Let’s Experience: Telling the Bees
As part of bee folklore, there was a practice that involved bees being told of significant life events—births, marriages, deaths, and other life transitions. It is believed that this practice of telling the bees is connected with bees being psychopomps, beings who could guide souls to the afterlife and other realms. This tradition uplifts the importance of ceremony, storytelling, and ritual as it relates to engaging with the bees and natural world to support us in our mourning and grief process. In this offering, Michelle Cassandra Johnson guides you through the process and practice of telling the bees about your heartache and how you are acknowledging, honoring, digesting, and metabolizing the sorrows in the world. Using meditation to connect with a honeybee hive, Michelle invites you to share what is in your heart with them, and listen to what the honeybee might have to offer in response to you and the sorrows you are present with. This experience will include meditation, presencing ourselves to our individual and collective grief, humming, some movement, and discussion.
Purchase two of Michelle's books, Finding Refuge and We Heal Together, from Shambhala Publications and receive 30% off. Enter REIMAGINEMCJ at checkout. The code is activated and valid through December 20.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson is an author, activist, spiritual teacher and practitioner, racial equity consultant and trainer, and intuitive healer. She approaches her life and work from a place of knowing we are, can, and must heal individually and collectively. Michelle teaches workshops and immersions and leads retreats and transformative experiences nationwide. As a dismantling racism educator, she has worked with large corporations, non-profits, and community groups. Michelle published the first edition of Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World in 2017; and the 2nd edition of Skill in Action in November 2021, published by Shambhala Publications. Her second book, Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief, was published by Shambhala Publications in 2021. Her newest book, We Heal Together: Rituals and Practice for Building Community and Connection, published by Shambhala Publications, explores the deep knowing and truth that we are interconnected; we belong to one another. We Heal Together offers rituals and practices meant to dream us into a new way of being to benefit the highest and fullest good. A Space For Us: A Guide For Leading Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Affinity Groups, was published by Beacon Press in August 2023. Michelle's latest book, Illuminating Our True Nature: Yogic Practices for Personal and Collective Healing, explores the root causes of suffering, how to disrupt them, and work toward collective liberation.
Michelle was a Tedx speaker at Wake Forest University in 2019 and has been interviewed on several podcasts in which she explores the premise and foundation of Skill in Action, along with embodied approaches to racial equity work, creating ritual in justice spaces, our divine connection with nature and Spirit, and how we as a culture can heal.
Michelle leads courageously from the heart with compassion and a commitment to address the heartbreak dominant culture causes for many because of the harm it creates. She inspires change that allows people to stand in their humanity and wholeness in a world that fragments most of us. She lives in North Carolina with her sweet dog, Jasper, and her honeybees.
https://www.michellecjohnson.com/
About the Series “The Whole World in Our Hands”
Collective grief is a response to tragedy among cultural groups, communities, towns, nations, and global citizens. War, terror, racism, natural disaster, the pandemic, environmental injustice, and mass shootings adversely affect all of us directly or indirectly via news and social media. In these times of trouble, let’s examine shared experiences of grief through listening, learning, mindfulness, and activation.
About Reimagine
Reimagine is a nonprofit organization catalyzing a uniquely powerful community–people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and faiths (and no faith) coming together to create a more compassionate world. We support each other in facing adversity, loss, and mortality and channeling life's biggest challenges into meaningful action and growth.
