Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast
351 episodes - English - Latest episode: 14 days ago - ★★★★★ - 12 ratingsJoin 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
241: What Love Depends Upon
May 22, 2022 08:00 - 36 minutes - 33.8 MBWhen love depends upon a feeling, it comes and goes as the feeling comes and goes. And when love depends upon the way someone else is - beautiful, or kind, or successful - it’s vulnerable to the inevitable changes in a human life. But what if love could depend upon something deeper - not something inside me, nor something inside you, and maybe not even something between you and me? What if we came to know love as the very ground we could stand upon, or a wellspring we could draw upon that...
240: The Art Spirit
May 15, 2022 10:29 - 43 minutes - 39.7 MBThere's something inherently artistic about living a human life, in all the ways we're called to respond creatively, sensitively, boldly to the conditions and relationships in the midst of which we find ourselves. But, for many of us, the 'artist in us' got suppressed by being unsupported, or unwelcome. So what would it be to reclaim our artistry and direct it towards the unfolding of life-giving possibilities in the world? And what would it be to be ones who can sincerely welcome the artis...
239: What is Time?
May 08, 2022 08:55 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MBSo often our lives are ruled by 'clock time' - we're counting off how long there is to get something done, or we're aiming for a time-bound goal, or we're measuring time wasted or time used productively. But although this is the dominant way of understanding time for many of us, it is only one way of relating to the flow of things. What if, instead of filling time with work or play, we turned things around and allowed time to flow into our activity? And what if instead of trying to secure o...
238: Tumbling Into the Heart
May 01, 2022 09:59 - 35 minutes - 33 MBOur amazing capacity to separate parts of ourselves from ourselves - to keep the inner experiences of grief, or joy, or longing away and out of view. How this serves us. And how it can also lead us away from ourselves and all that we have to bring to the world. The letting go, falling in, opening that's available to us that can play its part in reuniting ourselves with what would otherwise be lost. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the possibility of letting ourselve...
237: The Story of Money
April 24, 2022 08:05 - 37 minutes - 34.8 MBThe cultural story of money that we all live in has opened up all kinds of opportunities for trade and exchange in the world. And at the same time, the story is easily one of transaction rather than relationship, of fleeting contact rather that the weaving of deep reciprocal obligation and care, of efficiency, mechanism and convenience over the vulnerability and gifts of connection and reciprocity and community. Is there a way we can live in the story of money in a way that binds us into th...
236: What Is Lost Is Now Found
April 17, 2022 10:47 - 33 minutes - 30.6 MBHow can we be the ones who welcome what has been lost in others, and in doing so be the ones who welcome again what has been lost in ourselves? It's a central question for our fragmented times. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we find our way back home to what was here all along, and the crucial role of welcome, truth-telling and relationship in making that possible. It's hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here's a link to the detail...
235: Called to Leadership
April 10, 2022 11:43 - 36 minutes - 33.3 MBStepping into leadership, on whatever scale, immediately asks a central question of each of us: What kind of person will I be? Can I be a person who brings out virtues of dignity, creativity, courage, compassion, persistence, humility, generosity and wisdom in myself and the people I am alongside? Can I catch on to the ways in which I contract into fear, or reactivity, or habit? Can I find others who will help me walk the path of attention, inquiry and practice that can support me in bringi...
234: Fear is Contraction
April 03, 2022 10:42 - 38 minutes - 35.3 MBWhen we're afraid, but not acknowledging our fear, we're most likely to act out of line with our deepest intentions. It's easy from the midst of fear to try to assert our power and control - by being right or over-certain or dominating others - or to shrink away from our own dignity by saying 'yes' when something else is called for. What if we could learn to notice and name our fear, to ourselves and others, and in doing so return to the qualities of wisdom, truthfulness, and reciprocity th...
233: Whatever Leads to More Life
March 27, 2022 13:12 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MBIn the words of Marie Howe’s beautiful poem that is our source this week, “whatever leads to joy, to more life, to less worry”. Can we learn to live this way in the midst of it all - attending to joy in its deepest sense, in the way it brings us into contact with what is most real? And is there a way to not pile worry on top of everything that it already matters for us to take care of? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the faithfulness it takes to lean into our lives...
232: Holding Together
March 20, 2022 11:05 - 34 minutes - 32 MBIn those moments when, in the midst of the brokenness of the world, any of us find ourselves able to kindle our resolute love or contagious joy, we're being of much needed service - both to ourselves and to those around us. And we don't always know that we're doing that. So what would it be to begin to notice this most human of capacities in ourselves, and share it with others - as a complement to all the other strong feelings and orientations that sweep through us when we are also in conta...
231: What if This Was That Day?
March 13, 2022 17:06 - 34 minutes - 31.5 MBHow do we make contact with our own kindness, generosity, creativity, patience, courage, compassion, fierce or gentle love, and our capacity to stay in contact with life, right when we're afraid or wanting to turn away? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we find that in ourself that's ready to stay faithful, when other parts of us strongly want to turn away - and how we help one another to do that. Our conversation is seeded from a source from the wonderful work o...
230: Liminal Space
March 06, 2022 11:42 - 32 minutes - 30 MBWe might imagine we can choose the 'threshold moments', when we're called to step into the unknown. Sometimes we can. But as events in the world remind us this week, what changes around us and within us often comes without warning and without our say-so. One response to transitions on whatever scale is to run from them, or to try to be in control of them on our own. But that rarely works out, because for us to be in charge would mean having powers that none of us have. Instead, can we tur...
229: Things Will Always Happen
February 27, 2022 16:42 - 30 minutes - 27.9 MBHow do we approach our lives when they don’t go how we want? Or when we find ourselves judging the value of our lives by the outcomes of our actions and projects? When we find out we’re not nearly as ‘in charge’ as we imagine, and that every choice is riddled with complexity, it’s easy to tune out and seek the promise of easy answers or to demand of ourselves a level of control and power that’s impossible for us humans. So how else might we live? Might we find a way to honour that our lives...
228: When Your Hair is Aflame with Winter
February 20, 2022 12:26 - 34 minutes - 31.5 MBCan we look at ourselves and others around us as we all grow older with eyes of wonder... seeing and receiving the luminosity and depth that shines out from beneath the skin? Or will we get caught up in our culture's dominant meta-narratives - that to grow old is to be diminished, and that time is a 'resource' that we get less of as we age? What if, instead, life is a ripeness that we grow into, and growing into our elderhood is a deep gift we can bring to others? This week's Turning Towar...
227: The Great Gift of Selfhood
February 13, 2022 11:48 - 32 minutes - 30 MBIt's hard to turn towards the basic condition of our lives - that everything changes, and that everything ends, including ourselves. That we will lose it all. But our resistance to this truth can easily end up with us trying to freeze our lives in place, holding us back from encountering what's here in an effort to never have to face loss or grief. But we know not to do that with that which flows - we don't try to freeze each wave on the sea, for example, because we know that what makes a w...
226: Sweet Darkness
February 06, 2022 18:03 - 30 minutes - 28.4 MBWe’re taught that what’s most of value in life is what we can explain, that which can be illuminated by the daylight, and which we can see and know. But the shadows and darkness have gifts too - gifts of belonging, and gifts of freedom, and a way of teaching us what to give up in order to take up the one life that is our own. What if we approached the non-obvious not as something to run from, but as a doorway into a life beyond? Can we honour the underneath and the behind and the dark and...
225: The Professionalism That Will Kill Us All
January 30, 2022 12:23 - 33 minutes - 30.4 MBThere’s a prevalent understanding in the world that the very definition of ‘professional’ is a kind of machine-like activity - efficient, rule based, predictable, rational but unfeeling. Even when it’s not talked about we see it shaping our participation in organisations of all kinds - businesses, schools, health-care. And beyond work it shapes our entire orientation to life. But what if we started to notice the deadening qualities of this way and started to attend to a life-giving altern...
224: Bonus Episode - The Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course 2022
January 29, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes - 50.5 MBLizzie and Justin are partners in Thirdspace, an organisation which supports people to recognise their goodness and capacity, helping them bring their whole selves to the world. In this special episode Lizzie and Justin talk about the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course, a certification programme in integral development coaching which is at the heart of Thirdspace's work and a project of great joy and love for both of us. Our next cohort is open for applications now, and begins in June...
224: What Open Means
January 23, 2022 13:59 - 34 minutes - 31.8 MBBeing open to the world, to experience, to being changed by what's around us and within us, may be one of the great human capacities, and precisely what allows us to make community and relationship, and to respond with wisdom, creativity and love to the challenges and gifts of our times. But it's greatly diminished by that in us which wants to manipulate and control, which insists on reducing to right and wrong, and the impulse in us which demands certainty. Those qualities are needed, inde...
223: Because We Are Not Machines
January 16, 2022 10:25 - 34 minutes - 31.5 MBWe are not machines, even though most of us have grown up, quite without noticing it, as if we were in some essential way meant to be shiny, efficient, perfect, unstopping, optimal, results-producing mechanisms. And so we easily miss seeing the already-miraculous living beings that we are. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about loving our messiness, our incompleteness, our glorious particular just-who-we-are-ness, hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdsp...
222: A Host of Stories
January 09, 2022 10:25 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MBLearning to live with a many-chambered heart; relating to ourselves, others and life by taking into account the astonishing richness and complexity that’s always here; honouring that there’s never just one story or explanation for what’s happening, or what we’re feeling, or what’s emerging, or what’s intended. And, along the way, how movies, trees, parks and people can be teachers of all of this to all of us. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about learning to live in a ho...
221: ‘I Am’ is a Complete Sentence
January 02, 2022 10:10 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MBTo be a living, conscious, experiencing being is one of the great miraculous wonders of the universe. And being ‘this one’, the unique one each of us is, will never happen again. And yet… we learn to discount the unique first-person experience of being ourselves, pushing our ordinary everyday sacredness to the side, often in favour of treating ourselves and others more like objects or production machines than the sacred conscious beings that we are. What would it be to let ourselves honour...
220: Your Implicit is My Possibility
December 29, 2021 00:34 - 31 minutes - 29.3 MBWe each carry a whole implicit world with us, a way of being that profoundly shapes what's possible for others in relationship with us. But because it's implicit, the 'background', it can be hard to see how much more there is to our relationships than the actions we take and the words we say. As Lizzie writes in this week's source, "What’s implied in your words, your actions, your feelings towards me. That’s what’s most powerful. What’s implied. That’s what shapes me most profoundly. " This...
219: What Is Truth?
December 19, 2021 10:45 - 36 minutes - 33.2 MBWe live in a time when truth gets pulled apart by the move towards ‘I am right, you are wrong’ and the parallel move to make all truths equal and indistinguishable from one another. And in coming at truth this way, we easily pull ourselves and one another apart. But what if finding out ‘what’s true’ is a process, not a thing? A process of loving, disciplined attention, in which walk a path together, taking one another’s judgements into account, bringing our best reason, imagination, intui...
218: Climbing Into Your Own Life
December 12, 2021 17:58 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MBThe wonderful Robert Bly died just a short time ago, leaving behind him countless invitations to each of us to step into our lives more fully. Our conversation this week honours his work by taking up his poem 'He Wanted to Live His Life Over'. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the nature of time, what it might be to allow our lives to be enriched by all that has come before, and what it is to say 'yes' to life, no matter what. It's hosted as always by Lizzie Winn an...
217: Shameless
November 28, 2021 21:03 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MBIt's hard to be of genuine service to others from the part of us that worries about being liked. But there is something deeper in all of us that is not at all concerned about favour and is at once fiercely committed, gentle, loving and true enough to serve in an authentic, generous way. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might cultivate the shameless leadership that's called for right now. It's hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Th...
216: The Grace of Hidden Beauty
November 21, 2021 18:55 - 36 minutes - 33.7 MBWhat if beauty isn't something we add to the world, but an already-existing quality of everyone and everything that we can uncover through the way we learn to look, feel, sense and hear? What world would present itself to us if we practiced skilfully looking for beauty everywhere, including in those places (ourselves, others, our collective endeavours, the situation we find ourselves in) where we've already concluded that beauty, and all its attendant possibilities, is absent? This week's ...
215: Turn Mishaps Into the Path
November 14, 2021 10:12 - 34 minutes - 31.9 MBWe add difficulty to our difficulty if we imagine, as we often do, that difficulty should not happen, that it must be our fault to be living a life that is far from perfect, and that we have to blame one another when the world turns out to be full of problems. Mostly, we've been taught to respond to difficulty in this way by a culture that tells us that everything can be fixed and that if it's not fixed, already, someone must be doing something wrong. The resulting despair turns us away fro...
214: You Know When It's Time To Go
November 07, 2021 12:20 - 35 minutes - 32.8 MBIf we look patiently, we'll sometimes see that underneath the 'presenting surface' of our lives is something within us working away persistently, lovingly, courageously. That something - a kind of essential goodness - has often begun working with what we care most about even before we've consciously begun ourselves. What would it be to see and trust that essential goodness within us and within one another, and to give it a name - as David Whyte does in the luminous poem that's our source fo...
213: Knowing Now You'll Never Be a Clown
October 31, 2021 10:45 - 34 minutes - 31.4 MB'Imagination is everything', we were once taught by a teacher of ours. And so in this episode we take up the imaginative possibilities of play and laughter, wondering together what possibilities can come from holding the 'darkness and vulnerability in the heart of everything' alongside the joyful, expansive possibilities of play. Along the way we laugh a lot, imagine what it would be to welcome the joy of others, and consider how 'authenticity' always involves some measure of playfully cult...
212: Always Be Vulnerable to All That You Are
October 24, 2021 12:08 - 35 minutes - 32.9 MBWhen we learn to include more and more of ourselves, we also become more able to include more and more of one another. Being able to do this - to welcome that in us that's fearful, ashamed or lonely, as well as what's joyful, grateful and love-filled - is greatly helped by finding the bigger-something that we are... the something of us that's wide and deep, curious and compassionate and which is, essentially, welcome. And that's something we can also help one another with. This week's Turn...
211: Never One Thing
October 17, 2021 09:23 - 32 minutes - 29.4 MBWhenever we come to ‘conclusions’ about ourselves or one another we run the risk of missing our marvellous multiplicity - the way we can be both gentle and wild, curious and assertive, narrow and wide, afraid and courageous. There’s an inclusiveness and dignity that comes quite naturally when we see one another’s complexity, and we see it in ourselves, and when we learn to trust our own capacity to turn towards, to be with, to welcome that very complexity as we live alongside one another, ...
210: Remembering Our Infinite Value
October 10, 2021 14:34 - 32 minutes - 30.1 MBWhat would be if we could each help one another remember the ways in which we matter, the ways in which are are unarguably of value, the ways in which our mere presence is a gift? Perhaps it would help us find some respite from the strong cultural pressures to think of ourselves as incomplete, or faulty, or missing something. Perhaps it would help us give up equating our value with our looks, our circumstances, our difficulty. And maybe it would give us the courage to respond to the world w...
209: The Discomfort of What Matters
October 03, 2021 09:53 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MBIt’s easy to judge and berate ourselves for getting distracted, especially when we find ourselves on social media rather than attending to the things that matter most to us - the projects, conversations, commitments that we know are most meaningful in our lives. But when we see that our distraction is a result of something very tender - our attempts to not feel grief at how little control we have of how things turn out, and at the realisation that everything, even what matters mosts, ends -...
208: I Come to You With No Need to Be Fixed
September 26, 2021 12:15 - 32 minutes - 29.7 MBWe'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? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might walk a path of loving mutual inclusion, hosted as always by Liz...
207: The Brilliance We Are
September 19, 2021 10:01 - 36 minutes - 33.1 MBSometimes we catch a glimpse of ourselves that shows us that we are not as small as we think, and we start to see the shining beauty and brilliance that we are. Knowing ourselves this way can open us up to a deeper appreciation of the beauty of others, and offers us a vibrant, compassionate path towards the generosity and creativity that is available to every one of us. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about about opening to what we really are, hosted as always by Lizzie...
206: Through Our Speaking We Create Each Other
September 12, 2021 10:53 - 34 minutes - 31.7 MBLanguage is a doorway through which we can step into new relationships with the world and with one another, and as such our ways of speaking and listening are a profound kind of power. We are changed by what we say and by what others say. So how do we find ways with language that honour its power, and that open up possibilities and understanding for one another? And how might we be ones who, by our listening, gift others around us with the possibility of speech, so they they can bring thems...
205: Falling
September 05, 2021 21:02 - 31 minutes - 29.1 MBCan we learn to live with the certainty that we'll lose the ones we love, and they will lose us, without tuning out, avoiding, denying or imagining that it's some form of punishment? Can we learn how to bring together the fullness of the joys of loving as well as the sorrows? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might find ways to help one another enter into the fierce grace of living in a world in which love and loss are inseparable, hosted as always by Lizzie ...
204: Attention is the Beginning of Devotion
August 29, 2021 10:41 - 32 minutes - 30.1 MBWe easily forget that we are quite literally born of the Earth, which is itself the cradle and origin of the life we call our own and the life of everything around us. And in our forgetfulness, we easily forget ourselves and the wonder and mystery of a life we were born into without our say-so and without any instruction manual. Sometimes, it's necessary to shift our attention so we can rekindle our sense of belonging, hope and devotion to the world which we call home. This week's Turning ...
203: Preparing the Way
August 22, 2021 10:08 - 32 minutes - 29.5 MBOne of the characteristics of being human is that we have the capacity to transcend ourselves - to grow beyond narrow conceptions of ourselves, to imagine and live into new possibilities, to unfold creatively into ways of living and knowing that give us a chance to bring our own gifts to others. It can be painful when we try to resist this happening, or when we try to walk the path of our own development alone. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might see and s...
202: Watching Ourselves
August 15, 2021 09:10 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MBGenuine communication is a kind of intimacy in which we let ourselves be changed and affected by the gifts brought by the other person we're communicating with. In this way it's different from other forms of speaking (convincing, making a point, offloading). And it requires of us a certain kind of receptivity not just to the other, but to what's going on with ourselves as we speak and listen. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might watch our capacity to receiv...
201: Feelings are Beings
August 08, 2021 09:38 - 33 minutes - 31 MBAre feelings like objects, like forces, like waves, like eruptions? The metaphors we use for what we feel profoundly shape how we'll respond to them. Should we let them pass, push them away, be overwhelmed by them? Or, as we consider in this conversation, perhaps we could treat them as beings in their own right, with their own kind of intelligence, sensitivity, commitments, and ways of relating to the world. When we see our feelings and the feelings of others this way, we become more inclin...
200: Fast Forward
August 01, 2021 21:16 - 34 minutes - 32 MBMany of us have grown up immersed in a culture that teaches us to be anywhere but 'here'... to feel an emptiness we imagine we must fill from outside ourselves, to pursue what takes us far from our most genuine needs, to hide from one another the effect that doing so has on us. Turning back towards our own lives isn't easy, but it always begins with a choice not to continue to abandon ourselves and, with some simple attention and care towards one another, it is something we can help one ano...
199: In Between
July 25, 2021 09:01 - 33 minutes - 30.6 MBWe're mostly told that our job is to be in control of life - that's the whole narrative of 'self-improvement' and 'progress' and 'optimisation' that permeates much of contemporary culture. But it's an interpretation of life that barely meets life's real conditions - that we're always in the middle of things, and that many things keep on falling apart and coming together quite without our say-so. So can we find a different story to live in, one that allows us to receive our lives rather than...
198: If You Sit Long Enough
July 18, 2021 10:01 - 29 minutes - 27 MBIf you sit long enough, and still, the world might reveal itself in ways you had not, yet, imagined. If you'll dance with the people and things of your life, you might find they come forward and dance with you in return. Because the world is always offering us to our imagination... and our capacity to be in the world 'as if' is one that we don't always remember to draw upon. This week's Turning Towards Life is conversation about how the world is always being shaped by the way we're engagin...
197: Growing Downward
July 11, 2021 08:01 - 31 minutes - 28.6 MBWe're taught by our culture to think in polarities - something is either good, or bad; worthwhile, or a waste of time; valuable, or worthless. And because of this we often judge ourselves and our lives in polarised terms too - we're broken, or whole; empty, or full - which in turn leads us into efforting to 'get' the side of the polarity we judge as the right one. Where does this polarised thinking lead us? And might there be another way? This week's Turning Towards Life is a dive into the...
196: Here's to Wildness
July 04, 2021 09:50 - 33 minutes - 30.6 MBWe've all selected parts of us that we present to the world, while other perhaps wilder parts of us have been pushed to the margins, as a strategy we chose earlier in our lives so we could belong, or be safe. In our adulthood, though, there's an opportunity for those precious exiled parts - with their many gifts - to be returned to our lives. They can do this with our own help, when we discover our own capacity, love and courage - and with the help of others who are generous, brave and lovi...
195: One Source of Bad Information
June 27, 2021 10:09 - 33 minutes - 30.3 MBWhat would happen if we could see that the many 'young parts' of ourselves, with their fears and worries, with their plans and advice, are doing their best to take care of us - even if the information they have is partial and, sometimes, applies only to a much earlier time in our lives. Could we come at them with kindness, appreciation and welcome instead of trying to dominate and suppress them? Could we bring them the gifts of the deeper patience and spaciousness that we are so that we can...
194: May We See Beyond Those Stories
June 20, 2021 09:14 - 39 minutes - 36.4 MBWe go around our lives hiding much of ourselves from view, 'setting out a stall' that we've learned to set out through all that's happened for us so far. There are gifts behind the face we present to the world, gifts that could be brought for the benefit of many. But often we run from the very truthfulness about what's peeking out from the shadows, what's waiting in our messy, beautiful selves, because we've assumed that what is hidden is somehow inherently shameful, or because we've not y...
193: I Believe In All That Has Never Yet Been Spoken
June 13, 2021 15:10 - 32 minutes - 30 MBIt's natural that the process of our growing into adulthood results in our leaving a whole lot of ourselves behind - as we navigate what it takes to belong, to not be shamed, to stay safe, to build a life with some measure of predicability in it. But alongside all of that, what gifts and wonders, what song and words, what works of the creativity that is uniquely human might we bring to the world in service of others? And how might we support one another in doing that? This week's Turning T...