Finding Refuge
Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Learn how to process your own grief--as well as family, community, and global grief--with this fierce and openhearted guide to healing in an unjust world.
In unsettling and uncertain times, the individual and collective heartbreak that lives in our bodies and communities can feel insurmountable. Many of us have been conditioned by the dominant culture to not name, focus on, or wade through the difficulties of our lives. But in order to heal, we must make space for grief and prioritize our wholeness, our humanity, and our inherent divinity.
In Finding Refuge, social justice activist, social worker, and yoga teacher Michelle Cassandra Johnson offers those who feel brokenhearted, helpless, confused, powerless, and desperate the tools they need to be present with their grief while also remaining openhearted. Through powerful personal narrative and meditation and journaling practices at the end of each chapter that explore being present with your heart, Michelle empowers us to see that each of us has a role to play in building enough momentum to take intentional action and shift what is unsettled and unjust in the world. Finding Refuge is an invitation to pick up the shattered parts of yourself and remember your strength, wholeness, and sacredness through this practice of presence and attending to your grief.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Social worker and yoga teacher Johnson (Skill in Action) suggests uplifting methods for processing grief resulting from cultural trauma and systemic oppression. She writes with wisdom and clarity ("Spiritual practice is designed for us to see things as they are, which means we must see, sense, and feel collective suffering"), offering meditation and journaling exercises to help readers connect with a "loving Spirit." Each chapter centers on a personally traumatic experience that caused her to feel "collective grief," such as recognizing racial bias in the medical system after doctors presumptuously dismissed her mother's mysterious ailments as a pinched nerve and delayed treating her spinal stenosis, and unpacks concepts such as spiritual bypassing (using one's spiritual beliefs to avoid hard topics instead of confronting them) and understanding that one is constantly "deciding what our legacy will be with our actions, intentions, and beliefs." She also recommends creating boundaries in order to maintain one's "life force" and communicating with one's ancestors by creating an altar or composing letters. Spiritualists interested in social justice will get much out of Johnson's engaging stories, practical advice, and contemplative practices.
