Ayana Young  Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we're speaking with Toko-pa Turner.

Toko-pa Turner There is something within us that knows who we are supposed to become. And in our dreams, we see evidence of that and when we learn the symbolic language of dreams, we can get better at following or living in harmony with that ordering principle.

Ayana Young  Blending the mystical teachings of Sufism in which she was raised with a Jungian approach to dreams, Toko-pa Turner is a Canadian author, teacher, and dreamworker. She founded The Dream School in 2001, from which thousands of students have since graduated. She is the author of the award-winning book, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, which explores the themes of exile and belonging through the lens of dreams, mythology, and memoirs. This book has resonated for readers worldwide, and has been translated into 10 different languages as well as winning multiple awards for excellence in publishing. Her work focuses on the relationship between psyche and nature, and how to follow our inner wisdom to meet with the social, psychological, and ecological challenges of our time. 

Oh, Toko-pa, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to having a quality and deep conversation with you.

Toko-pa Turner  Me too. Thanks for inviting me.

Ayana Young  Yeah, absolutely. Well, I guess we could start with opening up about your path towards dream work and the connections between dream worlds and conscious worlds.

Toko-pa Turner  Yeah, when I was a small person, I used to have really vivid dreams. And I was intrigued by dreams from as young as I can remember. But my particular story is different from a lot of people in that I left home at a very young age. I was about 14 years old, and I ended up living in the system, and essentially not really having parents after that. And I think going through that kind of initiation meant that I didn't have any of that external guidance in my life. I think this is true for a lot of people that it turned me towards my inner life. And at that time, I received many sort of guiding dreams, often which turned into synchronicities, which maybe ties into your next to the second part of your question. 

But I really feel looking back on my life at this point, that my dreams were really parenting. I come from the perspective that this distinction or bifurcation that we make between the psyche or what we call dreams, or the dream time, as being distinct or somehow separate from the material world, the physical world, from nature, is really illusory. And when we begin to delve deeply into the work with dreams and into the exploration of psyche, we discover that there is a reciprocal conversation taking place between these two dimensions. And this becomes extremely obvious in moments of synchronicity. But instead of thinking of a synchronicity as extraordinary events that intervene on ordinary reality, I think that they are actually the underlying dynamism of the cosmos. This relational dialogue between waking and dreaming, between physical and non physical, between see and unseen, which is really an ancient idea and I think any of those cultures that observed what we call animism, certainly were and are recognizing the sacred dimension behind the visible surface of things.

Ayana Young  Right. This is not new to us humans. This is part of our old ways. And there's an essay you wrote, called "Giving Up on Timelines" and you say, quote, "You can grow your imaginal faculties by listening to your dreams and intuitions, following synchronicities, and engaging your imagination. Eventually, you will no longer be caught in the flat, rational existence of consensus culture, but begin to experience different ways of knowing––languages that are not tied to words alone, but that speak in symbols, gestures, sounds, patterns, feelings, and rhythms that are layered with meaning," end quote. Gosh, I would love to learn more about how we can listen to our dreams in the sense that they can guide us towards new ways of understanding and listening, which I think in a way is learning how to treat our dreams as significant.

Toko-pa Turner  Yeah, definitely, I would say that's a very first step. And even though it may look like a simple step, it's very complicated for us, because consensus culture devalues dreams, for the most part. And so there's a great deal of sort of unhindering, reading of those ideas around to the bifurcation between the worlds that really originated, or at least was deeply ensconced around the 17th century and René Descartes and rationalism and materialistic thinking like that. But this kind of unlearning or unhindered processes, kind of complicated because there's so much evidence to the contrary, that we get pulled by worldly demands that keep us in a kind of locked relationship with the physical world. And so this sort of stretching into the imaginal and practicing animism and even exploring our dream time, is a kind of privilege that is not available to a lot of people when trapped in that context of capitalism and all the Hydra heads of that paradigm. 

But I do believe that we can practice at rehabilitating that imaginal capacity. And it does take practice, though. And like you said, the first step is this very basic idea that we have to give value to our dreaming experience. And most of us have been taught that say, if we wake up from a dream that is difficult, or scary, or repulsive or upsetting in some way, our first reaction is to push it away––is to get as far away from it as possible. And that's kind of an expected reaction when looking at something when being confronted with something that is upsetting or difficult. But we have to really shift our mind frame to realize that when these difficult dreams come up to be seen, it is in and of itself, a validation of something that's ready to come to consciousness, something that's ready to be seen, to be acknowledged.

And the other thing I think that is a big hurdle, is often people will have dreams that will have content that echoes experiences that they've had in the previous day or days. And they think, oh this dream isn't interesting or this dream is mundane and what I really want is a mystical dream. But until we can actually value that or love the dream that we are given, we aren't going to get those deeper dreams. It's a little bit like weeding a garden. If you want the plants to fruit and thrive, you have to make space around them and part of that means looking at what appear to be superficial dreams, and extending the possibility that those dreams are not meant to be taken literally, even though they contain images from your literal existence. But instead, we have to shift our perspective to begin thinking symbolically. And this is a small but mighty step in the practice of recovering our dream life.

Ayana Young  I'd love to hear more about that. But I do want to go back to the quote that I just read and there's something in there that you said, the sentence "Eventually you will no longer be caught up in the flat rational existence of consensus culture, but begin to experience different ways of knowing." And I would love to dive in a bit more to what this rational existence of consensus culture is.

Toko-pa Turner  Yeah, for sure. I mean, what I mean by that is when we explore the origins of rationalism, and take it back several 100 years into history, we discover that so much of the culture that we have built is based on this idea that the physical world is the only thing that exists. Most sciences are based in this idea that if it can't be seen, if it can't be observed, if it can't be proven in evidence, then it doesn't exist. And so everything that doesn't fall under that purview, from dreams, to the feeling life, to the subjective experience, to the creation of meaning, to the intuitive faculty, all of these things are more or less disposed of in that process. And all of us can relate to that in the way that we live in a day to day way around calendar and time constructs where we have so much focus on linear types of thinking around, being able to accumulate wealth, around being able to find our way up in our profession through the various social ladders, being able to achieve things on linear timelines, and all of these things, the clock and calendar constructs, right. And all of these things are important. I'm not saying that we should dispose of these things. But I think everything that falls to the margins of that way of thinking is more or less neglected in our culture. And when something is so neglected, it becomes devalued or dismissed or just not acknowledged. And so the work of bringing things back into balance is about learning how to value those things at a very personal level, learning how to make time for our dreams, for instance, and to give a part of every day to paying attention to maybe even writing down and perhaps even doing a ritual around the dreams that we do receive, and/or creating responses or enacting changes in the way that we live our lives and the way we are in relationship as a response to the promptings that we get from our dreams. So that we can start to engage in a kind of reciprocal dialogue with that larger governing intelligence that is written into the nature of life.

Ayana Young  Beautiful. I wanted to read another quote from well, this time, your website where you say, "Dream work is a practice in which we coax weave and tend to the roots of our separation and in so doing, restore our membership and belonging," end quote. And, yeah, I think about this idea of separation, particularly in relation to the deep longing and yearning we seem to have in our culture or this over culture. Yeah, I'm just picking up on also, it seems that so many of us are craving something and yet, we have difficulty naming exactly what that is. So I'm wondering, how does dreamwork engage with this separation and belonging?

Toko-pa Turner  Yes! So I wrote a book on the topic of belonging, and it's called Belonging. And I was just like you were, Ayana, was really struck by that question in my own life, about this deep yearning for a place of belonging. And as much as I had been searching for it over the course of my life, it seemed that my searching was in vain. If I would ever find what I thought was a place of belonging, it was usually only temporary, or it has had its disappointments and it had conditions or silent contracts in order for me to gain acceptance. And so I began to notice that in my own life, this deep longing to belong, was in a sense unconsciously driving me to make certain decisions in my life. And I wanted to understand, really what is belonging? How do we achieve it if such a thing is possible? And I also wanted to know if other people were feeling something similarly to me, even though it felt like a very taboo subject to even bring up because it's one of those things that just kind of runs silently in our background underneath the conversations we're having in the open. Like, will I be liked? Will I be loved? Do I belong here? Is it okay for me to be here? It's like this constant refrain that's happening for so many people unconsciously. Why do I feel like an outsider? And so I started to ask this question really just as a personal inquiry. And as I did that, I started to perceive all of these dreams. And at first, it was just me journaling page upon page about more or less a kind of refinement of that question, as it became more complex. But also, I was receiving teachings from my dreams that seemed to be saying to me that there was an entirely different way of understanding belonging than the one that I had inherited. Instead of thinking of belonging as something that was outside of myself that I was perpetually in search of, that actually, belonging was a skill, it was a set of competencies that could be developed, could be grown. And it's just that in modern consensus culture, we have lost or forgotten those competencies, that skill. 

And so I began to talk to people in my life and in my community and in different walks of life, about this question, and I was amazed to discover that so many of the people that I came into contact with had this same feeling of longing to belong, even when it looked from the outside looking in, that they had established the place of belonging to the outside observer. But when asked their secret feeling, they too felt this sense of longing to belong to this, something greater, as you've said, that is so difficult to me. And so after a while, I realized, "Oh, my goodness, I think I'm writing a book" because it just kept going deeper and deeper. I realized that somewhere along the way that we had, as a people experienced different kinds of estrangement. And from what I observed, this happens at three levels. The first level, of course, is the personal. So this is your personal story. And we all have these moments where we felt like maybe the way that we were was not enough, or that it was too much. And so we began to alter ourselves in order to fit in. And fitting in is very different from belonging. It requires us to cut parts of ourselves off in order to gain acceptance. The image that I like to use is the old Grimms version of the Cinderella story. In the more modern Disney version, you know, the stepsisters just don't fit into the glass slipper, but in the Grimms fairy tale, they actually had to cut off their toes to try and fit into the tiny slipper. And I think this is a really gruesome but accurate image of what we do to ourselves on a psychic and emotional level and spiritual level, when we're trying to fit into established norms. And this can happen in our family homes, it can happen in our churches, it can happen in our schools, it can happen in our workplaces, and so on and so forth. So this is the personal level of estrangement.

But then the level above that, of course, is the cultural level, where you're at the cultural level, there are just things as we were sort of touching on earlier, that are considered acceptable, and other things which are just considered not valuable, or maybe worse, they're derived it or maybe they are just undiscovered. But we do learn those things in certain social medias about what is acceptable in the culture and what is not. This is when we see larger systems of oppression and people falling into marginalized groups.

And then there is a level even beyond that. And that level of estrangement, where we are cleaved off from belonging is the ancestral level. And this is those times in most people's history, even those of European descent, though it's obviously more obvious for people of color and who have a background, the various diasporas in world history. But even those of European descent can trace back our family's lineage by a few generations to discover a time when our people’s people were displaced from their original place of belonging. And we carry that ancestral wound, of course, in the outer branches of the family tree because it metastasizes through the generations. 

So these are just some ways to kind of put some language around, you know, how did this happen? Why are we suffering with this cultural ailment of longing to belong to something we don't even know how to name? But coming back to your question, Ayana, was about you know, how does that tie into dream? Well, I believe that psyche stretches far beyond the personal, what we call consciousness or vision of mind contained within the scaffolding of the human body. Psyche extends into the larger collective, what Carl Jung called the 'collective consciousness.' And even further than that, into all of nature. Circling back to the original topic, we started on around animism and a psyche contains within it, the entirety of the appendix of our species' experience. And not only that, but I believe that there is a greater intelligence, which is governing the interconnected harmony of the entire ecosystem, and inclining us to growth, inclining us to a sense of wholeness. And what that means is from the Jungian perspective, certainly, that we come into this world, not as a sort of tabula rasa, blank slate, but as containing a kind of inborn story that we are meant to live. Some people might call that destiny. You know, a great analogy is also in the DNA there is a story contained at that subatomic level, which contains the possibility of the larger organism within given the right conditions. And so in our dreams, we seek glimpses of that. And the way that we know this is because when we understand a dream correctly, the next dream that we have built upon the understanding of the last dream. So what that means is we haven't been given the previous streams, something in us knows what we needed in order to go into the next evolution of our becoming. There is something within us that knows who we are supposed to become. And in our dreams, we see evidence of that. And when we learn the symbolic language of dreams, we can get better at following or living in harmony with that ordering principle

Ayana Young  Well, now I really don't want you to stop. Because I want to hear more about this ordering principle. And yeah, I'm totally intrigued.

Toko-pa Turner  I think a good way to explain this is with recurring dreams. So somebody could have a recurring dream for five years, or even 20 years and each dream is a little bit different, but for the most part, the theme of the dream is the same. Something happens over and over again. And when you wake up, you feel a bit exhausted because you think, Oh, not that dream again. But the reason why we have recurring dreams is because we're kind of stuck in a loop of recurring behavior.

So let's say you have a dream of being chased by a grizzly bear and you have this dream, every time you are confronted by a moment of rage in waking life. And maybe you haven't even made this connection yet. But let's say that's why it exists. Because perhaps somewhere in your history, it was taught to you that it was not okay to express your anger. So in that estrangement, we were talking about, you worked very hard to separate yourself from that anger. But as a result of pressing those inclinations down, and not being in relationship with them, you would have these dreams of a scary grizzly bear chasing you, pursuing you trying to get your attention repeatedly every time you get into a situation where this rage was triggered in you.

And so this is sort of how the anatomy of a recurring dream works. A similar or a familiar threat confronts us. And we have a very similar or recurring reaction or strategy to that threat and it results in a recurring dream. So it's the inability to get out of a patterned way of thinking that causes this recurring dream. So until you can find a new perspective, which usually comes quite simply from exploring the dream, and trying to move deeper into it. Instead of trying to run away from the grizzly bear, actually turning to face it and trying to embody or understand what it wants, then what happens is, the dream usually disappears. So suddenly, the recurring dream is complete. And then the next dream that we have is an evolution upon that thing. So maybe in the next dream, you now have a dream, where you come nose to nose with a grizzly bear, but this time, you don't run from it. You just feel its breath on your skin, and you feel your fear, but you hold your ground. And in waking life, you're doing something similarly, which is allowing your rage or your anger to express itself in your body, perhaps not unconsciously and without care, but just making contact with that visceral energy that's in your body.

Okay, so here we have this idea that the dream has evolved, well, maybe we can even just fast forward five years down the line. And let's say you step into a position of leadership that requires you to enact very strong boundaries in order to be successful in your role. And you recognize that this would not have been possible had it not been for those earlier teachings around embodying your anger and learning how to use it in a productive way. So something in us knew at this early juncture that we needed to move through those hindrances to become who we were meant to be. So this is just a very simple example. But these stories tend to get quite complex over the course of a person's lifetime. And many people report looking back on earlier dreams, and seeing that they were foretelling of the person that they were meant to become. And so the conclusion that we can make from all of that, is that something in us knows what our potential is, and it when we work in relationship with that something, then we can begin to move into greater and greater belonging, not only with ourselves, but then that belonging actually becomes a shelter for others to take refuge in our own life.

Ayana Young  Beautiful. Yeah, it reminds me of something that I think I spoke with Stephen Harrod Buehner about years ago, and I think the sentiment was walking into the fire or walking towards your fear, and I think there's something so potent and of course scary but also almost relieving about that. Because it's almost scarier to me, to have the fear at my back than to confront it face on. I mean, the confrontation feels maybe anxiety producing, but I actually think, for me when I avoid that it builds in my mind. And so yeah, I just really appreciate all that you're speaking to. And honestly, I feel like I could just keep asking you questions about this topic, because it feels so rich. And there's so much here. But I also wanted to go back to belonging for a moment and talk about false belonging, which is something you discussed in your book. And, you know, you also discuss these initiations by exile. And yeah, I would just love to dive a bit more into this and think through some of the ways we are almost, quote, 'sold' or 'marketed,' a type of belonging that ends up alienating us further.

Toko-pa Turner  Yeah, for sure. Well, I'm glad that it's as thrilling to you to discuss me because this is my favorite soapbox to be on. But I'm glad that I'm not alone in being fascinated by it. But yeah, so I came across the term false belonging in the book "Anam Cara," by John O'Donoghue. And I love that word coupling so much that it inspired a chapter in the book for me, in which I talk about false belonging. And I sort of touched on this earlier, as being those places in our lives, that, like you said, sort of market, an idea of belonging to us, and they're very seductive. It could be like, belonging to a group, most often. But it could also be belonging to a spiritual path. It could be belonging to a relationship. It could be belonging to a job, career, or vocation. But often these pieces of belonging are conditional, which is to say, there is something hidden in the silent contracts of acceptance in these places, that says, "We can prolong so long as we don't dot dot dot," and that can look different for all of those scenarios, right? Like maybe, you know, the relationship is, you know, we can stay in this relationship and be happy so long as we don't talk about money. So long as we don't explore anger. As long as we don't need each other too much. Or it could be something like a career.

For a number of years, I worked in the music industry. And I was an executive at a record label. And I used to sit in these boardrooms that were 99% older white men. And I would usually be the only woman in the boardroom. And there was conditional acceptance of my being there, so long as, and I'm sure you've heard these ideas before, I wasn't too aggressive, or I wasn't too emotional, or you know, all of the things that we traditionally expect of the gender divide. And so things like this, right, or maybe it's a spiritual group that you can belong to this spiritual group, but we don't want any negative thinking or so called negative thinking, or negative self talk. Or we don't call into question the structures of this environment. That's a big one, right?

And so these, these are what I call places of false belonging, because it isn't true belonging, it's something that requires us to be smaller, and to leave parts of ourselves behind in order to gain acceptance in those places. And you know, this can be fine and instructive for a while, but usually what ends up happening is you butt up against those limitations enough times, and it starts to become increasingly intolerable to you. And eventually something from the unconscious is going to burst out in you and say, Hey, this is not okay with me. And maybe you become a whistleblower or maybe you have that blowout fight in your relationship or maybe you speak out in your, your spiritual group or whatever it is. And often what happens is a kind of shattering. You get exiled. Maybe it's a breakup. Maybe it's a demotion, maybe you get fired, or something terrible often happens where you get pushed outside of this false place of belonging.

And sometimes I will add that if you haven't addressed these unconscious disagreements, but I call them sacred disagreements in the book, because we talk a lot about sacred agreements. But we rarely talk about sacred disagreements. Because these are ultimately disagreements in some way at a moral or emotional or physical level. You disagree with this place of belonging in some way. If you don't express them, then sometimes what happens is they will manifest in a crisis. So either that will be self chosen, like in the ways that I described, or it could come in another form, like suddenly getting fired for no reason, or suddenly developing an illness. Or there are ways that it may manifest in the physical world, to somehow create a separation from You and that falseness. And this is where it goes into what I call initiations by exile. And I call these moments of exile initiations, because I do believe that there is a task being asked of us in these moments. And that task is, in as much as you may be grieving that the door has been shut on this old way of life, there is also a call as faint as it may be, towards true belonging. And that means really sifting and sorting through all of those extraneous arguments to get to the core of who you are, what you believe in, and what you stand for, and what is your soul's truth.

And if you really want to live a sort of heroic story, for your life up, there is almost always... If you look at the mythic tales of heroes and heroines, there's always a period of exile, in which the hero or heroine must come into the true medicine of their vocation. And this can be a really painful process and it can last a lot longer than the stories. In the stories, there's always just this very brief period of Oh, and then I got trapped in a dark forest, but I found my way out and I found a helper and, and then all ended well and I was given a place in the castle or what have you. But in real life, sometimes these periods can last a decade.

A good example of this story is the break that Carl Jung had from Sigmund Freud. I find it to be quite a touching story, because you can imagine, psychology was a brand new field, and Jung and Freud, Jung was a student to Freud's but he was also a colleague, and the two of them were two of the only people on Earth who were doing this work at the time. They were pioneers in the field. And they had a great and deep friendship. But there were some ways in which Jung deeply disagreed with Freud's way of viewing the unconscious as a kind of repository, and sort of reductionist way of debris from a person's lifetime. Sort of in the way that we've already discussed, he believed that there was this inborn story before our lives, that if we could learn to follow it, that would lead us somewhere important. And so he had a break with Freud that was surrounded by a number of powerful synchronicities, but Jung went into a 13 year, dark night of the soul. He still kept up his practice, and was helping people in the consulting room, but for the most he sort of withdrew from society and just turned towards his own dreams. And at many points in this journey, he thought he was crazy. And he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to come out into the world with some of these ideas, which even by today's standards are considered radical, and even an occultist.

So just to tell you that little story as an example of how long these initiations may take, and hopefully it isn't that long for our listeners or as extreme, but it can happen. And it requires a huge amount of bravery. Which is why it's so helpful to have a relationship with your dreams. Because in those dark times, our dreams can offer the only duiding light, sometimes in an otherwise obscuring darkness.

Ayana Young  There's so much in your responses that I'm sitting with and wanting to pull the threads on. But staying on this thread of belonging, I'm so fascinated with the way you describe an ecologically-rooted idea of belonging, you know, tapping into reciprocity across species and consciousness and ecosystems. So I'm wondering, how is this belonging particularly important in times like these? And how can we deepen this connection beyond the superficial or the surface level? 

Toko-pa Turner  Yes, well... coming back to that idea of, of the separation that we uphold, in consciousness between matter and psyche, one of the ways in which that is incredibly destructive is that we don't see ourselves anymore as belonging to the ecosystem in which we are embedded. We've constructed this whole notion of being sort of this apex species. And we're sort of rooted in these theologies of dominion over nature which allow us to have this incredibly destructive relationship with the environment, with other species, and to be disconnected from the impact that we have on the world. 

But when we are practicing in the animistic way of thinking that all things are connected, and that psyche spills out into the physical world around us and is constantly in varying kinds of conversation with us. And that includes our own bodies, the holobiont, which is made up of so many millions of other organisms that are other than human organisms, in fact, they outnumber us 10 to 1 in the human body alone, which is kind of a mind blowing fact. But when we start to take up this perspective that psyche is everywhere, and psyche is constantly in conversation with us, just in different kinds of forms of expression, then we begin to care about those reciprocal conversations. It makes us more porous. It makes us more sensitive, which in turn, impacts the way that we interact with the world around us. And so developing this sensitivity is key, really, and perhaps even we could say foundational to making any of these other changes we would like to make around climate change, and species [unknown] and and even you know, socially in the, in the human world, between races and genders, and, you know, all of the differences we have between us and the world around us. Because unless we're able to change things at the level of consciousness, we're never going to be able to have the kind of sensitivity necessary to really create a diverse and inclusive culture.

Ayana Young  Yeah, I'm thinking too about how shadow work and exploring our consciousness brings up the ways we are raised and of course for a lot of people that brings up religious or spiritual connotations but so many of us have been wounded by that world. So how do we reconcile with all of these influences and find an open path forward?

Toko-pa Turner  Yeah, that can be tricky. If you have received a sort of dogmatic idea of spirituality or religion, that you might take refuge in more of a scientific path or maybe even atheistic, and you know that those are valid ways of going. But, yeah, I have a similar story because I was raised as a Sufi, in Sufi community, and a lot of people hear that story. And they think they, I think they have some sort of glamourous idea of what it's like to live in spiritual community, particularly Sufism, because a lot of people know what love the poetry of Rumi II and, you know, the whirling dervishes and there is so much beauty in Sufism, there's a kind of idealism of that world. But the truth of the matter is, there was a profound shadow cast in the spiritual community that I was part of, where we would see much of the same things that we see in many organized religions, where there is a sort of proselytizing of this purity, or ascension consciousness. But meanwhile, behind closed doors, there's a profound shadow that is being cast. And that could look like somebody who's a leader in the community also being violent behind closed doors or abusive in some way. Of course, this is very famous for happening in the Catholic Church with the abuse of children. But it's true of a lot of religious organizations that have that incredibly polarized view of good and bad, good and bad, good and evil, God and Satan. 

And so, for me, it's really been a lifetime of wrestling with that paradox to find a way forward for me. And I think, at this point in my life, it is still an organic process. My relationship to spirit is an organic process. And I sort of call myself an aspiring animist. And this is because I wasn't raised with animism, as many indigenous cultures have been. And this is a sad fact. And so, I have a lot of, as I was talking about earlier, unlearning to do in order to come into adept practice of joining these two worlds, material and psychic, in my own consciousness. And so I think of myself as a work in progress in that way. But I don't think of it anymore as spirit being beyond the material. I don't frame it in that way. I think spirit and/or what you could call God, or what you could call nature, or what you might call divinity, is for me, inseparable from the physical world. And this is why we see magic in nature everywhere. If we're looking. Even in quantum physics. You know, there's so much magic to be seen about the relational web that we call nature. 

And so, I do believe that it is a practice and for me, that practice looks like a very simple act of everyday paying attention to my dreams, writing them down, questing to understand their perspective, trying to understand not what I can acquire from them, and what I can get out of, say, interpreting a dream, but instead sort of making a courtship of that dream to discover what it longs for, what it wants, and then to try and move my life in in such a way as to attempt to fulfill that longing, which is hidden in the dream. And often, that looks like nothing much really, maybe just taking a pause before I say yes to something, or taking longer to say something out loud, because I want it to be true to what I'm hearing in my own dreams.

But it also looks like physical practices like enacting small rituals, which are either an attempt to further enflesh what I am hearing in my dreams, which is to say, maybe making an altar, to bring those images further into my waking life and into my space and into my consciousness. And by those images, I mean, the symbols which are living symbols in my dream. Or it might look like making an offering of things, giving gratitude in some small way for receiving guidance that comes through the dream. And of course, supporting others with their dreams is a big part of what keeps me connected to that field.

Ayana Young  Thank you for that, ahhh. Well, Toko-pa, this has been such a deeply intriguing and lovely conversation. And although I could talk for much longer with you and hope to do in the future, I would be remiss if we didn't touch on some of the ways that pleasure and beauty might serve as a guide, which is something you discuss in belonging, and yet, how can we let ourselves be guided by what feels good?

Toko-pa Turner  What a great way to end our conversation, Ayana, thank you. Beauty is everything. Beauty is everything because when we notice beauty, what we are doing is coming into resonance. And resonance, in the way that I think about it, is that matching with that pattern that is inside of us, and whatever is externally presenting itself to us. So that's really what resonance is. If you think about resonance in terms of ... if you've ever had a guitar leaning up against a wall in a room and somebody enters the space and says something or sings something in a particular tone of voice and suddenly the guitar without even being touched, resonates, and makes a resonant sound. There is a correspondence between you, the voice, and the guitar. So something existed already between the two of you to create harmony, to create a harmony between those two things. So when we feel pleasure, when we feel joy, when we feel resonance, that is everything. 

And I think that's what Joseph Campbell meant, when he said, Follow your bliss. He didn't mean go around and just do whatever makes you happy and forget your day job. I think he was talking about this deeper underlying principle of listening to what feels right as he put it. And so when we can tune into that pleasure, into that resonance, we are strengthening the instrument that keeps us in tune with who we are meant to be. And I think all of us have a story of oooh when I followed my resonance or when I followed what felt right, it led me into this fantastic adventure. And if I hadn't followed that thing, I never would have known such and such. And sometimes you can't see it until maybe five years down or 10 years down the road when you're looking back on your life. But most of us have a moment in our past that we can look back on when we say we followed our resonance and it led us deeper into our state of becoming or belonging.

And so we can actually practice this in very simple, small ways. It doesn't have to be big events that intervene and create an extraordinary moment of resonance. If we can actually seek them out, and one of the practices I love doing is I call it beautiful things, where I just make a list of at least 10 things every day that I have found beautiful. And it's often really small things. And it could be something weird to like that I might find beautiful and somebody else might not like. I was taking a walk the day before yesterday and I saw that the local community center had thrown into the trash these skeletons that they use for medical demonstrations. It was this medical skeleton and the garbage can. And I just found it to be such a great dream image. And I was like, oooh, that that feels like it could have meaning. I wonder what that meaning could be and I found it beautiful. So I've added this to my list of beautiful things. And shortly after that, I was invited to a death cafe. And I don't know if you've heard about these death cafes, but they're just events where people can come together and discuss with their community topics around death and dying just to break the taboo that we have about these subjects. And in fact, it's quite an enriching discussion.

So you see, there was a little synchronicity that was happening in these moments and by acknowledging it and adding it to my list of beautiful things, it helps to increase that relationship to psyche and dreaming even as it spills out in the physical world, but also, as it proliferates in our own imaginal faculties. When I make these lists, I am also increasing my awareness and attunement towards beautiful things in the world which helps create patterns in the way of thinking instead of slipping into negative thought patterns. It's different from thinking positively, which I don't advocate for as a way of repressing bad thoughts, but actually noticing beauty and making sure that we include that in our way of going and experiencing pleasure in our bodies as well. So hopefully that helps somebody out there. It certainly has helped them change my life.

Ayana Young  Toko-pa, thank you so much for everything you've shared with us. It's been such a rhythmic and beautiful conversation. I've really enjoyed this time with you.

Toko-pa Turner  Oh, I'm so happy to hear that. It's been a joy to speak with you and thank you for your sensitive question.

Ayana Young  Absolutely.

Even Tenenbaum Thanks for listening to For The Wild. The music you heard today is by Magnetic Vines and Tarotplane. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, José Alejandro Rivera, and Evan Tenenbaum.