00:00 Introduction, Welcome, and Turning Towards Life Live

04:55 The Importance of Finding One's Voice

08:17 Engaging with Deep Questions

10:51 Confronting Fear and Acceptance

19:00 Self-Remembrance and Aliveness

25:08 The Shared Human Experience

35:07 Conclusion and Invitation to Community

Here’s our source for this week:

Looking deeply at each remembrance and breathing in and out with our awareness of each one, we engage our fear in an empowered way…

Most of us don’t want to acknowledge it, so we live more or less in denial. Yet down deep in the recesses of our minds, we know it’s true. When we suppress our fearful thoughts, they continue to fester there in the dark. We are driven to consume in an attempt to forget and keep those thoughts from surfacing in our conscious mind. Running away from our fear ultimately makes us suffer and makes others suffer, and our fear only grows stronger…

Invite your fear into consciousness, and smile through it; every time you smile through your fear, it will lose some of its strength. If you try to run away from your pain, there is no way out...

We must invite these things up into our mind consciousness every day and tell them, “My dear, I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of my fear. It is my nature to grow old; I cannot escape old age.” When fear manifests, we want to have the seed of mindfulness also manifest to embrace it. So we have two energies present—the first is the energy of fear, and the second is the energy of mindfulness. The fear receives a bath of mindfulness and becomes a little bit weaker before it drops back down to the depths of our consciousness in the form of a seed.

Photo by razi pouri on Unsplash

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We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons from September. It's going to be in person on Zoom once a month. We're very excited about it. A chance to expand beyond the bounds of a podcast into forming a community of learning and practice. You can register your interest for Season 1 of Turning Towards Life Live here.

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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.

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growing old acceptance, death awareness, mindfulness practice, fear embracing, mortality contemplation, Buddhist remembrances, Thich Nhat Hanh wisdom, existential tenderness, human vulnerability, self-remembrance, control illusion, avoidance strategies, everyday mindfulness, shared humanity, ordinary sacredness, life force recognition, conscious ageing, intimate fears, tender ordinariness, universal mortality, presence practice, busyness distraction, consumption patterns, denial mechanisms, awakening practice

Thich Nhat Hanh - Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and author of "On Fear," whose text on the five remembrances forms the central source material

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel - Referenced for his teaching about being alive as a blessing

Joanna Macy - Mentioned as author of a previous source discussed in an earlier episode