Waking Up With Hoffman (2016)
I signed up for something called the Hoffman process, having been recommended it by my coaching supervisor as a way of access my “complex defensive structures”.
As part of the pre-work, my teacher asked to me hold a possibility gently and with curiosity. Based on her own life experience, as well as what she had learned from teaching the process over many years, my teacher offered me a hypothesis that my first two weeks on this planet were akin to a near-death experience. She said the world lacked empirical data to prove this, but that it was her profound belief that this hypothesis would be at the heart of the work I would be undertaking.
I noticed my scepticism, a well-developed part of my armoury, kick in and my eyes twitched as if wanting to roll in my head. And yet something in her conviction convinced me to at least be open to the possibility that I was carrying a deeply painful, traumatic memory in my unconscious psyche and that this alone had caused many of the patterns of behaviour that I was now keen to eradicate.
I asked what she believed about my experience in the womb of a mother who had not wanted, chosen or planned for me. A mother who was feeling shame at her pregnancy and whose sole focus was my disposal. My teacher paused and then answered, more equivocally, that this too was something to work with.
And so my work began; both within The Hoffman Process and without.
Having completed the Process I believe in this hypothesis as much as I believe in anything, and certainly more than I believe in the myth of my adoption. And yet it is still a hypothesis. I have no conscious memory of the experience I was being asked to imagine. I cannot prove it. It is unlikely I will ever be able to prove it. So what is required is faith; and faith is something I have always taught myself to dismiss.
On good days I find it easy to believe the hypothesis at the heart of this exploration. But when darkness comes it all seems like a load of bollocks. Either a self-justifying reason to behave in whatever way I want, or a good story designed to make people notice me more. The darkness is never very far and I hope it keeps me honest.
I don’t need blind faith here; just to be wide awake to the way my mind constructs meaning and my body reacts. I know there is validity in the hypothesis. And when I use the word ‘know’ I’m not talking about research or the wisdom of others, although both help. By ‘know’ I mean a stomach clenching, heart aching knowledge that I am still in pain, and that the cause of the pain is deep within the fabric of my personality, my ego, my soul, my essential being.
