Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

In which we talk about integral development coaching, a way to work in profound and compassionate support of people at they engage with their lives. It's this work that we're deeply dedicated to at Thirdspace, but which we haven't spoken much about directly in the more than six years of Turning Towards Life. Along the way we talk about what it is to meet someone with deep welcome, to be attentive...

What might come if we could, as Julia Fehrenbacher writes, make a home inside ourselves, a shelter of kindness that grows all the truest things? It seems to us that doing exactly that is of great support to our courage, our blossoming, our bringing ourselves to the world with both strength and gentleness, and with the truthfulness our relationships deserve. So much of the time our inner harshness...

When we’re children we often know intuitively something that as adults we forget - that there are many different parts of each of us inside, and that sometimes we really need to give space to the part of us that will be kind, and nurturing, and gentle. As adults it is possible for us to relearn this, and we can practice relating to the whole of our inner world with an attentiveness and spaciousnes...

In our work as coaches, teachers, leaders and community makers, we have been finding anew over the last few years just how important ‘deliberateness’ is in making relationships that can hold and spaces in which there is genuine welcome. It might be easy to ignore the deliberate practices needed to make relationships in this way, or to treat them as optional. But, as the poet Seamus Heaney tells us...

“I am a person who needs you to listen, simply listen, hear me say 'this is hard for me', not offer an answer or solution,” writes Lana Hechtman Ayers. And we are in agreement that there is a move, an opening, a 'coming alongside' one another that is the first move to make when someone brings us their difficulty, or pain. For many of us, this is not at all easy to do. Later, perhaps, when a reques...

“What is it like, such intensity of pain?” writes Rainer Maria Rilke. While we might ask one another in our more difficult moments “How are you?” or perhaps “How are you doing?”, we less often ask Rilke’s deeper question, a question that helps us and one another make contact with the aliveness and mystery of our being human. And so in this week’s conversation we explore together what it is to trea...

"Remember when you saw the stars of childhood, when you knelt alone and thought that they were there for you, lamps that something held to prove your beauty?" writes Joseph Fasano. Can we use these words as a gateway to finding a sense of belonging in the world, rather than being separate from it? And as we find our way to our own belonging - our receiving of life - what does it take for us to be...

“When you love someone, you do not love them in exactly the same way all the time. It is an impossibility - a lie to even pretend to.” So how might we live gracefully in our relationships with their inevitable ebb and flow and, instead of demanding they stay constant, learn to trust the very natural movement in them as we would learn to trust the tides? And what might we need to discover about our...

When we freeze in public - giving a speech, or making a presentation - it's valuable to consider the possibility that all the unwelcome attention that seems to be coming our way might actually be our own attention, projected out onto others. In other words, feeling everyone's intense interest in us might show us something about how interested we are. The same goes for the feeling of pressure to do...

We can easily live as if we're 'skating over the surface of life'. Sometimes that's an intelligent strategy for protecting ourselves from the intensity and difficulty that life can bring us. But our wider culture rarely helps us remember the depths of our lives - the depths that remind us of our mutual goodness, our pain, the ways we heal, the brevity of it all. And if we're skating the surface mo...

It’s not surprising, when we’re in difficulty or overstretched, to find ourselves tuning out of the world, distancing ourselves from what and who is around us. The stories we’re handed by our culture - that life is essentially meaningless - don’t help. Who do we become if this is what we do? How might we, instead, learn to love again when we’re ‘running out of things to love’? And how might we - a...

When any of us - or all of us - face a tectonic shift in our lives, through a birth or a death, a change in circumstances, or a calamity in the world, it can be hard to know how to respond. We easily overcomplicate, or turn away because we don’t know what to do. But what if the most necessary response in difficult times - and the one that cultivates the best in us - was the simplest… taking care o...

"The first step", writes Paul Weinfield, is not reaching for a solution to our difficulties but "the willingness to admit 'this is hard for me'". It's this move that gives us the opportunity to let go of the habitual ways we have of 'holding up the heavens'. And when we do this, we have the chance to enter into a series of discoveries about the force and patterns of our own personality and assumpt...

Difficult times in the world can easily drive us towards the worst of ourselves. When we become rigid, or narrow in our thinking, or too certain about the rightness of our position… or when we forget how to acknowledge the pain of the other. But difficult times can also be when we choose to bring forward the best of ourselves, to live in our communities and our homes in the way, as Howard Zinn say...

The healing we need - the healing the world needs - can't happen without us. When we separate ourselves from the world, as if it's up to someone else, we miss the ways in which healing and our shared capacity arise from our own minds, hearts and bodies. We can't leave it up to someone else to do - but doing it also calls on our courage, our care, our truthfulness, our love, and our capacity to cul...

When our inner worlds are in turmoil, perhaps in response to the outer world, how should we respond? Might there be a way to honour other parts of ourselves that easily get sidelined in heightened times? And how might that be a way to hold onto our dignity, care and humanity? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe...

There are so many reasons to harden ourselves to the world. But what we long for, in ourselves, from one another, is for our ‘clenched fists to unfurl, ready to hold whatever small things drop inside’. It’s not the easiest thing to do when our worlds are filled with hurt and pain, or when we are feeling tender and fragile. So how might we begin? And help one another stay open? Hosted, as always, b...

Underneath many of our common-sense understandings of who we each are, there is a deeper mystery. How did I get to be the person who I am today? How does the stream of life that began long before me, and will continue long after me, shape me? And is there a way we can come to know ourselves and our mystery more fully in the way we listen to and come to know one another - in friendship, community,...

Where does our courage come from? It certainly (and paradoxically) doesn’t come from our efforts to make ourselves safe, or strong, or to armour ourselves against the world. Indeed, it may be that our courage really comes from what is most vulnerable in us, and what is most true - the something in us that lives very close to fear, and is also a neighbour to joy. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn a...

True patience isn’t ‘going slow’, it isn’t ‘tuning out’, and it isn’t a stick to beat ourselves with. Instead it’s our capacity to turn towards what is actually happening without turning away, and to turn towards our own responses - including our irritation, anger, frustation - without turning away either. It’s in this kind of patience that the seeds of a genuine kind of compassion for the messine...

Within us are great forces for the destruction of one another. But also great forces for mutual support, mutual strengthening, and the mutual amplification of care and goodness. Which will we draw upon when we are in trouble? It’s the 6th birthday of ‘Turning Towards Life’, and we are feeling celebratory, and also a mix of  hopefulness about the world and tenderness at the many difficulties we are...

The possibility of taking up both remembering and forgetting as intentional practices. So that we can remember, and not forget, one another’s gifts and goodness, sacredness and possibility, strength and tenderness. So we can forget all that we hold onto in one another that keeps us from who we could be, and meet one another afresh in each brink of time. And so we can remember what needs fixing and...

Look around at the people you know, and you’ll quickly see how particular each person’s response is to what life brings to them. You might say that each person has cultivated, over time, a particular ‘flavour’ for their engagement with life, or a particular ‘way of being’ in response to the world. And yet this ‘flavour’ is often all but invisible to us in our understanding of ourselves, falling in...

We human beings are very sensitive to truth. So when we find the place inside us from which we can talk, truthfully, about the many aspects of our experience, it can be deeply connecting and safety-making. It also goes a long way to having the many parts of us themselves feel named and seen, and in doing so to become less desperate and fearful. And this place from which we can talk? We might call...

A conversation about slowing down so we can, with gentleness, relax our own patterns and habits and then see them with truthfulness. About how we might be the ones for each other that make this possible. And about how radical, counter-cultural and necessary true rest can be. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting...