patterns allow us to have is to move more and more towards the possibility of being more fully human. I thought I was whatever, a 2 cylinder bicycle and I took the process and realized there's so much more to me than that. So much more. And how do I orient to this moment that's not is it good? Is it bad? Is it tall? Is it making money me making me money? Do you like me if I do?
And just be present to it as spirit and body. For me at that moment, the the only response is thank you. Thank you, tree. Thank you, light. Thank you, Ed. Thank you, Drew. Oh, this is a great moment. Thank you so much for being here with me. That brings up the one of the final questions as we wind down is,
how do you keep the process alive? And part of what I hear there is seeing the spirit in all things, allowing the embodied experience, the sensuality to live in your life beyond the teaching of it, which certainly keeps it alive. How else does the process live in you? I think, you know, that's that's also part of the richness of of my mom
and dad. I was raised Catholic but not rules and reg and you're gonna burden hell if you don't go to church Catholic but prayerfulness and and you know the sacraments is a way of connecting to the experience of the divine So I think I still have a child's view of the wonder and mystery of it all and you know our our intellects and our our left road seeks certainty. Usually that's a pretty comfortable and not too horrible but banal certainty. But almost giggling with,
I don't know what's gonna happen today. I wonder what what's gonna happen. I wonder what mystery is gonna show up today. Some mystery or something. And then if you see it and you acknowledge it and you sort of lustily feel the appreciation of that, not just that, Oh, that was lovely, but, Wow, this is so cool. Then there's more of those gifts all around. DOUG STANDLEY I love that lustily feel. DOUG STANDLEY You know the old slogan or cliche, the angels envious our bodies?
We came to the physical plane to have physical experiences. This is why I could never understand in so much of my religious upbringing, you know, the sort of Christian idea of dissociating from the body or it's a big part of my life, but I mean I want to feel alive here in this lifetime. I only got so many days.
And I think that's maybe the biggest lesson for a lot of the people who come to the process who are very successful and have, you know, worked really hard and diligently and I honor and respect that because they have a work ethic that I could use more of. We learned to experience our life through our intellect, through the realm of assessment. It was a good day, it was a nice round of golf, it was a lovely conversation and oh boy don't we have nice things.
But we've sort of been shamed out of being in our bodies which is why the spirit came into this form in the first place in some version of theology. I'm not sure what theology that would be, but, you know, it's like I came here to to be alive and my patterns narrowed that. In the process, boom, brought me. Oh, wow. Holy smokes. I could be what I dreamed as a kid I could be, alive and having fun and engaged with this moment.
Like I was playing in the mud in the backyard with my little toy soldiers. There's an image right there. Ed, I am so grateful for this conversation. Thank you. I'm so glad you asked, Drew, and I'm sure we could keep talking and talking. It does. Sometimes I appreciate a good geek out of what the Hoffman process is all about. It's it's fun. A Hoffman geek out. Ed McClune, thank you very much. Grateful for your time. Thank you, Drew. 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 Razz 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 hopkinsinstitute.org.