Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

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 waiting to be known in us and through us, rather than collapsing into self-pity or demanding that the world meets us 'just so' before we'll live? 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 conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here’s our source for this week: A Splendid Torch This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. George Bernard Shaw Photo by Olga Bast on Unsplash

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 with the wisdom and grace that is called for. So how might we support ourselves in staying open, deepening, wisening up and becoming the ones the world cries out for? And how might we support other people in doing the same? 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 conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here’s our source for this week: Older, and Wiser The passing of time makes everyone older, but not necessarily wiser. People either wise up to who they are at their core of their soul or else tend to slip into narrow, egocentric patterns. Either they develop a greater vision of life as they mature or they simply lose sight of who they were intended to be and what they came to give to this world. Many actually become more childish in old age. An extended old age can easily lead to a return of infantile attitudes and exaggerations of basic neediness. In traditional societies the old people became the guardians of the mysteries and keepers of the higher laws of life. Having grown both older and wiser they knew best what needed to be preserved and remembered in order for human life to be noble and meaningful and in tune with nature. Those “old enough to know better” would become living depositories of wisdom for the next generation to draw upon; if not, everyone would suffer a loss of knowledge and greater disorientation in the world." Michael Meade, "Fate and Destiny" Photo by Chris Andrawes on Unsplash

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 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 conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here’s our source for this week: The Awkwardness Principle “The practices that carry the greatest potential for transformative change are usually counter-instinctual.”  —Bruce Tift If you’re trying to get better at life in some way – more patient, or better at listening, or less prone to procrastination or anxiety or self-sabotage – the necessary actions are pretty much guaranteed not to feel especially good. They’re more likely to feel scary, or at least awkward, like wearing an ill-fitting shirt, or writing with your non-dominant hand. While learning to be patient, you should expect to feel restless. As you embark on a long-postponed creative project, you should expect to feel unready. One way or another, change will feel crappy. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. After all, you’re attempting in some way to be different than you are. (That’s true, by the way, even if your goal is to become more accepting of how things are.) Yet your entire personality, up to this moment, has been one long exercise in getting good at being who you currently are. So of course you’ll feel ungainly and self-conscious when you try to do otherwise... Most of us grow up with the deep-seated belief that there are certain feelings we can’t allow ourselves to feel. Maybe you were raised with the message that you shouldn’t depend too much on others, or that you shouldn’t stand out from the crowd, or that you should stand out from the crowd, or that you should always have a clear plan for the future, or that people are out to take advantage of you... For a small child, falling in with these family patterns feels like a matter of survival. So by the time you’re an adult, you’re deeply convinced that easing up on them – that is, by allowing yourself to depend on others, or stand out, or operate without a clear plan, etcetera – would be to invite disaster. No wonder the prospect seems utterly terrifying. Oliver Burkeman www.oliverburkeman.com Photo by Ion Fet on Unsplash

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 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 conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Therapy  the hard season will split you through. do not worry. you will bleed water. do not worry. this is grief. your face will fall out and down your skin and there will be scorching. but do not worry. keep speaking the years from their hiding places. keep coughing up smoke from all the deaths you have died. keep the rage tender. because the soft season will come. it will come. loud. ready. gulping. both hands in your chest. up all night. up all of the nights. to drink all damage into love. Nayyirah Waheed www.instagram.com/nayyirahwaheedwords Photo by Evie S. on Unsplash

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, so that we don't fall into habitual patterns that end up elevating one side of each polarity at the cost of the destruction of the other? 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 conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Bird and Stone There is a bird and a stone in your body. Your job is not to kill the bird with the stone. Victoria Chang from the book "The Trees Witness Everything" victoriachangpoet.com Photo by Sneha Cecil on Unsplash

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 intentional about what others can bring us, and what they can't? And can we find a way to open the horizons of welcome so we less and less try to control others so they're 'just the way we want them' and instead meet them and welcome them more fully exactly as they are? 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 conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: The Walking Permission Slip As I walk the world, I walk as a set of permissions.  Around me you can break.  Around me you must behave. Around me you must be ashamed. Around me you can be yourself.  Around me you can be honest. Truly, messily honest.  As I walk the world, I walk as a set of permissions.  I want to know if you’re suffering. I want to know only your good bits. I want to know if you’re sad. I want to know of your successes but not your failures. I want to know the ways you love me. As I walk the world, I walk as a set of permissions.  What are my implicit permissions? What do I imply by the way I speak, act, the language I use? How do my responses either welcome more or tell others to cut off of or edit themselves? What do I make it OK for you to be by me being me, with you?  As I walk the world, I walk as a set of permissions.  This set of permissions can thankfully change. We can give up the set we got given for another set that allows people around us to be fully themselves if we like. It really is possible.  We can ask ourselves what shows up around us, what doesn’t, what others feel safe to reveal to us, what they feel they have to hide. And we can make some decisions about what we actually want the answer to that to be. And then the work begins. Of becoming that which we intend rather than that which we unwittingly, habitually invite by walking the world the way we walk it.  Lizzie Winn 7/7/23  Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

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 we find our way back to contact with this depth, this holiness, in our everyday lives and relationships, and navigate life’s complexity from there? 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 conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: What is Most Holy In Me Something exquisitely sweet and tender, like a hummingbird’s tongue. Some kernel of something, a breath. If I hold still enough, I can feel it. If I move slowly enough, I can hold it in both hands, gingerly, like an offering. I have to be quiet to be with it – move too fast and it feels like I may lose it, like holding a tiny feather without gripping it. But I know it’s also lodged in there, in here, like the tree I saw that had grown through and around a fence. “I’m not going anywhere”. This delicate, solid, holy thing. Another breath, another flutter. What is most holy in me? That part that wants to cry out and weep with the world these days and drop onto the sidewalk, exhausted. But also to feel the gentle warmth of the sun on my skin once I’m down there. Anna Rich, from ‘Please Scream Inside Your Heart’ www.soulwriting.org/books-nonstore Photo by Andraz Lazic on Unsplash

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 support that's there? Because our turning away from receiving is also our turning away from giving. 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 conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Safety Net This morning I woke thinking of all the people I love and all the people they love and how big the net of lovers. It felt so clear, all those invisible ties interwoven like silken threads strong enough to make a mesh that for thousands of years has been woven and rewoven to catch us all. Sometimes we go on as if we forget about it. Believing only in the fall. But the net is just as real. Every day, with every small kindness, with every generous act, we strengthen it. Notice, even now, how as the whole world seems to be falling, it is there for us as we walk the day’s tightrope, how every tie matters. By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer from her newest book ‘All the Honey’

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 to do, to listen in a way that meets the ‘other’ instead of meeting ‘ourselves’? 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 conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: What Listening is For We project everything we perceive onto the world, including the world of others: their beauty, their emotions, their personalities, their hopes, and their fears... While what you perceive about another person is indeed in reference to your interactions with them, your perceptions still take place internally to you, though they arise from the space between you and them. This means that [what you experience as] their personality is in a very literal sense your personality transposed. Their fears are your fears transposed... Likewise, other people's perceptions of you are exactly the same. You too are created as a function of them. You contain all the personalities, fears, and colors of the others you perceive... ... so what we need to each our children and each other is the ability to 'just stop' when listening, not only in conflict but always - in order to listen differently. Listening is the diminishment of the answers we project onto the world. Beau Lotto, from 'Deviate' Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

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 appreciate and delight in our own splendour... and in doing so free up the splendour and wonder of others. 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 conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Don’t prioritise your looks my friend, as they won’t last the journey. Your sense of humor though, will only get better with age. Your intuition will grow and expand like a majestic cloak of wisdom. Your ability to choose your battles, will be fine-tuned to perfection. Your capacity for stillness, for living in the moment, will blossom. Your desire to live each and every moment will transcend all other wants. Your instinct for knowing what (and who) is worth your time, will grow and flourish like ivy on a castle wall. Don’t prioritise your looks my friend, they will change forevermore, that pursuit is one of much sadness and disappointment. Prioritise the uniqueness that make you you, and the invisible magnet that draws in other like-minded souls to dance in your orbit. These are the things which will only get better. Donna Ashworth donnaashworth.com Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash