Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

Our capacity to say a real, genuine, heartfelt ‘yes’ depends upon our ability to also say ‘no’ when it’s called for. But so often we act out of integrity with ourselves to try to save ourselves from feeling the guilt that so often comes with ‘no’. But what if we saw guilt as something to welcome rather than avoid? A conversation about finding a way to be true in our relationships with others, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 99 of 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. Our source this week is by Jeff Foster. You can find it here on the Turning Towards Life website. Photo by Isaiah Rustad on Unsplash

Is it possible to love life even when it doesn't go our way? And to love others for the sake of loving, not because of what we'll get in return? A conversation about coming at life in a recklessly unconditional, life-giving way, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 98 of 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. It’s most ordinary for us to long for things to be different from how they are, and our longing can be a great source of human ingenuity and creativity. But we also so easily fall into despair and cynicism when things don’t turn out the way we want them, or when we see the fragility and vulnerability of our lives. Our question this week is exactly this – can we find a way to honour and live with our longing without it becoming a demand that life go exactly our way? And can we find a way to love life itself even in the gap between what we demand and what happens? Our source this week is written by the artist Nick Cave, and comes from this exquisite website ‘The Red Hand Files‘. You can find the source on the Turning Towards Life website here.

What if love isn’t a feeling but the dedicated, liberating, sometimes painful work of learning to tell each other the truth? A conversation about being courageous, turning towards one another, and honouring the complexities of being a human being, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 97 of 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 For a while it seems obvious to many of us that it’s self-protection that’s the guarantee of an easy life. But before long we find that our wish to protect ourselves – particularly from those we are closest to – leads to a life in which we’re distant from everyone and everything. So the alternative is to learn to tell the truth about ourselves, and to develop our capacity to listen while others tell the truth about themselves. It’s a process that is never done, calling on ever-deeper refinement, sensitivity, and courage. And the reward is that we get to inhabit our lives and establish contactfulness with others. Join us for a conversation about walking the hard, honourable and loving path together, which begins with a source from Adrienne Rich that you can find here: https://wp.me/p4Tynu-jV

What would happen if we lightened up with one another just enough to see the tender, vulnerable human being behind the bluster? A conversation about treating one another with kindness and truthfulness and letting go of our certainty about each others' intentions, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 96 of 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 When we forget that other people are - just like us - often suffering, confused, longing and vulnerable, we can easily hold them to impossible standards. And when we do this, all kinds of conflicts, differences, and irritations gain a rigidity that makes them hard for us to deal with. What would happen if we softened our stance enough to see the human behind the bluster? And, in doing so, revealed our own messy humanity too?  Join us for a conversation about looking below the surface in our everyday interactions, which begins with a source from Alain de Botton's book 'The Course of Love', which you can find here: https://wp.me/p4Tynu-jN Photo by Max Goncharov on Unsplash

What if we dropped our self-imposed demands for perfection (in ourselves particularly) and instead saw that the one gift we really have to bring is our own aliveness and creativity? And what would happen if we really allowed ourselves to feel, taste and act on what calls us? A conversation about letting go, taking on, fiercely resisting the forces of perfectionism, and bringing ourselves fully to this one life, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 95 of 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 It's so easy for us to bury our aliveness under a suffocating layer of self-criticism and perfectionism, and it can be hard for us to work with because so many of us live in a narrative that to be a human is to be 'efficient' rather than 'alive'. But what if we caught on to how short time is, and how quickly life goes, and the possibility that the one gift we really have to bring is our own aliveness and creativity? And what would happen if we really allowed ourselves to feel, taste and act on what calls us?  Join us for a conversation about letting go, taking on, fiercely resisting the forces of perfectionism, and bringing ourselves fully to this one life, which springs out of a wonderful piece by Anne Lamott which you can find here. Photo by Jonah Pettrich on Unsplash

What would happen if we understood that we're all making it up, and that nobody really knows what's going on? A conversation about facing the messy realities of human life, and about learning we're not alone, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 94 of 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 We easily make two big mistakes in making sense of our lives, mistakes which add to whatever difficulties we already find ourselves in. The first is to imagine that everyone else 'has it to together' while it is only I who is muddling through a messy, unpredictable, and deeply mysterious existence. The second is related to the first. It's when we secretly hope that we'll be saved from the mess and confusions - by a magical happening, a saviour, winning the lottery etc. Both of these mistakes have us turn from our lives and from each other. But what if we were to find out that this is just the way that life is? And what if we were to welcome, then, the inevitable and surprising transformations that come upon us in the course of a human life, without trying to make them go away? Join us for a conversation about winging it, owning up to what it is to be human, and finding out we're not alone, which begins with Leza Lowitz's beautiful poem 'Waiting', which you can find here.

What happens when we stop relating to ourselves and others as things? A conversation about trees, depth, and openness to one another with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 93 of 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 We easily forget how wide, deep and mysterious it is to be a human being, and in doing so we misunderstand ourselves as things. And when we relate to ourselves this way – as objects – we run the risk of reducing everything and everyone to an object in our own image. It’s this way of ‘flattening’ ourselves and life that can most easily be undone when we open ourselves to the way of being of the non-human world – an invitation beautifully made in this episode by Howard Nemerov’s poem ‘Trees’. Join us for a conversation about openness, relating differently to fear, connecting deeply with the world and other people, and understanding how it’s our relationships that make each of us who we are. You can find the poem here. 

Our lives are made more difficult than they might be by our insistence that things should be a certain way that we’ve imagined or seen in the lives of others. What would happen if we compassionately let go of the idea that there is ‘a path’ for each of us to follow, and committed instead to taking one step into the wild unknown at a time? A conversation about time, gratitude, practice and turning into the flow of our lives with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 92 of 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 One of the ways in which we so easily add needlessly to the difficulties life brings us is our engagement in comparison – with the lives of others, and with the life we imagine we should have or should have had. There’s no way round it: the life we have is, exactly, this very life, and the question we might most powerfully and kindly ask is ‘which way now, from this moment, now?’ Making the path by walking it is a topic beautifully taken up by Lynn Ungar in her poem ‘The Path’, which reminds us that there is no way life is meant to be, only what we make by living. And it’s this truth that forms the basis of our conversation in this episode. You can see the source for this episode here. Photo by Simon Rae on Unsplash

What would happen to our parenting (and all our relating to others) if we gave up our commitment to perfection and instead treated ourselves, and the people around us, as always 'works in progress'? A conversation about care, kindness, taking a stand, and walking the path of practice with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Here’s Episode 91 of 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 It's probably true that none of us can expect perfect parenting, and none of us can be perfect parents. The reason is simple - we are all of us incomplete, and none of us perfectly able to see fully, and respond to fully, the depth and breadth of the uniqueness of small people who come into our care.  And it's exactly in giving up our ideas of perfection - our expectation that we know exactly what to do, and that we should be able to be in control of everything - that we have the biggest chance of parenting with the care, humility and creativity that raising children requires of us: when we can take a stand for commitments we care about, and at the same time be honest about our mistakes and incompleteness; when we can act in stewardship without imagining ourselves to be demi-gods with super-human powers; when we can be vulnerable enough to feel without 'acting out' of our feelings; when we can model apology and acts of repair when we find ourselves taking an unhelpful path. These qualities that can help us parent more skilfully and forgivingly are the same qualities that can support us in all our human relating, which is why we have called this episode 'A Manifest for Parenting One Another'. You can find our source on our website here.

What if love isn't a feeling, but an action or a path we can walk? A conversation about actively choosing who and how we love, giving up trying to control things, and the miraculous properties of cups of tea with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.   Here’s Episode 90 of 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   Our source this week is a from Rebecca Solnit's new book 'Cinderella Liberator'. It launches us into conversation about the difference between feeling love and loving. We explore how practicing love without demanding that we feel a particular way, or get something particular in return, opens up a whole world.   Along the way we explore what it might be like to actively choose how and who we love, the life-giving possibilities of making a cup of tea, loving people from afar on the London Underground, and the terrible consequences of imagining that love can be found by trying to climb to the top of the ladder of beauty. You can find our source for this week here: https://wp.me/p4Tynu-j1