Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

Most of us were never taught to admit we don't know - and as a result we hold onto our positions and beliefs no matter what. Others of us learned early on that the most important thing we could do was get along with others, and so we routinely give up what we see or care about in order to avoid disagreement. At the heart of both positions is a kind of distrust - distrust that we can still take up...

Life keeps calling us to uncover and act on all the parts of ourselves we've so far left out, but much of the time we resist the call. Too painful perhaps, too unfamiliar. Sometimes, though, we find ourselves stepping right into exactly that unfamiliarity and making discoveries about ourselves the open up a whole world... and sometimes we find ourselves being that for others. Both require us to gi...

Somewhere along the line, many of us learn that voicing our needs directly - asking people for what we want - is to invite ridicule, shame or otherwise ask to be hurt. Our learning to undo that - to find out what we really long for, and to give voice to it - is a necessary, difficult and life-giving path to taking up our full size and place in the world. And it's also absolutely necessary for a li...

When we treat the pain of our lives as a mistake, we cut something off that could be deeply life giving - for ourselves, for our families, for our wider society. When we treat the pain of our society as a mistake, we cut off many avenues for healing, understanding, and for addressing the difficulties that surround us. A conversation about learning, with one another's support, to handle life's diff...

What happens when we confuse ourselves with just one part of ourselves – when we think we ‘are’ a particular way we’re feeling, a thought, the exam result I got… When we think we ‘are’ our job title, or our joblessness, our bank balance… In short, when we confuse ourselves with being ‘just one thing’. And how our forgetting our own variety in this way also has us forget and not see the richness, d...

A bonus episode describing and exploring the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course in London, which this year is being offered as a completely on-line programme beginning September 2020.  In this special edition of 'Turning Towards Life' Lizzie and Justin talk about the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course, offered this year as a completely on-line programme beginning September 2020 (offered...

Life keeps on happening, and most of it happens whether we want it that way or not. Our ‘not wanting’ can easily lead us into pushing away life as it happens, and into exiling the parts of ourselves and others that we find to be unwelcome. But another way might be possible for each of us, a path we can practice that has us turning towards what happens with welcome. And this could be a way in which...

Just beyond ourselves, just outside all the ways we’ve taken ourselves to be, just beyond our certainty and the familiar ways we know ourselves… Just here, beyond ourselves, something is calling all the time, something which we discover in our willingness to be affected by, to be changed by, the ‘other’ in other people and in the world. A conversation about the possibilities that come when we noti...

All the ways we try to protect ourselves from life by hardening our hearts, how this leads us to misunderstand love in ways that strangles the aliveness that's in ourselves and in others, and what we might do to exercise proper responsibility in how we care for each other. A conversation about our power to either recognise or smother the beauty in people, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirds...

It's a necessary part of our growing up that we learn to get along in the culture into which we were born. But, on the way, we easily lose touch with what is most life-giving for us, and cover up our truer desires with a crowd of wants and needs that help us to fit in, or stand out, or keep a particular kind of image going. So much becomes possible when we start to strip away the cloud of distract...

It's so easy to suspend our lives... to in one way or another miss out on being here because we're waiting for conditions to be right, to become a better kind of person, until we're saved. We can even suspend our lives waiting until we feel like 'nothing is missing'. But what if even the feeling of 'something missing' is what's calling us to inhabit our lives just as they are? A conversation about...

How about we find a way to live without permanently being annoyed that things aren't just as we'd like them? Might that not be a path to some joy? Could we give up the way we exhaust ourselves (and often others!) by our attempts to push life around, to control it, to have things just our way? A conversation about creativity, relationship, what happens when we let ourselves fall into life, and givi...

When big change comes upon us, we can at first devote a great deal of our hearts' energy to a fight with the change - which often does nothing to help us. But our hearts are equally capable of something else - a turn towards bigger questions, and to the possibility that the change might be inviting us into a deeper relationship with life. Hidden here might be 'the jewel at the heart of the stone'....

How are we coming at life at this time? Are we careful? mindless? gentle with the things we are touching? Or careless, distracted, and in a self-important hurry at all costs? A conversation about paying attention to our lives, this week inspired by Amanda Palmer’s writing, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by T...

There's a down-to-earthness about some people, an everydayness. When people are this way, there's no fear that they're putting on an act for you, that they may be different towards you when you are not there. And when each of us finds a way to be like this, we can be a profound welcome to one another. A conversation about ordinary, kind ways of being with one another, with Lizzie Winn and Justin W...

Why we're all trying to get loved, why our covering that up gets us into all kinds of trouble, and what can happen when we start to get honest with one another about what's going on. A conversation about loving people without condition, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Li...

What does it take to remain hopeful about life when we're entering into the dark? How can we be beacons of hope to one another as we travel through the more difficult passages of our lives? A conversation about faithfulness to one another's wholeness, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Jus...

The weeks of physical distancing we're in might, if we'll take it, give us an opportunity to develop a new relationship with time. What if time isn't a commodity to be consumed? And what would happen if we allow ourselves to encounter time as depth, or as play, or as presence, or as possibility? A conversation about giving up our frantic, fearful relationship with the finiteness of our time, with...

Here in London we're coming the end of the first week of lockdown as the world responds to the coronavirus pandemic and, like millions of others across the globe, we're wondering together about what to make of this time. And there are choices about how to relate to the experience of confinement and physical distance - choices that are marked by our willingness to not add unnecessary suffering to o...

Here in London, it's spring, and the blossom is emerging with its brightness and beauty. At the same time, we humans are living with an unfolding worldwide epidemic that threatens lives and livelihoods. Can we learn to live in these times in a way that opens us to both grief AND joy, to both fear AND our responsibility for one another? A conversation about the necessity and power of including and...

In many parts of the world, as we recorded this conversation, we're having to take up practices of physical separation from one another in order to keep each other safe. But there are ways, even when we are physically distant, that we can come into a deeper, more full contact with one another than we might usually experience, and such contact with one another's depth is also a return to ourselves....

How can we face uncertainty in a way that brings us into closer contact with our courage, openness and compassion for one another? Can we find a way, when we feel squeezed, to not withdraw into ourselves in fear? And is there a life-giving, truth-bringing way of turning towards our inescapable vulnerability? A conversation about turning towards one another for support in an uncertain time, with Li...

" Perhaps," Lizzie says, "even our reactivity is a way to come home." One part of us is a reactive self, a way in which we get triggered and gripped by our certainties about ourselves and one another. Another, more essential part, is a kind of depth and openness in which we can meet the world - and have the world meet us - with more depth and openness in return. When we're gripped by our reactivit...

It's so easy to be in a fight with our lives, as if there's a way we can win out over our fear, or grief, or some other experience we're wishing not to have. But often trying to win out leaves us small, and exhausted, and rigid. What if we were to take up a different relationship with what's happening, in which we know our experiences not as something to get away from but a way in which life is fl...

The discipline of regular practice can look like a painful constraint but - as Lizzie says in this week's conversation - when we approach practice with intention and kindness it can bring us an extraordinary freedom from our habits, preferences, and ways of going to sleep to our lives. A conversation about the gifts of enabling constraints that we choose for ourselves, and the ways in which practi...