Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen
Writer Elise Loehnen explores life’s big questions with today’s leading thinkers, experts, and luminaries: Why do we do what we do? How can we understand and love ourselves better? What would it look like to come together and build a more meaningful world?
Episodes
April 24, 2025 • 61 mins
“ 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.
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Mark as Played
April 17, 2025 • 56 mins
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...
Mark as Played
April 10, 2025 • 49 mins
“ 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 mor...
Mark as Played
April 3, 2025 • 55 mins
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...
Mark as Played
March 31, 2025 • 39 mins
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 tr...
Mark as Played
March 27, 2025 • 47 mins
I had the great honor of writing a book with legendary psychiatrist Phil Stutz. Now that True and False Magic is out, I got to ask him about some of the concepts that have remained on my mind: the lie of certainty, the purpose of creativity, why some of the hardest parts of life are also what makes it compelling and fun, and why he believes I should be 10 percent more evil (and maybe you should, too).
For our book, more of Phil St...
Mark as Played
March 20, 2025 • 46 mins
Diego Perez is widely known by his pen name, Yung Pueblo. He’s a #1 New York Times bestselling author, and his latest book is How to Love Better. Today, we both share a bit about our own relationships, and what we’ve learned from our partners. We talk about the myths and archetypal relationships that are served to us, and how many of us have been conditioned to go into a relationship looking for someone to solve all our problems. W...
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March 13, 2025 • 51 mins
Diane Hennacy Powell is now known as the neuroscientist from The Telepathy Tapes podcast (it’s created by Ky Dickens, and it’s great). Hennacy Powell trained at Ohio State University and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she received her MD and psychiatric training. She has been on faculty at Harvard Medical School. And she is a leading expert on autism and savant syndrome. Her research focuses on autistic children who appear...
Mark as Played
March 6, 2025 • 64 mins
This episode has been a very long time in the making: Richard Rohr is a Franciscan friar, the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, and one of the most profound teachers. Today, we explore the prescient themes from his new book The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. He helps us to make sense of disorder, evil, anger, and grief—and he helps us to find our fulcrum of growth. He makes the case that ...
Mark as Played
February 27, 2025 • 47 mins
Chelsea Handler shares my favorite stories from her new book I’ll Have What She’s Having, along with a few poignant lessons she’s gleaned while growing up. She talks about a pivotal conversation she had after Jane Fonda called her in; what she learned about the futility of defensiveness in therapy; and how we might tend to our jealous thoughts. We also talk about how Chelsea has big-sistered so many women, including me. And what I’...
Mark as Played
February 24, 2025 • 43 mins
After finally getting to meet the incredible Richard Rohr (interview coming to the podcast soon), I sat down to reflect on: The unlikely road I’ve been on to become so immersed in Christian writers (was never on my bingo card), and what I misunderstood in my original interpretation of Jesus. What I’ve learned about dying to your small self and growing into your big self. What it means to be a prophet—not a fortune-teller, but a tru...
Mark as Played
February 20, 2025 • 56 mins
I’ve had a few conversations with spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl but I finally got to talk to him about the topic that’s been on my mind for a long time: evil. How do we define, and perceive what’s evil? What role does evil energy play in our own lives? What transgressions might we take responsibility for, and how? What moral conflict is part of our work, and what does not belong to us? What’s the purpose of it all? Where do we ulti...
Mark as Played
February 13, 2025 • 52 mins
Loretta J. Ross’s particular approach to deciding when, and how, to call someone in helps us to avoid making other people’s problem our problem. It gives us a way to effectively be in conversation with people capable of causing harm—instead of trying, and failing, to be in defense of the vulnerable. Ross shares what she’s learned from watching people be manipulated into hating, and from helping them to release that hate. She talks ...
Mark as Played
February 6, 2025 • 61 mins
Psychotherapist Nicole Sachs has been pioneering a simple, yet remarkable approach to helping people with chronic pain, anxiety, and other very human conditions. Her story today begins with how she discovered Dr. John Sarno and eliminated her own debilitating back pain a few decades ago. Sachs explains why she’s come to believe that many chronic conditions stem from a dysregulation in the nervous system that leads the brain and the...
Mark as Played
January 30, 2025 • 45 mins
There is a historical lack of research on the female body—and this has hurt women, men, everyone. But now, there is some fascinating research on the female body, which Cat Bohannon, PhD, shares today. (Bohannon is the New York Times–bestselling author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.) For example, Bohannon explains why the fat around our butts and hips is quite special, and how women tend to m...
Mark as Played
January 27, 2025 • 38 mins
I recorded this month’s solo episode from the floor of the hotel room where I stayed for a couple of weeks after the fires broke out in Los Angeles. There, I met an incredible cast of characters and I started to process what’s happening in our city: Acts of bravery that have stunned me. The incredibly moving ways we have shown up for each other. Other very human responses that have created some dissonance. What I think will change ...
Mark as Played
January 23, 2025 • 54 mins
Why do we go along with situations that make us comfortable? What can we learn from nervous laughter, or a crocodile smile? If we’ve been conditioned to be overly compliant, how do we learn to be a little more defiant? How do we intuit when it’s the right time for us to comply, and when we’re better off defying? Sunita Sah—trained physician, Cornell University professor, organizational psychologist, and author of Defy—answers these...
Mark as Played
January 16, 2025 • 61 mins
In the past three decades, renowned author Pico Iyer has made more than 100 trips to a small monastery in California. Today, he shares what he’s learned there, along with other moments of beauty from his new book Aflame. He talks about why many of us crave a particular type of silence, how to escape the trappings of our minds, why a recollection can be more profound than a realization, and how he’s come to see the people in his lif...
Mark as Played
January 9, 2025 • 45 mins
Trying to bring the best sparkly version of yourself to your own healing: It just doesn't work, says Katherine May. In this conversation, we return to May’s New York Times–bestselling book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. It feels more relevant now than ever. We talk about finding a home for lingering, unexpressed grief and for vast, unsettled feelings. We talk about rest, creative work that we love, and...
Mark as Played
January 2, 2025 • 46 mins
Drawing from Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy, Gabby Bernstein created this simple, and yet powerful, process that you can do for one minute a day—or whenever you need to check in with yourself and reconnect with the core of who you are. It’s a helpful tool for (safely) recognizing beliefs, behaviors, and patterns that limit us—and then befriending these smaller, childlike parts of us, instead of letting them control us. It’s ...
Mark as Played
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