Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast artwork

Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

348 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 22 hours ago - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings

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 Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, YouTube and FaceBook, at http://www.turningtowards.life and at http://www.wearethirdspace.org

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Episodes

337: This Small Space

March 27, 2024 19:57 - 30 minutes - 27.7 MB

On acknowledging experiences rather than moving away from them or interrupting them. How we might experience our feelings without ‘acting them out’ when they’re intense or overwhelming. And the gifts and blessings of being gentle with ourselves and 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 inv...

336: Right-Sized

March 17, 2024 16:23 - 29 minutes - 27.2 MB

How do we take up our right size in the world? Not in some fixed, rigid way but as a responsive way of engaging with what is called for in each situation and context? When we see that in some way ‘too big’ and ‘too small’ are both ways we try to control situations, maybe we can open to the emergence of something more fluid, more adaptive, and more sensitive in us. Something that asks of us to be of service to life, and responds accordingly. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wi...

335: The Thread We Follow

March 10, 2024 10:26 - 32 minutes - 29.5 MB

So much changes in the course of a day, a year, a life. We can be mysteries to ourselves and to others - confounding, confusing - as we turn this way and that, trying to find our way together through this changeable complex world. It’s very easy to feel lost and confused. But even in the midst of all of this, is there something we can learn to trust… a thread we can reach for that runs through it all? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Maili...

334: How to Hold the Questions of Others

March 03, 2024 16:39 - 24 minutes - 22.9 MB

How can we learn to love questions themselves as much as the answers we seek? And can we learn to be the ones who sincerely welcome the questions of others, so that they have room to breathe and grow? Because it may well be that often, in the midst of the complexity of life, it’s the very bringing of our sincere questions to one another in which the seeds of the responses we need can begin to grow. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: w...

333: Nurturing the Goodness Within

February 26, 2024 08:49 - 35 minutes - 32.9 MB

As we encounter life we encounter all manner of different parts within us - and among them we often find parts of us which seem determined to thwart us and hold us back. How might we relate to the critical parts, the over-protective parts, the obstructive parts, and the parts of us that are simply terrified? And instead of being dominated by them, or trying to dominate them, how might we parent them well so they can grow in wisdom and maturity and bring us, and the people around them, their...

332: Coaching and the Stories We Live In

February 18, 2024 16:34 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MB

In which we talk about integral development coaching, a way to work in profound and compassionate support of people at they engage with their lives. It's this work that we're deeply dedicated to at Thirdspace, but which we haven't spoken much about directly in the more than six years of Turning Towards Life. Along the way we talk about what it is to meet someone with deep welcome, to be attentive to the way someone is relating to their life, and to find compassionate and truthful ways to sp...

331: The Most Important Thing

February 11, 2024 09:00 - 26 minutes - 24.3 MB

What might come if we could, as Julia Fehrenbacher writes, make a home inside ourselves, a shelter of kindness that grows all the truest things? It seems to us that doing exactly that is of great support to our courage, our blossoming, our bringing ourselves to the world with both strength and gentleness, and with the truthfulness our relationships deserve. So much of the time our inner harshness - when we have not learned how to grow a kind, welcoming place inside us - gets projected out ...

330: Looking After Our Selves

February 04, 2024 10:27 - 36 minutes - 33.9 MB

When we’re children we often know intuitively something that as adults we forget - that there are many different parts of each of us inside, and that sometimes we really need to give space to the part of us that will be kind, and nurturing, and gentle. As adults it is possible for us to relearn this, and we can practice relating to the whole of our inner world with an attentiveness and spaciousness that’s resourcing to us. This in turn frees us up to bring our personal complexity to meet ...

329: The Deliberate Scaffolding of Relationship

January 28, 2024 14:48 - 37 minutes - 34.8 MB

In our work as coaches, teachers, leaders and community makers, we have been finding anew over the last few years just how important ‘deliberateness’ is in making relationships that can hold and spaces in which there is genuine welcome. It might be easy to ignore the deliberate practices needed to make relationships in this way, or to treat them as optional. But, as the poet Seamus Heaney tells us in this week’s source, it’s the careful making of such deliberate ‘scaffolding’ for our relat...

328: This is Hard for Me

January 21, 2024 11:38 - 34 minutes - 31.9 MB

“I am a person who needs you to listen, simply listen, hear me say 'this is hard for me', not offer an answer or solution,” writes Lana Hechtman Ayers. And we are in agreement that there is a move, an opening, a 'coming alongside' one another that is the first move to make when someone brings us their difficulty, or pain. For many of us, this is not at all easy to do. Later, perhaps, when a request is made, it could well be time for us to bring a response. But first, before that, how do w...

327: Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

January 14, 2024 10:17 - 34 minutes - 32 MB

“What is it like, such intensity of pain?” writes Rainer Maria Rilke. While we might ask one another in our more difficult moments “How are you?” or perhaps “How are you doing?”, we less often ask Rilke’s deeper question, a question that helps us and one another make contact with the aliveness and mystery of our being human. And so in this week’s conversation we explore together what it is to treat our own experience of ‘the happenings of life’ with reverence and respect, and start to see ...

326: Urgent Message to a Friend in Pain

January 07, 2024 14:14 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MB

"Remember when you saw the stars of childhood, when you knelt alone and thought that they were there for you, lamps that something held to prove your beauty?" writes Joseph Fasano. Can we use these words as a gateway to finding a sense of belonging in the world, rather than being separate from it? And as we find our way to our own belonging - our receiving of life - what does it take for us to be ones around whom others get to belong? All of these seem like urgent questions to us in a world...

325: The Ebb and Flow of Relationship

December 31, 2023 10:34 - 36 minutes - 33.6 MB

“When you love someone, you do not love them in exactly the same way all the time. It is an impossibility - a lie to even pretend to.” So how might we live gracefully in our relationships with their inevitable ebb and flow and, instead of demanding they stay constant, learn to trust the very natural movement in them as we would learn to trust the tides? And what might we need to discover about ourselves in order to make this possible? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Th...

324: Taking Back Our Projections

December 24, 2023 10:21 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MB

When we freeze in public - giving a speech, or making a presentation - it's valuable to consider the possibility that all the unwelcome attention that seems to be coming our way might actually be our own attention, projected out onto others. In other words, feeling everyone's intense interest in us might show us something about how interested we are. The same goes for the feeling of pressure to do things - which might be a projected-out version of our own wish to contribute. Seeing this way...

323: You Are Big Enough To Hold It All

December 17, 2023 17:47 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MB

We can easily live as if we're 'skating over the surface of life'. Sometimes that's an intelligent strategy for protecting ourselves from the intensity and difficulty that life can bring us. But our wider culture rarely helps us remember the depths of our lives - the depths that remind us of our mutual goodness, our pain, the ways we heal, the brevity of it all. And if we're skating the surface more than is necessary, we're barely being ourselves. What would it be to live with openness to t...

322: What To Love When You're Running Out of Things to Love

December 10, 2023 15:26 - 35 minutes - 32.6 MB

It’s not surprising, when we’re in difficulty or overstretched, to find ourselves tuning out of the world, distancing ourselves from what and who is around us. The stories we’re handed by our culture - that life is essentially meaningless - don’t help. Who do we become if this is what we do? How might we, instead, learn to love again when we’re ‘running out of things to love’? And how might we - as the poet Maya Stein invites us - ‘narrow the distance’ between ourselves and the world, ours...

321: The Small Things That Carry Love

December 03, 2023 23:10 - 33 minutes - 30.4 MB

When any of us - or all of us - face a tectonic shift in our lives, through a birth or a death, a change in circumstances, or a calamity in the world, it can be hard to know how to respond. We easily overcomplicate, or turn away because we don’t know what to do. But what if the most necessary response in difficult times - and the one that cultivates the best in us - was the simplest… taking care of one another through the simple, practical, almost-invisible small things? Hosted, as alwa...

320: The First Step is to Admit 'This is Hard for Me'

November 26, 2023 15:11 - 30 minutes - 27.6 MB

"The first step", writes Paul Weinfield, is not reaching for a solution to our difficulties but "the willingness to admit 'this is hard for me'". It's this move that gives us the opportunity to let go of the habitual ways we have of 'holding up the heavens'. And when we do this, we have the chance to enter into a series of discoveries about the force and patterns of our own personality and assumptions - and maybe even to find out what of the scaffolding that we use to hold everything up is ...

319: To Be Hopeful in Bad Times

November 19, 2023 14:55 - 35 minutes - 32.5 MB

Difficult times in the world can easily drive us towards the worst of ourselves. When we become rigid, or narrow in our thinking, or too certain about the rightness of our position… or when we forget how to acknowledge the pain of the other. But difficult times can also be when we choose to bring forward the best of ourselves, to live in our communities and our homes in the way, as Howard Zinn says, ‘that human beings should live’ when we are in contact with the compassion, courage and ki...

318: The Healing

November 12, 2023 11:08 - 32 minutes - 30.1 MB

The healing we need - the healing the world needs - can't happen without us. When we separate ourselves from the world, as if it's up to someone else, we miss the ways in which healing and our shared capacity arise from our own minds, hearts and bodies. We can't leave it up to someone else to do - but doing it also calls on our courage, our care, our truthfulness, our love, and our capacity to cultivate a many-chambered heart... to hear one another's joys and anguish, love and anger, and ho...

317: Something Small and Practical

November 05, 2023 15:36 - 31 minutes - 28.4 MB

When our inner worlds are in turmoil, perhaps in response to the outer world, how should we respond? Might there be a way to honour other parts of ourselves that easily get sidelined in heightened times? And how might that be a way to hold onto our dignity, care and humanity? 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 c...

316: Stay Like Clay

October 29, 2023 18:47 - 35 minutes - 32.6 MB

There are so many reasons to harden ourselves to the world. But what we long for, in ourselves, from one another, is for our ‘clenched fists to unfurl, ready to hold whatever small things drop inside’. It’s not the easiest thing to do when our worlds are filled with hurt and pain, or when we are feeling tender and fragile. So how might we begin? And help one another stay open? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.li...

315: We Never Know Who We Are

October 22, 2023 15:20 - 31 minutes - 29.2 MB

Underneath many of our common-sense understandings of who we each are, there is a deeper mystery. How did I get to be the person who I am today? How does the stream of life that began long before me, and will continue long after me, shape me? And is there a way we can come to know ourselves and our mystery more fully in the way we listen to and come to know one another - in friendship, community, or the kind of helping that coaching provides? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin ...

314: Blessing of Courage

October 15, 2023 13:20 - 26 minutes - 24.4 MB

Where does our courage come from? It certainly (and paradoxically) doesn’t come from our efforts to make ourselves safe, or strong, or to armour ourselves against the world. Indeed, it may be that our courage really comes from what is most vulnerable in us, and what is most true - the something in us that lives very close to fear, and is also a neighbour to joy. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us ...

313: Patience

October 08, 2023 09:06 - 32 minutes - 30.2 MB

True patience isn’t ‘going slow’, it isn’t ‘tuning out’, and it isn’t a stick to beat ourselves with. Instead it’s our capacity to turn towards what is actually happening without turning away, and to turn towards our own responses - including our irritation, anger, frustation - without turning away either. It’s in this kind of patience that the seeds of a genuine kind of compassion for the messiness of a human life can arise, and the possibility that we might grow in ourselves an ever w...

312: 6 Years In: Strengthening One Another

October 01, 2023 09:16 - 33 minutes - 30.5 MB

Within us are great forces for the destruction of one another. But also great forces for mutual support, mutual strengthening, and the mutual amplification of care and goodness. Which will we draw upon when we are in trouble? It’s the 6th birthday of ‘Turning Towards Life’, and we are feeling celebratory, and also a mix of  hopefulness about the world and tenderness at the many difficulties we are all in. We invite you to join us for this conversation about how we might find a path through...

311: The Gift of Forgetting

September 24, 2023 09:40 - 33 minutes - 30.6 MB

The possibility of taking up both remembering and forgetting as intentional practices. So that we can remember, and not forget, one another’s gifts and goodness, sacredness and possibility, strength and tenderness. So we can forget all that we hold onto in one another that keeps us from who we could be, and meet one another afresh in each brink of time. And so we can remember what needs fixing and healing - so that it can be fixed and healed - and forget the patterns in us that break an...

310: Continually Remade

September 17, 2023 09:21 - 33 minutes - 30.5 MB

Look around at the people you know, and you’ll quickly see how particular each person’s response is to what life brings to them. You might say that each person has cultivated, over time, a particular ‘flavour’ for their engagement with life, or a particular ‘way of being’ in response to the world. And yet this ‘flavour’ is often all but invisible to us in our understanding of ourselves, falling into the background of habit and familiarity. How might we help one another awaken to the ways w...

309: Within You Is...

September 11, 2023 17:34 - 29 minutes - 27 MB

We human beings are very sensitive to truth. So when we find the place inside us from which we can talk, truthfully, about the many aspects of our experience, it can be deeply connecting and safety-making. It also goes a long way to having the many parts of us themselves feel named and seen, and in doing so to become less desperate and fearful. And this place from which we can talk? We might call it the ‘essential self’. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Tur...

308: Start with Rest

September 03, 2023 14:43 - 34 minutes - 31.5 MB

A conversation about slowing down so we can, with gentleness, relax our own patterns and habits and then see them with truthfulness. About how we might be the ones for each other that make this possible. And about how radical, counter-cultural and necessary true rest can be. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. 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 W...

307: Remembering Ourselves Whole Again

August 27, 2023 21:32 - 28 minutes - 25.9 MB

The wider culture of the world doesn’t teach us much about how to see and name the goodness of people. But we quickly learn how to compare, criticise, and find all the ways we’re wanting or falling short, or how other people are. What does it take to start to see the goodness that underlies even the mistakes we make, and be ones who can help liberate that goodness into ever fuller expression? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Because we're travelling this wee...

306: Listen Until the Clouds Crack

August 22, 2023 05:39 - 33 minutes - 30.4 MB

Listening is the foundation of all human relationship. But what is it to listen? Who do we have to be, to be ones whose listening connects, heals, restores, and supports our being true with one another? One response is that we're called to be ones who listen for all that is not said - the vastness of a person, their wholeness, and the 'essential self' that is beneath everything another person is saying. In this way we become a deep and faithful welcome to one another. Could a machine ever d...

305: A Splendid Torch

August 13, 2023 17:29 - 36 minutes - 33.5 MB

What if a life of purpose isn't so much found by looking far from ourselves, towards some future goal, but instead by paying attention to the way that life is already moving through us? What does it take to kindle life's energy in us so that the qualities that we uniquely have to bring have a chance to get brought? And how might we stay awake to the splendour and energy of life that is always waiting to be known in us and through us, rather than collapsing into self-pity or demanding that t...

304: Older, and Wiser

August 06, 2023 10:26 - 38 minutes - 34.9 MB

The wider culture no longer honours elders in the way it once did, and so we lose a source of wisdom and depth that we so need in these times. Because of this, the culture also doesn’t give many of us a route to become elders ourselves as we age, so we can easily fall into patterns of rigidity of thought and opinion, insisting that the world and others stay the same rather than meeting the world with the wisdom and grace that is called for. So how might we support ourselves in staying o...

303: The Awkwardness Principle

August 02, 2023 22:35 - 36 minutes - 33.3 MB

How our familiarity and what we’re comfortable with builds a whole world, with its own particular horizon of possibilities. Why it might be that the very thing that’s most called for to change things in the ways we long for is to do the last thing we’d imagine. And how we can help one another grow by being the ones who lovingly find a way to welcome and explore the unfamiliar in one another. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace...

302: Drinking Damage into Love

July 23, 2023 09:13 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MB

In a wider culture that has told us to turn away from our own suffering and grief, to harden up and plough through, it’s a deeply counter-cultural and necessary move to turn towards it and towards one another. How might we do this? And how do we trust the deep wells of goodness and capacity within and between us that can, with patience and faithfulness, transform our difficulty into love? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. ...

301: Bird and Stone

July 16, 2023 09:12 - 29 minutes - 26.7 MB

How do we attend to our inner complexity? Are there ways we might relate to the many parts of us that honour both subtlety and certainty, practicality and mystery, hardness and softness, ground and sky? And what might it take for us to be the ones who bring ourselves to all of this - and to each other - in a way that fosters relationships that are nourishing and truthful, inviting and care-taking, so that we don't fall into habitual patterns that end up elevating one side of each polarity a...

300: A Walking Permission-Slip

July 10, 2023 18:26 - 30 minutes - 28.2 MB

It's our 300th episode, so we are feeling very celebratory. This week our conversation takes up the question of permission. What do we make possible - give permission for - in others, by our way of being and interacting with the world? And what do we make impossible? Can we begin to catch on to the patterns that have become habitual to us (and often invisible to us) so we can start to be more intentional about what others can bring us, and what they can't? And can we find a way to open th...

299: What is Most Holy in Me

July 02, 2023 09:13 - 31 minutes - 29.2 MB

We easily forget that inside us, and inside everyone, is something delicate, solid, sweet, and very tender - a source of life and dignity and care. And when we forget this it’s easy to treat the surface of things - our disagreements, our hurriedness, our fear - as what is most true. But it’s the depth of being human that gives us access to the most life-giving of gifts we each have to bring. Can we find our way back to contact with this depth, this holiness, in our everyday lives and relati...

298: A Vast Net of Kindness

June 25, 2023 10:41 - 33 minutes - 30.7 MB

As the poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer teaches us, even as the whole world can seem to be falling, we have a choice whether to contribute to isolation and fear or to a vast net of generosity and kindness in which we hold one another. Perhaps when we feel most afraid and most isolated, it's the time to ask ourselves the other side of the question too - are we willing to receive and be open to the support that's there? Because our turning away from receiving is also our turning away from givin...

297: What Listening is For

June 18, 2023 16:57 - 36 minutes - 33.6 MB

Every experience we have of another person is first about us (our hopes, our fears, our way of interpreting, our projections). And every experience another person has of us is first about them. We live, in some very deep way, in a ‘hall of mirrors’. So, do we have any chance of truly ‘receiving’ one another? What in ourselves might we have let go of to make that possible? And then what do we have to do, to listen in a way that meets the ‘other’ instead of meeting ‘ourselves’? This week's ...

296: Age is Not a Problem to be Solved

June 11, 2023 17:56 - 29 minutes - 27 MB

A conversation for any of us who find ourselves resisting our bodies ageing and changing: about all the painful comparisons we can get into; about the way the narratives and economic structures (and algorithms) of our wider culture are built to enrol us in just these comparisons and just this pain; about how we might attend joyfully to our own inner lives so that we can come to discover and appreciate and delight in our own splendour... and in doing so free up the splendour and wonder of ot...

295: A Kind of Attention

June 04, 2023 22:45 - 32 minutes - 30 MB

The kind of attention we bring to the world can enslave, reduce or destroy us and others, or support us, and them, in flourishing. It particularly matters when we have any kind of power or influence - for example when we’re a parent, or a leader, a coach, in a partnership of any kind. But we're rarely taught anything about this, because it's not largely in the interest of the systems around us to have us cultivate the broad open attention that brings out meaning and richness from others and...

294: One Stubborn Layer at a Time

May 28, 2023 09:15 - 36 minutes - 33.1 MB

How do we find our way back to remembering who and what we really are, in the midst of lives that so easily call us into busyness, distraction, fear and the gnawing sense that something is always missing? How might we speak with one another, and write, in a way that evokes one another's depth? And why it is that, in these days of an new explosion of machine-writing software tools such as ChatGPT, we need the honesty and generosity of writing and speaking to one another that can come only fr...

293: The Facts of Life

May 21, 2023 21:08 - 34 minutes - 31.2 MB

How do we face life as it is, with all its inevitable difficulty and with all the meaning and love we might be able to bring to it? And how do we find that in ourselves that is life itself, and live more often from there so that we can meet life with life? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin W...

292: The Sharpest Tool in the Shed

May 14, 2023 10:20 - 37 minutes - 34.6 MB

How much of each us gets excluded when we constantly compare ourselves to one another, and to the expectations we're handed by our culture. And how much we exclude the gifts of others by the very same process. Is there a way we could give up inappropriate comparison and in so doing learn to include so much more everyone's talents and gifts, and the supportive ground of life itself? In this conversation we talk about different kinds of learning, mischief, the attitudes we take that portray...

291: This Ruined House

May 07, 2023 09:37 - 34 minutes - 31.7 MB

When we stop walling ourselves off from the suffering of the world - our own, other people's - we give ourselves a chance to meet one another's moonlight beauty in the midst of the inevitable undoing that is part of every human life. In this week's conversation we wonder together about what it is that makes this possible, and the relationships with one another that can grow as a consequence. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace...

290: This is the Time to Be Slow

April 30, 2023 12:41 - 32 minutes - 29.8 MB

What happens when we stop demanding of one another that we change, and instead generously come alongside one another with a measure of faithfulness in what John O'Donohue calls the 'hesitant light' which is still present in us even in our greatest difficulties? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.  Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by ...

289: Losing It

April 23, 2023 09:30 - 32 minutes - 30.1 MB

What if we could hold gratitude and sorrow together in us, rather than reducing ourselves to only one or the other, and rather than tuning out of life so as to avoid losing things? What might it be to honour and experience the gratitude that is inside all sorrow, and the sorrow that is inside all gladness, and in so-doing come to honour the exquisite and extraordinary depth and inner multiplicity of being a human being? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn...

288: Uncertainty is a Sacred Path

April 17, 2023 07:32 - 30 minutes - 27.7 MB

We greatly misunderstand ourselves and other people when we take ourselves to be 'fixed', just ‘one-way’. However stuck we've become, there is something of us that is always changing, and even when we can't see it there's always the seed of change waiting for the right moment to burst forth. So how do we learn to trust that in ourselves and others that is life's never ceasing unfolding into itself? How do we undo the rigid stories and judgments that increase the distance between us? And ho...