In conversation with Toko-pa Turner

Toko-pa Turner is an author, mystic, and dream worker. Blending the mystical tradition of Sufism with a Jungian approach to dreamwork, in 2001 she founded the Dream School and has grown a network of more than a hundred thousand dreamers all over the world. In addition to tending dreams, her work focuses on restoring the feminine, reconciling paradox, elevating grief, and facilitating ritual. In 2017, she published the Nautilus Award Gold winning Belonging, Remembering Ourselves Home, a book about exile, and the search for Belonging. Read her full bio here.

Sylwia: I’d like to start by asking - why a book on belonging? Why was it so important for you to write on this topic?

Toko-pa: The impetus for writing belonging came out of a personal crisis. I had belonged to a spiritual community for not a very long time, but something happened, a kind of split in the group where I was more or less shunted and exiled from that group. 

Now, normally this might not affect someone because I didn't know these people very long but I think what happened for me was that it triggered a much older wound and that wound was one that I had been carrying since childhood - the wound of not belonging. I left home, my family of origin, at a very young age. And as a result of that, I spent a good part of my life, unconsciously searching for a place to belong and when I had this experience with this group, it brought all of that up to the surface. 

Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by these questions - what is belonging? Why is it so hard to find? How can I heal this wound in myself? And so, in asking those questions, I started to journal about it and the more that I wrote, the more questions I had. Once I began to talk to other people about these questions, I had the most remarkable experience. Speaking to people who appear, to me, to be on the inside of belonging, they themselves had this wound of feeling like an outsider, feeling like they were looking from the outside and were themselves in search of a place of belonging. The more I explored it, the more I realized that this wasn’t just a personal quandary or common among the people in my community, but it was much larger than that. And in fact, it seems that this wound of alienation plagues us at the cultural level. That’s what really precipitated the book.

Sylwia: There is a quote in your book that I found deeply profound. “But what if belonging isn’t a place at all, but a skill: a set of competencies that we, in the modern world, have lost or forgotten?” I have never heard anyone talk about belonging in such an empowering way. Belonging always felt like it was something outside of myself, something to be gifted to me by others more so than something I can do for myself. Can you say more about that?

Toko-pa:  This revelation came to me again, and again in the form of dreams. One of the most important dreams that I had while writing about this book was, that I dreamed of someone building a balcony on their house, and in the balcony, they had left a hole where they planned to plant a tree into that hole. It occurred to me that this wasn’t going to work because the tree would grow, and when the tree grew, it would break through this hole. As I had that thought in my dream, I could see the entire balcony dissolve in a kind of ash. When I woke up from that dream, I realized what was being shown to me - it was a reversal of the idea that one has to find a place to fit in. 

If you find a place to fit in, fitting in by its very nature means that you have to either make yourself the size of “a hole” or you’re not allowed to grow beyond the size that has been allowed for you. 

And so if we dissolve this idea of finding a place to fit in, what makes more sense is that the tree itself has to be planted properly, it has to draw nutrients from the soil, and it has to grow to the very size that it wants and maybe then you can build things around it. I think this was one of my first realizations as a metaphor for belongings that it wasn't a place that we were searching for but actually, we had to develop like the tree has to develop, a set of qualities.

Of course, that led to the question, what are those competencies? In the book, I have about fifteen or sixteen different competencies that I refer to. All these skills are so much about growing the self, becoming oneself, and un-hindering oneself of the obstacles to that growth.

Sylwia: In the book, you map a path to belonging. You begin by diving into the origins of our estrangement, some of which is the estrangement from the feminine. The suppression of the feminine is real and despite all the progress we have made, women are still living in the patriarchal order. You discuss how the persecution of women created a loss of “an ancient feminine legacy.” Can you share with us why this is so tragic and what we can do to regain it?

Toko-pa: Well, that is a very big discussion which I’m sure we can only scratch the surface of, the reason I sort of weave in and out of it throughout the book. I’ll just point out that the loss of what we call the feminine affects all of us, all genders. In as much as women are living in the patriarchy, so too are men and people who live off the binary spectrum of gender. We’re all living under the spell of rationalism which since the Age of Enlightenment has been dominating the culture. That means that we have this obsessive focus on scientific objectivity at the expense of everything else. That everything else is everything that can’t be explained with reason. This includes our dreams, this includes the feeling life, the instinctual nature, this includes animism, and the soul, the belief in a world behind the objective world. Some people call that god and some people call it nature, other people call it great spirit. It’s that whole world that can’t be seen with ordinary eyes.

Of course, women, in particular, carry the projection of that feminine. Because, when you’re born into a female body, we have these very gendered notions of what women would inherently possess as their characteristics and how that’s different from the characteristics that men possess. So the damage is extensive because it means that, when we talk about a vast cultural legacy, it’s really everything that we associate with the feminine, but also the projection on the female body and nature itself and how we see it not as a living organism but as a resource to be exploited for profit. It’s a huge subject and I think we have to keep talking about it in lots of different ways. 

But what I emphasize in the book is that there is intermarriage between the masculine and feminine that is possible within every individual’s psyche. And it is a reconciliation of the opposites that needs to happen for each of us internally if we want to see change at the level of culture. Because we are the makers of culture. 

Sylwia: It has taken me and many women I know a very long time to remember ourselves back to our bodies, to learn to trust our intuition. You call this loss of connection, the great forgetting. How can someone reading this interview start the process of reconnecting?

Toko-pa: Well, I think the big work ahead of us is actually restoring the value and practice of imagination. Imagination is very different from the word imaginary. In Western culture, and in the dominant ideology, we associate the word imagination with imaginary, with make-believe and you can feel the dismissiveness in that, right? It's not an empirical and objective place that we can examine. But actually, the imagination is humans’ most powerful organ. Everything that has been invented in human culture first took shape in the imagination. Every philosophy, every invention, every idea, every creation. And so the imagination is also, the realm of our dreams, and in our culture, we've learned to dismiss our dreams. 

Somebody wakes up from a bad dream and we tell our children, that it’s just a dream, go back to sleep. In other words, it’s devalued and dismissed and the problem with this, as I see, is that nature is “naturing” through us in the form of these dreams. 

There’s actually a greater intelligence that is weaving stories in the form of our dreams, trying to communicate with us, to be in communication with us. So I think restoring a kind of reciprocity with the imagination and with our dreams is the first place to start.

That sounds easier than it is because we have such powerful allegiances to the external reality. It takes massive amounts of effort and privilege to even elbow out a little bit of room to have a relationship with one’s imagination. It means not using your devices, it means not filling up every space and every pause with activities and addictions to television, food, social activity, or work. Instead, to create a kind of a secret holy enclosure with boundaries, where we can sit and we can begin to develop what the poet Yeats called negative capability. And negative capability, is that willingness to face the unknown, despite how scary it is, despite how much doubt in ourselves we have, despite how uncertain and unstable it makes us feel. To develop a willingness to withstand that uncertainty long enough so that something new, something generative, something original can come through each of us. 

This looks like paying attention to your dreams, it looks like listening to your body, and it looks like spending time with your sacred tools. For me, that’s just my journal and the pen first thing in the morning where I write down my dreams and my poetry. It means spending time in nature, all of these things that are sort of at the very bottom of the cultures’ list of importance are what we have to learn to restore in our lives. When we do that, slowly what begins to happen is those power structures that we have allowed to govern and co-opt our imagination begin to dismantle. And suddenly we find a kind of inner authority and an inner guidance system which tells us more clearly which way to go in life - because IT KNOWS. Just in the same way that nature knows how to produce fruits on trees, there’s something within us, that knows how to come into the fullness of our potential. You can call that purpose, you can call it meaning, I like to use the word wisdom because it has an ancient lineage. When we’re in a relationship with wisdom, we are actually in a relationship with nature. The more of us that can listen to wisdom’s prompting in our lives, the more we are going to take leadership and action in the ways that the world needs as a larger ecosystem.

Sylwia: Another aspect of the journey to belonging is exile. You say that we all must endure a period of exile whether it’s by choice or other forces. Why is this experience important and how can we reframe it? Because exile sounds so scary.

Toko-pa: I think it sounds scary because it is legitimately so. If you read any of the old myths and stories, the hero or heroine of those stories always has to endure a period of their own exile in order to step into the true medicine of their vocation and their calling. This is an ancient pattern of nature where you have to make separations from what the poet, John O'Donohue, calls false belonging. False belonging is a place, a group, or a relationship, where like the tree and the hole we have to make ourselves smaller in order to fit in.

If one is to come into their true size, there has to be a period of breaking from the group. I call these initiations by exile because essentially it is an initiatory period. If we resist that initiation, we can get trapped in a kind of purgatory, where part of us is always wishing to go back to how it was in the Golden Era. 

You look at the good times before something terrible happened and rather than accepting this change that is unavoidably upon us, this can be an incredibly painful period to endure for some people, it can go on for years. To give you an example, I would say somebody who falls out of their cherished relationship or perhaps they lose a loved one to death or maybe they are demoted from a job they loved or downsized, or maybe they got sick and developed a mysterious illness, these are the ways in which life has to shut a door on an old way of life and cast us out into the unknown. 

In order to grapple with that unknown, we have to on some level be willing to enter into that process of exile. It usually requires us to be stripped right down to the bone. 

Have you ever heard the story of Inana who makes a descent into the underworld to see her sister, Ereshkigal? On her way through the gates into the underworld, she has to leave her adornments and her armor, and her power. Everything has to be left behind because you can only enter the underworld when you're completely naked. Symbolically, this means that we have to be taken down to the essence of who we are, so when we strip away the values of the culture, when we strip away other people’s expectations of us, when we strip away the trappings of the ego, the things that give us status and power and prestige and beauty, what is left? That is the ultimate question of initiation - when everything has been taken from you what is it that endures? And if you can answer that question, it becomes your starting place. It becomes this thing that is unassailable in you, which is the core of who you are. It’s your soul. And from there, you can begin to build a place of true belonging which allows you to continually grow and change. 

Let me just say this - belonging is a practice. Recognizing that belonging is a practice and that we can work at it, and that it’s not a place of attainment, is really helpful because it's important to realize also that part of this great wound that we carry culturally around of not belonging is inherited from our ancestors. I think many people no matter what their culture is, don’t have to go back very many generations to discover a time when their people were exiled from their place of belonging in the world.

I think it’s really important that we recognize that there is a historical intergenerational trauma that many cultures especially those like the African diaspora, the Jewish diaspora, and cultures that have been enslaved and killed, have to reckon with in order to try and find a place of belonging especially in a society that still upholds some of those programs around racism and marginalizing of others. It may not even be possible to do that in our lifetime, so it could be helpful to think of belonging as a practice that also has limitations within the context of culture.

Even the cultivation of imagination is an extremely privileged undertaking because if your life is occupied with just trying to make ends meet in a capitalist society, the range of motion of your imagination is very hard to reclaim and sometimes impossible for people. So those of us that do have the privilege to spend time exploring the inner life also, carry a great possibility to make those kinds of changes that would allow more people to dive into that.

Belonging is not a static place of attainment. It is dynamic and there will always be periods of expansion and contraction in the process of practicing belonging. You must allow for these alternating periods of togetherness and apartness, of being in a group or relationship or a place of belonging and then to be alone and to be an individual and come back into that essential truth of who you are.