We're in a culture that has so much of that gaslighting, denying, dismissing. I don't wanna hear this. I can't cope with that. People then start thinking, what's wrong with me? Not, hey, I have a story. They think, I have stomachaches. They think, I have an anger problem. They think, I procrastinate. They think why is my confidence so low?
And they don't think I have a story to tell you about what's happened to me, which is a very different presentation than here's my psychology and my pathology. Welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute. I am Drew Horning, host of this short but special series with guests who are not graduates of the Hoffman process, but whose life's work is harmonious with the work and ethos
of the process. As you settle in to explore this new terrain, just please keep in mind that the views and ideas expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of the Hoffman Institute. However, we think you will find these conversations very interesting, very thought provoking, and we're really glad you're here and hope you enjoy this conversation. This episode mentions physical and sexual violence and may not be suitable for all listeners. Please use your discretion.
Welcome to the Hoffman podcast. Welcome, David Bedrick. It is great to have you. How many years have you been doing this work? 30 plus years? Yeah. 35. 35 years, supporting people in connecting to their wisdom, their power, their intelligence, their whole and authentic selves, and you really do that by going right after shame and the grip that shame has on people's lives. You've written books. You deliver webinars. You have worked with thousands of people, really, in this unshaming.
Is that the right term, unshaming? Yes. Unshaming. What else would you add to that in terms of your resume, if you will? I always think of my resume in two ways. There's more conventional formal things. I also have a law degree. I practiced law for 8 years. I taught, psychology and philosophy at university for 8 years. And, I'm a teacher at the Process Work Institute in addition to my own institute.
Another important credential, I think, in today's world that's becoming more important is that I've been through something and worked hard with that material. I don't think I'm more evolved or whatever, but people who've worked through a personal struggles, whether that's their violence of a family, whether that's being a marginalized human being on the planet,
and has done something with that. Many people just get crushed by those things and don't wrestle with it or don't have the the resources, the money, or the people around them to help. But I grew up in a, in a Jewish family that carried on a history of intergenerational trauma. And one of the ways that manifested was by living in a home with a father who was violent, physically violent. I say he used fists and belts to express his rage
as opposed to just punishing. Not that that would be okay, but he was a grown man in a rage. And then a mother who was I call disempowered, that means she could do nothing but act like it wasn't happening. I'm not trying to blame either 2 of them. That's fine also to do. I'm just saying that's the context of my fear based childhood, which I was scared all the time all the time because it was a scary place to live. But I've spent a lot of time wrestling. What does that
mean? What do I what do I cook out of that soil, given that's the soil I got? So wrestling with that, empathizing with that, understanding what it's like to be powerful and relatively powerless in the world has given me an empathy and a drive to want to help. The wounded healer archetype, some people would call that. Elizabeth Kubler Ross has a sentence that says beautiful people do not just happen.
Beautiful people don't just happen. And when I hear that, I think of, yes, your resume is all these wonderful things, but, also, you are a human being who's lived through and metabolized pain as a way of moving forward and understanding something that you then pass on. That's right. And understanding what helps and what is possible and also understanding the task, the project, as you're talking about becoming an authentic human being, maybe a multigenerational
task. I'll get certain places, and I can see that I have. And there are certain difficulties I might not be able to add to that resume of personal development because they're that big, because a culture may need to change, and we see that with lots of things. We see that with sexism, for instance. Many women can get very far in their empowerment and development. And if the culture gets more awake, it gets a little bit easier, and that tide lifts more women to be able to do
that. So there's a social aspect to what a person can do. Not to say that the person can't do things and isn't responsible and can't be accountable. But as a culture gets more awake, particularly to trauma and abuse, we've seen that in the last 20 years and even in the last 5 to 10 understanding of trauma growing, then it makes it more likely that people will see context for what they think are something wrong with themselves and begin to a healing process. David, I wanna go right to it.
And on some level, you have a difficult task because you're targeting the thing that nobody really wants to talk about, which is shame. How did shame become the thing that you ended up focusing on, and how hard is it to get people to talk about shame when they have shame around their shame? Yeah. Part of it is my own story, as I just said. If I have have a father who's brutal and violent, many people have some level of violence in their family.
Sometimes violence looks more covert, but still impacts a person, so it doesn't have to be a dramatic physical sexual assault. But if people have a certain amount of violence that happens in their family, then they need what I call a witness, someone who sees it, notices it at the time or afterwards. I tell you, hey, Drew. This is what happened to me. Let's say you're my therapist, And you have options for how you're gonna respond. You could say, David, get over it.
Come on. Did that really happen? I can't believe you would've belts aren't so bad. Makes me shiver just to say that. So if you say those kinds of gaslighting, dismissive kinds of things, and I'm vulnerable to you, like I would to a parent or to a counselor or to a culture, then I take in your viewpoint. Your viewpoint is, what's wrong with me? Why am I like this? Why am I upset? That didn't really happen. So now I have a violence, like a wound inside, but wrapped around that is a belief system.
Why am I like this? What's wrong with me? How come I get do I make things up? Can I trust myself? And that self-concept that wraps around the violence becomes my identity. So I walk around thinking, I don't really know what's true about me. Well, Jew said something that was hurtful to me. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was me. I can't tell you I'm hurt, or I can't say that I'm upset because that's usually
me being triggered. So I have all these explanations from my experience that are not about what's happening in the moment. They're about what I've implanted from the way I was seen, witnessed. So I call that witness a shaming witness. What's wrong with me? I ask. Not, hey. Why'd you do that? Then you could explain. I can go, oh, I'm sorry. I made a mistake. That's a fine interaction. But if I don't have that interaction, I just think, what's wrong with me? Why am
I like this? I'm 68 years old. I've worked with myself for 35 years. Why am I still acting this way? I'm dramatizing it. If that's what's in my head, then I don't communicate with you. I don't create an honest relationship with you. I don't know who I am because I can't say this is what happened. And that disconnection from you would call it authentic self that would be a good word for me as
well. That disconnection from myself leaves me disempowered even to be an intelligent person or to write to somebody or to tell somebody I like them or don't like them or to make a boundary. So the implication for that shame that's entered is widespread. Wow. And it sounds violent. The dehumanizing messages we send ourselves sounds violent. Do you phrase it that way? I think it's the greatest violence that exists.
Now, yes, somebody can say, look what's happening in the Middle East, and what's what happened to children being violated by cops who are sexually abused in religious organizations? So, yes, that's not we shouldn't just dismiss those, and those are incredible violences. When it comes to healing from those violences, this is an amazing thing that I've discovered and researched for all those decades. When it comes to being violated, if I hurt you, I'm not gonna hurt you, I
hope. Right? If I hurt you and you're vulnerable to me, you're smaller than me, or you're a child of mine, or somehow I have powers, my role as a perpetrator is incredibly important to that story. When you go to heal from that story, my role is not the most important role, the perpetrator. It's how that was seen, who heard it, who understood it, who didn't. Who would you never tell because you know how they would react? That story, the story of how people react is much more potent.
So for instance, few years ago, as a doctor in the United States, Larry Nassar, he sexually violated women and girl gymnasts for the US Olympic team and then at, Michigan State. He was a doctor there. So he did that, and then reports came out about that for 20 years before a 160 women came forward and a female prosecutor,
all of those conditions. And 20 years later, when people are more open to having that happen, the judge in that case said, we are gonna hear any witness statement from a person who wants to come forward as a healing process. You can come forward and speak publicly as part of the sentencing. We don't need a 160 women. You go ahead. You have a thought. In the courtroom? In the courtroom. Wow. Yeah. She said, if it takes days, I'm gonna make I'm just not gonna use
her words. I'm gonna make a healing environment for anybody who wants to speak. I have read and listened to all of these statements. I can tell you what the statements are about. Who they told, He's a violator. There's no there's no dismissal of that. Right? He's a perpetrator. He should be in jail. He should be stopped. Yes. Clear. And the stories these people tell is I told the FBI. I told my parents. A lot of people at Michigan State knew. A lot of people in the gymnastics told,
this is the organizations that I told. These are the police that I told. These are the friends that I told. These are other doctors that I told. The stories they I get animated about that. I'm self conscious about that. The stories they tell are about who they told and how they denied and dismissed and gaslighted their reactions. So the healing problem the violence problem is the perpetrator. The healing problem is what happens when I tell you, what do you do? They they
just forgive them. Well, I haven't even known what happens to me yet. I haven't had a response yet. So we're in a culture that's has so much of that gaslighting, denying, dismissing, and I don't wanna hear of this. I can't cope with that. People then start thinking, what's wrong with me? Not, hey. I have a story. They think I have stomachaches. They think I have an anger problem. They think I procrastinate. They think, why is my confidence so low?
And they don't think, I have a story to tell you about what's happened to me, which is a very different presentation than here's my psychology and my pathology. You talk about a couple things. One of those is the silence and the secrecy and the fact that it isn't heard or amplified or understood. So I'm curious about secrecy, but the other thing you mentioned is story. Why is story so important? Can you share a little more about that? So it touches me a lot
when you just say that. If I took a moment, I would get a little teary because I feel so passionate about it. And I think that's why I wanna even tell people when I'm in public. This is part of my own story because it outs our humanity. And in this way, you don't have my exact story and the person who was taken out of Israel. I don't have their story. I don't have Maya Angelou's story, a black girl raped at 6. I don't have her story. But our stories, when we go into the particulars, connect us
with others, connect us with humanity. I don't have that exact story, but I understand the details. I have a story also. I'm part of the human experience, the glory and beauty of me to thrive and make intelligence and and literature out of it and the pain and suffering of that. So that's an important part of the story for the
opening of the world. The more people tell stories, the more we live in a world that's open to understanding, the kind of traumatic worlds that many of us, maybe all of us have lived in. But the healing has so much to do with story. Because if we don't have a story, if I can't say this is what happened, then I usually say this is what's wrong with me. I may not say it that way, but I might say, fix my anxiety, Drew, and
that's could be good. I maybe you could help me with my anxiety, help me breathe or relax or regulate myself, and I would appreciate that. If you only do that, yes, I'll help with your anxiety, then you also become slightly complicit with, yes. I have an anxiety problem. But maybe I'm scared because I was scared in an actual story that you can relate to, and I need help with the story, the trauma, the abuse, the person who lives in me. I don't need help only with my anxiety.
I want you to understand. I wanna be seen. I wanna be witnessed for being a human being who's been through an experience. That's unshaming. That's humanizing as opposed to what I call pathologizing. Oh, you have a problem. Let me give you a solution for your problem.
You just referenced something that I I'm I think a lot about because I know recently there was an article in the New York Times about anxiety and TikTok and young kids and the fixing, dehumanizing, pathologizing of the stories we tell ourselves as opposed to the humanizing. Can you share a little bit more about how diagnosing is part of what you're saying that in the diagnosis, there's some shame? Yeah. I mean, it's it's really interesting because many diagnosis we have to say is incredibly
useful. Like, I've worked with people who are depressed, who've gone on antidepressants. It may have saved their life. So we can't say, oh, that's all this. It's all bad. I have to know that. And I just had an infection in my mouth, and I got an antibiotic. And it helped, and I'm glad because I was in pain. So and other kinds of psychological, or physical diagnosis, somebody in the right hands is intelligent and can say, I can relieve your suffering
by understanding it. And giving it a label tells me what to do, and that works. So just to hold that also as important and useful and sacred in its own intelligence and right. On the other hand, if we wanna have a balanced system, then we would also wanna say, I wonder what story and experience lives inside. When I was a child, I got very difficult stomachaches. My parents didn't know what to do. They took me to the hospital a couple of times because I
was in agony. They're like, what's wrong? I'm glad they do. That's an intelligent thing. Right? Like, our child is looks like they're in agony. We should do something. And then they would say, there's nothing going on. There's nothing wrong. Nobody is to blame about that. And my system thinks I have a stomachache problem. What do I do about my stomachache? I'm gonna try acupuncture. It helped a little bit. I did some acupuncture. I'm gonna try this. I have,
IBS, irritable bowel syndrome. These things I need oh, that's good. And all of those are saying, I have a problem to work on, and it's absent of a story so that you can maybe relate to. Maybe you have IBS. You can relate to that. Or stomachaches. Oh, I relate to that. I try this. I do this, David. I drink chamomile tea before bed and don't have coffee. I think thank you. That's empathetic.
On the other hand, if you knew that I got intense stomachaches and the family environment I live in and how my body dealt with it, somebody else got headaches, somebody else runs away, somebody else bangs their head, this kid, for some reason, got stomachaches. If I tell you the story of the stomachaches inside the story, now you can connect your own story. Maybe it wasn't the stomachache. Maybe it was something else. I'm a human being, and I'm not a problem to be fixed.
Oh, those stomachaches make sense. Now it's not only an illness. Of course, you got stomachaches. Oh my gosh. What would your stomachache say? Ah, yeah. I can't stand it. Oh, you had a scream, a yell, a pain in you that didn't come out. So even as I say that, you can tell Drew it's like a feeling life, a connection. People may listen and say, oh, right. That makes sense to
me. And now my connection with the world, my connection with myself is embraced in a kind of self compassion as opposed to, I have to fix what's wrong with me. Why am I why do I have stomach? I guess I have a bad stomach. It sounds like part of what you do in your unshaming work is really help people walk into their story, and you even walk alongside them into their story for the sake of, helping them walk out of their story or
beyond their story. But the first part is you have to actually get into understanding the being in the context of their own story. That's right. The story and then I'll add one more thing, end their experience. Because sometimes people don't have a story ready. They don't know their story, or that's not what comes up. Somebody could tell me in an unchaming process. A person could say, I get really bad headaches. Now I don't say, okay. How do we fix your headaches? But I might say, have
you been to a doctor? Whatever. I'm I'm not against them trying to understand how do you relieve this. Maybe there's something that needs to be medically addressed. But then I might say, what's it like to have a headache? And this is an incredibly unshaming question. It was, what do you mean what it's like? What's it like to have a headache? What's it somatically like? Is it banging in there? Is it pressure? Is there a sharpness pressing on you? Some people get that experience.
Is it a pressing down? Is it like this huge pressure inside? Is it making you dizzy and sensitive to light, like migrainal headaches? And I could say more. So those are different kinds of headaches. Let's say a person says, it's like a I get like a throbbing pounding. And I said, that's really helpful. Let's stay with your experience as an intelligent aspect of you. I'm not gonna try to get rid of it. Let's stay with it. Show me the pounding. They'll go boom. Boom.
Oh, god. You're making a sound, and people may not be able to see. I'm making a hand motion like a boom boom boom, like a fist that's banging on, like, a door or something. Boom boom boom. Keep doing that. Show me more of that headache. And now they'll go bang, bang, bang. And I'll be like, oh, you have this thing in you that would bang, that would punch, that would hit something. Maybe you would bang on a door to open it. Maybe
you would bang on a drum. Maybe it would wanna hit something and say, no way. I see. So I don't know all of your story, but I know in your experience is not something wrong with you, but in intelligence, you need some of that. Where? I always give in. I never set boundaries. Oh, you need a little p. I'm not saying go punch somebody, but you might need a little oomphy, fist, and to say, hey, Drew. That's too much. That's
not okay with it. In your first two examples, maybe it's a coincidence, but you chose body somatic cellular reactions. In your work, do you find that that's often the doorway? Is the headache or the IBS? Yeah. So important. Even if it's an emotional experience, I'm anxious. I still say, what's it like in your soma in your body? Is there a quivering in your chest? Is your chest getting tight? Is your jaw shaking a little bit? Do you feel like a shake, like,
in your body, let yourself shake? Are you freezing and you feel solid? So I still use the soma's experience because experience is sacred. My ideas about it, I get from witnesses. Experience is sacred. Experience is sacred. David, can you go there a little bit? What do you mean by that? If I don't share with you my experience, I'm telling you my theories and opinions about myself. Those theories and opinions are mostly internalized from the culture.
I'm a screwed up human being. This is what's wrong with me. But experience doesn't have an interpretation one way or the other. Right? My pounding headache is a pounding. Right? Migraine says, shut off all the lights and let me go under the covers. Take me out of the world. Things like that. My tittiness says, I can't hear anything other than these loud things. Those experiences are sacred. They're intimate, and they're absolutely true, meaning they're not like
a fact of the outer world. But if I have a stomachache, I have a stomachache. Right? Maybe I'm lying about it, you could say. But my experience is not it's a subjective thing. It's me. It's authentic. It's not an we're not arguing about the interpretation. You know, maybe I should've asked this earlier, but how would you define shame? Because I'm thinking about embarrassment, humiliation, guilt, all these synonyms. When people ask you, what does shame mean to you? How do you share about it?
It's a really important question. I gotta tell you what I've learned from my research about shame. It's not just my theory. It's empirical, meaning that this is what I've you've studied people. This is what you'll learn. It's a paradigm shift to understand shame the way I'm gonna explain it. A paradigm shift because people have been taught for various reasons.
Some of it is Judeo Christian moral ideas that shame is a feeling of like we're saying, that somewhat is a guilt kind of maybe, because people say shame and guilt, shame and guilt, like, they're the same, or they won't be able to distinguish humiliation, embarrassment because of the the definitions are unclear, or there's toxic shame, there's untoxic shame. So there's a lot of confusion around it. So now let me say what it actually is. Shame is an internalized vision of oneself.
It creates feelings, but it's not a feeling. So, again, like, with with my father here hurting me, and then my mother says nothing ever happened. Why are you upset? Your father's a great guy. She would say things like that. So now I have the wound, the fear. It's a physical wound from the physical balance, but the fear that lives in me. Right? So that call that a wound. And now I have an interpretation. My interpretation is I'm dramatic. I have anger problems, and I make up things.
And I'm not sure whether this is true anymore. That self annihilating you see how that's annihilating? Because my experience is no longer true. You're just a screwed up human being. I didn't say anything hurtful to you. Oh, thanks, David. I guess I am. Now you don't longer exist as the person interacting with me. You exist with inside that bubble. That's what shame does. It creates that orientation
towards the self. There's so many things that are important about that, but one thing is most shame is unknown to people. So because, like, if you look and listen to a Brene Brown, who's been incredible in this area and people know her, but she will tell stories about shame, which people will go, oh, yeah. That's true. They're all very potent stories of kind of deep humiliation. You got caught naked, and you're embarrassed about your body, and, oh my gosh, on the podcast.
Right? Those are the kind of story you can, oh, I can imagine that. But most shame, you would not know you carry. Shame would would be inside of you, and you would take those part of yourselves and hide them even from yourself. And I would say, what's it like not to be to be tough all the time? You'd say, I like that about myself. It feels good. I'm you would even report feeling good about yourself if you could take all of your vulnerability, call it weakness that you should get over.
Boys on Christ. So let's say you take your vulnerability. We push it away. Now it lives under shame's veil. You'll call it weakness. You don't say vulnerability, hurt, intimacy. You don't call it those things. It lives under shame's veil. That's it. So now you walk around thinking, I'm a strong man. You don't feel bad at all in your conscious mind. You think it's great, and yet we've taken a whole part of you and disconnected it from your capacity to live it.
So if you're in intimate relationship and you can never say, that hurts, that's too much for me, or I'm tired, or that's gonna make the intimacy more difficult. So your life will suffer in those ways, but you won't have an experience of this awful shameful thing. You'll just think, I feel better about myself. Or if you're a woman who's learned not to be forceful or angry or tough or direct or bow boundaried, then you might say, I love I need to be more open. I need to be more open.
And she thinks that's good to be more open. So I imagine it's hard and a challenge to engage in the unshaming process. But if we're not even aware of it, at as you said, most people are walking around in shame and not even aware that they're in shame. I imagine that cost of being in shame without being able to even know you're in shame, what's the cost of that, David? Yeah. That's the culture we live in. It's a shame based culture, and I'm not just trying to be a downer.
I'm 68 years old. I've worked in myself a long time. I still try to be a certain kind of person. That's not only bad. It's good that I was a little tired today and that I got up a little bit early and took a shower before I met you. So it's not like I'm that's a bad suppression of a thing. But if I perpetually do that and have to be a certain way, you could call that a colonizing culture also. But if they're in a colonizing culture, I should try to make money. How can I use this interview to
promote my work the most? That's not a bad thing to do. But if that's what's always on my mind, right, then I'm living within a set of values that's not only best for my authentic self or my heart, my being, my rest, my physical health, then that will be I'll just go along with that. So the whole culture goes along with that. Most people don't know vast parts of themselves and are happy to have removed them
from themselves. And then we live in a healing wellness industry that mostly says, if you have a problem, I can help relieve you of it without asking to for me, the most fundamental question. What's it like being the human you are with that experience? It's hard. I know, but what's the experience? What's the stomach ache like? What's the anger like? What's it like to be anxious?
This feels like a key distinction, and I just wanna stay here for a minute because the healing wellness culture offers a kind of solution that doesn't actually address the core problem. And part of your work is to look at that core problem, which is shame, and then offer people a kind of healing that moves into the shame as a way of minimizing its impact. That's right. It's it's very different from what the dominant culture is offering even in the psychotherapy, wellness,
healing environment. It's allopathic in its core, and it came from allopathy, at least Western psychology, which means you have a pathology, and then, right, right, you have an infection. So if you're anxious, there's an anxiety quote, unquote, infect you. You have an anxiety problem. So if I can take your anxiety away, you'll be healthy, which is great. Again, we wanna do that, but it doesn't say there's a story, your anxiety is meaningful, your anxiety is intelligent.
Some people come to me and say, can you help me with procrastination? Tell me what to do. And then I always say, what's it like to procrastinate? I don't get things done. I ended up and they go on to tell me why they ought to do something that they're not doing. That makes sense. I understand, and I wish and hope that they could be freer to do the things that are most important.
There's 2 things that if you spend time with that person, 10 minutes, it wouldn't take long, asking them what's it like, you'll learn 2 things. One, they're very critical of themselves. You can hear that already. Right? I should get more things done. Drew, I didn't get done what I should get done today. I was goofed off all day. I procrastinated. And you're hearing the tone, but that's what lives in people. So one, you're hearing I live in under a very critical world, which
the procrastination problem doesn't sound like. Just you just believe it, then you believe my self criticism. And the second thing you don't know from that person, if you ask 10 more minutes, what do you do when you procrastinate? What do you mean? Do you go over the Internet? Do you listen to music? Do you read books? Do you play video games? Let's say the person says, I play video games. I'm thinking of a bunch of people who say that. And I say, what's it like when you play video games?
And they'll show me. Their face will light up. They'll look full of energy and focus, and they start getting animated. And then I think the video game may not be the best way to express themselves. I understand. But they're showing me that there's an animation and excitement that they don't feel in what they're trying to do. So then I at least know, oh, I see you're missing animation and excitement in what you're doing. Now let's go back to the task you're trying to accomplish.
Is it the wrong task? Is it you're approaching it in a way? Are you sitting with a critic that's telling you doing wrong, so it's not animating? But now I've actually found out something 2 things that I wouldn't find out in almost any procrastination program. What do we do with that inner critic? Maybe you have that father belting you in his words inside your head. I do, and my father's long gone from
this world. And I know what you're hungry for because I know what you actually are doing when you're quote, unquote, procrastinating. You're doing something really interesting. Yeah. That's that's funny that's where you're going because that's what I was gonna ask. For people that are willing to do this work, and part of what you said is it doesn't have to take long. 10 minutes is maybe all you need to get inside that experience and not just shame ourselves for what we're doing wrong.
What have you found is the reward? What do you see people get when they engage in this kinda direct approach to shame and all these things unspoken, what happens on the other side? Sometimes the symptoms the person is disturbed by, whether it's the anxiety or the anger or the headache, sometimes those symptoms get relieved. I say sometimes because I don't like the fact that some people say this will resolve all the anything. Sometimes that doesn't happen, you know, whether because
of what you do. Right? And whether how good the method is mine or others, so we have to understand that doesn't always happen, or sometimes there's a period over time where something will change. Some of the same difficulties I've had went away very quickly. Some of them over decades changed slowly. Some of them didn't change much other than I'm more at ease with the fact that they I struggle. So things like that. But I can tell you the thing that I know, again, from my direct experience.
People experience a kind of I'm gonna call wellness, meaning they show. You can see it somatically when I work with people, when they enter and connect with these parts of themselves. They either smile or laugh or tears pour, but not the tears of, oh, I can't stand it, but, like, arriving in themselves. Like, if you said something very touching to me and it touched and I just got teary, there's a kind of wellness that goes with those tears. Right?
Like, oh, wow. True. Thank you. And I sort of arrive in myself, or it could be exciting, or it could be relaxing, or I could get passionate. Woah. Wow. I could be that way. So you hear the waking up of the system, and people have what I call a wellness all the way through even if they're in pain. For instance, I work with a woman who is dying within a few months, and she had done lots of stuff with people, including many surgeries, and the infections that she had wasn't gonna go
away. She was in incredible pain, and her body was incredibly hot because she she had fevers. And sometimes we would sit together, and, we'd actually be on phones before Zoom, and she was very sick. I couldn't get to see her at that time. And sometimes I would say, what's it like to have the pain? It's awful. Can you make painful sounds? And the 2 of us would howl. You know? And she'd be laughing and smiling. We both would be. Her pain didn't go away.
She's in pain. So what is this laughing and smiling together given the pain is still there? That's fascinating to me. What's happening? Intimacy between the 2 of us is happening, but some experience, the freedom of being a person in pain, not a person who shouldn't be in pain, but a person who is in pain, that was, very special. So people have that with just
about anything. If you give them the chance to let yourself experience openly, especially with a witness who's not gonna try them, what do I do about that? He's gonna say, let's do it. Let's have headaches together. Right? Something happens there. What incredible work you do to bring people alive, the waking up of the system, aliveness, vitality, the emergence of spirit as they step into their lives. That's a beautiful way of saying it. I wanna say something that I'm noticing about you.
You highlight certain things so specifically, like, this is the thing. And I'm really appreciating that because it's tapping into the message, but you're also helping teaming up with me to communicate something that's really important. So I wanna thank you and appreciate that. Wow. I'm feeling a presence. I guess you talked about intimacy with this woman. You were helping deal with the pain as she was dying, and you had this intimate moment moments with her.
And I'm experiencing that now with you. I'm really grateful for this time. What's it like to to talk about this work you do? That's my question. Wait a second. No. I appreciate it. It's interesting, Drew. I'm still learning to be freer with my passion, with my upset about things that are going on in healing and how many people are suffering and not seeing how important it seems to me to the ideas that I've cultivated over years of not trying to be too
confident and being more humble. So I have a lot of ideas inside of me, shaming ideas that say, don't be too smart, don't be too passionate, be more level. But I still wrestle with that. It so it's a it's a such a great experience, and I'm still wrestling with that. Right? My 4th book is coming out, The Unshaming Way, and I've gotten an incredible endorsement just yesterday. But I noticed also wanting to tell people and feeling like, is it okay to tell
people? Like and not everyone would have that. Some people would think, yeah. Tell everybody. But some part of me, you're bragging. That's you know, whatever. And yet I'm really excited and proud about it. So I think a little bit of that comes up, inside of me, this sort of is it okay to be excited and passionate and shy and awkward at times to, to say what I've been learning?
Well, I feel your passion, and and we'll put lots of your work in our show notes so that people can follow-up and look at these books and look at your research and any podcasts you do as well in there. We'd love to put in the show notes. David, thank you so much. I'm really grateful for this time. Thank you too. I appreciate meeting you and seeing your smiling face, and I'm thinking, that's a brother. I don't know, whatever that means, but that's the words that come up.
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 Razzi 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 hoffmaninstitute.org.