Mary Vallarta:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the virtual summit. I’m your host, Mary Vallarta. As you know, we are here to talk about healing your chronic illness and taking back your life. Basically how to balance your mind, body, and spirit to restore your health and vitality.
Mary Vallarta:
Today I have Dr. Bruce Hoffman and I am super excited to chat with him. Before I get into the questions, let me tell you a bit about who he is. Dr. Hoffman is board certified in anti-aging medicine, has a master’s degree in clinical nutrition, and is a certified Functional Medicine practitioner. In addition to his clinical training, Dr. Hoffman has studied with many of the leading mind, body, and spiritual healers of our times, including Deepak Chopra, Osho, Ramesh Balsekar, and John Kabat-Zinn. He has shared the stage with Deepak Chopra and Dr. John Demartini, and he continues to spread his inspiring vision of healing and wellness with audiences and patients around the world. Once ensconced in the practice of family medicine, he quickly realized that his interests in medicine were broader than just drugs and surgery. The allopathic medical practice was limited to treating symptoms and illnesses but fell short of restoring the patient’s health entirely. So Dr. Hoffman embarked on a journey to understand what constitutes the human experience and what the triggers and mediators are that perpetuate human suffering. He wanted to do this not only to help patients be free of disease but to realize their maximum potential. Dr. Hoffman welcome. That is quite a resume.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Nice to be here. I’m looking forward to this conversation and seeing what we can come up with.
Mary Vallarta:
Me too. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. I’m super energized to be speaking with you. Let’s get into it. Dr. Hoffman, I love how you’ve combined the strengths of Western medicine with the mindful and spirit-centered approach of Eastern medicine. As your bio states, you didn’t actually start out this way. You were practicing Family Medicine. What pushed you to go into the path of functional and integrative medicine that takes mind, body, and spirit into account?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, the part leading to where I am now is quite interesting in that when I was a young boy in my teenage years, I went to boarding school and I had a teacher there. My teacher was very interested in not only Western psychology, particularly the work of Carl Jung but also very interested in Eastern mythology and religions, particularly the work of a subset of the Vedantic Hindu medicine called Advaita. Advaita takes the point of view that there is no “there out there”. Everything springs from one source. So there is just one mind, one consciousness, and there is no separation. It’s a very specific way of looking at reality. Many of the quantum physicists who came onto the scene at the turn of the century had a very similar point of view. When they dissolved matter into light, they said, all light is continuous. There is no separation
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So this ancient, theological concept, was being married with Western physics. My teacher, Roger, I just hung out with him and we explored all these things and so I became very interested. When I was about 15 years of age, I had what they call a Satori experience, where I directly experienced this One Mind, One Reality. It descends upon you, and you just know that to be true. Before too long, you descend back into your dualistic past, present and future, gain and loss reality and the awareness is lost. I still remember that. Then I had a second experience like that in my thirties. So having had two experiences of One Mind, One Reality. It sort of cemented, in my body based understanding, that was behind all systems of appearance.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Nonetheless, I continued my high school education. My mother applied for me to go to med school. I had no idea. I find myself in med school. I wanted to be a poet, go hang out with all the beat poets in San Francisco, but my mother thought I should have a more formal education. So she applied for med school and I found myself in med school. Actually, after six years of medical training, I became a Family Physician and fell in love with it. I actually loved what I did. I ended up in Saskatchewan, Canada, practicing Family Medicine. When I got to Canada practicing Family Medicine, it was very apparent that that system of medicine is very limited in terms of what you can offer. We call it the N2 / D2 system of medicine. Name of disease, name of drug. That’s about it.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
But what happened was then I also came across a video by Dr. Larry Dossey, one of the great thinkers of the last 50 years in the field of integrative medicine. I watched Larry Dossey sort of draw out this long explanation as to how he combined East and West into his medical practice and his thought process. That triggered another huge explosion of interest and reignited my childhood experiences with my high school teacher and Advaita and psychology. All of a sudden this whole roadmap just opened up and I thought, this is a very interesting possibility. So I then just started learning as much as I could about the human experience. I became a student of as much as I could possibly absorb across all spectrums of human reality from toxicology to illumination. I started to develop a roadmap and with different teachers and different experiences and different ways of seeing and being exposed to different systems of information. I did Ayurvedic training and they talk about different bodies, different systems of the body. I spent time with a very well-known doctor from Germany who lives in Seattle by the name of Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt. I spent years studying with Deepak Chopra and David Simon, et cetera, et cetera. And I just started to develop a roadmap for looking at the human condition from traditional medicine, then expanding it a bit to Functional Medicine and then moving to the brain and then to the emotions, then to the mental field, then to the soul and then to the spirit, which is beyond all confines to space/time. So I developed this roadmap of experiences at each level, diagnosis at each level, potential treatments at each level, because many people will want to go to an acupuncturist, which is at level three in this energy model, but they really should be seeing an oncologist or they’ll go to an oncologist where they really should be doing trauma work.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
I tried to sort out all these different possibilities across all layers and levels and help teach/write a new curriculum, really for doctors or healers. Not really doctors. MDs should keep doing what they do. They do it well. Every patient that sits in front of me says well, why doesn’t my doctor know this. Well, because it wasn’t his interest and he didn’t train to know this. So give it up. Don’t even ask the question, don’t waste your time. We need a new curriculum for a new expansive model. That’s been my life calling, my life passion, and to which I’m still a student. I mean, I study more now than I did when I was young. I just keep expanding the knowledge base.
Mary Vallarta:
I think that’s what makes your work so fascinating to me. You have sort of like a 360-degree view since you’ve been on the MD side, the family medicine side, and then you’re now continuing to learn more about the Eastern methodologies. So you’re kind of taking everything and putting it all together to make these roadmaps that you’re talking about.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It’s not just Eastern, Mary, it’s all systems of knowledge, you know, from phenomenology to theology, to psychology East to West, to up and down, it’s all layers, all levels. It’s not only Eastern insights. Some of it is Eastern, but it’s not only Eastern insights.
Mary Vallarta:
I see. Interesting. So integrating all that together is very fascinating and it gives you more of a well-rounded perspective. As you mentioned, MDs aren’t trained to have that type of approach. That’s why there’s a time and place where that’s going to be appropriate. There’s also another time and place where something else might be more appropriate for a patient. So I think that’s important to note. There is a lot of research coming to light on the important role that food plays on one’s ability to prevent disease and sometimes also reverse or heal. As you pointed out, there are such things called trauma. You’ll recommend people see some trauma specialists or stress. What are your thoughts on having more emphasis or focus on things like mindset, changing internal narratives, and healing emotional trauma when it comes to healing?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
One of the great challenges of working with patients is when they present with complex multi-system illness, which is the only kind of patient I see these days, they are still very in that diagnostic mindset of “what do I have”? Usually singular, what one thing do I have? Is it mold or Lyme or Mast Cell or whatever? Then they start to think diagnostically and therapeutically in an allopathic way. When you start to have a broad spectrum of understanding the human condition, and you start to understand all the antecedents, mediators, and triggers that eventually ended up in biology and pathology/disease, you can’t stop yourself from taking a far more comprehensive history. So the healer of the future can commit both acts of commission, as well as acts of omission. It’s not what he knows, but it’s also what he doesn’t know.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So if you’re sitting in front of a patient and they are presenting with symptomatology at this moment in space-time, it behooves you to ask every single possible trigger that may have led up to that presentation. It’s our Western understanding and consensual reality that diseases kind of fall out of the sky. It’s like, Oh, I’ve got rheumatoid arthritis. Then you can go to the doctor and get an immune modulator, or you can go to a naturopath and get an herb, but it’s still that singular mindset. When we look at patients from a more complex model, we have to start looking at not only diagnosis from a Western perspective, because you need to know that, that it’s an inflammatory and immune system-based disease based on autoimmunity, which has its links in leaky gut, et cetera, et cetera, and the genetic predisposition.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You’ve got to know that, but you’ve also got to understand how people arrive at a point in time with a diagnosis. You know, people, they inherit epigenetically the traumas of their forefathers. So if you don’t ask a history of their forefathers and the ancestors you are missing out on a piece. Then they get born into a family system, and whether or not they were adequately seen by the mothers in the first 10 years and by their fathers in the second 10 years and peers, and by the loved ones in the third decade, they don’t adequately myelinate the three different brains that grow up, the reptilian, limbic and adult brains. So if they are not self-regulated by external parental figures, they don’t learn to self-regulate themselves and they have a fragile personality structure very often.
Mary Vallarta:
So how do you help them uncover all of this information?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You’ve got to take a very thorough history. I take a two and a half to three-hour history and ask all of these questions.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Then those experiences, your epigenetic transfer, ancestral trauma, early childhood experiences that all gets then translated into your perception of reality, your internal dialogue, your thoughts, your value systems, your beliefs, and your defenses. So many people stay highly defended from feelings that arose in the first 30 years of life because they are too painful. So they’re defended and they are traumatized. That then translates into electrical messages in the brain, which you can read on a qEEG. I have a brain treatment center, which reads qEEGs. You can see hallmarks of early trauma on the brain. You’ll see the one brainwave, the [1] beta brainwave highly red, highly amplified. That then gets turned into chemical signals. That then starts to interact with your phospholipid cell membranes, which you can measure, which then turn on receptors, which then turn on genes, which then turn on proteins, which then turn on all the biochemistry that runs your life.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So you have this whole cascade of possible antecedents that can set you up for what’s happening at this moment with so-called symptomatology or disease expression, but it’s not just rheumatoid arthritis. It’s way back in the ancestry, trickling all the way down to physiology. And then you have the environment coming in. That plays havoc with your, your detox pathways and sitting on DNA. Sitting as adducts on your DNA and mitochondria affecting their expression of lipids and proteins. So if you don’t ask all these questions, you’ve got a limited roadmap and you got a couple of tools in your toolbox. You’ve got to have a very broad toolbox, and that’s why education becomes important. We have to educate healthcare providers of the future to broaden their toolbox. Not only to broaden their toolbox but also to broaden their self-understanding as well.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
If a healer approaches a patient with a hero type approach, I’m all-knowing, and you’re all sick. They also perpetuate a very lopsided point of view. The patient’s well side doesn’t get activated. They don’t activate the healthy part of who they are. They identify with the disease, the doctor as the hero is going to fix them. That’s a very lopsided relationship. Often patients sort of, in order to survive that lopsidedness, they just don’t activate their intent to do what is required for them to activate the healer within. The healing archetype within. Without activating that there’s no outcome.
Mary Vallarta:
Right. So would you say your approach is also about giving power back to the patient? Like letting them realize that they have a big role to play in their healing?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
We try to. Some people are highly defended. People have value systems, a hierarchy of values. People will say that their health is a high value. They come to you to treat their health or help them treat their health. When you start to take a history, you’ll find out, particularly with men, by the way, this is like a big male thing. Their highest value is their career, making money, health is secondary. They often delegate their health to the loved ones, their spouses, or somebody else. They don’t really want to rob Peter, their career-making money, to pay Paul, to invest in their health. So they don’t raise health up as a value. Unless patients are prepared to raise health up as a value and become a participant in their own healing experience, they remain passive and they have what we call “projection of will”.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
They project their will to heal onto you. If you rise up in the healing archetype “I’m all-knowing, I’m going to fix you”, you start working harder than the patient. It’s a very lopsided relationship, almost doomed to fail. So you’ve got to try and enter into their system and sort of feel where they are in their own evolution. Is health a high-value? How healthy is their ego strength? Is it fragile? How much projection of will do they have? Do they have outer resources to assist them or are they without resources? Do they have personality disorders? Do they have what it takes to take on such an extensive journey? And, of course, finances. Most of this isn’t funded by healthcare systems and nor should it be because it would bankrupt most of them.
Mary Vallarta:
Right. Also, one of the most important questions for them to know the answer to is why do they want to heal? Why do they want to get better?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
On the first page of my 70-page questionnaire is “Why are you here, How can we help you, What is it you want to achieve?” and how committed are you to making the changes necessary? It’s interesting when it comes back 50% or 75% committed. Immediately I say we have to have this conversation first and find out what that’s about. Because if people haven’t been seen by their parents, if they haven’t been supported and challenged in a healthy, supportive, challenging way, which is how love evolves and how you develop a concept of self. You only develop a good concept of self, good ego strength if you are both supported and challenged by your parents, not just supported. If they don’t have a healthy sense of self, they can’t take on what is being required of them to sort of move through this experience. They just don’t have the resources to do so.
Mary Vallarta:
Right. That’s very true.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You have to find out where they are with that, you know, and where is health in their value system. You really have to ask that question before you launch into “tell me about your disease”. You have to find out who this person is sitting in front of you and where they are at in their hierarchy of values as to doing what it takes to get better. You know, there are many possibilities for healing. The first possibility is just treating disease. Get this symptom out of me. I want to do it quickly without money and without me being involved, just give me a pill. Mahatma Gandhi said the tragedy of modern medicine is that it works. There’s that possibility. Then the other possibility is they see symptoms as teleological. Those symptoms are actually asking them to enter into their own life, to try and find out why they are this way in space-time. Then they see mind, body connections. That the way that they construct reality may influence the systems they put in place to support them and the way they perceive things and what they eat, it all plays a role. So they become more conscious of their own advocacy. That’s the second possibility. The third possibility for healing are those people who do not only want to be free of disease, which is sometimes not possible, you’ve always got some symptomatology and, but they want to live at the highest maximum potential. To do that, they have to go through a lot of personal development and personal growth to know their value systems, to know how inspired they are. To find out what wakes them up every morning. Are they called from above by some spiritual purpose or do they just get out of bed and just sort of see what happens?
Mary Vallarta:
Right. So that brings us back to the why. Let’s talk more about maximum potential, because I know that’s a big part of your work. Can you describe what maximum potential is?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, when a person wakes up in the morning inspired by what they do, that’s living at your maximum potential. They are living at their maximum potential. It’s a vision of what they are here to do on this planet while they’re in a body. In psychology, it was called a daemonic calling. Your inner constellated self calls you from above to become who you’re meant to be. So you’re just inspired to do what you do, and you know what you are meant to do and you throw all your life force into that outcome.
Mary Vallarta:
Which is basically their higher purpose.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Their highest value, their highest purpose. They don’t need to be motivated to get out of bed. They get out of bed and just do what they do. They stay up very late at night trying to manifest it. Their life force is invested in it. There’s that old image that I love, if you will go to a university and you stand outside and you look at the different levels of a university, the undergraduate student’s lights go out at four o’clock, the postgraduate at six o’clock, the doctoral students at 10 o’clock and the Nobel prizewinner’s their lights get switched off at one o’clock in the morning. They are just called into the daemonic calling. They just know who they are and what they meant to do.
Mary Vallarta:
…and that’s what pushes them, yes.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
But that’s only the third possibility. The fourth possibility of healing is when you know that you are part of a connected whole. You don’t identify with your body, your emotions, your mind. You identify with that aspect of you that is beyond all of that. Your deepest self, your soul, which is sort of linked to this one mind, this eternal consciousness. You know you’re not your body, you’re not your mind, you’re not your thoughts, but instead, you’re part of this continuous oneness and you stay connected to that in that field of consciousness that is that. I’ve had patients die, fully healed, connected to that aspect of themselves. They just know who they are. They know they are not their bodies, they’re not their minds, they’re not their thoughts, they’re not their actions. They are beyond that.
Mary Vallarta:
That reminds me of the concept of Satva in Ayurveda.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It’s called Brahmi in the Vedantic model.
Mary Vallarta:
Oh, nice. I’m just getting into more Vedic studies. I’m in Ayurveda right now, which I’m really loving. That’s really what inspired my own healing journey.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
I took my model from Ayurveda because I studied it for years and went to India and did an internship there.
Mary Vallarta:
That’s my dream. I want to go to India and study it one day.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
But they have these koshas, these bodies. I took that model and added a few and I made the seven stages to health and transformation model based on Ayurvedic and Vedantic scriptures.
Mary Vallarta:
Oh, got it. So what are those seven stages? Can you share them with us?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yes. Spirit, soul, mind, emotion, energy, physiology and structure, environment.
Mary Vallarta:
Okay. Interesting.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah. They are based on the five koshas from the Vedantic philosophy, the five bodies, the five layers.
Mary Vallarta:
So obviously when your patients are working with you, I can only imagine some of them get challenged. Right? Some of them might get frustrated during this whole process. So how do you go about helping them and supporting them push through or be comfortable with feeling this discomfort? Cause a lot of times people run away from discomfort.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Again, it’s incumbent upon me if I’m doing a reasonable job, not to impose my model on them, but just ask what they want.
Mary Vallarta:
Ok, going back to that.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Some people just want to not have asthma. They’re not interested in seven levels of healing. I respect that. Then I pull out all my functional medicine, toxicology tricks, and just treat asthma. Treat triggers of asthma such as mold and food sensitivities and Mast Cell blockade and mitochondrial resuscitation. I do all my functional medicine things. Other people come to me and say, I’ve been sick my whole life and they give you 50 symptoms. And you know, immediately that that person probably has not had the most advantageous experience from either ancestrally or from birth. Almost definitely you can tell that. The adverse childhood experiences studies show that people who’ve had adverse childhood experiences had three to four times increased health disadvantages as they mature.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So you know when people tell you they’ve been sick for as long as they remember. You immediately go into early childhood trauma history and it’s always there. You can always tell. Interrupted bonds with their mothers. They have merged with mothers. They were sent off to boarding schools at young ages. They go to intensive care units and incubators and the mother has problems with the father so the mother takes her eyes off the child and doesn’t myelinate the child’s sense of self. Then mother’s offline. Then they have stillbirths and miscarriages and they’re all there in the history almost every time in a complex illness patient.
Mary Vallarta:
Hmm. So basically you meet them where they’re at.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yes, I tend to meet them where they’re at. You try and work out each level. At level one what’s going on? Is it food? Is it mold? You do your normal medicine. Then you ask deeper questions. Are some of these symptoms teleological? Are these symptoms bringing patients to you because they have to heal a part of themselves that they never integrated in their evolution? For instance, I had a patient with MS whose father was a very famous sports coach and she never felt seen by her father, always neglected. She had a superego that is highly punitive, and she didn’t feel ever seen. So she was constantly beating herself up and attempting/strivinh to become more than she could possibly be. She tried and tried and tried, but dad was always coaching the team.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Then the dad, when she was 18 or 19 I believe, her father got fired from the team. The next day she developed MS. The next day. That symptom was saying, dad, you were never there to take care of me. Now, look at me, I’m sick. He rose to the occasion. When he was fired, he was at home and he could be with his daughter. It was set up that way, that the symptoms drew that complexity together for it to be resolved. When she got that installed that she used that to use that in healing. It was very powerful. I have many, many cases and stories like that, where symptoms guide people to heal a part of themselves they’ve left behind.
Mary Vallarta:
Right. That is fascinating.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Symptoms don’t fall out of the sky. They have intent. In my experience.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. I think that the more I speak to all of the experts that I’ve talked to so far, the more I’m realizing that symptoms are really an opportunity for people to get to know themselves on a deeper level.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
I did a workshop with Mark Wolynn who is one of the great family constellations authors and workshop leaders out there. Once a year, we’ll do a workshop on illness and your family system and early developmental trauma. Almost to the person, we can link the rising of symptoms to events in the lifespan that needed to be resolved and healed. Once we linked them and made them conscious and gave them the homework to do, there was a vast new release of healing potential because you don’t heal until you have a new internal dialogue, a new story, a new narrative. If you have the old narrative, you create the same biochemistry. People with a new narrative, they have a new insight. It releases a potent internal life force that then constellates the biochemical pathways downstream to advocate healing.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So we would do this workshop. Mark was a master at family constellations. Patients would sit next to him, and we would ask what their problem is and they’d say thyroiditis or leaky gut or Mast Cell, mold, whatever. Then you’d say, well, tell me about your mother. Tell me about your father. Tell me about your grandparents and your siblings. Then he’d put up people in this constellation and worked with them energetically as to what was going on in the system and how their symptoms correlated with the dynamics of the system, the entanglements of the system. They could see how their symptoms didn’t just arise from nowhere. They were contingent upon some of these entanglements that needed to be healed. Once they saw what they hadn’t perceived before because children will often tell themselves a story that’s not true.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
They’ll say their mother was mean and angry, but their mother lost two children before they were born. The mother got very little from her mother. The mother was always bothered about the father who is out doing something or other. So the mother just had a little bit to give and unless the child sees that, and sees the mother through new eyes, the judgment of the mother will be there. A person is half their mother, half their father. If they start judging half of themselves, guess what? They’re not open to the healing force, which is their whole self. So everybody ultimately has to realign with their parental mothers and fathers. If you don’t say yes to your mother and father, your healing is going to be limited, no matter what you’ve experienced.
Mary Vallarta:
Because it’s pushing yourself away. They’re half of you like you mentioned.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
That’s the setup for auto-immunity by the way.
Mary Vallarta:
Oh yeah, because you’re rejecting yourself and autoimmune, right? Oh my God, that is powerful. I don’t even know what to say right now, but it shows how important it is to really understand yourself, but also understand your parents. Also understanding your grandparents because your grandparents affected your parents’ psyche. It affected how your parents treated you.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
No question. 100%. There’s a one-to-one correlation.
Mary Vallarta:
So Dr. Hoffman, switching gears here a little bit because I’m also quite interested in anti-aging medicine, but I don’t know too much about it. Could you tell us a little bit about what that is?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It’s a myth. I’ve trained in it but there is no anti-aging medicine. It’s a nice sort of slogan for slowing down the process of aging. Okay. We all age. You’ve got the hormones of youth and you’ve got these drives. In the first 30 years, you can do no wrong. You just push yourself through everything. Then entropy sets in and you start to sort of come apart slowly but surely.
Mary Vallarta:
You’re noticing it now.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
No question. The wrinkles and the skin sags.
Mary Vallarta:
The low back pain
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Then you get the inflammatory diseases of aging. Then you get separated into either heart disease or cancer or one of those things. They are all driven by genetics and environment and lifestyle and mind/ body. The more inflamed you are by your lifestyle, the more unresolved you are with multiple triggers, the more interleukin six and tumor necrosis factor and all the inflammatory signalings are flying around, destroying your mitochondria, which then reduce your ATP, which then reduce your life force. So what we do in anti-aging medicine is try and slow down that trajectory before all is lost.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. There’s no way that you can stop yourself from aging. It’s just really about how to stop those symptoms of aging or delay them, right?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Modify it so that your entropy isn’t like this. Then you drop dead one day because your gene pools run out, it’s time.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. It reminds me of my grandmother. She died, but she didn’t really die of any disease or illness. I think it was just because she was older and her body was just tired.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
The genes give up. Everything ends.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. So share some of the most important things you’ve learned from your spiritual teachers. You’ve named a lot of big names, in your bio, like Deepak Chopra and Osho.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So, here’s the answer. You probably won’t want this one.
Mary Vallarta:
Give us the real answer, not what you think we want to hear.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
People who’ve had difficult upbringings, who’ve had some complexity in their early developmental years, will often go to find spiritual teachers to take the part of the good parent that they feel they didn’t get. So whenever I have patients come in who have spiritual teachers and gurus, I’m very suspicious. Having had very many spiritual teachers and gurus myself. Having been to India three times and sat on many mountain tops meditating. So that’s the first insight that I really want to emphasize. It’s not wrong. It’s just when people don’t heal with their individual mothers and fathers, they’ll find a great mother and father that will look upon them benignly.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You’ll find a lot of the great spiritual teachers who went to Burma and Thailand and India in the seventies, all of the Western students of spirituality. There are a lot of them. Jon Kabat-Zinn is one of them, Jack Kornfield is another. They all went and meditated for 15, 20 years, put on red robes and then came out of the forest, went back into cities of America, started to see people and all of a sudden realized, hold on a second, we are just performing spiritual bypass. These people have got messed up lives and they all went and became psychologists. They all needed to heal the early traumas that people were trying to bypass to develop spiritual awakening. So that’s one of the greatest insights I’ve seen over the years. It’s not that spiritual teachers can’t provide some insight, but I always get a little uneasy when I see a guru sitting on a big white pedestal. Then there are all of these devotees. And I’ve done that for decades. I’m judging myself.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Then I just always ask, what is it about this experience that was being bypassed? What is it that they are trying to gain? What, what layer and level is still unfulfilled in their evolution? That’s what my curiosity is because an awakening experience into Satori is a sort of a brief exposure where you go beyond mind/ body and you actually know that everything is unified. There is no past/present/future. There’s nothing to fear and you’re sort of eternal, immortal and you’re never born and you never die. That is what happens when you awaken. But to sit in front of a guru to try and get that experience, I’m not sure that’s the best use of your time.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. I think it’s just an illustration of how you’re still searching for answers outside of you.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
That’s what Advaita says. The essence of Advaita, which I learned at 15 was the very act of seeking prevents you from being who you are because you are that. So what are you seeking? You are already that thing.
Mary Vallarta:
What are you seeking? Exactly. I get that. That is really good advice when you think about it. The answers are not out there. They are in here.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Carl Jung said the urge to be whole is evolutionary. You can’t avoid it. Dianne Connelly said all sickness is homesickness. You try to come home to the most integrated aspect of who you are. You can’t just go and sit with a guru.
Mary Vallarta:
That won’t give you the answers.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It’s fun, and it’s very pleasant for a time. And I’ve done it for a long time, but you still got to go down the chakras and work your way through them. Early developmental trauma. All of that stuff. You’ve got to heal that stuff.
Mary Vallarta:
If anything, it’s sort of a way where someone could continue resisting actually looking at themselves, getting to know themselves by sitting with a guru, and not ever advancing to internal examination.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Perfect, perfect example you just gave. It really does, in many cases, exemplify and exaggerate, the very pathology that’s brought them to the guru in the first place, which is resistance and projection. By sitting in front of the guru they are refusing to face the very thing that they need to face, which is themselves and their defenses.
Mary Vallarta:
Yes. Fascinating. So aside from sitting or seeing your patients, one-on-one Dr. Hoffman, you also actually have online programs and courses that people can take. Can you tell us a bit about what those are?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, it’s funny, I used to do weekend workshops and all sorts of things. Then I condensed it all into a Friday afternoon lecture, a one-hour lecture for my new patients. Then the one-hour lecture became seven hours. I felt sorry for my patients. So then I took that lecture and made it into a book. So that book and those videos are available.
Mary Vallarta:
Nice.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah. So if you want to learn Seven Stages to Health and Transformation, I have a video and I have a PowerPoint explanation of it all, but I no longer lecture to that degree. I’m going back and starting to do lectures on different topics like Alzheimer’s disease and Mast Cell Activation and mold exposure and various aspects of mind-body healing. Those are in development. Most of the time now I’m helping other practitioners. Guiding them through this new curriculum of Seven Stages to Health and Transformation where not only do they learn new skills, but they learn about themselves.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
They have to stay congruent, they have to be present in that experience. I forgot to mention as part of my explanation, I went off at a tangent, that patients who don’t have good relationships with their parents have low trust. If they have medical PTSD or trauma from the medical system, that gets projected on you as a healer because all medical systems are very patriarchal and you are a parental figure. So if you’re sitting in front of a patient and there’s no trust established, there’s nothing you can do. So you have to ask that question first. You know I’m trying to teach people, other practitioners, how to be present with patients before they get more tools in their toolbox and go into courses and learn things.
Mary Vallarta:
That is so important.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
How to develop trust with a patient. Sometimes you can’t, they’re too traumatized and you try your best, but it’s just not possible.
Mary Vallarta:
But that just shows the role that each person plays. The role that the practitioner plays and also the role that the patient plays. If either one of them is not invested, it’s not going to yield the highest potential outcome.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It won’t. Some people are too traumatized with too much mental health illness that they just can’t do what it takes to show up in that experience. Then you just have to admit that it’s not going to work out. You have to learn who is sitting in front of you. Also, know yourself through your own Myers – Briggs typology, through your own Ayurvedic typology, you have to know if you’re Vata, Pitta, Kapha. Is that patient Vata, Pitta, Kapha because the Vata patient is not going to do what the Kapha patient does. They are an entirely different person.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. And then honoring and accepting that type of person and not projecting another type of person in that chair.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
If I’m a Pitta practitioner in my hero archetype and I know everything, I’m going to tell you what to do. And the Vatta patient walks in and is very sort of inspired for like three days and then they lose interest. If you impose your value system and your Ayurvedic typology or dosha onto them, and you don’t resonate and know how to treat Vata patients, you will lose them and you’ll feel frustrated. Like a Kapha patient, they always show up, they never do what you asked them to do, or they do very little, but they’re always very loyal.
Mary Vallarta:
Very loyal. And we’re talking about Kapha, Vatta, Pitta. Those are the different dosha constitutions, that we talk about in Ayurveda.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Then the Pitta patient, if you’re not the best in the city, they’ll leave you and go find the best.
Mary Vallarta:
They are looking for the facts. They’re like the fact-finder.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You’re not sharp enough and don’t have the best office and are always on time….
Mary Vallarta:
You gotta check all the boxes for the Pitta patients.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
But as a practitioner, you’ve got to know who’s coming in the door because you’ve got to adjust the way you interact with them. Knowing your Myers-Briggs typology as well, thinking people are not the same as feeling people. You’ve got to know that.
Mary Vallarta:
That’s very true. It’s sort of like detective work that you have to do when you work with your patients. Well, Dr. Hoffman, I can talk to you for hours. There are so many different questions that I can keep asking you, but for the sake of this particular interview, I’d like to ask if there’s anything else, one thing that you can leave us with here today that you didn’t get a chance to cover.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
In regards to talking to well people? Or people with complex illnesses? Or could you give you more direction?
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. Well, the title of the summit is Healing Your Chronic Illness and Taking Your Life Back, meaning taking control of your health, right? Being the person and seeing the power that you have to own your life, to own your health. And so what would be the last thing that you’d want to leave us with here today?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
I think what’s most important is that people have to understand that if they present with chronic ill health or chronic complex illness, they have to try and find a practitioner who has a broad range of experience with multiple tools in their toolbox. They can’t just do one stool test and hope to heal. That’s number one.
Number two, they have to become their own patient advocates. If they are not invested in advocacy, there is very little that you can do.
Number three, they can’t project all the will to heal on the practitioner. They have to take some of that responsibility themselves.
Number four, they have to raise health up as a value. If the health isn’t one of the first or second values, it will default to number four or five, wherever you have your highest value, you will have your most order. Wherever you have your lowest value you will have your most chaos. If health truly isn’t your highest value, be honest with yourself. Then look at it and say in the future, I will make it my high-value but right now I want to keep working and eating poorly and making money because that’s where my highest value is. Not wrong or right. Just be honest and truthful and know your value system.
Mary Vallarta:
Wow. That is a great way to end the discussion. I feel like you beautifully summarized our conversation and added new thoughts to it. So I appreciate that. I will go ahead and make sure that I link Dr. Hoffman’s website, where some of his writings and programs are, so you all can take a look. I’ll also include that in the post-summit email. Dr. Hoffman, you’re also on social media. So what is your handle where people can find you and possibly connect with you there?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So Instagram. My staff said, “make sure you say this at the end”.
So Instagram is www.instagram.com/drbrucehoffman/
Facebook is www.facebook.com/TheHoffmanCentreforIntegrativeMedicine/
and then the website is www.hoffmancentre.com.
I also have a brain treatment center, www.braintreatmentcentreofalberta.com I think those are all the handles.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. I mean, there are more. Do you have a Tik Tok? Do you have a Twitter?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah. Yeah. Yesterday my Twitter account was activated by an assistant. I have no clue.
Mary Vallarta:
There you go. Well, Dr. Hoffman is on Instagram, so you can catch him there. I think that everyone’s on Instagram. So find him on IG. You should see the links in the handles below. Look at his website. There are a lot of resources there where you can get started if you are interested in everything that we’ve talked about. As Dr. Hoffman said, be truthful to yourself and meet yourself where you are. Stop, resisting, and meet yourself where you are, because that is an integral part of starting and continuing the healing journey.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Also, the outer aspects of healing often in complex illness have to be congruent with inner healing too. You can’t just take a potion or herb. It’s much more complex than that. You’ve got to take a full system approach. There is a lecture being posted on my website soon on YouTube, where I give a 1 ½ hour lecture on the Seven Stages of Healing which will summarize some of the things we’ve mentioned.
Mary Vallarta:
Ooh, yes. I’m gonna watch that for sure. Okay. Thank you so much for joining us today. Hope you got a lot out of this. Dr. Hoffman, you are amazing. Thank you for speaking with me.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah. It was nice talking with you.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.
But before I begin with that, I’d like to say that mast cells are part of, they’re produced in our bone marrow, and they’re part of our immune system. And they make up a very small percentage of it. And they act as defense structures against incoming invading pathogens. So, anything that comes into our environment or into our biome, mast cells are often at the first line of defense. And they were actually discovered a long time ago, 1878, I believe, by Paul Ehrlich. And he called them mast cells because they were fat and puffy.
