Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

Perhaps one of the most difficult steps in each of our development, in our becoming more ourselves, is the push-back we get from the people around us - often the people who are closest-in to our lives. We find ourselves caught between the life that is longing to unfold into the world, and the parts of us that want to keep us safe from shame and disapproval. And at the same time, even as we long to...

" Boundaries seem to be the only way that human beings can find a place to stand, a place to begin, a place from which to move out" writes Richard Rohr, and at the same time we need to be able to fight and engage with boundaries before we discover what we really need or want . So what does it take to be one who makes 'enabling constraints' for ourselves so that the full possibility of our lives ca...

To be human is to learn... but very often our learning is made much more difficult by  narratives of shame, or our demands for perfection, or our worries about not being welcomed by others in our unfinishedness. Learning is both what we are made for, and among the most difficult endeavours of our lives, particularly the learning about ourselves that requires ongoing patience, generous kindness, an...

In between our certainty that we’re too small, or too inadequate to meet life, and our fantasies (perhaps even expectations) of perfection, mastery of life, and personal power, there is a middle place. And the middle, if we’ll meet ourselves and one another there, is far from a place of mediocrity. Instead it’s a way in which we can be real with one another, truthful about our messiness and our gl...

When something difficult or unwelcome happens, there are many reasons for us to contract away from our lives in an attempt to control what we're feeling. It's a kind of self-protection, yes, but can also be a kind of violence to ourselves. And it often cuts us off from what could most support us, open us, and hold us. So how about  learning to connect to the memory of our vastness, and our intimac...

So much of what we're afraid of is inside us... we're afraid of the feelings that will come with shame, or with grief, or if we really let ourselves feel the scale of our love or our longing or our hurt. And often our fear is, itself, a way not to feel what we imagine we won't be able to tolerate feeling. So what happens if, instead of treating all these experiences as terrors, we start to see the...

"The opposite of life is not death", writes Caitlin Johnstone, "The opposite of life is habit." So how, we wonder in this conversation, can we invest the ordinariness of life with the reverence and awe that calls to us? How might we find that aspect of ourselves, in our vast inner landscapes, that is neither our reactivity nor our defensiveness, but is itself life looking out at life in wonder? Th...

How can we cultivate a real, mature kind of gratefulness that keeps opening us to both the wonder of life and the suffering and difficulty that's here? A gratefulness that doesn't seek to cover over anything at all, but instead awakens our care, skilfulness, and capacity to step into the world with the action that is called for? This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about having l...

What does it take to allow ourselves to be who we are, and to allow other people to be who they are? What happens when we relate to one another from a deep respect for our own goodness, power and care, and a deep respect for the goodness, power and care of others? This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the possibility of being in relationship in a way that allows us to bring...

We are made for belonging... we are made to be the ones who can hold onto one another with hope and love as we descend into the darkness... and we are made for  discovering in ourselves and one another an indestructable goodness that holds and welcomes all our hurts, all our difficulties, all our confusion. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the practices of hopefulness a...

We all carry wounds and hurts with us into our lives, and we present them to the world in our longing to be seen and to be healed. Perhaps when our hurts are so easily 'out front' we shouldn't be surprised at how often we each get triggered into self-protective and defensive patterns which are at odds with our deeper intentions and longings. But if we could find a way to support one another in hea...

It's in the small acts that we build a life: the way we look at one another, the way we talk to one another, the way we listen. At these times when so much of what we rely upon is being called into question, what does it take for us to see that it's these small acts that also shape who we are? Can we learn to be the ones who, a step at a time, bring to the world exactly what we are longing for? Ca...

So many of us live in the midst of a harsh narrative of self-criticism and self-doubt, feeling all the ways we imagine we fall short of who we're meant to be in life. But every now and again we might catch a glimpse of something very beautiful in us, something essential, that reminds us that to be a living being in the midst of a living world is always in one way or another to belong, to be at hom...

Listening deeply, lovingly and fearlessly to one another is among the most nourishing and life-giving practices we humans can take up, and yet many of us have few places in our lives where we regularly do this. Perhaps that's because laying out a 'table made of listening' for one another, one that is open enough and solid enough and safe enough, calls on us to welcome parts of ourselves and others...

When we allow our hearts to be completely colonised by the demands of the organisation, community, movement or family we're part of, we lose a vital gift of our own individuality - our capacity to take a stand on our lives that includes us fully, and our capacity to speak up truthfully and with integrity about what we see both within and around us. And when we find ourselves more and more able to...

What does it take to be good ancestors, to be people who come not from fear but from a deep love for the world and a commitment to its future? This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the tricky, necessary and life-giving possibility of committing to love of the world not as a 'feeling' but as a practice, a promise, and a commitment - and when we work to widen our understanding...

When we make our relationships into projects, when we demand that the people close to us be different to how they are, when we bring only our 'fix things', 'make things happen', 'change things' energy to them, we should perhaps not be surprised that the people we are in relationship with quickly become disappointments to us. And, as we do this, we quickly become difficult to find and meet deeply o...

As Oliver Burkeman writes in our source for this week "So much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future". This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about what can happen when we start to relax our attempts to have life go exactly our way, the man...

A great deal of our suffering comes from our certainty that life is meant to go our way... and this certainty easily throws us into on the one hand imagining we're meant to have the powers only a deity could have and, on the other hand, feeling small and cynical and disconnected from life. But what if we could see that we're participants in something much more like a dance in which we barely know...

We're encouraged to live our lives as a way of controlling things - most particularly in the realm of acting into the world to get attention from others and to be recognised as special. This understanding leads us quickly down a painful and deeply unsatisfying path of needing to be verified at every turn. But if instead we could learn to pay attention to life, and to find a way to receive the one...

How often we compare ourselves to impossible standards of perfection, and how often this comparison produces the kind of contraction, efforting, and pushing that distances us from ourselves and others, and that is the opposite of what we seek. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might find playful ways of loving the messiness that it is to be human and, from there,...

Very often our relationship to the world is, in some way, a projection of the inner relationships between the different parts of ourselves. And, just as often, our experience of others is really a projection of some part of us. All of this can very much get in the way of our being in full and truthful contact with what's outside us. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how...

As we grow in whatever family and wider culture we're born into, we inevitably find out that parts of us are not welcome. Most of us are pretty adept at exiling or hiding those parts away. But what if, instead of labelling them, judging them, and trying to keep them out of view, we learned to turn towards them as if they were bearers of gifts? And what if we could learn that we are indeed made up...

How would we live our lives if we understood our mortality to be a gift - one we were given by all those who came before us, and that makes possible the lives of those who will come after us? What kindness and forgiveness might we bring to our lives if we understood that each of us - especially those with whom we are in difficulty - is a brief flash of life in a universe-sized unfolding process? E...

What if sadness isn't something to be avoided, but an opening, a doorway that we can step into? What if sadness could wake us up to what we most care about? And what if it could bring us into the orbit of others in a way that deepens our lives? Episode 148 of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might treat our inevitable grief as a call, a question, a possibility - and about how we...