Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

How might we approach life's inevitable interruptions and openings - the often unexpected events that change things, perhaps without our say-so? Can we find a way that opens us and changes us, rather than coming at life's inevitability with fear and resentment? A conversation about finding a way to keep faith with our changing lives, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This is Turning...

How might we learn to relax our annoyance, to treat what irritates us as if it were the weather rather than something personal, and in so doing take our defensive reactivity down a step? A conversation about blame, kindness, and finding a way to be contactful with our experience, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. So much of our annoyance and irritation comes from our certainty that w...

We need to draw the people we love nearer, smell their hair, enjoy them, drink them in. We need to let our hearts burst open with all the love. And experience the simplicity and sacredness of things. Even if we can only do it for one moment a day. It's the hard way but it's the only way. A conversation about vulnerability, and how love, fear and grief are inevitable partners, with Lizzie Winn and...

Sometimes we try to be too big, imagining we should have super-human powers of control over the inevitable difficulties that face us. Other times we make ourselves too small, as if we have no choice at all. How might we turn back towards our lives by right-sizing ourselves? A conversation about breath, feeling life course through us, and facing the world with grace, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wis...

What would it take for us to allow ourselves the freedom to move in new ways, speak in new ways, love in new ways? And can we spot the subtle and not-so-subtle ways we and others are engaged in keeping one another moving along narrow grooves founded on the expectations that come with having a particular kind of body, a particular kind of history, and a particular kind of cultural background? A con...

We human beings change all the time - it's inevitable. But somehow we've got into demanding that our friends, family and partners are fixed - that they 'complete us'. What would happen if we started to live with the truth of our ever-changing natures? At the start of the 3rd year of Turning Towards Life, a conversation about walking a path together and being in nourishing relationship, with Lizzie...

The more we try to control, the less we can receive from life. But there is a path by which we might, gradually, remember ourselves more fully and find ourselves reached by life, with all its gifts and all its challenges. At the end of the 2nd year of Turning Towards Life, a conversation about being porous to life, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 104 of Turning Towar...

Can we catch on to the ways we contract from life so as not to feel its consequences? And can we learn to open, instead, so that the possibilities of our loving – other people, a calling, life itself – can come through, with all their pain and all their joy? A conversation about the radical opening that love can be, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 103 of Turning Towa...

What's beyond our endless efforting, striving and comparing, and the often-merciless inner voice that keeps all of that going? And what might happen if we begin to relax our certainty that it's the way we have to be? A conversation about opening to our lives, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 102 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by T...

What happens when we slow down enough to make contact with the wisdom, care and depth that arises from the silent background of our lives? And how do we stop running from life so that we can do this? A conversation about patience, creativity, and the gifts of relationship, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 101 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversati...

When anger is used as a way to be right, to exert power over others, or as violence, it can be an enormously destructive force. But how might we find the gifts of wisdom in anger, and its extraordinary capacity to change things for the better? A conversation about contactfulness, care, emotional vulnerability and learning to be true with one another, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace....

Our capacity to say a real, genuine, heartfelt ‘yes’ depends upon our ability to also say ‘no’ when it’s called for. But so often we act out of integrity with ourselves to try to save ourselves from feeling the guilt that so often comes with ‘no’. But what if we saw guilt as something to welcome rather than avoid? A conversation about finding a way to be true in our relationships with others, with...

Is it possible to love life even when it doesn't go our way? And to love others for the sake of loving, not because of what we'll get in return? A conversation about coming at life in a recklessly unconditional, life-giving way, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 98 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise a...

What if love isn’t a feeling but the dedicated, liberating, sometimes painful work of learning to tell each other the truth? A conversation about being courageous, turning towards one another, and honouring the complexities of being a human being, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 97 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in...

What would happen if we lightened up with one another just enough to see the tender, vulnerable human being behind the bluster? A conversation about treating one another with kindness and truthfulness and letting go of our certainty about each others' intentions, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 96 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted b...

What if we dropped our self-imposed demands for perfection (in ourselves particularly) and instead saw that the one gift we really have to bring is our own aliveness and creativity? And what would happen if we really allowed ourselves to feel, taste and act on what calls us? A conversation about letting go, taking on, fiercely resisting the forces of perfectionism, and bringing ourselves fully to...

What would happen if we understood that we're all making it up, and that nobody really knows what's going on? A conversation about facing the messy realities of human life, and about learning we're not alone, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 94 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive...

What happens when we stop relating to ourselves and others as things? A conversation about trees, depth, and openness to one another with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 93 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. Find us on FaceBook to watch live a...

Our lives are made more difficult than they might be by our insistence that things should be a certain way that we’ve imagined or seen in the lives of others. What would happen if we compassionately let go of the idea that there is ‘a path’ for each of us to follow, and committed instead to taking one step into the wild unknown at a time? A conversation about time, gratitude, practice and turning...

What would happen to our parenting (and all our relating to others) if we gave up our commitment to perfection and instead treated ourselves, and the people around us, as always 'works in progress'? A conversation about care, kindness, taking a stand, and walking the path of practice with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 91 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute...

What if love isn't a feeling, but an action or a path we can walk? A conversation about actively choosing who and how we love, giving up trying to control things, and the miraculous properties of cups of tea with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.   Here’s Episode 90 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive...

Men, and women, and the stories about how we're 'meant' to be human that constrain us. A conversation about relationships, power and being on a path with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.   Here’s Episode 89 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. Find us on FaceBo...

What is it to learn to look at ourselves the way 'one looks at distant things'? And what happens when we relax our certainty that we have to have it all figured out before we can contribute? A conversation about love, invitation and purpose with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.   Here’s Episode 88 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which...

Can we catch on to the ways in which we defend ourselves from life? And, when we see our part in making life smaller than it might be, can we discover how to stay in contact with what happens in life, to learn from it, and to find a fuller kind of presence in the midst of everything? A conversation about learning to stay open with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.   Here’s Episode 87 of T...

What's the cost of trying to 'get over' grief, sorrow and pain? Is there another way? Can we perhaps find a way to welcome in ourselves what we'd otherwise try to push away, and in doing so learn to welcome other people more fully too? A conversation about encountering and including difference in our lives with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.   Here’s Episode 86 of Turning Towards Life,...