← New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
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And then I started to receive dreams and these dreams were so powerful and they seemed to be reframing the way that I was thinking about belonging altogether from the inside out.
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Keep watching to learn more for early access to our videos and livestream events, sign up for our free weekly newsletter and@newthinkingallowed.org New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at CIHS.
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Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of.
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Exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon. You are warmly invited to visit transformationandintegration.com to access additional resources that support the journey through deep transformation and to learn more about the ongoing offerings at center for Transformation and Integration and including our certified training in transformational coaching with an emphasis in somatic integration therapy. I look forward to welcoming you there.
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Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
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Hi, I'm Leeann Whitney, guest host, working alongside longtime host and producer Jeffrey Mishlove and my other colleagues here at New Thinking Allowed. Today. I'm delighted to welcome Tocopah Turner to the show. Tocopah is a Canadian author and dream worker whose work explores the rich interplay between psyche and nature. Blending the mystical wisdom of Sufism with a Jungian approach to dreams, she calls us to recognize the living intelligence present within both our inner worlds and the larger world around us. Her acclaimed first book, Remembering Ourselves Home, investigates the archetype of exile and reimagines belonging as a lived, ecological and relational practice. This beloved book has touched readers globally, translated into 10 languages and honored with the Gold 2018 Nautilus Award as well as the Gold Reader's Favorite Award. Tocopah's latest work, the Dreaming Courting the Wisdom of Dreams, serves as an accessible field guide to animist dreamwork. This work recently received the 2025 Gold Nautilus Award for its contribution to the field of personal growth. In today's conversation, Tocopa and I explore unbelonging and exile along with reclaiming inner authority and belonging to ourselves, to each other, to the land, and to the cosmos. Tocopah joins me from Ottawa Valley, Canada. And now let's switch over to our Internet interview. Hi Tocopa, welcome to New Thinking Allowed. Nice to be with you today.
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Oh thank you so much for having me, Leanne. It's a delight to be here with you.
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I know when I connected with you, you had mentioned to me that Thinking Aloud was something that you watched back in the. And your whole body of work has to do with moving from unbelonging to belonging. I'm wondering if you could start by introducing our viewers to your backstory for those who haven't met you yet or are unfamiliar with your work, and let us know.
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Yeah.
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How Thinking Aloud weaved into that. That part of your journey.
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Well, I'm gonna really have to cast back into the memory banks there. Okay, so you're probably really familiar with Jeffrey back episodes, so is it possible that I remember him interviewing Terence McKenna?
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Yes, absolutely.
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Okay. That is incredible. I think they did a conversation about the nature of synchronicity and time back in the late 80s or early 90s, probably mid to mid-90s. Does that sound familiar?
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Jeff was definitely doing his work on Thinking Aloud at that time.
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Y. I think my impression of Thinking Aloud back in the day was that Jeffrey has always seemed to me to be a kind of person who sort of balanced this very human, very sensitive listening qualities with great scholarship, and so he could meet this wide range of guests on all these different topics and be able to have a fascinating, spiraling conversation. And Terence McKenn was a great. Can I say, mentor of mine, even though I didn't know him personally. But even to this day, when I need sort of returning to myself, I will go and listen to some Terrence McKenna audio, of which there are huge amounts just to help break out of, you know, imaginative lock boxes. You know, just his use of language in such a creative way tends to be. And humor tends to be so inspiring to me. So that's just one of, you know, one of the many ways in which I think the show touched me, and I'm so honored to be part of this long and continuing lineage.
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Wonderful. So glad to have you with us and your body of work. Now, two Nautilus Book Awards. Two books, two award winners. And if you could start by sharing about your feelings of unbelonging and what that initiatory journey was like for you, because there's many of us that have strained feelings of belonging, let's say isolation, the plague of our time, loneliness. So, yeah, if you could please share with our audience again, for people who haven't been introduced to your body of work yet, a little bit about your own story of being an orphan or exiled.
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Yes. Well, so my. In my first bullet Book which is called Belonging, Remembering Ourselves Home. And so belonging really came out of a very personal question that had been plaguing my life, really, for as long as I can remember. And so the book is a combination of genres. It is nonfiction. And I do tell quite a lot of my own memoirs in the book because I sort of have a unique story. I was born Jewish to. I was the grand. I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. I was raised as a Sufi. So my mother and my stepfather became very deeply involved in the Sufi order, which is sort of Islamic mysticism.
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And.
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And then I eventually found my way into the Jungian world of dream work. So it's this very interesting confluence of influences that have shaped me. And I grew up living in a commune, what in the Sufi tradition is called a conca, where we lived communally. We prayed, we ate, we danced, we sang communally. But as much as I loved that and thrived in that context, Sufism, there was also a profound shadow in the community. And so a lot of the spiritual leaders, including my own parents, caregivers, had a lot of difficulty with various mental health problems that were not being treated. And as a result, my home became a place of a lot of turbulence and hardship. And so I started running away from home at a young age and was finally successful around 14, 15. And I ended up living in the system. And something looking back on it now only because you can imagine at that age, I was very disoriented and lonely. But looking back on it, I can see how very important my own dreams were to me. And I often think of them as having parented me through that dark period. Because as soon as I was living in group homes, I started keeping a journal because it was the only person I could speak to. And so I wrote down my dreams. I often didn't know what they meant, but I was curious about them. And what would happen was I would experience these synchronicities where images from my dreams or scenarios or feelings from my dreams, even people, would spill out into waking life. And sometimes very miraculous to me ways. And this further confirmed that there was something deeply intelligent and wise that was coming through my dreams. And so began a kind of lifetime apprenticeship to. To becoming a dream worker, to study in dreams, to becoming an apprentice, really, of the dreams themselves. Yes, that was a bit of a circumnavigation around your question, but just to. To hear a little bit of my story. And of course, you've read my books, but you know that this sort of being exiled at such a young age caused me to really question my own sense of belonging. You know, what is belonging? It was a mysterious mystery to me because I didn't experience it in my family. I definitely didn't experience it in group homes. And so I kind of spent much of my early adult life searching for a belonging, looking for groups, looking for a place to fit in. And this continued well until. Well, until my twenties. And even as I went into the Jungian world, I found that there were barriers to access places where people appeared to be inside of something that I felt outside of perpetually and always would be. And. And so this was the question, where do I belong? And what really is belonging? What does it look like to people who do experience a sense of belonging? And so. So I had this question, and I started to ask. Talk to other people about it. And to my amazement, every conversation I had with those others who appeared from the outside to have achieved a sense of belonging to my eyes were themselves struggling with a sense of exile or outsidership or feeling like a black sheep in some way. And I thought, well, this is fascinating. And so I started to write about it, and I wrote about those conversations. I kept talking to a lot of people, and then I started to receive dreams. And these dreams were so powerful, and they seemed to be reframing the way that I was thinking about belonging all together, from the inside out. And before I knew it, I was like, oh, I think I'm writing a book. And I had never written a book before, but I had been a writer, you know, professionally all my life, or not all my life, but, you know, a professional life. And. And so I started taking the topic more seriously. And it was one of those things where I didn't enter into a project with an idea in mind. It was more like I was receiving all of these experiences and later had to put it into some sort of cohesion, cohesive shape for others to be able to, you know, appreciate.
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C
Beautiful. That receptivity piece is such a key element of belonging or a key part of the path, perhaps, to learn to be able to receive. I'd love to sort of drill down on a few aspects that you're sharing. I do remember there is a dream of a porch and an opening for a tree.
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Yes, yes.
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Could you share some of that dream?
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I think that was a. Leanne, I think maybe you must have heard me tell that story somewhere, because I actually don't tell it in the book, do I?
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I'm not sure. I've listened to a lot of your interviews, so, yes, I could have Picked it up outside of the book.
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I'm so happy to retell it because I somewhat regret not including it in the book because it was an important image. So this was the dream. One of the first dreams I received was that somebody was building a deck and they were laying down this wood and they purposefully left a hole in the wood because they intended to plunk, plantling a tree sapling into that hole. And as the dream went on, there was a kind of a time lapse that I was able to witness. And while the tree was planted into that hole, it quickly overgrew its space. And in, in effect the, the so much time had passed that the platform itself burnt to ashes. Like it just sort of dissolved and, and became carbon. And so I really sat with this dream for a long time because I was very moved by it. It had a very powerful affect to it. And eventually what I understood about this dream and what it was saying was that belonging isn't. It's the difference between fitting in and belonging. Right? You can't find a pre designed space that you can fit into for any length of time because eventually you're going to outgrow it. And that. So the nature of belonging is actually dynamic, that there are periods of disintegration as well as belonging. And so one of the big pieces I share in the book is about what I call the dark sisters of exile and belonging. That actually they need each other. And that these periods of being exiled, of being outside, of belonging, are initiatory in nature. And they are meant to be a kind of vocation, a sort of calling into the enlargement of our next becoming. And we may find places of belonging comfortable for a while, sometimes a long while, sometimes many seasons. But ultimately we have to remember that dynamic nature of belonging because it's that expansion and contraction, which like all of nature, is a way of staying in a living conversation with the rest of life and with our evolving selves.
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C
Yes, we don't want any rigidity or stagnation. And again, where that receptivity can end up playing such an important part. What I also hear, and obviously have read in your work as well, is how grief kind of sits in that process as well. Like exile as a marker, grief as a marker, sort of like guardrails or just again, psyche speaking to us, encouraging us in ways can feel very painful. And deep suffering can happen in those orphaned or exiled experiences. But big picture, your invitation is. It's also a calling into the dynamism in a new and different way, or seeing it that way, seeing it as sacred.
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Absolutely. You know, grief is such a big topic and it's one of those things that's really not sanctioned in modern culture where, you know, there are only certain occasions where we're expected to grief and only then for a very short amount of time. And yet there are all these hidden griefs. Whether it's the loss of ability in our body, illness, or whether it's the loss of a child that never lived, or whether it's the loss of a position in society or the loss even of a certain era of our lives. There are all these thresholds upon which grief makes itself known and is necessary. I think of grief a lot like motion, because I think when we refuse grief, when we're not invited into. An experience of, of being able to have our grief held, that movement can stop. We can sort of get stuck in amber around a certain moment in our history because we've never had an ability to flow, to allow that grief to flow out. But it serves a very important function which is to loosen our attachments to things that have been important to us. And in order to do that, they have to be witnessed, they have to be acknowledged, and they have to be held space for. And if that can be done successfully, if we can do that for one another and for ourselves, but it often really does require support from our communities, then there is a chance then that the moisture from that grief becomes a fertilizing agent so that the arid soil where we have been standing in loss begins to grow new life. So it's a very important component because grief really it. The amount of grief that we have about something is directly proportionate to how deeply we have loved it. The two are two signs of the same coin.
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C
Anything you can share about your own direct experience with ways of being present to grief. Was it, was it ultimately, was the internal turn enough to, to soothe maybe finding your partner or finding a community? All of the above. Did they all work together to, to weave that sense of belonging?
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Absolutely. I mean, I have seen especially Jungian oriented therapists most of my life. And I'm so grateful to those people with whom I've been able to share my dreams because dream work has been the core practice of my life. And what I, what I love so much about dreams is that they show, show you the living edge where you are bravely working at every moment. And so if you are continuously tending that soil and bringing your attention there, things rarely get into stagnancy at an extreme level because you can see the warning Signs early. But that being said, I have always needed support on the outside from really precious few others. And you mentioned my partner Craig, who I've been with for 15 years. And he's amazing. He's just an incredibly compassionate and patient and wise person who I don't know how I got so blessed. But to find true love like that is. I wish it for everyone. And community, of course, is very, very important, especially people who can relate to your particular form of grief, whatever that looks like.
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Yeah, we need each other.
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We need each other more than ever. And don't you think it's. It's quite extreme now how disconnected from one we've grown? It's very sad and distressing and hopefully, you know, our listeners are able to count a few loved ones and pockets of closeness with other in these troubling times especially.
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C
Yeah, because the Internet has its beauty. Right. We're able to meet with each other and have this conversation and share it with the new thinking allowed community. So that's a blessing. And like anything, we must utilize in balance. If we go too far down these sort of into these meta worlds and not boots on the ground actually in person with people again now we're sort of. The separation distress call is one way I like to think of unbelonging. It's like a separation distress. What would be some signs maybe that if somebody right now was feeling more exiled or orphaned, listening to dreams. Any, any. Any other pointers you would give?
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Yeah, so I have a chapter in my book that I call Archetype of the Outcast and looking at certain fairy tales to sort of examine this archetype and learn from them how they've overcome the sense of being alone or being cast out or being exiled, of being shunned. And I think if you have that archetype active, you know it very well. So I don't need to describe the signs to you, but I think this person serves an incredibly important role in culture and the. It's easier if we sort of take it into the personal and think of how every family unit has a black sheep. You know, there's one person in the family that is, you know, too weird or too not like the others or causes trouble or, you know, has gone astray in some way. And you know, that can be very, very hard on that person because they can feel as if everyone's ganged up against them and that there's something profoundly wrong with them or that they're broken in some way. But the truth of the matter is that person is Responsible in a sense for carrying the shadow projection of the whole family, which is to say everything that has been rejected or denied, or maybe that person triggers everybody by how they behave, or maybe we just don't talk about those sorts of things in this family. That kind of thing that all gets projected onto the person and it's a very, very heavy load to carry. However, them being different is essential. If you look at the family as one organism, it's the impulse to change. It's the impulse in that family to break out of patterns, to find new ground, to do something differently. And, and it's not an easy path. You know, I don't want to sort of valorize it and say, you know, yay, you're the black sheep, because everybody knows that it sucks. However, if you are able to find joyful self regard and profound compassion for the ways in which you are particularly different and to stand more fully in that attitude, then the way that you are different changes from causing you to stand, causing you to stand out, to being a kind of beacon for others like you to feel a sense of belonging. That might not make a whole lot of sense to you if you're early in your journey, but I think as you learn to step more into the. The differences that make you who are who you are, then you will find others who are different in a similar way to you. And paradoxically, your unbelonging becomes a place of shel for others to take refuge.
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C
It's like, it sounds like your life in many ways that you've. You've now allowed many others to take refuge inside your portal or your experience and the communities that you have created through writing your books and your dream school.
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And I have to say that I have, I received some of the most incredible letters from people telling me the stories of their lives. You know, just glimpses into whatever they're going through. And somehow this little book has been like an important companion to them. And. You know, when this book was first released, I had a dream. I had many pregnancy dreams while I was creating the book. But when it was time to release it, I dreamed that the baby emerged fully into a tall toddler. It was this robust little. I couldn't even lift it up. It was too heavy. It was running off, doing its own thing. And so I've always taken that as a metaphor for it having a life of its own. And I often have this imagining of belonging sort of out there, traveling the world, having experiences with people I've never met and, and you know, holding their hand in A hard time. And so I do feel a deep sense of having done the right thing about writing my own story, which was very scary to do, and, you know, sharing from the inside out in the way that I have.
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C
So what's coming up for me as we're discussing this is the heart center and love and warmth and. And again, Sufism is by and large about heart. So when we talk about becoming whole or integrating and belonging, to me, also to become whole, sort of the integration of different aspects, different parts, so to speak. What role does the heart play in this, both for ourselves, both within and between?
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A
I think we think traditionally of belonging as kind of an outside place that we search for. And we can spend our whole lives looking in vain for a place, or we find places of false belonging where they look on the outside as if, you know, we are accepted, but. But then eventually a threshold is reached where that we find out that there are silent contracts in place, you know, to not speak a certain way or that certain things are not included or are more aggressively speaking, excluded. And so we find ourselves breaking from those places of false belonging back into exile. And. And so I think this, this idea of searching for an external place, that's not to say that we don't find wonderful places of belonging, of course we do, but ultimately it's an inside job. And what I mean by that is we have many different aspects of the self. This becomes very obvious when you do dream work and you have this whole vill of characters who appear in your dreams. And some of them we like, some of them are very annoying, some of them are scary. And. And so when we're doing dream work, we are meeting these many different aspects of the self and the larger self. And so this process of coming to meet those aspects of the self is a form, is a form of practicing at belonging internally. Because often, especially the darker, more threatening figures in our dreams are representative of split off aspects of the self. Parts of ourselves we deny, parts of ourselves that have been hurt too badly, parts of ourselves that have been rejected by others or disowned by us, or even undiscovered as yet undiscovered. And so this project, which is never complete, of coming into relationship with the multiplicity that is contained within us, is a kind of practice of belonging. So this is where I see dream work and belonging as almost synonymous because it takes, coming back to your question, an enormous amount of compassion and understanding and forgiveness and bravery to do this work. And so sometimes we have a dream and let's say we dream of a figure that is terrifying. Well, of course, when we wake up from the dream, the first thing that we want to do is forget the dream completely. Definitely don't write it down. Try not to remember it. You know, maybe put some bagels on top of it or some Netflix or anything to get it out of our minds overrun if you have healthier habits. And, and so we avoid it as much as we can. And unfortunately that doesn't work like it may work in the temporary, but it's like it has roots. So it keeps coming back in different iterations. And sometimes that looks like increasingly disturbing dreams. Other times it can manifest in the external world, which is a bigger topic, but it can manifest in the material world in the form of illness, conflict, and at a global scale, war. You know, the unchecked shadow, as we would call it, gets projected outwards onto the evildoer, the other, the evil other. And, and so it's never reconciled at the level of the self. And so all this to say is that it will keep coming back. And so can we develop the skills and the bravery, but more importantly the kindness to begin holding those wounds that we carry even intergenerationally, so that we can stop the cycle of enactment that happens from unaddressed shadow. So I don't know if that directly answers your question, but you know, the, you, you've spoken a couple times about receptivity, and receptivity is an important quality of heart. That ability to just listen, to be present, to stay open, to not jump into defensive argument, arguments or behaviors, but to just show up, even when it's uncomfortable and painful and hard. And so when we practice this with dream work, we are developing a symmetrical skill in our relationships in the outside world. Do you see what I'm saying? When we're, when we're meeting those inner others and learning to tolerate the diversity of influences that every single one of us is made up of, then that carries over into a kind of gift for ambiguity in the world. Being able to hold more than one perspective at once, which, as far as I can tell, is one of the great skills needed of these times.
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C
What I'm hearing you say is shadow work is a gift of self love. I mean, it's a gift that we're giving to each other, but it's a profound gift that we can give to ourselves to welcome all of our exiled parts, whether they be immediate mind to body. Maybe we've exiled our body and there hasn't been a mind body unity enacted, or perhaps the intergenerational traumas A lot of us, especially in the United States or North America, our families have come from different lands. So there's an exiling there, I think, with intergenerational trauma and just not even feeling like belonging to a land, even like belonging has gotten so kicked up by so much immigration and moving to.
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A
Different lands and diasporas and exile and. Yes, exactly. And yes. So I just, I just want to tease out one little point here that I'm not. I'm not advising that people should embrace their. The demons or predators in their dreams, because that's not what shadow work is. You know, eventually something like acceptance might take place, but initially, you know, your body's reaction is repulsion or fear or anxiety. And those are. Those are your body telling you that there's, you know, there's something bad here. And the first stage is really just being curious about it enough to hold that curiosity, to not dismiss it. And that's just the beginning of shadow work. You know, that eventually, through a process when you can understand that something has started to chase you because it ultimately needs love is a little further down the line. So I just don't want us to get into spiritual bypass. I know that wasn't your intention, but I just want to say it for those who are listening, that it's a process and it takes some time to master, especially for people who have experienced, which is a lot of us, trauma, actual trauma, and who are living with pts, various different kinds of PTSD and complex trauma. And this is when, you know, having a mental health professional, somebody who can support you in looking at disturbing dreams, can be incredibly necessary and healing. Yes.
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C
And thank you for emphasizing not spiritual bypass, because again, then we're exiling again. If we do do spiritual bypass now, we're going to have another fragmentation and another break, and there's going to be a whole other cycle to come around. So. So sometimes people find that fork and take it by accident. They don't realize perhaps, that they are spiritually bypassing. But big picture, yes, we don't want to bypass anything.
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A
Yeah, that's a really good point. I think if we are denying how we feel, even in dream work, that is a bypass. If you, you know, you don't want to be hugging a predator. That's, you know, that's, that's not going to work. But you do want to understand what is intruding. Why is it intruding? What are the feelings it brings up for you? See if you can discover its roots. And so in my second book, there are a lot of dreams in belonging. And a lot of dream teaching where I tell people stories of sort of coming into their own belonging and the kinds of dreams that helped them get there. But in my second book, the Dreaming Way is devoted purely to the art of dream work. And. And so if people want to learn more of those skills, that would be a good follow up to the first book.
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C
Yes. And I want to keep with this idea of boundary setting almost is what you're intimating to those predatory energies. Like, yes, integration. As one of my key teachers, Dan Siegel with Interpersonal Neurobiology, I love how he says it's a fruit salad, not a frap. We want the differentiation and the linkage so we make this beautiful. Right. This beautiful meal on the fruit salad. So we want to be able to differentiate and some of that. That is energetic boundaries and putting those boundaries in the right place. So perhaps in the act of being exiled or scapegoated that we again, put the boundary in the right place. Is the best way for me to articulate that, that there's an energetic boundary that's important to be kept, held, felt, sensed.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. I think you're onto something really important there, and maybe it would. And I love the fruit salad metaphor. That's great. I'm going to borrow that. But maybe it would help to sort of take it out of the abstract and just offer an example. So, for instance, let's say you had a dream about an intruder and you felt very afraid in your apartment or house or whatever, and you started hiding. Well, let's say you woke up from this dream and you started to just become curious about this intruder. And maybe you asked yourself, what do they look like? And it reminded you of someone you know, perhaps in your family. I'm just, you know, coming up with an example off the top of my head here. But let's say they remind you of a distant cousin who every. Every time you meet that cousin, he makes cracks about you being an artist and. Or a bleeding heart or a spiritual or whatever, some kind of, you know, crack demoralizing who you are and what your life path is. And so you have that association to the intruder in the dream. Wow, this opens up a whole awareness for you. You're certainly not going to embrace that intruder. But now you can ask yourself, why am dreaming that right now? And maybe you reflect on it and you realize that the. Just yesterday you were writing a piece that you wanted to share with your friends or your audience, and while you were doing that, that a voice came into your mind demoralizing you and say, oh, you don't, you know, this is just woo woo nonsense. Or you know, you don't really have talent to be an artist or whatever your internal dialogue may have been. And suddenly you have a match and you're like, okay. The intruder in my dream reminds me of this distant cousin who's very much like the voice that I had internalized and was harping on me when I was trying to be creative. And what did I do? I put my creative work away and I hid from it by doing other things. So this is the process of dream work is trying to understand the nature of something, noticing where it is active for you, either in your relationship sphere or internally in your internal relational sphere. And now boundaries. You talk about boundaries. Well, what kind of boundaries can you bring to that kind of situation in the future? Well, maybe now you remount the enterprise and you sit down to be creative. And maybe that voice comes back because it's chronic and it's internalized, but you stand up to it and you say, I don't want to hear from you right now. You are not welcome here. This is my creative space. I have a right to speak. And suddenly it disappears. Intruder, gone. That's the healing of dream work is being able, like you say, to have boundaries about around those things that are hurting us. And in a sense, that is a kind of integration ultimately of its teaching to you.
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C
And again, this process of exiling belonging is sort of like this back and forth of, could we call it empowerment, optimization of our energy field. Like we have to say no or again, put that energetic boundary in the right place. No, not today. Disempowering voices today, you know, either feeling our feet on the ground or breathing into our gut. Something that's grounding that, that allows for. Is empowerment a term that resonates with you. Like to choose the yes to our maybe authenticity or to our gifts instead of the criticality of the judging voices.
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A
Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, I really love the language of inclusion because this work, in a way, I would say it makes us powerful in the sense of being more vulnerable. And so we're not as easily taken off our authentic expression because we are actually more vulnerable. Sometimes the language of empowerment and optimization feels a little alienating to me just because. Because I think we have a lot of that in the world. And I would personally like to see more people being not knowing and being openly confused and being bewildered. You know, Rumi has that great line in a poem. He says, sell your cleverness and buy Bewilderment. I love that. That's just my jam. That's just my jam.
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C
I love that. I love that. I would query, though, that to do. To really be curious and open in a way that's grounded. And again, I'm not talking about power over in any way, but it calls us. Or that vulnerability that you speak to. I think it, like a certain level of development already has to be there. And empowerment is a word that I like because otherwise we could sort of adapt or cave or take a step to belong when we really don't belong or don't really want to make the choice to belong.
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A
It's.
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C
It's more of a compromise or a selling of the soul or. Yeah, it's a tricky dance.
- [48:54]
A
I agree with you completely. And I think that it would be wonderful to model different forms of power in the world, you know, power among power with. So that we could reclaim that word so it doesn't have all that hugely triumphant archetypal energy behind it. The word. Your archetype. Although. But I. But I also hear what you're saying that that's absolutely necessary in these cases to be able to, you know, hold. Hold that. The staff of discernment and say, no, I'm not in this beautiful.
- [49:34]
C
I love that image.
- [49:35]
A
Yeah.
- [49:36]
C
Of even just a fierce. It can be archetypal feminine warrior that. That stands there with her power of discernment. For sure. It's a very important part of the path.
- [49:52]
A
Yes.
- [49:53]
C
Any other important parts of the path that you feel like sharing today? Anything else that feels as we move towards again, either belonging to ourselves or greater community, belonging to.
- [50:12]
A
Well, so we've sort of talked a little bit about dream work and shadow work. And I. I think one of the things about these periods of exile that people sometimes get, you know, coming back to this topic of triumph, we have a lot of sort of heroic stories in our culture about the triumph part of the journey, about coming back and doing something amazing, but very rare. Do people talk about how long sometimes exile can be? Sometimes it can take decades. You know, there was a period in Jung's life, Carl Jung's life, where when he made a split from Freud, because he had that staff of discernment and was like, no, this is where we disagree, and I can't get behind you on this, that they had a very fierce break in their relationship that was, I think, painful to both men. But for Jung, it was so profound that he spent 13 years in what he now he called after the fact, a creative illness. In that he went Very deep into the darkness of his own process, where he had to do battle with. With the. The cultural archetypes of the time, where he was very interested. He was really sort of a mystic ultimately, when you read the Red Book and the Black Book, that his process was really going right into the imaginal world to make these encounters with imaginal others and to learn from them and to paint from it and to write from it and to. And I can imagine that in that time he was fighting some very big battles, not just on behalf of himself personally, but on behalf of the collective. Freud was so much more interested in sort of a rationalistic perspective. And of course he was fighting for legitimacy within the scientific community for psychology at all. But Jung was already ready to, I think on some level, take steps beyond that framework. Though he himself was a real rationalist, you know, so that must be said as well, at least in his. Published. In his earlier published works. But all that to say that the length of time that we one one can spend underground can take a really long time. And so if anyone is listening and they are beleaguered by what has felt like a very painful and difficult path, I guess I just want to send some reassurance out to say that. That you're doing great and that. That it's necessary not only for you to make these separations and to come into relationship with your true values, but it's necessary to all of us. And so unfortunately, that work has to take place alone in solitude. But ultimately the goal is to bring back the wisdom of your discovery to the world, whatever that looks like. It could look like how you raise your children. It could look like becoming a writer. It could look like teaching or making art or music. Any, you know, millions of ways can we depict the course of our journeys. But that is essentially in these times. And to do that takes tremendous bravery. And so maybe that. That empowerment you were talking about is an absolute necessity to bring something out of the darkness into. Into the world.
- [54:41]
C
Trust is the word also that's coming to me, especially when one begins the path of really understanding their aspects that are exiled or orphaned. So that. That's a message I would like to share with anybody who may be listening, who may be newer to the path of understanding or beginning shadow work or understanding their exiled parts. Is trusting, trusting psyche, trusting nature.
- [55:16]
A
Is that there is an other side to all of this. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
- [55:22]
C
That's right. That Psyche, Sophia, like that. That the wisdom body is yearning to speak to us as Much as we yearn for it. So whatever that time period is of being present to the discomfort that those voices of wisdom through dreams or through navigating to a Jungian community or any kind of enriching community, this community here at New Thinking allowed is ways of people to begin to soothe. Yeah. To soothe those fragmented parts as we come to a close here. And I so appreciate all the wisdom that you shared. Is there anything to share about living into belonging at this point on the planet? But personally I feel, and maybe it's just because I am a member here at New Thinking Allowed, that there's a cosmic call, that it seems like astrology is growing more interesting to people. I think shadow work too is, is gaining momentum and dream tending. Yeah, but this idea of living, living into belonging, that in a moment when maybe the rational mind has usurped so much of the territory and the yumminess of the receptivity and the feminine or Sophia, I'm not sure what words you would choose here, but. Yeah, any guidance you can give around the collective and living into belonging together.
- [57:14]
A
Yeah. Oh, it's such a great question. And I mean, the thing that comes to my mind immediately is how co opted our imaginations are by virtual space and is. And you know, as you said earlier on in our conversation, there's great beauty and value and connection in, you know, what we can find, like this conversation itself. You know, we never would have been able to do this without the technology that has developed out of this space. But I think the pendulum has swung far too far with many people imbibing the feed that is supplied by agents of, you know, corporate interests and power interests. And this, this is really troublesome very, very urgently, I think, do we need to reclaim imaginal space? And this is, I think of social media a little bit like outsourcing the imagination. Right. Because instead of sitting quietly and being receptive to your own thoughts and feelings, you fill it with the images, ideas, symbols, slogans, arguments, outrage, all of that stuff that happens on social media. You fill that space with other people's ideas. And I think if we could call it, if we could use the metaphor of a muscle, that the imaginal muscle is getting very flabby and that people are less and less comfortable being able to use it. And perhaps the listeners that new thinking aloud are some of the exceptions because I imagine spending time in an imaginal space, voice is more familiar for, for this community. But I do think that we're all very susceptible to that sort of the imagination being co opted. And this may seem like a small deal to some people, but I really think it's quite urgent because what we need right now is your creative voice, the voice that is different from what everybody else is saying. We need the voices of dissent who have something new to say, who are tapping their originality, who are making beauty, who are showing a way to peace and who are touching in to that holy in nature, what we can call, you know, the beloved in Sufi terms, in order to be kind to ourselves, to each other, and to step forward with those things. So I tend to harp on about this quite a bit because I. I do feel like we're at a tipping point. And I realized that the imbibing of this. This feed is ex. It's like a dangerous drug. It's actually very addictive and very hard to resist because it's right in our pockets and we fill every blank moment we have with it. So if it stirs anybody, my hope is that, you know, you have boundaries with that and instead allow your imagination to. To strengthen and to spread pred its wings.
- [61:15]
C
Thank you so much. Beauty, Beauty, Peace, Beloved. Wonderful direction. Thank you. Thank you so much.
- [61:26]
A
Tocopa, thank you so much for having me here and I wish your show and everyone listening a wonderful season ahead.
- [61:36]
C
Thank you. Likewise. And thank you for those of you watching and listening. Thank you for being with us. You're the reason that we're here in community exploring our common unity.
- [62:11]
B
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