Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

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.

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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:

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