September 11, 2025 • 34 mins
“The goal is freedom. The goal is your own happiness. The goal is joy, and it’s hard to have as much joy and lightness as you can if you’re holding onto old resentments.”
Simbi Hall, Storyteller, Screenwriter, Director, and Producer, sits down with Hoffman Podcast host Sadie Hannah to share her life journey of healing.
While Simbi completed the Process in 2022, her journey of self-reflection began at the age of seven, when she had her own subscription to Psychology Today. From a young age, she tried to analyze things in her head and figure things out. Somewhere within her, she felt there was something she needed to address.
For Simbi, one of the main transformations at the Process was the shift in her relationship with her father. Raised by her mom, her nana (technically her step-great-grandmother), and a dog “who helped raise” her, her father was absent. Simbi felt abandoned by him. She could count on her hands the number of times she’s seen him in her life. As Simbi says, you idealize what you don’t have. She grew to resent him and what she could never have. It’s been “the homework of her life” to attempt to resolve the pain of her childhood. Her birthday is always right around Father’s Day. Each year, this has been a big trigger for Simbi. This past year, just a few years after doing the Process, Simbi had a very different birthday experience. She discovered that she had let go of her deep resentment toward her father.
Listen in as Simbi shares wisdom learned from doing the homework of a lifetime. Be sure to listen for Simbi’s mic-drop moment at the end.
More about Simbi Hall:
Simbiat Hall is an award-winning Nigerian-American filmmaker who divides her time between LA and NYC.
Born in Chicago and raised in Virginia, Simbi graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a double major in film and dramatic writing. She is also a graduate of AFI’s “Directing Workshop for Women” and the Bill Cosby-sponsored “Guy Hanks/Marvin Miller Screenwriting Fellowship at USC.
Simbi is well-known for Long Story Short (2004), Bring It! Vegas Dreams and Disney Parks’ Magical Christmas Celebration (2016).
Follow Simbi on Instagram at @simbihall.
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
As mentioned in this episode:
Daily Buddhist Practice
Buddha-nature
Buddha-nature in Hoffman terms: The Spiritual Self, or the Light that’s within you. This is the foundation from which growth can evolve.
The Divine Mother
Positive Legacy:
While much of the work of the Hoffman Process involves disconnecting from negative parental patterns, we also receive a positive legacy from our parents. This is also addressed during the 7-day retreat.
Black woman tropes/stereotypes –
What is Transference?
A couple of great quotes from Simbi:
“If you’re open and seeking, you can get guidance from a stop sign.”
“If you don’t do the work, life adds Miracle-Gro to the belief systems.”
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
That's the goal. The goal is freedom. The
goal is your own happiness.
The goal is joy. And it's hard
to
have as much joy
and lightness
as you can if you're holding on to
old
resentments.
Hello, and welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a
(00:24):
podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute.
My name is Sadie Hanna. And in this
podcast, you'll hear real conversations and stories with
graduates
about their courageous journey inward, and how their
love and light are living in the world
around them. Love's Everyday Radius.
Thank you for being here and welcome.
(00:52):
Hello, everyone, and welcome.
I'm Sadie, and I'm here with Simbi Hall.
Simbi, thank you so much for joining us
today.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah. So let's dive right in. Tell us
a bit about who you are, whether that's
personally, professionally.
So I will share that I'm Hoffman grad,
(01:12):
obviously,
and I did the process in November
2022.
And
it was
a hundred percent one of the best things
I've ever done. It's the kind of thing
that I wish I could give to everybody
on the planet.
Professionally, I'm
a screenwriter,
director, and a producer,
(01:34):
but, you know, but it impacts everything in
your life, you know, once you do the
process.
So, Simbi, before we began
recording, you were sharing a really touching moment
of sitting in front of your father who
has not changed, and he
did not hold the same charge for you.
(01:56):
What experience you had inside of you is
different. Let's begin
there.
Maybe we start at the end of the
story
and go backward.
One of
the major
I don't even know if the word is
result
of doing the Hoffman processors. One of the
things that I've been working on was the
(02:17):
relationship with my father. I have had a
very
complicated
relationship
with my father
mostly because
I wasn't
raised with him and I felt, you know,
very abandoned by him, You know, known him,
but I could pretty much count on my
hands how many times I've actually seen him.
(02:37):
And so I have resentment around that because
I also have a lot of half siblings,
you know, on his side
that
have had very different relationship with him.
Not easier or better, but different and present.
And I feel that up until,
you know, recently, you know, you idealize what
(02:58):
you don't have. You know? That's something I've
discovered that I do, that I think, oh,
it's this way. If you had a father,
it would be like this. If only if
only that. And because I didn't,
then x y z are true. And it's
really been the homework of my life because
I
started
(03:18):
in the
the self awareness journey or the, like, really
trying to fix things is really what I
was doing. Trying to fix things from when
I was a a small child.
I had my own subscription to Psychology Today
from when I was seven. And always coming
from my head and always trying to analyze
and figure things out. And so to cut
to what happened this past Father's Day, and
(03:40):
my birthday is always around Father's Day. So
my birthday
has always been a bit of a trigger
because it's the duality of, like, yay, it's
my birthday, and I don't have a father.
It was always a pair.
One of my brothers, his daughter was graduating
from Stanford, and so
he was FaceTiming
the whole family. So I was calling it,
(04:01):
like, Nigerians around the world because people just
kept popping up from all over the place
to, you know, be present for this incredible
graduation.
My father was on the FaceTime,
and it was the first time, Sadie,
that I
talked to him or looked at him, and
there was no
resentment.
(04:23):
There was no
and or but, however,
you didn't.
It was just, oh, I love him. You
know, what I was saying to you before
is that he hasn't changed.
He is a 100%
a Nigerian narcissist.
(04:44):
You know? So it isn't like, oh, there's
been some big transformation.
The transformation was me, was just in what
I was
somehow
able to
just let go of. I started crying.
It sounds like it took you by surprise.
Yeah. It did. I wasn't expecting to get
the FaceTime, so it wasn't like I'd done
(05:04):
any big preparation
for it.
So that was by surprise. And I wasn't
expecting that emotion, and I wasn't
doing any, like, quote unquote work before
to prepare for anything.
It just happened, and I recognized it, and
I felt it more than intellectually recognized it
because I was just
(05:24):
crying, and then I felt
lighter
and joyful.
And then what was really wild,
he ended up talking to my mom
a couple times. Like, I think they talked
the next day and then a a few
times
that week.
She didn't have any resentment.
I love what you've shared this moment of
(05:46):
realizing there is no resentment. But what is
there? Tears.
Yeah.
Lightness.
Yeah.
Joy.
And the fact that you were surprised by
it,
it speaks to a spontaneity
of that as this sort of spontaneous
(06:07):
fill in the blank. What is it? This
spontaneous
Just awareness of love. Like, he loves me.
And that and it makes me wanna cry
because I ain't gonna cry because
and I don't, like, I don't have, like
it's it's not like some perfect experience,
but this feeling that
(06:28):
people can love you
and it not necessarily
look the way
you
think it ought to look,
and that evolves,
and that people have
various capacities. We all do. I'm not coming
at this like I'm perfect and your capacity
is less than mine. I don't mean it
(06:49):
like that. But I mean, nobody
can perfectly
meet
all of your needs as you're having them.
And I think that often with our parents,
we expect that even once we're adults.
What I feel like maybe I did was
I held on to
(07:10):
you owe me
from then because you didn't do anything,
and you could have, in my opinion.
And now it's like, that's the resentment. It's
like holding
all the old stuff of what hadn't been
done,
and then you're just constantly
piling it on
(07:31):
because there's no way really to make up
for that.
And so then you're the one carrying it.
And one of the really incredible things that
happened
during the process that I sort of realized
after
one of the exercises
that we did,
I remember
(07:51):
writing out this whole story of, like, why
could it have been this way? Why could
it have been this way? And it's just
you
journaling
what you might wanna say or what might
have happened in their life. We don't know.
And then
finding out
later
that
a lot of what I'd actually journaled about
(08:14):
was very close to how it was, like,
emotionally. Like, it just made me feel like,
oh, there's, like, this reservoir of knowledge if
we get curious about
a situation
rather than
just
reacting
and responding based on our own
space
and projecting out.
(08:36):
And then thinking, like, somebody should behave this
way or that way, and if they don't,
it necessarily
means they don't love me. They don't care.
They're whatever they are. And then responding from
your assumed idea, it's it's transference.
You're describing
a perspective,
a way of understanding
(08:58):
your own unmet need
around his presence
that has evolved since you first took the
process.
And I've heard you say
no one can meet every need as it's
arising
real time,
and that doesn't mean he didn't or doesn't
love me.
(09:18):
How did you come to that? How did
you get there? Because that's an incredible
ending.
How did you even know that you needed
to do the work?
I
have always known I needed to do the
work.
I had a good childhood. It wasn't like
I was in some
trauma laden dynamic
(09:40):
all the time.
But even as a child, your parents can't
possibly meet every need you have as it
arises. They don't
know it. They don't recognize it. They don't
have the skills, whatever. It doesn't mean they're
bad parents. They're just human beings.
I feel like I've always been doing the
work, and because my family didn't look like
other families,
(10:00):
then as a kid, I was like, well,
what's going on? Why is this one different?
So I was raised by my mom and
my nana, who was
technically my step great grandmother.
So she wasn't biological, but that obviously didn't
matter. She was my nana. She was so
those were my parents, and I had a
dog who helped in raising me.
(10:21):
And so, you know, this was a funny
family, as as one of my cousins said
to me as a kid. But as an
adult, the work continued, so I was on
my own quest. Then I went to therapy,
and then I've been a practicing Buddhist the
majority of my life and I feel like
that daily work of self reflection,
chanting Nam myoho renge kyo to bring out
(10:43):
your highest potential and everyone around you to
be sort of acting from
what we call in Buddhism, our Buddha nature,
what we call in Hoffman, our higher nature,
our lightened self. That should be the team
leader. When we do the quad checks,
when you have that part of yourself,
really
acknowledge
(11:04):
the other
parts
and kind of take them on like a
divine mother in a way more than a
human mother can do.
And say, okay, emotional self, I hear you.
Okay, body, I hear you. Okay, intellect, I
hear you. Here's how we're gonna do this
day.
And so I think from being consistent and
doing
(11:24):
all of that work, then things get to
evolve, and it doesn't have to be
hard.
Because I think also when people hear the
word work,
it sounds like,
like, deep effort, and you're working through, you're
fighting through something. And I'm not saying there's
(11:45):
not that part of it too, but I
think when you sort of laid a foundation,
then you have the tools to meet whatever
situation comes your way. And then you can
if you're self reflecting,
you're able to see how you're meeting it
now versus how you might have met it
ten years ago or more.
(12:06):
You're describing having a foundation
that sounds deeply spiritual
and finding a through line with
what we call at the Hoffman process, your
spiritual self
or the light that's within you,
and that being the foundation for growth to
evolve as opposed to something you force.
(12:29):
This foundation
and this knowledge that you
wanted to fix something. You spoke about getting
psychology today when you were seven. So something
within you saying,
we need
to address this. You also spoke about your
awareness of what was missing
in feeling abandoned by
(12:51):
your father and how you were in some
ways looking for that throughout your life. If
only
this then
that. Can you give us one example of
how you saw that playing out for you
before you came to the process?
The body can become the battleground between the
intellect and the emotion. So for me,
one of the
(13:12):
largest
battleground moments in belief systems about, because I
don't have a father, here's this thing that's
happening, or because of him, here's this thing
that's happening. So I had a kidney problem
growing up. It wasn't
discovered. I actually discovered it in junior high
school
because I was in an advanced
science program where we got these case histories
(13:35):
that we got to study, and then we
were able to go to the medical school
nearby and see the med students working on
these cadavers of the case studies that we
had been studying.
So as divine intervention would have it, one
of them that I had
was this woman who had passed away. She's
(13:55):
like 80 some year old lady,
and she had some symptoms in her history
that were like mine. And I remember sitting
on my mom's bed doing my homework, and
I was like, this is what I have.
And it was a simple enough thing that
the tube from the kidney to the bladder
was too small. The ureter was too small,
and it was backing up and killing the
kidney. A simple blue dye test would have
(14:16):
shown this. Because I had that case study,
now my mom could say she has this
and, like, go and force them to do
the blue dye test. And in fact, that's
exactly what it was. And so then
from
'14 to '21, I had a kidney surgery
or some kind of surgery almost every year
to fix it, and they ended up taking
it out. So
(14:37):
this is, you know, inherited
from
my father's side. Somebody else in the family
that we found out later had that.
In my mind, even before we knew
that,
in my mind,
I felt like this is about my father.
This is about not having a father. And
(14:58):
if I just had the family history,
in theory,
you go to a doctor and you say,
there's this family history.
Can you please check this, this, and this?
And they do it and you find it,
and maybe it could have been fixed when
I was a child. I have a friend
whose daughter had something similar, and they were
able to fix it as a kid, and
so she has both her kidneys.
I didn't have that.
(15:19):
And I'm fine. My left kidney does all
the work, and so you can't even tell.
I only have one, and we can live
with three quarters of one. So it's fine.
But for years,
I was
just
so upset,
and it felt like such a punishment.
It's like I'm already being punished
(15:40):
by not having
a present father.
And now
because of your effed up genes, this is
how I thought about it. I've been through
all this pain because by the tube being
too small and backing up and killing the
kidney,
I was having consistent
kidney infections.
So I was in a tremendous amount of
(16:01):
pain all the time, and it got to
where I now still have a very high
tolerance for pain because of that, which is
good and not good because you can ignore
things that you shouldn't. So as an example,
when they were doing one of the kidney
surgeries, I got a terrible infection and they
had to put ice sheets on me. They
actually thought I was gonna die or that
I was gonna become septic. And my mother
(16:22):
called my father to tell him, and he
said, by the grace of God, she'll be
okay, and then didn't call back for three
years.
So
that was
hardcore
proof
that you don't care.
You don't love me. I have nothing to
you. Like, who doesn't call back for three
(16:43):
years?
One of the things I realized during the
process
was,
well, maybe he was scared.
Maybe he was scared. Maybe he was ashamed.
I don't know. But it doesn't have to
mean
that I'm unlovable.
And I feel like that
is one of the main takeaways
(17:04):
is that
we're always telling ourselves stories,
and we're assigning meaning to things
to
work with the story that we've
married ourselves to.
We have no idea
really why anybody does anything.
For me, it's like I thought, well,
(17:26):
I don't have all the information.
I can talk about how somebody made me
feel. That's real and valid, of course.
But I don't have to assign a meeting
that means
I'm never gonna have what I want,
or nobody is ever going to love me,
or whatever. You don't have to make something
mean more than it is. Those are the
(17:48):
facts of what happened.
Why they happen?
I don't know.
That's up for debate.
But
I now feel like
the story I've been telling myself
since that happened of, like, see, there's proof
he doesn't love me
isn't true.
Even if it were true,
(18:10):
that
doesn't mean that I'm unlovable.
Regardless of what's true for him,
you know
what's true
for you.
Your relationship with him has not changed.
Are you saying it's not required
to in order for you
(18:31):
to feel
free or to heal?
I've been through many, I wanna say, like,
iterations of this relationship.
The little girl, Simbi, just wanted a dad
even though she never would have said that.
Then
there was
the teenage
(18:52):
simby
who felt very divorced from her body because
of all the stuff I just said. There's
so much to impact in the teenage simby
of just feeling, in general, rejected by men,
but definitely starting from the father stuff.
Then
there was
the angry
part where I really and that's why I
went into therapy because I was really just
(19:14):
wanted to, like, physically hurt him because, again,
I was blaming my
physical pain from all the kidney stuff on
him. And I'm like, I would like to
give you a little bit of of a
taste of this. So there was, like, the
vengeful thing, and there's so many other stories
of him
physically closing doors in my life to access
to him and just being just not available.
(19:35):
And then, of course, there was also the
part that wanted an apology,
that wanted an acknowledgment and an apology, and
that that would fix it.
Not for me. I'm not saying for anybody
else that
that is not valid and required,
but I didn't get it
and realized
that
(19:55):
I probably
never will.
And now from where I'm sitting now with
the experience that I just shared earlier,
I also feel like it doesn't matter.
This is wonderful
because
I'm not waiting for somebody else
to make me feel better.
(20:18):
I love this image of the divine mother
that you mentioned.
You are such a strong
woman.
What have you come to know about that?
Because there is also this positive legacy
that our parents leave.
That's right.
That's right.
About being a strong woman,
(20:40):
I have mixed
feelings about it because
I feel like it's,
kind of like a black woman
trope and expectation
to be a strong woman.
Black women in general have a different
level of weight to carry
in this society.
(21:01):
So
you build muscles when you do heavy lifting
or you fall over, you know, and you're
out, and I'm not about to be out.
So you just have to be strong. And
I even used to have resentment, and maybe
I still do. I don't know.
Resentment about that.
What I am that I'm proud of is
I'm resilient.
(21:21):
I keep going.
And so I'm resilient in all the ways,
emotionally,
physically, spiritually,
intellectually.
I'm always a, okay, and the store closes,
and what else are we gonna do?
How do you see your strength
showing up for you in this understanding
(21:43):
of your father that you've recently come to?
That,
I was strong enough
to keep moving forward.
Even just taking the FaceTime I was telling
you about,
I could have not accepted it.
I could just hide and be like, door
closed. And I did that for years. I
(22:03):
didn't talk to him.
And that was part of this process where
I really was at a place at that
time where I felt like this isn't healthy
for me. I'm not gonna engage in it.
And I think that sometimes you have to
do that in relationships.
But the reason that I did that,
it was for self protection
(22:23):
because I was still believing the story of
if you
disappoint me, if you treat me a certain
way, if you say a certain thing,
I'm assigning
the meaning still to myself of I'm not
valuable, lovable, whatever.
But if I remove that meaning, you can
still choose to not have people in your
life that aren't meeting
(22:44):
how you wanna be treated, of course. And,
yes, we should.
But if somebody calls me stupid, that's not
gonna hurt my feelings because I know I'm
not stupid. But if somebody
abandons me,
then
because I had the belief system,
that's just always what's gonna happen. That is
painful because I believe that
(23:05):
to be true, that I'm going to be
left. You know, I believed that. So then
when it shows up or it feels like
it's gonna show up,
that is
hurtful.
But I feel like what's happened with him
is I've unplugged
his actions
from
that belief system. Like, I'm not walking around
(23:27):
believing that anymore.
So then I'm free of that, and I
can just
be
present in the moment that we're in rather
than waiting for
the
abandonment
to happen or the hurt to happen.
I love what you've said.
There can be some strength and anger. And
we talk about this at the process. There
(23:49):
is a strength in that.
What you've just described
beautifully though, is the strength to question your
own narrative,
the strength to ask
what happened to him.
Maybe he was scared.
Maybe that's not true,
but it sounds like you're enjoying the benefit
(24:10):
of freedom
of unplugging
the connection.
Right. Because that's the
goal. The goal is freedom. The the goal
is your own happiness.
The goal is joy, and it's hard to
have as much joy
and lightness
as you can if you're holding on to
(24:31):
old
resentments.
It's taking up too much space.
And, again, it's not saying, like, just let
people treat you however they want. No.
You can still not have them in your
life and not carry the resentment.
Whatever you want, just drop the resentment some
kind of way. Your description about
(24:52):
writing what may have happened to your father
and then finding out later that some of
that was not far from the truth. How
do you describe that?
I feel like on
a cellular level,
we're all connected,
especially if you're talking about, like, in your
actual DNA lineage. We have epigenetics, so we
(25:13):
have information that's passed on to us through
our ancestors
into ourselves, and they express themselves in various
ways that we have no idea, even though
they've done some studies.
And then I feel like on a creative
level, just as a writer in general,
I feel like writing is a form of
channeling.
I
(25:34):
would say
that if you are
doing
emotional
investigative work
with someone who is in your DNA lineage,
you're going to get
answers,
whether it's in a dream, it's in a
feeling,
you meet somebody, and they
(25:55):
present
something. You're like, well, that could be the
case, what however it comes. For me, it
was through writing
that
can give you an answer
or give you another perspective even if it's
not an answer. It can give you another
perspective or give you a question
that can lead you to an answer.
So I feel like if you're open
(26:16):
and seeking,
you can get guidance from a stop sign.
You know, like, really. It's also
evident of this connection.
Even though he wasn't there for you growing
up or, you know, you said you've seen
him a handful of times in your life,
there was still a presence in his absence
(26:38):
even in an emotional level that you were
able to access what you spoke of as
reservoir of knowledge.
Coming to a sense of peace around that,
what do you think that offers you
going forward?
With him, I feel like, specifically, it offers
me
an ability to just enjoy him for what
(26:58):
he is
without
having a filter on
and always referring to the past of what
wasn't done, hasn't been done, whatever,
and just being present. Like, we talk about,
like, just being able to be just in
the moment.
I think for other relationships,
just the exercise of being curious
as to why
(27:20):
someone
is behaving in a way that we don't
enjoy
rather than making a story about what
that must mean because we're always so certain.
And being curious and then deciding again how
you're gonna process it and how you're gonna
respond.
I just keep coming back to the you're
(27:41):
not worthy or lovable
because those are some of my things.
I had something very interesting happen just recently
with two long term friends.
One is a mom person in my life,
you know, around my birthday, and
we were gonna have a birthday party, and
it was canceled.
And then I went
(28:02):
to I can't trust anybody.
That stuff, that narrative came right back up
because
the patterns still exist. However, they're not so
deeply rooted. So as soon as it came
up,
I was like, well, that's not
true.
And it was almost kind of, like,
surprising that that even came up.
(28:24):
And then other friends
were upset and had their feelings about it
and felt like, you know, indignant and mad
for me. And then
rather
than cutting that person off, wouldn't do because
I love her, and also that wanting to
cut things off is really like the protective
coating. Again, the little girl thing.
Rather than doing that, I just, like, went
(28:45):
and saw her, and all of that melted
away. And I saw, like, oh, she's just
not okay right now. And she said that,
and it was like, not a big deal.
I don't even care about the party. It
was just the trigger of it thinking and
being not thought of or discounted in some
way.
And I thought to myself, this is how
wars start.
People have old hurts.
(29:07):
We talk about transference, you know, in the
process. People have old hurts.
Something happens or somebody reminds them of something
from however long ago,
and then they respond to this person or
this situation
from the old hurt,
usually respond badly.
And so I was really
(29:29):
proud of myself that I didn't stay in
that belief system
for any real amount of time and that
I didn't let it color our relationship.
It just didn't take roots. And I credit
the process for that because
I think
what
it does is it does uproot
(29:52):
those narratives.
And
by maintaining
some of the tools that we learn there,
you're continually
weeding the garden. You're continually pulling those things
out because because things in life are gonna
come up and you're gonna be like, no.
That's a weed. That's not true. Let's take
it out. Versus if you don't do any
(30:14):
work,
life has been just giving miracle grow
to those belief systems.
What I really am hearing from you is
this
curiosity about another person's experience when something's
hard
rather than evidence that I'm not lovable.
Beautiful.
Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing.
(30:34):
Is there any last thing you'd like to
share with us before we go? Anything that
you didn't say that you'd like to?
As a
storyteller,
I feel like
that has always been who I was before
I knew that that was a job and
that I did that with my Barbie dolls.
And so it always had a sense of
(30:56):
play. Like, everything that I'm doing
now, like, I was doing with Barbies. Like,
I would have my friends come over, and
I would
tell them the the script, essentially,
of the play that we were gonna enact
with the dolls, and I was directing and
and world building. Like, it's all the same
things. And I'm saying that because I feel
like
(31:16):
to be happy,
I need to be
as much of that little girl as possible.
I feel
super lucky
in that
what I was
doing naturally as a little girl,
I'm doing
in the adult version of my life.
(31:37):
And then also
Hoffman
helped me
recognize it in a different way
because of the element of play.
Even the being curious about, like, what's going
on with somebody else that can be done
in a playful way, like by yourself. They
don't even have to be involved. Obviously, it's
more fun if you're with somebody else,
(32:00):
But just to just take it as way,
like, well, let's pretend. Like,
maybe it's this, and it can be ridiculous
and outlandish. And then suddenly you're you're laughing
about it.
And then some of the sting of whatever
story you've been telling yourself
gets unplugged
if you can play with it. This is
brilliant.
So recognizing in a way you're authoring
(32:20):
or building your own story,
and if some part of that is hurting
you or leading you to the conclusion that
you're not lovable,
you can question it.
The strength to question
that, to play with it,
to be curious,
and to write a new narrative.
Drop the mic.
(32:46):
Yes.
Beautiful.
Oh, my gosh. You're radiant. Thank you so
much for being here with me.
Thank you so much. Thank you for all
of your help and support. I love you.
I love you.
(33:07):
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. To
(33:29):
find out more, please go to hompaninstitute.org.
That's the goal. The goal is freedom. The
goal is your own happiness.
The goal is joy. And it's hard
to
have as much joy
and lightness
as you can if you're holding on to
old
resentments.
Hello, and welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a
(00:24):
podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute.
My name is Sadie Hanna. And in this
podcast, you'll hear real conversations and stories with
graduates
about their courageous journey inward, and how their
love and light are living in the world
around them. Love's Everyday Radius.
Thank you for being here and welcome.
(00:52):
Hello, everyone, and welcome.
I'm Sadie, and I'm here with Simbi Hall.
Simbi, thank you so much for joining us
today.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah. So let's dive right in. Tell us
a bit about who you are, whether that's
personally, professionally.
So I will share that I'm Hoffman grad,
(01:12):
obviously,
and I did the process in November
2022.
And
it was
a hundred percent one of the best things
I've ever done. It's the kind of thing
that I wish I could give to everybody
on the planet.
Professionally, I'm
a screenwriter,
director, and a producer,
(01:34):
but, you know, but it impacts everything in
your life, you know, once you do the
process.
So, Simbi, before we began
recording, you were sharing a really touching moment
of sitting in front of your father who
has not changed, and he
did not hold the same charge for you.
(01:56):
What experience you had inside of you is
different. Let's begin
there.
Maybe we start at the end of the
story
and go backward.
One of
the major
I don't even know if the word is
result
of doing the Hoffman processors. One of the
things that I've been working on was the
(02:17):
relationship with my father. I have had a
very
complicated
relationship
with my father
mostly because
I wasn't
raised with him and I felt, you know,
very abandoned by him, You know, known him,
but I could pretty much count on my
hands how many times I've actually seen him.
(02:37):
And so I have resentment around that because
I also have a lot of half siblings,
you know, on his side
that
have had very different relationship with him.
Not easier or better, but different and present.
And I feel that up until,
you know, recently, you know, you idealize what
(02:58):
you don't have. You know? That's something I've
discovered that I do, that I think, oh,
it's this way. If you had a father,
it would be like this. If only if
only that. And because I didn't,
then x y z are true. And it's
really been the homework of my life because
I
started
(03:18):
in the
the self awareness journey or the, like, really
trying to fix things is really what I
was doing. Trying to fix things from when
I was a a small child.
I had my own subscription to Psychology Today
from when I was seven. And always coming
from my head and always trying to analyze
and figure things out. And so to cut
to what happened this past Father's Day, and
(03:40):
my birthday is always around Father's Day. So
my birthday
has always been a bit of a trigger
because it's the duality of, like, yay, it's
my birthday, and I don't have a father.
It was always a pair.
One of my brothers, his daughter was graduating
from Stanford, and so
he was FaceTiming
the whole family. So I was calling it,
(04:01):
like, Nigerians around the world because people just
kept popping up from all over the place
to, you know, be present for this incredible
graduation.
My father was on the FaceTime,
and it was the first time, Sadie,
that I
talked to him or looked at him, and
there was no
resentment.
(04:23):
There was no
and or but, however,
you didn't.
It was just, oh, I love him. You
know, what I was saying to you before
is that he hasn't changed.
He is a 100%
a Nigerian narcissist.
(04:44):
You know? So it isn't like, oh, there's
been some big transformation.
The transformation was me, was just in what
I was
somehow
able to
just let go of. I started crying.
It sounds like it took you by surprise.
Yeah. It did. I wasn't expecting to get
the FaceTime, so it wasn't like I'd done
(05:04):
any big preparation
for it.
So that was by surprise. And I wasn't
expecting that emotion, and I wasn't
doing any, like, quote unquote work before
to prepare for anything.
It just happened, and I recognized it, and
I felt it more than intellectually recognized it
because I was just
(05:24):
crying, and then I felt
lighter
and joyful.
And then what was really wild,
he ended up talking to my mom
a couple times. Like, I think they talked
the next day and then a a few
times
that week.
She didn't have any resentment.
I love what you've shared this moment of
(05:46):
realizing there is no resentment. But what is
there? Tears.
Yeah.
Lightness.
Yeah.
Joy.
And the fact that you were surprised by
it,
it speaks to a spontaneity
of that as this sort of spontaneous
(06:07):
fill in the blank. What is it? This
spontaneous
Just awareness of love. Like, he loves me.
And that and it makes me wanna cry
because I ain't gonna cry because
and I don't, like, I don't have, like
it's it's not like some perfect experience,
but this feeling that
(06:28):
people can love you
and it not necessarily
look the way
you
think it ought to look,
and that evolves,
and that people have
various capacities. We all do. I'm not coming
at this like I'm perfect and your capacity
is less than mine. I don't mean it
(06:49):
like that. But I mean, nobody
can perfectly
meet
all of your needs as you're having them.
And I think that often with our parents,
we expect that even once we're adults.
What I feel like maybe I did was
I held on to
(07:10):
you owe me
from then because you didn't do anything,
and you could have, in my opinion.
And now it's like, that's the resentment. It's
like holding
all the old stuff of what hadn't been
done,
and then you're just constantly
piling it on
(07:31):
because there's no way really to make up
for that.
And so then you're the one carrying it.
And one of the really incredible things that
happened
during the process that I sort of realized
after
one of the exercises
that we did,
I remember
(07:51):
writing out this whole story of, like, why
could it have been this way? Why could
it have been this way? And it's just
you
journaling
what you might wanna say or what might
have happened in their life. We don't know.
And then
finding out
later
that
a lot of what I'd actually journaled about
(08:14):
was very close to how it was, like,
emotionally. Like, it just made me feel like,
oh, there's, like, this reservoir of knowledge if
we get curious about
a situation
rather than
just
reacting
and responding based on our own
space
and projecting out.
(08:36):
And then thinking, like, somebody should behave this
way or that way, and if they don't,
it necessarily
means they don't love me. They don't care.
They're whatever they are. And then responding from
your assumed idea, it's it's transference.
You're describing
a perspective,
a way of understanding
(08:58):
your own unmet need
around his presence
that has evolved since you first took the
process.
And I've heard you say
no one can meet every need as it's
arising
real time,
and that doesn't mean he didn't or doesn't
love me.
(09:18):
How did you come to that? How did
you get there? Because that's an incredible
ending.
How did you even know that you needed
to do the work?
I
have always known I needed to do the
work.
I had a good childhood. It wasn't like
I was in some
trauma laden dynamic
(09:40):
all the time.
But even as a child, your parents can't
possibly meet every need you have as it
arises. They don't
know it. They don't recognize it. They don't
have the skills, whatever. It doesn't mean they're
bad parents. They're just human beings.
I feel like I've always been doing the
work, and because my family didn't look like
other families,
(10:00):
then as a kid, I was like, well,
what's going on? Why is this one different?
So I was raised by my mom and
my nana, who was
technically my step great grandmother.
So she wasn't biological, but that obviously didn't
matter. She was my nana. She was so
those were my parents, and I had a
dog who helped in raising me.
(10:21):
And so, you know, this was a funny
family, as as one of my cousins said
to me as a kid. But as an
adult, the work continued, so I was on
my own quest. Then I went to therapy,
and then I've been a practicing Buddhist the
majority of my life and I feel like
that daily work of self reflection,
chanting Nam myoho renge kyo to bring out
(10:43):
your highest potential and everyone around you to
be sort of acting from
what we call in Buddhism, our Buddha nature,
what we call in Hoffman, our higher nature,
our lightened self. That should be the team
leader. When we do the quad checks,
when you have that part of yourself,
really
acknowledge
(11:04):
the other
parts
and kind of take them on like a
divine mother in a way more than a
human mother can do.
And say, okay, emotional self, I hear you.
Okay, body, I hear you. Okay, intellect, I
hear you. Here's how we're gonna do this
day.
And so I think from being consistent and
doing
(11:24):
all of that work, then things get to
evolve, and it doesn't have to be
hard.
Because I think also when people hear the
word work,
it sounds like,
like, deep effort, and you're working through, you're
fighting through something. And I'm not saying there's
(11:45):
not that part of it too, but I
think when you sort of laid a foundation,
then you have the tools to meet whatever
situation comes your way. And then you can
if you're self reflecting,
you're able to see how you're meeting it
now versus how you might have met it
ten years ago or more.
(12:06):
You're describing having a foundation
that sounds deeply spiritual
and finding a through line with
what we call at the Hoffman process, your
spiritual self
or the light that's within you,
and that being the foundation for growth to
evolve as opposed to something you force.
(12:29):
This foundation
and this knowledge that you
wanted to fix something. You spoke about getting
psychology today when you were seven. So something
within you saying,
we need
to address this. You also spoke about your
awareness of what was missing
in feeling abandoned by
(12:51):
your father and how you were in some
ways looking for that throughout your life. If
only
this then
that. Can you give us one example of
how you saw that playing out for you
before you came to the process?
The body can become the battleground between the
intellect and the emotion. So for me,
one of the
(13:12):
largest
battleground moments in belief systems about, because I
don't have a father, here's this thing that's
happening, or because of him, here's this thing
that's happening. So I had a kidney problem
growing up. It wasn't
discovered. I actually discovered it in junior high
school
because I was in an advanced
science program where we got these case histories
(13:35):
that we got to study, and then we
were able to go to the medical school
nearby and see the med students working on
these cadavers of the case studies that we
had been studying.
So as divine intervention would have it, one
of them that I had
was this woman who had passed away. She's
(13:55):
like 80 some year old lady,
and she had some symptoms in her history
that were like mine. And I remember sitting
on my mom's bed doing my homework, and
I was like, this is what I have.
And it was a simple enough thing that
the tube from the kidney to the bladder
was too small. The ureter was too small,
and it was backing up and killing the
kidney. A simple blue dye test would have
(14:16):
shown this. Because I had that case study,
now my mom could say she has this
and, like, go and force them to do
the blue dye test. And in fact, that's
exactly what it was. And so then
from
'14 to '21, I had a kidney surgery
or some kind of surgery almost every year
to fix it, and they ended up taking
it out. So
(14:37):
this is, you know, inherited
from
my father's side. Somebody else in the family
that we found out later had that.
In my mind, even before we knew
that,
in my mind,
I felt like this is about my father.
This is about not having a father. And
(14:58):
if I just had the family history,
in theory,
you go to a doctor and you say,
there's this family history.
Can you please check this, this, and this?
And they do it and you find it,
and maybe it could have been fixed when
I was a child. I have a friend
whose daughter had something similar, and they were
able to fix it as a kid, and
so she has both her kidneys.
I didn't have that.
(15:19):
And I'm fine. My left kidney does all
the work, and so you can't even tell.
I only have one, and we can live
with three quarters of one. So it's fine.
But for years,
I was
just
so upset,
and it felt like such a punishment.
It's like I'm already being punished
(15:40):
by not having
a present father.
And now
because of your effed up genes, this is
how I thought about it. I've been through
all this pain because by the tube being
too small and backing up and killing the
kidney,
I was having consistent
kidney infections.
So I was in a tremendous amount of
(16:01):
pain all the time, and it got to
where I now still have a very high
tolerance for pain because of that, which is
good and not good because you can ignore
things that you shouldn't. So as an example,
when they were doing one of the kidney
surgeries, I got a terrible infection and they
had to put ice sheets on me. They
actually thought I was gonna die or that
I was gonna become septic. And my mother
(16:22):
called my father to tell him, and he
said, by the grace of God, she'll be
okay, and then didn't call back for three
years.
So
that was
hardcore
proof
that you don't care.
You don't love me. I have nothing to
you. Like, who doesn't call back for three
(16:43):
years?
One of the things I realized during the
process
was,
well, maybe he was scared.
Maybe he was scared. Maybe he was ashamed.
I don't know. But it doesn't have to
mean
that I'm unlovable.
And I feel like that
is one of the main takeaways
(17:04):
is that
we're always telling ourselves stories,
and we're assigning meaning to things
to
work with the story that we've
married ourselves to.
We have no idea
really why anybody does anything.
For me, it's like I thought, well,
(17:26):
I don't have all the information.
I can talk about how somebody made me
feel. That's real and valid, of course.
But I don't have to assign a meeting
that means
I'm never gonna have what I want,
or nobody is ever going to love me,
or whatever. You don't have to make something
mean more than it is. Those are the
(17:48):
facts of what happened.
Why they happen?
I don't know.
That's up for debate.
But
I now feel like
the story I've been telling myself
since that happened of, like, see, there's proof
he doesn't love me
isn't true.
Even if it were true,
(18:10):
that
doesn't mean that I'm unlovable.
Regardless of what's true for him,
you know
what's true
for you.
Your relationship with him has not changed.
Are you saying it's not required
to in order for you
(18:31):
to feel
free or to heal?
I've been through many, I wanna say, like,
iterations of this relationship.
The little girl, Simbi, just wanted a dad
even though she never would have said that.
Then
there was
the teenage
(18:52):
simby
who felt very divorced from her body because
of all the stuff I just said. There's
so much to impact in the teenage simby
of just feeling, in general, rejected by men,
but definitely starting from the father stuff.
Then
there was
the angry
part where I really and that's why I
went into therapy because I was really just
(19:14):
wanted to, like, physically hurt him because, again,
I was blaming my
physical pain from all the kidney stuff on
him. And I'm like, I would like to
give you a little bit of of a
taste of this. So there was, like, the
vengeful thing, and there's so many other stories
of him
physically closing doors in my life to access
to him and just being just not available.
(19:35):
And then, of course, there was also the
part that wanted an apology,
that wanted an acknowledgment and an apology, and
that that would fix it.
Not for me. I'm not saying for anybody
else that
that is not valid and required,
but I didn't get it
and realized
that
(19:55):
I probably
never will.
And now from where I'm sitting now with
the experience that I just shared earlier,
I also feel like it doesn't matter.
This is wonderful
because
I'm not waiting for somebody else
to make me feel better.
(20:18):
I love this image of the divine mother
that you mentioned.
You are such a strong
woman.
What have you come to know about that?
Because there is also this positive legacy
that our parents leave.
That's right.
That's right.
About being a strong woman,
(20:40):
I have mixed
feelings about it because
I feel like it's,
kind of like a black woman
trope and expectation
to be a strong woman.
Black women in general have a different
level of weight to carry
in this society.
(21:01):
So
you build muscles when you do heavy lifting
or you fall over, you know, and you're
out, and I'm not about to be out.
So you just have to be strong. And
I even used to have resentment, and maybe
I still do. I don't know.
Resentment about that.
What I am that I'm proud of is
I'm resilient.
(21:21):
I keep going.
And so I'm resilient in all the ways,
emotionally,
physically, spiritually,
intellectually.
I'm always a, okay, and the store closes,
and what else are we gonna do?
How do you see your strength
showing up for you in this understanding
(21:43):
of your father that you've recently come to?
That,
I was strong enough
to keep moving forward.
Even just taking the FaceTime I was telling
you about,
I could have not accepted it.
I could just hide and be like, door
closed. And I did that for years. I
(22:03):
didn't talk to him.
And that was part of this process where
I really was at a place at that
time where I felt like this isn't healthy
for me. I'm not gonna engage in it.
And I think that sometimes you have to
do that in relationships.
But the reason that I did that,
it was for self protection
(22:23):
because I was still believing the story of
if you
disappoint me, if you treat me a certain
way, if you say a certain thing,
I'm assigning
the meaning still to myself of I'm not
valuable, lovable, whatever.
But if I remove that meaning, you can
still choose to not have people in your
life that aren't meeting
(22:44):
how you wanna be treated, of course. And,
yes, we should.
But if somebody calls me stupid, that's not
gonna hurt my feelings because I know I'm
not stupid. But if somebody
abandons me,
then
because I had the belief system,
that's just always what's gonna happen. That is
painful because I believe that
(23:05):
to be true, that I'm going to be
left. You know, I believed that. So then
when it shows up or it feels like
it's gonna show up,
that is
hurtful.
But I feel like what's happened with him
is I've unplugged
his actions
from
that belief system. Like, I'm not walking around
(23:27):
believing that anymore.
So then I'm free of that, and I
can just
be
present in the moment that we're in rather
than waiting for
the
abandonment
to happen or the hurt to happen.
I love what you've said.
There can be some strength and anger. And
we talk about this at the process. There
(23:49):
is a strength in that.
What you've just described
beautifully though, is the strength to question your
own narrative,
the strength to ask
what happened to him.
Maybe he was scared.
Maybe that's not true,
but it sounds like you're enjoying the benefit
(24:10):
of freedom
of unplugging
the connection.
Right. Because that's the
goal. The goal is freedom. The the goal
is your own happiness.
The goal is joy, and it's hard to
have as much joy
and lightness
as you can if you're holding on to
(24:31):
old
resentments.
It's taking up too much space.
And, again, it's not saying, like, just let
people treat you however they want. No.
You can still not have them in your
life and not carry the resentment.
Whatever you want, just drop the resentment some
kind of way. Your description about
(24:52):
writing what may have happened to your father
and then finding out later that some of
that was not far from the truth. How
do you describe that?
I feel like on
a cellular level,
we're all connected,
especially if you're talking about, like, in your
actual DNA lineage. We have epigenetics, so we
(25:13):
have information that's passed on to us through
our ancestors
into ourselves, and they express themselves in various
ways that we have no idea, even though
they've done some studies.
And then I feel like on a creative
level, just as a writer in general,
I feel like writing is a form of
channeling.
I
(25:34):
would say
that if you are
doing
emotional
investigative work
with someone who is in your DNA lineage,
you're going to get
answers,
whether it's in a dream, it's in a
feeling,
you meet somebody, and they
(25:55):
present
something. You're like, well, that could be the
case, what however it comes. For me, it
was through writing
that
can give you an answer
or give you another perspective even if it's
not an answer. It can give you another
perspective or give you a question
that can lead you to an answer.
So I feel like if you're open
(26:16):
and seeking,
you can get guidance from a stop sign.
You know, like, really. It's also
evident of this connection.
Even though he wasn't there for you growing
up or, you know, you said you've seen
him a handful of times in your life,
there was still a presence in his absence
(26:38):
even in an emotional level that you were
able to access what you spoke of as
reservoir of knowledge.
Coming to a sense of peace around that,
what do you think that offers you
going forward?
With him, I feel like, specifically, it offers
me
an ability to just enjoy him for what
(26:58):
he is
without
having a filter on
and always referring to the past of what
wasn't done, hasn't been done, whatever,
and just being present. Like, we talk about,
like, just being able to be just in
the moment.
I think for other relationships,
just the exercise of being curious
as to why
(27:20):
someone
is behaving in a way that we don't
enjoy
rather than making a story about what
that must mean because we're always so certain.
And being curious and then deciding again how
you're gonna process it and how you're gonna
respond.
I just keep coming back to the you're
(27:41):
not worthy or lovable
because those are some of my things.
I had something very interesting happen just recently
with two long term friends.
One is a mom person in my life,
you know, around my birthday, and
we were gonna have a birthday party, and
it was canceled.
And then I went
(28:02):
to I can't trust anybody.
That stuff, that narrative came right back up
because
the patterns still exist. However, they're not so
deeply rooted. So as soon as it came
up,
I was like, well, that's not
true.
And it was almost kind of, like,
surprising that that even came up.
(28:24):
And then other friends
were upset and had their feelings about it
and felt like, you know, indignant and mad
for me. And then
rather
than cutting that person off, wouldn't do because
I love her, and also that wanting to
cut things off is really like the protective
coating. Again, the little girl thing.
Rather than doing that, I just, like, went
(28:45):
and saw her, and all of that melted
away. And I saw, like, oh, she's just
not okay right now. And she said that,
and it was like, not a big deal.
I don't even care about the party. It
was just the trigger of it thinking and
being not thought of or discounted in some
way.
And I thought to myself, this is how
wars start.
People have old hurts.
(29:07):
We talk about transference, you know, in the
process. People have old hurts.
Something happens or somebody reminds them of something
from however long ago,
and then they respond to this person or
this situation
from the old hurt,
usually respond badly.
And so I was really
(29:29):
proud of myself that I didn't stay in
that belief system
for any real amount of time and that
I didn't let it color our relationship.
It just didn't take roots. And I credit
the process for that because
I think
what
it does is it does uproot
(29:52):
those narratives.
And
by maintaining
some of the tools that we learn there,
you're continually
weeding the garden. You're continually pulling those things
out because because things in life are gonna
come up and you're gonna be like, no.
That's a weed. That's not true. Let's take
it out. Versus if you don't do any
(30:14):
work,
life has been just giving miracle grow
to those belief systems.
What I really am hearing from you is
this
curiosity about another person's experience when something's
hard
rather than evidence that I'm not lovable.
Beautiful.
Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing.
(30:34):
Is there any last thing you'd like to
share with us before we go? Anything that
you didn't say that you'd like to?
As a
storyteller,
I feel like
that has always been who I was before
I knew that that was a job and
that I did that with my Barbie dolls.
And so it always had a sense of
(30:56):
play. Like, everything that I'm doing
now, like, I was doing with Barbies. Like,
I would have my friends come over, and
I would
tell them the the script, essentially,
of the play that we were gonna enact
with the dolls, and I was directing and
and world building. Like, it's all the same
things. And I'm saying that because I feel
like
(31:16):
to be happy,
I need to be
as much of that little girl as possible.
I feel
super lucky
in that
what I was
doing naturally as a little girl,
I'm doing
in the adult version of my life.
(31:37):
And then also
Hoffman
helped me
recognize it in a different way
because of the element of play.
Even the being curious about, like, what's going
on with somebody else that can be done
in a playful way, like by yourself. They
don't even have to be involved. Obviously, it's
more fun if you're with somebody else,
(32:00):
But just to just take it as way,
like, well, let's pretend. Like,
maybe it's this, and it can be ridiculous
and outlandish. And then suddenly you're you're laughing
about it.
And then some of the sting of whatever
story you've been telling yourself
gets unplugged
if you can play with it. This is
brilliant.
So recognizing in a way you're authoring
(32:20):
or building your own story,
and if some part of that is hurting
you or leading you to the conclusion that
you're not lovable,
you can question it.
The strength to question
that, to play with it,
to be curious,
and to write a new narrative.
Drop the mic.
(32:46):
Yes.
Beautiful.
Oh, my gosh. You're radiant. Thank you so
much for being here with me.
Thank you so much. Thank you for all
of your help and support. I love you.
I love you.
(33:07):
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. To
(33:29):
find out more, please go to hompaninstitute.org.
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