Finding Refuge

Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief

By: Michelle Cassandra Johnson

Narrated by: Michelle Cassandra Johnson

Learn how to process your own grief - as well as family, community, and global grief - with this fierce and openhearted guide to healing in an unjust world.

In unsettling and uncertain times, the individual and collective heartbreak that lives in our bodies and communities can feel insurmountable. Many of us have been conditioned by the dominant culture to not name, focus on, or wade through the difficulties of our lives. But in order to heal, we must make space for grief and prioritize our wholeness, our humanity, and our inherent divinity.

In Finding Refuge, social justice activist, social worker, and yoga teacher Michelle Cassandra Johnson offers those who feel brokenhearted, helpless, confused, powerless, and desperate the tools they need to be present with their grief while also remaining openhearted. Through powerful personal narrative and meditation and journaling practices at the end of each chapter that explore being present with your heart, Michelle empowers us to see that each of us has a role to play in building enough momentum to take intentional action and shift what is unsettled and unjust in the world. Finding Refuge is an invitation to pick up the shattered parts of yourself and remember your strength, wholeness, and sacredness through this practice of presence and attending to your grief.

©2021 Michelle Cassandra Johnson (P)2021 Shambhala Publications

Critic reviews

"In Finding Refuge, social justice activist, social worker, and yoga teacher Michelle Cassandra Johnson offers those who feel brokenhearted, helpless, confused, powerless, and desperate the tools they need to be present with their grief while also remaining openhearted. Through powerful personal narrative and meditation and journaling practices at the end of each chapter that explore being present with your heart, Michelle empowers us to see that each of us has a role to play in building enough momentum to take intentional action and shift what is unsettled and unjust in the world. Finding Refuge is an invitation to pick up the shattered parts of yourself and remember your strength, wholeness, and sacredness through this practice of presence and attending to your grief." (Rev. angel Kyodo williams, sensei)

"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, best-selling author of My Grandmother's Hands)

"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)

Life changing

I can and will listen to this multiple times. It is the medicine my soul needed at this moment in life. Michelle’s words and practices spoke to my soul.

Practice with this profound book! It is healing!

Michelle Cassandra Johnson’s voice is soothing. Her stories engaged my soul. Practices work! Listen up!

an important read for moving forward to heal

Inspirational and practical, enlightened and engaging, this book is one I will return to again and again as I do my own work to heal and support the healing of our world. Thank you Michelle Cassandra for being a taproot and showing us how to grieve and grow.

An absolutely beautiful book

Moving. Touching. Inspiring. Transforming. In all ways, for self and for the collective. Everyone should read this. I’m gonna start it again. Today.

Sincere and wise

What a meaningful book for this deeply challenging time we’re in, facing personal losses, a global pandemic, systemic oppression and ecosystem devastation. I’m grateful for Michelle Cassandra Johnson’s authenticity, vulnerability and wisdom. I’ll be drawing on her insights often.