Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

How can we come to know the vast stores of goodness, care and benevolence that are in each of us simply by being human? What makes it possible for us to bring this goodness to bear on the many difficulties and realities that face every single human life? How can we do this without minimising or explaining away the dark sides of human life, and the genuine pain and confusion we can experience at what happens to us? And how do we at the same time cultivate a deep faithfulness our individual and collective capacity to respond in ways that care ever more deeply about the world? 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: That I Would Be Good That I would be good even if I did nothing That I would be good even if I got the thumbs down That I would be good if I got and stayed sick That I would be good even if I gained ten pounds That I would be fine even if I went bankrupt That I would be good if I lost my hair and my youth That I would be great if I was no longer queen That I would be grand if I was not all knowing That I would be loved even when I numb myself That I would be good even when I am overwhelmed That I would be loved even when I was fuming That I would be good even if I was clingy That I would be good even if I lost sanity That I would be good whether with or without you Alanis Morisette Photo by Arthur Poulin on Unsplash

Right when we’re in the mess and complexity of things - for example when raising children, or being in a partnership, or working alongside others - we can learn so much about what it is to be human. And it’s where we also learn the most about our own power to make a world that is better for others to live in, or worse. In this week’s conversation we explore how we might turn everyday complexity into a deeper care for the world and the use of whatever power we each have for the benefit of those around us. We refer in this week’s conversation to Lindsay Green and Charlie Lyons’ wonderful podcast ‘Made Possible by Parenthood’ which you can find on Spotify here. 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: Bless This Dirty Sponge My spiritual path is not marked out by rose petals, but dirty sponges, baby wipes, frozen peas and car keys. Washing up is my daily Zen practice. Leaving parties early to get everyone home to bed is how I learn self-discipline. My meditation happens while I run the bath. And sometimes at 4am while I try to get back to sleep after waking to help someone use the potty. My masters are unusually direct and demanding. They teach me how to live without apology and how to be right where I am. Because they know there is nowhere else. And at the end if the day, I give myself a cup of Hail Mary tea as I forgive myself for all of the ways I felt I fell short. Again. And I kiss my gurus on their tiny, wise heads and prepare myself to start all over again. Hollie Holden Photo by Imani on Unsplash

In a time of global distress, we’re often faced with news of dire situations far from us that we can do little to affect directly. But we can learn to respond to the world that is more immediately around us with the kind of patience, wisdom, care and love that makes a genuine, tangible, and life-giving difference. In this week’s conversation we explore how we can observe and undo the barriers inside us to being this way. And how we enroll others in helping us to do that. 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: Your Task Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Helen Schucman, from A Course in Miracles Photo by Paul Mocan on Unsplash

How can we be the ones who create safety for other people to bring their troubles, longings, hopes, pain and fear our way? And how can stay long enough, and not turn away? And how do we then accompany one another as we address what we find - with love, truthfulness, patience and exquisite care? 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: Like the Trees You have been waiting for the body to say, This is not an emergency, you are safe. And when it finally does, in a whisper you almost don’t believe, you can breathe a full breath again, and then another, at last trusting the open arms of trees, even their menacing shadows at midnight. Now you know everything that grows must also feel pain, must fear and doubt until they sense this same quickening, like sap rising up in the trunk and spreading through each limb. You have lived as if underground, but now you are breaking open, breaking free, becoming so vast and green, you make a shady place for others to rest in. James Crews Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash

On the ways comparison can steal the actual living of life from us, and on finding ways to appreciate and live in the midst of the ordinary everydayness of things. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. 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 Living Do Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you. Marie Howe Photo by Marcus Ganahl on Unsplash

On acknowledging experiences rather than moving away from them or interrupting them. How we might experience our feelings without ‘acting them out’ when they’re intense or overwhelming. And the gifts and blessings of being gentle with ourselves and one another. 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: This Small Space I’ve curled in. Observing the paned frame of freckled rain, Trickling down the window. Steam falls from my clay cup. Hugged in cast shadows and held in fresh sheets I try to find home within myself. Complex cluttered colours shine on difficult days, one part still waits for a calling. She is soft, broken, real and trying, A frame for the rain to run, A window for truth to-shine. Cracks of comfort come with falling, folding into the wisdom calling. Roberta Morrow Photo: Unsplash | Madi Doell

How do we take up our right size in the world? Not in some fixed, rigid way but as a responsive way of engaging with what is called for in each situation and context? When we see that in some way ‘too big’ and ‘too small’ are both ways we try to control situations, maybe we can open to the emergence of something more fluid, more adaptive, and more sensitive in us. Something that asks of us to be of service to life, and responds accordingly. 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: Right-Sized A response to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s Big What if this the year to learn to be right-sized? I learned on the playground to Flinch from arrogance. ‘Please – don’t leave me. I promise not to get Too Big.’ But the cost, I’ve learned, is dear. Trading potential for false modesty, Dampening power with every apology, Neglecting my impeccable edges With every hedge. But then I remember What the rabbis knew. They stretched wide a red silk thread. At one end: Arrogance. At the other: Not humility – but Playing Too Small. They knew playing small was just arrogance by a different name. Placing comfort above contribution. Our gifts withdrawn from the world, For the price of fitting in. ‘What if holding back is stealing?’ So in the middle, they placed a pair of right-sized shoes. Yours. Mine. The right-sizing that awaits us all. What, I wonder, will it take for you to grow into your right size The one that seems Impossibly large, and Obnoxiously loud? Clownish as these shoes seem now, prone to stumbling, At first you’ll feel the fool. Some People will have Things To Say. Some may even walk away. (In this modesty-mad world, they’re yet to clock that claiming your shoes does nothing to keep them from theirs.) But every now and then you wake up to the truth. That it's the world that's wrong - not you. These too-small shoes will no longer do. So take your credit where it’s due. And when no-one offers it – give yourself a spoon daily. Take your space Trading in the apologies for gratitude. Minimise your emotions no more – They too deserve to expand to the full. Fill your circle with champions And learn to see yourself with the wonder of their eyes. And when you hit your stride, and weather whatever, Give up the surprise. When those shoes once vast grow snug, Be sure to celebrate well. Acknowledge yourself, and your people, and the view. Until another pair of shoes calls to you Between arrogance and avoidance On that red silk string… You Are Needed. And this is no time, no world, For stealing. Debbie Danon, Jan 2023 www.debbiedanon.com Photo by Michael Wright on Unsplash

So much changes in the course of a day, a year, a life. We can be mysteries to ourselves and to others - confounding, confusing - as we turn this way and that, trying to find our way together through this changeable complex world. It’s very easy to feel lost and confused. But even in the midst of all of this, is there something we can learn to trust… a thread we can reach for that runs through it all? 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 Way It Is There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding. You don’t ever let go of the thread. William Stafford Photo by Stephane Gagnon on Unsplash

How can we learn to love questions themselves as much as the answers we seek? And can we learn to be the ones who sincerely welcome the questions of others, so that they have room to breathe and grow? Because it may well be that often, in the midst of the complexity of life, it’s the very bringing of our sincere questions to one another in which the seeds of the responses we need can begin to grow. 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: A Gift by Denise Levertov Just when you seem to yourself nothing but a flimsy web of questions, you are given the questions of others to hold in the emptiness of your hands, songbird eggs that can still hatch if you keep them warm, butterflies opening and closing themselves in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure their scintillant fur, their dust. You are given the questions of others as if they were answers to all you ask. Yes, perhaps this gift is your answer. Photo by Rae Galatas on Unsplash

As we encounter life we encounter all manner of different parts within us - and among them we often find parts of us which seem determined to thwart us and hold us back. How might we relate to the critical parts, the over-protective parts, the obstructive parts, and the parts of us that are simply terrified? And instead of being dominated by them, or trying to dominate them, how might we parent them well so they can grow in wisdom and maturity and bring us, and the people around them, their gifts? The poet Rainer Maria Rilke has some wonderful advice on this, from his book 'Letters to a Young Poet', and it's this that is the starting point for a very rich conversation. 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: And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way: watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers - perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life. Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke letter to Mr Kappus, Nov,4 1904 Photo by Rae Galatas on Unsplash

In which we talk about integral development coaching, a way to work in profound and compassionate support of people at they engage with their lives. It's this work that we're deeply dedicated to at Thirdspace, but which we haven't spoken much about directly in the more than six years of Turning Towards Life. Along the way we talk about what it is to meet someone with deep welcome, to be attentive to the way someone is relating to their life, and to find compassionate and truthful ways to speak about that what we say can be of use to another. And we talk about living in stories - the stories that constrain us, the stories that release us, and the good intention that so often lies behind even those stories that get us into the deepest difficulty. 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 Story Do You Live In? To live in the world as a human being is always to live in the middle of a story of one kind or another. We all live in a world of interpretation - the particular way we each make sense of the world. The interpretations we live in profoundly shape the experience we have of life, and the possibilities that open and close for each of us. So shifting our interpretations into ever more life-giving forms might be one of the most important ways we can play a part in our lives. In other words, examining and changing the stories we’re living can be a way to bring about new kinds of personal and collective freedom: the freedom of thought, feeling and action we need in order to respond fully to our lives. One of the intriguing aspects of the interpretations we live in is that they’re often invisible to us. We may have come by them deliberately and then forgotten them in the midst of the habit and repetition of day to day life. Or we may have entered into them ‘unconsciously’, taking them up in response to the surrounding culture or the family systems we grew up in when we were small. When they’re ‘in the background’ in this way, it can be hard to see how much they shape us. There’s a sense in which it’s easy for us to ‘belong to’ an interpretation rather than having our interpretations consciously and purposefully ‘belong to us’. This is where integral development coaching can be helpful. Because a skilled coach can be of support in helping us first see and then shift the stories in which we can live, often in liberating and life-giving ways. It can be wonderful to have someone who will help us observe what we have not yet observed about the stories we live in - someone who will partner with us as we enter into new ways of making sense of our lives that we may never have considered before, and help us find and practice new ways to live them. In this way we can come, over time, first to 'have our stories' rather than being 'had by them', and then to make new ones that can serve our lives more fully. It’s a very creative, joyful and compassionate role to play in support of another person. Photo by Nong on Unsplash

What might come if we could, as Julia Fehrenbacher writes, make a home inside ourselves, a shelter of kindness that grows all the truest things? It seems to us that doing exactly that is of great support to our courage, our blossoming, our bringing ourselves to the world with both strength and gentleness, and with the truthfulness our relationships deserve. So much of the time our inner harshness - when we have not learned how to grow a kind, welcoming place inside us - gets projected out into the world, and onto others. And often we try to seek reassurance and kindness from others, when it would be much more life-giving to first grow it in ourselves. 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 Most Important Thing I am making a home inside myself. A shelter of kindness where everything is forgiven, everything allowed—a quiet patch of sunlight to stretch out without hurry, where all that has been banished and buried is welcomed, spoken, listened to—released. ​ A fiercely friendly place I can claim as my very own. ​ I am throwing arms open to the whole of myself—especially the fearful, fault-finding, falling apart, unfinished parts, knowing every seed and weed, every drop of rain, has made the soil richer. ​ I will light a candle, pour a hot cup of tea, gather around the warmth of my own blazing fire. I will howl if I want to, knowing this flame can burn through any perceived problem, any prescribed perfectionism, any lying limitation, every heavy thing. ​ I am making a home inside myself where grace blooms in grand and glorious abundance, a shelter of kindness that grows all the truest things. ​ I whisper hallelujah to the friendly sky. Watch now as I burst into blossom. Julia Fehrenbacher www.juliafehrenbacher.com Photo by Arno Smit on Unsplash

When we’re children we often know intuitively something that as adults we forget - that there are many different parts of each of us inside, and that sometimes we really need to give space to the part of us that will be kind, and nurturing, and gentle. As adults it is possible for us to relearn this, and we can practice relating to the whole of our inner world with an attentiveness and spaciousness that’s resourcing to us. This in turn frees us up to bring our personal complexity to meet the complexity of the world. ‘Where to begin’ is the starting point for this week’s conversation. 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: Looking After Our Selves It’s well observed that between the ages of around one and twelve, many children manifest a deep attachment to a stuffed soft object, normally shaped into a bear, a rabbit or – less often – a penguin. The depth of the relationship can be extraordinary… What’s truly remarkable is that the animal looks after its owner, addressing him in a tone of unusual maturity and kindness. It might, in a crisis, urge the child not to worry and to look forward to better times in the future. But naturally, the animal’s character is entirely made up. The animal is simply something invented, or brought to life by one part of the child, in order to look after the other… Though it sounds a little odd, speaking to ourselves is common practice throughout our lives. Often, when we do so, the tone is harsh and punitive. But… mental well-being depends on having to hand a repertoire of more gentle, forgiving and hopeful inner voices… Being properly mature demands a gracious accommodation with what can seem childlike, embarrassing or humiliatingly vulnerable. We should honour stuffed animals for what they really are: tools to help us on our first steps in the vital business of knowing how to look after ourselves. From The School Of Life www.theschooloflife.com/article/stuffed-animals Photo by Richard Stovall on Unsplash

In our work as coaches, teachers, leaders and community makers, we have been finding anew over the last few years just how important ‘deliberateness’ is in making relationships that can hold and spaces in which there is genuine welcome. It might be easy to ignore the deliberate practices needed to make relationships in this way, or to treat them as optional. But, as the poet Seamus Heaney tells us in this week’s source, it’s the careful making of such deliberate ‘scaffolding’ for our relationships that gives them a chance to endure the very real challenges, difficulties and surprises of our personal and organisational 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: Scaffolding Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points, Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet all this comes down when the job’s done Showing off walls of sure and solid stone. So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be Old bridges breaking between you and me Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall Confident that we have built our wall. Seamus Heaney Photo by Mathieu Perrier on Unsplash

“I am a person who needs you to listen, simply listen, hear me say 'this is hard for me', not offer an answer or solution,” writes Lana Hechtman Ayers. And we are in agreement that there is a move, an opening, a 'coming alongside' one another that is the first move to make when someone brings us their difficulty, or pain. For many of us, this is not at all easy to do. Later, perhaps, when a request is made, it could well be time for us to bring a response. But first, before that, how do we quiet ourselves enough, and make enough welcome inside of us, that we can be the ones who meet others with sufficient dignity and welcome to be with them right where they are? And how do we set aside our own need to be right, be complete, and know what to do, so that we can be that for them? 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: This Is Hard for Me for Lizzie Winn & Justin Wise I am not the broken mug in the sink, handle snapped off, fixable with a few dabs of quick glue. Nor am I the unmoored board sticking up on the walkway that a couple of steel nails and even-handed whacks with a hammer will resolve. I am not even the small pearl button popped off the white cotton shirt that simple needle and thread will neatly address. I am a person who needs you to listen, simply listen, hear me say This is hard for me, not offer an answer or solution, just caress my hand softly as a fine rain, a time for you to be silent and hold my struggle as you would a precious newborn already asleep in your arms. Lana Hechtman Ayers Photo credit / Arturo Rey on Unsplash

“What is it like, such intensity of pain?” writes Rainer Maria Rilke. While we might ask one another in our more difficult moments “How are you?” or perhaps “How are you doing?”, we less often ask Rilke’s deeper question, a question that helps us and one another make contact with the aliveness and mystery of our being human. And so in this week’s conversation we explore together what it is to treat our own experience of ‘the happenings of life’ with reverence and respect, and start to see how this reverence and respect can help us inhabit the coming and going of all kinds of experience as a vibrant and necessary kind of gift for ourselves and for those 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: LET THIS DARKNESS BE A BELL TOWER Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am. Rainer Maria Rilke Photo credit / Arturo Rey on Unsplash

"Remember when you saw the stars of childhood, when you knelt alone and thought that they were there for you, lamps that something held to prove your beauty?" writes Joseph Fasano. Can we use these words as a gateway to finding a sense of belonging in the world, rather than being separate from it? And as we find our way to our own belonging - our receiving of life - what does it take for us to be ones around whom others get to belong? All of these seem like urgent questions to us in a world in which it is so easy for us to feel incomplete, desperate even, and in which it's possible and necessary for us to support one another in finding our place again. 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: Urgent Message to a Friend in Pain I have to tell you a little thing about living (I know, I know, but hear me), a little thing I've carried in the dark: Remember when you saw the stars of childhood, when you knelt alone and thought that they were there for you, lamps that something held to prove your beauty? They are they are they are they are they are. Joseph Fasano Photo by Vincent Chin on Unsplash

“When you love someone, you do not love them in exactly the same way all the time. It is an impossibility - a lie to even pretend to.” So how might we live gracefully in our relationships with their inevitable ebb and flow and, instead of demanding they stay constant, learn to trust the very natural movement in them as we would learn to trust the tides? And what might we need to discover about ourselves in order to make this possible? 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 Ebb and Flow of Relationship When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides. Anne Morrow Lindbergh Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash

When we freeze in public - giving a speech, or making a presentation - it's valuable to consider the possibility that all the unwelcome attention that seems to be coming our way might actually be our own attention, projected out onto others. In other words, feeling everyone's intense interest in us might show us something about how interested we are. The same goes for the feeling of pressure to do things - which might be a projected-out version of our own wish to contribute. Seeing this way starts to give us some routes to notice how we're participating in life, and to receive our own lives rather than push them away. And when we can see the ways in which 'what is happening' is at least in part 'what I am doing', we have the opportunity to turn our many gifts in productive directions that free us rather than constrain 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: Taking Back Our Projections Perhaps nothing is more painful than the feeling of acute self-consciousness, the feeling that everybody is staring at us. Maybe we have to give a speech, or act in a play, or receive an award, and we freeze because we feel that everybody is looking at us. But many people don't freeze in public. So the problem must lie not in the situation itself but in something we are doing in the situation. And what we are doing [is] projecting our own interest in people, so that everybody seems interested in us. Instead of actively looking, we feel looked at. We give our eyes to the audience, so that their natural interest in us seems blown out of proportion into a massive amount of interest zeroed-in on us personally, watching every move, every detail, every action. And so naturally we freeze. And we will stay frozen until we dare to take back the projection – to look, instead of feeling looked at, to give attention instead of being clobbered by it. Ken Wilber, from 'No Boundary' Photo by Rainier Ridao on Unsplash

We can easily live as if we're 'skating over the surface of life'. Sometimes that's an intelligent strategy for protecting ourselves from the intensity and difficulty that life can bring us. But our wider culture rarely helps us remember the depths of our lives - the depths that remind us of our mutual goodness, our pain, the ways we heal, the brevity of it all. And if we're skating the surface more than is necessary, we're barely being ourselves. What would it be to live with openness to the depths? And to bring ourselves to that task with gentleness and kindness? 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: Let the Leaf Fall When this living breaks your heart, steals your plans, when you miss the holy of here, thinking thinking thinking something brighter is over there, when there is no denying how precious, how precarious this aliveness is, let yourself break again and again, let the cool, almost-autumn breeze blow all the way in. Let the fading light, the falling leaf, show you how short it is, this life. How feather-fine the line. And then blow infinite kisses of kindness to every dying-living thing, yourself included. Always yourself included. Whoever you think you are does not even come close. You are big enough to hold every break, every ache, every dark cloud, every twinkling star too. Let the leaf fall. watch now— watch how life catches you. Julia Fehrenbacher juliafehrenbacher.com Photo credit: Matt | Unsplash