Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

“When you love someone, you do not love them in exactly the same way all the time. It is an impossibility - a lie to even pretend to.” So how might we live gracefully in our relationships with their inevitable ebb and flow and, instead of demanding they stay constant, learn to trust the very natural movement in them as we would learn to trust the tides? And what might we need to discover about ourselves in order to make this possible? 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 Ebb and Flow of Relationship When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides. Anne Morrow Lindbergh Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash

When we freeze in public - giving a speech, or making a presentation - it's valuable to consider the possibility that all the unwelcome attention that seems to be coming our way might actually be our own attention, projected out onto others. In other words, feeling everyone's intense interest in us might show us something about how interested we are. The same goes for the feeling of pressure to do things - which might be a projected-out version of our own wish to contribute. Seeing this way starts to give us some routes to notice how we're participating in life, and to receive our own lives rather than push them away. And when we can see the ways in which 'what is happening' is at least in part 'what I am doing', we have the opportunity to turn our many gifts in productive directions that free us rather than constrain 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: Taking Back Our Projections Perhaps nothing is more painful than the feeling of acute self-consciousness, the feeling that everybody is staring at us. Maybe we have to give a speech, or act in a play, or receive an award, and we freeze because we feel that everybody is looking at us. But many people don't freeze in public. So the problem must lie not in the situation itself but in something we are doing in the situation. And what we are doing [is] projecting our own interest in people, so that everybody seems interested in us. Instead of actively looking, we feel looked at. We give our eyes to the audience, so that their natural interest in us seems blown out of proportion into a massive amount of interest zeroed-in on us personally, watching every move, every detail, every action. And so naturally we freeze. And we will stay frozen until we dare to take back the projection – to look, instead of feeling looked at, to give attention instead of being clobbered by it.  Ken Wilber, from 'No Boundary' Photo by Rainier Ridao on Unsplash

We can easily live as if we're 'skating over the surface of life'. Sometimes that's an intelligent strategy for protecting ourselves from the intensity and difficulty that life can bring us. But our wider culture rarely helps us remember the depths of our lives - the depths that remind us of our mutual goodness, our pain, the ways we heal, the brevity of it all. And if we're skating the surface more than is necessary, we're barely being ourselves. What would it be to live with openness to the depths? And to bring ourselves to that task with gentleness and kindness? 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: Let the Leaf Fall When this living breaks your heart, steals your plans, when you miss the holy of here,  thinking thinking thinking something brighter  is over there, when there is no denying  how precious, how precarious  this aliveness is, let  yourself break again  and again, let  the cool, almost-autumn breeze  blow all the way in. Let  the fading light,  the falling leaf,  show you how short it is, this life. How feather-fine the line. And then blow infinite kisses of kindness to every dying-living thing, yourself  included. Always yourself included.  Whoever you think you are  does not even  come close. You are big enough to hold every  break, every ache, every dark cloud,  every twinkling star too.  Let the leaf fall. watch now— watch how life catches you.       Julia Fehrenbacher juliafehrenbacher.com Photo credit: Matt | Unsplash

It’s not surprising, when we’re in difficulty or overstretched, to find ourselves tuning out of the world, distancing ourselves from what and who is around us. The stories we’re handed by our culture - that life is essentially meaningless - don’t help. Who do we become if this is what we do? How might we, instead, learn to love again when we’re ‘running out of things to love’? And how might we - as the poet Maya Stein invites us - ‘narrow the distance’ between ourselves and the world, ourselves and one another, so we can let life flood in once again? 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 love when you’re running out of things to love Pick any landscape—a kitchen counter, a waiting room, that part of your body you shield from photographs—and narrow the distance between you. At first, the stains will monopolize your eye. Each blight and crack and overgrowth, a seismic disruption. If you can bear the stillness of not looking away, if you step even closer, the contours will begin to lose their meaning. The noise of an old story will fade. New shapes will emerge, like petals after a hard rain. I’m not saying you will desire, suddenly, the pits and pores of the world, or that your hands passing over every rough surface will feel fresh tenderness. But you’ll notice your breathing has softened, your heart a door you can open past the jambs. How there’s room for what you see, and everything you can’t. Maya Stein mayastein.com Photo by After Exposure Studio on Unsplash

When any of us - or all of us - face a tectonic shift in our lives, through a birth or a death, a change in circumstances, or a calamity in the world, it can be hard to know how to respond. We easily overcomplicate, or turn away because we don’t know what to do. But what if the most necessary response in difficult times - and the one that cultivates the best in us - was the simplest… taking care of one another through the simple, practical, almost-invisible small things? 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 small things that carry love  When I gave birth for the first time, My daughter washing up on the shores of my world  With such newness and raw need  And so many questions swimming in her eyes, I remember not knowing which way was up. Or who I was or what anything was.  I felt like I needed something huge, Some great pair of hands to scoop me up and help me find a way to be in this new world I had been ushered into so slowly and suddenly. I needed a plan for my whole life. How to keep her safe, how to live, how to be this new version of myself that didn’t fit yet.  And here’s what I remember.  I remember my mum changing the bin for me and folding a pile of laundry.  I remember my husband bringing me dark chocolate and a cup of tea and letting me sleep for half an hour.  I remember these small things because these are the things that mattered most while the tectonic plates shifted inside me.  Small, practical, kind things that don’t require any words or thinking or explaining or responding to.  The small things that whisper ‘you’re okay, the world is still slow and gentle and made of daily tasks; it will wait for you.’  And so now, when I find myself on the other end of  another’s great crossing of some invisible line - the  death of someone or the birth, or any slow, sudden  change that can come in any number of ways,  I have learned to trust that the love I feel and the  goodness I want to express will best flow towards this one I love  Through the simple, practical, almost-invisible  small things. Hollie Holden Photo by rajat sarki on Unsplash

"The first step", writes Paul Weinfield, is not reaching for a solution to our difficulties but "the willingness to admit 'this is hard for me'". It's this move that gives us the opportunity to let go of the habitual ways we have of 'holding up the heavens'. And when we do this, we have the chance to enter into a series of discoveries about the force and patterns of our own personality and assumptions - and maybe even to find out what of the scaffolding that we use to hold everything up is ready to fall so that something else can grow.  In this conversation Lizzie and Justin consider how it is that we come to know when it's time to solve, and when it's time to open to what's new, and how we might each help one another do that. 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 Willingness to Admit 'This Is Hard for Me' The first step is not a solution, but the willingness to admit, “This is hard for me.” For as long as we deny that our lives can be difficult, we will always act from our conditioning and take the same ineffectual actions. But if we can sit with compassion for ourselves, our innate wisdom can show us how to truly be there for ourselves, and, eventually, how to let go. Compassion feels a bit like rain at the end of a hot summer day. There’s a sense of relief in letting it all come down. Yes, you have to let go of some control. You have to let go of trying to hold up the heavens with your solutions, strategies, and stories of right and wrong. But maybe all that scaffolding needs to fall. Maybe none of it kept you safe in the first place. Maybe, all the while, there’s been a child tugging at your sleeve, saying, “Can we go now? I don’t want to fight any more. Just stay with me. All I want is for you to stay with me.” Paul Weinfield  www.paulweinfieldcoaching.com/about

Difficult times in the world can easily drive us towards the worst of ourselves. When we become rigid, or narrow in our thinking, or too certain about the rightness of our position… or when we forget how to acknowledge the pain of the other. But difficult times can also be when we choose to bring forward the best of ourselves, to live in our communities and our homes in the way, as Howard Zinn says, ‘that human beings should live’ when we are in contact with the compassion, courage and kindness that is our true nature. How might we begin to walk that path when it calls to 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: To Be Hopeful in Bad Times To be hopeful in bad times is based on the fact that human history is not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. If we only see the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act. And if we do act, in however, small way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presence, and to live now, as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself, a marvellous victory. Howard Zinn Photo by Kristel Hayes on Unsplash

The healing we need - the healing the world needs - can't happen without us. When we separate ourselves from the world, as if it's up to someone else, we miss the ways in which healing and our shared capacity arise from our own minds, hearts and bodies. We can't leave it up to someone else to do - but doing it also calls on our courage, our care, our truthfulness, our love, and our capacity to cultivate a many-chambered heart... to hear one another's joys and anguish, love and anger, and hold it tenderly without either escalating or ignoring, so that something more true and whole-hearted can emerge in us and between 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: The Healing This planet will not be healed by powerful politicians in big cities who spend trillions on a global strategy that never quite begins. They also burn much fuel. Earth will be healed by villagers who sing, by backyard gardeners like you, who walk more slowly right here, who feel the green through bare soles, speaking fewer words, cradling each others anger like mothers, awakening the heirloom seeds of the heart. by Alfred K. LaMotte Photo by Nikola Knezevic on Unsplash

When our inner worlds are in turmoil, perhaps in response to the outer world, how should we respond? Might there be a way to honour other parts of ourselves that easily get sidelined in heightened times? And how might that be a way to hold onto our dignity, care and humanity? 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: Thursday When the dusk comes in as quiet as this as low as this, as dense as this, like your whole world has gone back to where it began and you wonder how you got into this mess, the kind of mess you cannot see an end to as if it may already have ended very badly and all you can hear is the sound of your own name spoken deep inside your own head, it is probably best to step back from whatever kind of brink you imagine you have reached and think about something else, something small and practical like boiling an egg. Elaine Beckett www.elainebeckett.com Photo by Rodrigo Pereira on Unsplash

There are so many reasons to harden ourselves to the world. But what we long for, in ourselves, from one another, is for our ‘clenched fists to unfurl, ready to hold whatever small things drop inside’. It’s not the easiest thing to do when our worlds are filled with hurt and pain, or when we are feeling tender and fragile. So how might we begin? And help one another stay open? 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: Stay Like Clay How we want hard things to soften and change right away, for frost to lift off stiff blades of grass before the summer green can fade, and for a gentle rain to prevail over sleet that coasts each leaf left clinging to gleaming black branches. For the furrowed brow of a loved one to smooth back into a smile, and for every clenched fist to unfurl into a small bowl, ready to hold whatever small thing falls inside. Maybe the trick is never to harden in the first place, to stay like clay outside the kiln, willing to be molded, reshaped by the rough and tender hands of this world. James Crews www.jamescrews.net