March 20, 2025 • 29 mins
Nita Gage, Hoffman teacher and Director of Faculty, worked closely with Dr. Lipsenthal, M.D., for several years before his death. He was an internationally recognized leader, teacher, and author in integrative medicine and physician wellness. And he loved the Hoffman Process.
The vision, care, and understanding that Dr. Lipsenthal brought to the world of medicine and medical doctors has changed how doctors care for themselves. Through his own time in the medical profession, Dr. Lipsenthal observed that the health, morale, and work satisfaction of many physicians were often worse than that of their patients. He found a way to support physicians in improving these areas of their lives. Like both Dr. Lipsenthal and Nita, many physicians they worked with eventually came to do the Hoffman Process, which gave them additional tools to change their lives for the better.
Listen in as Nita shares her experience of working with Lee, the physician, and Lee the man. We hope you enjoy this conversation with Nita and Drew.
More about Lee Lipsenthal, M.D.:
Lee Lipsenthal, MD
Lee Lipsenthal, M.D., was an internationally recognized leader, teacher, and author in integrative medicine and physician wellness. He was the medical director with Dean Ornish of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, for ten years, and has also served as president of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine and on the American Medical Association's Physician Wellness Committee. Through his years in the medical profession, Dr. Lipsenthal observed that the health, morale, and work satisfaction of many physicians were often worse than that of their patients.
Inspired by his personal and professional experience, he developed the "Finding Balance in a Medical Life" program, which has been adapted by major medical groups and is being delivered at medical schools and residency programs nationwide. Lee was a 2006 graduate of the Hoffman Process. He died in September 2011. His wife, Kathy, also a physician, and his two children live in California.
Lee Lipsenthal authored, Enjoy Every Sandwich: Living Each Day as If It Were Your Last.
More about Nita Gage:
From 1970 to 1980, Nita trained in psychoanalysis with R.D. Laing in London. Upon returning to the United States, she pursued graduate degrees in clinical psychology and a doctorate in shamanic psychology.
Nita has been leading transformational healing retreats for over 25 years and the last 10 years recently with the Hoffman Institute. She is now the Director of Faculty for Hoffman Institute. Before Hoffman, she founded the Healer Within Retreats, with Lee Lipsenthal, MD, offering physician wellness retreats. She also served clinical and executive positions in hospitals and treatment centers over the 50 years of her career.
Listen to Nita on The Hoffman Podcast - A Courageous Ripple
Nita has authored two books: Soul Whispering: The Art of Awakening Shamanic Consciousness and Women in Storage: How to Reimagine Your Life.
As mentioned in this episode:
Dean Ornish
Ornish.com
ACEs - Adverse Childhood Experiences
Sausalito, CA
Moloka'i, Hawaii
• Hui Ho'olana Retreat Center
Buddhist Fundamental Teachings
Co-Dependency
Work addiction
Chronic Illness/Disease
IONS - Institute of Noetic Sciences, Established by Hoffman Graduate, Astronaut, Dr. Edgar Mitchell.
"I realized that the story of ourselves as told by science—our cosmology, our religion—was incomplete and likely flawed. I recognized that the Newtonian idea of separate, independent, discrete things in the universe wasn’t a fully accurate description. What was needed was a new story of who we are and what we are capable of becoming." Dr. Edgar Mitchell
HeartMath
Recycling - Hoffman tool
Self-Compassion
• Kristen Neff and self-compassion on the Hoffman Podcast - Goodwill & Intention, the Magic Ingredients
• Chris Germer and self-compassion on the Hoffma...
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
He used to talk about expanded states of
consciousness from meditation and shamanic journey as divine
and mystical experiences
that we could tap into as humans. And
he's got closer to leaving this life. He
began to teach that these states are really
just human experiences.
They're not mystical. They're not magical. They're not
fantastic.
They're simply human. So it became important to
(00:23):
him to get folks to see that we
all have a capacity for expanded states of
consciousness as humans because we are divine, but
also because we are human and being human
is sacred.
Welcome, everybody. My name is Drew Horning, and
this podcast is called Love's Everyday Radius.
It's brought to you by the Hoffman Institute,
(00:45):
and it's stories and anecdotes
and people we interview
about their life post process
and how it lives in the world radiating
love.
Hey, I wanted to just share a little
bit about today's episode.
Nita Gage comes on as our director of
(01:07):
faculty,
and she shares about a relationship and a
connection she had with Lee Lipsenthal.
Lee passed on in 02/2011.
But in this conversation, Nita relates
the value he brought,
the passion
he felt for helping
the medical profession find ways to care for
(01:28):
themselves.
It was a radical idea back then.
Lee loved the Hoffman process,
and Nida shares the experiences she had with
him, the valuable work he brought to the
field, his passion for Hoffman,
his own loves everyday radius.
Nida Gage, welcome to the Hoffman podcast.
(01:49):
Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.
Well, we're happy to have you. Nida
is the faculty director
at Hoffman
and
engages in helping the faculty,
wrangling the faculty
into a cohesive unit so that we can
do the work we do as successfully as
we do. So thank you, Nita, for your
(02:11):
service to
this faculty body, which is can be challenging
sometimes.
Yes. But it's very rewarding too. It's my
privilege.
It is your privilege. You and I also
trained together
more than ten years ago to be Hoffman
teachers.
You've had a whole life
prior to that,
(02:33):
and
we're here today to talk about Lee Lipsenthal.
Why Lee? Why are we even having this
conversation, Nina?
Well, I think we're having the conversation because
Lee was extraordinarily
influential in the world of physician wellness. He's
a physician himself.
He got to the process at one point
in 02/2006
(02:54):
and was a convert. And then after that
was involved with being a consultant to the
board
of Hoffman
and really
talked to everybody about Hoffman at that point.
He and I had been prior to that
leading week long intensive workshops
ourselves.
So for him to then go to Hoffman
and then he talked me into going.
(03:15):
I didn't really want to and I'm a
little bit kicking and screaming. I'm one of
those people like, I don't need another workshop.
But I went and of course, here I
am, you know, seventeen years later. So I
was working for a major healthcare corporation
and I was the product development director. We
were looking for ways to provide new,
wellness programs
to members
(03:36):
so that they didn't always have to be
on antidepressants,
essentially.
And at that time, I was aware of
Dean Ornish's work. Dean is a physician who
did all of the incredible work to do
lifestyle change
for people with cardiac issues. So that he's
the one that brought in, and this was
like thirty five years ago when he started,
brought in the notion that if you change
(03:57):
your lifestyle, that if you meditate, that if
you eat better and then you really deal
also to some extent with your emotional issues.
He was very aware of ACEs,
Adverse Childhood Events
and childhood trauma.
He made a lot of changes in Medicare,
but he created a week long workshop for
people with who had had heart attacks
(04:19):
and help them turn around their lifestyle. So
I thought, oh, great. This is a perfect
person to connect to to do lifestyle changes
for
this corporation I was working for, this healthcare
corporation.
So
I called him, talked to him for a
while. He was gracious, but he said to
me, you know who you really need to
talk to is my medical director,
(04:40):
Lee Lipsenthal.
So I did. Lee and I, I went
to his office in Sausalito
and
Lee and I often joke that it was
sort
of intellectual spiritual love at first sight between
us. And we really connected, like, immediately, like,
soul recognition.
And we tried to make some changes at
this large corporation I worked for. We did
(05:02):
not succeed.
We stayed friends.
And we both were just so I was
really burnt out working for corporate health care.
I was ready to just leave.
And he liked his job with Dean, but
he was wanting his passion was physician wellness.
He wanted to change the way medical schools
train physicians.
(05:23):
He wanted to change the way they train
their humanity out of them. So that was
kind of his passion that he was hoping
to get into. And we met several times
and eventually,
we both quit our jobs
with
no plan, either of us.
I had been
working leading week long workshops
(05:43):
using shamanic breath work, a way to
access deep states of consciousness and altered states
without substances.
And he had been wanting to do physician
workshops. And so one day I just said
to him, hey, I do this workshop in
Molokai.
Do you wanna do one with me? That's
kind of how that started. And then we
(06:03):
did them for the next,
I don't know, eleven years together, at least
once or twice a year.
He,
at the same time, was
doing a lot of training at medical conferences,
going around to hospitals, physician groups,
really teaching about lifestyle change for physicians.
(06:24):
And I think what he connected to the
most deeply with the work I was doing
was the intensity
of diving into
emotional material,
to spiritual material.
I remember he once said to me that
physicians are really shamans. It's just been trained
out of them.
He'd tell me, look, physicians are highly intellectual.
We all know that. They're highly intelligent
(06:46):
and they're
high and caring for people. Because most people
go into being a position because they care
and they wanna help people.
At the time I've been working with a
lot of corporate physicians. I've gotten a little
cynical about physicians motivation. So he really helped
me understand. No, most of them really wanna
help people. However, they go to medical school
(07:08):
that gets trained out of them because
they get trained to shut down their emotions
and really for good reason. You do not
watch your position in the ER or in
the operating room having an emotional breakdown.
So
what his goal in life was,
was to help physicians come back to their
heart,
(07:28):
come back to their center while they really
went into medicine.
I then got involved with him with a
couple of large physician organizations, the American Board
of Holistic Medicine and a couple others and
I would go with him to do some
things at large conferences. But
the thing that he loved was going to
Molokai and he would bring,
(07:50):
I don't know, he'd recruit 10 or 12
positions who'd sign up for this workshop. And
the interesting thing was is that at Hoffman,
we tell you to turn in your
phone and your computer and all that. Well,
in Molokai, there was no cell service and
no Internet service. So there was no there
weren't gonna use those things while they were
(08:10):
there, and it was a bit challenging.
And he worked up a beautiful
program
outlining the neuroscience
of what happens
in medical school, what happens to physicians, and
why they're so far away from their heart
and their soul.
And then one day during that, we would
do a day long
intensive shamanic breath work session. Shamanic breath work
(08:33):
uses music
and
deep breathing
and intention
to really dive into altered states. We'd spend
the first two days with him doing the
neuroscience with the physicians and all that, and
then we do that. And what he soon
discovered was a couple of things.
These physicians were not interested in the neuroscience.
They knew it inside out.
(08:55):
They were interested in the experience.
And then he began to to understand that
physicians can be experienced junkies. Like a lot
of them are going to South America and
doing Ayahuasca, which is wonderful, but what he
wanted them to learn was how to integrate.
And so that's really what we ended up
doing together in Molokai for years and then
(09:15):
around the country in
conferences.
For a while, I was the executive director
of the board of holistic medicine, so he
and he was the president, so we were
doing a lot there.
He loved
going to the island of Molokai and completely
unplugging.
And he was pretty steeped in Buddhist teachings,
I would say, but he also really loved
(09:37):
Judeo
Christianity. He was a very spiritual guy. And
the other thing we really discovered that that
high
ability to care for people that physicians have,
the shadow of that is codependency
and it was killing them.
So we focus a lot on helping them
recover from codependency and work addiction, by the
way, because physicians are so highly rewarded for
(10:00):
addictive work behaviors.
I remember one guy saying to me, one
of the physicians at the workshop sort of
were teaching him about work addiction and he's
going, oh my god. Oh my god. I'm
getting it. But I love my work. It
can't be an addiction. And I just
because I have no filter, just said to
him,
well, heroin addicts love their heroin too, but
(10:20):
it's gonna kill them.
You know, that became Lee and my running
joke. That was the journey we did together.
And we then started doing workshops, you know,
in Italy. That was really fun. And then
in February
I believe it was 02/2010, he was diagnosed.
And so you love doing your workshops, and
it feels like part of what Lee brought
(10:40):
was
attention to the caregiver.
Most people were focusing on the recipient of
it, and Lee sort of said, wait a
minute. Let's look at these doctors
coming out of medical school, what they're trained
to do, and how do we help them
connect back to their heart, take care of
their body,
understand their emotions.
(11:01):
For people listening, that might sound kind of
obvious now, but back then, it was
somewhat radical. Was it not? Yeah. It was
extremely radical. He was certainly one of the
leaders in that. And, also,
there wasn't a lot of
sympathy for positions and their feelings because, you
know, there was just a sense of, well,
they make a lot of money. That's what
they're trying to do and all that, And
(11:22):
not a lot of understanding of the toll
it actually took
on them and Lee was acutely
aware of that.
He had a big impact on changing curriculum
in medical schools even. I mean, you're right,
these days there's a lot of physicians
coming out of medical school who have
spent time learning
meditation, have been learning self care.
(11:45):
That was not going on then. It was
really the opposite. And there were several people
on the scene that started making a difference
with physician wellness, which is really why the
American Board of Holistic Medicine was even created.
So at the same time, physician wellness
and also the recognition
that holistic medicine had to come in because
(12:06):
physicians recognized
that they're great at acute medicine.
They are great at it. They are great
at fixing things. They're great at that. And
yet chronic illness,
not so much because chronic illness
really is a whole person
issue.
And his feeling was in order to make
that change in medicine,
(12:26):
physicians had to understand that they're whole people,
that they have a shadow, that they have
their own pain that deserves attention,
that they have
their resentments, they can, you know, show up
and work. And it's okay that they're pissed
off at their patients.
It's okay. I mean, he really wanted to
normalize
(12:47):
them
as people.
And it was enormously
liberating.
And for all the physicians that he touched,
and everybody loved this guy. And I think
it's important
to say that
his
love for people was palpable
and fairly
unconditional,
and you could feel it. And at the
(13:08):
same time, he was the first one to
talk about people's shadows. So he really was
into the whole person.
Does that make sense?
Yeah. It does. You know,
one of the things he did is bring
attention to the research that had been done
around
patients
when they're with doctors who open their hearts.
(13:29):
Too often, doctors were making it a clinical
intervention. It was just about the
diagnosis. They had a clipboard in their hand.
It was a quick visit.
Insurance was speeding things up here at the
time. And he sort of said, wait a
minute. If doctors show up in their hearts
making eye contact,
being open,
there's so much they can do that can
(13:50):
actually create better outcomes
for patients
if they stay in their heart. I'm really
glad you're bringing that up. That was
such an important discovery, which has now been
incorporated into a lot of physician training.
And, yeah, there's a whole body of research
on it that there are better outcomes.
You know, he was the perfect person to
(14:11):
do it because he so believed it. You
know, I must say there was a whole
cadre of physicians who basically
began to really change how they practice because
of their connection with doctor Liptonthal
and their respect for him. And for those
listening who've taken the process
in Petaluma
at the Hoffman Retreat site,
(14:34):
that formally was IONS,
which is what Lee also had a big
connection to. And IONS was
still is, doing beautiful work of integrating spirituality.
How would you describe what IANS does, Nida?
Well, let's give the the name of it.
It's the Institute for Noetic Science.
(14:55):
And Noetic is
looking at
events that are outside the ordinary understanding.
Ions was,
I believe, actually created by
an astronaut, and his name is slipping my
mind right now, but but he had this
incredible experience as he came around and saw
the Earthrise,
(15:15):
which was why they named the Eons Retreat
site Earthrise
initially
before Hoffman purchased it.
He was also
on their board, he was a medical director
or HeartMath
for anybody that's aware of that organization that
does
deep research
and to heart rate variability and how that
impacts our consciousness which is really related
(15:39):
deeply to why recycling works, why self compassion
works because it's not just to feel good,
it's actually changing brain chemistry. So he was
involved with that and he brought a lot
of that work in to what we did.
Give me two seconds and I'm gonna tell
you how he got to Hoffman. He was
on an airplane
flying to Kauai. We were gonna meet there
and do some kind of medical workshop.
(16:00):
And he was sitting next to Randy Perkins
who was on the board of Hoffman at
the time. They got to talking,
Randy kinda realized, oh my gosh, this guy
does similar work that I do. Randy ended
up coming to the workshop and Kawhi and
then he really wanted Lee to see what
the Hoffman process is. Neither Lee or I
ever heard of it. I don't know how
I missed it all those years, but I
(16:20):
had never heard of it. And he actually
gifted Lee the process because they wanted his
involvement. So he went and did it and
that's when he tried it back to me
and said, oh, you gotta do this. It's
really, really good. He loved the process and
the thing for him
was a couple of things for him. He
recognized
that
really being able to release the emotional material
(16:41):
from your childhood
was so important. You couldn't just talk about
it. You couldn't just know
about your childhood issues. You had to actually
work on releasing energy that really changed his
life in huge ways.
Yeah. I mean, that's really important as a
former therapist
trained in psychotherapy.
Insight
(17:01):
was kind of the gold standard. If we
can just help our patients
get more insight,
then all things will change. Well, this sort
of says insight is not enough, doesn't it?
No. It's not enough. And, you know, I
don't think he'd mind me telling the story.
He had been struggling with his weight all
his life. He's a hefty guy. Got sick
(17:21):
of trying everything.
And at the Hoffman process,
he discovered, that's what he told me, he
discovered
that he was overweight
as a way to punish his mother.
And I would I'm here to tell you,
he lost the weight in the ensuing years.
He lost it, never regained it.
Profound.
He shared that story with a lot of
(17:42):
people.
Yeah.
And so
then
something happens, Nida. How do you find out
this next very important piece of his life?
He called me and told me that he
had
had a lump in his throat, went to
the doctor, and found out it was esophageal
cancer.
This was on the telephone because I was
(18:02):
in Hawaii and he was in California at
the time.
And he
pretty quickly told me, he goes
ten percent chance of living more than two
years. So I'm a physician I know, he
said, I really,
I don't know that I even wanna go
through all of the chemo and
radiation. Said, I,
I'm okay.
(18:22):
He was only 54,
about 53,
the diagnosis.
But all those years of teaching
that if you live for the moment, if
you live fully,
he liked to quote this,
phrase that
that I had told him about once that
native Americans say that
(18:43):
today's a good day to die.
And of course, what they mean is if
you live well, it's a good day to
die. So that became kind of his mantra.
He did choose to do some chemo and
so forth and he lived for a couple
of years.
True to Lee though, I mean, he just
continued to walk his talk
that it's okay to die. I've had a
(19:03):
full of beautiful wife,
two
fabulous,
beautiful children.
So it wasn't nothing.
He was in the middle of writing the
book when he got the diagnosis and then
he wrote the book, which is titled Enjoy
Every Sandwich,
Live Today as Though It's Your Last. Very
popular book at the time and
he spent the next couple of years, we
(19:24):
continued to do workshops together.
He continued to teach
that
love is the answer to everything.
Love more.
Love your family.
Love people despite their
Hoffman people. We call them patterns.
He just said, love them despite their flaws.
He meditated more
(19:46):
and
lived fully, right, to the end.
Nida,
in his book,
Enjoy Every Sandwich, which, by the way, Warren
Zivon,
ten years earlier or maybe eight years earlier,
had
shared in a
conversation with David Letterman.
And Warren Zivon also died of esophageal
(20:09):
cancer. He said,
enjoy every sandwich.
And
Lee wrote a book called Enjoy Every Sandwich.
And in one of the
sentences in the book, he says, at any
moment,
in an instant,
life as we know it can change.
Our mortality waits for us, sometimes
patiently,
(20:30):
sometimes not so patiently,
but our mortality is always there, undeniable,
and closer
than any of us wants to admit.
When he died, you
you wrote and read a eulogy to him.
Would you be willing to to read it
now how you finished it? Yeah.
(20:52):
Lee's teaching fundamentally didn't change after his diagnosis.
He walked his talk, lived his teaching.
However, there was one subtle yet powerful shift
in what he taught that showed up at
the last few months he was alive and
it was this.
He used to talk about expanded states of
consciousness from meditation and shamanic journey as divine
(21:12):
and mystical experiences
that we could tap into as humans.
And he's got closer to leaving this life.
He began to teach that these states are
really just
human experiences.
They're not mystical, they're not magical, they're not
fantastic,
they're simply human.
So it became important to him to get
folks to see that we all have a
(21:34):
capacity for expanded states of consciousness as humans
because we are divine,
but also
because we are human and being human is
sacred.
And Lee wanted folks to know that you
can experience life fully by understanding this simple
truth that life is temporary
and it's always sorry.
(21:55):
It's always a good day to die when
you live with a grateful heart and know
that truly all you need is love.
He was truly one of my best friends
as well.
He really exemplifies
that statement that I kinda hate that the
good die young, but my goodness,
they do.
(22:16):
I saw that his wife is still practicing
in the Bay Area. His son
is now a psychotherapist.
Yes. Lee would be so thrilled. I mean,
he was his son was Will was just
starting college when Lee passed, and Lee always
used to say he was a closet therapist,
you know. But if he had had it
to do over, that's what he would have
done. So that's very exciting. He has two
(22:37):
grandchildren now. And One of the things we
haven't talked about, but that you're
such
a proponent of, and Hoffman is such
a advocacy
around, which is music.
He had this dream of wanting T shirts
that doctors would wear that would say, we'll
work for music.
(22:58):
He loved music. You guys loved music. There
was really a power in music, wasn't there?
Yeah. Definitely. He was a complete music
fanatic, and he did spend a lot of
years helping musicians who couldn't afford health care.
He was passionate about it. He would work
with them, but he'd also hook them up
with physicians around the world
that would work with them for free. That's
(23:20):
why I wanted the t shirt. He was
he was really gonna start a movement. That
was one of the future plans. He loved
it. He was brilliant
about music of all types. I used to
tease that he was my personal Shazam
mechanism. I mean, he could listen to anything
and tell me what it was from classical
to rock to everything in between.
And I think that's one of the reasons
he loved the shamanic breath work because it
(23:41):
involved a lot of use of music to
stimulate healing and states of consciousness.
Mhmm.
And I read that he he was
over the moon
about iPods because he didn't have to carry
around CDs or albums that there was so
much available
in this one little piece of technology
that he could listen to so much music,
(24:02):
and it was just a dream for him.
Absolutely. Yeah. He was always the first one
to have the iPods. Yeah. He was obsessed
obsessed with music. It was a wonderful thing,
and he played a bit himself, played guitar,
and loved it. You know, every time I
was visiting with him, any music thing that
was going on, he'd wanna drag me to.
And, I mean, I went. I like music
(24:23):
too, but he was definitely obsessed and had
friends all over the country that were musicians,
that love music. Yeah. You know, so much
of
who he
represents
as a human being, what he's done in
the field,
it seems to align so much with Hoffman
and his deep capacity to do two things
(24:44):
at once, which is to love
and lean in with an open heart
and
to understand
and not be afraid of shadow.
That is our calling card at Hoffman. We
do both owning,
embracing spirit,
and
going right to shame and vindictiveness
and the dark side.
(25:05):
Lee held both those beautifully, didn't he? He
did. One of his favorite quotes was Carl
Jung's, do you wanna be good, or do
you wanna be whole?
And being whole involves that, embracing the shadow.
And I credit him for why I actually
became a Hoffman teacher. He'd already passed before
that happened because when he was dying, he
made me promise to carry on his work.
So I did for quite a while. And
(25:27):
then I rolled into doing Hoffman and I
also recognized I often
think of him when I'm at the process
very often, almost every time and just kind
of thank him for leading me to this
path because it really is an opportunity
to do
all that he taught and believed in. And
of course, many physicians now come to Hoffman.
And in fact, when we were doing our
(25:47):
workshops
in Molokai, well, you know, he lived another
five years after he did Hoffman.
We frequently
encourage physicians to go to Hoffman
after he and I both done it. So
they come to our workshop. They kind of
treated it as initiation
into self awareness and spirituality and all of
that, and then we'd encourage them. And a
few of them did, and a couple of
(26:08):
them that did went on to be big
leaders in physician wellness as well.
And he also
loved the Beatles.
Who did he like on the Beatles?
John Lennon.
I mean, Lee's,
you know, of a different generation than me.
So not quite Beatlemania generation, kind of the
next one, but he really loved them
(26:30):
and was very aware of all they did
for music in the world. Yeah. He loved
John Lennon. He was kind of like to
think of himself as a sort of a
John Lennon type, you know, disrupting
the medical world like John would disrupt and
wanting to bring peace on Earth. He wanted
to bring peace to medicine.
Yeah.
And this simple adage of
(26:51):
all you need is love. Yeah. He really
believed it. And interestingly enough,
even Dean Ornish, circling back to that, Dean
Ornish is
one of his books. I don't know that
it was his last, but certainly one of
his books is called Love and Survival in
which he talks about he had been focused
on be a vegan,
meditate,
exercise.
(27:11):
And in this book, he points out, yeah,
that's all really important
but love is the number one healer.
It's the number one healer and
the American Board of Holistic Medicine that Lee
was president of their tagline was love heals.
So that coming around to recognize
self love and compassion for yourself, love for
(27:32):
yourself and compassion and love for others
heals.
Absolutely.
We'll put in the show notes much of
what we talked about. So for listeners who
wanna
dig into Lee a little bit and this
work and Nita and the work they did
together, we'll put some links in there.
Nita,
well, let me say this.
(27:53):
Lee,
thank you.
Thank you for Nita
for bringing
Nita to Hoffman
and the impact she's had. And Lee, thank
you for the work you've brought to this
world.
Nita, thank you for channeling Lee today and
helping us understand this incredible human and the
impact he had.
(28:14):
Thank you, Drew.
It was really beyond a joy to be
able to talk about him.
It's been a long time.
He died in 02/2011,
so it's been a long time.
So thank you. I really appreciate it.
(28:36):
Thank you for listening to our podcast. My
name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and
president of Hoffman Institute Foundation.
And I'm Rassie Grassi,
Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute
Foundation.
Our mission is to provide people greater access
to the wisdom and power of love. In
themselves, in each other, and in the world.
(28:57):
To find out more, please go to hompaninstitute.org.
He used to talk about expanded states of
consciousness from meditation and shamanic journey as divine
and mystical experiences
that we could tap into as humans. And
he's got closer to leaving this life. He
began to teach that these states are really
just human experiences.
They're not mystical. They're not magical. They're not
fantastic.
They're simply human. So it became important to
(00:23):
him to get folks to see that we
all have a capacity for expanded states of
consciousness as humans because we are divine, but
also because we are human and being human
is sacred.
Welcome, everybody. My name is Drew Horning, and
this podcast is called Love's Everyday Radius.
It's brought to you by the Hoffman Institute,
(00:45):
and it's stories and anecdotes
and people we interview
about their life post process
and how it lives in the world radiating
love.
Hey, I wanted to just share a little
bit about today's episode.
Nita Gage comes on as our director of
(01:07):
faculty,
and she shares about a relationship and a
connection she had with Lee Lipsenthal.
Lee passed on in 02/2011.
But in this conversation, Nita relates
the value he brought,
the passion
he felt for helping
the medical profession find ways to care for
(01:28):
themselves.
It was a radical idea back then.
Lee loved the Hoffman process,
and Nida shares the experiences she had with
him, the valuable work he brought to the
field, his passion for Hoffman,
his own loves everyday radius.
Nida Gage, welcome to the Hoffman podcast.
(01:49):
Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.
Well, we're happy to have you. Nida
is the faculty director
at Hoffman
and
engages in helping the faculty,
wrangling the faculty
into a cohesive unit so that we can
do the work we do as successfully as
we do. So thank you, Nita, for your
(02:11):
service to
this faculty body, which is can be challenging
sometimes.
Yes. But it's very rewarding too. It's my
privilege.
It is your privilege. You and I also
trained together
more than ten years ago to be Hoffman
teachers.
You've had a whole life
prior to that,
(02:33):
and
we're here today to talk about Lee Lipsenthal.
Why Lee? Why are we even having this
conversation, Nina?
Well, I think we're having the conversation because
Lee was extraordinarily
influential in the world of physician wellness. He's
a physician himself.
He got to the process at one point
in 02/2006
(02:54):
and was a convert. And then after that
was involved with being a consultant to the
board
of Hoffman
and really
talked to everybody about Hoffman at that point.
He and I had been prior to that
leading week long intensive workshops
ourselves.
So for him to then go to Hoffman
and then he talked me into going.
(03:15):
I didn't really want to and I'm a
little bit kicking and screaming. I'm one of
those people like, I don't need another workshop.
But I went and of course, here I
am, you know, seventeen years later. So I
was working for a major healthcare corporation
and I was the product development director. We
were looking for ways to provide new,
wellness programs
to members
(03:36):
so that they didn't always have to be
on antidepressants,
essentially.
And at that time, I was aware of
Dean Ornish's work. Dean is a physician who
did all of the incredible work to do
lifestyle change
for people with cardiac issues. So that he's
the one that brought in, and this was
like thirty five years ago when he started,
brought in the notion that if you change
(03:57):
your lifestyle, that if you meditate, that if
you eat better and then you really deal
also to some extent with your emotional issues.
He was very aware of ACEs,
Adverse Childhood Events
and childhood trauma.
He made a lot of changes in Medicare,
but he created a week long workshop for
people with who had had heart attacks
(04:19):
and help them turn around their lifestyle. So
I thought, oh, great. This is a perfect
person to connect to to do lifestyle changes
for
this corporation I was working for, this healthcare
corporation.
So
I called him, talked to him for a
while. He was gracious, but he said to
me, you know who you really need to
talk to is my medical director,
(04:40):
Lee Lipsenthal.
So I did. Lee and I, I went
to his office in Sausalito
and
Lee and I often joke that it was
sort
of intellectual spiritual love at first sight between
us. And we really connected, like, immediately, like,
soul recognition.
And we tried to make some changes at
this large corporation I worked for. We did
(05:02):
not succeed.
We stayed friends.
And we both were just so I was
really burnt out working for corporate health care.
I was ready to just leave.
And he liked his job with Dean, but
he was wanting his passion was physician wellness.
He wanted to change the way medical schools
train physicians.
(05:23):
He wanted to change the way they train
their humanity out of them. So that was
kind of his passion that he was hoping
to get into. And we met several times
and eventually,
we both quit our jobs
with
no plan, either of us.
I had been
working leading week long workshops
(05:43):
using shamanic breath work, a way to
access deep states of consciousness and altered states
without substances.
And he had been wanting to do physician
workshops. And so one day I just said
to him, hey, I do this workshop in
Molokai.
Do you wanna do one with me? That's
kind of how that started. And then we
(06:03):
did them for the next,
I don't know, eleven years together, at least
once or twice a year.
He,
at the same time, was
doing a lot of training at medical conferences,
going around to hospitals, physician groups,
really teaching about lifestyle change for physicians.
(06:24):
And I think what he connected to the
most deeply with the work I was doing
was the intensity
of diving into
emotional material,
to spiritual material.
I remember he once said to me that
physicians are really shamans. It's just been trained
out of them.
He'd tell me, look, physicians are highly intellectual.
We all know that. They're highly intelligent
(06:46):
and they're
high and caring for people. Because most people
go into being a position because they care
and they wanna help people.
At the time I've been working with a
lot of corporate physicians. I've gotten a little
cynical about physicians motivation. So he really helped
me understand. No, most of them really wanna
help people. However, they go to medical school
(07:08):
that gets trained out of them because
they get trained to shut down their emotions
and really for good reason. You do not
watch your position in the ER or in
the operating room having an emotional breakdown.
So
what his goal in life was,
was to help physicians come back to their
heart,
(07:28):
come back to their center while they really
went into medicine.
I then got involved with him with a
couple of large physician organizations, the American Board
of Holistic Medicine and a couple others and
I would go with him to do some
things at large conferences. But
the thing that he loved was going to
Molokai and he would bring,
(07:50):
I don't know, he'd recruit 10 or 12
positions who'd sign up for this workshop. And
the interesting thing was is that at Hoffman,
we tell you to turn in your
phone and your computer and all that. Well,
in Molokai, there was no cell service and
no Internet service. So there was no there
weren't gonna use those things while they were
(08:10):
there, and it was a bit challenging.
And he worked up a beautiful
program
outlining the neuroscience
of what happens
in medical school, what happens to physicians, and
why they're so far away from their heart
and their soul.
And then one day during that, we would
do a day long
intensive shamanic breath work session. Shamanic breath work
(08:33):
uses music
and
deep breathing
and intention
to really dive into altered states. We'd spend
the first two days with him doing the
neuroscience with the physicians and all that, and
then we do that. And what he soon
discovered was a couple of things.
These physicians were not interested in the neuroscience.
They knew it inside out.
(08:55):
They were interested in the experience.
And then he began to to understand that
physicians can be experienced junkies. Like a lot
of them are going to South America and
doing Ayahuasca, which is wonderful, but what he
wanted them to learn was how to integrate.
And so that's really what we ended up
doing together in Molokai for years and then
(09:15):
around the country in
conferences.
For a while, I was the executive director
of the board of holistic medicine, so he
and he was the president, so we were
doing a lot there.
He loved
going to the island of Molokai and completely
unplugging.
And he was pretty steeped in Buddhist teachings,
I would say, but he also really loved
(09:37):
Judeo
Christianity. He was a very spiritual guy. And
the other thing we really discovered that that
high
ability to care for people that physicians have,
the shadow of that is codependency
and it was killing them.
So we focus a lot on helping them
recover from codependency and work addiction, by the
way, because physicians are so highly rewarded for
(10:00):
addictive work behaviors.
I remember one guy saying to me, one
of the physicians at the workshop sort of
were teaching him about work addiction and he's
going, oh my god. Oh my god. I'm
getting it. But I love my work. It
can't be an addiction. And I just
because I have no filter, just said to
him,
well, heroin addicts love their heroin too, but
(10:20):
it's gonna kill them.
You know, that became Lee and my running
joke. That was the journey we did together.
And we then started doing workshops, you know,
in Italy. That was really fun. And then
in February
I believe it was 02/2010, he was diagnosed.
And so you love doing your workshops, and
it feels like part of what Lee brought
(10:40):
was
attention to the caregiver.
Most people were focusing on the recipient of
it, and Lee sort of said, wait a
minute. Let's look at these doctors
coming out of medical school, what they're trained
to do, and how do we help them
connect back to their heart, take care of
their body,
understand their emotions.
(11:01):
For people listening, that might sound kind of
obvious now, but back then, it was
somewhat radical. Was it not? Yeah. It was
extremely radical. He was certainly one of the
leaders in that. And, also,
there wasn't a lot of
sympathy for positions and their feelings because, you
know, there was just a sense of, well,
they make a lot of money. That's what
they're trying to do and all that, And
(11:22):
not a lot of understanding of the toll
it actually took
on them and Lee was acutely
aware of that.
He had a big impact on changing curriculum
in medical schools even. I mean, you're right,
these days there's a lot of physicians
coming out of medical school who have
spent time learning
meditation, have been learning self care.
(11:45):
That was not going on then. It was
really the opposite. And there were several people
on the scene that started making a difference
with physician wellness, which is really why the
American Board of Holistic Medicine was even created.
So at the same time, physician wellness
and also the recognition
that holistic medicine had to come in because
(12:06):
physicians recognized
that they're great at acute medicine.
They are great at it. They are great
at fixing things. They're great at that. And
yet chronic illness,
not so much because chronic illness
really is a whole person
issue.
And his feeling was in order to make
that change in medicine,
(12:26):
physicians had to understand that they're whole people,
that they have a shadow, that they have
their own pain that deserves attention,
that they have
their resentments, they can, you know, show up
and work. And it's okay that they're pissed
off at their patients.
It's okay. I mean, he really wanted to
normalize
(12:47):
them
as people.
And it was enormously
liberating.
And for all the physicians that he touched,
and everybody loved this guy. And I think
it's important
to say that
his
love for people was palpable
and fairly
unconditional,
and you could feel it. And at the
(13:08):
same time, he was the first one to
talk about people's shadows. So he really was
into the whole person.
Does that make sense?
Yeah. It does. You know,
one of the things he did is bring
attention to the research that had been done
around
patients
when they're with doctors who open their hearts.
(13:29):
Too often, doctors were making it a clinical
intervention. It was just about the
diagnosis. They had a clipboard in their hand.
It was a quick visit.
Insurance was speeding things up here at the
time. And he sort of said, wait a
minute. If doctors show up in their hearts
making eye contact,
being open,
there's so much they can do that can
(13:50):
actually create better outcomes
for patients
if they stay in their heart. I'm really
glad you're bringing that up. That was
such an important discovery, which has now been
incorporated into a lot of physician training.
And, yeah, there's a whole body of research
on it that there are better outcomes.
You know, he was the perfect person to
(14:11):
do it because he so believed it. You
know, I must say there was a whole
cadre of physicians who basically
began to really change how they practice because
of their connection with doctor Liptonthal
and their respect for him. And for those
listening who've taken the process
in Petaluma
at the Hoffman Retreat site,
(14:34):
that formally was IONS,
which is what Lee also had a big
connection to. And IONS was
still is, doing beautiful work of integrating spirituality.
How would you describe what IANS does, Nida?
Well, let's give the the name of it.
It's the Institute for Noetic Science.
(14:55):
And Noetic is
looking at
events that are outside the ordinary understanding.
Ions was,
I believe, actually created by
an astronaut, and his name is slipping my
mind right now, but but he had this
incredible experience as he came around and saw
the Earthrise,
(15:15):
which was why they named the Eons Retreat
site Earthrise
initially
before Hoffman purchased it.
He was also
on their board, he was a medical director
or HeartMath
for anybody that's aware of that organization that
does
deep research
and to heart rate variability and how that
impacts our consciousness which is really related
(15:39):
deeply to why recycling works, why self compassion
works because it's not just to feel good,
it's actually changing brain chemistry. So he was
involved with that and he brought a lot
of that work in to what we did.
Give me two seconds and I'm gonna tell
you how he got to Hoffman. He was
on an airplane
flying to Kauai. We were gonna meet there
and do some kind of medical workshop.
(16:00):
And he was sitting next to Randy Perkins
who was on the board of Hoffman at
the time. They got to talking,
Randy kinda realized, oh my gosh, this guy
does similar work that I do. Randy ended
up coming to the workshop and Kawhi and
then he really wanted Lee to see what
the Hoffman process is. Neither Lee or I
ever heard of it. I don't know how
I missed it all those years, but I
(16:20):
had never heard of it. And he actually
gifted Lee the process because they wanted his
involvement. So he went and did it and
that's when he tried it back to me
and said, oh, you gotta do this. It's
really, really good. He loved the process and
the thing for him
was a couple of things for him. He
recognized
that
really being able to release the emotional material
(16:41):
from your childhood
was so important. You couldn't just talk about
it. You couldn't just know
about your childhood issues. You had to actually
work on releasing energy that really changed his
life in huge ways.
Yeah. I mean, that's really important as a
former therapist
trained in psychotherapy.
Insight
(17:01):
was kind of the gold standard. If we
can just help our patients
get more insight,
then all things will change. Well, this sort
of says insight is not enough, doesn't it?
No. It's not enough. And, you know, I
don't think he'd mind me telling the story.
He had been struggling with his weight all
his life. He's a hefty guy. Got sick
(17:21):
of trying everything.
And at the Hoffman process,
he discovered, that's what he told me, he
discovered
that he was overweight
as a way to punish his mother.
And I would I'm here to tell you,
he lost the weight in the ensuing years.
He lost it, never regained it.
Profound.
He shared that story with a lot of
(17:42):
people.
Yeah.
And so
then
something happens, Nida. How do you find out
this next very important piece of his life?
He called me and told me that he
had
had a lump in his throat, went to
the doctor, and found out it was esophageal
cancer.
This was on the telephone because I was
(18:02):
in Hawaii and he was in California at
the time.
And he
pretty quickly told me, he goes
ten percent chance of living more than two
years. So I'm a physician I know, he
said, I really,
I don't know that I even wanna go
through all of the chemo and
radiation. Said, I,
I'm okay.
(18:22):
He was only 54,
about 53,
the diagnosis.
But all those years of teaching
that if you live for the moment, if
you live fully,
he liked to quote this,
phrase that
that I had told him about once that
native Americans say that
(18:43):
today's a good day to die.
And of course, what they mean is if
you live well, it's a good day to
die. So that became kind of his mantra.
He did choose to do some chemo and
so forth and he lived for a couple
of years.
True to Lee though, I mean, he just
continued to walk his talk
that it's okay to die. I've had a
(19:03):
full of beautiful wife,
two
fabulous,
beautiful children.
So it wasn't nothing.
He was in the middle of writing the
book when he got the diagnosis and then
he wrote the book, which is titled Enjoy
Every Sandwich,
Live Today as Though It's Your Last. Very
popular book at the time and
he spent the next couple of years, we
(19:24):
continued to do workshops together.
He continued to teach
that
love is the answer to everything.
Love more.
Love your family.
Love people despite their
Hoffman people. We call them patterns.
He just said, love them despite their flaws.
He meditated more
(19:46):
and
lived fully, right, to the end.
Nida,
in his book,
Enjoy Every Sandwich, which, by the way, Warren
Zivon,
ten years earlier or maybe eight years earlier,
had
shared in a
conversation with David Letterman.
And Warren Zivon also died of esophageal
(20:09):
cancer. He said,
enjoy every sandwich.
And
Lee wrote a book called Enjoy Every Sandwich.
And in one of the
sentences in the book, he says, at any
moment,
in an instant,
life as we know it can change.
Our mortality waits for us, sometimes
patiently,
(20:30):
sometimes not so patiently,
but our mortality is always there, undeniable,
and closer
than any of us wants to admit.
When he died, you
you wrote and read a eulogy to him.
Would you be willing to to read it
now how you finished it? Yeah.
(20:52):
Lee's teaching fundamentally didn't change after his diagnosis.
He walked his talk, lived his teaching.
However, there was one subtle yet powerful shift
in what he taught that showed up at
the last few months he was alive and
it was this.
He used to talk about expanded states of
consciousness from meditation and shamanic journey as divine
(21:12):
and mystical experiences
that we could tap into as humans.
And he's got closer to leaving this life.
He began to teach that these states are
really just
human experiences.
They're not mystical, they're not magical, they're not
fantastic,
they're simply human.
So it became important to him to get
folks to see that we all have a
(21:34):
capacity for expanded states of consciousness as humans
because we are divine,
but also
because we are human and being human is
sacred.
And Lee wanted folks to know that you
can experience life fully by understanding this simple
truth that life is temporary
and it's always sorry.
(21:55):
It's always a good day to die when
you live with a grateful heart and know
that truly all you need is love.
He was truly one of my best friends
as well.
He really exemplifies
that statement that I kinda hate that the
good die young, but my goodness,
they do.
(22:16):
I saw that his wife is still practicing
in the Bay Area. His son
is now a psychotherapist.
Yes. Lee would be so thrilled. I mean,
he was his son was Will was just
starting college when Lee passed, and Lee always
used to say he was a closet therapist,
you know. But if he had had it
to do over, that's what he would have
done. So that's very exciting. He has two
(22:37):
grandchildren now. And One of the things we
haven't talked about, but that you're
such
a proponent of, and Hoffman is such
a advocacy
around, which is music.
He had this dream of wanting T shirts
that doctors would wear that would say, we'll
work for music.
(22:58):
He loved music. You guys loved music. There
was really a power in music, wasn't there?
Yeah. Definitely. He was a complete music
fanatic, and he did spend a lot of
years helping musicians who couldn't afford health care.
He was passionate about it. He would work
with them, but he'd also hook them up
with physicians around the world
that would work with them for free. That's
(23:20):
why I wanted the t shirt. He was
he was really gonna start a movement. That
was one of the future plans. He loved
it. He was brilliant
about music of all types. I used to
tease that he was my personal Shazam
mechanism. I mean, he could listen to anything
and tell me what it was from classical
to rock to everything in between.
And I think that's one of the reasons
he loved the shamanic breath work because it
(23:41):
involved a lot of use of music to
stimulate healing and states of consciousness.
Mhmm.
And I read that he he was
over the moon
about iPods because he didn't have to carry
around CDs or albums that there was so
much available
in this one little piece of technology
that he could listen to so much music,
(24:02):
and it was just a dream for him.
Absolutely. Yeah. He was always the first one
to have the iPods. Yeah. He was obsessed
obsessed with music. It was a wonderful thing,
and he played a bit himself, played guitar,
and loved it. You know, every time I
was visiting with him, any music thing that
was going on, he'd wanna drag me to.
And, I mean, I went. I like music
(24:23):
too, but he was definitely obsessed and had
friends all over the country that were musicians,
that love music. Yeah. You know, so much
of
who he
represents
as a human being, what he's done in
the field,
it seems to align so much with Hoffman
and his deep capacity to do two things
(24:44):
at once, which is to love
and lean in with an open heart
and
to understand
and not be afraid of shadow.
That is our calling card at Hoffman. We
do both owning,
embracing spirit,
and
going right to shame and vindictiveness
and the dark side.
(25:05):
Lee held both those beautifully, didn't he? He
did. One of his favorite quotes was Carl
Jung's, do you wanna be good, or do
you wanna be whole?
And being whole involves that, embracing the shadow.
And I credit him for why I actually
became a Hoffman teacher. He'd already passed before
that happened because when he was dying, he
made me promise to carry on his work.
So I did for quite a while. And
(25:27):
then I rolled into doing Hoffman and I
also recognized I often
think of him when I'm at the process
very often, almost every time and just kind
of thank him for leading me to this
path because it really is an opportunity
to do
all that he taught and believed in. And
of course, many physicians now come to Hoffman.
And in fact, when we were doing our
(25:47):
workshops
in Molokai, well, you know, he lived another
five years after he did Hoffman.
We frequently
encourage physicians to go to Hoffman
after he and I both done it. So
they come to our workshop. They kind of
treated it as initiation
into self awareness and spirituality and all of
that, and then we'd encourage them. And a
few of them did, and a couple of
(26:08):
them that did went on to be big
leaders in physician wellness as well.
And he also
loved the Beatles.
Who did he like on the Beatles?
John Lennon.
I mean, Lee's,
you know, of a different generation than me.
So not quite Beatlemania generation, kind of the
next one, but he really loved them
(26:30):
and was very aware of all they did
for music in the world. Yeah. He loved
John Lennon. He was kind of like to
think of himself as a sort of a
John Lennon type, you know, disrupting
the medical world like John would disrupt and
wanting to bring peace on Earth. He wanted
to bring peace to medicine.
Yeah.
And this simple adage of
(26:51):
all you need is love. Yeah. He really
believed it. And interestingly enough,
even Dean Ornish, circling back to that, Dean
Ornish is
one of his books. I don't know that
it was his last, but certainly one of
his books is called Love and Survival in
which he talks about he had been focused
on be a vegan,
meditate,
exercise.
(27:11):
And in this book, he points out, yeah,
that's all really important
but love is the number one healer.
It's the number one healer and
the American Board of Holistic Medicine that Lee
was president of their tagline was love heals.
So that coming around to recognize
self love and compassion for yourself, love for
(27:32):
yourself and compassion and love for others
heals.
Absolutely.
We'll put in the show notes much of
what we talked about. So for listeners who
wanna
dig into Lee a little bit and this
work and Nita and the work they did
together, we'll put some links in there.
Nita,
well, let me say this.
(27:53):
Lee,
thank you.
Thank you for Nita
for bringing
Nita to Hoffman
and the impact she's had. And Lee, thank
you for the work you've brought to this
world.
Nita, thank you for channeling Lee today and
helping us understand this incredible human and the
impact he had.
(28:14):
Thank you, Drew.
It was really beyond a joy to be
able to talk about him.
It's been a long time.
He died in 02/2011,
so it's been a long time.
So thank you. I really appreciate it.
(28:36):
Thank you for listening to our podcast. My
name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and
president of Hoffman Institute Foundation.
And I'm Rassie Grassi,
Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute
Foundation.
Our mission is to provide people greater access
to the wisdom and power of love. In
themselves, in each other, and in the world.
(28:57):
To find out more, please go to hompaninstitute.org.
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