Toko-pa Turner 

2018 Readers' Favorite Gold Winner 2019 IAN Book of the Year Award 2017 Nautilus Award Gold Winner Feel like you don’t belong? You’re not alone.The world has never been more connected, yet people 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. Most people think of belonging as a mythical place, and they spend a lifetime searching for it in vain. But what if belonging isn’t a place at all? What if it’s a skill that has been lost or forgotten? With her signature depth and eloquence, Toko-pa maps a path to Belonging from the inside out. Drawing on myth, stories and dreams, she takes us into the origins of our estrangement, reframing exile as a necessary initiation into authenticity. Then she shares the competencies of belonging: a set of ancestral practices to heal our wounds and restore true belonging to our lives and to the world.

Remembering Ourselves Home

Belonging

Laura Mei

Longing is the call to reconciliation with the events of our lives. Instead of trying to curate reality so that it is only filled with pleasure and peace, longing asks us to make a mingling of laughter with grief, a combining of hurt and salve, a willingness to enter our lostness so that we may be found. Embodied living is to involve ourselves not only with goodness, but with the ache of longing and absence, including them in our way of going. Can I be with my longing? Can I allow the emptiness of what is missing from me remain without trying to fill it with stand-ins and facsimiles? Can I be longing without expectation that it be soothed? Our longing lives in the unapproached regions of our lives. Because we are always trying to placate or outrun it, we rarely listen to what longing has to say. But if we can learn to treat the absence with reverence, longing then becomes a call to the edge of the question we have for our lives. Am I in alignment with the great nature of things? Am I in service to that which I love, and which loves me?

In every family, and in many folk tales, there is a designated black sheep. This outsider carries the shadow projection for the whole group. In their collective rejection of him or her, the black sheep is a uniting force. In other words, they become the carrier of the rejected, undiscovered and forgotten places of the family story and, by living life in their own way, the black sheep is often responsible for bringing the family to consciousness. But as heroic as that made sound, it is a lonely, difficult path. Whether by abandonment or choice, being estranged from or without a family puts unbelonging at the foundation of our lives. A feeling of homelessness can live like a persistent condition in the psyche, colouring everything we do. 

Perfectionism is a virus, widespread in Western culture, which keeps us running on the treadmill of never-enoughness. It is inherently deadening for how it strives and never arrives. Failure is embedded in its very pursuit, because humanity can never be homogenized. And yet, we are constantly being harangued into sameness, the condition upon which our inclusion hinges. We all have outlawed attributes in our lives — those things that have been driven to the margin of belonging, that starve for the leftover scraps of our attention. In avoidance of the things that make us different, we construct entire lives and personas around those qualities which, consciously or unconsciously, we understand to be acceptable and desirable to our families and culture. The only antidote to perfectionism is to turn away from every whiff of plastic and gloss and follow our grief, pursue our imperfections, and exaggerate our eccentricities until the things we once sought to hide reveal themselves as our majesty.

Though we may think of belonging as a static place of attainment, it is actually dynamic. Even the forms of belonging that are enduring, such as a good marriage or engaging vocation, only perpetuate through our willingness to allow them to grow and change shape. The healthiest forms of belonging allow for, and even require, periods of exile or separation in order to mature into greater capacities. When the individual's needs are at odds with the group or relationship, they must break into new ground, either by choice or by divine intervention. More often than not, we either resist, ignore, or reject these calls to attrition. We leave our roots planted in the shallow soil of false belonging for whatever benefits they might be affording us.  But if we haven't been listening to the early warning signs of restlessness, doubt, and longing, one day a strong gust of fate will blow through our lives and knock us right out of the soil. Life will have its way with us. The door slams shut on your old way of life. The way home is completely lost. These are called Initiations by Exile because, as we discover in myths and fairytales, every hero or heroine must endure a period of their own exile if they are to be initiated into the true medicine of their calling.

Nobody goes willingly into initiation. By its very nature, initiation is a humbling of the will. It comes as a tsunami would, wild with nature, shattering us on all levels. And though every part of us may mount resistance to being changed, we are not meant to emerge intact. We are not meant to re-cover what has been revealed. Rather, we are meant to be 𝘥𝘪𝘴illusioned, 𝘥𝘪𝘴solved, 𝘥𝘪𝘴appointed before any thought of rebuilding can begin. In exile, we must [surrender] layer after layer of armour and adornment, until we are bare. We must then undergo a symbolic death of the old life in order to be reborn with greater resilience and a holy assignment to carry forward. The initiated adult has learned to withstand uncertainty, has paid a debt to the gods through his loss and his grief, and has decided to make beauty with his life as the future ancestor that he is. As Jung famously wrote, "there is no birth of consciousness without pain." It is this lowering down into the very isolation you feel, coming to know its proportions, that enables you to tunnel outwards into a greater intimacy with your life.

Shame is perhaps one of the most insidious of the dark visitors, because it is rarely specific enough to be rooted out. It colours everything we say and do with an overall feeling of being wrong, inadequate or worthless. It is at the root of many other difficult emotions, like feeling insignificant, invisible, left out, misunderstood, unimportant, and unsupported. It is the belief that wr should remain quiet, remove our contributions, spare others our very presence. However misguided, some of us hold the secret and painful conviction that certain parts of ourselves are so ugly and unworthy that unless we mask or hide those pieces away, we will never be loved or accepted. We cover the very things that make us who we are. Dreams, however, will go straight for those things and throw off the covers. They work tirelessly to retrieve our forgotten, neglected and rejected soul-parts. Dreams can be threatening to the ego, whose whole existence depends on keeping those things hidden, but the greater Self lives to be seen.

Learning to grieve well must begin with the self. There are ruins in each of us. A place where 'what once was' lives on like an echo, haunting the landscape of our lives with its weathered foundations. Abandoned, scavenged, and dismantled by time, the ruin is the holiest place in our heart. It is the ways in which we have been broken that have earned us a place to stand. It is in our life's absences that a wild longing is born. This ruined place is a temple in which to worship, to throw down our grief and our forgetting, and praise what remains. After all, these remains are the evidence of how greatly we have loved and they should be venerated as the legacy of survival that they are.

The body is the first gate of belonging. And though so many people struggle to feel at home in their own bodies, I am amazed at how rarely it is mentioned. It's absence in our consideration speaks volumes. The body is the home we never leave, though some of us may try. It is the place where our soul has taken root for a lifetime and it is only through the body's senses that we come to know the world in which we live. It is with our hands that we offer tenderness, our voices that speak truths, our ears that differentiate noise from music, and our feet that take a stand. The body is also the first place of separation from belonging, where we leave our mother's body to become our own person. It is the terrible-wonderful learning ground upon which we come to know where we end and where otherness begins. Collectively speaking, the prevailing relationship we have with our body is much like the one we have with cars: we treat them like mechanical robots to drive on automatic and expect them to always be at our service, no matter how little we attend to their needs. We use them as a garbage dump and push them beyond their limits, then are mystified and frustrated when they mysteriously break down. Sometimes injury or discomfort is the only thing that will bring us back into relationship with our bodies. As Marion Woodman explains, consciousness must be enlightened at the cellular level of the body. It isn't enough to know something with the mind, or even the spirit. It's as if every cell of the body [needs] to remember.

True healing is an unglamorous process of living into the long lengths of pain. Forging forward in the darkness. Holding the tension between hoping to get well and the acceptance of what is happening. Tendering a devotion to the impossible task of recovery, while being willing to live with the permanence of a wound; befriending it with an earnest tenacity to meet it where it lives without pushing an agenda upon it. But here's the paradox: you must accept what is happening while also keeping the heart pulsing towards your becoming, however slow and whispering it may be.

As Rumi writes, "that which you seek is seeking you." So longing is not only the quality of seeking reunion, but the sound of something in search of us: the calling homeward. The mystical path is to return to our longing even when the pain of separation is excruciating. This is why longing is in the root of belonging. To be longing for what the soul hungers after, even when that hunger can not be satisfied, is to be truly alive.

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