The Wisdom of the Hive: Facing Fear and the Future Together, Part 1 of 3
In this three-part Reimagine series, Michelle Cassandra Johnson and special guests explore themes from her newest book The Wisdom of the Hive (Sounds True, 2025). By seeing honeybees as our teachers, we can learn about our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world at large. In times marked by grief, chaos and uncertainty, bees offer a powerful example of turning toward pain and fear, committing to better conditions for all beings to survive, and building a sweeter future where all can thrive.
Featuring luminaries from the fields of wellness, science, spirituality, and the arts, this interdisciplinary series includes panel discussions, sound and visual meditations, and tools to foster a more collective mindset, much like the bees, which function as a superorganism, not thinking of themselves as individual bees, but rather as a unified collective. Each session opens and closes with a mindful moment and practice inspired by a buzzing beehive of activity. Together we will cultivate the values of interdependence, strive for greater attunement to one another and the planet, and see the liminal space between darkness and light as a resource for growth.
From September 30 - December 30, 2025, registrants to the series receive a 20% discount on The Wisdom of the Hive paperback on Bookshop.org. Discount code: LetsReimagine20
In session 1, Michelle Cassandra Johnson, spiritual teacher, grief tender, and beekeeper, will introduce her book and set the stage for our understanding of how a honeybee hive functions. In dialogue with author and spiritual teacher Lama Rod Owens, Michelle will share both the practical and mystical components of a hive and relate these components to this time on our planet, weaving in themes of grief, love, interdependence, and the threshold we find ourselves upon now. The program also includes music by singer-songwriter Alexandra “ahlay” Blakely and an opportunity for Q&A with guest speakers.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson is an author, activist, spiritual teacher, racial equity consultant and educator, and intuitive and shamanic healer. She has led transformative work dismantling racism and systems of oppression, disrupting the wellness industry to make it more inclusive and accessible, creating space for healing in myriad ways, and through her work for over two decades as a clinical social worker. Michelle’s work centers on healing from individual and collective trauma, returning to wholeness, and aligning the mind, body, spirit, and heart.
https://www.michellecjohnson.com/wisdom-of-the-hive
Lama Rod Owens is a Black Buddhist Southern Queen. An international influencer with a Master of Divinity degree in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School. A leading voice featured by various national and international news outlets, he is the author of the bestsellers The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors and Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger, and co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation. His teachings center on freedom, self-expression, and radical self-care. Lama Rod’s mission is showing you how to heal and free yourself. He activates the intersections of his identity to create a platform that’s natural, engaging, and inclusive.
Alexandra “ahlay” Blakely is a descendant of Ashkenazi, Scandinavian, and British folk. She is an artist, singer-songwriter, communal grief tender, community organizer, facilitator, and ceramicist walking the path of ancestral healing and the reclaiming of lost cultural memory. Her community singing album Spells from the Unknown offers songs for collective transformation, inquiry, and living in service to the future ones. Her second album, WAILS: Songs for Grief, was recorded with a 200-person choir and is entirely dedicated to grief, inspired by the Whales of the Sea, the wails of our times, and Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow, especially “the five gates of grief.” Her forthcoming third album, Anthems for an Apocalypse, arrives September 2025 and explores themes of collapse, courage, and abolitionist love. Through her music and gatherings, ahlay invites people into deep feeling, collective remembering, and the restoration of belonging across time.
https://www.healingattheroots.com/
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.
