I realized that there was no darkness. It was just me. It was just what I thought of the world of what I thought about myself and that I couldn't even resist it. I couldn't even fight it. To make it go away. I had to love it until it completely shattered like glass. And that's when I realized I just the raw power of self love. And once I was able to feel that for me, it was so easy to feel that. For the world. Welcome to Lu everyday radius. A podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute.
I'm your host, Sharon moore And I hope that you enjoy today's conversation and that the stories shared by our graduates, impact, move and inspiring. My guest today is Doctor. K Reach Cha. Doctor C is a neurologist and an our practitioner. She's also the author of 2 books, the prime and sound medicine. And she coaches executives running large corporations on how to connect. Today she shares with us her journey of the process and how it impacted her life in such a beautiful and powerful way.
Doctor Cool. Welcome to the show. It's set the pleasure to be here with you. I can hear your smile. I love that. I am smiling. You can hear it. Yeah. I heard it. Well, I'm really eager and excited to have this conversation with you, and I'd love to kind of anchor in the process itself? When did you take the process? And what was 1 of the biggest impacts it had
on you. It's funny that you ask about dates because it was such a powerful pivotal point, that I kind of look at it as, oh, there was a way of being before, and there was a way of being after it. I think it was maybe 2 or 3 years ago somewhere. In that time frame, but it just doesn't feel so linear when I think about my experience there's I think it was about 2 years ago, roughly 2 years ago. I appreciate that nonlinear because I feel the exact way the same way. So is there
in reflection? Is there a moment during that process that was you mentioned the word pivotal. That was a pivotal... Magical moment for you. Absolutely. And at the moment, I was having it, have called it magical because it was there is nothing comfortable about it and I had really gone into Hoffman expecting the discomfort, you know, I had...
Intellectual the discomfort of, like, how how much I was going to embrace it Of course, that's not how it happens when they actually faced with something that's subconscious. And the moment was really, and this is always, I think so perfectly synchronized. Right? Vice spirit by the universe, I had been paired up with somebody in the process.
And when I say paired up I just mean the way that we were put together in the group and the way that we were even ce where I I could not, Maneuver around this person, it had been coordinated so that we were going to be a part of each other's experience. And she's so perfectly symbolize and represented, be most painful and messi, patterns for my childhood. And so the way that everything unfolded, I saw the way in which My Intellect was responding to the process trying to keep it very, very clean.
I saw, even the way I I was spiritual. You know, my own patterns to try to keep it clean and contained and just not messy. And there is this moment where my my coach at Hoffman, you know, looked at me and said, create, like, this is... You see this. Right? Like, you see this juicy experience, sitting in front of you. Like, you see how perfect it is, can you just go to that place and take a buyout out of there and just get as vulnerable as possible?
And I was like, I'm trying... I'm trying, and I could deem myself just trying to keep it clean. As a physician, I've been trained a certain way to be with people, as a spiritual seeker, I was trying to take, you know, the higher ground, like I was trying to make this look better and feel better than it was. And there was finally this moment. It was near the end where I just finally lost my shit, I mean, like I just really lost it, and I was just like, this is not
Okay. Like, there's nothing about this. That's okay. I don't give a shit that I was trained as a doctor to be compassionate to you and I don't give a shit that I meditate for hours every day. Like, it is really not okay. And I don't think I have ever been that emotionally messy, in my entire adult life, like, in public with... I mean, maybe with my husband, Like, you know, with the person I feel
the absolute most safe with. Like, I'm sure he's seeing that, but never ever ever, you know, with another person, especially someone I hardly knew and in public with And when that happened, and I remember looking over at my coach and she actually she she looked just so late, and I could see that she had tears in her eyes because she knew, like, I got to the place that I was really trying to get to do this process.
And, you know, I looked over her, and I was like, oh my god, Like, this is as messy. As it could be, and I just looked over with this giant smile, and I was like, oh, I can be messy. I can be a messy 1 I don't have to clean up somebody else's mess, and it was so empowering, and it was so natural. To be just so completely in the power of those emotions right at that moment without any apology and without having any label attached to them, and I just felt. So
free. I don't think I had ever felt that free as an adult ever before. All because you let yourself lose your shit. Yeah. Because, you know, I clean up other people's shit for a living, like, you know, and 1 of my patterns and childhood was cleaning up the shit of the adults in my life. And so I... Never gave myself permission to be that raw, that human to express those emotions of, like, This is not okay with me that you're being like this. Like, you've got to really own your
own stuff here. I'm not on cleanup duty for you. And again, my hoffman coaches understood that every single program that I had that I had assumed as my identity would have never allowed that. And so in that moment, I was as authentic, as I could possibly be. And the great lesson that I learned from there was, I can really... I can lose my shit, and losing my shit is actually good for
other people. Like, there are moments where that degree of authenticity is so important for other people to see an experience. You know, 1 of the things I took from that was like being able to be at work and and not to the degree that you do at Hoffman because Hoffman is such a raw experience. But I was able to bring that authentic tone of my emotional self into meetings and people were, like, able to give themselves permission to feel similar emotions, but
also they were like, Wow. You don't normally see a woman so okay with expressing her emotions in such a powerful way. And yet at the same time, have such presence of her mind to do something with it. It's not just losing it, for the sake of losing it, but it's using the power of those emotions to actually move something forward you know, into intellect chile, move an organization forward. And they were like, this is new.
Like, she's not trying to be nice in this moment, although she's usually very, very easy to work with, but it was like, whoa, when we needed to experienced these emotions, she was able to tap into hers, and because she was able to tap in, he gave us permission To express that, hey, yeah, We're actually all feeling this way. Thank you. Thank you for being the microphone, you know, for all of us. Let me zoom in on this because I find it very relatable.
What I'm hearing in a way and correct me if I got this. You built this career, right? You keep saying this is what I do for a living. And that career worked hand in hand with your patterns. Then you go to Hoffman. You break open. You lose your shit. You have access to the messi of the emotions. But you come back to the world and the job that you created that worked hand in hand with your partners. What was that like? How did that evolution and transformation show up post hoffman?
You know, it was tricky at first. Because, you know, here I was, I had already built a certain way of being in the world, and it wasn't just on a private level. Know I was doing things publicly. I was representing organizations. And so then all of a sudden, you after I had already become important as that person to this world of mine. All of a sudden was like, hey, hold on. No. That's not actually all of it. And so in the beginning, I didn't know quite how to do it.
And I was really religious about keeping up with the process. Like, in my check, I remember my coach was just like, man, you are living and breathing this. She's like, if we have a poster child you would be it because I would just keep going into everything I learned, like especially as a neurologist, I understood the importance of the plastic that was going on, my brain was re rewire and I didn't want
to lose the momentum I had gained. And so I just kept going back to the basics again, and again, and again, until those patterns broke and they've really got fine tuned down into, like, even just the subtle ways that they were showing up. And what I found, was that the more and more I became an integrated hole where I wasn't even having to think about it, where I didn't have to think what am I feeling? It was just there.
The more and more powerful I became, as an instrument of change, and as an instrument of just moving other people forward in everything that I did, and I just realized that when I don't show up with all of me no 1 is getting the best of me. No 1. Not my patients, you know, not the organizations I work it not for the people that I was coaching, nobody my family, nobody was getting the best of me. But when I show up as an integrated hole, it they get something that creates, like a tsunami,
oftentimes a very gentle tsunami. When I say tsunami, I don't mean somebody who's, like, coming in and just ripping people apart. Oftentimes a tsunami of compassion. It was like, I became the tsunami of humanity, and it just put people at ease. You know, I do some really quirky things sometimes, even with business partners, and they'll come to like, that is just 1 of the weirdest things. I'm like, I know. I'm weird.
I've got weird parts of me. I love those weird parts, and I bet you've got weird parts of you, and you know what? This is a safe place for your weird stuff to come out too. I and it just creates a space of humanity that we can we can be together and even though we're together in a working situation you can bring your weirdness because your mess, it doesn't bother me. I don't feel
like I need to clean you up. I wanna touch upon something here because I think hearing the tsunami of humanity in the space for humanity is the result of this work that you did. Right? Your coach said you're the poster child. And as you were telling the story, you said something like, until the patterns broke, then all this happened. Zoom in on that. How did that happen? What what what what do you mean until the patterns broke? You know, it's a hoffman even after it's
hard work. It's, you know, and luckily, especially through my medical career and, you know, having spend so much time in a spiritual practice since I was really young. I was accustomed to hard work. Like, I knew you don't just go and do it once and then you're done. And so I turned it into part of my, like, daily routine, Like, everything else that I did in my daily routine when I first... It was hard work, the way I took care of my body.
The way that I developed my brain, the way that I started you know, created this very strong connection to spirit. And so I realized like, okay, this is gonna be hard work with the emotions. I had to do my check ins when I hit these blocks. I had to go and look for these tools that you guys had provided. I never felt like I had to go beyond what you guys gave. And so I knew it
was all there. Yeah. And so there were days where I was maybe, like, smashing, like, 3 or 4, or 5 new patterns and recycling, and I just kept with it kept with it kept with it because I knew just like everything else I do, that there's always this tipping point. And so the tipping point for me was, you know, because my spiritual practice was so strong. It's oftentimes tied to, like, these big shifts. These big points of integration. And so I had just started a more advanced,
spiritual practice. And anything else I had done. And I went in with a little bit of t interpretation because, you know, it was said, like, this is going to really, like, pull out the stuff that you would never choose to go into. And I was like, I've already done Hoffman. So I at least, you know, have that... Tools now. Right? To to deal with this on my own. I had the confidence of that. And so I had started that practice and very true to its name. It did exactly that.
And I remember that there were these 3 days where I just felt completely paralyzed. I mean, the pain and the darkness were so big. They were just so massive. And by this point, my husband had all, so Dun hoffman and he saw how my body just completely shut down, which is what happens when I can't reach the emotions when I can't process them, It'll just come out in my body. And I was like, I feel like I can't move. Like, I I feel so stuck
right now. I feel like somebody has poured cement, and I can't move, and the pain is so thick. And he said, you know, do a dark dioxide stop. I feel like this is a dark size stock like, you know, I'll do it with you. And I said, I can't even reach for that. Like, I can't even must up the energy. Like to do that. And so I just kept sitting with it, you know? And I said, look, I know that I have this strain to do this. III know my quadrant is there with me. I know what it feels like
to be integrated. And so even though I couldn't must the strength, to do the dark side stomp, which I love by the way. So the fact that I was in such a paralyzed place tells you how thick this pain was. I just kept connecting to myself, and I just kept reaching out and that finally, there was this breakthrough moment where I stood face to face, like, with my fear, and I was like, oh, my god, you are so massive. You are so massive. You are so dark. And you're so overwhelming.
And I couldn't resist it. Like, I couldn't fight it, and the only thing I knew to do what's to love it? Like, that was my only go to. I was like, I can't offer you anything, but my complete love and compassion. And so I just sat there, and I was watching this, like in front of my eyes just like the biggest scariest thing that you could ever imagine. And I just started to love it. I didn't have the energy to do anything other than love it.
And I just kept loving it, kept loving it cup loving it, and there is this moment, and this was over 3 days where really I was struggling just to get up. And there is this moment in those 3 days where the love became so intense And the darkness just shattered. I mean, Sharon, it just shattered like you would break glass and underneath that was me at around 2 years of age. I looked at myself standing there at such
a young age. And I said, was this how old you were when you started to believe all of this. And when I looked at her, and a way that she ran into my heart and just fully integrated and was like, you finally see me. And I was like, yeah, none of that was
you. And from that moment on, even though we had done, you know, some of this work at Hoffman, and, you know, this was many, many, many months afterwards, of just drilling into practice, it wasn't until that moment where I realized that there was no darkness it was just me. It was just what I thought of the world of what I thought about myself, and that I couldn't even resist it. I couldn't even fight it to make it go away. I had to love it until it completely shattered like glass.
And that's when I realized like just the power, the raw power of self love, And once I was able to feel that for me, it was so easy to feel that for the world. You know, that doesn't mean that there's not moments of, you know, frustration or anxiety or overwhelm or you know, that there's moments where I'll look at somebody and be like, oh, why did they have to be like that? There's always those moments where human are very nature fluctuates, but underneath those
little waves of fluctuation. There is now such to deep belief in understanding that any darkness that is out there in the world is just covering somebody's pain and that as our hearts become bigger and bigger and bigger, we have the capacity to shatter it, and that should be our main goal in life.
To learn how to grow our hearts to the point where it can shatter our own pain, and then to grow it even beyond that where it begins to shatter the pain of others because their mess and their darkness is no longer scary to you. Wow, that's beautiful. 1 thing I noticed was this desire at least from your husband, I don't know if you would have that desire to
stop it, move it, Try. Try try and then you had to surrender to this feeling of I just need to sit here with this, and I'm curious is that 1 of the first times that you just sat there with it. Tell me more about that. I've known the words surrender, and it's not that I'm unfamiliar with what really deep surrender means. I've been put through, you know, many, many tests around surrender particularly from my spiritual practice because I so embraced it from that side.
This was so different though I had so many tools growing up, especially through my intellect, especially through my meditation practice and through my body. For dealing with pain. I was so adept at it. You know that if something happens, Oh, my knowledge in ie medicine and and the pseudo medicine tradition. I had all of these tools unbelievable tools of how to move it, Right? How to shift it? How to even sculpt it? And this was the first time in my life.
Where all of those tools were just completely paralyzed. I couldn't access any of them, and I remember my husband looking at me. He saw how powerless I was. I mean, just how completely powerless and he's never seen me like that. Now, I'm somebody who can move pain. I have worked at this for over 40 years personally and spent most of my my career, learning how to shift and sculpt and move pain for myself and other people, and all of his sudden, everything I had learned.
I I couldn't use it It was like somebody took the entire toolbox away from me. I didn't have a choice, but to totally surrender, it was the first time that I really got what that meant. It wasn't surrendering to a spiritual teacher. It wasn't surrendering to a practice. It wasn't surrendering to a physical process us it wasn't rendering to an intellectual process, I had to completely surrender to the most terrifying experience so of my adult life.
And it was in that moment of just complete release by saying, I'm not gonna move I'm not gonna try to do anything to you. I am just going to look. I am gonna look with so much earnest ness. Because I felt like this was gonna kill me. That's how strong the experience was. I was like, I think this is trying to kill me It was such a visceral experience of being killed while alive. And so I just had to sit with it and watch it.
And what I found was in that complete I mobility, There was just an energy that was so much bigger than anything I had ever tried to do. There was an energy that came in once I was just completely quiet. But like this discernment you made that it's not surrender to a spiritual teacher, surrender to. A practice, it was surrender period. And and you said with earnest, and and the word that also came up for me was courage.
Yeah. You know, I wouldn't have said it was courageous in a moment, and just because I had never been filled with so much beer in my life. But I I'm sorry. This is the analogy that comes up. And anybody who's a Star wars junkie will appreciate this. But, you know, it's like in that final scene of return of the jedi where Luke Skywalker looks at Darth vader and just says, I won't kill you. I'm just... I'm not gonna kill you. Like, if you wanna take me over, go ahead, but I'm not gonna kill you.
And You know, we've watched that movie so many times, and we watched it with my my kids. And, you know, that... He It's a this dramatic movie moment. But after I had this experience when we saw that again, I just looked at that scene so differently and it really is. Like, something inside you completely gives up the fighting the doing, and it requires so much trust I mean, just an unbelievable amount of trust that you were not brought to to have this experience on this planet to be destroyed
by pain. You really weren't. You weren't brought here to be destroyed by darkness. It was just sitting in that courage in that moment of... I know that I am loved, and I know even though I can't feel that right in this moment, I know that that's my truth. I know that that's my reality. And then everything just kind of stopped, and I just waited I just watched. It's almost like what I hear when you say trust is it's like a trust in yourself.
It's a trust, and I can only say this after the fact when this was going on here. I was completely terrified. So, you know, I'm making this sound, much better in in hindsight... In the moment, I was just completely terrified. And I had no choice really to to let go just because I was
so tired of the terror. I was like, I can either sit in this because this isn't going anywhere, or I can let go to it was this trust that somehow, all of the theoretical things that I knew And even though I had this experiences of being whole and being connected to something so much bigger that in that moment, I had to really trust that that was completely true. And what I found since that moment is that the different parts you know, that we connect with at Hoffman.
They've just gotten closer and closer and closer. Like, I'm not having to check in as much. Like, they're just, they're becoming more and more and more and more integrated. And it's the first time that I had a conscious awareness. Of what we call enlightenment and spirituality be and that it must just be when all of these parts, all of these fragments, remember that they are a hole. And once you remember that, from where would the darkness even come from
where would the fear come from? You know, the emotions will be coming up from the present moment because that's just part of the human experience. But they're not rooted really in anything from the past. Everything just exists as a whole in the present moment. And I'm not saying that I'm there, but I'm just feeling every day that I'm getting closer and closer and closer and that, you know, there's many times now,
and I still do the quad check. Just again, as a way of reinforcing the the neurology of it You know, as a neurologist I'm just fascinated with how the brain works. But I'm realizing also just how it's becoming less and less. Necessary because on a moment to moment to moment basis, they're pretty connected. And there's times where they get a little disconnected, but not for very long that they know that they were a hole.
And we had somehow made a mistake somewhere along the line and for me, when I faced that dark experience, for me, it was around the age of 2, that that's when the fragmentation really happened. That's when I had to separate myself into these different parts to survive. This quadrant when the parts of us, are together, there's no reason for survival. You just are, and you really do function as a child of the universe because you don't see the separation between you
and everything that that is. Like I said, I don't experience that in every single moment of my life, but I'm experiencing it more and more and more, and it's easier for me to bring that experience now to the people that I work with to the organizations that I work with, I just bring me to wherever I go and that's enough.
That's so beautiful and so powerful and what a beautiful journey to to share with us from this almost comic vision that I got of you losing your shit at the process to you having this incredible moment where the patterns are breaking and then you just sitting in it paralyzed almost.
And through that, landing in a place of seeing that 2 year old and hearing you finally see me and then feeling this raw power of love that you get to feel for yourself, but now for everybody else around you, what a powerful journey. And that's what I'm really working on now, Sharon is how do I feel this now for everybody around me? You know, I'm still practicing it with me, but it's become so easy, Like, after that moment, it's just become really, really easy. My weirdness is lovable.
My messi in the emotional messi, that's lovable. My quirks are lovable. I'm becoming more and more lovable to myself, but there's a point where you go, okay, that's nice. Fantastic. Now, how do I do that for the whole world? You know? And that's really where my attention is going? How do I do that? When there's really tough things in front of me, and it's just kind of coming back to realizing that no matter what you're facing The people around you are also whole, but they don't remember that.
They also lost the memory of that. Just like I did. That's really becoming this next stage of what I'm getting out of Hoffman is, I brought it into my life, And and again, it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to always be there. It is there. Whenever I wanna call upon it, it is there. When I wanna take a moment of silence, it is there. And now how how do you see the entire world with the same degree of love and compassion that you have for your? Self, and you can only
show them what you have for yourself. And I feel so blessed that my work demands them of me, yourself for me to be better at what I do in the world, it actually demands that I'm constantly practicing this. Well, in the and and here we come full circle and I'm gonna end with these 2 thoughts.
How amazing, that you built a life, where you are actually in the role of a healer, and you got to go through this journey, that now leaves you with such like you said, powerful and raw self love that you are just so ready to give to others. And you built a life where you're in that position. Amazing. Yeah. And it wasn't go into losing my shit. Just that moment. Exactly we you go back to losing your shit. Yeah. Exactly. Alright. I would have never been able to tap.
Into it. So I built a life where I never lost my shit, and only to realize that it was losing it that actually unlocked the power of healing because it unlocks the power of being able to love your messy parts and then love other people's messy parts Yeah. That's beautiful. I think not only are we saying lose your shit. The other thing I'd like to say is this interesting reflection that when you were in it, it was terrifying.
It was probably, I think you said the scariest thing you'd ever done in your life. So, yes, while we hear it now from the futures, perspective of looking back and hearing what you went through in that moment, it felt overwhelming and scary. That's important for us to remember. That maybe right now, if any of us are feeling like that. 1 day you might look back and see that this is the greatest gift you ever got. Who knows?
We can't promise that's for everybody, but certainly it happened for you, and that is really inspirational. I love that you said that. Thank you for adding that. We could go on
for a long time, but I... I'll pause us here because this was so rich and dense and beautiful and to know that a person who went through this journey that you just shared with us, now goes back into the world and brings it out not just to your patience, it sounds like everywhere you go, like, with business partners and organizations and family members, etcetera, back and how lucky our world is to have somebody who's so committed to their own self love and to bringing love into our world.
Thank you, Sharon. Yeah, Thank you for doing the work and bringing it to our world. Thank you for sharing and for being with us today. Great.
It's my absolute pressure, and I can't tell you how many people I already talked to about the Hoffman process and how many patients that I have referred, you know, to go and just the fact that you guys exist it's just it's a tremendous tremendous gift, you know, to our our time on the planet that there is a process like this that can guide people into these dark places with the tools to turn on the light really. Through self love, so I'm so grateful for the work you do. You have no idea.
Thank you for listening to our podcast My name is Liza and Grass, I'm the Ceo and President of Hoffman Institute Foundation. And I'm Ras Rossi, Hoffman teacher and... Founder of the Hop 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 hop institute dot org.