Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

We can brace ourselves against our lives, and we can try to control the many situations in our lives that really can't be controlled. We mean by this everything from parenting, to relationships, to our living and dying. Sometimes, our bracing and our rigidity works right against the forces and movements of life that are bigger than us, and out of our reach, and then we end up crashing into situations. So what would it take for us to recognise when we are falling and learning to be soft, like a cat, rather than landing as a bag of bones? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  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, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here’s our source for this week: Be Like a Cat When a cat falls out of a tree, it lets go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground. But if a cat were about to fall out of a tree and suddenly made up its mind that it didn’t want to fall, it would become tense and rigid, and would be just a bag of broken bones upon landing. In the same way, it is the philosophy of the Tao that we are all falling off a tree, at every moment of our lives. As a matter of fact, the moment we were born, we were kicked off a precipice, and we are falling, and there is nothing that can stop it. So instead of living in a state of chronic tension, and clinging to all sorts of things that are actually falling with us because the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat. Alan Watts Photo by Wren Meinberg on Unsplash

When the differences between us come into play - in a relationship, in a community, at work, in a friendship - it can seem tempting to search for some kind of false harmony, or to try to either ‘win over’ others or ‘lie down’ in the face of their will and wishes. But what if we started to see our differences, and our conflicts, as exactly the place where our freedom and our unique shape gets born? What if we could differ ‘for the sake of our becoming just who we need to be’? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  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, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here’s our source for this week: Here’s our source for this week: The Life in Our Resistances I have come to feel that we live in a universe of spirit, which materialises and de-materialises grandly; all things seem to me to live, and all acts to contain meaning deeper than matter-of-fact; and the things we do with deepest love and interest compel us by the spiritual forces which dwell in them. This seems to me to be a dialogue of the visible and the invisible to which our ears are attuned.  There is, first of all, something in the nature of the clay itself. You can do very many things with it, push it this and and pull that, squeeze and roll and attach and pinch and hollow and pile. But you can't do everything with it. You can go only so far, and then the clay resists.  We know ourselves by our resistances [...] You can do very many things with us: push us together and pull us apart and squeeze us and roll us flat, empty us out and fill us up. You can surround us with influences, but there comes a point when you can do no more. The person resists, in one way or another (if it is only by collapsing, like the clay). Their own will becomes active.  This is a wonderful moment, when one feels one's will become active, come as a force into the total assemblage and dynamic intercourse and interpenetration of will impulses. When one stands like a natural substance, plastic but with one's own character written into the formula, ah, then one feels oneself part of the world, taking one's shape with its help - but a shape only one's own freedom can create. from Centering, by the potter and writer MC Richards Photo by Grant Durr on Unsplash

It seems like it should be so simple - giving to one another, receiving from one another, loving one another, opening ourselves to the love of others. But it’s so often hard, and so often we make ourselves unavailable to what we most need and long for, and hold back from what we are most able to give (or give it, but without taking into account the impact of our way of giving). What can we do to understand the relational dynamics that shape our giving and receiving and our holding back our contribution from one another? And what kind of conversation and skilfulness can help us find our way through the maze of expectations, stories, culture, conditioning and habit so we can find one another in a more straightforward way? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  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, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here’s our source for this week: The Gift of Loving Give the gift of loving you to others. Ask for their help.  We seem to have learned that helping involves sacrifice.  So we think that by asking for help, we’re asking people to make a sacrifice. So we don’t ask. We try and do it all alone. And we forget that people can just say no. So it’s OK to simply ask. Maybe life is about the giving and receiving of gifts….. It’s a true joy when someone feels loved and we have something to do with it.  So what are we doing removing opportunities for people to love us, taking this away from them, this joy of loving us ? If we all knew what it meant to truly say no, and what a true yes means, what kind of love filled, supported world might we find ? Lizzie Winn Photo by Brad Switzer on Unsplash

What if what is most called for in order to live our lives is remembering the mystery that we each are... the essential depth that we are, which is often buried beneath layers of habit, personality patterns, the strength of our feelings, our busy-ness, our worry? But we forget, and we take ourselves to be something much smaller than we are. One way that we might begin to remember is to pay attention to that moment between sleeping and waking, before we 'put ourselves back together' and become our familiar habitual selves, when we can catch a glimpse of our essentialness... a path to recover our depth and the depth of others. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  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, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: What to Remember When Waking In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day that closes the moment you begin your plans. What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep. To become human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance. You are not a troubled guest on this earth, you are not an accident amidst other accidents you were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just emerged. Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything that can be, what urgency calls you to your one love? What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky? Is it waiting in the fertile sea? In the trees beyond the house? In the life you can imagine for yourself? In the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk? by David Whyte Photo by Jack B on Unsplash

In this episode, the hosts delve into the transformative power of deep listening in communication. They emphasize the importance of being fully present while listening, which can lead to profound changes in relationships and personal growth. By suspending disbelief and engaging authentically, listeners can discover hidden aspects of themselves and foster deep connections with others.

What if we were able to really deeply honour and welcome our incompleteness and imperfection, and honour our own and one another's unique ways of being in the world? Maybe then - if we gave up our harsh self-criticism and our demands for perfection - we'd ever more be able to be 'home' for one another, and participate generously, lovingly and compassionately in the reshaping of ourselves that life is always asking of us. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  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, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: Symmathesy (the poem) Each one of us is a crooked tree, Reaching for water and light, Bending ourselves around obstacles, Scary thoughts, hurtful moments, darkness & thirst, Finding a way to breathe in the sun and hold the soil, Our branches are kinked and twisted, Because that is what it took to be here, The ways of learning to be in our worlds, Have shaped responses, Our many experiences are speaking through every gesture. Our loves, and broken paths, a tenderness, a criticism, Learning always, Yearning always, In crooked beauty... To be a home for those who may find comfort In the asymmetry of our belonging, A nest cradling new life, Tucked into an old log teeming with creatures, learning to be in each other's reshaping. Nora Bateson Photo by Brandon Green on Unsplash

We're born as wide-open hearts, but very quickly discover that the world around us is not ready or able to welcome us in our fulness. So early on we learn strategies to put large parts of ourselves away - to belong by unbelonging many aspects of ourselves. It's necessary, unavoidable even, but comes at a huge cost. So can we learn as we traverse our years of adulthood to bring ourselves out into the open where it is, in the end, possible to be most fully loved? And can we be the ones who love our friends, partners, children and colleagues 'out into the open' by being an affordance for those around us to bring themselves forward ever more fully? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  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, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: In The Open No matter the strength of shyness No matter how tempting it is to keep myself a secret Oh how comfort’s infestation spreads While it urges me to do nothing There is no room to hide In a world I am made for Out in the open There is no room to hide I am supposed to be loved Out in the open Morgan Lahm Photo by bady abbas on Unsplash

Because we are imaginative beings, we can imagine and call into being all kinds of better possibilities for ourselves and those around us. At the same time, our imaginations can have us pretend to ourselves about the reality of our lives and experience. It’s completely understandable that we do this - distracting ourselves with what Rainer Maria Rilke calls ‘empty freedoms’ is surely one way to try to avoid experiences and feelings we don’t want to have.  But those distractions, those ‘empty freedoms’ do little to help us plant deep roots, or to learn how to fly when called for. So how might we turn with courage and whole hearts towards the reality of what is, as a way of opening ourselves to the possibility of acting to bring about a better future? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  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, Amazon Music and Spotify. Here's our source for this week: How Surely Gravity's Law  How surely gravity’s law  Strong as an ocean current,  Takes hold of even the strongest thing  And pulls it toward the heart of the world.  Each thing – each stone, blossom, child – is held in place. Only we, in our arrogance,  Push out beyond what we belong to  For some empty freedom. If we surrendered to Earth’s intelligence  We could rise up, rooted, like trees … This is what the things can teach us: to fall,  Patiently to trust our heaviness.  Even a bird has to do that  Before he can fly.  Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy Photo by Cindy Tang on Unsplash

Explore the notion of safety and acceptance in human relationships, finding solace in 'Safe Space' poem. Reflect on navigating uncertainty and anxiety, learning to feel safe within ourselves as a source of welcome for others. Dive into the importance of practice and persistence in ongoing conversations, emphasizing depth and growth through continual engagement.

In this podcast, the hosts discuss embracing opposites within ourselves and in relationships for personal growth and understanding. They explore the transformative power of balance, commitment, and self-exploration, highlighting the beauty of integrating contrasting qualities like strength and weakness.