Toko-pa Turner on Belonging

This live online conversation was recorded to the CIIS Public Programs YouTube Channel. It is also available on our podcast.

Feel like you don’t belong? You’re not alone. The world has never been more connected, yet people feel—and are—lonelier than ever. Whether we feel unworthy, alienated, or anxious about our place in the world, the absence of belonging is the great silent wound of our times.

Join award-winning author, teacher, and dreamworker Toko-pa Turner and licensed psychotherapist and CIIS Faculty Rachael Vaughan for a nourishing conversation about what it means to belong. Sometimes called a Midwife of the Psyche, Toko-pa's work focuses on restoring the feminine, reconciling paradox, and facilitating grief and ritual practice.  

Most people think of belonging as a mythical place, and they spend a lifetime searching for it in vain. Toko-pa asks, what if belonging isn’t a place at all? What if it’s a skill that has just been lost or forgotten? Toko-pa shares practices to heal our wounds and restore true belonging to our lives and to the world.

This event is hosted live online. Instructions on how to join will be emailed to you shortly before the event. If you need to request accessibility accommodations, please email publicprograms@ciis.edu at least one week prior to the event. For more information click here.

Toko-pa Turner is an award-winning author, teacher and dreamworker. Blending the mystical tradition of Sufism in which she was raised with a Jungian approach to dreamwork, she founded the Dream School in 2001 from which thousands of students have since graduated. 
 
Toko-pa has been interviewed by CNN News and BBC Radio and has a community of over 100,000 online readers. She is the author of the bestselling book, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, which explores the themes of exile and the search for belonging. Belonging won the prestigious 2017 Gold Nautilus Award for its contribution to the field of Personal Growth, the 2018 Gold Readers’ Favourite Award, and the 2018 Silver IPPY Award. 

Sometimes called a Midwife of the Psyche, Toko-pa’s work focuses on restoring the feminine, reconciling paradox, and facilitating grief and ritual practice.

Rachael Vaughan, MFT, is a licensed psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, T-Group facilitator, trainer, and graduate school professor. She holds an MA in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, as well as an MA in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She has studied at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. 

Born in Asia and raised primarily in Europe, Rachael has a lifelong, passionate interest in issues of culture, identity and inclusion. She has a bilingual therapy practice in San Francisco and Marin county, seeing clients in English and French. She writes the Ethnopsychology Blog, and has studied French approaches to psychotherapy, such as ethnopsychiatry and genealogical psychology. Her teaching is informed by multiple cultural perspectives, as well as post-colonial and feminist theory. 

Rachael’s interest in culture, politics, and group dynamics led her to train in T-Group facilitation and organizational dynamics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Corporate bullying, the trauma of work, and issues of psychological colonization are an area of interest and engagement for her, and she works daily with issues of oppression and liberation with clients in her practice. 

For Rachael, passionate engagement with both the political and the depth-psychological is no contradiction. The motto of her alma mater isanimae mundi colendae gratia: “for the sake of tending the soul of the world”. Surely to tend the soul of the world must involve integrating the two. 

As a Jungian-oriented therapist, Rachael frequently works with dreams as a window to the personal and collective psyche. She has studied advanced dreamwork with Dr Stephen Aizenstat, and teaches dreamwork at several Bay Area psychotherapy training institutes. She is particularly interested in the somatics of dreaming, and in how symbol, metaphor and movement mediate between implicit and explicit memory. Rachael has a ten-year dance and authentic movement practice, and she is currently studying Somatic Experiencing. 

Rachael also holds a Permaculture Design Certificate and has an active interest in eco-psychology, grounded in gardening, nature art and rural life. She is a member of the Shambhala lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.