Transformation at the Hoffman Institute & Process

The Hoffman Process is a week-long residential and personal growth retreat that helps participants identify negative behaviors, moods, and ways of thinking that developed unconsciously and were conditioned in childhood. The transformation at the Hoffman Institute is a paradigm shift.

My career and relationship coach, Tessa advised me to go to the Hoffman Institute where I could really go through a transformative change in myself and how I work with others. She encouraged me to do this for one simple reason: your family and how you grow up have tremendous impact on how you communicate with others, perceive others, and develop relationships – even with a potential partner. This is something you need to learn and will give you what I learned about that transformation at the Hoffman Institute.

This has served as a foundation to the social and emotional aspects of UWB: Ultimate Well Being.

In a nutshell, the Hoffman Process helps you to love your ‘negative love’ patterns that your parents gave to you. Founded by Bob Hoffman (https://www.hoffmaninstitute.org/bob-hoffman/), he took micropsychoanalysis developed by Freud and Dr. Silvio Fanti and put it to test through large groups of people. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/mar/15/why-tried-hoffman-process-psychoanalysis

In these groups, he combined Eastern mysticism with deep meditation, Gestalt, group therapy, visualisation, and your lifetime of analysis into one eight-day process.  It was a whirlwind of an experience and coming out of it your mind and brain feels completely new as if you can reconstruct it however you’d like. With that, you develop a new path and a vision, keeping in mind your funeral and what would be said at your eulogy. It’s a powerful process.

Here is the eight-day schedule:

• Strict sleep and eating schedules
• Maintain silence until the class begins
• Teacher check-in daily “How are you feeling?” 
• Daily commitments to write a message for the spiritual self

The process is based on understanding the quadrinity: the emotional self, intellect, spiritual, body, and spiritual guide. It’s important to constantly check in with these facets. But before that, the process takes you into a cycle, called the cycle of transformation, that strips you naked of all past.

The cycle of transformation: The beginning of the transformation at the Hoffman Institute.

Awareness → expression → compassion & forgiveness → new behavior → Awareness → expression → compassion & forgiveness → new behavior…..

During these phases many things happen. Here is a list:

1. Beating the shit out of pillow with whiffle ball bats for an hour
2. Guided meditations. They are good. 
3. Team discussions and sharing
4. Lots of journaling so much your hand hurts
5. Continuous check-in on feelings and way of life=

Before you transform your cycle you have to know what a vicious cycle looks like. 

How to map a vicious cycle: 

• A specific situation/what gets you triggered
• A shame belief
• A core belief you hold about yourself
• When i am in a pattern what do i do? When i do that how do i feel? When i feel that way what do i do?

Negative love Map

• I am not good enough: stupid, unwanted, ugly, wrong, addict, accident 
• My shame belief: worthlessness, uselessness, powerless

My negative cycle: worthlessness, denial → concern → anxious → angry → blame on work, blame on others → blame boss/colleagues → piss people off, get fired, bad message → worthlessness, not enough.

Once you identify them then you get rid of them through this process:

Here is an example a Quadrinity check-in: This helps you to know what is off or wrong.

• Intellect: curious, keen, desire to create change, compares to others
• Emotional child: happy, playful, adventurous
• Emotional check-in at the moment of reflection: caged, frustrated, detached 
• Body: not much, cold, pressure
• Spiritual self: happy, healthy, confident, prideful of family and past

Awareness 

• Trace your patterns
• Honest & self-compassionate
• The first step to breaking free

Expression & Boundaries

• No, I don’t want this in my life. i draw the line here.
• A tool is what you use to say no
• (re)claiming our own lives

Compassion & Forgiveness

• We must forgive and let go
• The core of vipassana (non-attachment)
• All of us have hurt, all of us have suffered… be curious and sensitive to what has happened in your life and in others that have paved the path for patterns.
  • “Endeavor to remain aware of the quiet world That lives behind each face”
  • “Be compassionate in your criticism”

New Behavior 

• Recycling = do over the mistakes we made
• Imagining ourselves and our outcomes if we brought hindsight wisdom to intervene in our patterns 
• Not to repair what is damaged but to reawaken what you already knew as wise

Negative Love Syndrome

• We adopt negative patterns early on as children to adapt to the patterns of our parents
• This early onset pattern development makes them compulsory, automatic and reactive 
• The goal of the Hoffman process is to free yourself of these patterns so you can live with authenticity, compassion, love, and connection

How do patterns manifest?

• Way of being (i.e. rebel)
• Way of acting (i.e. interrupting)
• Beliefs (i.e. lack of trust)
• Moods (i.e. sadness)
• They live in us through adoption, reaction, & rebellion
• Addiction: pathological relationship to a substance or activity with the mood-altering effect that can have life dangering consequences. They’re a means to fill a void of emptiness.

Exercise: Understand your resistance patterns. What are things that often come up with others?

• Being late, confused, demanding, disrespectful, glaring/staring, judging

Exercise: Visualization of your Funeral (This point is a large transformation at the Hoffman Institute)

• Visualize your funeral and tombstone. Who is there? What do they say?
• With his family
• With friends and colleagues
• Feeling mutual respect in interactions with others and in the moment with others

Exercise: What are your dependencies? Dependencies hold you back in life and are often scripted by your upbringing. Your family had no money, therefore you focus on money.

• No more dependence on money. Enough money for travel, play, eatings
• Dependency on having a relationship

Exercise: Understand Transference

• Seeing and reacting to others as our childhood mothers and fathers and reacting to that.. Habitual reactions
  • Triggered by feelings like fear, anxiety
• Your transfer this to others in your life: Tend to externally blame
• Often happens with people in authority roles
• Positive transference looks like idealizing positive qualities

Final Exercise: Choose a path: Left Rode/Right road map

• My life is MY responsibility
• I hold the position of making the choice of going left or right. I can intervene in the moments before the junction of a road and determine my own path. 

Surrender or Submission

• Submission is a passive action. It is a sign of weakness/a lack of inner strength. A person who submits is a victim, an effect, rather than a cause
• Surrender is a conscious act that comes out of the free will. It’s an active choice. Surrender is the beginning of freedom.

You come out of the Hoffman Institute feeling like you can fly. It’s an energetic feeling. Everyone has some form of transformation at the Hoffman Institute.