Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

What happens when we meet ‘what is’ with an open heart, and when we drop our demands that life somehow bend itself exactly to our will? A conversation with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. What might it be to enter into the vast mystery of life with an attitude of welcome? What happens, we wonder, when we meet ‘what is’ with an open heart, and when we drop our demands that life somehow b...

What happens when we see and loosen the loyalties we may have carried since childhood but which no longer serve us? A conversation about adult development, freedom and finding out what's ours to do, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. In this conversation we talk about adult development, about the loyalties to particular ways of doing things that we enter into during childhood, and abo...

How can we see through the stories we have about life that have us either be too small (and which have us give up) or too big (when we demand that the world goes just our way)? What it is to see that most of life doesn't unfold in a 'cause and effect' way? And how to 'live as if you liked yourself' - finding our goodness in the midst of everything that happens. Turning Towards Life is a weekly liv...

How might we live in life's mystery without being swallowed by fear, or losing touch with ourselves? A conversation about living with depth with Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. In this conversation we consider how to have our lives be informed by the depth and imagination of our sleeping dreams, and what it is to find a way to be a gift back to the life that is a gift to us. Our source...

How avoiding fear can shrink our lives. A conversation about living in an ever larger world, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. In this conversation we consider what it takes to live in an ever larger world of both meaning and contribution, and how that nearly always calls on us to move towards what we’re most afraid of. As we go we talk about the ways in which fear draws us away from...

Self-deception, our attempts to stay in control of everything, and the trouble that comes from all of it. Our source this week is an extract from a piece published on Justin's blog, justinwise.co.uk . We use it to launch into a conversation about self-deception, trying to stay in control of circumstances and experiences (and the cost of both), the trouble that comes from our attempts to manage our...

The difficult and live-giving work of both loving and grieving. A conversation about courage and tenderness with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. In this conversation we consider together how easily our fear of loss can stop us from loving fully, how love and grief are but two sides of the same coin, and how we might step into both with a clear heart, courage and tenderness. And along th...

The urgency of belonging to the world. A conversation about the feeling safe even when the world is risky, with Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. This conversation is inspired by a poem by Mary Oliver, who died this week. Lizzie and Justin talk about the power of ongoing practices to shape the world; the many ways in which we're taught that we're in some way separate from things, and what...

How we box ourselves into an identity - a conversation about shame, self-criticism and freedom with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. One of the weirdest and yet most understandable features of being a human being is how we'll box ourselves in to an identity - a particular way of being in the world that allows this but doesn't allow that; a way that we lay out familiar territory for ourse...

A conversation on listening, and hearing, silence and true connection. With Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Turning Towards Life is a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. You can find the source text and more information on this conversation at https://wp.me/p4Tynu-ec and find more, inc...

What is it to learn in a way that allows us to be more truthful, compassionate and alive? A conversation about community with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This week we talk about learning. Not the kind of learning that fills us with facts, but the kind of learning that allows us to open ourselves to more spacious interpretations of our lives, and which helps us to take new kinds of a...

This week we talk about poem Lizzie's sister Hollie wrote which has gone viral in the past year. We believe it’s so popular because of how harshly we treat our bodies in our minds and hearts, and Hollie's call for us to treat our bodies call with a simple, powerful loving-kindness. During our conversation we talk about what it is to know ourselves in a gentle way, to appreciate the miracle of an e...

Stepping in when life seems a mystery. A conversation about time, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This week we talk about how we might understand the mystery of being human. So often both of us find ourselves in a place of real confusion, and it's tempting while there to treat the confusion as something wrong - either with life or with ourselves. We know this is true of many other...

Love, and grief, and defendedness, and the huge life-giving letting go (and welcome) that's required for us to love and be loved in return. Along the way we talk about doing the dishes, having grand plans, and the place in the middle that can hold them both. Turning Towards Life is a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big que...

How can we respond to fear without being 'had' by it? A conversation about courage and the act of remembering ourselves, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This week our conversation covers the unavoidability of fear, how contagious it is, and the choices we must each make about whether to be uncritically 'had' by it, or whether to reach past it to bring forward other qualities that c...

The possibility of happiness - living with our wonderful, messy humanity. A conversation about acceptance, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This week we talk about how the suffering that comes from comparison (with others, with imagined future selves), and we examine together ways in which it might be possible to live with an alternative orientation of acceptance of our wonderful, m...

This week: how vulnerable and lost we human beings can feel, and how our attempts to distract ourselves from this and to appear 'ok' only tend to make things worse for us and those around us. We consider the life-giving possibilities of sharing our fears and confusions with others, what it is to trust that we're always part of something way bigger than ourselves, and the freedom that comes from kn...

Standing up, speaking out, and putting ourselves on the line. A conversation about hope with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This week we ask what it takes to take action in the world – to actually stand up, speak out, and put ourselves at risk. We explore together how shaky it can feel to do this, and how necessary in a world that deeply needs each of our gifts to be brought and contri...

A conversation about mid-life transitions and transformation with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This week we explore together those giant transitions in life where we get remade from the outside in and from the inside out, if we’ll only let ourselves. We talk about some of the ways we resist being changed – out of fear and shame – and how life conspires in myriad ways to keep teaching...

Listening as if we're wrong, even when we think we're right. A conversation about speaking and hearing truth, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This week we take up truth telling, which turns out to be a deep and rich subject. In our conversation we explore what it is to work against our own habits and preferences – always the move that makes development possible – and what it is to...

Parenting ourselves, one another, and our children. A conversation about guiding one another into the world, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This week we take up parenting as a question, inspired by a poem from William Martin. Our definition of parenting is broad here as we ask each other what it takes to guide anyone into the world – our children, other people’s children, our fami...

Climate-change, despair, and the hopeful move of owning up to the limits of our power. A conversation about life's impermanence with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This week, in a week of further news about the mess we’re in with climate change and the urgency and despair all of that can generate, we begin with the poem ‘The Dakini Speaks’ by Joyce Wellwood. We talk together about the...

Finding a way fo drop our defences in the face of feedback from others. A conversation and dignity in relationships with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. In this episode we take up the enormous possibilities that come when we can find a way to drop our defences in the face of feedback from other people, and whatever gift may be hidden within while maintaining our own dignity and the dign...

Openness, shame and the nothingness with often find when we make contact with ourselves. A conversation about openness, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Our conversation opens with a piece written by Lizzie which launches us into a conversation about openness, shame, and the nothingness we often find when we make contact with ourselves. We consider that such ‘nothingness’ is another...

Truthfulness with ourselves. A conversation about honesty and welcome, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. In this episode we take up the topic of truthfulness with ourselves. We talk about how our efforts to turn away from what’s true about our experience can be a kind of violence to ourselves. And how easily that becomes a way we suppress the truth of others’ experience. Along the wa...