There is No Neutral
Michelle Cassandra Johnson offers critical insights into the impacts of trauma on the holistic health of Black women, an area often overlooked in broader dialogues on wellness. As an activist, author, yogi, healer and social change influencer immersed in struggles for justice, Johnson provides a powerful lens for examining and addressing the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wounds oppression inflicts. With her lived experience as a Black woman, she bears firsthand knowledge of how privilege and inequity operate to undermine collective wholeness. Crucially, Johnson not only identifies the deleterious effects of systems of oppression but spotlights pathways toward individual and communal restoration.
Across her anti-oppression trainings, yoga instruction, and intuitive healing sessions, healing and wholeness constitute Johnson’s guiding framework addressing participants’ needs. Having spent years on the frontlines of justice movements while yearning for spaces integrating ritual, ceremony and spiritual nourishment, she insightfully bridges activism and contemplative practices.
As a yoga teacher for over a decade situated in communities overlooking systemic injustices, Johnson discerned limitations in many spiritual spaces and yoga communities’ consciousness surrounding these issues. Driven by her commitment to holistic wellness, she founded Skill in Action in 2013 to train social justice activists and yoga teachers in tools at the potent intersection of these pursuits.
Given many Black women’s subjection to traumatic burdens from intersecting forms of oppression, Johnson’s offerings hold profound potential for nurturing resilience. Via her multidimensional understanding of trauma’s impacts on “mind, body, spirit and heart,” she empowers those marginalized at this nexus to reclaim agency over their healing journey. The restorative modalities she provides counterbalance exhausting struggles for survival and human dignity. Building consciousness of linkages between activism and spiritual health simultaneously equips Black women with practices for sustaining themselves amid unrelenting threats to their flourishing.
Ultimately, Johnson constitutes an invaluable resource for appreciating Black women’s complete welfare given her ability to address wounds shaped by intersecting racialized, gendered and economic realities. The frameworks she constructs lovingly uphold Black women’s right to holistic wellbeing rather than narrowly concentrating on physical health. Womanist scholars and communities committed to illuminating overlooked dimensions of Black women’s lives will find critical insights regarding their needs for stability and renewal throughout the individual and collective parts constituting their whole selves in Johnson’s teachings.
The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2024
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx