Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

We celebrate nine years of Turning Towards Life with a conversation about the relationship between life's everyday demands and a deeper, more stable presence that we can rely upon. We explore how remembering what lies beneath can help us to meet life's complexity as active participants, grounded in something mountainous and enduring that holds us no matter how turbulent our circumstances become. T...

An episode about the deep wellsprings of aliveness within each of us that we might remember in ourselves and one another as we face crisis, uncertainty, or simply as we navigate ordinary moments in our lives. How our presence matters: to ourselves, to each other, and to life itself, and how this is the very ground from which we grow into the people we're becoming. This week is hosted as always by...

In a time when despair and apocalyptic thinking dominate public discourse, what does it mean to remember our capacity for imagination, astonishment and wonder? Can we find alternatives to the pull toward cynicism and fear and learn to astonish others and ourselves into a state of genuine aliveness? An invitation to step forward with courage to remember that we are far earlier in the human story th...

How genuine relationship requires us to release our need for the ones we love to remain unchanged, and grief and love as two inseparable dimensions of the same human experience. This week is hosted as always by 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 Lizzie Winn explore living with...

This episode celebrates the life and work of Wendell Berry, the  poet and farmer who died this week. Berry's brief  poem "The Real Work,"  invites us to recognise that when we no longer know what to do or which way to go, we may have arrived at our genuine calling. A conversation for all of us navigating confusion, loss, or disorientation, and wondering about how we might bring ourselves when we n...

A conversation about meeting one another's 'falling apart', the cultural pressure to stay buttoned up, the fertile potential hidden inside our moments of undoing, and what it means to be a person who can welcome and hold space for another's becoming rather than trying to put the lid back on. How genuine care for another might involve staying faithful to the life inside them, which is something dee...

A meditation on loss, presence, and what we learn from the people in our lives. Lizzie and Justin consider what each person might be teaching us, not just through their words, but through their presence. We explore how to see beyond the surface presentation of other people and wonder "what gifts and qualities is this person showing me? How are they sweeping the path for me?" And we consider what i...

We begin with Rick Rubin’s “The Prism of Self”. A conversation about the welcome and unwelcome, our inner multitudinousness, bringing forward what’s been in the shadows, discernment, and how art and open conversation can make room in our lives for more of the vast complexity we each are. This week is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace . This is Turning Towards Life, a we...

We begin with Ella Dessington’s poem “Where Words Kneel” and reflect on freedom, trust, safety, belonging and the limits of language. How language is always provisional, changing as we use it and inquire into its meanings. How fixed definitions can distance us from our living experience, and how relationships can remain alive through return, listening, apology, openness and the willingness to let...

In this episode of Turning Towards Life, we open into a conversation about living and dying, the memory of those who matter to us, presence, and love. Speaking from the freshness of recent losses, we explore how those we love can remain vividly alive in us, and how this can become a way of carrying them forward as a blessing. This week is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspa...

Following a very welcome request from a listener, we return to a conversation about the strength to be open and affected by others, to reshape ourselves from what we receive, and to influence others only after being influenced by them. And how that capacity underpins trustability, the extension of safety to one another, purpose, and staying-with appropriately in each kind of relationship. This wee...

On presence, embodiment, and choosing life-giving attention in the midst of our lives. How we might transform our experience into ‘drops of sunlight’ that help us stay in contact with life as we meet despair and the counterfeit comforts that promise relief but leave us diminished. An invitation to notice what brings freedom and love, both within ourselves and in relationship with others. This week...

It is not our power to remain unaffected, or even the power to control others, that makes our lives richer and more valuable. It is our amazing capacity to be affected by the incredible richness and complexity of the relational web in which we live… A conversation about the remarkable power that comes with staying open to others. This week is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thir...

We can rely on the wisdom and expansiveness of our own hearts to hold and respond to the complexity of the world, though it's easy to ignore this as we pursue our strategies of trying to be right, or be in control, when it's hard to see a way through grief, or confusion, or anger, or self-righteousness. An invitation to do what leaves do - absorb the fierce energy that shines upon them and turn it...

When we're in difficulty, or people who matter to us are in difficulty, we often rush to find out how to make the problem go away. That's just fine for some issues we face... for example just before recording today's episode we had to fix an audio issue which would have prevented us getting this episode out. But many other kinds of difficulties are not so amenable to such an approach and, in any c...

When our lives change in an instant, when we find ourselves in relational difficulty, when circumstances shift and we no longer understand what to do... what then? In this week's source, Ingrid Goff-Maidoff invites us to trust the inherent openness and holding power of our hearts as both a support and as a pathway. And that's our conversation this week - how to we learn to trust the many-chambered...

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 conver...

Some people have the patience to sit with the right problem instead of fixing the wrong one. They ask the question that actually needs asking, don’t accept our stories at face value, and get to the real thing waiting to be said. They see what we’re actually struggling with, not the account we offer. They are quiet, patient, kind, curious, and deep enough for us to speak about what matters. They kn...

Inspired by William Martin’s poem ‘Journey’s End’, we wonder together about what it would be to each receive the one, precious, unique life that we are rather than trying all the time to be something or someone else. What happens when we let ourselves soften into receiving everything that has, since the beginning of time, led directly to each of us, seeing ourselves and one another as the sacred p...

We're unable to record a new episode this week so we have remixed the sound and video on one of our favourites, from 2022, about a topic that we're thinking about a lot right now - time. So often our lives are ruled by 'clock time' - we're counting off how long there is to get something done, or we're aiming for a time-bound goal, or we're measuring time wasted or time used productively. But altho...

What might become possible if, even for a moment, we let ourselves feel cherished… allowing ourselves to feel the care of others as a living presence in our bodies? And what happens to our way of being in the world when we use this as a doorway, returning us to connection, to belonging, to the quiet rhythm of being human together? In this episode, we turn toward a luminous poem by Rosemerry Wahtol...

Identity, integrity, and how we come to understand ourselves through attention, discernment, reflection and relationship. Drawing on Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, Justin and Lizzie talk about the life-giving values of curiosity, seeing one another, and the possibilities that arise when we create opportunities for us all to express and inquire into our inner lives together with honesty, cou...

How do we learn to be honest about our lives… to look closely, to say truthfully what we see, and to turn with reverence and respect to all that has been and the path that unfolds before us? Said another way, what does it take to say ‘yes’ to our lives, in spite of everything? This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Episode Overview 00:00...

Cultivating both joy and sorrow within us. Seeing what they are made of, so that we can approach them with reverence rather than trying to control them or banish them. And finding out that that the more we go on in lives, the more we can know and the more we can have faith that we can meet what life brings us. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of T...

“The circumstances of our lives don’t have to be perfect in order for us to feel like we’re alive. The world and the people and things in it are calling for our participation - our granting everything significance and feeling and knowing our own significance too.”  A conversation about our choices as we relate with who and what is around us, and how we might live our way into the sacredness of eve...