Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

It's hard to turn towards the basic condition of our lives - that everything changes, and that everything ends, including ourselves. That we will lose it all. But our resistance to this truth can easily end up with us trying to freeze our lives in place, holding us back from encountering what's here in an effort to never have to face loss or grief. But we know not to do that with that which flows - we don't try to freeze each wave on the sea, for example, because we know that what makes a wave a wave is that it is free to arise and fall away in exactly the way that waves do. And so this week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about what might become possible if we understand ourselves and everyone around us as flow, arising from the bigger flow of life or existence itself. It's 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 dive deep into big questions of human living. 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 and Spotify. You can find out more about our Professional Coaching Course, which we talk a little about in this episode, on the Thirdspace website here. Here's our source for this week: The Great Gift of Selfhood “You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose… That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself - safety forever?” Ursula K. Le Guin, from 'The Farthest Shore' Photo by Ryan Moulton on Unsplash

We’re taught that what’s most of value in life is what we can explain, that which can be illuminated by the daylight, and which we can see and know. But the shadows and darkness have gifts too - gifts of belonging, and gifts of freedom, and a way of teaching us what to give up in order to take up the one life that is our own.  What if we approached the non-obvious not as something to run from, but as a doorway into a life beyond? Can we honour the underneath and the behind and the dark and what cannot be put into words? This is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. 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 and Spotify. You can find out more about our Professional Coaching Course, which we talk a little about in this episode, on the Thirdspace website here. Here's our source for this week: Sweet Darkness by David Whyte (davidwhyte.com) When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone, no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognise its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your home tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. Photo by David Gabrić on Unsplash

There’s a prevalent understanding in the world that the very definition of ‘professional’ is a kind of machine-like activity - efficient, rule based, predictable, rational but unfeeling. Even when it’s not talked about we see it shaping our participation in organisations of all kinds - businesses, schools, health-care. And beyond work it shapes our entire orientation to life.  But what if we started to notice the deadening qualities of this way and started to attend to a life-giving alternative: professionalism as a kind of deep care and sensitivity, to one another, to wisdom, to life itself?  This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about all of this, 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 dive deep into big questions of human living. 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 and Spotify. You can find out more about our Professional Coaching Course, which we talk a little about in this episode, on the Thirdspace website here. Here's our source for this week: The Professionalism That Will Kill Us All by Charles Davies (www.howtobeclear.com) “The professionalism that requires us to be unmoved by what we meet through the day is a professionalism that will kill us all.” About fifteen years ago I started regularly going to Denmark to teach at the Kaospilots, a school of creative and social entrepreneurship. What I loved about the school was that, rather than teaching people to be ‘businesspeople’, they asked: What do you need to learn to live and work well in an unpredictable world? And so the students learned how to listen to each other. And how to listen to themselves. How to see what is happening and see what is needed — and feel able to respond. How to stand for something. They were learning how to be sensitive. How to be sensitive at work... The insensitivity required to be part of the system is unsustainable. Without sensitivity to life as a whole, everything starts to die... [So] how can we do the work we need to do in a way that increases rather than blocks our sensitivity? What does professionalism look like when it is something you feel your way through, moment by moment? When it requires vulnerability and uncertainty? When being more professional means being more human? Kinder, wiser, more generous, more forgiving, more loving. And — not doing these things for their own sake, not doing these things because they’re nice, but doing them because that’s what works. Because, if we go to work and we‘re on autopilot, then everything starts to die. Photo by Davide Cantelli on Unsplash

Lizzie and Justin are partners in Thirdspace, an organisation which supports people to recognise their goodness and capacity, helping them bring their whole selves to the world.  In this special episode Lizzie and Justin talk about the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course, a certification programme in integral development coaching which is at the heart of Thirdspace's work and a project of great joy and love for both of us. Our next cohort is open for applications now, and begins in June 2022. Over the course of our conversation you'll hear what makes this special programme unique, how it changes participants and what it makes possible, the distinction between 'developmental' and other kinds of coaching, and more about the details and structure of the programme. You can read more about the course (the 'PCC') right here. 

Being open to the world, to experience, to being changed by what's around us and within us, may be one of the great human capacities, and precisely what allows us to make community and relationship, and to respond with wisdom, creativity and love to the challenges and gifts of our times. But it's greatly diminished by that in us which wants to manipulate and control, which insists on reducing to right and wrong, and the impulse in us which demands certainty. Those qualities are needed, indeed, but as support to our openness rather than as a way of dominating it. So how do we stay open to life as it happens? And how do we keep ourselves from closing down? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the practice of standing in our lives prayerfully and willingly, 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 dive deep into big questions of human living. 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 and Spotify. You can find out more about our Professional Coaching Course, which we talk a little about in this episode, on the Thirdspace website here. Here's our source for this week: What Open Means To be open means receptive, able to be touched. Open means undefended, with an inner "yes" resounding loud and clear. It means really being here, present and awake. Open means willing to take the moment in. It is a choice, a discipline, a surrender of my being to the truth. Open is a state of mind, a way of life, a refusal to close down. Imagine a flower in full bloom. In your mind's eye, see a tree with leaves that welcome in the sunlight. See the night sky filled with stars and empty spaces. I pray to be that open today, with plenty of room for the mystery to fill. I pray to be so open the universe spills in, pours out, and leaves me drenched in wonder. Danna Faulds Photo: Katerina Pavlyuchkova | Unsplash  

We are not machines, even though most of us have grown up, quite without noticing it, as if we were in some essential way meant to be shiny, efficient, perfect, unstopping, optimal, results-producing mechanisms. And so we easily miss seeing the already-miraculous living beings that we are. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about loving our messiness, our incompleteness, our glorious particular just-who-we-are-ness, 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 dive deep into big questions of human living. 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 and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Loving our brokenness We have to find a way to love our brokenness No, not loving ourselves in spite of our failings But loving the brokenness itself We have to love all the ways we’re late And all the ways we missed the point We have to love that we were scared And that we were ashamed to say it We have to love that we didn’t get it all done And love that we imagined it was doable in the first place We have to love that we’re such a glorious mess And how we struggle to meet our own standards We have to learn to love, in short, all the ways we fall short Because our grace, courage and capacity to stand Our care of what’s broken in the world around us Is strongest when we’re carried by that which we’ve learned to cherish And not when we’re mired in that which we’ve chosen to hate. Justin Wise (from a blog post, here) Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

Learning to live with a many-chambered heart; relating to ourselves, others and life by taking into account the astonishing richness and complexity that’s always here; honouring that there’s never just one story or explanation for what’s happening, or what we’re feeling, or what’s emerging, or what’s intended. And, along the way, how movies, trees, parks and people can be teachers of all of this to all of us. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about learning to live in a host of stories, rather than just one, 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 dive deep into big questions of human living. 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 and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: There Are Days When There are days when I’m bored rigid by my singular story. I wear it like a prize or a prison. Who might this soul be if it had been sown in different soil?  I long to forsake my temperate fields for exotic climes; of course I do. But how small a leap an opposite is, the same story niftily rebranded. A story of endless wants: Of not this but that Not this feeling but that one Not this father but that one Not this lover but that one Not this job but that one Not this loss but – No, not that one either. Perhaps there are days when this soul-seed carried by the elements, and watered with love, can grow a host of stories. Stories of endless vows: Of this and this Yes, this joy and this sorrow Yes, this adventure and this homecoming Yes, this freedom and this constraint Yes, this loss - and yes, this one too. A host of stories: beyond compare; beyond comparison. Janeena Sims Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

To be a living, conscious, experiencing being is one of the great miraculous wonders of the universe. And being ‘this one’, the unique one each of us is, will never happen again. And yet… we learn to discount the unique first-person experience of being ourselves, pushing our ordinary everyday sacredness to the side, often in favour of treating ourselves and others more like objects or production machines than the sacred conscious beings that we are.  What would it be to let ourselves honour the beauty and mystery of our everyday consciousness, our joys and losses, our lost-and-found-ness, and to honour the sacredness of that in each other? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about saying hello, with love and reverence, to the miracle of the everyday experience of being a person, 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 dive deep into big questions of human living. 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 and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas, how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took questions on how not to feel lost in the dark. After lunch she distributed worksheets that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep without feeling you had forgotten to do something else— something important—and how to believe the house you wake in is your home. This prompted Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks, and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts are all you hear; also, that you have enough. The English lesson was that I am is a complete sentence. And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions, and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking for whatever it was you lost, and one person add up to something. Brad Aaron Modlin Photo by Leonardo Toshiro Okubo on Unsplash

We each carry a whole implicit world with us, a way of being that profoundly shapes what's possible for others in relationship with us. But because it's implicit, the 'background', it can be hard to see how much more there is to our relationships than the actions we take and the words we say. As Lizzie writes in this week's source, "What’s implied in your words, your actions, your feelings towards me. That’s what’s most powerful. What’s implied. That’s what shapes me most profoundly. " This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about  profound ways we affect one another before we even speak. It's 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 dive deep into big questions of human living. 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 and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Your implicit = my possibility. You see me as whole, you trust me. You treat me as capable, you encourage me. You feel me to be complete, you allow me. Each day you welcome me as new, you accept me. No fixing. No changing. Something way deeper. Something far wider. What’s implied in your words, your actions, your feelings towards me.  That’s what’s most powerful. What’s implied. That’s what shapes me most profoundly.  That you trust me makes me trustworthy.  That you love me makes me loveable. That you honour me makes me honourable. That you have faith in me makes me faithful.  We are connected. Not separate. My depth, and all that comes comes from my background shapes what’s possible for you.  Your depth, and all that comes from your background shapes what’s possible for me. Lizzie Winn Photo by Billy Huynh on Unsplash

We live in a time when truth gets pulled apart by the move towards ‘I am right, you are wrong’ and the parallel move to make all truths equal and indistinguishable from one another. And in coming at truth this way, we easily pull ourselves and one another apart.  But what if finding out ‘what’s true’ is a process, not a thing? A process of loving, disciplined attention, in which walk a path together, taking one another’s judgements into account, bringing our best reason, imagination, intuition to bear, in which we experiment together?  This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the lives we might build it we treated the search for truths to live by as a loving, attentive path of responsibility and openness. It's 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 dive deep into big questions of human living. 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 and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: What is Truth? Truth is an encounter: it needs to be 'felt in the blood and felt along the heart', in Wordsworth's famous phrase... We have become accustomed, in our Western way, to see all exchange of ideas as a kind of battle-ground in which there will be conquest and defeat. In the East, ancient truths have not commonly been thought such that they can convince (the word comes from the Latin 'vincere', to conquer) through argument, but rather that they become appreciated (the word comes from Latin 'pretium', value) through a patient, disciplined opening up of the self to experience. Jan Zwicky puts it like this: 'Truth is the asymptotic limit* of sensitive attempts to be responsible to our actual experience of the world ... 'sensitive attempts to be responsible' means truth is the result of attention. (As opposed to inspection). Of looking informed by love. Of really looking.' ... Though truth is always my personal judgement, it is not just possible, but necessary, that my judgment should take into account yours and many others. It is far from random, but is, rather, informed by experiment, perception, reason, intuition and imagination. Ian McGilchrist, from 'The Matter With Things' pp396-397 *[*in mathematics, an asymptotic limit is a value that you get closer and closer to, but never quite reach] Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash