My name was given to me by my parents. They chose it from a book of poems called Technicians of the Sacred, by Jerome Rothenberg. Toko-pa is a deity in the Maori creation myth, known as Parent of the Mist. Over the years, I’ve come to think of that mist as the veil between the worlds, seen and unseen. Indeed, my life became a devotion to repairing the bridge between the waking and dreaming worlds.
My maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and emigrated from Warsaw with my mother to Canada after the war. I am Ashkenazi Jewish and Polish on my mother’s side, and British on my father’s side. I was born on a farm in Devon, in the south of England, and immigrated to Montreal at the age of four, where my maternal grandparents had settled after leaving Poland. I grew up in a Sufi kahnqah (spiritual community) in the Ināyati Order, led by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan.
As fundamentally nourishing as the Sufi tradition is, behind closed doors my home life was volatile and filled with violence. I ran away at the age of 14, and was placed into the system until I was emancipated to live independently at the age of 16.
I became a professional musician with a touring band and had a diverse career in the arts and culture industry, including working as a journalist for publications like Chart Magazine, NYArts Magazine, and Canadian Art. This experience led to my being hired as the domestic A&R person for Attic Records, the largest independent record label in the country.
It wasn’t until my late twenties that I returned to the mystical teachings of Sufism and the study of dreams. I became deeply interested in the work of Carl Jung and did a three-year internship with the Jung Foundation of Ontario. I have been blessed to learn from teachers like Marion Woodman, James Hollis, J. Gary Sparks, and other great 2nd generation Jungians.
Blending the mystical tradition of Sufism with a Jungian approach to dreamwork, I founded the Dream School in 2001. Out of the longing to share what I had been learning, I began to teach and support others with their dreams in my private practice. Now, more than 20 years later, I have grown a network of more than a hundred thousand dreamers worldwide.
In 2018, I fulfilled a life-long dream and released my first book, Belonging, which explores exile and the search for belonging through the lens of dreams, mythology, and nature. It went on to win several awards, including the 2018 Gold Nautilus Award, the 2018 Gold Readers’ Favorite Award, and the 2018 Silver IPPY. It was also a finalist in the 2018 Whistler Independent Book Awards and the 2019 Montaigne Medal in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. Belonging has been translated into 10 different languages.
Along with speaking and teaching, I am currently working on my second book on the relationship between psyche and nature, and how to follow our inner wisdom to meet the social, psychological, and ecological challenges of our time.
