Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

We can be invitations to one another, showing one another ways of being courageous, or ways of being loving, or ways of relating to others that we’d never imagined before. What might it be for us to stay open to one another in this way? To learn from one another in everything, and to see one another as living beacons of what might be possible - on the scale of the everyday (how we wash the dishes;...

How can we learn to bring enthusiasm and aliveness to what's happening, without turning away? How do we welcome in ourselves that which we've exiled - and that very same something in others - and do so with joy and gladness? How do we hold together our wildness and our seriousness, our wide-eyed wonder and our practicality, our delight and our shame? How do we orient to life so that everything tha...

'There are only two directions,' writes Quinn Bailey, 'towards and away'. Towards our lives or away from them. Towards life itself, or away from it. But is it always a choice? And when it is a choice, how do we go about even noticing which we are choosing? And what is it to act in harmony with life's longing for us, what with all the complex shaping forces within us and around us that can sometime...

We can live our whole lives caught up in ideas of ourselves that were handed to us from others - our family, our culture, or structures that work to constrain us. But in the midst of all of that, sometimes, if we look out of the corner of our eye or listen to the quiet voice inside us, we discover that something truer to us is calling. Stepping out onto that path - whether it's the call away to so...

A 'contract' is a way of making sure our interests are met in our relationship with another person, a business, a career. But contracts are a shallow framework for what really matters in our lives - friendships, long-term partnerships, marriages, parenting, or dedication to a vocation. Before long, if we've lived a life of bargains and contracts, we may find our hearts in a deep longing for someth...

When a wild god arrives at our door... do we just shut it, or could we find a way to let the wildness in? What would it take to inhabit the 'wild' end of the wild-civilised polarity in a way that honours our lives, brings us to life, includes it - so that our wildness does not only live in the shadows but can live in our conversations, our creativity, the way we dance, and the way we respond to th...

What we won't own in ourselves often finds its way out into the world anyway, but in distorted or destructive form - sometimes at great consequence to ourselves and to those around us. Or we'll project it onto others - seeing anger in them, for example, when it's really ours to work with. But there are other paths, one of which is to turn towards what is 'shadow' in us and find a way to integrate...

What happens when we find out that we are not, as we had thought, separate from the world, but are instead participants in a vast context that stretches back into deep time and that holds us and makes us, even as we make it? From this vantage point perhaps we get to see that in being living, sentient, relational beings in such an inescapably relationship-rich context we are in some ways very small...

It's so easy to feel how small we are in the face of the world, and there's so much in our contemporary culture that tells us that we are insignificant - either because we're not famous or because to be human is, itself, inconsequential. But what if we were to live our lives in an orientation of reverence and wonder to the extraordinary power we have to shape things through the way we pay attentio...

The radical act of loving others both for who they are right now, and who they could yet become... and our willingness to 'leap ahead' on behalf of one another's being as a way of bringing our love into the world. What it is to love as a choice rather than as a feeling, to act in the best interest of others, to love those our culture tells us not to love, and a conversation along the way about the...

What we will point ourselves towards this year? Will it be dignifying, for us, our lives, the lives of those around us? Will it be generous, heartfelt, courageous, compassionate, kind, creative, patient, principled, inclusive, daring, fierce, loving, joyful, grateful, truthful or some other set of life-giving qualities? Or will we just take up the projects and commitments we’ve been handed by thos...

What happens in us and between us when we learn to live on the inside of wonder, amazement, and deep gratefulness for the life we have been given - all of it? Might gratitude, indeed, be exactly what is called for in order for us to turn towards the world with all its difficulties and all its suffering, with the energy, creativity and love to do something about it all? This week's Turning Towards...

What if our attempts to 'manage time' and to somehow escape the constraints (and possibilities) of time always, in the end, disappoint us because in some way we 'are time'? Saying that we are time begins to turn our experience of time inside out and upside down. It offers us the profound possibility that the inevitable passage of time is more an 'unfolding' than a 'passing', or maybe even a 'spira...

Underneath our inner chatter, fear, and attempts to have life go our way, there's a profound and welcoming silence - a silence that is a kind of recognition, a kind of acceptance, and a kind of refuge for the parts of us that clamour and fear... and which can be a refuge also for one another. We could even say that the silence is a kind of ground for who we each are, and in that way we long for it...

The story that 'my life is about me' that has become central to our culture ignores that we are, without our say-so, always part of a life and a universe that is much bigger than us. While it's understandable that we try to control and dominate life, before long we find out that life is having its way with us too. It may well be truer to say that 'I am about life'. So what would happen if instead...

Being able to live with multiplicity - the ability to accept multiple realities at once - is critical to healthy relationships, and it's critical to our own flourishing too. Because once we see that there are many parts within us - that there we are each a kind of unfolding process of inner community - we can come to see that when two or more people are together there are already many parallel int...

Why it matters to build a life of awareness, wondering, curiosity, truthfulness and facing things as they are. Finding a way to notice when we are letting life itself flow through us, and when we are standing in its way. Paying attention to all inside us that we have exiled or abandoned and doing the courageous, loving, painstaking work of welcoming it back and undoing our inner separation. Attend...

What does it take to be faithful enough in the unfolding of our lives that we let go of our tight grip, our hurry, our trying to control... and fall into letting ourselves be the kind of person we long to be? How might we learn that life will always surprise us, and instead of trying to remove the surprise let ourselves be brought to life by it? And what might it be to lessen the grip of 'hurry' -...

A friend once pointed out to us that conversations sometimes - often even - 'die in the middle' without anyone paying any attention to it happening. And sometimes conversations are robbed of their aliveness by our very wish that they go well, and our trying to fall back on a method in order to bring that about. So that has us wondering together who we each have to be in order that our conversation...

Somewhere along the way we easily lose contact with the mystery and wonder of a life we're thrown into, a life that comes to us infused with presence and possibility. Perhaps because there are no directions, and perhaps because we're thrown into life without our say-so, and perhaps because there are always pressing practical issues of survival and care to attend to, it's easy for us to find oursel...

There are so many ways we've learned to 'perform' - in work, as parents and friends and loved ones. And for any of us who do anything to help others - coaching or therapy or other helping roles - it's tempting to try to perform as the 'skilful helper' too. But what is most often called for is not any kind of 'performing' but a way of being present with one another, with all of our creativity, wisd...

Can we embrace both the acceptable and unacceptable parts of ourselves? Can we act and let go of trying to control the result? Can we hold onto both sides of each of life's great polarities, and in doing so grow in wisdom and in the possibility to contribute? And what might it take, if we did want to become like this, to faithfully practice our way in to cultivating our own goodness and capacity a...

We're beginning our 6th year of Turning Towards Life today, and in recognition of this we're having a conversation about 'Soulful Repetition' - those practices we can take up in life that return us to ourselves, and to one another, and to meaning and belonging. How do we take up new practices that can help us remember who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred... and which respond to the dept...

At the end of our first 5 years of 'Turning Towards Life' we ask - how do we do the difficult work of reconciliation, of making peace with ourselves and with those with whom we share this one life, without abandoning ourselves or one another? How do we make peace together in a world where there are rarely easy answers, and where the right path is often shrouded in complexity? And can we commit our...

How do we hold together two truths - that there is so much to be deeply concerned about, and that we have within us many gifts with which we can respond - without collapsing into pessimism or naive optimism? And how do we find something in our lives and in one another that puts us in contact with those very gifts so that - even if the outcome is far from certain, or even far from what we want - we...