Finding Refuge

Tamira is both a student and medium of ancestral and earth-honoring wisdom who is committed to centering personal wellness in service to greater cultural healing. She is the beloved grandchild of West African, British & Irish peoples with deep southern roots.

Her Ori (destiny) and spiritual path have conspired to guide her towards studying emergent and embodied ancestral liberation and healing practices, Brazilian earth-honoring traditions and of West African Ifa Òrìṣà tradition. These paths of practice are the foundation of her ritual training and development and continue to shape the contours of the ritual containers and embodied practices that she co-weaves with Spirit and her incarnate kin.

She holds the medicines of ancestral and earth-honoring wisdom with deep reverence and respect for the ways these medicines nourish her life and affirm the interconnectedness and importance of all of our kin-folk seated within the vast web of relations. She is dedicated to co-weaving decolonized, reverence filled ritual containers and intergenerational ancestral connections across space and time. She is honored to co-weave containers and connections which facilitate transformation, healing and celebrate all forms of ancestral diversity through embodied practice and song. 

She is honored to make her home on traditional Catawaba & Eno territory.

Tamira drops wisdom about:

-Ori/Our Destiny
- Connecting with our Ancestors
- Ancestral Wisdom and Medicine
- How to Carry our Medicine Forward
- Listening to Ancestors
- Signs/Symbols from Ancestors
- Altars and Offerings for Ancestors 
- Reciprocity in Relation to Ancestors
- Centering in the Body
- Sustaining our Movements for Social Change through Ritual and Magic
- This Moment as a Classroom
- The Elements and Natural World
- Prayer
- Ritual
- Ceremony
- Magic

You can connect with her at tamiracousett.com or on Instagram @tamiracousett 

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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This is a special episode of the Finding Refuge podcast, in which Tristan Katz (they/them) and Lauren Roberts (she/her) interview me!

Tristan and Lauren are both friends and collaborators of mine and I’m excited to share this conversation with you—a cross-over episode with their newly launched podcast, ALL THE F*CK IN: Showing up for social justice in your work.

Tune in to hear about…

- My career path and what led me to the work I do today
- My experience as a dismantling racism trainer and how I brings this into yoga and wellness spaces
- How I work with rituals to stay connected to my intuition
- What it looks like to operate as an entrepreneur with many different offerings
- All things money and abundance in social change work

And more!

Learn more Tristan and Lauren’s work:

ALL THE F*CK IN Podcast

Tristan’s website

Lauren’s website

Social Justice for Entrepreneurs — a program Tristan and Lauren are co-facilitating with another friend and colleague of ours, Charlie Redd

We’d also love for you to take a screenshot of where the episode resonates with you and tag us in your Instagram stories at @alltfinpodcast, @skillinaction, @tristankatzcreative, and @laurenkayroberts.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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This is a special interview with my friend and fellow lover of honeybees, Karla Michelle Capacetti Quintana.

Karla is a magical woman who weaves between the earthly plane and spiritual realms. Karla Michelle Capacetti-Quintana is a medicine maker, sacred beekeeper, and Earth steward. She is a student of sustainable agriculture, community food systems, yoga & Ayurveda, western herbalism, poetry, feminine-form frame drumming, dreaming, anti-racism and decolonization, alternative economies, bee mysticism, permaculture, and priestess arts. Karla’s roots rise from the island of Boriké, colonially known as Puerto Rico. She currently resides in central Florida on stolen and occupied Timacua and Seminole territory with her parents, grandparents and younger brother on their 5-acre intergenerational land project, Apis Atabey. Apis Atabey is an ancestral food forest, bee sanctuary, and apothecary garden dedicated to birthing a healed Earth for all beeings. In less than a year her and her family have incorporated 50+ varieties of edible and medicinal fruits trees, vegetable crops, herbs, and flowers. Karla envisions Apis Atabey growing to include volunteer workdays and residential work-exchange, produce and herb subscriptions, community dinners and educational workshops. 

In this conversation, we explore:

- A relationship based on reciprocity with the earth and honeybees
- Being born into the dark of the hive
- The messages the bees are sending us at this time 
- How bees are psychopomps
- Love and rage
- Cultivating a deeper relationship with the land
- Being held in community
- The importance of making space to grieve
- Ancestral energy
- Plantcestors 

Connect with Karla on Instagram 

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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Kelley is a creator, coach, yogi, community advocate and writer. She is passionately following the path that at times, calls her, pulls her and propels her forward. She is focused on wholeness and liberation. Individually and collective. That intention looks like a few different things for Kelley. It shows up as teaching yoga, working in community and holding space for others to connect to their own practices, rituals and understandings.

Kelley is a 200 E-RYT with Yoga Alliance and a certified continuing education provider with Yoga Alliance. She is also a certified Accessible Yoga teacher and trainer. Additionally Kelley, is a founding member of The Sanctuary In The City, a Charlotte based non-profit focused on equitable access to healing and educational opportunities to BIPOC through programming, grants and scholarships.

The work she chooses to do means she is traveling to teach, coaching in person and virtually and contributing to some amazing Teacher trainings, conferences and summits. Kelley is based in Charlotte, NC where she lives with my two children Palmer and Duke. Mothering them inspires and informs her work. Kelley wants to hold the space for them to have an expansive and liberated experience. That shows up in the offerings she makes to other parents but also the work around race, equity and liberation that weaves through almost everything she does.

Kelley drops wisdom about:

- Joy as a birthright
- Working outside of systems rooted in systemic oppression and white supremacy
- Parenting
- The practice of yoga and what it means to her.
- Liberation
- Moving away from grind culture
- Prioritizing joy and self-care
- Shifting the culture of wellness
- Pleasure
- How we should ask for everything

You can connect with her at peacefilledmama.com and on Patreon.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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Shankari Goldstein is a Program Manager at the Mind & Life Institute. Trained in the lineage of Integral Yoga, Shankari has spent years connecting to breath, body, strength, movement, and energy. She is a Certified Yoga of Recovery Instructor, an Accessible Yoga Ambassador, Activist and a founder of The State of Union (Yoga) Address series, Shensara Yoga Festival, The Black Female Farmers Network, and the Black Yogis of Virginia group. An avid Social Justice activist for over a decade, she continues to find ways to help propel the voices of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) forward and share their embodied practices. Shankari lives on a regenerative farm, with her husband and more than 60 animals and livestock.

In this very informative and generative interview with Shankari, we discuss:

- Regenerative Farming and regeneration of all kinds
- Black liberation
- Our ancestors as radical seeds
- Our work as living ancestors
- The critical nature of this very moment of reckoning with white supremacy
- The State of Union (Yoga) Address Series
- How the practice of yoga allows us to dig deeper and develop more compassion
- Our relationship with the earth
- Practices to deep our relationship with the earth and ancestors

You can learn more about Shankari on her website, and be sure to check out her State of Union (Yoga) project.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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Tema Okun has spent over 30 years working with and for organizations, schools, and community-based institutions as a trainer, facilitator, and coach focused on issues of racial justice and equity. Dr. Okun currently co-leads the Teaching for Equity Fellows Program at Duke University, which works with faculty seeking to develop stronger skills both teaching about race and racism and across lines of race, class, and gender. She was a member of the Educational Leadership faculty at National Louis University in Chicago and has taught undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral level students in educational leadership and education. She is the author of the award-winning The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching About Race and Racism to People Who Don’t Want to Know (2010, IAP) and the widely used article White Supremacy Culture. Tema is a participant in the Living School for Action and Contemplation and a member of the Bhumisphara Sangha under the leadership of Lama Rod Owens. She is an artist, a poet, and a writer. She lives in Durham NC where she is fortunate to reside among beloved community. Her current project is deepening her ability to love her neighbor as herself. She is finding the instruction easy and the follow through challenging, given how we live in a culture that is afraid to help us do either or both.

In this very special interview with my friend, mentor and beloved Tema Okun we explore:

- the gift of feedback
- transformative relationships
- the myriad ways to lead movements for social change
- humility
- cultural conditioning
- what it means to be in beloved community

and, love.

You can learn more about Tema’s work at dismantlingracism.org.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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I’m excited to share this interview with you—a conversation with a dear friend and beloved, Jeanine T. Abraham. Jeanine is a playwright, actor and producer founder of VisAbleBlackwoman productions. She’s been practicing the 8 limbs of yoga for 20 years and has been a health coach and JourneyDance Facilitator for over 10 years. She founded VisAbleBlackwoman productions in 2017 as a space to center Black women’s stories to preserve our legacies.

In our conversation, Jeanine drops wisdom about:

- Holistic Healing for Black people
- Alignment with values and action
- Liberation
- The Black Imagination
- Black Genius and Vision
- Working from a place of integrity
- She asks us to dig deep about what we are really hungry for?
- Joy

You can connect with Jeanine at VisAbleBlackwoman.com and on her VisAbleBlackwoman Patreon page.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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This episode features a special interview with four of Michelle’s close comrades and colleagues. Michelle brought the team of Healing in Community facilitators together to hear about how they are tending their hearts at this time—Katie Veleta, Johnette Walser, Amy Burtaine, and Stephanie Ghoston Paul co-led an online retreat this past summer with Michelle, and they are reuniting for a special offering this fall: an online series exploring topics such as Collective Grief and Liberation, Embodying Grief, How to be a Living Ancestor, Decolonizing Our Relationship with the Land, and more. In this conversation, Katie, Johnette, Amy, and Stephanie share about the ways in which they are continuing to heal in community and how they are finding and creating refuge at this time.

This episode explores:

- How to heal amidst the turmoil of life at this time
- The value of being tender hearted
- The connection between pain and joy
- How to connect with joy and allow oneself to be in the experience of joy
- How to set boundaries and break up with people, old habits, thoughts and patterns
- The hearts capacity to heal and feel
- Heart work that the group of facilitators if bringing forth at this time

Music: Charles Kurtz

Learn more about our guests through their websites and Instagrams:

Stephanie Ghoston Paul: website, podcast

Katie Veleta: instagram

Johnette Walser: instagram

Amy Burtaine: website

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Welcome to The Finding Refuge Podcast!

This podcast emerged from work based in the exploration of collective grief and liberation. It exists to remind us about all the ways we can find refuge during unsettling and uncertain times, and to remind us about the resilience and joy that comes from allowing ourselves to find refuge.

Michelle C. Johnson, author, yoga teacher, healer, social worker, dismantling racism trainer, activist, and grief-worker, offers monthly interviews, engaging and amplifying the brilliance and wisdom of people who have found ways to honor their grief and stay centered amidst the turmoil in the world. It uplifts the brilliance and wisdom of people who are invested in creating conditions for liberation for the collective. We feature spiritual teachers, movement practitioners, activists and social change makers, and people who hold space in various ways for healing.

By listening, you will gain ideas about how to find and create refuge for yourself and others. You will learn about rituals to move through grief and find freedom. You will learn tools to prevent you from being swept up by the chaos of the world. You will reaffirm your capacity to heal.

Visit Michelle’s website to learn more about her and her work; stay connected with her news and sharing on Instagram and Facebook.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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