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  • Published: 6 September 2021
  • ISBN: 9781611809367
  • Imprint: Shambhala
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 168
  • RRP: $29.99

Finding Refuge

Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief



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.

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.

  • Published: 6 September 2021
  • ISBN: 9781611809367
  • Imprint: Shambhala
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 168
  • RRP: $29.99

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Praise for Finding Refuge

“Too many of us try to use spiritual practices to lower the charge and weight of our grief. Michelle Cassandra Johnson wisely encourages us do the opposite—to accept, embrace, and metabolize grief's full charge and full weight. Instead of shying away from our breaking hearts, we need to lean in and experience the breaking. Thus, we find refuge not from our grief, but in it. As Johnson wisely reminds us, 'Spiritual practice is about awakening and becoming aware—it is not about bypassing our collective trauma.'”—Resmaa Menakem, bestselling author of My Grandmother's Hands