Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

“We need to be open to things that offend or transcend our worldview because they're clearly doing that for a reason,” says Jeffrey Kripal, PhD. Kripal—who holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University—returns to the podcast for a second time. We talk about different ways to understand the deeper realities of our lives, and his latest book, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. Yes, we get to time travel and conspiracy theories. And also what makes Kripal’s work fun—and funny.

See more about this episode and guest on my Substack.

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“I think it's good to relive the past and then revise your life,” says Edith Eva Eger. “Go through it, but don't get stuck in it.” The world-renowned psychologist, who survived the Nazi death camps, and went on to be a colleague of Viktor Frankl, just turned 97. And she just released The Ballerina of Auschwitz, which is the YA edition of her major memoir The Choice. She joins the podcast with her grandson, Jordan Engler, to talk about how her mindset has evolved—and what she still looks forward to doing.

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Dr. Jim Doty is a neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, and the director of Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. Jim is also a bestselling author—his first book, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart, tells his improbable life story: Jim had a tough start in life. He wandered into a magic shop where he met the shop owner’s mother, Ruth, who offered to spend six weeks teaching him mindfulness and meditation—these weren’t really things at the time—and ultimately how to manifest. After a rollercoaster of a life, including manifesting the list of things he wanted as a tween, he found himself back at the bottom again, and began to attend to making real meaning with his life. This ushered in his last chapter, where he has become much more than a neurosurgeon: He is one of the leading figures in the globe drawing connections between the brain, compassion and care, and how love shows up in the world.

We caught up when Jim was in Riyadh, in the middle of the night for him—thank you Jim!—launching a new AI-enabled mental health app called Happi.ai, which isn’t therapy but is a friend in your pocket. Our conversation begins there before we dive into his newest book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How it Changes Everything. If you think of Manifestation as woo-woo, Jim explains why it’s actually not—and the underlying brain mechanisms that are activated when you focus attention and intention. 

MORE FROM JAMES DOTY, M.D.:

Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How it Changes Everything

Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart

Jim’s App: Happi.ai

Jim’s Website

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Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis has one of the most illustrious resumés of all the guests on Pulling the Thread—and I think we’re the same age. Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University where she serves on the Standing Committee on American Studies and Standing Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. It was at Harvard that Lewis pioneered the course Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship, which she continues to teach and is now part of the University’s core curriculum—as it were, Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice, which means that she is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London. She also served as a Critic at Yale University School of Art. I’m not done—in fact, I could go on and on. She’s the author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, a book on Carrie Mae Weems, and innumerable important academic papers. Today, we talk about The Rise and how it dovetails in interesting ways with her brand-new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, which is about the insidious idea that white people are from the Caucasus, a.k.a. Caucasian—an idea that took root in the culture and helped determine the way we see race today. 

MORE FROM SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS, PhD:

The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America

The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

Carrie Mae Weems

Sarah Lewis’s Website

Vision & Justice

Follow Sarah on Instagram

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James Hollis, PhD is a Jungian analyst who is still in private practice in Washington D.C. Hollis started his career as a professor of humanities before a midlife crisis brought him to his knees—and to the Jung Institute in Zurich. The author of 19 books, Hollis is one of the best interpreters of Carl Jung’s work, making it accessible for all of us who want to understand how complexes, archetypes, synchronicities, and the shadow drive our lives.

Hollis’s books are very meaningful to me—you’ll find a long list in the show notes—and the chance to interview him did not disappoint. In fact, at one point, where he describes what we do to boys as we turn them into men, I actually started to cry. Meanwhile, James Hollis still lectures—you can go to his site to find a way to see him live. The fact that he’s 84 and does not seem inclined to retire—in fact, he told me he has another book coming out next year—is a testament to how a vocation doesn’t feel like work. This is one of my favorite interviews to date. I hope you love it as much as I do.

MORE FROM JAMES HOLLIS, PhD:

Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

A Life of Meaning: Relocating Your Center of Spiritual Gravity

The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves

James Hollis’s Website

RELATED EPISODES:

Connie Zweig, “Embracing the Shadow”

Satya Doyle Byock, “Navigating Quarterlife”

Terry Real, “Healing Male Depression”

Niobe Way, PhD, “The Critical Need for Deep Connection”

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Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. Jamil trained at Columbia and Harvard, studying empathy and kindness in the human brain, and I’ve been a mega-fan for years, after interviewing him for his first book, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, in 2019. His latest book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, is a must-read. It’s a love letter of sorts, a collaboration through the veil with his late colleague Emile Bruneau, who also studied compassion, peace, and hope. 

I would love for every single person to read this book as it paints a more accurate, data-driven portrait of who we are, which is mostly good, and mostly aligned in our vision for the future. Jamil explains what happens to us when fear and cynicism intervene and the way we come to see each other through a distorted lens. He busts some other significant myths as well, namely that we glorify cynicism as being “smart”—you know, no dupes allowed—but cynicism actually makes us cognitively less intelligent. Yes, you heard that right. I loved this conversation, which we’ll turn to now.

MORE FROM JAMIL ZAKI, PhD:

Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness

The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World

Follow Jamil on X and Instagram

Jamil’s Lab’s Website

RELATED EPISODES:

Amanda Ripley, “Navigating Conflict”

"Calling In the Call-Out Culture with Loretta Ross"

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Tara Mohr is a coach, educator and the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead, which is celebrating its 10th birthday this fall. I first met Tara a decade ago and was so taken with her and her insights that we did four stories together—stories that were deeply resonant with women everywhere. These stories were about understanding—and releasing—your inner critic, locating your inner mentor, examining the ways in which you keep yourself in the shadows and why, and the most potent one of them all: why women are so quick to criticize other women. We cover this same ground 10 years on—and it’s just as powerful as it was then. I loved reconnecting with Tara and can’t wait to do more with her over the coming decades, specifically revisioning what it might look like if more women led—but not in a model defined by men, in a way that might be uniquely their own. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM TARA MOHR:

The Inner Mentor Guided Meditation

Tara Mohr’s Website

Tara’s Online Courses

Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead

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Dr. Katie Hendricks is the co-founder of The Hendricks Institute and the co-author of 12 books, including the bestseller, Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment. Katie and her husband, Gay, have been leading seminars and workshops for individuals and couples for decades—moving them from their definition of co-dependence into co-commitment. We touch on it in our conversation, but their definition of co-dependence is the only one I’ve heard that makes sense to me as they suggest co-dependence at its simplest is when your behavior is determined by someone else’s—when you are adjusting yourself around someone else in a way that is a disservice to the relationship. Instead, they argue for co-commitment, where everyone takes complete responsibility for their own actions and their own lives. They coach a lot of tools that I love to talk about on this podcast, including the Drama Triangle, and they also coined the concept of the Upper Limit Problem, which is our tendency—just when things are going really well–to self-sabotage. That’s a big focus of our conversation today.

MORE FROM KATIE HENDRICKS, PhD:

Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment

The Conscious Heart: Seven Soul-Choices that Create Your Relationship Destiny

The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks, PhD

The Hendricks Institute

Foundation for Conscious Living

Follow Katie & Gay on Instagram

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Amanda Montell is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, as well as Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism and Wordslut. Amanda is a linguistics major from NYU and all of her work centers around the way that words—and thoughts—shape our minds, and how our minds are permeable to other factors, whether it’s the halo effect, confirmation bias, or Cult-like sensibilities. Amanda is also the host of a podcast, “Sounds like a Cult.” Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM AMANDA MONTELL:

The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

Follow Amanda on Instagram

Amanda’s Website

Amanda’s Podcast: “Sounds Like a Cult”

Amanda’s Newsletter

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Jerry Colonna is the founder of Reboot and one of the most sought after CEO coaches in the world. Before he began coaching executives, Jerry was a burnt out VC, convinced that there must be a better way to impact the world—and also convinced that if he could influence the upper reaches of corporate structures, if he could help leaders heal, he could vastly improve the lives of all the employees. After all, he had observed the ripple effect of unhealed emotional wounds being taken out on other people—specifically people with less power. This is the focus of Jerry’s two great books about leadership: His first one is Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up and his second is Reunion: Leadership and the Longing to Belong, which takes a probing look at power and privilege and how it can alienate those who already don’t feel like they belong. In today’s conversation, we talk about all of this and specifically one of Jerry’s main queries. This passage is from Reunion: “While necessary, it’s not enough for us to do the inner work of unpacking our childhood wounds and, with fierce radical self-inquiry, free ourselves from the need to reenact the old stories of our pasts. Radical self-inquiry that stops at the question of how we have been complicit in creating the conditions we say we don’t want—a core tenet of my coaching and my book Reboot—is insufficient if it fails to look out to the world as it exists and ask how it could be better.”

MORE FROM JERRY COLONNA:

Reunion: Leadership and the Longing to Belong

Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up

Reboot Coaching

Follow Jerry on Instagram

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Spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl is back for the second part of a series we’ve decided to undertake. If you missed part one, I’d recommend giving it a listen—it ran last week—though there is no test! You can pick up with this episode and you won’t be lost. Thomas is one of my favorite thought partners because of his presence—he can build and hold an incredible amount of space, which I hope is perceptible to all of you who are tuning in from afar. I can feel it through the computer. In today’s episode, we went deeper into our conversation about finding “bad” feelings in our bodies, sitting with discomfort, and learning how to move these sensations up and out. We talked about our collective responsibility to build this capacity—particularly if we’re not deep and directly in suffering ourselves—and why these deposits of collective trauma stick around for so long. On this final point—the presence of dark and dense entities that you can sometimes sense or feel, particularly in highly traumatized parts of the globe—we’re going to devote an entire episode. So stay tuned for Part Three, coming later this fall.

MORE FROM THOMAS HÜBL:

Part One on Pulling the Thread: “Finding Shadow in the Body”

On Pulling the Thread: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”

On Pulling the Thread: “Processing Our Collective Past”

Thomas’s Podcast, Point of Relation

Attuned: Practicing Interdepence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World

Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

Thomas Hübl’s Website

Follow Thomas on Instagram

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Dr. Carol Gilligan is an esteemed professor and developmental psychologist, who is the author of a landmark book called In a Different Voice—a book that I talk about and write about all the time. Back in the ‘80s—Gilligan is 87 now and still working—she looked at all the research from the likes of Lawrence Kohlberg and Piaget and made a stunning and obvious realization: These developmental psychologist giants had only ever studied boys. Typically white, middle-class boys. In response, Gilligan did a study on girls and moral development, a groundbreaking look into how culture genders our response to the world: Gilligan found that for girls, morality is relational and rooted in care—not so much law—and that fear of separation from relationship encouraged these girls to stop saying what they know. She struggled to get this study published—it was rejected multiple times—and has since become the most requested reprint out of Harvard. It also became the subject of In a Different Voice, which has sold 500,000 copies—unheard of in academic publishing. Everything that Carol Gilligan shares with us in this conversation is a revelation and also deeply resonant—and something you will know to be true. Before I go, if you missed Niobe Way’s episode from a few weeks ago, tune in to that next—Niobe was Carol’s student, and has done for boys what Carol has done for girls.

MORE FROM CAROL GILLIGAN:

In a Different Voice

In a Human Voice

Why Does Patriarchy Persist?

Carol Gilligan’s Website

Niobe Way’s Episode: “The Critical Need for Deep Connection”

FROM MY NEWSLETTER:

“What Valley Girl’s Tell Us”

“What Are We ‘Really, Actually” Saying

“The Achilles Heel of Women” 

“How to Keep Caring” 

“Why is it So Hard to Scream?”

EPISODES IN THE “GROWING UP” SERIES:

Niobe Way, “The Critical Need for Deep Connection”

Harvey Karp, M.D., ”The Long-Term Implication of Sleep”

Carissa Schumacher

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You’ve likely heard spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl on my podcast before. This conversation actually happened on his podcast, The Point of Relation, and we went so deep, we decided we needed to do a Part Two, which is coming to you next week. Thomas is the author of two excellent books on collective trauma and resonance: Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World and Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds. He does work all over the globe in geographic pockets where a lot has happened, helping people create containers to move the energy up and out. In this conversation, we talked about locating “bad” feelings in our bodies—specifically in the context of On Our Best Behavior—though the practices we discuss here are applicable to anything. 

MORE FROM THOMAS HÜBL:

On Pulling the Thread: Feeling into the Collective Presence”

On Pulling the Thread: “Processing Our Collective Past”

Thomas’s Podcast, Point of Relation

Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World

Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

Thomas Hübl’s Website

Follow Thomas on Instagram

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Long-time listeners will recognize Carissa Schumacher from this podcast. Carissa is an incredible forensic medium—which means that yes, sometimes the police call on her for assistance in solving crimes and yes, she also talks to people on the other side. But as of the end of 2019, she’s also a full-body channel for Yeshua, or Christ Consciousness. This might sound wild—and it is wild—but what’s expressed during these transmissions is also incredible. It’s deeply resonant, lyrical, and profound wisdom that feels so true—and sometimes counterintuitive—that it doesn’t really matter who is its author. Carissa and by extension, Yeshua, have been guiding lights for me in the past four years bringing me ever closer to myself. If you have an opportunity to go to one of Carissa’s journeys and you feel called, do it. They can be life-changing, in both overt and slowly unfolding ways. 

I asked Carissa to join me for this special series on GROWING UP because I wanted to ask her about highly sensitive children, empathy, and intuition—both its presence in all of us, and what happens as we grow up that causes it to shut down. For highly sensitive people—of which I know there are many who listen to this podcast, hopefully you’ll hear your own experiences reflected here. For parents of highly sensitive children, I hope what you hear will help. Conversations with Carissa are never short though, so we cover a lot of other ground from recent transmissions—the “in-reality self” versus “the in-theory self” and so much more. 

MORE FROM CARISSA SCHUMACHER:

The Freedom Transmissions: A Pathway to Peace

Carissa’s Website

Energy Healer Uta Opitz’s Website 

“The Codes of Anger”

PREVIOUS EPISODES WITH CARISSA:

“Yeshua: Integration not Eradication”

“Understanding Spiritual Power”

“Why Do We Suffer?”

“My Spiritual Teacher and Yeshua Channel”

EPISODES IN THE “GROWING UP” SERIES:

Niobe Way, “The Critical Need for Deep Connection”

Harvey Karp, M.D., ”The Long-Term Implication of Sleep”

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Poet and author Mark Nepo has now written nearly 30 books, including mega-bestsellers like The Book of Awakening. In this latest book, You Don’t Have to Do It Alone, Mark explores the power of friendship to lend life both vital energy and more meaning, likening friends not to the boat, but to the oars that can help you reach the other side of the water. I’ve been thinking a lot about boys and men lately—including the ways in which they suffer under patriarchy too, sometimes in more devastating ways. I’m grateful for people like Mark who are insisting and modeling that to care is to be human—and that intimate friendships are vital for all of us who hope to lead long and meaningful lives. Women have an easier time of this, though we can all benefit from reminders. 

MORE FROM MARK NEPO:

You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: The Power of Friendship

The Book of Awakening

Falling Down and Getting Up

Mark Nepo’s Website

Follow Mark Nepo on Instagram

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Dr. Harvey Karp is the author of The Happiest Baby on the Block which has Bible-like status in the world of parenting. As a beloved Los Angeles pediatrician, Harvey punctured the mainstream with the 5 S’s—swaddling, shushing, swinging, sucking, and holding the baby on its side—all simple interventions that helped parents help their newborns sleep. This was revolutionary—and certainly changed my trajectory as a new parent, as getting five straight hours instead of three can have a huge impact on your mental health. Harvey then codified his findings into “The Snoo,” a bassinet that functions as an extra set of hands: It swaddles, swings, shushes, and keeps the baby safely on its back while it sleeps. In today’s conversation we talk about what it would look like to institutionalize support of new parents, what Harvey’s trying to do about this, why it can be so awful, isolating, and hard to have kids, along with the advice most parents frequently seek. I’m lucky to call Harvey a friend and to be able to turn to him over the years—in fact, Sam slept in a prototype Snoo—so I’m thrilled to share some of his wisdom with all of you. Let’s turn to our conversation now.

MORE FROM HARVEY KARP, M.D.:

The Happiest Baby on the Block

The Happiest Toddler on the Block

The Snoo

Follow Happiest Baby on Instagram

EPISODES IN THE “GROWING UP” SERIES:

Niobe Way, “The Critical Need for Deep Connection”

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Sarah Bessey is the author or editor of five books, including Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith. Sarah writes most prominently about leaving her evangelical upbringing and working through the deconstruction of her religious beliefs to create something that feels more true to her in its wake—as part of this, she co-founded the Evolving Faith community with some of her friends, including the wonderful and late Rachel Held Evans. Bessey writes prolifically about what it means to connect with her idea of God in a bigger and more expansive way—one that has moved from Simplicity, to Complexity, to Perplexity, to Harmony. In addition to Field Notes for the Wilderness, Sarah is also the editor of the New York Times bestseller A Rhythm of Prayer and Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women. In today’s conversation we talked about ideas and processes Sarah holds tenderly, including a shift from peace-keeping to peace-making and trying to articulate a vision of what she is for rather than who she is against. There is much in this conversation to which we can all relate.

MORE FROM SARAH BESSEY:

Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith

A Rhythm of Prayer: A Collection of Meditations for Renewal

Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women

Follow Sarah on Instagram

Subscribe to Sarah’s Newsletter

Evolving Faith

Sarah’s Website

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Dr. Niobe Way is an internationally-recognized Professor of Developmental Psychology, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH) at NYU, and the Director of the Science of Human Connection Lab. She is also a Principal Investigator of the Listening Project, funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and the Rockefeller Foundation. When she was a student, Niobe studied with Carol Gilligan—if you read my newsletter or listen to this podcast, you know Carol is a hero of mine and will be wrapping up this series as a guest. Niobe has done for boys what Carol has done for girls—and their research intersects and Venn diagrams in fascinating ways. While Carol’s research shows that girls come to not know what they know, Niobe traces how boys disconnect from their caring and often enter a period of irrevocably devastating and dangerous loneliness. Niobe is the author of Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection as well as the just-released, Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture, which offers fascinating insight into our culture at large. Along with historical context, Niobe offers beautiful case studies from her research—following and interviewing boys as they grow up—along with notes from boys who have gone on to wreak havoc on the culture, in homicidal and suicidal ways. These notes speak to disconnection, extreme loneliness, and feeling like nobody cares. As I talk about my book in living rooms around the country, I often cite Niobe and Carol Gilligan, specifically the insight that at a certain point—around 8 for boys, and 11 for girls—the word “don’t” enters children’s vocabulary. For girls, it’s “I don’t know.” For boys, it’s “I don’t care.” And of course, girls knows. And of course, boys care. We need to repair our culture so it’s safe for them to stay connected. As you can tell, I’m very excited for this conversation.

MORE FROM NIOBE WAY, PhD:

Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture

Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions

Niobe Way’s Website

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Stan Tatkin is an author, therapist, and researcher who guides couples toward more durable relationships. He developed the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), a non-linear approach that explores attachment theory to help couples adopt secure-functioning principles: In short, Stan and his wife, Tracey, train therapists to work through a psychobiological lens. Often, our brains get away from us when we’re in conflict in our relationships—we lose ourselves to our instincts. He has trained thousands of therapists to integrate PACT into their clinical practice, offers intensive counseling sessions, and co-leads couples retreats with his wife. Tatkin is also an assistant clinical professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. 

Stan wrote Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship more than a decade ago and it became an instant classic. It was due for a refresh to encompass the wider range of relationships we’re now experiencing and it’s just been re-issued, better than ever.

In today’s conversation we talk about the table stakes of a good relationship: Nobody cares about your survival more than your partner, something we easily forget. As it were, we get into a fascinating sidebar on Pre-Nuptial Agreements, which in Stan’s estimation cause many relationships to founder. I’ll let him tell you why.

MORE FROM STAN TATKIN:

Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship

In Each Other’s Care: A Guide to the Most Common Relationship Conflicts and How to Work Through Them

We Do

Wired for Dating

Stan Tatkin’s Website

Follow Stan on Instagram

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Hi, It’s Elise, host of Pulling the Thread. Starting next Monday, I’m doing another special series—this one is about growing up, and no, it’s definitely not just for parents. It’s mostly about re-parenting, or understanding the driving factors of how we all come to understand the world. You’ll hear from four very different voices about childhood, social programming, and development. Two are pioneers in gender development: One of my all-time heroes, developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan, who I write about in my Substack all-the-time who wrote In a Different Voice in the ‘80s, is joining me on the show, and so is Niobe Way, who does for boys what Carol Gilligan does for girls. I’m also talking with legendary pediatrician Harvey Karp, creator of The Happiest Baby on the Block, the founder of the Snoo, and an ardent and early environmentalist—and Carissa Schumacher, a full-body psychic medium and dear friend who is going to talk to us about what it’s like to raise and be a highly empathic and intuitive person—and how you can retain and develop those abilities. Or shut them down. It will be a great series, coming every Monday for the next month. I’ll see you every Thursday for a regular episode.

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Prune Harris has been able to see, study, and shift energy fields since she was born—a gift she didn’t fully realize she didn’t share with everyone else. Prune is an incredible teacher—I’ve been lucky enough to work with her—because can take esoteric and complex energy systems and distill them into metaphors, concepts, and practices that are both easy to understand and easy to do. She has taught me so many simple holds and gestures that have had a direct impact on helping me calm myself down and feel more contained and grounded. She’s the author of a great guidebook, Your Radiant Soul: Understand Your Energy to Transform Your World, and she has an incredibly comprehensive Youtube channel where she teaches simple practices. She’s wonderful. In today’s conversation we cover a lot of ground—from basic holds and energy systems to why most of us need to also ground up. We also discuss the auric membrane and what happens when it gets punctured, by other people, the energy of the world, and psychedelics.

MORE FROM PRUNE HARRIS:

Your Radiant Soul: Understand Your Energy to Transform Your World

Prune’s Website

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Karl Deisseroth is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist and bioengineering professor at Stanford. Karl is also the author of Projections: The New Science of Human Emotion, which is a beautiful revisitation and exploration of his time as a psychiatry resident, where he encountered all sorts of people who didn’t quite understand what was happening to their brains—and by extension their minds.

In the book—and in our conversation today—Karl explores mania, autism spectrum disorder, eating disorders, borderline personality disorder, psychopathy, and dementia, all in gorgeous prose. Karl runs a lab at Stanford that focuses on optogenetics, mind-blowing science that can pinpoint where adaptive and maladaptive behaviors begin in the brain. He’s won the Kyoto Prize and Heineken Prize for his research, which is not surprising—it just might change the entire world of psychiatry.

Today’s conversation is far-ranging and it’s also surprising, including a conversation about how some of these disorders—like eating disorders, which can be deadly, can also be strangely adaptive. Please stick with us. 

MORE FROM KARL DEISSEROTH, M.D., PhD:

Projections: The New Science of Human Emotion

Follow Karl Deisseroth on Twitter

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Ken Wilber's work and intellect is difficult to describe. Throughout a long career—and the authoring of 20 books, including A Brief History of Everything, Grace and Grit, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and The Religion of Tomorrow, Wilber has put together what is essentially a synthesis of every psychological model of development. In fact, he locked himself away for years, writing every model down on pieces of yellow legal paper, and then knit them all together. I’ve written about Wilber’s work at length in my newsletter, which is also called Pulling the Thread—I’ll put links in the show notes—and I talk about his work on this show as well. Most recently, I talked about Ken Wilber with Nicole Churchill in our conversation about Spiral Dynamics. Wilber is a Spiral Dynamics wizard, though he uses it in aggregate with the work of other developmental thinkers, integrating the work of luminaries like Carol Gilligan, Robert Kegan, and others. 

In today’s conversation, we talk about Wilber’s brand new book, Finding Radical Wholeness, which explores the five big processes we all undertake in our lives. In today’s conversation, we mostly talked about two: Waking Up and Growing Up, which are often conflated. Wilber makes the case for why they are unrelated processes—and the essential nature of the latter. While Waking Up, or having a Satori experience is wonderful—and something that 60% of people report—we all need to grow up. Wilber and I spend most of today’s conversation talking about our political environment from the standpoint of developmental psychology: Why we’re so fractured, and what it will look like when the Integral Stage becomes the leading edge of culture and we learn how to include and transcend. I think this is fascinating, and reassuring, and excellent context for a moment that feels so out-of-control.

MORE FROM KEN WILBER:

Finding Radical Wholeness

A Brief History of Everything

Sex, Ecology Spirituality

Trump and a Post-Truth World

The Religion of Tomorrow

Grace and Grit

More books from Ken Wilber

More from Pulling the Thread Podcast:

“The Basics of Spiral Dynamics” with Nicole Churchill

“Our Collective Psychological Development” with John Churchill

More from Pulling the Thread Newsletter:

Transcend and Include

Embracing Nondual Thinking

Right Doing

Ascending and Descending

States vs. Stages

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Nicole Avant is a philanthropist, filmmaker, and former diplomat. In her recent memoir, Think You’ll Be Happy, Nicole describes attending to the grief and shock of her mother’s unthinkable murder—she was shot in the back by a home intruder in 2021—by creating a living legacy in her honor. Her mom, Jacqueline Avant, had turned her Los Angeles home into a refuge for artists, politicians, and world-changers as the partner to Nicole’s father, entertainment mogul Clarence Avant, who is the subject of Nicole’s beautiful documentary,The Black Godfather. Nicole grew up sitting at the feet of extraordinary artists like Bill Withers, Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Sidney Poitier watching as her parents navigated the world to make it better for future generations. In today’s conversation, we talk about that legacy—as well as Nicole’s relationship to the divine. Like her parents, she is a master connector—putting people together to see what unfolds.

MORE FROM NICOLE AVANT:

Think You’ll Be Happy: Moving Through Grief with Grit, Grace, and Gratitude

The Black Godfather, on Netflix

Follow Nicole on Instagram

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“I think we need each other. I say this all the time, there are some things that are too big to feel in one body. You need a collective body to move them through. And I think that's what we need. We need to come together in spaces to heal, not just to consume together or to watch a movie together, but to feel together and to have human emotion in real life, in public and act from the place of a feeling body, to choose action from a feeling body and not just a reactive or a numb body, but a body that feels, a body that can connect. What kind of actions do you take in the world from that kind of body? I think it's different.”

So says Prentis Hemphill, therapist, embodiment facilitator, and author of the just-released, What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World. In today’s conversation—the final in a four-part series—we explore a path to putting ourselves, and the collective, back together, and how this begins with a visioning…but a visioning born from getting back in touch with how we actually feel. I loved their book—just by reading along with Prentis’s own path to re-embodiment, I found myself finding similar sensations in my chest, back and heart. In today’s conversation, we talk about somatics, yes, but also about conflict—and what it looks like to become more adept with our emotions in hard times. This is one of my favorite conversations I’ve had to date on Pulling the Thread—I hope you enjoy it too.

MORE FROM PRENTIS HEMPHILL:

What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

Prentis’s Website

The Embodiment Institute

Follow Prentis on Instagram

RELATED EPISODES:

PART 1: James Gordon, M.D., “A Toolkit for Working with Trauma”

PART 2: Peter Levine, Ph.D, “Where Trauma Lives in the Body”

PART 3: Resmaa Menakem, “Finding Fear in the Body (TRAUMA)”

Thomas Hubl: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”

Gabor Maté, M.D.: “When Stress Becomes Illness”

Galit Atlas, PhD: “Understanding Emotional Inheritance”

Thomas Hubl: “Processing Our Collective Past”

Richard Schwartz, PhD: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”

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“This is the richness of the traditional wife explosion, right? There's this simple idea that you get to choose. Now you're choosing to emulate a situation that's a fiction in that those women didn't choose anything. They had to dress like that. They had to live like that. They had to be nice to the men like that, because they had no bank accounts. They had no cars. They had no licenses. They had no income. They had no security. So, don't equate these two things because you're just kind of living a dignified version of something that was pretty egregiously harmful, you know. And it's the difference, I think, in knowing that you have an option.”

So says Soraya Chemaly, an award-winning writer, journalist and activist whose work has been at the center of mine. Her now-classic, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger lit me on fire—not only for the deftness of her arguments but also because she is a meticulous researcher. What she gave air to in the pages of that book blew me away. She figures prominently in the endnotes of On Our Best Behavior.

Her new book, The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, follows a similar path. Soraya takes something we’ve been served as an ideal—develop resilience—and flips it on its head, both widening and undermining this definition. She challenges our cultural myths about this concept and urges us all to shift and expand our perspective on the trait, moving from prioritizing the role of the individual to overcome and conquer to focusing on what’s really at work, which is collective care and connections with our communities. As she proves in these pages, resilience is always relational. 

MORE FROM SORAYA CHEMALY:

The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma

Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger

Follow Soraya on Instagram

Soraya’s Website

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“Here's what I would say: peace will happen when people invest in cultivating peace as opposed to war. Peace will happen. And one thing I know, for me, I know peace, I know I will never see it, but maybe I can put something in place to where I leave something here and my children's, children's, children's grandchildren can nibble off of and feed on what I've left here the same way I feed off of Frederick Douglass's stuff.”

So says therapist and social worker Resmaa Menakem, author of the New York Times bestseller My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies and originator of the Somatic Abolitionist movement. I met Resmaa many years ago, when he was one of the few voices in this space—Resmaa calls himself a communal provocateur and this is true, as his work challenges all of us to recognize and acknowledge that we’re scared. And that much of this fear is ancient. We were supposed to talk today about trauma in relationships, but our time together took a different turn—Resmaa jumped at the opportunity to put me in my familial and familiar fear. It’s hard, or at least it was for me, but hopefully you’ll stick with us to see how this works. This is the third part of a series on trauma, and it won’t surprise you to hear that Resmaa also trained with Peter Levine.

MORE FROM RESMAA MENAKEM:

My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies

Monsters in Love: Why Your Partner Sometimes Drives You Crazy—And What You Can Do About It

The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

Resmaa’s Website

Follow Resmaa on Instagram

RELATED EPISODES:

PART 1: James Gordon, M.D., “A Toolkit for Working with Trauma”

PART 2: Peter Levine, Ph.D, “Where Trauma Lives in the Body”

Thomas Hubl: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”

Gabor Maté, M.D.: “When Stress Becomes Illness”

Galit Atlas, PhD: “Understanding Emotional Inheritance”

Thomas Hubl: “Processing Our Collective Past”

Richard Schwartz, PhD: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”

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“There are studies showing that, once your basic needs are met, and you're not worried about losing your house, losing your health care, increases in money don't significantly increase happiness, right? So I think, you know, money helps alleviate the very real biological primitive fear of you're gonna die if you don't have shelter and food and in our society, healthcare, but when it comes to things beyond that, I think that we have been sold the lie that money creates security and it's a natural conflation because at a certain point for securing the necessities,and it makes other problems easier to solve also clearly, but emotionally, money is not the solution to an emotional problem any more than food or having a certain kind of body or being married or not married.” 

So says Kara Loewentheil, author of Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head—and How to Get it Out. While Kara and I went to college together, I first met her when she was gracious enough to have me on her hugely successful podcast, UnF*ck Your Brain, where I obviously fell in love with…her brain. Kara is theoretically an unlikely life coach—she graduated from Harvard Law School, litigated reproductive rights, and ran a think tank at Columbia University before deciding that she wanted to go upstream and rewire our culture’s brain instead. 

Kara is fixated on what she calls the “Brain Gap” in women—the thought patterns so natural to women that keep us feeling anxious and disempowered. It’s in that “Brain Gap” that we continue to both unconsciously support and re-enact a culture that doesn’t do great things for women. My work and Kara’s work are very aligned. In fact, Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head—and How to Get it Out is a cousin to On Our Best Behavior—one that’s written with actionable insights, by a life coach, for getting to the root of the problem.

MORE FROM KARA LOEWENTHEIL:

Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head—and How to Get it Out

Kara’s Website: The New School of Feminist Thought

Kara’s Book Website

Kara’s Podcast: UnF*ck Your Brain

Follow Kara on Instagram

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“There are therapies where the person is made to relive their traumas over and over and over again. It's called flooding. And that's the one type of therapy that I do not agree with. I think it, not all the time, but it can be harmful, again, in somatic experiencing, we titrate the experience, we touch into a sensation in our bodies that have to do with the trauma, but just touch into it, and then notice the shift to a higher level of order, a higher level of coherence, a higher, greater level of flow. To go from trauma to awakening and flow is really, I think, what healing is all about."

So says Peter Levine, PhD. If you’ve read or heard anything about trauma, you likely know Peter’s name, as he’s the father of Somatic Experiencing, a body-awareness approach to healing trauma that’s informed the practice of almost every trauma-worker today. Levine is a prolific writer—his international best seller, Waking the Tiger, has been translated into twenty-two languages—though much of his work has been for fellow academics and teachers. He’s just published a new book, An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey, which is highly accessible for all of us. It’s a beautiful book that recounts how he came to understand the somatic experience of trauma through an event in his own childhood—and the scientists and cultures he encountered along the way that informed what ultimately became a world-changing protocol. Today’s conversation explores all of this—including some very surprising appearances by Einstein.

MORE FROM PETER LEVINE, PHD:

An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey

Waking the Tiger: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences

Trauma & Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past

In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness

Somatic Experiencing International

RELATED EPISODES:

PART 1: James Gordon, “TRAUMA/Tools for Transforming Trauma”

Thomas Hubl: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”

Gabor Maté, M.D.: “When Stress Becomes Illness”

Galit Atlas, PhD: “Understanding Emotional Inheritance”

Thomas Hubl: “Processing Our Collective Past”

Richard Schwartz, PhD: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”

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“In writing my book, I wanted to bring it back to the self because being online allows us to have this inappropriate level of audacity. And I think audacity is a very beautiful thing, but it gets so inappropriate online where you can go into Elise's messages and say, “by the way, I saw you liked this, you should be liking this, prove yourself to me”-- when the same person is probably not even able to have a conversation with their own partner in their home, but they can go online and demand people to say certain things, but in your home, are you that courageous to have a difficult conversation? Are you that courageous to have that same level of audacity in your day to day life. And I just worry that we're performing this very shadowy version of ourselves, especially online, without making any kind of effort in our everyday life to cultivate a strong sense of self, where you're able to handle conflict, where you're able to express disappointment to someone face to face and have a dialogue.”

So says Africa Brooke, coach and author of The Third Perspective: Brave Expression in the Age of Intolerance. I’ve been smitten with Africa for years, after I was one of the 12 million-odd people who read her Instagram manifesto, “Why I’m Leaving the Cult of Wokeness” in 2020. There, Africa gave voice to being part of a culture that was supposed to be tented around diversity and inclusion, and yet, she found herself sounding and behaving in an increasingly intolerant way, a way that resisted diversity of thought. Originally from Zimbabwe, Africa lives in the U.K. and had already amassed a following for documenting her path to sobriety online—a path that anticipated the sober curious movement that’s become more mainstream today. She’s well-versed in spotting patterns and recognizing the way culture was working both on her and in her, in ways that were separating her from herself. 

I loved this conversation, a conversation I was very excited to have—it’s a vulnerable one. I’m grateful to Africa for saying what needs to be said and conscious that more of us need to join her. As she explains, people quickly finger her as far-right—and the far-right would love nothing more than to co-opt her—but she’s more of a social justice advocate than ever. She needs people in the center, and people on the left to join her in pointing out how our cancel culture is, to use her term, actually “collective sabotage.” And how we abandon our highest principles when we turn on each other so quickly and make each other “wrong.” I think this conversation speaks for itself.

MORE FROM AFRICA BROOKE:

The Third Perspective: Brave Expression in the Age of Intolerance

“Why I’m leaving the cult of wokeness”

Africa’s Website

Follow Africa on Instagram

Africa’s Podcast: “Beyond the Self”

Loretta Ross’s Episode: “Calling in the Call-Out Culture”

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“Now the tragedy, in one sense is a tragedy, that often people only become open when they've suffered horribly when that is both the tragedy of trauma, but also the promise. It's one thing to be trauma informed. It's another thing to inform our experience of trauma with some kind of courage and some kind of hopefulness for profound change. That's what's got to happen. If that can happen, then maybe out of all this contentiousness that is present in our 21st century United States, maybe something really good can happen, but we've got to pay attention, we've got to act on it, and take responsibility.”

So says Dr. James Gordon, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist, former researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and Chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy, and a clinical professor of psychiatry and family medicine at Georgetown Medical School. He’s also the founder and executive director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine and a prolific writer on trauma. This is because he’s spent the last several decades traveling the globe and healing population-wide psychological trauma. He and 130 international faculty have brought this program to populations as diverse as refugees from wars in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa; firefighters and U.S. military personnel and their families; student/parent/teacher school shooting survivors; and more.

I met Jim many years ago, and he’s become a constant resource for me in my own life and work, particularly because he packages so many of the exercises that work in global groups into his book Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing. We talk about some of those exercises today—soft belly breathing, shaking and dancing, drawing—along with why it’s so important to address and complete the trauma cycle in areas of crisis. This is the first part of a four-part series, and James does an excellent job of setting the stage.

MORE FROM JAMES GORDON, M.D.:

Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing

The Center for Mind-Body Medicine

Follow Jim on Instagram

RELATED EPISODES:

Thomas Hubl: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”

Gabor Maté, M.D.: “When Stress Becomes Illness”

Galit Atlas, PhD: “Understanding Emotional Inheritance”

Thomas Hubl: “Processing Our Collective Past”

Richard Schwartz, PhD: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”

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“I realized I think there's a few things that are in our heads that are so deep in the culture. One of them is the idea that being overweight is a sin. It goes right back to if you look at Pope Gregory I in the 6th century when he first formulates the seven deadly sins, gluttony is there, it's always depicted with some fat person who looks monstrous, overeating. And how do we think about sin? If being overweight is a sin, we think sin requires punishment before you get to redemption. The only forms of weight loss that we admire are where you suffer horribly, right? You think about The Biggest Loser, that horrid, disgusting game show. If you go through agony, if you starve yourself, if you do extreme forms of exercise that devastate your body, then we'll go, he suffered. We forgive you. Well done. We'll let you be thin now, right?”

So says Johann Hari, author of many bestselling books—Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, and Chasing the Scream. Johann is a fellow cultural psychic and his latest book—the subject of today’s conversation—bears this out. He takes on drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro in Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs. He also writes about his own relationship to these drugs, as Johann is taking them. His book is a subtle and sensitive navigation of what is a tightly bound convergence of health and culture—and every page of his book anticipates and precedes the conversation. (As a disclaimer, I’m in it.) We talk about all  of it in today’s conversation, along with what would have happened if a woman had written this book first.

MORE FROM JOHANN HARI:

Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

Johann’s Website

Follow Johann on Instagram

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Hi, It’s Elise, host of Pulling the Thread. Starting next Monday, I’m doing another special series—this set is about trauma, specifically trauma and the body. You’ll hear from four important voices in the space. We’re going to start with Dr. James Gordon, who works with groups all over the world who are in crisis, helping them move their experiences through the body before it gets stuck. Next, we’ll turn to the father of Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine, who has a new autobiography about a horrific trauma from his childhood that led him to the formation of his practice, from which we all benefit today. Next, I’m joined by my friend Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands, the creator of the somatic abolitionist movement who works with me directly to illustrate how we all carry fear. And finally, Prentis Hemphill is taking us home: Their stunning new book, What it Takes to Heal, explores finding our calcified feelings and patterns of behavior in our bodies and navigating conflict without projecting our pain. In the show notes, you’ll find related episodes from years past, including guests like Galit Atlas, Gabor Maté, Thomas Hubl, and Richard Schwartz. I’ll see you this Thursday for a regular episode—though it’s Johann Hari, so there’s nothing regular about it.

RELATED EPISODES:

Thomas Hubl: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”

Gabor Maté, M.D.: “When Stress Becomes Illness”

Galit Atlas, PhD: “Understanding Emotional Inheritance”

Thomas Hubl: “Processing Our Collective Past”

Richard Schwartz, PhD: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”

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“When we can pause for a moment and rifle through all that noise to figure out what the root of the fear is, then we can be with it in a meaningful way, rather than just let it run our lives. And a little bit of fear of death and a little bit of death anxiety is totally normal, for all of us. I mean, it's that thing inside that tells you not to keep walking when you get to the edge of a cliff, and even to like drink water, you know, hydrate, stay alive. It's in us. It's in our DNA. It's rooted in there. And so the goal is never to get over it entirely, but rather to learn from it, to be with it, to not let it run our lives, but rather to let it fuel our lives.”

So says Alua Arthur, a death doula and recovering attorney who is the author of Briefly, Perfectly, Human, which is a guidebook for both how to live and also how to die. Alua is the founder of Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. In today’s conversation, we talk about what it would look like to get our death phobic culture a little closer to the end, why people fear dying, and what can be gained when we recognize the priceless gifts that come when our lives come to a close. Let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM ALUA ARTHUR:

Briefly, Perfectly, Human

Follow Alua on Instagram

Going with Grace Website

RELATED EPISODES:

B.J. Miller: “Struggle is Real—Suffering is Optional”

Roshi Joan Halifax: “Standing at the Edge”

Frank Oswaseski: “Accepting the Invitation”

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“But one thing the whole “Karen” thing did, which I think was very good, was that it pointed out the existence of spaces Ostensibly open to everyone, but not, and then patrolled often by white women saying you don't belong here. And she got a name, and people with that name wince and rightfully so, but without that wince-worthy kind of situation, I don't think large numbers of Americans would realize that there really is a sort of silent apartheid in our public spaces.”

So says Nell Irvin Painter, who Henry Louis Gates Jr. refers to as “one of the towering Black intellects of the last century.” I first heard Nell on Scene On Radio with John Biewen in his series “Seeing White,” and have been biding my time for an opportunity to interview her ever since. I got my chance, with her latest endeavor, an essay collection called I Just Keep Talking, which is a collection of her writing from the past several decades, about art, politics, and race along with many pieces of her own art.

Now retired, Nell is a New York Times bestseller and was the Edwards Professor of American History Emerita at Princeton, where she published many, many books about the evolution of Black political thought and race as a concept. She’s one of the preeminent scholars on the life of Sojourner Truth—and is working on another book about her right now—and is also the author of The History of White People. Today’s conversation touches on everything from Sojourner Truth—and how she actually never said “Ain’t I a Woman?”—to the capitalization of Black and White. 

MORE FROM NELL IRVIN PAINTER:

I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays

The History of White People

Old in Art School

Nell’s Website

Follow Nell on Instagram

Scene On Radio: “Seeing White”

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“What is that instinct that might be asking me to do something really unadvisable or radical or leap outside the bounds of my own life? And that's the space by which I think we move forward in life. And that's the space in which I think we move forward honestly on the page and in writing. And I tell people, you know, what is it that you want to explore in your writing? Like the page is this beautiful opportunity to start taking some big risks, whether it's persona poetry, where you're literally writing in a different voice, or you're naming something that cannot be held in any other space available to you, or you're testing out just an idea that you're not ready to say out loud. The page is this really beautiful field that gives us a lot of courage to then apply that, I think, to our actual lives.”

So says Joy Sullivan, the author of Instructions for Traveling West, which is a guidebook of poems for letting your life fall apart and remake itself as something new. In our conversation, Joy and I explore her early life: how she grew up in Africa, the child of medical missionaries, bound tight by evangelicalism and purity culture—and her relationship to religion and faith now that she’s left that behind. Eve is a central figure in Joy’s poetry, and you will hear why. 

MORE FROM JOY SULLIVAN:

Instructions for Traveling West

Follow Joy on Instagram

Joy’s Newsletter, “Necessary Salt”

Joy’s Website

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Million Dollar Advice is a work and career advice podcast hosted by friends and colleagues Kim Lessing and Kate Arend. Together Kim and Kate run Amy Poehler’s Paper Kite Productions and are very cool and good at their jobs. Each week, they help live callers with their work-related dilemmas. Whether you have a question or you just like listening to other people’s problems, this show will change your life. If you have a problem at work or a career question big or small, write in to [email protected] or leave a message on the Million Dollar Advice Hotline (888) 799-6327. Kim and Kate can’t wait to give you some Million Dollar Advice!

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“You want to find yourself? Give. We're not hungry for what we're not getting. We're hungry for what we're not giving. And then at the same time, you watch this old pattern of guarding what you have and of watching your mother take the leftovers and your mother taking leftover food and taking the piece of cake that broke in half while it was being served and taking the lesser car and taking whatever time is left for her to get her needs met. And so, you know, all truth is a paradox. And that's really what I believe is that I really, really give, but because I'm healing the codependence, I'm healing the self doubt, I'm giving from a place that is abundant because I live in gratitude. I notice how much I have been poured into, crazy love from a number of different directions. And I give that away. I don't give from my place of deprivation.”

So says Anne Lamott, the eternally wise, prescient, and deeply human writer so many of us wish we could call in times of need. Anne is the author of 20 books—yes 20—including the New York Times bestsellers, Help, Thanks, Wow; Dusk, Night, Dawn; Traveling Mercies; and Bird by Bird, which is essential reading for every writer. I refer to and cite her advice all the time. Anne is also a Guggenheim Fellow. Her latest book—and the subject of today’s conversation is Somehow: Thoughts on Love that revolves around the William Blake line: We are here to learn to endure the beams of love—and how hard this is. 

MORE FROM ANNE LAMOTT:

Somehow: Thoughts on Love

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival & Courage

Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

Follow Anne on Instagram

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“From my perspective, one of the reasons we tell stories is it helps give us a sense of who we are, we use stories to affirm our identity. And that's part of the reason why we don't actually like to call them stories, because if we call them stories, and we begin to see that the self is actually rooted in construction, made up interpreted reality, it can be very threatening to us and to our sense of who would I be without this story. And so that's one of the things that I really love about this is you can begin to see that my sense of self has to change, if I'm willing to look at my stories, what is going to happen is my sense of who I am is going to change.”

So says Courtney Smith, a coach, facilitator, and dear friend who is schooled and trained in many different modalities: Conscious Leadership Group, Byron Katie’s work, the Alexander Technique, and the Enneagram. She is one of my favorite thought partners because of the range of her intelligence and the structure of her mind: She was a math econ major who happens to have a J.D. from Yale and a masters in public health from NYU. Before taking a turn toward the mystical, she was a McKinsey consultant. So in short, she’s a multi-hyphenate Renaissance woman whose bookshelf looks much like mine. You might remember Courtney from our conversation on Pulling the Thread about the Enneagram—if you missed it, there’s a link in the show notes—but today, we’re going to talk about Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle: What it is, how to know when you’re in it, and how to move past it…while recognizing that you’ll be in another one soon enough. We also do a little bit of live coaching and role-playing, so you all will really get a sense of how this powerful tool works. 

Meanwhile, if you want to work with me and Courtney, together, we’re hosting a workshop from May 17-19 at the Art of Living Retreat Center in Boone, North Carolina. It’s called “Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness” and will be a combination of On Our Best Behavior and Courtney’s techniques. Honestly, I can’t wait—I hope you’ll all join us. The link to sign up is also in the episode page, or the link in bio on my Instagram account, @ eliseloehnen. 

MORE FROM COURTNEY SMITH:

My Workshop with Courtney at AOLRC: “Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness”

First Pulling the Thread episode: “The Practical Magic of the Enneagram”

Courtney’s Website

ALSO MENTIONED:

The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leaders

Elise’s Substack Newsletters:

Ending the Manel

The Perception (and Reality) of Scarcity

Who Gets to Be an Expert?

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“I think historically we have always seen that intergenerational partnership is the way that movements grow and expand and the way people feel resilient about what they're trying to accomplish. The first defeat as a young person, when you feel your morals are on the line, your sense of justice is on the line, that is such a devastating blow and you really need people who've been doing this work for a long time to say, yeah, you're right. That's how that feels. It sucks. It hurts so bad. And this is how, when it happened to me, I got up again and I kept fighting. There is no future for progress without that kind of perspective. You need the fiery engagement of young people and you need the sense of history and the sense of perspective that older people can provide.”

So says Mattie Kahn, a prolific writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and more. Mattie was also the culture director at Glamour and a staff editor at Elle. Today, she joins me to talk about her book, Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions, which is a much-needed survey of young female voices who were and are often at the heart of political movements, whether it was bus boycotts, strikes at mills, or the environmental movement unfolding today. This isn’t just a book about ensuring that the names of these girls are preserved by history, though, this is an examination of why girls are frequently so central to social change, and what it is about their often-precocious voices that can capture the attention of the nation. This, of course, is a double-edged sword, as Mattie’s work explores how quickly we dump these girls, or move on, once they turn into angry women. Today, we also talk about what’s happening on campuses and what a container might look like to hold dialogue, debate, and discourse.

MORE FROM MATTIE KAHN:

Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions

Mattie’s Website

Follow Mattie on Instagram

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“Part of middle life is that hopefully there's a little bit of wisdom there. And I think that is part of what we gain as we go through this journey of life is that there is wisdom that's accrued, which allows us to exist a little bit more in the complexity and nuance of things. I believe so much of this work is that we have to hold grace and compassion. And we also have to hold ownership and accountability and responsibility. And I feel that way, right? It's like, okay, if there's something that happened in our childhood or something happened in our teenage years, something that happened in our twenties, right? It's hard to process those things really early on. And especially when we're younger and really immature, because the lens is so narrow. I think as we grow and hopefully as we get wiser, that the lens opens.”

So says Vienna Pharaon, a therapist whose practice centers around helping individuals—and couples—identify old patterns, patterns that often belong to the family system, that have them by the throat. And then, of course, she helps people break them and find new stories for how they show up in the world. Vienna is the host of the podcast, This Keeps Happening and the author of the national bestseller The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love, where she outlines the main themes that she sees in her practice. There is much in these pages to which we can all relate, as she articulates five core, original wounds that revolve around worthiness, belonging, trust, safety, and prioritization. Sound familiar? 

MORE FROM VIENNA PHARAON:

The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

Vienna’s Website

Vienna’s Podcast: “This Keeps Happening”

Follow Vienna on Instagram

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Neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi, PhD currently has 11 grants—including four from the NIH—to study Alzheimers, menopause, and the female brain. Dr. Mosconi is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience in Neurology and Radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM), and the Director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Program at WCM/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. The program includes the Women’s Brain Initiative, the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic, and the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinical Trials Unit. 

There are many things to love about Dr. Mosconi and her work—one, that she’s focused on an underserved group, i.e. women, but also because her insights dramatically expand the way we’ve been conditioned to understand these hormonal shifts in our lives. The picture she paints of the female brain is not only fascinating, but it’s inspiring: As we age and move through stages, our brains continually remodel, becoming leaner, meaner, and more empathic. The female brain is…formidable. There are also many things we can do to make these turbulent transitions slightly smoother sailing, which we dive into throughout our conversation. Let’s turn to it now.

MORE FROM LISA MOSCONI, PhD:

The Menopause Brain: New Science Empowers Women to Navigate the Pivotal Transition with Knowledge and Power

The XX Brain: The Groundbreaking Science Empowering Women to Maximize Cognitive Health and Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease

Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Power

Lisa’s Website

Follow Lisa on Instagram

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“Historically, there's no such thing as a pure tradition. And I also think as human beings, we transcend these religions and we transcend these cultures. And so the cherry picking is an affirmation of our transcendence. It's like, no, you are more than your religious tradition. You are more than your culture. You are more than your body. And you are also your body and your religion and your culture. Yes, yes, yes, all that. But you are also more. So I think, again, the power of the modern period is that we're all so super connected and in communication with everything that we know that, we know that in a way that we didn't know that, you know, four or five-hundred years ago.”

So says Jeffrey Kripal, who holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. Jeff is the author of many, many, many books that span a massive academic career—books on Kali, books on Gnosticism, and books on supernatural phenomena. He’s also the author of a short and immensely readable book called The Flip: Who You Really Are and Why it Matters, which is the focus of our conversation today. As an academic and historian of comparative religion, Jeff writes and speaks beautifully about the way that we’re losing our collective stories, and the way that we’re splitting ourselves apart, divided between the sciences and the humanities. In The Flip, Jeff recounts how both science and spirituality are using different languages to explain and explore the same experiences, and what emerges when “The Flip” happens, those often mystical moments when the minds of scientists across time have cracked open to see the world in a different way. I loved this book and I love Jeff’s wide-ranging and yet imminently approachable and kind mind—I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it.

MORE FROM JEFFREY KRIPAL:

The Flip: Who You Really Are and Why it Matters

The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities

Jeff’s Website

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Hi, it’s Elise Loehnen, host of PULLING THE THREAD. Today, it’s just me. I’m sharing five things I’ve been thinking about a lot—from understanding how to quantify and charge for one’s time, what to consider before starting a new creative project, and the art of a gentle no. I’m also answering some of your questions—about judgment, sanity, and the etymology of “should.”

THINGS I REFERENCE:

1. “Your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you cannot manage it.”
2. “The Construct of Time”
3. The Matter With Things, by Iain McGilchrist
4. Practicing the Gentle No
5. What is Intuition?

MORE FROM ME:

On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good

My Substack Newsletter

My Instagram

Solo Episode 1: What We’re After

Solo Episode 2: Five Things I’ve Learned This Year

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“Turquoise is looking for how do we bring back the village? How do we live in community again? Why are we living in these separate houses? We're not sharing resources. Everyone on the street has a snowblower, a lawnmower, you know, like the design isn't elegant, it's not an elegant design. And so I think the mind of yellow joins into turquoise and as it has studied systems, it contributes to that and we are looking for more holistic, elegant solutions to give birth to a new culture. It's like we can no longer continue down the path. And at turquoise, we are going to have to sacrifice for the whole.”

For those of you who follow me on Instagram or read my newsletter on Substack, you’ll know that I’ve been quite obsessed with Spiral Dynamics of late, and see it as one way to explain our current cultural and political dilemmas, along with so much of our internalized anxiety. It was first developed by the late professor Clare Graves, who was a contemporary and colleague of Abraham Maslow, and then advanced by professor Don Beck, who worked on post-Apartheid South Africa with Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, and then further pushed by integral philosopher Ken Wilber. Spiral Dynamics can be heady stuff, and so I was thrilled when Nicole Churchill, a wonderfully grounded therapist and expert in Spiral Dynamics, offered to talk through the system with me for the podcast. Nicole and her husband John Churchill, who has also been a guest on Pulling the Thread, studied with Ken Wilber, and both apply it in their therapy work with both individuals and organizations.

If you all end up loving Spiral Dynamics as much as I do, Nicole has offered to come back and explore how she uses it in therapy—please pass this episode on to any friends who you think might enjoy. I’m convinced that there are some keys here that can help us see the world and ourselves more clearly. In the show notes, you’ll find ways to go deeper as well. 

MORE FROM NICOLE CHURCHILL:

Nicole’s websites: Samadhi Institute and Karuna Mandela

John Churchill’s episode on Pulling the Thread: “Our Collective Psychological Development”

MORE ON SPIRAL DYNAMICS:

My Substack Newsletter: “Finding Ourselves on the Spiral”

Spiral Dynamics Integral, by Don Beck

Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy, by Ken Wilber

Spiral Dynamics, by Don Beck and Chris Cowan

Trump and a Post-Truth World, by Ken Wilber

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“When I went back and looked at some of these shows that I loved, I noticed that the writer's room was all adult men with the exception of one or two episodes in Saved by the Bell's case. And I just thought, wow, it is so interesting that we talk about diversity and representation, like yes, of course, who's on the screen matters, but who's in the writer's room and who's telling the stories really matters too, because that's where stereotypes abound. Because those men were not writing Jesse Spano as an example of an actual feminist. She was written as a character from an adult male's response to like second wave feminist stereotypes. And they found that type of woman irritating, so they wrote Jessie as an irritating character. And it just was an interesting thing for me to explore the way I internalized themes from pop culture thinking about who was writing this and when did it contribute to a stereotype versus when did it communicate an authentic experience.”

So says Kate Kennedy, a brilliantly astute historian of millennial culture, which she explores, in depth in One in a Millenial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting in, a bestselling book that’s part memoir, but really a love letter and a critique of the culture so many of us grew up in.

As part of my book tour I went on Kate’s podcast, Be There in Five, where I was immediately taken by her intelligence and deep, deep knowledge of the programming that shaped our consciousness, from Jessie Spano’s feminism in Saved by the Bell—and the laugh track it inspired—to the way so many women and girls were taught that our interests were dumb, shallow, and silly. Or, to use the parlance of the day: Basic. In One in a Millenial, Kennedy points to this long tradition of the veneration of action figures, Marvel, and football—and the deprecation of pretty much anything that girls and women value, whether it’s romance novels, the Spice Girls, or American Girl Dolls. While her point is not new—and certainly aligned with our summer of the Barbie movie, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé—her exploration of how it shaped her own mind in childhood, and the way she experiences herself now as a result of it, is revelatory, and something we explore in today’s conversation.

MORE FROM KATE KENNEDY:

One in a Millenial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting in

Be There in Five Podcast

Kate’s Website

Instagram: Follow Kate and Be there in Five

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“The deal is your bodies are going to change over time and people can stay attracted to somebody's body over time, even though it is unrecognizable from what it was like when they first met because that body is the home of a human they adore our attraction to a person's body can be just like superficial something like your toenails are gross, or it can be here is the human whose life I have shared in our home for all these years and like their belly and their bum and their varicose veins and their scar from the surgery that saved their life all of it is so fucking hot because this is my person.”

So says Emily Nagoski, one of the most exceptional minds at work today on the science—and she would add, art—of sexual connection, intimacy, and arousal. Emily is brilliant and she’s also deeply human, using her own experiences in the world as the foundational ground for exploring relationship: This means that she’s not full of heady theory and diagnoses, but focused on what actually works to fuel desire—and bring it to fruition.

She’s the author of the mega bestselling Come as You Are, as well as a book called Burnout about the stress cycle that she co-authored with her twin sister, and now she brings us Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections, which is the natural evolution. While Come as You Are is a primer on how we all function as sexual creatures, Come Together explores what happens when you bring that into relationship—and try to establish and maintain a connection that can endure through seasons of, well, low interest. 

She is full of ideas, principles, and methods for getting it going—including a core blueprint for determining what rooms are adjacent to your desire. I loved this book, I love Emily, and I loved our conversation.

MORE FROM THE EMILY NAGOSKI:

Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

Watch Emily’s TED Talk

Emily’s Website

Follow Emily on Instagram

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“Every single human being is a pack animal. That's what we are biologically. We would die if we didn't depend on each other. Saying what you need is a form of connecting with your partner and saying, let's be a team. Can you serve me in this way? Can I trust you to have my back? Because I've got yours. And I want to be there for you. The other thing that people don't realize is that when they ask their partner for something they need, what they're doing is saying to the partner, you are my chosen one. You are my confidant. You are the person I trust more than anybody to be there for me. And the other person may feel very honored by that, actually. What that person is saying is you are trustworthy. You are the person that I know has the strength and the resources to be there for me.”

Doctors John and Julie Gottman are two of the most famous and popular couples therapists in the world—not only because of their ability to impart relationship-saving and relationship-strengthening advice, but because of John Gottman’s decades of reearch in the so called “Love Lab,” where he observed couples over time and could predict—with a dizzying level of success—who was destined to divorce.

In short, the Gottmans are the world’s leading relationship scientists, having gathered data on thousands of couples—they then use those findings to train clinicians and create simple principles for couples around the world.

In their latest book, Fight Right, they explore conflict—something we’re all trained to avoid at all costs. Their point though, which their research supports, is that conflict is essential for healthy relationships, clearing out the brush of stagnant resentments and deepening bonds.

In today’s conversation, we explore everything from fighting styles—there’s avoiders, validators, and volatiles—along with our tendency to start conflict harshly because we feel like we need a lot of ammo to justify the rupture and make our point. And then we move to modes and paths of repair, along with what their latest research can tell us about infidelity and its root cause. I loved this conversation, which we’ll turn to now.

MORE FROM JOHN & JULIE GOTTMAN:

Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection

The Love Prescription: Seven Days to More Intimacy, Connection, and Joy

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

The Gottman Institute: A Research-Based Approach to Relationships

Gottman Relationship Quiz: How Well Do You Know Your Partner?

Find a Gottman Trained Therapist

Follow the Gottman Institute on Twitter and Instagram

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“I think there's a lot of assumptions in play here that a good body is a thin one, a thin body is achievable, a thin body is achievable for everyone, and that you will be fully in control of your health and your mortality if you're thin, which is also just of course a myth. There are plenty of fat, healthy, happy people, and there are plenty of sadly unhealthy, thin people who should not be regarded as any more or less worthy than a fat person who suffers from a similar health condition. These people should be receiving, in most cases, just the same treatment. And yet, for the fat person who suffers from the same health condition, the prescription is weight loss, whereas for the thin person, they're given often closer to adequate medical care.”

So says, moral philosopher and Cornell professor Kate Manne, one of those brilliant and insightful observers of culture working today. She’s the author of two incredible books about misogyny—Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women and Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny—and has coined mainstream terms like “himpathy,” her word for the way we afford our sympathy to the male aggressor rather than the female victim. The example she uses is the trial of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who sexually assaulted Chanel Miller, and the way the judge and the media seemed more concerned about Turner’s sullied future than Miller’s experience and recovery.

Her newest book is just as essential: It’s called Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia and it explores Manne’s own experience of being a fat woman in our unabiding culture. If you read the Gluttony chapter of On Our Best Behavior, some of the material she explores will be familiar—but in Kate Manne style, she drives it all the way home. I love this conversation, which we’ll turn to now.

MORE FROM KATE MANNE:

Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

Follow Kate Manne on Twitter

Kate Website

Kate’s Newsletter

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“I think that with regulation, the funny thing is that it's either I want to control the weather around my children, or I want to control my children, but regulation is very much a self thing for adults and a co regulation thing between you and other, especially you and a young person whose brain isn't fully able to self regulate. But if you're so focused on controlling all these outside things that you can't, like the weather, then you get to let yourself off the hook of getting into the much harder, but more possible work of self regulation and of figuring out your own stuff. And all of that has much bigger benefits to your kids, of course, than making the weather perfect around them, but it just is harder. Even though it shouldn't be so easy to change the weather, but it does appear that is what happens, right?” 

So says Aliza Pressman, development psychologist and Assistant Clinical Professor in the Division of Behavioral Health Department of Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital where she is co-founding director of The Mount Sinai Parenting Center. Aliza is also the host of the hit podcast, Raising Good Humans, and the author of The Five Principles of Parenting: Your Essential Guide to Raising Good Humans.

I love Aliza for many reasons: Yes, we all want friends who are developmental psychologists on speed-dial, but she’s also different in the way she delivers advice. For one, she cuts right to the point, reminding and reaffirming that while yes, every family has its own complicating factors, the basic tenets of raising good humans are simple. You don’t need your own PhD in parenting to do the job, nor do you need a PhD to re-parent yourself, you need to focus on the elements she outlines in The Five Principles of Parenting: Your Essential Guide to Raising Good Humans: Relationship, Reflection, Regulation, Rules, and Repair. As she explains, through practice and normalizing imperfection, along the way you’ll discover the person you’re ultimately raising is yourself. By becoming more intentional people, we become better parents. By becoming better parents, we become better people.

In today’s conversation, we touch on these tenets while also exploring the particular social world we find ourselves in, one in which there seems to be an expectation that we can and should control the weather for our kids. 

MORE FROM ALIZA PRESSMAN, PhD:

The Five Principles of Parenting: Your Essential Guide to Raising Good Humans

Raising Good Humans Podcast

Aliza’s Website

Follow Aliza on Instagram

Aliza’s Newsletter

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"How do we center the voices that traditionally and historically we know existed, but were only marginalized in the tradition? And that does feel like holy work. And for me, in part, when I encountered a tradition that was so driven by male stories and male voices, I felt so alienated by it when I first began to encounter it. And I had this moment, which I think lots of women faith leaders have, which is maybe this just isn't for me. I mean, I'm not intended to ever even read these texts, let alone teach these texts. And then I had an awakening where I realized, not only is it meant for me, but I have an obligation. It was waiting for me. It's waiting for me and for so many more people because there's a void until our voices enter this space."

So says Rabbi Sharon Brous, a wise and wonderful friend, and the founder and senior rabbi of IKAR, a Jewish community founded to attend to critical questions. As Rabbi Brous writes in her beautiful new book The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World , “How can our Jewish tradition help us live lives of meaning and purpose? And: Given our faith and history, who are we called to be in this time of moral crisis? We launched IKAR—our best attempt to address those questions—on a hope and a prayer, with no funding, no space, and no business plan. What we had was a shared conviction that faith communities needed to be spiritually alive and morally courageous at the same time.” 

I read Sharon’s beautiful book last summer, and could not wait to talk to her about it. So we recorded our conversation early, before the Jewish High Holidays, at the beginning of August, months before October 7th. Rabbi Brous’s work in general is highly prophetic and brave—she has been a fierce and vocal critic of the increasingly right wing Israeli government, even as many Rabbis try to steer clear of politics. This conversation, which is not about Israel, is also highly prophetic and brave: It’s about the dire need for interfaith conversation, for chipping away at the calcified belief structures of religions that don’t fully serve our broken world, and for being with each other, particularly on our most painful days. This, in fact, is the theme of The Amen Effect, which is about an ancient mishnah, or overlooked piece of Jewish law that instructs us on the sacred act of circling—and tending, face-to-face, to each other’s agony and grief. In today’s conversation Sharon and I also talk about social justice and responsibility, a conversation that I’m hoping to pick back up with her in the new year, as so many of us feel a little lost and confused. While Rabbi Brous and I thought about doing a second episode as a fast follow, we decided to wait a beat—if you want to hear her talk about Israel and Gaza, I highly recommend you listen to her conversation with Ezra Klein, where the two talk about how some of Israel’s actions are indefensible even as Israel itself must be defended. Her sermons are also stunning, and available on the IKAR website. 

I think Rabbi Brous is incredible, and I’m not alone. She offered the blessing at both Biden and Obama’s inaugurations, and led Hannukah at the White House this year. She manages to teach and model what so many of us need to learn how to do: We must learn how to hold each other close even through disagreement, disappointment, and despair. The Amen Effect offers some ideas for how this work might begin.

MORE FROM RABBI SHARON BROUS:

The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World 

IKAR’s Website

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“If you have a reaction to a stranger or someone in the media or someone in politics or someone who's just providing this kind of blank slate because you don't really know him or her, then it's a projection. And yes, there's often a sensation in the body that's negative. It could be fear, it could be distrust, it could be disgust, right? And then there's the flip side. There's positive projection, which happens in the spiritual universe a lot. When someone is looking for a charismatic leader, then they're going to project their own awakening, their own compassion, their own wisdom onto the leader, the clergy person. So the content of the projection can be anything, what we view as negative, what we view as positive.”

So says Connie Zweig, a Jungian therapist and author who has focused much of her career exploring and teasing out the implications of the shadow, which is how Carl Jung referred to the unconscious. Chances are that you’ve been hearing more and more about shadow work—it’s having a moment—in part, I’m convinced, because it’s a concept whose time has come. As I’ve written about a lot in my Substack newsletter, we are swimming in collective shadow, unable and unwilling to process our share of it. When we don’t take on this unconscious material, or darkness, our tendency is to project it onto other people and groups, to get away from it as quickly as possible. But, of course, it doesn’t work like that—our shadow is ours. It’s our blind spot. When we’re willing to face our shadow, to access it, to allow it to emerge, we often find that it’s full of gold. In fact, Jung believed that the shadow is the source of all of our energy, the main mechanism for growth—ask anyone who has gone through hard or dark times and they will likely tell you that the experience propelled them forward in unexpected ways, often for the better. 

Connie and I explore all of these concepts and then some, as she’s one of the most prodigious writers in the space. She co-authored Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow, which are essential anthologies and texts, and then more recently wrote Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, which explores what happens when the shadow, or darkness, is unresolved in spiritual and religious communities. She’s also the author of The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, which is an exploration of the shadow of aging in our ageist culture. I’m hoping she comes back to the podcast soon so we can discuss that book at length. 

MORE FROM CONNIE ZWEIG, PHD:

The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul

Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening

Romancing the Shadow: A Guide to Soul Work for a Vital, Authentic Life

Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature

A Moth to the Flame: The Life of the Sufi Poet Rumi

Connie Zweig’s Website

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Today, it’s just me. I thought I’d round out the year by trying something different, and offering five big things I’ve learned this year.

THINGS I REFERENCE:

1. Owning Our Wanting, Wants vs. Needs
2. Transactional Relationships & Shadow Vows
3. Undoing the Drama Triangle, Are You Victim, Villain, or Hero?
4. Facts vs. Stories
5. Transcend and Include

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“Nobody wants to be somebody with a serious substance use problem. Nobody wants to be addicted to a substance. I mean, it doesn't feel good. Dependency doesn't feel good. And we end up in there anyway, right? So I think if we can bring compassion and understanding to, wow, it must really be working in a way that's really powerful for them to keep pursuing it. And then you've got the physical effects of substances, right? So then our bodies physically get dependent, you know, so it starts out as like, it's probably working for an emotional or something in our life and then we become physically dependent on it. And then it's a whole nother host of things in terms of how do you stop it? And people don't fully understand treatment in terms of there's medications available.”

So says Carrie Wilkens, PhD, a psychologist who is attempting to change the way we think about and address recovery and treatment—specifically by simply presenting evidence for what motivates change. AFter all, she is the co-president and CEO of CMC: Foundation for Change, a not-for-profit with the mission of improving the dissemination of evidence-based ideas and strategies to professionals and loved ones of persons struggling with substance use. 

As you’ll hear in this conversation—and throughout the entire series—we have not collectively been served by the mono-myth of addiction, that it’s only solved through harsh intervention and confrontation, that addicted people must hit rock-bottom, and that any involvement from concerned family and friends is inherently co-dependent or enabling.

As Dr. Wilkins explains, this simply isn’t true: In fact, evidence overwhelmingly suggests that harsh confrontation and intervention works AGAINST recovery, and that there is a very specific and meaningful role for family to play in what can often feel like a family illness.

The CMC:FFC team’s Invitation to Change approach is an accessible set of understandings and practices that empower families to remain engaged and be effective in helping their struggling loved one make positive changes. The approach has been widely used across the country and is utilized in trainings with laypeople and professionals. 

She is co-author of the award-winning book Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change, a practical guide for families dealing with addiction and substance problems in a loved one based on principles of Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT), and co-author of The Beyond Addiction Workbook for Family and Friends: Evidence-Based Skills to Help a Loved-One Make Positive Change.

Dr. Wilkens is also the Co-Founder and Clinical Director of the Center for Motivation and Change, a group of clinicians serving all ages in NYC, Long Island, Washington, DC, San Diego, CA, and CMC:Berkshires, a private, inpatient/residential program for adults.

Dr. Wilkens has been a Project Director on a large federally-funded Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) grant addressing the problems associated with binge drinking among college students. And she is a member of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies and the American Association of Addiction Psychiatrists.

MORE FROM CARRIE WILKINS:

Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change

The Beyond Addiction Workbook for Family & Friends

CMC: Foundation for Change

Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:

PART 1: Holly Whitaker, “Reimagining Recovery”

PART 2: Carl Erik Fisher, M.D., “Breaking the Addiction Binary”

PART 3: Maia Szalavitz, “When Abstinence-Only Approaches Fail”

ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture”

TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness”

BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?”

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“I think what's interesting about healing, psychological healing, is there's always a narrative that helps. So sometimes when you go to therapy, and you tell a story, and in the story, you locate your despair, and it's a knot, and then with the therapist, you work through the knot, you feel better. And was all the pain really attendant to that knot? Or did you just kind of load up that knot with some of the despair that comes from being alive and then you kind of work through it and that story helps you live life better. And I think that's true also this idea of how we look at the different personality states and we can name them and we can give them ages and it's a story that helps us understand ourselves.”

So says Akiva Goldsman, an Oscar, Golden Globe, and WGA-Award winning screenwriter whose credits include A Beautiful Mind, The Client, Batman Forever, A Time to Kill, Practical Magic, Cinderella Man, I Am Legend, The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, Insurgent, and I, Robot. He’s on Pulling the Thread today, though, to talk about Apple TV+’s The Crowded Room, a psychological thriller starring Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried on which he was both the writer and the showrunner.

So first, some warnings: Yes, there are spoilers, though in my opinion, nothing that will markedly change your experience of watching the show. In fact, knowing the back story made it easier for me to get through the first, very stressful episode. (It gets easier, and by episode three, I was riveted.) And also, a trigger warning: The Crowded Room and our conversation today explore childhood sexual abuse, which is also part of Akiva’s personal history.

MORE FROM AKIVA GOLDSMAN:

“The Crowded Room” on Apple TV+

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“I think it's really important for, you know, people to realize that you can totally be an absolutely excellent parent of a traumatized child and the trauma had nothing to do with you and you couldn't possibly have prevented it. So I think, you know, assuming that there is trauma in somebody's addiction history, which is not always the case, but if there is, you should not immediately assume that it was bad parenting because sure, that could be the case sometimes, but again, there's so many different ways that people can be traumatized by so many different people. And it's also the case that so much of addiction has to do with people's temperament that will set them up for things. So, if you are incredibly sensitive to stimuli, something that wouldn't traumatize someone else might traumatize you. And again, that's not your parents fault. That's just how you were born.”

So says Maia Szalavitz, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and author of two fantastic books about addiction. Her New York Times bestseller, Unbroken Brain, tells the story of her own heroin and cocaine addiction as a student at Columbia University in the ‘80s—she was expelled for dealing and barely escaped prison time—woven together with the decades of work she’s done as a journalist in the addiction space after entering recovery in her early ‘20s. In it, Maia offers a compelling case for why addiction should be thought of as a learning disability, in part because so many people “grow out of it.” 

Maia’s latest book—Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction—taught me so much and challenged so many of the stories about addiction I was holding onto. Ultimately, it’s an optimistic book in the face of what feels like an overwhelming cultural challenge, a challenge that only seems to get worse every month—Maia explains why we’re trending in this direction, and more importantly, what we can do to shift our collective fate toward recovery. And what an expanded idea of recovery might mean. 

MORE FROM MAIA SZALAVITZ:

Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction

Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary Way of Understanding Addiction

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog

Read Maia on The New York Times

Maia’s Website

Follow Maia on X

Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:

PART 1: Holly Whitaker, “Reimagining Recovery”

PART 2: Carl Erik Fisher, M.D., “Breaking the Addiction Binary”

ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture”

TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness”

BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?”

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“As you grow older, your brain is able to keep rewiring all the time. And so we have this impression that the flexibility of the brain decreases as you get older. But in fact, it's just because your brain's job is just to figure out how to get by in the world and do a good job in the world. And once you've figured most things out, like, oh, these are different kinds of personalities, and this is how I need to do something at work, and this is how I use email and phone and whatever, then your brain does less changing only because it has successfully done its job, and it doesn't need to keep changing. The brain changes when there's surprise, when there's something that happened that it wasn't expecting, then it changes up. So, you still have plenty of plasticity even when you're 90 years old. It's just that most people aren't using it at that point because they say, Oh, I got it. I know how things work.”

So says David Eagleman, renowned neuroscientist, podcast host, and the author of many bestselling books about consciousness and the brain—along with more than 120 academic publications. Besides his perch as a neuroscientist at Stanford University, David is the co-founder of two venture-backed companies, including Neosensory, which is a pioneering wrist device that enables the deaf to hear. Yep, that’s right.

David is fascinating, and hopefully this conversation lives up to his capacity: We discuss the malleability of the brain to adjust to its inputs, the roots of synesthesia, how those who are born blind and deaf can now use touch to see and hear, and why we dream. Ultimately, we explore just how it happens that a brain trapped in a dark vault can create the vibrancy of our existence.

David is a TED speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow, and serves on several boards, including the American Brain Foundation and the The Long Now Foundation. He is the Chief Scientific Advisor for the Mind Science Foundation, and the winner of Claude Shannon Luminary Award from Bell Labs and the McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication.

What’s cooler? He has served as the scientific advisor to several television shows (including Westworld and Perception).

Ironically—considering we both host podcasts and David is a neuroscientist—we had some technical difficulties during our conversation, but the hope is that this is not perceptible to you! 

MORE FROM DAVID EAGLEMAN:

Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

The Brain: The Story of You

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

David’s Podcast: “Inner Cosmos”

David’s Website

Follow David on Instagram

David’s Company: Neosensory

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“I want to say that it's not just some idea about suffering, it's also a function of social and economic systems that are deliberately weaponizing an individualized view of suffering as a technique, as a strategy. I found across eras and eras and eras in the book is that addiction supply industries, which is what one scholar calls them, like the alcohol industry, the tobacco industry, they constantly come back to this hyper individualization in saying, you know, like, the problem is not in the bottle, the problems in the person. If so many people can drink, quote unquote normally, that means the problem is really with these sick people over here. And that happened with tobacco. And then very directly and deliberately, things like the processed food industry and other modern addiction supply industries have used the same language.”

So says Carl Erik Fisher, an addiction psychiatrist, bioethics scholar, author, and person in recovery. Carl is also an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he teaches law, ethics, and policy relating to psychiatry and neuroscience, particularly where they converge with substance use disorders and other addictive behaviors. He hosts a podcast called Flourishing After Addiction and is launching a Substack, where he’ll organize his thinking around treatment paths and modalities. Most pertinent to our conversation today, he’s the author of The Urge: Our History of Addiction, which is a fascinating deep dive into our long cultural fascination with addictive substances, interlaced with his own story, and stories from his practice: In fact, the book opens in Bellevue where Carl is not functioning as a doctor—in this case, he’s the patient, after suffering an addiction-induced manic episode that put him into recovery. Carl is brilliant and kind, and also fluent in all the prevailing science about addictive behavior…science that hasn’t really ruled the day until recent years. Instead, the addiction space has been one of binaries—you’re compulsive, or you exercise choice; you’re normal, or an addict; you have no control to stop, or you have all the control and refuse to use it; and on and on and on.

MORE FROM CARL ERIK FISHER:

The Urge: Our History of Addiction

Carl’s Podcast: Flourishing After Addiction

Carl’s Website

Follow Carl on Instagram

Carl’s Newsletter

Carl’s Substack

Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:

PART 1: Holly Whitaker, “Reimagining Recovery”

ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture”

TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness”

BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?”

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“I think what one of the things that's interesting to me is like when we think about what causes distress and a life that goes awry, there's so much attention to different causes, but the way that the story, or the diagnosis, or the treatment interacts with our identity, I think, is not thought about as much. Like, the way that the very intervention itself changes our sense of who we are feels like it gets neglected. There's this sense that, you know, the diagnosis is describing something that is always solid and real and less thought given to like, well, how does that diagnosis interact with a mind? And how does the mind change knowing that the mind has been characterized this way?”

You might recognize Rachel Aviv’s name from The New Yorker, where she’s been a staff writer for a decade, covering subjects like medical ethics, psychiatry, criminal justice, and education. She’s been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards twice, and in 2022 she won one for profile writing. In 2022, she also published Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, a recipient of the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. In It, Aviv tells the story of four people and the treatment they underwent—or not—for their mental illness. It’s a gorgeously told, layered exploration of all that we don’t know about the brain and the mind, and how various treatment modalities restructure our lives—including the stories we tell about who we are. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM RACHEL AVIV:

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Read Rachel in The New Yorker

Follow Rachel on X

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“For years, I was asking myself whether or not I was an alcoholic versus really asking myself whether or not alcohol was actually providing any benefit to me. And for me, it was just like, This realization when I stopped drinking that I had been asking the wrong question for my whole drinking career and like, why are we not asking the question? We're just like, we're drinking, it's compulsory in our society. It's exceptional if you don't drink. And then it's also this very addictive drug that's marketed to us in a way that totally overrides our ability to like make rational choices around it. It's like the most socially accepted drug that you can use and like, we just don't have meaningful conversations or informed consent or any, you know, so for me, a huge part of me quitting drinking, which I did in 2013, it was this realization of Intellectually understanding I had been asking the wrong question which for me was a huge empowerment and part of the reason I was able to quit.”

So says Holly Whitaker, author of the New York Times bestselling Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol. I had heard about Holly long before I met her, primarily because she was disrupting recovery culture and many people did not like this. But the more I learned about her, the more I spoke to her, the more I witnessed her impact on culture, the more I was completely taken by both her brilliance and her willingness to say the things. Be warned: If you read her book, you’ll never think about alcohol again. In its pages, she recontextualizes the way we’ve been trained to normalize booze—and also the way the current recovery scene is shaped for the consciousness, and egos, of men. She’s created companies in the vein of a feminine-centered recovery, and it feels like she’s just getting started in the way we talk about addictive substances—and addiction. Those who struggle will find a lot of relief in her words, and I understand why. 

MORE FROM HOLLY WHITAKER:

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

Holly’s Newsletter

Holly’s Website

Holly’s Podcast

Follow Holly on Instagram

Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:

ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture”

TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness”

BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?”

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“If there is this part of you that you think is inferior, the weak spot, something you're ashamed of, etc., it's one of these things where if you believe it's true, there's a part of the human soul, we call it part X. It doesn't want you to have any kind of forward motion, doesn't like it, it wants to render your life failure. It wants you to never re change your potentials. And it wants you to hate yourself, which is the biggest thing. So, the genesis of the tools came from the idea, we have to be active about dealing with this.”

So says Phil Stutz, the creator of the Tools. You might know Phil from his bestselling book of the same name, or its sequel Coming Alive. Or you might know him from the Netflix documentary Stutz, which is a profile of him as a beloved psychotherapist who doesn’t practice in a particularly traditional way. What you might not know is that Phil is actually a psychiatrist—he received his MD from NYU and then abandoned the standard approach, feeling like he wasn’t helping patients at all. He created The Tools for exactly that: To provide practices for people to move through life’s obstacles, rather than just listening to them talk about them. Ad nauseum. One of the things that I love most about Phil’s approach is the way in which he uses the spiritual, or what he calls “Higher Forces.” Foundationally, he believes that a beneficent universe will move in as soon as you put yourself in motion, unlocking creativity and growth. His latest book, Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You, is a beautiful collection of essays about aging, hard times, and obstacles. It’s equal parts moving and practical, much like Phil himself. 

MORE FROM PHIL STUTZ:

Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You

The Tools: Five Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower—and Inspire You To Live Life in Forward Motion

Coming Alive: Four Tools to Defeat Your Inner Enemy, Ignite Creative Expression & Unleash Your Soul’s Expression

“Stutz” on Netflix

The Tools Website

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Starting next Monday, I’m doing another special series—this set is about addiction. You’ll hear from four distinct voices in the space, covering harm reduction, new paths to recovery, codependency, and the shape of addiction in our culture. This is just scratching the surface, but hopefully the beginning of conversations in our own lives, as addiction touches us all, in its myriad forms. While this set is focused on substance, we'll be back with more in this space—and if you want to get started, you’ll find links to two previous episodes on this theme. Dr. Gabor Maté, who spent much of his career working in the most addicted corner of North America, explains why trauma is central to understanding addiction, and Dr. Anna Lembke, explores the role of dopamine and the delicate balance between pleasure and pain. You can find those links in the show notes—and I’ll see you on Thursday for a regular episode of Pulling the Thread, and Monday for the beginning of this special episode.

SHOW NOTES:

ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture”

TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness”

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“I’m grateful for seasons. I'm so happy that there can be a winter and there can be a spring and there can be a summer, that it can't always be summer, can't always be bright and happy. And, you know, my book is a bit about that. In winter, the stone fruit loses its leaves and it falls down and it saves its energy for spring. It's okay to sleep. I feel like when life served me a winter and I dropped my leaves for a bit, I came back stronger in spring. I'm just grateful for that idea of that constant change, not just in the world, but in ourselves, and how exciting that has been. And that's given me a whole new fresh perspective. I keep saying a lot, I want to ripen like a peach. I'm okay for my skin to get wrinkled and my flesh to get soft. I really just want to get really sweet and juicy on the inside and and enjoy that process.”

I met Richard Christiansen more than a decade ago, though we didn’t become very close friends until very recently, when strange fates brought us together. We have spent the past three-and-half years birthing new versions of ourselves: We kept each other as close company as I wrote my book and launched this podcast, while Richard left the world of advertising to launch a beautiful brand called Flamingo Estate. You’ve likely seen Flamingo Estate in magazines or on Instagram—it’s Richard’s home, and garden, and also the inspiration point for a range of products like, oh I don’t know, honey made from the bees in Lebron James’ backyard, to Terrazzo bars of soap, to the best olive oil I’ve ever tasted. I’ve never met anyone like Richard, to be honest, who has both a fantastical imagination and incredible design aesthetic with his feet firmly planted in the soil. Richard grew up on a farm in Australia—from a whole family of farmers—and being in the garden is his first home. He has a deep and unabiding reverence for the natural world—Jane Goodall is one of his close friends, after all—which is part of the reason why its the foundation of his brand. He calls nature the last great luxury house, and he sees no reason why a gorgeous tomato shouldn’t get the same photographic consideration as a handbag. We had a wide-ranging conversation about creativity, abundance, pleasure, and fantasy for this special friendsgiving episode.

MORE FROM RICHARD CHRISTIANSEN:

Flamingo Estate

Follow Flamingo Estate on Instagram

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“Well, the interesting thing is, I guess some of this came from writing the book too, but all of those versions of me live inside of me, right? Even the kid that was, you know, forced to kind of navigate the world as a boy and all of these different things, like that kid is still inside of me, right? The teenager slash young adult who was gay, just like regular gay, boring gay, boring gay now, it wasn't boring gay then, lives inside of me. That trans woman, at the start of my adulthood who felt like she had to live up to so many of these ideals of womanhood, you know, she lives inside of me too.”

So says Raquel Willis, a Black trans activist who just released a debut memoir, The Risk it Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation. Her book traces her evolution—from her childhood in Georgia, through her multiple coming out experiences, or unfoldings, as the title of her book suggests. Willis has served as the director of communications for Ms. Foundation for Women, executive editor of Out Magazine, and a national organizer for Transgender Law Center. She also co-founded Transgender Week of Visibility and Action and currently serves as an executive producer for iHeartMedia's Outspoken and the president of the Solutions Not Punishments Collaborative’s executive board, and is a WNBA Social Justice Council member. Our conversation today isn’t really about her accolades, it is, to quote her, more existential: We explore whether our souls are gendered, what it means to perform or play with femininity, and why sexual violence against women and girls affects us all. Let’s turn to our conversation now.

MORE FROM RAQUEL WILLIS:

The Risk it Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation

Raquel’s Website

Follow Raquel on Instagram

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Chetan: “The human design chart, is basically a match to your unique particular frequency, whether it's partially ancestral, whether it's partly what you've come to live out consciously in this lifetime. But it's there. It's all on a page. It's all on a chart. And you start recognizing how this chart works and you start going along with your type and your authority and you recognize your profile and who you naturally attract and get along with so easily and how other people see you. And all these things just can't start getting more and more distilled in your life. Describing it as a karma chart, things that have to be resolved, you start living true to your design, then all of these things just go click, click, click.

Carola: You start attracting the situations or the people the opportunities to resolve those things.

Chetan: And you're not in resistance. You're in acceptance to life.” 

Human Design has a wild origin story—and so does Chetan Parkyn, who studied with Osho in India and read palms and faces before coming to Human Design, which he’s been working with for three decades. His partner, Carola Eastwood, came to Human Design through Astrology and counseling after her own dark night of the soul. The duo are steeped in the system, having performed thousands of readings and written multiple books, including Human Design: Discover the Person You Were Born to Be, The Book of Lines, and The Book of Destinies. If you’re new to Human Design, it’s a fascinating and complex system—I’d recommend going to their site, Evolutionary Human Design and quickly generating a free chart. You’ll need your birth date and time. If you’re familiar, these two will turn new pages for you. 

MORE FROM CHETAN & CAROLA:

Human Design: Discover the Person You Were Born to Be

The Book of Lines

The Book of Destinies: Discover the Life You Were Born to Live

Evolutionary Human Design

Get Your Human Design Report

Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:

PART 1, ENNEAGRAM: Courtney Smith “The Practical Magic of the Enneagram”

PART 2, ASTERIAN ASTROLOGY: Jade Luna “The Secret Astrological System”

PART 3, TAROT + KABBALAH: Mark Horn “The Mystical Roots of Tarot”

ASTROLOGY: Jennifer Freed “A Map To Your Soul”

ENNEAGRAM: Susan Olesek “The Power of the Enneagram”

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“Nature, the universe, speaks in metaphor, and one of its truest things is paradox, is holding two things that are both true at once. I remember laying in bed, I was probably 12 and before I go to bed, I'm thinking about the universe because my brain suddenly works and I'm like, how can space be infinite? Infinity makes no sense to my mind. So then I'm imagining space expand, expand, expand. And then I hit a wall, which is the edge of space. And then I go, okay, so let's say if space isn't infinite, well, if you get to the edge of space to the wall, what's on the other side of the wall? There has to be something on the other side of the wall. There can't be nothing. And so I remember thinking in that moment, those two scenarios are both impossible, but then also finiteness is impossible because there must be something on the other side of the wall. And I remember laying there being like, oh, I actually think the computer brain that we have is not designed to understand the wholeness of reality. We're stuck in a partial understanding.”

It’s likely fate that Jedidiah Jenkins is a writer—a New York Times bestseller at that. After all, his parents sold more than 12 million books in the early years of their writing careers, when they were still married, and a duo—they wrote a series of books about walking, yep walking, across America. In Jedidiah’s latest book—Mother, Nature—he retraces their journey by car, with his mother riding shotgun. He suggested this trip to his mother because he wanted to see the world through her eyes—to understand who she is by accessing who she was—and also because of a chasm that keeps them apart. See, Jedidiah is gay, while his mother believes—ardently—that homosexuality is a sin. And a choice. Mother, Nature is a beautiful and tender love story between a mother and a son that revolves around one of Jedidiah’s foundational beliefs: That he cannot excommunicate his mother, even if she might not come to his eventual marriage to a man. 

MORE FROM JEDIDIAH JENKINS:

Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to See if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret

Life Streams to the Ocean: Notes on Ego, Love, and the Things That Make Us Who We Are

Jedidiah’s Website

Follow Jedidiah on Instagram

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“One of the things that we do on Yom Kippur is we read the story of Jonah, the prophet who ran away saying, no, no, I don't want to do this job, find somebody else to do it. And I connect this to the card, the king of cups, because in the distance behind the king, you can see the seas are in the middle of a storm and there's a storm tossed ship. And there's also a great fish that has come out of the sea which reminds me of the whale that swallows Jonah, or as they say in the Bible, a great fish, and then you see the king who is on a platform in the middle of this roiling sea, and he is like a surfer. He is not being tossed and turned. He knows how to ride the wave. And I talk about the way in which we run from our destiny or what we think is our destiny, what we're afraid of in the future. We see storms coming and we try and run from them when really what we need is the knowledge to surf them and how to learn how to use the energy of the challenges in our lives to move us forward rather than to crash us into the sand.”

This is the third part in our special series on Mystical Systems—last Monday, we heard from Asterian astrologist Jade Luna, and the Monday before we heard from Courtney Smith on the Enneagram. Next week, we’ll learn about Human Design. That voice you just heard is Mark Horn, who jokes that he might be the only person who has taught at both the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Readers Studio International Tarot Conference. Yep, that’s right: Mark Horn is an Kabbalah academic who also reads Tarot—though the most remarkable point about this combination is that the two actually go together, and are indelibly linked throughout time. In Tarot readings with Mark—full disclosure, I’ve had two—you settle on a specific question, and he does your hand through the Sephirot, which is the Kabbalistic symbol for the Tree of Life. These readings are fascinating, not only for their ability to respond to the question, but also because Mark decodes the cards through stories from the Kabbalah, making it an entirely different, wholly mystical experience. Okay, lets get to our conversation.

MORE FROM MARK HORN:

Tarot and the Gates of Light: A Kabbalistic Path to Enlightenment

Mark Horn’s Website

Follow Mark on Instagram

Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:

PART 1, ENNEAGRAM: Courtney Smith “The Practical Magic of the Enneagram”

PART 2, ASTERIAN ASTROLOGY: Jade Luna “The Secret Astrological System”

ASTROLOGY: Jennifer Freed “A Map To Your Soul”

ENNEAGRAM: Susan Olesek “The Power of the Enneagram”

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“I mean, I do think that I have an abiding interest in women's bodies. In how our bodies can be determinative, how they can suggest certain identities, how they can preclude certain identities, how our bodies can, you know, hold lots of possibilities. Like, I noticed I just said the negative parts first, I think because it took me until I was in my mid forties when I finished this book and published it, to understand the possibilities of a body, the transformative possibilities of living in and living from a body and taking pleasure in my body in a way that it's not that I had never taken pleasure in it. There were certainly things I did that gave me pleasure, but there was a lot of self loathing directed at my form. So, I think that we have a lot of stories about living in these bodies as women.”

So says Susan Burton, whose voice you might recognize from the incredible New York Times and Serial podcast, The Retrievals, which explores the experience of women who underwent egg retrieval at the Yale Fertility Center with saline in lieu of fentanyl—because a nurse named Donna was replacing the drugs in service of her addiction. The series is a beautiful exploration of whose pain matters, and the type of medical gaslighting that’s far too common in the lives of women. Susan is a veteran staff member at “This American Life,” and the author of the stunning memoir, Empty, which explores her own uneasy relationship with her body. Though she’s in recovery now—a description she holds lightly—Susan spent the first few decades of her life struggling with binge eating disorder. We explore all of this in our conversation, which I’ll take you to now.

MORE FROM SUSAN BURTON:

Empty: A Memoir

The Retrievals Podcast

Susan Burton’s Website

Follow Susan on Instagram

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“The more we let go of, the more we receive. I feel that I live in that light. I believe that consciously. I'm not trying to control what the universe brings to me. I believe it knows exactly what's right for me. I'm an astrologer, so I believe in the cosmos. I believe it's a conscious, not an unconscious entity, which I believe a lot of new age thinking is treating the universe like it's unconscious and doesn't really know what it's doing. I think we're still dealing with fear then. We're still collectively, I want to control things because I'm afraid of what's going on. So I view a lot of new age beliefs as being clout in that fear.” 

This is the second part in our special series on Mystical Systems—last Monday, we heard from Courtney Smith on the Enneagram. Next week, we’ll learn about Tarot and Kabbalah, and the following week about Human Design. That voice you just heard is Jade Luna, who studies what he calls Asterian Astrology—he claims to be the first Westerner to reconstruct Hindu astrology into a Greco-Roman format. As you’ll hear, there are parts of the system that are familiar, and others that are wholly different—though his readings will align with what you might have heard in the past…and then some. My reading with Jade was quite wild and very specific, down to health tendencies and the structure of my brain. Our conversation today goes way beyond astrology though: Jade and I talk about our fear of darkness, why waking up from what can sometimes feel like a collective nightmare is part of the point, and the confluence of seeds that have been planted in the past that are pushing us toward responsibility. We even get into global warming and predestiny. It’s a fascinating one. 

Just wanted to note that Jade and I recorded this episode at the end of August, during the Los Angeles Hurricane, and before the Israel / Hamas war.

MORE FROM JADE LUNA:

Follow Jade on Instagram

Jade’s Website

Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:

PART 1, ENNEAGRAM: Courtney Smith “The Practical Magic of the Enneagram”

ASTROLOGY: Jennifer Freed “A Map To Your Soul”

ENNEAGRAM: Susan Olesek “The Power of the Enneagram”

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“That's just like the human struggle, is how is it that our interiority and the way that we're perceived externally, how do we live with that? How does it act? Like, how do those things influence each other? Like, that's maybe the human problem. And so academia puts another layer on that, disability puts another layer on that, being an artist puts another layer on that because there is this expectation I think in those spaces to both use your identity to flag something socially to the world, but also, if you do that, then you take on all the trappings, the preconceived notions, the stereotypes of that.”

So says Chloé Cooper Jones, the author of the truly stunning memoir Easy Beauty, which unsurprisingly, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Chloé was born with sacral agenesis, a rare congenital condition that impacts her gait and her stature, and makes it at times painful to move throughout the world. Her memoir is a study in the way her condition has kept her apart, driving her toward intellectual superiority as a defense mechanism against a world that doesn’t feel like it belongs to her. In Easy Beauty, she travels the globe, reclaiming spaces and her own body as she had always refused to make it the center of her scholarship. As she travels, Chloé probes big questions, like why do we gather at places where terrible things have happened and who gets to be a philosopher? She also explores the qualities of easy versus difficult beauty, beauty we have to work for. Chloé is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and an Associate Professor at Columbia University’s MFA program. This is one of my favorite conversations to date, so let’s turn to it now.

MORE FROM CHLOÉ COOPER JONES:

Easy Beauty: A Memoir

Follow Chloé on Instagram

Chloé’s Website

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"Part of what happens when human beings experience difficulty is the same difficulty, the same fact pattern, can resonate very differently for different human beings. And so, part of what happens when a human being encounters a challenge is not just, Oh, you hurt me, but it's how do I make meaning of the fact that you hurt me. Is it that there's something wrong with you? Is it that there's something wrong with me? Is it we should never have been involved in the first place? Is it that I need to fight and stand up for myself so that never happens again? Is it I need to make myself really small so that never happens again? So type is about how I made meaning of a challenge that happened to me early in life and because of the way I made meaning of it, that's how my adaptive strategies arose."

Welcome to the first part of a four-episode special on metaphysical systems. These episodes don’t build on each other, per se—you can cherry pick what’s interesting to you—but they all go together. In this first set of systems, we’ll explore the Enneagram, Asterian Astrology, Human Design, and Tarot. Today, we’re kicking it off with Enneagram, specifically as interpreted by my dear friend, Courtney Smith, who is, quite frankly, one of the smartest people I know. 

I heard Courtney might be one of my soulmates for years before we finally met—not only because we have the same taste in people (we have many dear mutual friends), but also because she’s an Enneagram genius, and the sort of person who is happy to talk about G.I. Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way at a cocktail party. Courtney has a robust coaching practice—individuals, executive teams, women’s groups—where she integrates the Enneagram, which she studies under Russ Hudson, along with trainings from the Conscious Leadership Group, the Alexander Technique, and the Work of Byron Katie. She also adds her own perception and raging intelligence. Courtney is brilliant, particularly at assessing systems on both the micro and macro level, and she’s also exceptionally warm, excavating all of our human foibles and patterns for the treasures of promised growth. My favorite part of Courtney though is that she plays against type: I love finding the mystical and metaphysical in a woman who has a degree in mathematical economics from Wake Forest, a masters in Public Health from New York University, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Courtney also worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM COURTNEY SMITH:

Courtney Smith’s Website

Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:

ASTROLOGY: Jennifer Freed “A Map To Your Soul”

ENNEAGRAM: Susan Olesek “The Power of the Enneagram”

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“You cannot differentiate when you never fight. Fighting is also a tool for differentiation, for having two people be able to breed and grow inside a relationship. If all you try to do is avoid any friction, any conflict, and merge into one, then there is a relationship of two halves, not of two holes, basically, to put it in simple terms. So some people find it very scary. Some people find it scary because there was uncontrolled fighting where they came from. And nobody could disagree without the whole thing going on fire. So there is good reasons for why people have learned not to fight or not to stand up for themselves or not to argue or not to say no, for some people simply saying no is experienced as a declaration of war. It's a continuum for those who are avoiding fighting and who are scared of it and reluctant to engage with it are basically said to themselves, I will never be like that person, my mother, my father, my grandparents, whoever it was, and then hold it in and hold it in.”

Esther Perel’s voice doesn’t need an introduction—nor does her work. Esther is inarguably one of the most important therapists working today, pioneering a much deeper understanding of how couples function—and ultimately how couples can thrive. While Esther has written multiple bestselling books, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence and The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, and made an excellent intimacy-creating conversation card deck that will liven up any dinner party, I am most smitten with her podcast, “Where Should We Begin?” which brings listeners into real therapy sessions with real people—people, I’ll caveat, who are not her ongoing clients. Not only do you get to hear Esther’s brain work, but you get to listen as couples engage in arguments and issues that will likely feel…familiar, meaning that the show is an antidote to feeling slightly less alone in the world. Esther’s newest project is something that we all need, in every sphere of our lives: She is teaching a one-hour masterclass in conflict, including what’s beneath the content that we fight about everyday. Hint: Our fights are not actually about the dishes, they’re about power, control, respect, and foundational questions like: Do I matter? Do you value me? Conflict is the substance of today’s conversation, which we’ll turn to now. You can find the course on turning conflict into connection on Esther Perel’s website, or in the show notes. Here’s Esther.

MORE FROM ESTHER PEREL:

Turning Conflict into Connection Course

Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

Where Should We Begin Podcast

Where Should We Begin Conversation Cards

Esther Perel’s Website

Follow Esther on Instagram

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This is a channeled transmission of Yeshua, from Thursday, October 12, 2023. 

This was part of an online study group for my book, ON OUR BEST BEHAVIOR. Originally, Carissa and I were planning this for August—three days of discussion, no Yeshua transmission—but then Carissa asked to push it to these dates in October, and told me that Yeshua wanted to do a transmission about beauty. Who am I to argue with Yeshua?

And who, you might be wondering, is Yeshua? That was my question when I first met Carissa in January 2020. Yeshua is Jesus, or Christ Consciousness. Yeshua was Jesus’s name in Aramaic. Carissa is a forensic medium—one of the finest I’ve ever encountered—and in December 2019, Yeshua pushed into her channel and she became a full-body medium, which means that he knocks out her consciousness and uses her body and voice to talk. It’s strange, undeniably.

If you’ve read Jesus’s aphorisms or words in the New Testament, this is what you’ll hear: As one friend said, Yeshua is like a rapper. There’s word play, loop-de-loops, and so much wisdom, applicable to every single day. Sometimes he talks about history—his parents, Jewish law, the prophecies, Mary Magdalene. He was very much a Jew, which history likes to forget, though he frequently says that he came not to change Jewish law but to evolve it, to make it more accessible. 

He talks about shadow directly, but always offers that shadow is space, waiting to be filled with light. Typically, he talks about shadow versus light as unrealized versus realized—realized being what we see with our “real eyes.” 

He also talks a lot about the void. He talks about the Friday, when he was crucified, as the death day. Saturday is when you move from the tomb to the womb. And Sunday is the resurrection. We all do this all the time in our lives—when we die to relationships, jobs, beliefs. His point: You can’t skip the Saturday, the Sabbath. You must accept the full cycle of life.

You’ll also hear mention of the vertical and the horizontal: The vertical is our access to divine, spirit, the universe, however you perceive energy. The horizontal is our daily lives. It’s our job to spill the vertical into the horizontal.

In my experience, Yeshua’s words are always about breaking polarities and binaries—putting you in a position to re-examine what you’ve come to accept wholesale or believe. Because, interestingly, he’s not at all interested in telling any of us what to believe. He wants instead to open our awareness and perception so that we can love more deeply. He wants to give us new lenses through which to perceive the world, including the sacredness of both life and death.

The transmission begins with Yeshua guiding a 20 minute meditation. Please do the meditation, and not while you’re driving. Transmissions are mental exercises, certainly—I take pages and pages of notes—but often they can be a full-body experience, so listen with your feet on the ground.

One note from Carissa: “The Transmission is the copyrighted intellectual property of Sacred Spirit Illumination and not to be reproduced or used, in part or sum, without permission. However, folks are of course welcome to share the link to the Pulling the Thread podcast with any and all people. We welcome and honor discussion surrounding this important Transmission.”

MORE FROM CARISSA SCHUMACHER & YESHUA

The Freedom Transmissions: A Pathway to Peace

Carissa Schumacher’s Website

Carissa Schumacher Episode 1: “My Spiritual Teacher”

Carissa Schumacher Episode 2: “Why Do We Suffer?”

Carissa Schumacher Episode 3: “Understanding Spiritual Power”

On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good

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Yes, it’s a Monday and not a Thursday, but today, I’m announcing something special. Kicking off next week, we’re going to host occasional, short series that are focused on a tangly or complicated theme—big concepts that require multiple voices and perspectives to put them into proper context. We’re kicking off next Monday with a look at Mystical Systems, or you could call them Personality Systems: Enneagram, Astrology, Tarot, and Human Design. Some people might think of these ways of understanding the world as silly, while others will stake their lives—and sometimes every big decision—on them. I’m somewhere in between: I think there’s nothing more powerful than hearing about yourself, and how your life likely unfolded, from someone who knows nothing more about you than your birth sign. To me, it signals that there’s a much deeper plan at play. I’ll see you next week, meanwhile you can get started with the two episodes below.

ASTROLOGY: Jennifer Freed “A Map To Your Soul”

ENNEAGRAM: Susan Olesek “The Power of the Enneagram”

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“I just think that never being the one to say no to yourself is so powerful for so many reasons. One, the amount of yeses that you get will shock and surprise you. The idea behind the philosophy is that somebody else can absolutely say no to you. Like, you can go try to get a literary agent, you can get a million rejections, you can go try to get a job, you can ask for a raise, you can get a million rejections. But the amount of people, especially since I've shared this online, who write to me and say that they got yeses is so cool. Like yeses they never dreamed of. There's so many people I know who've gotten raises, who've gotten their dream homes, who've gotten their dream jobs, who've moved across the country, who've asked out people that they're now married to, which is so cool. And it's because they went out in search of the no.”

For the past decade, Liz Moody has been building a steady foothold in the world of wellness—first, for her work developing recipes. In recent years, her empire has expanded rapidly as she’s become a point of distillation for many of us who want to know…what’s what in a sea of overwhelm. Liz has a genius point for simplifying an onslaught of information to a few salient points—easy shifts that can lead to meaningful change. She does this on The Liz Moody Podcast, and also in her new book, 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success. She was only half-joking when she offered that this is an old-school bathroom book—the sort of guide you can pick up for a few minutes at a time and gain some insight, or return to time again, like why temptation bundling is wise, or it’s good to talk with your hands. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM LIZ MOODY:

100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success

The Liz Moody Podcast

Healthier Together: Recipes for Two

Liz Moody’s Website

Follow Liz on Instagram and TikTok

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“We think that money is just going to solve the problem. We think that we can get rid of the fear by making more money. We can get rid of the fear by having more money. If only someone just gave me a million dollars, well, I mean, I wish that for everybody, but I would be lying if I said that that's going to solve everything. You have to also recognize some of the other resources that you have that I think are equally quantifiable as richness. These are rich things, things like your health, the measure of your health, the measure of your relationships, the measure of your time, the measure of your ambition. All of these things are assets and when you can remember that and start to put those things into play again and leverage them, that's when you realize that you've been focused on this fear of money of not enoughness and you've been focusing maybe too much on the actual money and not so much on everything else that plays a big role in your ability to say I'm wealthy.”

So says Farnoosh Torabi, host of the podcast So Money, and the author of numerous books, including the just-released A Healthy State of Panic: Follow Your Fears to Build Wealth, Crush Your Career, and Win at Life. Farnoosh got her start as a financial journalist, though she quickly came to understand that understanding money and investing was really just a cover for a desire to understand life…and all the animating impulses that drive us toward safety and security. When we talk about money, we’re talking about so much more than dollars and cents. Money is one of the most essential energies alive in our culture: It says a lot about who we are, collectively and individually, and what we value. It’s these types of underlying emotional states that are at the root of Farnoosh’s work, including her just released book, which is an exploration of all the different types of fear that guide and refine our days, whether it’s Fear of Failure or Fear of Exposure or Fear of Loss. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM FARNOOSH TORABI:

A Healthy State of Panic: Follow Your Fears to Build Wealth, Crush Your Career, and Win at Life

When She Makes More: The Truth About Navigating Love and Life for a New Generation of Women

You’re So Money: Live Rich Even When You’re Not

So Money Podcast

Elise’s Conversation on Farnoosh’s Podcast

Farnoosh’s Website

Follow Farnoosh on Instagram

Subscribe to Farnoosh’s Newsletter

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“Everything we heal, we mature, we develop in ourselves, is never just for ourselves only. It's always also eco-systemically relevant. So if somebody becomes more open, it will affect all the relationships that person has in life. So all the relationships will begin to enjoy or benefit from the fact that I grow, everybody that knows me benefits from my growth because it will nourish all those relationships. So we are always ecosystemic and individual at the same time.”

So Says Thomas Hübl, who I’m thrilled to welcome back to Pulling the Thread—our first conversation, entitled “Processing Our Collective Past,” is one of my favorites to date, although today’s conversation doesn’t disappoint either. In Thomas’s new book Attuned: Practicing Interdepence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World he explores the idea of being present, or creating the internal capacity to host the experiences of others. He mentions this line from Fares Boustanji which sums it up: “To get in contact with the other, you have to be in contact with yourself.”

Thomas Hübl is a spiritual teacher, but his particular genius point is holding space for large groups, groups that can then begin to process and transmute dark, dense energy—energy that’s often held by traumatized culture and places. He has worked all over the world, because this stuck energy is…everywhere: And when we fail to acknowledge and move it, we’re stuck, repeating karmic cycles.

In Attuned, Hubl explains what we can all gain from getting in touch with our ability to host the experiences of others. As he writes: “When I speak to groups or before an audience at an event, it is not enough that I show up knowing what I wish to say. To be effective, I must be in dialogue with the whole, and therefore aware of the group or the audience as a dynamic system. Only noticing what is happening for me is not enough; I must be able to accurately feel with and adapt to the needs of my listeners. I need to clearly sense my participants’ degree of availability and curiosity. I also need to perceive whether and when I am being heard and received—or what else might be needed or present. The clarifying of the relational matrix comes with expanded awareness and offers an acceleration of our coming-into-relation. This is the leading edge of communication and leadership, and it requires deeper awareness of the intersubjective space from all.” This sounds like something we all need.

MORE FROM THOMAS HÜBL:

Thomas’s First Pulling the Thread Conversation: Processing Our Collective Past

Attuned: Practicing Interdepence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World

Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

Thomas Hübl’s Website

Follow Thomas on Instagram

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“But it's also okay not to get it right. You know, people mistakenly think that they want perfection, say you're playing golf and you wish you could get a hole in one every time you swung the golf club. Well, no. There'd be no game there. You know, that if you want to do something where you're always winning, play tic tac toe against a five year old, four year old. So on some level we know we don't want that. And the problem is that much of school teaches us these absolute answers. We're graded. Most tests are designed to find out what you don't know rather than what you do know, which I think is a big mistake. So, we end up with a world where we think there are winners and losers.”

If you’ve heard about a fascinating study that explores the power of the mind over the body, most likely it emerged out of the lab of Harvard Professor Ellen Langer—in fact, in 1981, Langer became the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. There, she studies the illusion of control, decision-making, aging, and mindfulness theory. She’s responsible for the Counterclockwise study, published in 2009, where aging men recovered their youth, and Alia Crum’s famous study on chambermaids and their understanding of their own health and wellness, got its start with Langer as well. She has a fascinating mind, in part because she is always, always willing to question our underlying assumptions about where we have control and where we don’t. Now here’s an important caveat: Ellen Langer is the mother of modern mindfulness—but she is not talking about meditation. No disrespect to meditators, but Langer is focused instead on attention and the power of thought on the physical body, not so much on controlling or emptying the mind. She is a force, and I was so honored to invite her onto Pulling the Thread. Let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM ELLEN LANGER:

The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health

Mindfulness

Counter Clockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity

The Power of Mindful Learning

Ellen Langer’s Website

Follow Ellen on Instagram

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“I think a lot of us embody this, what I call the paradox of the courageous coward, right? Like, we're capable of doing these things that are bonkers. Like they take a tremendous amount of courage or maybe experience, you could call it, but we'll call it courage, speaking in front of a panel, going live on television, you know, with me, swimming with sharks, going into the eyes of hurricanes, going to war many times, marooning myself in weird places. And yet we have this other side that is so fragile, so gossamer thin and on our level to tolerate anxiety that, you know, it can break and then snap at any moment.”

So says Matt Gutman, ABC Chief National Correspondent and the author of No Time to Panic: How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks. Matt is a new friend, and I’ve loved getting to know him and his deeply feeling heart, as well as the way he so perfectly captures this idea of being a “courageous coward.” He’s not afraid to step into a war zone, and yet he’s felt incapacitated by anxiety—taken out at the knees by panic—which makes him the perfect encapsulation of the binary of modern masculinity. Quite simply, the world is too much for any of us to confidently swashbuckle our way through. I commend Matt for saying it. He wrote this book because he suffered a panic attack on air during a heightened moment of news—one of those moments where all of our eyes were turned toward our TVs—and he ended up being put on a temporary leave. It was in that moment that he recognized he needed help and healing, as this panic attack—though public—was not a solitary event. It was happening to him all the time. In No Time to Panic he explains how hard he went to work at healing, at uncovering what was at the heart of his anxiety, which is at the center of our conversation today.

MORE FROM MATT GUTMAN:

No Time to Panic: How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks

Matt Gutman’s Stories at ABC

Follow Matt on Instagram

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“It’s, you know, all but hardwired to resist failure, to not want to be blamed. You know, it's an instinct that's very, very powerful because we don't want to be rejected. We don't want to be thought less well of, which is why, you know, the things that I write about and let's face it, organizations that are truly world class, whether it's a scientific laboratory or, you know, an innovation department, or you know, a perfectly running assembly line, they are not natural places, right? They're not just left to their own devices, humans will create places like that. No, they're really hard work, good design, good leadership, kind of daily willingness to kind of stretch and grow independently and together. And the short way to put that is it takes effort to create a learning environment. It really does, but it can be done.”

So says Amy Edmonson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Early in her career, she worked as the Chief Engineer for architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, which started her on the road to reimagining how we’re all impacted by the world around us. She then became the Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she designed change programs in large companies. Now she’s an academic, where she focuses on how teams function and evolve, along with the essential dynamics of collaboration required in environments that are informed by uncertainty and ambiguity. What sort of environments are those? Almost all work environments. A significant point of her research and focus is the necessity of psychological safety in teamwork and innovation—effectively, how do you create an environment where people feel like they can fail in the right direction, where they’re learning and taking risks toward evolution and growth even when they might not get it right the first few—or few hundred—times? This is the focus of her latest book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. 

MORE FROM AMY EDMONSON:

Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well

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“I’m really hopeful that we're evolving past our very hyper individualistic understanding of like, my health, wealth and happiness is the great goal. And that we're trying to fold in a more collective, and I hope, generous sense that like our lives will require love. Our lives will require courage and interdependence, you know, and it's probably going to never fall along any of our demographic, political, religious, sociocultural dreams that advertising companies have for us, but instead it's gonna require a very collective sense of what can we become?”

It is not without a dose of irony that professor Kate Bowler—a prolific historian and author about the Prosperity Gospel—was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer at the age of 35. After all, her work had revolved around parsing a spiritual point-of-view that if you were a good person, a good Christian, good things would invariably happen…like wealth and health. From her diagnosis, she wrote a bestselling book: Everything Happens for a Reason—and Other Lies I’ve Loved and added an entirely new dimension to her scholarship at Duke. She’s now in remission and the host of the Everything Happens podcast, and has written several more bestsellers, including books of devotionals like The Lives We Actually Have and Good Enough. In today’s conversation, we covered a lot of ground—the inherent goodness of people, when we rise to the occasion, and whether evil as an absolute exists. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM KATE BOWLER:

The Everything Happens Podcast

The Lives We Actually Have

No Cure for Being Human

Everything Happens for a Reason—and Other Lies I’ve Loved

Good Enough

Kate Bowler’s Website

Follow Kate on Instagram

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“Sometimes it feels like empathy, sympathy, sorrow, grief are scarce resources, because we certainly treat them like that. And if someone is feeling too much for you, they are not feeling enough for me. If somebody is comforting this person at the funeral because they are weeping the loudest, not because they were closest to this person, but because funerals bring up all kinds of feelings about ourselves, our relationships to other people. I was unhinged at a funeral for my mom's friend's husband. I was supposed to be on my second date with Aaron. This man died of brain cancer and I was choking, crying, imagining my own dad dying, not knowing that this same disease is growing in the man I'm about to go on a second date with. Not knowing that in four years I will be at my dad's funeral. And then we're always checking up on each other. Just this is a human thing, right? To check up on each other, to see how other people are doing it, to take your eyes off your own paper to see how you are doing and what kind of attention you're getting or all these things, all these comparisons, they all come down to like, does mine count? Yeah. Does mine count? The thing is they all count and they're all completely different.” 

So says Nora McInerny, one of the brightest lights in my life, and a guide to many, many others, thanks to her hit podcast, “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.” Nora is quick to point out one of the deep and painful ironies in her life, which is that she wouldn’t be our guide if she hadn’t really been through it—and lost so much. In the span of a few months, Nora miscarried, her father died from cancer, and her first husband, Aaron, died from glioblastoma when he was 35. Alone with their baby, Nora began the journey back to life, using this new, deeply unwanted reality, as the ground from which to plow a path for the rest of us—a path that’s often sad, sometimes hilarious, and always wise. In the early days of her loss, she founded a Facebook group called “The Hot Young Widows Club” and started a podcast called “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” as a meeting ground for other travelers who also found themselves improbably devastated and lost. She also gave an incredible TED Talk: “We don’t ‘move on’ from grief. We move forward with it.” In the intervening years, she remarried, birthed another child, and written a roster of hilarious and moving books—It’s Okay to Laugh: (Crying is Okay, Too), No Happy Endings, Bad Vibes Only, and more. She also started a company called Feelings & Co., where she attends to all of our messy emotions: Besides the main podcast, she now produces a short, daily show—”It’s Going To Be Okay,” and “The Terrible Reading Club.” Shameless plug, but she featured On Our Best Behavior and interviewed me on her show. Nora is one of my favorite conversation partners because she’s not afraid to go there—and make jokes while doing it. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM NORA MCINERNY

Terrible, Thanks for Asking

It’s Going To Be Okay

The Terrible Reading Club

Bad Vibes Only

No Happy Endings

It’s Okay to Laugh: (Crying is Okay, Too)

Feelings & Co.

Nora’s Website

Follow Nora on Instagram and TikTok

Nora’s Substack

Nora’s TED Talk

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“It's okay to not be perfect. I don't wanna be judging myself for my imperfections. I actually wanna be accepting myself for my imperfections. And that was really liberating actually. You know, I think so many women, we grow up thinking we are supposed to be perfect. And we internalize, you know, excelling at everything and being good at everything curating our appearance and, you know, being the perfect mom and doing everything right and doing everything right and doing everything right. And just the realization that I was like so over that and feeling like it was actually getting in the way of me having a more authentic understanding of who I was. That’s when I think a corner really started to be turned.”

So Says Florence Williams, the author of The Nature Fix and Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, which is a beautiful exploration of the end of her marriage—and its impact on her health and her soul. Florence met her husband in college and had never lived alone—much less alone as a middle-aged woman. Their divorce and her resulting heartbreak turned her upside-down, and filled her with an incapacitating amount of anxiety and fear. The resulting memoir offers a map as she returns to herself. Ever the science writer, this isn’t just a treatise on her feelings of rejection and loss—this is also a thoroughly researched guide to the implications of heartbreak on our hearts, full of learnings for all of us. 

MORE FROM FLORENCE WILLIAMS:

Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

Florence’s Website

Follow Florence on Instagram

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“Energy doesn't dissipate. You know it moves, but it doesn't die. And the big bang that happened 15.7 billion years ago, all that energy is still here. We are it like we are a version of it. We are an instance of that near Infinite Force and every atom that existed then exists now. And some of those are us. Like we are riding this cosmic wave. We're like surfers on a cosmic wave, billions of years in the making. And so my atoms were at the Big Bang.They're also in the future, right? Their time doesn't, in this kind of math, you can almost take time out of it. It's just being, we just, we are, we are. And so if we can tap into maybe just symbolically, but maybe actually, I don't know, but certainly the value symbolically is enough for me to take the leap to say, The things we want to do, the things we aspire to, we are, we can, we have, and there's something really powerful in that. To me, that's not like spiritual bypassing, like, oh, just manifesting one, but it's just like a deeper level of truth. We can interact with trees in ways that we're just starting to.”

My guest today is Baratunde Thurston, a true multi-hyphenate whose journey has taken him from stand-up comedy stages to the heart of political and social activism. He's the author of the critically acclaimed, New York Times Best Seller How to Be Black; an Emmy-nominated host and executive producer of the PBS television series America Outdoors; and the creator and host of the podcast How to Citizen. 

His mission? Tell a better story of us—challenging the status quo and fostering meaningful conversations about the intersections of race, technology, democracy, and climate. The stories we have inherited are too small for us, he tells us, urging us to nurture stories that are bigger, bolder, and better. Our conversation today touches on the concept of citizening—as a verb—as Baratunde suggests that we are capable of more than we have been asked to do and gives us the steps to better citizen. We discuss the great potential and great concerns surrounding AI and the fine line between enhancement and disconnection through mechanization. We can heal people, landscapes, even society as a whole, he tells us—but technology alone will not get us there—we must tap into something that we have known but chosen to forget—how to live. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• How to citizen…
• On AI…
• Undoing the harm we have done…

MORE FROM BARATUNDE THURSTON:

Read How to Be Black

Baratunde’s writings at Puck

Listen to his TED Talk: How to Deconstruct Racism, One Headline at a Time

Explore Baratunde’s Website

Listen to the How to Citizen podcast on APPLE and SPOTIFY

Follow him on INSTAGRAM and MASTODON

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“Acceptance is kind of a choice. We say, I accept this. That's the way they are. Surrender feels different. It feels like, we're not just distancing ourself from something, but we're expanding around the thing that was giving us trouble. So it doesn't have such a stranglehold on us, in a way. And with acceptance, comes a gateway to something appreciably deeper, which is the possibility of transformation, the possibility of using the situation that we find ourself in, as if it’s a step in our growth and our further discovery of who we are.”

So says the enduringly wise Buddhist teacher Frank Ostaseski, a leading figure in the contemplative care for the dying, having co-founded the acclaimed Zen Hospice Center. In 2004, he established the Metta Institute, which offers innovative training and education for compassionate end-of-life care. His book, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, explores the wisdom that emerges from embracing mortality, which guides our conversation today. Frank invites us to consider how we approach the small endings that occur in our everyday life—how do you say goodbye?—along with the practice of listening intently. Ultimately, though, our conversation circles what it means to surrender to circumstances we cannot control. 

MORE FROM FRANK OSTASESKI:

The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

Frank’s Website

The Metta Institute

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“A loving being isn't domineering and a loving being is not going to judge you and certainly isn't going to test you. A loving being, a loving energy, and you can call that energy God, or again, it doesn't matter to me what people call it, when you call in forces of love, it is forces of love. What does love want? Love wants for you, what you want for yourself. Love wants to support you in ways that are in grace and patience. And so when you call it, it's coming in and saying, how can I help you? What do you need? How can I support you in the light? It's not gonna say, oh, you know what? I know you really wanted this, but too bad. But oftentimes, you know, we think that we get tested by the divine universe. No, we don't. We get tested by the shadow. Are you gonna come and agree with me again, that you're less than? Are you gonna come and agree with me again that you should be afraid? And that's when the answer has to say no. I'm actually gonna agree with the fact that I can trust in my own capability because I'm a divine being of the light. And when I tune into those energies, there's a whole force field of energy that is coming and welcoming me, and also joining me in my intention.”

So says Jakki Leonardini, a highly clairvoyant energy healer. I originally met Jakki through my friend Kasey Crown, a trauma therapist—the duo host WellSoul Workshops several times a year and while I’ve never been to one, friends tell me they are actually life-changing, because the combination of Kasey and Jakki’s wisdom and expertise addresses each person, on every level. When you work with Jakki, she explains that we all have intuitive gifts, and that they’re a skill and not a gift. And yes, we may live in very material bodies, with very complex minds, but we’re all animated by energy—energy that’s highly influenced by the world. Understanding this is the first step toward keeping ourselves well.

Over the years, I’ve worked with Jakki a lot on the idea of “fear” and how this animating and very human idea gets its power—she has a lot to say about this, as you’ll hear in today’s conversation. Energy healing is very nebulous and confusing, but hopefully Jakki’s framework will give a context to make it all more palpable, and easy to access in our lives. She’s even designed an app called My Soul Vibe, which uses the quality of your voice to track your energy—it’s pretty fascinating. 

MORE FROM JAKKI LEONARDINI:

Jakki’s Website

Follow Jakki on Instagram

My Soul Vibe App

WellSoul Workshops

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“There's a deep need for all of us to grow up, like we are now being handed tools of the gods, right? And so we have to grow up and we have to mature. And so those levels of deep heroic altruism that in the past may be reserved for the great saints and sages of the past, this will have to be democratized. It'll have to become something that is accessible to everybody. And so to do that, we're talking about a trait development, which means it has to become permanent. And so altered states is one thing, but an altered trait is a whole other process. And in order to have altered an altered trait developmentally, in order to really grow and then stay there, which is what you and I did, like you and I, we grew when we were five years old and we grew to 10, and then we grew to like 12 and 18. We went through completely different worlds. But the truth is, most adults, we plateau and most people haven't probably grown through any other worlds for a decade, two decades, three or four decades.”

So says psychologist John Churchill, co-director of Karuna Mandala and co-founder of Samadhi Integral, which is focused on consciousness, human potential, and psychedelic integration. John does both initiatives with his wife, fellow therapist Nicole. In his early life, John became a Buddhist monk at Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland—his book, Becoming Buddha, explores paradigm shifts of the dharmic wheel and serves as a gateway to integrating Buddhist theory and teachings into western psychology.

In today’s conversation, we talk about the dire need for our culture to evolve and grow up, the level of consciousness at which we’re creating technological advances like artificial intelligence, and the journey to self-realization. With vast expertise and experience, he invites us to explore our individual development and existence within the larger organism of our universe. This is a heady episode, as John has a fascinating brain—fair warning that you might need to listen more than once. And I highly recommend reading Ken Wilber if the topics we discuss stoke your mind—I’d start with A Brief History of Everything. John has studied and worked with Ken for decades.

MORE FROM JOHN CHURCHILL:

Becoming Buddha: Buddhist Contemplative Psychology in a Western Context

Samadhi Integral

Karuna Mandala

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"So trauma can get stuck in our tissues.You know, our emotions can actually be stuck in our tissues because in a way, our fascia is actually holding and remembering everything that we experience in our lives, because it's this living matrix. And so maybe people don't realize it and it might be in the subconscious mind, but when you're laying on the table and you drop into parasympathetic state of the nervous system and your, your subconscious mind is more available and your body is more available to actually be present and to let things come to the surface, it's incredible what people will let go of, and they didn't even realize it was there, and then all of a sudden the pain is released or they can start having an orgasm. Or they are just laughing and giggling. I mean, just like energy or like they're undulating. Or they're vibrating or they're, you know, like something like, just energy coming up and releasing. It's such a beautiful thing."

So says Lauren Roxburgh, who has been working with fascia long before fascia even became a word we know. A life-long athlete, Lauren knew from a young age that she had a different type of intelligence—less verbal, more kinesthetic. She can feel things with her hands and sense how and where a body is out of alignment—it’s quite stunning to behold. Lauren applies her genius to the fascia, the web of tissue—or matrix, as she calls it—that wraps around our muscles and organs. She believes that the fascia is the energetic web of our bodies, the sense organ that connects our intuition to how we move. She argues that it holds movement patterns and emotional patterns, that our trauma can get stuck or blocked in these tissues. After working with Lauren for a decade, I think she might just be right.

MORE FROM LAUREN ROXBURGH:

Website: https://laurenroxburgh.com/

Lauren's Studio:https://alignedlifestudio.com

Instagram:https://instagram.com/loroxburgh

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“So circling can be very personal, meaning you have your own awareness. It's not like, you know, you come to a circle and everybody sees you and they know everything about you and now you're outed. No, it's, you can have an experience where you see yourself in everybody in the circle. You have an inner awakening that leads you down a spiritual path of getting to know yourself in a way that you had no idea. I see it happen all the time where a woman will say, I've never shared this before. I don't know why I'm sharing, but it was something that so and so said, and I feel like I need to share it. And that share will be part of the whole circle that will then be a ripple effect that will then inspire somebody else to share. And then you have this whole circle of women having these epiphanies about themselves for themselves. Nobody's forcing them to do anything, but it's simply just from women sharing their stories.”

So says Dre Bendewald, the founder of the Art of Circling. Dre is a dear friend—and powerful to behold, particularly when she’s in action, holding space for other women. She holds circles, where women—strangers and friends alike—gather to tell the truth about their lives. To be witnessed. To be heard. Admittedly, I was nervous before I joined my first circle, but Dre builds a safe and grounded container in which to alchemize your emotions, and bring your stories out of the shadows in a type of communal confessional. What’s most profound is when you hear your story—something you thought had only ever happened to you—come out of another’s woman’s mouth. Ultimately, Dre is also a teacher intent on spreading this sacred and ages-old activity across the globe: Women have always gathered to share wisdom and story—it’s only recently that we’ve been torn apart. In our conversation today, she explains how to do it, whether you choose to circle with your own friends, or join her. Meanwhile, I’m thrilled to announce that she’s holding circles for On Our Best Behavior, which anyone can join: You can go to her website, theartofcircling.com to learn more. 

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“And I am not thankful for how hard it was. I don't believe we have to suffer to be great people. I do believe great empathy and depth and love come from all these hard parts. Yes. But I don't think that their requirement for empathy, so when it comes to the narrative of the adage of, I'm so thankful for this painful thing, it's a great way for us to survive these painful things. But I resist the urge to be thankful for how hard things were sometimes, because what I think of is, man, if I'm this, despite all of that, who would I be had all of that not happened. Had I had proper guidance and education and a parent who nurtured my interests, what kind of instrument would I be playing right now? How many languages would I be speaking right now? What companies would I be running right now? You know, because when I tap into certain things in the world and my curiosities when I'm living, I think, God, I'm good at this a little bit. Wow. I wonder what I would be capable of, you know? So that makes me begrudge the hard things. It doesn't make me thankful for them. It makes me go, God, what if?”

While Minka Kelly is most known for playing Lyla Garrity, the All American cheerleader on the hit, Emmy award winning TV show Friday Night Lights, that’s definitely not the most remarkable thing about her. And this role, where Minka played a spoiled, beautiful and rich cheerleader is almost diametrically opposed to Minka’s actual childhood, grounded in trauma and neglect. Minka’s mother was a stripper who struggled with addiction, and Minka couch-surfed her way through her life, unmoored and often untended. At one point, they even lived in a storage unit. Minka tells this story in her New York Times bestselling memoir, Tell Me Everything, which manages something rare: It is both an honest and unflinching revelation of a very challenging and abusive childhood and a love letter to her single mom. This is very difficult to do and a testament to Minka’s strength, resilience, and desire to heal—her willingness to hold her mother close while acknowledging everything she did not receive as a child. 

MORE FROM MINKA KELLY:

Tell Me Everything: A Memoir

Follow Minka on Instagram

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“I think there are a number of ways that we move into action that's characterized by integrity and where, you know, healthy altruism and compassion are present. I'm very grateful that I'm an old Buddhist , you know, with years of practice behind me and the practice of cultivating intentional balance, cultivating emotional balance, really being able to self-reflect on what, what's going on in my body, what's happening in the stream of my emotions and thoughts. So, you know, all of this has been of benefit to me over the years of practice in terms of stabilizing myself and being more able to engage, less done in by the work that I do. I mean, I'm 80 years old and I feel, you know, mostly full of life, and, and, and humor and so forth. And I really attribute it to the mindset that has come out of these decades of practice.”

My guest today is the brilliant Joan Halifax—a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author of many books, including Being with Dying and Standing at the Edge. The founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist Monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Joan has dedicated her life’s work to engaged and applied Buddhism, with a particular emphasis on end-of-life care. 

Today, she shares with us wisdom gleaned from Zen traditions, mindfulness practices, and the Buddhist approach to death; drawing from her groundbreaking research on compassion and decades of experience working with the dying and their caregivers all the while. As our current reality pushes us all to the existential exploration of suffering, altruism, and meaning, Joan’s words become an exceptionally valuable source of inspiration, guiding us to the edges of our human experience in order to discover wise hope, truth, and a fuller realization of what it is to be alive. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Pathological altruism…
• Serving with our self, not our strength…
• Compassion is adaptive…

MORE FROM JOAN HALIFAX:

Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Face of Death

Explore JOAN'S WEBSITE

Follow her on INSTAGRAM and TWITTER

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“Sex is not a quick fix when there's these foundational challenges that you're having, you're like, I know how to give oral sex a million different ways, but I'm not in the mood and I'm not turned on. And I know that sex is important because I love my partner and I know sex is important, but we can't quite hack how to be turned on and ready to go and ready for sex at the right time. And a lot of that is because we don't understand our arousal desire process. We don't know that if the house is a mess and there's dishes in the sink, or I have resentments with my partner, or I haven't worked out in a week, that there's all these factors of why you're not turned on. And so I think getting people to actually think about their sex life in that way and trying to think about like, what do I know to date just from my sexual history, but like, what's happening with my hormones? What's happening with my psychology? Do I have unhealed trauma? And you'd think that that would be sort of obvious, but it's really not. Like if you've been on an antidepressant for years or even just recently, Or any other blood pressure medication and now you're like not as turned on. People often don't make that connection.”

Emily Morse is not only a dear friend and a stellar human, but she’s also a doctor of human sexuality, revolutionizing discussions surrounding sex and the pursuit of pleasure. She is already a best-selling author, though her just released book, Smart Sex: How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure, is the navigational guide we all need in our lives. She also leads a MasterClass on Sex and Communication and hosts the top-rated and chart-topping podcast, Sex With Emily. Through candid conversations, she challenges the inaccurate cultural programming surrounding sex and promotes the value of open conversation to foster connection. Today, we talk about how women often find themselves disconnected from sex and their bodies, often due to social conditioning and traumatic events that occur during our sexual development. Emily helps us consider ways to reconnect with ourselves in order to feel more embodied, more aligned, and more pleasure.

MORE FROM EMILY MORSE:

Smart Sex: How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure

Sex With Emily

Emily’s Website

Follow Emily on Instagram

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“A million Americans a week are quitting a job. This number is almost twice as high as it's ever been in history, not laid off. Not being fired. Quitting. That’s 50 million people a year. That's a third of the workforce. And another third of the workforce is saying, Hmm, I don't wanna come in five days a week. Okay? Like, what if I give you Tuesday and Thursday or Tuesday Wednesday? I mean, only 15% of Americans in white collar office jobs are even showing up to work anymore on a Friday. So there is this big renegotiation, can I do it remotely? Can I do it from anywhere? Like not even being in the same town? All of this is a rebalancing of the balance of power between workers and workforce. And so I think that if you are in HR and you are particularly in the wellness and health and safety and you know, mental health, you were three years ago in a small basement office with no windows and no one ever talked to you. It turns out there's a lot of people outside your door now, and we are beginning to realize if you want to recruit and retain talent, you have to change the way that you talk to your workers.”

Bruce Feiler is an author and speaker known for his insight and perspective on how we can better show up in the world. With seven New York Times bestsellers like Life is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families, he blends wisdom and contemporary knowledge to inspire individuals to lead more intentional and joyful lives. He is also a writer and presenter of two prime-time series on PBS, Walking the Bible and Sacred Journeys with Bruce Feiler. Additionally, he writes a newsletter called The Nonlinear Life.

In today's conversation, we chat about his latest book, The Search: Discovering Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World, based on real-life narratives for finding fulfillment in the workplace. He tells us that those who find the most meaning and success don't climb; they dig. They go looking inside of themselves. Bruce's first hand approach to his work, living the experiences he writes about, allows him to provide practical guidance on navigating life's transitions and finding reasons for why we’re all here.

MORE FROM BRUCE FEILER:

The Search: Discovering Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World

Life is in the Transitions

The Secrets of Happy Families

Bruce’s Newsletter

Follow Bruce on Instagram and Twitter

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“I believe certainly, I know now, after have going through this years and years of feeling ashamed of who I am, you know, internalizing the shame, how America sees trans people, gender in general, and what I know now, is truly, this is the power. I mean, maybe many, many years as a fashion model, definitely there were days when I felt like, why did I even, just a thought of being born as trans and all that. Like, I love being a trans person right now, especially right after that Ted Talk in 2014 when I realized, oh wow, I've opened up. The world opened up to me. You know, this is just the beginning. It doesn't mean all my problems disappear, but certainly there’s a sense of freedom in that. So hopefully the freedom that, at least for me to start with, that I found within myself by speaking truth, by truly living authentically as myself, you know, it gives me power. I think people are afraid of that.”

Geena Rocero is a model and advocate, known for her courageous journey of self-discovery and self-revelation: In 2014, she came out to the world as transgender on the stage at TED. Today, we discuss her debut memoir, Horse Barbie, where Geena bares her soul, relaying her journey as a pageant queen hailing from the Philippines. Courageously, she made the difficult decision to temporarily conceal her identity in order to pursue a career as a model in New York City, where not even her agent knew her truth. While she booked magazines and ad campaigns, deep within her, she recognized that embracing her authentic self was the key to unlocking her boundless potential. Geena's determination to live her truth serves as a testament to the transformative strength in self-acceptance and genuine empowerment. Besides telling her story, Geena also founded the advocacy and media production company Gender Proud. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM GEENA ROCERO:

Horse Barbie

Her TED Talk: “Why I Must Come Out”

Gender Proud

Follow Geena on Instagram

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“When you are quite literally told that you are not human. What option do you have? What’s the other option other than to overthrow the system that is telling you you're not human, you know? And so this is work, this is generational work. And we have had to do that generational work largely alone, because when women got the opportunity to vote, we were purposefully left out. When the civil rights movement was happening, we were the backbone of that mission. But our names don't appear in the books, in our history books. That we know how to move through systems that weren't built for us because there are so few that are. The only systems that are built for us are the ones we build together. Otherwise, we spend our entire lifetime in this country moving through systems that were not made for us, and in fact that weren't, not just not made for us, but made to squash us, made to make sure that we do not succeed and so in order to live into our own human dignity, the only option is to change the world because this is unacceptable.”

So says Austin Channing Brown. Her ability to distill essential truths always sends chills down my spine. Austin is a powerful and resonant public speaker, racial justice advocate and educator, and author, whose bestselling book, I'm Still Here, has catalyzed an indelible impact on how we perceive and discuss what it means to be a Black person, let alone a Black woman, in America. She just released a Young Adult version, which is required reading for all of our children as we work to build an equitable future. Austin is also the CEO of Herself Media, a platform creating content and narratives to provide a supportive space for those who find themselves on the outskirts of traditional power.

Today, Austin joins me in unveiling the facade of what it means to be good and how culture detrimentally enforces this burdening standard of goodness on women. We discuss the importance of anger and how it can be a navigational tool. By examining her own anger, Austin learned to move that energy toward creating community and literature that relentlessly fights for the future that America needs. 

MORE FROM AUSTIN CHANNING BROWN:

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

I’m Still Here: Adapted for Young Readers

Herself Media

Austin’s Website

Austin’s Newsletter

Follow Austin on Instagram

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“If I remember correctly, I think you ran as fast as you could to the thing that you're more comfortable with, which is other people's research, other people's ideas, showing the connection between historical ideas and current, you know, thought leaders and the way they were operating. And so, and what I felt was that you, Elise, were missing. And I think what I really wanted you to do, and this is what I meant by like, show us your journey through these things, is I needed you and, and you got there, to filter and to sort of act as guide for the reader showing us what you were realizing as you were bringing and making these connections and synthesizing all of these other thought leaders, and, you know, expert work because that's the journey we need to be on as reader.”

That voice? That's my editor Whitney Frick, and she joins me today for a very special episode of Pulling the Thread, on the eve of On Our Best Behavior's publication—coming May 23. Many of you have been with me as I've written this book, and by osmosis, you probably have some sense of the process, but it felt important to me to celebrate OOBB (as we call it), by bringing you all the way inside. I wanted to do this with the person who knows the text almost as well as I do.

Writing a book is really hard—and it's also incredibly co-creative. As someone who has co-written or ghostwritten 12 books, I'm usually the co-creator, holding the structure for the authors while they revisit their lives and mine it for story. In this case, though, it was Whit who helped me, holding the potential of the book as a guiding light for the process. She took me by the hand, bringing me ever closer to myself as I worked through drafts. We both worked really hard on this book—really hard. Distilling, refining, and interrogating the material until we knew the path was so well-trod, readers would be able to easily follow the book's unfolding, and understand exactly what I was trying to say. To say that I'm pleased with how On Our Best Behavior turned out is an understatement—I'm thrilled, which is not something that's easy for me to say. I believe the book is the best I could write, and I'm so grateful to Whit for getting me there. As we explore in today's conversation, I had a very powerful battle with resistance—and am so happy I pushed through. If you haven't yet ordered your copy, On Our Best Behavior is available wherever you get your books starting May 23—in the U.S., Canada, UK, and Australia, with more countries to come.

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE:

On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good

Follow Elise on Instagram

Elise’s Substack Newsletter

The Dial Press

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“One thing my work has taught me is how human interaction is a comedy of errors. People are making so many errors without knowing it. I think I'm making sense to you, but I'm not. I think I'm being clear, but I'm not. I think I understand you, but I don’t. I think I heard you, but I didn’t. I think when you raise your chin, you're looking at me defiantly or someone else, arrogantly or someone else, like you know, looking down at your nose. But maybe you don't think that, you're just lifting your chin because you naturally do it. Lifting of the chin, by the way, is a skeletal feature of when our heart rates go up and we start moving towards higher arousal, we'll elongate our neck and our back and we'll lift the chin sometimes. So often it means nothing but optically, to the other person, it doesn't look so good. Just like looking at scans doesn't look so good, or, you know, looking away for too long, or staring too much. All of these things are subjective and for one person, it doesn't bother them, for another person, it drives them crazy.”

Stan Tatkin is an author, therapist, and researcher who guides couples toward more durable relationships. He developed the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), a non-linear approach that explores attachment theory to help couples adopt secure-functioning principles: In short, Stan and his wife, Tracey, train therapists to work through a psychobiological lens. Often, our brains get away from us in conflict—we lose ourselves to our instincts. He has trained thousands of therapists to integrate PACT into their clinical practice, offers intensive counseling sessions, and co-leads couples retreats with his wife.

His latest book, In Each Other's Care, provides practical tools for couples struggling with recurring arguments. In our discussion, he explains how to identify and overcome triggers that lead to conflicts and improve communication to achieve better outcomes. Using the concept of secure functioning, Stan emphasizes the positive impact of healthier arguments. Though his solutions require effort and dedication, they have the power to benefit all aspects of your life. I should know—he has worked with me and Rob before, sessions that were honestly fascinating, for both of us. 

MORE FROM STAN TATKIN:

In Each Other’s Care

We Do

Wired for Love

Wired for Dating

Stan Tatkin’s Website

Follow Stan on Instagram

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“But I now think about how wonderful it is that some of these radio stories that meant a lot to me that might have otherwise just disappeared, now do have a longer life. And you mentioned the fear of vampirism as a journalist. And the flip side of that is something that Audie Cornish, who was my co-host for many years on All Things Considered, said to me that I've really taken to heart, which is that in a crisis when people are on the worst day of their lives, whether it's a war or a natural disaster, or a mass shooting, of course there are people who don't want to talk and I respect that, but there are also people for whom being able to tell their story and being able to have somebody truly listen to them can be healing and can be a gift, and can be an act of love. And so when I go into those situations, I'm not going in as an emergency relief worker. I'm not going in as an aid worker. I'm going in as a listener. I'm going in to give people an opportunity to tell their stories and to be there to listen to them, and I've realized that that also has value and that that can be important.”

Ari Shapiro is an award winning journalist with one of the most recognizable voices in the land: He’s the host of NPR’s “All Things Considered.” In his tenure, he’s covered war zones, mass shootings, the White House—and also so much more, using his microphone to tell deeper stories about who we actually are. He recently published a debut memoir—The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening—where he uses his own life as the scaffolding to tell many of these stories. I cried…maybe 10 times as I followed Ari across the globe.

Like me, Ari is from small town America—he was born in Fargo, North Dakota before his parents moved to Portland. Like my brother, Ari is gay—and came of age at a time when that was a dangerous thing to be. Like me, Ari grew up listening to Nina Totenberg and Susan Stamberg make sense of the world. And like me, he went to Yale. The point of Ari’s book is exactly this: We all have so much in common, regardless of where we are born. Telling these stories brings us closer together.

In our conversation, he shares his insights on what makes valuable journalism and we discuss the importance of exploring diverse perspectives to gain a broader understanding of the world around us. 

MORE FROM ARI SHAPIRO:

The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening

Follow Ari on Instagram and Twitter

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“Women spent so much time in the ancient world spinning, like they spent all their time, any spare moment. And spinsters were not bad, it wasn't bad to be a spinster the way we think of it, spinsters were, you know, respected members of households, single women who didn't have the responsibilities of husbands or children, who could spin more, and make money. And, you know, you think about things like marauding around when they sailed across the Atlantic and their little hats and everything, but you don't think about the sails. You don't think like, who made those sails? Who made the thread that made all those sails? Who do you think did that? How many years did it take those women to make one lousy sail, you know, I mean, it took two years of women's labor to make a sail. So the kind of invisible labor of women in all of that…”

So says, Peggy Orenstein, a celebrated journalist who is acclaimed for her insightful analysis of gender, sexuality, and identity issues. She’s written several best-sellers about the topic, including Girls & Sex and Boys & Sex. But that’s not what we’re going to talk about today. During COVID, Peggy took a right turn, and an entirely different type of book emerged, one that is actually just as radical. In Unraveling, she explores the depths of her grief and tackles societal issues through the process of making a sweater from scratch—including shearing a sheep and carding and dying the wool—ultimately discovering the power of creativity and connection.

While sharing her journey of making the sweater, which is actually riveting, she also unravels the rich history and culture of spinning and weaving while exposing the sobering reality of fast fashion and its detrimental impact on our environment. This is a book about something that sounds simple, yet is actually about everything, offering the potential for a genuine shift in how we perceive the world. 

MORE FROM PEGGY ORENSTEIN:

Unraveling: What I Learned about Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater

Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hook-Ups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity

Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

Don’t Call Me a Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex and Life

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of New Girlie-Girl Culture

Peggy Orenstein’s Website

Follow Peggy on Instagram and Twitter

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“So one of the things I explored in life in Life in Five Senses was the value of boredom. Because when you're bored and when your mind is just kind of running free and trying to amuse itself, you'll often have insight. And that's why people have ideas in the shower, when they're walking the dog or something. When there's nothing occupying them, that's when our brain can come up with these new insights. So I was walking through the Met, I was in a very familiar place, so I was a little bored. And that's when I realized, the way I thought of it was that the beautiful often requires a little bit of ugly. And being systematic, I’m like, you say that, but how do you back that up? And I could think of one for each sense because it does turn out that often the beautiful does require a little bit of what might be considered ugly. And that is part of, as you say, the complete picture. When I took a perfume class as part of my sense of smell study, our professor had said that often a beautiful perfume will have some bad, you'll smell it and you would be like, Ooh, that smells bad. And yet it makes the perfume more beautiful.”

Gretchen Rubin is an author, podcast host, and self-improvement expert, who has written many New York Times bestellers, including one that hit #1: The Happiness Project, where Gretchen performed what she has now perfected—using herself as a lab through which to study how principles from throughout time act on us, and inform our understanding of the world. She extends this point-of-view into her podcast, The Happiness Project with Gretchen Rubin, where she offers actionable daily strategies for cultivating joy and well-being, along with her sister.

Today, we discuss her newest book, Life in Five Senses, which explores the powerful impact of embracing the world through sensing the world, rather than thinking about the world. It’s a book about experiencing: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Through her extensive research and personal insights, Gretchen found that tuning into these senses provides relief from internal chaos while fostering our connection with the external world.

MORE FROM GRETCHEN RUBIN:

Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World

The Happiness Project

The Four Tendencies

Better Than Before

Happier with Gretchen Rubin Podcast

Gretchen’s Website & Newsletter

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“For people who have been in a long relationship and then it goes off the rails and ends, it’s a different kind of grief from say widower grief, right? Where maybe the relationship gets to stay intact and time capsuled. And you get to maintain the quality and texture of those memories even as you're grieving the loss of the person in your present life and in your future. And I think something that happens in divorce that we maybe don't talk enough about is the kind of like, I think they call it ambiguous grief, right? It's like losing someone who's still around, but not really, and not still around and available to you in the capacity that they once were. And so if you've been with someone for a really long time, you have all this institutional knowledge, right? Like all these private jokes and little songs, and it's like, who did I see? Oh, I remember seeing that movie. Who did I see that with? Oh, right. And it's like walking in a minefield…”

So says Maggie Smith, an incredible poet and teacher whose mastery of language is always stunning: She distills sentiments of motherhood, grief, and survival in a way that is equal parts relatable and beautiful. While she’s published poems that touch such a collective nerve they’ve gone viral—namely Good Bones—her newest offering is a memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. And in it, she not only breaks the traditional memoir format, but she also breaks open her relationship and the way we reimagine ourselves and our experiences as time passes. It is a beautiful book. Today, we discuss the ways that Maggie's memoir explores the disparity among gender roles and the collective damage caused by the patriarchy. Ultimately, through her story, she encourages us all to commit to a practice of self-love, introspection, and forgiveness. 

MORE FROM MAGGIE SMITH:

You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Goldenrod

Keep Moving

Good Bones

Maggie’s Website

Maggie’s Substack Newsletter

Follow Maggie on Instagram

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“Ideas don't arrive with a bang. There is no parade. The big thing never screams that it's a big thing. The big thing actually at first looks quite small, but if your life is filled with constant noise, constant chatter, and you're not making room to listen to yourself, you won't be able to hear that subtle whisper, when it arrives. Most people say, oh, my, my best ideas come to me in the shower, it's surprising. If you think about it though, it's not surprising at all because it's like one of the few moments of your day when you're by yourself and you're not getting bombarded by these high decibel sirens for attention in the form of notifications and emails and text messages and phone calls and this and that. You're in this solitary environment where you're letting your mind wander and it's just you and your thoughts and all of these built up whispers then begin to emerge to the surface, but we just don't stay with that long enough to really lean into those ideas, but imagine, you know, the types of ideas you might be able to generate if you can replicate those shower like conditions throughout the day so that you do hear those subtle whispers when they come up.”

So says Ozan Varol, a recovering law professor and former rocket scientist who has spent the last decade or so analyzing the way we think, create, and ideate. In 2020, he wrote Think Like a Rocket Scientist, which explores the way we problem solve—it’s full of fascinating stories and case studies. And he’s now out with his next book, Awaken Your Inner Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary, which offers a continuation of the theme: How do we come up with new ideas and novel solutions, without falling into the trap of doing what everyone else is doing. Ozan is a wonderful narrator and guide, offering hundreds of anecdotes of people—in every conceivable sphere of life—who are doing things differently, and creating change in the process. The best part? Most of his advice is simple and easy to implement, a small shift in how we move throughout our days. 

MORE FROM OZAN VAROL:

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

Awaken Your Inner Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary

Ozan Varol’s Website

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“I guess for me the real tragedy is this idea of a life where you're getting further and further away from something meaningful or what you want and then just watching the time, like having to sell your time in which you do something meaningless. That's deeply horrifying to me. I mean, I know that is describing a lot of jobs and work, but I think a lot of this book is me kind of poking someone and being like, hey, don't you hate that? Like we shouldn't be okay with this. You know, because I think to some degree if you're in a situation like that, there are coping strategies, or you know, you're just kind of like, well, I can't really think about that because I just need to get through another day.”

So says the brilliant Jenny Odell, the now two-time New York Times Bestselling author. In 2019, she came out with HOW TO DO NOTHING, a treatise on the attention economy. Her book landed right before COVID, offering wise and trenchant insight into what happened to all. This book captured my heart. And her follow-up—SAVING TIME: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock continues the conversation, exploring the way we use our hours, whose hours count more, and what this looks like in the context of our ancient universe where time has a different measure. 

MORE FROM JENNY ODELL:

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Inhabiting the Negative Space

The Bureau of Suspended Objects

Jenny Odell’s Website

Follow her On Instagram and Twitter

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“We are in a time where everything that we think we have taken for granted in terms of human achievement, human conscience, human goodness are being turned upside down. To reclaim them, you know, to reclaim them is an act of courage, personally, but also depends to an extent on having a roadmap broad enough and receptive enough to receive the help that's coming to us from a wider world that we're not even aware of anymore, for which this planet is, in its own funky way, the eye of the needle. There's something really precious and really painful, really difficult about our walk here, and everybody knows it, but we can reach for hope.”

So says Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopalian priest and modern day mystic, who is one of the most fascinating thinkers on the planet today. She has written many, many books—books that have re-ordered my understanding of the world and what we’re all doing here. Her book on Mary Magdalene—The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity—reconceived the way I understood early Christianity, and then The Wisdom Jesus, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, and the Eye of the Heart have each brought me deeper into an understanding of consciousness. Ultimately, Cynthia is a map-maker—a map-maker who can put context around experience and point us toward where we all need to go. While she leads retreats and lectures, in her earlier life, Cynthia was a student and then a colleague of Father Thomas Keating, the founder of the Centering Prayer movement—Cynthia worked intently with this pioneering tradition, which seeks to unite wisdom traditions and teachers from across the globe. Cynthia is an emeritus faculty member at Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation. Her mind is complex, so listen closely—she is incredible.

MORE FROM CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT:

Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm

The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message

The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity

The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity

Cynthia’s Website

The Center for Action and Contemplation

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“People have always fought against anyone trying to impose power on them or trying to assert their status on them. That is true right throughout history, from written records onwards, certainly, you know, we have evidence of it, even in some of the most misogynistic societies on the planet, like ancient Greece, for instance. You can still see in legal records, for instance, or in written records, this tension, male anxiety, and women pushing back, you know, that is a kind of constant all the way through. And, not least, we have societies in which women do have more power and that is not seen as remarkable or weird in anyway by those societies themselves.”

So says Angela Saini, an award-winning science journalist who is one of my favorite guides through topics that are sticky—and sometimes icky—and also defining, like the origins of highly problematic race science, and the way the scientific field has come to understand and codify what it is to be a woman. In her first appearance on Pulling the Thread, she talked about science as fact—and then “science” that becomes ripe with human bias and interpretation. As humans, we can really mess things up. 

Angela has written two books interrogating the divisive politics embedded in the science of human difference, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story and Superior: The Return of Race Science. I’m most excited about her latest book, though: It’s called The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality and it’s about the origins of inequality. As she explains, patriarchy was not our predetermined fate. It’s not biological, or natural, or inevitable. And women have been resisting our oppression ever since.

Her book is loaded with fascinating insights, many of which we explore. 

MORE FROM ANGELA SAINI:

The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

Superior: The Return of Race Science

Watch her 2019 BBC Documentary: Eugenics: Science's Greatest Scandal

Angela's Website

Follow Angela on Instagram

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“When I'd gone off and got lost in the woods and I walked for hours and I just couldn't find my way back out of the woods, there was this moment when I stopped and just had this sense of the forest as like this complete system of life. Like I could suddenly hear this, this crackle that felt to me like I could hear the water being drawn up from the soil and I could hear the leaves dropping down, and I could just feel this like I was part of this body and it was a remarkable moment, and I've never let go of that. And I I think once you've heard it once, like you can hear it again, this sense of like the being part of this huge system that's way bigger and way more ancient than you are and, and the humility of that, like the lovely, the lovely humbling that, that, that entails, because, you know, humility, it means literally to be part of the soil, to be of the soil. And that is a grand feeling to chase, I think to integrate with that.”

Katherine joins me today to discuss her newest book, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. A much needed follow-up to her first book, Wintering, which provided so many with language that articulated the pain of the long, communal loneliness and dislocation resulting from the pandemic—even though it was written well in advance—Enchantment presses forward to provide readers with a guide to rediscovering the beauty in being alive. The adult world, Katherine notes, is a profoundly play-less place—as we age, we turn away from our innate sense of wonder and awe in favor of grounded materialism that leaves us tired, anxious, and lonely. In our conversation, she encourages listeners to lean into our natural curiosity, engaging with what feels interesting and luminous in our immediate environment in order to re-sensitize ourselves to the subtle magic of living. We talk about sitting with our fascination instead of rushing to process it and the unique value of small moments in a world that prizes big experiences. For those of us searching for a different way of relating to the world, Enchantment is the balm we have been looking for. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• The death of playfulness…
• Longing and loneliness…
• Everything and nothing, all at once…

MORE FROM KATHERINE MAY:

Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman's Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home

Explore KATHERINE'S WEBSITE

Listen to her podcast, How We Live Now, on APPLE PODCASTS or SPOTIFY

Follow her on INSTAGRAM

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“And we are made of stars, you know. It's not some fun little thing I'm trying to make everyone feel happy with. It's the carbon in your muscles, the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, born in stars. And so I just sat there on the road and the question was, okay, if I've got that in me, if those stars can shine despite everything they've been through, can, can I have some glow? Can, can I have something that lights the way even when things are really grim? Because at that moment I felt so lost. I felt like, how is it possible that I wrote this whole book about self-care? I had this whole career. I've done all this work. How is it possible that I'm still reeling from things that happened to me when I was a kid? Sort of the journey you go on with me on this book is, you know, kind of recognizing we all suffer. I mean, you know, I feel like trauma is almost like a taboo word. People think that it's being used too much. It's like, no, it's, it's suffering. Right? Like every major religion refers to this as suffering.There's pain and rather than ignore it, what I have found is my life is much easier when I deal with it. It's just a better way to live.” 

So says Tara Schuster, author of the breakout hit, Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies. Tara joins us today to discuss her ongoing work to unravel the mystery of the self—tales and tribulations captured in her latest book, Glow in the F*cking Dark: Simple Practices to Heal Your Soul, from Someone Who Learned the Hard Way. 

By all external accounts, Tara is someone who had it all figured out—by the time she was in her late twenties she had worked for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and was a rising star at Comedy Central where she was in charge of critically acclaimed shows like Key & Peele. Beneath it all, she was on the road to rock bottom—anxious, depressed and haunted by her chaotic upbringing. She wrote her first book, in many ways, for herself—a candid and practical guide to healing on the inside through the implementation of simple, daily rituals to transform mind, body, and soul. 

But just as Tara thought she had gotten through the hardest work, and even wrote a book to bring others along with her, she suddenly lost her job—in the middle of the pandemic. One terrifying, dissociative experience while driving down a highway late at night later, she had to come to terms with the fact that her hardest internal work was just beginning. Tara shares with us the things that helped her the most along the way—from journaling to build internal safety and wisdom, to rejecting helplessness and restoring faith in our own agency—Tara makes the sometimes lofty lessons of complex theories such as internal family systems and deep trauma therapy accessible. Self-awareness comes from perpetual curiosity, she reminds us, and we must learn about ourselves before we can extend those learnings for the good of the world. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Self-retrieval…
• Trusting internal authority…
• Perpetual curiosity…

MORE FROM TARA SCHUSTER:

Glow in the F*cking Dark: Simple Practices to Heal Your Soul, from Someone Who Learned the Hard Way

Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, from Someone Who's Been There

Explore TARA'S WEBSITE

Follow Tara on INSTAGRAM

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“I think the biggest challenge with codependency is, when a family member is catered to when their unhealthy or toxic behavior is catered to, it makes the other people in the situation neglected. You know, if you have a sibling who's getting more care than you, or you know, more financial support, that feels a certain way to you. And often we take that out on not just the person doing it, but the other person involved too. So the codependency just, it doesn't impact one relationship, it impacts many. And it really doesn't set anyone up for success. The best way to help a person is sometimes not helping. You know, I think about, um, all of the help I didn't receive, but figured it out. Those were the biggest lessons versus someone rescuing me or doing the work for me, or me never having to figure out this thing because there is someone I can call.”

So says Nedra Glover Tawwab, sought-after relationship expert, licensed therapist and New York Times best-selling author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself. Her new book, Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships is sure to hit the list as well.

In this latest book, Nedra puts her 15 years of experience to work to demystify the ways that our earliest relationships—those with our family of origin—can lead us astray, causing us to abandon ourselves to maintain connection. Like her first bestseller, Drama-Free is packed with insights that are broken up in such a way as to be instantly actionable. Ultimately, it tackles what dysfunctional families look and feel like—and how to break free. Nedra is responsible for mainstreaming a cultural understanding of “boundaries,” and she now tackles other ideas that we all need to address, like co-dependency and enmeshment. In today’s conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including parenting, re-parenting, and what it means to offer support without overstepping.

MORE FROM NEDRA TAWWAB:

Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships

Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself

The Set Boundaries Workbook: Practical Exercises for Understanding Your Needs and Setting Healthy Limits

Follow Nedra on Instagram and Twitter

Sign up for Nedra’s Newsletter 

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“A conversation that I hope this book sparks, because it's such a fun conversation, is the conversation about like, gay men being friends with straight men. But also straight women being friends with straight men. Like, you know, being friends, like a lot of times writings on friendship talk about women and their best friends or straight men and they're like bro friends, or even gay men and their gay friends. But I would love to see more writing about friendships across these artificial gender lines.”

So says Will Schwalbe, someone I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for a long time. In fact, our lives have overlapped in strange and magical ways—a testament, really, to the way that we are all interconnected. Sometimes improbably.

Besides being a long-time, venerated book editor, Will has written four books, including one of my long-time favorites—it’s called The End of Your Life Bookclub, and it’s a memoir about his mother, who died of pancreatic cancer. In her final years, Will and his mom read together, and discussed their lives through the prism of books. It’s beautiful. And his latest book, which we discuss today, is also incredibly, and quietly, moving: It’s called We Should Not Be Friends. It’s about Will and a guy named Chris Maxey, or Maxey, who Will met his senior year of college in the ‘80s—Maxey was a world-class wrestler, who ultimately became a Navy Seal, while the bookish Will worked the Gay Men’s Health Crisis phone lines at night. Point is: They could not have been more different. 

The book is a powerful treatise on what friendship is—and what’s required for intimacy, particularly in a culture where there aren’t many examples of friendships between gay and straight men, or between straight men and women either. We explore all of this.

MORE FROM WILL SCHWALBE:

We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship

Books for Living: Some Thoughts on Reading, Reflecting, and Embracing Life

The End of Your Life Bookclub

Send: Why People Email So Badly and How To Do It Better

Will Schwalbe’s Website

Follow Will on Twitter and Instagram

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“And the moment when she admitted that she had been wrong, that was the greatest healing moment for me of all. And that would never have happened had I not written the memoir, had I not been sort seeking her out asking her lots of questions, details of fights that they had why they fell in love, how they fell in love, what her doubts were. And then there was that moment where she sent me that brief email where she affirmed his essential goodness, his essential integrity and his worth as a father, which was so important to me. And essentially saying she married him in large part because she so desperately wanted to have children. And at that, in that era, she was 27, I think, or 28 when she married him, which for a girl who came from the Midwest was very late especially. And she had gone through and then went through all this trauma. She had three miscarriages. She had something wrong with her uterus, she had to have surgery. So I was the fourth pregnancy that my parents had, and that's why they went ahead and had another baby so quickly with my sister 14 months later. And I think she just saw immediately that not only would my father be an incredible parent, but also he would be the kind of parent that a working woman, the dream parent for a working woman, because he wanted to do all that stuff that not only did she not have time to do, but she really didn't have any inclination to do playing with us, the imaginative play, taking us out on the weekends. I mean, my father, I don't think I ever, in my entire life, had a moment where I looked at my father and thought He's tired of us, or he's exhausted, he's bored with us. He wants to get back to his adult things every instant that he was with us, I felt him completely engaged. And to use your word from earlier, completely enthusiastic.”

So says Priscilla Gilman, author, critic, and former professor of English literature at Vassar College and Yale University. In her first book, The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy, Priscilla writes of the challenges and delights of raising her son Benjamin, who is autistic. Her newest work,The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir, is another family story—this time a searching reflection of her relationship with her esteemed, brilliant, and complicated father, the late theater critic and professor at Yale Drama School, Richard Gilman. 

Though the world knew him as an exacting and confrontational critic, Priscilla and her sister knew their father as the adoring, playful parent who regularly entered their childish worlds, delighting in their company and imaginative pastimes. This father-daughter connection was forever changed, however, by her parent’s separation. At the age of 10, she witnessed her father fall—into shame and depression—which forced her to reckon with the lasting wounds marital dissolution could leave on a person, and a family. The book, filled with honest and painful stories of learning to see her father for who he truly was, expertly captures the universal experience of coming to terms with one’s parents as flawed, complicated people and then choosing to admire and respect them anyway. Our conversation explores what it was like to be raised surrounded by creatives and critics, the difficulties of being thrust into the role of parenting your own parents, and the gifts and complications that come from endeavoring to truly know those we love the most. 

MORE FROM PRISCILLA GILMAN:

Read The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir and The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy

Explore Priscilla's Website

Follow her on Twitter and Instagram

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In today’s episode—my first ever solo attempt—I explain how my spirituality emerged out of a largely secular, nature-based childhood, how I learned to work with the forces of the universe, and what I think we’re after. (Hint: Wholeness.)

MORE FROM ME:

On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good (coming 5/23)

My Substack

My Instagram

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“This is the time where it's kind of like the things that we didn't get right. We need to start fixing. Not fixing, I would say, but opening up to new paths of exploration because we clearly, we've learned at this point that we can't keep doing things the way that we have in the past for our environment, for social rights, workers rights, children's rights, reproductive rights, the whole thing. We need to make some shifts in order to sustain our evolution with the progress that we want to make. So we kind of all need to take a bit of a reset and a pause. I have said for some time, and this is why I'm excited about 2023 and these next couple of years, I have said that there is absolutely nothing that would get resolved while Pluto is still in Capricorn.” 

So says Carissa Schumacher. This is Carissa’s third visit to Pulling the Thread. I highly recommend listening to our introductory conversation—called “My Spiritual Teacher”—if you’re new to Carissa’s work. In it, we talk about how we came into each other’s orbits—through a miracle, I would—and how her presence has deeply affected the last few years of my life.

In today’s conversation, we dive right into Yeshua’s recent transmissions—and yes, when Carissa says Yeshua, she’s talking about Jesus, or more specifically Christ Consciousness—or what she calls the energy of peace. I know this sounds odd, but Yeshua—who we’ll refer to as a “he” to keep things simple—says throughout the transmissions: “Know me not as I was, but as I am.” Carissa is not the only Yeshua channel, she asserts, and one of the points of these transmissions is for each of us to cultivate that voice we have inside. The content Yeshua delivers is universal, deeply applicable to our lives today, and certainly not attached to any formal religious culture or system of faith. I find it full of revelations and profound wisdom, insights that I can immediately apply to the way I conceive and understand the world around me.

Today, we cover a lot of ground—Carissa dives into the difference between creativity and productivity, and between wisdom and knowledge, and we talk about the seven ways Yeshua says we can recognize power that comes from shadow—and how, like a switchboard, those old era energies are being switched off—and will no longer work in the coming era. Speaking of that coming era, Carissa also talks about what it means that Pluto is leaving Capricorn, and the changes we will begin to see.

If you want a grounding in these teachings, I highly recommend Carissa and Yeshua’s book, The Freedom Transmissions, which is eight Yeshua transmissions Carissa channeled over the course of a week, several years ago. And if you want to experience this work in community, I highly recommend attending one of Carissa’s journeys. They are life-changing events. Her website is TheSpiritTransmissions.com. And for more on Carissa, I’ve written about a lot of these transmissions in my newsletter and on my website: eliseloehnen.substack.com.

MORE FROM CARISSA SCHUMACHER

The Freedom Transmissions: A Pathway to Peace, Yeshua as channeled by Carissa Schumacher

Carissa’s Website

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“Look at how we've convoluted and complicated. The most simple things. Look at nutrition now. How many supplements are we supposed to take? How many grams of fat am I supposed to eat? And then grams of carbs, and then how many grams of sugar is taller? It's insane that we've managed because I think a lot of people don't believe stuff unless it sounds scientific or it's extremely complicated. But nature isn't that complicated. Like why do all of these cultures, the few that are around now, indigenous cultures, they don't have high blood pressure, they don't have heart disease, they don't have diabetes, they don't have anxiety, they don't have panic, they have all have straight teeth. They don't also have any big pharma. Uh, they don't have dentists. They don't need any of this stuff because they are living in an environment in which humans naturally evolved.You and I are not, we're living in an environment that is so different and it's no coincidence that the more we integrate back into nature, the better we get.”

So says the brilliant—and endlessly entertaining—James Nestor, author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. While Breath is a mega-bestseller—across the globe, it’s also an award-winning work of science reporting, stringing together seemingly disparate streams of thought and science into a treatise on one of the most significant impacts on our health: The way we learned to breathe. Yep, breathe. James makes the case that our tendency toward mouth-breathing works against our very nature, distorting our faces and jaws, ramping our anxiety, and weakening our immune response…simply because our noses are designed to filter the world on our behalf. I loved our long-ranging conversation, and it was wonderful to be in James’s company again. Let’s get to our chat.

MORE FROM JAMES NESTOR:

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves

James’s Website

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“There are many places I'd love to see and I know I would learn from. But if I never see them, I won't be sorry. I mean I feel I'm so happy just being here in my little rented two room apartment in the middle of nowhere, Japan where we've been for 29 years. And I would be so grateful if I could spend almost every day here. And again another thing that the pandemic reminded us, I couldn't travel as much as usual. I don't think I really missed it. What I did find was I'd take a walk along the road behind my mother's house and it's in the hills of Santa Barbara and my parents had lived there more than 50 years. I'd never walked to the end of the road just 20 minutes away before. And I did. And I'd look around and there was a golden light of early morning and there's a Pacific ocean in the distance with the sun sentient above it. And I said, this is as beautiful as anywhere. Somebody would go to Capri or Rio de Janeiro to see us right in my backyard. And I'd never thought to look at it before. And so too, with this little apartment, my wife and I just start taking walks in every direction. And we came upon bamboo forests and cherry blossoms, all kinds of wonders. And we'd never in 29 years in this apartment looked around us. And so a reminder that all the beauty of the wonder of the world is right here. If only I have the eyes and motivation to see.”

So says the wonderful Pico Iyer, who began his career teaching writing and literature at Havard, before he joined Time as a writer on world affairs. Since then, he has published 15 books, many of which are bestsellers. His books have been translated into over 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism to the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. Perhaps known best for his travel writing, his most recent book, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, is the culmination of a lifetime of experiences in the outer world, intertwined with a deep and beautiful look at his inner world, as he asks himself, and the reader, how we might come upon paradise in the midst of the reality of our lives. 

Most of us are steeped in a culture which views paradise as eternally elusive—we live our lives with a deep longing to return to the Eden from which we have been evicted, to a place where the struggles of the human experience melt away. But it is in our struggle that we find paradise, Iyer tells us, if only we have the eyes to see it. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Recalling what we have forgotten…
• Utopian longings and viable dreams…
• Creating a life that matters…

MORE FROM PICO IYER:

The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise and other books by Pico Iyer

Pico’s website 

Watch Pico Iyer’s TED Talks:

Where is home? (2013)

The art of stillness (2014)

The beauty of what we'll never know (2016)

What ping-pong taught me about life (2019)

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“We're aware that we're in an ecological crisis. We are destroying our own ecosystem. We're aware there's loss of biodiversity, these beautiful species going extinct and who is the prime partner for us is the earth. But you go to an ecological conference like they are having now in Egypt and who listens to the earth whereas the voice of the earth herself, she's not heard, she's not asked, nobody asks the earth. And she is this ancient being. And so wise, she has been through mass extinctions before. Indigenous people knew how to ask and how to listen and how to talk to the earth. And that's why a lot of my writings recently are about trying to find a way to reconnect, to regain this way of being present with the earth, of listening to the earth of just being with her. And so her voice can be heard. Because if we don't make that connection, I don't see how we can go forward into a living future.”

So says my guest today, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee - Sufi mystic, PhD, lecturer and prolific author. I have been reading through his books in a type of fever—they are some of the most powerful, and clarifying, treatises on spirituality—and what this whole experience is about—that I’ve ever read. 

Vaughan-Lee began following the Naqshbandi Sufi path at the age of 19, guided by Irina Tweedie, who brought this particular Indian branch of Sufism to the West. He eventually became her successor, and moved to Point Reyes, California where he founded the Golden Sufi Center—continuing to expand the reach of his Sufi lineage, making its teachings ever more available to the Western seeker. While he is in retreat as a teacher, he recently launched a podcast, called Stories for a Living Future that is beautiful.

His many books provide a detailed exploration of the stages of spiritual and psychological transformation experienced on the Sufi path. More recently, his writing has focused on our spiritual responsibility to the earth, in the present time of transition; awakening our awareness of oneness with the world and all that is in it; and the presence of the amina mundi, or the world soul. Today, Vaughan-Lee joins the podcast to discuss one of his latest books, Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, which is a collection of essays from some of our most esteemed leaders across faiths and dimensions, including Joanna Macy, Thich Nhat Hanh, Wendell Berry, Richard Rohr, and Vandava Shiva. As he explains today, we have lost awareness of the sacredness of creation, a loss that has allowed us to abuse an Earth regarded as unfeeling, unknowing matter. This is the spiritual root of our ecological crisis.    

He implores us to follow the thread that allows us to once again live in direct connection with creation, noting that real change can only happen when we regain our magical consciousness; grow closer to the lumen natura—nature’s light—and allow ourselves to fall in love with the Earth once more. Llewellyn does a remarkable job of placing our human story within the story of the Earth—in turn, he leaves us yearning to rediscover our place within the whole and thereby reaffirm our primal connection with our sacred home. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• A tree is not just timber, it is a spirit…
• Regaining our magical consciousness..
• The great unraveling of present civilization..
• Healthy society needs cultural eldering…

MORE FROM LLEWELLYN VAUGHAN LEE:

Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth

Seasons of the Sacred: Reconnecting to the Wisdom Within Nature and the Soul and other books by Vaughan-Lee (I love the six-part series on Spiritual Power & Oneness).

Stories for a Living Future Podcast

Check out The Golden Sufi Center and Working with Oneness

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“How do we actually with due speed, cuz this is a timely issue, start to live in modern culture, which is taken over the planet. Basically live in a way that is really about the truth of who we are. That we are a me and we are a we, and that if we live that way, we wouldn't treat each other as enemies, we would treat each other as relatives. You know, you don't get along with every relative the same way, but if they're in your family, they're your family. And if we then saw all of nature as the family of nature, you know, we would treat earth not like a trash can, but a sanctuary. And, and we would do this together. And we are incredibly collaborative, we're incredibly creative and yes, we can use competition, but what we can do in our competition is make it so we're competing to really deal with, you know, diseases and famine and all the problems we face. So when you win the competition, everybody benefits.”

So says Dr. Daniel Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center. As an interpersonal neurobiologist Dan is focused on the creation of self—and his latest book, IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging takes his lifelong pursuit to understand the Venn diagram between personal reality and collective identity even farther: In it, he explores questions of consciousness, the importance of connection, and the world of quantum physics as it relates to our relationship with the external world. For Dan, the science of energy, which animates us all, is the study of the continuum of possibility to probability. 

MORE FROM DAN SIEGEL, M.D.:

IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging

The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are

Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind

Follow Dan on Instagram

Dan’s Website

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“I mean, nourishing is truly, honestly, it is, it is, uh, an activism. It is it, the, the minute you are nourished the decisions you make versus when you weren't nourished, they're gonna be really different the way you react to your kids. How we parent, how we are in our, our partnerships or our work. It's like when we're nourished, it's like another, another part of us is being like our truest part, like who we truly are. And so if we can all be a little closer to that, like that, that's the activism I'm tending. You know, it's like that's, that, that really is, that's an advocacy for a culture that's really hungry. A world that really needs us to care for ourselves. It's not just an i it really is a, we, it's a we movement.”

So says Jules Blaine Davis, otherwise known as The Kitchen Healer. I met Jules nearly a decade ago, after hearing rumors about this miraculously woman who lived on the other side of Los Angeles: I was told that she could restore a desire to cook, for one. But that her work was actually much deeper than that: That she probed long-held stories we hold about ourselves when it comes to our appetites and their validity, as well as whether we believe we deserve to be nourished. I spent an afternoon with her—walking around her backyard barefoot and telling her about my relationship with food—and left her house deepened, newly dedicated to turning on the fire in my own house, and reclaiming the kitchen as a place where I could be—not as a zone where there was more for me to do.

MORE FROM JULES BLAINE DAVIS:

The Kitchen Healer: The Journey to Becoming You

Follow Jules on Instagram

Jules’s Website

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“If you don't change things that we already feel we should change or we feel called to change, if you're holding onto our job alone or to a relationship that is toxic or to whatever, because we are afraid to change, then it becomes stronger and stronger. And when the, the tension is too big, then we call it crisis. Because then the system needs to rebalance itself through a painful process. But there's a conscious version of it too, < which means we support each other in the change process and we create societies and environments that are actually supportive of change and create safety for change. And we can do that together. If we invest in it.”

So Says Thomas Hübl, one of the most incredible, spiritually oriented teachers working in the trauma space today. Thomas primarily works with large groups, where his process focuses on transmuting dark, collective energy—typically old, dense energy that’s held by cultures and places. He has worked all over the world in zones where there is much dense despair, using a collective holding space to transmute and metabolize this energy, arguing that it’s essential fuel for our evolution and growth. When we deny this energy’s presence, or refuse to acknowledge what’s happened in humanity’s past, we are stuck reliving these stories and patterns, not understanding where they even come from. The beauty of Thomas’s work is that you don’t need to be directly affected by these stories in order to help move and release them. He explains how this works in his book, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds, and we dive into the journey here. This conversation was very powerful and moving to me—it’s one of my favorite on this podcast so far.

MORE FROM THOMAS HÜBL:

Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

Thomas’s Website

Follow Thomas on Instagram

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“Now I'm making something that I didn't imagine. It's not going like I imagined, but it's going. And then when you finish the Object Thing book, then it has the power to take you on a journey that you never would have dreamt had you kept the idea in your interior museum. And then that shifts your imagination. You have more, more artwork that's collected in the Interior Museum and but, and then as you grow older, as a maker, You see that distinction, right? The distinction between the beautiful interior museum and the museum in reality of things that you've actually made and done and the stories attached to the making and doing that have changed your life.”

I am joined today by my dear friend, Alexandra Grant. Alexandra is a fascinating person and talented visual artist whose work examines language and written texts through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and other media and has been exhibited at institutions across the country: at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), the Pasadena Museum of California Art, among others. In 2008, she created the grantLOVE Project, which has raised awareness and funds for various arts nonprofits through the gift and sale of her iconic LOVE artwork. In 2017, she and her life partner, Keanu Reeves, co-founded X Artists’ Books, an artist-centric publishing house, helping artists and readers alike explore the creation of artwork and ideas outside the traditional model of book publishing. If that wasn’t enough, Alexandra is currently leading the first NFT project of the Hollywood Sign for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and is an Advisor to the Future Verse Foundation.

She joins me today to meditate on art and love—as we celebrate the release of her book Love: A Visual History of the grantLOVE Project. A comprehensive history of the foundation she started fifteen years ago, the book is a visual collection of paintings, prints, sculptures, textiles, jewelry, and architecture gathered by Grant and her collaborators to explore the timeless question, what is love? Our conversation is a peek into our regular walk and talks—a beloved routine through which we have been able to explore, reflect, and build an incredibly meaningful friendship. Today we discuss what it means to be looked at and perceived by the public, especially as the partner of one of the most famous actors of our generation; the inevitable disappointment that results from taking the beautiful ideas in our heads and attempting to turn them into something physical; and owning our native talents in the pursuit of a creative live, whether or not we fit into the conventions of being an artist. You have to create opportunities between the cracks, she tells us. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Being in the messy middle…
• Owning your native talents…
• Conversing with the past self…
• Creating opportunities between the cracks…

MORE FROM ALEXANDRA GRANT:

Love: A Visual History of the grantLOVE Project

Explore X Artists' Books

Check out her website and the grantLOVE Project

Follow Alexandra on Instagram

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“But a life devoted to something larger than yourself is a life worth living. It's a life that is in recognition of life is given to us, it's given to us so that we can give it, we're blessed so that we can bless. We're born, I think, I can't prove this, but I've experienced it to make the contribution that's uniquely ours to make. And when you find that dharma, that discovers who you are, this is a match for what's wanted in the world. Oh my God. It's so thrilling that I wanted to do everything I could to make that available to people, because it's not only wonderful for you, the world needs us now. The world always did. But now the crises are so deep, so profound, so intense, so everywhere. So in every part of society, in every economic class, in every country, in every language, in every culture, that it's all hands on deck. And what a thrilling time to be alive when it's an all hands on deck moment.” so says my guest today, Lynne Twist. Lynne is a world-renowned visionary committed to alleviating poverty, ending world hunger, and supporting social justice and sustainability. Her 40-year career has taken her from working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, to the refugee camps in Ethiopia and the threatened rainforests of the Amazon, to guiding the philanthropic efforts of some of the world’s wealthiest families. Her breadth of experience led her to found the Soul of Money Institute, where she has worked with hundreds of thousands of people all over the world on topics such as fundraising with integrity, practicing conscious philanthropy, and creating a healthy relationship with money. Lynne first translated her compelling stories and life experiences into the bestselling book, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life and joins us today to discuss her newest book, Living a Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself.

In the book, and our conversation, Lynne reveals the guiding principles that have enabled her to live as a thought leader and activist, teaching us that a committed life is one worth living: That sometimes the commitment to it alone is enough to ensure it happens. The universe is telling us repeatedly that we are in this together, she says, and in a world that sometimes feels chaotic and devoid of meaning, it’s incumbent that we draw together around what it means to be human.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Taking a stand vs. taking a position…
• Pain pushes until vision pulls…
• We won’t think our way out of this…
• Replacing charity with solidarity…

MORE FROM LYNNE TWIST:

Living a Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself

The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

Check out Lynne’s Soul of Money Institute and The Pachamama Alliance

Follow Lynne on Instagram and Twitter

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“Boundaries don't tell other people what to do. They tell other people what you are willing to do to take responsibility for your own needs and your own feelings and keep yourself safe and healthy. And they actually are, as we've discussed, a gift to your relationship, they make relationships better. And when you turn it around on its head like that, I think number one, that helps people understand all of the benefits to your relationship when each party does take responsibility for how they feel and for their needs. And it also gives you a sense of empowerment. I think people feel like, Oh, I can't set boundaries because what if the other person won't do it or doesn't say yes? And when I tell them, Oh no, no, no, your boundary cannot depend on somebody else. It is only dependent on what you are willing and able to do.”

So says Melissa Urban, a woman who can do everything. Not only is the founder of Whole30, she’s a six-time New York Times best-selling author. Her latest is the subject of our conversation today: It’s called "The Book of Boundaries: Set the Limits That Will Set You Free,” which is the result of helping her community navigate through their relationships to…pretty much everything as they begin to fix and adjust their relationship to their own bodies and food. She is a fierce proponent of self-efficacy and a commitment to showing up for yourself in all aspects of life.

In our conversation, we discuss what a boundary even means—and how difficult it is for us to address what’s at the root of establishing them, which is our NEEDS. Melissa guides us through relatable scenarios, like with the in-laws or a boss, where boundaries might be missing. And we talk about the qualities of niceness and how they can get in the way of caring for ourselves: Melissa, who is fierce in her directness, distinguishes between the quality of niceness and the quality of kindness in a very profound way. And it all comes to this: We must first be kind to ourselves before we can show up with kindness in the world.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Direct not rude…
• Boundaries don’t tell other people what to do…
• Set limits, set expectations…
• Make the goal showing up for yourself…

MORE FROM MELISSA URBAN:

The Book of Boundaries: Set the Limits That Will Set You Free

Check out Melissa's Website

Follow Melissa on Instagram and Twitter

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“My childhood was a childhood in the closet. I had some good things. I had some bad things, like living in the closet is, you know, not always terrible. It's simply not the greatest expression of, of who we have the capacity to become, I think. Um, but for my parents, you know, as my father went along in my childhood, he became more and more withdrawn and kept trying to do the right thing, was closeted even to himself. This was a secret he was keeping even from himself for most of my childhood. But it made him kind of a lousy partner. Right. My mother's experience was just a very, very lonely experience. Her life looked on the outside exactly like it was supposed to look, we lived in a nice community. She was married to a lawyer, or, you know, we looked great on a Christmas card, but it felt cavernous, just vacant and left with so much time on her own. Um, she really struggled not to let her memory present her with things to work on. And that led her to be very depressed throughout my childhood.”

So says Jessi Hempel, a long-time media and technology journalist, an award-winning host of the podcast, Hello Monday, and author of the new memoir, The Family Outing. Her book is a profound telling of family dynamics, offering lessons on accepting one's truest self. Specifically, it’s the story of a family who comes out of the closet to embrace their queer identities. Even Jessi’s mother, who is straight, lives in a type of closet, Jessi explains, as she nearly became the victim of a serial killer as a teenager—this unconfronted trauma affects her entire family’s life. In our conversation, Jessi shares her journey to emphasize the detrimental side-effects of shame and the non-linear path to liberation.

Our conversation explores the value of authenticity and navigating parts of ourselves we have not yet learned to face. She believes that when we“step into ourselves,” culture has the capacity to shift, allowing us all to live more gracefully. Okay, let’s get to our conversation. 

MORE FROM JESSI HEMPEL:

The Family Outing

Jessi’s podcast, Hello Monday

Follow Jessi on LinkedIn and Instagram

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“I’m trying to map the territory in the center world, just the way I did with families and the distinction that immediately leaped out was between parts that other systems would call inner children, which, you know, they're very, before they're hurt, they're delightful. They give us all kinds of joy and, and imagination and creativity and playfulness and so on. But once they feel, once you have an experience that leaves you feeling worthless or terrified or hurt, they're the ones that take that in the most, because they're the most sensitive parts of you. And then they get stuck with these, what I call burdens of worthlessness or pain or terror. And now we don't wanna be around them because they have the power to overwhelm us and make us feel all that again and bring us back into those scenes that they literally are living in still. And so we try to lock them away in inner basements, thinking we're just moving on from the memories, sensations and, and emotions of the trauma. Not realizing that we're actually leaving in the dust, the parts of us we love the most when they're not hurt, just cuz they got hurt.” So says Dr. Richard Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems, a transformative, evidence-based model of psychotherapy that de-pathologizes the multipart personality. Dr. Schwartz began his career as a systemic family therapist and academic in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago and later at Northwestern University. It was there that he worked with a number of clients who claimed to recognize that they had several components, or parts, to themselves. This discovery led him to develop Internal Family Systems, also known as IFS. Within his model, Dr. Schwartz argues that our consciousness, or personality, can be broken down into multiple parts, each with distinct characteristics that fall under three categories: exiles, managers, and firefighters. Exiles are the parts of us that experience anxiety, fear, or trauma—often when we’re very young. Our other parts begin to protect those exiles from being triggered by events and experiences. Managers do this by dictating how we interact with the external world and firefighters seek to protect us by pushing us toward distraction to numb our pain.

 All of our inner parts contain valuable qualities, Dr. Schwartz tells us, but when they are left unattended, they may lead to damaging impulses, causing us to write them off as damaging in and of themselves. On the other hand, when our parts are acknowledged and their needs are addressed, a confidence and openness emerges—what Dr. Schwartz has come to call the Self. It is in this state of Self, that we can begin to heal all of our parts and become integrated and whole.

In our conversation today, Dr. Schwartz walks us through the basics of his model and then guides me through an IFS work session. This was very powerful for me. Because the concept sounds heady, I’m glad you can experience the model in action: I hope our work together inspires you to explore the profound awareness made accessible by IFS. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• It is the nature of the mind to have multiple parts…
• Reconciling with your exiles…
• My IFS session…

MORE FROM DR. RICHARD SCHWARTZ:

Books by Dr. Richard Schwartz: 

• No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
• Introduction to Internal Family Systems
• You Are the One You've Been Waiting for: Applying Internal Family Systems to Intimate Relationships

Explore the IFS Institute 

WATCH: Dr. Richard Schwartz Explains Internal Family Systems (IFS)

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"We have offered a model, the seven circles, that helps people to understand that it's not just food and fitness, which so many wellness practitioners purport. It's not just diet and exercise. It's not just the way that you look on the outside or the $90 yoga pants that you can afford, or the fancy studio class or the 25 ingredient smoothie that costs $25. You know, those are unfortunately the images that we have now when it comes to wellness. And that's why so many people continue to feel excluded and uninterested in wellness. It seems so superficial. And so what I hope is that we have incorporated all these other elements to show people that not only can they be a wellness person who participates or who practices wellness, but they are already. We are all on this journey to some degree already." So says Chelsey Luger. Luger and her husband Thosh Collins are wellness teachers, authors, and the founders of the indigenous wellness initiative, Well for Culture. Launched in 2013, Well For Culture was established to reclaim ancient Native wellness philosophies and practices to promote the wellbeing of the physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional self. From their exploration and practice, the two have developed a holistic model for modern living which they share with us in their first book, The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well. 

According to Luger and Collins, these seven circles—food, movement, sleep, community, sacred space, ceremony, and connection to land—are interconnected, working together to keep our lives in balance. In our conversation, we begin to explore these many aspects of health, as Luger and Collins explain how their teachings can be adapted to every life, and how to do so while maintaining respect and reverence for the Indigenous origins of the wisdom and practices they share. We discuss their work to reframe wellness, how to integrate spirituality into movement through intention, and the power of the hollow bone mentality. Healing and wellness is not just a journey of one, they tell us, but rather a journey of family and community: When we take the important steps to heal ourselves, we contribute to the health of all. I was very moved by this conversation, which we’ll turn to now.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Creating a true connection to movement…
• Misappropriation…
• Fools Crow and the Hollow Bone Theory…
• Creating agreements with ourselves around technology…

MORE FROM CHELSEY & THOSH:

The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well

Check out their initiative: Well for Culture

Native Wellness Institute

Follow Thosh on Instagram 

Follow Chelsey on Instagram

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“The thing is the type of thinking where you can figure out how mechanical things work. It’s a different kind of intelligence. And I think it's hard for verbal thinkers to understand. And they kind of will look at the shop kids as a dumb kids. Now, fortunately, some states are starting to put it back in. We're having more and more infrastructure things falling apart, like this latest disaster with the water works breaking—you see, a visual thinker can see how it works and how to fix it. And you keep deferring maintenance. I mean, we got wires falling off of electric towers in California and starting fires because they deferred maintenance, but we need all of the different kinds of thinkers. And the first step is realizing that they exist and they need to work together as teams.” So says Dr. Temple Grandin, a New York Times bestselling author, celebrated animal welfare advocate, and one of the world’s most prominent speakers on autism. Temple first came into the public consciousness with her memoir, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism, which provided her unique inside narrative and revolutionized how the world understood autistic individuals. Her latest book, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions, works to expand our awareness of the different ways our brains are wired even further as she draws upon cutting edge research to demystify the brains of visual thinkers. 

Our world is geared for verbal thinkers, she tells us, with rigid academic and social expectations sidelining visual thinkers at school and in the workplace—to the detriment of productivity and innovation everywhere. In our conversation, Temple takes us through the three different types of thinkers, and argues that changing our approach to educating, parenting, and employing visual thinkers has great potential to encourage, rather than stifle, their singular gifts and unique contributions. As the number of children diagnosed with autism continues to rise nationally, her call to foster “differently-abled” brains is more important than ever—as she so eloquently says, we need all kinds of minds to solve today’s most difficult problems.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Three kinds of thinkers…
• Neurodiversity is essential for our survival…
• Avoiding label lock…

MORE FROM TEMPLE GRANDIN:

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

Emergence: Labeled Autistic

The Autistic Brain: Helping Different Kinds of Minds Succeed

Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism (Expanded Edition)

Visit Temple's Website

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“What I'm positing is, is an ability to grapple with contradiction. So that's the paradox mindset that Wendy Smith, Maryanne Lewis and other scholars have shown that when we're able to sit with two conflicting things in our minds, for example that if we stick with the example in South Africa, it may be true that if I'm a student that my parents and my grandparents participated in actively supported apartheid and that they were also wonderful parents and grandparents, right? Like those two things can be true, and being able to sit with that contradiction gives me. Like emotional limberness to kind of, you know, push my way through the, the emotional slog of this is awful. This is awful. And to sit with terrible things happened, that's the only way you can do it.” So says Dolly Chugh, award-winning social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, where she is an expert researcher in the psychology of people and goodness. Her first book is the wonderful, The Person You Mean to Be and she just released a second, called, A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change. Both books serve as inspiring, yet practical guides for those of us who seek to be better. A More Just Future builds on Chugh’s first book, which equipped readers with the tools to be “good-ish” people who stand up for their values. In her latest, she offers a guide to reckoning with the whitewashed history of our country in order to build a better future. 

The seeds of today’s inequalities were sown in the past, she tells us, and it will take an extra dose of resilience and grit to grapple with the truth of our history and to make the systemic changes needed to mend the fabric of our country. Moving from willful ignorance to willful awareness isn’t easy, leading to uncomfortable feelings of shame, guilt, disbelief, and resistance when we encounter revelations that run against what we have long been told. But it is possible to love your country with a broken heart, she says, imploring us to grapple with contradiction, employing the paradox mindset as we shift from the rigidness of “either/or” to the nuance of “both/and.” 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Wired for consistency…
• Light vs. heat-based change…
• Sitting in paradox…
• Belief grief…

MORE FROM DOLLY CHUGH:

A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change

The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias

“How to let go of being a "good" person—and become a better person,” TED Talk

Check out Dolly's Website

Follow her on Twitter and Instagram

“The Truth About Rosa Parks And Why It Matters To Your Diversity Initiative,” Forbes

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“But my other favorite thing about the confidence piece, as someone who can be very anxious and nervous myself, is that sometimes it's valuable not to be confident. And there is this piece in the book about how everyone would benefit if, when you're making decisions, you start off in an information gathering stage. And instead of being super confident when you're trying to gather data, you turn down your confidence, be not confident at all, be confused, be concerned, be anxious. Gather all the data, as many differing viewpoints as possible. Once you've figured out the right answer with all the humility that you could possibly have, jack up your confidence and then you execute. And this idea that confidence can be on a dial and there's value in not being confident sometimes is something that I was never taught. And that feels very reassuring to learn,” so says Julia Boorstin, who has spent over two decades as a reporter, working for CNBC, CNN, and Fortune. She’s also the creator of the “Disruptor 50” franchise, a list which highlights private companies transforming the economy and challenging companies in established industries. Her first book, When Women Lead, draws on her work studying and interviewing hundreds of executives throughout her impressive career to tell the stories of more than 60 female CEOs and leaders who have fought massive social and institutional headwinds to run some of the world’s most innovative and successful companies. 

Combining years of academic research and interviews, Julia reveals these women’s powerful commonalities—they are highly adaptive to change, deeply empathetic in their management style, and much more likely to integrate diverse points of view into their business strategies. This makes these women uniquely equipped to lead, grow businesses, and navigate crises in ways where their male counterparts don’t seem as gifted. 

Today’s episode digs into Boorstin’s meticulously researched book as we cover a few of the female tendencies that correlate with great leadership: how women embrace the role of fire-prevention as opposed to fire fighting; their ability to avoid ethical quandaries and group think; and the value of gaining confidence through experience. The monoculture tends to focus on iconic female leaders, she tells us, but there is so much more to gain from focusing on the stories that are not being told, expanding the diversity of images of success for women and men alike. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Female qualities correlate with great leadership…
• Women as fire preventers…
• The myth of the confidence gap…
• Feedback bias…

MORE FROM JULIA BOORSTIN:

When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn from Them

CNBC Disruptor 50

Follow Julia on Instagram and Twitter

DIVE DEEPER: 

“Better Decisions Through Diversity: Heterogeneity Can Boost Group Performance,” Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Study 

“How the VC Pitch Process Is Failing Female Entrepreneurs,” Harvard Business Review

“Investors Prefer Entrepreneurial Ventures Pitched by Attractive Men,” Harvard Kennedy School Gender Action Portal

“The Remarkable Power of Hope,” Psychology Today

“Language Bias in Performance Feedback,” Textio 2022 Study

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“Well, I think of it like the metaphor of the ensemble in a great musical, like everybody has to know their part. Everybody has to give 2000% and everybody has to really cheer on the other people, doing their part or it just doesn't work. And the way I see the map to our soul, this astrological map is we have free will. So we get to play it at whatever level we choose and certainly cultural influences and patriarch and all kinds of stuff messes us up. But I firmly believe, and I've seen it over and over that if we get the help, we need to uncover our fullest expression, people are humming at their fullest best part, which then allows everyone else around them to rise up.” So says Jennifer Freed, a psychologist, astrologer, and the author of many books, including the just-released A Map to Your Soul: Using the Astrology of Fire, Earth, Air, and Water to Live Deeply and Fully. I met Jennifer almost a decade ago—she was, in many ways, the gateway to discovering my own spirituality, because when she did my natal chart, I felt deeply seen and held. It seemed like a small miracle. Jennifer is also a psychologist and so her perceptions are grounded in life: They are insightful, practical, and actionable while also being profound and deep.This is a hard path to walk. Jennifer brings this same quality to her books—you need only have the most rudimentary understanding of astrology to get a lot out of their pages. They are, in many ways, a workout for your soul, and an opportunity to get to know yourself better. And if you do it with or for people you love, you’ll also get insight into why they do what they do. As she explains, astrology is often confined to our star signs and newspaper tidbits, when it’s so much vaster. In today’s conversation we discuss our moon, our rising, and the elements in our chart, which signify how we respond to our life. If you want, head to astro.com and get a free natal chart so you can understand the presence of air, water, fire, and earth in your own chart—though it’s not necessary. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• We are all known by the planets…
• Talking about the elements…
• Don’t spare the necessary pain…
• The corporatization of spirituality…
• Sign round-up…

MORE FROM JENNIFER FREED:

A Map to Your Soul: Using the Astrology of Fire, Earth, Air, and Water to Live Deeply and Fully

Use Your Planets Wisely: Master Your Ultimate Cosmic Potential with Psychological Astrology

Check out Jennifer Freed's Website

Follow her on Instagram and Twitter

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“I’ve never really figured out how come we stop asking each other questions. You know, we always do that in the beginning of a relationship just to get to know somebody, but then once we get committed, once we get busy, we're busy, busy, then we think, okay, everything is cool over here. I don't need to put energy into it. I'll go to work. And our partners, meanwhile, and we are changing over time. We are changing with history, with politics. We are changing with our whole world as our kids get older. If we have kids as our career changes and we stop asking each other questions, you know, our days become this endless to-do list period. And the only question we ask is, did you call the plumber? Well, yes. Anything else you wanna know?,” says Dr. Julie Gottman. Julie and her husband, John, have dedicated over four decades to the research and practice of fostering healthy and long lasting relationships. The Gottmans are the world’s leading relationship scientists, having gathered data on over three thousands couples to identify the building blocks of love and employing those findings through the training of clinicians and creation of principles and products for couples around the world. 

Their latest book,The Love Prescription: Seven Days to More Intimacy, Connection, and Joy, distills their findings to the simple question, what makes love last? Providing readers with a simple, seven-day action plan, the book makes the Gottman’s work accessible to every relationship - no grand gestures, difficult conversations, or multi-day seminars required. 

I am delighted to be joined by the couple today as we discuss how to build a fruitful dialogue around the perpetual problems that crop up in relationships; filling your relationship piggy bank with small, but daily, positive actions; and committing to an ongoing curiosity about your partner as they grow and evolve. If both people want to do the work, they tell us, many more relationships can be saved than we may think. Lasting love requires good partnership hygiene, tiny interventions over the course of a lifetime, in order to establish a culture of respect, awareness, and rediscovery that keeps things on the rails. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Accepting perpetual problems…
• Cultivating curiosity…
• Dawning of awareness…
• Respecting anger…

MORE FROM JOHN & JULIE GOTTMAN:

The Love Prescription: Seven Days to More Intimacy, Connection, and Joy

The Gottman Institute - A Research-Based Approach to Relationships

Gottman Relationship Quiz - How Well Do You Know Your Partner?

Find a Gottman Trained Therapist

Follow the Gottman Institute on Twitter and Instagram

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“Sometimes you can't see the full path. And so you don't even venture into the unknown, you know, you're unhappy, you know, you need to change, but you're afraid to take the next step because you can't see the whole path. And so what I learned that night in the dark on the trail in Jerusalem when I had left my, first marriage and I was terrified of the unknown is that it's okay. I could see the next step. There was just enough light on the path to take one step at a time. And after I would take a step, I could see the next step. And that became a metaphor for me, for venturing, you know, breaking out of a stuck place and trusting uncertainty.” So says Estelle Frankel, a psychotherapist and author of Sacred Therapy: Jewish Spiritual Teachings on Emotional Healing and Inner Wholeness and The Wisdom of Not Knowing: Discovering a Life of Wonder by Embracing Uncertainty. In today’s conversation we explore the dimensions of an ironically, more certain state: That of uncertainty, of not knowing, or being able to control what happens next. Estelle is a deep thinker about questions like this, as well as the intersection between spirituality and psychology, and what feel like essential truths to all of us, regardless of the denomination of our faith. I particularly love the way that she thinks about the polarity of good and evil, and the essential components of each.

MORE FROM ESTELLE FRANKEL:

Read Sacred Therapy: Jewish Spiritual Teachings on Emotional Healing and Inner Wholeness and The Wisdom of Not Knowing: Discovering a Life of Wonder by Embracing Uncertainty

Estelle’s Website

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“Where in your life where you're not saying yes, but there's a, yes. That wants to be said where there's some desire for self expression or creativity or way of being that you're stifling because you're trying to stay in an attachment relationship rather than being yourself. So where are you still choosing attachment over authenticity? If the two are in conflict now, ideally we will form relationships with partners and spouses and, and families and friends where we can have both authenticity and attachment. But if that's not possible, this is the challenge for all of us. What are we gonna choose? Are we still gonna choose the attachment or we're gonna go for authenticity. And I'll tell you, health wise, we pay a huge price. If we go for the attachment by stranding authenticity. And so, as we say in the book, the loss of authenticity inauthenticity, it may not have been a choice to the child. It's not like they had a choice in a matter, but authenticity can be a choice to the adult,” so says Dr. Gabor Maté, renowned physician and four-time bestselling author, who joins me today to discuss his newest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. With over four decades of clinical experience, Gabor is a sought after expert on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and unraveling the relationship between stress and illness. In his new book, he brilliantly dissects our understanding of “normal,” exploring the role of trauma, stress, and societal pressures play in our mental and physical well-being. 

Chronic diseases are not interruptions to our lives, but rather manifestations of how we live, Dr. Maté tells us. Very few diseases are genetically predetermined, he says, emphasizing that it is our environment that brings any genetic predispositions we may have to fruition. Starting in childhood, when we begin to disconnect from our authentic selves in order to maintain attachment relationships, most of us live a life where some combination of trauma, emotional pain, and separation from self play a major, yet unexplored, role in our health. Without a grounding in trauma-informed study, western medicine often fails to treat the core wounds that make us sick, leaving us vulnerable to mental illness, auto-immune disease, and addiction. When we recognize our maladies not as independent identities but as bodily expressions of mental suppressions, we can become empowered adults who choose to rediscover an authentic self we lost somewhere along the way. It is only through self-retrieval, Dr. Maté shares, that we can truly begin healing. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Chronic illnesses are representations of our lives…10:00
• Childhood wounds…21:00
• Addiction as a coping mechanism is response to trauma…42:00
• Soul retrieval…48:00

MORE FROM DR. GABOR MATÈ:

Read The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture as well as other books by Gabor Maté

Explore Dr. Maté's Website

Follow him on Twitter and Instagram

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