Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

We can rely on the wisdom and expansiveness of our own hearts to hold and respond to the complexity of the world, though it's easy to ignore this as we pursue our strategies of trying to be right, or be in control, when it's hard to see a way through grief, or confusion, or anger, or self-righteousness. An invitation to do what leaves do - absorb the fierce energy that shines upon them and turn it...

When we're in difficulty, or people who matter to us are in difficulty, we often rush to find out how to make the problem go away. That's just fine for some issues we face... for example just before recording today's episode we had to fix an audio issue which would have prevented us getting this episode out. But many other kinds of difficulties are not so amenable to such an approach and, in any c...

When our lives change in an instant, when we find ourselves in relational difficulty, when circumstances shift and we no longer understand what to do... what then? In this week's source, Ingrid Goff-Maidoff invites us to trust the inherent openness and holding power of our hearts as both a support and as a pathway. And that's our conversation this week - how to we learn to trust the many-chambered...

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 conver...

Some people have the patience to sit with the right problem instead of fixing the wrong one. They ask the question that actually needs asking, don’t accept our stories at face value, and get to the real thing waiting to be said. They see what we’re actually struggling with, not the account we offer. They are quiet, patient, kind, curious, and deep enough for us to speak about what matters. They kn...

Inspired by William Martin’s poem ‘Journey’s End’, we wonder together about what it would be to each receive the one, precious, unique life that we are rather than trying all the time to be something or someone else. What happens when we let ourselves soften into receiving everything that has, since the beginning of time, led directly to each of us, seeing ourselves and one another as the sacred p...

We're unable to record a new episode this week so we have remixed the sound and video on one of our favourites, from 2022, about a topic that we're thinking about a lot right now - time. 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 altho...

What might become possible if, even for a moment, we let ourselves feel cherished… allowing ourselves to feel the care of others as a living presence in our bodies? And what happens to our way of being in the world when we use this as a doorway, returning us to connection, to belonging, to the quiet rhythm of being human together? In this episode, we turn toward a luminous poem by Rosemerry Wahtol...

Identity, integrity, and how we come to understand ourselves through attention, discernment, reflection and relationship. Drawing on Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, Justin and Lizzie talk about the life-giving values of curiosity, seeing one another, and the possibilities that arise when we create opportunities for us all to express and inquire into our inner lives together with honesty, cou...

How do we learn to be honest about our lives… to look closely, to say truthfully what we see, and to turn with reverence and respect to all that has been and the path that unfolds before us? Said another way, what does it take to say ‘yes’ to our lives, in spite of everything? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Episode Overview 00:00...

Cultivating both joy and sorrow within us. Seeing what they are made of, so that we can approach them with reverence rather than trying to control them or banish them. And finding out that that the more we go on in lives, the more we can know and the more we can have faith that we can meet what life brings us. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of T...

“The circumstances of our lives don’t have to be perfect in order for us to feel like we’re alive. The world and the people and things in it are calling for our participation - our granting everything significance and feeling and knowing our own significance too.”  A conversation about our choices as we relate with who and what is around us, and how we might live our way into the sacredness of eve...

“If I don’t want to be that person who uses power for the sake of power just because I can, and because I can frighten people, and because people do what I say because they’re scared… then what power am I using? How do I find creative alternatives to power struggles - to use my power as a person to enable something to happen, but not because of fear?” An exploration of how we can use the great pow...

How can we love - people, life, the world - in a way that allows us to genuinely contribute? And how is that different from the kind of love that is really a strategy to have ourselves feel ok?  That second kind of love might be better understood as a way that we try to control life or other people - we’ll love just as long as we get back exactly what we hoped for.  The first kind of love is wilde...

When we think of ourselves only as isolated, separate individuals, we lose sight of the vast life that came before us, which gave us birth, and the vast life which will come after us. Even though we will all, without exception, eventually be forgotten, there is no knowing how the gifts we bring flow on into the life we leave behind us. And there, perhaps, there is both solace and also inspiration...

Crossing thresholds in life - birth, death, loss, love, discovery, confusion - is inevitable. How can we do this in a way that recognises the mystery of each of life's great transitions, and which honours how each changes us? And how can we be ones who are wise, compassionate and courageous as we witness and accompany others through those inevitable transitions, without turning away? We recorded t...

Our 440th episode considers what it is for each of us to dare to bring our unique form of expression to the world. How we might take the ways we've learned to belong in our lives - which may have supported us and constrained us - and give enough space around them that we can be our own voice, rather than an echo; what ways of supporting one another are called for, so we can help one another do thi...

A conversation about the qualities that seem absent in us, that we long for so greatly, and the way they are already present in us because that is what humans are. How we  find our courage, or integrity, or creativity or love not so much by trying to fill the absence from outside but by walking our way, patiently, into them in our everyday way of moving through life. All inspired by a wonderful po...

A call to our imaginative capacities when we are caught in conflict with one another... our capacity to uncover new stories and new ways of understanding that bring us into a different kind of relationship with ourselves, with each other, and with the something we seem to be in conflict about. Imagination as a path to choice, invention, discovery and as a counter to our familiar ways of keeping ou...

When we make mistakes or take a wrong turn, it's understandable that our first move might be to blame others, or try to defend ourselves, or do all we can to avoid the feelings of shame or disappointment that come our way. What those responses do, though, is close us off to our human capacity to learn and to be creative in the midst of our difficulties. So what does it take to turn towards the 'ho...

A conversation which begins with a beautiful and stirring song from MaMuse [a link to the song is in the show-notes]. How might we imagine light inside darkness, and call to the light in ourselves and in one another, even as we feel grief and worry and sadness? And how might we bring our imaginative capacities to invite one another into relationships of mutual care, for each other and for the worl...

How do we counter the stories in ourselves that render our lives flat, meaningless and mechanical? And how might we find sources of life inside ourselves and around us that support our participation, relationship and contribution, especially when we are feeling afraid or disoriented? A conversation about the everyday, about a radical appreciation of the sacredness of everything, and about breathin...

There's a certain kind of faithfulness in ourselves and in one another that is required if we are to address both the joys and the real difficulties of our lives. It's something beyond mere appreciation or even love, but a kind of fierce commitment to the sacredness of being a human. It allows us to be loving, to be tender, to say what's true, to recognise what is, to name suffering, to call on on...

Thirdspace turns 21 years old today, and so we take this opportunity to reflect together on one of our central commitments: learning to respond ever more to the world with wisdom, creativity, and compassion. We talk about what it is to be an integral development coach, and what it is to learn to coach with these commitments in mind, especially during these times. And we reflect on the joys and opp...

Perhaps we are so afraid of grief because we have forgotten how vast we humans are and can be. When we forget this, we mistake ourselves for a tiny receptacle, unable to imagine that we can meet life as it is. And then how little we let in, and how frightened we get of feeling the immensity both of our sadness and of the wonder of being here. In this episode we consider what it is to let ourselves...