Afleveringen
-
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 compassionately in the reshaping of ourselves that life is always asking of us.
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
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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:
Symmathesy (the poem)
Each one of us is a crooked tree,
Reaching for water and light,
Bending ourselves around obstacles,
Scary thoughts, hurtful moments,
darkness & thirst,
Finding a way to breathe in the sun and hold the soil,
Our branches are kinked and twisted,
Because that is what it took to be here,
The ways of learning to be in our worlds,
Have shaped responses,
Our many experiences are speaking through every gesture.
Our loves, and broken paths, a tenderness, a criticism,
Learning always,
Yearning always,
In crooked beauty...
To be a home for those who may find comfort
In the asymmetry of our belonging,
A nest cradling new life,
Tucked into an old log teeming with creatures,
learning to be in each other's reshaping.
Nora Bateson
Photo by Brandon Green on Unsplash -
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 our years of adulthood to bring ourselves out into the open where it is, in the end, possible to be most fully loved? And can we be the ones who love our friends, partners, children and colleagues 'out into the open' by being an affordance for those around us to bring themselves forward ever more fully?
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:
In The Open
No matter the strength of shyness
No matter how tempting it is to keep myself a secret
Oh how comfortâs infestation spreads
While it urges me to do nothing
There is no room to hide
In a world I am made for
Out in the open
There is no room to hide
I am supposed to be loved
Out in the open
Morgan Lahm
Photo by bady abbas on Unsplash -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
-
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. Itâs completely understandable that we do this - distracting ourselves with what Rainer Maria Rilke calls âempty freedomsâ is surely one way to try to avoid experiences and feelings we donât want to have.
But those distractions, those âempty freedomsâ do little to help us plant deep roots, or to learn how to fly when called for. So how might we turn with courage and whole hearts towards the reality of what is, as a way of opening ourselves to the possibility of acting to bring about a better future?
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:
How Surely Gravity's Law
How surely gravityâs law
Strong as an ocean current,
Takes hold of even the strongest thing
And pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing â each stone, blossom, child â is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
Push out beyond what we belong to
For some empty freedom.
If we surrendered to Earthâs intelligence
We could rise up, rooted, like trees âŠ
This is what the things can teach us: to fall,
Patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
Before he can fly.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Photo by Cindy Tang on Unsplash -
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 committing to this make it more possible for us humans to live together in families, organisations, and the societies of which we are a part?
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:
Safe Space
When there is nowhere else you feel safe,
and you think that goodness has gone extinct;
when the world seems cold as a snowed-in car
that wonât start anymore â step inside this poem.
Find solace in the spaces between each line,
breathe peace in the pause between words.
Let no one every say you donât belong here â
you were born, youâre alive, you exist: take this
as proof that you too are loved. Say this to yourself
until it is true: May I be safe, may all beings
on this planet be safe. And feel how a small fire
kindles in your chest, spreading to the bundle
of tinder that is your heart, still humming
its tireless, ancient hymn: I am, I am, I am.
James Crews
www.jamescrews.net
Photo by Robert Lukeman on Unsplash -
We make all kinds of separations inside ourselves and between ourselves and one another. âIâm like this, but not like thatâ we tell ourselves. But that division leaves us bereft of all kinds of possibility and freedom. Perhaps right when weâre feeling most serious, itâs time to reach for that in us which is playful and bring it right alongside. Or when we meet someone very different to us, itâs time to discover their many virtues and see what it is like to bring those virtues inside us, alongside the virtues we already claim as our own.
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 Opposites and the Center
As our personal universes expand, if we keep drawing ourselves into center again and again, everything seems to enhance everything else. It becomes unnecessary to choose which person to be as we open and close the same ball of clay. We will make pots for our English classes. Read poems to our pottery classes. Write on the clay, print from the clay. The activity seems to spring out of the same source: poem or pot, loaf of bread, letter to a friend, a morning's meditation, a walk in the woods, turning the compost pile, knitting a pair of shoes, weeping with pain, fainting with discouragement, burning with shame, trembling with indecision: what's the difference? ...
What I mean here [is that] it seems to me that one must be able to picture before oneself the opposite of what one has just declared, in order to keep alive the possibility of freedom, of mobility, of growth. As soon as we find ourselves spellbound by order and our ability to control our medium and our tools, to do exactly what we want, we must do the opposite as well. As soon as [we find ourselves working] with danger, and disrespect for the canons of taste, do the opposite. ...
Most of the separations we make need to be looked at very carefully: weakness and strength, sickness and health, not-knowing and knowing, play and seriousness... For example, we tend to think that strength is all-important, and yet we have a very shallow notion of what strength consists of. For unless our weaknesses play into our strengths we are not as supple as we should be... The natural rhythms of life seem to go by polarities which swing around this unmoving centre: the very rhythms of our breathing are the dialogue of inner and outer.
by the potter and writer M.C.Richards, from her book 'Centering'
Photo by Earl Wilcox on Unsplash -
We bring ourselves into life in a dance we learned right from our earliest days⊠in which weâre often carefully managing what we can show to one another of ourselves. And others learn to dance with us in this way too, finding out from being around us what is ok to talk about, and what to avoid. Pretty soon weâre all dancing around that which, if we pay attention, was in plain view all along.
Oftentimes the dance feels necessary. Sometimes it is necessary. But keeping on the surface of things is hardly a way towards the intimacy, connection, contact and realness we long for. So who could we be for ourselves and for one another, so that we can bring ourselves - and all our rich complexity - into the light for the benefit of everyone 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:
What if we could just tell each other?
Parts of us lie in quiet, sly shadows.
Publicly undiscernible, or so we believe.
The truth is they are experienced by others,
Despite our internal dance to conceal them.
When we commit to something,
And our actions âsayâ otherwise,
They betray the façade we
Made to manage othersâ views of us.
If we knew, and accepted that we were visible,
Weâd know there would be no point in trying to hide.
How people feel around us reveals so much of us.
What if we could just tell each other?
Instead of hiding in plain sight,
weâd be open to anything anyone brought our way.
Here I am,
ready and willing to learn.
By Lizzie Winn
Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash -
Change is everywhere. Within us. Around us. And, sometimes, in our longing for some stability, some centre of âno changeâ in the tumult of our lives, weâll close ourselves off from the truth of things, numbing ourselves, distracting ourselves, and pretending it isnât happening.
But the truth is that everything changes. And although we might try to fight it, we human beings long for what is true, what is real, and for intimacy with the world. So can we instead âmake an altar to changeâ, and turn towards its ever-presence as a way of deepening our engagement with life, and with 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:
Become The Wind
What if we built an altar to change?
Dedicated ourselves to the idea,
bowed down to that which
is not steadfast.
Perhaps there would be an empty bowl
in the middle that might break
at any moment.
Perhaps in the center there is only a shard
that we must learn to worship.
We donât come to this altar begging,
we come to be reminded
there is nothing to beg for.
We are happy. We are devastated.
We are whole. We are broken.
It rains. It clears.
All at the same time.
Or maybe in the center there is a mirror
Which reflects only what is,
not necessarily what is wanted.
An altar where we come to meet truth,
to bow down to it.
To open the window of the heart
and accept that there is no choice
but to be changed.
Penny Hackett-Evans
Photo by Colin Watts on Unsplash -
We often go searching out in the world, far and wide, for qualities that already live in ourselves.
And, fuelled by the story of our wider culture that our longings are best met always by âmoreâ and always âaway from ourselvesâ, we can forget the treasures that live right here within us, in this living, beating, life-filled heart and body that we are never separate from.
So how can we open ourselves to meeting the deeper something that we long for, that we already are? And how can we help one another home?
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:
I was passionate,
filled with longing,
I searched
far and wide.
But the day
that the Truthful One
found me,
I was at home.
Lal Ded (Kashmir, 14th century)
[translated by Jane Hirshfield]
Photo by Valentina Locatelli on Unsplash -
How can we come to know the vast stores of goodness, care and benevolence that are in each of us simply by being human? What makes it possible for us to bring this goodness to bear on the many difficulties and realities that face every single human life?
How can we do this without minimising or explaining away the dark sides of human life, and the genuine pain and confusion we can experience at what happens to us? And how do we at the same time cultivate a deep faithfulness our individual and collective capacity to respond in ways that care ever more deeply about the world?
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:
That I Would Be Good
That I would be good even if I did nothing
That I would be good even if I got the thumbs down
That I would be good if I got and stayed sick
That I would be good even if I gained ten pounds
That I would be fine even if I went bankrupt
That I would be good if I lost my hair and my youth
That I would be great if I was no longer queen
That I would be grand if I was not all knowing
That I would be loved even when I numb myself
That I would be good even when I am overwhelmed
That I would be loved even when I was fuming
That I would be good even if I was clingy
That I would be good even if I lost sanity
That I would be good whether with or without you
Alanis Morisette
Photo by Arthur Poulin on Unsplash -
Right when weâre in the mess and complexity of things - for example when raising children, or being in a partnership, or working alongside others - we can learn so much about what it is to be human. And itâs where we also learn the most about our own power to make a world that is better for others to live in, or worse.
In this weekâs conversation we explore how we might turn everyday complexity into a deeper care for the world and the use of whatever power we each have for the benefit of those around us.
We refer in this weekâs conversation to Lindsay Green and Charlie Lyonsâ wonderful podcast âMade Possible by Parenthoodâ which you can find on Spotify here.
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:
Bless This Dirty Sponge
My spiritual path is not marked out by rose petals, but dirty sponges, baby wipes, frozen peas and car keys.
Washing up is my daily Zen practice.
Leaving parties early to get everyone home to bed is how I learn self-discipline.
My meditation happens while I run the bath. And sometimes at 4am while I try to get back to sleep after waking to help someone use the potty.
My masters are unusually direct and demanding. They teach me how to live without apology and how to be right where I am. Because they know there is nowhere else.
And at the end if the day, I give myself a cup of Hail Mary tea as I forgive myself for all of the ways I felt I fell short. Again.
And I kiss my gurus on their tiny, wise heads and prepare myself to start all over again.
Hollie Holden
Photo by Imani on Unsplash -
In a time of global distress, weâre often faced with news of dire situations far from us that we can do little to affect directly. But we can learn to respond to the world that is more immediately around us with the kind of patience, wisdom, care and love that makes a genuine, tangible, and life-giving difference.
In this weekâs conversation we explore how we can observe and undo the barriers inside us to being this way. And how we enroll others in helping us to do that.
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:
Your Task
Your task is not to seek for love
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.
Helen Schucman, from A Course in Miracles
Photo by Paul Mocan on Unsplash -
How can we be the ones who create safety for other people to bring their troubles, longings, hopes, pain and fear our way? And how can stay long enough, and not turn away? And how do we then accompany one another as we address what we find - with love, truthfulness, patience and exquisite care?
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:
Like the Trees
You have been waiting for the body to say,
This is not an emergency, you are safe.
And when it finally does, in a whisper
you almost donât believe, you can breathe
a full breath again, and then another,
at last trusting the open arms of trees,
even their menacing shadows at midnight.
Now you know everything that grows must
also feel pain, must fear and doubt until they
sense this same quickening, like sap rising
up in the trunk and spreading through
each limb. You have lived as if underground,
but now you are breaking open, breaking
free, becoming so vast and green, you make
a shady place for others to rest in.
James Crews
Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash -
On the ways comparison can steal the actual living of life from us, and on finding ways to appreciate and live in the midst of the ordinary everydayness of things.
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 Living Do
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano wonât work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still havenât called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
Itâs winter again: the skyâs a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heatâs on too high in here and I canât turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
Iâve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kissâwe want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that Iâm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Marie Howe
Photo by Marcus Ganahl on Unsplash -
On acknowledging experiences rather than moving away from them or interrupting them. How we might experience our feelings without âacting them outâ when theyâre intense or overwhelming. And the gifts and blessings of being gentle with ourselves and 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:
This Small Space
Iâve curled in.
Observing the paned frame of freckled rain,
Trickling down the window.
Steam falls from my clay cup.
Hugged in cast shadows and held in fresh sheets I try to find home within myself.
Complex cluttered colours shine on difficult days,
one part still waits for a calling.
She is soft, broken, real and trying,
A frame for the rain to run,
A window for truth to-shine.
Cracks of comfort come with falling,
folding into the wisdom calling.
Roberta Morrow
Photo: Unsplash | Madi Doell -
How do we take up our right size in the world? Not in some fixed, rigid way but as a responsive way of engaging with what is called for in each situation and context?
When we see that in some way âtoo bigâ and âtoo smallâ are both ways we try to control situations, maybe we can open to the emergence of something more fluid, more adaptive, and more sensitive in us. Something that asks of us to be of service to life, and responds accordingly.
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:
Right-Sized
A response to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommerâs Big
What if this the year to learn to be right-sized?
I learned on the playground to
Flinch from arrogance.
âPlease â donât leave me.
I promise not to get Too Big.â
But the cost, Iâve learned, is dear.
Trading potential for false modesty,
Dampening power with every apology,
Neglecting my impeccable edges
With every hedge.
But then I remember
What the rabbis knew.
They stretched wide a red silk thread.
At one end: Arrogance.
At the other: Not humility â but
Playing Too Small.
They knew playing small was just arrogance by a different name.
Placing comfort above contribution.
Our gifts withdrawn from the world,
For the price of fitting in.
âWhat if holding back is stealing?â
So in the middle, they placed a pair of right-sized shoes.
Yours.
Mine.
The right-sizing that awaits us all.
What, I wonder, will it take for you to grow into your right size
The one that seems Impossibly large, and
Obnoxiously loud?
Clownish as these shoes seem now, prone to stumbling,
At first youâll feel the fool.
Some People will have Things To Say.
Some may even walk away.
(In this modesty-mad world, theyâre yet to clock
that claiming your shoes
does nothing to keep them from theirs.)
But every now and then you wake up to the truth.
That it's the world that's wrong - not you.
These too-small shoes will no longer do.
So take your credit where itâs due.
And when no-one offers it â give yourself a spoon daily.
Take your space
Trading in the apologies for gratitude.
Minimise your emotions no more â
They too deserve to expand to the full.
Fill your circle with champions
And learn to see yourself with the wonder of their eyes.
And when you hit your stride, and weather whatever,
Give up the surprise.
When those shoes once vast grow snug,
Be sure to celebrate well.
Acknowledge yourself, and your people, and the view.
Until another pair of shoes calls to you
Between arrogance and avoidance
On that red silk stringâŠ
You Are Needed.
And this is no time, no world,
For stealing.
Debbie Danon, Jan 2023
www.debbiedanon.com
Photo by Michael Wright on Unsplash -
So much changes in the course of a day, a year, a life. We can be mysteries to ourselves and to others - confounding, confusing - as we turn this way and that, trying to find our way together through this changeable complex world. Itâs very easy to feel lost and confused.
But even in the midst of all of this, is there something we can learn to trust⊠a thread we can reach for that runs through it all?
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 Way It Is
Thereâs a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesnât change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you canât get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop timeâs unfolding.
You donât ever let go of the thread.
William Stafford
Photo by Stephane Gagnon on Unsplash -
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, itâs 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 donât 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 weâre 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 theyâre 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 âunconsciouslyâ, taking them up in response to the surrounding culture or the family systems we grew up in when we were small. When theyâre âin the backgroundâ in this way, it can be hard to see how much they shape us. Thereâs a sense in which itâs easy for us to âbelong toâ an interpretation rather than having our interpretations consciously and purposefully âbelong to usâ.
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. Itâs 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 allowedâa quiet patch
of sunlight to stretch out without hurry,
where all that has been banished
and buried is welcomed, spoken, listened toâreleased.
â
A fiercely friendly place I can claim as my very own.
â
I am throwing arms open
to the whole of myselfâespecially the fearful,
fault-finding, falling apart, unfinished parts, knowing
every seed and weed, every drop
of rain, has made the soil richer.
â
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.
â
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.
â
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 - Laat meer zien
