Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

When we allow our hearts to be completely colonised by the demands of the organisation, community, movement or family we're part of, we lose a vital gift of our own individuality - our capacity to take a stand on our lives that includes us fully, and our capacity to speak up truthfully and with integrity about what we see both within and around us. And when we find ourselves more and more able to include and incorporate the many different parts of ourselves, we're more able to turn towards the difference and the many parts of others. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how the path of cultivating a 'many-chambered heart' can help us with bringing our actions into harmony with our inner lives, and with using whatever power we have in the world to help others do the same, with 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. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website. Our source this week is brought to us by Lizzie, and is from Parker Palmer's extraordinarily wise and generous book 'The Courage to Teach': Many of us know from personal experience how it feels to live a divided life. Inwardly, we experience one imperative for our lives, but outwardly we respond to quite another. This is the human condition of course - our inner and outer worlds are never in perfect harmony. But there are extremes of dividedness that become intolerable when one can no longer live without bringing ones’s actions into harmony with one’s inner life. When that happens inside of one person, then another, and another and another in relation to a significant social issue, a movement may be conceived. The condition to be overcome by living divided no more has a specific etiology. We inhabit institutional settings, including school and work and civic society, because they harbour opportunities that we value. But the claims those institutions make on us are sometimes at odds with our hearts - for example the demand for loyalty to the corporation, right or wrong, versus the inward imperative to speak truth. That tension can be creative up to a point. It becomes pathological when the heart becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the organisation, when we internalise organisational logic and allow it to overwhelm the logic of our own lives. To live divided no more is to find a new centre for one’s life, a centre external to the institution and its demands. This does not mean leaving the institution physically; one may stay at one’s post. But it does mean taking one’s spiritual leave. One finds solid ground on which to stand outside the institution - the ground of one’s own being - and from that ground is better able to resist the deformations that occur when organisational values become the landscape of one’s inner life. Parker Palmer - The Courage to Teach Photo by Anthony Intraversato on Unsplash

What does it take to be good ancestors, to be people who come not from fear but from a deep love for the world and a commitment to its future? This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the tricky, necessary and life-giving possibility of committing to love of the world not as a 'feeling' but as a practice, a promise, and a commitment - and when we work to widen our understanding of what our lives are for to something bigger than our own personal safety and preferences, with 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. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website. Our source this week is brought to us by Justin, and is from Robert Macfarlane's luminous book 'Underland': Maybe this is among the best things we can try to do, I think...: to be good ancestors. I remember a paragraph I have copied out into a notebook, from a book called 'After Nature': "People are best able to change their ways when they find two things at once in nature: something to fear, a threat they must avoid, and also something to love, a quality ... which they can do their best to honour. Either impulse can stay the human hand, but the first stops it just short of being burnt or broken. The second keeps the hand poised, extended in greeting or in an offer of peace. This gesture is the beginning of collaboration, among people but beyond us, in building our next home." Robert Macfarlane, from 'Underland' Photo by Aaron Lee on Unsplash

When we make our relationships into projects, when we demand that the people close to us be different to how they are, when we bring only our 'fix things', 'make things happen', 'change things' energy to them, we should perhaps not be surprised that the people we are in relationship with quickly become disappointments to us. And, as we do this, we quickly become difficult to find and meet deeply ourselves. What if we were to return, often, to the possibility of returning to our flexibility, capacity to nurture and witness others, our ability to listen in an unhurried way?  This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about what can happen in our relationships when we learn to inhabit the side of ourselves that lets life flow through and that is able to welcome all things whether beautiful or painful, with 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. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website. Our source this week is brought to us by Lizzie: Always Return by William Martin It is good to know your own strength but always return to your flexibility. If you can cradle your beloved in your arms in nurturing gentleness, love will flow through you. It is good to achieve things but always return to anonymity. Your beloved does not need your achievements but needs your uncomplicated soul. It is good to work for change, but always return to what is. If you accept all things whether painful or joyful, you will always know that you belong to each other and to the Tao. Return today, to that which brings you life; enfolding, caressing, soothing, nurturing, forgiving and accepting. Photo by Richie Nolan on Unsplash

As Oliver Burkeman writes in our source for this week "So much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future". This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about what can happen when we start to relax our attempts to have life go exactly our way, the many ways this can have us return to our lives as they are, and how all this can uncover our capacity to love, delight-in and respond-to life and those around us, with 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. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website. Our source this week is brought to us by Justin: The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. Oliver Burkeman As the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood, much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future. We want to /know/, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on. But we never can. (This is why it’s wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it’s just that we’re currently very aware of it.) It’s freeing to grasp that no amount of fretting will ever alter this truth. It’s still useful to make plans. But do that with the awareness that a plan is only ever a present-moment statement of intent, not a lasso thrown around the future to bring it under control. The spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti said his secret was simple: “I don’t mind what happens.” That needn’t mean not trying to make life better, for yourself or others. It just means not living each day anxiously braced to see if things work out as you hoped. from Oliver Burkeman's excellent recent article 'The Eight Secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life'. https://bit.ly/3iKkjid Photo by Frank McKenna on Unsplash

A great deal of our suffering comes from our certainty that life is meant to go our way... and this certainty easily throws us into on the one hand imagining we're meant to have the powers only a deity could have and, on the other hand, feeling small and cynical and disconnected from life. But what if we could see that we're participants in something much more like a dance in which we barely know the steps, and came to be less certain about exactly how this would turn out or, even, quite what it is that we are dancing with. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about looking beyond our certainty and catching a glimpse, perhaps, of something quite astonishing beneath, with 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. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website. Our source this week is brought to us by Lizzie: ANGELS by MARY OLIVER You might see an angel anytime and anywhere. Of course you have to open your eyes to a kind of second level, but it’s not really hard. The whole business of what’s reality and what isn’t has never been solved and probably never will be. So I don’t care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty. For myself, but not for other people. That’s a place you just can’t get into, not entirely anyway, other people’s heads. I’ll just leave you with this. I don’t care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s enough to know that for some people they exist, and that they dance. Photo by Josh Howard on Unsplash

We're encouraged to live our lives as a way of controlling things - most particularly in the realm of acting into the world to get attention from others and to be recognised as special. This understanding leads us quickly down a painful and deeply unsatisfying path of needing to be verified at every turn. But if instead we could learn to pay attention to life, and to find a way to receive the one unique life that we are, we might find ourselves more fully inhabiting the gifts of our lives and, perhaps paradoxically, more able to be a genuine contribution to the life of others. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we can find our place in the beauty of things by the way we pay attention to life, with 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. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website. Our source this week is written by Mark Nepo. Much of our anxiety and inner turmoil comes from living in a global culture whose values drive us from the essence of what matters. At the heart of this is the conflict between the outer definition of success and the inner value of peace. Unfortunately, we are encouraged, even trained, to get attention when the renewing secret of life is to give attention. From performing well on tests to positioning ourselves for promotions, we are schooled to believe that that to succeed we must get attention and be recognized as special, when the threshold to all that is extraordinary in life opens only when we devote ourselves to giving attention, not getting it. Things come alive for us only when we dare to see and recognize everything as special. The longer we try to get attention instead of giving it, the deeper our unhappiness. It leads us to move through the world dreaming of greatness, needing to be verified at every turn, when feelings of oneness grace us only when verify the world around us. It makes us desperate to be loved when we sorely need the medicine of being loving. One reason so many of us are lonely in our dream of success is that instead of looking for what is clear and true, we learn to covet what is great and powerful. One reason we live so far from peace is that instead of loving our way into the nameless joy of spirit, we think fame will soothe us. And while we are busy dreaming of being a celebrity, we stifle our need to see and give love, all of which opens us to the true health of celebration. It leaves us with these choices: fame or peace, be a celebrity or celebrate being, work all our days to be seen or devote ourselves to seeing, build our identity on the attention we can get or find our place in the beauty of things by the attention we can give. (From “The book of awakening’, Mark Nepo) Photo by Bryan Hanson on Unsplash

How often we compare ourselves to impossible standards of perfection, and how often this comparison produces the kind of contraction, efforting, and pushing that distances us from ourselves and others, and that is the opposite of what we seek. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might find playful ways of loving the messiness that it is to be human and, from there, respond with the love, care and creativity that our lives call for, with 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. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website. Our source for this week is chosen by Lizzie. Do not give me only perfect Do not give me only perfect For there is beauty in what lacks, The things that are most true Are filled with flaws, covered in cracks, So stumble on your sentences, forget the words you need, To those parading as perfection I must say, pay them no heed. For it is you and your surroundings, It is you and how you feel, You and those you love Which are the things that are most real. And if that means burnt toast and breakdowns Know there is strength in salty tears, Which says “I will not let the world tell me there’s failure in my fears.” So be afraid and be forgetful, Please just be with all your heart, And if it happens that it’s broken Then be yourself with every part. Erin Hanson Photo by Saira on Unsplash

Very often our relationship to the world is, in some way, a projection of the inner relationships between the different parts of ourselves. And, just as often, our experience of others is really a projection of some part of us. All of this can very much get in the way of our being in full and truthful contact with what's outside us. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might become more skilful at letting go of the grip our inner parts have over our experience - and in doing so how we can find a way to more fully see and appreciate the parts of ourselves and others that less often get our attention, with 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. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website. Our source for this week is written by Justin: Parts of me, Parts of Her It increasingly occurs to me That my relationship to the world Is most often a reflection Of the relationships between parts of myself. It helps me to remember That I often see in other people That of myself that I Fear, am ashamed of, or have learned to hide away That there are other inner relationships I can call on The parts of me that are settled when I’m anxious, that love when I’m irritated, that are courageous and able to take action when other parts of me are paralysed with fear. When I’m bewildered by her rage, to remember to stay in relationship with the part of her that is love; when I’m frustrated by his uncertainty to remember the part of him that is clarity; And that my certainty that she’s judging me might well be the part of me that judges myself that my need to rescue him is often the part of me that itself longs to be rescued And that until I learn to see though my ways of pushing away and judging and projecting my interior world I can expect to have a tricky time loving the outer world, in which I live every day, as fully as I could. Justin Wise, www.justinwise.co.uk Photo by Roselyn Tirado on Unsplash

As we grow in whatever family and wider culture we're born into, we inevitably find out that parts of us are not welcome. Most of us are pretty adept at exiling or hiding those parts away. But what if, instead of labelling them, judging them, and trying to keep them out of view, we learned to turn towards them as if they were bearers of gifts? And what if we could learn that we are indeed made up of many parts, and did what we could to welcome them all? Our 150th episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the freedom that can be gained when we stop over-identifying with particular parts, and the step by step path to recovering our own wholeness that comes when we're willing to do the uncertain messy and loving work of welcoming exiled parts home - with 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. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website. Our source for this week is written by Lizzie: The Dark Bathing in Warmth Brings Light Not so easily named but felt, just outside of my vision, Who is this elusive and powerful part of life, Calling my name and disappearing as I turn to see? I know now that it has to feel safe to be in the light, So I reassure and don’t look too directly on as she inches forward to talk. When she talks there’s hardness and meanness there, And in my safety I can hear her without mistaking her as the whole of me (how often have I done that?). I hold her in my hands, in my heart, Let her cry and rage and be mean. As long as she will let me. And all the while I try to hold this as just a part,  Just some of me, not all.  And this way I can hold, I can be with, I can witness and most gladly I can learn and let the passion and purpose flow from this part to all of me with all it has to give.  All these years she’s been banished and afraid, and now she comes to sit with us. Sits and says it like it is, and she has space. Not all the space she sometimes wants, but space none the less. Enough to be fully heard, learned from, embraces and treated as important and equal.  May I always see this part with my heart and remember my faith in the times of fear. She is here to love me too. She doesn’t have the power to take me over if I turn and look with loving eyes and an open and courageous heart.  She is me, I am her. And I regain so much by turning into her darkness with my light shining faithful and bright, my warmth thick and soft. by Lizzie Winn, August 2020 Photo by Joshua Sortinoon Unsplash

How would we live our lives if we understood our mortality to be a gift - one we were given by all those who came before us, and that makes possible the lives of those who will come after us? What kindness and forgiveness might we bring to our lives if we understood that each of us - especially those with whom we are in difficulty - is a brief flash of life in a universe-sized unfolding process? Episode 149 of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might stop trying to be unaffected by our lives and instead turn to our losses and what's next with grace, creativity and compassion  - with 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. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website. Our source for this week is chosen for us by Justin. Mortality is the gift the living give to the future Words by Bradley Shavit Artson, excerpted from his book 'God of Becoming and Relationship' The wonder of life, awesome and terrible, is that it renews itself constantly by sloughing off the old and embracing the new... Just as we thrill that babies, infants, and children refuse to do things the way they have always been done, bringing a relentless energy to their lives and to ours, so too we know that what is old breaks down and gives way before the young. Life, in this cascading process of endless renewal, splashes across the millennia towards greater diversity, experience, relationship and connection. Human beings, like all living creatures, are events.  Moment by moment we shift and change and move with time, created anew each moment. We may be dying, but we are not yet dead. In that sense, mortality is the gift the living give to the future.  Awareness that we are dying should serve to focus our attention on living. It should make what is unimportant less important. We do not have time to waste: not on people we do not enjoy being with; not on activities that are not compelling, necessary, or worthy. That time is brief. Because we are all under the same sentence, it ought to be easier easier to forgive each other. The one who has wronged us is not some all-powerful divinity who will outlast the ages, but, like each of us, a brief and ephemeral flash of life in a sea of roiling sameness. We ought to know that our identities are not simply that of solitary individual beings. We are part of something larger than ourselves... [We are always] in relationship, a component of that living organism called humanity, which itself is a component of the biosphere as a whole.  Everything is a manifestation of becoming-in-relationship Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash