Holistic Circle: How to Not Murder Your Mother (podcast)

4 Jul 2025 · 1 h 03 min

Episode Holistic Circle: How to Not Murder Your Mother (podcast)

0:00 1:03:00

A June 2025 conversation between me and Philipp Kobald, a podcaster with a startlingly similar background to my own: business, spirituality, mountaineering, psychology, and education.

We talk about all of these things incidentally, but float above them on a layer of spiritual concern. This is as it should be. All things should have spiritual foundations.

https://holisticcircle.org/blogs/news/what-a-mountaineer-turned-therapist-learned-about-healing-while-hanging-on-cliff-s-edge

What the video version on YouTube:

Philipp was impressed with our conversation and wrote a lengthy summary of it. Here’s what he said, which is posted on his website.

A Raw Look at Inner Exploration with Lincoln Stoller

Don’t Try This at Home, Unless You’re Ready to Change Your Life

If your idea of self-work involves scented candles and journaling prompts, Lincoln Stoller might make you feel like you’ve brought a foam sword to a gladiator match. Here is a man who free-soloed cliffs, consumed ayahuasca in the Americas, studied quantum physics, and now — presumably with both feet firmly back on the ground — helps people explore their inner landscapes as a psychotherapist and brain trainer.

And yet, despite his death-defying CV, what Stoller champions is not adrenaline. It’s honesty. Brutal, inconvenient, edge-of-the-precipice honesty. The kind that tells you your brain’s trying to communicate via dreams, and you’re ghosting it.

Early in the episode, host Philipp Kobald finds unexpected common ground with Stoller. Both grew up immersed in the raw beauty of high-altitude landscapes, and their mutual love for mountaineering becomes more than a metaphor — it’s a shared language. As Philipp puts it, mountains teach you honesty in a way no therapist ever could. One wrong move, one dishonest thought about your limits, and nature will remind you who’s really in charge. It’s not just a nice bonding moment — it’s a grounding force for everything that follows.

This was no spiritual sugar cube of a chat. Hosted with his usual gentle mischief by Kobald, Spiritual Conversation (produced by HolisticCircle) went spelunking into the caverns of mountaineering, neuroscience, psychedelics, and the weird nightly theatre of dreams. Spoiler: you’ll never look at that one recurring dream about losing your teeth the same way again.

The Mountaineer Who Fell Into the Mind

Stoller’s journey from cliffs to counseling reads like an indie film that wins awards in Berlin. After scaling literal mountains, he took a nosedive into physics, then fell sideways into shamanism and psychedelics. Somewhere between salvia and neurofeedback therapy, he stumbled upon the realization that the biggest climbs are internal.

His spiritual awakening didn’t arrive via incense or a perfectly curated yoga playlist. It came via the moment he realized that free-soloing thousands of feet up a mountain without a rope was not only inadvisable — it was stupid. Or in his words, “If everyone did what I did, half the planet would be gone.”

Now, instead of chasing summits, he helps others descend into themselves, one deeply uncomfortable truth at a time. Yes, there are ropes involved. Emotional ones. Tension lines strong enough to support people tumbling through grief, depression, anxiety — or just the existential swamp we call modern life.

Dreams Are Not Oracles, They’re Audits

If you’re still clinging to the notion that dreams are cute little metaphors for your waking life (“I was flying — so I must be seeking freedom!”), Stoller is here to torch your dream dictionary. To him, dreams are not messages. They’re more like audit reports from your subconscious: overwhelming, disjointed, and rarely flattering.

Dreams, he explains, are your mind’s attempt to stitch together nonsense into a meaningful pattern. It’s your internal cartographer mapping chaos. And no, that flying dream doesn’t mean you’re destined for…

Links in the notes 3

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