Toko-pa was born in a farmhouse in Devon, England by a midwife to two poet-parents. Because they liked the music saying it made, they named her after the Maori deity, Toko-pa, who is the "parent of the mist" according to the aboriginal creation myth.
She came to Canada at the age of four, where her grandparents had settled after the war in Poland, and was raised in a Sufi community in Montreal.
Along with yoga, meditation, Sufi dancing and singing, dreaming was an every day part of her culture. Her mother, a yoga teacher and holistic therapist, was her first dream teacher and encouraged Toko-pa to share and explore her vivid dreams.
In her teens, Toko-pa pursued her creative abilities, appearing in several theatrical productions, touring with a band and recording an album of her original music. It wasn't until her mid-twenties that she returned to the mystical teachings of Sufism, and the study of dreams. For the next six years, she became deeply interested in analytic psychology, and did a 3 year internship at the Jung Foundation of Ontario, while pursuing her studies in spirituality, mythology and shamanism.
In early 2001, she was awarded a scholarship to study with psychophysiologist and lucid dreaming expert, Dr. Stephen LaBerge, in Hawa'ii. She spent the following year writing a documentary series, Awake and Dreaming, which was picked up for development by Vision TV but, due to shifts in management, has yet to be produced. In the same year, Toko-pa founded the Dream School in Toronto as a way of sharing dreamworking tools, while creating community around dreaming.
Since then, she has lectured, taught and published her writings on dreams as well as helped many individuals in her private dreamworking practice.
In 2006, Toko-pa relocated to Nelson, a beautiful town in the interior of British Columbia, just beyond the Rocky Mountains. She now publishes her Dreamspeak column in a collection of newspapers and magazines across Canada and the United States.
