- All those little fragments of feeling unseen, unheard. They stack up and they blot out the light. You know, it's kind of like a photosynthesis moment, right? , where suddenly these deprived cells get access and can metabolize the light for maybe the first time in a decade or two or three, you immediately feel alive. I didn't feel alive after going to Hoffman 10 years later or two months later. I felt alive immediately because I was able to bend toward the light and get the nourishment from it.
- Welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute. My name is Liz Severn and on this podcast we will explore graduates journeys of self-discovery and learn how the process transformed their internal and external worlds. Hope you enjoy. Hello everyone. I am so excited as today our guest is Patricia Martin. Welcome Patricia. - Hi Liz. It's great to be here.
- I'm so excited. I've been eagerly awaiting this conversation, so I'm so happy that you are finally here. - Oh, thank you. So have I, I've been excited to talk about Bob Hoffman and the Hoffman Institute and how it changed my life. - Well, I've been excited to talk about all of you because you are just this infectious, amazing personality and I love the energy you bring. And so you are an author of four books, a researcher, a podcaster, a mom, a wife.
I'm sure so much more, but I'd love it if you told us a little bit about who you are and what you do in the world. - Well, I, I have a strange job. I study the culture. I trained a bit at the CG Jung Institute in Chicago. The word for it is the collective. If you're a Jungian. And I analyze what is changing. I listen for tremors before they become trends and I write about it. I research them and I write about them. - I love that you listen for tremors before they become trends.
So where did all of this interest in society, and I know there's a separate part in your life of what you did and then you studying with the institute is in the last decade or so. Is that right? - Yes, that's right. I began writing in earnest about the trends I was seeing and how they were going to affect the economy and the dismantling of certain ways of living and the rise of new ways of living and seeing the world. Those are the things that govern our lives.
And so they have a great deal of importance to how we make decisions and how we find our way in the world. And so these are big sweeping topics. Usually I found my way to the CG Union Institute of Chicago because I began studying the effects of not just the internet culture, but what the internet culture brought with us.
And that is sort of this age of hyper reinvention where we are having to reinvent the self and at the same time the ideas we have around identity we're being ripped apart and reconstructed in a digital age, which meant that people were starting to feel like their psyches were really fractured. Like they couldn't kind of hold it all together. So that's what was coming out of the research cohort that I had assembled people who had volunteered to be a part of the study.
And at one point, Liz, I kind of felt overwhelmed, like I'm out of my depth here. I'm a social researcher, I'm not a psychoanalyst. So that led me to wanna anchor my work in some tradition, you know, some school of psychology. And you have to this day, if you boil it all the way down and you go all the way to the early history of psychology, your choices are Carl Young or Sigmund Freud.
And having done my time at the Hoffman Institute leaning into Carl Jung was a no-brainer , because what broke Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud up, it's a famous breakup that they had, is when Carl j began advocating for the soul and said, there is more to us than our emotions and our pathologies and our sexuality. There's something else going on here and I believe it's emanating from the unconscious and I'm gonna drop my anchor into that. And Sigmund Freud said goodbye.
I don't wanna have anything to do with that. That's not totally fair to Sigmund Freud. He too talked about the unconscious. But really Carl Young devoted the rest of his life to understanding the motivations that lie deep within us as human beings that we're sometimes unaware of. And our job is to begin to uncover that and to begin to see that there is more to us to break open our consciousness so that we are able to surface some of the things that really make life worth living.
- And I remember you once told me that Hoffman taught you how to live internally, not externally. So was part of this soul discovery during your process, was this part of this journey as well? - Yes. I'm just old enough to be able to look back and see the wisdom in my path. 'cause at the time it felt like a hot mess. - , you've made it. Even now you're looking back with wisdom . - I know, I know. Phew . So I, you know, here I was, I had a successful research communications firm.
I had young children. I was spinning lots of plates. And I was not just in overwhelm, you know, I was just driven by my resentments. I was quick to anger, I was foggy in my thinking, meaning I was being operated by something that felt like it was outside of me. And I was very attuned to what people thought of me. And I was very performative in those days. 'cause let's be fair to me, I was business and giving talks and it's a very performative act, all of that.
But that doesn't change the fact that I didn't have any sense of how to direct my life. I was just operating from one deadline, one crisis, one child's needs to the next thing. I was piling up resentments and piling up anger. And I met with a friend and she and I were friends on lots of different levels. So we were really intimate enough to share certain details of our lives.
And she had a really difficult childhood, her particular story, alcoholism and in her parents and you know, all the things that go with that. And my story was the early loss of a father, and then my mother suffering a series of nervous breakdowns. And you know, I lived through that. I don't mean to be cavalier about these things, but as Carl Young said, we aren't what happened to us. There's a bigger story.
And I think what was rumbling in me was that I had this trash heep piled up around that bigger story, which meant I couldn't access it, I couldn't be conscious of it. And so I certainly couldn't live my life by its guidance. So I had no sense of inner guidance. And everything was external. And that means you are constantly, your face is in the wind, your thrown off course, and you're, you're sabotaging your own life because you can't hold your center.
And she is sitting in front of me drinking a cup of tea and she's radiant and together I'm hanging on every word. And I said, have you had some work done? I mean, what, what is this? Then she's told me about the Hoffman Institute. And I knew immediately, you know, it's that Harry Met Sally moment when I thought, I want what she's having. I looked into Hoffman and it was immediate.
Never have I been called so clearly as I was called to the Hoffman Institute, but I will admit to you, I didn't drive to Hoffman. I came to Hoffman on my knees. It was there that the tools I was given, I was able to rake back the debris that was covering that greater self, that seed of me that couldn't sprout any further because it was just piled up. Once I was able to clear that space, so many other things were possible.
We can talk more about how I arrived at the Carl Jung Institute, but that was a good 20 years later. And so I feel like when I say that I used to live externally and now I live internally, you know, I'm just like everyone else. We have to get up every day and go to work. Or in my case, I have to research and write and blog. And despite all the things that we do in life, I now have a greater understanding of why I'm doing it, because that's all coming from what I was able to uncover.
And that's an inner guidance that comes only from deep within us. - So take us back to the process to the week. - So , you know, so I showed up to Hoffman like everybody else kind of, I think, you know, I was managing the impression and, and I was ready because one of the things the Hoffman Institute does really well, I think, is it prepares you well by giving you exercise. So there was homework that also taught me right away, oh, this isn't a spa or a junket. This is a rigorous undertaking now.
And I was game for it because remember, I was in a lot of pain. And so I showed up for the week eager. And the one thing I remember as being a source of anxiety for me was that we were going to do this in a group. I meet WTF, here I am writing all these notes to send to Hoffman about, you know, what it was like to be 10 years old and lose my father, and then have my mother who was an immigrant. We had no family, you know, she proceeded to retreat into these really dark depressions.
She lived behind a locked door. I mean, I remember I was having these flashbacks of pulling a chair up to the washing machine so that I could wash the clothes. I was 10 years old, the therapeutic term as I was parented, you know, there were four kids, my sister was five. And so what I was doing is I was at 10 years old having to set aside my grief over losing my father. My family's financial situation changed overnight. We went from middle class people to uh, hand to mouth.
My brothers were teenagers and kind of became feral. And so here I was having these flashbacks and then thinking, I'm gonna share all this with a group. I was so re refreshed and impressed, I guess with how Hoffman is a very intimate personal experience. It is you doing your work with guidance and support and really revelatory exercises, and you are in a group, but everyone is so there to get their work done.
Truthfully, I don't think that week for me was any different than boot bootcamp, but it was bootcamp for the soul where you were there to work on your stuff and you were gonna get yourself ready for the next phase of your life. Even though I couldn't articulate it at the time, that's exactly what I was doing. So that week also revealed some things to me, Bob Hoffman's idea of negative love that has childhood roots. And I could see so clearly that that had been my experience.
But I think the one key that got put to unlock what I had repressed as a child and then came back to revisit me in adulthood was that I had never been able to grieve my father's death. That I had to sort of take charge, do things I wasn't really capable of. And there wasn't time to grieve. And it's interesting, I think back on it now, and I think, oh, and by the way, people don't really give kids the agency or the credit for needing to grieve.
We think of them as innocent beings, and maybe they can't integrate their grief or express their grief. They're not even probably feeling it. I was able to get in touch with that process that at a very deep level and release it. And because I didn't even know I had that and that had become like a stone sitting in my soul. Once I was able to release that, it was like I could feel the air rushing into my soul. You know, it sort of inflated me in this, in this beautiful way.
And so I think it's very hard to explain the paradox of Hoffman because it does that work, and yet it doesn't operate from a trauma modality so much. Its ethos is aimed at helping a person identify, identify what happened, identify why it mattered, see how hit it has run your life and release it.
I still to this day, uh, , one of the tools that I found the most useful in that week and still use to this day, is being able to identify when you're in a pattern, you know, hey, the more we rise and get experience and succeed in the world, the more challenges we're gonna face. And so I'm able to say to myself, get in my car, start it up and say, you know, I think I, I was in a pattern today, , what is going on there?
And then I know what to do with it. Thanks to Hoffman, - Your imagery is just, I'm just hanging on every word you're saying and I, I love the connection that you're making to knowing that you came into Hoffman with several stories, right? Beliefs about yourself, beliefs about your childhood, and then discovering, I haven't even grieved the death of my father. I was too young. I I got thrown into life far too soon.
But that you were able to identify those stories, identify those patterns, and really move through them and breathe this new life into you is just beautiful. - Thank you. It is, I who feel really grateful for having that experience. And it was in my forties, so I still had a life, a lot of life to live. I would not probably have been ready. I mean, we're ready when we're ready. Carl Jung said, the self will take you. It has an itinerary and it will get you where it wants to go.
And sure enough, I showed up to Hoffman at exactly the right time where I still had some plenty of life to live in accomplishments and goals, but I had lived long enough to realize that something was running my life that was not of me. - I often tell students in, in the process, you know, nothing's gonna reveal itself this week that you're not ready to handle, that you're not ready to see and heal and feel and move through. So thank you for reiterating that.
- You know, I wanna say something about Hoffman teachers because that's another nuance, I think to the Hoffman process. That the teachers aren't your therapists. The teachers aren't your Buddha, the teachers aren't your drill sergeants. They are truly your Sherpas. They carry packs and march the path with you. They remind you when you, you know, you've had enough. They remind you when you, you know, really do you really wanna keep carrying that in your pack another 20 miles?
Really? And that was so helpful, the work of a Hoffman teacher. I don't know what ring of heaven if, if heaven and hell are structured the way Dante believes hell was structured. I don't know what ring of heaven y'all belong on, but I'm pretty sure it's in the Iner circle. - There is something beyond this world that I believe opens up at Hoffman. Just bringing it back to what you were originally saying this like, search for our soul.
And so I love the analogy, I use it often about being a Sherpa and guiding, but again, it's coming from within. It's not to do with us. It's the processes, this beautiful structure, but it's the soul really guiding - It. Well, it's so interesting thinking about how my life is now after Hoffman. You know, there's a numinous quality to the process. You do have to walk through some rugged stretches.
I don't think anybody should embark on Hoffman with a sense of whimsy and eager self-development agendas. I think you should really treat it as a, a journey you're going to take and it's going to lead you to places unknown. And then you're gonna do some of the work that you set out to do that you have to identify before you come.
But if I were to say how those two unknown agendas and known agendas converge to give me a life that I believe has a great deal of meaning, is that I learned that the green shoots that were growing out of the seed, that was a at the center of who I am, that really sacred self, I guess I would call it, those green shoots, do so much better when they lean into the light. I had a pattern of negative thinking from my childhood that I was unaware of, and it was a survival tactic.
So, gee, you know, when your mother is living in a really dark depression, she doesn't read the letters from school and doesn't know to show up to the Christmas pageant where you're in the show. So there's an empty seat where your mom's supposed to be. All those little fragments of feeling unseen unheard. They stack up and they blot out the light. I think, you know, it's kind of like a photosynthesis moment, right?
where suddenly these deprived cells get access and can metabolize the light for maybe the first time in a decade or two or three, you immediately feel alive. I didn't feel alive after going to Hoffman 10 years later or two months later. I felt alive immediately because I was able to bend toward the light and get the nourishment from it.
And I then knew the difference between living in the dark, in the darkness, in the sadness, in my sad story between living as if all I had to do was be mindful and to to be conscious when I was in a pattern and then bend toward the light. And that was a pretty easy recipe. And it has served me to this day. - I feel like there's so many nuggets in there that I'm gonna just put a post-it note on my mirror somewhere or something. Those are beautiful ways to illustrate all of that.
And I love the enthusiasm you bring to life post process. And you um, mentioned that in a previous conversation that a current obsession of yours is mixing the psyche and the digital age. So let's talk a little bit about life post process and this big endeavor. You started writing Renaissance generation after the process, is that right? Years after, - Yes. I started writing it, uh, six years after the process.
- You know, I, I know that you, in the book you mentioned it's this emergence of a of a new cultural archetype, right, in society. But what even spurred this exploration for you? - Well, gosh, the inception story, to answer that question, I, I have to go a little bit farther back, but not too farther back from that.
So before I started really putting together the early signs of how the internet was gonna shape up, I was kind of there at the dawn of the internet and I was not a founder or anything, but I did get to work with one of the founders, , and I was at the American Library Association. There was this thing called the internet, no one knew how to use it. And we represented the network of public libraries in America, which is larger than the McDonald's franchise.
We were the installed base of information exchange. And so we had these people coming to us like Vinton Surf, the father of the internet, and Al Gore's office, bill Gates, they were coming to us to say, we'd like to work with you. And they weren't sure where all of this was going, but everybody had a hunch that this was important. So I began to be put on these projects. That's where I got this feeling that this was going to be truly transformative.
And I left the American Library Association at one point, and I took one of my projects with me. And that was the project where we were wiring 25 communities across the country to introduce them, to bring Main Street to the information Super Highway was our slogan. This makes me a silverback in the business, but I'm okay with that.
For those of us who stuck it out and still continue to think and write about the digital culture, we're sort of the philosopher class, I guess is emerging, you know, and I, it makes me happy to be a part of it, but be that as it may, I could see that what was going to emerge was this, this was going to become this vast digital canvas for people to express themselves. And so I began to think, okay, where has this come before? When was this outpouring of mass creativity culturally before?
And that was the European Renaissance. I created an arrangement with the, an old convent in Rome to put me up for a month. I had set up appointments looking at everything from the Sistine Chapel laying on the floor 'cause the Vatican was closed, and looking up at the Sistine Chapel and feeling like I was just touching the surface of this. So I studied the social conditions that exist right before a renaissance. And then I looked at our civilization to see, well, where do we match up?
And there's one in particular I wanna talk about because it, I feel like we're living through it right now. And that is, uh, death comes first. So there was a dark age before the European Renaissance, by the way. Time was a different paradigm. time was a different construct back then. So, you know, I'm gonna be talking really quickly about like, let's say 200 years of culture . So, you know, that went unrelieved by progress in many ways.
Until then. There was this outpouring, there was this point at which there was a plague, and this is one of the rules of, of a renaissance, is that death comes first. And so we are living in a time right now where systems of meaning are breaking down and falling away. The modern culture has decided that God is a construct, um, not something to be felt. And I'm not saying this to get religious. This was an organizing principle of life, for centuries, and we're discarding it.
Institutions we once believed in are being broken apart and discarded. The structure of our myths around the American dream are being dismantled. And so we're entering into a period where what we're experiencing is the death of meaning. And it, it has created different forms of control, anger, hostility, as people try to fill that void. But this death is what happens right before a renaissance, that something gets cleared away so that a, a new layer can be built. It's not a new foundation.
You know, one of the things that fascinated me about living in Rome is Rome had fires and would burn to the ground, and then they'd build another layer and they'd build another layer. People talk about the layers of Rome. That's how societies work. That's how civilizations work we build. And so we're in this process of deciding what we still believe in what no longer serves our humanity.
And we've got the looming presence of AI that none of us can decide how that's gonna go, but we're deathly afraid of it. There are some people who think we ought to be very optimistic about it, about. I think people have lived in the digital culture long enough to distrust it. And I, I believe that that distrust is, is well deserved. That was how I started on the , which is the book about how this tool of the internet could serve society.
And we're in the period of watching the death, but the digital culture is rising faster than the death process can clear anything away. And so I guess if I were to think about this on the individual level and not be thinking about the collective, I would say if you're in this moment in history and you wanna be able to navigate it with some serenity and some certainty, what would you do?
And I would think that the more you can clear away from your own inner world where there might be debris that is clogging you, the more you can put to death ideas about yourself that are punishing and self-destructive, the more you can understand that your past was a piece of you, but not the whole of you. And set your sights to going and gathering the up the other pieces. And by the way, the only way to do that is to live life. Then you're individually resilient to some of the outward chaos.
And I didn't know it at the time that Hoffman had helped me do all that work. , you know, had made me resilient in that way. But some of this is just coming to me now, Liz, as we talk. And I realize now what a preparation that was for living through the chaos we're in now and still maintaining a sense of grace - In talking about the digital culture.
I, I see it often just not even at Hoffman, just in the world, that it's digital world is often a place people are going to to try to build or rebuild themselves. I wonder what you've seen in trends over sort of this digital culture and this sense of self. - I've identified three disruptions to our development that really have the roots in the digital culture. One of them I think is probably the most useful to talk about now because I, I won't sound like a scientist, I'll sound like a human.
That is my theory, that we are beginning to suffer what I call persona fog. We have lived now for 20 years and many people create, produce and distribute the show. That is the self, it's the self show. This is how we've come to see who we are. We fracture up little personas. There's a kernel of us in there. You know, it's not all fakery, but we're creating spaces slivers where a lot of things can seep in to our psyches that maybe did weren't able to do that before.
And there has never been at any point in history, a time when humans are the media. We're not consuming it. We're producing and consuming. The part of the self that we're doing this work from is the persona. Persona is a theory of Carl Young's. It's the thin veneer of the self. And it's a protective covering. It's a coating and it helps us interact with the world. It helps us be social. It has its tether to the ego. And so it really kind of takes direction from the ego.
It has a high need to fit in. It has a high need for validation. Modern neuroscience is proving that that kind of validation is actually addictive. And so the more you do it, the more you need it and want it. And now you've got researchers who are coming up and putting data side to side that says, you know, this is the record of all of the social media activity of this teenager who also met her death through suicide. It's hard in science today to say something is causal.
People are afraid to do that. But I don't think anybody's afraid to say there are connections between these things. Part of the reason is because we are operating from the part of ourselves that has the least capacity to sustain our development. This is the thinnest layer of the self, the persona, and yet we're running our lives from it. And it has had enormous consequences for us. Chief among them is it fogs our sense of direction forward.
So I was interviewing people who were otherwise successful. Some of them were influencers, had successful businesses. And I asked a simple question, said, how would you describe your future self silence or apologies or stuttering? No one leapt off the mark to answer that question. And I know I'm asking something that has an imaginative answer to it, but I couldn't fathom why it took them so long. And they had to retrain. No, I, no, it's not really that.
No, strike that. Don't, I don't wanna say that. In other words, they were editing their answers to me about how they saw themselves in the future and this didn't add up. So I began to see that one of the effects of living our lives out of our personas means we're not able to tap the parts of ourselves that are the where the reservoir is, where the life giving source of self is. It's depleting us and it's creating a host of other problems.
There's a, one of my favorite writers, Christopher Lash, wrote in his book The Culture of Narcissism, that every age has this pathology. And I believe that persona fog is ours - And is persona fog, is it safe to say that that's in bringing Hoffman world into it, that's where our patterns live and sort of function from is the persona. - I don't know. I couldn't answer that. I haven't thought about that. That's a great question though. Now you've got me going Miss Liz.
But I do think this, our patterns are not only ever with us 'cause we continue to learn about who we are, but now our patterns are also talk about living externally. Our patterns are echoed across platforms and into audiences around the world. If patterns are contagious, I have no idea if they are, but I'm thinking about it now. If patterns are contagious, well, let's think about childhood trauma. Childhood trauma is a pattern of thinking about your childhood.
It's a way of thinking about your childhood. Certainly a traumatic childhood is a heartbreak, you know, and there's plenty of evidence as to how it marks a person physically, somatically, psychologically. But I think what happens in the digital culture is that we now have this drumbeat that is inescapable and it becomes a way through which we see everything and how we define ourselves and how we come to understand ourselves.
This then also contributes to people feeling like in order to belong and in order to be a part of something and to feel okay about themselves, there must be a part of me that's in that trauma story. I believe that, again, one of the beauties for me of Hoffman is that I was able to look at the difficulty of my childhood and not have it destroy the possibility of my future. That I wasn't going to wrap a lot of ego around that anymore.
And I wasn't gonna congratulate myself anymore for suffering through it. And I was gonna let go of my martyr complex about it and I could do all of that because there was something out there that beckoned and I wanted to get to that, whatever it was, I didn't know. I just knew that I couldn't get there.
If I was gonna hang on to a childhood story, - When you mentioned our patterns contagious, it made me think of generational trauma and then that, just, that story then of really breaking the chains of that and really freeing yourself for the possibility of what does my future self look like? How do I create this story, this narrative, connected to myself, but also full of possibility?
- Yes. You know, that legacy work, that's another way of thinking about how forward looking Bob Hoffman was because some of that generational trauma research is just coming to the fore now. What you have is consciousness on one side and then identification on the other. And I think where Hoffman rests is on the consciousness side to make us conscious of something and then to trust that the self is going to, now that something is conscious, we are now able to work on it.
One of my favorite beliefs that Carl J had was that at the bottom of every depression, there is a task, and when we address it, our lives can move in a new direction. And I didn't realize when I signed up for Hoffman and showed up that it was gonna help me identify the task, and then it was gonna show me how I could possibly address it and then my life moved in a new direction.
- Beautiful. Well, Patricia, I just want to thank you for your vulnerability, for your insights, just for being you and for coming on this podcast. 'cause I have had a beautiful time talking with you today. - Thank you, Liz. It was my pleasure. - And um, hopefully we'll all be looking for your next work and so much to learn from just this podcast. I feel like it's one of those, I'm gonna be listening kind of over and over just to, to get those little nuggets out of it. So thanks again.
- Thank you, Liz. I was honored. - Thank you for listening to our podcast. My name is Liza Insi. I'm the CEO and President of Hoffman Institute Foundation. - And I'm Rasi 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 hoffman institute.org.