THESE 5 PODCASTS WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU LIVE
Elise Loehnen shares the Goop Podcasts that have altered how she looks at life
Early one Sunday in 2017, my brother-inlaw died, while sleeping quietly next to my brother, Ben. Months later, we learned he had a rare, undiagnosed and untreatable heart disease that emerged out of nowhere to sweep him into the night, just a few months shy of his 40th birthday. I struggled to understand why he, of all people, was dead. Besides being my brother’s partner for 20-odd years (they met in their first week of college), Peter was my closest friend. Alternately sharply funny and boundlessly kind, he could size people up in seconds to determine whether they deserved his wit or his generosity. He was a rare creature, who made everyone feel seen, who breathed life into every conversation. He could not have actually died. And so emerged a growing belief that maybe he wasn’t actually gone – there were signs. Many signs. Two months later, I called a medium named Laura Lynne Jackson under the (true) auspices of interviewing her for a story. I was too embarrassed to ask her outright about Peter and so I prayed that he would blast through her vaulted psychic door. And Peter obliged. Over the next 30 minutes, Laura relayed inside jokes (the amount of bridge my mum was actually playing on her ipad, how much better a brother Peter had been to me than my own), messages for his family and helpful facts about his passing, including what had happened to his heart. (We were operating under the belief that he died from an irregular heartbeat and could have been saved.) She also explained that he was now executing against his greater purpose and had transcended Earth School – and that he would always be with us. The conversation felt nothing like the platitudes you would expect, nor was it a goodbye: it was a ‘what’s up, I’m here, let’s do this’.
That call changed my life. It felt like incontrovertible proof that our consciousness survives our meat-jacket bodies – that we are spiritual beings having a physical experience, rather than robots with brains generating a random reality out of which we try to create meaning. And if this is Earth School – if we are here to learn, to love, to overcome, to transcend, while on a path of potential and a set of hurdles that are uniquely our own – then the entire context around our existence changes. There is a lesson in everything, nothing is truly random and the small moments of resonance and connection where we feel seen and reflected back might be a sign that our true selves are being called forth. And those times when life feels overwhelming are opportunities to transmute pain into potential.
This, all in a phone call. On one hand, Peter’s early death taught me about the finiteness of our time here; on the other, it showed me the infinite potential of tapping into a greater purpose.
We launched The Goop Podcast six months later. While I can’t speak for Gwyneth, for me, it felt like a way to honour Peter, to look for the lesson in everything – to make our choices count while we’re here to make them, to leverage the wisdom of the collective for the greater good, to bring thought and emotion to the impact of each of our decisions on the wider world. Here are some of the best lessons I’ve learned from it:
‘THERE IS A LESSON IN EVERYTHING’
Scarcity is a myth
What We’re Taught About Money with Sallie Krawcheck Most women I know have been raised on scarcity, and the idea that there will never be enough – enough high-powered jobs, enough good men, enough cash in the bank. Many of us have also been raised on the myth that both wanting and having money is base and that money and markets are complicated. Sallie Krawcheck, once the most powerful woman on Wall Street and now co-founder of financial start-up Ellevest, explains that she created her company ‘because of a recognition that the traditional industry has done a terrible job for women and blamed them for it… our entire society gives women messages that we’re not good with money and that money is for men.’ Meanwhile, women are actually better investors (we don’t flap), and it’s better for the economy when women have cash (we spend more, we’re more philanthropic). We just have to change our programming around scarcity: in Krawcheck’s experience, both sexes use a water analogy when it comes to money, but for men, it’s a river, and for women, it’s a constantly dwindling pond. She explains that because money is a topic of shame and loneliness, and we’ve been trained not to talk about it, women would rather discuss death than their salaries. We have to change the conversation.
Escaping pain isn’t the answer
How To Defeat Your Inner Critic with Barry Michels ‘There is no exoneration from pain and hard work,’ says psychotherapist Barry Michels, co-author of
The Tools and Coming Alive. He cautions against the belief that once you ‘have it all’ life is easy and carefree. That might be the biggest lesson of all:
‘Our society and our culture is so about escaping pain… but the more you can will yourself to do the things that are difficult, the more fulfilling your life is going to be.’
‘When you suppress one emotion, all emotions tend to be suppressed’
When Our Bodies Talk To Us with Dr James Gordon Dr James Gordon, adviser to multiple presidents, founder of The Center For Mind-body Medicine and author of The Transformation, primarily spends his time in war-torn countries and zones that have been devastated by environmental disasters, helping members of those communities process the emotional trauma that’s stuck in their bodies. Using practices such as soft belly breathing, shaking and dancing, and ultimately inquiring within your body where it feels pain and why (you’ll be shocked at what it will reveal), he helps people process where emotion cannot escape, where it tends to ball up, or collect, and cause pain. As it emerges, the lessons and healing unspool:
‘If we understand that our trauma can be a school of wisdom… then it does change the nature of what’s happening to us,’ he says.
‘You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance’
We Are Better Than The Worst Things We’ve Done
with Bryan Stevenson
America’s painful past is rooted in systemic white supremacy and we continue to grapple with its legacy, most notably a bifurcation between those who have the privilege to be able to turn away and those who cannot change the channel because they swim in its wake every day. Lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the lynching memorial and author of Just Mercy, has liberated more than 100 innocent black men from death row as a living testament to the idea that the most important work to be done is to right the wrongs. This is true in every context. ‘We have practised silence for decades,’ he explains. While it’s painful to sit in discomfort, to grapple with the ways we’ve misstepped, been complicit or benefited from any abuse of power, we all have to lean in to do the work of dismantling systems of injustice. As Stevenson’s grandmother said to him, ‘You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close.’
Changing your energy can change your life
How To Become Your Future Self with Joe Dispenza
If epigenetics teaches us that we can express disease, does it not also hold that we can express health? Bestselling author Joe Dispenza argues that we become so rutted in our old beliefs that we manifest our futures from a place of fear and despair rather than potential. ‘If you’re living by certain emotions that keep you connected to the past, then you can’t create a new future.’ For Dispenza, it all comes down to energy: ‘Nobody changes until they change their energy. When you change your energy, you change your life, and it only takes a decision with such firm intention that the amplitude of that decision carries a level of energy that’s greater than the hardwired programmes in your brain and the emotional conditioning – and your body literally responds to your mind.’