Our Deeper Essence
ThirdSpace was born at the meeting place of lived experience, spiritual longing, cultural encounter, and the questions women carry at the turning points of their lives. Many women reach a moment that does not fit neatly into the identities they’ve built, the roles they’ve mastered, or the obligations they’ve faithfully upheld. It is the place between who they have been and who they are becoming. That in-between—filled with both disorientation and possibility—is the ThirdSpace.
This work did not emerge from a business plan or a moment of reinvention. It grew slowly through decades of walking between worlds: East and West, Christianity and Islam and Judaism, sorrow and devotion, community and solitude, intellect and intuition, personal growth and social responsibility. ThirdSpace rests on the understanding that transformation happens not in times of certainty, but at thresholds—where the old maps fail and the new ones have not yet taken shape.
ThirdSpace exists women who are willing to be changed by what they encounter—within themselves, within other cultures, and within the wider human story. Women who feel, somewhere deep in the body, that their lives are not meant to narrow with age, but to deepen in meaning, ingenuity, and conscience.
At its heart, ThirdSpace is about relationship: with self, with the sacred, with culture, with land, with history, and with the living world as it actually is. It is about staying present inside complexity without numbing, collapsing, or hardening. It is about cultivating the inner steadiness needed to live with integrity in a confusing, polarized, aching world.
ThirdSpace exists because women deserve spaces that do not ask them to escape the world in order to heal, nor to sacrifice their inner life in order to engage it. This is a space where both are held—where healing, faith, and social responsibility become interwoven commitments. A space where becoming is not about reinvention, but about remembering what is true.
Why This Work Needed to Be Born
ThirdSpace emerged in response to a pattern that had become impossible to ignore. Again and again, deeply capable women—leaders, caregivers, creatives, advocates—were carrying a quiet dissonance beneath the surface of lives that looked coherent from the outside. They were meeting their responsibilities, raising families, tending careers and communities, yet carrying private questions about meaning, longing, identity, grief, purpose, and the moral weight of a world in turmoil.
Some were exhausted from decades of outward service with little room for inward listening. Others had done meaningful personal growth work but felt increasingly disconnected from the social, political, and spiritual realities unfolding around them. Many were carrying grief—for relationships, for younger versions of themselves, for global suffering—with few places to metabolize it. And beneath it all was a shared desire not simply to feel better, but to live with greater integrity—where inner life, conscience, and action could finally align.
Most spaces available to women fell into one of two extremes:
• Self-care spaces focused almost entirely on individual healing, disconnected from cultural and ethical context.
• Leadership or justice spaces emphasizing action but leaving little room for grief, doubt, spiritual wrestling, or renewal.
Women were being asked, implicitly, to choose between tending their souls and engaging the world. ThirdSpace was born from refusing that false choice.
This work recognizes that inner healing without social and cultural awareness becomes fragile—and that social engagement without inner anchoring becomes brittle. ThirdSpace is a place where prayer and protest, rest and reckoning, grief and responsibility, devotion and doubt can coexist in one human life.
It exists to hold the whole woman: her spirituality without escapism, her leadership without ego, her longing without shame, her conscience without perfection. Here, becoming is allowed to be imperfect, gradual, and deeply human.
Wendy is the founder and steward of ThirdSpace, established in 2019 as a living home for the questions women carry at life’s most honest thresholds. Her life has unfolded at the crossings of cultures, faiths, disciplines, and human complexity. For more than twenty-five years, she has been teaching, facilitating, coaching, and creating spaces where people can tell the truth about who they are and what they carry. Her work has taken her from university lecture halls to interfaith councils, from boardrooms to grassroots community circles, from the sidewalks of American cities to the historic and modern landscapes of Egypt. She does not tolerate diversity—she loves and lives inside it. Her life is shaped around learning from difference rather than defending against it.
Meet Wendy
Wendy Manchester Ibrahim, PhD, MA ABS
What people encounter in Wendy is a rare blend of warmth, humor, depth, and steadiness. She brings an ease that allows others to soften, and a clarity that helps them see themselves without distortion. She has a long practice of navigating difficult conversations with grace, not because they are easy but because they are necessary. Whether sitting with CEOs, mothers, activists, faith leaders, educators, or young adults, she sees the fully formed, perfectly flawed, deeply loved human being in front of her—and invites that truth to emerge with dignity.
Wendy’s leadership has been shaped not by reinvention but by apprenticeship to real life: interfaith living, cultural displacement and belonging, motherhood, trauma and healing work, spiritual questioning, community conflict, and the moral tensions of a world in need of repair. She has spent decades working at the intersection of emotional intelligence, applied behavioral science, spiritual formation, systems thinking, and social responsibility. Her path has been sculpted as much by what has undone her as by what has strengthened her. Egypt has been her greatest teacher—its landscape, its contradictions, its devotion, and its people have continually reshaped her understanding of what it means to live with integrity.
What guides her now is a commitment to supporting women who feel the quiet dissonance of outward competence and inward depletion, leadership without spiritual grounding, or purpose that has become muffled under the weight of roles, responsibilities, and global realities. She helps women listen for the wisdom inside their suffering, release what no longer serves them, orient toward meaning, and reclaim the moral imagination required for this moment in history. She believes that inner work without cultural and ethical context becomes fragile—and that social engagement without inner anchoring becomes brittle. Her work helps women become emotionally, spiritually, and socially wiser so they can lead from their highest, most humane selves.
Wendy stands within this work not as its answer, but as its current steward—responsible to the communities that shaped her, accountable to the land that continues to teach her, and devoted to holding spaces where women can expand into deeper truth, steadier purpose, and more generous lives.
Telling Our Stories- Pamela Gray Daniel interviews Wendy Ibrahim
What calls us into the ThirdSpace? In this video recorded in 2021, Wendy is interviewed by Pamela, a Social Unity/Oneness Practitioner. They discuss a holistic approach that focuses on creating Social Equality, Social Justice, and Unity. Pamela asks Wendy questions that help get to the essence of what Wendy’s call to this kind of work is all about.
