Tobin Marsh: True Service Comes Through Devotion

Tobin Marsh has led an adventurous, unconventional life. Raised six years in Japan, from a young age he felt drawn to different cultures and questions of human suffering. Tobin answered his early spiritual longings through extensive solo travels, wilderness backpacking, hopping freight trains, and long journeys on foot through remote corners of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and China. He has degrees in International Affairs and a Master’s in Theology. For 25 years Tobin was a devout Quaker. His work has been vast and varied, ranging from homeless services, to directing a Quaker center in Mexico City, to leading programs for youth on the streets and aging out of foster care, to facilitating prison workshops in conflict resolution. Now Tobin works as a craftsman building rooftop decks. A lifelong skier and distance runner, today Tobin’s happy place is on a forested mountainside with his 15 year-old son.

Tobin has been journeying with Mama since January 2023, and Susanita recently sat down with him to explore his medicine experiences. He spoke of the “holy sacrament” leading to so many tender, intimate communion experiences with God. He meets Mama as a teacher and friend leading him through a curriculum that begins in compassion, understanding, and bottomless forgiveness for self and the many others he’s been close to. Tobin describes healing by “excavating through layers of thick black muck on the basement floor of his being, as Mama loosens long-stuck energies of emotional hurt, self-recrimination, and self-defeating narratives.” He told me “Mama moves within and I’ve come to love the way my body purges these old energies.” And “She shows me how to access the divine light both from the heavens and within the fire at my core that appears connected to a stream of lava flowing from the core of the Earth.” Tobin describes, as gift, his felt connection to land, weather, trees, birds, people, the city, and the natural patterns all around and within. “Mama shows me that I belong here, as much as any tree in the forest. I am a human being at home on the Earth.”

In answer to the question of what effect medicine has had on his life, Tobin immediately pointed to his marriage of 23 years. “These have been the most loving, tender, mutually supportive of our years together. I feel so grateful and happy to be husband and father to Natasha and Micah. And Natasha tells me she finally has the husband she always wanted. I’m just more present in the home.” He spoke of a 5PM daily alarm that reminds him to return home “gentle, curious and quiet” with his close relations. He also spoke of rarely suffering the depression that plagued him on-and-off for thirty years. Tobin tells me the altar has become central to his devotional practices. “It’s where I learn to allow in divine light, open the chakras, and relate to Divine Mother and Christ Jesus as teachers and friends who know me intimately.” 

With a desire to serve others, Tobin recently became an apprentice guardian for SOULS. He reflected on how the beauty of the Enzo setting and the details of the room – the altar, circled mats, ritual items, sage smoke, and the kindness and respect of the staff – create a sacred space for the soul to enter, do its healing work, and come alive. Tobin spoke admiringly of the healing gifts among the ministers and guardians, and how much love flows among the people who come to ceremony. His final words about that were “The ceremony lasts about 45 hours and I love every minute of it!”

Tobin with his son, Micah