Podcasts religion Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast 138: Nothing Missing

138: Nothing Missing

Published: May 24, 2020, 9:29 a.m.

It's so easy to suspend our lives... to in one way or another miss out on being here because we're waiting for conditions to be right, to become a better kind of person, until we're saved. We can even suspend our lives waiting until we feel like 'nothing is missing'. But what if even the feeling of 'something missing' is what's calling us to inhabit our lives just as they are? A conversation about letting ourselves actually be in our lives with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

This is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website.

Our source for this week is written by Jeff Foster, and brought to us by Lizzie.

The old chair is here, offering itself, whispering, "Come, sit down, rest, you are weary. See, I am here..."

And the carpet that you've never really looked at before, never really valued before, because you've been so busy looking for enlightenment and salvation and love in the future - see how it just… lies here… offering itself fully to you, prostrate in your presence, whispering, “Come, lie, sit, stand, I ask nothing of you, I want nothing. I am here…."

You didn't truly see the carpet because you wanted to get enlightened first. You wanted to be an enlightened person standing on the carpet! You were going to work on yourself for forty years, meditate your way to Nirvana, heal your traumas, perfect your ‘self’, transcend your ego, or wait until you were ‘ready’ before valuing the carpet, seeing the carpet, recognizing the carpet as a divine expression, and a tremendous gift.

It was all a postponement, you see. It was all a movement away from ‘what is’, from the extraordinary sacredness of the ordinary. It was a displacement into a future that could never come...

The carpet was always here. The chair was always here. Ready. Alive. Innocent. Waiting. Life was always here, offering itself, showing itself, calling you, beckoning you, to finally see it, inviting you to awaken, to come alive, to be a child of awareness. And yet, you've been so busy moving away, into a 'future', into a dream...

Just take a moment. Any moment. This moment. And behold it in loving awareness, bathe it in your light.

- Jeff Foster