Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast
by 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
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473: On Habits of Attention
“Things come alive for us only when we dare to see and recognize everything as special. The longer we try to get attention instead of giving it, the deeper our unhappiness.” So writes Mark Nepo, inviting us to see how we make the world through our habits of attention. We consider the choice in…
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472: The Whale in You
We begin this week with Hollie Holden's poem about the ways we perform in order to belong, and the counterpoint of an unconditional love by which we might welcome ourselves and others. We explore the ways that a deeper belonging with one another arises from encountering ourselves and others with…
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471: Radical Amazement, Creative Maladjusment
We are invited into Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's philosophy of wonder and radical amazement. It's a call to break free from habitual thinking and approach life with fresh curiosity. We explore together what it is to take nothing for granted and to practice 'maladjustment' to what we already…
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470: Today is a New Day
We begin our 10th year of Turning Towards Life with a poem about the capacity of our own hearts to meet the newness of each day, and the love and grief of living. We explore how we can find a way to know our own vastness, capacity and the inherent dignity and sacredness of being a person, and see...
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469: Ninth Birthday: Slow Steps and Appropriate Thoughts
We celebrate nine years of Turning Towards Life with a conversation about the relationship between life's everyday demands and a deeper, more stable presence that we can rely upon. We explore how remembering what lies beneath can help us to meet life's complexity as active participants, grounded…
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468: She is Fireweed
An episode about the deep wellsprings of aliveness within each of us that we might remember in ourselves and one another as we face crisis, uncertainty, or simply as we navigate ordinary moments in our lives. How our presence matters: to ourselves, to each other, and to life itself, and how this…
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467: Astonished
In a time when despair and apocalyptic thinking dominate public discourse, what does it mean to remember our capacity for imagination, astonishment and wonder? Can we find alternatives to the pull toward cynicism and fear and learn to astonish others and ourselves into a state of genuine…
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466: The Ebb and Flow of Relationships
How genuine relationship requires us to release our need for the ones we love to remain unchanged, and grief and love as two inseparable dimensions of the same human experience. This week is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. This is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live...
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465: Wendell Berry and the Real Work
This episode celebrates the life and work of Wendell Berry, the poet and farmer who died this week. Berry's brief poem "The Real Work," invites us to recognise that when we no longer know what to do or which way to go, we may have arrived at our genuine calling. A conversation for all of us...
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464: Breaking Open
A conversation about meeting one another's 'falling apart', the cultural pressure to stay buttoned up, the fertile potential hidden inside our moments of undoing, and what it means to be a person who can welcome and hold space for another's becoming rather than trying to put the lid back on. How...
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463: The Ones Who Cleared the Path for Us
A meditation on loss, presence, and what we learn from the people in our lives. Lizzie and Justin consider what each person might be teaching us, not just through their words, but through their presence. We explore how to see beyond the surface presentation of other people and wonder "what gifts...
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462: The Prism of Self
We begin with Rick Rubin’s “The Prism of Self”. A conversation about the welcome and unwelcome, our inner multitudinousness, bringing forward what’s been in the shadows, discernment, and how art and open conversation can make room in our lives for more of the vast complexity we each are. This…
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461: Where Words Kneel
We begin with Ella Dessington’s poem “Where Words Kneel” and reflect on freedom, trust, safety, belonging and the limits of language. How language is always provisional, changing as we use it and inquire into its meanings. How fixed definitions can distance us from our living experience, and how...
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460: May Her Memory Be a Blessing
In this episode of Turning Towards Life, we open into a conversation about living and dying, the memory of those who matter to us, presence, and love. Speaking from the freshness of recent losses, we explore how those we love can remain vividly alive in us, and how this can become a way of…
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459: Trustability, Purpose and the Strength to Stay
Following a very welcome request from a listener, we return to a conversation about the strength to be open and affected by others, to reshape ourselves from what we receive, and to influence others only after being influenced by them. And how that capacity underpins trustability, the extension…
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458: Cast All Your Votes for Dancing
On presence, embodiment, and choosing life-giving attention in the midst of our lives. How we might transform our experience into ‘drops of sunlight’ that help us stay in contact with life as we meet despair and the counterfeit comforts that promise relief but leave us diminished. An invitation…
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457: The Remarkable Power of Opening to Others
It is not our power to remain unaffected, or even the power to control others, that makes our lives richer and more valuable. It is our amazing capacity to be affected by the incredible richness and complexity of the relational web in which we live… A conversation about the remarkable power that...
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456: A Different Holding Pattern
We can rely on the wisdom and expansiveness of our own hearts to hold and respond to the complexity of the world, though it's easy to ignore this as we pursue our strategies of trying to be right, or be in control, when it's hard to see a way through grief, or confusion, or anger, or...
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455: Care or Cure
When we're in difficulty, or people who matter to us are in difficulty, we often rush to find out how to make the problem go away. That's just fine for some issues we face... for example just before recording today's episode we had to fix an audio issue which would have prevented us getting this...
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454: My Heart Opened and I Went In
When our lives change in an instant, when we find ourselves in relational difficulty, when circumstances shift and we no longer understand what to do... what then? In this week's source, Ingrid Goff-Maidoff invites us to trust the inherent openness and holding power of our hearts as both a…
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453: The Sharpest Tool in the Shed, Remix
How much of each us gets excluded when we constantly compare ourselves to one another, and to the expectations we're handed by our culture. And how much we exclude the gifts of others by the very same process. Is there a way we could give up inappropriate comparison and in so doing learn to…
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452: The Real AI
Some people have the patience to sit with the right problem instead of fixing the wrong one. They ask the question that actually needs asking, don’t accept our stories at face value, and get to the real thing waiting to be said. They see what we’re actually struggling with, not the account we...
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451: The Still Point at the Journey’s End
Inspired by William Martin’s poem ‘Journey’s End’, we wonder together about what it would be to each receive the one, precious, unique life that we are rather than trying all the time to be something or someone else. What happens when we let ourselves soften into receiving everything that has,...
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450: What is Time? Remix
We're unable to record a new episode this week so we have remixed the sound and video on one of our favourites, from 2022, about a topic that we're thinking about a lot right now - time. So often our lives are ruled by 'clock time' - we're counting off how long there is to get something done, or...
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449: A Great Shining
What might become possible if, even for a moment, we let ourselves feel cherished… allowing ourselves to feel the care of others as a living presence in our bodies? And what happens to our way of being in the world when we use this as a doorway, returning us to connection, to belonging, to the...
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448: Identity and Integrity
Identity, integrity, and how we come to understand ourselves through attention, discernment, reflection and relationship. Drawing on Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, Justin and Lizzie talk about the life-giving values of curiosity, seeing one another, and the possibilities that arise when we...
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447: I Am Much Too Alone in This World
How do we learn to be honest about our lives… to look closely, to say truthfully what we see, and to turn with reverence and respect to all that has been and the path that unfolds before us? Said another way, what does it take to say ‘yes’ to our lives, in spite of everything? This week's Turning...
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446: With Equal Reverence Towards Sorrow and Joy
Cultivating both joy and sorrow within us. Seeing what they are made of, so that we can approach them with reverence rather than trying to control them or banish them. And finding out that that the more we go on in lives, the more we can know and the more we can have faith that we can meet what...
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445: A Song of Significance
“The circumstances of our lives don’t have to be perfect in order for us to feel like we’re alive. The world and the people and things in it are calling for our participation - our granting everything significance and feeling and knowing our own significance too.” A conversation about our choices...
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444: The Power We Choose
“If I don’t want to be that person who uses power for the sake of power just because I can, and because I can frighten people, and because people do what I say because they’re scared… then what power am I using? How do I find creative alternatives to power struggles - to use my power as a person…
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443: Love is Always Wilder Than You Imagine
How can we love - people, life, the world - in a way that allows us to genuinely contribute? And how is that different from the kind of love that is really a strategy to have ourselves feel ok? That second kind of love might be better understood as a way that we try to control life or other…
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442: The Great Weave of Nature and Humanity
When we think of ourselves only as isolated, separate individuals, we lose sight of the vast life that came before us, which gave us birth, and the vast life which will come after us. Even though we will all, without exception, eventually be forgotten, there is no knowing how the gifts we bring...
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441: Thresholds
Crossing thresholds in life - birth, death, loss, love, discovery, confusion - is inevitable. How can we do this in a way that recognises the mystery of each of life's great transitions, and which honours how each changes us? And how can we be ones who are wise, compassionate and courageous as we...
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440: Breathing Life Into the Artist
Our 440th episode considers what it is for each of us to dare to bring our unique form of expression to the world. How we might take the ways we've learned to belong in our lives - which may have supported us and constrained us - and give enough space around them that we can be our own voice,...
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439: Keeping Things Whole
A conversation about the qualities that seem absent in us, that we long for so greatly, and the way they are already present in us because that is what humans are. How we find our courage, or integrity, or creativity or love not so much by trying to fill the absence from outside but by walking…
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438: Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
A call to our imaginative capacities when we are caught in conflict with one another... our capacity to uncover new stories and new ways of understanding that bring us into a different kind of relationship with ourselves, with each other, and with the something we seem to be in conflict about....
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437: Autobiography in Five Chapters
When we make mistakes or take a wrong turn, it's understandable that our first move might be to blame others, or try to defend ourselves, or do all we can to avoid the feelings of shame or disappointment that come our way. What those responses do, though, is close us off to our human capacity to...
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436: At Home in the Holy
A conversation which begins with a beautiful and stirring song from MaMuse [a link to the song is in the show-notes]. How might we imagine light inside darkness, and call to the light in ourselves and in one another, even as we feel grief and worry and sadness? And how might we bring our...
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435: On the Calculation of Volume
How do we counter the stories in ourselves that render our lives flat, meaningless and mechanical? And how might we find sources of life inside ourselves and around us that support our participation, relationship and contribution, especially when we are feeling afraid or disoriented? A…
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434: One Day You Will Discover You Are a Sun
There's a certain kind of faithfulness in ourselves and in one another that is required if we are to address both the joys and the real difficulties of our lives. It's something beyond mere appreciation or even love, but a kind of fierce commitment to the sacredness of being a human. It allows us...
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433: On Learning Coaching and Responding to the World
Thirdspace turns 21 years old today, and so we take this opportunity to reflect together on one of our central commitments: learning to respond ever more to the world with wisdom, creativity, and compassion. We talk about what it is to be an integral development coach, and what it is to learn to...
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432: Everything is Beautiful and I am So Sad
Perhaps we are so afraid of grief because we have forgotten how vast we humans are and can be. When we forget this, we mistake ourselves for a tiny receptacle, unable to imagine that we can meet life as it is. And then how little we let in, and how frightened we get of feeling the immensity both…
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431: Your Life is Not About You
What if we mistake ourselves for the stories we've been told - that life is about our happiness, that we should wrestle control from circumstance, that we're separate from the world around us? A conversation about discovering that we didn't parachute into nature but grew from it, like apple...
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430: Undividing Ourselves
We tend to divide our experience into two parts, which we usually name ‘good’ and ‘bad’. And we do so for good reason - to belong in our family systems and communities, to keep a particular image or identity going, because we are afraid of who and what we will be if we let love, or joy, or anger,...
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429: And Have You Changed Your Life?
Life presents itself to us in all its strangeness and beauty, but given the kind of beings we humans are, we might find ourselves tuning out or looking away. And that is so easy to do. But what if we started to see life as a question that is being asked of us, a call to pay attention and to…
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428: Love Letter from the After Life
We carry other people inside us, when we're with them and when we are apart from them. After all, where does my experience of you live, apart from inside me? And your experience of me, apart from inside you? In this conversation we explore what it is to hold others in us in this way, and how our...
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427: What I Know to Be True
We’re so good, we humans, at telling stories about ourselves, other people, our lives. Sometimes our stories bring us close in to the ground of what is - they remind us of our humanity, our dignity, our care, our vulnerability, and the brief span of our existence alongside one another on this...
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426: Becoming a Place
Earlier this week we ran a workshop for our Thirdspace coaching graduates on ‘supervision’ - the practice of supporting one another in being of service to others. Our source this week comes from one of the participants in that day, and asks what it is to ‘become a place’… in which we stand stable...
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425: Always Be Vulnerable to All That You Are (our most popular episode, from Oct 2021)
We are glad to bring you a repeat of our most popular ever episode "Always Be Vulnerable to All That You Are) from October 2021. We were unexpectedly interrupted for this week's live recording but will be back next week. When we learn to include more and more of ourselves, we also become more…
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424: Until I Thought of Myself as the Sea
On the astonishing power of metaphors to reframe our sense of who we are, what’s possible, and how we might hear and speak with one another… and on the ocean’s vastness and depth as a invitation for us to contain multitudes, especially when in the midst of our most challenging conversations. This...
About this show
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
Hosted by
Thirdspace
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