Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

It’s easy to try to resist the inevitable passage of time, as if our ignoring time would some how save us from its consequences. But what if we found an everyday way to make time sacred, by honouring its transitions rather than turning away? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the rituals we can create to mark life’s big changes and its more ordinary ones - sleep, waking, eati...

The background culture that surrounds us very often makes the unspoken claim that what's most true about existence is cold, hard matter, and that anything else we encounter - meaning or love for example - is just something we humans invented. But what would happen if we trusted instead that there is an ancient light doing its best to shine forth through us and between us? And what would happen if...

What happens when we give up trying to control each other, and instead allow ourselves be changed by our encounter with one another? Could we let the extraordinary beauty and mystery of others really reach us? What would happen if we did this in the roles where we have the most power over others - when we're teachers, parents, employers, or leaders? And what are the costs if we don't, if we stay c...

How can we learn be the ones who don't turn away when we encounter other people's difficulties and suffering? And how can we learn to be the ones who offer a profound welcome... to others and to ourselves? One way we've learned to do this is to take up a regular 'sitting' practice - an apparently simple practice of sitting very still for long enough that we get to encounter our own inner vastness...

When we take a moment to look, we'll probably find that we're listening more to ourselves than to one another. But how can we create things together, coordinate together, learn together, trust one another if we're not listening? And what does it take to listen - in our organisational life, in our families, in our friendships, in our communities? It's both simpler, and harder, than it seems. This w...

When 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 cam...

There'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...

So 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 thin...

Our 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...

The 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...

How 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...

Stepping 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...

When 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...

In 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...

In 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...

How 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 h...

We 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, beca...

How 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 im...

Can 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, a...

It'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’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...

There’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 start...

Lizzie 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 grea...

Being 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 r...

We 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 glorio...