insight arising

Please check out my new website:   www.insightarising.com   MUCH LOVE, THANK YOU! 

by Toko-pa Turner There is a good kind of waiting which trusts the agents of fermentation. There is a waiting which knows that in pulling away one can more wholly return. There is the waiting which prepares oneself, which annoints and adorns and makes oneself plump with readiness for love’s return. There is a good kind of waiting which doesn’t put oneself on hold but rather adds layers to the grandness of one’s being worthy. This sweet waiting for one’s fruits to ripen doesn’t stumble over itself to be the first to give but waits for the giving to issue at its own graceful pace.  

I have lived with my parents for nine months now. While I didn't know what to expect from the experience, I never thought the wild card would be my dad. My quiet, reserved, calm, and harmless dad. Since the beginning of my journey home to the belly of the beast , I have been struggling quite a bit with him. These frustrations have been surprising and confusing and incredibly unfamiliar given the minimal conflict we've had over the years. Unexpectedly, I've gotten so upset by him...  He spits in the sink without washing the things away.  He's become radically conservative in the past few years.  He's stubborn as heck and will only do things his way.   He's a product of cultural patriarchy and refuses to do anything outside his gender role. He's emotionally unavailable and has dismissed my sadness.  He can be cold, distant, and inconsiderate.   I've been triggered countless times by him. I've snapped. I've been repeatedly impatient with him. I'...

When COVID-19 hit in March 2019, my weekly basketball league and pick-up nights halted immediately. I was bummeddddddddd. Running felt insufficient so I somehow found my way back to a jump rope. When I started skipping rope for the first time since grade school, I realized, this shit is not as easy as it used to be! So as a good ESFJ, I dove into everything available to learn how to jump rope correctly - YouTube videos, Instagram jump rope stars, tutorials, and even virtual classes with premier coaches. Forget baking bread, doing puzzles, or knitting sweaters, my pandemic time has been all about this rope. I fell in love with it, the way I did basketball as a little kid. It's been SO MUCH fun. It's been hard and challenging. It's been a thing to master. Not to mention, it's been awesome for my mental health and heart wellness.  5 life lessons the rope has taught me:  I can still learn something new, regardless of age. I can put my mind to something, drill, practice, be ...

My favorite part about writing and sharing with the world is experiencing what arises with others in response. When I posted the original piece about the 35 things I'm learning to love about myself , a kind friend wrote me a sweet note encouraging me to memorialize my light (in addition to the darker things I struggle with). He talked about how embracing our light can be the scariest thing to do. So, with a lot of gratitude, I decided to take up his loving challenge. Below you'll find my list of things I already love about who I am. I recommend you to try out this beautiful self-loving exercise. Comparatively, it was a lot more fun to write than the other one! Closing out Leo season with a full heart.  I adore my heart. She is tender. She is forgiving. She is vast. I live heart led and I’m so proud I choose to live this way. I am a natural athlete.  I’ve got a solid drive to the basket, a mean spiral to the football, and can send a softball flying into the field. Along these l...

Another anniversary in life I never imagined celebrating - two years of healing with my dear dear therapist, C.  Two years ago, at the beginning of my separation, I approached finding C like I did with most other decisions in my life. With a lot of intention, rigor, and a mental excel sheet. I had adamant ideas for what I was looking for, especially because I developed such respect and appreciation for our couples therapist who we had just sadly separated from. My new therapist needed to be a self-identifying she, she needed to be a woman of color, and she needed to be a fucking badass. I scoured Psychology Today and Therapist of Color Bay Area Directory , read their bios with my mafia boss eyes, made a list of 15+ people, and ended up emailing about 10 of them. Over the course of three weeks, I had about 7 phone calls to check for chemistry.  By the end of my rigorous process, something quiet called me to toss out my mental excel sheet, along with my old patterned way of maki...

This art piece reflects my effort to cultivate deeper self love and tenderness <3   For my 35th birthday today, I am reflecting on things I've held shame, guilt,  embarrassment  or simple shyness and discomfort around. Some of them are imperfections, either past or present, that I am learning to love, accept, and adore about who I am - from the daily mundane to the deeply personal. Each one of these things is its own journey and I proudly celebrate them on the day of my rising into the 36th year of living on Mother Earth. I fully acknowledge I am a tender work-in-progress for this lifetime and beyond. Thank you as always for witnessing and celebrating with me.  I can be incredibly stubborn.  When things don't follow through according to plan, I can get irritated or anxiously controlling.  I really love to eat... and can throw down food. I was a chubby kid once so I can get embarrassed by this. Somehow I always get food stains on my clothes. But the imper...

It took several months to find the courage to tell most people about my decision to divorce. For many months following, I continued to stumble on my words and would avoid talking about it when possible. It felt excruciating inside to say more with anyone outside my very small circle of safety. It wasn't until last month did I finally say the words "I'm divorced" without feeling the weight of shame. So, this is a pretty big step for me, to be a guest on Katie Tuite's  beautiful podcast Choosing Courage , where we talk about the intimate moments leading to the most painful decision of my life. Katie seamlessly moves us through a conversation about connecting to intuition, confronting fear, valuing stillness, and how A Year of Dana unfolded. A loving shout out to dear Grace Turkis  for being the catalyst for this offering. Thanks for giving the show a listen, and for all the love and support as I continue to expose my heart to the world.  Click here to check out the...

I'm so grateful to share, after a year of deep inner work, I crossed a rite of passage this weekend and became a certified Integral Coach with New Ventures West . My beloved teachers asked us these essential questions. "What does it feel like to become more of yourself in your own life?" "What does life want of you? What must be released in order to meet life's calling?" As I become more of myself in my own life, I feel so deeply free. I have little to contend with internally. There are no wars within me. This journey of becoming a coach, and more importantly, of becoming whole and intimate with myself, has gifted me peace and ease in my heart, mind, and body. The more of these qualities I feel, the more present and attentive I am to life. The more of life I witness, the stronger the energetic force within me grows, welcoming in all the possibilities for a deeper and more aligned way of life. The more truly I live, the more capacity I have within to hold the...

We don't talk as much about the heartbreak we experience in friendship. Maybe we talk about disagreements we've had with someone or even momentary grievances that occur, but we rarely hear  about the pain that comes from when a friendship transitions into a state that just doesn't feel the same as it once did.  Over the past few years, as my life has transformed, so have all of the relationships in my life in some way or another. Some have deepened in ways I couldn't expect. Some became even more like family. Some became easier and lighter. Some more strained or a little awkward. Some ended quietly. Some ended abruptly. Some became more distant. I've made new friendships that have nourished me deeply in a short time. I've lost old friends where the connection lost its steam and shared understanding. I've reconnected with those whose lives felt more relatable.  Recently I've been struggling with the impermanence of it all. I've been confused by my des...

In 2012, the summer before our graduate program started, we took a dream trip to Asia. We witnessed a teaching by the Dalai Lama in his exiled home and had fresh grilled fish by a river in India. We saw the  sacred temple ruins of Angkor Wat and experienced a sobering visit to the Land Mine Museum. We had the world's best boat noodles for 25 cents and drunkenly roamed the narrow shopping aisles of Siam in Thailand. We visited our parents' motherland and spent time with family eating delicious home cooked Vietnamese food. We visited my dear old nanny and second mother to my dad, an elderly nun who was living in a Catholic convent and died a year later.  In between these beautiful experiences with the world around us, the world between us was breaking down. We did our best to hide the tumult away from the friends we traveled with and visited but I'm sure the hardened distance between us was not difficult to sense. So many of the cracks in our relationship were already present...

The photo of myself represents my feminine, when I was tenderly rubbing my dear friend's feet, she had just given birth at home. The piece represents my masculine, called vajra, a thunderbolt symbol in Tibetan Buddhism that cuts through ignorance.  I committed to a new conscious partnership, within myself, and to myself.  This past weekend, my inner feminine and masculine made vows to each other to create a loving, expansive, and conscious partnership within me. We had a ceremony, made offerings to an altar, and celebrated in dance with sacred community. No other partnership in this lifetime has ever felt more clear and available to me.  From masterful teachers, I've been learning about the energetics within my body. This field of study has given me a new lens for deeper self understanding. We all have a mix of feminine and masculine energies within us, regardless of our sex and gender. From a young age, our energies are developed and shaped by our conditioning within our...

Hi friends and family,  I am super excited to announce the launch of a new podcast called Asian Heart Mind Body Collective ! In collaboration with my dear friend, Adele Ray , a fellow Vietnamese sister and filmmaker, we’re creating a space for Asian sisters and brothers to come as they are to share their healing stories and experiences. Recognizing the harm and violence occurring right now within our communities, we’re taking action in a way that may compassionately bring light to our collective pain, yet also celebrate our beautiful joys and triumphs without apology.  We release Episode 1 today, on the 46th Anniversary of Black April commemorating an important time in history for many in our community. If you’re curious, please listen here ! You can also find it on Spotify and Amazon Music . It will be available soon on Apple Podcasts .  If you could consider passing along this message and flyer today to five or more of your friends, we’d be so grateful! Also, if y...

Receiving this sweet gift from a dear friend that made my heart somersault  I LOVE MAPS! Last week, I reached the one year milestone of A Year of Dana  since I left my job.   Today, I am a very different person. In many ways, I am unrecognizable to myself, yet I know I'm on the path of returning home.  I attribute a large part of this transformation to the practice of dana.  Dana (pronounced dah-nah), is a Pali word for generosity, which is the foundation upon which other important qualities like patience and wisdom are built. From my intentional practice of generosity, I realize, I want to live a life of dana , not just a brief year. I want the practice of generosity to be fully integrated into the way I experience life everyday. Generosity is a way of being through the acts of giving and receiving. It is not a one way practice. It can be learned and trained over time with intentionality. Here are 5 ways to make generosity a lifelong practice.  1. G...

When people walk away from you, let them walk. Let them go.  Bishop T.D. Jakes speaks this wisdom during an electrifying sermon that has gone viral for good reason. His guidance is real, grounded, and truthful.   When I recall moments of being abandoned whether emotionally or physically by my family, ex-partner,  or other beloveds in my life, I close my eyes and can feel instantly, the sensation of trauma spinning circles within my abdomen, as if my insides are being wrung like a towel. It doesn't feel good, yet at this point, I know it's momentary so I stay with it, breathe deeply, and then it passes, like all things in life.  As I grow intimate with my own body, I become more amazed by her and what she teaches me. My body is no longer this thing I have to just feed and train and make fit. Western society socializes us to identify "the self" as our minds primarily - our personalities, values, beliefs, and ideas. Thus, our body becomes this separate thing that ...

We are no different from the Atlanta killer, Robert Aaron Long.  The colonial capitalist patriarchy, and its associated structures and institutions, reinforces the cultivation of inner hatred and oppression in each of us. The system breeds this inner hatred and oppression, seeking ultimately to keep us divided.  To believe we are separate from this white man who murdered eight innocent people in Atlanta would confine us to exactly what the system wants - supremacist ways. To view ourselves as different from him keeps us from seeing the complexities of our human experience as well as the structural systems that entrap all of us. To hate him and everything he represents in return will keep us deluded from the healing we all desperately need individually and collectively.   Robert Aaron Long is unfortunately an ugly mirror for each of us. To see how gruesomely and tragically our inner pain can unravel left ignored. To see where within us do we hold our own hatred or dis...

All my life, I saw my heart as weak.  I grew up being told that my tears were cowardly. That my sensitivities left me too exposed and indefensible to the world. That the soft ways of my heart were signs of my fragility and unsteadiness.  My mom often expressed her greatest concern for me being out in the world, especially when it came to love and relationships.  Má  sợ con sẽ b ị  ăn hiếp.   I am afraid you will be abused or bullied.  My mom was 21 when she had my oldest brother. She was 29 when her entire family left her behind in Vietnam, when the war ended and my dad was taken to communist camp leaving her behind with 3 small children. She was 32 when they escaped by boat with nothing but a few dollars.  Con  phải   giống   Má .  You must be like me.   Strong, resilient, unbothered, and unfuckwitable. All the qualities opposite of a weak heart.  Con  là   cọp giấy .  You are a paper tiger. ...

The snow is melting and the first signs of life are re-emerging. Small blades of grass and flowers are beginning to sprout through the remaining layers of icy slush. Earthly signs of a beautiful new genesis.  Winter is over.  The sun's warmth is here. She illuminates wonder upon the seeds that were planted. I look up at her, gently smiling.  My life's longest stretch of winter is finally approaching its point of transition.  Relief slowly comes over my body and my spirit begins to lift.  After setting down the last bit of weight I was carrying, my hands are now fully free to shape and create life, allowing my spirit to transpire fully into the artistry of who I am.  In this new season, my intention is to continue integrating all parts of me. The opposing parts of me. The paradoxical parts of me. The renewing parts of me. The parts of me still developing. My aim is wholeness. Stepping bravely into wholeness, bringing together light and dark, deepening balanc...

Dear friend,    When I decided to share my writing with the world, to share these deeply personal reflections openly and vulnerably, my purpose was not to make friends or to be liked or to seek validation from others. I knew I was taking a risk. I knew some people would disagree with my effort.   I found my way back to writing, first and foremost, as a source of my own deep healing, a journey I understand not everyone will choose or have the resources or capacity to pursue. Writing and sharing with others is my effort to expose my heart as expansively as possible. Because when I put my heart out there, there's really nothing else to lose or be scared of in life. And that's my intention here, is to live each moment without fear, and as authentically as possible.  The reactions I've received over the past year of writing has been overwhelming. It has revealed to me that many of us live in real emotional isolation. It has showed me that many are suffering without b...