298: A Vast Net of Kindness
As the poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer teaches us, even as the whole world can seem to be falling, we have a choice whether to contribute to isolation and fear or to a vast net of generosity and kindness in which we hold one another. Perhaps when we feel most afraid and most isolated, it's the time to ask ourselves the other side of the question too - are we willing to receive and be open to the...
33m Jun 25, 2023
33m
297: What Listening is For
Every experience we have of another person is first about us (our hopes, our fears, our way of interpreting, our projections). And every experience another person has of us is first about them. We live, in some very deep way, in a ‘hall of mirrors’. So, do we have any chance of truly ‘receiving’ one another? What in ourselves might we have let go of to make that possible? And then what do we h...
37m Jun 18, 2023
37m
296: Age is Not a Problem to be Solved
A conversation for any of us who find ourselves resisting our bodies ageing and changing: about all the painful comparisons we can get into; about the way the narratives and economic structures (and algorithms) of our wider culture are built to enrol us in just these comparisons and just this pain; about how we might attend joyfully to our own inner lives so that we can come to discover and app...
29m Jun 11, 2023
29m
295: A Kind of Attention
The kind of attention we bring to the world can enslave, reduce or destroy us and others, or support us, and them, in flourishing. It particularly matters when we have any kind of power or influence - for example when we’re a parent, or a leader, a coach, in a partnership of any kind. But we're rarely taught anything about this, because it's not largely in the interest of the systems around us ...
33m Jun 04, 2023
33m
294: One Stubborn Layer at a Time
How do we find our way back to remembering who and what we really are, in the midst of lives that so easily call us into busyness, distraction, fear and the gnawing sense that something is always missing? How might we speak with one another, and write, in a way that evokes one another's depth? And why it is that, in these days of an new explosion of machine-writing software tools such as ChatGP...
36m May 28, 2023
36m
293: The Facts of Life
How do we face life as it is, with all its inevitable difficulty and with all the meaning and love we might be able to bring to it? And how do we find that in ourselves that is life itself, and live more often from there so that we can meet life with life?
34m May 21, 2023
34m
292: The Sharpest Tool in the Shed
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 include so much more everyone's talents and gifts, and the supportive ground of life itself? In this conv...
38m May 14, 2023
38m
291: This Ruined House
When we stop walling ourselves off from the suffering of the world - our own, other people's - we give ourselves a chance to meet one another's moonlight beauty in the midst of the inevitable undoing that is part of every human life. In this week's conversation we wonder together about what it is that makes this possible, and the relationships with one another that can grow as a consequence.
35m May 07, 2023
35m
290: This is the Time to Be Slow
What happens when we stop demanding of one another that we change, and instead generously come alongside one another with a measure of faithfulness in what John O'Donohue calls the 'hesitant light' which is still present in us even in our greatest difficulties?
32m Apr 30, 2023
32m
289: Losing It
What if we could hold gratitude and sorrow together in us, rather than reducing ourselves into only one or the other, and rather than tuning out of life so as to avoid losing things? What might it be to honour and experience the gratitude that is inside all sorrow, and the sorrow that is inside all gladness, and in so-doing come to honour the exquisite and extraordinary depth and inner multipli...
33m Apr 23, 2023
33m
288: Uncertainty is a Sacred Path
We greatly misunderstand ourselves and other people when we take ourselves to be 'fixed', just ‘one-way’. However stuck we've become, there is something of us that is always changing, and even when we can't see it there's always the seed of change waiting for the right moment to burst forth. So how do we learn to trust that in ourselves and others that is life's never ceasing unfolding into it...
30m Apr 17, 2023
30m
287: The Tender Places Inside Us
We can make a whole life around avoiding the tender places inside us, our ‘sore spots’, and in doing so keep ourselves away from many of our gifts and deepest longings. So how might we, instead of turning away, turn towards that in us which longs to sing, dance, speak or feel? And how might we help one another work compassionately with the sophisticated ‘protective patterns’ that keep us away f...
34m Apr 09, 2023
34m
286: Not Long to Love
We really don’t have long. And the world keeps telling us that the answer to that is to hurry. But our hurry and fearfulness, our sense that we always have to be in control, distracted and in action, obscures a different kind of attention that is greatly needed in the world - the kind of attention we would call ‘love’. So what becomes possible when we turn ourselves truthfully to the world with...
40m Apr 02, 2023
40m
285: Nature is Imagination
It’s so easy to feel separate from the world - indeed we’re taught in many ways that human beings are in some profound way separate, different, and apart from nature. So what happens when we start to allow the world around us to be our teacher... when we look within us to find resonance with that which we find around us? And when we let the living and non-living world teach us new ways of relat...
36m Mar 26, 2023
36m
284: Bonus Episode - The Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course 2023
In this special episode Lizzie and Justin talk about the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course, 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 of us. Our next cohort is open for applications now, and begins in July 2023. Over the course of our conversation you'll hear what makes this special pr...
55m Mar 23, 2023
55m
284: We Are Each a World
The world is calling out for change, and still we need to take care of one another. How can we remember to meet each person ‘as if they are a whole world’, whatever scale we’re working on?
32m Mar 19, 2023
32m
283: The Appointment
We can be invitations to one another, showing one another ways of being courageous, or ways of being loving, or ways of relating to others that we’d never imagined before. What might it be for us to stay open to one another in this way? To learn from one another in everything, and to see one another as living beacons of what might be possible - on the scale of the everyday (how we wash the dish...
34m Mar 12, 2023
34m
282: Promise to Stay Wild With Me
How can we learn to bring enthusiasm and aliveness to what's happening, without turning away? How do we welcome in ourselves that which we've exiled - and that very same something in others - and do so with joy and gladness? How do we hold together our wildness and our seriousness, our wide-eyed wonder and our practicality, our delight and our shame? How do we orient to life so that everything ...
34m Mar 05, 2023
34m
281: The Only Two Directions
'There are only two directions,' writes Quinn Bailey, 'towards and away'. Towards our lives or away from them. Towards life itself, or away from it. But is it always a choice? And when it is a choice, how do we go about even noticing which we are choosing? And what is it to act in harmony with life's longing for us, what with all the complex shaping forces within us and around us that can somet...
34m Feb 27, 2023
34m
280: Once You Begin, the Journey Owns You
We can live our whole lives caught up in ideas of ourselves that were handed to us from others - our family, our culture, or structures that work to constrain us. But in the midst of all of that, sometimes, if we look out of the corner of our eye or listen to the quiet voice inside us, we discover that something truer to us is calling. Stepping out onto that path - whether it's the call away t...
32m Feb 19, 2023
32m
279: A Commitment is a Promise Made from Love
A 'contract' is a way of making sure our interests are met in our relationship with another person, a business, a career. But contracts are a shallow framework for what really matters in our lives - friendships, long-term partnerships, marriages, parenting, or dedication to a vocation. Before long, if we've lived a life of bargains and contracts, we may find our hearts in a deep longing for som...
35m Feb 12, 2023
35m
278: Sometimes a Wild God
When a wild god arrives at our door... do we just shut it, or could we find a way to let the wildness in? What would it take to inhabit the 'wild' end of the wild...civilised polarity in a way that honours our lives, brings us to life, includes it - so that our wildness does not only live in the shadows but can live in our conversations, our creativity, the way we dance, and the way we respond ...
46m Feb 05, 2023
46m
277: Meeting the Shadow
What we won't own in ourselves often finds its way out into the world anyway, but in distorted or destructive form - sometimes at great consequence to ourselves and to those around us. Or we'll project it onto others - seeing anger in them, for example, when it's really ours to work with. But there are other paths, one of which is to turn towards what is 'shadow' in us and find a way to integra...
40m Jan 29, 2023
40m
276: Shaping Ourselves, Being Shaped
What happens when we find out that we are not, as we had thought, separate from the world, but are instead participants in a vast context that stretches back into deep time and that holds us and makes us, even as we make it? From this vantage point perhaps we get to see that in being living, sentient, relational beings in such an inescapably relationship-rich context we are in some ways very s...
36m Jan 22, 2023
36m
275: A Heartbeat Away From the Miraculous
It's so easy to feel how small we are in the face of the world, and there's so much in our contemporary culture that tells us that we are insignificant - either because we're not famous or because to be human is, itself, inconsequential. But what if we were to live our lives in an orientation reverence and wonder to the extraordinary power we have to shape things through the way we pay attenti...
34m Jan 15, 2023
34m
274: The Meaning of Love
The radical act of loving others both for who they are right now, and who they could yet become... and our willingness to 'leap ahead' on behalf of one another's being as a way of bringing our love into the world. What it is to love as a choice rather than as a feeling, to act in the best interest of others, to love those our culture tells us not to love, and a conversation along the way about ...
33m Jan 08, 2023
33m
273: Gardening Ourselves Awake Again
What we will point ourselves towards this year? Will it be dignifying, for us, our lives, the lives of those around us? Will it be generous, heartfelt, courageous, compassionate, kind, creative, patient, principled, inclusive, daring, fierce, loving, joyful, grateful, truthful or some other set of life-giving qualities? Or will we just take up the projects and commitments we’ve been handed by t...
32m Jan 04, 2023
32m
272: Thanks
What happens in us and between us when we learn to live on the inside of wonder, amazement, and deep gratefulness for the life we have been given - all of it? Might gratitude, indeed, be exactly what is called for in order for us to turn towards the world with all its difficulties and all its suffering, with the energy, creativity and love to do something about it all? This week's Turning Tow...
32m Dec 25, 2022
32m
271: We Are Time
What if our attempts to 'manage time' and to somehow escape the constraints (and possibilities) of time always, in the end, disappoint us because in some way we 'are time'? Saying that we are time begins to turn our experience of time inside out and upside down. It offers us the profound possibility that the inevitable passage of time is more an 'unfolding' than a 'passing'... we are time becau...
33m Dec 19, 2022
33m
270: A Silent Welcome
Underneath our inner chatter, fear, and attempts to have life go our way, there's a profound and welcoming silence - a silence that is a kind of recognition, a kind of acceptance, and a kind of refuge for the parts of us that clamour and fear... and for one another. We could even say that the silence is a kind of ground for who we each are, and in that way we long for it just as we long to feel...
30m Dec 11, 2022
30m
269: What Life Does
The story that 'my life is about me' that has become central to our culture ignores that we are, without our say-so, always part of a life and a universe that is much bigger than us. While it's understandable that we try to control and dominate life, before long we find out that life is having its way with us too. It may well be truer to say that 'I am about life'. So what would happen if inste...
36m Dec 04, 2022
36m
268: Understanding, Not Convincing
Being able to live with multiplicity - the ability to accept multiple realities at once - is critical to healthy relationships, and it's critical to our own flourishing too. Because once we see that there are many parts within us - that there we are each a kind of unfolding process of inner community - we can come to see that when two or more people are together there are already many parallel ...
42m Nov 27, 2022
42m
267: The Shimmering Waves of an Endless Sea
Why it matters to build a life of awareness, wondering, curiosity, truthfulness and facing things as they are. Finding a way to notice when we are letting life itself flow through us, and when we are standing in its way. Paying attention to all inside us that we have exiled or abandoned and doing the courageous, loving, painstaking work of welcoming it back and undoing our inner separation. Att...
36m Nov 20, 2022
36m
266: No Agenda
What does it take to be faithful enough in the unfolding of our lives that we let go of our tight grip, our hurry, our trying to control... and fall into letting ourselves be the kind of person we long to be? How might we learn that life will always surprise us, and instead of trying to remove the surprise let ourselves be brought to life by it? And what might it be to lessen the grip of 'hurry...
33m Nov 13, 2022
33m
265: An Intense, Urgent, Truthful, Alive Conversation
A friend once pointed out to us that conversations sometimes - often even - 'die in the middle' without anyone paying any attention to it happening. And sometimes conversations are robbed of their aliveness by our very wish that they go well, and our trying to fall back on a method in order to bring that about. So that has us wondering together who we each have to be in order that our conversat...
37m Nov 07, 2022
37m
264: Ordinary
Somewhere along the way we easily lose contact with the mystery and wonder of a life we're thrown into, a life that comes to us infused with presence and possibility. Perhaps because there are no directions, and perhaps because we're thrown into life without our say-so, and perhaps because there are always pressing practical issues of survival and care to attend to, it's easy for us to find our...
33m Oct 30, 2022
33m
263: Let Nothing Be In Between
There are so many ways we've learned to 'perform' - in work, as parents and friends and loved ones. And for any of us who do anything to help others - coaching or therapy or other helping roles - it's tempting to try to perform as the 'skilful helper' too. But what is most often called for is not any kind of 'performing' but a way of being present with one another, with all of our creativity, w...
32m Oct 23, 2022
32m
262: Growing in Wisdom, Controlling Nothing
Can we embrace both the acceptable and unacceptable parts of ourselves? Can we act and let go of trying to control the result? Can we hold onto both sides of each of life's great polarities, and in doing so grow in wisdom and in the possibility to contribute? And what might it take, if we did want to become like this, to faithfully practice our way in to cultivating our own goodness and capacit...
35m Oct 17, 2022
35m
261: Beginning our 6th Year: Soul Repetition
We're beginning our 6th year of Turning Towards Life today, and in recognition of this we're having a conversation about 'Soulful Repetition' - those practices we can take up in life that return us to ourselves, and to one another, and to meaning and belonging. How do we take up new practices that can help us remember who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred... and which respond to the d...
37m Oct 09, 2022
37m
260: Making Peace
At the end of our first 5 years of 'Turning Towards Life' we ask - how do we do the difficult work of reconciliation, of making peace with ourselves and with those with whom we share this one life, without abandoning ourselves or one another? How do we make peace together in a world where there are rarely easy answers, and where the right path is often shrouded in complexity? And can we commit ...
37m Oct 02, 2022
37m
259: Hope Is Not a Prediction
How do we hold together two truths - that there is so much to be deeply concerned about, and that we have within us many gifts with which we can respond - without collapsing into pessimism or naive optimism? And how do we find something in our lives and in one another that puts us in contact with those very gifts so that - even if the outcome is far from certain, or even far from what we want ...
35m Sep 25, 2022
35m
258: The Body in Relationship
Being together in a way that makes ourselves available to one another is what we're made for, and is among the most simple and most difficult things we'll ever do. So how do we create the safety and openness in our own way of being that allows us to be deeply connected to and available for others? What does it take to create the kind of relationship with our own bodies that can be a ground of s...
35m Sep 19, 2022
35m
257: Beauty, Obligation, Wildness
Could we live inside definitions of 'success' and 'intelligence' that are wildly more life-giving, generous, and generative than the ones we've been handed? And what if we found a way to cultivate ourselves so that we become the ones who stand - in our lives, in our ways of observing life, and in our practices - who choose to cultivate virtues that have us, and the people around us, step into t...
36m Sep 11, 2022
36m
256: Soft Again
It can be hard to return to ourselves and one another when we find ourselves caught 'in a thing' that's not life-giving - a tightness, stubbornness, grumpiness, an anger or rage or sourness or grudge, or indeed any way we're holding on to a feeling or idea long beyond its usefulness or appropriateness. The return is often hard because returning means facing ourselves and all the parts of us tha...
36m Sep 04, 2022
36m
255: It is No Small Thing to Trust Yourself
In a culture that values 'keeping it all together', it is no small thing to trust ourselves - to welcome the parts of ourselves that are scared, or confused, or unravelling. When we remember that there's always something of ourselves that we can trust, perhaps we can turn towards those parts of us - that we might otherwise try to push away - and hold them in just the ways in which they long to ...
33m Aug 28, 2022
33m
254: The Mystery of One Another
Whenever we speak, there's a something from which speech arises which is not itself yet, quite, words. And when we make art, there's a something from which the art arises that is itself not yet, quite, art. And it's in this vast unspoken background of before and between, of body and world and story and imagination, that so much of who we are and who we can be is found. Can we learn to see and h...
34m Aug 21, 2022
34m
253: The Basis of Our Civilisation
We've often internalised a particularly destructive story about what it is to be human - that we're inherently selfish, grasping, and inevitably violent to one another. And that because of that we ought to live very warily indeed. But, as the writer David Graeber reminds us, the 'common-sense' story of what it is to be human is just one story out of many. And we are filled with many different k...
32m Aug 14, 2022
32m
252: Such Precious Times, Between
In the choices about what to pay attention to, the wider culture many of us inhabit tells us - be afraid, be in a hurry, get things done, be productive, panic about the future, distrust your own senses, distract yourself. So much of the media that comes our way reinforces all of those messages. But what if we turned towards the beauty and wonder that is, alongside all there is for us to worry a...
31m Aug 07, 2022
31m
251: Magnifies Ten Times
So many of us have been taught to flatten our imaginations, and in the space that is left we so easily feel as if we somehow have to magnify our experiences of life, always striving for something more intense or more meaningful or more vibrant. And, while there are times for that, we wonder what would happen if we allowed ourselves to kindle our radical amazement (itself an imaginative act) wit...
33m Jul 31, 2022
33m
250: Please Use Me, Please Move Through Me
There are moments when we suddenly find out that we're not separate from one another or from life... and in those moments we discover that what we're here to do is to love. Isn't that a possibility we all long for, and sometimes find so difficult to entertain - the opportunity to give love, to receive love, to have love flow through us into our work, into our relationships, into our friendships...
32m Jul 24, 2022
32m