Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

Here’s episode 20 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. You can find all our sources and more information at turningtowards.life In this episode Lizzie and Justin talk about being afraid – how it paralyses us and turns us away from ourselves and others, and what comes from owning up to being scared and knowing others as afraid also. The source is from our friend Joy Reichart’s Blog Beginnerdom, and is called “Because I was Scared“. Photo Credit: danhamilt1 Flickr via Compfight cc

Here’s episode 21 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. You can find all our sources and more information at turningtowards.life In this episode Lizzie and Justin talk about the radical possibility of welcoming ourselves, and others, just as we are. To those of us with a more action-oriented stance or a commitment to improving things, welcoming in this way can look like an act of irresponsibility. After all, doesn’t making things better in some way entail rejecting how things are? We explore this tension together, look at how our surrounding culture of keeping up and comparison with others turns us away from ourselves, and consider the possibility of both welcoming and working to repair the world. And in the midst of things Lizzie’s niece joins us for a surprise visit.

Here’s episode 17 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. You can find all our sources and more information at turningtowards.life In this episode Lizzie and Justin talk together about stuckness - what it is, how our efforts to deny it or overcome it can end up being unhelpful, and the deep quality of welcome that's required for stuckness to flower into whatever it is that it is an opening for. The source for our conversation is a piece written by Lizzie. Photo by Federico Beccari on Unsplash

Here’s episode 18 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. You can find all our sources and more information at turningtowards.life In this episode Lizzie and Justin talk together about being lost – a phenomenon that touches most of our lives at some point or another, even when we pretend it’s not so. The source for our conversation is a beautiful poem by David Wagoner. Photo by Valeriy Andrushko on Unsplash

Here’s episode 19 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. You can find all our sources and more information at turningtowards.life In this episode, Lizzie and Justin talk about Rainer Maria Rilke's poem 'The Swan'. In particular we take up the question of faith in ourselves - what does it take to trust in the particular shape in which we're made, even though it brings us difficulties? And gifts what can come when we're prepared to trust that what we're for might be quite different from what we've been doing, or from what we've imagined? Photo by Amy Humphries on Unsplash

Here’s episode 16 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. You can find all our sources and more information at turningtowards.life In this episode, Lizzie and Justin talk about 'The Right Time to Hope', a piece written by Justin for his blog and reproduced below. Along the way we talk about the importance of playful experimentation in finding a wider space to stand in, about the problems with 'self-improvement' and the comparison and self-criticism it evokes, and about what it is, like a swan entering the water, to find a way of being in the world that expresses ourselves in our fullness. Photo Credit: *- mika -* via Compfight cc

Here’s episode 14 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. You can find all our sources and more information at turningtowards.life In this conversation we began with this piece from the Long Now Foundation, about what the living can learn from the dying. We consider the importance of welcoming everything, even what we can’t change – and that while not everything can be changed, nothing can be changed that is not first faced by us. Photo by Les Anderson on Unsplash

Here’s episode 12 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. You can find all our sources and more information at turningtowards.life ‘The Cradling’, begins with a beautiful and powerful meditation from the work of Joanna Macy reproduced below. We ask ourselves what possibilities there are when we remember the extraordinary and unlikely evolutionary background from which all human beings come, and when we remember also that everyone – even those people we judge most or are most afraid of – arises from exactly the same background and shares with each of us the same biology. Would we respond so easily with the impulse to hurt, or distance ourselves, or turn away? And if we did not, what then? Photo by Benji Aird on Unsplash

Here’s episode 10 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. You can find all our sources and more information at turningtowards.life It’s so easy to feel our separateness from everything. For a start, we always experience ourselves at the centre of our lives, right where our body is, while people and things come and go around us. We can easily conclude that we are the only solid something in the world, while everything else is transient. And few of us live in the midst of community. We have practices that shape how we work, how we take care of ourselves, how we attend to our lives that emphasise how alone we are, and how self-reliant we must be in order to survive. It’s rare to find ourselves bound up in the midst of communities of depth, support and care that remind us in each moment how held we can be. And then there’s the whole way our systems of knowing and learning are constructed, deeply influenced by the Cartesian view that we are essentially minds, separate from the world. And our economic system, which deems us useless unless we can prove our productivity. It’s no wonder we can feel so alone, so afraid, so distant from everything. It’s no wonder it’s so hard for us to feel the way in which each of us matters, in which the world and we depend each upon the other. But we do matter. And the world does depend upon each of us. And when we’re able to remember this, we have a much better chance of doing what we’re here to do. Photo by Everaldo Coelho on Unsplash

Here’s episode 11 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. You can find all our sources and more information at turningtowards.life In Oh Beautiful Sky we begin with a poem written by Lizzie’s husband Matthew for his daughter. Our conversation turned into the topic of power – how we try to have power over others and over the world, and the difficulty this brings. And how cultivating awe and connection with something bigger than ourselves – the sky, nature – can remind us of a much truer power we have, power-with, in which we turn towards others and bring ourselves in a way that brings out the possibility of mutual commitment. And what different world of organisations, family, community and politics we’d cultivate if power-with was our central commitment in the world? Photo by George Kedenburg III on Unsplash