When we’re caught up with our harsh inner voices we can easily smother out a kind of solid, deep wisdom and aliveness that we could be bringing to our lives and our relationships. It’s this depth in us from which can come the kind of responsiveness and resourcedness which is called for in the complexity of our human living and relating.

In a wider culture which rarely values such depth, what is it to learn to drop down beneath our shallow, reactiveness to the life which pulses beneath in all of us, and respond from there?

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

Episode Overview
00:00 Celebrating Community and Connection
04:40 Exploring Eugene Gendlin's Insights
09:37 The Inner Dialogue: Harshness vs. Compassion
15:10 Understanding the Inner Self and Relationships
21:58 Strength in Vulnerability and Connection
30:25 The Invitation to Depth and Wholeness

Here’s our source for this week:

Fresh Answers from the Inside

If you are like almost everybody else, you undoubtedly know a good deal about what is wrong in your life.

You may often lecture yourself, perhaps basing your lectures on sound inferences and assumptions…

Or, at other times, you skip the sophisticated lecture and insult yourself roundly and simply instead. A kick is what you think you need…

Not only do these lectures and self-castigations feel unpleasant, but they produce no useful change. You become something like two people, one in prison and the other outside. The outside person lectures or insults the one inside, cruelly listing all the alleged (but usually unproven) faults of character that have supposedly led to the prisoner's sorry plight. None of this helps the prisoner escape. When the lecture is over, the inner person is, as always, stuck…

Instead of talking at yourself from the outside in, you [could] listen to what comes from you, inside. You ask in a quiet, friendly, and sympathetic way, "What's wrong?" You may never before have been quite this friendly to yourself. Most people treat themselves very badly, much worse than they would ever think of treating another human being. Most people deal with their inside feeling person as a sadistic prison guard would.

Now, having asked your body this question-"What's really wrong?" —you deliberately refrain from answering it. When you ask another person a question, you don't go right on and answer the question yourself. Treat your own inside feeling person at least as well as you would someone else. Your inside feeling person, too, can answer, and doesn't need you to do all the answering. Try to pass up all the glib, familiar answers that come very fast. They are the same old answers you've heard in thousands of self-lectures down through the years.

Firmly reject them. Wait quietly for fresh answers to come from the inside, from the bodily felt sense of whatever situation is troubling you.

From ‘Focusing’ by Eugene Gendlin

Photo by Dominic Kurniawan Suryaputra on Unsplash
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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.

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401: Fresh Answers from the Inside