Katy Perry credits a week-long, $5,350 hippy healing retreat with turning her life around through methods including beating a pillow with a baseball bat and ripping up phone books.
And others who have been to The Hoffman Institute in California — where participants spend thousands to give up their phones, alcohol, sex and exercise to “live more consciously” and break bad behavior patterns — tell The Post it helped them too.
Perry, 39, says taking the seven-day Hoffman Process helped her battle depression after a breakup with Orlando Bloom in 2017. The duo reunited a year later and got engaged in 2019.
“I had a really tough year, and I finally went to Hoffman towards the end of that year that we were separated, and then I got the tools and spoke the same language, and it changed my life,” she told “Call Her Daddy” podcast host Alex Cooper, revealing Bloom had also attended the retreat in Petaluma when they first began dating.
“It saved my life. I would be dead without it. I would not be on this planet without that process — and meditation,” she said in the interview, describing the process as “intensive re-wiring of your neural pathways” that helped her purge “negative habits.”
The “Woman’s World” singer – and celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Sienna Miller, Oliver Hudson, Hoda Kotb and others – credit the method, which also involves techniques such as chopping wood as a means to move through trauma, with helping them achieve deeper connections with their authentic selves.
The Hoffman Process was established in 1967, by New York-born Bob Hoffman, a men’s tailor with no formal training in psychology, psychiatry or psychotherapy.
Hoffman’s teachings lead with love, digging into the emotional history of a client’s parents and how they unknowingly adopted negative traits as a result he refers to as “negative love.”
The understanding is meant to yield forgiveness and compassion for the client’s parents or loved ones fostered through sessions involving cathartic exercises to ‘break negative behaviors’.
“It starts with awareness of certain patterns, then expression – the idea that these patterns live energetically in our body and it can be helpful to physically say ‘no,’ to them or remove them or get the energy out,” Sun Valley Idaho-based leadership coach Dave Kashen, 46, who attended the retreat last May told The Post.
Before the retreat, participants must connect with a series of counselors to do an ’emotional audit’, which is designed to uncover the behavioral patterns and vices sparking anxiety and ‘impostor syndrome’.
Participants undergoing the rigorous 12-hour enrollment process must also unearth childhood trauma and past relationships to parents and caregivers limiting their full potential.
Attendees and celebrities – who must participate alongside average guests – then undergo exercises like guided meditation and journaling, coupled with physical activities to stomp out negative feelings of self worth.
Perry isn’t the only star who claims the Hoffman Process had a profound impact on her. Miller called the process “terrifying but extraordinary.” And Hudson, 47, said it helped him unlock and resolve feelings of neglect and abandonment he felt as the child of actress Goldie Hawn.
“It’s an incredible week of enlightenment. My mother was the one that I had almost the most trauma about, interestingly enough, because she was my primary care giver and I was with her all of the time so I felt unprotected at times she would be working and away or she had new boyfriends I didn’t really like,” Hudson said on his podcast “Sibling Revelry” in March.
“The forgiveness the compassion you feel towards them at the end of this process is unbelievable because then you realize they’re only repeating the s–t they went through with their parents.”
Still, not everyone is ready to dive in. Justin Bieber famously walked out of the retreat, telling Vogue in 2019 he was not prepared for the process.
Kashen recalled to The Post literally stomping out his intrusive thoughts like “I’m not good enough” and “I’m too sensitive” when he attended the retreat in May, 2023. He called it a “heart opening experience,” but confessed he initially felt “awkward” doing some of the more physical workshops.
“You have a pillow and a bat and you want to powerfully say ‘no’ to some behavior patterns [you’re trying to break]. You’re physically saying ‘no more of that!’ It’s super awkward at first. I found what worked for me was ‘fake it until you become it,'” he said.
“I didn’t feel much anger,” he said. “[But] one of my commitments was to trust the process. After enough time of screaming and dealing with the emotions it went from feeling like I’m doing the exercise for the sake of the exercise to ‘wow this is a really powerful release.'”
Los Angeles-based Emily, 34, who works in public relations — who declined to give the Post her last name for privacy reasons — attended the Hoffman Institute in 2022 after a break up. She learned through the program she had patterns of being “overly self critical and having low self worth,” she said.
“There were two patterns that I had, until that week, externally blamed others for. Then identifying which parent I adopted that mindset from, and why that parent adopted it as a child, from their parents. A lot of these things are generational, it’s crazy,” she said of the revelation that helped her adopt a new mindset.
She said surrendering her phone and the ping of its news alerts and emails helped her become more grounded.
“We all joked that the world could be ending and we wouldn’t have a clue – the Queen died when I was there and I didnt find out until days later. By the time the week concluded, no one even wanted their phone back – the internet, social media and all of the noise that we are consuming every day from the palm of our hands felt overwhelming and trivial.
“It has wholeheartedly changed my life,” she said.
However, some East Coasters less steeped in California’s holistic healing industry can’t quite shake spending upwards of $5,000 to chop wood and scream about their feelings.
Megan P, 37, from Hoboken, New Jersey, told The Post: “Why would I waste $5,350 to release trauma to be ‘on trend’ when I can release trauma in the woods of my own backyard doing yard work at my cabin?” Megan told The Post.
“One week isn’t going to cut it — sounds like a real hippy gimmick to me.”
