Saturn Returns with Caggie - 1.7 Belonging and dream work with Toko-pa Turner

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

How can we belong to ourselves? What does it mean to belong? In this Episode of Saturn Returns Caggie is joined by dream expert and author of Belonging, Toko-pa Turner. They discuss why we need to feel a sense of belonging, and how that need can influence our emotions and behaviour. Through our Saturn Return we often gain an awareness of the aspects of ourselves we had denied in order to 'fit in'. In order to belong to ourselves again and take back ownership of the parts of ourselves we might have denied or kept hidden, we may have to go through a difficult period, but it is in this space that we find ourselves. Caggie and Toko-pa also discuss loneliness, grief, and the interaction between the conscious and the subconscious via dreams. --- Follow or subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a new podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. and doubt. There comes a point though where fate of some kind will knock us out of false belonging and that puts us in a place of exile and it's in those times that we actually have this opportunity to find out who we really are. In today's episode, I have the pleasure of being joined by Toko Pa Turner. Toko Pa is a writer, a teacher, and she's the first dream worker that I have ever met and has even founded her own dream work school. Now, if you guys remember in episode two of Saturn Returns, I did an episode with Ruby Warrington and we discussed sobriety

and Tokopar's work came up in that conversation and specifically about her book Belonging. Now this book kept coming up for me in different conversations and different podcasts I listened to so I went and I read it and I found it so fascinating because it touches on many things but one that's particularly prevalent to this time is how we are driven by a desire to be seen in our authentic selves but also to fit in I know that to be true of myself for when I was in my 20s how I would do anything to fit in to to feel loved and validated and in relationships I would do anything to fit in, to feel loved and validated. In relationships, I would mold myself to the person. In friendships, it left me feeling very unanchored and unsure of who I really was.

So this has been a huge part of my journey during my Saturn return to really come back home to myself. There's so much wisdom in what Tokopar says and so much that I learned from it. She also has such an interesting story herself about how she got into this work. Yeah, she's just a really interesting human being and it was an absolute pleasure to talk to her. So I hope you enjoy it. you just mentioned so many beautiful things in this book and i'm sure a lot of people like myself have experienced this this longing for belonging and for me a lot of my my 20s were um searching and searching outside of myself and traveling and moving places. And with everything that's going on right now, there's a sort of restlessness in me that has that craving for

another space, another place. And it's an interesting test for me to have to sit in that and find it within myself, I guess. Well, just an acknowledgement of that feeling of restlessness. And I actually believe that that restlessness is really important to us. And it's a key part of the process. And maybe we can just start there. Because in my exploration and apprenticeship to the topic of belonging, exploration and apprenticeship to the topic of belonging, what I have discovered is that many of us are taught that belonging is a static place of attainment that many of us will spend our whole lives searching for. And we think, well, if I keep looking for it, if I keep going to further and further reaches, maybe one day I will finally find that place and I will recognize it and it will recognize me and we'll live happily ever after in this state of unquestionable belonging. But what I discovered,

one of the key things that came through this work was that belonging is not static at all, came through this work was that belonging is not static at all, actually, but a dynamic process. And what I mean by that is that it's necessary that we have times of restlessness and apartness, or what I call in the book exile, that feeling of being an outsider and alternating periods of feeling a place of I found my home or I found my people. And we move in and out of these two regions and each are necessary to one another. And the key for me is that the word rest is in the root of restlessness. So restlessness means where there's an absence of that resting, an absence of that place where we really sit and come to terms with the emptiness, which is actually like a holy grail. It's like a chalice, that emptiness, which prepares itself to receive something new. But if we're constantly filling that emptiness with busyness and experiences and social activity and scrolling and Netflix and food, then we never actually make a true encounter with that emptiness. We never truly rest.

And if we allow ourselves to rest, we allow ourselves to invite in all the things that give us actual fulfillment. with maybe a deeper longing for our lives. So instead of just following the demands and the cues of the outside world, the invitations from the outside world, instead we are turning our allegiances to the inner life. And by doing that, we have the chance at coming into contact with a true longing for what we want to create with our lives or for what our true values are. And from there, when we move from that place, our movement becomes in right relationship with our purpose in the world. with our purpose in the world because I think a lot of people myself included there can be a false sense of belonging in perhaps the society we've been brought up in in the friendships in the relationships and if you feel like you're in in an environment and a friendship group and stuff but there's just something that's not quite right what I it's been in my experience that it's difficult to trust the in-between.

So we often cut off the truth of who we know to be and stay there rather than risk the unknown. And what I think you really encapsulate in your book is the invitation to the unknown and into that what you describe as an exile and trusting that in between that space that you then nourish yourself and then bring in the people that are your community and your people yes exactly so you described very well this process of living in a place of false belonging. And some of us do it for decades or even most of our lives because we are raised in a culture that

aggrandizes certain values and qualities and tells us how we should be living our lives. And we are taught that it's normal to make whatever compromises are needed to make to remain in that place of false belonging, because we don't want to be an outsider. And so we continue in those friendships that perhaps don't fulfill us, or we stay with our spiritual group that perhaps has corruption in it, whatever our particular story may be, there comes a point though, where something, fate of some kind will knock us out of false belonging. It will intervene. belonging. It will intervene. It will intervene, exactly. And this might look like a crisis or a conflict that happens in those relationships. It might look like an illness that happens in your

own body. It might look like a depression. It might look like getting fired from a job. There are so many different ways in which we can be kicked out of false belonging. And that puts us in a place of exile. And that's what you were describing as the unknown, which we go to great lengths to avoid for good reason, right? Because we do not know what's on the other side. And that can be incredibly uncomfortable because where do you find the faith that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel, that you will find that relationship that's more enduring or more fulfilling for you or a job that is in alignment with your true values. But there's only one way through, only one way to get to it and that's through it

and that is that's why in the book i call these periods of exile initiations by exile because we really have to be initiated and initiation is not some you know woo-woo term, which takes a week. It's this horrible process of things being stripped away from us and having to be confronted with our wounds and our shadows and for things to fall away and to feel completely alone. And it's in those times that we actually have this opportunity to find out who we really are. I think it was the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung had this beautiful way of talking about loneliness. He said, loneliness is not the, I'm just paraphrasing here, but loneliness is not about being alone, because you can feel very lonely, as you said, in relationship with other people. But loneliness is the inability to

communicate the things of your soul with another person. And I think that's so, so true. If we can't speak and be heard and feel seen at that level of our soul, of our heart, then it does create this feeling of loneliness. And my experience in my early 20s was that I, I mean, you wouldn't know this, but I ended up doing a TV show and it felt very much like that wasn't where I belonged. And it wasn't that I didn't love my friends or the people I was with, but I just didn't feel like I really belonged there or that I was truly seen for who I was. But at the same time, I didn't necessarily know what I was trying to show, if that makes sense. Because as a society, we haven't been taught how to really express our truth or our uniqueness. We are taught from a younger age to copy or that's what I was taught.

That's what I observed would keep me safe, would stop me from feeling pain was that if I mimicked myself of other people, I would protect myself. Yeah, very much so. And I think, you know, when we're talking about belonging, we have to realize that we can't really have the conversation about belonging without really exploring estrangement at the same time, because the two are like dark sisters of each other. And what I try to do in the book is first explore what I think are the roots or the origins of our estrangement. And there are multiple levels at which this happens. We've been mostly speaking about the personal here, and that part is a really important part. But then there are these other levels, like we were talking earlier about the cultural programming that we receive, the cultural indoctrination, which really is a kind of group mind or group think, which says these set of qualities in a person are valuable and lauded and aggrandized. And this other set of qualities, well, usually we minimize them, we ridicule them, we dismiss them. We put them in shame. Or exactly, worst of all, we don't even mention them because that's how fundamentally unimportant to us they are. And so what happens is the people who grew

up, who grow up in this society, receive this kind of programming, either through our social institutions or from our families themselves. And we try to mold ourselves, like you were pointing out, in this kind of homogenous sort of way to fit into that picture. But of course, so many people feel a sense of not belonging because they're literally living half split off from the wholeness of who they are. And then, of course, there's a level above that, which is the ancestral level of displacement that so many people in the world experience. And so if we trace our history, even back a few generations, we can usually find a place where even European ancestry can find a place where we were displaced from our original land, our original people, our original traditions and stories and culture. And over generations, that causes a profound sense of disconnection, especially, of course, for people in the diasporas like the African slave trade and the Jewish Holocaust. But there are many stories that

you can find that create this sense of displacement. And so we, as you know, are also dealing with this multi-generational problem of unbelonging. And how do we start to shift that? Well, that's a really excellent question. I think it's important that we approach that question as a living question, which is to say that many different disciplines can contribute to answering that question. learn about our generational history, not just personally, but each other's generational history and how that has impacted us systemically. So what I did, and I tell this story in my book, my grandparents on my mother's side were survivors of the Holocaust. And what happened for us is survivors of the Holocaust. And what happened for us is the entirety of that branch of our family tree had been lost. And it was just empty, even though some of my siblings had put together a family tree of genealogical connections, the Jewish branch of our family was completely empty.

The Jewish branch of our family was completely empty. And so I undertook to see if I could recover lost information. And it took me spent a year working with these organizations and I managed to, I actually physically went to the places where my ancestors had been killed and ended up meeting a living farmer in the rural part of France where my ancestors were exiled and put into work camps. And he actually remembered my ancestors and told me stories of what it was like to watch them be put into the back of a truck, which was going to the convoy, which would eventually take them to Auschwitz to meet their death. And there was a lot of weeping and there was a lot of healing in just being able to reconnect

my life to that story for him, for me, for that village in France. And in the end, which was my greatest wish, I actually managed to find living relatives of my ancestors and reconnected with them. So I think this is a first step in what could be a very complex and fascinating and healing process very complex and fascinating and healing process of really understanding where we come from, owning our story, and perhaps even beginning to re-culture ourselves to enacting the ceremonies and rituals and songs and languages of our ancestors to bring them back alive because they are very quickly becoming extinct in our world. That is so fascinating. And you talk in your book about as well, your upbringing and your relationship with your mother. And that was something that I guess, you know,

maternal relationship is one where we always feel a sense of belonging or should and how that has affected you on your journey yeah I mean that's a very big topic and um as you know I dedicated a whole chapter to what I call the death mother so I go quite deeply into this topic of conversation in the book, talking about what it was like to grow up feeling unwanted and how when that's woven into your earliest development is that it causes so many difficulties making secure attachments later in life. And so I tell the story of how I left home when I was 14 years old and ended up in the foster system and then spent the rest of my life without a family. And so that was a huge part of my not feeling belonging. But also what uniquely qualified me to write about the topic of belonging

because of its profound absence in my life. And perhaps what forced me to reckon with this question, this experience that we may or may not have around having a nurturing mother becomes a kind of inner voice. And if you have a good example of a healthy mothering relationship, then that might carry over into your adult relationship with yourself. But if you have a deaf mother or an unhealthy dynamic with your mother, that translates later into an archetype of scarcity. That it's never enough.

What you're doing is never good enough. And so even when you work so hard to achieve great heights in your career, or in your relationship, or in your social spheres, you may still find that nagging feeling of, it's not enough, you need to do more, you need to be prettier, you need to be thinner, you need to be more successful, you need to be more. You need to be prettier. You need to be thinner. You need to be more successful. You need to be more articulate, whatever form that takes for you. And I think one of the great works that we have to do as a planet really is learning how to be enough because we're so focused on doing and achieving and building bigger, bigger, better, faster, that there is no emphasis on rest, on receiving, on, you know,

rest, on receiving, on the sensuality of being in the moment, of having space, of paying attention to our dreams. And there's this vast network of skills and abilities that are lost in that process. For instance, our intuitive nature, our ability to dream and to envision a new world, our instinct and learning to pay attention to our instinct and move from our instinct, our creativity, all of that lives in that luscious place that we are overriding when we're constantly pushing to achieve. So I don't know that there's any other way to go about this than to simply make to create a holy refuge in your life, a place of what the Greeks call a temenos, a sacred enclosure. And it's a place of rest. And for me, the soapbox that I'm always standing on

is dream work, because that is my particular discipline. And I've dedicated my life to teaching others how to pay attention to and learn the language of your own dreams. And the reason why this is incredibly important is, in my view, dreams are actually nature, actually nature, naturing through us as part of this larger ecosystem that we are just a part of. In the same way that a tree produces blossoms and then fruits, dreams are produced through us. And these dreams are incredibly valuable. I think working with our dreams has this tremendous significance that we can tap into, which primarily turns our relationship to authority within. So instead of looking for outside answers, for looking to an authority outside of ourselves, suddenly we realize we have this storehouse of wisdom that we can access within ourselves. And from that place, I think the answers to what can create the culture that we're longing for live.

Did you learn anywhere about how to work with your dreams? I learned from many places. So I started having very powerful dreams when I was really little. And this is going to sound very strange, but I grew up as a Sufi. Just to give you a little context for people who don't know, Sufism, if you've ever heard of the poetry of Rumi, Rumi was one of the, if not the original Sufi. So it's a mystical branch of an old Islamic tradition. It has nothing to do with traditional ideas about God. There's no central deity or anything like that.

But it's all about devotion to the beloved. And when I was a little kid, I started receiving these powerful dreams, which were much more experiential in nature than they were narrative. And so I started reading books by people like Carlos Castaneda when I was nine years old. I was a weird little kid. So at a very young age, I was deeply interested in it. And it was really my calling in this life. But it wasn't until my late teens, I think I was about 18 or 19 years old, when I discovered Carl Jung, who I was mentioning earlier. And Carl Jung was the pioneer of psychoanalysis, which was this branch of psychology that was particularly interested in dreams. I spent many years studying that because

it was like discovering this alien race of people who were speaking my language. I hit a kind of limitation with the Jungian world when I realized that there was such exclusivity. You had to be very wealthy to enter the Jungian program because it would cost probably $100,000 to do a postgraduate level program with them. So there were many, many hurdles to me getting into that program. And I started to really think about those privileges

and it started to wrestle up for me that I really felt that dreaming needed to be brought back to the people. And I became very interested in indigenous practices around dreaming because if you study any indigenous culture that still exists in modern times, and even some that have gone extinct, dreaming was always a central practice in most tribal cultures. And I'm speaking very generally here, but there are many specific examples like the Siberians and the Iroquois and many South American tribes. And this resonated for me that we should have a direct relationship with our dreams and that that should be not hidden behind many levels of academic degrees, that we should be able to contact our own dreaming. But it is frustrating because it's not easy to go and just study about dreams. And yet, it is incredibly important that you are well educated when working with anybody else's psyche because it is such a vulnerable profession. Such a vulnerable profession. And so people come to you and you work with them through their dreams and then that informs their life, basically.

Yes, yes. I mean, it is such powerful work. It's impossible to convey how transformative it can be in a person's life even to work with a single dream okay can I ask you something on a something on a personal level then for me with a recurring dream that I have yes certainly okay so that I'm sort of flying but I need I have something that's usually assisting me so whether it's like a plastic bag or a blanket or something and it's sort of I've discovered that oh my god I can actually fly with this and I'm having a great time flying around but then I start to like doubt the fact that I'm flying and that actually I've never been able to fly before and other people don't seem to be flying so I start

sinking and then I have to try and get myself back into that mentality to start flying again. So I'm constantly like dipping down and then going up a bit more and then dipping down. Okay. So let me just repeat back what you said to me. You said, I have these moments where I'm just flying and I need some assistance, but I'm just soaring. And then I start to have doubts. I look around and I see nobody else is flying. And then I begin to sink down. And I have to get myself back into the mindset that allowed me to soar. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, we're just getting to know each other.

So I don't know anything about your life, but not knowing anything about you. I might wonder if there are times where you really feel like you can rise above and that you, you know, I would go into the feeling that you have when you're flying, which is likely a sense of being empowered and being free and the excitement that you have of having that bird's eye view. But then you start to doubt. And like your friend said, that an introduced doubt can sink you down to the ground again. And I'm curious, when you have these dreams, are you actually lucid? Like, do you know that you're dreaming? Do you know that that is unusual and that you're not normally

physically capable of flying? Therefore, it must be a dream? No, it's real. What I would suggest is in a dream like that, maybe enter the possibility the next time you're dreaming and a doubt starts to appear, maybe you can remind yourself that you're actually dreaming and then you can become awake in the dream and see what happens next. Wow. Can you do that? Yes. It's called lucid dreaming, which simply means you know that you're dreaming while you're in the dream. And suddenly you have abilities to make choices within the dream. And it's not like some people use the language, I can control my dreams, but it's not really control because there will always be something unusual in your environment, which is provided by the dream, but you can make choices

about how you handle it. And some people practice lucid dreaming as a way of life and they get extremely expert at becoming awake in their dreams. And they do all kinds of amazing things. You could have lucid sex, you could have lucid flying, you could have a conversation with a spiritual master. One of the things I love doing when I have a lucid dream is just to explore nature because it's so incredibly real. In fact, it's hyper real. It's more real than reality. And it's amazing to me that I can be inside a dream and feel the sun on my skin and smell the grass and put my hand in the wet river. So it's sort of like our conscious dancing with our subconscious.

Yeah. I must try it. Yes. And something else I wanted to talk to you about that I feel will be useful for our listeners is to explore a little bit the concept of grief and you describe it as a necessary current that leads to our becoming and I think you know that grief I think when we think about grief I've always associated that with death of course there can be all kinds of death, though. There can be the death in a relationship, in a friendship, or in a career, or in self. Yeah, I think you're right.

We have constant little deaths in our lives. And, you know, it was taught to me by one of my teachers, Martine Prechtel, that grief and love are the same thing, actually, because we only grieve what we have loved. And so through our grief, we understand what we truly value. understand what we truly value. And so when we're grieving something very deeply and long, it's because we have profoundly opened ourself to love. And grief is, I guess you could say, it's the price you pay. But there's nothing wrong with grief. It's just as necessary as the rain falling from the sky. In a way, it helps to undo previous attachments. But here's the problem, is that there are rarely any sanctioned places in our culture to grieve properly. And in fact, we're taught that we have this very short amount of time that it's okay to grieve, and then you're just sort of supposed to get over it and start being a contributing member to society again, being productive. But actually, this does a great disservice to us because grieving takes the length that it takes.

And ideally, what we would have is a place in our personal lives, in our relationships, in our culture that encourages grief and encourages the social sharing of grief as well. Because part of what is so scary about grieving is you think, well, I will just drown in this grief. And it feels very isolating. What you really need is to have a village around you who's grieving with you. And then it helps to ease the burden when other people can carry your grief with you. So how do we hold space for each other and honor each other's grief? I think very simply showing up on somebody's doorstep or on the phone and saying,

how are you today? Again and again, and just listening. That is everything. Having somebody care enough to show up and say, I'm thinking of you. How are you coping? What's going on in your heart right now is huge. And I think even if it's experiencing the grief of the loss of a relationship, how powerful that is. I went through a breakup at the end of September, early October, and I'm still grieving. And that actually brings me on to this idea of leaving well. But I think a lot of people, myself included,

struggle with knowing how to close a relationship and move on with still having love in your heart for that person. And often women specifically will make martyrs of themselves because they want to love and feel loved, even when perhaps they haven't been treated very well and I find it hard to know where the middle ground is between these two spaces because also building up a wall doesn't necessarily make you strong I think that's a really juicy question, you know, because you're holding these two pieces. You're like, okay, it's really important that we create healthy boundaries. But also, I want to make sure that I am leaving well, that I am moving through something consciously. And where is that line? I mean, it's obviously very different in every situation. But I think you made an excellent point, which is that as women, I think we are taught to be over responsible, especially when it comes to emotional labor and so we carry a great deal of the project and often men especially

get away with doing much less emotional work because we don't expect them to because we carry it for them because we carry it for them exactly Because we carry it for them. Exactly. And also we make excuses for the people we love. And by doing that, we make them feel like they're not responsible in doing the work themselves. Yes. Yes. So I think it's really important in our relationships with each other that we hold each other accountable to carry at least half of the responsibility. And that's a big work, you know, because again, we're dealing with intergenerational programming here, which goes back a long time. And we have these very gendered roles when it comes to especially heterosexual relationships, but we see the same dynamic

in same-sex relationships as well, or some combination of genders. So I think it's really important to try and ask ourselves in any dynamic, is this, do I feel like I'm being met emotionally with regards to the labor that's required in this relationship? And so then the question is, if the answer is no, then why do we still get into those relationships? Now that's the tougher. Now that's the million dollar question. Right. That's the tougher thing.

And yeah, I'm sort of coming full circle to one of your first questions, can we withstand the gap of uncertainty as we search for those relationships in our lives that do meet us halfway? And are we willing to brave that uncertainty for as long as it takes to find those unique people who have done their inner work or are committed to doing their inner work? I will just speak personally that I really require that in all of my relationships now at this point in my life, because nothing less will do. It'll only end up in disappointment and heartbreak. And I just don't have time for that. But you had to go through your own personal exile and trust the space in between to start

bringing in those people into your life. Is that correct? Exactly. Yes. And in some cases, it was extremely painful. And I had to make what I call a conscious estrangement from people in my life who were not doing that work. The important thing is that you're reconnecting with those estranged parts of yourself, what I call the refugee aspects of the self, those parts that were exiled in your own family or in our culture and in certain relationships or in our church or schools or whatever it is, that we reconcile ourselves with those parts that are always trying to re-belong themselves to us.

And from that place of individuation, of wholeness, of integration, we have a chance, a much greater chance actually at meeting the partner who is equal to us. And to go, to again, go full circle on something we touched on before about how I felt like I had this craving to be seen, but I didn't know in what capacity and it was to be seen in all the ways all the aspects of myself that I had hidden away and that seems to be a common thing of a lot of people that I come into contact with that once they begin embodying those parts of themselves they had denied they start coming into their true essence and thriving and finding what it is they're supposed to be doing and and truly connecting on a on a deep level because you recognize that in someone and you support it because they support it in you and it's this sort unsaid thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think we are all tasked with this process of coming back

into relationship with our estranged qualities or just undeveloped qualities, things we haven't discovered yet. And my hope for you and for everyone and myself included is that you continue to have that throughout your lifetime. It's that process that makes us feel alive because we're always on the living edge of knowing who we are. And there's always something more to discover. It's when you think that you've got it all figured out that life begins to end. I love that. Well, thank you. This was such a lovely conversation. Oh, you're so welcome. Thank you for your beautiful questions. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Toko Pa. I found it so interesting and fascinating talking to her.

I mean, her life story in itself is just really humbling. I think being able to just be, sit with ourselves and hold space for ourselves is such a beautiful thing and just this idea of being able to sit in our own discomfort is something that we're just not familiar with and like I said we're not taught how to do it and this idea of belonging to ourselves I find incredibly empowering and also we touched on grief which right now I know a lot of people are experiencing in in various ways being able to show up for each other and what that means and hold space for one another even if you can't see each other but just you know a message or a phone call can be so powerful so I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it as thought-provoking as I

clearly did. If you want to hear more about Tokopar you can find her on Instagram at Tokopar or me at Kagi's World. Saturn Returns is a Feast Collective production. The producer is Hannah Varrell and the executive producer is Kate Taylor. If you did enjoy today's podcast, I would love it if you could share it with someone who you think might find it useful. Until next time, thank you very much for listening. And remember, you are not alone.