New Moon in Aries

 art, beauty, consciousness, creativity, dream interpretation, dreaming, dreams, events, Writing
Apr 102013
 

 

Happy New Moon intrepid dreamers!

I have a dear friend who calls this the ‘horns of the bull’ moon, which I find so apt considering the fiery, active energy that comes available to us at this time. For many of us, these long winter months have been about doing the hard, internal work of shedding old habits and patterns, sealing up our energy leaks, and tuning in to the deeper sense of direction that only arises from ashes. And now, we are ready to grab on and go!

As well as a couple of announcements below, you’ll find some beautiful art, poetry and wisdom to touch your brave heart in my April Newsletter.

In my biggest news, a gorgeous group of women will be making the great journey to the UK this August to come together in Dreaming Council for a retreat I am offering called Embodying the Dream. There are a handful of spots left if you’d like to join this magical circle!

And by popular demand, I’m happy to announce new dates for Dreamwalking: A 4-week online Course on Dreaming. It tends to fill up quickly so be sure to register early if the timing feels right for you.

Lots of love,
Toko-pa

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Embodiment

 ambiguity, art, consciousness, creativity, grief, paradox, Writing
Apr 032013
 

This is the true meaning of Embodiment: To show up with wholehearted presence for this moving encounter with life. Instead of clambering towards ever-furthering horizons or withdrawing into distractions and addictions, showing up for those absences in our lives. Welcoming our fears and discomforts as necessary conditions to creativity. Loving the gestation as much as the harvest, even while remembering the barren season that must follow.

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Night Raptures

 beauty, consciousness, creativity, dreaming, dreams, inspiration, paradox, Rumi
Feb 162013
 

Millions of people around the world report awakening around 3 a.m. for no reason. For many, it is a frustrating interruption in an otherwise restful sleep. But what if you could learn to release resistance to these mysterious awakenings? What if the night has secrets to whisper to you? What if that is the magic hour in which to move “back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,” as Rumi writes.

Indeed, my most powerful teachings have come through at that time, many of which I might have missed had I kept sleeping.

I call them Night Raptures. Sometimes difficult to explain, these experiences are like catching glimpses into the perfection of everything.
For those brief moments when the ego is retired from guard, we are given sudden access to the allness – a pure and sensual passion for everything just as it is. Like a giant parade, organized in its chaos, in which every last one of us is celebrating this gift of being alive. Don’t go back to sleep!”

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Dreaming in 2012

 beauty, consciousness, creativity, dreaming, dreams, grief, inspiration, women, Writing
Jan 032013
 

Someone recently asked me, “In your Dreamworking practice, have you seen a collective theme in the kinds of dreams people had in 2012?”

I paused for a moment to reflect on the epic tapestry of dreamers I’ve been blessed to work with in this last year, and the answer crystalised.

“The Rise of the Feminine. In men and women alike, there is a tenacious chipping away at the internalised, calcified Patriarchy to rouse the long-Sleeping Beauty of the heart.

AP/Kevin Frayer

Dreamers are toppling patriarchy’s worst tyrants; Perfectionism, Prestige and Power over others. We are learning to live unsplit-off from our vulnerability and our sacred endowments.

Grief, long-stopped up in the body, rushes like a torrent yearning for self-love, fertilising everything. The child-heart remembers its innocence and belonging.

We are drawing out the sudden shoots of creativity, vitality and empowerment. We are coronating our inner-authority. We are wearing red and letting our voices be heard. We are, like an ecosystem, carrying our responsibility together.”

I can’t wait to see what we dream in 2013.

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Birthing New Traditions

 art, beauty, consciousness, creativity, grief, inspiration, myth, Writing
Dec 242012
 

Though I loved the coziness of a fire in the winter’s dark, the reunion of far-flung beloveds, the feast of epic proportions and other shared rituals, at a certain point I had to admit to myself that the painful disappointments of Christmas far outweighed its joys in my family.  Like many commercial holidays, it was a loaded time for my family; rife with tensions, the ensnarement of obligation and, in the end, dashed hopefulness.

It wasn’t until my mid-twenties, after many sad Christmases alone, that I decided to take the holy power back. Starting from scratch, I began to build new traditions for myself, focusing on aspects of the holiday that I cherished, growing them outwards from there.

At the time, I lived in Kensington Market, a colourful enclave in the heart of Toronto populated by artists, merchants and bohemian types. Every year they had a magical parade on the Winter Solstice when the streets would fill with freaky people, bands played on the rooftops with drums and trumpets, and everyone hoisted their colourful, handmade lanterns into the night sky. The whole thing culminated in a terrible-wonderful bonfire, when we burned our precious creations and boogied-down in the snow.

I loved lighting the longest dark of the year, celebrating our endurance and honouring all that we were releasing in the fire, and decided to adopt the Winter Solstice as my new tradition. Unlike the Christian holiday, observing the ancient astronomical event made deep sense to me. While it took some time to develop a relationship with it, eventually Solstice displaced all that old tension and loss, infusing this time of year with new life and love.

Instead of buying presents, now we roast a giant bird for our friends, gather musicians to fill our night with song, light our home with lanterns and, instead of cutting down a tree my partner and I build one from scratch using bits we find on the forest floor; branches, spirals of honeysuckle and fallen boughs of fir.

We observe the sacred aspect of the holiday by gathering in ritual around the fire to honour our grief and our loss through storytelling moistened with tears, witnessed by those who know  – and we express our deep gratitude for the returning of the light. This year we were blessed to gather with like-hearted friends, in a gorgeous tipi they raised on their land for to birth their own new traditions.

Photograph by Christopher Roy

While there are still times when I find myself mourning what never could be in my family of origin, now in the balance the joys far outweigh any disappointments. A blessed holiday to all of you and yours!

 

 

 

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A conversation with Moon Woman Rising

 consciousness, creativity, dream interpretation, dreaming, dreams, inspiration, women, Writing
Dec 182012
 

Tree of Life by Enkel Dika

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the special fortune to be interviewed in depth by Aja Blanc who runs one of my favourite blogs, Moon Woman Rising on the deep & tender Art of Dreaming.  Here is an excerpt:

“So many of us feel a deep longing to offer our gifts to the world, to contribute something meaningful to the deficits of our time, but there are so many sources offering spiritual guidance that it can be hard to know who to trust. But as a student said recently, “The beauty of Dreamwork is that it connects me to my inner teacher, who I know is guiding me to live my life according to me!”

And that’s just it – we can think of dreams as Nature, naturing us by way of symbols and stories. There is no outside guidance more creatively genius, or tailor-made for our personal growth – we just have to re-learn the language dreams are speaking, which is the mother-tongue of the soul. Despite the richness of the Sufi tradition, my own family home was very troubled and I left at a young age. With no parental guidance I was, in a sense, forced to turn to my inner world and very quickly learned that it was a source of powerful wisdom and it was rooting for my greatness!

People are often blown away when a dream tells them that they are a writer, or a healer or whatever their vocation may be – because it confirms their greatest hope. The dreams show them that it isn’t fanciful – they must follow that secret passion with a life-or-death commitment. One of the first things that happens when people get into this work is the releasing of shame around dark dreams, which seem to contain perverse or violent images, but which are often speaking to the ways in which we are being violent or dismissive of our own hearts.”

To read the full article and have a chance at winning a Private Dreamwork session with me, click here to get to Moon Woman Rising’s blog.

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Dreamspeak: Eating Your Shadow

 ambiguity, beauty, consciousness, creativity, death, depression, dream interpretation, dreaming, dreams, Dreamspeak, grief, jung, paradox, shadow, Writing
Oct 042012
 

The Shadow is the place where everything we have forgotten, denied, rejected or not yet discovered goes to live. The greater the denial of one’s darkness, taboo, or ‘negative emotions’ the more fertile the breeding ground for fear, shame, depression, violence and anxiety.

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Dreamspeak: The Importance of Fairy Tales

 consciousness, creativity, death, dream interpretation, dreaming, dreams, Dreamspeak, jung, myth, symbols, Writing
Sep 262012
 

Little Red & The Wolf, by Amy Sullivan

As the maple leaves begin to fall here on Salt Spring Island, I’ve started lighting fires in the evenings, eating spicy dhals, and reading dreamy books. These days I’m sinking my nerdy teeth into Marie-Louise von Franz’s Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales.

Actually a transcript from her legendary Zurich lectures, von Franz explores in-depth six fairy tales from Denmark, Spain, China, France, Africa, and one Grimm (from Germany).

As Joseph Campbell famously says, “Dreams are the private myth & myths are the public dream.” Indeed Campbell and other mythologists, such as those delightful Jungians, discovered amazing cross-cultural motifs in Fairy Tales. Those patterns, (or what we now call Archetypes), are found repeatedly in stories from around the world, seemingly unconstrained by geography or epoch.

Imagine for a moment that you could strip your ‘local’ story down to its bare essence, to find what you  have in common with everyone in the world, and you’ll get archetypes. From the Greek archetupos, meaning “first-moulded,” fairy tales are the blueprints of our innate, universal experiences.

Archetypes get activated in our dreams during meaningful transitions, but having lost the art of symbolic language in our culture, we don’t recognize (or remember) them when they arise. Working with Dreams & Fairy Tales helps us to see when we are undergoing important rites of passage, such as initiation, courtship, marriage, birth and preparation for death.

They bring meaningful dimension to our human lives by showing us the chapters in our mythic journey. We aren’t just leading unnecessary lives, but stepping through the same gates with bravery and despair, awe and triumph as the heroes and heroines we grew up admiring in our storybooks.

As the woman who gives birth in a dream at the same time she launches a creative project into the world, she recognizes how long the labour, how precious the outcome, how fragile yet the offering. She comes into contact with the hugeness of her experience, and knowing how fairy tales work, might then follow their maps with greater confidence into the unknown.

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Dreamwalking – A 4-week (online) Course on Dreams

 art, consciousness, creativity, dream interpretation, dreaming, dreams, events, inspiration, myth, paradox
Aug 172012
 

 

Digital painting by Stacy Pugh, of Lavender Lilly Dilly Dilly

 

In this 4-week online course, (April 29th-May 24th), you will be learning the Cornerstones of Dreamwork. Using an intimate blend of art, theory and practice, dreamers learn to understand the structure and language of dreams & develop the tools necessary to begin bridging their wisdom back to waking life.  This series is excellent for beginner and intermediate dreamers.

The weekly online classes will cover the following topics:

 

Dream Architecture

Dreamwork is an art as well as a science.  In this class we learn to approach dreams in the same way we would a work of literature, film or painting; appreciating its mechanics as well as its poetry.   We will learn how to recognize the dramatic structure of a dream, isolate its key elements and bridge their symbolism back to waking life.

Light in the Dark

Learning to actively dream involves finding balance between the light and dark sides of our nature.  In this class we will pay special attention to the Shadow and nightmares, learning how to read the warning signs of imbalanced attitudes.  We will explore the redeeming medicine of dark dreams and the importance of finding the light contained within them.

Inner Marriage

Each of us contains both masculine and feminine qualities within.  It is only our gender conditioning that engrains a bias towards one or the other.  What results, is an impoverishment of our opposite-gender qualities.  In this class, we will learn how to integrate both through dreamwork, so that we can recover our wholeness as individuals, correspondingly healing our larger community.

Dream Yourself Awake

Dreaming is a kind of archaeological process where we enter the landscape of the soul to unearth the forgotten or undiscovered parts of our selves.  As we begin to do away with unconscious, habitual behaviour, we awaken to a new way of being in the world.  We begin to walk the dream – turning inspiration into action. In this class we will learn techniques for engaging our co-creative abilities in both dreaming and waking realities.

 

How it works:

  • Once I have received your registration, you will receive an invitation to join an exclusive Facebook Group with your fellow Dreamwalkers, where most of our discussions will take place.
  • You will then receive your video lessons on Monday of every week, along with your weekly study guides.
  • We meet twice a week to accommodate opposite time zones: Saturdays at 11 am (PST) and Wednesdays at 7pm (PST). You are welcome to come to either or both. If you have to miss both, Live Chats are available for review by members anytime.
  • We will be working on actual dreams as a group in every class, so if you’d like to submit a dream, you will be invited to email it to me beforehand.
  • Our private Facebook Group can be used throughout the week to share dreams with your fellow Dreamwalkers, start discussions, offer insights, and ask questions.

 

Testimonials:

Click here to read some Testimonials from Graduate Dreamwalkers

 

Tuition:

Earlybird tuition (Friday April 19th) for this 4-week course is $140.

Final registration deadline (Friday April 26th), is on a sliding scale from $160 – $180.

Due to the volume of scholarship requests, any amount above the base price ($140) will go towards a Scholarship Fund to help those in need.

Some scholarships are available and will be considered on interest, merit & need. If you’d like to apply for a scholarship, please send a mind & heartful letter to dreamquestion@gmail.com.

If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me.

Click the ‘register now’ button and enter an amount between $140-180:

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Beautiful Things

 art, Beautiful Things, beauty, consciousness, creativity, inspiration, poetry, Writing
Aug 162012
 

1. The longing to hand-make beautiful things has overtaken me recently. It was seeded some 4 years ago when I was gifted a deerskin medicine pouch by a friend in ceremony. She had learned to skin & tan the hide herself, working it until the tassels hung gently and the slipknot moved gracefully along its braided path.

2. Recently, I was given another miraculous gift – an anatomical drawing of a long-gestating moth carved into the broad side of a reishi mushroom, by a woman who also wove her own baskets. So enamoured was I, that I set about weaving my first grass basket for a sister on her wedding day.

3. Since music, writing and dreamwork are all ‘invisible’ arts, I have an inextinguishable thrill whenever I create a thing in 3D. In a more pronounced way, physical arts feel as if they go on to live a life of their own once they leave my hands.

4. When a dear friend sewed me a vibrant string of prayer flags for my birthday, into which she’d woven symbols and objects that were meaningful to our shared history, I finally understood why hand-making calls me so strongly. It isn’t just the long efforts to bring beauty into the world, honouring that which made us by creating as we have been created, but the story that is embedded in the work itself.

5. The songs of the Aborigines are actually maps of their landscape. An elder who has never been to a place can navigate their way there if they know the sequence of the song. Each word and rhythm represents a tree, stone, or curve in the earth, making a ‘songline’ which they can follow to their destination. Languages between tribes are not a barrier because the “melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes.”

6. The Shipibo are one of the many indigenous tribes in Peru who, throughout history, have recorded their songs, or icaros, in elaborately embroidered geometric designs that correlate directly with nature.

7. Weaving, sewing and painting our stories & myths into the things we make is a way of keeping our culture alive. Heirloom is a compound word, with its roots in heredity + looming. Indeed, if even one generation is denied their inheritance, the story and the way home may be lost. As it is said in West Africa, “When an elder dies, a library burns to the ground.”

8. I set out earnestly on this path of hand-making, hoping one day to pass on things of beauty to the young ones in my life so they may find their way home across the songlines, as I have been found by those who have made beautiful things for me.

 

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