Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

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

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