What if we regarded our grief as holy and human?
Finding Refuge is a book designed to guide you through exploring what is breaking your heart, where grief resides, and how it affects you.
We are holding grief in our bodies and bones, often in isolation. And yet, our grief isn’t isolated. It is pervasive. To respond to the grief that we experience as a collective, we need to be present to what is breaking our hearts. We need a spiritual practice to hold and allow us to feel grounded as we begin to recognize our broken-heartedness. When we turn toward our broken-heartedness, we can begin to acknowledge what we are grieving and we can create space to grieve. As we grieve, we also tap into our own capacity to heal. We connect with our resilience and begin to piece back together the parts of ourselves that feel shattered. We come back into wholeness.
In Finding Refuge, you will receive:
Divinity
Spiritual Practices
Rituals
Journal Prompts
Pranayama
Meditations
Finding Refuge is a book designed to guide you through exploring what is breaking your heart, where grief resides, and how it affects you. This book is intended to serve as a tool for healing yourself, thus allowing you to create conditions to heal what continually shatters many of us—the immense amount of suffering on the planet. It is a resource designed for you to be present with your grief by committing to a spiritual practice. And, it is a resource designed for you to digest the unprocessed grief that has emerged from the losses we are experiencing as a collective—the planet, resources, relationships, connection, and the pain of living in an unjust world. It is a resource that beckons you to be present to your broken-heartedness while remaining openhearted.
Download the Finding Refuge during the Holidays Guide
The Finding Refuge During the Holidays Guide is a free downloadable PDF guide to offer some journaling prompts and practices for how you can find refuge amid all that is swirling inside and around you right now.
Download the Finding Refuge Book Club Guide
The Finding Refuge Book Club Guide is a free downloadable resource designed to center what we are holding in our hearts, make space for and process individual and collective grief, and offer guidance on facilitating a conversation and discussion about Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief.
Join the Finding Refuge Sadhana
A 40-Day Sadhana Practice
In honor of the publication of Finding Refuge, Michelle is offering a 40-day self-guided Sadhana Practice. This Sadhana will include prerecorded meditations, rituals, short asana practices, and an electronic journal, intended to give you space for stillness, time for reflection, and an opportunity to acknowledge and let grief move through you with ease.
Meet Michelle Cassandra johnson
she/her
Michelle is a social justice warrior, author, dismantling racism trainer, empath, yoga teacher and practitioner, and an intuitive healer. With over 20 years of experience leading dismantling racism work and working with clients as a licensed clinical social worker, Michelle has a deep understanding of how grief impacts the mind, body, spirit, and heart. Finding Refuge, published by Shambhala Publishing, is her second book.
listen to the podcast
Join Michelle for conversations centered in the exploration of collective grief and liberation.
The Finding Refuge podcast exists to remind us about all the ways we can find refuge during unsettling and uncertain times, and to remind us about the resilience and joy that comes from allowing ourselves to find refuge.
"Too many of us try to use spiritual practices to lower the charge and weight of our grief. Michelle Cassandra Johnson wisely encourages us do the opposite—to accept, embrace, and metabolize grief’s full charge and full weight. Instead of shying away from our breaking hearts, we need to lean in and experience the breaking. Thus, we find refuge not from our grief, but in it. As Johnson wisely reminds us, ‘Spiritual practice is about awakening and becoming aware—it is not about bypassing our collective trauma."
—Resmaa Menakem, bestselling author of My Grandmother's Hands
Finding Refuge is now available
Order your copy today
"Finally, a skillful, actionable resource that addresses healing beyond merely the individual and recognizes the necessity of addressing the grief that results from impact social and collective trauma. People both marginalized and privileged will find tangible practices to reclaim the heart and humanity that oppressive systems have sought to rob every single one of us of. Finding Refuge is an essential offering for these times."
—Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Sensei
Finding Refuge, the audiobook, is now available. The stories in Finding Refuge are so tender, vulnerable, and raw. Which is exactly why Michelle has narrated the book herself, to bring her own voice to these stories as they come to life.
Get the audiobook
"Perhaps the greatest task for us in this new era is the work of allowing our hearts to break. In Finding Refuge, Michelle Johnson weaves together a path of practice that becomes a balm tending to our unexpressed grief. She helps us to understand that when we allow our broken hearts to be tended to through practice, care, and attention, we are doing the liberatory work of grieving. Finding Refuge is a gift to anyone lost in sorrow."
—Lama Rod Owens, author of Love and Rage and Radical Dharma
May your grief be honored and seen. May our grief be honored and seen. May we expose and regurgitate what needs to be processed now so we do not pass on trauma to future generations. May we move through the loving act of being with our tender hearts and our grief. May we move through the loving act of being in space together, witnessing one another in our healing.
—Michelle Cassandra Johnson