Toko-pa Turner’s name — given by her parents — was chosen from a book of poems called “Technicians of the Sacred.” Toko-pa is a deity in the Maori creation myth, known as Parent of the Mist, and over the years, she’s come to think of that mist as the veil between the worlds, seen and unseen. She is devoted to repairing the bridge between the waking and dreaming worlds.
Toko-pa is Ashkenazi Jewish and Polish on her mother’s side, and British on her father’s side. She was born on a farm in the south of England and, at age 4, immigrated to Montreal, where her maternal grandparents settled after surviving the Holocaust. She grew up in a Sufi kahnqah (spiritual community) in the Ināyati Order. As fundamentally nourishing as the Sufi tradition is, Toko-pa says her home life was volatile and violent. She ran away at age 14 and was placed into the system until she was emancipated to live independently at 16.
She became a professional musician with a touring band and had a diverse career in the arts and culture industry, including working as a journalist and as the domestic A&R person for the country’s largest independent record label. In her late 20s, Toko-pa returned to the mystical teachings of Sufism and the study of dreams. She became interested in the work of Carl Jung and did a three-year internship with the Jung Foundation of Ontario. Blending Sufism with a Jungian approach to dreamwork, she founded the Dream School in 2001. Out of the longing to share what she had been learning, Toko-pa began to teach and support others with their dreams in private practice. In 2018, she released the award-winning book “Belonging,” which explores exile and the search for belonging through the lens of dreams, mythology and nature.
