Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

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...

Learning 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 t...

To 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 m...

We 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...

We 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 togeth...

The 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...

It'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...

What 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'...

We 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...

If 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...

'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 th...

When 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,...

Whenever 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...

What 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...