CIIS Public Programs Podcast

transcript

[Theme Music]  
 
This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. Through our programming, we strive to amplify the voices of those who have historically been under-represented. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.  
 
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Rachael: Hello Toko-pa, welcome to virtual CIIS.  

Toko-pa: So happy to be here with you Rachael. Thank you.  

Rachael: Yeah, I'm psyched to be talking about your wonderful book Belonging. You can see my copy is bristling with bookmarks. [laughs softly] I wonder if you'd like to start us off by reading a piece out of the book. You mentioned that maybe you might read the invocation at the beginning of the book. I think that would be lovely. 

Toko-pa: Yeah, sure. Mine is a lot more mangled than yours, [Both laugh] but I would love to read that. So. This is a blessing that I added at the very last minute as the book was about to go to print. And my friend who was typesetting the book said, “well, there's one page that's blank and we need something to fill up that page.” And we were literally hours from going to print and I said, “well, I feel like I've said everything” because I had spent years writing the book, but I decided to sit down and try to just write a final blessing which encapsulated the hopes that I had for the reader as they move through the book and this is what came out.  

For the rebels and the misfits, the black sheep, and the outsiders. For the refugees, the orphans, the scapegoats, and the weirdos. For the uprooted, the abandoned, the shunned and invisible ones. May you recognize with increasing vividness that you know what you know. May you give up your allegiances to self-doubt, meekness, and hesitation. May you be willing to be unlikable, and in the process be utterly loved. May you be impervious to the wrongful projections of others and may you deliver your disagreements with precision and grace. May you see with the consummate clarity of nature moving through you that your voice is not only necessary, but desperately needed to sing us out of this mudhole. May you know, may you feel shored up, supported entwined, and reassured as you offer yourself and your gifts to the world. May you know for certain that even as you stand by yourself, you are not alone.  

Rachael: That's beautiful. That sounds really heartfelt as well.  

Toko-pa: Yes, absolutely.  

Rachael: So, let's start by situating you. Where are you? Where are you right now? What land are you on?  

Toko-pa: I am Canadian. I live in British Columbia on Vancouver Island, which is a… most people have heard of Vancouver, but if you get onto a boat and sail into the sea westward for about 2 hours you get to my island. Which is actually quite a big island and we have the city of Victoria on this island. 

Rachael: And how long have you belonged in that part of the world?  

Toko-pa: Well, I have lived here before, but my husband and I just moved here actually, literally four days before the lockdown and the pandemic took hold here in Canada. So, before that I was living on a different island for about 10 years, so I've been on the coast for a while.  

Rachael: Beautiful. And so, I actually use your book when I teach Jungian dream work because I think it really gives a flavor of the Jungian work in a way that is not too heavy and theoretical, but actually gives people a feel of what it's like to do the work. So, you're not an analyst but you're clearly steeped in the Jungian work. Can you situate us where you are in the world of the Jungian theory and practice? 

Toko-pa: Mmm-hmm. Yeah, so I was actually raised in a Sufi community and there were a lot of intersections, interfaith intersections in the Sufi world and on my shelves, well, I should say on the community bookshelves there were all kinds of literature that would lean in the direction of you know, everything from the poetry of Rumi and Khalil Gibran and that kind of thing, but then also into Carlos Casteneda and some of the Jungian stuff as well. And so, I had very powerful dreams when I was a young person. So powerful that that I began to become quite obsessed with dreaming and experimenting in different dreaming states, but it really wasn't until I was about 19 years old that I discovered a book called Man and His Symbols, which is a very famous sort of Jungian anthology from different Jungian analysts with a foreword by Carl Jung.  

And when I read this book, it was like discovering my lost civilization, a community of people who were speaking a language that I recognized instantly as my own. They were creating a topography, a world that made sense to the way that my spirit and soul was inclined and also my intellect. And so that's sort of began my love affair with all things Jungian and later in life I ended up working at the Jung Foundation of Ontario for a number of years and that was a real boon because that was a period in my life that happened to coincide with some of the great living Jungiangs of the time… would pass through that foundation because a lot of the analysts were being trained out of there.  

But I should also add that there came a point after years of being in that community where I felt its limitations. That there was something deeper, more visceral, more feminine that I was craving when it came to dream work and that's when I started to veer off in my own directions and in some ways back to the beginning. You know, because I think a lot of the deep Sufi teachings that I was raised with hit that spot that I found was missing for me and then of course many Indigenous practices around dreaming I became really fascinated and curious about as well. Because I'll just add that all ancient people that we know about have some sort of dreaming belief system, dream practice, and I was interested in that level of you know, bringing dreaming back to the people and not necessarily having to you know, go through rigorous academic hoops to be able to decipher one's dreams.  

Rachael: Beautiful. Who are some of the great Jungians who inspired you?  

Toko-pa: Well Marion Woodman.  

Rachael: I was wondering whether you were going to mention her.  

Toko-pa: Yes, yes. I was so blessed to be able to be in her presence and hear her speak and teach. James Hillman, James Hollis, who else? Well, my friend Gary Sparks, J. Gary Sparks was a huge influence on me. And yeah… many, many others, but those are the ones that come right off the top of my head.  

Rachael: Can you tell us a little about how Marion Woodman's work influenced you? You mentioned that the feminine became more and more of a draw to you and that's certainly what I associate with her work. 

Toko-pa: So deeply. So deeply did she influence me. So, her, for those who aren't familiar with Marion Woodman's work, she had her own experience with an eating disorder throughout her life. And this got her very curious in her own studies to become an analyst about the importance of the body in relationship to the unconscious and in relationship to our dreams. And so, she wrote a number of books that tend to be a little bit chewy to read and they take a different sort of brain that is comfortable with sort of circumambulating. You know, it's not such linear thinking but she sort of speaks in symbols and it's very, very powerful stuff. So, I would say her emphasis on the feminine, her emphasis on the body and on movement and the primacy of somatic experiencing I think is probably her greatest gift to me.  

Rachael: You know, one of the things I'm fascinated in right now is that there are a lot of people, especially Black women in America who are writing about the importance of the body, of pleasure, and of rest. For example, I’m thinking of adrienne maree brown, or The Nap Ministry where they're writing about how it's an important part of our resistance when our oppression is situated in the body to value the body, and value rest and nourishment for the body and that seems to be aligned with very much with your life and your approach. 

Toko-pa: Rest as rebellion. I think there’s been powerful, powerful work coming out of those particular names that you mentioned… those people doing work, and I know adrienne's coming to speak for CIIS in the next couple of days as we… I think it's February… oh you’ll have to check the CIIS calendar, but I think it's within two or three days. So yeah, she wrote a wonderful book called Pleasure Activism and she'll be speaking about that in depth. But yes, yes, a form of resistance to actually reclaim, listen to and center the body. Especially in conversations about dreams and about the unconscious. There's so much that is communicated at a cellular level that we have learned to become disconnected from, that we are quite alienated from in modernity. And so, there is this work to be done at peeling off those layers of disconnection and often trauma and pain to come back into relationship with our bodies.  

Rachael: It's like we've stopped belonging on so many levels, right? We don't belong inside of our own bodies. We don't belong inside of our own communities. We don't belong on the land. I'm very interested in this, in the theme of belonging and I wonder what for you it means to belong?  

Toko-pa: Well, that is a very large question. And I think that, you know, I think that was the question that really drove me to write this book. And in fact, at first the question, you know, even though it was much more personal, was where do I belong? You know, what is belonging? Why do so many people report to me personally that they don't have a sense of belonging, they don't feel belonging in their lives? It was these, you know questions which really drove me to begin to ask my own dreams, really… and that, you know, posing those questions and in that process, you know, I started to just journal and… but I realized that the more I would write about it, the more I would dream about.  

I would receive these really powerful dreams that seemed to be telling me that the way that we think about belonging is completely wrong and that there's a whole different way. We see belonging, I think in popular culture, belonging is something that's outside of ourselves and we'll spend a whole lifetime really searching for that place of belonging. Whether it's in a relationship, or whether it's in a community, or whether it's a spiritual path, or whether it's you know a geography, or whether it's our own bodies, or whether it's you know in relationship to nature and the rest of the other human beings. And many of us search for that place of belonging in vain, right? That we never find it and we have this longing, this deep longing within us that actually drives us to make decisions, to make choices to try and achieve belonging. But it drives us unconsciously because we never bring these questions out into the open.  

So, the more I started to write the more dreams I received and before I knew it I was like, oh, I think I'm writing a book [laughs] and there, you know for the next five years I just went down very deep into this question into all these different facets and very much exploring my own personal relationship to belonging and how that deep longing had driven me personally to behave, and to make choices that ended me up in places that weren't always true belonging, but actually places of what I call false belonging which is a term that I borrowed from the great poet John Donoghue, false belonging. And so below, you know, what is belonging is a really big question and I think the most important thing that we've done already is to articulate how there are many different forms of belonging and each one has its own dimensions and its own subtleties, but overall, what I think belonging is is a skill. It's not something that we find outside of ourselves, but it's a set of competencies that we in modern times have lost or you could say we've forgotten over many generations of displacement. And so this is why the subtitle of my book is Remembering Ourselves Home because I think that it is this process of remembering how to practice at belonging, how to turn belonging into a verb and not a noun. 

Rachael: That's fascinating. So, what are some of your practices of belonging? Could you share a couple with us so we can get a sense of what you might mean? 

Toko-pa: Yeah, of course. So, I would say there's probably about you know, and I should just say before I get into it that I've really only scratched the surface of this topic and there are many that I hope in their expertise will continue to create a map from different perspectives, but in the book, I have identified about 15 different competencies, and the first one I think is really looking first into exile. It's impossible to talk about belonging without talking about its sister, the unknown sister, which is exile. And what I mean by that is that there are places in which we personally, we as a culture, and then our intergenerational lines have become exiled, have become cast out of places of true belonging and the work I think is looking at each of those levels in depth and discovering for ourselves where we have been cast out. Where we ourselves learn from the example of our culture and even our family systems and intergenerationally those places where we cast out parts of ourselves that are considered unworthy, or unacceptable, or just not valued in the culture that we live in.  

So, to my feeling, the work always begins at the most personal level, at the level of the self and the personal history and then it expands into these larger questions of what are the qualities and values that our overarching monoculture espouses and aggrandizes while at the same time denigrating, dismissing, and just not even acknowledging other abilities and qualities. And it creates a kind of fragmentation, a splitting off into what the Jungians call the shadow. It's the unacknowledged, the outcast, the black sheep, the rebels, the misfits, the weirdos. So, this is done to us and then we do it to ourselves and to others and this is why we have, you know, rampant xenophobia and the othering that we're really struggling against right now in present time because so much has been split off and put into what the poet Robert Bly calls the long black bag we drag behind us, which is his way of describing poetically the shadow. Yeah, all of that unknown unacknowledged stuff has to go somewhere.  

Rachael: Yeah, so the internal work and the external work are very similar right? They’re very aligned. That which we split off and reject in ourselves we project onto others and then split them off socially. So, the social justice work and the internal work are very aligned there. 

Toko-pa: Indeed, and in some ways, I would say just taking action on the outside without doing the internal work will not ultimately be effective because it is these deep patternings that are in our psyches, and in the collective psyche, that have to be unearthed if we really want to have a vision for an inclusive and diverse culture to share together.  

Rachael: This might be a good time to ask you about the death mother. So, you didn't talk about the negative mother. You didn't talk about the father so much. The death mother is a core figure in your book and people have truly and deeply resonated with that when I've recommended the book to them. I wonder if you’d talk a little about the death mother for those people on the call or watching this video who don't know about that. She’s a very intriguing figure. 

Toko-pa: For sure, let me just dive right in then [both laughing]. And you know, I give people three chapters before we get into the death mother because it's really difficult material for a lot of people. So, the death mother is an archetype, and the name of this archetype the death mother was originally coined by, I would say Carl Jung’s greatest peer and a genius onto herself Marie-Louise Von Franz, and then there wasn't much said about this archetype until Marion Woodman took up the mantle and began to explore her in more depth and she was going to write a book about the death mother. She was going to write a book about the death mother, but she became unwell before she was able to do that. And so, there's a wonderful philosopher and academic named Daniela Sieff, who picked up by interviewing Marion Woodman on the death mother and there's some incredibly rich material that she's put out and you can find those PDFs by looking up Daniela Sieff. Her last name is spelled S-I-E-F-F and I link to that on my website as well on a post that I did called “The Death Mother”.  

So, the death mother is an archetype, and for those who are listening who don't know what an archetype is, archetypes are really patterns of behavior that we have discovered, or mythologists have discovered, and psychologists have discovered that these patterns of behavior occur across cultures and across era and across time and space really, and they repeat, these patterns of behavior repeat. And these archetypes can be personified in actual humans that are in our life or in ourselves. And so, the death mother is a kind of Medusa-like archetype who is a filled with I would say more than rage, but actually an impulse to kill. And when someone is possessed by this archetype, they may raise children who feel like nothing they do is right and that they are unwanted and that they are rejected. And in fact, it would be better if they weren't alive at all. And when confronted by the death mother, whether she's in our own mother or in our own grandmother or you know some figure in our life who is raising us, there's a very profound wound that can be created from having a parent or maybe caregiver I'll use the term loosely here in this context who is possessed by that archetype the effect is that we can begin to take on the death mother internally, which is to say we will learn to kill ourselves from going forward with any creativity in life, so it's like the, you know stopping us before we're even out of the gate, and immediately it hits you right in the body, it hits you with a feeling of paralysis, or lethargy, or you know a sense of turning to stone, right? That I can't move. I can't go forward. Everything I do is worthless.  

So that's a little bit about the death mother. It's a very complex topic. The reason why I decided to write about the death mother was because I grew up with a parent who was very much possessed by that archetype… and so it was hugely important to me to examine… the nature of that archetype, how it could have formed, and what its effects on me were and continue to be so what I have to do battle with on a regular basis every time I sit down to write or to speak to you or whatever it is. And so, the reason why I decided to write about that was very personal, it was an acknowledgement of a lot of the deep sense of unbelonging that I felt throughout my life was very much connected to this archetype living internally in me as a result of being raised by a death mother. 

Rachael: You know I'm fascinated by Medusa, right now actually, because of course the thing about Medusa is that she was made into Medusa by I think it was Athena as punishment for Medusa being raped in Athena's Temple. So, Medusa did nothing, but she had this terrible fate visited upon her and so what it makes me think about is it makes me think about the death mother as something that arises or that we begin to channel because of trauma. It reminds me of Donald Kalsched’s persecutor/protector archetype. Where it arises, it’s an archetypal force that arises to protect us in the face of overwhelming trauma when we’re little but then sort of locks us up in a tower of protection and threatens to kill us if we try and move out of that sphere of protection/jail.  

Toko-pa: Yes and can also be incredibly destructive to the people who are in our lives.  

Rachael: Right.  

Toko-pa: And so, I think the point that you're making is really important because most people think about Medusa as being this evil, you know, snake-haired witch who turns people to stone and there's no real exploration of how that came to be, but the truth of the matter is that she was raped by Poseidon in I think it was Aphrodite's temple. 

Rachael: Oh, it was Aphrodite's temple. That's right, yeah. 

Toko-pa: And so, the reason why I wanted to tie in Daniela Sieff’s work is because she is an anthropologist, a biological anthropologist who looked into history and could see that there were many, there are many species, and then even in the human population… that would literally create, would literally enact infanticide in order to survive. So, it was a matter of survival that she may not have had the resources, the community support, the food, the health, whatever it may be were somehow not available to her and so she enacted infanticide. I'm speaking of mostly in animals, but also in humans, in earlier humans, a not uncommon practice. Sometimes we even hear these stories of the foundlings, you know, how babies are orphaned from mothers who are unable or unwilling to take care of them. So, some very interesting sort of biological roots in the evolution of that archetype that I try to explore in the chapter as well thanks to the support of Daniela Sieff.  

Rachael: I must look her up. 

Toko-pa: Yes. Yes. She's amazing. 

Rachael: Another piece I would absolutely love for you to read if you're up for that is your beautiful “Black Sheep Gospel” which people I think might resonate with, which is a sort of a clarion call and an encouragement to those of us who may have felt addressed by your initial invocation to urge us to really be ourselves, right and adopt some of those practices of radical belonging and we could also say decolonization to find our authenticity underneath what we have been colonized by. So, if you would be willing to read that “Black Sheep Gospel” I would love to hear it.  

Toko-pa: This is actually a looser homage to Alice Walker because she's one of my favorite authors and in Temple of my Familiar, the incredible novel that she wrote, she has a section in her book called “The Gospel According to Shug” which is a wonderful piece. I recommend if you haven't read that book yet go and grab it. It's potent stuff.  

So, I wrote the “Black Sheep Gospel” and it's got these 13 commandments, so I'll read them to you. Number one, give up your vows of silence, which only serve to protect the old and the stale. Number two, unwind your vigilance, soften your belly, open your jaw and speak the truth you long to hear. Number three, be the champion of your right to be here. Number four, know that it is you who must first accept your rejected qualities, adopting them with the totality of your love and commitment. Aspire to let them never feel outside of love again. Number five, venerate your too muchness with an ever-renewing vow to become increasingly weird and eccentric. Number six, send out your signals of originality with frequency and constancy, honoring whatever small trickle of response you may get until you reach a momentum. Number seven, notice your helpers and not your unbelievers. Number eight, remember that your offering needs no explanation. It is its own explanation. Number nine, go it alone until you are alone with others. Support each other without hesitation. Number ten, become a crack in the network that undermines the great towers of establishment. Number eleven, make your life a way-finding, proof that we can live outside the usual grooves. Number twelve, brag about your escape. Number thirteen, send your missives into the network to be reproduced, let your symbols be adopted and adapted and transmitted broadly into the new culture we're building together.  

Rachael: That's lovely. I know this. I know at least one person in the audience who will be completely thrilled by that and resonating with it as it permeates their cells… and I'm wondering what some of the qualities of that new culture that you would like to see us building, what you see arising already today? Hopefully in parallel with this, we've got this archetypal astrological struggle going on still I believe between Saturn influences and Pluto influences. We've got this new identity, age of Aquarius, a lot of stuff up, Mercury's retrograde. There’s an enormous kind of churning thing happening right now, this big struggle between the forces of repression and the forces of revolution I guess you could say in a good sense. I wonder what some of the qualities are that you see in the new culture that we need to grow? 

Toko-pa: We're in a really tough time right now with so much chaos and opposition. But I believe what's happening is a kind of shattering before the reconstitution. I believe we're being collectively initiated in this time. And when I say initiated what I mean is that…  the very way that we think in binary terms that is so divisive and black and white is not going to work in the future. And I think what we are going to need to learn is ambiguity. I think we're going to need to let go of certainty. And allow ourselves to get more comfortable with disagreement, and diversity of beliefs, and diversity of cultures instead of trying to make everything fit into this great monoculture. And so, I think what we're feeling right now is the tension of our disagreements with the status quo and my hope for the future is that those people who have been marginalized, the human people, and the other than human people will begin to have more of a voice, more of a place, and more of an influence in the creation of the new world.  

I think this begins with every, you know, it may seem like a grand plan, I mean it may seem quite far off from all of that, but I think each of us has this private gateway into that practice of inclusion and belonging. It starts with the self. It starts with looking into our own shadows and discovering what has been split off from us and reclaiming it and standing up for it in our own estimation, but also in the spheres that we move in and as we grow a greater tolerance for that diversity of characters that exists in our own unconscious, there is a chance that a beautiful symmetry will occur on the outside in bigger ways as more of us do this work. 

Rachael: I'm very aware that we're two privileged white women having this discussion and touching on issues of inclusion, and social justice, and diversity. And I'm wondering if you have any opinions as to what other white women like us can do to actually put our feet on the ground and get our hands dirty in this work.  

Toko-pa: Mmm…yeah, well, you know my particular area of expertise is working with the psyche and so I have devoted my life to working with dreams. And the reason why I keep bringing conversation back to this is because I think everything that exists in the world first occurs the imagination, in the imaginal realms which is different from say just dreaming something up during the day, but it is actually the deep fabric of the way that we and the world are created is through the imaginal. So, but it's not enough to do inner work, we must be able then to walk that work into the world.  

You know, I've seen a lot of people in the last couple of years make declarations in social media spaces about what they stand for and to some degree I think that's helpful because it's good to say what you stand for, but I think it's more important to find the ways in which you have had, or we have had blinders on. Which is to say the ways in which there might only be white people in your social media news feed. There might only be white people in your day-to-day friend circle. There may only white people on your bookshelves.  

And so, it becomes a kind of stagnant consciousness, you know, so it's really important to find the ways in which that stagnancy exists in our lives and to begin to physically try to diversify that. Whether it's through educating yourself, I think is hugely you know number one and then finding the many, many ways in which we can run our businesses, our friends circles, use our influence in such a way that amplifies those voices for people of color but also for the environment because right now we're in the midst of a mass the sixth mass extinction on planet Earth and we very few people, not enough people are listening to the needs of the ecosystem in which we are embedded. And so, there's a lot, there's a lot of work to be done and I don't want people to feel overwhelmed with how little we may be accomplishing with what we have, but we have to start there with our small little corner and what we can do to affect real change.  

Rachael: I'm convinced actually that I'm seeing people have dreams that would appear to be from the world - dreams of flood, dreams of fire, and so on. Are you noticing that in some of the work that you're doing with people? Stephen Aizenstat, who teaches dream tending, talks about the anima mundi and how it talks to us through certain dreams. 

Toko-pa: Absolutely. I mean, I would almost take that one step further and say that all dreams come from nature and why wouldn't they, because it's a biological process to dream, you know, where else would they be coming from but the nature that is our bodies, and these bodies are fruits of this larger ecosystem. Which isn't to say that all dreams are not also to be taken personally and are speaking about the personal apocalypse or the personal revolution that we happen to be going through. I think there's a sign of simultaneity between those two things. Of course, we would be having apocalyptic dreams, or you know tsunami dreams or disaster dreams things like that because we are in this time of great upheaval but simultaneously something is really shifting for us and in our consciousness, hopefully for many of us anyway, so I do these things... I often take both levels at once.  

So, when I'm working with a dream, I'm certainly looking at the individual’s unfoldment but also the unfoldment of the larger collective, which is that ecosystem that we are all apart… and you know often I... well back before the pandemic, you know, we used to... I used to host these retreats and I'm starting to do some of that online now. Whenever we get a group of dreamers together in a community and over a course of a few days, we begin to notice that we literally are an ecosystem. It's not a metaphor. That actually our dreams are connected either through images or themes or questions that emerge from the circle and it always amazes us. People who might not have ever met each other will come together and we wake up in the morning and you know five or six people in the circle will have dreamed about cats, you know or something like that, that is more than can be dismissed as a coincidence and I think the reason is this would happen much more often if we actually practiced dream work in communities or families on a regular basis, but we don't, we tend to live quite isolated and nuclear lives. But when you do practice this you get a glimpse into the miracle that is our connectedness and certainly there are much larger pieces which are attempting to work themselves out through us. 

Rachael: I’ve got… my mind is going in different directions with what you just said. I think I want to come back to the theme of working things through. You talk a lot about the role of pain and suffering in moving us out of those old structures, right, and how that can be a path of initiation for people. Can you say a little bit more about that and maybe how that has moved in your own life? 

Toko-pa: Yeah. We touched earlier on this idea of exile and that in the search for belonging, to understand how to practice belonging, we really have to dig deep into what are the origins of our sense of exile. And this as I mentioned happens on at least three different levels: the personal, the cultural and then the ancestral, you know, and intergenerational. So, after we have done that and identified where those places of separation and wounding have taken place, there can be a kind of an initiation that happens because once you see something it’s very hard to unsee it.  

And so, once you see something it's like lifting the wool from your eyes and often the individual, once they've seen something like that… a period of initiation, I call it initiation by exile because it's a period where it may cause us to break from a place of false belonging whether that was a relationship or whether that is a place of work that didn't allow us to be entirely ourselves. Or it may be a group that we break from or are exiled from, and this starts off this initiation process and sometimes that can look like illness, it can look like disease, it can look like some kind of break. So, anything that kind of slams the door shut on the old way of life, you can't go back, it doesn't exist anymore and yet, you don't know where you're going next or who you're actually even going to be after this process, however long that's gonna take. And in a way we're collectively going through that with the pandemic right now, right?  

We've been collectively exiled from life as we know it kind of thing and we have no idea what's going to happen next, but this can also so happen at the level of the body, a kind of crisis of some kind and… it's difficult to make meaning out of things like this because the pain can be so intense, can be so severe and so alienating that there is a seduction there to become cynical or become lost in a depression or become hopeless and lose faith.  

But I believe the task in times of exile is really to turn towards the soul. To work at pulling back our allegiances to the outside world and its demands and its cues and its permissions and its notifications, and instead find this inner guidance, which for some people could be quite wounded if it has been mistreated in the past, if we've been taught not to trust our feelings, if we’ve been taught that our feelings don't matter or that our bodies don't matter. But in these times of exile, what else do you have but that, and so you're confronted with it. You turn towards it. You have to face it.  

And that's when you begin to receive dreams and sometimes these dreams can be terrifying and hard and full of trauma and pain and so this is when it's really good if you have a lot of those really terrifying dreams, it's really good to have a mentor. Someone who has a skillfulness with dreams to help you hold that container and who can help put those pieces together that seem chaotic and nonsensical. But it's also not impossible to do some of this work on one's own and I really do like to empower people to learn the language of their dreams so they can begin to have that very direct relationship with their inner guidance.  

And in the dreams, even those really scary ones and painful ones, there is always some sort of twinkle, some... something redemptive, and it may be very small, and it may be hard to find, and it may be muffled and buried under a lot of garbage, but we have to push back that stuff to amplify that small voice to... like cradling a flame that wants to go out and begin to breathe onto that flame to grow its power. And it may just look like a little twinkle at first but that flame over time if we tend to it and care for it and enact ritual around it and seek support with it, it will grow into hours and those hours grow into days and those days grow into years and eventually the voice of the instinct, the voice of the originality of our origins, of our intuition, of our inner knowing, let's just put it that way, gets stronger and stronger and stronger until it's infallible one day. And then even if you continue to go through illness and to go through hardship, you still know what you know to be true. It isn't, you know, sometimes there's a magic formula that I think some spiritual traditions tried to put on illness and say if you just discover, you know, what emotional baggage you have that you haven't worked out then your illness will magically disappear, and I think that's a very violent thing to teach people actually. 

Rachael: Blaming the victim, right? 

Toko-pa: Yes, exactly blaming the victim. It, you know, it's a suggested that you know, you haven't done your emotional work and that's why you're sick. This is an appalling thing for anybody to say to anybody who's unwell and usually comes out of a discomfort and fear of one's own uncertainty. So just a hello to any of you listening out there who have had that said to you, just know that this is a very wrong-headed approach. Because life is chaotic and unpredictable and sometimes illness doesn't go away and sometimes hardship doesn't go away. However, we can choose to make meaning from it. 

Rachael: If people are interested in discussing more of this with you and learning more about the way you work, I know you hinted at the fact that you are perhaps writing a secret book about which you don't want to say anything because you're presumably nourishing that little flame and keeping it safe. But what... how can they get more of you? How can we get more of your work? 

Toko-pa: Well, you know, I have been posting on social media every single day for about... what is it like nine years, occasionally, I miss a few days, but I treat social media as a place to put poetry into the world, to generate inspiration and thoughtfulness and soulfulness in the world. So, you can find me on Instagram and I'm on Facebook and I post in both places. So that's a really easy way to get a dose of soulfulness every single day. And if you want to learn more about dreams, I have a course called Dream Drops, which is an introductory course, so if you are struggling with dream recall, you know, you kind of don't know where to start, that's a great... It's a four-week course and I deliver a three to five minutes lesson every single day for a month which will take you deeper and deeper into relationship with your dreams and I call it Dream Drops because I believe that with every drop of a dream moisture is restored to our lives, so instead of that kind of spiritual aridity that we have where you know, there's a sense of meaningless and disconnection, it's a way of adding water to the soils so things can grow. And what else, you can find my website toko-pa.com. You just have to remember to put the hyphen in, so it's toko-pa.com and I keep everything more or less there. So, there's of course, you know the book. You're welcome to find the book. It's on sale everywhere, I think. You can find it just about anywhere and if your bookstore doesn't have, it you can ask them to order it in for you. And what else can I say? Yeah, I think I think that's enough for now. I'd love for people to stay in touch. So, come find me.  

Rachael: Where does your name come from, Toko-pa? 

Toko-pa: Well, you know most people assume that I named myself this name because it's so kooky and it's a very West Coast thing to do, you know to give yourself a funny name, but it's actually my given name and it's a Maori name and I don't have any relationship to the Maori people, but my parents found the name in a book of poems and there were some Maori poems and they talked about the creation myth of the Maori people and Toko-pa is the parent of the mist, the parent of the mist in the Maori cosmology. And so, you know, it was a hard name to grow up with, very big shoes to fill. [laughs] I'm working on it.  

But you know, once I found my path and started working with dreams, being the parent of the mist, carrying a big name, that was the parent of the mist, I like to think of that mist as the veil between the worlds and that somehow, I'm helping to occupy that space so it... I'm working on making it fit for me now. 

Rachael: Well, you certainly live in the misty islands up there in the Northwest. That sounds lovely sitting in California where we're waiting for the... we’re still waiting for our rain. So, it's lovely to have a little transmission of the mist and the water. 

Toko-pa: I wish I could send you some. I pray for that all the time. 

Rachael: Thank you. Yes, we do too.  

Rachael: Toko-pa, this has been such a wonderful, rich conversation. Thank you so much. 

Toko-pa: It’s been a pleasure to speak with you and our listeners too. Rachael, thank you for asking such juicy questions. 

Rachael: It was a pleasure. 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  
 
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