Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

“What does it mean to make change in my life—not from a place that there was something wrong with me?” asks my coauthor Courtney Smith. “But I made choices that have gotten me here. I respect and value those choices. I understand I wouldn’t be here without them. And I'm also choosing to do something a little bit different going forward.” Courtney is a coach, group facilitator, and Enneagram exper...

Today it’s just me, sharing a few revelations I’ve had this summer around: The set ages we seemingly get stuck at. Emotions I’m connecting to for the first time in my life (and how certain codes of anger have helped me). How busyness impacts our physical patterns and the way we hold our bodies, or clench our weight. And practicing rejection and building our capacity to hear no, while simultaneously building our ca...

“We’re not empty containers just being filled up with fear and terror and trauma,” says psychotherapist Francis Weller. “We’re also medicine carriers.” Many of you will know Weller from his moving conversations about grief with Anderson Cooper, or his beautiful book The Wild of Edge of Sorrow. Weller’s new book, In the Absence of Ordinary, is exactly what we need now. Today, we ta...

“If we stop transforming, and we try to hold ourselves back, we’re effectively stagnating and killing the life that’s ahead,” says psychologist and author Sharon Blackie, PhD. Today, we talk about what Blackie has learned from studying myths and fairy tales, and working to reimagine the stories that currently define women’s lives. She shares a much-nee...

“We can’t change what’s happened, but we can change what it looks like inside of our mind-brain-body network,” says neuroscientist Caroline Leaf, PhD. Here, Leaf shares what she’s learned about how our minds work, and how we can change a thought, a habit, a pattern. And we get into the compelling 63-second intervention from her new book, Help in a...

Thomas Hübl (a frequent guest here) is a renowned teacher whose work has focused on resilience and healing trauma. In this conversation, we explore: Some of our biggest fractured interpretations of the world, and how we can gain more clarity and connection. The impulse to become very certain about something very quickly, and our tendency to see other people in 2D—and the consequences of doing so. Using our own energy to ...

In this month’s solo episode, I’m sharing some thoughts on why everyone seems to want a book under their belt, why that may or may not be the right move for you, as well as concrete tips and takeaways about what to think through before you begin putting words on paper. Most importantly, I share some tips and frameworks for getting you through the creative process once you begin.

For the show notes (and ...

Today, I’m talking to Meggan Watterson—theologian and author of The Girl Who Baptized Herself—about the importance of being embodied, the search for self, where we derive power, and the way that culture is edited and passed down to us. Watterson tells the incredible stories behind the Gospel of Mary (and what happened to Mary Magdalene), and the Acts of Paul and Thecla (and what happened to Thecla). We also e...

Rutger Bregman is the New York Times–bestselling author of Moral Ambition. Today, he shares his model for living a more meaningful life. It’s not about being an idealist, or following your “passions.” It is, in many ways, about effectively solving the problems in our lives using the talents we already have.

For Rutger Bregman’s work (including that amazing viral Davos clip, in case you missed it), head...

“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 t...

“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 n...

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 sho...

“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 I...

“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.

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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 l...

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.

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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...

“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 ...