My Hoffman Process Experience

Reflections

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I wrote the below reflection on the day after I finished The Hoffman Process earlier this year. I’ve become more reticent to blankly recommend it since people should only go if they’re truly sold on going. If they’re skeptical, I don’t encourage it. People probably won’t get value from it if they don’t buy in and commit to the experience, and that requires intrinsic motivation. And to be sure, while most people seem to have a great experience, not everybody does.

I’m also reticent about recommending this type of work more generally. I think the internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber, and this work might similarly have positive impacts on people predisposed to benefit from it and negative effects on people predisposed to struggle with it. More broadly, I’m sympathetic to criticisms of therapy culture, as well as the book Bad Therapy, even if I’ve also gotten value from somatic therapy in particular.

As you can gather, I’m nervous to share this for a few reasons. This blog is normally for intellectual topics, and this feels way too personal. It also doesn’t feel like an accurate reflection of me. Consider this piece as something of a fictionalized journal entry, or at least exaggerated for effect. After all, I wrote it in 12 hours the day after my retreat, high off of the experience.  Furthermore, I think it’s somewhat trite, mediocrely-written, and heavily-redacted.

That said, I’m deciding to share a modified version of it publicly because I think the Hoffman process is a powerful experience and I haven’t seen many reflections on it. When I tweeted my endorsement, a few people went and said they loved it, so if this inspires a few people to attend who would get value from it, then it’ll be worth it.

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I have just returned from the Hoffman process, and I am in awe. It was an amazing experience. It was, I hope, truly life-changing for me. Of course, the extent to which my life changes depends on how I act after the retreat.

In this essay, I’ll share my reflections from the week, and more importantly, how I hope to change going forward. I’ll keep it high-level because they don’t want people going in knowing the agenda.

First, some context on The Hoffman Process retreat. The organization is a non-profit started almost 60 years ago that has had 135,000 people attend its retreats. The retreat is based on the concept of negative love, the idea that we learn negative patterns from our childhood, and, since we were not born with them and instead adopted them, with enough reprogramming, we can change them. 

In order to facilitate such a change, the retreat uses a bunch of different modalities: physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, etc. The retreat is non-stop activity from 8AM to 9PM with no phones or internet at all. The week felt like a month, in the best way. In some ways I was more open with my 30 fellow Hoffman attendees — all previously complete strangers — than I’ve been with friends I’ve had for decades. A group, might I add, that I would likely not have befriended in real life, since I have little in common with them, or so I thought. They work in different industries (e.g. doctors, lawyers, nutritionists), they’re different ages (mostly 40s and 50s) and different life stages than me (e.g. having kids, getting divorced, etc). 

OK, so what happens at the retreat to bring about this transformation and community? Well. Part of the thing about Hoffman is that confidentiality is critical so people can be(come) their true selves. You’re not supposed to go with anyone you know. No one is allowed to talk about work at all, not even mention their industry. As a result, everyone is on the same level, whether it’s a 9 time felon or a 9 figure entrepreneur. As someone who lives in a status-driven environment, this was a welcome change.

But you’re also not supposed to know what happens at Hoffman more broadly before you go. You don’t get to see the agenda; surrendering is part of the experience. This was annoying for me as you can imagine. I wanted to know what to expect in order to mentally prepare. But this is a pattern that they’re trying to challenge too. They want you to lead with the spirit and not just the intellect, and showing up and being open to the experience is one way to do that.

Why did I go to Hoffman then, without knowing much about it except that a few friends raved about it? 7 days is a big sacrifice after all. Well, I’d been meaning to go to a 7-day detox because I realized that I have a phone addiction that goes beyond your typical phone addiction. I check my phone the first second I wake up. I remain on my phone all day, checking it in every meeting, until I can’t stay awake. Like any addict who finally accepts his fate, I noticed that I couldn’t stop checking my phone/social media and that it was starting to affect my ability to be present in my relationships. Every second I wasn’t engaged in a conversation with someone, I was either listening to a podcast or reading Twitter or Substack. There were very few moments where I would be alone with my thoughts. I justified this to myself by saying I’m obsessed with learning (which is also true, and I love that about myself and will continue prioritizing it, but not above my happiness), but I also appreciated the benefits of disconnecting from technology. I had been an off and on practitioner of the sabbath, a digital detoxing, and I realized that I could no longer do it. I was an addict: I wasn’t just running *to* the phone. I was running *from* something too. And I wanted to find out what.

But I could have gone to a standard meditation retreat for a digital detox. Another explanation for why I went to Hoffman specifically is because I had also realized that there was something else missing from my life: embodiment. I lived too much in my brain, and not enough in my body. Close friends started to tell me that. I normally thought that was something to celebrate: Being an infovore has led to many good things. But I also started to appreciate the downsides of not being connected to my body, namely not being able to process grief and loss. There were things that I experienced that I was never able to process, and the pain had become too overwhelming to bear. My intellect couldn’t reason it away. The pain curdled to anger. But because I couldn’t process it, I couldn’t shake off the anger. I know I needed to do something. 

I had started seeing a somatic therapist for the first time. I was skeptical but I was desperate and willing to try anything. She helped me realize that I was truly disconnected from my body. She would hear me talk about the hard things that happened to me and then ask how the pain felt in my body. She asked me to describe the sensation. I couldn’t. I asked her for sample answers to that question because I was totally confused as to what a person should physically feel in their body. She suggested that I likely disconnected early on in my childhood as a trauma response. That was the first analysis of my childhood I’d heard that sounded plausible. I had very few memories about my childhood. I don’t know how people even have them and trust that they’re accurate. I have a ton of memories about the past 15 years, but very little about childhood. 

My therapist recommended nervous system regulation, so we tried it. She started pressing different parts of my body. At first I didn’t feel any effects from it. I was skeptical. And then after a bit, I don’t know how to describe it, but it made me calmer. More grounded. I could notice my breathing. I was less reactive. I was expanding my emotional capacity, literally. I didn’t know how to explain it, I didn’t even care if it was a placebo, I had finally found something that was making a difference, however incremental, and I wanted to double down.

So when someone told me that doing Hoffman was like undergoing 10 years of therapy in a week, and that the retreat explored all these different modalities including inspiring internal family systems, I knew I had to go.

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The first few days of the retreat focused on our parents. Our first task was to identify the harmful patterns we adopted from our parents, and then reflect on how those patterns set us back in life.

And then I bashed a pillow with a wiffle ball bat meant to symbolize that I was destroying those patterns. That’s a big theme in Hoffman: using your body to physically release bad patterns and reinstall new ones. I’ll get back to the power of embodiment later. 

I listed all my bad patterns that cause friction or harm in relationships. In the computer game, “The Sims”, every person you encounter has a score over the head meant to symbolize your relationship strength with them. Good interactions increase the score, bad interactions decrease the score. This is sometimes referred to an emotional bank account. Of course that’s not exactly how it works, but it’s a helpful metaphor. The bad patterns I tried to eliminate were the actions that caused my score with loved ones to go down.

For example, here are the bad patterns I listed for myself that have recurred in my life, even if sparingly: judgment, gossip, sarcasm, paranoia, phone/internet addiction, being reactive, talking just to be heard, saying things I don’t mean, interrogating others, arguing/being provocative, being cranky, being late, taking things personally, holding grudges, feeling like I need to earn love so I work to prove my worth, disconnecting/detaching/numbing myself with distractions, keeping score, caring about status, punishing myself, overthinking, repressing emotions, not being present, etc etc etc.

We were encouraged to connect these bad patterns to our childhood and how we were raised. I was initially resistant to this idea. I love my parents; they’ve given me everything. I didn’t want to blame them for my bad patterns. I had arrived at a place in my life where I was grateful for my childhood. My parents only have so many years left on this planet, so I romanticized my childhood so I could better appreciate them in our remaining time together.

I also wanted to take radical responsibility for my circumstances. I didn’t want to be the person who blames their parents. I’m 34 years old. I’ve been free from my parents for too long for that. I am the author of my own life.

Hoffman teachers get this resistance a lot, so they explained to me that, by holding this attitude, I was unable to accept certain patterns I’ve adopted (at least partly) from my parents, either directly or in retaliation/rebellion, and thus I’ve been unable to expunge those patterns. Holding onto harmful patterns isn’t serving me, and this isn’t what my parents would want either. If they could free me from any negative influence they may have had on me — real or imagined — they would do it in a second. Plus, it’s less about blame and more about self-awareness. Blame is actually the wrong word. The classic Hoffman line is “everyone is guilty, but no one is to blame”.

After remembering our childhoods and what patterns we took from them, we then wrote about our parents’ childhoods and what patterns they learned from their parents. If we didn’t know their childhoods, we made it up. That exercise was fascinating because it reminded me how little I know about my own parents’ childhood. More importantly, it helped us get more appreciation for our parents’ positive and negative patterns and where they came from. Going through the exercises, I started to make other connections between my childhood and current patterns as well.

To be sure though, you don’t have to focus as much on parents to get the benefits of Hoffman. If you think most of the negative patterns are picked up by others, you can just focus on the patterns themselves. We spent the whole week focusing on excising the bad patterns from our lives. We wrote about how our bad patterns caused harm to people we care about. We ruminated on the cost of these patterns, and visualized what our lives would be like if we kept living these patterns out. 

Forgiveness was a big theme of the weekend. “Resentment is drinking poison, hoping they die.” I made a list of all the people who I held grudges against and I forgave them. I didn’t realize how long I’d been holding certain grudges. Some of them I’ve had for years. I would have these grudges but be not able to feel them. And not being able to feel them is what kept them. 

I also made a list of all the people I have wronged and apologized to them. I detailed how I would have done things differently if I could do them over. Some of them I reached out to. Others I don’t think want to hear from me so I’ll trust that the message will be sent to them telepathically. I also thanked them.

I also forgave myself for the pain my patterns have caused others and thus myself. In reflecting on how I developed these patterns, besides childhood, I appreciated how I’d been through some hard things in my adulthood, and had more sympathy for my past failures. Forgiveness is giving up a hope for a better past in service of a better future. 

I made a list of ways I have been vindictive towards myself and others in the past, and I vowed to not do it again. Beyond forgiving, I grieved. I grieved my friend’s death. I grieved the pain I’ve caused other people, the pain I don’t even know about. In addition to grieving the relationships and projects that didn’t work out, I also celebrated the great things I've contributed to my relationships. I celebrated the fact that though the path has been winding, there has been growth. I vowed to no longer hold grudges, since I am sick of using my beautiful creative energy on rehashing my past.

One related tool we learned was the concepts of “left road” and “right road” — basically the left road is your default pattern, your autopilot mode. You execute your bad patterns on autopilot. Acting out those patterns is comfortable, it feels good. That’s why you keep doing it, even if the patterns keep making your life worse. In order to change your patterns, you have to take the right road instead of the left road. 

A tool to get us on the right road instead of the left is “recycling”, or “pre-cycling”. This is when you imagine a situation that has happened in the past (recycling), or one that will happen in the future (pre-cycling), and visualize making a different decision. The way it works is first you imagine yourself in the situation, you feel the pain of the bad pattern, and then you do something visceral with your body to exorcise the pain away, like exorcising a demon. 

Transference is a related tool. It is basically identifying why you get triggered by certain people. And then recognizing that it is probably a reflection of some insecurity you have, or it reminds you of something your parents did in the past, but that you can recycle and visualize a new response.

This is the process in a nutshell by the way: Become aware of a bad pattern, then express sadness at having the pattern and the costs of it, then forgive yourself for having the pattern —  “I am a human, I make mistakes” — then visualize acting differently. 

Visualization more broadly is a very important part of the Hoffman process. They mention the study where three different control groups shoot free throws and then do three different things over 30 days and shoot free throws again. The first group does nothing for 30 days. The second group shoots free throws for 30 minutes a day for 30 days. The last group visualizes themselves shooting free throws for 30 minutes a day for 30 days, but doesn’t actually shoot them. The first group hits the same percentage 30 days later, which makes sense given they didn’t do anything over the 30 days. The second group that shot 30 free throws a day shot 24% better after 30 days. The last group that didn’t shoot any free throws, but visualized themselves doing so, shot 23% better! They shot nearly the same percentage as the second group even though they didn’t shoot any free throws over the 30 days. That’s the power of visualization. Hoffman tries to take that visualization approach to the most important interactions of our lives, by having us reprogram how we’ll act in the future when faced in the same situation. 

We spent a lot of time visualizing how great our life would be if we acted on the right road. I thought about the gifts that other people had given me, the acts of service, the moments where they had shared their life with me, and I imagined myself doing the same thing. 

The wiffle ball bashing portion of visualization did not come naturally to me, initially or by the end. The use of physical force or exertion was not something I was familiar with. I don’t really express anger, I've never learned how. Basketball is therapeutic to me, but it’s not exactly anger inducing (except watching the Knicks, of course). But despite my struggles, the bashing was still a very powerful exercise. I wasn’t a huge basher, but I did yell and express anger, and it was cathartic. I realized I had so much more range to express myself than I imagined I was capable of. I have been storing up so much I didn’t know how to express it, especially because anger is a scary thing to express in the wrong way. But Hoffman offered a productive way to express it: moving it through the body.

A Hoffman teacher said something that shocked me: If you truly feel a feeling, often it takes 60 seconds to feel it and process it. Notice how kids have temper tantrums and then move on instantly? We’re in some ways also kids, but older. We can process feelings quickly too, but only if we have the tantrum. But we don’t have the tantrum, so we instead repress the anger, pointing the anger towards ourselves. Instead of processing it for a minute, we hold it for years. Maybe decades. And all it might take to expunge it is a few minutes of releasing it. I can’t believe I said I didn’t have time for things like meditation or morning or evening practices. I clearly made time to have conflicts, so I’m sure I have time to work on trying to avoid them. On the contrary, I don’t have the time *not* to process my anger. Slowly repressing anger takes too long. What am I so busy for? Endless zoom calls, endless catch ups, endless scrolling the internet? For what?  

And this gets at the biggest thing I got from Hoffman: the ability to deeply feel the feelings. Having emotions feels so good. I was like a beach with no waves, and now I’m not. I have so much inside of me I didn’t know I was capable of. I used to shed a tear once every few months. At Hoffman I cried like five times a day. I used to think crying was a sign of weakness, or a sign I was depressed. Now I know that crying is pain leaving the body. 

The newfound surge of emotions I felt could be partly explained by the phone detox. That alone is a total game changer. I now process things in real time instead of repressing them. I realize that my phone is acting as a way for me to disconnect and repress. Even writing this piece, I’m struggling not to check any one of the endless enticing portals the internet has to offer.

Basically I realized I was incapable of paying attention for sustained periods of time. I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid, so I’d always had this to some degree, but I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten. One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, Ladybird, has a nun asking the main character: “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing — love and attention?” If I can’t pay attention, how can I love? I can’t. 

I also realized I resist intimacy in other ways too. I send hundreds of texts a day, but I can’t remember the last time I called someone just to chat. I hide myself when I’m not my best self, and when I’m clogging my brain I’m not my best self. 

This extends more broadly. The reason I couldn’t cry or feel the feelings or connect is because I’ve been clogging my ears and eyes with information instead of paying attention to myself letting my brain and body process. To be clear, ingesting an insane amount of information has had its benefits. It’s what enables me to build my companies and befriend such interesting people. I’m proud of what it’s enabled me to achieve. I’m going to keep doing it, but I’m going to be more balanced.

While the screen-addicted life has had significant benefits, it has also had a deep cost. And that cost has been my spiritual self, a big part of my soul. I’m no longer willing to sacrifice this part of me. I will strive to have not only an active intellectual life, but also an active physical, emotional, and spiritual life too. 

I learned at Hoffman that the way to get from the left road to the right road was not through my head, but through my body. I used to think a lot of this somatic stuff was new age mumbo jumbo. But it actually works. Because of course it works. Because it’s not actually new; it’s as old as religion. The only thing “new” about it is the intellectual justification (the spirituality *without* the religion). But these traditions have existed forever (the sabbath, anyone?) And anything that people have been doing forever has deep wisdom in it, even if we don't know how to explain that wisdom, otherwise people wouldn’t keep doing it. I had made the same mistake the new atheists made with religion and thrown out the baby with the bathwater when dismissing spirituality.

The last decade, while my life has changed tremendously for the better — I am proud of my friendships, relationships, and my career accomplishments — I wasn’t always able to be fully present for them. I no longer journaled. I had lost my once active meditation practice. I stopped reading fiction altogether. I thought losing these gifts from childhood was a natural part of growing up. I no longer think this. 

To be clear, I am proud of the life I’ve lived to date. I’ve been mostly a happy-go-lucky guy, in touch with how lucky I’ve been. I’m simply looking at the things I’ve done that have brought me fulfillment and connectedness, and the things I’ve done that have contributed to hurt and alienation, and I’m looking to do more of the former and less of the latter.

While I feel I have lived a good life so far, if you look at how I spend my time, it’s not always in accordance with how I’ll imagine myself thinking about my life on my deathbed. They say the regrets of the dying are as follows:

“1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

I have a career that I love, so in some sense I’m doing #1, but I can’t say the same for the other 4.

I am on track to have some of the regrets of the dying. I’m not beating myself about this. I just know that I can change small things so my revealed preferences match my stated preferences. I am not my patterns, that’s what Hoffman drills into us every few hours via some other modality or exercise.  

I don’t want to feel numb anymore. This week, it felt so good to feel so much. I have my vitality back. Not only did it make me feel good, it made me be good. I was so much more secure, so much more present, so much more connected. 

And that’s when I realized that all my patterns stem from the same root: disconnection. So much of my struggle is when I am stuck in some loop in my brain, or I get triggered and react hastily. Which means I am not in my body. You can’t be in your body and be stuck in your brain at the same time. The way out of the brain is through the body. 

Disconnecting from my body and spirit is the source of my bad patterns. If you were to ask me a year ago what my spiritual life was, I would laugh and say that’s beta or part of a mind virus. I had a spiritual life as a young adult, but I dismissed it as just trendy. I thought being in touch with the body was often for the people who are not deeply in touch with their mind. After all, the people I learn the most from are not deeply embodied. Naturally, the people with the most knowledge specialize in knowledge-accumulation. Indeed: my heroes were super disconnected people. Just info-sucking machines. The truth is I’m not as good as them at that. But I do not have their gifts, and they do not have mine. Of course people who specialize will be deeper in an area, but people who are able to be well-rounded have unique gifts too. 

I was so out of touch with myself I basically doubted the idea of having an inner voice at all. I wrote essays about how being authentic was new age bullshit. While there’s some directional truth to what I was saying in the sense that one shouldn’t apply new age spirituality to politics, I think it was also a way of justifying silencing my spiritual self. I was on the external validation treadmill in so many ways: career focused, status inclined, and outsourcing big decisions in my life to friends because I felt I was an unreliable narrator. I was so disconnected from my body that I even distrusted my ability to perceive reality accurately. But I am not an unreliable narrator. I just wasn’t even listening to myself.

***

I keep coming back to the phone. The phone is simultaneously a triggering device and a numbing device. And here’s the crazy thing: I didn’t check it for one entire week after checking it hundreds of times a day. And basically nothing happened. Some people texted me, some people emailed me, but I didn’t really miss much. Like, I could check my phone 50% less a day and probably still do my job as effectively. 

When I wasn’t on my phone this week, I experienced the magic I once wrote about in my essay on solitude years ago when I used to celebrate the sabbath. 

It came out of nowhere. I was journaling, and suddenly, I came up with a nice thing to say to someone. Then another. And another. I couldn’t stop. One was an apology. Another was a note of gratitude, far overdue. I started fiercely writing letters, with a clarity of spirit that I hadn’t felt before. I also started to untangle the knots in my head and my heart. Overtime, you untie the mental knots that keep popping up. Tensions you have with people. Limiting beliefs you have about yourself. Other bottlenecks that are preventing you from connecting with yourself, and thus, other people. Then the feelings come. Regret at mistakes you made. Anger. Pain. Sadness. You haven’t felt actual feelings in so long. Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only solitude can help you find them again.

It’s the strangest thing: When I am alone for extended periods of time, I feel closer to others. When I am offline, away from devices, I feel like I am connected to something bigger than myself. 

The process takes time. The thoughts are sporadic and are surface level before going deeper. It’s as if you’re hacking at a tree, several trees at a time. Whack-a-mole. With enough hacks, you get at the root. Normally, an input blocks a deeper hack. But with silence, you hack away…

Your heart becomes like Wolverine’s body — the wounds heal themselves, if you let them. “Time heals all wounds”, they say, but they forget to say that it’s the right kind of time--solitude.”

As I learned the day after the process when I got my phone back, the phone is too addicting to stop checking compulsively without an intervention. So I’m ordering a flip phone. I’m celebrating the sabbath on weekends, like an Orthodox Jew. L’chaim, motherfuckers. Even in writing this essay, I checked Twitter like 20 times. Every time I do it saps my spiritual self.

Commitment

More broadly, I’m committed to continuing the practices I learned this week. 

There are so many ways I want to live differently after Hoffman. I wish I went years ago so I could have changed some patterns before they affected people. I’m glad I went now because it’s never too late. One of the most inspiring messages I ever learned in basketball camp was “I will be ready when my time will come”. I wasn’t always ready for every hiccup that occurred in the past decade, but I’ll be ready for my next one. 

Here are some things I want to do differently in my day-to-day life to help me stay in the light:

• Drop internet usage by 50% (still putting me at par with my peers), cutting out distractions like IG and others

• Instead of solely texting people, also call them.

• Adopt a morning and evening practice and stick to it.

• Find a weekly practice of Hoffman-style exercises (I still haven’t found this)

• Incubate or fund something that facilitates this work for others.

The other thing I was reminded of about Hoffman is the importance for me of doing this work in community. It’s not just accountability, it’s also for insight and connection. The more I connect with others the more I can connect with myself, and vice versa.

I’m committed to trying to facilitate something like it, first as a retreat series and maybe after as a social club. For the last 7 years, I’ve been doing my own type of retreat in Tahoe, and it’s given me great fulfillment. It’s been mostly around friend-making, but it has mixed some intellectual and emotional conversations, and I want to bring in more Hoffman-esque components to it. 

To be sure, not everything about Hoffman was ideal. It did feel too long. Some of it was annoying. It felt like school. They made us wake up early for no good reason. There were some exercises that made no sense. But I even took that as a challenge. I wanted to be open to all of it

While I will be a strong Hoffman advocate exactly as it is today, I also think there should be a ~3 day experience for people who aren’t yet ready to do the full thing. It would be a radically different experience of course, but it could introduce a new whole group of people to this type of work. If you’d like to come to something like this, apply here. Also there should be a more on-going experience. I’d go to something weekly if I could find the right container. I want it to be Hoffman style exercises with people who have no connection to my work (not a CEO group, though those are also valuable!)

This is how I’d pitch it to them if they’re skeptical of the childhood reflecting or therapy tools: Your life might be going great at the moment, but you may also believe that if you changed certain behaviors, your life would be a lot better. You could have better relationships with your family, your friends, your partner or future partner, and just a richer life. You’d do better in your career, be healthier, live longer, etc. So this weekend, we are going to evaluate your behaviors/patterns, evaluate how they are serving you and not serving you, and visualize different behaviors you could adopt, and then find a series of practices/tactics to help you adopt them. And then introduce some accountability going forward to make sure you're doing it. That’s the pitch.

I want to be a shepherd of the light. Not just intellectually, but emotional, physically and spiritually as well. I have a spiritual self. And I’m not going to numb it anymore. I have the emotional capacity. I have the light. I am the light. And I will never dim myself again.