You can attend the entire weekend, which we recommend, or one session. The weekend will focus on Michelle’s third book, We Heal Together: Rituals and Practices For Building Community and Connection.
We are connected to all things and the entire web of life. Every raindrop, blade of grass, bird taking flight, baby being born, ancestor transitioning, seed germinating, bear entering a cave to hibernate, whale migrating, and sea turtle resting on the shore. Even though we may know how interconnected we are to all things, we may experience periods of feeling isolated and disconnected. During these times, it is essential for us to resist the urge to retreat into our disconnection and come back into community with one another. We must reach out, connect with compassion and openness, and practice alongside one another to heal from our past and present-day wounds now and into the future.
Join spiritual teacher and social justice activist Michelle Cassandra Johnson for a transformative workshop exploring communing as a spiritual practice for personal and collective healing. Understand how to connect to ourselves and all beings, past, present, and future by working with the universal truth that we all come from each other. We are kin and community, and we thrive and heal in community.
Friday Evening | 6-8PM
Healing Our Hearts, Healing The Collective
An Asana and Meditation Practice with Michelle C. Johnson
The path of yoga asks us to deeply feel our hearts and allow what is present in our hearts to guide us toward personal and collective healing. Join Michelle C. Johnson for an asana and meditation practice focused on the heart and healing and why we need to come together to heal in community at this time. The practice will ask you to turn toward your heart, feel what resides there, remember your capacity to open your heart, find joy through a connection with the heart, and heal. The practice will include a flow aligned with the breath and heart, restorative postures for self-reflection and integration, pranayama, and rest.
Saturday Session 1 | 10AM-12PM
Ritual
Join Michelle C. Johnson for a session focused on rituals and, specifically, how to engage your body in rituals and practices in connection with Spirit as a tool for collective change. Michelle will define ritual and guide you through somatic practices intended to deepen your understanding of how all we need to practice rituals is an intention and openness, to connect with Source, Spirit, and that which is bigger than us, breath, and will. This session will explore how to bring in elemental energy as an ally for our ritual work and ceremony. It will include meditation, movement, pranayama, and attunement practices.
Saturday 2nd session | 2-4PM
Ancestral Connections
Many of us are contemplating how we connect more deeply to our ancestors as we both face uncertain times and create conditions for collective healing. Ancestral work can feel challenging because some of us are unsure of where we come from; some of us have challenging relationships with our ancestors, and some of us may feel fearful of opening the portal to ancestral connections. In this session, Michelle will share about ancestral bonds that both touch on blood lineage and lineage beyond blood. She will guide practices meant to invite you to call on ancestors for support and guidance. In addition, Michelle will share about energetic boundaries for ancestral connections we want protection from. This session will include meditation, pranayama, discussion and self-inquiry, and a shamanic journey intended to call on benevolent beings and ancestors and set up energetic boundaries for protection.
Sunday 1st session | 10AM-12PM
Dreaming Our Way Into the Future
If we want to create a future in which we all are free, we have to dream our way into it. Dreaming requires us to be in a liminal space, between worlds and realms, and the creation of a world where we all have space to be and breathe requires us to bring our dreams into waking life. During this session, Michelle will take you on a journey to connect with what your heart desires as you consider a whole and healed world. The session will include meditation, yoga nidra, and journaling. Each one of these practices will culminate in the weaving of a web of dreams we hold collectively for the future.
Sunday 2nd Session | 2-4PM
The Alchemy of the Honeybee
The final session of the weekend immersion is focused on alchemy. Michelle believes we must be alchemists to traverse the times in which we live. We must connect with our inner magic and the mystery that may not be visible to us but is most certainly unfolding inside and around us. This session will use the honeybee as a teacher of how to connect with inner alchemy for the collective good. Michelle will share some of the ways honeybees alchemize, be that the way they do complex math and create symmetrical hexagons to hold their food, babies, and pollen. Or the way they turn nectar into honey. Or the way they dance with one another. These teachings about alchemy will help us deepen our understanding of how we, too, can alchemize to meet these times. This session will include meditation, humming, brahmari breath, movement, journaling, and small and large group discussions.