147 episodes

45-minute conversations and investigations with today's leading thinkers, authors, experts, doctors, healers, scientists about life's biggest questions: Why do we do what we do? How can we come to know and love ourselves better? How can we come together to heal and build a better world?

Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen Elise Loehnen and Audacy

    • Education
    • 4.8 • 688 Ratings

45-minute conversations and investigations with today's leading thinkers, authors, experts, doctors, healers, scientists about life's biggest questions: Why do we do what we do? How can we come to know and love ourselves better? How can we come together to heal and build a better world?

    When Girls Spark Revolution (Mattie Kahn)

    When Girls Spark Revolution (Mattie Kahn)

    “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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    • 56 min
    Breaking Family Patterns (Vienna Pharaon)

    Breaking Family Patterns (Vienna Pharaon)

    “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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    • 55 min
    The Upsides of Menopause (Lisa Mosconi, PhD)

    The Upsides of Menopause (Lisa Mosconi, PhD)

    “It's important to realize that yes, menopause can come with symptoms, but the symptoms are not alien symptoms. We've seen them before. We've seen them at puberty. We've seen them at pregnancy, if you've been pregnant. We've been there before. And I like to say that menopause is just another tune that we learn to dance to, right? We can do it. We will navigate it. The point is let's make sure that we have the right information, that we understand how it works and that we're aware of the solutions because there are so many women who decide how to navigate menopause based on information that is not unfortunately accurate, it is not up to date. So a lot of decisions are really based on fear rather than facts and then there's regret.”
    So says neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi, PhD, who 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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    • 1 hr 6 min
    When Spirituality and Science are the Same (Jeffrey Kripal)

    When Spirituality and Science are the Same (Jeffrey Kripal)

    “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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    • 1 hr
    Five Things I’m Thinking About: The Creative Process, Pricing Your Work, Inspiration vs. Discernment, Insanity, and the Etymology of Should

    Five Things I’m Thinking About: The Creative Process, Pricing Your Work, Inspiration vs. Discernment, Insanity, and the Etymology of Should

    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:


    “Your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you cannot manage it.”

    “The Construct of Time”


    The Matter With Things, by Iain McGilchrist


    Practicing the Gentle No

    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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    • 37 min
    The Basics of Spiral Dynamics (Nicole Churchill)

    The Basics of Spiral Dynamics (Nicole Churchill)

    “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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    • 1 hr 19 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
688 Ratings

688 Ratings

1017lb ,

Grateful

Thank you, Elise, for today’s episode! Enlightening, educational, and inspiring!

MicahB2Cool ,

The thoughtful conversations we need

I have listened to almost every episode and gained something valuable from each one. These topics are thought-provoking, life-affirming, and much-needed in our times. Thank you for your voice, heart, and intellect. Love, love, love this show!

megadeath666 ,

Nicely done on Spiral Dynamics

I had checked out other resources on this topic and couldn’t get to the essence of why this system is useful/helpful - but this episode did it for me. Nicole Churchill brings such a balanced and elegant perspective to outlining this framework and I look forward to part 2 with her.

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