

Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast
Thirdspace
Join Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise from Thirdspace for weekly conversations that ask how we might bring ourselves to life with as much courage and wisdom as we can. We start each episode with inspiring sources and then dive deep together into the questions and possibilities they open up. Find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, YouTube and FaceBook, at www.turningtowards.life and at www.wearethirdspace.org
Episodes
Mentioned books

Apr 14, 2019 • 31min
80: The Place Where We Are Right
It's so gratifying to be right, but often it's our very rightness that strangles the life out of our relationships and out of our own existence. What can we do to soften our rightness and allow both doubt and love, so that something new can come in? A conversation with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
In this conversation we consider together how easy and gratifying it can be to feel right, even right about our own uncertainty, and how easily 'rightness' strangles the life out of things, especially out of our relationships with others. We explore what it is to turn over the soil of our convictions, and to soften ourselves so that something more life-giving can enter in, all the while without this having to have us abandon ourselves or others. And we wonder together how it might be that we can meet ourselves and others more fully in a hopeful way that doesn't give up on the possibility of goodness and doesn't turn away from the dark.
Turning Towards Life is a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. You can find the source text and more information on this conversation here and find more, including details about how to join us live, on our website http://turningtowards.life
Photo by sergio souza on Unsplash

Apr 7, 2019 • 34min
79: The Path of Beyond and Beneath
What can we do, when we get wounded, to stay in a relationship with others that’s dignified and respectful of everyone's humanity? It’s a question pertinent both to our personal relationships and to our troubled, fractious conversations about the big issues of our times. A conversation with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
In this conversation we explore together how we might navigate a course between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when we're wounded, without it having to entail that we give up on ourselves or others. We discover together that much of what’s often called for is a kind of acceptance of life’s inevitable messiness, that there are limits to our attempts to have the world go just the way we want it, that forgiveness nearly always involves a kind of grieving, and that through all of this there is nevertheless a profound kind of hope and healing that’s possible between us.
Turning Towards Life is a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. You can find the source text and more information on this conversation here and find more, including details about how to join us live, on our website http://turningtowards.life
Photo by Hoang M Nguyen on Unsplash

Mar 31, 2019 • 55min
77: Bonus: The Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course
In this special edition of 'Turning Towards Life' Lizzie and Justin talk about the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course (offered in partnership with New Ventures West), 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.
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') at www.thirdspacecoaching.com

Mar 31, 2019 • 35min
78: Precious Time
The mystery of time and death. We explore two different ways that we turn away from the reality of time – either by tuning out from the fleeting nature of things and the urgency of our response, or by eating up time in a panicked flurry of frantic activity. Somewhere between the two, we discover, is a way in which we can meet time more directly, more lovingly, and in a more responsive way – and in a way that helps us both decide what matters and invest our activities with mattering.
Along the way we talk about the changes that time brings, in our bodies and the bodies of others; the mystery of where time ‘goes’ when it has ‘gone’, and we bring to mind those we have known and have loved who are no longer with us and find out that they are still present, in time, even though they are no longer here. And it occurs to us that this is the nature not only of people but of all moments that continually arise, disappear, and yet travel with us.
Turning Towards Life is a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. You can find the source text and more information on this conversation at https://wp.me/p4Tynu-gj and find more, including details about how to join us live, on our website http://turningtowards.life

Mar 31, 2019 • 34min
77: Let Us Begin the Journey Home
How should we respond to our confusing, complex times? Is there a way that we can find ourselves deep in the midst of the sacred ordinariness of life, ready to contribute and participate without being so convinced of our smallness, separateness or fear? A conversation with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
This week we return to a poem by Rumi that calls to these confusing and complex times. We explore together what can happen as we soften ourselves so that life, in its bigger sense, can reach us. What are the possibilities, we wonder, in seeing that we each take to be ‘me’ or ‘us’ or ‘life’ is always something of a misunderstanding? And if we open to a more expansive story that frees us, at least somewhat, from our grasping and our aloneness?
Perhaps, we find, there’s a way that we can find ourselves deep in the midst of the sacred ordinariness of life, ready to contribute and participate without being so convinced of our smallness, separateness or fear. We recorded this conversation the midst of week of great political uncertainty here in the UK as a way of finding and remembering, together, how much more than this is always present, even though we so easily forget.
Turning Towards Life is a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. You can find the source text and more information on this conversation at https://wp.me/p4Tynu-fK and find more, including details about how to join us live, on our website http://turningtowards.life
Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash

Mar 31, 2019 • 38min
75: On Self-Compassion and Belonging
How our welcoming ourselves makes it possible for us to welcome others more fully, without having to control them or judge them. And what comes from welcoming even our own shame. A conversation with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
In this conversation we talk about the belonging in life that is supported by finding out that all the parts of us that we usually push away, and all the experiences too, also belong. We explore together how difficult it can be to welcome ourselves with curiosity and wonder, and how our welcome – when we find it – makes it possible for us to welcome others more fully, without having to control them or judge them. We discuss the possibilities that come from welcoming even our shame, how it turns out that none of us is really so different from one another, what it might be to know ourselves as an expression of life as well as our more everyday sense of being a separate self, and how we might practice all of this in an everyday, day-to-day way.
Turning Towards Life is a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. You can find the source text and more information on this conversation at https://wp.me/p4Tynu-fe and find more, including details about how to join us live, on our website http://turningtowards.life
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Mar 31, 2019 • 33min
76: Life While You Wait
What happens when we meet ‘what is’ with an open heart, and when we drop our demands that life somehow bend itself exactly to our will? A conversation with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
What might it be to enter into the vast mystery of life with an attitude of welcome? What happens, we wonder, when we meet ‘what is’ with an open heart, and when we drop our demands that life somehow bend itself exactly to our will? We consider the ways in which life is an ongoing invitation to improvise, and how we might relate to the circumstances that come our way as an opportunity to participate rather than as a justification for our resentment or flight.
Turning Towards Life is a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. You can find the source text and more information on this conversation at https://wp.me/p4Tynu-fH and find more, including details about how to join us live, on our website http://turningtowards.life
Photo by Pawel Tadejko on Unsplash

Mar 31, 2019 • 31min
74: The Abandoned Parts of Ourselves
What happens when we see and loosen the loyalties we may have carried since childhood but which no longer serve us? A conversation about adult development, freedom and finding out what's ours to do, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
In this conversation we talk about adult development, about the loyalties to particular ways of doing things that we enter into during childhood, and about what it is to find ourselves free – to a greater or lesser extent – to pursue what is increasingly ‘ours’ to do in the world. Along the way we grapple with the many kinds of orthodoxy that shape us throughout life – family, religious, societal – and explore together how we might turn our loyalties to them into a bigger kind of loyalty which takes in life itself. We end with a consideration of the support and community that can help us find a life that feels true and real and which can joyfully welcome the parts of us that our loyalties – up until now – have had us turn away from.
Turning Towards Life is a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. You can find the source text and more information on this conversation at https://wp.me/p4Tynu-gj and find more, including details about how to join us live, on our website http://turningtowards.life
Photo by Bambi Corro on Unsplash

Mar 31, 2019 • 33min
73: The Seven of Pentacles
How can we see through the stories we have about life that have us either be too small (and which have us give up) or too big (when we demand that the world goes just our way)? What it is to see that most of life doesn't unfold in a 'cause and effect' way? And how to 'live as if you liked yourself' - finding our goodness in the midst of everything that happens.
Turning Towards Life is a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. You can find the source text and more information on this conversation here: https://wp.me/p4Tynu-f6 and find more, including details about how to join us live, on our website http://turningtowards.life
Photo by Fikri Rasyid on Unsplash

Mar 31, 2019 • 32min
72: What to Remember When Waking
How might we live in life's mystery without being swallowed by fear, or losing touch with ourselves? A conversation about living with depth with Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.
In this conversation we consider how to have our lives be informed by the depth and imagination of our sleeping dreams, and what it is to find a way to be a gift back to the life that is a gift to us. Our source this week is by the poet David Whyte.
Turning Towards Life is a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. You can find the source text and more information on this conversation at https://wp.me/p4Tynu-eY and find more, including details about how to join us live, on our website http://turningtowards.life
Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash