Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

What would we do if we found different questions to ask, bigger ones, than the habitual questions we're asking of life without even knowing we're asking?    This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about what we might do if we stopped contracting away from life, if we undid our own everyday self-diminishment, if we trusted that we had gifts to bring and that we, and others, could be bles...

The predominant narrative in our wider culture is that human beings were made for conflict, for dominating one another, for 'getting ahead' of one another. But that's only one story. What if human beings were made for meeting one another, for welcome, for mutual wonder and mutual seeing, for cooperation, for the intertwining of our many gifts? For giving, even when we ourselves have not received a...

Turning Towards Life 'Live' - an online event for everyone - is coming on Sunday 18th April 2021 2pm-5pm UK. Join us! Details are here https://bit.ly/2NYkeNC How finite everything is, including the time we will get to spend with any of our great loves. And how much we want to turn away from this, avoiding feeling too much of our love in an attempt to try and avoid the inevitable grief that will co...

We're not machines, but we often treat ourselves as if we are. Many of us in our lives become 'busyness machines' or 'target-hitting machines'. But we feel, too, how small this is as a way to live a life. This week we are guided by Parker Palmer's luminous writing into a bigger question - 'What is it to be faithful to something bigger than ourselves?' It's a life-giving alternative that calls us i...

What can happen when we share our 'selves' with each other, making our gifts, qualities and experiences available. How we grow through this, how we long for it, and how much we try to defend against it.  This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation of  discovery: that our selves are not something we made on our own, but gifts given to us by the sharing of others. Hosted as always by Lizz...

The education most of us have had taught us how to know the answer, how to be right, and how to move quickly to solve problems. But, by and large, it didn't tell us much about how to be true to the one life we have, nor what kinds of practices of creativity, inquiry and attention might support us in that project.  This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might start to d...

What does it take to not just say 'yes' to our lives and to one another, but to bring our beauty, dignity, creativity and imagination in response? It's a different path to take from 'turning away', and equally different from 'passive acceptance'. Being a human affords us this possibility - that when we encounter fear, shame, wonder, injustice, confusion, or hope, we have the chance to muster a res...

When we discover that we're not really separate from one another - that in a very ordinary way we are always deeply shaping and affecting one another - we also open to new ways that we might be of help to one another and care for one another. And we can also find that we can be profound teachers to one another - that we learn to see, feel, and hear in new ways by the very act of being present to e...

The possibilities of saying a 'bright shining no' where previously we've been in the habit of saying 'yes'. Or a 'bright shining yes' where we've been in the habit of saying 'no'. And on the possibility of newness, creativity and discovery when we greet other people's new ways with wonder and welcome. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about letting our genuineness into the wor...

When we're faced with difference or conflict it's often easiest to turn away, to give up on ourselves and our own values, or to try to force others to agree with us. But what if we were to learn to trust the creative possibilities that arise precisely because we are different to one another? What if we found a way to enter together into the promise that our encounter with the difference of others...

Asking for what we need is difficult for so many of us, because by genuinely asking we open ourselves up to the possibility that another person might respond in a way we're not expecting. Said another way, making genuine requests shows us that we're not - actually - in control of how other people show up in our lives. But at the same time, it's our capacity to request that opens up worlds - of dig...

A conversation about the essential goodness of people, how it gets misdirected by our misunderstanding ourselves, and the gifts of people who see our goodness, support our stopping our usual defensive ways, and who gladly welcome our remaking… and the possibility of being that way for others… hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live...

Perhaps one of the most difficult steps in each of our development, in our becoming more ourselves, is the push-back we get from the people around us - often the people who are closest-in to our lives. We find ourselves caught between the life that is longing to unfold into the world, and the parts of us that want to keep us safe from shame and disapproval. And at the same time, even as we long to...

" Boundaries seem to be the only way that human beings can find a place to stand, a place to begin, a place from which to move out" writes Richard Rohr, and at the same time we need to be able to fight and engage with boundaries before we discover what we really need or want . So what does it take to be one who makes 'enabling constraints' for ourselves so that the full possibility of our lives ca...

To be human is to learn... but very often our learning is made much more difficult by  narratives of shame, or our demands for perfection, or our worries about not being welcomed by others in our unfinishedness. Learning is both what we are made for, and among the most difficult endeavours of our lives, particularly the learning about ourselves that requires ongoing patience, generous kindness, an...

In between our certainty that we’re too small, or too inadequate to meet life, and our fantasies (perhaps even expectations) of perfection, mastery of life, and personal power, there is a middle place. And the middle, if we’ll meet ourselves and one another there, is far from a place of mediocrity. Instead it’s a way in which we can be real with one another, truthful about our messiness and our gl...

When something difficult or unwelcome happens, there are many reasons for us to contract away from our lives in an attempt to control what we're feeling. It's a kind of self-protection, yes, but can also be a kind of violence to ourselves. And it often cuts us off from what could most support us, open us, and hold us. So how about  learning to connect to the memory of our vastness, and our intimac...

So much of what we're afraid of is inside us... we're afraid of the feelings that will come with shame, or with grief, or if we really let ourselves feel the scale of our love or our longing or our hurt. And often our fear is, itself, a way not to feel what we imagine we won't be able to tolerate feeling. So what happens if, instead of treating all these experiences as terrors, we start to see the...

"The opposite of life is not death", writes Caitlin Johnstone, "The opposite of life is habit." So how, we wonder in this conversation, can we invest the ordinariness of life with the reverence and awe that calls to us? How might we find that aspect of ourselves, in our vast inner landscapes, that is neither our reactivity nor our defensiveness, but is itself life looking out at life in wonder? Th...

How can we cultivate a real, mature kind of gratefulness that keeps opening us to both the wonder of life and the suffering and difficulty that's here? A gratefulness that doesn't seek to cover over anything at all, but instead awakens our care, skilfulness, and capacity to step into the world with the action that is called for? This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about having l...

What does it take to allow ourselves to be who we are, and to allow other people to be who they are? What happens when we relate to one another from a deep respect for our own goodness, power and care, and a deep respect for the goodness, power and care of others? This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the possibility of being in relationship in a way that allows us to bring...

We are made for belonging... we are made to be the ones who can hold onto one another with hope and love as we descend into the darkness... and we are made for  discovering in ourselves and one another an indestructable goodness that holds and welcomes all our hurts, all our difficulties, all our confusion. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the practices of hopefulness a...

We all carry wounds and hurts with us into our lives, and we present them to the world in our longing to be seen and to be healed. Perhaps when our hurts are so easily 'out front' we shouldn't be surprised at how often we each get triggered into self-protective and defensive patterns which are at odds with our deeper intentions and longings. But if we could find a way to support one another in hea...

It's in the small acts that we build a life: the way we look at one another, the way we talk to one another, the way we listen. At these times when so much of what we rely upon is being called into question, what does it take for us to see that it's these small acts that also shape who we are? Can we learn to be the ones who, a step at a time, bring to the world exactly what we are longing for? Ca...

So many of us live in the midst of a harsh narrative of self-criticism and self-doubt, feeling all the ways we imagine we fall short of who we're meant to be in life. But every now and again we might catch a glimpse of something very beautiful in us, something essential, that reminds us that to be a living being in the midst of a living world is always in one way or another to belong, to be at hom...