Best Turning Towards Life A Thirdspace Podcast Podcasts (2025)

1
395: The Moral Labour of Living 40:11

6d ago40:11

40:11

A rich conversation about the necessity, joys and inevitable difficulties of loving - of loving one another, of loving all we can about this one precious life. About how easy it is to turn away, to distract ourselves, to check out of all that loving takes - as if that would save us from what Lizzie calls ‘the rattling sorrow’ of loss. And about the…

1
394: A Manifesto for Aliveness 34:04

13d ago34:04

34:04

In this conversation, we explore a poem by Wendell Berry which calls us to wake up from the numbing effects of conventional life and practice living with true aliveness. We begin by reflecting on how Berry's invitation to "do something that won't compute" challenges us to question the systems and habits that keep us trapped in unconscious patterns …

1
393: Coaching and Learning to Coach 34:16

20d ago34:16

34:16

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 appl…

1
392: The Real Power 29:29

22d ago29:29

29:29

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 fe…

1
391: No, There is No Turning Back 30:41

1M ago30:41

30:41

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 whi…

1
390: Be a Water Wheel 30:18

1M ago30:18

30:18

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 …

1
389: As Close as My Own Breath 32:49

2M ago32:49

32:49

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 wa…

1
388: Horizons 30:44

2M ago30:44

30:44

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 …

1
387: Within Each of Us There is a Silence 32:58

2M ago32:58

32:58

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 easi…

1
386: Children Learn What They Live 35:25

2M ago35:25

35:25

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, …

1
385: All the True Vows 28:43

3M ago28:43

28:43

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 mu…

1
384: Circling Around Through Time 27:22

3M ago27:22

27:22

When we see our lives only as a linear path from here to there, A to B, we put ourselves at the risk of endless comparison between 'where I am' and 'what might have been'. It's a comparison that does not often support us well, and it fuels an orientation that values youth ('I still have time to get to where I'm supposed to be') over age ('time is r…

1
383: My Face is Real, Yours Is 30:32

3M ago30:32

30:32

We have choices to make in how we relate to one another. We can relate from something real in us, and choose to treat the others we are with as real. Or we can retreat into a 'hall of mirrors' when we relate to one another from the more protective patterns in us. Much becomes possible when we find a way to be real, to 'wake to each other' as we're …

1
382: The Experience of Being Alive 29:55

3M ago29:55

29:55

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

1
381: The Light in Us 35:08

3M ago35:08

35:08

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

1
380: Try to Love the Questions Themselves 27:22

4M ago27:22

27:22

To live in the unresolved questions, tensions and contradictions of life is to be alive. To try to turn away from them, as if our lives could be question and confusion free is simply to drive the tensions inside us - to divide ourselves internally and to divide ourselves from life. We could see, as Lizzie says in this conversation, that "the tensio…

1
379: No Position is Correct for Long 36:54

4M ago36:54

36:54

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

1
378: Once Loved 34:16

4M ago34:16

34:16

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

1
377: Learning to be Alive 30:18

4M ago30:18

30:18

“Worry is really misplaced imagination”, someone told us recently. In this conversation, we consider what it is to bring our rich capacities for imagination, reflection and attention to the living of our lives, rather than as a way to escape life. What becomes possible when we commit to being changed by our experiences, in much the same way that li…

1
376: Serious Play and Playful Seriousness 27:55

5M ago27:55

27:55

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

1
375: Believe in Your Own Strange Loveliness 36:25

5M ago36:25

36:25

“People can be wonderful”, is where we begin this week’s conversation. How do we bring that forward, in the midst of all that can be so difficult, so that we can step-by-step make a world in which we meet one another with conversation, compassion, kindness, and welcome? And where do we need to start inside ourselves and with the ones closest to us …

1
374: Learning to Trust Life 33:11

5M ago33:11

33:11

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 conversati…

1
373: The Patterns of Your Life Repeat Themselves Until You Listen 31:34

5M ago31:34

31:34

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 …

1
372: Bonus: I Come to You With No Need to Be Fixed 32:26

5M ago32:26

32:26

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 …

1
371: Not Trying to Be Perfect 28:33

6M ago28:33

28:33

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-c…

1
370: Intimacy With Life 35:41

6M ago35:41

35:41

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 inh…

1
369: Uncovering the Wisdom Within Us 33:27

6M ago33:27

33:27

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 regardl…

1
368: One Word Spoken Slowly by the Stars 36:12

6M ago36:12

36:12

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 c…

1
367: The Gift of Our Attention 33:42

7M ago33:42

33:42

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, an…

1
366: What Grief Wants 34:06

7M ago34:06

34:06

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 t…

1
365: What the Journey is For 37:36

7M ago37:36

37:36

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 ou…

1
364: Learning to See What We See But Do Not Know That We See 31:49

7M ago31:49

31:49

As we unfold into life one of the risks is that we become more rigid rather than more fluid, more automatic rather than taking up our freedom. And one place we might look for, and work with, our rigidity and freedom is in seeing the judgments and assumptions we make about other people. When other people become fixed, predictable or boring to us, it…

1
363: Some People Will Ask 24:43

8M ago24:43

24:43

On the profound, life-saving and deeply dignifying possibilities that come from sharing our personal stories and experiences. The cultural narratives that often discourage openness, contrasted with the healing power of vulnerability and the importance of creating welcome for one another to speak and be listened to. Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn…

1
362: The Wildness in Our Hearts 32:31

8M ago32:31

32:31

On the tensions between our inner worlds and the external identities we often adopt to fit in. How societal expectations and personal fears can lead us to suppress what’s most true about us, and the importance of reconnecting with the "wild energies" within our souls. This week we explore how creative practices, changes in routine, and mindful enga…

1
361: This Relationship is Ours 33:55

8M ago33:55

33:55

We ‘privatise’ so much about our lives that is actually shared, as if we were separate entities - like objects that bump into one another only occasionally. But it’s an impoverished story that robs us of so much contact, depth and support. It might be much more accurate to say that instead of being like objects we are more like whirlpools in a rive…

1
360: Don't Lighten the Burden 36:07

8M ago36:07

36:07

Sometimes, instead of trying to make life's challenges easier, it's more beneficial to fully acknowledge the weight of our burdens until we're compelled to put them down. How we often carry impossibly heavy expectations, work ethics, or people-pleasing behaviours, thinking these will lead to success or belonging, when instead they multiply our diff…

1
359: When the Neglected Comes Forward for Recognition 25:54

9M ago25:54

25:54

How might we engage with our inner world and find meaning in our experiences? In this episode we explore how we might embrace even the difficult parts of life as potential sources of wisdom and growth. And how this perspective can transform our relationship with challenging emotions and experiences, inviting us all to approach life's complexities w…

1
358: Myths That Keep Us From Our Lives 34:45

9M ago34:45

34:45

Exploring three common protective myths people use to cope with life's uncertainties. How these myths, while intended to provide comfort, often amplify the very isolation and fear we want to avoid, and rarely help us as much as we think they will. How we might come to examine our own protective stories, opening the possibility of softening them so …

1
357: What You Thought You Lost 35:24

9M ago35:24

35:24

On rediscovering and recovering our own and other people’s qualities and possibilities in the midst of everything that happens. How what we think we've lost in life may actually be ever-present, just waiting to be rediscovered, often brought to us by the presence of others. And the possibility that every encounter with another person, even difficul…

1
356: Becoming an Adult Who... 35:52

9M ago35:52

35:52

How do we become fully ourselves, as adults, in contact with our essential depth and capacity and without being so much in the grip of the defensive patterns of personality we developed as children? Being an adult who is in touch with their essence. Being an adult who can play. Being an adult who can be joyful. Being an adult who can find freedom i…

1
355: Be Like a Cat 29:34

10M ago29:34

29:34

We can brace ourselves against our lives, and we can try to control the many situations in our lives that really can't be controlled. We mean by this everything from parenting, to relationships, to our living and dying. Sometimes, our bracing and our rigidity works right against the forces and movements of life that are bigger than us, and out of o…

1
354: The Life in Our Resistances 35:14

10M ago35:14

35:14

When the differences between us come into play - in a relationship, in a community, at work, in a friendship - it can seem tempting to search for some kind of false harmony, or to try to either ‘win over’ others or ‘lie down’ in the face of their will and wishes. But what if we started to see our differences, and our conflicts, as exactly the place…

1
353: The Gift of Loving 30:55

10M ago30:55

30:55

It seems like it should be so simple - giving to one another, receiving from one another, loving one another, opening ourselves to the love of others. But it’s so often hard, and so often we make ourselves unavailable to what we most need and long for, and hold back from what we are most able to give (or give it, but without taking into account the…

1
352: What to Remember When Waking 37:22

10M ago37:22

37:22

What if what is most called for in order to live our lives is remembering the mystery that we each are... the essential depth that we are, which is often buried beneath layers of habit, personality patterns, the strength of our feelings, our busy-ness, our worry? But we forget, and we take ourselves to be something much smaller than we are. One way…

1
351: Listening is Suspending Disbelief 34:50

10M ago34:50

34:50

When we listen with total presence, the person speaking to us often communicates differently, hearing themselves more deeply. We ‘hear ourselves into being’ more fully by listening this way too. Most people aren’t used to being heard in this way, and most of us aren’t used to listening with this much attention. But the act of deep attentive listeni…

1
350: Learning to Be In Each Others' Reshaping 31:24

11M ago31:24

31:24

What if we were able to really deeply honour and welcome our incompleteness and imperfection, and honour our own and one another's unique ways of being in the world? Maybe then - if we gave up our harsh self-criticism and our demands for perfection - we'd ever more be able to be 'home' for one another, and participate generously, lovingly and compa…

1
349: In the Open 28:02

11M ago28:02

28:02

We're born as wide-open hearts, but very quickly discover that the world around us is not ready or able to welcome us in our fulness. So early on we learn strategies to put large parts of ourselves away - to belong by unbelonging many aspects of ourselves. It's necessary, unavoidable even, but comes at a huge cost. So can we learn as we traverse ou…

1
348: How Surely Gravity's Law 35:33

11M ago35:33

35:33

Because we are imaginative beings, we can imagine and call into being all kinds of better possibilities for ourselves and those around us. At the same time, our imaginations can have us pretend to ourselves about the reality of our lives and experience. It’s completely understandable that we do this - distracting ourselves with what Rainer Maria Ri…

1
347: Safe Space 31:44

11M ago31:44

31:44

How do we make the safety in ourselves that makes it possible for others to feel safe with us? How do we make it safe for others so they can feel safe in themselves? How do we make it safe for us to disagree with one another as well as agree, to be uncomfortable together as well as comfortable, to hold together unity and difference? And how might c…

1
346: The Opposites and the Centre 35:07

12M ago35:07

35:07

We make all kinds of separations inside ourselves and between ourselves and one another. “I’m like this, but not like that” we tell ourselves. But that division leaves us bereft of all kinds of possibility and freedom. Perhaps right when we’re feeling most serious, it’s time to reach for that in us which is playful and bring it right alongside. Or …

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Turning Towards Life A Thirdspace Podcast

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Quick Reference Guide