Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

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...

What happens when we meet the parts of ourselves we've kept out of view, and let them dance with the parts that we're more comfortable showing other people? What happens when we're willing to welcome the parts in others we usually try to push away? And what creativity and possibility open when we give up trying to control one another so that instead we can meet one another fully? A conversation ab...

When we're in the midst of giant changes - the birth of a new child, the death of someone we love, or any other changes that life brings us - it's tempting to try and get life back to 'the way it has been'. Indeed, we often actively encourage the people around us to do exactly that. 'You'll soon be back to your old self', we say. But what if we could see that life's changes will change us however...

It may be hard to see, but how we listen greatly shapes what it is possible for other people to say to us. Can we catch on to all the ways we’re trying to control what we experience as we listen, and as we do so drop our need to control so that we can be a profound welcome to others? A conversation about the ways in which we share ourselves with one another, and about how we can receive with openn...

What if we could learn to behold one another's wholeness, rather than focussing so narrowly on the aspects of others that we fear or desire? To trust in one another's vastness and depth instead of relating to one another from defensiveness or a desire to control? It would, for sure, give us a way to know one another with a greater kindness and a greater truthfulness than we do now. Can you imagine...

What if we knew ourselves as made up of many parts, as opposed to being a single ‘I’? Could we find a new way to relate to the parts that are afraid, hurt, resentful or ashamed? A way that at once treated them with great respect while remembering that there are always other parts which might yet have a voice?. A conversation about the ways we exile aspects of ourselves, and the possibility of taki...

What does it take to really understand one another, especially when what separates us can seem so great? What if it takes a bold act of unselfishness - setting aside our ordinary, rigid ways of listening and being prepared to encounter the unknown while simultaneously doing all we can to make it safe for the person speaking to speak? A conversation about a wild, courageous way to listen to friends...

When we learn to relax our defensiveness, when we become less anxious to protect our borders – when we find ourselves surrendering to life – we become more loving, we regain our integrity and our dignity, and we have a much better chance of both receiving our lives and contributing to them. A conversation about the ways we separate ourselves from life and how we might return, with Lizzie Winn and...

Receiving our lives – actually allowing ourselves to inhabit, touch and be affected by the one life we’re in the middle of living – can be difficult for many of us. We have so many ways of spinning off into fear, or numbness, or distraction. But there are ways we can bring ourselves back into the fierce loving presence of life. A conversation about opening to what’s here, allowing ourselves to be...

When life is dark or frightening, or when we feel stretched beyond our ordinary abilities, it's often our willingness to learn from others that can restore our capacity to respond. Other people, if we'll let them, can often give us the gift of another way of coming at life and, in particular, the gift of practices that can invite in us an entirely new orientation to the circumstances we find ourse...

'Light' and 'Dark' are both names, ways in which we can observe and respond to what's happening within us and around us. Our refusal to name can feel protective but in the end it isolates ourselves from one another and from life. Learning to name well can be a living bridge between us - a way of entering into conversations, understanding and action that would be unavailable to us if we turned away...

Nachman of Bratslav, the precariousness of all of our lives, and the possibility that we might learn to give up amplifying our fear - indeed that we might find a way to walk through an inevitably risky life with joy. A conversation about faithfulness to our lives, practice, why joy isn't the same as happiness, and what becomes possible when we live as if we're all in this together, with Lizzie Win...

The culture we live in encourages us to live at a distance from ourselves. Many of us consequently live a life of frantic doing, as if the next project or achievement will be what saves us. Our living far from ourselves is often fuelled by intense self-criticism. But it's never too late to find out that underneath all our activity, life itself is always waiting to welcome us and that, in allowing...

Our lives can easily become an anxiety-fuelled rush of activity. But when we live this way - even when our packing every moment seems filled with excitement and promise - we easily smother our own creativity, learning, and the chance to be in meaningful contact with others. So how can we learn to live our lives in a way that gives more space for life itself to come through? A conversation about fe...