Toko-pa Turner Quotes

Especially in times of exile, when our anchors are pulled up and we’re no longer taking cues from the outside world, we have a chance to find that inner well and reinstate our connection to the sacred. We may find it overgrown, or hard to reach through the brambles, but each of us faces a time when the well within needs tending: when we’re no longer able to bestow blessings on others because we’ve over-given, or when something precious has been taken from us, or life’s demands have been too taxing on our fragile system. When the moisture goes out of our lives, and we’re no longer able to see beauty or converse with magic, we must ask ourselves how we can replenish our well-ness.

Naturally, the antidote to shame is to risk showing up as fully as we’re able. The discipline needed for shame is to practice revealing yourself. It is bringing into the open the full brightness of your spirit, despite your fear of failure. It is to brave your secret gifts into the open. It is revealing your fears to trusted others, allowing them to be assuaged. It is reaching out when you’d rather hide. It’s asking for help when you feel abandoned.

Occasionally you meet someone with whom you can dive right in, but in general it’s better to move slowly into closeness with others, because it is a worse thing to call someone home and leave them, than to not call them home at all.

The real marriage must first take place within. The Inner Marriage is a slow process of first attempting to understand the true qualities of masculine and feminine, how they manifest in our lives and dreams, and then undertaking a courtship of the inner opposite, activating those latent qualities in our repertoire.

At the very heart of ‘belonging’ is the word ‘long.’ To be-long to something is to stay with it for the long haul. It is an active choice we make to a relationship, to a place, to our body, to a life because we value it. Even knowing that it may not be all that we hope it to be, we are keeping the long view of what is possible, and our life becomes an offering to making it so.

that modern culture is suffering an epidemic of alienation, yet so many of us feel alone in our unbelonging, as if everyone else was inside of the thing that we alone are outside of. And keeping silent about our experience of estrangement is, in large part, what allows it to perpetuate.

As we apprentice ourselves to the way of nature, we begin to understand that all of life is in a continuous cycle of giving and receiving. It is the honouring of this cycle that makes us feel at home in ourselves and in relation to the rest of nature. In order to experience true belonging, we must not only acknowledge the gifts we are receiving, but also give our beauty away, no matter how it may be received by others.

"The willingness to rebel from the expected norms, rules, and silent contracts of establishment comes out of knowing that one cannot afford to build resentment. Resentment, which comes from the decision to go against one's truth, embitters the self. It somaticizes in the body and takes on the burden of pain as if it were ours alone. The whistleblower, on the other hand, reveals a shared complicity. It says, "I expect more from myself and from you." And in that stance, the pain becomes, in a sense, communal."

Pain and injury and illness ask us to consider that our lives are worthy without justification.