"A love worth loving earns its place in your life. It recognises the demands of intimacy are ongoing and continuous. It knows that it must give at least as much as it receives, while always striving to go further with the expression of its vow. Love is a staying put, an availing, a drawing near. It is the response before the call. It keeps watch for what is needed and swoops down into those yearnings to give of itself in the filling." ~Toko-pa Turner
“Among other qualities, an elder is someone who is committed to staying put, who has lived into the competencies of belonging and made an invitation of their lives to the young ones growing up around them." ~Toko-pa Turner
"Anger is one of those emotions that's been long-stricken from the social palette of acceptability. Especially for women, who are taught that being angry makes you unlikeable, and being unlikeable is a kind of rejection from Femininity itself. But a terrible thing is lost in the suppression of anger - your relationship with one of your greatest allies: Instinct." ~Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"As we, in the Northern Hemisphere, enter the season of plenty, warmth and ease, it's good to remember how the winter prepared us, the cold deep and stilled us, the burrowing freed us. Like the trickle prepares the riverbed for the sudden runoff, you too have earned your new capacity." - by Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"Be wary of any influence in your environment which dismisses or judges your enthusiasm. Without it, we would become anaesthetised to life itself. Anyone who demands this smallness of you is in danger themselves and may have contracted this insidious, deadening monotone. Enthusiasm is the vitality of spirit expressing itself through us and its grace in our voice should be welcomed and cherished. The word originates in the early 17th century, from the Greek enthousiasmos meaning ‘possessed by god.' Now, more than ever, the world needs your enlargement, your weirdness, your fiery crescendos of rebellion from boring." ~Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"Grief is the honour we pay to that which is dear to us. And it is only through the connection to what we cherish that we can know how to move forward. In this way, grief is motion." ~Toko-pa Turner
"I think being motivated is naturally built-in to one’s vocation. When you walk a path you love, there is something deeper calling you forward on it, like a beautiful question that can never be answered. In the hard times you may turn away from it, but a part of you knows you’ll always turn back because you can’t give up on what you love, even if you try.… In the end, I think the real work is not finding inspiration, but attuning to it. So when I’m not feeling inspired, I know somewhere along the line I’ve been distancing myself from life. This feeling of being separate from ‘something greater’ is usually brought about by numbing habits; so I’ll take myself to the forest and let my senses be reawoken and warmed back to life. I think pleasure is really the gateway to feeling connected and inspired." ~Toko-pa, Belonging
“If you think of your life as the fruit of a long surviving tree, you are an expression of a dream once seeded by your ancestors.” ~Toko-pa Turner
"It is the paradoxical nature of grief to lead us to love. There is a seed planted in loss, an evolution made in breaking, a genius found in separation that is rarely apparent in the heart of crisis. But often what looks like deviation is really proliferation, like satellite initiatives born from a group’s dissolution. Leadership is forged in the hearts of those who know exclusion. To them is given the gift of tenderness which can mentor another through their own isolation." ~Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"In the end, so much of the conflict we feel in our hearts is because we've split ourselves off from the very life we are living. We partition ourselves from the things with which we are at odds, treating them as unbelonging even as we live them. We vaguely imagine some other place, some better job, some other lover - but the irony is that so much of what makes us unhappy is our own rejection of the life we have made. Eventually we must take our life into our arms and call it our own. We must look at it squarely with all its unbecoming qualities and find a way to love it anyway. Only from that complete embrace can a life begin to grow into what it is meant to become." ~Dreamwork with Toko-pa (Excerpted from the upcoming book "On Belonging" © Toko-pa Turner 2014)
"In times of uncertainty, the most difficult thing to do is to stop searching for detours. It can be tempting to act from the desperation one feels when an abyss opens around you, but all of the ego's equipment is useless in these dark regions. Instead, consider this an invitation to deepen your trust, to renew your committed heart to its course. After all, every creation was first seeded in an absence." ~Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"It is the paradoxical nature of grief to lead us to love. There is a seed planted in loss, an evolution made in breaking, a genius found in separation that is rarely apparent in the heart of crisis. But often what looks like deviation is really proliferation, like satellite initiatives born from a group’s dissolution. Leadership is forged in the hearts of those who know exclusion. To them is given the gift of tenderness which can mentor another through their own isolation." ~Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"In the end, so much of the conflict we feel in our hearts is because we've split ourselves off from the very life we are living. We partition ourselves from the things with which we are at odds, treating them as unbelonging even as we live them. We vaguely imagine some other place, some better job, some other lover - but the irony is that so much of what makes us unhappy is our own rejection of the life we have made. Eventually we must take our life into our arms and call it our own. We must look at it squarely with all its unbecoming qualities and find a way to love it anyway. Only from that complete embrace can a life begin to grow into what it is meant to become." ~Dreamwork with Toko-pa (Excerpted from the upcoming book "On Belonging" © Toko-pa Turner 2014)
"In times of uncertainty, the most difficult thing to do is to stop searching for detours. It can be tempting to act from the desperation one feels when an abyss opens around you, but all of the ego's equipment is useless in these dark regions. Instead, consider this an invitation to deepen your trust, to renew your committed heart to its course. After all, every creation was first seeded in an absence." ~Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"Nature was for me the great mother who, in times of growing turbulence in my family, always welcomed me into belonging with her." ~Toko-pa Turner, Reciprocity with Nature
"Poems come as they will. They come as they want, when I'm waking, eating, exercising, chatting with someone.
Sometimes they come to me as a whole, sometimes a line. I think it's one of the ways my soul communicates with me. I do my best to sit down and listen." ~Toko-Pa Turner
"Sometimes our holding patterns need to be broken and, like a husk on the heart, this stage can be enormously painful. That's why it's vital to nurture even the smallest glimmer of newness wanting to be born from our old strategies. Like sunshine on sprouts, let the warmth of your attention draw that newness out, so your glimmer can multiply into a full-on radiance." ~By Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"Soul is not a thing, but a perspective. It's the slow courtship of an event which turns it into a meaningful experience. It's the practice of trusting that if one sits silently and long enough with the absence of magic, the miraculous will reveal itself. Nothing is sacred until we make it so with the eloquence of our attention, the poetry of our patience, the parenting warmth of our admiration." ~by Dreamwork with Toko-pa Turner
“Soul is the governing centre of every individual’s life, but it is also the expression of a larger oneness, the animating principle of the world.” - Toko-pa Turner
"The calling is in your blood, like a vow that was made for you. Everything your dream requires is within the provisions of your being." ~Toko-pa Turner
"The function of stories is not to reflect ‘real life,’ but rather to rescue it from randomness." ~Toko-pa Turner
"This is the true meaning of prayer. To clear an emptiness in our lives where the holy can enter. To prepare a place in our home, in our lives, in our hearts, where magic can feel welcome. And while nothing happens for an uncomfortable amount of time, we can adorn that emptiness with the humble images of our own longing. The carving of a wild wolf that ate from my hand in a dream; the painted stone that houses an elder’s prayer for my well-being; the snakeskin shed at a time of essential loss. These few sacred items ring like a bell from a timeless place where spirit showed itself to you, and act as a summoning that it may do so again. And day by day, hour by hour, the debris of outer influences evaporate like a fog from your bright, new horizon." ~Toko-pa Turner, Excerpt from "Clearing the Fog"
"Water ... is the slipstream from which poetry is culled, the softening grief makes of us, it is the flow, the origin and sustenance of all life." ~Toko-pa
"Water ... is the slipstream from which poetry is culled, the softening grief makes of us, it is the flow, the origin and sustenance of all life." ~Toko-pa
"We grieve the loves we’ve lost. We grieve our abilities vanishing through illness or age. We grieve the loss of faith in our religion. We grieve our children leaving home. We grieve the paths we didn’t walk. We grieve the family we never had. We grieve the suffering of the planet.But while grief may look like an expression of pain that serves no purpose, it is actually the soul’s acknowledgment of what we value." ~Toko-pa Turner
"Without the guidance of our elders, and the wisdom found in stories, myth and dreaming, we in modern culture are mirroring an increasingly distorted image of the externalised life." ~Toko-pa
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"Without the guidance of our elders, and the wisdom found in stories, myth and dreaming, we in modern culture are mirroring an increasingly distorted image of the externalised life." ~Toko-pa
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"Grace is one of the most majestic words in theology. It suggests the sublime spontaneity of the divine which no theory or category could ever capture. Grace has its own elegance. It is above the mechanics of agenda or operation. No one can set limits to the flow of grace. Its presence and force remain unmeasurable and unpredictable. Grace also suggests how fluent and seamless the divine presence is. There are no compartments, corners or breakages imaginable in the flow of grace. Grace is the permanent climate of divine kindness. It suggests a compassion and understanding for all the ambivalent and contradictory dimensions of the human experience and pain. This climate of kindness nurtures the sore landscape of the human heart and urges torn ground to heal and become fecund. Grace is the perennial infusion of springtime into the winter of bleakness." ~John O'Donohue from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
“In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say 'Aha,' that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say 'Aha' to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.” ~Joseph Campbell from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"In this powerful choice to be vulnerable or stay masked rests the heart of our intentions, our deep caring for each other, and our will to see and speak love in the world. Where anger and hatred isolate, love and forgiveness embrace. This is a melancholy kind of love. A love that sees separation and the space between us that inspires so much pain. A love that knows the sting of suffering but chooses to see the fullness, light and darkness, joy and sorrow, entwined in one magnificent reality." ~Unattributed from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"Like the bears, we are slowly waking up, coming out of our winter tunnels into the world of possibilities. Though our dens have been comfortable, they are suddenly feeling cramped and agitated. And with the increasing light, dreams that seemed far off are imminent and visible. But like the crocuses pushing optimistically up through the earth, there is still the real possibility of getting snowed under again. We are vulnerable to the world, stripped down to our essentials, trying as best we can not to take up the old armour..." ~Unattributed by Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"Like trees who share the same root system, we are but individual expressions of the greater whole. When we raise a revolution in our personal psyche, we are serving the quickening of collective consciousness." ~Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"Often it’s only when the well runs dry that we realise how thirsty we’ve been. We become aware of having lost a presence for life. We may find ourselves asking what happened to those magic eyes which saw poetry in the ordinary? Put quite simply, the emptiness has become full..." ~Dreamwork with Toko-pa
“Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.” ~Rachel Naomi Remen from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"Sometimes we are not meant to solve the mystery---at least not right away. Rather it means to solve us. "Solve" comes from the Latin solvere, "to loosen, release, or free." It is the same root as "solution"---not in the sense of an answer, but a dissolving of individual ingredients into a surrounding medium. In dreams our narrow selfhood is loosened; the ego experiences itself, to its surprise, as only an element in something much larger. In dreamwork, too, we must first allow ourselves to dissolve back into the dream, allowing its images to work upon us. For we are being confronted with an ancient, urgent question: Not merely what does the dream mean, but what does the dream want?" ~Marc Ian Barasch from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"The animal heart sees clearly what the intellect cannot because it follows the innate knowing of the earth itself." ~Toko-pa Turner
“The image to be held before one is that every act by every person has an effect on all, changing the delicate balance that keeps the universe in motion. Therefore, it was considered necessary by the alchemists to so conduct their work and their lives, which were really the same thing, as if the salvation of the world depended upon it.” ~June Singer from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"The rhythms learned by our bodies and souls over hundreds of thousands of years are syncopated with nature. We walked through the world and ingested it viscerally, tangibly in sounds and fragrances, sensations wafting over skin. This intimacy with the sacred opened the lens of perception wide and through that we were awakened to awe.
Brian Swimme was once asked why humans were put here on earth since we seem to perform no necessary function for the well-being of the earth. His answer was beautiful. “We were put here to gawk: To be amazed.” That is our spiritual responsibility. What is asked of us in return for all of this beauty is to register the majesty that is this world and to reply with rituals of appreciation and gratitude. This simple gesture keeps us linked to the world as enchanted, magical and most assuredly, alive." ~Francis Weller from Dreamwork
["There is within a woman an aspect of the psyche that acts and responds in a manner identical to a woman's experience in childhood with her own mother.
This internal mother is made from not only the experience of the personal mother but also other mothering figures in our lives, as well as the images held out as the good mother and the bad mother in the culture at the time of our childhoods.
For most adults, if there was trouble with the mother once but there is no more, there is still a duplicate mother in the psyche who sounds, acts, responds the same as in early childhood. Even though a woman's culture may have evolved into more conscious reasoning about the role of mothers, the internal mother will have the same values and ideas about what a mother should look like, act like, as those in one's childhood culture.
It is one of the core aspects of a woman's psyche, and it is important to recognize its condition, strengthening certain aspects, arighting some, dismantling others, and beginning over again if necessary.” ~Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes (via Journey Of Young Women)] from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"Paradoxically, the moment of utter defeat can be the traditional turning point in the journey. It is the moment when all conscious strategems have failed, the ego abdicates, and deeper forces of life may make their appearance." ~Marc Ian Barasch from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"Though we give ourselves only small drinks to soothe our gasping gills, what we really need is to be often returned to these great depths, to be carried deeper into our own fathomlessness, immersed in that place where lovemaking is the dialect and discovery is the constant – where we are without destination or tether, carried by the twirling currents of change." ~Unattributed from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"Until one is committed there is always hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising to one’s favor all manner of unforeseen accidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." ~Goethe on commitment (paraphrased by W. H. Murray) from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"We're in a free-fall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes." ~Joseph Campbell
"When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold, because they believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful." ~Barbara Bloom from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"When young people are not encouraged and given a chance to awaken to the story seeded in their souls, something greater than careers and potentials becomes wasted. Something golden and noble becomes lost and more people begin to wander in confusion, seeking in the outside world what has been lost within themselves." ~Michael Meade from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
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