Full Transcript
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Yoshino:
Hey everyone, welcome back to Artist Decoded. This is your host, Yoshino. And, this is yet another Mind/Wave episode. These episodes have been transforming over the course of time, but mainly my intention for these episodes is that I want to explore various modes of thinking. And, I want to hopefully give people an access point to create positive mental health routines. I’m a firm believer in conscious decision-making and in creating a solid foundation for self-reflection, self-care, and self-growth. Creating good habits in all aspects of life is extremely important, which takes a conscious effort to do so. I personally work out about 12 times per week, so that’s twice a day with one day off. I lift weights in the morning and do calisthenics in the morning, and do my cardiovascular activities such as walking, running, and cycling before sunset. I also know from personal experience that good habits, both physically and mentally, have to be developed slowly and over time.
This can be holistically compared to creating a solid foundation for a career in the arts, or just simply having an artistic practice because not everyone necessarily needs to have a career in the arts. But either way, this takes a conscious, consistent, and concerted effort to continue your craft. Which can be likened to anything in life, including developing positive mental health practices, which leads me to my guest for today, Dr. Bruce Hoffman, who is the founder of the Hoffman Centre for Integrative and Functional Medicine.
So let me tell you a bit about Dr. Hoffman. Dr. Bruce Hoffman did not choose the medical arts as a vocation. Originally, he wanted to be a writer and poet. His interest in health and healing developed later in life after a long and winding road of self-discovery, life experience and learning. He only applied to medical school so he could complete a residency in psychiatry and subsequently study Jungian analysis to understand the human condition and behavior. As life would have it, his destiny took him on a different journey. He never did formally pursue a psychiatry residency or Jungian analytic training, but his love for art, poetry, and psychology remains.
Dr. Hoffman was born and educated in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. After two years of compulsory military training, his distaste for the local regime convinced him to immigrate to Canada in 1986, where he pursued family medical practice in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. 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 failed short in restoring the patient’s health entirely. Bruce embarked on a journey to understand what constitutes the human experience. What are the triggers and mediators that perpetuate human suffering? He wanted to assist his patients not only to be free of disease, but to realize their maximum potential.
Well, I hope you all enjoy this podcast episode. There’s a lot of rich information here, so stay tuned for that. But before we begin, please go to our iTunes page, leave us a review. It helps reviewers just like yourself to hear about the podcast. We’re also now on YouTube. There are a lot of new videos and content from past episodes up there. So, check us out over there and be sure to tune into our no wave cinema conversations on Clubhouse. The next conversation will be with me and Justin Dasher Hopkins. We’ll be talking about the classic 1964 Hiroshi Tasha Guevara film, Woman and the Dunes. We will be having this conversation on Wednesday, April 7th at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time. So definitely go check it out and listen to us over there. Maybe even contribute to the conversation as well. So anyways, without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dr. Bruce Hoffman. Hope you enjoy it.
Dr. Hoffman, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. And the main reason why I want to bring you on is to talk about good mental health practices and as Maslow would put it to hopefully reach self-actualization. And I think it’s really important for people in general, to be honest with themselves about every single aspect in their life, to live a holistic practice. And I was wondering if you can speak about your early pursuits for wanting to become a writer and poet and how that eventually led you down a path of studying traditional medicine.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Sure. I was brought up in apartheid, South Africa. And initially in quite a conservative traditional home. But at a young age, when my parents got divorced at around age 10, my mother drifted off into more creative endeavors and found herself hanging out with Keith Anderson, who was a head of a circus, also an artist, a set designer with the opera company and the director of the opera company. And so, I found myself hanging out with Keith and his group of merry pranksters, if you will, because they were circus people, artists, creatives, and opera participants. And I found myself as a trapeze artist in a circus that traveled around South Africa, hanging out with these rather unique individuals, clowns, dwarfs, transvestites, just a crazy band of merry pranksters, which at a young age in conservative South Africa was completely unheard of.
So, I was exposed to alternative lifestyles from a young age. But then when my father got wind of this, he sent me off to an all-male boarding school, a thousand miles from home. And when I got to this all-male boarding school, they took one look at me and said; Hoffman, we’re going to knock you back into shape. So, then I was forced into this narrow, masculine boarding school mentality, and I was horrified it was like the worst thing that ever happened. But the school was an outward-bound school based on the boarding school that Prince Charles went to Gordonstoun and Prince Phillip went to. Just based on those same principles, go out into the mountains and find yourself. But after a couple of years of being at a boarding school, I had a school teacher by the name of Roger Loveday. And Roger was a devotee of a guru called Ramana Maharshi. He exposed me to the teachings from India and particularly the subset of Hinduism called Advaita or non-dual Vedanta. And also at the same time, I got exposed to the writings of Jung; Memories, Dreams, and Reflections- his autobiography had a huge impact on me. And what ended up happening was I had a satori experience.
One day, Roger was speaking to me outside the school, outside the classroom, after he’d given a big dissertation on the bible and Christianity. After I was very cynically inclined at that time. I said to him; Roger, you don’t believe in all of those myths, do you? And he said to me, “of course I do”. And in that moment when he said, of course I do, I had a sudden awakening. I went into the state called non-dual state or satori. And, that’s where all space-time sort of, linear time disappears and you see behind the curtain, so to speak. You see the appearance of reality through the quantum lens, which is, there’s no time, there’s no future, there’s no danger, there’s no fear of death. Everything just dissolves into this oneness and where everything’s light. Which is well-documented in all the literature, many people have had these experiences. But that then set the stage for further exploration of these principles and these studies. I just continued to be inspired by the fact that there was a reality behind the reality that the rest of the world was operating on.
And then my mother applied for me to go to medical school, unbeknownst to me. Why, because she had a friend who had a friend who could get a scholarship for medical school, for somebody from the particular part of the country that I came from. So, she applied and I was actually up in Johannesburg building sets, scenery for a play with Keith Anderson and his group. I got a phone call and my mother said; Oh, by the way, you got into medical school. And I said, what? What’s medicine, I’m go to do what? She said, no, you got to go study medicine. I said, are you out of your mind? I want to go and study literature. Anyway, I ended up going to med school and not knowing what I was doing there. It is quite a peculiar experience. But while I was in medical school, I happened to go and stay on a remote farm up on the mountain. And there were a group of people around that area who were very influenced by the beat poets, Kerouac, Ginsberg, et cetera. And I started to read them with great sort of joy. And, and then I ended up in my second year of med school, going to San Francisco and started to hang out with Gregory Corso and a lot of the other beat poets. And that was another inspiration for me.
I just got involved in creative endeavors, integrating Jung and Eastern thoughts and philosophies, and then finished my medical training, ended up in rural Saskatchewan as a family practitioner and really loved being a doctor, when I actually discovered what being a doctor was, because I had no clue. But then after a period of a year or two, I realize that this whole N2D2, name of disease, name of drug method of practicing was ridiculous. Even though it serves a function. And then I came across the writings and the videotapes of a medical writer and thinker called Larry Dossey. Larry Dossey had explored the interface between Eastern philosophies and Western medicine. I’ve written quite extensively about it. And, I watched his video and I was like completely moved. I realized that; Hey, I can bring back everything I learned in my youth that I thought I had to leave behind forever into the integration of this kind of medical practice. I flew down, met Larry Dossey, at a conference, had dinner with him. Very inspired, and then started off with that. To eat, discover, and study anything I could across the whole spectrum of medicine. Healing and the healing arts, including anything that could help an individual live at their maximum potential.
People enter into the medical office. I’m sitting in my medical office. I’ve just seen patients this morning and they come in with symptoms of depression, mold illness, Lyme disease, mast cell activation syndrome, a whole host of chronic fatigue or whatever. Then you start to work with a bigger lens are really entry points into a much greater dialogue and a much greater roadmap that you need to bring to the table in order to assist the person through this transformation of illness to wellness. People think they have a disease in which they label, and they think that’s where it begins and ends. But in the system I use and the method I’ve employed, and I’m proud to say that some of the success I have is that I employ a much larger roadmap. It was a much larger set of tools and hence have written about this new curriculum that’s necessary in order to interface with complex patients who can’t just be mechanistically reduced to a diagnosis. It’s actually absurd when you start to think of it. We’re just not trained to think with a different paradigm. We’re very mechanistic in our thought process, but there’s a lot more mystery that goes on into diagnostics and treatment.
What happened after that was that I started to study Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, homeopathy and German biological medicine, and the the sub-disciplines. And, happened to spend number of years with Deepak Chopra and David Simon. And when I discovered Ayurvedic medicine, they had an explanation of the different layers and levels of what they consider to be human reality, which is stepped down from soul to spirit, to mind, to emotion, to energy, to physicality, to outer world, out there, the expanded universe.
And I started to use that diagnostic model to think of human behavior and illness. And now I’ve incorporated that and expanded that and happened to also, at the time, meet up with a German doctor who’s still alive and still very active, Dietrich Klinghardt. He had also thought of these things and integrated some of these systems into his roadmap. And then I just expanded the roadmap. And now I use the Seven Levels of Diagnosis and Treatment TM across all layers and levels. And when a person enters my room, I use western diagnosis and their symptomatology as an entry point into a much wider dialogue and a much wider diagnostic and therapeutic potential roadmap. So that’s how I work nowadays.
Yoshino:
In terms of just like a, I want to say like a global scale, but I guess, you know, some of the pitfalls for allopathic medicine and the way that it’s practiced in a Western context, like what are some of the things that you’ve observed that needs to change within that context? And how do you think that you implement it in your particular practice?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, being a trained western MD, I have the fortunate privilege of being able to look at disease through that lens. And the pitfalls are that the Western diagnosis implies that an organ system gets diseased, then you must find a pharmacology or a therapy or a surgical treatment for that. That is often the case, as we know. Sometimes when you got pneumonia, you want to get intravenous antibiotics, nothing wrong with that. But now we have a whole new paradigm upon us of complex multi-system multi-symptom disease presentations. And that model, that DSM- 10 classification of organ systems and pharmacological interventions is hopelessly inadequate to address those complexities. And it’s quite uncanny really when you start to work with complex patients as to how often western medicine gets it entirely wrong. And it’s only because their tool bag is so limited, it’s this perception that human beings are these mechanistic beings that, a little biochemical particles, that disease just falls out of the sky. And then you got to find a drug to kind of turn down the symptom.
Yoshino:
Do you think that that’s more of a systemic issue or what do you think the actual issue there is?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, we think of human beings as being physical bodies, mechanistic bodies. So, it’s the paradigm, it’s the lens through which human beings are observed. That becomes a limiting factor. And we think diseases just fall out of the sky. There’s no antecedents, mediators, and triggers over the inflammatory disease process that is constellated. And we now know generationally, people exhibit, as you spoken with Mark Wolynn, people can come and present with disease processes that the initial triggers have been three generations before they were even born. And that epigenetic transfer of data is real. It’s studied at all the major universities. So that isn’t taken into account in the mechanistic model and the drug-based model. 5 minutes, 10 minutes, what diagnosis, what symptom cluster, what drug, boom. And in America is even worse because your insurance companies control what goes through the gates. And it’s ridiculous. I mean, it’s silly. It’s not how it works.
Yoshino:
Yeah. I think in America, it’s more capitalized, but that’s just part of the whole system. So pharmacologically, it could be traced from that. And also like the way that the educational system is structured as well.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah. It’s a disease-based model, it’s a mechanistic model. And the only therapeutic input that’s of any use is pharmacologically based, and the gateway to that is controlled by the drug industry and the drug lobbyists. It’s very bizarre how it’s all got set up. It’s very peculiar really. Because it’s not real. The human body is the final resting place of every incoming influence. And every top-down influence. The hidden and the obvious. And the body is the final kind of resting place of an individual for all of those influences. And if you don’t start looking at the toxicological logical input of a very diseased planet, the genetics of the individual, which can either detoxify or not that process. And then the influences of the energy body, because we basically, our DNA emits light, which then stands as a standing wave around us, either coherent or incoherently and is highly affected by electromagnetic fields. If you don’t take those things into account, and then the emotional influences we bring up from early childhood, we know from all the literature that children that have been either suffered from abuse trauma, or neglect trauma. Neglect trauma being often more damaging than abuse trauma. They have an infinite amount of increased disease processes later on in life. So, the environmental body, the physical body, the structural body, dentistry, chiropractic, if you don’t take all of those moving parts into play.
Like today, this morning, I saw a woman with a headache, but she had a bite misalignment. She had an overbite, with TMJ issues, had root canals, implants, and had a swollen back of the throat, which we call a Mallampati grade four with sleep apnea. I’m not trained about dentistry as a medical practitioner. I wouldn’t even look in the mouth as a doctor, but its obvious that her dentistry was playing a huge role in her headache presentation. I would just find a drug to treat the headache if I’m using my western practice.
So, the structural piece, then the energetic piece, and then the emotional piece, and then the ego development of the individual. The first half of life, ego structure, which takes us out into the world to become something that drives the first half of life. If we don’t know the internal dialogue of that person, the defenses they develop in order to stay safe, the thoughts that they have, the beliefs that they carry, the value systems, the hierarchy of values that they have. If you sitting in front of a patient and you don’t know their hierarchy of values, you can’t treat them because if their health is a fourth on their value system and running their businesses is the first on their value system, guess what? You have chaos in your low value systems, and you have order, you run your business well, but you’re going to delegate your health to your wife. And you’re not going to show up for all that’s required for you to transform your life. So, if you don’t know the hierarchy of values of people, you can’t really effectively relate to them where they are. Because they will come in and say, they want to feel better. But when you examine their hierarchy of values, it’s fourth on their value list. And unless they raise it, they’re not going to achieve any ends.
Yoshino:
Yeah. I think that’s really important to bring up because, even in that ICI presentation that you were giving, you were talking about how traditional allopathic approaches not taking into account different states of consciousness. And, you know, you could speak obviously more about this than I can, but I’m curious, how would you diagnose someone that doesn’t really take their health into consideration, but is more focused on maybe their business and work and value that as like something that is more important?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Oh, I take a history and I have a questionnaire. One of my set of questions, in my 70-page questionnaire, is determining your hierarchy of values. And I ask the question; how do you spend your time, your money, your attention, what you talk about, what you’re surrounded by? And if somebody says, well, I get up at six in the morning, I go to work. I talk business all day. I come home along the cell phone, I’m doing business deals and I’m surrounded by financial books and I watch business TV. It’s pretty obvious where their hierarchy of values is. Well, you got to “rob Peter to pay Paul”. If you want to get your hypertension under control, and your diabetes under control, how much time are you going to devote to exercise, diet, meditation, sleep, et cetera? And they go, I’ll do my best. I’ll do my best, usually means not much.
Unless you’re inspired to have health as a high value, you have to be motivated from the outside, not inspired from the inside. Motivation lasts six weeks and then you give up, you can’t sustain somebody else’s value system to motivate you if it’s not inside of you.
Yoshino:
Yeah. It’s kind of like that traditional saying, you can lead the horse to water, but ask to take a sip. Maybe sometimes a much bigger sip. So going back to non-duality and speaking of…
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Hey, can I just say something? Sorry Yoshino, can I just say something quick just before we leave that subject. Mahatma Gandhi said that the problem with Western medicine is it works. You know, he said that. If you’ve got heartburn, you take a PPI, you take Pepcid, it goes away, nothing to do with what you ate before, how much you drank, blah, blah, blah. So people just take a whole bunch of suppressing drugs and they get on with their life, which is fine. But if you want, if you value health and wellbeing, you want to do a lot to get where you want to be. There’s this whole new group of younger people who are called bio-hackers, who make it their life’s work to study all that it takes to sustain a healthy cell membrane and a healthy internal milieu of the mitochondria. And a brain functioning and sexuality and libido, and they just devote the whole life to enhancing that. And that’s a full-time job. So, there’s is a gradation of what you can expect from a patient from just take a few supplements, to really devote your life, to turning your life around from a health perspective.
Yoshino:
But going back to the non-duality approach, how do you at the Hoffman Centre integrate that into the practice of educating people that are your patients, and then also integrating those more nuanced approaches with allopathic approaches and Western medicine?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, the non-duality concept can’t be taught as you know, it’s either happens or it doesn’t happen. You either wake up to non-duality or you don’t. And it’s one of those strange events that other people experience or don’t experience. That’s when you start to see reality from behind, you see it with what they call One Mind. There’s no dual mind, there’s no you and me. We are just part of the same consciousness. Everything is consciousness, and that can’t be taught. Many gurus have set for decades on their stools, talking about the fact that the very thing you seek is preventing you from finding it. So, the very seeking prevents it, it just happens. But that’s a non-dual, that’s Level Seven in my model. But then there’s the other levels which I integrate in my model of assisting people achieve maximum potential within the realms of the dual life. The non-dual part is it can’t be imparted. It happens or not.
Yoshino:
Can you break down your seven-step method, essentially? I’m curious what exactly is in each part of the system.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So, the Ayurvedic or Vedantic breakdown of human reality is we arise from Brahman. The one mind, the unified field, which we call spirit. You won’t be able to see this and I’m not going to attempt, but I sort of broken it down like this. Spirit, soul, intellect, emotion, electromagnetic, physical, extended (bodies). And on each of those stages, each of those layers of an individual’s reality, there’s definitely experiences, anatomical, designations, sciences related, diagnostics and therapeutics. So that’s the system I use. If you look at my website, I believe there’s a chart there, or that ISEAI lecture. That’s a system I practically use in order to assist people and get better. But they all enter through the physical, they come with a diagnosis and their symptomatology. And then I look at all the environmental influences, the biochemical imbalances, the genetics, the structure, the brain, I do, I have a brain treatment center. So, we’re always looking at brain function. And the electromagnetic, heart rate variability, et cetera. And I take a history of early developmental trauma. And then I look at ego structures and defenses and if need be, I send them for psychometric assessments. And then for the soul piece, for the family soul, I use a genogram and do Mark Wolynn’ s work or Bert Hellinger’s work, family constellation work. And for the individual soul, do dreamwork and Jungian type approaches.
So at each layer, there’s different ways of perceiving and experiencing human reality. And so, in a two-hour consult, you’re doing your best to sort of take as much in as you can to get to know that person and where the major blocks are. So even if they come in with Lyme disease, sometimes it’s a question of inherited family trauma, that’s really running the show. Or sometimes it’s due to a traumatic brain injury and they need brainwork. Sometimes it’s all layers, all levels. So having done this for a long time I sort of getting get better and better making the diagnostic and therapeutic recommendations.
Yoshino:
Can you talk a bit about your success stories with this process? I like to understand that a bit.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Well, all cases in the end sort of blur into one. But you know, there’s endless amount of patients that present with, say a diagnosis of Lyme disease or mast cell activation syndrome, who believe that that’s the only reason why they are sick. But when they start to explore all the other potential diagnostic possibilities, they all of a sudden realize that that was truly a teleological entry point into a much larger dialogue with themselves. And then they start to explore the whole of their lives and they start to make the necessary adjustments. I’ve got case histories in my upcoming book. I can’t pull one right now because this sort of endless variety of different presentations that I see on a daily basis. I mean, it’s just one little thing today. I saw somebody just very recently who was in her thirties, failed marriage, young child, no direction in life, presents with depression.
Her diagnosis is depression, on antidepressants. And could I help her with her depression and poor self-esteem. Upon further inquiry I found out that she’s moving back home with her parents at the age of 38. And she was very ashamed by all of that. At 38, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m going back home. What a tragedy. And the man she just divorced, was castigating her for being hopeless, no good, et cetera, et cetera. But when you take a deep inquiry, you see that this soul has had interrupted bonds with her mother at a young age. Mother was separated from her for six weeks. She had a very poor diet. When she went to her mother in teens with developing puberty, her mother was offline, and didn’t see her. She never felt seen. And then she had the series of events, sexual abuse, medication and drug abuse, and then never really found her calling.
So, subsequently turns out that going home to mother and father at age 38 was an opportunity to actually reconnect and heal the interrupted bonds that she’d never been seen in heard for in the first half of her life. So instead of being castigated and feeling so ashamed, she now sees this as an opportunity to reconnect with her mother and father in a truly humble way where the parents, carry the greater weight, and she’s the child. And she can go back and start to integrate her life with her mother’s life and her grandmother’s life, both of whom were artists. She was a makeup artist, but always thought that her makeup career had nothing to do with art. But when it was reframed that she was disconnected from the feminine lineage and her makeup artistry was a continuation of that lineage, she all of a sudden blossomed into the realization that she was part of that maternal lineage and she need not be ashamed of it.
And even though she’d put the makeup artistry aside because of her child and she has to take care of the child because the hours were wrong, she realized she could always pick it up again, and she could step into that female lineage. And she did have a calling. She thought she didn’t, all of a sudden, she knew her whole calling was still on that feminine lineage. Her mother had had a transformation and had said to her; “darling, I realize I didn’t see you when you were younger. I apologize for that”. And all of a sudden, she had this entry into this greater feminine lineage that she could not use so she can pass on to her daughter. So, the daughter doesn’t feel as strained and shameful, et cetera, et cetera. So, yes, she’s depressed. She’s depressed because he’s in an existential crisis of not knowing. She was floundering in life, but she had all this opportunity that’s presenting itself. If she just turned the switches and started to see how it was all part of a grand design that was going to help her realign with her life calling. So, it just gets reframed in a new context and all of a sudden, the life force opens back up.
Yoshino:
Yeah. So, can you speak about the neurological significance of reframing, perceived negative events in one’s life and then transforming them into something positive in one’s mind?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, the way I was introduced to, it’s a combination of neuro-linguistic programming and Jungian psychotherapy done cognitively, strangely enough, was through the work of a person by the name of John Demartini. And being exposed to his work, I was able to see how the perceptions that we take into life are often not real. And he uses this teaching tool. He says, look, basically in the quantum world it’s all light. Light gets broken down or dumbed down into matter. Matter is both equal positron and electrons, it’s got both sides. Our lower mind, which always seeks pleasure. One side is always excluding the other side. We always looking for dopamine and trying to avoid pain. And he says, the lower mind can see both sides simultaneously, but you can train your mind to see the integration of both sides to any event, if you just train it. It’s a cognitive restructuring of your mental processes. So, I learned how to do that. I learnt his methodology of how to re-perceive reality through non-dual, if you will, both sides, eyes. So, any event in the future, which looks disastrous, you start asking yourself, where is the upside to this so-called disastrous event? Anything you judge very negatively, like if you judge somebody with very negative trait, you’ll find out where you have the trait, how that trait serves, how that person’s negative trait is benefiting you. It’s not just something that should be a thorn in your side. And how, when you being challenged by a so-called person, who’s is sort of challenging you, where are you being supported? The universe is constantly in this flux of support and challenge, positrons and electrons, which is the basic nature of the quantum reality.
If you can train your higher mind to collapse the world into its opposites, as quickly as possible, you can stay poised in what John calls love. And love to him is just a synthesis of all opposites, where you see both sides simultaneously. And there’s no judgment or no lowering yourself into black and white unipolar perception. So, I try and assist patients like “you going home to mom, this is the most terrible thing at 38, but what is the soul wanting of you? “What is being asked of you? And once I took a history after, she came in saying that this is a horrible thing. She felt so ashamed. She left, she couldn’t wait to go home to see her mother to reconnect because it was reframed. She just saw how it had served her soul’s experience. It was necessary to go home, to receive the love of the mother in a new light, because she had had interrupted bonds all her life with mother. Her mother was ready. She had to be ready. She had to shift the perception from negative, to not positive, but just as opposite. As soon as reframed, boom, I’m going home. Thank God.
Yoshino:
No. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that’s a beautiful story, but I think, especially in the metaphorical sense, you know, when you think of a situation such as a purgatory situation, you can even think about it in certain ways, in a biblical context or in many different stories of purgatory. But we sometimes put ourselves in that purgatory by not seeing the positive association that could be taken out of that negative or what we perceive, quote, unquote, “as that negative lesson of the past”. And if there was something negative that happened the past, if I could say, Oh, that actually helped build my character for who I am today. And then constantly frame it in that context, you can find those lessons. But all those lessons are always there screaming at you to essentially, show themselves in a way that can benefit you. This is at least from my observations.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah. I have the firm belief that every experience that you have, whether it’s positive or negative is serving the projection, the evolution of your life experience. You sort of born over here; you die over there. The acorn does become the oak tree. The acorn needs the wind, the sun, the stresses and support of the environment to become who it’s meant to be. And, I’ve no doubt in my existence, your voids, the things you find most missing, the things you judge the most negatively actually become your highest values. In the end, you look back and I have the unfortunate and fortunate privilege of being in my second half of life. So, when you’re more soul based than ego-based not that you, without ego, not saying that, but you’re more trying to integrate the parts of you that you left behind in your pursuit and the drives of the first half of life when you’re driven. Adler drives, Freud’s drives, that you’re driven to become something in the first half of life.
And then in the second half of life, you try and pick up the pieces of the parts you left behind. And you try and reintegrate your authentic, innate self. And, in that process, you realize everything that ever happened to you was in service of your soul. There was never a mistake. You never were out of purpose for your soul’s trajectory. Nothing ever occurred to you that wasn’t in service of yourself. You have no regrets. And there’s nothing to forgive because everything was in service. Forgiveness is a ridiculous concept because it’s implying that, that one was given to you was wrong. And now you must forgive them. No, everything’s in service. Thank you for giving me that experience. Forgiveness implies I’m bigger than you. What you did to me, you were wrong, I’m right. And now I’m going to forgive you. How dare you, you know. Say, yes, thank you for giving me that experience. It’s always in service of our soul.
Yoshino:
So, speaking specifically about that forgiveness and you speak so passionately about it, but you know, if someone is suffering from some sort of shame or guilt, what sort of questions would you prompt to them to be able to have them question that shame and guilt and where that comes from. I’m curious about that.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So, guilt is the perception, that in the past you’ve done something that’s caused others more pain than pleasure. So, the only question you need to ask is where do you think that experience that you gave that individual, where did it serve them? How did they perhaps benefit from that experience? Could you please look in the seven areas of their life? We have spiritual, which is our calling. We have relationships, social friends, we have health and beauty. We have careers, we have making money. And we have intellectual, mental development. If you feel guilty by some act you’ve done, it’s incumbent upon you to ask; where do you think that person benefited in those areas of their life that served their evolution? Keeping in mind that everything serves, everything is in evolution of the soul’s progression. So where might it have served them? Not where did it damage them? We know that there’s both sides. Yes, it was maybe painful to them, but how did it serve their evolution in the end? And if you ask those questions, which of the seven areas did they benefit, you could find? Some people because of pain, you’ve caused them, branch out and start to develop. They read, they go to courses, they connect with their family because they sort of destitute and in pain that they have to reach out to whoever they can. So, they start forming relationships back with strange family members. They form new friendships. They go online, they go to self-help, they go to retreats. They build careers around the adversity that you caused them. So, at the end of the day, you’ve got to ask the right questions of individuals.
Nobody suffers without gaining. If it doesn’t exist, the universe is not one sided. It doesn’t work that way. Which brings into question the whole victim mentality of “I’m a victim”. No, I’m not, this can provoke a whole outlandish backlash that victims will be up in arms but if you look through the lens of moral and ethics, yes, there’s victims and perpetrators. I’m not questioning that. But if you look through the eyes of the soul, there’s a balance there that’s evolutionary. And, if you look through the right lens, you can see an evolutionary projection. It’s just how I tend to see the world.
Yoshino:
No, that’s great. And I think that it’s interesting because of your background in more traditional western forms of medicine. And also, how you combined the western perspectives and also these eastern perspectives. Or what would be deemed as western and eastern. And, you’re able to eloquently, within practice, like what you do at the Hoffman Centre within practice, to be able to mold these things. And even on your bio, you said writing and poetry, which led you to the medical arts. I think that’s very important because that is what you do. Cause you’re essentially utilizing all of your experiences, your own personal pursuits, such as your pursuit of literature and poetry. And letting that inform you in a way to ask the right questions of your patients. But at the same time to ask the right questions of yourself.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It’s so important Yoshino that you know to stay in an inquiring mode, a student mode. And once you have the privilege of having lived longer is you start to see patterns and trends. You’ll see an individual present with anxiety and OCD and anorexia and so forth and so on, and like a young woman in her thirties. And then you’ll see this archetypal trend that exists that she’s addicted to perfection. And she’s following the value system of a patriarchy, which is inculcated. And she’s introjected somebody else’s value system, like an overbearing father and wants it to achieve. And you see these archetypal trends emerging in your practice. And that’s based on reading, is based on literature, is based on knowing. In the ancient Greek temples, once you’ve gone through, this is in my lecture, the outer healing and the inner healing, you are then sent out into the theater where you watch Greek tragedies, which were archetypal or depictions of life. And you see these trends occurring. You see these people in certain stages. If you don’t know the stage of life the person’s in. Your first half of life patients, very different from second half of life patients. They’re not the same. They’re different flavor, different. You approach them differently. You got to be sensitive to the stage of life. And if I wouldn’t have known that. If I hadn’t been exposed to all these different paradigms of insights.
Yoshino:
Uh, I’m curious. You were speaking of liking essentially, or interested in Jungian philosophy, but also have you read a lot of Joseph Campbell? I’m sure you have.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Well, when I first got interested in Jungian work, Joseph Campbell was very popular. He had that PBS series, I think, in the 90’s…
Yoshino:
Power of Myth. Is that right?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
I don’t know how old you are, Yoshino. Hahaha
Speaker 5:
No, I’m 34.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You probably were. But, Joseph Campbell did the Power of Myth. It was everywhere on PBS. And we watched that series. I’ve got all the videos. We have all the VHS videos of that. I still have that.
Yoshino:
I know I’ve seen them.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
I still got them in my library right there. And I read his books and yes, very moved, very beautiful. He was a big influence.
Yoshino:
No, I was just curious, because you were talking about seeing certain patterns and archetypes.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You do see them; you see them over and over again. It’s quite uncanny when you tune to those archetypes. And, you can see when a person is presenting with symptomatology, when it’s got nothing to do with the western diagnosis. When it’s actually a calling from the soul to wake up to a deeper transformation, that’s being asked of them. And you just get used to knowing how to have that dialogue with people and when to watch out for signs and symptoms. And know that, oh, the Lyme disease is not Lyme disease. It’s the fact that they are misaligned with, they haven’t integrated an aspect of themselves, which is calling to be integrated. They’re still living out the first half of life, dictates, which need to be given up at some stage. You can’t, a 70 year old man in a Ferrari, that’s diagnostic. It’s just is.
Yoshino:
Yeah. I mean, I’m sure you can see many examples of that from either people that are also in your working profession or there’s so many examples of that. And, just someone having a Ferrari at any point of life, you just have to ask, like, what is the reason for that? You know, and also you can only drive one car at a time. They can’t drive two at a time, at least not from what I understand.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah, there’s all those clues, the history taking is filled with clues. And you just got to be sensitive to them and hopefully tuned in as much as you’re able to. And so that requires a whole new curriculum for the healers of the future. It has to be rewritten. The curriculum must be rewritten. Not to say that MDs must become healers. I disagree. Doctors should stay doctors. Stay with all that. Stay with a mechanized symptom-organ system- method medicine. Be very good at it, be the best at it. And leave them alone. Don’t ask them to become healers. Let’s have a new curriculum for healers. People are called into a different way of interrelating with their patients. And let’s have that curriculum outlined. And let’s co-exist with each other in equal exchange, which doesn’t happen. Doctors have this peculiar arrogance that what they’re not up on, they down on. And so, anything that doesn’t fit into that model, they tend to dismiss, which is unfortunate.
Yoshino:
Makes sense. I mean, it’s essentially breaking up the paradigm that if you believed in this certain way of life being educated by the system. And it creates a certain type of way that you think about the world and your perception of your space in it, essentially.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Absolutely.
Yoshino:
I have one more question for you because I don’t want to take too much of your time and I appreciate you for taking the time to be on the podcast, but what sort of advice do you have for artists and creatives?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Wow. I spoke to you before we got on, that my great love is art. Now in the last 10 years, I rediscovered this huge passion, interests, and I was deeply moved by art and still to this day. Before I answer the question, I was estranged, I was South African living in Canada, and I felt deeply homesick. But as soon as I started to buy South African art with its imagery and symbology, I could bring it over and have it in Canada, I settled down, I had living symbols of my African heritage with me, and there was no such need to go back home. So, I mean, artists generally are tuned in, at a deeper dimension and they bring forth symbolic messages and are able to translate archetypal stories, like poets. When they tuned in and the higher their skill, both intuitive and skill, the deeper the symbolism, the deeper the impact on that, because we all resonate at some level with archetypal symbolism. It hits us like a break when it’s true. And it speaks to us.
So advice, I’m in awe of artists. I mean, those surrealists’ artists like Leonora Carrington. Oh, my goodness. I mean, what were they bringing forth? And what’s really going on. I’m fascinated. I believe some of their outer lives are maybe quite chaotic, but they sort of balanced it with this inner rock of their own unconscious that just pours through them. So, I think it’s an equal balance between outer neuroses, if you will. Then in a solidity and what a beautiful exchange, what a beautiful gift to humanity.
Yoshino:
Well, I mean that’s a sound observation. It sounds like you have a very deep love for and appreciation for the arts and what the arts can provide for humanity.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Yeah. Poetry. I mean, Mary Oliver, The Wild Geese. Oh man. When it speaks, it speaks and you just fall over into ecstasy. It’s so archetypally resonant. It’s just makes life meaningful. Provides meaning. It’s a beauty. Beauty and meaning.
Yoshino:
I agree. I agree.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Have you ever seen that movie? The Great Beauty?
Yoshino:
I haven’t, no. When did that come out?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Oh, it’s by that French (incorrect- Italian) director, Paolo Sorrentino. It’s about a man who gets to be in the 60s and nothing inspires him anymore. And so this whole movie is about him visiting sights and sounds. And is in Rome, all this opulence and decadence and nothing excites him. And he’s just like desperate. Until he realizes that at some stage he was moved by a great beauty. It happened to be in the form of a woman he loved. But all of a sudden, he just wakes up to some things that he’s left far behind. And he wakes up into another phase of his life, realizing how many years he’d lived in this outer world without connecting to his true inspiration. It’s a beautiful movie. Wow.
Yoshino:
You know, what that reminds me of, have you seen Citizen Kane recently?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You know, I saw it once and I read it. I’d read how perfect a movie it was. And when I watched it, I thought, what are they talking about? But after 10 minutes, I watched each frame and I immediately got the majesty and the marvelous sort of symmetry and exactness of the whole development of that movie. And I’ve got why it’s one of the greatest movies of all time. I just could see it just so obvious actually, you know, Jungian.
Yoshino:
Definitely. Well, I just bring that movie up because what you’re talking about specifically at the end of the film. I don’t think I need to say like spoiler alert because this film came out in, I think 1945 or 43, but at the end of the film he just keeps on saying rosebud. And then you find out what that symbolized to him. And so, I think, he does all these things throughout his life to attain power, to attain wealth, but then this was it, I believe it’s a sled when he was a child carried so much meaning and symbolism to him. And it’s just interesting how there’s that consciousness shift. So it just kind of sounded similar to the film that you were telling me about.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Well, now I’m going to watch both movies back-to-back and then keep that in mind to see the connections. Well, we live our lives through symbols and meaning in the end, the outer world is just a playground for meaning and symbol.
Yoshino:
It’s interesting. Just to leave you with this, but yeah. I’ve been meaning to crack open Jung the Book of Symbols. Is that what it’s called? I have it downstairs and I need to spend some time, cracking that open. But anyways, thanks so much for doing this and taking the time. I appreciate you for doing this.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Yeah, absolutely lovely. I’m going to look at your podcast and see what else you’ve done. That it is inspired me through your connection to the artists and artistry.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. You might like some of the artists, you know? All right, Bruce. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Thanks for the talk. I appreciate the talk. Thank 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.
