Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

Where does our courage come from? It certainly (and paradoxically) doesn’t come from our efforts to make ourselves safe, or strong, or to armour ourselves against the world.

Indeed, it may be that our courage really comes from what is most vulnerable in us, and what is most true - the something in us that lives very close to fear, and is also a neighbour to joy.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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:

Blessing of Courage

I cannot say
where it lives,
only that it comes
to the heart
that is open,
to the heart
that asks,
to the heart
that does not turn away.

It can take practice,
days of tugging at
what keeps us bound,
seasons of pushing against
what keeps our dreaming
small.

When it arrives,
it might surprise you
by how quiet it is,
how it moves
with such grace
for possessing
such power.

But you will know it
by the strength
that rises from within you
to meet it,
by the release
of the knot
in the center of
your chest
that suddenly lets go.

You will recognize it
by how still
your fear becomes
as it loosens its grip,
perhaps never quite
leaving you,
but calmly turning
into joy
as you enter the life
that is finally
your own.

by Jan Richardson

True patience isn’t ‘going slow’, it isn’t ‘tuning out’, and it isn’t a stick to beat ourselves with.

Instead it’s our capacity to turn towards what is actually happening without turning away, and to turn towards our own responses - including our irritation, anger, frustation - without turning away either.

It’s in this kind of patience that the seeds of a genuine kind of compassion for the messiness of a human life can arise, and the possibility that we might grow in ourselves an ever wider range of responses when we find ourselves in the thick-of-things.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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:

When tough times cause our love to fray into annoyance, our compassion to be overwhelmed by our fear, and our insight to evaporate, then patience begins to make sense. To me it is the most substantial, most serviceable, and most reliable of all spiritual qualities. Without it all other qualities are shaky. The practice of patience is simple enough. When difficulty arises, notice the obvious and not so obvious ways we try to avoid it. The things we say and do, the subtle ways in which our very bodies recoil and clench when someone says or does something to us that we don’t like. To practice patience is to simply notice these things and be fiercely present with them (taking a breath helps; returning to mindfulness of the body helps) rather than reacting to them and flailing around. Paying attention to body, paying attention to mind. And when possible, giving ourselves good teachings about the virtue of being with, rather than trying to run away from, the anguish we are feeling in this moment.

Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong by Norman Fischer

Photo by Melanie Vaz on Unsplash

Within us are great forces for the destruction of one another. But also great forces for mutual support, mutual strengthening, and the mutual amplification of care and goodness. Which will we draw upon when we are in trouble?

It’s the 6th birthday of ‘Turning Towards Life’, and we are feeling celebratory, and also a mix of  hopefulness about the world and tenderness at the many difficulties we are all in. We invite you to join us for this conversation about how we might find a path through, together.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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 world is meant
for building each other
into castles, for holding
each other in times of
duress and struggle.

We are not meant to
burn each other to the
ground.

If we cannot support
each other in the times
we need to come together,
we will be left in ashes.

Courtney Peppernell
www.peppernell.com

Photo by Xavier Senente on Unsplash

The possibility of taking up both remembering and forgetting as intentional practices.

So that we can remember, and not forget, one another’s gifts and goodness, sacredness and possibility, strength and tenderness. So we can forget all that we hold onto in one another that keeps us from who we could be, and meet one another afresh in each brink of time.

And so we can remember what needs fixing and healing - so that it can be fixed and healed - and forget the patterns in us that break and hurt, so that we don’t continue repeating them.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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 Forgetting

Forgetting has its uses. Were it not for our ability to forget, we would never be free from melancholy. No joyous occasion would dispel sadness. The events that could delight us would give us no pleasure, while we recalled every trouble of life. Even from the success of our hopes we could not expect to derive rest and peace of mind. We would never refrain from grieving. So both memory and forgetfulness, different and contrary as they are, are both gifts given to us, and each of them has its uses in our lives.

Bachya Ibn Pakuda, Duties of the Heart

Photo by Michael Jasmund on Unsplash

Look around at the people you know, and you’ll quickly see how particular each person’s response is to what life brings to them. You might say that each person has cultivated, over time, a particular ‘flavour’ for their engagement with life, or a particular ‘way of being’ in response to the world.

And yet this ‘flavour’ is often all but invisible to us in our understanding of ourselves, falling into the background of habit and familiarity. How might we help one another awaken to the ways we’re living, and support one another as we practice and experiment with wild new possibilities for ourselves?

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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:

Fighting the Wind

The trick is not to.
Not to struggle, thrusting
the anvil of your

body against the
gale, not to compete, but to
sway and bend, threading

the edge of the air,
welcoming dishevelment.
Who is in charge of

corralling the squall
into meager breezes, these
air conditioned spaces?

Who is bold enough
to slam open the windows
let the shouting in?

You want to be brave.
But you yearn also to curl
beneath the blanket

of wind, a small fold,
your breath a small sigh beneath
the world’s loud exhale

and also
to be the window
it shoves into and through, a
portal for the sky.

The wind reminds you
of what you can be, tousled
dismantled,
a being

that can continually
be remade.

Teresa Breeden



Photo by Oliver Hihn on Unsplash

We human beings are very sensitive to truth. So when we find the place inside us from which we can talk, truthfully, about the many aspects of our experience, it can be deeply connecting and safety-making. It also goes a long way to having the many parts of us themselves feel named and seen, and in doing so to become less desperate and fearful. And this place from which we can talk? We might call it the ‘essential self’.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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 body is a great sage, a many with one purpose, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd, a purpose that includes the free and the determined together, conflict and harmony together, multiplicity and unity as one

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Within you is a place of love and grace.
It is a place without fear
Where there is no need to defend or prove,
No need to lie or hide.

From this place spring words of truth,
Actions of courage,
And a life of love.
Wait patiently for the voices of fear in your mind
To cease their frantic call to action.

Become aware of what the next clear step
Of love might be.

Be patient with yourself.
The qualities of a lover
Do not depend on externals.
They take root in your own soul
And grow as you attend to them.
They all lie within you.

WILLIAM MARTIN

Photo by manu schwendener on Unsplash

A conversation about slowing down so we can, with gentleness, relax our own patterns and habits and then see them with truthfulness. About how we might be the ones for each other that make this possible. And about how radical, counter-cultural and necessary true rest can be.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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:

So, I wrapped myself
tightly in a silk cocoon.

And I told myself that
the only way I was going
to survive was if I slowed
down my healing and I gently
reasoned with all my being.

Because to reason with yourself
is to reflect, and to reflect must
always start with rest.

Courtney Peppernell
www.peppernell.com

Photo by Victoria Berman on Unsplash

The wider culture of the world doesn’t teach us much about how to see and name the goodness of people. But we quickly learn how to compare, criticise, and find all the ways we’re wanting or falling short, or how other people are. What does it take to start to see the goodness that underlies even the mistakes we make, and be ones who can help liberate that goodness into ever fuller expression? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Because we're travelling this week, the sound quality is a little different from our more regular episodes. We hope to be back to our usual sound quality next week.

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:

Saint Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell

Photo by ali mahmoodi on Unsplash

Listening is the foundation of all human relationship. But what is it to listen? Who do we have to be, to be ones whose listening connects, heals, restores, and supports our being true with one another? One response is that we're called to be ones who listen for all that is not said - the vastness of a person, their wholeness, and the 'essential self' that is beneath everything another person is saying. In this way we become a deep and faithful welcome to one another. Could a machine ever do this? Or is there a way in which the depth and particular ethical freedom of being human lends our listening a quality which only we can bring to the world? Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Because we're travelling this week, the sound quality is a little different from our more regular episodes. We hope to be back to our usual sound quality next week.

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:

Hush

Have you ever just
sat and listened to
a loved one vent?

Silently you held space,
'til from darkness
they'd rallied back?

Support
need not be complex,
it only needs to be only
     ....that.

Listen
until the clouds crack
and bleed them some sunshine.

Smile
and be their lifelifef,
'til their worst feels like

it's just fine.

Broms the Poet

Photo by Michael & Diane Weidner on Unsplash

What if a life of purpose isn't so much found by looking far from ourselves, towards some future goal, but instead by paying attention to the way that life is already moving through us? What does it take to kindle life's energy in us so that the qualities that we uniquely have to bring have a chance to get brought? And how might we stay awake to the splendour and energy of life that is always waiting to be known in us and through us, rather than collapsing into self-pity or demanding that the world meets us 'just so' before we'll live?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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 Splendid Torch

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

George Bernard Shaw

Photo by Olga Bast on Unsplash