You know, it feels victorious in a way because, as I said, I don't have an issue being vulnerable. I've done it in public forums before, but the ability to be able to do it in a way where I am able to stay open to not close-up has been very important to me. To be able to tell my story without being so ashamed of it has been very important to me, and I think it's a critical element of me being able to move forward in strength and power.
Welcome everybody. My name is Drew Horning, and this podcast is called Love's Everyday Radius. It's brought to you by the Hoffman Institute, and it's stories and anecdotes and people we interview about their life post process and how it lives in the world radiating love. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Hoffman Podcast. Kevrick Jones is with me. Welcome, Kevrick. Thanks, Drew. Nice to see you. It's great to have you.
So in our post process follow-up call, which we do with all our grads to support them as they head out into the world, you and I had such a great conversation, and it just inspired me to follow-up with you and ask later on, would you be willing to sit down for a podcast recording? So I'm so glad we're doing this. Can you share a little bit about why you took the process, what led you to it, all of that? Sure. I will try to do that as succinctly as possible because I've kinda had a
windy road as opposed to the process. I feel like life's been preparing me for it for quite some time. Ultimately, I chose the process, it felt right for me because, in my discovery process around stuckness, feeling very stuck in life, very aware of powers that I had, very aware of great relationships and great opportunity sets in life, but feeling as though I fell short of living fully within that.
I'm a kind of a consummate studier of the human condition and how to improve, and so I have a lot of knowledge, a lot of even wisdom, but it wasn't translating into practices the way that I felt like it should. And particularly since the pandemic, having a young family, there are a lot of things that, I
guess, the cover got blown off of. You know, between my wife and myself, we were managing kind of with, you know, our long held traumas, and that really imploded, I would say, the pandemic forward, but it's related to things that have been long brewing and always under the surface. But, again, we were able to manage around it.
And so since the pandemic, particularly over the last, I would say, 3 years, there have been a lot of different experiences, exposures that, I guess, readied me for the process. My wife and I, I think it was August of 21, we took a trip, just she and I, to Hawaii, which was enlightening on many fronts. And so on the one hand, it was a beautiful trip for us, first time away from the kids. At the same time, we had a lot of intermarital
strife during the trip, right, in paradise. And, I remember my wife having a lot of trepidation going into that trip about, like, the trip not being able to solve or resolve some of the frictions that she, you know, had awareness of within our relationship. The next summer after that, my wife turned 40, and we went to a place, called Rancho La Puerta, which is in Tecate,
right outside of Tijuana, Mexico. It's a wellness based resort, and it's a very unique place in that it is almost like a day camp or a summer camp for a lot of different wellness related things. So we experimented a lot there. My wife did, watsu, which is like a water based kind of meditation, which was very
emotional and spiritual for her. I observed I remember there was a woman there who was teaching a course based off of a book that she authored called The Healthy Deviant, and I sat in on, I think 4 or 5 of her lectures, experimented with some of the things that she suggested while at the ranch. And the whole notion there was if you want to live a healthy life that you're deviating from the norm, you have to be willing to bravely kind of experiment to find yourself and to, you know, live
within that. And something about coming out of that resort really kinda reset the table for me in terms of expectations for myself, what it meant to be, and kinda holistic and well rounded. And I've been really trying to attack things from that point forward from a nutrition standpoint, from a physical standpoint, from a mental, spiritual standpoint.
Another parallel coming out of, the pandemic and everything that happened in the summer of 2020 around George Floyd, I had gotten involved in a number of leadership things on the diversity side. There was one diversity leadership training program that I went through where, you know, there was a lot of sharing involved. And I realized in trying to share my lived experience and my story that I have very visceral, almost emotional, like,
seizures. Like, my body would physically seize up, like, whenever I would try to talk about my upbringing, my lived experience, etcetera. And one of the works that came through, one of those leadership trainings was a book called My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menikin, and it focuses on epigenetics and really the concept of race through the lens of intergenerational trauma.
And I remember picking that book up and working through a number of the exercises, you know, some, you know, now that I have gone through the process, I realized are, like, similar visualizations as, you know, what we might experience in the process. And again, I would have these very strong kind of emotional, just, like, physical, like, lock up reactions.
And those things persisted. I remember I did another leadership kind of fellowship program that was designed for, you know, mid career people, you know, accelerating their careers. And I was a very open sharer in that, similar to how I was in the process. But I noted if I counted the number of tiers per participant, like, I was definitely, you know, head and shoulders above everyone else in terms of, you know, how emotional I was when trying to share
my story. And so, you know, these two prongs, just like the general health and wellness, I had physical debilitations, like, I was having a lot of my physical inflammation issues that was causing fatigue, mental fog, like just physical tiredness breakdown. And so I just wrapped all those things up and over the last 2 years have decided that I would push into all of
them. So, from my grandmother's hands, I, elected to find a somatic based therapist or practitioner, that I started working with at the end of last year. I found a functional based nutritionist, the end of last year. Started going to the chiropractor last year, doing a lot of body work. I went to a physical therapist, and then, really started focusing based off of the comments from the physical therapist around my core.
And one of the things that my pneumatic practitioner mentioned to me that resonated was that, you know, my body, my somatic positioning had taken on just a very closed, shrunken disposition, probably consistent with how I've been feeling about myself, how I had coped with my childhood conditions. And so, you know, I've been through all of these various practices trying to open up and loosen up, which, you know, I think all, you know, kinda prepared me for the process.
The process itself came to me, I think, very randomly. Somehow I got on a distribution for something called Tapping World Conference, and so it's, you know, this concept of Meridian Tapping. It's like a week long virtual conference that I just put on my calendar. And when the week came, I had kinda forgotten about it, but, you know, ended up viewing a couple of live presentations, and one was by a woman who was dealing with childhood trauma. And in listening to her tapping
presentation, she just mentioned the Hoffman process. And I had never heard of it, But, you know, in going to the website and researching, it seemed like it was, you know, kind of ready made for, what I was trying to do. And it's very consistent with the theme of, you know, coming into 2024 for me, which was integration and trying to integrate a lot of these healthy practices, wellness practices that I've been studying for a long time, like, into my experience.
Hearing that full description and that wonderful timeline, I can't help but notice your deep commitment to healing. Where'd you get that? I have, I think since childhood, been very curious about not just what makes people tick, but, you know, I guess the way I would describe it is what makes good people suffer through bad circumstances? What makes good people have bad outcomes? And so for me, my parents got divorced when I was, I think, 8 or 9 years old.
I could argue that maybe they shouldn't have been married in the first place, but I do think there was, you know, initial love. You know, neither of my parents had traditional upbringings. And so my father, his mom had him when she was, I think, 15, and he essentially was raised by his grandparents. I think with the notion of, you know, we'll take care of him for a little bit of time,
You are daughter, go get established. She moved to DC to get a job, and she ended up marrying someone who she had a family with, but then they never came and got my father and integrated them into that family. And so I think that left a lot of open wounds for him growing up. And then my mother, she moved around a great deal. Both her parents died by the time she was in high school, you know, mostly from drug or alcohol affliction.
There's a lot of drug use that, you know, kinda pervaded her family circumstances, and she also lost a lot of her, caregivers, you know, along the way, not only parents, grandparents, aunts, etcetera, that, you know, supported her during her childhood. And so these two people get together and, you know, create a family.
The youngest of 3, you know, for a time, it's good, but, you know, those pressures of, you know, trying to hold everything together, be able to immobile while, you know, not having your wounds heal, like, really just blew up. And so in my formative years, especially very early on, there was a period of time where we had family support similar to what my mother, I guess, and my father had, like, with grandparents involved. And so we used to live directly beside my mom's grandmother,
who we call grandma babe. I'm starting to study our family tree in a way that I guess wasn't comfortable with pre process, and I've come to realize that, like, she's technically not even like a grandma, like she's an aunt, right? But, you know, we called her grandma babe and she served that role. And so given that we live directly beside her, I spent a lot of time with her. So, Kevrick, just to clarify this, that your mom was born to a teenage mother at 15. That was my father's story. Oh,
that was your father's story. Where was your mom then that her grandmother had this parent so much, or she just was next door and that was part of it? It's probably even more convoluted on my mother's side. And so she, just depending on circumstances, would be raised by different people. And so similar to my dad's circumstance around the elders saying, okay. You know, we're seeing, you know, the great migration happen. We're
seeing opportunities in the big cities. And so a lot of people, once they would get done with high school, they would migrate to the cities. And if they had kids, a lot of times those kids would end up back down south so that they could be in the cities and actually earn a living. And so then that started the whole process of sending money back home. Sometimes kids would come, sometimes they would not. And so for my mom, her mother moved to New York City, and then for a fair amount of time, she
was raised by her mother's mom. But then sometimes she would go to New York and be with her mom or be with other aunts, cousins, etcetera. But her mom died when she was in high school. She came back to be with her mother's mother, her grandmother, and then I think within a year, she died. And then one of her aunts came to take over that position, and then within a year, she
died. And so there was a lot of loss there, and she had, for a period of time, been raised by her father's grandmother, grandma babe, and later in life after her mother's mother died, she spent more time with her father's grandmother, and that's grandma babe. And just to help listeners, that's who you chose, grandmother babe, grandma babe, as your surrogate in addition to your mom and dad. Is that right? Yeah. It was my mother, my father, grandma babe, and the church. So those are
my 4. Okay. And it sounds like you've been interested in your family tree and the lineage and understanding family history even more post process. Yeah. I was I had no interest for it pre process. It all felt kind of painful and what's the point. So I think going through the process has given me, you know, more curiosity around it. So take us into your week. Bring us along. What happens, Kevrick? I had I had a very roller coaster experience in the process.
I know that in the beginning, I had a lot of self shame. The past 3 years, I'll say I've been doing a lot of studying around, you know, parenting, relationships, like, what these close in relationships are meant to do for us as individuals. Gotten fascinated by the whole concept of one's inner child and that these close relationships are really mirrors for your inner child and the things that
are undealt with. So I had some awareness around it, but, obviously, the process goes pretty hard into that space. And I remember each morning, I would get up and, you know, on the campus, there was a little nature area and they had a labyrinth in that area, and so I tend to get up early anyways. I couldn't quite sleep in. And so on the second morning, I remember I went to the labyrinth just to see what happened.
Right? Because, you know, I felt very lost, and so I think that's it kinda represents that feeling. And I remember, you know, that morning, I was in the labyrinth and I just broke all the way down in the labyrinth. It was really around this feeling of having abandoned my childhood self, not really having been there for my childhood self. Yeah. Again, I have been growing in awareness around this over the last 3 years with things I've been
reading, etcetera. But, you know, there was a whole point of being here at process is to not continue that relationship. And I remember going into it, feeling a ton of shame. I remember coming out of the labyrinth feeling connected, literally being able to walk out kind of hand in hand with my inner child and being able to play with that spirit. So that was a great beginning, but as you go through the process, you move beyond just your inner child and you start focusing on,
your parents' inner children. And that, I realized, was really, really difficult territory for me. Like, for my mother, I think, you know, because I've had more of a relationship with her over the years, and she's been very, instrumental in, you know, kinda my family rearing and being with my kids, and she used to live with us for some time. And I'm very similar to her, like, I had more empathy for her. But for my father, I was just really
just angry. I mean, I was really livid, and I not appreciated that because I think my attachment style, I just tend to bury emotions and I really feel emotions to the point where I can kinda point to what the feeling is. But I had a lot of rage just pent up related to my dad and, you know, how he treated the family and how absent he was and how he, you know, hasn't been able to, I guess, heal himself to be a better participant in the family. But even that, I dealt with in the
labyrinth. And so, like, there was a day where we had to, you know, do a visualization exercise around our parents and the inner child and I. I remember ending that, and we were in the big room, and everybody left, and it was like I was really just sensitive. And I was just kinda there, stuck in that sensitivity,
and I had a emotional breakdown. And I remember one of the coaches just coming up behind me, had my eyes closed, and just consoling me and, you know, ended up holding me, like, on the floor like a toddler. And, again, that helped me to really appreciate how much pent up emotion I had around this stuff. But then the next morning, I had another moment in the labyrinth where I kinda found things in nature, leaves that, for me, at that time, represented
my inner child, my mom, my father. I walked through and similar as, you know, with my inner child, I was able to get to a place of just release, I suppose, to not have the rest of the process be ruled by that anger and that rage. And from there, there was still more road to hoe, as they say, because, you know, there's a lot more work we have to do on the parent side. And so I definitely had, you know, more experiences, but I was able to push through them.
Wow. That labyrinth for you is there's some potent energy, some deep work that happened between you and the labyrinth every morning. That seems to be the case. This is special for me for sure. What happened around your grandmother, your great grandmother? So, yeah, another, you know, important relationship for me, again, was my relationship with my grandbaby. I have realized over the years, having worked through things that, she was really a mother figure for me.
You know, in my early years when, you know, my parents were struggling and busy, there was some way that she made me feel seen and valued that was really lost when she died, which was, you know, just before my parents separated and then got divorced.
So in working through, you know, kinda patterns and feelings and so on and so forth, I realized that I felt very abandoned by my grandma babe, that she, you know, and my childhood self left, didn't say goodbye, and left me with people who could not understand what I lost. So that was another, you know, kinda feeling of sadness, anger, you know, that was within me.
I don't think I dealt with that much as a point of focus the way that I deal with my inner child and, you know, my parents or parents' inner children. But we had a exercise towards the end where, you know, we were trying to defeat our dark side, we'll say, in the rage room, as I call it. And so, you know, we're having this very physical, I think you guys call it cathartic experience. We're kinda literally bashing this notion of our
dark side. It's a very taxing thing. And so at some point, it became, you know, almost like a rhythmic kinda like beating of a drum. And I remember, for some reason, being compelled to sing on top of that, and so I started singing things that, I don't know, just just felt right in the moment. And I remember singing wade in the water. That is a song that I remember from, you know, being
Southern Baptist in church. Like, there was a very specific way that we did wade in the water that felt like you, you know, were making waves. I just felt like a presence kinda kinda come over me. And it it's almost like, you know, everything muted around me. Like, you know, when you put the car in reverse and you got the nice auto feature and it turns down the volume, it just I don't know. It just really reminded me of me of grandma, babe.
And so I sat in that and remember speaking to her like it was my grandma babe and saying, you know, why did you leave me? And I remember it going away. Right? And it's like I was like, you know, okay, volume up. Like, okay, people are bashing, yelling. Right? I guess I'll get back to bashing. And then it came over me again, and I was like kneeling down and I was hitting. It almost put me in like a deep prayer stance, and it was sort of like my body was taking over
a bit. And I remember, like, my mouth loosely saying I love you. You know, I love you. I love you. And there's just a warmth that came over me. It gave me a feeling of perhaps she never actually left me. Right? And perhaps I just didn't know where she was, or I I can see her, or it wasn't the right time for her to present herself, like that sort of thing.
And, you know, we have not only the quadrinity, but we have the spiritual guide that you all work us through, and so I kinda enlisted her, I inherited her as like an additional spiritual guide, I'll say. And so in that sense, she'd stayed with me, like, since the process. And when I do my quad check, I often, you know, ask her for a message, you know, just as I do my spiritual guide. What do you feel? I feel appreciated, quite frankly.
I feel stronger because I always associated strength with her, and I associated wisdom with her. And so, you know, feeling like, a, I have access to her now, like, just helps. Right? Because we post process, go through a lot of works to try to work from our spirit.
I also feel as though it sort of changed my relationship with things because it makes me feel and or believe that when she was with me, that she put something inside of me to help me to navigate to get through all the things that I would have to get to. I noticed myself getting a little emotional about the idea that she put something inside you, that she never really left you, that she's been there all along. What's that like to consider that she's been there all along? It's beautiful.
It is humbling. It's a little sad because wish I could have seen that, tapped into that, I suppose. It also helps me to look at certain things that have occurred in life differently and to see where that spirit helped me to overcome some things or avoid some things or look at something again or look at something differently. And there are so many, kind of, I call it, like, spiritual interventions, right, that have occurred along the way in order for me
to get to this place. And many of them, very unusual into Biologic, but, nevertheless, they were there. Then maybe she was there. You come to the end of the week. What happened as the week wound up, and I imagine you kept taking walks in the morning? I did. So, you know, in post process, there is was it self forgiveness walk? That's right. Self forgiveness and self compassion walk. And, so I stayed we were in Chester, Connecticut, and so I stayed over in
Chester, Connecticut. I got a small Airbnb. I brought my bike up from DC just in case. And Chester's like a cute little town, and so I could, you know, bike from where I was around, and I ended up biking to the ferry. There's a ferry that goes across the Connecticut River to, I think it's Gillette State Park. And so I went up and saw William Gillette's castle, I don't know what you call it, and then there's a whole
kinda natural area around there. And so I took my book bag, I took my workbooks, and and on this hike, I ended up finding this one very particular tree that, for some reason, just really owned its own space in the woods. Like, it was, like, the tallest tree, the widest tree, like, I mean and, like, all other trees just kinda just like, you know what? You got it. You know? This is this is your hood. Like, we'll just be over here.
And I remember doing my exercises, like, in front of that tree and being reminded of, we did one exercise where we expanded our width, our depth, our height, and it just, I don't know, really connected me in that moment. For me, it was a great kinda capstone. Right? And it was a different kinda labyrinth because I was just literally out in the woods, like, meandering, seeing different things, just going as far as I could go before, you know, I needed to get back to catch the ferry again.
So, yeah, I was I was saying that was probably my my capstone labyrinth. What do you notice about the process and you together months now? It's been almost 6 months. October. So we'll say 3 months. What do you notice about you now 3 months afterwards in life? How is it? The thing I notice the most is that I don't feel as steeped in, I guess, what I what I now call shame. I feel as though preprocess, there's a lot of shame.
And it's almost as though, you know, everything I was reacting to was because of the shame I felt around what something meant to me or how it, made me think of myself. And, you know, in a lot of the child trauma works, they talk about and, you know, Hoffman, no different, how central shame is to when you live a trauma as a child because you don't have enough context to rationalize it a different way. And so it's like if these circumstances are this way, I was here,
it must be because of me. And I had a lot of, you know, unusual childhood circumstances. I think, you know, with that, there was a sense of deep unworthiness of people being fooled by me, and so at some point, they won't be able to be fooled anymore, people will leave, etcetera. And so you might as well get ahead of that. Right? Like, unless not feel, because if you wanna feel, then whenever somebody decides to leave, you know, that's gonna be a big vacuum. And so
there's a ton of that. I realized that I showed up in, you know, my lived experience, how I interacted with my loved ones, interacted with work, I mean, just literally everything. And so post process, without the shame, I have a much stronger ability to listen. Listen not only to, you know, what another person is saying, to listen to, you know, we'll call it my quadrinity, but particularly my body speaks really well to me. We have a good relationship.
My emotional self, we're still getting to know each other because I haven't really interacted with, embraced, appreciated my emotions for a long time. I've, for the most part, suppressed them, so I don't have the type of emotional language yet. But I am able to sit and observe that, oh, there's feelings going on here. Right? Like, I can't call them by name. They seem like they're in a gray direction or a red direction or
whatever you wanna call it. And even just this morning, I reflected something to my wife where I was like, I can't articulate fully what I'm feeling, but I know that I'm feeling negative feelings. And I know that that relates to this, and I'm working to express of. I think that's another piece that you all talk about greatly in the process is the beauty, the benefit of expression.
I think I always felt, but I can understand more when I'm having, like, a emotional blockage or emotional buildup inside that needs to come out in some way. Oftentimes, when I'm able to express myself in one way or another, it helps to kinda brighten the space and open up so that I don't go into closure, which is my natural pattern. My natural reaction is to close-up.
Kevrick, I wanna wind down here by asking about sort of taking us back to where we started, which is seeing the journey you've taken in self help and spiritual growth, and you sort of laid out all these steps that brought you to Hoffman. And so now that you've completed the process, you've had 3 months out into the world, how has that shaped what you're gonna do next, or what next holds for you in this journey?
I think that's something that, can't remember what you said in small group or something like, you know, hold the question, you know, allow the question to remain out there and open. And that is something that I'm definitely holding the question around because, you know, I work in a certain industry, certain career, I got here for certain reasons, there are reasons for me to stay, but there's also this long standing gravitation towards people development.
And I realized underneath that is not, you know, in the surface level sense, it's at a very deep, deep rooted, spiritual sense that I really value that for myself. I see that in the loving relationships that I've had over the years, that's something that has come through and something that people have really valued of me, and it's something that I want to lean into and grow.
What that looks like, TBD, primarily because, again, I'm still working on integration, and I'm still working on openness, and I am focused on building the practices, integrating them better into my life, pattern recognition, the expression, the recycling, and then attaching, you know, some of the models that I have for stronger relationships and using that to inform that pattern recycling process. So, basically, skill up to a certain level and then determine from there, like, what
the best next steps are. So that's over the next 6 months what I'm really focused on is just collecting the data and being very open to the feedback from my loved ones. I just delivered my letter to my mother and father over the last week. I had a conversation with my mom. You know, I was much more open to talking about family structure. It's just like there's this blossoming that's happening right now that I don't necessarily know where it goes or what it looks like
or if it ever end. But at some point, I think letting it season for a bit will be wise before determining best next steps. What's it been like to take this time and speak so vulnerably about your journey to talk about your Hoffman time and life before and after. What do you notice in the sharing of all this? You know, it feels victorious in a way because, as I said, I I don't have an issue being vulnerable.
I've done it in public forums before, but the ability to be able to do it in a way where I am able to stay open to not close-up has been, you know, very important to me. To be able to tell my story without being so ashamed of it has been very important to me, and I think it's a critical element of me being able to move forward in in strength and power. Kevin, thanks for sharing. I'm grateful for this time. Same to 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 Rasa 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 hompaninstitute.org.