Episoder
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“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 possibility?
This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
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Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Highlights of our conversation:
00:00 Introduction and Reflections
03:13 The Power of Words and the Always Already Present Possibility of Human Goodness
06:08 Orienting to Ourselves and Others with Kindness
08:00 Maya Stein’s Poem, ‘Believe’
12:01 The Struggle with Self-Judgement
14:52 Our Messiness and Incompleteness
18:05 Creating Safety Together
20:56 Realness
24:11 The Gifts and Curses of our Standards and Expectations
27:04 The Path of Repair and Connection
30:13 Practicing Kindness and Engaging With One Another
32:54 Effecting Repair
Here’s our source for this week:
Believe
Maybe the camera crew is at someone else’s house,
a spotlight haloing over another’s fleshy story.
Maybe the mailman is delivering the good news
to your neighbor, or a different city entirely,
and you come home to a rash of catalogues,
the second notice for a doctor’s bill, a plea
from the do-gooders for whatever you can spare.
Maybe you haven’t cleaned your kitchen floor in weeks,
forgotten to nourish the front garden, spilled too much
coffee in your car, weaving through traffic.
Maybe you are 10 pounds heavier than last year.
Maybe your skin is betraying your age.
Maybe winter is ravaging your heart.
Maybe you are afraid, or lonely, or furious, or wanting out
of every commitment you entered with such vigor and trust.
Maybe you’ve bitten your nails down to the quick,
chosen your meals badly, ignored the advice of those
who know you best. Maybe you are stubborn as a toddler.
Maybe you are clumsy or foolish or hasty or reckless.
Maybe you haven’t read all the books you’re supposed to.
Maybe your handwriting is still illegible after all these years.
Maybe you spent too much on a pair of shoes you didn’t need.
Maybe you left the window open and the rain ruined the cake.
Maybe you’ve destroyed everything you’ve ever wanted to save.
Still.
If anything, believe in your own strange loveliness.
How your body, even as it stumbles, angles for light.
The way you hold a dandelion with such yearning and tenderness,
the whole world stops spinning.
Maya Stein
mayastein.com
Photo by Anton Darius on Unsplash -
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 Rilke which invites us to know ourselves as not at all different from the life we are already in the middle of, and then invites us to see that what is most difficult or frightening to us is an opportunity to draw upon the inherent capacity we humans have to meet life. It's a stirring, inspiring and very kind invitation to us to meet a world that really could do with our bringing ourselves as whole-heartedly as we can.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here's our source for this week:
Fear of the Inexplicable
But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.
But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.
We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abuses, those abuses belong to us; when there are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.
How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash -
Mangler du episoder?
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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.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here's our source for this week:
THE ART OF FUGUE
VI
Once again, the moment of impossible
transition, the bow, its silent voice
above the string. Let us say
the story goes like this. Let us say
you could start anywhere.
Let us say you took your splintered being
by the hand, and led it
to the centre of a room: starlight
through the floorboards of the soul.
The patterns of your life
repeat themselves until you listen.
Forgive this. Say now
what you have to say.
by Jan Zwicky
Photo by Xingchen Yan on Unsplash -
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, 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?
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here's our source for this week:
Love
Though I am undeniably broken,
I come to you with no need to be fixed.
I come to you the way one river
Meets another river - not joining
Out of thirst, but because
there is so much power
And beauty in giving oneself
To another, in moving
Through the world together.
I come to you the way the half moon
Comes into the yard - I could be more
Whole, but in the meantime,
I will bring you everything
I have.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
ahundredfallingveils.com
Photo by nousnou iwasaki on Unsplash -
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. And they can leave us feeling very alone as we look around us and imagine that other people’s lives are not as messy, confusing, and unpredictable as ours are.
So can we might find a more life-giving way to relate to the standards and ideals we choose to live by? What might happen if instead of turning to social media and our own fantasies about other people, we turned simultaneously towards our own way of knowing and to the wisdom of others around us as we each take our next steps in the roles in life we’re pursuing?
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week, from a message between Molly, a mum, and her birth doula Natalie.
Not Trying to Be Perfect
Hello Natalie… I cannot tell you how much more content I am now that I have ditched social media and trying to be perfect. I have a wonderful set of mum friends and we can go to each others’ houses even when it’s so untidy it looks like we’ve been burgled, join in with whatever that night’s plans for tea are and let our kids play or fall asleep on the sofa while we hang out. It’s great.
The Shirley Hughes book is so lovely. Nobody in her illustrations has an immaculate house or sensory play bins. Her children accompany mums and dads on errands and cooking and gardening and the school run. That’s enough. I’ve gone back to a corporate job and really, in what industry would you ask one person to work day and night shifts as CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, personal assistant, drive, head of logistics, head of learning and development, washerwoman, cleaner and cook all in one. It’s ridiculous. No wonder so many parents are miserable. They feel like a failure because we set impossible expections.
Which leads me back to the only tick list one should have at the end of day… ‘all fed, none dead, mostly in bed’. My new standard is… everyone warm and dry, clean bum, have we been outside, full tummies, making sure we eat some vegetables, not too much telly, focusing on kindness to each other. I find it so much easier to REALLY feel my red lines/bondaries this way. It works for us.
Lots of love
Molly
Photo by Luis Tosta on Unsplash -
Perhaps instead of trying to control our experience, to somehow ‘lift ourselves out of our lives’, we might find 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 skilfully of that which we care most about?
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
Intimacy with Life
In Zen, the word for intimacy is a synonym for awakening or enlightenment. And for me, intimacy is a much better word than these other words.
Enlightenment, realisation, or awakening seem to imply some special state of mind or spirit, some kind of transformative, mystical knowledge or experience that somehow will bring us beyond life's day to day problems to a more spiritual plane.
The word intimacy is better. It sounds like we are getting closer, deeper, more loving with our experience rather than somehow beyond it. Intimacy better expresses what 'enlightenment' really feels like, I think.
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Photo by NEOM on Unsplash -
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 shielding ourselves from life's challenges, but about allowing our inner wisdom to emerge and flourish so we can face them with less of a sense of ‘safety vs harm’ and more of a sense of our own capacity to be full participants in whatever life brings our way.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
Uncovering the Wisdom Within Us
There’s a life affirming teaching in Buddhism, which is that Buddha, which means ‘awake’, is not someone you worship, Buddha is not someone you aspire to; Buddha is not somebody that was born more than two thousand years ago and was smarter than you’ll ever be.
Buddha is our inherent nature - our buddha nature - and what that means is that if you’re going to grow up fully, the way that it happens is that you begin to connect with the intelligence that you already have.
It’s not like some intelligence that’s going to be transplanted into you. If you’re going to be fully mature, you will no longer be imprisoned in the childhood feeling that you always need protect yourself or shield yourself because things are too harsh.
If you’re going to be a grown up - which I would define as being completely at home in your world no matter how difficult the situation - it’s because you will allow something that’s already in you to be nurtured. You allow it to grow, you all it to come out, instead of all the time shielding it and protecting it and keeping it buried.
From ‘Start Where You Are’
by Pema Chodron
Photo by Chris Ensey on Unsplash -
We might see ourselves, as Ursula Le Guin writes, as ‘one syllable of a word spoken slowly by the stars’. In this episode we wonder together what is made possible when we reclaim and retell sacred narratives about being human, as an alternative to the mechanistic views of existence which tells us life is meaning-free and humans are accidents in a cold unfeeling universe. How might these more life-giving narratives help us open to what is around us, and the life-giving qualities in the world and in one another?
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
One Word Spoken Slowly by the Stars
“Aye,” Ged answered. “Light is a power. A great power, by which we exist, but which exists beyond our needs, in itself. Sunlight and starlight are time, and time is light. In the sunlight, in the days and years, life is. In a dark place life may call upon the light, naming it.” …
There was a little pause; and Yarrow asked, “Tell me just this, if it is not a secret: what other great powers are there besides the light?”
“It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.”
Staying his knife on the carved wood, Murre asked, “What of death?” [Yarrow] listened, her shining black head bent down.
“For a word to be spoken,” Ged answered slowly, “there must be silence. Before, and after.”
Ursula K Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition (p. 157). Orion
Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash -
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 valuable gift and contribution to each of us, how is it that it can be so hard to bring it genuinely to those around us - those we love, those we respect, those we want to get to know, those we interact with in the midst of our day to day lives? And what might be do to cultivate the kind of mutually dignifying attention that will benefit everyone?
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
The Gift of Our Attention
There is one thing, I believe, that all of us want, no matter how old we are, no matter whatever differences are between us; the one thing we cherish from another human being is attention. Love…is not certain. Some people will love us, and some people will not. But the one thing that anyone can give to any other person is simple attention. It is not as involved as in love. This attention may last 20 minutes or many hours. If you live with somebody it is repeated. "You are worthy of my attention." That, I think, is the greatest gift we can give each other.
Magda Gerber
Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash -
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?
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
What Grief Wants
I only want one thing.
I want you to pay attention.
I want you to look in her eyes, now,
While there is time, while there is
Still breath, while the magnolias unfold
Into flower, quietly, in the garden.
I want you to feel, all the way through,
What it is like as she looks back at you,
While she still can, while you are here to
Receive, to be seen.
I will be ready to hold you, flood you,
Carry you, when all the gazing is done.
I want you to receive your life,
While there is life to receive.
We will wail together about its loss
In good time.
But now is not the time for that.
It is not the time for turning away,
For trying to avoid anything,
For trying not to feel.
There will be a time when you have
No choice but to be turned away.
But that time is not now.
I want you to feel what it is like to
Release your desperate grasp around
What you could never hold onto anyway.
To delight in the living flow with its
Everyday beginning and its always endings.
I want you to feel the shining aliveness of
Everything you will lose
While it is still here.
Justin Wise
justinwise.co.uk
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash -
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 active observers of our lives, which takes a concerted kind of practice and attention, and what it is to respond actively and intentionally to what we observe. And how that can give us opportunities both to respond to life as it is to learn and deepen as we go.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
What the Journey is For
What if the descent,
Over and over again,
Into the dark
And back out into the light
Is the forging of us rather than
The breaking of us?
What if there’s nothing wrong with us in the deepest sense of that truth?
What if we are not broken
Even when we find ourselves
Back in the same territory,
Back in painful patterns,
Back in the underworld again?
What if we are simply meant to give ourselves over to a process
That isn’t meaningless at all
But a bright, spiralling, gravitational pull
Ever-deeper towards
Our own
Sheer
Gorgeous
Becoming?
Hollie Holden
www.facebook.com/hollieholdenlove
Photo by Iswanto Arif on Unsplash -
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 requisite depth; or that we have rigidified our understanding of them rather than regarding them as the great and unfathomable mysteries that they are.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
Learning to See What We See But Do Not Know That We See
Our awareness of ourselves and our environment is woefully deficient. In particular there is a tendency to see what things have in common rather than what makes them unique, the source of a dispiriting sense of sameness …
Our categorising tendency likes to put people in pigeon holes then notices only the behaviour that fits in with our simplistic classification and finishes by dismissing people as superficial, limited, predictable and boring. The equivalent in relationships is to see only the irritating aspects of the partner and then to turn this into a final, dismissive definition. It is common even to want others to behave badly in predictable ways in order to confirm our own good judgment and enjoy superiority and righteousness.
A crucial function of the arts is to prevent, or break down, dismissive labelling and reveal the singular instead of the similar, the peculiar instead of the familiar, and the inscrutable instead of the understood. I have often been guilty of impatient dismissiveness but recently, under the influences of literature, process thinking, and the gentle remonstrations of my wife, I have come to find even people I have known for a lifetime increasingly strange. And, strangely enough, the fact that they elude me has brought them closer; my inability to understand them makes them more understandable.
Michael Foley, from ‘Life Lessons From Bergson’
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash -
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.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
Some People Will Ask
Excerpt from You Could Make This Place Beautiful
“Why are you telling these stories? Why air your dirty laundry?”
Someone will ask this, or if they don’t ask, they’ll think it. Maybe you’re thinking it now. How do I answer?
I could say what happened to me is mine. I could say that suffering equals pain plus resistance, and I’m no longer resisting, no longer hold it in, letting it fester. And why would you expect me, or anyone, to grit my teeth and quietly carry my story? I could say there is a cost to carrying your truth but not telling it. I could say women have been doing this for decades and look where it’s landed us. I could say I’ve gone and lost my narrative, and lost not only my understanding of the future but also my understanding of the past, and this is how I’m trying to find it – Who’s calling this laundry dirty, anyway? It’s just lived-in.
Maggie Smith
Photo by Elizabeth Gottwald on Unsplash -
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 to our innate aliveness. We reflect on the balance between necessary social conventions and the gifts of discovering our own unique expression, and propose that we each find a way to honour "wonder of their own presence" and bring our unique life force into service to the world around us.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
The Wildness In Our Hearts
Every human person is inevitably involved with two worlds: the world they carry within them and the world that is out there. All thinking, all writing, all action, all creation and all destruction is about that bridge between the two worlds...
Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us. Now, other people can glimpse it from [its outer expressions]. But no one but you knows what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it. That’s the whole mystery of writing and language and expression — that when you do say it, what others hear and what you intend and know are often totally different kinds of things.
One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.
from an interview with John O'Donohue
Photo by Linda Xu on Unsplash -
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 one another. If we saw ourselves and our relationships that way, perhaps we’d begin to wonder afresh about the power of cultural norms that encourage separateness, and the potential benefits of more open and contactful conversation about ourselves and our relationships with those around us.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
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Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
This Relationship is Ours
One of the principles of the Dagara concept of a relationship is that it’s not private. When we talk about “our relationship” in the village, the word our is not limited to two. And this is why we find it pretty hard to live in a relationship in a modern culture that is lacking true community. In the absence of community, two people are forced to say, “This relationship is ours,” when in fact, a community should be claiming ownership.
Subonfu Somé
from ‘The Spirit of Intimacy’
Photo by YUXUAN WANG on Unsplash -
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 recognising both the good intentions behind these burdens and the suffering they cause, and the role of coaches and loved ones in helping people see alternative ways of living that honour their true selves without abandoning themselves. And the transformative power of imagining and articulating different "styles" of engaging with life's challenges, whether in parenting, work, or relationships. Who can we be, we wonder, when we learn to envision and offer new possibilities and narratives for relating to life that honour other people’s aliveness and wholeness?
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
Don't Lighten the Burden
The British-born Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett [...] said of her teaching style that her goal wasn’t to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. I had a full-body reaction the first time I encountered that, in the basement shelves of Watkins, the ‘esoteric’ London bookstore. Tears pricked behind my eyes. The relief! To me, the phrase meant this: you can slog through life (and I had been slogging through life) trying to ‘get on top of things’, trying to reach the point at which you feel like you know what you’re doing, trying to fix your flaws, or make yourself emotionally invulnerable… All of that is an attempt to ‘lighten the burden’, and there are a thousand self-help gurus on standby, promising to aid you in the effort. But making the burden heavier? That means seeing that as a finite human you’ll never get on top of everything, never fully understand what makes others tick, never immunize yourself from distress. The burden of reaching that goal is an impossibly heavy one. And so you put it down. You let your shoulders drop and your muscles unclench. And then – crucially – you’re free to actually be here, actually do stuff, actually show up. You get to climb life’s mountains without lugging a huge rucksack full of steel ingots on your back the whole way, which is both easier and much more fun.
Oliver Burkeman
Read the full piece, “Turning Words”, by Oliver Burkeman here
Sign up here to Oliver’s newsletter
Photo by Marcus Zymmer on Unsplash -
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 weaves through topics such as the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences, the wisdom inherent in our inner responses to life events, and the possibility of finding value in even the most unwelcome feelings, making space for confusion, wonder, and the potential for transformation in our everyday lives.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
Coming Home to Myself
The Self
pushes the neglected forward
for recognition.
Do not disregard it.
It holds energy
of highest value.
It is the gold in the dung.
Do not disregard the dung.
Marion Woodman
Photo by Vivek Doshi on Unsplash -
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 creativity and courage, especially in challenging moments, engage more authentically with life and cultivate deeper connections with others.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
Myths That Keep Us From Our Lives
At the times when the world has shrunk to its smallest horizons, when I have felt most despairing, desperate, or alone, or when I have found myself working and pushing much too hard, it usually turns out that I have been living in thrall to one or more protective myths about life that rarely help as much as I imagine.
Myth 1 – I’m not like other people
I’m not really a person, but other people are. Others’ lives are complete in ways that mine is not. Other people know where they’re going, while I am lost. Other people made the right choices, while I stumbled. Other people aren’t as confused as I am. Other people don’t suffer as I do.
Underpinning this myth is a great deal of negative self-judgement, which fuels a sense of deflation, self-diminishment or self-pity. But it can equally be worn as a mask of grandiosity, in which I puff myself up with certainty and arrogance. Sometimes I bounce between the two poles, from deflation to grandiosity and back again.
This is the myth of specialness. It boosts our self esteem by giving us a reason for all the difficulty we’re experiencing. And protects us from feeling the suffering of others by keeping us at a distance from everyone and everything.
Myth 2 – Death has nothing to do with me
Somehow I’m separate enough from the real world that death is not an issue for me in the way it is for others. It’s frightening but far-off, a rumour, something that happens to other people. Consequently, I need pay it little real attention. I can ignore what my body tells me, and what my heart tells me. I’m protected from seeing that my time is finite and that I have to decide in which relationship to life I wish to stand.
This is the myth of no consequence. It saves us from the burden of having to choose, or face the uncertainty of our choices in a world in which choices matter because our time is limited.
Myth 3 – A saviour is coming
If I’m good enough, popular enough, loved enough, successful enough, recognised enough, powerful enough, rich enough, famous enough, caring enough… then I’ll be saved. Someone – one of the grown-ups in the world – will see me and, recognising my goodness, rescue me from my troubles
And then I won’t have to face them any more.
This keeps me working really hard. Sometimes it has me try to save others in the very same way that I am desperate to be saved.
This is the myth of dependency. By rendering us helpless it keeps us from taking on the full responsibility (and possibility) of our own adulthood.
—
I know these are not myths I carry alone.
We cling onto these myths because, as well keeping us at a seemingly safe distance from our lives, we’re afraid that if we face the true situation of our lives then our troubles will be magnified. But, as with any turning away from the truth, they come at an enormous cost. In particular they keep both our dependency and our hopelessness going.
When we can learn to see them and begin through them, we give ourselves the opportunity for a much more direct, unmediated contact with our lives and with others. We might begin to discover deep sources of hope, courage and compassion which which we had been out of touch. And as we allow ourselves to step out of hiding and into relationship, we might discover that our capacity to help others – and to be helped by them in return – is greater than we could have imagined.
Writing and Photo by Justin Wise -
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 ourselves we may have forgotten if we can maintain a sense of wonder and openness to the mysterious nature of things.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
What You Thought You Lost
What you thought you lost along the way
hangs in the air like a prayer
May you find your way home
may the doors swing open wide
from the out and the in
side
under a wide open sky
May you lose
may you find,
may you know
in the core
of your weathered soul your old
and your new sign
May every stranger on the path
become the one who
stopped
to hang something you thought
you lost in the air
by a thread like an ancient
pagan prayer
like some kind of
elder
warm-eyed
guardian was standing there.
Wendy Videlock
www.wendyvidelock.com
Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash -
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 everything down just to make everything okay the whole time. Being an adult who can be open to people's views. Being an adult who can be accepting of difference. Being an adult who isn't trying to corral everybody into one way of doing things the whole time. Being an adult who doesn't blame everything on everyone else for whatever they're going through.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here’s our source for this week:
Holding Personality Lightly
Early in life we all experience emotional states we cannot tolerate - being left alone, interaction with an anxious or depressed parent etc - and in response we begin to build shields of protective armour around our essence. These defence structures constitute our personality. Doing their job well, they continue to guard our vulnerability, but they also prevent the intimate contact we long for.
What we routinely identify as our selves is actually this personality… a construct, an idea or self-image that hides the part of us that is vulnerable and capable of unmediated connection. This mask plays a crucial role in our lives. It is likely that we could not have survived without it. But we are so much more than this learned self-concept. Knowing ourselves solely as our personality limits us severely.
When we delve into the truth of our personality, we begin to see how our daily struggles in relationship result from our inclination to defend this assumed identity. Before we can have direct, unmediated contact with ourselves or with a significant other, we must take the necessary step of unmasking our personality. In this process, we do not give up the personality entirely, but rather learn to wear it more lightly.
Jett Psaris and Marlena Lyons
from ‘Undefended Love’
Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash - Se mer
