Michelle Cassandra Johnson - Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief

Grief does not change youIt reveals you.

JOHN GREEN, The Fault in Our Stars

I first met Michelle Cassandra Johnson when I wandered into a yoga studio where she taught in Carrboro, North Carolina. I was immediately taken. Her classes were a balm, a remembering, a calling-forth. She not only held space for us to center and resource ourselves from the deep well of our bodies, but unlike other yoga spaces I had been in, Michelle also called us up and out of ourselves and into the work of the world. She centered justice. She called us into the collective, not just the private inner world of our bodies on the mat. She reminded us that the internal was external, and vice versa. I knew immediately that I wanted to be friends with this powerful human being.

The more I learned about Michelle, the more I understood what a force she was. Everyone knew Michelle. Her spirit was big and her imprint was huge in our small town. She had an uncanny ability to call things into being. If Michelle decided to take something ona project, a fundraiser, a campaignit was as good as done. At some energetic level, when Michelle set an intention, it was as if deep tectonic plates started shifting and celestial winds started blowing.

Sometime shortly after we first met, I attended a Dismantling Racism workshop where Michelle was one of the trainers. Like her name, Cassandra, she is a seer and a drop-the-mic kind of truth-teller. She does not shy away from the truth, however painful. She does not look away from grief and trauma. And yet, masterfully, she is able to hold these spaces with grace, with great spaciousness, and with great kindness.

Over time, our friendship grew and deepened. We saw each other through marriages and divorces, and held one another in grief and joy. She officiated my husbands and my marriage ceremony and we became part of each others chosen families. I watched my best friend fall apart after the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman. She held me through a brutal series of miscarriages. I was with her the night she found out her father had passed. We followed each other through moves across the country and began working together, co-facilitating anti-racism training in organizations. Michelle taught me more about friendship than I have ever known. She means it when she says to those she loves, with a twinkle in her eye, Ride or die, boo. Ride or die.

To say that Michelle has changed my life is a paltry attempt at capturing the breadth and depth of that alchemy. To say she changes spaces and conducts energy in rooms is to watch a great artist, a great healer, at work.

When Michelle told me that she was writing a book on grief, we both knew it was not only something she would be channeling that the world needed to hear but it was also something she had been preparing for her whole life. As a Black woman in America, the lineage of grief pulses in her veins. So does a lineage of creativity, resilience, and joy. As a healer and intuitive, Michelle is called to work for the collective.

In this book, calling on the powerful metaphor of bees, Michelle writes:

We are living during a time where it is important for us all to embrace the practice of collective care. We are living during a time where remembering we are precious to one another, and remembering that all parts of our ecosystem are precious to us, might allow us to heal the fragmentation that comes from living in a culture that doesnt allow us to be whole or see ourselves as part of the whole. What would it be like for us to embody a responsibility for our collective hive? What would it be like to create spaces for us to grieve what has been lost as a result of our forgetting? That we are interconnected and part of a fragile and beautiful ecosystem, shared and composed of sentient beings whose survival is as important as our own? How might we begin to break down systems that separate us from remembering that we are part of a hive and that we have different roles to ensure our collective liberation and survival? What would it feel like to be devoted to the liberation of all?

Grief does not change usit reveals us. What will our collective grief reveal? What can be transmuted if we move through our grief with great care for the collective, like the hive? Can the grief and trauma of racism, sexism, transphobia, and other systems of dominance transmute us if we allow ourselves to truly touch into that grief and hold one another through it? Can we repair across lines of power and privilege, offer reparations, attend to truth and reconciliation, and center love?

This is deep work and there are no easy answers. But Michelle Cassandra Johnson is an able guide for this journey. She extols us to breathe. To open our hearts. To allow ourselves to feel the heartbreak of a world bound in systems of oppression. She gives us practices, meditations, and mantras. Equal parts alchemist, seer, truth-teller, Michelle takes us on the journey of her own grief and guides us in lessons for how to transmute our own. Her words are a true embodiment of ahimsa, of service, and of love.

This book, like Michelle herself, is a great gift to the world.

AMY BURTAINE,

co-author of The Facilitators Handbook for
Leading White Racial Affinity Groups