Matthew here with the third installment of Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson was an early guest on our show and helped us lay the groundwork for understanding the reality and impacts of racism in the worlds of wellness and new spirituality.
She’s an author, activist, and racial equity trainer. Her latest book, A Space For Us: A Guide For Leading Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Affinity Groups, was published by Beacon Press in August 2023. She lives in North Carolina with her sweet dog, Jasper, and her honeybees.
Show Notes
Michelle Cassandra Johnson
Conspirituality 40: White Supremacy: Grift and Gravity (w/Michelle Cassandra Johnson & Daniel Lombroso)
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Hello, everyone.
Welcome to the Conspirituality Relief Project.
This is your regular timeline cleanser featuring interviews with folks reflecting on hope, faith, resilience, and building community in hard times.
You know, all of the things that you don't hear about otherwise on this particular beat.
These are short personal visits in which I ask my guests the same five questions about their life wisdom, at least as it is in this moment.
My name is Matthew.
My guest today is Michelle Cassandra Johnson, who was an early guest on our show and helped us lay the groundwork for understanding the reality and impacts of racism in the worlds of wellness and new spirituality.
I'll put her full bio in the show notes, but what I can add to that is a memory of the first time I met her.
It was at the annual meeting of the now defunct Yoga Service Council at the Omega Institute way back before the pandemic.
She was leading a workshop in radical inclusivity, doing the kind of sociocultural healing work that has since been targeted by the anti-woke mob as worse than unnecessary, as though it's corrosive to national spirit and white identity.
And that's really strange to remember at this point because the discussion that day and then later over dinner and over the following days was just really friendly and matter of fact and also profound.
What does it mean to have a race and to carry its advantages or wounds into the present?
Who is this culture built to serve and how do we make it more welcoming?
And far from shaming my whiteness, it gave me something to consider and also positive work to do, like mainly around who really is my larger family and how can I take care of them?
And that's what I've always felt around Michelle.
That's what I always feel she's sort of encouraging me to do.
So here's our conversation.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson, welcome to the Conspiratuality Relief Project.
Thank you so much for inviting me to be here.
Okay, so I sent you five questions.
You've had some time with them, and I'm just going to ask them and I'll try to stay out of your way.
The first question is the grim question, but I think it sets the stage for the relief part.
So here we go.
First question.
What terrifies you most in these times?
What terrifies me the most in these times is really the same thing that has always terrified me, which is an awareness that we're so disconnected from what I believe is the core of who we are as humans.
And we've forgotten we are interconnected to all beings, human and more than human.
This, you know, lack of memory around us being interconnected, I feel like leads us, and I'm including myself in this, to dehumanize, to extract, to exploit, to oppress, and to remain complacent within systems that are actually not designed for us to be liberated or for all beings, human and more than human, to be liberated.
And in thinking about the response to this question and just what's present for me and what terrifies me, I'm aware that suffering, of course, at least in my experience, is part of the human experience.
And it feels like the suffering that humans are creating is untenable and In so many ways might lead to, you know, the demise of humanity and also has led to climate chaos, which I know one of the questions you sent is about that and the destruction of the ecosystem.
So I feel scared that we've moved so far away from being in community with one another.
And I'm curious about whether or not we know how to move back into community.
And I'm scared that, at least in the patterns that have played out historically and continue to play out now, from my observation, that, you know, we've forgotten we are each other's relations and connected to all time and space.
I'm also afraid of the cultural, political...
Climate and chaos.
And I've been thinking a lot about, well, for a while now, particularly during this time, though, about whether or not the chaos that has been generated by humans, because chaos can be generative and we see it in the natural world, the more than human world, all the time.
But I'm curious about whether or not this chaos, this frenzy, this disconnection will consume us.
And in some of my work and practice, I sit with this question of how we can consume the chaos so that we are not consumed by it, which I know many people talk about, have written about, and that through this process of consuming chaos that we can transmute it into something that might move us back into balance.
And I'm afraid we've forgotten we are nature.
I'm sitting in my office right now.
I'm looking outside.
A cardinal just flew by.
There are trees around.
I have honeybees.
I'm connected to all of these things.
And in fact...
You know, came from nature.
There isn't a real separation.
Nature really is adaptable and it also tries to move into a state of balance to keep the ecosystem in balance, particularly when humans are not destroying the ecosystem and creating climate chaos and also operating out of this place of a hierarchy of human, right, being superior to all other parts of the ecosystem.
I have a 13-year-old stepdaughter.
Her name is Anna.
And I am afraid about the future for her of the world that she will continue to grow up in.
And this month I'll turn 49 and I'm thinking about her like when she turns 49, right?
Yeah.
What will the world be like?
What will we have left her to deal with?
And not just her, she's close to me, but think about all of the youth, young people.
And I also, on the other end of that spectrum, my mother's 81 and I think about her, her name is Clara.
And the amount of time she's told me how the world is just changing in ways she never anticipated and not in ways that are, that are positive.
And even though this question is about terror and fear, I also want to say I'm aware of the chaos and I am afraid.
I don't know.
I think I practice or work to have a healthy relationship with fear and also understand, be aware enough, not bypass the things that I just named.
And I think my mother really raised me to, if possible, not be overcome by fear.
This wasn't about her telling me to be strong and force things or that I'm invincible.
She didn't teach me that.
But I think...
She really modeled to me maybe to respond to fear when it arises and not allow it to overtake me.
Well, on that note, the second question is, what is the most meaningful and supportive idea or story that you wind up returning to for reliable wisdom and relief?
I actually want to share part of a myth, and it's the myth of Isis and Osiris.
And I'll just preface this by saying that over the last eight years, I've had a series of dreams about different Egyptian and Greek gods and goddesses from myths.
And even before I read more about them, they were coming to me during dream time.
And the short version of the myth that I want to share As I said, it's about Osiris and Isis.
And I have Isis on different altars and I return to the story because it really reminds me of...
Or it invites me into what it actually means to remember our wholeness or to piece ourselves back together.
And so the short version is that, you know, Osiris was an Egyptian king and he was married to Isis.
And his brother, Seth, was really jealous of him, which, of course, this theme shows up in many myths.
And Seth devised this plan to kill Osiris.
And Seth had this...
He measured Osiris while Osiris was sleeping, and he had this beautiful box that was adorned with gold that he had made, and he knew Osiris would fit into it perfectly.
And Seth had a party.
Isis was not at the party.
Apparently, Osiris was there, and Seth wanted to play this game where he wanted guests to get into the box and to see who would fit.
Of course, he knew Osiris would fit.
And so Osiris went.
It was his turn.
He got in the box and Seth closed the box.
And there wasn't a way for Osiris to get out of the box.
And Seth took the box down to the river and put it in.
And of course, you know, this was again his plan to kill Osiris because Seth wanted the kingdom.
And Isis heard about this and of course was heartbroken.
And, you know, she went to the river to...
See if she could find Osiris' body and she did find it in the box and she wanted to move through the rites that would happen when someone transitioned so that they could transition to the afterlife.
And so she hid Osiris' body in the river grass so that she could come back and be in ceremony and perform this ritual.
Well, Seth went down to the river and saw Osiris had been pulled out of the box and was in the river grass.
And, of course, was, I would say, rageful based on what the myth tells us.
And he ended up cutting up Osiris into pieces.
And he cut Osiris, sometimes the myth says, into 13 pieces, sometimes it says 14 pieces.
But he cut him up into all these pieces.
And Isis came back to perform the rites and discovered that Osiris had been cut up and the pieces of his body were all over Egypt.
And so she transformed into a huge bird and she flew around Egypt and gathered the pieces of her husband's body, recovered the pieces to place them back together to perform the rites so that he could go to the afterlife again. recovered the pieces to place them back together to perform What I love about this myth is that In myths, like people come back to life and all these different things happen.
So I love that part too, because I like different realms of experience.
And also, what I really love is what I mentioned before, which is that How do we transform ourselves, right?
Isis transformed into this big bird to go and recover the pieces.
How do we transform ourselves to recover what may be broken or what we believe is broken and piece it back together, particularly given the chaos that is unfolding on the planet?
So often I think about like, what would this be like to transform in this way?
To remember and come back into wholeness in the ways I spoke about earlier, the way we've forgotten our wholeness.
And this particular myth is in one of my books, We Heal Together, which is a chapter about the honeybees.
And I use this myth to talk about the honeybees because they...
Our superorganism and they don't believe that their individuals, each bee and every part of the hive is part of the superorganism.
And this really reminded me of that, this power to transform and transmute.
To perhaps come back into this idea and practice of being a super organism and seeing ourselves human and more than human as an extension of one another and the entire ecosystem.
So this is the myth that I come back to all of the time.
Speaking of superorganisms, the third question is, what is the greatest obstacle you face in forming community relationships?
And how do you work to overcome it?
I found this question so interesting because forming shaping community has been fairly easy for me in my life, at least in my adult life.
Although my mom would say when I was a teenager, I was always calling friends and planning something for us to do, which still happens.
Many gatherings in my home.
And I'll speak to some of the conditioning, though, and experiences people have that I understand make it such that it would be difficult to build community.
I do want to share that I've moved, I live in North Carolina right now, and I have moved a few times, but I moved across the country in 2017 to Portland, Oregon, lived there for a year, and then I moved back to North Carolina, but in a different part of North Carolina.
When I moved to Portland, I was only there for, I'd been there for 11 days before I heard the news that my father passed away.
And in that moment, when I heard that, I had attended a circle, a shamanic circle that actually met monthly, but I had attended it once during that 11 days and first 11 days in Portland.
And those were the people who showed up for me.
They didn't know me.
They showed up for me when my father died.
And then my grandmother passed away.
And they showed up again and they were like some of my closest friends.
And when I moved back to North Carolina from Portland, I already had a circle of friends.
They were friends that came to a workshop that I taught before I ever moved to this part of North Carolina.
And I knew they would be my people.
And when I bought my house and moved into it and had no furniture, I was waiting for my furniture, they all came over and blessed my house and brought food and brought bolsters for us to sit on.
And this is what I mean.
I feel like everywhere I've gone, People have shown up for me, which again, I know is not everyone's experience.
And of course, there's so much going on that fragments us and makes it difficult to build community and disrupts community.
So that's real.
I just am naming this because I was trying to think about when I've experienced obstacles to forming community communities.
And I do want to say, I mentioned my mom, that she, my mom was a special education teacher for 32 years, and I watched her take care of people, families, and children in a system that was not really designed to take care of the kids she was working with, the family she was working with in inner city Richmond and Virginia.
And so I feel like she taught me a lot about how to relate to people, how to connect, and how to care for people, even if I don't know someone, how to extend care, which I think is part of the reason why, so far, it's been easy for me to create community.
I do want to name that I think I mean, from what I've witnessed and perhaps at times experienced maybe a little of is that I think there's this deep conditioning about doing things on our own.
Although my conditioning for my mom was different, but from dominant culture was like, do it on your own.
But from my community and church, right, or my family and my extended family, it was like we are that superorganism.
We do come from one another.
So I got a lot of different messages.
But I think the dominant cultural norm, as I think about systems and, you know, hierarchies of bodies, is that we're individuals and that we have to do everything on our own and that we can't ask for help.
So I think that...
Can make it difficult to form community.
And in fact, at times we're incentivized to do things on our own.
People are rewarded for that as if we're not in relationship with one another.
I also know that in communities, and I know this has happened in many spiritual communities, that there are traumas that have happened that sever relationships.
And one sense of belonging in a space, which is actually what I think most of us are seeking as I think about community.
So, you know, that's a little about community.
And one of the practices that I return to and I teach, and this might be helpful for people given All that's going on right now is a practice of imagining a web and our web of relations and who we're in community with.
So sometimes it can be difficult to be in community with other humans for many, many reasons.
But this activity, this practice about the web is about ancestors and the honeybees and The trees, right?
The more than human world and the garden, which I spent a lot of time in this morning before meeting with you here now.
So this practice around, you know, contemplating and being present to all we're in communion with, I feel like has supported me in decreasing isolation.
And I've offered this practice many times and I feel like It's just broadened people's definition of community when we can open it up to ancestors and deities and the more-than-human world.
It can help people and myself.
It's helped me feel more connected and less isolated.
We'll get to ancestors at the end, but you mentioned care as essential to community formation, and so that's what the fourth question is about.
So it's, if you were responsible, and it sounds like you have been, for comforting and guiding a child, let's say the child is eight, and they are terrified of climate catastrophe, how would you do that?
What would you say?
I love this question.
And it also makes me sad.
I would say to the eight year old that, you know, when I was eight, the summers weren't as hot and the climate seemed more, more predictable than me.
These weather patterns we're experiencing, which many of us know are not normal and point to climate chaos.
So I would say, yeah, this is real.
I don't know if we're experiencing more natural disasters.
I have no idea.
It just feels that way.
It could be the chaos that's happening on the planet.
And so I would say things have changed and it is scary to think about how the climate has changed and is changing in ways that we may not be able to repair or repair quickly enough.
And it's normal to feel scared when something is happening that is out of our control.
Although, you know, humans created this chaos, but for an eight year old, this wasn't in their control.
This is the legacy that was left to them due to my behavior, my parents' behavior, grandparents' behavior, corporations and systems, all of that.
It would normalize that it makes sense to feel scared when it feels like this is not in one's control.
And I would offer that fear about something that's changing, that we can feel and sense and witness.
Particularly as a young person is a sign that, you know, this eight-year-old really cares about the earth and cares about the climate and cares about the ecosystem.
And that care to me really points to how we might disrupt the chaos and can point us to what's within our lives.
Our control to take action and disrupt.
So I would ask, you know, while this may feel like it's not in your control and there's a lot of fear, what is in your control?
What have you learned?
What are people talking about that we can do for the planet?
What is your relationship like with the planet?
And I would likely name, you know, the trees and the water and the earth, the dirt, right?
Do you get to play in the dirt and what does that feel like?
Are your friends afraid?
Is anyone in your family talking to you about this, given or chosen extended family?
Can you talk to them about it as well?
Maybe they're thinking the same thing and maybe they're afraid to and just haven't known how to talk to you about it or been afraid that it's going to happen.
Overwhelm you.
They may be able to help you think about what you can do that is within your control to disrupt climate chaos and destruction.
And I would also say that, and this is sort of from my eight-year-old self, while my mother didn't say I had to be strong, she didn't use those words, there was some conditioning around feel your feelings and then move on.
And I know why.
And so what I would say to this eight-year-old is that feeling something like fear or an emotion, especially in response to climate chaos and feeling like, you know, are the mountains going to be there anymore?
Is the water going to be there, right?
Or what is the quality going to be?
That feeling these kind of emotions is an indication we're alive and we're feeling into what's going on.
Versus numbing out or not paying attention.
And so I would say to this eight-year-old, I'm really glad you're paying attention and you're feeling.
And I know that it's fear, but still I'm glad that this eight-year-old is feeling something.
And I would acknowledge that your awareness is a gift and a firm of support.
May we all be as aware as this eight-year-old.
The last question is...
If your wisest ancestor came to you in a dream to offer you one piece of advice about living in difficult times, what would that be?
This actually happened.
My grandmother, Dorothy, who I consider to be my wisest ancestor, came to me in a dream.
She was...
In my backyard, there's an oak tree that she never saw while she was here on Earth, but that I associate with her and her energy.
And so in this dream, she was in front of this oak tree and she didn't speak to me.
Her arms were outstretched and she was wearing purple.
And then all of a sudden she was holding this box and And it's actually a box that I found in her house after she transitioned.
I'd forgotten all about it until it showed up in this dream in her hands.
And what she was communicating to me was that I needed to make an offering.
To the ancestors, to the tree, which is a practice that I do a lot like pouring libations and speaking to the ancestors and connecting.
She was really communicating to make an offering.
And I didn't know what kind of offering she wanted me to make in the sense of I wasn't sure what elements, components needed to be part of this ritual for this offering.
And so I sat with it and I meditated and I kept asking her to show me what she wanted me to offer.
And finally, what she communicated was tobacco, flowers, some honey, images of ancestors.
Which is actually what was in the box when I found the box in my house and had forgotten where it was the night before the ritual.
I found it.
So images of my ancestors.
She wanted wine.
My grandmother liked a glass of wine on holidays.
And she wanted a friend, my friend Katie, to come and sit with me to do this ritual.
So we come in and Move through this ritual.
And the other thing that happened related to the ritual is that I wrote a letter to my grandmother the night before we engaged in this ritual to make this offering, which I wasn't planning to do.
And I wrote a letter that I was...
And in the letter, I talked about how afraid...
Thinking about the eight-year-old, how afraid I was.
This was in 2020 when I wrote this letter, or may have been early 2021, but I think it was 2020.
So I was like, Grandma, I'm scared.
I don't know what's going to happen in the future.
I'm scared for the climate.
I'm scared we've forgotten who we are.
I'm scared for the more than human world.
COVID-19 is happening.
The murder hornet is attacking honeybee hives, right?
Which is...
I mean, that happening at the same time as COVID. But anyway, I wrote all of this to her and I set out to do the ritual and I read this letter to her.
Well, what I realized as we were doing the ritual is a week before and after I'd had the dream, I'd had a bunch of ivy taken off of the tree.
I didn't know that ivy...
Apparently takes out nutrients from the tree and the people here decided to take it off the tree because they said it was strangling the tree and the tree needed to be liberated.
So there was that.
Also during the ritual, I noticed this hook that was on the tree.
I don't know what the hook held in the past, but I had never seen the hook.
And so...
What I think my grandmother Dorothy was saying to me is that the ivy and the hook, and this is central to my practice and work, to me feels like a reminder of us becoming liberated and a reminder that we're not our conditioning and we're not the oppressive systems that dehumanize people and destroy ecologies.
And we're not the ivy and we're not the hook and we aren't bound to this way of being.
I don't believe we're hooked to this fate of humans making and creating chaos and that persisting I believe something else is possible.
So I think through the dream and the ritual and the practice, this is what my grandmother was saying to me, that we aren't the conditions in place.
We contribute to these conditions in place, but we contribute to them to either disrupt them or to perpetuate them and that we have some say in that.
And I also, and I mentioned an offering, believe, you know, she was reminding me of reciprocity Generally, but I think in that dream in particular, with the ancestors and the earth, to remember a relationship, to remember the web of communion, to remember I'm in this reciprocal relationship.
The other thing my grandmother would say is, this is one thing, one sentence, she would say, do your work.
She said it all the time.
Michelle, do your work.
Keep going and do your work.
And what she was saying is focus.
Focus.
She was like, focus.
You have a place.
Keep going.
My mother did some of this too, which I'm grateful for.
Like, you know, what is your intention?
What is your goal?
And there's all this noise.
But you, Michelle, you focus on what you're doing, given that I, you know, try to remember I'm in relationship with all beings.
Like, do that.
And so I'm really grateful for that.
She would totally say that.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson, thank you so much for taking the time.
