Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

“What matters is: Are you free?” asks Elizabeth Ralph. “Do you feel free?” Ralph is a former finance trader, and the founder of the Spiritual Investor, where she now helps people reach financial freedom in less traditional ways. Together, we explore some of my own (self-limiting) stories around money, and how our ego and identity gets wrapped up in our relationship to money. Ralph coaches us through moving toward a place of money neutrality, where it feels like money doesn’t have such a tight grip on us. And she explains why she believes the spiritual world “has to wake up to money.” For links to Elizabeth Ralph’s programs and the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“The midlife crisis is not a dark night of the soul,” says Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy. “It’s a dark night of the ego.” Conley, who is also the author of Learning to Love Midlife, outlines the main myths that we’re led to believe about midlife—and some optimistic data about what actually happens during this chapter of our lives. He shares different frameworks for navigating the transitions that come in midlife. We talk about how in the early parts of our lives, we’re often naturally focused on constantly accumulating knowledge—and how it can be such a relief, and a gift, to be able to shift into distilling it all into wisdom. For links to Chip Conley’s work and the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this month’s solo episode, I’m sharing: The tools and people helping me to manage my fear right now. Thoughts on growing up versus waking up. The most important things I’ve learned from the Spiral Dynamics theory of human development, and Ken Wilbur’s concept of holarchies. What makes me believe there is a way for many of us to expand our worldviews and push up the spiral now. And more. For the show notes (and so many links if you want to go deeper), head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In her new book, The Genius Myth, journalist Helen Lewis explores how and why we label certain people geniuses; and the impact this has on said geniuses, us, and culture at large. Today, we talk about our perception of the exceptional, and some of our more pernicious and dark misperceptions. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Living on fire is really a metaphor for figuring out two things,” says Shannon Watts. “What is limiting you. And what is calling you.” Watts spent 11 years as the full-time volunteer lead of Moms Demand Action, which she founded. Now, as she puts it, Watts continues to summon the audacity of other women. Today, she shares so many useful life nuggets from her new book, Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark Into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“You're going to find a lot of people doing their best, revealing how beautiful and strange we are, and how remarkable we can be,” says Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and founder of On Being Krista Tippett. In this conversation, Tippett shares where we might turn for more hope and pleasure, and how she thinks about what shapes our presence in the world. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In her new memoir, The Dry Season, Melissa Febos (award-winning author of Girlhood) examines her (and our culture’s) relationship to love, to falling in love with someone, to being in love with someone. Today, we talk about why she decided to spend a year celibate after a particularly rough breakup, and what more she wanted from a relationship, from herself, and for her life. We talk about being conditioned to be codependent, the lovely things that have happened in our own long-term relationships when we’ve gone off script, what it actually means to be a people pleaser—and more. For links to Melissa Febos’s books and the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, this is a wild one. Danielle Gibbons is not a psychic, but she is a channel—she channels messages from Mother Mary. Today, she’s sharing her origin story, and a message from Mother: about how to create something sustainable and meaningful, adapt to these ever-evolving times, and find a little bit of beauty right now.  For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In May’s monthly solo episode, I’m reflecting on: motherhood, my mom, the Performance of Parenthood, and what provokes my anger around Mother’s Day. How badly the world needs us all to hold a balance of the masculine and feminine—and how badly we need the feminine to rise in men. What it might look like if we didn’t operate out of fear. Applying my writing process and system to other areas of life. What keeps us from saying no, and what keeps us from saying yes—based on our Enneagram types. And, more. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“I think both of those things are problematic—both that we’ve optimized too many things and that it’s our sole worldview,” says Coco Krumme, applied mathematician and author of Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization. Today, we talk about what we lose by prioritizing optimization above all else—and what we could gain by choosing something else. We also talk about why Krumme thinks the threat of surveillance capitalism is overblown, and why she’s more optimistic about what humans can do than what AI can do. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here, I'm sharing another podcast series with you, called Other People’s Problems. In her new season, host and therapist Hillary McBride explores the potential power of psychedelics in a therapeutic setting. She leads clients through drug-assisted therapy—and we'll experience these real, unscripted sessions as they unfold, and get a more honest look at therapy using psychedelics. Which I hope helps to further demystify this often misunderstood practice and tool in trauma recovery. In this episode, we hear from Donovan, who has lived in fear and anger ever since telling the truth about being abused as a child. Now, after several ketamine therapy sessions, Donovan is able to look back at his young self with care. And, for his own children, Donovan works to become the kind of adult he needed then. You can listen to more episodes of Other People’s Problems at: https://link.mgln.ai/yK69mt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Psychological astrologer Jennifer Freed, PhD, shares: What’s happening, astrologically speaking, that can inform the choices we make now, in the present. And she gives us a preview of what’s coming, and what opportunities the next astrological shifts will bring us. “Coming this summer, we will have a full transformation of planets and their signs,” says Freed. For the show notes and links to Freed’s latest projects, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Satya Doyle Byock is a psychotherapist, author of Quarter-Life, and a great teacher of Carl Jung’s work. She uses the I Ching, an ancient Taoist divination system, as a tool to help guide her life. (Not dissimilar to how others might consult tarot, astrology, Human Design, etc.) Today, we talk about the beauty of the I Ching, and much more. Including: How we’re seeking some combination of meaning and stability in our lives, a balance of the inner and outer world, and more harmony between rationalism and irrationalism. I learned some new things about Jung’s theories on the unconscious, archetypes, and synchronicity. We pondered moments of meaning that can’t be fully explained, and where the binary instinct comes from to either dismiss science or the sacred. And, ultimately, what a larger paradigm might look like if we made space for all of it—for expanded science, for synchronicity and meaning, for the masculine, and for the feminine. For the show notes (including links to resources on the I Ching and our video workshop), head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“It’s a shame that we lose so much of that history and we silence so many of those voices when we just try to flatten the whole Bible,” says scholar, TikTok hero, and author Dan McClellan. Today we talk about why McClellan has chosen to attend to questions about the Bible, and challenge people who want to translate it, or negotiate with it, to the benefit of their own dogma. We also talk about how he squares this with his own faith (McClellan became a Mormon at the age of 20). And we explore past and present understandings of God, sex, and the law. McClellan’s perspective is an antidote to so much that is unnecessarily harsh about our current culture—and his work serves as a map for how we can approach many of life’s bigger questions and debates. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For April’s guest-less episode, I’m looking back on the wild ride that was this month, and trying to make sense of this period of contemplation in my life. I share a few realizations I’ve had about: uncertainty (involving Phil Stutz’s “evil wedding cake” theory); betrayal (involving a special tarot reading with Mark Horn); whether or not I have faith that the universe will support me (involving a group workshop on what women want); and what we’re meant to be doing here (involving a gondola ride with Chelsea Handler). I also answer a couple of listener questions about how I manage my time, and my research and creative processes. For the show notes, head over to my Substack.== Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“ Here are my real tools—because fantasy tools give you fantasy results,” says Laura Day, New York Times–bestselling author and renowned psychic. Today we get into her new book, The Prism, and her simple, effective approach to the kind of change that is often tiny, and incremental, and yet can reconstruct your whole life. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What actually motivates us? When we disagree with someone else—how can we do it better? Social psychologist and author of Outraged, Kurt Gray, PhD, shares what he’s learned from studying the behaviors of people with different experiences. He corrects a few funny things we got wrong about human evolution. And he explains what “concept creep” and “the creep of harm” mean—and why we’re generally much safer than we think. We talk about what tends to give birth to polarization, why we behave the way we do on social media, and why we often forget the complexity within our own perspectives. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“ My work is about getting the logjams out of your personal river so things can flow again,” says one-of-a-kind, intuitive coach Anne Emerson. Today, she outlines her process (holographic repatterning) for helping people to work through limiting beliefs—to recognize the false stories that we tell ourselves on repeat, and to break free from them. It’s perhaps surprisingly fun. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For decades, Elaine Pagels’s work has been changing the historical landscape of Christian religion. She’s also changed the way many people, including myself, see the world. Pagels is a religion professor at Princeton University, and the author of seminal, award-winning books like The Gnostic Gospels, and her newest, Miracles and Wonder. We talked about the surprising things she’s learned about Jesus and his followers; what his most radical teaching was; and why Jesus, this essentially unlikely traveling rabbi, emerged as the figure he did in our culture. And why this all still matters today. We talk about Pagels’s own story, her personal spiritual pull; as well as a vortex I went down in boarding school that made me understand how susceptible we all are to constraints that explain the world in overly reductive and simple ways. We reflect on how natural it is for us to want some sense of connection with a transcendent being. And how this has shaped the way Elaine approaches her work: not with the intention of destroying a framework, but looking for ways to expand it.  For links to all of Elaine Pagels’s book and the (many) show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this month’s solo episode, I spend some time thinking about why psychiatrist Phil Stutz observed that I’m holding myself back. And why I have a hard time with the idea of marketing, or promoting, my own work. I also share more about Phil’s concept of Part X—which gives you problems that you don’t need, and solutions to those problems that only make it worse. I think about how my own Part X has changed; and why it’s currently trying to convince me that I’m too good, too righteous, too pure…to be fully engaged. And, how, when we put ourselves in motion—when we go for something, even if we get knocked down—it’s an opportunity to truly grow and learn (which Phil would call an opportunity to “meet the father”). For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices