357: What You Thought You Lost
On rediscovering and recovering our own and other people’s qualities and possibilities in the midst of everything that happens. How what we think we've lost in life may actually be ever-present, just waiting to be rediscovered, often brought to us by the presence of others. And the possibility that every encounter with another person, even difficult ones, can remind us of qualities within ourse...
35m Aug 11, 2024
35m
356: Becoming an Adult Who...
How do we become fully ourselves, as adults, in contact with our essential depth and capacity and without being so much in the grip of the defensive patterns of personality we developed as children? Being an adult who is in touch with their essence. Being an adult who can play. Being an adult who can be joyful. Being an adult who can find freedom in themselves. Being an adult who can not shut ...
36m Aug 04, 2024
36m
355: Be Like a Cat
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 situ...
30m Jul 28, 2024
30m
354: The Life in Our Resistances
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 bo...
35m Jul 21, 2024
35m
353: The Gift of Loving
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 t...
31m Jul 14, 2024
31m
352: What to Remember When Waking
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 atte...
37m Jul 07, 2024
37m
351: Listening is Suspending Disbelief
When we listen with total presence, the person speaking to us often communicates differently, hearing themselves more deeply. We ‘hear ourselves into being’ more fully by listening this way too. Most people aren’t used to being heard in this way, and most of us aren’t used to listening with this much attention. But the act of deep attentive listening can change us profoundly, and change the re...
35m Jun 30, 2024
35m
350: Learning to Be In Each Others' Reshaping
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 l...
31m Jun 23, 2024
31m
349: In the Open
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 int...
28m Jun 19, 2024
28m
348: How Surely Gravity's Law
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...
36m Jun 09, 2024
36m
347: Safe Space
How do we make the safety in ourselves that makes it possible for others to feel safe with us? How do we make it safe for others so they can feel safe in themselves? How do we make it safe for us to disagree with one another as well as agree, to be uncomfortable together as well as comfortable, to hold together unity and difference? And how might committing to this make it more possible for us ...
32m Jun 02, 2024
32m
346: The Opposites and the Centre
We make all kinds of separations inside ourselves and between ourselves and one another. “I’m like this, but not like that” we tell ourselves. But that division leaves us bereft of all kinds of possibility and freedom. Perhaps right when we’re feeling most serious, it’s time to reach for that in us which is playful and bring it right alongside. Or when we meet someone very different to us, it’s...
35m May 26, 2024
35m
345: What If We Could Just Tell Each Other?
We bring ourselves into life in a dance we learned right from our earliest days… in which we’re often carefully managing what we can show to one another of ourselves. And others learn to dance with us in this way too, finding out from bring around us what to talk about, and what to avoid. Pretty soon we’re all dancing around that which, if we pay attention, was in plain view all along. Oftentim...
33m May 19, 2024
33m
344: Become the Wind
Change is everywhere. Within us. Around us. And, sometimes, in our longing for some stability, some centre of ‘no change’ in the tumult of our lives, we’ll close ourselves off from the truth of things, numbing ourselves, distracting ourselves, and pretending it isn’t happening. But the truth is that everything changes. And although we might try to fight it, we human beings long for what is true...
30m May 12, 2024
30m
343: Home
We often go searching out in the world, far and wide, for qualities that already live in ourselves. And, fuelled by the story of our wider culture that our longings are best met always by ‘more’ and always ‘away from ourselves’, we can forget the treasures that live right here within us, in this living, beating, life-filled heart and body that we are never separate from. So how can we open ours...
25m May 05, 2024
25m
342: That I Would Be Good
How can we come to know the vast stores of goodness, care and benevolence that are in each of us simply by being human? What makes it possible for us to bring this goodness to bear on the many difficulties and realities that face every single human life? How can we do this without minimising or explaining away the dark sides of human life, and the genuine pain and confusion we can experience at...
33m Apr 28, 2024
33m
341: Bless This Everyday Mess
Right when we’re in the mess and complexity of things - for example when raising children, or being in a partnership, or working alongside others - is where we can learn so much about what it is to be human. And it’s where we also learn the most about our own power - to make a world that is better for others to live in, or worse. In this week’s conversation we explore how we might turn everyday...
37m Apr 21, 2024
37m
340: Your Task is to Undo the Barriers to Love
In a time of global distress, we’re often faced with news of dire situations far from us that we can do little to affect directly. But we can learn to respond to the world that is more immediately around us with the kind of patience, wisdom, care and love that makes a genuine, tangible, and life-giving difference. In this week’s conversation we explore how we can observe and undo the barriers i...
34m Apr 15, 2024
34m
339: A Place for Others to Rest In
How can we be the ones who create safety for other people to bring their troubles, longings, hopes, pain and fear our way? And how can stay long enough, and not turn away? And how do we then accompany one another as we address what we find - with love, truthfulness, patience and exquisite care?
29m Apr 10, 2024
29m
338: What the Living Do
On the ways comparison can steal the actual living of life from us, and on finding ways to appreciate and live in the midst of the ordinary everydayness of things. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
33m Mar 31, 2024
33m
337: This Small Space
On acknowledging experiences rather than moving away from them or interrupting them. How we might experience our feelings without ‘acting them out’ when they’re intense or overwhelming. And the gifts and blessings of being gentle with ourselves and one another.
30m Mar 27, 2024
30m
336: Right-Sized
How do we take up our right size in the world? Not in some fixed, rigid way but as a responsive way of engaging with what is called for from us in each situation and context? When we see that in some way ‘too big’ and ‘too small’ are both ways we try to control situations, maybe we can open to the emergence of something more fluid, more adaptive, and more sensitive in us. Something that asks of...
30m Mar 17, 2024
30m
335: The Thread We Follow
So much changes in the course of a day, a year, a life. We can be mysteries to ourselves and to others - confounding, confusing - as we turn this way and that, trying to find our way together through this changeable complex world. It’s very easy to feel lost and confused. But even in the midst of all of this, is there something we can learn to trust… a thread we can reach for that runs through...
32m Mar 10, 2024
32m
334: How to Hold the Questions of Others
How can we learn to love questions themselves as much as the answers we seek? And can we learn to be the ones who sincerely welcome the questions of others, so that they have room to breathe and grow? Because it may well be that often, in the midst of the complexity of life, it’s the very bringing of our sincere questions to one another in which the seeds of the responses we need can begin to g...
25m Mar 03, 2024
25m
333: Nurturing the Goodness Within
As we encounter life we encounter all manner of different parts within us - and among them we often find parts of us which seem determined to thwart us and hold us back. How might we relate to the critical parts, the over-protective parts, the obstructive parts, and the parts of us that simply terrified? And instead of being dominated by them, or trying to dominate them, how might we parent the...
36m Feb 26, 2024
36m
332: Coaching and the Stories We Live In
In which we talk about integral development coaching, a way to work in profound and compassionate support of people at they engage with their lives. It's this work that we're deeply dedicated to at Thirdspace, but which we haven't spoken much about directly in the more than six years of Turning Towards Life. Along the way we talk about what it is to meet someone with deep welcome, to be attenti...
44m Feb 18, 2024
44m
331: The Most Important Thing
What might come if we could, as Julia Fehrenbacher writes, make a home inside ourselves, a shelter of kindness that grows all the truest things? It seems to us that doing exactly that is of great support to our courage, our blossoming, our bringing ourselves to the world with both strength and gentleness, and with the truthfulness our relationships deserve. So much of the time our inner harshne...
26m Feb 11, 2024
26m
330: Looking After Our Selves
When we’re children we often know intuitively something that as adults we forget - that there are many different parts of each of us inside, and that sometimes we really need to give space to the part of us that will be kind, and nurturing, and gentle. As adults it is possible for us to relearn this, and we can practice relating to the whole of our inner world with an attentiveness and spacious...
37m Feb 04, 2024
37m
329: The Deliberate Scaffolding of Relationship
In our work as coaches, teachers, leaders and community makers, we have been finding anew over the last few years just how important ‘deliberateness’ is in making relationships that can hold and spaces in which there is genuine welcome. It might be easy to ignore the deliberate practices needed to make relationships in this way, or to treat them as optional. But, as the poet Seamus Heaney tells...
38m Jan 28, 2024
38m
328: This is Hard for Me
“I am a person who needs you to listen, simply listen, hear me say 'this is hard for me', not offer an answer or solution,” writes Lana Hechtman Ayers. And we are in agreement that there is a move, an opening, a 'coming alongside' one another that is the first move to make when someone brings us their difficulty, or pain. For many of us, this is not at all easy to do. Later, perhaps, when a req...
35m Jan 21, 2024
35m
327: Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower
“What is it like, such intensity of pain?” writes Rainer Maria Rilke. While we might ask one another in our more difficult moments “How are you?” or perhaps “How are you doing?”, we less often ask Rilke’s deeper question, a question that helps us and one another make contact with the aliveness and mystery of our being human. And so in this week’s conversation we explore together what it is to t...
35m Jan 14, 2024
35m
326: Urgent Message to a Friend in Pain
"Remember when you saw the stars of childhood, when you knelt alone and thought that they were there for you, lamps that something held to prove your beauty?" writes Joseph Fasano. Can we use these words as a gateway to finding a sense of belonging in the world, rather than being separate from it? And as we find our way to our own belonging - our receiving of life - what does it take for us to ...
35m Jan 07, 2024
35m
325: The Ebb and Flow of Relationship
“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 ...
37m Dec 31, 2023
37m
324: Taking Back Our Projections
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...
34m Dec 24, 2023
34m
323: You Are Big Enough To Hold It All
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...
35m Dec 17, 2023
35m
322: What To Love When You're Running Out of Things to Love
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 ...
36m Dec 10, 2023
36m
321: The Small Things That Carry Love
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 car...
33m Dec 03, 2023
33m
320: The First Step is to Admit 'This is Hard for Me'
"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 assu...
30m Nov 26, 2023
30m
319: To Be Hopeful in Bad Times
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 ...
35m Nov 19, 2023
35m
318: The Healing
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 ...
33m Nov 12, 2023
33m
317: Something Small and Practical
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?
31m Nov 05, 2023
31m
316: Stay Like Clay
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?
35m Oct 29, 2023
35m
315: We Never Know Who We Are
Underneath many of our common-sense understandings of who we each are, there is a deeper mystery. How did I get to be the person who I am today? How does the stream of life that began long before me, and will continue long after me, shape me? And is there a way we can come to know ourselves and our mystery more fully in the way we listen to and come to know one another - in friendship, communit...
32m Oct 22, 2023
32m
314: Blessing of Courage
Where does our courage come from? It certainly (and paradoxically) doesn’t come from our efforts to make ourselves safe, or strong, or to armour ourselves against the world. Indeed, it may be that our courage really comes from what is most vulnerable in us, and what is most true - the something in us that lives very close to fear, and is also a neighbour to joy.
27m Oct 15, 2023
27m
313: Patience
True patience isn’t ‘going slow’, it isn’t ‘tuning out’, and it isn’t a stick to beat ourselves with. Instead it’s our capacity to turn towards what is actually happening without turning away, and to turn towards our own responses - including our irritation, anger, frustation - without turning away either. It’s in this kind of patience that the seeds of a genuine kind of compassion for the mess...
33m Oct 08, 2023
33m
312: 6 Years In: Strengthening One Another
Within us are great forces for the destruction of one another. But also great forces for mutual support, mutual strengthening, and the mutual amplification of care and goodness. Which will we draw upon when we are in trouble? It’s the 6th birthday of ‘Turning Towards Life’, and we are feeling celebratory, and also a mix of hopefulness about the world and tenderness at the many difficulties we ...
33m Oct 01, 2023
33m
311: The Gift of Forgetting
The possibility of taking up both remembering and forgetting as intentional practices. So that we can remember, and not forget, one another’s gifts and goodness, sacredness and possibility, strength and tenderness. So we can forget all that we hold onto in one another that keeps us from who we could be, and meet one another afresh in each brink of time. And so we can remember what needs fixing ...
33m Sep 24, 2023
33m
310: Continually Remade
Look around at the people you know, and you’ll quickly see how particular each person’s response is to what life brings to them. You might say that each person has cultivated, over time, a particular ‘flavour’ for their engagement with life, or a particular ‘way of being’ in response to the world. And yet this ‘flavour’ is often all but invisible to us in our understanding of ourselves, fallin...
33m Sep 17, 2023
33m
309: Within You Is...
We human beings are very sensitive to truth. So when we find the place inside us from which we can talk, truthfully, about the many aspects of our experience, it can be deeply connecting and safety-making. It also goes a long way to having the many parts of us themselves feel named and seen, and in doing so to become less desperate and fearful. And this place from which we can talk? We might ca...
29m Sep 11, 2023
29m
308: Start with Rest
A conversation about slowing down so we can, with gentleness, relax our own patterns and habits and then see them with truthfulness. About how we might be the ones for each other that make this possible. And about how radical, counter-cultural and necessary true rest can be.
34m Sep 03, 2023
34m