168: When the Unexpected Comes
When something difficult or unwelcome happens, there are many reasons for us to contract away from our lives in an attempt to control what we're feeling. It's a kind of self-protection, yes, but can also be a kind of violence to ourselves. And it often cuts us off from what could most support us, open us, and hold us. So how about learning to connect to the memory of our vastness, and our inti...
34m Dec 20, 2020
34m
167: All the Dragons are Princesses
So much of what we're afraid of is inside us... we're afraid of the feelings that will come with shame, or with grief, or if we really let ourselves feel the scale of our love or our longing or our hurt. And often our fear is, itself, a way not to feel what we imagine we won't be able to tolerate feeling. So what happens if, instead of treating all these experiences as terrors, we start to see ...
36m Dec 13, 2020
36m
166: The Alive Ones
"The opposite of life is not death", writes Caitlin Johnstone, "The opposite of life is habit." So how, we wonder in this conversation, can we invest the ordinariness of life with the reverence and awe that calls to us? How might we find that aspect of ourselves, in our vast inner landscapes, that is neither our reactivity nor our defensiveness, but is itself life looking out at life in wonder?...
33m Dec 06, 2020
33m
165: And the Spiral Begins Again
How can we cultivate a real, mature kind of gratefulness that keeps opening us to both the wonder of life and the suffering and difficulty that's here? A gratefulness that doesn't seek to cover over anything at all, but instead awakens our care, skilfulness, and capacity to step into the world with the action that is called for? This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about havin...
34m Nov 29, 2020
34m
164: In the Blaze of Your Presence
What does it take to allow ourselves to be who we are, and to allow other people to be who they are? What happens when we relate to one another from a deep respect for our own goodness, power and care, and a deep respect for the goodness, power and care of others? This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the possibility of being in relationship in a way that allows us to bri...
33m Nov 23, 2020
33m
163: We Are Made for Belonging
We are made for belonging... we are made to be the ones who can hold onto one another with hope and love as we descend into the darkness... and we are made for discovering in ourselves and one another an indestructable goodness that holds and welcomes all our hurts, all our difficulties, all our confusion. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the practices of hopefulnes...
34m Nov 15, 2020
34m
162: The Shape of a Heart
We all carry wounds and hurts with us into our lives, and we present them to the world in our longing to be seen and to be healed. Perhaps our hurts are so easily 'out front' we shouldn't be surprised at how often we each get triggered into self-protective and defensive patterns which are at odds with our deeper intentions and longings. But if we could find a way to support one another in heari...
32m Nov 08, 2020
32m
161: Small Kindnesses
It's in the small acts that we build a life: the way we look at one another, the way we talk to one another, the way we listen. At these times when so much of what we rely upon is being called into question, what does it take for us to see that it's these small acts that also shape who we are? Can we learn to be the ones who, a step at a time, bring to the world exactly what we are longing for?...
31m Nov 01, 2020
31m
160: You Too Are That Beautiful to Me
So many of us live in the midst of a harsh narrative of self-criticism and self-doubt, feeling all the ways we imagine we fall short of who we're meant to be in life. But every now and again we might catch a glimpse of something very beautiful in us, something essential, that reminds us that to be a living being in the midst of a living world is always in one way or another to belong, to be at ...
32m Oct 25, 2020
32m
159: A Table Made of Listening
Listening deeply, lovingly and fearlessly to one another is among the most nourishing and life-giving practices we humans can take up, and yet many of us have few places in our lives where we regularly do this. Perhaps that's because laying out a 'table made of listening' for one another, one that is open enough and solid enough and safe enough, calls on us to welcome parts of ourselves and oth...
34m Oct 18, 2020
34m
158: Divided No More
When we allow our hearts to be completely colonised by the demands of the organisation, community, movement or family we're part of, we lose a vital gift of our own individuality - our capacity to take a stand on our lives that includes us fully, and our capacity to speak up truthfully and with integrity about what we see both within and around us. And when we find ourselves more and more able ...
34m Oct 11, 2020
34m
157: Loving and Being Loved by the World
What does it take to be good ancestors, to be people who come not from fear but from a deep love for the world and a commitment to its future? This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the tricky, necessary and life-giving possibility of committing to love of the world not as a 'feeling' but as a practice, a promise, and a commitment - and when we work to widen our understand...
33m Oct 04, 2020
33m
156: Always Return
When we make our relationships into projects, when we demand that the people close to us be different to how they are, when we bring only our 'fix things', 'make things happen', 'change things' energy to them, we should perhaps not be surprised that the people we are in relationship with quickly become disappointments to us. And, as we do this, we quickly become difficult to find and meet deepl...
28m Sep 27, 2020
28m
155: Every Moment a Surprise
As Oliver Burkeman writes in our source for this week "So much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future". This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about what can happen when we start to relax our attempts to have life go exactly our way, the ...
34m Sep 20, 2020
34m
154: You Might See an Angel, Anytime
A great deal of our suffering comes from our certainty that life is meant to go our way... and this certainty easily throws us into on the one hand imagining we're meant to have the powers only a deity could have and, on the other hand, feeling small and cynical and disconnected from life. But what if we could see that we're participants in something much more like a dance in which we barely kn...
31m Sep 13, 2020
31m
153: Receiving Our Lives
We're encouraged to live our lives as a way of controlling things - most particularly in the realm of acting into the world to get attention from others and to be recognised as special. This understanding leads us quickly down a painful and deeply unsatisfying path of needing to be verified at every turn. But if instead we could learn to pay attention to life, and to find a way to receive the o...
33m Sep 06, 2020
33m
152: The Right Side of the Wrong Tree
How often we compare ourselves to impossible standards of perfection, and how often this comparison produces the kind of contraction, efforting, and pushing that distances us from ourselves and others, and that is the opposite of what we seek. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might find playful ways of loving the messiness that it is to be human and, from ther...
31m Aug 30, 2020
31m
151: Parts of Me, Parts of Her
Very often our relationship to the world is, in some way, a projection of the inner relationships between the different parts of ourselves. And, just as often, our experience of others is really a projection of some part of us. All of this can very much get in the way of our being in full and truthful contact with what's outside us. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about h...
37m Aug 24, 2020
37m
150: Bringing the Darkness into the Light
As we grow in whatever family and wider culture we're born into, we inevitably find out that parts of us are not welcome. Most of us are pretty adept at exiling or hiding those parts away. But what if, instead of labelling them, judging them, and trying to keep them out of view, we learned to turn towards them as if they were bearers of gifts? And what if we could learn that we are indeed made ...
34m Aug 16, 2020
34m
149: Our Mortality is our Gift to the Future
How would we live our lives if we understood our mortality to be a gift - one we were given by all those who came before us, and that makes possible the lives of those who will come after us? What kindness and forgiveness might we bring to our lives if we understood that each of us - especially those with whom we are in difficulty - is a brief flash of life in a universe-sized unfolding process...
34m Aug 10, 2020
34m
148: The Gift of Sadness
What if sadness isn't something to be avoided, but an opening, a doorway that we can step into? What if sadness could wake us up to what we most care about? And what if it could bring us into the orbit of others in a way that deepens our lives? Episode 148 of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might treat our inevitable grief as a call, a question, a possibility - and about how...
37m Aug 02, 2020
37m
147: Willing to be Changed
Most of us were never taught to admit we don't know - and as a result we hold onto our positions and beliefs no matter what. Others of us learned early on that the most important thing we could do was get along with others, and so we routinely give up what we see or care about in order to avoid disagreement. At the heart of both positions is a kind of distrust - distrust that we can still take ...
32m Jul 26, 2020
32m
146: Most of Us Are Dragged Towards Wholeness
Life keeps calling us to uncover and act on all the parts of ourselves we've so far left out, but much of the time we resist the call. Too painful perhaps, too unfamiliar. Sometimes, though, we find ourselves stepping right into exactly that unfamiliarity and making discoveries about ourselves the open up a whole world... and sometimes we find ourselves being that for others. Both require us to...
34m Jul 19, 2020
34m
145: Do You Want To Leave?
Somewhere along the line, many of us learn that voicing our needs directly - asking people for what we want - is to invite ridicule, shame or otherwise ask to be hurt. Our learning to undo that - to find out what we really long for, and to give voice to it - is a necessary, difficult and life-giving path to taking up our full size and place in the world. And it's also absolutely necessary for a...
30m Jul 12, 2020
30m
144: Blessings Often Arrive as Trouble
When we treat the pain of our lives as a mistake, we cut something off that could be deeply life giving - for ourselves, for our families, for our wider society. When we treat the pain of our society as a mistake, we cut off many avenues for healing, understanding, and for addressing the difficulties that surround us. A conversation about learning, with one another's support, to handle life's d...
33m Jul 05, 2020
33m
143: The Alchemy of Welcome
What happens when we confuse ourselves with just one part of ourselves – when we think we ‘are’ a particular way we’re feeling, a thought, the exam result I got… When we think we ‘are’ our job title, or our joblessness, our bank balance… In short, when we confuse ourselves with being ‘just one thing’. And how our forgetting our own variety in this way also has us forget and not see the richness...
34m Jun 28, 2020
34m
142: Bonus: The Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course, starts September 2020
In this special edition of 'Turning Towards Life' Lizzie and Justin talk about the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course, offered this year as a completely on-line programme beginning September 2020 (offered in partnership with New Ventures West), a certification programme in integral development coaching which is at the heart of Thirdspace's work and a project of great joy and love for both ...
55m Jun 24, 2020
55m
142: Making the Unwanted Wanted
Life keeps on happening, and most of it happens whether we want it that way or not. Our ‘not wanting’ can easily lead us into pushing away life as it happens, and into exiling the parts of ourselves and others that we find to be unwelcome. But another way might be possible for each of us, a path we can practice that has us turning towards what happens with welcome. And this could be a way in wh...
38m Jun 21, 2020
38m
141: Just Beyond Yourself
Just beyond ourselves, just outside all the ways we’ve taken ourselves to be, just beyond our certainty and the familiar ways we know ourselves… Just here, beyond ourselves, something is calling all the time, something which we discover in our willingness to be affected by, to be changed by, the ‘other’ in other people and in the world. A conversation about the possibilities that come when we n...
34m Jun 14, 2020
34m
140: How to Kill a Living Thing
All the ways we try to protect ourselves from life by hardening our hearts, how this leads us to misunderstand love in ways that strangles the aliveness that's in ourselves and in others, and what we might do to exercise proper responsibility in how we care for each other. A conversation about our power to either recognise or smother the beauty in people, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thi...
31m Jun 07, 2020
31m
139: No Conflict With Anything I Do
It's a necessary part of our growing up that we learn to get along in the culture into which we were born. But, on the way, we easily lose touch with what is most life-giving for us, and cover up our truer desires with a crowd of wants and needs that help us to fit in, or stand out, or get ahead. So much becomes possible when we start to strip away the cloud of distractions from our truer longi...
39m May 31, 2020
39m
138: Nothing Missing
It's so easy to suspend our lives... to in one way or another miss out on being here because we're waiting for conditions to be right, to become a better kind of person, until we're saved. We can even suspend our lives waiting until we feel like 'nothing is missing'. But what if even the feeling of 'something missing' is what's calling us to inhabit our lives just as they are? A conversation ab...
36m May 24, 2020
36m
137: If We Were No Longer Pushing
How we exhaust ourselves (and often others!) by our attempts to push life around, to control it, to have things just our way. And what might happen if we learned to give that up, so we could discover what our hands might do when our bigger intentions are freed. A conversation about what happens when we let ourselves fall into life, and when we stop trying to herd cats, with Lizzie Winn and Just...
39m May 17, 2020
39m
136: The Jewel at the Heart of the Stone
When big change comes upon us, we can at first devote a great deal of our hearts' energy to a fight with the change - which often does nothing to help us. But our hearts are equally capable of something else - a turn towards bigger questions, and to the possibility that the change might be inviting us into a deeper relationship with life. Hidden here might be 'the jewel at the heart of the ston...
34m May 10, 2020
34m
135: How You Do Anything is How You Do Everything
How are we coming at life at this time? Are we careful? mindless? gentle with the things we are touching? Or careless, distracted, and in a self-important hurry at all costs? A conversation about paying attention to our lives, this week inspired by Amanda Palmer’s writing, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
40m May 03, 2020
40m
134: Bread & Butter People... or How to be a Welcome
There's a down-to-earthness about some people, an everydayness. When people are this way, there's no fear that they're putting on an act for you, that they may be different towards you when you are not there. And when each of us finds a way to be like this, we can be a profound welcome to one another. A conversation about ordinary, kind ways of being with one another, with Lizzie Winn and Justi...
38m Apr 26, 2020
38m
133: That Sweet Moon Language
Why we're all trying to get loved, why our covering that up gets us into all kinds of trouble, and what can happen when we start to get honest with one another about what's going on. A conversation about loving people without condition, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
38m Apr 19, 2020
38m
132: Unbroken
What does it take to remain hopeful about life when we're entering into the dark? How can we be beacons of hope to one another as we travel through the more difficult passages of our lives? A conversation about faithfulness to one another's wholeness, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
33m Apr 12, 2020
33m
131: How Long Will This Last?
The weeks of physical distancing we're in might, if we'll take it, give us an opportunity to develop a new relationship with time. What if time isn't a commodity to be consumed? And what would happen if we allow ourselves to encounter time as depth, or as play, or as presence, or as possibility? A conversation about giving up our frantic, fearful relationship with the finiteness of our time, wi...
33m Apr 05, 2020
33m
130: The New Normal
Here in London we're coming the end of the first week of lockdown as the world responds to the coronavirus pandemic and, like millions of others across the globe, we're wondering together about what to make of this time. And there are choices about how to relate to the experience of confinement and physical distance - choices that are marked by our willingness to not add unnecessary suffering t...
33m Mar 29, 2020
33m
129: And Joy
Here in London, it's spring, and the blossom is emerging with its brightness and beauty. At the same time, we humans are living with an unfolding worldwide epidemic that threatens lives and livelihoods. Can we learn to live in these times in a way that opens us to both grief AND joy, to both fear AND our responsibility for one another? A conversation about the necessity and power of including a...
36m Mar 22, 2020
36m
128: Seeing One Another
In many parts of the world, as we recorded this conversation, we're having to take up practices of physical separation from one another in order to keep each other safe. But there are ways, even when we are physically distant, that we can come into a deeper, more full contact with one another than we might usually experience, and such contact with one another's depth is also a return to ourselv...
35m Mar 15, 2020
35m
127: On Vulnerability
How can we face uncertainty in a way that brings us into closer contact with our courage, openness and compassion for one another? Can we find a way, when we feel squeezed, to not withdraw into ourselves in fear? And is there a life-giving, truth-bringing way of turning towards our inescapable vulnerability? A conversation about turning towards one another for support in an uncertain time, with...
38m Mar 08, 2020
38m
126: Never Too Late
"Perhaps," Lizzie says, "even our reactivity is a way to come home". There's a part of us that is reactive, a way in which we get triggered and gripped by our certainties about ourselves and one another. Another, more essential part, is a kind of depth and openness in which we can meet the world - and have the world meet us - with more depth and openness in return. When we're gripped by our rea...
33m Mar 01, 2020
33m
125: Being Loved by the Storm
It's so easy to be in a fight with our lives, as if there's a way we can win out over our fear, or grief, or some other experience we're wishing not to have. But often trying to win out leaves us small, and exhausted, and rigid. What if we were to take up a different relationship with what's happening, in which we know our experiences not as something to get away from but a way in which life is...
34m Feb 23, 2020
34m
124: The Freedom in Discipline
The discipline of regular, intentional practice can look like a constraint but - as Lizzie says in this week's conversation - when we approach practice with intention and kindness it can bring us an extraordinary freedom from our habits, preferences, and ways of going to sleep to our lives. A conversation about the gifts of enabling constraints that we choose for ourselves, and the ways in whic...
32m Feb 16, 2020
32m
123: If They Dance Together, Something Unexpected Will Happen
What happens when we meet the parts of ourselves we've kept out of view, and let them dance with the parts that we're more comfortable showing other people? What happens when we're willing to welcome the parts in others we usually try to push away? And what creativity and possibility open when we give up trying to control one another so that instead we can meet one another fully? A conversation...
29m Feb 09, 2020
29m
122: The Way I Love You
When we're in the midst of giant changes - the birth of a new child, the death of someone we love, or any other changes that life brings us - it's tempting to try and get life back to 'the way it has been'. Indeed, we often actively encourage the people around us to do exactly that. 'You'll soon be back to your old self', we say. But what if we could see that life's changes will change us howev...
36m Feb 02, 2020
36m
121: Telling is Listening
It may be hard to see, but how we listen greatly shapes what it is possible for other people to say to us. Can we catch on to all the ways we’re trying to control what we experience as we listen, and as we do so drop our need to control so that we can be a profound welcome to others? A conversation about the ways in which we share ourselves with one another, and about how we can receive with op...
34m Jan 26, 2020
34m
120: Safe and Sound
What if we could learn to behold one another's wholeness, rather than focussing so narrowly on the aspects of others that we fear or desire? To trust in one another's vastness and depth instead of relating to one another from defensiveness or a desire to control? It would, for sure, give us a way to know one another with a greater kindness and a greater truthfulness than we do now. Can you imag...
31m Jan 19, 2020
31m