Race & Resilience: Michelle Cassandra Johnson

Michelle Cassandra Johnson is shaking things up in the yoga world and speaking all the truths about toxic culture and white supremacy so that real healing is possible. She is a social worker, yoga teacher, long time race equity trainer and author of the book Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World. And she is showing us what radical self care really looks like.

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"We are bigger than white supremacy." Michelle C. Johnson with @kkellyyoga on #CTZN Podcast. Check it out: ctznwell.org/ctznpodcast @ctznwell

More about this episode:

Michelle discovered that it is impossible to heal when you’re navigating a system that wasn’t designed to heal you. So, she wrote a book called Skill in Action to help us redefine and reclaim what yoga and wellness really looks like in a toxic culture. Yoga and contemplative practice is a pathway to healing, but only when we are willing to do the difficult and uncomfortable work of acknowledging the truth of a culture that is dominated by ideologies of whiteness and individualism. The pain of that culture of separation demands to be felt and that is the only way towards healing.

She challenges us to hold the reality that we are both one human interdependent family AND (and this is a big “and”) that we are living very different experiences based on how institutions and culture are set up for our particular identity and social location. There is shared experience in how we get free AND there are unique roles and responsibilities that we each play given our location and that is a part of the “skill in action” that we need to cultivate.

The truth is, we are not really doing yoga, we are not really being mindful and we are not really well unless we center a level of consciousness that acknowledges the truth of who we are and how we got here. Otherwise, we are just replicating the toxic systems that we are trying to transform.

But Michelle reminds us that we are bigger than white supremacy and we can be better, We can construct something better. And we have to...for the sake of all us.

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