Community Healing: How "We Heal Together" with Michelle Cassandra Johnson (63)

Healing is integration, it's wholeness, it's an awareness of our interconnectedness.

I am so grateful to share today's episode with you because I got to talk to activist, social justice warrior, author, anti-racism consultant and intuitive healer and yoga practitioner, michelle Cassandra Johnson. All about healing and what it looks like to heal on a community level. There's a lot of healing that needs to be done in the world today on an individual level and especially on a community level. So in today's conversation I got to reflect with Michelle about her new book. We Heal Together and we talk about the importance of healing within ourselves, with others and even with our ancestors. How cool is that. And on top of that, we talk about what healing looks like and how we can heal together. But before we get started, I want to take a moment to thank our newest how the Wise One Grows supporter, holly. It's not me, holly, it's my name, twin Holly. Holly. Thank you so much for supporting this podcast and making these conversations possible. It is so important to me to share this podcast because I believe that growth happens when we learn to listen, when we learn how to listen to the natural world, to others and to the wisdom that lives within each of us. If this podcast has helped you grow, has helped you listen, has been impactful in your life in any way. You can be like Holly and join the Dream Team for as little as $3 a month and if you don't have the financial capacity to support, you can absolutely still support this podcast by sharing an episode you love with a friend, leaving a review on your favorite streaming platform and following the podcast on all the podcast and social media places. So thank you all for helping this podcast exist and for helping each of us grow as we listen together. Let's take a moment to land here together with 3D breaths. Just take a moment to notice where your body touches the earth and feel your connection to the earth beneath. You Know that you're held here. If it's safe, you can gently rest your eyes or soften your gaze and take a big breath in and a big breath out Again. Inhale, fill your chest, fill your belly with air, exhale, open your mouth, let it all out. One more big inhale and exhale and then you can slowly reconnect to that point of contact to the earth and slowly open your eyes as we return to this space. Thanks so much for taking time to land here together. So I'm going to introduce our wonderful guest today, michelle. Michelle Cassandra Johnson is an activist social justice warrior, author, anti-racism consultant and trainer, intuitive healer and yoga teacher and practitioner. Michelle's work centers on healing from individual and collective trauma, coming back into wholeness and aligning the mind, body, spirit and heart. Michelle, I actually think that I don't know if we met in person, but I did a lot of email communications with you when I was working at Project Yoga, richmond and I think it was the time of your first book, skill and Action. You were doing some workshops at Project Yoga then and now I am really excited to be talking to you about I think this is book number three. We Heal Together, rituals and Practices for Building Community and Connection, which I absolutely loved. So thanks so much for reconnecting with me in this way.

Thanks for inviting me to be here.

Yeah, do you mind? I kind of just want to dive in, because there's so much depth to your latest book and I kind of wanted to just take a moment to start by talking about healing and how you define healing and why it's important.

Yeah, I appreciate this question about healing and will say that my definition of healing, it's ever evolving, based on what I'm experiencing, how I'm relating to what's happening on the planet at this time, how I'm relating to others and to self. So I'll offer something and I'm also open to the expansion of this definition of healing. And what I'll share is that you know, I guess, simply put, I think about healing as connected to the integration of different experiences. We have healing as connected to wholeness, and not just my individual wholeness, but remembering wholeness as connected to other beings, so our interconnectedness and connected to the earth. And you know, the practice of healing or the process of healing suggests that something has been wounded, there's a wound site or something needs to be repaired or mended. Perhaps I'm not suggesting that we're broken and this is why we need to heal. It's more that, as I think about my own experience in this body you know, I was born into a world where there was already a system of dominance and system of superiority and oppression at play when I came into being in this incarnation of self and these systems of dominance, the hierarchy of bodies, the extraction and mining, these things we do to the planet and to one another and those less proximal to power all things I inherited and suggest that something's out of balance on our planet and within ourselves, I'd say and so healing feels rooted in this and that from the moment I think we come into being, based on the context that there is healing that needs to happen, and healing is an ongoing process. And there may be healing in response to things we've experienced in our lives, like traumas that have happened to us, that feel specific to the conditions that were in place for us or what was happening at the time right, or our family system, and there are traumas that have happened and continue to happen on the planet that we'll have to respond to, and so there may be, for people, an individual healing process that's going on, while I also and we heal together speaks to this and holding this vision for our collective healing. So healing is integration, it's wholeness, it's an awareness of our interconnectedness, and it is a process that I suggest we move through to find balance again.

I really appreciate in that response and really so much in the book, how you lean into the importance of interconnection and I feel like in dominant culture it's really common to see healing as individualized. Do you mind, for listeners who might not be familiar with what dominant culture is, do you mind just like touching on that definition? I loved how, at the beginning of your book, you gave all these definitions so everyone's on the same page with what we're speaking to. And I guess then leaning into why do you think dominant culture has made healing so individualized and how can we work towards changing that to tap into the interconnection between individual healing, community healing and healing with the earth and the spiritual world as well?

Mm-hmm. So you mentioned at the beginning of we Heal Together and really every book I've written as far, there's a shared language section. I was just looking at the books on the shelf. There's a shared language section to really help people orient to my perspective worldview and so people have that point of reference as they engage with the content.

Which is so important to do. I really appreciate that. There's so many times in conversation with my husband, a lot of times where it's like we're talking, we're using the same words, but we are talking about totally different things. So I really wanna acknowledge how impactful that is to have at the beginning of your work and for taking time to do this with us today.

Yeah, it's funny. I was in a conversation the other day about where it's an equity team who's creating a toolkit for their organization and they were thinking about a glossary and how that's used versus shared language and I was like you might wanna? The glossary is usually at the end and people are looking through and then they reference what something means and I was like if we have shared language at the beginning, there's an opportunity to raise consciousness and set context and set the tone in a sense. So it feels different than a glossary to me. It's like part of the teaching and the lesson and the way people enter into it, and I think the definitions invite people to consider well, what does spirit mean for me? What does dominant culture mean for me? What does social location mean? And so you asked about dominant culture and I'm not gonna read the long definition from we Heal Together, but what I'll say is that it has to do with I mentioned the hierarchy of bodies, and when I say the hierarchy of bodies, what I mean is that there are some people, based on the identities they embody, that are more proximal to what I will call social and institutional power. So this is not personal power. We all have that. This is the power to access spaces, to access resources, the ability to be advantaged in specific ways that are often rooted in cultural norms and who is seen as normal, and social and institutional power is also connected to the policies that protect those who are more proximal to power and disadvantage or marginalized or oppressed those who are less proximal to social and institutional power. And it's also connected with resources who controls the resources? Who has access to them? Who decides how they're allocated and used financial and otherwise? So this is I'm talking some about social location, because it's connected to dominant culture. There is a hierarchy of bodies that suggests that some bodies are more worthy than others based on the identities, and I'll give an example of this. I'm a black person who's lived in America and a white supremacy culture, and my blackness is an identity I embody that places me further away from social and institutional power, in a culture that says whiteness is superior to blackness or being indigenous or a person of color. And what feels important about this is that people made up these hierarchies and systems, so it wasn't like they just came out of the air. People constructed hierarchies that said this group is better than this group, the group that is seen as superior is setting the cultural norms and setting the tone and the context, and trying to control the context and tone and experience for people who are less proximal to power and dominance has to do with power and power over right. And these hierarchies that I am talking about were constructed, were made up by people. So I'm not saying that I believe whiteness is superior to blackness. I'm saying I live in a culture that says that to me at every turn. And then that belief that hierarchy is embedded in our institutions, is embedded in our cultural norms, is embedded in how we relate to one another, is embedded in the like carceral system, right, embedded in all of every, the healthcare system, every system we interact with, and there's more I could say. But it's really thinking about the culture as the air we breathe, the water we swim in, the things we're internalizing, about who we are, based on, the identities we embody, many of which these identities have been constructed and made up, and then certain levels of power are assigned. So that's some about dominant culture, and I think it very much relates to the second part of that question, which is about the individualized framing or nature of how healing is talked about and even the industry of healing and wellness. And it's interesting because, when you ask the question about this individualized way that we might think about healing, it made me think about my second book, actually Finding Refuge, which is about collective grief and cultural trauma and, yes, what we are grieving individually, and also that there needs to be a much larger conversation about what we've lost as a collective, and that conversation and awareness can call us into creating new ways of being and disrupting these hierarchies and dismantling them, and that there's a cost to not making space to grieve and not acknowledge that we, when we try to bypass what we've lost, there's a cost to that to us all, and then there could be a tendency to replicate the systems that have created the grief and loss. To begin with, and your question made me think about I remember sitting thinking about people talk about grief individually or traumas and individual experience. What if we actually had that conversation on a collective scale? Because it's happening right, we're all experiencing what it is to be human on the planet at this time, although we're experiencing it quite differently based on the identities we embody, but there's a level of cultural trauma we're experiencing. And why are the programs centered around grief and loss or trauma. So about the individual and not about our collective experience. It's not to minimize the work we need to do to heal as individuals, but we're in relationship with everything. So are we actually on an individual healing journey or are we on a collective healing journey? Even when we believe we're healing ourselves as individual, like we can't separate our experience from anyone else's or anything else's or as I write about, and we heal together? Anything that has been, is now and will be, and I think this is what so much of what we heal together speaks to, as systems like capitalism and white supremacy and any sort of system of dominance have conditioned us to believe that we are individuals, not in relationship with anyone or anything, and that we're sort of untethered, moving through the world and we're disconnected, and so healing that needs to happen can happen in these siloed ways. And, as I just suggested, my question is is that actually even real or true? Because this conditioning around individualism is it works for the machine, right, it works for capitalism, it works for other dominant systems or systems of superiority, but it isn't actually true to who we are. And so this, you know, we heal together as an invitation to broaden how we think about healing and what it means to actually be in community or recognize how we are in communion with everything and everyone. And then what would healing look like if we're able to come back into the truth of our deep relationship with everyone and everything?

Yeah, I think there's so much to what you just leaned into and I just kind of like reflect on what you were saying about. Like I think you're right. I think when we try to heal just individually, but not with community and not with the natural world, not with the ancestral world, we aren't whole in that healing. We're healing apart but we're not healing the wholeness of our being in this life, and I think that can almost create more of a disconnection where you're like I'm just healing this part but I'm not paying attention to this here. So I think it's. I really appreciated that you brought that in to the forefront of this conversation. From your experience, I would be curious for listeners is what does community healing look like and how can we start to cultivate this in our lives? And you also touched on this too, of like, can you speak to how being in community expands beyond people and physical bodies on this earth as a part of that communal healing?

I feel like healing in community looks I mean, can look many different ways or happen in many different ways and this is something I think about when I think about practice. So I'm a yoga practitioner, spiritual teacher, yoga teacher and I think about how, at times, we are invited to think about practice as one thing. So practice is me sitting on my cushion. Practice is me reading the Yoga Sutras. Practice is me practicing Asna, or movement, for an hour a day. Right, that, this is what we define practice in this way, and I think healing has been defined in this. It's like it looks like one thing you go to therapy or you find a shaman or you, right, work with plant medicine, whatever it might be like, it's this thing. This is the way I do it, and I say this because I actually think there are many ways that we can practice and many ways that we can come into community and center our healing, as evidenced by the multiple practices that are in we Heal Together. There are so many access points for people and so many different ways to practice, and what I'll say is that a through line in we Heal Together, at least in the practices that are for people who want to be in relationship with others more consciously, practicing what I've invited people into, and that because there are practices for people who are trying to find a community, and then practices if you wanna practice with one other person, and then practices if you wanna be in circle or you wanna facilitate. The through line is that this speaks to the second part of your question One. We are in communion with everyone and everything, as I spoke about before, human and non-human, and that we are intentional about coming into relationship with one another or with self would be the other way to think about this If it's the individual practice people are working with at the end of one of the chapters and we Heal Together. So healing community can look like coming together in circle, centering relationship. Often there is some either shared vision that we have or some resonance between people as they are coming together to heal. Sometimes there's an acknowledgement of what we are responding to and why we need to heal and in most of the spaces I am in for healing there's some component of spirit or creator or source or that which is bigger than us, moving both through the space and through us and calling us into our healing. So the other things I think about when I think about community healing our community healing can be going to a rally right Because we're calling for something, we're calling for action or accountability to happen and we're doing that. It can look like being part of a community organizing circle. It can look like being part of a healing justice or restorative justice circle. It can look like dinner at my grandmother's house around the table right, or practicing in a place of faith or spiritual space. It can look like gathering outside with people to breathe and move together. The point is that we come into, as I said relationship with one another and I mentioned and you did too human and non-human In the first chapter. The practice at the end is this web of who we're in communion with and there is an invitation in there and writing about. I think so many of us have been conditioned to think about community as just the humans around us and we're in communion with the air and the earth and the water and the chipmunks that are probably eating all the bird seed and the bird feeder that I've filled the birds feeder this morning and they've probably eaten all of it. Or the honeybees that I have in my backyard, or the plant that's sitting next to me, or the drum that's sitting next to me, or the candlelight right Like we are in communion with, or all the flowers that are in bloom right now in my yard. With all of these things and we heal together as an invitation. There are many times I feel like I invite people to bring in the natural world as an ally in their healing and as a deeper practice of understanding our relationship with the natural world, and that there actually is no separation between us and the natural world. We're just conditioned to believe there is. But what if we understand? I'm not separate from. That tree outside right that I can see out of my window right now, or that chipmunk that's eating the bird seed, or the butterfly bush that's in bloom right now. Like what? If we actually leaned into and remembered we are nature and that connection, we would probably regard the planet in a very different way.

Absolutely. I think that's such a key component and something, as you were talking, that came up for me was healing is such a raw thing. It's a raw, vulnerable thing often and I think that can be a part of the challenge people find and calling in community. So I really love what you're leaning into of like if we just if we feel like some people don't love sharing their emotions but there's still healing work that needs to be done. So ways in which we can start to step into that is like, okay, what if I step outside? And this is a way I'm still healing in community, but maybe in a way that feels more comfortable for me as I work up to being amongst physical people in this life. But I think it's really a big beauty that you pointed out and we heal together of like all these other types of spirit that we are in communion with that we can heal with. So there's multi layers to meet yourself where you are that in this moment and to help scaffold you to deeper healing in greater community. And throughout the book I just couldn't get over. I think the real heart of this book for me was all the work you talked about with ancestral healing and working with ancestors in the healing process. Do you mind speaking a bit to the importance about reconnecting to our ancestors for healing and why it's important to know our ancestry to work towards our present day healing?

Yeah, in both we heal together. Well, actually, skill and action, we heal together. Finding refuge there's some component of ancestry in each in different ways, like where I'm from is a way to connect to that and skill and action. And then, in finding refuge, there's a chapter about my grandmother and ancestors and connecting with them and the broad way we can think about ancestors and then we heal together. My grandmother's weaved in throughout Dorothy, and there is a chapter about Angie, my great grandmother, which is the chapter about lineage and legacy. And that chapter and writing and my great grandmother's story, or at least what I shared and we heal together, feel so powerful to me because the short version of it is that I was describing my great grandmother by the conditions that were in place for her, meaning the hierarchy of bodies and how that was playing out at the time when she was born, and continued to sort of describe her that way, even though I understood she was something more than that through my experience with her. But it took someone reflecting back to me the way I described my great grandmother as her conditions, rather than as a woman who was really, really feisty and always brought sweet things to me at my grandmother's house, and she was sassy Angie was. And yeah she was really something and it just it made me think about this. Writing about her was really made me think about the risk of defining ourselves by the conditions that are in place, and then it opened up a space for me to explore, which I think was already open, but it deepened this opening for me, or this doorway or portal around our ancestors. I believe this the well and healthy ancestors, I will say, because certainly there are people in my lineage that are working to heal now and the healing I am doing now will support them the well and healthy ancestors, I feel like, have wisdom that can support us at this time so we can actually dream beyond the conditions that are in place. So I'm not talking about bypassing, but beyond climate chaos, right, what is possible Beyond white supremacy, what is possible Beyond capitalism, what is possible? And the reason I think that ancestors know this and I actually think we have some wisdom about it too, and parted from them, but also just in us is because, if I think about my great grandmother or my grandmother, there were ways that they were. There are conditions they experienced that I've never experienced, that were just horrific, and I also think about the ancestors that brought them into being that dreamed about something beyond the conditions in place and how. My ancestors had dreams of something beyond their conditions and how I'm here because of that. And this way I'm talking about. It may not resonate for everyone, so I'll say something about ancestors, but I do believe this about my bloodline, and I often say they had dreams of me being here, and here I am having this conversation, right, about existing beyond the conditions that are in place, because there is something beyond this that we can work towards, something we can dream of, something we can create. I think the well and healthy ancestors are that wise and I think it's important for us to like heed the call and their wisdom and to be that expansive, versus being constrained and defined by what is playing out in this earthly realm. That makes no sense. There are so many things that are happening. The other piece of this is really about where we're from and the fact that our ancestry, our lineages, are intertwined and we can't like separate from that right. So there may be people in my friend's bloodline that actually were implicated in the system of white supremacy that harmed my people, right that's. I'm not neutralizing our identities as I talk about ancestors. This is true, right, this is happening, and one of my teachers, lamarad Owen, said there always is like there must be some well, ancestor somewhere in the line, even if it's one right. So even if your ancestors were implicated in the horrors that we are reckoning with now, right, there was probably at least one ancestor that was resisting what was happening or had a question about what was happening or, like, wanted to disrupt what was happening. And I remind people of this because people have such complicated relationship with ancestors and sometimes want to, like, move away from them. And I think the importance of knowing where we're from, based on our lineage and then I'm gonna broaden it on our bloodline, it's important to understand that the blood of my great grandmother is flowing through me, her traumas, her resilience, her joy. The same is true of my great-great grandfather. Right, this is inside me and defines in so many ways how I move through the world, potentially defines how I do my work, I would say for sure. My grandmother, dorothy, shaped how we heal together, was written right Because I'm in deep relationship with her and have a practice If I try to escape from where I'm from. Right, if I try to say I don't have any connection to Dorothy or Fred or Cornelius, that's false right. And so it feels important to, in a reverent and honorable way and way that remembers our interconnectedness, to actually look at where we're from and explore it and engage it to help us think about how we heal now in the present, what we can heal back in our lineage and what we wanna dream up for the future is what I would say. And finally, what I'll say is that, because ancestors and ancestry is complicated, I can't trace back past my great-grandmother. We don't have records. My great-grandmother was, her parents were enslaved and she was born into slavery, and beyond that we don't know, so there isn't anyone to tell us. And, yes, I can track genealogy, but it's actually quite hard to trace back, depending on our identities. Right, johnson is not my last name, it was something else and that was the name of whoever enslaved my ancestors. It's not the name that I was given or my great-great-grandmother was given, like that's not the name that was put upon them. And so it is complicated. Some of us can't trace back, some of us don't want to, some of us don't wanna know, and what I'll offer is that and it relates to the earlier question about communing with the natural world is, as my friend Stephanie Ghost and Paul says and does, a lot of work around living ancestors. So we are living ancestors right now, deciding what our legacy will be right and how we wanna place ourselves in this lineage and we are part of a lineage. We also can think about living ancestors as the things around us. So the tree the oak tree in the backyard is older than me, I'm sure right Living ancestors, and that's the oak tree you reference in the book. okay, yeah, older than me, right? Living ancestor. The lake that's in my neighborhood living ancestor, because this neighborhood was built before I was born, right Like the mountains that are 20 minutes away from a pilot mountain. Living ancestor. The teachings from teachers who are no longer here in their physical bodies living ancestors. The teachings, the books, the texts, the quotes, the art that was created before I was ever even thought of. Living ancestor. The songs that were sung right In the fields as my great, great grandparents were working right and laboring living ancestor. And so I'm just offering this because and there's more we can think about ancestry so broadly, and it relates to the whole essence, I feel like, of we heal together, which is what you named earlier about us being communion with everything and everyone. This is, in fact, true. We are in relationship and part of a much larger lineage that exists beyond our blood lineage, and sometimes it's helpful for people to think about that soon after that.

Yeah, I really appreciate you leaning into that part because that was a part of the book that really stood out for me when you were sharing, like I think maybe fourth grade, but it could have been another one. You said there was like a family lineage project and you brought it home and your mom was like that's not great, like this is really challenging for us and on top of that can be quite traumatic for many people in their lineages and I think it's really important that we honor and acknowledge that. I think that's again where some dominant culture can come in of like, oh, your family tree, like we know everything, but so many of us come from a wide range of backgrounds and things that can be really hard to trace and can be really quite traumatic and hold heaviness. So I really appreciate that you spoke to ways we can lean into nature as a part of our ancestry as well. And something I'm curious for your insight on is how can we something I've been leaning into since the passing of my grandmother has been like healing some of her trauma, like and not replicating these generational traumas and patterns that I've witnessed in my family and in my life? So I'm curious about you spoke to your relationship with Dorothy as a practice right now how do we and how can we witness perhaps challenging and traumatic patterns of our ancestry and then how can we cultivate a practice to work towards healing those patterns and cultivating relationship with loved ones who have passed but are still a part of us?

Yeah, I think I mean we would have to go way, way, way back, for any of us would to find a time when our ancestors didn't experience some sort of trauma. Like we would have to go way back. I'm not saying I imagine there was a time when that wasn't true, where there was probably balance or harmony perhaps, but we would have to like trace way back. And I say this because almost everyone is responding to some sort of trauma in their lineage that lives in a place where they're not, that lives on inside of them, that they're conscious of or unaware of. Like that's just true for most people. I would say I'm not gonna say everyone because I don't know, but for most people that's true. And so what I would encourage people to think about, listeners to think about, is that I don't believe it's my responsibility to heal all of perhaps the unhealed or the ancestors who may not have had in this lifetime the resources, energy, time, whatever they may have needed to heal their trauma, both the trauma that they experienced in their lifetime and the trauma that came in with them from our ancestors. Like I don't think it's my responsibility, nor can I heal everyone in my line who experienced trauma. But I do think that how I live my life and regard lineage now and think about being in service and understand that I'm in relationship with my ancestors in a really profound way, and the way that I prioritize healing collective healing, my own healing and understand the relationship between the two, that this will heal something in my line. So I just trust that and so that's an invitation for people to lean into their healing work and serve us of their lineage Right and the awareness of what we said we're living ancestors. So it's not just lineage in the past, it's right now what we're creating and it's what we will create in the future. So I just invite people not to take on all of it, because we actually can't. But we can think about how does you know what I do now, the choices that I make, the way I understand, how I'm in relationship with everything, the way that I practice, what I prioritize, whether or not I think about collective care, whether or not I feel connected to something bigger than me, right, how do these things support me and healing Back now and into the future? So there's that piece to not take on all the trauma, because it's we can't hold it all, nor can we heal it all. So it's a more part of this lineage that's ongoing. So someone else will likely be doing some healing work that is in relationship to me and what I wasn't able to heal for myself or in my line before I leave this earthly realm. There's that piece of it and with that, I'll also say I'll just give an example of this, because it speaks to like a relationship we can have with ancestors. My father transitioned in 2017. I hadn't seen him in like seven years and I think I don't only talked to him a few times in during that time, that seven-year span before he transitioned and and he was complicated, as many people are and From what I have learned, I think he he took on or internalized some things from his father that caused him to Be unkind at times, feel disconnected. He also experienced some trauma that I believe added to that, that people really didn't know about Until he disclosed it to me at a certain point, and when he transitioned, I didn't feel, I Didn't feel like there were things I needed to repair in our relationship and I had lost the opportunity to do that. That isn't how I was relating to it. I Did feel like he had things he Did not make space or time to repair or didn't know how to repair with me and with many other people Before he left his body. So I think he left his body and was probably there was probably a lot of dissonance Because he had run out of time in the earthly realm To resolve some things. And this may resonate with people like if you think about ancestors, but for me I was like it's actually clean for me. I don't have Something that's unspoken or unsaid or that I didn't do, but he did, and so for about two years Maybe longer, after he transitioned, I would feel his energy and and I would set a real clear boundary about it being in my space, like no, not well enough. Nope, don't want to, I'm not taking this on for you, I'm not doing this work. It may have taken longer than two years. Maybe it was about three years after he passed when I felt a shift in his energy and I didn't invite him into my space, but I was like I Wasn't setting that hard boundary anymore. In the same way, I don't know if he's done healing work wherever he is, I don't know what's going on, but something shift energetically Around him that let me know that he wasn't expecting me to take on the stuff he didn't right or wasn't in this like unhealthy Relationship with me. It didn't feel like that anymore, and so I just offer that, because the point is I had an agency. I was like nope, not doing that healing work for you. It's your trauma. You can call in some other supports. Not gonna be me. I wish you well, but it's not gonna be me Right. And then something shifted and I was like you could, we can, you can be around. You know, it's kind of like energetically you can be around right, but I'm still not taking on his healing and I think sometimes when people think about a relationship with ancestors, they feel like especially ancestors who are working through trauma or have things on many unresolved things when they transition, that they have to like take that on. No we actually have agency, even when, when beings have transitioned, to decide how we want to be in relationship with them.

Yeah, I think that's a great reminder that it's it's a continued relationship Even when someone does make that transition and you can still. They were still a real person and a whole person, and it's not all like warm feelings about that all the time. You can still Grieve the whole person and love the whole person and hold boundaries with your relationship with them in this new space as well Something thank you for sharing that as well, something you spoke a lot about in we heal together and you really weaved it in beautifully in the book is this power of ritual, and I think it's something that we Indominate culture are like losing more and more of and that can be pretty detrimental. Do you mind speaking to what ritual is to you and why it's important?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about ritual and ceremony and sometimes I use those words interchangeably, but they're not actually the same thing, like coming into ceremony with one another. Often ceremony includes rituals and often there's some shared Vision around ceremony or why we're coming together in space. And then there are these things that we practice as we come together, which feel like the rituals, and typically Ceremony is connected to source or something bigger, or nature, spirits, right, or allies, or, you know, elemental energy in some way which we use in our daily life, in some way which we can move through rituals focused on, on the elements or other things we might bring into ceremony, and typically ceremony is centered around celebration or morning, or the changing of the Seasons, right, or or these big events that can happen in our lives. And then there are specific rituals that go along with that, like the summer solstice Just passed right, and I imagine people were engaged in ceremony and practicing many rituals to honor that day and the turning of the season, depending on where people are, the turning of the of the season, and For me, you know, and it's written about, and we heal together. I think about ritual as connected to ceremony and I think about ritual as connected to the body and spirit and practice and Intention, and I've been in spaces where ritual has been practiced or what they're telling us. We're practicing ritual but there's no heart or spirit in it. It's like we're going through the motions of something and may not actually know why we're opening the circle in a particular way, but we're doing it, but we're not bringing ourselves with us, we're not bringing our bodies with us, we're not bringing spirit that moves through us with us. We're just sort of going through the motions and what I'll say is that sometimes, when people are newer to ceremony or rituals, that this can happen when they're like trying to figure out why are we doing what we're doing?

Yeah, like where am I Right?

so that's real. I'm not really talking. I'm not talking about that transition period of like oh, you absolutely know where you're calling in the cardinal directions when you open the circle right, or you're casting a circle To open a space, or you're calling an ancestors as you open the space, or you're closing the space, or you're bringing in water into the ritual, depending on the, the nature of that ceremony it's. I'm not really talking about that. What that transition where we because there is a transition for many people, because we've been stripped of our rituals and because of what you named about dominant culture moving us away from ritual, which is so I mean ritual and ceremony. These things are old and you know Like why is old Practices and, of course, dominant culture would want us to move away from ritual and from ceremony, because Ceremony, in so many ways, invites us into our divinity our interconnectedness, our humanity, in a way that threatens dominant culture. You know, if I'm in ceremony and I'm thinking about ritual and I'm being reverent, I'm less likely to participate in the capitalist system, in the same way as when I feel disconnected and I'm not in touch with people and I'm tired and I'm like not really paying attention. Right, ritual calls me to come into attention, like pay attention to this now, for this. It's like, for the sake of what? Right? What is the intention of this ceremony and ritual? So rituals can take on so many different forms and be practiced. You know the ritual of I think about meditation Each morning as a ritual I move through. Or pulling divination cards as a ritual. Or going to visit the oak tree and pouring libations as a ritual these are things I do almost every day. Or going to visit my honeybees, sitting near them and listening to them a ritual, right, that I move through with deep intention and I'm bringing myself with me and I'm bringing spirit with me. Right, and there is a, there is an acknowledgement of spirit moving through whatever I'm communing with as well, which I think is connected to ritual too, right, I'm bringing my heart with me. These are all rituals, and then there's the. There are the rituals we might move through in a, in a Spiritual service, for example, right, the song, the movement, the call and response, the prayer, right, all of these things are rituals that are part of a bigger ceremony. So I just want to say that, because I imagine people are moving through many rituals and not acknowledging it, and there's an invitation to do this with more intention and then sort of expand from there and think about how you can bring your heart and your spirit Along with you in a in a more potent way as you engage in ceremony and ritual.

Hmm, thank you for that. Towards the end of we heal together, you talked about joy and how we can find joy, and even these like Deeply painful moments too. Do you mind speaking to why it's important to find joy and how joy can be a part of healing and a part of darkness, mm-hmm Well.

Well, um, I I mean that chapter begins with my, I think, journey of coming to joy as a remembering joy, as my birthright, and also this journey of reclaiming joy, I would say which I think happened over time. But I was a very serious child and I wasn't unhappy. I was just paying attention and feeling things and wondering why certain things were the way they were and whether or not other people noticed. And I certainly went through a period of time where I wondered if I was allowed to feel joy, which I know many people feel this for many reasons. For me it was about really the work I was doing and the magnitude of what we're up against and the systems of dominance that we were talking about earlier and the conditioning, even in activist spaces around like we don't have time to feel joy or center joy or center healing or center our well-being. We're like fighting the cause. There was like deep conditioning around that and then unlearning around that, because without joy I don't think we can sustain our work right. Our practice are coming together for something that is bigger. Joy is part of that, and there's also a recognition in this chapter of more of that tension, of and it relates to what I said about ancestors and trauma and we can't heal at all. We can't heal everything that's happening right now. Like I, michelle, cannot take care of everything that's going wrong on the planet right now, can't do it. I can do my part of it and I'm allowed to feel joy alongside the grief and the pain and the things that make no sense to me, that are happening, that we're doing to each other on the planet. Like I'm allowed to feel joy, and without that, I think the pain could consume me and us. And so this chapter is really a like call to be curious, to be in awe of all that is happening, to bring this in because I think it builds resilience to alongside the things that are happening that are causing us to feel heartbroken, and it's like both can exist at the same time, and there are many different teachings in this chapter around how to connect with joy and a real acknowledgement of how much we're discouraged from feeling joyful. Yeah, or that, or like believing with to earn our joy, or we have to write and it's like, no, that's not actually true. Maybe the hummingbird that I saw earlier on the butterfly bush, that brought me this moment of joy and like, oh, and like there's so too, was so special. I see them all the time, but it was like, oh my gosh, there's a hummingbird, right. That like childlike wonder, that curiosity, that belief in magic, right, because hummingbirds feel very magical to me and I don't really know where they come from. Like it feels like they just come out of nowhere and they're just there, little spirits flying around. It's like embracing a moment like that, even as it's been raining in North Carolina for a full week.

And it's a man.

And it's climate chaos is real. It's happening in. The bees can't go out and forage, right. It's like I saw that in my yard and I saw these hummingbirds. That brought me joy and was like I'm actually just going to feel both. And that's just a small. It's a small example, but it felt big this morning, right, like I'm going to make space for all of this in my experience of being human and alive, because I'm going to need the joyful moments to sustain me, as they're going to be many moments of of trauma, of of the horrific things that are unfolding in this planet. And and what if we leaned into joy without feeling like we had to earn it right or believing we're not worthy of it and we have to do something to be worthy of it? What if it's just part of our experience.

Yeah, I love that time. I think you started our conversation this way, too is just like we're not healing because we're broken. We're not what the rhetoric is. Healing is just a part of being human in this worldly. Experience and joy, again, isn't something that we are ever unworthy of or need to earn. It's just simply a part of what we get to experience as being human. And letting go of that I almost think like wrongness I don't know if this is the right word that dominant culture puts into us that we have to be hustling, working, earning, doing. There's something wrong with us that needs to be fixed all the time. But when we can come back to that spirit, that home, that space of deep peace and wholeness within the heaviness of darkness, the light within us, that's when we can really start to step into healing beyond ourselves.

Yeah, that's right, and there is so much, there's so many things that will I did start the conversation with that there's so many things that will tell us we are, we are broken, but this we heal together as a call for us, as you just shared, to Do this. A lot in my work and talk about is a call for us to remember. It's like remember who we are, remember who we are to each other, remember who we belong to, and that reclamation process is what it feels like this, this remembering, remember who we want to be and how we want to be, and that interconnectedness in the way you just spoke of.

Yeah, I really appreciate you bringing that word into the conversation of remembering and letting that be a key component of our healing remembering our connection to ourselves, our ancestors, the natural world and the communities that we're a part of.

Mm, hmm.

Yeah, to leave listeners for our conversation today. Is there one thing that you would recommend someone listening do today to help them remember and heal within community?

I would invite people to, as they think about healing, not only think about how you come into community with people that you're you know, but think about the power of coming into space with people that you may not yet know. And and think about the connections that can be built, even as we come from different experiences and spaces with different stories and lived experiences and lineages. To try that and I say this now because I think we've been in a time with covert, of great isolation. Many people have been isolated and there can be a tendency to, yes, want to be out in community, but not necessarily in spaces that are unknown to us or people who are unknown. Right, like. There can be this like, yeah, I want to be around and I think I would invite people again. It's like, well, we're all your people really, so you know. It's like just thinking about again who we belong to and if, if we belong to each other, what does that mean about how we commune and who we commune with and the risks that we might take. And we, you know, extend generosity and grace and care to one another and the way we listen and witness one another. I would invite people into that kind of practice and agree around that. What does it mean? To acknowledge that we're not in this alone. We're not all having the same experience, but we're not in this alone, and so I would remind people of this as well, because often people who are in a healing process can feel like they're the only one experiencing the same thing they're experiencing, and it's not true. And so to lean into the collective nature of our healing and the power of that to bring us back into wholeness, I really, really love those, those last words to land with and especially.

You know we all have a lot of healing to do in the world today. There's a lot of collective grief that we are experiencing and a lot of hard work and healing that needs to be done, and we need to do it together. We need to do it alone, just like you said. So I highly recommend that listeners by Michelle's book we Heal Together. The link will be in the show notes. That is my recommendation of a first step. But, michelle, I would love for you to share with listeners what are other ways that we can support you and the work that you're doing in the world.

Thank you. So certainly, as you recommended, buying reading we Heal Together, being in book clubs, with sharing it with people. I think it's medicine for sure. And people can also stay in community with me through my website, which likely will be in the show notes. And the other thing that's coming to mind around support is I have taught for many, many years and I don't know if I don't think I've ever turned anyone away from a teaching, from an opportunity to be in space with me because of who I am and what I believe in and wanting to make space. And I have a scholarship fund for Black, indigenous and people of color, two-spirit, lgbtqia plus folks to support people who may need some financial support. I always offer a sliding scale and typically I pay what you can, but I have this way people can donate to the scholarship fund so that people can join my offerings and that's a real, tangible way people can support those who might have resources to do that. And for those who don't, you know if something I shared today touched you, resonated, inspired you in some way, or if you read we Heal Together, and it does sharing my work with people.

Michelle, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. Thank you for the incredibly impactful work that you continue to show up for in this world every day and for helping us all heal, and I'm really happy to be a part of your family, and your family member and that we do it together.

Thank you, thanks for inviting me to be here and thank you for the work you do. It's been an honor to be in community and conversation with you.

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