Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

We're conditioned to think of ourselves and other people as in need of fixing, and it makes it so difficult for us to open to one another's beauty and mystery. So what if we could cultivate eyes and hearts of wonder at the luminescent half-moon of one another's presence, and receive one another as rivers do as they give their power and beauty to one another? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might walk a path of loving mutual inclusion, 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: Love Though I am undeniably broken, I come to you with no need to be fixed. I come to you the way one river Meets another river - not joining Out of thirst, but because there is so much power And beauty in giving oneself To another, in moving Through the world together. I come to you the way the half moon Comes into the yard - I could be more Whole, but in the meantime, I will bring you everything I have. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer ahundredfallingveils.com Photo by nousnou iwasaki on Unsplash

Sometimes we catch a glimpse of ourselves that shows us that we are not as small as we think, and we start to see the shining beauty and brilliance that we are. Knowing ourselves this way can open us up to a deeper appreciation of the beauty of others, and offers us a vibrant, compassionate path towards the generosity and creativity that is available to every one of us.  This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about about opening to what we really are, 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: The proximity of death, the ultimate failure, seems to open us this way. In his novel the idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote a thinly veiled account of the time the tsar played a terrible joke on Dostoyevsky and his circle of revolutionary intellectual friends. The czar had them all arrested. And then one morning they were awakened at dawn and told they were to be executed. As Dostoyevsky rode to the execution with his friends in an open wagon, a strange sensation began to overcome him. He felt a spacious, oceanic sense of time. He felt as if the limits of time had opened wide. In a few minutes he would die, but he felt as if he had all the time in the world to do what he needed to do. What he needed to do, he now realised, was to say goodbye to his comrades for the final time. He did this in a full and leisurely way, the great love he bore for his companions welling up to the bursting point. And then he decided to spend his last moments on earth looking around at the world for the last time. As he did so, he found himself gazing at the tin roof of a nearby barn. A brilliant morning sun was shining, and a great burst of sunlight shone off the tin roof. Suddenly he knew for certain that this was what he would become. In a few minutes he would die, and he would become this blazing, radiant light. This knowledge filled him with an ecstasy so intense he thought that if it went on for even another minute, he wouldn't be able to bear it. It was then that the czar’s captain told them it was all a joke. The czar had only wanted to frighten them. They wouldn't die after all. Dostoyevksy was changed forever by this experience. It showed him what he really was. It took him to the core of his being, and he was a different man for the rest of his life. Alan Lew, from ‘This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared’ Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Language is a doorway through which we can step into new relationships with the world and with one another, and as such our ways of speaking and listening are a profound kind of power. We are changed by what we say and by what others say. So how do we find ways with language that honour its power, and that open up possibilities and understanding for one another? And how might we be ones who, by our listening, gift others around us with the possibility of speech, so they they can bring themselves and their powers of creation fully to the world? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about about giving name to what would otherwise be hidden, 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: In Hebrew the term davar (דבר) means both ‘word’ and 'deed.’ Thus to say something is to do something. I love you. I hate you. I forgive you. I am afraid. Who knows what such words do, but whatever it is, it can never be undone. Something lay hidden in the heart that is irrevocably released through speech into time, is given substance and tossed like a stone into the pool of history, where the concentric rings lap out endlessly.  Words are power, essentially the power of creation. By my words I both discover and create who I am. By my words I elicit a word from you. Through our converse we create each other. Frederick Buechner  Photo by chris liu on Unsplash

Can we learn to live with the certainty that we'll lose the ones we love, and they will lose us, without tuning out, avoiding, denying or imagining that it's some form of punishment? Can we learn how to bring together the fullness of the joys of loving as well as the sorrows? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might find ways to help one another enter into the fierce grace of living in a world in which love and loss are inseparable, 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, written by our dear friend and partner in Thirdspace, Neena Sims Falling There is a moment upon waking full of grace empty of knowledge, free of suffering the length of a breath - only and then we’re falling, thrown once more into the certain heart-wrenching knowledge that he’s dead that she’s ill that our beloved is leaving - or we are our greatest fears made flesh our cherished tomorrows torn asunder - we’re left grasping and gasping Perhaps this is what it’s like to be born, to arrive blinking and crying into the light Perhaps this is what Eve accepted and Adam received: that to be human is to know to be human is to wake-up to be human is to keep breathing - big painful gulps of paradise that to be human is to fall again and again not from grace, but into it. Neena Sims Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash

We easily forget that we are quite literally born of the Earth, which is itself the cradle and origin of the life we call our own and the life of everything around us. And in our forgetfulness, we easily forget ourselves and the wonder and mystery of a life we were born into without our say-so and without any instruction manual. Sometimes, it's necessary to shift our attention so we can rekindle our sense of belonging, hope and devotion to the world which we call home. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might keep reminding ourselves of the beauty and mystery from which we come, 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: Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect. Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones—inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones—rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion. Mary Oliver, from 'Upstream' Photo by Jachan DeVol on Unsplash

One of the characteristics of being human is that we have the capacity to transcend ourselves - to grow beyond narrow conceptions of ourselves, to imagine and live into new possibilities, to unfold creatively into ways of living and knowing that give us a chance to bring our own gifts to others. It can be painful when we try to resist this happening, or when we try to walk the path of our own development alone. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might see and support one another in the process of dropping our leaves so that new ones can grow, 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: Preparing the Way So long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth. —GOETHE To die is not a bad thing. Cells die every day. Paradoxically, it is how the body lives. Casings shed. Coverings fall away. New growth appears. It is how we stay vital. Likewise, ways of thinking die like cells, and we suffer greatly when we refuse to let what’s growing underneath make its way as the new skin of our lives. It is the stubbornness with which we refuse to let what’s growing underneath come through that pains us. It is the fear that nothing is growing underneath that feeds our despair. It is the moment that we cease growing in any direction that is truly deadly. When resisting this process, we become a troubled guest, moaning like a human crow. We double the pain of living when we try to stop the emergence that all life goes through. Imagine if trees never shed their leaves, or if waves never turned over, or if clouds never dumped their rain and disappeared. I say this as much to remind myself as you: Little deaths prevent big deaths. What matters most is waiting its turn underneath all that is expending itself to prepare the way. Mark Nepo, from 'The Book of Awakening' Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Genuine communication is a kind of intimacy in which we let ourselves be changed and affected by the gifts brought by the other person we're communicating with. In this way it's different from other forms of speaking (convincing, making a point, offloading). And it requires of us a certain kind of receptivity not just to the other, but to what's going on with ourselves as we speak and listen. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might watch our capacity to receive while we're in the midst of conversation, 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: “To communicate is to enter the other, while watching ourselves carefully, to enter without usurping…to usurp the other is to annul them, to prevent them from returning the gift; it is the refusal to accept their discrete word; it is to violate his inner home without allowing him to enter ours; it is the arrogance of someone who believes themselves to be an entirely fecundating force and refuses to receive.  The univocal gift, without reciprocity… is not communication, but violation.” MF Sciacca Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Are feelings like objects, like forces, like waves, like eruptions? The metaphors we use for what we feel profoundly shape how we'll respond to them. Should we let them pass, push them away, be overwhelmed by them? Or, as we consider in this conversation, perhaps we could treat them as beings in their own right, with their own kind of intelligence, sensitivity, commitments, and ways of relating to the world. When we see our feelings and the feelings of others this way, we become more inclined to be curious, to listen, to bear witness. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about ways we can include what we might ordinarily try to dominate, ignore or push away, 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: Since I've been a child, I've been in an antagonistic relationship with an important part of myself. I have consistently tried to ignore, repress, or force my feelings away. I have tried to create unnatural feelings or force away feelings that were present. I've denied I was angry, when in fact I was furious. I have told myself there must be something wrong with me for feeling angry, when anger was a reasonable and logical response to the situation. I have told myself things didn't hurt, when they hurt very much. I have told myself stories such as "That person didn't mean to hurt me"... "I need to be more understanding". The problem was that I had already been too understanding of the other person and not understanding and compassionate enough with myself. I have tried to use spiritual energy, mental energy, and even physical exertion to not feel what I need to feel to be healthy and alive. Emotional control has been a survival behaviour for me. I can thank that behaviour for helping me get through many years and situations where I didn't have any better options. But I have learned a healthier behaviour - accepting my feelings. We are meant to feel. Part of our dysfunction is trying to deny or change that. Part of our recovery means learning to go with the flow of what we're feeling and what our feelings are trying to tell us. We are responsible for our behaviours but we do not have to control our feelings. We can let them happen. And we can learn to embrace, enjoy, and experience - feel - the emotional part of ourselves. Melody Beattie, from 'The Language of Letting Go' Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

Many of us have grown up immersed in a culture that teaches us to be anywhere but 'here'... to feel an emptiness we imagine we must fill from outside ourselves, to pursue what takes us far from our most genuine needs, to hide from one another the effect that doing so has on us. Turning back towards our own lives isn't easy, but it always begins with a choice not to continue to abandon ourselves and, with some simple attention and care towards one another, it is something we can help one another with. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about ways we can be of profound support to each other in choosing our lives, 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: Fast Forward  The awkwardness of this silence. Let me fill the space with whatever. Any nonsense is better than this. The sinking shame of a mistake. Let me make all the ‘sorry’ or 'back off' noises. Move the spotlight from my disgrace. The dread of beginning again. Let me delay just one more day… The nagging need I won’t admit. Netflix! Ebay! What’s App! A prospect dashed by disappointment. ‘I’m fine. I’m fine.’ (Oh God, I wish I was fine.) And then there are moments, Quiet still moments Before my itchy finger can hit the button. I realise that fast forward isn’t doing what it promised. I’m still here. Doubts still perched on my shoulder. Fear still churning my gut. 3-year-old me still wailing in my throat. One day, curiosity calls before the dread. I peel off the 'fast forward' sticker from the button. There it is in faded red letters... ‘Abandon Yourself.’ The betrayal is complete. Maybe this time will be different. If I can just stay still for a moment longer I can resist the easy fix. If I can gather up that shaking part of myself and tell her, ‘It’s okay. I’m here. Let’s feel it all together…’ Not to abandon. To be my own companion. Maybe this time, I can choose. By Debbie Danon Here’s a link to the poem on Debbie’s website: https://www.debbiedanon.com/blog/fast-forward

We're mostly told that our job is to be in control of life - that's the whole narrative of 'self-improvement' and 'progress' and 'optimisation' that permeates much of contemporary culture. But it's an interpretation of life that barely meets life's real conditions - that we're always in the middle of things, and that many things keep on falling apart and coming together quite without our say-so. So can we find a different story to live in, one that allows us to receive our lives rather than stand outside them, and one that supports us in welcoming and participating, in giving and receiving, in being with what comes as well as bringing ourselves to what comes? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about 'dancing' or 'playing' in life rather than trying to 'engineer' it, 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: In Between Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realise it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. From ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Pema Chödrön Photo by Ben Collins on Unsplash