OM DENNE EPISODE
Dr. Nicole Dolan sits down with Dr. Andrew Hahn, creator of Life-Centered Therapy, for a conversation that gets stranger the deeper it goes.
Andy’s starting point is simple: when something triggers us, there is often a sensation in the body that we immediately assume is us. Anxiety becomes “I’m anxious.” Pain becomes “my pain.” Fear becomes “I’m afraid.” LCT asks a different question: what if the sensation is something you can listen to rather than something you are?
Nicole tries the process with Andy in real time, beginning with a simple tightness in her throat. Within minutes, the conversation moves from an intellectual explanation of therapy into an actual experience of it.
From there, Andy starts pulling on the bigger questions. What exactly do we mean by “self”? Is consciousness more fundamental than matter? Why do we keep recreating the same patterns? And if a sensation can carry a story, who is actually having the experience?
Nicole also shares the personal experience that first made her want to learn LCT, including a past-life experience she says was connected to a pattern she had been struggling with.
Then Andy tells the stories behind the work itself: a poem he wrote at nine years old that he later understood differently decades later, his early experiences with intuition, a dream involving a three-story lion that taught him to become what he feared, and an encounter he describes as discovering the “seat of the healer.”
The conversation eventually lands on one of Andy’s strangest and most useful ideas: sometimes the thing we spend our lives trying to escape may be the very thing we need to become willing to experience.
Whether you take his ideas literally, metaphorically, spiritually, or simply as an experiment in how we understand our own experience, this episode asks some unusually large questions about healing.
And Nicole keeps doing what makes this conversation work: asking, “Okay, but what does that actually mean for a human being sitting here?”
CHAPTERS
00:00:00 - A New Way to Face Suffering
00:00:28 - The Root Cause of Suffering
00:01:03 - Why the Sensation Is Not the Self
00:01:52 - Introducing Dr. Andrew Hahn and Life Centered Therapy
00:03:07 - The Self, Soul, and Life as a Hologram
00:06:08 - A Guided Exercise for Becoming the Sensation
00:08:42 - Nicole Explores Tightness in Throat
00:16:05 - How Identification Creates Repeating Patterns
00:19:57 - Healing by Finding Who Has the Problem
00:22:06 - Why Consciousness, Not Matter, Is Foundational
00:23:22 - Healing a Panic Attack Through Witnessing
00:26:21 - Connecting the Method to Parts Work
00:29:42 - Expanded Awareness as the Essential Resource
00:31:30 - Remembering the Awareness That Is Always Present
00:32:41 - Nicole’s Healing Through a Past-Life Experience
00:37:35 - Trauma, Protection, and the Foundations of LCT
00:43:25 - How Life-Centered Therapy First Revealed Itself
00:43:33 - A Childhood Poem Foretelling the Work
00:44:28 - Remembering Can Heal an Entire Lineage
00:47:09 - Early Signs of a Life Between Worlds
00:48:31 - The Lion Dream and Becoming Fear
00:51:36 - Discovering the Seat of the Healer
00:54:40 - Falling into Grace and Facing Nothingness
00:58:06 - Discovering Universal Patterns Beneath Symptoms
01:00:53 - Tracing Trauma to a Deeper Story
01:02:43 - Making Amends for a Past-Life Betrayal
01:05:09 - How One Story Shapes Lifelong Patterns
01:06:33 - Using Unusual Experiences as Healing Metaphors
01:07:20 - Closing Reflections and Invitation
ABOUT THE PURPLE COUCH
The Purple Couch is hosted by Dr. Nicole Dolan, a depth psychologist, alongside co-host Melinda Kincaid, LMFT, CPAT. Two therapists making attachment, the nervous system and the unconscious make sense in plain language, including when it’s about them.
Instagram: instagram.com/drnicoledolan
Tags:
consciousness, therapy, somatic therapy, depth psychology, parts work, healing patterns, body awareness, past life experience, spiritual psychology
