Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

The wider culture of the world doesn’t teach us much about how to see and name the goodness of people. But we quickly learn how to compare, criticise, and find all the ways we’re wanting or falling short, or how other people are. What does it take to start to see the goodness that underlies even the mistakes we make, and be ones who can help liberate that goodness into ever fuller expression? Host...

Listening is the foundation of all human relationship. But what is it to listen? Who do we have to be, to be ones whose listening connects, heals, restores, and supports our being true with one another? One response is that we're called to be ones who listen for all that is not said - the vastness of a person, their wholeness, and the 'essential self' that is beneath everything another person is s...

What if a life of purpose isn't so much found by looking far from ourselves, towards some future goal, but instead by paying attention to the way that life is already moving through us? What does it take to kindle life's energy in us so that the qualities that we uniquely have to bring have a chance to get brought? And how might we stay awake to the splendour and energy of life that is always wait...

The wider culture no longer honours elders in the way it once did, and so we lose a source of wisdom and depth that we so need in these times. Because of this, the culture also doesn’t give many of us a route to become elders ourselves as we age, so we can easily fall into patterns of rigidity of thought and opinion, insisting that the world and others stay the same rather than meeting the world w...

How our familiarity and what we’re comfortable with builds a whole world, with its own particular horizon of possibilities. Why it might be that the very thing that’s most called for to change things in the ways we long for is to do the last thing we’d imagine. And how we can help one another grow by being the ones who lovingly find a way to welcome and explore the unfamiliar in one another. This...

In a wider culture that has told us to turn away from our own suffering and grief, to harden up and plough through, it’s a deeply counter-cultural and necessary move to turn towards it and towards one another. How might we do this? And how do we trust the deep wells of goodness and capacity within and between us that can, with patience and faithfulness, transform our difficulty into love? This wee...

How do we attend to our inner complexity? Are there ways we might relate to the many parts of us that honour both subtlety and certainty, practicality and mystery, hardness and softness, ground and sky? And what might it take for us to be the ones who bring ourselves to all of this - and to each other - in a way that fosters relationships that are nourishing and truthful, inviting and care-taking,...

It's our 300th episode, so we are feeling very celebratory. This week our conversation takes up the question of permission. What do we make possible - give permission for - in others, by our way of being and interacting with the world? And what do we make impossible? Can we begin to catch on to the patterns that have become habitual to us (and often invisible to us) so we can start to be more inte...

We easily forget that inside us, and inside everyone, is something delicate, solid, sweet, and very tender - a source of life and dignity and care. And when we forget this it’s easy to treat the surface of things - our disagreements, our hurriedness, our fear - as what is most true. But it’s the depth of being human that gives us access to the most life-giving of gifts we each have to bring. Can w...

As the poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer teaches us, even as the whole world can seem to be falling, we have a choice whether to contribute to isolation and fear or to a vast net of generosity and kindness in which we hold one another. Perhaps when we feel most afraid and most isolated, it's the time to ask ourselves the other side of the question too - are we willing to receive and be open to the su...

Every experience we have of another person is first about us (our hopes, our fears, our way of interpreting, our projections). And every experience another person has of us is first about them. We live, in some very deep way, in a ‘hall of mirrors’. So, do we have any chance of truly ‘receiving’ one another? What in ourselves might we have let go of to make that possible? And then what do we have...

A conversation for any of us who find ourselves resisting our bodies ageing and changing: about all the painful comparisons we can get into; about the way the narratives and economic structures (and algorithms) of our wider culture are built to enrol us in just these comparisons and just this pain; about how we might attend joyfully to our own inner lives so that we can come to discover and apprec...

The kind of attention we bring to the world can enslave, reduce or destroy us and others, or support us, and them, in flourishing. It particularly matters when we have any kind of power or influence - for example when we’re a parent, or a leader, a coach, in a partnership of any kind. But we're rarely taught anything about this, because it's not largely in the interest of the systems around us to...

How do we find our way back to remembering who and what we really are, in the midst of lives that so easily call us into busyness, distraction, fear and the gnawing sense that something is always missing? How might we speak with one another, and write, in a way that evokes one another's depth? And why it is that, in these days of an new explosion of machine-writing software tools such as ChatGPT,...

How do we face life as it is, with all its inevitable difficulty and with all the meaning and love we might be able to bring to it? And how do we find that in ourselves that is life itself, and live more often from there so that we can meet life with life? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conve...

How much of each us gets excluded when we constantly compare ourselves to one another, and to the expectations we're handed by our culture. And how much we exclude the gifts of others by the very same process. Is there a way we could give up inappropriate comparison and in so doing learn to include so much more everyone's talents and gifts, and the supportive ground of life itself? In this convers...

When we stop walling ourselves off from the suffering of the world - our own, other people's - we give ourselves a chance to meet one another's moonlight beauty in the midst of the inevitable undoing that is part of every human life. In this week's conversation we wonder together about what it is that makes this possible, and the relationships with one another that can grow as a consequence. This...

What happens when we stop demanding of one another that we change, and instead generously come alongside one another with a measure of faithfulness in what John O'Donohue calls the 'hesitant light' which is still present in us even in our greatest difficulties? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.   Turning Towards Life, a week-by-wee...

What if we could hold gratitude and sorrow together in us, rather than reducing ourselves to only one or the other, and rather than tuning out of life so as to avoid losing things? What might it be to honour and experience the gratitude that is inside all sorrow, and the sorrow that is inside all gladness, and in so-doing come to honour the exquisite and extraordinary depth and inner multiplicity...

We greatly misunderstand ourselves and other people when we take ourselves to be 'fixed', just ‘one-way’. However stuck we've become, there is something of us that is always changing, and even when we can't see it there's always the seed of change waiting for the right moment to burst forth. So how do we learn to trust that in ourselves and others that is life's never ceasing unfolding into itself...

We can make a whole life around avoiding the tender places inside us, our ‘sore spots’, and in doing so keep ourselves away from many of our gifts and deepest longings. So how might we, instead of turning away, turn towards that in us which longs to sing, dance, speak or feel? And how might we help one another work compassionately with the sophisticated ‘protective patterns’ that keep us away from...

We really don’t have long. And the world keeps telling us that the answer to that is to hurry. But our hurry and fearfulness, our sense that we always have to be in control, distracted and in action, obscures a different kind of attention that is greatly needed in the world - the kind of attention we would call ‘love’. So what becomes possible when we turn ourselves truthfully to the world with th...

It’s so easy to feel separate from the world - indeed we’re taught in many ways that human beings are in some profound way separate, different, and apart from nature. So what happens when we start to allow the world around us to be our teacher... when we look within us to find resonance with that which we find around us? And when we let the living and non-living world teach us new ways of relating...

Lizzie and Justin are partners in Thirdspace, an organisation which supports people to recognise their goodness and capacity, helping them bring their whole selves to the world.  In this special episode Lizzie and Justin talk about the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course, a certification programme in integral development coaching which is at the heart of Thirdspace's work and a project of grea...

The world is calling out for change, and still we need to take care of one another. How can we remember to meet each person ‘as if they are a whole world’, whatever scale we’re working on?  This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conv...