Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

What would it be to learn to help other people turn deeply towards their own lives? We’ve been asking this question in many ways over the past more than seven years, and this week we turn towards a great love of ours, the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course, which is designed around this very question. 

This year’s course begins in June and applications are coming in. In this rich conversation we talk together about what it is to be an attentive, compassionate and wise support for the development of others, and what it might be like to learn with us over the course of a year.

You can find out more about the programme on the Thirdspace website wearethirdspace.org

This week’s conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Episode Overview
00:00 Introduction to the Thirdspace Professional Coaching Course
03:03 The Heart of Integral Development Coaching
05:59 Navigating Life's Interruptions with Creativity and Compassion
08:47 The Role of Community in Learning to Coach
12:03 Coaching is Learning to Turn Towards Life
14:58 The Importance of Belonging and Contribution
17:51 Embracing Creativity and Courage in Difficult Times
21:06 The Journey of Self-Discovery
23:55 Practical Skills for Life and Coaching
27:00 Conclusion and Invitation to Join
30:38 Taking Up Our "Right Size" in the World

Here's our source for this week:

Coaching and Learning to Coach

Every so often in life we pause and make note of the person we have become and the one we are becoming. Sometimes this reflection is prompted by professional circumstances, like a promotion, performance review, job change, or firing. Just as often it emerges from the “rest of life” – as through an illness, death, or the beginning or ending of a relationship. Whatever the origin, these experiences can feel like an opportunity or a burden, a chance to develop or a painful lesson…and often both. How we make sense of these experiences often determines what actions we take, and this, of course, influences our competence and fulfilment in life. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, in these moments, to have someone by our side to ask skilful questions, listen deeply, be fully present with who we are and what we say, point out our blind spots, and custom-design practices to help us move forward? And wouldn’t it be marvellous, too, to be this person for others?

The Professional Coaching Course (PCC) exists in large part due to the primacy of these questions for ourselves and the people we serve. 

Integral Development Coaching is what happens when two people develop a professional relationship that is grounded in mutual trust and respect, directed toward a set of clear outcomes, guided by presence, and informed by broad models about what it means to be a human being. It is a methodology. It is an integration project. It is a moment when you feel deeply connected to yourself and others, with a deep acceptance of everything, and you take practical steps to move forward in life. It is both simpler and more complex than it sounds.

James Flaherty and Amiel Handelsmann
From ‘Integrating Rigour, Compassion, and Creative Design - an Introduction to Integral Development Coaching and the PCC’

Join Us Live in 2025

On Sunday 8th June 2025 it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Zoom. You're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. If you are at all interested and you would like to join us, please keep watching out and listening out on the podcast or you could head over towards our website turningtowards.life and sign up for our weekly emails there and you will get all of the information directly into your inbox.

We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons. 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. If you go to turningtowards.life there is a button you can press to register your interest in this.

About Turning Towards Life
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.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest

If 'power' is the extent to which we each are able to bring about our intentions in the world, then our power matters. But there are many different ways to exercise power - as a parent, colleague, friend - in any role where our actions influence others.

What does it take to recognise how we're exercising the power we have? Are we acting from our fearful parts or from that which is solid, genuine and faithful to life? Perhaps the deeper invitation is to centre our power around love itself - whether fierce or gentle - rather than around our attempts to dominate and control.

This week’s conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Join Us Live in 2025

On Sunday 8th June 2025 it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Zoom. You're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. If you are at all interested and you would like to join us, please keep watching out and listening out on the podcast or you could head over towards our website turningtowards.life and sign up for our weekly emails there and you will get all of the information directly into your inbox.

We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons. 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. If you go to turningtowards.life there is a button you can press to register your interest in this.

About Turning Towards Life
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.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest

Episode Overview
00:00 Introduction and Upcoming Events
02:19 Marion Woodman’s Source
05:07 Personal Authenticity
08:31 Distinctions in Love and Power
12:05 The Nature of Power and Love
16:38 Truth, Power, and Realness
20:08 The Necessity of Power Dynamics
24:45 Faith and Possibility

Here's our source for this week:

The Real Power

To me, real power is about presence. It’s the energy of knowing that you are who you are, and therefore speaking and acting from your authentic self. It doesn’t matter what your work is—if you’re a teacher or a nurse or whatever; it is your presence that’s the power. It’s not power over anybody else. It’s just the expression of who you are.

Power in the sense of controlling somebody else is different from personal presence.

Love is the real power. It’s the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you’ll want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with - everyone blooms.

Marion Woodman 

Photo by Jessica Alves on Unsplash

This is a very brief update to say that this week's Turning Towards Life episode is, for the first time in our history, slightly delayed because of a technical difficulty that we ran into this morning. So we are planning to come to you with our next full episode of Turning Towards Life later this week. We think on Friday.

So please watch out for us landing in your podcast app or whatever way you like to watch or listen to us then. Whilst you're here with us, just a couple of announcements that you might be interested in. On Sunday the 8th of June 2025, it will be our 400th episode and we are planning a Turning Towards Life live gathering on Sunday the 8th of June on Zoom.

You're all very welcome to join. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet us and to meet others. If you are at all interested and you would like to join us, please keep watching out and listening out on the podcast or you could head over towards our website turningtowards.life and sign up for our weekly emails there and you will get all of the information directly into your inbox. We also have the launch of our Turning Towards Life live programme which is going to run in six month seasons. 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. If you go to turningtowards.life there is a button you can press to register your interest in this.

It's going to start in the first or second week of September and we will email you all of the details about how to take part, what it will cost, what it will involve. And we are tremendously excited to build something we hope very exciting, rich, deep, a great opportunity for learning and long lived as well. So that is also at turningtowards.life. And then the last thing to tell you about is that the Thirdspace annual cohort of the Professional Coaching Course, the centrepiece of our work helping people become skillful in supporting their own development and the development of others is coming up. The next annual cohort begins at the end of June. We have a two-day introductory Foundations of Coaching programme also online coming up on the 19th and 20th of May.

We're assembling a wonderful cohort of people and maybe you'd be interested in finding out more and maybe joining us. So you can head over to wearethirdspace.org to find out all about that over there and we'll be very happy to answer any questions you have. So thanks for listening. We will be back with you with a full length episode later in the week.

The narratives about time and growing older that our culture hands us often fail to name and invite the kind of luminous gathering of life that we can become with age. What if we found a way to fully grieve the losses of aging, rather than fight against them, and in doing so we deepen into a kind of translucent generosity of heart and spirit in which we allow ourselves to give ourselves away to those around us and to life itself? And what if we could do that together, rather than alone?

This week’s conversation 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
Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest

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
03:11 Exploring Wendell Berry's Work
06:00 The Nature of Time and Aging
12:01 Grief and Acceptance
18:12 Generosity in the Face of Loss
23:57 Community and Intergenerational Wisdom

Here's our source for this week:

Sabbaths 1993 I

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

by Wendell Berry

Photo by Maria Krasnova on Unsplash

Chasing after what we want so badly - from our friends and other relationships - can make it infuriatingly difficult to have and be what we most need. Can we find a way to move towards our longings also find out that although there is much that we might legimately want and long for, the act of receiving and giving right here, in the midst of where we already are, can so often bring us much that we really need. In the process of cultivating a steady reciprocity of receiving and giving we can become a person who meets the truer needs of those around us. The metaphor of the water wheel, in its steady turn of giving and receiving, has much to stir our imagination in this regard, as Rumi teaches us in this week's luminous source.

This week’s conversation 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
Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest

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 Welcoming the Audience
02:53 Exploring Rumi's 'The Water Wheel'
05:55 Curiosity and Aliveness in Relationships
08:55 The Nature of Friendship and Reciprocity
11:53 Receiving and Giving in Life
15:10 The Balance of Stillness and Movement
17:53 Desires and the Journey of Staying Present
21:08 The Invitation to Stay Together
24:00 Conclusion and Reflection on the Conversation

Here's our source for this week:

The Waterwheel

Stay together, friends.
Don’t scatter and sleep.

Our friendship is made
of being awake.

The waterwheel accepts water
and turns and gives it away,
weeping.

That way it stays in the garden,
whereas another roundness rolls
through a dry riverbed looking
for what it thinks it wants.

Stay here, quivering with each moment
like a drop of mercury.

Rumi

Photo by Jonathan Wheeler on Unsplash

We long to be present in our lives, and we run from it too. In a culture which emphasises the running - into distraction and avoidance - how might we turn towards the intimacy of presence with our own lives and what we care about the most? Why does this even matter (and it does!)? And how do we do that without dishonouring those parts of us that want to protect us from the inevitable tragedies and losses that come along with beauty and sacredness?

This week’s conversation 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
Join Turning Towards Life Live: www.turningtowards.life/ttl-live-interest

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 Live
03:01 The Importance of Community and Connection
06:01 Exploring the Poem 'Prayer' by Marie Howe
08:53 The Struggle Between Presence and Distraction
11:44 The Human Condition: Longing and Running
14:58 Finding Humor in Our Inner Conflicts
17:51 The Sacredness of Everyday Life
21:05 Navigating the Complexity of Life
24:04 The Balance of Beauty and Tragedy in Existence
27:13 The Role of Presence in Our Lives
30:08 Conclusion and Reflections on the Conversation

Here's our source for this week:

Prayer

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention – the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here

among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.

Marie Howe

from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (Norton, 2008)

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

We look out at the world and see horizons everywhere, lines on the ‘edge of the world’ that we know are markers of the beyond. When we move and shift our position, what is beyond the horizon reveals itself in new ways. 

And we are like this too - what is within us and what is between us is marked by horizons that are not fixed lines but invitations for movement and discovery. What would become possible if we committed ourselves to standing in new places inside ourselves, and taking one another by the hand to meet on new horizons between us than the habitual, familiar ones we have grown used to?

This week’s conversation 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
02:02 Exploring the Concept of Horizons
10:15 The Nature of Limitations and Possibilities
16:35 Shared Horizons in Relationships
22:01 Imagination and New Horizons
28:38 The Power of Connection and Support

Here's our source for this week:

HORIZONS

are everywhere: both inside and outside of what only feels like our sense of self. The edge between what I think is me and what I think is you is as much a horizon as any line of mountains or that far dark line on the distant ocean. Horizon is the line between what we think we know and what we do not know, between what we think we see and do not see: horizons mark the threshold between the world that I inhabit and the one that seems to wait for me, between a world I can almost understand and what lies beyond the imagination of my present life. Horizons are creative, disturbing, invitational edges just by the fact that they exist.

David Whyte
from ‘Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words’

Photo by Sam Williams on Unsplash

There is action to be taken in the world, for sure. Urgent action to take care of our lives, our communities, and the wider world in which we all live. But there is a also a deep well of presence, patience, intimacy, and connection right in the centre of each of us. When our action is fearful, rushed and out of touch with this still centre, it easily spills over into polarisation, panic and disconnection. And when the source of our action is this centre, the essential aliveness and goodness that we all are at the heart of things, much more that is sustaining and care-filled becomes possible. What is it to find our way back to the vastness that is our origins, and to let our lives and relationships be infused by that at each moment, especially 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 Silence
04:03 The Importance of Silence in Our Lives
08:00 Silence as a Political Act
12:04 Finding Our Center in Silence
15:58 The Role of Silence in Action
20:08 Cultivating Silence for Deeper Connection
23:46 Reflection and Observation in Leadership
28:10 Gratitude for Silence and Connection
31:51 Conclusion and Invitation to Return

Here's our source for this week:

Within Each of Us There is a Silence 

Within each of us there is a silence
—a silence as vast as a universe.
We are afraid of it…and we long for it.

When we experience that silence, we remember
who we are: creatures of the stars, created
from the cooling of this planet, created
from dust and gas, created
from the elements, created
from time and space…created
from silence.

In our present culture,
silence is something like an endangered species…
an endangered fundamental.

The experience of silence is now so rare
that we must cultivate it and treasure it.
This is especially true for shared silence.

Sharing silence is, in fact, a political act.
When we can stand aside from the usual and
perceive the fundamental, change begins to happen.
Our lives align with deeper values
and the lives of others are touched and influenced.

Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses,
to our selves. It locates us. Without that return
we can go so far away from our true natures
that we end up, quite literally, beside ourselves.

We live blindly and act thoughtlessly.
We endanger the delicate balance which sustains
our lives, our communities, and our planet.

Each of us can make a difference.
Politicians and visionaries will not return us
to the sacredness of life.

That will be done by ordinary men and women
who together or alone can say,
"Remember to breathe, remember to feel,
remember to care,
let us do this for our children and ourselves
and our children's children. Let us practice for life's sake."

by Gunilla Norris

Photo by Janke Laskowski on Unsplash

How can we start to become more aware of the ways we conduct ourselves in our lives, especially the way we conduct ourselves towards others? At a time when we are being encouraged to cheapen our relationships with one another, or to wield power over one another, can we catch on more sensitively to the ways we carry our shame, our wish to dominate, our fear, and how the protective parts of us respond to that in the way we bring ourselves to others? Can we nurture in us that which brings our fullest qualities forward, and which evokes them in others? And how do we attend to the patterns over time in us that we're expressing - patterns which may have been born in our own childhood or in the generations before us - and intervene thoughtfully and with integrity so we can more and more be the ones we are here to be?

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

Episode Overview
00:00 Introduction to Turning Towards Life
03:00 Exploring the Source: Children Learn What They Live
05:46 The Impact of Parenting on Self-Perception
09:10 Understanding Inner Patterns and Their Origins
11:54 The Role of Consciousness and Observation
14:58 Navigating Power Dynamics in Relationships
18:11 The Journey of Self-Discovery and Healing
21:03 Compassion and Understanding
24:12 The Importance of Reflection and Choice
26:48 Closing Thoughts and Future Conversations

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:

Children Learn What They Live

If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn.
If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight.
If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be shy.
If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel guilty.
If a child lives with tolerance, he learns to be patient.
If a child lives with encouragement, he learns confidence.
If a child lives with praise, he learns to appreciate.
If a child lives with security, he learns to have faith.
If a child lives with approval, he learns to like himself.
If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, he learns to find love in the world.

Dorothy Law Nolte, 1954
Family Column for the Torrance Herald newspaper

Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash

Underneath the necessary surface of our life - all the ways we accommodate, fit in, bend ourselves to take care of one another - there is another deeper current. Sometimes we might go years without attending to this flow, maybe encountering it again only right at the end of our lives. We keep on finding through our conversations and our work how much it matters in a life to attend to the flow, to discover what it is saying, to find out the unique kind of truth that we can make with our own lives, and to bring it to the surface so it can flow into the world and be of benefit. How might we do this? What does it take to do this? That's the topic of David Whyte's stirring poem that forms the source for this week, and the conversation which follows.

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

Episode Overview
00:00 Introduction and Context
03:10 Exploring David Whyte's Poem
06:25 Personal Reflections on Truth
10:41 The Importance of Realness
15:16 Discernment in Relationships
20:38 The Journey of Self-Discovery
25:13 Creating Spaces for Truth
27:57 Conclusion and Invitation

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:

All the True Vows

 All the true vows
 are secret vows
 the ones we speak out loud
 are the ones we break.
 There is only one life
 you can call your own
 and a thousand others
 you can call by any name you want.
 Hold to the truth you make
 every day with your own body,
 don’t turn your face away.
 Hold to your own truth
 at the center of the image
 you were born with.
 Those who do not understand
 their destiny will never understand
 the friends they have made
 nor the work they have chosen
 nor the one life that waits
 beyond all the others.
 By the lake in the wood
 in the shadows
 you can
 whisper that truth
 to the quiet reflection
 you see in the water.
 Whatever you hear from
 the water, remember,
 it wants you to carry
 the sound of its truth on your lips.
 Remember,
 in this place
 no one can hear you
 and out of the silence
 you can make a promise
 it will kill you to break,
 that way you’ll find
 what is real and what is not.
 I know what I am saying.
 Time almost forsook me
 and I looked again.
 Seeing my reflection
 I broke a promise
 and spoke
 for the first time
 after all these years
 in my own voice,
 before it was too late
 to turn my face again.

David Whyte, from The House of Belonging

Photo by Justin Wise