Dr. Toye Oyelese, MBBS, CCFP, FCFP
Certificate in Medical Acupuncture, U of A
Clinical Associate Professor
Faculty of Medicine, UBC
The "Navigational Mind Framework" emerged over more than four decades of clinical practice, personal reconstruction, and sustained attention to how minds actually behave. Several formative experiences shaped the perspective from which these ideas arose:
Early sensory limitation:
Until age seven or eight, Dr. Oyelese lived with severe undiagnosed myopia, navigating a world of blurred images supplemented by imagination and other senses. This created an early understanding that "clear sight" might be less essential for functional navigation than commonly assumed—and that reality could be successfully engaged through indirect means.
Cultural context:
Growing up in Nigeria provided exposure to multiple explanatory systems existing simultaneously—traditional, colonial, religious—each claiming truth while demonstrating obvious limitations. This fostered a natural skepticism about any single system's completeness and an appreciation for the ways different frameworks illuminate different aspects of experience.
Clinical practice:
Decades of family medicine reinforced the practical necessity of making crucial decisions under uncertainty, with limited information, while recognizing that certainty is rarely available. The consulting room became a laboratory for observing how minds navigate—how patients make decisions, how residents within them compete for leadership, how direction emerges or collapses.
Personal reconstruction.:
The experience of immigrating, losing professional status, rebuilding from nothing, and navigating the uncertainties of creating a life in a new country provided direct experiential data about collapse, rebuild, and the primacy of direction over destination.
Although aware of Erikson's developmental stages through medical training, Dr. Oyelese developed this framework largely in isolation from academic psychology and philosophy, working from direct observation rather than existing theory. Late in the process, he discovered parallel frameworks—most notably Internal Family Systems and phenomenological traditions traceable to Husserl and Kant. The convergence is striking but unsurprising: minds observing the same phenomena will often reach similar structures.
PODCASTS
NAVIGATIONAL MIND
NAVIGATING BLIND
MINDLESSNESS
MIND MATTERS
THE SPHERE OF REALITY
PUBLICATIONS
NAVIGATIONAL MIND (BOOK)
MINDLESSNESS
RAISING THE CAPABLE CHILD
DECISION MAKING TOOLS
THE RULES NAVIGATOR
NAVIGATIONAL CLARITY
NAVIGATIONAL FIDELITY
COURSES
NAVIGATIONAL MIND
GAMES
NMAVILLAGE
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