Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

When we see our lives only as a linear path from here to there, A to B, we put ourselves at the risk of endless comparison between 'where I am' and 'what might have been'. It's a comparison that does not often support us well, and it fuels an orientation that values youth ('I still have time to get to where I'm supposed to be') over age ('time is running out'). There is another way to look - to see that in many ways, alongside our achievements and disappointments, life is a circling. We move in a circular way, carrying, as Nick Cave writes, "all our needs and yearnings and hurts along with us, and all the people who have poured themselves into us and made us what we are". It is in It is "this circular reciprocal motion that grows more essential and affirming and necessary with each turn". 

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
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.

Episode Overview
00:00 Introduction to Turning Towards Life
02:00 Exploring Nick Cave's Insights
06:01 The Circular Nature of Life
12:05 Rethinking Time and Progress
17:52 The Impact of Human Constructs
23:52 Embracing the Journey of Life

Here's our source for this week:

Circling Around

S: So essentially what you’re doing as an artist is constantly stumbling forward.

N: Stumbling forward is a beautiful way of putting it Seán, but I wonder if the notion of forwardness is correct.  Perhaps what I mean to say is that although we feel we are moving in a forward direction, in my estimation we are forever moving in a circular way, with all the things we love and remember in tow, and carrying all our needs and yearnings and hurts along with us, and all the people who have poured themselves into us and made us what we are, and all the ghosts who travel with us.  It’s like we are running towards God, but that God’s love is also the wind that it pushing us on, as both the impetus and the destination, and it resides in both the living and the dead.  Around and around we go, encountering the same things, again and again, but within this movement things happen that change us, annihilate us, shift our relationship to the world.  It is this circular reciprocal motion that grows more essential and affirming and necessary with each turn.

From Faith, Hope and Carnage - by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan


Photo by Erlend Ekseth on Unsplash

We have choices to make in how we relate to one another. We can relate from something real in us, and choose to treat the others we are with as real. Or we can retreat into a 'hall of mirrors' when we relate to one another from the more protective patterns in us. Much becomes possible when we find a way to be real, to 'wake to each other' as we're invited to do by M C Richards in this week's source. A conversation about generosity, curiosity, courage and contactfulness - all qualities of great value in the world right now.

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
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.

Episode Overview
00:00 Welcome and Introduction to the Conversation
02:29 Exploring the Source: MC Richards' 'Centering'
06:21 The Challenge of Realness
11:06 Initiative and Newness
16:05 The Importance of Realness in Relationships
22:22 Curiosity vs. Fear in Human Connection
27:24 The Ripple Effect of Genuine Connection

Here's our source for this week:

My Face is Real. Yours is.

“An act of the self, that’s what one must make. An act of the self, from me to you. From center to center. We must mean what we say, from our innermost heart to the outermost galaxy. Otherwise we are lost and dizzy in a maze of reflections. We carry light within us - there is no need merely to reflect. Others carry light within them. These lights must wake to each other. My face is real. Yours is. Let us find our way to our initiative.”

M C Richards, from ‘Centering’

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Is our primary task in our lives to pursue meaning? Or is it first to learn how to be in ever more contact with our lives - to actually experience what happens inside us and outside us and bring the two into relationship with one another? It might well be the case that until we’re doing that, it’s very hard for us to be sensitive enough to our lives to even know if meaning is coming our way.

A conversation about meaning, purpose, and the experience of life, with 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.

Episode Overview
00:00 Introduction to Turning Towards Life
02:59 Exploring Joseph Campbell's Perspective on Life
10:08 The Experience of Being Alive
17:48 Intimacy Between Inner and Outer Worlds
27:59 Conclusion and Reflection on Aliveness

Here's our source for this week:

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

What happens when we recognise something original in ourselves and each other that exists prior to our individual stories and fears? When we see past the nest of our anxieties to what Mark Nepo calls 'the clear bird' - our essential nature that connects us to the very beginning of things - we might discover a profound basis for meeting life's complexities with wisdom and courage.

When someone sees us fully enough to see beneath our fears to this essential nature, we wonder why we ever held our secrets so tightly. Witnessing the light in one another invites us to remember that we're not separate from each other or the world, but rather expressions of the same something bursting itself forward into the world, offering a path toward genuine connection and meaning, and also what we might need to call upon to respond courageously and lovingly to the complexities and difficult challenges of the world.

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
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.

Episode Overview
00:00 Introduction and Gratitude for Mark Nepo
02:33 Exploring the Source: The Book of Awakening
07:05 The Connection Between Self-Love and the World
10:13 Understanding Originalness and Connection
15:01 The Power of Seeing Each Other's Originalness
18:46 Practicing Mutual Recognition and Light
22:51 The Importance of Seeing Beyond Stories
27:05 The Role of Conversation in Understanding
32:38 Closing Thoughts

I begin to realize that in inquiring about my own origin and goal, I am inquiring about something other than myself…. In this very realization I begin to recognize the origin and goal of the world.

Martin Buber 

In loving ourselves, we love the world. For just as fire, rock, and water are all made up of molecules, everything, including you and me, is connected by a small piece of the beginning. Yet, how do we love ourselves? It is as difficult at times as seeing the back of your head ... like feeding a clear bird that no one else can see. You must be still and offer your palmful of secrets like delicate seed. As she eats your secrets, no longer secret, she glows and you lighten, and her voice, which only you can hear, is your voice bereft of plans. And the light through her body will bathe you till you wonder why the gems in your palm were ever fisted... 

Once in a great while, if someone loves you enough, they might see her rise from the nest beneath your fear. In this way, I’ve learned that loving yourself requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world—our own self-worth. All the great moments of conception—the birth of mountains, of trees, of fish, of prophets, and the truth of relationships that last—all begin where no one can see, and it is our job not to extinguish what is so beautifully begun. For once full of light, everything is safely on its way—not pain-free, but unencumbered—and the air beneath your wings is the same air that trills in my throat, and the empty benches in snow are as much a part of us as the empty figures who slouch on them in spring.

When we believe in what no one else can see, we find we are each other. And all moments of living, no matter how difficult, come back into some central point where self and world are one, where light pours in and out at once.

Mark Nepo, from ‘The Book of Awakening’

Photo by Mitya Ivanov on Unsplash

To live in the unresolved questions, tensions and contradictions of life is to be alive. To try to turn away from them, as if our lives could be question and confusion free is simply to drive the tensions inside us - to divide ourselves internally and to divide ourselves from life. We could see, as Lizzie says in this conversation, that "the tensions are life itself". So what does it take to live in the midst of life's complexity rather than turn away - to live life rather than pretend to live? That's the question we take up in this episode.

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
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:

“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves….Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Parker Palmer writes in reflection:

But my deeper hope comes with Rilke’s words “and the point is to live everything.” Of course that is the point! If I do not fully live the tensions that come my way, those tensions do not disappear: they go underground and multiply. I may not know how to solve them, but by wrapping my life around them and trying to live out their resolution, I open myself to new possibilities and keep the tensions from tearing me apart.

There is only one alternative: an unlived life, a life lived in denial of the tensions that life brings. Here I play a masked role, pretending outwardly that I have no tensions at all while inwardly all those tensions I pretend not to have are ripping the fabric of my life.

Pretending is another name for dividedness, a state that keeps us from cultivating the capacity for connectedness on which teaching depends. When we pretend we fall out of community with the common centre that is both the root and the fruit of teaching at its best. But when we understand that ‘the point is to live everything’ we will recover all that is lost.

From the Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer

Photo by Jacky Nelson on Unsplash

We often hold onto positions, opinions and beliefs as a way of shoring ourselves up against the uncertainty of the world. And while our positions may have much integrity to them, it's most often the case that they're not the whole story, especially when faced with the complexity of the world, as well as the complexity of ourselves and other people.

Holding on to a position too tightly can easily lead us into difficult places, but it can also be difficult to soften a position and even more difficult to let it go when it is called for. We can so easily feel shame or embarrassment, strong inner criticism, or we can face the criticism of others. In this conversation we venture together into exploring what it might take for each of us to cultivate our own inner flexibility so we can meet the unfolding world with the responsiveness and wisdom that it calls for. And what it might take for us to be a welcome to that change in ourselves and to change in others.

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
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:

No Position is Correct for Long

Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error. It's not that no position is correct; it's that no position is correct for long. We're perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in—to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever and just be correct; to find an agenda and stick with it…

It's hard to be alive. The anxiety of living makes us want to judge, be sure, have a stance, definitively decide. Having a fixed, rigid system of belief can be a great relief.

Wouldn't it be nice to just decide to live as an anti-happiness zealot? … Completely consistent, you'll never need to be confused again. You can just stalk around, having sold your bathing suit, looking down your nose at everything.

For that matter, wouldn't it be nice to just throw down on the side of being happy? To decide to live life as an ardent pro-happiness advocate, always striving to celebrate, dance, have fun, maximize your joy? But then, before you know it, you're [obnoxious] on Instagram, standing in a waterfall with a garland of flowers, thanking God for blessing you with this wonderful life you must have somehow earned via your immaculate mindfulness.

As long as we don't decide, we allow further information to keep coming in… It reminds us that any question in the form "Is X right or wrong?" could benefit from another round of clarifying questions.

Question: "Is X good or bad?"

Story: "For whom? On what day, under what conditions? Might there be some unintended consequences associated with X? Some good hidden in the bad that is X? Some bad hidden in the good that is X? Tell me more."

George Saunders
from ‘A Swim in the Pond in the Rain’

Photo by Cici GUAN on Unsplash

Giving can, for many of us, be a fraught experience. Maybe we give to one another in the expectation of a particular kind of response or validation, and then maybe we get it… or not. Or we might hold back from giving as a way to keep ourselves safe from being exposed and getting things wrong.

How we give to one another and how our giving brings life to both giver and receiver are our topic for this conversation. Is there a way we might find to enter into a more mutual, life-giving, trusting reciprocity around our giving and loving one another, and the world?

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
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.

Highlights of our conversation:

00.00 Introduction and Welcome
04.35 Exploring the source, Once Loved
13.20 Polarities of Giving and Receiving
16.33 Cultivating Faith in Life’s Benevolence
19.26 Shifting Narratives
22.28 Generosity, Nurture, Care
25.19 Care vs Use
28.27 Closing Reflections

Here’s our source for this week:

Once Loved

World
Once loved
Will always yield
Its rewards to the
Giver

Meadow
Once grazed
Will never mind
Ceding grass to the
Grazer

Man
Once loved
Will never lose
Hope while holding the
Lover

Tree
Once hugged
Will never live
Life without loving the
Hugger

Stefan Atkinson

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

“Worry is really misplaced imagination”, someone told us recently. In this conversation, we consider what it is to bring our rich capacities for imagination, reflection and attention to the living of our lives, rather than as a way to escape life. What becomes possible when we commit to being changed by our experiences, in much the same way that light illuminates and changes a room, rather than ‘going to sleep in the middle of the show’? And how much it matters that we engage fully in the work of reflective conversation, making sense of and metabolising our experiences so we can learn from them. Living this way isn’t ‘navel gazing’ but a way of turning our experiences into learning rather than rigidity, and supporting us in bringing ourselves more fully into life.

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
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.

Highlights of our conversation:

00.00 Introduction and Welcome
04.08 Exploring the source, MC Richards’ ‘Centering’
08.07 Learning and Consciousness
11.59 Awakening to Life: The Challenge of Engagement
15.59 Processing and Metabolising Life
20.01 Imagination and Reflection: Staying Awake
23.52 The Value of Reflective Conversations

Here’s our source for this week:

Learning to be Alive

You don’t need to tell me what education is. Everybody really knows that education goes on all the time everywhere all through our lives, and that it is the process of waking up to life… It takes a heap of resolve to keep from going to sleep in the middle of the show. It’s not that we want to sleep our lives away. It’s that it takes certain kinds of energy, certain capacities for taking the world into our consciousness, certain real powers of body and soul to be a match for reality. 

That’s why knowledge and consciousness are two quite different things. Knowledge is like a product we consume and store. All we need [for that] are good closets. By consciousness I mean a state of being ‘awake’ to the world throughout our organism. This kind of consciousness requires not closets but an organism attuned to the finest perceptions and responses. It allows experience to breathe through it as light enters and changes a room.

That which we consume, with a certain passivity, accepting it for the most part from our teachers, who in turn have accepted it from theirs, is like the food we eat. And food, in order to become energy, or will, [must be] transformed entirely by the processes of metabolism. 

We do not become the food we eat. Rather the food turns into us. Similarly with knowledge, at best, we do not turn into encyclopedias or propaganda machines or electric brains. Our knowledge, if we allow it to be transformed within us, turns into a capacity for life-serving human deeds. If knowledge does not turn into life [it] poisons just as food would if it stayed in the stomach and was never digested, and the waste products never thrown off.

M C Richards, from ‘Centering’

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

The delicate balance between taking life seriously and maintaining a sense of playfulness. How earnest conviction and dedication help us take care of what matters - our responsibilities and the people who depend on us. And the life-giving and vital counterweight of lightheartedness: how a looser grip on life can free us to imagine, deepen our contact with others, and create new possibilities. 

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
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.

Highlights of our conversation:

00.00 Introduction and Welcome
01.53 Play, by Vince Gowmon
05.49 The Role of Seriousness and Playfulness
11.46 The Transformative Power of Laughter
18.24 Play as a Bridge Between Seriousness and Lightness
25.33 Conscious Engagement with Play

Here’s our source for this week:

Play

Play isn’t something separate from the daily grind of life. It is not something to finally get to when work ends. Rather, play, like music, is a force that we feel in our bones and that whispers in our heart. As kids demonstrate, play is not over there, but forever here and now.

Vince Gowmon

Photo by Rene Bernal on Unsplash

“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
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.

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