Podbit · On Purpose with Jay Shetty
At the Hoffman Institute, a teacher told Camila she was still a little girl screaming for her mommy — and then delivered the gut-punch: mommy isn't coming. You are your own mother now. The realisation that she had to parent herself, at 29, was both devastating and deeply liberating.
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At 16:00 · chapter starts 15:08
Two days after deciding to book Hoffman, Camila had a huge blowout with her mother — an uncharacteristically reactive, burnt-out explosion that horrified her. That fight became the thing she brought to a Hoffman exercise designed to help participants revisit a triggering memory and imagine reacting differently. Camila could not do it. She was totally stuck, insisting there was only one way to react in that moment. Her teacher pulled her aside and heard her saying, in essence, 'why do I always have to be the bigger person?' [1] — Camila Mendes "At the Hoffman Institute, a teacher told Camila she was still a little girl screaming for her mommy — and then delivered the gut-punch: mom…" 16:00 And then the teacher said it: 'I hear a little girl in a woman's body screaming, I want my mommy. And mommy ain't coming. You are your mommy now.' Camila fell apart. It wasn't a condemnation of her mother — who she describes as loving and present — but a realisation that at 29 she was still waiting to be taken care of, still grieving what a 15-year-old girl had needed. The insight: she could now be the mother to that little girl herself. That reframe changed everything.
The Hoffman Institute program requires participants to disconnect entirely for a week — no phone, no reading, no music — to stay fully present to the emotional experience.
Anxiety is not fear. Fear has an object — a wolf, a threat. Anxiety is the vertigo of standing at the edge of infinite possibility and knowing that choosing any one thing closes off all the others. Kierkegaard argued that the depth of your anxiety is proportional to the depth of your potential.
AI nailed Andrew Huberman's vertigo-vs-low-blood-pressure diagnosis because that pattern has been reported millions of times. But every patient's liver is different and data on liver surgeries is scarce worldwide — making solo robot surgery dangerous. The rule is simple: data abundance means AI can help; data scarcity means keep the human in the loop.
Fei-Fei Li's father had liver surgery performed by a da Vinci robot guided by a surgeon. The result: 10 times less blood loss than a typical procedure. This isn't replacement — it's the gold standard of human-machine collaboration, where the human's judgment and the robot's precision combine.
US drug overdose deaths fell from 110,000 to roughly 70,000 — the biggest CDC-recorded single-year drop ever. Men's rates fell 27% in one year, and the steepest decline of all was among 15–24-year-olds, down 37%. The crisis narrative around young men needs to make room for signs of genuine progress.
Kessler thought his grief expertise would protect him. It didn't. When his son David died unexpectedly, he found himself on the floor — and eventually realized that acceptance alone wasn't enough. That unmet need became the sixth stage: finding meaning.
Grief isn't just death — it's any unwanted change. Kessler lectured at Coca-Cola and General Mills not because they had lots of funerals, but because change management is grief management. People who grieve well live well.
Witnessing someone's grief isn't just emotional support — it's an essential act of healing. Kessler argues grief is a severance and connection heals it. But real witnessing has two steps: seeing the pain AND affirming the person's capacity to recover.
Avoiding grief isn't free — it's exhausting. Kessler's beach ball metaphor nails it: pushing a small balloon down is easy, but holding a massive beach ball underwater takes constant, draining energy. Unattended feelings don't disappear; they just consume you.
Most people try to control their environment to avoid triggers. Kessler flips this entirely: triggers aren't problems to manage around — they're a detailed map to your pain and your healing. Every trigger points directly to what needs attention.
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