“There's no generation before us that’s had this opportunity to find this treasure,” says therapist Connie Zweig, PhD. Zweig is the author of The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul. She outlines a compelling approach to aging—one that teaches us how to navigate identity shifts, see who we are beyond our roles, and truly make the most of the gifts of our lives. Today, she shares what happened when she did her own life review practice, and so many other gems that make me excited to...

Everything Richard Christiansen creates is incredibly beautiful and special. Christiansen is the founder of Flamingo Estate and the author of the new book, The Guide to Becoming Alive. He’s also a dear friend of mine. I loved chatting with him about how he moves so fast, what can spark momentum and growth, the qualities that make something precious but also cool, and what it means to ripen your banana (while this sounds vaguely sexual, it is actually a profound metaphor of his). See more...

Spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl, PhD, returns for a deeper exploration of shadow. We talk about our instinct to disown what feels dark or evil, and how tightly we claim the side of what’s good, clean, pure. But Hübl also paints a beautiful alternative: a gentle integration that allows us to illuminate, and own, more of our collective shadow bit by bit—and to transform it into something hopeful, healing. If you’re new to the podcast, you can find my first conversation with Hübl (on locating...

Rightful Instagram celebrity Sharon McMahon is known as “America’s Government Teacher.” Her new book, The Small and the Mighty, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. With her trademark warmth and wit, McMahon shares a few historical secrets, her approach to judging people from the past, and her perspective on our current moment in time. She also tells a remarkable story that may convince you to work with, instead of against, your enemies.  See more about this episode and guest on my...

In this solo episode, I share some things that are on my mind right now, including: An experience I had revisiting my 22-year-old self. A powerful takeaway from a workshop on wanting and desire. And how I’m thinking about personal stories, memoir, and bridges to bigger collective stories. I also answer some listener questions (thank you, and please keep them coming). See more about this episode on my Substack. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit:...

In this moving, live conversation with journalist Clara Bingham, we delve into the incredible stories that make up her latest oral history book, The Movement. Bingham reveals the highs and the lows of second wave feminism from 1963 to 1973, the women who transformed America during that time, and the reverberations that we’re still feeling today. I got choked up during this one. See more about this episode and guest on my Substack. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices...

Legendary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy gave us the term “allomother,” and by extension, “alloparent”—the pioneering idea that mutual care is the reason we’ve evolved to be the humans we are today. Hrdy, who is professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, has just written a new (and stunning) book, called Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies. Today, we talk about what she’s learned about human culture over the course of her long career, and the impact of her...

Sharing an episode of Need a Lift?, a show that focuses on bringing people together during a tough time in our culture. Host Tim Shriver talks to wise guests who have transformed painful moments in their lives into purpose through their spiritual rituals and practices. Guests like bestselling novelist Min Jin Lee on why she creates complicated characters who hold the secret to our transformation, and Olympic athlete Michael Phelps and his wife Nicole discussing the importance of cultivating...

“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...

“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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“The whole sense though, of the Upper Limit Problem, is instead of feeling good and then feeling bad, which is how we think it's supposed to work. You know, you feel bad, you feel good, and then you forget to go to your yoga class and then you start eating things that aren't good for you. And pretty soon, you know, you're off binging and you know, that's over. And in partnership, I'd say, The most common Upper Limit Problem is to criticize the other. Criticizing also gets over into contempt....

“Those of us growing up in consumerist society, when confronted with a problem, our tendency is to add a whole bunch of cumbersome variables to the equation. So, if we're experiencing pain in our relationship, I'll speak for myself, every time we were really, really suffering and not doing well. It did not occur to me once to break up. I was like, you know what we need to do? We need to go on another vacation. Or we need to get another cat. Or we need to replace all our furniture. I don't...

“Human beings trigger other human beings, right? My teacher and friend, Parker Palmer, likes to say, riffing on Socrates, "the unexamined life may not be worth living," but if you choose to live an unexamined life, please don't take a job that involves other people, right? And in classic Midwestern Wisconsin brilliance, Parker's got it, I mean, because what he's saying is that we all have a responsibility to tidy up ourselves as we interact, because we've all been in relationships with people...

“Many of us needed to suppress anger. And what you feel in your throat is an intelligent mechanism to suppress the intensity because it threatened the belonging, most probably the original family. And so when we say, oh, it's not that I cannot experience my anger, it was intelligent to suppress it at certain moments in my development or my life, to not threaten the attachment relation or to not threaten the belonging. And now we begin to get to know the intelligence and the more we re own...

“What I became aware of when I started writing about resistance, and I thought, the healthy body resists infection. We have an immune system. And the healthy psyche resists a culture that's going to infect us psychologically, that's going to keep us from basically being able to function psychologically. And what I realized is that there is, I mean, you see little boys going to school and they come up against it in this school, pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, where to be one of the boys they...

“I often ask, ‘so how beautiful are you when you need something?’ I call this the beauty of needs. And it's amazing how many of us don't feel beautiful at all when we need something. Like all kinds of other things come up: I'm needy, I feel ashamed, I feel young, I feel afraid, I feel whatever, I feel ugly. Sometimes a hundred people raise their hand and say, I don't feel beautiful at all. But I think given what you said with the anger and the need, I think also the quality of shame, that we...

“When you have a feeling, you can recognize when it's a feeling, when it's a knowing, a lot of knowers, especially automatic channel writers, are like, did I write this? Was I channeling? Did Mary Magdalene write that, you know, where is this coming from? And so they do have the tendency, knowers, to really second guess themselves some of the time or to think I probably made this up or it was a mental thing or primed in my brain. And so with knowers, I really work on helping them to trust...

“The real meaning of ‘remember’ is to put the members back together, to make whole. So a lot of times we go back in time to a special time or a special moment and nostalgia is wanting to go back there, as if there's something there that we lost. And the true value of memory is to touch that moment and see where it lives or is dormant in me or you now going forward. That was one form or expression of it, not the only. And that touches on, I think what friendship helps us remember is that life...

“I remember a wonderful psychologist was talking about, we shouldn't, should on ourselves. Don't should on yourself. And it's all of what I should do. And there's a big lie for new moms, which is that when the baby is born, you should take care of the baby. You're the best person. You're the mother. There's no one else who's going to take care of your baby in the same way. And of course you should be holding skin to skin, have the opportunity to breastfeed. But there was never a mother who...