Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

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 Learn more about your ad choic...

“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...

“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 n...

“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...

“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 a...

“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 sa...

“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 pa...

“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 th...

“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...

“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...

“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 understan...

“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 clo...

“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...

"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 ima...

“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...

“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 supporte...

“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 do...

“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 influe...

“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...

“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 ne...

“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 relations...

“I think we all have these stories, you know, whether they come through bereavements or betrayals or, or whatever, we, we all have these losses…There's something about having been immersed in this bittersweet tradition and understanding the pain of separation and understanding the desire for a union and understanding that the loves that we lose, that we might lose particular loves, but that we nev...

“There seems to be this basic idea that if you make a system including a human life, more efficient, capable of processing, more inputs to put it in like abstract general terms. Well, if that supply of inputs is infinite, all that's gonna happen is that you attract more of them into the system and you end up busier, right? This is Parkinson's law.. It's induced demand with the way when they widen...

“What I know is that no one is alone. There's no sense of isolation or sadness or disconnection that I think at times we mistakenly feel here because we get very stuck in the fact that we're in these physical bodies, right? And sometimes we're physically isolated or sometimes I think some of us are so distanced from our own truths and our own inner voice, our own inner wisdom that we get very conf...

“I tear up at the drop of a hand and got another facilitator who tears up quicker than I do. Uh, but like we tell the youth, the soul would have no rainbow had the eyes, no tears. And so whenever any of the youth tear up or any of the adults, we take the tears and we rub it on the drum so that the tears don't go to waste that reverberate, you know, when we, when we hit the drum. Yeah. So, yeah. So...