Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

"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 assumpt...

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 say...

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 cul...

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...

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, b...

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,...

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 a...

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 messine...

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...

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...

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 in...

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...

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...

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? Host...

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 s...

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 wait...

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 w...

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...

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 wee...

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,...

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 inte...

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 w...

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 su...

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...

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 apprec...