Today’s amazing guest is Elise Loehnen, brilliant writer, editor, and podcast host of Pulling the Thread, a podcast focused on pulling apart the stories we tell about who we are and then putting those threads back together. Ultimately, Elise is a seeker and synthesizer pulling together wisdom, traditions, cultural history, and a deep knowledge of healing modalities to unlock new ways to contextualize who we are and why we're here.

While she's also co-written 12 books, including five New York Times bestsellers, her first book under her own name is here, and it's called On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and The Price Women Pay To Be Good. The book weaves together history, memoir, and cultural criticism to explore the ways the patriarchy lands in our bodies and embeds itself in our consciousness and what we then police in ourselves and in each other.

With awareness, we can begin to recognize these patterns of self restriction, break the story, and move ourselves and each other towards freedom and balance. It is such a pleasure to welcome my friend, the brilliant Elise Loehnen to the show.

We also cover…

00:01:00 — Reprogramming the “Good Girl” Mentality

• The impetus for Elise writing this book
• Why do we think we aren’t “good”?
• Uncovering systemic misogyny in our subconscious
• How envy can be information
• To Be Magnetic by Lacy Phillips
• How the ”good girl” mentality has permeated our society
• The history of how the patriarchy came to be

00:21:00 — Diving into the History of the 7 Deadly Sins & Debunking the Fear of Laziness

• Read: Find Your Unicorn Space by Eve Rodsky
• Learning to reprogram embedded double standards in our culture and history
• Historical examples of women turning on each other like the witch hunts
• When and where the 7 deadly sins were created
• Sloth: a fear of laziness and how to support women in self-policing this instinct
• What happens when we can’t set and hold boundaries

00:45:00 — Tuning into Our True Selves: How to Confront Cultural Pressures & Noise

• How greed can mislead us towards things we don’t really want or need
• The wage gap between men and women & discrepancy in how we think about money
• The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist
• How pride keeps us small
• Sticking to your gifts and your dharma
• Gluttony: Why we don’t trust ourselves to not be out of control with food
• The problematic complexities of how lust is suppressed in women for self protection

Resources:

• Website: eliseloehnen.com
• Instagram: @eliseloehnen 
• Read: On Our Best Behavior, the Seven Deadly Sins and The Price Women Pay To Be Good by Elise Loehnen
• Podcast: Pulling the Thread

Connect with Kelly: