Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

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 it so it can belong. When we do this, the shadow has a much better chance of making the life-giving contribution it's here to make. This is, perhaps understandably, a far from easy path to walk, but one with many riches - and much to offer in the way of creating cultures in which we're able to take care of others and ourselves with dignity and compassion. Our conversation this week, hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace, draws on the work of Carl Jung as we wonder together about the courage, creativity, and openness it can take - and our willingness to allow ourselves to get messy and porous - in order to meet, with sufficient openness, that which we would otherwise turn away from. 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: Meeting the Shadow Letter from C. G. Jung to P. W. Martin, founder of the International Study Centre of Applied Psychology, Oxford, England, 20 August 1937 Dear Mr. Martin, It is a very difficult and important question, what you call the technique of dealing with the shadow. There is, as a matter of fact, no technique at all, inasmuch as technique means that there is a known and perhaps even prescribable way to deal with a certain difficulty or task. It is rather a dealing comparable to diplomacy or statesmanship. There is, for instance, no particular technique that would help us to reconcile two political parties opposing each other. It can be a question of good will, or diplomatic cunning or civil war or anything. If one can speak of a technique at all, it consists solely in an attitude. First of all one has to accept and to take seriously into account the existence of the shadow. Secondly, it is necessary to be informed about its qualities and intentions. Thirdly, long and difficult negotiations will be unavoidable. Nobody can know what the final outcome of such negotiations will be. One only knows that through careful collaboration the problem itself becomes changed. Very often certain apparently impossible intentions of the shadow are mere threats due to an unwillingness on the part of the ego to enter upon a serious consideration of the shadow. Such threats diminish usually when one meets them seriously. Pairs of opposites have a natural tendency to meet on the middle line, but the middle line is never a compromise thought out by the intellect and forced upon the fighting parties. It is rather a result of the conflict one has to suffer. Such conflicts are never solved by a clever trick or by an intelligent invention but by enduring them. As a matter of fact, you have to heat up such conflicts until they rage in full swing so that the opposites slowly melt together. It is a sort of alchemistic procedure rather than a rational choice and decision. The suffering is an indispensable part of it. Every real solution is only reached by intense suffering. The suffering shows the degree in which we are intolerable to ourselves. “Agree with thine enemy” outside and inside! That’s the problem! Such agreement should violate yourself as little as your enemy. I admit it is not easy to find the right formula, yet if you find it you have made a whole of yourself and this, I think, is the meaning of human life. Sincerely yours, C. G. Jung Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

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, and in other ways have the enormous power to shape what we pay attention to, and what we cultivate in response to the the world. And that it is exactly this capacity to choose that can make the difference between our making cultures of kindness, care and inclusion, or those that tear us apart.  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: WORKING TOGETHER We shape our selves to fit this world and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible working together in common cause, - to produce  the miraculous. I am thinking  of the way the intangible air passed at speed round  a shaped wing easily holds our weight. So may we,  in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine, and find the true shape of our own self, by forming it well to the great  intangibles about us. David Whyte Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

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 attention, and the intention we bring to our most everyday of actions? And what if we were to see not only that every act ripples out into the world in powerful and unknowable ways, but also that every act in one way or another affects how life shows up in this mysterious existence we share with 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: A Heartbeat Away From The Miraculous ... the everyday human gesture is always a heartbeat away from the miraculous – that ultimately we make things happen through our actions, way beyond our understanding or intention; that our seemingly small ordinary human acts have untold consequences; that what we do in this world means something; that we are not nothing; and that our most quotidian human actions by their nature burst the seams of our intent and spill meaningfully and radically through time and space, changing everything... our deeds, no matter how insignificant they may feel, are replete with meaning, and of vast consequence, and they constantly impact upon the unfolding story of the world, whether we know it or not ... All action provokes change. Nothing is ineffectual. Nothing... Rather than feel impotent and useless, you must come to terms with the fact that as a human being you are infinitely powerful, and take responsibility for this tremendous power. Even our smallest actions have potential for great change, positively or negatively, and the way in which we all conduct ourselves within the world means something. You are anything but impotent, you are, in fact, exquisitely and frighteningly dynamic, as are we all, and with all respect you have an obligation to stand up and take responsibility for that potential. It is your most ordinary and urgent duty. Nick Cave, from The Red Hand Files Photo by Elia Pellegrini on Unsplash

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 coaching work we do and teach at Thirdspace. 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 Meaning of Love Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of their personality. No-one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless they Love them. By the Spiritual act of Love they are enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, they see that which is potential in them; which is not yet actualised but yet ought to be actualised. Furthermore by their Love, the Loving Person enables the Beloved person to actualise these potentialities. By making them aware of what they can be and of what they should become, they make these potentialities come true. Victor Frankl Photo by Adam Hornyak on Unsplash

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 those around us, by our social media feeds, by advertising, by the current political discourse, by habit? 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: Gardening Ourselves Awake Again “If you were to be able to ask a bee, or an ant, ‘for the sake of what are you going about your business?’, and if they were able to respond in a way you could understand, my guess is that you’d hear an answer that would be striking in its consistency. “It’s my role to take care of the hive”, one might say. “I search for food”, might say another. And even if the kind of bee you were able to talk to had multiple roles, they’d be very circumscribed. Queen Bees don’t do the foraging. Worker bees don’t lay the eggs. No bees build computer software or become lawyers or compose orchestral symphonies. It’s not that the world of the bee is shallow or meaningless, or that it’s without purpose. It’s just that the range of ways of being - the range of purposes - available to a bee are strongly shaped by the bee’s physiology. The being with the body of the bee, with its particular kind of nervous system and musculature, occupies a very specific and wondrous and circumscribed set of purposes in the web of living communities of which it is a part. We humans are, of course, subject to many of the same constraints, the ones that come from our lives being supported by physical bodies with musculature, organs and nervous systems. But, at the same time, we are radically different in that our nervous systems support an extraordinary kind of openness to possibility. We *can* decide to create new possibilities - we can learn to make software, or be an artist, raise a family - or not, pursue a craft, or a fortune, or fame, or love, point our lives towards being a teacher, an astronaut, a plumber, a pickpocket, a politician, a cinema attendant, a tuba player, a clown. We - because of the way we invent shared artifacts, objects, processes and practices, because of the way we use language and generate interpretations which we can make explicit to one another, and because of the way we build a vast web of shared meanings, culture and tools that exist between us rather than ‘in’ us - are the kinds of beings who can point ourselves towards a huge array of possibilities, purposes and intentions. In that way we are very unlike bees, or ants, or foxes, whose bodies and interactions are ‘built in’ in a way quite unlike ours. We are the ones who can build societies that include, or exclude. We are the ones who can take care and steward, who can extract and abuse, who can point ourselves towards the needs of those who will come after us or who take care only of our own immediate gratification. We are the ones who can do this consciously, by declaration in language, or unconsciously, by following the grooves of habit laid down by the lives we’ve lived so far or the possibilities that were handed to us by others. And that’s another defining characteristic of us humans as we ‘press possibilities into being’ through our way of living. We can do so intentionally, declaratively, in response to the question ‘for the sake of what am I doing whatever I’m doing?’. And we can also do so habitually, routinely, unreflectively, automatically - as if we’re on an autopilot whose direction was set long ago. There’s no doubt that it can feel easier to live on the automatic-pilot option, especially when we’re afraid, or overwhelmed, and when we’re surrounded by a culture which provides us with so many ways to distract ourselves or numb ourselves to the vibrancy of life that’s always within us and among us. But it may be one of the great human dignities, and what makes us most human, that we are the ones who can choose, if we wish. We can’t always choose our circumstances, and we can’t always choose the actions or professions or possessions we would like to have, but we can choose with an enormous amount of creativity ‘that which our life is pointed towards’, or, in other words, the ultimate ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ which guides how we do whatever it is we are able to do. So, 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 ‘for-the-sakes-of-which’ we’ve been handed by those around us, by our social media feeds, by advertising, by the current political discourse, by habit? Justin Wise Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash

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 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: Thanks  Inside each honest thank you is a giant open-air pavilion beside a curving and generous pond that reflects the sky and is home to cormorants, white egrets, turtles, and humble ducks. There is laughter that rings through the archways, wonder that wanders the paths. There are angels that circle each thank you spoken with love, whether we believe in angels or not. Every sincere expression of thanks is a choice to meet what is good in the world and to honor it with our attention. There are thousands and thousands of reasons to forget we are grateful, and yet just one genuine thank you builds an improbable palace out of the moment, fills it with beauty, shares it with the world, asks nothing in return. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer ahundredfallingveils.com Photo: Nathan Fertig | Unsplash

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 'spiralling' or 'returning again and again'. We are time because we are always becoming something new and always making ourselves, even when we feel like we don't have enough of it (or perhaps when, in boredom, we feel like we have too much of it). If we 'are' time, we open the possibility that we might cherish time, be intimate with time, get to know time like we would get to know ourselves or a lover. Because time, in this way of taking, becomes our most intimate companion, as intimate as the vein on our neck or the skin on the back of our hands. 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: We Are Time Because you can't dictate, or even accurately predict, so much of what happens with the finite portion of time you do get [to live], you'll never feel that you're securely in charge of events, immune from suffering, primed and ready for whatever comes down the pike. The deeper truth behind all this is to be found in Heidegger's mysterious suggestion that we don't get or have time at all - that instead we are time. We'll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments. To 'master' them would first entail getting outside of them, splitting off from them. But where would we go? 'Time is the substance I am made of,' writes Jean Luis Borges. 'Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire'. There's no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank when the river is you. And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state - because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations. Oliver Burkeman, from 'Four Thousand Weeks' Photo by Jonas Gerg on Unsplash

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 just as we long to feel at home in what can be a disorienting and frightening world. So what is it, we ask in this conversation, to cultivate that silence as a space for our being together, for our listening and speaking, and for opening to new possibilities? And what is it to cultivate that silence as a way of creating safety and stability in ourselves, so we can be a welcome for 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: Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are.  We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life.  Silence is a place of great power and healing. Rachel Naomi Remen Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

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 of treating life as a problem to be overcome, we started to live as if the life we're part of has a deep intelligence of its own - an intelligence that is not oriented particularly towards my life or your life, but towards life's own flourishing. When we look this way, we see that it is indeed our responsibility to take care of one another. But we also see that we are participants in life and we have choices about whether to try to maintain the fiction that we're in charge, whether to collapse and try to flee from life, or whether to take up our places fully in a partnership with life. Which of these we choose will make a profound difference to what we get to bring forward into the world, and who we get to be for each 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: What Life Does  Life disappoints you so you stop living from illusions and see reality. Life destroys everything superfluous, until only the important remains.  Life does not leave you in peace, so you stop blaming yourself and accept everything as it is.  Life takes what you have, until you stop complaining and learn gratitude.  Life sends you conflicting people to heal you, so that you stop projecting and start reflecting who you are inside.  Life lets you fall again and again, until you decide to learn the lesson.  Life takes you off the path and presents you with crossroads, until you stop wanting to control everything and learn to flow like a river.  Life puts your enemies on the road, until you stop “reacting”.  Life frightens you and startles you as many times as necessary, until you lose your fear and regain your faith.  Life takes away your true love, it does not grant or allow it, until you stop trying to buy it with trinkets.  Life distances you from people you love, until you understand that we are not this body, but the soul that powers it.  Life laughs at you many, many times, until you stop taking everything so seriously and can laugh at yourself.  Life breaks you into as many parts as necessary for the light to penetrate you.  Life confronts you with rebels, until you stop trying to control.  Life repeats the same message, even with shouting and slaps, until you finally hear it.  Life sends you thunder and storms, so you wake up.  Life humbles and defeats you again and again until you decide to let your small-self die.  Life denies you goods and greatness until you stop wanting goods and greatness and you begin to serve.  Life cuts your wings and prunes your roots, until you need no wings or roots, but disappear into the forms and your being flies.  Life denies you miracles, until you understand that everything is a miracle. Life shortens your time, so you hurry to learn to live.  Life ridicules you until you become nothing, until you become nobody, and so you become everything.  Life does not give you what you want, but what you need to evolve. Life hurts you and torments you, until you let go of your whims and tantrums and appreciate just breathing.  Life hides treasures from you until you go out to look for them.  Life denies you God, until you see God in everyone and everything.  Life shortens you, prunes you, takes you away, breaks you, disappoints you, cracks you, … until only love abides in you.  Bert Hellinger Photo by Paolo Bendandi on Unsplash

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 interpretations, narratives, and sets of intentions wanting to be known. When we want to build community, trust, safety and connection between us - all conditions we long for and deeply need - the primary work is to cultivate our understanding of these many perspectives rather than trying to control things by having our way or making others (including the others inside us) abandon themselves in order to fit in. 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: Understanding, Not Convincing This idea of multiplicity - the ability to accept multiple realities at once - is critical to healthy relationships. When there are two people in a room, there are also two sets of feelings, thoughts, needs and perspectives. Our ability to hold on to multiple truths at once - ours and someone else’s - allows two people in a relationship to feel seen and feel real, even if they are in conflict. Multiplicity is what allows two people to get along and feel close - they each know that their experience will be accepted as true and explored as important, even if those experiences are different. Building strong connections relies on the assumption that no one is right in the absolute, because understanding, not convincing is what makes people feel secure in a relationship. What do I mean by understanding and not convincing ? Well, when we seek to understand, we attempt to see and learn more about another person’s perspective, feelings and experience. We essentially say to the person ”I am having one experience and you are having a different experience. I want to get to know what’s happening for you”. It doesn’t mean you agree or comply (these would imply a “one thing is true” perspective), or that we are wrong or our truth doesn’t hold: it means we are willing to put our own experience aside for a moment to get to know someone else’s. When we approach someone with the goal of understanding, we accept that there isn’t one correct interpretation of a set of facts, but rather multiple experiences and viewpoints. Understanding has one goal: connection. And because connecting to our kids is how they learn to regulate their emotions and feel good inside, understanding will come up over and over again as a goal of communication. Dr Becky Kennedy From Good Inside - A practical guide to becoming the parent you want to be. Photo by S&B Vonlanthen on Unsplash