Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast Thirdspace

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 listening can change us profoundly, and change the relationships between us in life giving ways. So how might we step in to this urgent task?

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.

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?

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 Rilke calls ‘empty freedoms’ is surely one way to try to avoid experiences and feelings we don’t want to have. But those distractions, those ‘empty freedoms’ 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?

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?

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 when we meet someone very different to us, it’s 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.