Join Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise from Thirdspace for weekly conversations that ask how we might bring ourselves to life with as much courage and wisdom as we can. We start each episode with inspiring sources and then dive deep together into the questions and possibilities they open up. Find us on Sp…
When we're caught up with our harsh inner voices we can easily smother out a kind of solid, deep wisdom and aliveness that we could be bringing to our lives and our relationships. It's this depth in us from which can come the kind of responsiveness and resourcedness which is called for in the complexity of our human living and relating. In a wider culture which rarely values such depth, what is it to learn to drop down beneath our shallow, reactiveness to the life which pulses beneath in all of us, and respond from there? This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Episode Overview 00:00 Celebrating Community and Connection 04:40 Exploring Eugene Gendlin's Insights 09:37 The Inner Dialogue: Harshness vs. Compassion 15:10 Understanding the Inner Self and Relationships 21:58 Strength in Vulnerability and Connection 30:25 The Invitation to Depth and Wholeness Here's our source for this week: Fresh Answers from the Inside If you are like almost everybody else, you undoubtedly know a good deal about what is wrong in your life. You may often lecture yourself, perhaps basing your lectures on sound inferences and assumptions… Or, at other times, you skip the sophisticated lecture and insult yourself roundly and simply instead. A kick is what you think you need… Not only do these lectures and self-castigations feel unpleasant, but they produce no useful change. You become something like two people, one in prison and the other outside. The outside person lectures or insults the one inside, cruelly listing all the alleged (but usually unproven) faults of character that have supposedly led to the prisoner's sorry plight. None of this helps the prisoner escape. When the lecture is over, the inner person is, as always, stuck… Instead of talking at yourself from the outside in, you [could] listen to what comes from you, inside. You ask in a quiet, friendly, and sympathetic way, "What's wrong?" You may never before have been quite this friendly to yourself. Most people treat themselves very badly, much worse than they would ever think of treating another human being. Most people deal with their inside feeling person as a sadistic prison guard would. Now, having asked your body this question-"What's really wrong?" —you deliberately refrain from answering it. When you ask another person a question, you don't go right on and answer the question yourself. Treat your own inside feeling person at least as well as you would someone else. Your inside feeling person, too, can answer, and doesn't need you to do all the answering. Try to pass up all the glib, familiar answers that come very fast. They are the same old answers you've heard in thousands of self-lectures down through the years. Firmly reject them. Wait quietly for fresh answers to come from the inside, from the bodily felt sense of whatever situation is troubling you. From ‘Focusing' by Eugene Gendlin Photo by Dominic Kurniawan Suryaputra on Unsplash ---- Join Us Live in 2025 Turning Towards Life Live Season 1, from September 2025 We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons from September. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. You can register your interest for Season 1 of Turning Towards Life Live here. ---- About Turning Towards Life Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
It's our 400th episode, and in a special celebration for which we were joined by a live audience of listeners to Turning Towards Life, we return to the theme of episode 1, revisiting a source about living as fully as we can in the light of a life that is limited in time, and in which everything ends. Can we find a way not to turn away from the truth of this and, indeed, to use its truth as a path into living our lives contactfully, attentively and with joy, care, delight, sorrow, grief and truthfulness? This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here's our source for this week: Numbered Sometimes I remember that my days are numbered. My days for working are numbered. My days for seeing a cloudless sky are numbered. My days are numbered for sitting beneath tall trees. And my days are numbered for learning. My days for holding the ones I love are numbered, As are my days of kisses. My days of anguish, fear, and longing – they too are numbered. And my days of walking the crests of high hills. My days of deep conversation with friends and colleagues are numbered And the days on which I can make a dent on the world. My days for inventing, creating, demolishing, undoing, subverting, contributing. My days for mending and tearing apart. My days of confusion. My days of spreadsheets, keyboards, pens, paperclips. My days for travelling by train, bus, boat, plane. My days for reading, music, turning my face towards the stars, and washing the dishes. My days of getting to know myself. My days for understanding what life is. My days for loving. My days for knowing. All of these, too. I don't think I can remember this all the time. I am too forgetful for that. Too easily absorbed in the work of the day. But when I do remember, life shines with new depth and wonder. And I find it much more straightforward To do what I am here to do. Justin Wise From Justin's blog ‘On Living and Working' Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash ---- Join Us Live in 2025 Turning Towards Life Live Season 1, from September 2025 We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons from September. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. You can register your interest for Season 1 of Turning Towards Life Live here. ---- About Turning Towards Life Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
We're all practicing already, whether we know it or not, in the daily routines by which we live our days. And so we can ask ourselves whether the practices we're in the middle of now have us be in life in the way we wish for or value, or whether it's time to find a way to practice something new. A conversation about the gifts, challenges and possibilities of a life of intentional practice. This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. You can join our Episode 400 Live, 8 June 2025, here Here's our source for this week: On Practice All the world's great religious traditions know the value of practices, the daily acts of repetition and dedication that can so profoundly shape who we become. In our day to day lives we've mostly forgotten this – leaning towards tools or goals instead. Both have value, but without practice we miss something very important. The idea of practice is, at its heart, very simple. They're rehearsals of a quality or way of being in the world that we wish to cultivate. Done regularly and with purposeful intent, they gradually shape and reshape our relationship to ourselves and to the world. In this way practices are so very different to techniques or tools – which are intended to bring about some immediate shift or change in the world. And they're different again to goals – ways in which we've got committed to bringing about a particular state of affairs that we wish for. The wonderful possibility in good practices is that we take them up primarily for their own sake, not to change things in a hurry, nor to compare ourselves with standards we might never reach. We taken them up because doing them has its own intrinsic value, and because we flower and flourish in unexpected ways by being people who are practicing. And the other wonderful possibility in practice is that we can take it day at a time. Practice now, today. Be scrupulously kind to ourselves when we miss it or forget tomorrow. And begin, again, the next day. We're all practicing already, whether we know it or not, in the daily routines by which we live our days. And so we can all ask ourselves whether the practices we're in the middle of now have us be in life in the way we wish for or value, or whether it's time, at last, to find a way to practice something new. Justin Wise From Justin's blog ‘On Living and Working' Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash ---- Join Us Live in 2025 Episode 400 Live, June 8 2025 On Sunday 8th June 2025 it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Zoom. You're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. You can book a place for Episode 400 Live on June 8 here. Turning Towards Life Live Season 1, from September 2025 We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons from September. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. You can register your interest for Season 1 of Turning Towards Life Live here. ---- About Turning Towards Life Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest
What happens when we honour both our deep gratitude for what is and our fierce yearning for what might be? How might we distinguish between the wanting that tries to fill an inner emptiness and the discontent that fuels a more life-giving opening to our lives... neither bypassing the tenderness of unfulfilled desires nor abandoning the creative energy they contain? What if our yearning, like trees reaching skyward, represents not something missing but something essential about what it means to be fully alive and engaged with the world? A conversation about the tension between receiving life fully as it presents itself and allowing ourselves to reach toward something that is still calling us. This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. You can join our Episode 400 Live, 8 June 2025, here Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction and Upcoming Events 02:12 Exploring Yearning and Gratitude 06:50 The Nature of Longing 10:09 The Balance of Gratitude and Yearning 15:16 Cradling Vulnerability in Longing 20:20 The Distinction Between Wanting and Yearning 25:24 Yearning as a Call to Participation 29:54 Conclusion and Invitation to Join Here's our source for this week: Always yearn Yearning is divine discontent that fuels us to keep expanding. To yearn is to live. Our desire is what gets us up in the morning, ignites our curiosity, gives our lives resonance. Do not be disconsolate when you feel a strong sense of yearning. It is an invitation that says: there is more, there is more, there is more. The Universe is constantly expanding. Why shouldn't you? Yearning is not a problem to be solved. It is an energy to be explored. Three useful questions to start your own conversation about yearning and desire What do you want? More, what do you long for? Most of all, when I do not have what I long for, how can I cradle myself through that rough edge? Tina Sederholm www.tinasederholm.com Photo by Duncan McNab on Unsplash ---- Join Us Live in 2025 Episode 400 Live, June 8 2025 On Sunday 8th June 2025 it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Zoom. You're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. You can book a place for Episode 400 Live on June 8 here. Turning Towards Life Live Season 1, from September 2025 We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons from September. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. You can register your interest for Season 1 of Turning Towards Life Live here. ---- About Turning Towards Life Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest Keywords: divine discontent, yearning practice, gratitude practice, creative relationship, vulnerability cradle, expansion energy, spiritual yearning, inner emptiness, receiving life, contribution mindset, bounty sharing, rough edge, fullness orientation, divine longing, creative field, human bounty, life engagement, tender vulnerability, authentic wanting, relationship creativity, spiritual expansion, longing distinction, gratitude receiving, yearning exploration, creative partnership
Turning Towards Life, our weekly podcast hosted by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise, reaches its 400th episode on Sunday June 8. You can book to join us at turningtowards.life/400 Lizzie and Justin will host our 400th conversation live on Zoom, you'll have the opportunity to meet us and other people from around the world who follow the podcast, and we'll host an opportunity for you to take a Turning Towards Life ‘source' and learn from it and with it in conversation with others who join. We expect it to be a rich, joyful two hours with depth and the opportunity to be and feel part of the growing community of people from around the world who are connected with Turning Towards Life. This will be a two-hour live event on Zoom, from 2pm-4pm UK (BST), which is 3pm-5pm CEST, 9pm-11pm Singapore, 9am-11am EDT, 6am-8am PDT. All the details are at turningtowards.life/400 Also coming soon, Turning Towards Life Live Season 1, starting September 2025. Find out more at www.turningtowardslife/live
What happens when we widen our perspective to view our individual lives as part of an endless flow of generations? How do we honour both the weight of our immediate concerns and the liberation that comes from seeing them as moments in an infinite tapestry? How might we practice radical amazement at the extraordinary nature of existence itself? What if our most profound joy emerges not from escaping life's difficulties but from embracing them while remembering the timeless quality beneath our temporal experience—that mysterious essence which precedes our birth and continues beyond our death? Perhaps our original light-heartedness—that which we carried as children—offers a way forward, now transformed by time and sorrow into something deeper. This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. You can join our Episode 400 Live, 8 June 2025, here Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction and Announcing Episode 400 Live on June 8 05:13 Exploring the Poem: 'Two Set Out on Their Journey' 09:56 Finding Out We Are Not Alone 14:58 Navigating Grief and Impermanence 20:03 Radical Amazement and Bigger Horizons of Time 25:11 The Journey of Life and the Light Heart 30:04 Conclusion and Reflection Two Set Out On Their Journey We sit side by side, brother and sister, and read the book of what will be, while a breeze blows the pages over— desolate odd, cheerful even, and otherwise. When we come to our own story, the happy beginning, the ending we don't know yet, the ten thousand acts encumbering the days between, we will read every page of it. If an ancestor has pressed a love-flower for us, it will lie hidden between pages of the slow going, where only those who adore the story ever read. When the time comes to shut the book and set out, we will take childhood's laughter as far as we can into the days to come, until another laughter sounds back from the place where our next bodies will have risen and will be telling tales of what seemed deadly serious once, offering to us oldening wayfarers the light heart, now made of time and sorrow, that we started with. Galway Kinnell Photo by Hoi An Photographer on Unsplash ---- Join Us Live in 2025 Episode 400 Live, June 8 2025 On Sunday 8th June 2025 it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Zoom. You're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. You can book a place for Episode 400 Live on June 8 here. Turning Towards Life Live Season 1, from September 2025 We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons from September. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. You can register your interest for Season 1 of Turning Towards Life Live here. ---- About Turning Towards Life Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest
What remains when someone we love is no longer physically with us? A conversation exploring the tension between doubt and the feeling that something continues beyond what we can see or touch. How we might speak to those who are gone, even when their ears and hearts seem to no longer exist, by voicing our love and sorrow—whether heard or not—a way in which we change both the world and our wounded hearts. And honouring the mysterious space where truth and our departed loved ones might still exist. Turning away from these deeper dimensions might be why we feel so disconnected, while embracing them offers a way to move through life with an open heart, receiving what remains precious beyond time and distance. You can find out more about the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course 2025-26 on the Thirdspace website wearethirdspace.org This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction 03:18 This Week's Source by Nick Cave 09:04 Love, Death, and Paying Attention 16:54 Allowing Ourselves to be Uncertain 22:01 Gratitude and Reflection on the Conversation Here's our source for this week: Red Hand Files #323, May 2025 My dad died suddenly and unexpectedly. We moved and only saw him for two weeks of what turned out to be his last year on earth. Now I feel like I have failed him so terribly. How do you apologize to someone who is gone? How do you say I love you and I'm so sorry when their ears and their heart don't exist anymore? AMY, LOS ANGELES, USA You can find the rest of the source on Nick Cave's Red Hand Files website here https://www.theredhandfiles.com/sudden-death-apologise-spiritual-intuition/ by Nick Cave Photo by Road Ahead on Unsplash ---- Join Us Live in 2025 On Sunday 8th June 2025 it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Zoom. You're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. If you are at all interested and you would like to join us, please keep watching out and listening out on the podcast or you could head over towards our website turningtowards.life and sign up for our weekly emails there and you will get all of the information directly into your inbox. We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. If you go to turningtowards.life there is a button you can press to register your interest in this. About Turning Towards Life Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest Podcast Keywords: spiritual intuition, grief processing, subtle presence, communion practice, emotional reconciliation, love declaration, sacred mystery, physical absence, soul calling, emergent belief, universal declaration, ordinary world, mysterious presence, heartfelt practice, spiritual recognition, cynicism rejection, living relationship, parent-child connection, grief healing, unsettled mystery, love endurance, existential comfort, reconciliation practice, softened receptivity
A rich conversation about the necessity, joys and inevitable difficulties of loving - of loving one another, of loving all we can about this one precious life. About how easy it is to turn away, to distract ourselves, to check out of all that loving takes - as if that would save us from what Lizzie calls ‘the rattling sorrow' of loss. And about the responsibilities and ‘moral labour' that's called for for us to stay engaged, to keep returning, even though we have such breakable hearts, for the benefit of all those around us, including of course our selves. You can find out more about the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course 2025-26 on the Thirdspace website wearethirdspace.org This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction and Celebration of Milestones 02:11 Exploring the Source: Wise Animals by Tom Chatfield 07:25 The Moral Labour of Living 15:24 Navigating Grief and Vulnerability 21:42 The Complexity of Love and Loss 27:19 Tussling with Different Points of View 31:32 Spiritual Perspectives on Living 35:02 Turning Towards Life Live - An Invitation to Engage and Learn Together Here's our source for this week: The Moral Labour of Living To be human is to be born into utter helplessness, in circumstances beyond our choosing. It is to grow and change, constrained by these circumstances and biological inheritance. It is to achieve some measure of independence, for a time, in the context of our planet's and our societies' vast networks of exchange and competition. And it is to seek not only survival but also – so long as the body's basic needs are met – some form of flourishing or contentment. There is no final victory, no guarantee of success, and no infallible guidance. There is only the contingent business of trying, together, to live and to know ourselves a little better. All of the above entails … moral labour whose difficulty and significance are inextricably linked. As the parent of two young children, one of the hardest lessons I have struggled to master – like most parents – is the fact that my children's desires are an imperfect guide to their wellbeing. Making their lives easier is not always the best way to prepare them for life. [It's] more important for me gradually to help them develop a measure of self-control, fairness and ambition – and to show them how trust can be earned – than it is for me constantly to monitor and intervene in everything they do. Also like many parents, a second lesson I'm still trying to learn is that the person who all too often needs to improve their self-control is me. To love and to nurture other human beings brings pain as well as joy; frustration and exhaustion as well as delight; the prospect of devastating loss alongside the gains of consuming love. And these satisfactions and sacrifices can't tidily be separated. To withdraw your care from any relationship is to make yourself less vulnerable, for a price: it's to diminish what you risk and give, but also what you can receive and gain. from Wise Animals: How Technology Has Made Us What We Are by Tom Chatfield Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash ---- Join Us Live in 2025 On Sunday 8th June 2025 it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Zoom. You're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. If you are at all interested and you would like to join us, please keep watching out and listening out on the podcast or you could head over towards our website turningtowards.life and sign up for our weekly emails there and you will get all of the information directly into your inbox. We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. If you go to turningtowards.life there is a button you can press to register your interest in this. About Turning Towards Life Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest Keywords: moral labour, vulnerability, human helplessness, self-regulation, emotional capacity, parenting wisdom, grief alongside joy, spiritual questions, letting go, loving attachment, life boundaries, personal mastery, technology escape, relationship vulnerability, human connection, personal growth, accepting mortality, biological inheritance, human dependency, embracing uncertainty, contingent living, self-control development, nurturing relationships, emotional complexity, devastating loss, consuming love, risk and reward, withdrawal consequences, heart expansion, denial mechanisms, holding contradictions, thoughtful disagreement, dialogue practice, human finitude, sacred impermanence, interdependence, tender-heartedness, parental challenges, intergenerational wisdom, therapeutic conversation, existential questions, philosophical exploration, emotional literacy, personal development, turning towards, personal responsibility, life meaning, conscious living, Third Space, turningtowards.life
In this conversation, we explore a poem by Wendell Berry which calls us to wake up from the numbing effects of conventional life and practice living with true aliveness. We begin by reflecting on how Berry's invitation to "do something that won't compute" challenges us to question the systems and habits that keep us trapped in unconscious patterns - the quick profit, the ready-made, the fear of death - and instead to embrace practices that cultivate genuine freedom and connection with life. We delve into the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, discussing how our natural tendency to create predictable cycles can both build stable communities and wall us off from deeper truths. Through Berry's provocative lines, we consider how systems try to predict and control us, and how deliberately cultivating 'eccentricity' - living at least partially outside the dominant cultural expectations - can be a path to a kind of aliveness and responsibility for life. We examine how laughter, loving what seems undeserving, and asking questions without answers can shake us from our sleepiness, while also acknowledging that not all disruptions are equally valuable - suggesting that we measure new possibilities against what would satisfy someone bringing life into the world. Ultimately, we see Berry's manifesto as an invitation to practice deliberateness through conscious engagement with life's full complexity rather than waiting for life to wake us through crisis. You can find out more about the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course 2025-26 on the Thirdspace website wearethirdspace.org This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction to Turning Towards Life 02:52 Exploring Wendell Berry's Manifesto 05:54 Eccentric Perspectives 09:52 Nature and Connection in Wendell Berry's Work 14:54 The Invitation to Question and Reflect 19:49 The Familiar vs. The Unfamiliar 24:38 Finding Sources of Truthfulness in Life 29:35 Conclusion and Reflection on the Conversation Here's our source for this week: Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion – put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. Wendell Berry Photo by Nina Luong on Unsplash ---- Join Us Live in 2025 On Sunday 8th June 2025 it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Zoom. You're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. If you are at all interested and you would like to join us, please keep watching out and listening out on the podcast or you could head over towards our website turningtowards.life and sign up for our weekly emails there and you will get all of the information directly into your inbox. We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. If you go to turningtowards.life there is a button you can press to register your interest in this. About Turning Towards Life Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest
What would it be to learn to help other people turn deeply towards their own lives? We've been asking this question in many ways over the past more than seven years, and this week we turn towards a great love of ours, the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course, which is designed around this very question. This year's course begins in June and applications are coming in. In this rich conversation we talk together about what it is to be an attentive, compassionate and wise support for the development of others, and what it might be like to learn with us over the course of a year. You can find out more about the programme on the Thirdspace website wearethirdspace.org This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction to the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course 03:03 The Heart of Integral Development Coaching 05:59 Navigating Life's Interruptions with Creativity and Compassion 08:47 The Role of Community in Learning to Coach 12:03 Coaching is Learning to Turn Towards Life 14:58 The Importance of Belonging and Contribution 17:51 Embracing Creativity and Courage in Difficult Times 21:06 The Journey of Self-Discovery 23:55 Practical Skills for Life and Coaching 27:00 Conclusion and Invitation to Join 30:38 Taking Up Our "Right Size" in the World Here's our source for this week: Coaching and Learning to Coach Every so often in life we pause and make note of the person we have become and the one we are becoming. Sometimes this reflection is prompted by professional circumstances, like a promotion, performance review, job change, or firing. Just as often it emerges from the “rest of life” – as through an illness, death, or the beginning or ending of a relationship. Whatever the origin, these experiences can feel like an opportunity or a burden, a chance to develop or a painful lesson…and often both. How we make sense of these experiences often determines what actions we take, and this, of course, influences our competence and fulfilment in life. Wouldn't it be wonderful, in these moments, to have someone by our side to ask skilful questions, listen deeply, be fully present with who we are and what we say, point out our blind spots, and custom-design practices to help us move forward? And wouldn't it be marvellous, too, to be this person for others? The Professional Coaching Course (PCC) exists in large part due to the primacy of these questions for ourselves and the people we serve. Integral Development Coaching is what happens when two people develop a professional relationship that is grounded in mutual trust and respect, directed toward a set of clear outcomes, guided by presence, and informed by broad models about what it means to be a human being. It is a methodology. It is an integration project. It is a moment when you feel deeply connected to yourself and others, with a deep acceptance of everything, and you take practical steps to move forward in life. It is both simpler and more complex than it sounds. James Flaherty and Amiel Handelsmann From ‘Integrating Rigour, Compassion, and Creative Design - an Introduction to Integral Development Coaching and the PCC' Join Us Live in 2025 On Sunday 8th June 2025 it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Zoom. You're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. If you are at all interested and you would like to join us, please keep watching out and listening out on the podcast or you could head over towards our website turningtowards.life and sign up for our weekly emails there and you will get all of the information directly into your inbox. We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. If you go to turningtowards.life there is a button you can press to register your interest in this. About Turning Towards Life Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest
If 'power' is the extent to which we each are able to bring about our intentions in the world, then our power matters. But there are many different ways to exercise power - as a parent, colleague, friend - in any role where our actions influence others. What does it take to recognise how we're exercising the power we have? Are we acting from our fearful parts or from that which is solid, genuine and faithful to life? Perhaps the deeper invitation is to centre our power around love itself - whether fierce or gentle - rather than around our attempts to dominate and control. This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Us Live in 2025 On Sunday 8th June 2025 it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Zoom. You're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. If you are at all interested and you would like to join us, please keep watching out and listening out on the podcast or you could head over towards our website turningtowards.life and sign up for our weekly emails there and you will get all of the information directly into your inbox. We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. If you go to turningtowards.life there is a button you can press to register your interest in this. About Turning Towards Life Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction and Upcoming Events 02:19 Marion Woodman's Source 05:07 Personal Authenticity 08:31 Distinctions in Love and Power 12:05 The Nature of Power and Love 16:38 Truth, Power, and Realness 20:08 The Necessity of Power Dynamics 24:45 Faith and Possibility Here's our source for this week: The Real Power To me, real power is about presence. It's the energy of knowing that you are who you are, and therefore speaking and acting from your authentic self. It doesn't matter what your work is—if you're a teacher or a nurse or whatever; it is your presence that's the power. It's not power over anybody else. It's just the expression of who you are. Power in the sense of controlling somebody else is different from personal presence. Love is the real power. It's the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you'll want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with - everyone blooms. Marion Woodman Photo by Jessica Alves on Unsplash
This is a very brief update to say that this week's Turning Towards Life episode is, for the first time in our history, slightly delayed because of a technical difficulty that we ran into this morning. So we are planning to come to you with our next full episode of Turning Towards Life later this week. We think on Friday. So please watch out for us landing in your podcast app or whatever way you like to watch or listen to us then. Whilst you're here with us, just a couple of announcements that you might be interested in. On Sunday the 8th of June 2025, it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Sunday the 8th of June on Zoom. you're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. If you are at all interested and you would like to join us, please keep watching out and listening out on the podcast or you could head over towards our website turningtowards.life and sign up for our weekly emails there and you will get all of the information directly into your inbox. We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. If you go to turningtowards.life there is a button you can press to register your interest in this. It's going to start in the first or second week of September and we will email you all of the details about how to take part, what it will cost, what it will involve. And we are tremendously excited to build something we hope very exciting, rich, deep, a great opportunity for learning and long lived as well. So that is also at turningtowards.life. And then the last thing to tell you about is that the Thirdspace annual cohort of the Professional Coaching Course, the centrepiece of our work helping people become skillful in supporting their own development and the development of others is coming up. The next annual cohort begins at the end of June. We have a two-day introductory Foundations of Coaching programme also online coming up on the 19th and 20th of May. We're assembling a wonderful cohort of people and maybe you'd be interested in finding out more and maybe joining us. So you can head over to wearethirdspace.org to find out all about that over there and we'll be very happy to answer any questions you have. So thanks for listening. We will be back with you with a full length episode later in the week.
The narratives about time and growing older that our culture hands us often fail to name and invite the kind of luminous gathering of life that we can become with age. What if we found a way to fully grieve the losses of aging, rather than fight against them, and in doing so we deepen into a kind of translucent generosity of heart and spirit in which we allow ourselves to give ourselves away to those around us and to life itself? And what if we could do that together, rather than alone? This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction and Gratitude 03:11 Exploring Wendell Berry's Work 06:00 The Nature of Time and Aging 12:01 Grief and Acceptance 18:12 Generosity in the Face of Loss 23:57 Community and Intergenerational Wisdom Here's our source for this week: Sabbaths 1993 I No, no, there is no going back. Less and less you are that possibility you were. More and more you have become those lives and deaths that have belonged to you. You have become a sort of grave containing much that was and is no more in time, beloved then, now, and always. And so you have become a sort of tree standing over a grave. Now more than ever you can be generous toward each day that comes, young, to disappear forever, and yet remain unaging in the mind. Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away. by Wendell Berry Photo by Maria Krasnova on Unsplash
Chasing after what we want so badly - from our friends and other relationships - can make it infuriatingly difficult to have and be what we most need. Can we find a way to move towards our longings also find out that although there is much that we might legimately want and long for, the act of receiving and giving right here, in the midst of where we already are, can so often bring us much that we really need. In the process of cultivating a steady reciprocity of receiving and giving we can become a person who meets the truer needs of those around us. The metaphor of the water wheel, in its steady turn of giving and receiving, has much to stir our imagination in this regard, as Rumi teaches us in this week's luminous source. This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction and Welcoming the Audience 02:53 Exploring Rumi's 'The Water Wheel' 05:55 Curiosity and Aliveness in Relationships 08:55 The Nature of Friendship and Reciprocity 11:53 Receiving and Giving in Life 15:10 The Balance of Stillness and Movement 17:53 Desires and the Journey of Staying Present 21:08 The Invitation to Stay Together 24:00 Conclusion and Reflection on the Conversation Here's our source for this week: The Waterwheel Stay together, friends. Don't scatter and sleep. Our friendship is made of being awake. The waterwheel accepts water and turns and gives it away, weeping. That way it stays in the garden, whereas another roundness rolls through a dry riverbed looking for what it thinks it wants. Stay here, quivering with each moment like a drop of mercury. Rumi Photo by Jonathan Wheeler on Unsplash
We long to be present in our lives, and we run from it too. In a culture which emphasises the running - into distraction and avoidance - how might we turn towards the intimacy of presence with our own lives and what we care about the most? Why does this even matter (and it does!)? And how do we do that without dishonouring those parts of us that want to protect us from the inevitable tragedies and losses that come along with beauty and sacredness? This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction to Turning Towards Life Live 03:01 The Importance of Community and Connection 06:01 Exploring the Poem 'Prayer' by Marie Howe 08:53 The Struggle Between Presence and Distraction 11:44 The Human Condition: Longing and Running 14:58 Finding Humor in Our Inner Conflicts 17:51 The Sacredness of Everyday Life 21:05 Navigating the Complexity of Life 24:04 The Balance of Beauty and Tragedy in Existence 27:13 The Role of Presence in Our Lives 30:08 Conclusion and Reflections on the Conversation Here's our source for this week: Prayer Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important calls for my attention – the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage I need to buy for the trip. Even now I can hardly sit here among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside already screeching and banging. The mystics say you are as close as my own breath. Why do I flee from you? My days and nights pour through me like complaints and become a story I forgot to tell. Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence. Marie Howe from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (Norton, 2008) Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
We look out at the world and see horizons everywhere, lines on the ‘edge of the world' that we know are markers of the beyond. When we move and shift our position, what is beyond the horizon reveals itself in new ways. And we are like this too - what is within us and what is between us is marked by horizons that are not fixed lines but invitations for movement and discovery. What would become possible if we committed ourselves to standing in new places inside ourselves, and taking one another by the hand to meet on new horizons between us than the habitual, familiar ones we have grown used to? This week's conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction to Turning Towards Life 02:02 Exploring the Concept of Horizons 10:15 The Nature of Limitations and Possibilities 16:35 Shared Horizons in Relationships 22:01 Imagination and New Horizons 28:38 The Power of Connection and Support Here's our source for this week: HORIZONS are everywhere: both inside and outside of what only feels like our sense of self. The edge between what I think is me and what I think is you is as much a horizon as any line of mountains or that far dark line on the distant ocean. Horizon is the line between what we think we know and what we do not know, between what we think we see and do not see: horizons mark the threshold between the world that I inhabit and the one that seems to wait for me, between a world I can almost understand and what lies beyond the imagination of my present life. Horizons are creative, disturbing, invitational edges just by the fact that they exist. David Whyte from ‘Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words' Photo by Sam Williams on Unsplash
There is action to be taken in the world, for sure. Urgent action to take care of our lives, our communities, and the wider world in which we all live. But there is a also a deep well of presence, patience, intimacy, and connection right in the centre of each of us. When our action is fearful, rushed and out of touch with this still centre, it easily spills over into polarisation, panic and disconnection. And when the source of our action is this centre, the essential aliveness and goodness that we all are at the heart of things, much more that is sustaining and care-filled becomes possible. What is it to find our way back to the vastness that is our origins, and to let our lives and relationships be infused by that at each moment, especially now? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Episode Overview 00:00 Welcome and Introduction to Silence 04:03 The Importance of Silence in Our Lives 08:00 Silence as a Political Act 12:04 Finding Our Center in Silence 15:58 The Role of Silence in Action 20:08 Cultivating Silence for Deeper Connection 23:46 Reflection and Observation in Leadership 28:10 Gratitude for Silence and Connection 31:51 Conclusion and Invitation to Return Here's our source for this week: Within Each of Us There is a Silence Within each of us there is a silence —a silence as vast as a universe. We are afraid of it…and we long for it. When we experience that silence, we remember who we are: creatures of the stars, created from the cooling of this planet, created from dust and gas, created from the elements, created from time and space…created from silence. In our present culture, silence is something like an endangered species… an endangered fundamental. The experience of silence is now so rare that we must cultivate it and treasure it. This is especially true for shared silence. Sharing silence is, in fact, a political act. When we can stand aside from the usual and perceive the fundamental, change begins to happen. Our lives align with deeper values and the lives of others are touched and influenced. Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses, to our selves. It locates us. Without that return we can go so far away from our true natures that we end up, quite literally, beside ourselves. We live blindly and act thoughtlessly. We endanger the delicate balance which sustains our lives, our communities, and our planet. Each of us can make a difference. Politicians and visionaries will not return us to the sacredness of life. That will be done by ordinary men and women who together or alone can say, "Remember to breathe, remember to feel, remember to care, let us do this for our children and ourselves and our children's children. Let us practice for life's sake." by Gunilla Norris Photo by Janke Laskowski on Unsplash
How can we start to become more aware of the ways we conduct ourselves in our lives, especially the way we conduct ourselves towards others? At a time when we are being encouraged to cheapen our relationships with one another, or to wield power over one another, can we catch on more sensitively to the ways we carry our shame, our wish to dominate, our fear, and how the protective parts of us respond to that in the way we bring ourselves to others? Can we nurture in us that which brings our fullest qualities forward, and which evokes them in others? And how do we attend to the patterns over time in us that we're expressing - patterns which may have been born in our own childhood or in the generations before us - and intervene thoughtfully and with integrity so we can more and more be the ones we are here to be? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction to Turning Towards Life 03:00 Exploring the Source: Children Learn What They Live 05:46 The Impact of Parenting on Self-Perception 09:10 Understanding Inner Patterns and Their Origins 11:54 The Role of Consciousness and Observation 14:58 Navigating Power Dynamics in Relationships 18:11 The Journey of Self-Discovery and Healing 21:03 Compassion and Understanding 24:12 The Importance of Reflection and Choice 26:48 Closing Thoughts and Future Conversations Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Children Learn What They Live If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn. If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight. If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be shy. If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel guilty. If a child lives with tolerance, he learns to be patient. If a child lives with encouragement, he learns confidence. If a child lives with praise, he learns to appreciate. If a child lives with security, he learns to have faith. If a child lives with approval, he learns to like himself. If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, he learns to find love in the world. Dorothy Law Nolte, 1954 Family Column for the Torrance Herald newspaper Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash
Underneath the necessary surface of our life - all the ways we accommodate, fit in, bend ourselves to taker care of one another - there is another deeper current. Sometimes we might go years without attending to this flow, maybe encountering it again only right at the end of our lives. We keep on finding through our conversations and our work how much it matters in a life to attend to the flow, to discover what it is saying, to find out the unique kind of truth that we can make with our own lives, and to bring it to the surface so it can flow into the world and be of benefit. How might we do this? What does it take to do this? That's the topic of David Whyte's stirring poem that forms the source for this week, and the conversation which follows. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction and Context 03:10 Exploring David Whyte's Poem 06:25 Personal Reflections on Truth 10:41 The Importance of Realness 15:16 Discernment in Relationships 20:38 The Journey of Self-Discovery 25:13 Creating Spaces for Truth 27:57 Conclusion and Invitation Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: All the True Vows All the true vows are secret vows the ones we speak out loud are the ones we break. There is only one life you can call your own and a thousand others you can call by any name you want. Hold to the truth you make every day with your own body, don't turn your face away. Hold to your own truth at the center of the image you were born with. Those who do not understand their destiny will never understand the friends they have made nor the work they have chosen nor the one life that waits beyond all the others. By the lake in the wood in the shadows you can whisper that truth to the quiet reflection you see in the water. Whatever you hear from the water, remember, it wants you to carry the sound of its truth on your lips. Remember, in this place no one can hear you and out of the silence you can make a promise it will kill you to break, that way you'll find what is real and what is not. I know what I am saying. Time almost forsook me and I looked again. Seeing my reflection I broke a promise and spoke for the first time after all these years in my own voice, before it was too late to turn my face again. David Whyte, from The House of Belonging Photo by Justin Wise
When we see our lives only as a linear path from here to there, A to B, we put ourselves at the risk of endless comparison between 'where I am' and 'what might have been'. It's a comparison that does not often support us well, and it fuels an orientation that values youth ('I still have time to get to where I'm supposed to be') over age ('time is running out'). There is another way to look - to see that in many ways, alongside our achievements and disappointments, life is a circling. We move in a circular way, carrying, as Nick Cave writes, "all our needs and yearnings and hurts along with us, and all the people who have poured themselves into us and made us what we are". It is in It is "this circular reciprocal motion that grows more essential and affirming and necessary with each turn". This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction to Turning Towards Life 02:00 Exploring Nick Cave's Insights 06:01 The Circular Nature of Life 12:05 Rethinking Time and Progress 17:52 The Impact of Human Constructs 23:52 Embracing the Journey of Life Here's our source for this week: Circling Around S: So essentially what you're doing as an artist is constantly stumbling forward. N: Stumbling forward is a beautiful way of putting it Seán, but I wonder if the notion of forwardness is correct. Perhaps what I mean to say is that although we feel we are moving in a forward direction, in my estimation we are forever moving in a circular way, with all the things we love and remember in tow, and carrying all our needs and yearnings and hurts along with us, and all the people who have poured themselves into us and made us what we are, and all the ghosts who travel with us. It's like we are running towards God, but that God's love is also the wind that it pushing us on, as both the impetus and the destination, and it resides in both the living and the dead. Around and around we go, encountering the same things, again and again, but within this movement things happen that change us, annihilate us, shift our relationship to the world. It is this circular reciprocal motion that grows more essential and affirming and necessary with each turn. From Faith, Hope and Carnage - by Nick Cave and Seán O'Hagan Photo by Erlend Ekseth on Unsplash
We have choices to make in how we relate to one another. We can relate from something real in us, and choose to treat the others we are with as real. Or we can retreat into a 'hall of mirrors' when we relate to one another from the more protective patterns in us. Much becomes possible when we find a way to be real, to 'wake to each other' as we're invited to do by M C Richards in this week's source. A conversation about generosity, curiosity, courage and contactfulness - all qualities of great value in the world right now. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Episode Overview 00:00 Welcome and Introduction to the Conversation 02:29 Exploring the Source: MC Richards' 'Centering' 06:21 The Challenge of Realness 11:06 Initiative and Newness 16:05 The Importance of Realness in Relationships 22:22 Curiosity vs. Fear in Human Connection 27:24 The Ripple Effect of Genuine Connection Here's our source for this week: My Face is Real. Yours is. “An act of the self, that's what one must make. An act of the self, from me to you. From center to center. We must mean what we say, from our innermost heart to the outermost galaxy. Otherwise we are lost and dizzy in a maze of reflections. We carry light within us - there is no need merely to reflect. Others carry light within them. These lights must wake to each other. My face is real. Yours is. Let us find our way to our initiative.” M C Richards, from ‘Centering' Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
Is our primary task in our lives to pursue meaning? Or is it first to learn how to be in ever more contact with our lives - to actually experience what happens inside us and outside us and bring the two into relationship with one another? It might well be the case that until we're doing that, it's very hard for us to be sensitive enough to our lives to even know if meaning is coming our way. A conversation about meaning, purpose, and the experience of life, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction to Turning Towards Life 02:59 Exploring Joseph Campbell's Perspective on Life 10:08 The Experience of Being Alive 17:48 Intimacy Between Inner and Outer Worlds 27:59 Conclusion and Reflection on Aliveness Here's our source for this week: “People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth Photo by NEOM on Unsplash
What happens when we recognise something original in ourselves and each other that exists prior to our individual stories and fears? When we see past the nest of our anxieties to what Mark Nepo calls 'the clear bird' - our essential nature that connects us to the very beginning of things - we might discover a profound basis for meeting life's complexities with wisdom and courage. When someone sees us fully enough to see beneath our fears to this essential nature, we wonder why we ever held our secrets so tightly. Witnessing the light in one another invites us to remember that we're not separate from each other or the world, but rather expressions of the same something bursting itself forward into the world, offering a path toward genuine connection and meaning, and also what we might need to call upon to respond courageously and lovingly to the complexities and difficult challenges of the world. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Episode Overview 00:00 Introduction and Gratitude for Mark Nepo 02:33 Exploring the Source: The Book of Awakening 07:05 The Connection Between Self-Love and the World 10:13 Understanding Originalness and Connection 15:01 The Power of Seeing Each Other's Originalness 18:46 Practicing Mutual Recognition and Light 22:51 The Importance of Seeing Beyond Stories 27:05 The Role of Conversation in Understanding 32:38 Closing Thoughts I begin to realize that in inquiring about my own origin and goal, I am inquiring about something other than myself…. In this very realization I begin to recognize the origin and goal of the world. Martin Buber In loving ourselves, we love the world. For just as fire, rock, and water are all made up of molecules, everything, including you and me, is connected by a small piece of the beginning. Yet, how do we love ourselves? It is as difficult at times as seeing the back of your head ... like feeding a clear bird that no one else can see. You must be still and offer your palmful of secrets like delicate seed. As she eats your secrets, no longer secret, she glows and you lighten, and her voice, which only you can hear, is your voice bereft of plans. And the light through her body will bathe you till you wonder why the gems in your palm were ever fisted... Once in a great while, if someone loves you enough, they might see her rise from the nest beneath your fear. In this way, I've learned that loving yourself requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world—our own self-worth. All the great moments of conception—the birth of mountains, of trees, of fish, of prophets, and the truth of relationships that last—all begin where no one can see, and it is our job not to extinguish what is so beautifully begun. For once full of light, everything is safely on its way—not pain-free, but unencumbered—and the air beneath your wings is the same air that trills in my throat, and the empty benches in snow are as much a part of us as the empty figures who slouch on them in spring. When we believe in what no one else can see, we find we are each other. And all moments of living, no matter how difficult, come back into some central point where self and world are one, where light pours in and out at once. Mark Nepo, from ‘The Book of Awakening' Photo by Mitya Ivanov on Unsplash
To live in the unresolved questions, tensions and contradictions of life is to be alive. To try to turn away from them, as if our lives could be question and confusion free is simply to drive the tensions inside us - to divide ourselves internally and to divide ourselves from life. We could see, as Lizzie says in this conversation, that "the tensions are life itself". So what does it take to live in the midst of life's complexity rather than turn away - to live life rather than pretend to live? That's the question we take up in this episode. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: “Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves….Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Rainer Maria Rilke Parker Palmer writes in reflection: But my deeper hope comes with Rilke's words “and the point is to live everything.” Of course that is the point! If I do not fully live the tensions that come my way, those tensions do not disappear: they go underground and multiply. I may not know how to solve them, but by wrapping my life around them and trying to live out their resolution, I open myself to new possibilities and keep the tensions from tearing me apart. There is only one alternative: an unlived life, a life lived in denial of the tensions that life brings. Here I play a masked role, pretending outwardly that I have no tensions at all while inwardly all those tensions I pretend not to have are ripping the fabric of my life. Pretending is another name for dividedness, a state that keeps us from cultivating the capacity for connectedness on which teaching depends. When we pretend we fall out of community with the common centre that is both the root and the fruit of teaching at its best. But when we understand that ‘the point is to live everything' we will recover all that is lost. From the Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer Photo by Jacky Nelson on Unsplash
We often hold onto positions, opinions and beliefs as a way of shoring ourselves up against the uncertainty of the world. And while our positions may have much integrity to them, it's most often the case that they're not the whole story, especially when faced with the complexity of the world, as well as the complexity of ourselves and other people. Holding on to a position too tightly can easily lead us into difficult places, but it can also be difficult to soften a position and even more difficult to let it go when it is called for. We can so easily feel shame or embarrassment, strong inner criticism, or we can face the criticism of others. In this conversation we venture together into exploring what it might take for each of us to cultivate our own inner flexibility so we can meet the unfolding world with the responsiveness and wisdom that it calls for. And what it might take for us to be a welcome to that change in ourselves and to change in others. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: No Position is Correct for Long Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error. It's not that no position is correct; it's that no position is correct for long. We're perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in—to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever and just be correct; to find an agenda and stick with it… It's hard to be alive. The anxiety of living makes us want to judge, be sure, have a stance, definitively decide. Having a fixed, rigid system of belief can be a great relief. Wouldn't it be nice to just decide to live as an anti-happiness zealot? … Completely consistent, you'll never need to be confused again. You can just stalk around, having sold your bathing suit, looking down your nose at everything. For that matter, wouldn't it be nice to just throw down on the side of being happy? To decide to live life as an ardent pro-happiness advocate, always striving to celebrate, dance, have fun, maximize your joy? But then, before you know it, you're [obnoxious] on Instagram, standing in a waterfall with a garland of flowers, thanking God for blessing you with this wonderful life you must have somehow earned via your immaculate mindfulness. As long as we don't decide, we allow further information to keep coming in… It reminds us that any question in the form "Is X right or wrong?" could benefit from another round of clarifying questions. Question: "Is X good or bad?" Story: "For whom? On what day, under what conditions? Might there be some unintended consequences associated with X? Some good hidden in the bad that is X? Some bad hidden in the good that is X? Tell me more." George Saunders from ‘A Swim in the Pond in the Rain' Photo by Cici GUAN on Unsplash
Giving can, for many of us, be a fraught experience. Maybe we give to one another in the expectation of a particular kind of response or validation, and then maybe we get it… or not. Or we might hold back from giving as a way to keep ourselves safe from being exposed and getting things wrong. How we give to one another and how our giving brings life to both giver and receiver are our topic for this conversation. Is there a way we might find to enter into a more mutual, life-giving, trusting reciprocity around our giving and loving one another, and the world? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Highlights of our conversation: 00.00 Introduction and Welcome 04.35 Exploring the source, Once Loved 13.20 Polarities of Giving and Receiving 16.33 Cultivating Faith in Life's Benevolence 19.26 Shifting Narratives 22.28 Generosity, Nurture, Care 25.19 Care vs Use 28.27 Closing Reflections Here's our source for this week: Once Loved World Once loved Will always yield Its rewards to the Giver Meadow Once grazed Will never mind Ceding grass to the Grazer Man Once loved Will never lose Hope while holding the Lover Tree Once hugged Will never live Life without loving the Hugger Stefan Atkinson Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash
“Worry is really misplaced imagination”, someone told us recently. In this conversation, we consider what it is to bring our rich capacities for imagination, reflection and attention to the living of our lives, rather than as a way to escape life. What becomes possible when we commit to being changed by our experiences, in much the same way that light illuminates and changes a room, rather than ‘going to sleep in the middle of the show'? And how much it matters that we engage fully in the work of reflective conversation, making sense of and metabolising our experiences so we can learn from them. Living this way isn't ‘navel gazing' but a way of turning our experiences into learning rather than rigidity, and supporting us in bringing ourselves more fully into life. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Highlights of our conversation: 00.00 Introduction and Welcome 04.08 Exploring the source, MC Richards' ‘Centering' 08.07 Learning and Consciousness 11.59 Awakening to Life: The Challenge of Engagement 15.59 Processing and Metabolising Life 20.01 Imagination and Reflection: Staying Awake 23.52 The Value of Reflective Conversations Here's our source for this week: Learning to be Alive You don't need to tell me what education is. Everybody really knows that education goes on all the time everywhere all through our lives, and that it is the process of waking up to life… It takes a heap of resolve to keep from going to sleep in the middle of the show. It's not that we want to sleep our lives away. It's that it takes certain kinds of energy, certain capacities for taking the world into our consciousness, certain real powers of body and soul to be a match for reality. That's why knowledge and consciousness are two quite different things. Knowledge is like a product we consume and store. All we need [for that] are good closets. By consciousness I mean a state of being ‘awake' to the world throughout our organism. This kind of consciousness requires not closets but an organism attuned to the finest perceptions and responses. It allows experience to breathe through it as light enters and changes a room. That which we consume, with a certain passivity, accepting it for the most part from our teachers, who in turn have accepted it from theirs, is like the food we eat. And food, in order to become energy, or will, [must be] transformed entirely by the processes of metabolism. We do not become the food we eat. Rather the food turns into us. Similarly with knowledge, at best, we do not turn into encyclopedias or propaganda machines or electric brains. Our knowledge, if we allow it to be transformed within us, turns into a capacity for life-serving human deeds. If knowledge does not turn into life [it] poisons just as food would if it stayed in the stomach and was never digested, and the waste products never thrown off. M C Richards, from ‘Centering' Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash
The delicate balance between taking life seriously and maintaining a sense of playfulness. How earnest conviction and dedication help us take care of what matters - our responsibilities and the people who depend on us. And the life-giving and vital counterweight of lightheartedness: how a looser grip on life can free us to imagine, deepen our contact with others, and create new possibilities. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Highlights of our conversation: 00.00 Introduction and Welcome 01.53 Play, by Vince Gowmon 05.49 The Role of Seriousness and Playfulness 11.46 The Transformative Power of Laughter 18.24 Play as a Bridge Between Seriousness and Lightness 25.33 Conscious Engagement with Play Here's our source for this week: Play Play isn't something separate from the daily grind of life. It is not something to finally get to when work ends. Rather, play, like music, is a force that we feel in our bones and that whispers in our heart. As kids demonstrate, play is not over there, but forever here and now. Vince Gowmon Photo by Rene Bernal on Unsplash
“People can be wonderful”, is where we begin this week's conversation. How do we bring that forward, in the midst of all that can be so difficult, so that we can step-by-step make a world in which we meet one another with conversation, compassion, kindness, and welcome? And where do we need to start inside ourselves and with the ones closest to us in order to first glimpse and then act on this possibility? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Highlights of our conversation: 00:00 Introduction and Reflections 03:13 The Power of Words and the Always Already Present Possibility of Human Goodness 06:08 Orienting to Ourselves and Others with Kindness 08:00 Maya Stein's Poem, ‘Believe' 12:01 The Struggle with Self-Judgement 14:52 Our Messiness and Incompleteness 18:05 Creating Safety Together 20:56 Realness 24:11 The Gifts and Curses of our Standards and Expectations 27:04 The Path of Repair and Connection 30:13 Practicing Kindness and Engaging With One Another 32:54 Effecting Repair Here's our source for this week: Believe Maybe the camera crew is at someone else's house, a spotlight haloing over another's fleshy story. Maybe the mailman is delivering the good news to your neighbor, or a different city entirely, and you come home to a rash of catalogues, the second notice for a doctor's bill, a plea from the do-gooders for whatever you can spare. Maybe you haven't cleaned your kitchen floor in weeks, forgotten to nourish the front garden, spilled too much coffee in your car, weaving through traffic. Maybe you are 10 pounds heavier than last year. Maybe your skin is betraying your age. Maybe winter is ravaging your heart. Maybe you are afraid, or lonely, or furious, or wanting out of every commitment you entered with such vigor and trust. Maybe you've bitten your nails down to the quick, chosen your meals badly, ignored the advice of those who know you best. Maybe you are stubborn as a toddler. Maybe you are clumsy or foolish or hasty or reckless. Maybe you haven't read all the books you're supposed to. Maybe your handwriting is still illegible after all these years. Maybe you spent too much on a pair of shoes you didn't need. Maybe you left the window open and the rain ruined the cake. Maybe you've destroyed everything you've ever wanted to save. Still. If anything, believe in your own strange loveliness. How your body, even as it stumbles, angles for light. The way you hold a dandelion with such yearning and tenderness, the whole world stops spinning. Maya Stein mayastein.com Photo by Anton Darius on Unsplash
We can make our lives very small by turning away from what we don't understand or what frightens us. And if we feel very separate from life, like somehow we are visitors from a far-off planet with no belonging to this planet, we can easily feel as if we have nothing to stand on as we face what is most difficult about life. In this week's conversation we begin with a source from Rainer Maria Rilke which invites us to know ourselves as not at all different from the life we are already in the middle of, and then invites us to see that what is most difficult or frightening to us is an opportunity to draw upon the inherent capacity we humans have to meet life. It's a stirring, inspiring and very kind invitation to us to meet a world that really could do with our bringing ourselves as whole-heartedly as we can. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Fear of the Inexplicable But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abuses, those abuses belong to us; when there are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. Rainer Maria Rilke Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
Sometimes, changing our patterns can seem like the most enormous task. But maybe if we learn to gently take ourselves by the hand, instead of using force, we can find a gentler way into new stories and new ways of living in them. And maybe it's exactly this gentleness, this sense of possibility and hope in our essential goodness and capacity, that is most called for right now. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: THE ART OF FUGUE VI Once again, the moment of impossible transition, the bow, its silent voice above the string. Let us say the story goes like this. Let us say you could start anywhere. Let us say you took your splintered being by the hand, and led it to the centre of a room: starlight through the floorboards of the soul. The patterns of your life repeat themselves until you listen. Forgive this. Say now what you have to say. by Jan Zwicky Photo by Xingchen Yan on Unsplash
We hit our first technical interruption in over seven years this week, when an operating-system update froze Lizzie's computer. We'll be back on track next week, but in the meantime here's a repeat of our most popular episode from back in 2021, which draws on the work of our cherished friend Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. We're conditioned to think of ourselves and other people as in need of fixing, and it makes it so difficult for us to open to one another's beauty and mystery. So what if we could cultivate eyes and hearts of wonder at the luminescent half-moon of one another's presence, and receive one another as rivers do as they give their power and beauty to one another? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Love Though I am undeniably broken, I come to you with no need to be fixed. I come to you the way one river Meets another river - not joining Out of thirst, but because there is so much power And beauty in giving oneself To another, in moving Through the world together. I come to you the way the half moon Comes into the yard - I could be more Whole, but in the meantime, I will bring you everything I have. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer ahundredfallingveils.com Photo by nousnou iwasaki on Unsplash
How might we relate to the standards that our culture hands us around parenting, partnering, working, and being a person? On the one hand, they can be of immense value. They can give us a way to orient to what might be important and worth paying attention to. But on the other hand they can be stultifying, the source of endless comparison and self-criticism, and an impossible goal of perfection. And they can leave us feeling very alone as we look around us and imagine that other people's lives are not as messy, confusing, and unpredictable as ours are. So can we might find a more life-giving way to relate to the standards and ideals we choose to live by? What might happen if instead of turning to social media and our own fantasies about other people, we turned simultaneously towards our own way of knowing and to the wisdom of others around us as we each take our next steps in the roles in life we're pursuing? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week, from a message between Molly, a mum, and her birth doula Natalie. Not Trying to Be Perfect Hello Natalie… I cannot tell you how much more content I am now that I have ditched social media and trying to be perfect. I have a wonderful set of mum friends and we can go to each others' houses even when it's so untidy it looks like we've been burgled, join in with whatever that night's plans for tea are and let our kids play or fall asleep on the sofa while we hang out. It's great. The Shirley Hughes book is so lovely. Nobody in her illustrations has an immaculate house or sensory play bins. Her children accompany mums and dads on errands and cooking and gardening and the school run. That's enough. I've gone back to a corporate job and really, in what industry would you ask one person to work day and night shifts as CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, personal assistant, drive, head of logistics, head of learning and development, washerwoman, cleaner and cook all in one. It's ridiculous. No wonder so many parents are miserable. They feel like a failure because we set impossible expections. Which leads me back to the only tick list one should have at the end of day… ‘all fed, none dead, mostly in bed'. My new standard is… everyone warm and dry, clean bum, have we been outside, full tummies, making sure we eat some vegetables, not too much telly, focusing on kindness to each other. I find it so much easier to REALLY feel my red lines/bondaries this way. It works for us. Lots of love Molly Photo by Luis Tosta on Unsplash
Perhaps instead of trying to control our experience, to somehow ‘lift ourselves out of our lives', we might find a way to be ever more contactful with life itself. Like a mother with her babies. Or like a fish with the stream. Or like the roots of the tree with the earth that gives it life. Might we find, in that softening and slowing, a way to inhabit our lives more fully and take care more skilfully of that which we care most about? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Intimacy with Life In Zen, the word for intimacy is a synonym for awakening or enlightenment. And for me, intimacy is a much better word than these other words. Enlightenment, realisation, or awakening seem to imply some special state of mind or spirit, some kind of transformative, mystical knowledge or experience that somehow will bring us beyond life's day to day problems to a more spiritual plane. The word intimacy is better. It sounds like we are getting closer, deeper, more loving with our experience rather than somehow beyond it. Intimacy better expresses what 'enlightenment' really feels like, I think. Zoketsu Norman Fischer Photo by NEOM on Unsplash Photo by Chris Ensey on Unsplash
What if life isn't calling us to reach for something outside ourselves, but instead to uncover and nurture the intelligence that's already within us? We examine how genuine maturity means moving beyond our childhood instincts of self-protection, discussing what it means to be truly "grown up" – a state where we can feel at home in our world regardless of circumstances. This isn't about shielding ourselves from life's challenges, but about allowing our inner wisdom to emerge and flourish so we can face them with less of a sense of ‘safety vs harm' and more of a sense of our own capacity to be full participants in whatever life brings our way. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Uncovering the Wisdom Within Us There's a life affirming teaching in Buddhism, which is that Buddha, which means ‘awake', is not someone you worship, Buddha is not someone you aspire to; Buddha is not somebody that was born more than two thousand years ago and was smarter than you'll ever be. Buddha is our inherent nature - our buddha nature - and what that means is that if you're going to grow up fully, the way that it happens is that you begin to connect with the intelligence that you already have. It's not like some intelligence that's going to be transplanted into you. If you're going to be fully mature, you will no longer be imprisoned in the childhood feeling that you always need protect yourself or shield yourself because things are too harsh. If you're going to be a grown up - which I would define as being completely at home in your world no matter how difficult the situation - it's because you will allow something that's already in you to be nurtured. You allow it to grow, you all it to come out, instead of all the time shielding it and protecting it and keeping it buried. From ‘Start Where You Are' by Pema Chodron Photo by Chris Ensey on Unsplash
We might see ourselves, as Ursula Le Guin writes, ‘one syllable of a word spoken slowly by the stars'. In this episode we wonder together what is maked possible when we reclaim and retell sacred narratives about being human, as an alternative to the mechanistic views of existence as meaning-free and humans as accidents in a cold unfeeling universe. How might these narratives help us step into a life in which we open to what is around us, and the life-giving qualities in one another? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: One Word Spoken Slowly by the Stars “Aye,” Ged answered. “Light is a power. A great power, by which we exist, but which exists beyond our needs, in itself. Sunlight and starlight are time, and time is light. In the sunlight, in the days and years, life is. In a dark place life may call upon the light, naming it.” … There was a little pause; and Yarrow asked, “Tell me just this, if it is not a secret: what other great powers are there besides the light?” “It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.” Staying his knife on the carved wood, Murre asked, “What of death?” [Yarrow] listened, her shining black head bent down. “For a word to be spoken,” Ged answered slowly, “there must be silence. Before, and after.” Ursula K Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition (p. 157). Orion Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash
Our attention is one of the most valuable gifts we can give to another. As radically social beings, we feel strongly when attention is genuinely brought our way with sufficient care and genuineness, and we long for it. And in the same way we are dignified and deepened when we bring our sincere attention to the world around us, to our experience, and to others. And so if attention is such a valuable gift and contribution to each of us, how is it that it can be so hard to bring it genuinely to those around us - those we love, those we respect, those we want to get to know, those we interact with in the midst of our day to day lives? And what might be do to cultivate the kind of mutually dignifying attention that will benefit everyone? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: The Gift of Our Attention There is one thing, I believe, that all of us want, no matter how old we are, no matter whatever differences are between us; the one thing we cherish from another human being is attention. Love…is not certain. Some people will love us, and some people will not. But the one thing that anyone can give to any other person is simple attention. It is not as involved as in love. This attention may last 20 minutes or many hours. If you live with somebody it is repeated. "You are worthy of my attention." That, I think, is the greatest gift we can give each other. Magda Gerber Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash
Some words about grief, and about grief's intelligence, and what it might be here to teach us both when it arrives in full force and when we 'catch a glimpse of it' in the moments with those we most cherish and love. How might grief - and its inevitability - open us to receive the life we are in the midst of right now, and how might it move us to take care of what and who we care about the most? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: What Grief Wants I only want one thing. I want you to pay attention. I want you to look in her eyes, now, While there is time, while there is Still breath, while the magnolias unfold Into flower, quietly, in the garden. I want you to feel, all the way through, What it is like as she looks back at you, While she still can, while you are here to Receive, to be seen. I will be ready to hold you, flood you, Carry you, when all the gazing is done. I want you to receive your life, While there is life to receive. We will wail together about its loss In good time. But now is not the time for that. It is not the time for turning away, For trying to avoid anything, For trying not to feel. There will be a time when you have No choice but to be turned away. But that time is not now. I want you to feel what it is like to Release your desperate grasp around What you could never hold onto anyway. To delight in the living flow with its Everyday beginning and its always endings. I want you to feel the shining aliveness of Everything you will lose While it is still here. Justin Wise justinwise.co.uk Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Today we mark the completion of seven years of Turning Towards Life with a conversation about how we might find a way to participate in our lives, whatever life brings us. In many ways, this has been the recurring theme of our last seven years - how to be active participants in a life which will always be a mystery and in which so much is beyond our control. We talk about the gifts of being active observers of our lives, which takes a concerted kind of practice and attention, and what it is to respond actively and intentionally to what we observe. And how that can give us opportunities both to respond to life as it is to learn and deepen as we go. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: What the Journey is For What if the descent, Over and over again, Into the dark And back out into the light Is the forging of us rather than The breaking of us? What if there's nothing wrong with us in the deepest sense of that truth? What if we are not broken Even when we find ourselves Back in the same territory, Back in painful patterns, Back in the underworld again? What if we are simply meant to give ourselves over to a process That isn't meaningless at all But a bright, spiralling, gravitational pull Ever-deeper towards Our own Sheer Gorgeous Becoming? Hollie Holden www.facebook.com/hollieholdenlove Photo by Iswanto Arif on Unsplash
As we unfold into life one of the risks is that we become more rigid rather than more fluid, more automatic rather than taking up our freedom. And one place we might look for, and work with, our rigidity and freedom is in seeing the judgments and assumptions we make about other people. When other people become fixed, predictable or boring to us, it may be that we are not looking with the requisite depth; or that we have rigidified our understanding of them rather than regarding them as the great and unfathomable mysteries that they are. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Learning to See What We See But Do Not Know That We See Our awareness of ourselves and our environment is woefully deficient. In particular there is a tendency to see what things have in common rather than what makes them unique, the source of a dispiriting sense of sameness … Our categorising tendency likes to put people in pigeon holes then notices only the behaviour that fits in with our simplistic classification and finishes by dismissing people as superficial, limited, predictable and boring. The equivalent in relationships is to see only the irritating aspects of the partner and then to turn this into a final, dismissive definition. It is common even to want others to behave badly in predictable ways in order to confirm our own good judgment and enjoy superiority and righteousness. A crucial function of the arts is to prevent, or break down, dismissive labelling and reveal the singular instead of the similar, the peculiar instead of the familiar, and the inscrutable instead of the understood. I have often been guilty of impatient dismissiveness but recently, under the influences of literature, process thinking, and the gentle remonstrations of my wife, I have come to find even people I have known for a lifetime increasingly strange. And, strangely enough, the fact that they elude me has brought them closer; my inability to understand them makes them more understandable. Michael Foley, from ‘Life Lessons From Bergson' Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
On the profound, life-saving and deeply dignifying possibilities that come from sharing our personal stories and experiences. The cultural narratives that often discourage openness, contrasted with the healing power of vulnerability and the importance of creating welcome for one another to speak and be listened to. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Some People Will Ask Excerpt from You Could Make This Place Beautiful “Why are you telling these stories? Why air your dirty laundry?” Someone will ask this, or if they don't ask, they'll think it. Maybe you're thinking it now. How do I answer? I could say what happened to me is mine. I could say that suffering equals pain plus resistance, and I'm no longer resisting, no longer hold it in, letting it fester. And why would you expect me, or anyone, to grit my teeth and quietly carry my story? I could say there is a cost to carrying your truth but not telling it. I could say women have been doing this for decades and look where it's landed us. I could say I've gone and lost my narrative, and lost not only my understanding of the future but also my understanding of the past, and this is how I'm trying to find it – Who's calling this laundry dirty, anyway? It's just lived-in. Maggie Smith Photo by Elizabeth Gottwald on Unsplash
On the tensions between our inner worlds and the external identities we often adopt to fit in. How societal expectations and personal fears can lead us to suppress what's most true about us, and the importance of reconnecting with the "wild energies" within our souls. This week we explore how creative practices, changes in routine, and mindful engagement with everyday tasks can help us wake up to our innate aliveness. We reflect on the balance between necessary social conventions and the gifts of discovering our own unique expression, and propose that we each find a way to honour "wonder of their own presence" and bring our unique life force into service to the world around us. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: The Wildness In Our Hearts Every human person is inevitably involved with two worlds: the world they carry within them and the world that is out there. All thinking, all writing, all action, all creation and all destruction is about that bridge between the two worlds... Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us. Now, other people can glimpse it from [its outer expressions]. But no one but you knows what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it. That's the whole mystery of writing and language and expression — that when you do say it, what others hear and what you intend and know are often totally different kinds of things. One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts. from an interview with John O'Donohue Photo by Linda Xu on Unsplash
We ‘privatise' so much about our lives that is actually shared, as if we were separate entities - like objects that bump into one another only occasionally. But it's an impoverished story that robs us of so much contact, depth and support. It might be much more accurate to say that instead of being like objects we are more like whirlpools in a river - constantly evolving processes that shape one another. If we saw ourselves and our relationships that way, perhaps we'd begin to wonder afresh about the power of cultural norms that encourage separateness, and the potential benefits of more open and contactful conversation about ourselves and our relationships with those around us. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: This Relationship is Ours One of the principles of the Dagara concept of a relationship is that it's not private. When we talk about “our relationship” in the village, the word our is not limited to two. And this is why we find it pretty hard to live in a relationship in a modern culture that is lacking true community. In the absence of community, two people are forced to say, “This relationship is ours,” when in fact, a community should be claiming ownership. Subonfu Somé from ‘The Spirit of Intimacy' Photo by YUXUAN WANG on Unsplash
Sometimes, instead of trying to make life's challenges easier, it's more beneficial to fully acknowledge the weight of our burdens until we're compelled to put them down. How we often carry impossibly heavy expectations, work ethics, or people-pleasing behaviours, thinking these will lead to success or belonging, when instead they multiply our difficulties. The importance of compassionately recognising both the good intentions behind these burdens and the suffering they cause, and the role of coaches and loved ones in helping people see alternative ways of living that honour their true selves without abandoning themselves. And the transformative power of imagining and articulating different "styles" of engaging with life's challenges, whether in parenting, work, or relationships. Who can we be, we wonder, when we learn to envision and offer new possibilities and narratives for relating to life that honour other people's aliveness and wholeness? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Don't Lighten the Burden The British-born Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett [...] said of her teaching style that her goal wasn't to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. I had a full-body reaction the first time I encountered that, in the basement shelves of Watkins, the ‘esoteric' London bookstore. Tears pricked behind my eyes. The relief! To me, the phrase meant this: you can slog through life (and I had been slogging through life) trying to ‘get on top of things', trying to reach the point at which you feel like you know what you're doing, trying to fix your flaws, or make yourself emotionally invulnerable… All of that is an attempt to ‘lighten the burden', and there are a thousand self-help gurus on standby, promising to aid you in the effort. But making the burden heavier? That means seeing that as a finite human you'll never get on top of everything, never fully understand what makes others tick, never immunize yourself from distress. The burden of reaching that goal is an impossibly heavy one. And so you put it down. You let your shoulders drop and your muscles unclench. And then – crucially – you're free to actually be here, actually do stuff, actually show up. You get to climb life's mountains without lugging a huge rucksack full of steel ingots on your back the whole way, which is both easier and much more fun. Oliver Burkeman Read the full piece, “Turning Words”, by Oliver Burkeman here Sign up here to Oliver's newsletter Photo by Marcus Zymmer on Unsplash
How might we engage with our inner world and find meaning in our experiences? In this episode we explore how we might embrace even the difficult parts of life as potential sources of wisdom and growth. And how this perspective can transform our relationship with challenging emotions and experiences, inviting us all to approach life's complexities with curiosity and openness. The conversation weaves through topics such as the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences, the wisdom inherent in our inner responses to life events, and the possibility of finding value in even the most unwelcome feelings, making space for confusion, wonder, and the potential for transformation in our everyday lives. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Coming Home to Myself The Self pushes the neglected forward for recognition. Do not disregard it. It holds energy of highest value. It is the gold in the dung. Do not disregard the dung. Marion Woodman Photo by Vivek Doshi on Unsplash
Exploring three common protective myths people use to cope with life's uncertainties. How these myths, while intended to provide comfort, often amplify the very isolation and fear we want to avoid, and rarely help us as much as we think they will. How we might come to examine our own protective stories, opening the possibility of softening them so we can remember our inherent qualities, such as creativity and courage, especially in challenging moments, engage more authentically with life and cultivate deeper connections with others. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Myths That Keep Us From Our Lives At the times when the world has shrunk to its smallest horizons, when I have felt most despairing, desperate, or alone, or when I have found myself working and pushing much too hard, it usually turns out that I have been living in thrall to one or more protective myths about life that rarely help as much as I imagine. Myth 1 – I'm not like other people I'm not really a person, but other people are. Others' lives are complete in ways that mine is not. Other people know where they're going, while I am lost. Other people made the right choices, while I stumbled. Other people aren't as confused as I am. Other people don't suffer as I do. Underpinning this myth is a great deal of negative self-judgement, which fuels a sense of deflation, self-diminishment or self-pity. But it can equally be worn as a mask of grandiosity, in which I puff myself up with certainty and arrogance. Sometimes I bounce between the two poles, from deflation to grandiosity and back again. This is the myth of specialness. It boosts our self esteem by giving us a reason for all the difficulty we're experiencing. And protects us from feeling the suffering of others by keeping us at a distance from everyone and everything. Myth 2 – Death has nothing to do with me Somehow I'm separate enough from the real world that death is not an issue for me in the way it is for others. It's frightening but far-off, a rumour, something that happens to other people. Consequently, I need pay it little real attention. I can ignore what my body tells me, and what my heart tells me. I'm protected from seeing that my time is finite and that I have to decide in which relationship to life I wish to stand. This is the myth of no consequence. It saves us from the burden of having to choose, or face the uncertainty of our choices in a world in which choices matter because our time is limited. Myth 3 – A saviour is coming If I'm good enough, popular enough, loved enough, successful enough, recognised enough, powerful enough, rich enough, famous enough, caring enough… then I'll be saved. Someone – one of the grown-ups in the world – will see me and, recognising my goodness, rescue me from my troubles And then I won't have to face them any more. This keeps me working really hard. Sometimes it has me try to save others in the very same way that I am desperate to be saved. This is the myth of dependency. By rendering us helpless it keeps us from taking on the full responsibility (and possibility) of our own adulthood. — I know these are not myths I carry alone. We cling onto these myths because, as well keeping us at a seemingly safe distance from our lives, we're afraid that if we face the true situation of our lives then our troubles will be magnified. But, as with any turning away from the truth, they come at an enormous cost. In particular they keep both our dependency and our hopelessness going. When we can learn to see them and begin through them, we give ourselves the opportunity for a much more direct, unmediated contact with our lives and with others. We might begin to discover deep sources of hope, courage and compassion which which we had been out of touch. And as we allow ourselves to step out of hiding and into relationship, we might discover that our capacity to help others – and to be helped by them in return – is greater than we could have imagined. Writing and Photo by Justin Wise
On rediscovering and recovering our own and other people's qualities and possibilities in the midst of everything that happens. How what we think we've lost in life may actually be ever-present, just waiting to be rediscovered, often brought to us by the presence of others. And the possibility that every encounter with another person, even difficult ones, can remind us of qualities within ourselves we may have forgotten if we can maintain a sense of wonder and openness to the mysterious nature of things. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: What You Thought You Lost What you thought you lost along the way hangs in the air like a prayer May you find your way home may the doors swing open wide from the out and the in side under a wide open sky May you lose may you find, may you know in the core of your weathered soul your old and your new sign May every stranger on the path become the one who stopped to hang something you thought you lost in the air by a thread like an ancient pagan prayer like some kind of elder warm-eyed guardian was standing there. Wendy Videlock www.wendyvidelock.com Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash
How do we become fully ourselves, as adults, in contact with our essential depth and capacity and without being so much in the grip of the defensive patterns of personality we developed as children? Being an adult who is in touch with their essence. Being an adult who can play. Being an adult who can be joyful. Being an adult who can find freedom in themselves. Being an adult who can not shut everything down just to make everything okay the whole time. Being an adult who can be open to people's views. Being an adult who can be accepting of difference. Being an adult who isn't trying to corral everybody into one way of doing things the whole time. Being an adult who doesn't blame everything on everyone else for whatever they're going through. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Holding Personality Lightly Early in life we all experience emotional states we cannot tolerate - being left alone, interaction with an anxious or depressed parent etc - and in response we begin to build shields of protective armour around our essence. These defence structures constitute our personality. Doing their job well, they continue to guard our vulnerability, but they also prevent the intimate contact we long for. What we routinely identify as our selves is actually this personality… a construct, an idea or self-image that hides the part of us that is vulnerable and capable of unmediated connection. This mask plays a crucial role in our lives. It is likely that we could not have survived without it. But we are so much more than this learned self-concept. Knowing ourselves solely as our personality limits us severely. When we delve into the truth of our personality, we begin to see how our daily struggles in relationship result from our inclination to defend this assumed identity. Before we can have direct, unmediated contact with ourselves or with a significant other, we must take the necessary step of unmasking our personality. In this process, we do not give up the personality entirely, but rather learn to wear it more lightly. Jett Psaris and Marlena Lyons from ‘Undefended Love' Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash
We can brace ourselves against our lives, and we can try to control the many situations in our lives that really can't be controlled. We mean by this everything from parenting, to relationships, to our living and dying. Sometimes, our bracing and our rigidity works right against the forces and movements of life that are bigger than us, and out of our reach, and then we end up crashing into situations. So what would it take for us to recognise when we are falling and learning to be soft, like a cat, rather than landing as a bag of bones? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Be Like a Cat When a cat falls out of a tree, it lets go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground. But if a cat were about to fall out of a tree and suddenly made up its mind that it didn't want to fall, it would become tense and rigid, and would be just a bag of broken bones upon landing. In the same way, it is the philosophy of the Tao that we are all falling off a tree, at every moment of our lives. As a matter of fact, the moment we were born, we were kicked off a precipice, and we are falling, and there is nothing that can stop it. So instead of living in a state of chronic tension, and clinging to all sorts of things that are actually falling with us because the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat. Alan Watts Photo by Wren Meinberg on Unsplash
When the differences between us come into play - in a relationship, in a community, at work, in a friendship - it can seem tempting to search for some kind of false harmony, or to try to either ‘win over' others or ‘lie down' in the face of their will and wishes. But what if we started to see our differences, and our conflicts, as exactly the place where our freedom and our unique shape gets born? What if we could differ ‘for the sake of our becoming just who we need to be'? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Here's our source for this week: The Life in Our Resistances I have come to feel that we live in a universe of spirit, which materialises and de-materialises grandly; all things seem to me to live, and all acts to contain meaning deeper than matter-of-fact; and the things we do with deepest love and interest compel us by the spiritual forces which dwell in them. This seems to me to be a dialogue of the visible and the invisible to which our ears are attuned. There is, first of all, something in the nature of the clay itself. You can do very many things with it, push it this and and pull that, squeeze and roll and attach and pinch and hollow and pile. But you can't do everything with it. You can go only so far, and then the clay resists. We know ourselves by our resistances [...] You can do very many things with us: push us together and pull us apart and squeeze us and roll us flat, empty us out and fill us up. You can surround us with influences, but there comes a point when you can do no more. The person resists, in one way or another (if it is only by collapsing, like the clay). Their own will becomes active. This is a wonderful moment, when one feels one's will become active, come as a force into the total assemblage and dynamic intercourse and interpenetration of will impulses. When one stands like a natural substance, plastic but with one's own character written into the formula, ah, then one feels oneself part of the world, taking one's shape with its help - but a shape only one's own freedom can create. from Centering, by the potter and writer MC Richards Photo by Grant Durr on Unsplash
It seems like it should be so simple - giving to one another, receiving from one another, loving one another, opening ourselves to the love of others. But it's so often hard, and so often we make ourselves unavailable to what we most need and long for, and hold back from what we are most able to give (or give it, but without taking into account the impact of our way of giving). What can we do to understand the relational dynamics that shape our giving and receiving and our holding back our contribution from one another? And what kind of conversation and skilfulness can help us find our way through the maze of expectations, stories, culture, conditioning and habit so we can find one another in a more straightforward way? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: The Gift of Loving Give the gift of loving you to others. Ask for their help. We seem to have learned that helping involves sacrifice. So we think that by asking for help, we're asking people to make a sacrifice. So we don't ask. We try and do it all alone. And we forget that people can just say no. So it's OK to simply ask. Maybe life is about the giving and receiving of gifts….. It's a true joy when someone feels loved and we have something to do with it. So what are we doing removing opportunities for people to love us, taking this away from them, this joy of loving us ? If we all knew what it meant to truly say no, and what a true yes means, what kind of love filled, supported world might we find ? Lizzie Winn Photo by Brad Switzer on Unsplash
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