Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

“The concept that sits right at the heart of a sane and meaningful life,” writes Oliver Burkeman “is something like aliveness.” In this conversation we explore what it is to attend to aliveness, how we might come to notice its presence, and consider steps any of us can take to cultivate it. And we talk about how vital this is in an age where we may find ourselves encouraged in many places to becom...

We make the world, and unmake that which doesn’t serve, by our everyday actions and inactions, our intentional taking care and our turning away. What does it take to have the courage, humility and compassion to attend as fully as we can to the world, to step towards a world we want to live in? This week’s conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Episode Over...

It's never too late to look at our lives, to set out on a new path, to begin the difficult and necessary and life-giving work of changing course, of learning how to bring ourselves in a way that deepens our depth, courage, love, kindness, truthfulness and contribution. It's never too late to learn something, to teach something. It's never too late to live - even in the very last moments of our liv...

A conversation about discovering that the entire world around us—the first star breaking through darkness, rain dancing on rooftops, stooping to pick up an acorn—aren't distractions from life's important questions but invitations further into them. That we are never separate from the world, and that there are many ways in which the world is calling to us even when we feel alone. And that rather th...

'For the sake of what am I doing this?' is the question that animates this week's conversation. For the sake of fitting in? Of having feelings that I want to have? For the sake of serving? Of bringing the unique gifts I have to offer? For the sake of doing the big jobs, the ones that make a difference over the long term - such as pursuing love, justice, peace? Rather than pursuing quick wins that...

We are far from powerless… though we often we imagine we are. And neither are we able to control how life goes… though we often long to be able to. Our making ourselves too small or too big rarely serves life. So what would it be to find a way to be in a responsive partnership with life itself - acting into life and then opening ourselves to life’s response, bringing the qualities we have to offer...

A conversation about imagination as essential aliveness—and how treating life as purely literal diminishes our humanity. A great human power lies in choosing which story we live from, recognising that even dead ends become part of a larger narrative of redemption. What would change if we approached each day wondering along which secret aqueduct new life might be flowing toward us? This week’s conv...

We spend so much energy trying to think our way to insight, yet a fuller understanding of our lives often arrives from somewhere beyond the usual way we know ourselves. When our hands are busy with ordinary tasks something vast can sometimes settle into awareness. What happens when we discover that our bodies know a kinship with the earth our minds may have forgotten? Could belonging be less about...

What if we recognised that every single thing we do - and everything we avoid doing - is quietly shaping us into the kind of person we're becoming? A conversation about discovering that we're already practising something all the time, whether we realise it or not, and that our choices about where to place our attention might be more consequential than we imagine. What would it mean to get good at...

How do we attend to the something in each of us that longs to break free through the cracks of our self-image? A conversation about discovering that sacred uniqueness within ourselves and others in the everyday mundane acts of living, loving, working and being genuinely present with one another. This week’s conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Episode Ov...

We mistake ourselves for the stories we've been told and the ones we keep telling. But what if those stories are too small to contain who we really are? A conversation about discovering that the more we open our hearts to the world, the less we actually know about anything—and how this not knowing might be exactly where freedom lives. What happens when we stop trying to figure everything out and i...

What happens when we choose to actively shape our own identity rather than only accept the stories handed down to us? How might we practice distinguishing between what belongs to us and what we've been told we should be? What becomes possible when we see ourselves as authors of our own ways of being in life? This week’s conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspac...

We are much more powerful than we often imagine, and in surprising ways. For most of us, our power is not in being remembered long beyond our lifetimes, or in being able to change the world that is far from us. It is rather in that we are each made by one another, and we make one another, by how we live, what we say, how we listen, and how we act. When we start to see that we are literally making...

We are patterned beings, and the patterns we live get started very early in our lives. They bring both blessings and blind-spots. One of the great opportunities of a well-lived life is to come to see the patterns, inquire into them, and find ways to open more spaciousness in us than the patterns have allowed so far. This is what we might call ‘growth’ or ‘development’. In this conversation we talk...

What happens when we allow ourselves to truly feel the reality that we will grow old, become ill, and die? How might we practice treating our deepest fears not as enemies but as intimate companions? The recognition that these experiences unite us with every other human being who has ever lived offers a pathway from aloneness into a more genuine and heartfelt connection with others. And when we sto...

Our immediate emotions about an event or happening usually sit on top of deeper currents of meaning, story, longing and commitments that may at first be obscured from view. If we want to become ever more active and intentional participants in our lives and relationships, there's much to be said then for first coming to know the emotion and then beginning to notice the commitments which lie underne...

Can we practice a fierce, truthful loving form of gratitude for life itself that calls us until our care for the world in practical, tangible ways? How is this different from shallow or 'pop-culture' versions of gratitude that might have us tune out from our pain and the difficulties around us? How might the deepest kind of gratitude connect us to the source from which all life comes, and the incr...

This week we explore the tension between bringing our wholeness to the world and the social pressure to maintain polished appearances. How might we practise opening our hearts to the whole of ourselves—including the uncomfortable, needy, and difficult parts?  Moving from performing acceptability to becoming spaces where others can feel genuinely welcomed means cultivating the capacity to ask "what...

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 i...

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...

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 we...

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...

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 To...

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 escapi...

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 h...