The Wisdom of the Hive: Facing Fear and the Future Together, Part 2 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
Session 2 will focus on bees as spiritual guides, doulas, and time travelers. Michelle will facilitate a conversation with individuals who work at the edge of birth, death, and the liminal space such as birth and death doulas, beekeepers, artists, and healers.
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
Omisade Burney-Scott (she/her) is a seventh-generation Black Southern feminist, storyteller, and reproductive justice advocate. She is also the Founder and Chief Menopause Steward of The Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause (BGG2SM), a multidisciplinary narrative and culture shift project focused on normalizing menopause by centering the stories of Black women, transgender, gender-expansive people, and other marginalized groups of the Global Majority.
Established in 2019, BGG2SM's core program offerings include a podcast that provides guidance and support for marginalized communities through the various stages of menopause, curated intergenerational storytelling gatherings, and a digital zine titled "Messages from the Menopausal Multiverse." She has been featured in multiple prominent media outlets, such as Oprah Daily, Forbes, VOGUE, WebMD, NPR, InStyle Magazine, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Additionally, she has written articles for Yes! Magazine, Blavity, Oprah Daily, The Honey Pot Company, and Ms. Magazine.
Over the past 30 years, Omisade’s work has been rooted in social justice movements focused on the liberation of marginalized communities, starting with her own. She has been active in movement space since 1995 and has served as an organizational culture and capacity-building consultant for 20 years for nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. She currently serves on the advisory boards of Elektra Health and the Honey Pot Company Pulse. Omisade is a member of the 2023 Open Society Foundations Soros Justice Fellowship cohort, working to expand the narrative shift work of the Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause for formerly incarcerated and system-impacted individuals. Omisade graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989. She resides in North Carolina and is the proud mother of two beautiful sons.
https://blackgirlsguidetosurvivingmenopause.com/
Ariella Daly is a writer, natural beekeeper, and dreamwork teacher with 25 years of experience in spiritual ecology, feminine rites, and animist practice, and 15 years as natural beekeeper. She is the founder of Honey Bee Wild, a sanctuary for women’s ancestral remembering through bees, dreams, and myth.
Trained in oracular dreamwork and shamanic ritual, Ariella’s work weaves practical hive tending with deep spiritual inquiry. Her long-form programs—Tending the Sacred Hive and Dreamer’s Sanctum—have guided hundreds of women into direct relationship with the sacred through beekeeping, dreaming, seasonal ceremony, and ecological devotion.
Ariella teaches from the ground of lived experience: as a beekeeper, a dreamer, and a lifelong student of the sacred feminine. Her work is known for bridging myth and practice, rooted in reverence for the unseen and the more-than-human world.
She lives in Northern California with her daughter, where she teaches, tends her hives, and writes beside the oaks.
Aditi Sethi, MD is a hospice and palliative care physician, end-of-life doula, and the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Conscious Living & Dying. She is devoted to bridging the sacred and practical dimensions of living and dying, offering compassionate, community-supported care that honors the dignity and interconnectedness of all beings.
Featured in the film The Last Ecstatic Days, Aditi is emerging as a powerful voice in the movement to transform our relationship with death. Her recent TEDx talk in Asheville, NC—“The Art of Dying Before You Die”—reflects her passion for inspiring a holistic and sacred approach to the end-of-life journey.
Her work is deeply influenced by her Indian heritage, spiritual practice, and a lifelong love of music as a path to healing and transformation.
https://aditimusic.com/aditi-sethi-md
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.
