249: Holding the Angle
We can change - that much is certain. But change doesn't come by magic, and rarely does it come alone from a moment of inspiration, but instead by the steady, faithful application of practice - the walking of a path, step by step. The magic is that even practices that turn us by just a degree or two can, when held with dedication and consistency, make a huge difference in our lives and in the l...
32m Jul 18, 2022
32m
248: Shoulders
What we long for, what we most need, is the simple kindness of others. But the world teaches us otherwise - that what we need most is away from one another. What a tragedy unfolds for all of us when we live in forgetfulness of our deepest longing. We think the world can be different - and this conversation is about just that. This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn ...
29m Jul 10, 2022
29m
247: Getting Older, Noticing More
Holding on too tightly to expectations of just about anything can trap us in a cycle of frustration and despair. And often our expectations are really ways we're trying to be in control of a situation rather than surrendering ourselves to the unfolding moment. Of course, our ability to control many circumstances so they will be just the way we want them is often beyond us. And so perhaps we mig...
33m Jul 03, 2022
33m
246: Every Day is a Threshold
It’s easy to try to resist the inevitable passage of time, as if our ignoring time would some how save us from its consequences. But what if we found an everyday way to make time sacred, by honouring its transitions rather than turning away? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the rituals we can create to mark life’s big changes and its more ordinary ones - sleep, waking, ...
28m Jun 26, 2022
28m
245: The Light Is The Context
The background culture that surrounds us very often makes the unspoken claim that what's most true about existence is cold, hard matter, and that anything else we encounter - meaning or love for example - is just something we humans invented. But what would happen if we trusted instead that there is an ancient light doing its best to shine forth through us and between us? And what would happen ...
34m Jun 19, 2022
34m
244: Let Me Become Orange
What happens when we give up trying to control each other, and instead allow ourselves be changed by our encounter with one another? Could we let the extraordinary beauty and mystery of others really reach us? What would happen if we did this in the roles where we have the most power over others - when we're teachers, parents, employers, or leaders? And what are the costs if we don't, if we sta...
31m Jun 12, 2022
31m
243: Why Sit Still
How can we learn be the ones who don't turn away when we encounter other people's difficulties and suffering? And how can we learn to be the ones who offer a profound welcome... to others and to ourselves? One way we've learned to do this is to take up a regular 'sitting' practice - an apparently simple practice of sitting very still for long enough that we get to encounter our own inner vastne...
34m Jun 05, 2022
34m
242: Listen
When we take a moment to look, we'll probably find that we're listening more to ourselves than to one another. But how can we create things together, coordinate together, learn together, trust one another if we're not listening? And what does it take to listen - in our organisational life, in our families, in our friendships, in our communities? It's both simpler, and harder, than it seems. Th...
36m May 29, 2022
36m
241: What Love Depends Upon
When love depends upon a feeling, it comes and goes as the feeling comes and goes. And when love depends upon the way someone else is - beautiful, or kind, or successful - it’s vulnerable to the inevitable changes in a human life. But what if love could depend upon something deeper - not something inside me, nor something inside me, and maybe not even something between you and me? What if we ...
37m May 22, 2022
37m
240: The Art Spirit
There's something inherently artistic about living a human life, in all the ways we're called to respond creatively, sensitively, boldly to the conditions and relationships in the midst of which we find ourselves. But, for many of us, the 'artist in us' got suppressed by being unsupported, or unwelcome. So what would it be to reclaim our artistry and direct it towards the unfolding of life-givi...
43m May 15, 2022
43m
239: What is Time?
So often our lives are ruled by 'clock time' - we're counting off how long there is to get something done, or we're aiming for a time-bound goal, or we're measuring time wasted or time used productively. But although this is the dominant way of understanding time for many of us, it is only one way of relating to the flow of things. What if, instead of filling time with work or play, we turned t...
35m May 08, 2022
35m
238: Tumbling Into the Heart
Our amazing capacity to separate parts of ourselves from ourselves - to keep the inner experiences of grief, or joy, or longing away and out of view. How this serves us. And how it can also lead us away from ourselves and all that we have to bring to the world. The letting go, falling in, opening that's available to us that can play its part in reuniting ourselves with what would otherwise be l...
36m May 01, 2022
36m
237: The Story of Money
The cultural story of money that we all live in has opened up all kinds of opportunities for trade and exchange in the world. And at the same time, the story is easily one of transaction rather than relationship, of fleeting contact rather that the weaving of deep reciprocal obligation and care, of efficiency, mechanism and convenience over the vulnerability and gifts of connection and reciproc...
38m Apr 24, 2022
38m
236: What Is Lost Is Now Found
How can we be the ones who welcome what has been lost in others, and in doing so be the ones who welcome again what has been lost in ourselves? It's a central question for our fragmented times. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we find our way back home to what was here all along, and the crucial role of welcome, truth-telling and relationship in making that possible...
33m Apr 17, 2022
33m
235: Called to Leadership
Stepping into leadership, on whatever scale, immediately asks a central question of each of us: What kind of person will I be? Can I be a person who brings out virtues of dignity, creativity, courage, compassion, persistence, humility, generosity and wisdom in myself and the people I am alongside? Can I catch on to the ways in which I contract into fear, or reactivity, or habit? Can I find othe...
36m Apr 10, 2022
36m
234: Fear is Contraction
When we're afraid, but not acknowledging our fear, we're most likely to act out of line with our deepest intentions. It's easy from the midst of fear to try to assert our power and control - by being right or over-certain or dominating others - or to shrink away from our own dignity by saying 'yes' when something else is called for. What if we could learn to notice and name our fear, to ourselv...
39m Apr 03, 2022
39m
233: Whatever Leads to More Life
In the words of Marie Howe’s beautiful poem that is our source this week, “whatever leads to joy, to more life, to less worry”. Can we learn to live this way in the midst of it all - attending to joy in its deepest sense, in the way it brings us into contact with what is most real? And is there a way to not pile worry on top of everything that it already matters for us to take care of? This we...
34m Mar 27, 2022
34m
232: Holding Together
In those moments when, in the midst of the brokenness of the world, any of us find ourselves able to kindle our resolute love or contagious joy, we're being of much needed service - both to ourselves and to those around us. And we don't always know that we're doing that. So what would it be to begin to notice this most human of capacities in ourselves, and share it with others - as a complement...
35m Mar 20, 2022
35m
231: What if This Was That Day?
How do we make contact with our own kindness, generosity, creativity, patience, courage, compassion, fierce or gentle love, and our capacity to stay in contact with life, right when we're afraid or wanting to turn away? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we find that in ourself that's ready to stay faithful, when other parts of us strongly want to turn away - and how ...
34m Mar 13, 2022
34m
230: Liminal Space
We might imagine we can choose the 'threshold moments', when we're called to step into the unknown. Sometimes we can. But as events in the world remind us this week, what changes around us and within us often comes without warning and without our say-so. One response to transitions on whatever scale is to run from them, or to try to be in control of them on our own. But that rarely works out, ...
33m Mar 06, 2022
33m
229: Things Will Always Happen
How do we approach our lives when they don’t go how they want? Or when we find ourselves judging the value of our lives by the outcomes of our actions and projects? When we find out we’re not nearly as ‘in charge’ as we imagine, and that every choice is riddled with complexity, it’s easy to tune out and seek the promise of easy answers or to demand of ourselves a level of control and power that...
30m Feb 27, 2022
30m
228: When Your Hair is Aflame with Winter
Can we look at ourselves and others around us as we all grow older with eyes of wonder... seeing and receiving the luminosity and depth that shines out from beneath the skin? Or will we get caught up in our culture's dominant meta-narratives - that to grow old is to be diminished, and that time is a 'resource' that we get less of as we age? What if, instead, life is a ripeness that we grow into...
34m Feb 20, 2022
34m
227: The Great Gift of Selfhood
It's hard to turn towards the basic condition of our lives - that everything changes, and that everything ends, including ourselves. That we will lose it all. But our resistance to this truth can easily end up with us trying to freeze our lives in place, holding us back from encountering what's here in an effort to never have to face loss or grief. But we know not to do that with that which flo...
33m Feb 13, 2022
33m
226: Sweet Darkness
We’re taught that what’s most of value in life is what we can explain, that which can be illuminated by the daylight, and which we can see and know. But the shadows and darkness have gifts too - gifts of belonging, and gifts of freedom, and a way of teaching us what to give up in order to take up the one life that is our own. What if we approached the non-obvious not as something to run from,...
31m Feb 06, 2022
31m
225: The Professionalism That Will Kill Us All
There’s a prevalent understanding in the world that the very definition of ‘professional’ is a kind of machine-like activity - efficient, rule based, predictable, rational but unfeeling. Even when it’s not talked about we see it shaping our participation in organisations of all kinds - businesses, schools, health-care. And beyond work it shapes our entire orientation to life. But what if we s...
33m Jan 30, 2022
33m
224: Bonus Episode - The Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course 2022
Lizzie and Justin are partners in Thirdspace, an organisation which supports people to recognise their goodness and capacity, helping them bring their whole selves to the world. 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 g...
55m Jan 29, 2022
55m
224: What Open Means
Being open to the world, to experience, to being changed by what's around us and within us, may be one of the great human capacities, and precisely what allows us to make community and relationship, and to respond with wisdom, creativity and love to the challenges and gifts of our times. But it's greatly diminished by that in us which wants to manipulate and control, which insists on reducing t...
35m Jan 23, 2022
35m
223: Because We Are Not Machines
We are not machines, even though most of us have grown up, quite without noticing it, as if we were in some essential way meant to be shiny, efficient, perfect, unstopping, optimal, results-producing mechanisms. And so we easily miss seeing the already-miraculous living beings that we are. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about loving our messiness, our incompleteness, our gl...
34m Jan 16, 2022
34m
222: A Host of Stories
Learning to live with a many-chambered heart; relating to ourselves, others and life by taking into account the astonishing richness and complexity that’s always here; honouring that there’s never just one story or explanation for what’s happening, or what we’re feeling, or what’s emerging, or what’s intended. And, along the way, how movies, trees, parks and people can be teachers of all of thi...
34m Jan 09, 2022
34m
221: ‘I Am’ is a Complete Sentence
To be a living, conscious, experiencing being is one of the great miraculous wonders of the universe. And being ‘this one’, the unique one each of us is, will never happen again. And yet… we learn to discount the unique first-person experience of being ourselves, pushing our ordinary everyday sacredness to the side, often in favour of treating ourselves and others more like objects or productio...
34m Jan 02, 2022
34m
220: Your Implicit is My Possibility
We each carry a whole implicit world with us, a way of being that profoundly shapes what's possible for others in relationship with us. But because it's implicit, the 'background', it can be hard to see how much more there is to our relationships than the actions we take and the words we say. As Lizzie writes in this week's source, "What’s implied in your words, your actions, your feelings towa...
32m Dec 29, 2021
32m
219: What Is Truth?
We live in a time when truth gets pulled apart by the move towards ‘I am right, you are wrong’ and the parallel move to make all truths equal and indistinguishable from one another. And in coming at truth this way, we easily pull ourselves and one another apart. But what if finding out ‘what’s true’ is a process, not a thing? A process of loving, disciplined attention, in which walk a path to...
36m Dec 19, 2021
36m
218: Climbing Into Your Own Life
The wonderful Robert Bly died just a short time ago, leaving behind him countless invitations to each of us to step into our lives more fully. Our conversation this week honours his work by taking up his poem 'He Wanted to Live His Life Over'. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about about the nature of time, what it might be to allow our lives to be enriched by all that has c...
31m Dec 12, 2021
31m
217: Shameless
It's hard to be of genuine service to others from the part of us that worries about being liked. But there is something deeper in all of us that is not at all concerned about favour and is at once fiercely committed, gentle, loving and true enough to serve in an authentic, generous way. This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might cultivate the shameless leadership th...
31m Nov 28, 2021
31m
216: The Grace of Hidden Beauty
What if beauty isn't something we add to the world, but an already-existing quality of everything that we can uncover through the way we learn to look, feel, sense and hear? What world would present itself to us if we practiced skilfully looking for beauty everywhere, including in those places (ourselves, others, our collective endeavours, the situation we find ourselves in) where we've already...
37m Nov 21, 2021
37m
215: Turn Mishaps Into the Path
We add difficulty to our difficulty if we imagine, as we often do, that difficulty should not happen, that it must be our fault to be living a life that is far from perfect, and that we have to blame one another when the world turns out to be full of problems. Mostly, we've been taught to respond to difficulty in this way by a culture that tells us that everything can be fixed and that if it's ...
35m Nov 14, 2021
35m
214: You Know When It's Time To Go
If we look patiently, we'll sometimes see that underneath the 'presenting surface' of our lives is something within us working away patiently, persistently, lovingly, courageously. That something - a kind of essential goodness - has often begun working with what we care most about even before we've consciously begun ourselves. What would it be to see and trust that essential goodness within us ...
36m Nov 07, 2021
36m
213: Knowing Now You'll Never Be a Clown
'Imagination is everything', we were once taught by a teacher of ours. And so in this episode we take up the imaginative possibilities of play and laughter, wondering together what possibilities can come from holding the 'darkness and vulnerability in the heart of everything' alongside the joyful, expansive possibilities of play. Along the way we laugh a lot, imagine what it would be to welcome...
34m Oct 31, 2021
34m
212: Always Be Vulnerable to All That You Are
When we learn to include more and more of ourselves, we also become more able to include more and more of one another. Being able to do this - to welcome that in us that's fearful, ashamed or lonely, as well as what's joyful, grateful and love-filled - is greatly helped by finding the bigger-something that we are... the something of us that's wide and deep, curious and compassionate and which i...
36m Oct 24, 2021
36m
211: Never One Thing
Whenever we come to ‘conclusions’ about ourselves or one another we run the risk of missing our marvellous multiplicity - the way we can be both gentle and wild, curious and assertive, narrow and wide, afraid and courageous. There’s an inclusiveness and dignity that comes quite naturally when we see one another’s complexity, and we see it in ourselves, and when we learn to trust our own capaci...
32m Oct 17, 2021
32m
210: Remembering Our Infinite Value
What would be if we could each help one another remember the ways in which we matter, the ways in which are are unarguably of value, the ways in which our mere presence is a gift? Perhaps it would help us find some respite from the strong cultural pressures to think of ourselves as incomplete, or faulty, or missing something. Perhaps it would help us give up equating our value with our looks, o...
33m Oct 10, 2021
33m
209: The Discomfort of What Matters
It’s easy to judge and berate ourselves for getting distracted, especially when we find ourselves on social media rather than attending to the things that matter most to us - the projects, conversations, commitments that we know are most meaningful in our lives. But when we see that our distraction is a result of something very tender - our attempts to not feel grief at how little control we ha...
34m Oct 03, 2021
34m
208: I Come to You With No Need to Be Fixed
We're conditioned to think of ourselves and other people as in need of fixing, and it makes it so difficult for us to open to one another's beauty and mystery. So what if we could cultivate eyes and hearts of wonder at the luminescent half-moon of one another's presence, and receive one another as rivers do as they give their power and beauty to one another? This week's Turning Towards Life is...
32m Sep 26, 2021
32m
207: The Brilliance We Are
Sometimes we catch a glimpse of ourselves that shows us that we are not as small as we think, and we start to see the shining beauty and brilliance that we are. Knowing ourselves this way can open us up to a deeper appreciation of the beauty of others, and offers us a vibrant, compassionate path towards the generosity and creativity that is available to every one of us. This week's Turning To...
36m Sep 19, 2021
36m
206: Through Our Speaking We Create Each Other
Language is a doorway through which we can step into new relationships with the world and with one another, and as such our ways of speaking and listening are a profound kind of power. We are changed by what we say and by what others say. So how do we find ways with language that honour its power, and that open up possibilities and understanding for one another? And how might we be ones who, by...
35m Sep 12, 2021
35m
205: Falling
Can we learn to live with the certainty that we'll lose the ones we love, and they will lose us, without tuning out, avoiding, denying or imagining that it's some form of punishment? Can we learn how to bring together the fullness of the joys of loving as well as the sorrows? This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might find ways to help one another enter into the fier...
32m Sep 05, 2021
32m
204: Attention is the Beginning of Devotion
We easily forget that we are quite literally born of the Earth, which is itself the cradle and origin of the life we call our own and the life of everything around us. And in our forgetfulness, we easily forget ourselves and the wonder and mystery of a life we were born into without our say-so and without any instruction manual. Sometimes, it's necessary to shift our attention so we can rekindl...
33m Aug 29, 2021
33m
203: Preparing the Way
One of the gifts of being human is that we have the capacity to transcend ourselves - to grow beyond narrow conceptions of ourselves, to imagine and live into new possibilities, to unfold creatively into ways of living and knowing that gives us a chance to bring our own gifts to others. A lot of our pain and suffering comes when we try to resist this happening, or when we try to walk the path o...
32m Aug 22, 2021
32m
202: Watching Ourselves
Genuine communication is a kind of intimacy in which we let ourselves be changed and affected by the gifts brought by the other person we're communicating with. In this way it's different from other forms of speaking (convincing, making a point, offloading). And it requires of us a certain kind of receptivity not just to the other, but to what's going on with ourselves as we speak and listen. ...
34m Aug 15, 2021
34m
201: Feelings are Beings
Are feelings like objects, like forces, like waves, like eruptions? The metaphors we use for what we feel profoundly shape how we'll respond to them. Should we let them pass, push them away, be overwhelmed by them? Or, as we consider in this conversation, perhaps we could treat them as beings in their own right, with their own kind of intelligence, sensitivity, commitments, and ways of relating...
34m Aug 08, 2021
34m