406: The Enneagram Guide to Waking Up
We are patterned beings, and the patterns we live get started very early in our lives. They bring both blessings and blind-spots. One of the great opportunities of a well-lived life is to come to see the patterns, inquire into them, and find ways to open more spaciousness in us than the patterns have allowed so far. This is what we might call ‘growth’ or ‘development’. In this conversation we t...
37m Jul 20, 2025
37m
405: Facing our Fear and Becoming Ordinary
What happens when we allow ourselves to truly feel the reality that we will grow old, become ill, and die? How might we practice treating our deepest fears not as enemies but as intimate companions? Perhaps the recognition that these experiences unite us with every other human being who has ever lived offers a pathway from aloneness into a more genuine and heartfelt connection with others. And ...
38m Jul 13, 2025
38m
404: The Feeling Beneath the Feeling
Our immediate emotions about an event or happening usually sit on top of deeper currents of meaning, story, longing and commitments that may at first be obscured from view. If we want to become ever more active and intentional participants in our lives and relationships, there's much to be said then for first coming to know the emotion and then beginning to notice the commitments which lie unde...
32m Jul 06, 2025
32m
403: On Gratitude
Can we practice a fierce, truthful loving form of gratitude for life itself that calls us until our care for the world in practical, tangible ways? How is this different from shallow or 'pop-culture' versions of gratitude that might have us tune out from our pain and the difficulties around us? How might the deepest kind of gratitude connect us to the source from which all life comes, and the i...
30m Jun 30, 2025
30m
402: What If I Told You
This week we explore the tension between bringing our wholeness to the world and the social pressure to maintain polished appearances. How might we practise opening our hearts to the whole of ourselves—including the uncomfortable, needy, and difficult parts? Moving from performing acceptability to becoming spaces where others can feel genuinely welcomed means cultivating the capacity to ask "wh...
34m Jun 22, 2025
34m
401: Fresh Answers from the Inside
When we’re caught up with our harsh inner voices we can easily smother out a kind of solid, deep wisdom and aliveness that we could be bringing to our lives and our relationships. It’s this depth in us from which can come the kind of responsiveness and resourcedness which is called for in the complexity of our human living and relating. In a wider culture which rarely values such depth, what is...
33m Jun 15, 2025
33m
400: Numbered, Revisited - our 400th episode
It's our 400th episode, and in a special celebration for which we were joined by a live audience of listeners to Turning Towards Life, we return to the theme of episode 1, revisiting a source about living as fully as we can in the light of a life that is limited in time, and in which everything ends. Can we find a way not to turn away from the truth of this and, indeed, to use its truth as a pa...
29m Jun 08, 2025
29m
399: On Practice
We’re all practicing already, whether we know it or not, in the daily routines by which we live our days. And so we can ask ourselves whether the practices we’re in the middle of now have us be in life in the way we wish for or value, or whether it’s time to find a way to practice something new. A conversation about the gifts, challenges and possibilities about a life of intentional practice.
35m Jun 01, 2025
35m
398: Always Yearn
What happens when we honour both our deep gratitude for what is and our fierce yearning for what might be? How might we distinguish between the wanting that tries to fill an inner emptiness and the discontent that fuels a more life-giving opening to our lives... neither bypassing the tenderness of unfulfilled desires nor abandoning the creative energy they contain? What if our yearning, like tr...
28m May 25, 2025
28m
398: Join us for Turning Towards Life 400 Live, on Zoom, 8 June 2025
Turning Towards Life, our weekly podcast hosted by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise, reaches its 400th episode on Sunday June 8. You can book to join us at http://www.turningtowards.life/400 Lizzie and Justin will host our 400th conversation live on Zoom, you’ll have the opportunity to meet us and other people from around the world who follow the podcast, and we’ll host an opportunity for you to t...
3m May 25, 2025
3m
397: Two Set Out On Their Journey
What happens when we widen our perspective to view our individual lives as part of an endless flow of generations? How do we honour both the weight of our immediate concerns and the liberation that comes from seeing them as moments in an infinite tapestry?  How might we practice radical amazement at the extraordinary nature of existence itself? What if our most profound joy emerges not from esc...
34m May 18, 2025
34m
396: Loving Those Who Are Gone
What remains when someone we love is no longer physically with us? A conversation exploring the tension between doubt and the feeling that something continues beyond what we can see or touch. How we might speak to those who are gone, even when their ears and hearts seem to no longer exist, by voicing our love and sorrow—whether heard or not—a way in which we change both the world and our wounde...
24m May 11, 2025
24m
395: The Moral Labour of Living
A rich conversation about the necessity, joys and inevitable difficulties of loving - of loving one another, of loving all we can about this one precious life. About how easy it is to turn away, to distract ourselves, to check out of all that loving takes - as if that would save us from what Lizzie calls ‘the rattling sorrow’ of loss. And about the responsibilities and ‘moral labour’ that’s ca...
40m May 04, 2025
40m
394: A Manifesto for Aliveness
In this conversation, we explore a poem by Wendell Berry which calls us to wake up from the numbing effects of conventional life and practice living with true aliveness. We begin by reflecting on how Berry's invitation to "do something that won't compute" challenges us to question the systems and habits that keep us trapped in unconscious patterns - the quick profit, the ready-made, the fear of...
34m Apr 27, 2025
34m
393: Coaching and Learning to Coach
What would it be to learn to help other people turn deeply towards their own lives? We’ve been asking this question in many ways over the past more than seven years, and this week we turn towards a great love of ours, the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course, which is designed around this very question. This year’s course begins in June and applications are coming in. In this rich conversati...
34m Apr 20, 2025
34m
392: The Real Power
If 'power' is the extent to which we each are able to bring about our intentions in the world, then our power matters. But there are many different ways to exercise power - as a parent, colleague, friend - in any role where our actions influence others. What does it take to recognise how we're exercising the power we have? Are we acting from our fearful parts or from that which is solid, genuin...
29m Apr 18, 2025
29m
391: No, There is No Turning Back
The narratives about time and growing older that our culture hands us often fail to name and invite the kind of luminous gathering of life that we can become with age. What if we found a way to fully grieve the losses of aging, rather than fight against them, and in doing so we deepen into a kind of translucent generosity of heart and spirit in which we allow ourselves to give ourselves away to...
31m Apr 06, 2025
31m
390: Be a Water Wheel
Chasing after what we want so badly - from our friends and other relationships - can make it infuriatingly difficult to have and be what we most need. Can we find a way to move towards our longings also find out that although there is much that we might legimately want and long for, the act of receiving and giving right here, in the midst of where we already are, can so often bring us much that...
30m Mar 30, 2025
30m
389: As Close as My Own Breath
We long to be present in our lives, and we run from it too. In a culture which emphasises the running - into distraction and avoidance - how might we turn towards the intimacy of presence with our own lives and what we care about the most? Why does this even matter (and it does!)? And how do we do that without dishonouring those parts of us that want to protect us from the inevitable tragedies ...
33m Mar 23, 2025
33m
388: Horizons
We look out at the world and see horizons everywhere, lines on the ‘edge of the world’ that we know are markers of the beyond. When we move and shift our position, what is beyond the horizon reveals itself in new ways. And we are like this too - what is within us and what is between us is marked by horizons that are not fixed lines but invitations for movement and discovery. What would become p...
31m Mar 16, 2025
31m
387: Within Each of Us There is a Silence
There is action to be taken in the world, for sure. Urgent action to take care of our lives, our communities, and the wider world in which we all live. But there is a also a deep well of presence, patience, intimacy, and connection right in the centre of each of us. When our action is fearful, rushed and out of touch with this still centre, it easily spills over into polarisation, panic and dis...
33m Mar 09, 2025
33m
386: Children Learn What They Live
How can we start to become more aware of the ways we conduct ourselves in our lives, especially the way we conduct ourselves towards others? At a time when we are being encouraged to cheapen our relationships with one another, or to wield power over one another, can we catch on more sensitively to the ways we carry our shame, our wish to dominate, our fear, and how the protective parts of us re...
35m Mar 02, 2025
35m
385: All the True Vows
Underneath the necessary surface of our life - all the ways we accommodate, fit in, bend ourselves to taker care of one another - there is another deeper current. Sometimes we might go years without attending to this flow, maybe encountering it again only right at the end of our lives. We keep on finding through our conversations and our work how much it matters in a life to attend to the flow,...
29m Feb 23, 2025
29m
384: Circling Around Through Time
When we see our lives only as a linear path from here to there, A to B, we put ourselves at the risk of endless comparison between 'where I am' and 'what might have been'. It's a comparison that does not often support us well, and it fuels an orientation that values youth ('I still have time to get to where I'm supposed to be') over age ('time is running out'). There is another way to look - to...
27m Feb 16, 2025
27m
383: My Face is Real, Yours Is
We have choices to make in how we relate to one another. We can relate from something real in us, and choose to treat the others we are with as real. Or we can retreat into a 'hall of mirrors' when we relate to one another from the more protective patterns in us. Much becomes possible when we find a way to be real, to 'wake to each other' as we're invited to do by M C Richards in this week's so...
31m Feb 09, 2025
31m
382: The Experience of Being Alive
Is our primary task in our lives to pursue meaning? Or is it first to learn how to be in ever more contact with our lives - to actually experience what happens inside us and outside us and bring the two into relationship with one another? It might well be the case that until we’re doing that, it’s very hard for us to be sensitive enough to our lives to even know if meaning is coming our way. A ...
30m Feb 02, 2025
30m
381: The Light in Us
What happens when we recognise something original in ourselves and each other that exists prior to our individual stories and fears? When we see past the nest of our anxieties to what Mark Nepo calls 'the clear bird' - our essential nature that connects us to the very beginning of things - we might discover a profound basis for meeting life's complexities with wisdom and courage. When someone s...
35m Jan 26, 2025
35m
380: Try to Love the Questions Themselves
To live in the unresolved questions, tensions and contradictions of life is to be alive. To try to turn away from them, as if our lives could be question and confusion free is simply to drive the tensions inside us - to divide ourselves internally and to divide ourselves from life. We could see, as Lizzie says in this conversation, that "the tensions are life itself". So what does it take to li...
27m Jan 19, 2025
27m
379: No Position is Correct for Long
We often hold onto positions, opinions and beliefs as a way of shoring ourselves up against the uncertainty of the world. And while our positions may have much integrity to them, it's most often the case that they're not the whole story, especially when faced with the complexity of the world, as well as the complexity of ourselves and other people. Holding on to a position too tightly can easil...
37m Jan 12, 2025
37m
378: Once Loved
Giving can, for many of ourselves, be a fraught experience. Maybe we give to one another in the expectation of a particular kind of response or validation, and then maybe we get it… or not. Or we might hold back from giving as a way to keep ourselves safe from being exposed and getting things wrong. How we give to one another and how our giving brings life to both giver and receiver are our top...
34m Jan 05, 2025
34m
377: Learning to be Alive
“Worry is really misplaced imagination”, someone told us recently. In this conversation, we consider what it is to bring our rich capacities for imagination, reflection and attention to the living of our lives, rather than as a way to escape life. What becomes possible when we commit to being changed by our experiences, in much the same way that light illuminates and changes a room, rather than...
30m Dec 29, 2024
30m
376: Serious Play and Playful Seriousness
The delicate balance between taking life seriously and maintaining a sense of playfulness. How earnest conviction and dedication help us take care of what matters - our responsibilities and the people who depend on us. And the life-giving and vital counterweight of lightheartedness: how a looser grip on life can free us to imagine, deepen our contact with others, and create new possibilities.
28m Dec 22, 2024
28m
375: Believe in Your Own Strange Loveliness
“People can be wonderful”, is where we begin this week’s conversation. How do we bring that forward, in the midst of all that can be so difficult, so that we can step-by-step make a world in which we meet one another with conversation, compassion, kindness, and welcome? And where do we need to start inside ourselves and with the ones closest to us in order to first glimpse and then act on this ...
36m Dec 15, 2024
36m
374: Learning to Trust Life
We can make our lives very small by turning away from what we don't understand or what frightens us. And if we feel very separate from life, like somehow we are visitors from a far-off planet with no belonging to this planet, we can easily feel as if we have nothing to stand on as we face what is most difficult about life. In this week's conversation we begin with a source from Rainer Maria Ril...
33m Dec 08, 2024
33m
373: The Patterns of Your Life Repeat Themselves Until You Listen
Sometimes, changing our patterns can seem like the most enormous task. But maybe if we learn to gently take ourselves by the hand, instead of using force, we can find a gentler way into new stories and new ways of living in them. And maybe it's exactly this gentleness, this sense of possibility and hope in our essential goodness and capacity, that is most called for right now.
32m Dec 01, 2024
32m
372: Bonus: I Come to You With No Need to Be Fixed
We hit our first technical interruption in over seven years this week, when an operating-system update froze Lizzie's computer. We'll be back on track next week, but in the meantime here's a repeat of our most popular episode from back in 2021, which draws on the work of our cherished friend Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. We're conditioned to think of ourselves and other people as in need of fixing...
32m Nov 26, 2024
32m
371: Not Trying to Be Perfect
How might we relate to the standards that our culture hands us around parenting, partnering, working, and being a person? On the one hand, they can be of immense value. They can give us a way to orient to what might be important and worth paying attention to. But on the other hand they can be stultifying, the source of endless comparison and self-criticism, and an impossible goal of perfection....
29m Nov 17, 2024
29m
370: Intimacy With Life
Perhaps instead of trying to control our experience, to somehow ‘lift ourselves out of our lives’, we found a way to be ever more contactful with life itself? Like a mother with her babies. Or like a fish with the stream. Or like the roots of the tree with the earth that gives it life. Might we find, in that softening and slowing, a way to inhabit our lives more fully and take care more skilful...
36m Nov 10, 2024
36m
369: Uncovering the Wisdom Within Us
What if life isn't calling us to reach for something outside ourselves, but instead to uncover and nurture the intelligence that's already within us? We examine how genuine maturity means moving beyond our childhood instincts of self-protection, discussing what it means to be truly "grown up" – a state where we can feel at home in our world regardless of circumstances. This isn't about shieldin...
33m Nov 03, 2024
33m
368: One Word Spoken Slowly by the Stars
We might see ourselves, as Ursula Le Guin writes, ‘one syllable of a word spoken slowly by the stars’. In this episode we wonder together what is maked possible when we reclaim and retell sacred narratives about being human, as an alternative to the mechanistic views of existence as meaning-free and humans as accidents in a cold unfeeling universe. How might these narratives help us step into a...
36m Oct 27, 2024
36m
367: The Gift of Our Attention
Our attention is one of the most valuable gifts we can give to another. As radically social beings, we feel strongly when attention is genuinely brought our way with sufficient care and genuineness, and we long for it. And in the same way we are dignified and deepened when we bring our sincere attention to the world around us, to our experience, and to others. And so if attention is such a valu...
34m Oct 20, 2024
34m
366: What Grief Wants
Some words about grief, and about grief's intelligence, and what it might be here to teach us both when it arrives in full force and when we 'catch a glimpse of it' in the moments with those we most cherish and love. How might grief - and its inevitability - open us to receive the life we are in the midst of right now, and how might it move us to take care of what and who we care about the most?
34m Oct 13, 2024
34m
365: What the Journey is For
Today we mark the completion of seven years of Turning Towards Life with a conversation about how we might find a way to participate in our lives, whatever life brings us. In many ways, this has been the recurring theme of our last seven years - how to be active participants in a life which will always be a mystery and in which so much is beyond our control. We talk about the gifts of being act...
38m Oct 06, 2024
38m
364: Learning to See What We See But Do Not Know That We See
As we unfold into life one of the risks is that we become more rigid rather than more fluid, more automatic rather than taking up our freedom. And one place we might look for, and work with, our rigidity and freedom is in seeing the judgments and assumptions we make about other people. When other people become fixed, predictable or boring to us, it may be that we are not looking with the requis...
32m Sep 29, 2024
32m
363: Some People Will Ask
On the profound, life-saving and deeply dignifying possibilities that come from sharing our personal stories and experiences. The cultural narratives that often discourage openness, contrasted with the healing power of vulnerability and the importance of creating welcome for one another to speak and be listened to.
25m Sep 22, 2024
25m
362: The Wildness in Our Hearts
On the tensions between our inner worlds and the external identities we often adopt to fit in. How societal expectations and personal fears can lead us to suppress what’s most true about us, and the importance of reconnecting with the "wild energies" within our souls. This week we explore how creative practices, changes in routine, and mindful engagement with everyday tasks can help us wake up ...
33m Sep 17, 2024
33m
361: This Relationship is Ours
We ‘privatise’ so much about our lives that is actually shared, as if we were separate entities - like objects that bump into one another only occasionally. But it’s an impoverished story that robs us of so much contact, depth and support. It might be much more accurate to say that instead of being like objects we are more like whirlpools in a river - constantly evolving processes that shape o...
34m Sep 08, 2024
34m
360: Don't Lighten the Burden
Sometimes, instead of trying to make life's challenges easier, it's more beneficial to fully acknowledge the weight of our burdens until we're compelled to put them down. How we often carry impossibly heavy expectations, work ethics, or people-pleasing behaviours, thinking these will lead to success or belonging, when instead they multiply our difficulties. The importance of compassionately re...
36m Sep 01, 2024
36m
359: When the Neglected Comes Forward for Recognition
How might we engage with our inner world and find meaning in our experiences? In this episode we explore how we might embrace even the difficult parts of life as potential sources of wisdom and growth. And how this perspective can transform our relationship with challenging emotions and experiences, inviting us all to approach life's complexities with curiosity and openness. The conversation w...
26m Aug 25, 2024
26m
358: Myths That Keep Us From Our Lives
Exploring three common protective myths people use to cope with life's uncertainties. How these myths, while intended to provide comfort, often amplify the very isolation and fear we want to avoid, and rarely help us as much as we think they will. How we might come to examine our own protective stories, opening the possibility of softening them so we can remember our inherent qualities, such as...
35m Aug 18, 2024
35m