Dreamwork is a living bridge
One of our muses for dreamwork is Toko-pa Turner. In 2017, she wrote the award-winning book, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home. Below is an excerpt:
“...I will be sharing dreams…which beautifully illustrate the different gates on the path to belonging.
...dreaming is nature naturing through us. Just as a tree bears fruit or a plant expresses itself in flowers, dreams are fruiting from us. The production of symbols and story is a biological necessity. Without dreams, we could not survive. And though it is possible to get by without remembering our dreams, a life guided and shaped by dreaming is a life that follows the innate knowing of the earth itself. As we learn to follow the instincts of our inner wilderness, respecting its agreements and disagreements, we are also developing our capacity for subtlety. This sensitivity is what makes us more porous and multilingual, bringing us into conversation with the many languages of the world around us.
Sensitivity is the privilege and responsibility of remembering…as we come to understand the symmetry between the outer landscape and the inner wilderness, we can’t help but grieve the ways in which our own nature has been tampered with, denigrated, broken into obedience, and in many cases eradicated from memory. We begin to face the ways in which we are complicit in this slow apocalypse, within and without. Only from such a place of loss and longing can we begin remembering ourselves home.
This book is an attempt to exalt what I understand to be the broader definition of dreamwork: the practice of weaving a living bridge between the seen and the unseen, an endeavour that can only be made with patience, an aptitude for grief, and a willingness to assume a stake in the way things turn out, even if we won’t live to see the benefits. This is the practice of belonging.”
I’ve been experiencing loneliness and have been yearning for spiritual connection since I moved to Seattle, Washington; at times, very intensely. Her words are soothing and validating, reminding me that our human-experience is fraught with disconnection. In many ways, my “own nature has been tampered with, denigrated, broken into obedience, and in many cases eradicated from memory.”
Dreamwork has been one of my medicines as I continue on this journey of healing, re-memebering, and reclaiming my sovereignty. With dreamwork, I feel the weaving of the living bridge between the parts of myself that have been fractured, banished, or neglected. I feel the weaving of the living bridge between those I practice dreamwork with, an intimate community of beings, and all of our wild dreamscapes. I feel the weaving of the living bridge between my rational and linear cognition and the mysterious and mystical intuition.
For me, dreamwork is a vital bridge that nourishes the living and the belonging into my experience of humaning.
This is the potent foreword from Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home:
I invite you to read her words from the “I” and notice how your body receives it:
Where in your body are you experiencing sensations? Describe the textures, temperature, and weight of these sensations.
What feelings arise? And can you be with the feelings and fully feel them? What message do they have for you?
For the rebels and the misfits, the black sheep and the [outsider parts of me]. For the refugees, the orphans, the scapegoats, and the weirdos. For the uprooted, the abandoned, the shunned and the invisible ones.
May I recognize with increasing vividness that I know what you know.
May I give up my allegiances to self-doubt, meekness, and hesitation.
May I be willing to be unlikable, and in the process be utterly loved.
May I be impervious to the wrongful projections of others, and may I deliver my disagreements with precision and grace.
May I see, with the consummate clarity of nature moving through me, that my voice is not only necessary, but deperately needed to sing us out of this muddle.
May I feel shored up, supported, entwined, and reassured as I offer myself and my gifts to the world.
May I know for certain that even as I stand by myself, I am not alone.
Love,
Me
Thank you, Toko-pa.
Thank you, dreams.
Thank you, dreamwork.
감사합니다 🙏