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.

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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:

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