Michelle Johnson: I do think there are malevolent forces. I think the level of distraction that we experience is a malevolent force, an energy. I think entities who are engaged in and invested in separation, disconnection, war, genocide—that is malevolence to me.
Tami Simon: That is malevolent energy. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Michelle Cassandra Johnson. She’s an author, mystic, activist, spiritual director, and teacher. She’s a racial equity educator and consultant, along with being an intuitive and shamanic teacher who approaches her life and work from a place of knowing that we can, and must, heal both individually and collectively. Johnson is a seven-time published author, including a book on radicalizing your yoga practice to create a just world called Skill in Action, and coauthoring a book with Sounds True on what honeybees can teach us, The Wisdom of the Hive. And now she’s releasing a new book, You Are Protected: Invoking Spiritual Support to Sustain Your Energy. Michelle, welcome.
Michelle Johnson: Thank you, Tami. So lovely to be here with you.
Tami Simon: Here at the very beginning, I have to ask you a very obvious question—one, to be honest, I’m not sure I fully understand the answer to: What are we protected from?
Michelle Johnson: I love this question. It’s a good way to begin, because sometimes when we hear the word protected, or protection, it’s as if we have to armor ourselves or defend against something. And You Are Protected really originated from a friend thanking me for creating a body of work—her acknowledgment that I am a vessel, a container who channels energy and words and facilitation, and how sacred I am, we are, as these vessels.
And what that led me to consider is: What do I do to tend my inner sanctuary, this channel, this container I’m in? So the protection is really more about how I protect my energy field. How do I protect what is sacred to me? How do I engage in practices that will continue to help me show up in the world and do the work that I do, but not from a defensive stance—more from a relational stance, and really an undefended stance.
And it’s more personal in that way. It’s not like putting my hand up for protection. It’s more turning my hand in toward myself to say, “What do I need to be able to continue to engage in meaningful work in the world, or practice in the world, given that the world is noisy and loud? There’s a lot going on to distract me and move me away from my center.” And so this protection is from being distracted from who we really are—from being swept up in all of the things that happen around us and in our world. It’s not creating a boundary or barrier so we don’t understand what is happening.
It’s more about not being swept up, untethered, and taken away from our center. So that’s what this type of protection is about.
Tami Simon: I appreciate your answer, and I’m going to push a little bit: Are there malevolent forces that we need to protect ourselves against? And if so, it’s probably good to name them.
Michelle Johnson: I appreciate this question, because I do write about malevolent energies and how they affect us or attack us—our physical bodies, our minds, our hearts, our spirit. I do think there are malevolent forces. I think the level of distraction that we experience is a malevolent force, an energy. I think entities who are engaged in and invested in separation, disconnection, war, genocide—that is malevolence to me.
That is malevolent energy. I think… I’m now thinking about samskaras, which are tendencies that create suffering—they’re based in the root of our suffering, and they’re habits related to suffering and why we suffer. So patterns of behavior, and how they take root, can be malevolent as well, based on beliefs like we’re separate from one another, we’re not connected, when we’re inherently interconnected.
And so yes, there are malevolent energies. Some of those are visible to us, in my own experience, and some of them are not visible, but they’re pervasive, and we can put this in context. We can think about how much separation is happening now, how much dis-ease is happening on our planet and to our planet, how much people are overwhelmed and dysregulated because of malevolence and malevolent energies.
So, yes.
Tami Simon: So, to begin here, I would like our conversation to have a field of protection around it, and blessing and power infusing it. I do my own little inner practice before I start each recording, and really, I just pray that whatever happens is of benefit to as many people as possible. But I wonder if you could offer, in your own way, right here at the beginning—and as our listeners are joining us—because in You Are Protected, you offer so many different ways that we can invoke protection. So I’m curious what will occur to you to start our conversation on that kind of note.
Michelle Johnson: Yes, I love this. Thank you for asking for this circle of protection around this conversation and around us. And I saw you, right before we started, sort of drop into yourself. So that’s what I’m going to invite you to do, and anyone listening. You can close your eyes, or you can soften your gaze—it’s up to you.
I invite you to let your hands rest wherever feels most supportive, perhaps at your side or in your lap or somewhere else. Take a deep breath in, and a complete breath out.
Taking another breath in, notice the parts of your body that are in connection with the earth—maybe that’s your feet, or your seat, or, for some folks listening, your hands or your back body, however you’re oriented right now. Take a moment to notice your connection to the earth, the ground.
Then, taking another breath, take a moment to notice what is above you, above the crown of the head.
Take a deep breath, feeling support from below—what is underneath you—and above.
Then notice the right side and the left side of the body, and your energy field.
Notice what is at the front of the body, and the back of the body.
So here we create support from below and above, the right side of the body, the left side of the body, the front of the body, the back of the body. In this way, we create a boundary around ourselves. You can take a breath in here, drawing energy into your center, wherever you perceive your center to be.
You can even imagine a protective boundary—a circle, a cylinder, whatever shape or form it might be—around you and around us,
so that we might show up in our highest self, and for the highest good, during this conversation and beyond.
And this circle, this boundary, this cylinder, is not about separation. It’s really about drawing our energy back into the center of our very being, our core. Feeling grounded and supported.
Take another deep breath in here, and a deep breath out.
And then, finally, for this next cycle of breath, if there are protective allies—like ancestors, or animal energies, or archetypes—that you wish to bring into your circle, your cylinder, this boundary, for this conversation, invite them in.
Take another deep breath in here, and a deep breath out.
And then gently return to the space, perhaps blinking your eyes open, and taking a moment.
Tami Simon: Wonderful. The question that occurs to me is for people who are like, “Wait, I’m going to invite in some spiritual support here”—archetypes? I don’t know who to invite in. How do people start the process? In your book, You Are Protected, you have a chapter on each of these—you call them agents of protection—that could be part of our support team. But tell me more: How do we start figuring out who we should even be calling on?
Michelle Johnson: Well, you know, I believe that each one of us has—I call it a spirit team. People could just call it their network, their support team; you can use other words.
And these different parts of the network want to support us. So sometimes it’s just about opening the channel for that to happen, to invite in the benevolent energies that wish to support us and, in this case, provide protection—spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically, psychically, and in whatever other ways people wish to call in.
So, understanding we’re in relationship with the different parts of the network—an easy archetype to call in, since you brought that up, is the protector, the caregiver, the supporter. I’ve written about a bunch of other archetypes, like the empress, and Cassandra, my middle name, for various purposes, and the magician, related to protection and different situations we might find ourselves in.
And the primordial mother—regardless of gender or gender identity—that energy of the mother, the maternal, and why we might call that in. So, to make it simple, folks can begin to think about different energies, entities, characters they’ve seen connected to protection, and begin to build a relationship with one of those. Begin to study and learn more about one of those, and then play with calling on them—if you’re going into a tense situation where you know there’s going to be conflict, or you’re just going outside of your house and you’re going to engage in the world in some way—begin to call on that specific archetype or ancestor.
I call on my grandmother Dorothy all the time; she’s also just with me all the time. I call in different animal energies as well, and work with natural curios for protection, and crystals for protection. So choose one place to start. Play with that. See how it feels. Notice the subtle shifts that happen as you call that archetype or energy into your inner network and circle.
Tami Simon: I love this idea of calling in archetypes for protection, because I think that’s really interesting and something I haven’t thought much about. I’m going to pick an archetype based on the tarot card imagery that I like, so I’ll go with the empress, as you mentioned, just for the sake of an example. When I think of calling on an archetype, am I calling on certain energetics and qualities that I associate with this very grounded rulership of the empress? However, am I calling on an actual being—an actual presence—or just energetics that I associate with this symbol, that are available to me as inner capacities? How do you see it?
Michelle Johnson: I love this question. To me, it feels energetic, although to someone else it might feel more like a physical presence, because they may have someone in their lives who is earthside, or someone who’s transitioned, who’s like the empress. There are people in my life who remind me of the empress energy, and they’re embodied. So people might associate it that way, but for me, I think about the actual image of the empress on her throne, feet on the ground. She’s often in a flourishing environment, has a crown of jewels, connected to the cosmos and solar system. And she is self-possessed. She knows who she is, in that grounded way that you spoke about. So I call on her when I need that energy—when I feel anxious, when I feel disrupted, when I feel like I need to stay steady, I call on the empress. And it feels like those energetic characteristics, which is what archetypes are: we all embody different archetypes that shape our personality and how we show up. Some are stronger than others. It feels like this energy I’m calling on to support me, and I might visualize her at the same time, and I might visualize myself embodying those characteristics—or the empress being the empress, sitting on the throne in that way: totally aware of who I am, unbothered, not easily messed with, unmessable in that way. So that’s how we can think about archetypes.
Tami Simon: This may be that I’m going down a bit of a mental rabbit hole here, so forgive me if that’s true, but I think part of the reason I’m interested in this question—about whether these presences are just energetics we carry, or actual beings outside our own energy form—is that when we get to things like ancestors, or even animal energetics, I think many people have the experience that these are outside beings. Like someone who has crossed over, and they’re really there. It’s not just our association with them that we’re invoking for protection, but they’re actually there as a being outside of whatever our associations might be. So I wanted to know more about your experience—when you, for example, talk to the agents of protection that come in the form of ancestors, when you’re calling on ancestors, how do you experience them?
Michelle Johnson: This is a great question, because ancestors, in some ways, may provide the same protection as the archetypes. But the ancestors that I call on most often are ancestors I knew when they were earthside, so they were in physical form. An archetype from the major arcana of the tarot—I haven’t known that in the same way I knew my grandmother Dorothy, or my grandmother Sally, who I tell a story about in You Are Protected. So they feel different, because I know what they looked like, felt like, smelled like—what their presence was.
I can visualize them in quite a different way. And I’ll say that sometimes my ancestors show up in a way—I don’t see them very often, except in dreams. I feel their presence more, and this may be different for someone else. Like, I can feel my grandmother’s energy around me, and sometimes actually feel her hand—Dorothy, my maternal grandmother—at my back. When I asked what was at the back body, I could feel her.
Like she is there, but I can’t see her.
I feel that. I’ve felt it many times. Sometimes it’s very gentle, and sometimes it’s a “Go, Michelle!” It can feel that way. And she’s the ancestor I’d say I have the deepest relationship with. My father is no longer earthside. He often communicates with me—I have a wind chime that’s associated with him, connected to the time when I found out he had transitioned—in part, the element of air, which I’ve also written about, elemental energies. So when I hear that ringing, I think about him and feel his presence. His father—my paternal grandfather—I’ll call on him for certain things, but I don’t really see him. Other people might see their ancestors in the form they were in while they were earthside; for me, it’s more of a felt sense, or an “I’m calling on you all to be in this circle with me today. I need your strength. I need your support. I need your protection.” That’s a way that I work with them. So that’s my experience, but I think it’s vastly different for a lot of people, because of the quality of their connection with their ancestors. And just because ancestors are not embodied anymore, because they’re not earthside, they move in different ways—they’re spirits. They move in very different ways than we do in these incarnations.
Tami Simon: You write in You Are Protected that you teach people, in different contexts, how to open up to protection from their ancestors. One, many people are unsure how to go about building such a relationship. Two, people are ashamed of their ancestry, and that’s an obstacle. And three, they may be holding on to ancestral trauma that creates barriers. And I thought, probably all of the above have an impact in some way. How do you help people address these obstacles when you work with them?
Michelle Johnson: Often when there’s a barrier or insecurity around working with ancestors, I’ll actually begin with another protective agent, which is the elemental energies, because we have trees around us—at least I do—that are a hundred years old or older, and we have mountains that have been here for a long, long time, and bodies of water.
And the sun, for fire, if we want to use that. So I invite people to connect with elemental energies that are around them that are ancient, because they’re living ancestors here, earthside, with us—they might actually outlive us. And that’s, for many people, an easy entry point into ancestral work and practice.
I also remind folks, when they think about their bloodline—this is true for me too—that most of us have someone, or several people, in our lineage and bloodline where there’s shame, or confusion, or part of the story is missing, or they did horrific things. We have that, but often we also have at least one ancestor who worked to disrupt that. That’s part of our lineage too. And I also invite people, if they’re really trepidatious about working within their bloodline, to work with other ancestors—known or unknown—who aren’t directly connected to their DNA, like teachers or teachings.
That’s a way to work with ancestors. So I find, with ancestral work even more than the other protective agents, that ancestry can be so confusing, and people often want to forget part of their lineage and bloodline, and they might also feel encumbered by the gravity of trying to heal back, to heal the timeline.
And I’ve written about this too, that I am not responsible for healing my entire ancestral bloodline. I can do the work that I can do now, in the hopes that it does heal back, heal now, and heal in the future as well. So really thinking about what my work is to do, and what my practice is around that.
So those are some of the ways that I work with those blocks or barriers that are very common.
Tami Simon: I never thought of a mountain as an ancestor. That’s very interesting to think of it that way.
Michelle Johnson: I love—well, I’m in the more-than-human world all the time. I love the more-than-human world. It’s expansive. It’s healing for me. It’s connective. It’s part of my network, my spirit team. And, you know, if you think about climbing a mountain, hiking a mountain, sitting at the top or the base of a mountain, and how old that is, and how much that mountain has seen—the different weather conditions, what has changed on that mountain, or even how the trees look very different at the bottom of the mountain than at the top, the climate and the microclimate that happen as we engage with a mountain. There’s something—I recognize the mountain is bigger than me, and so there’s something about that massive energy and spiritual, protective support that can come from that, and the awareness that I’m a blip on the screen. I’m just here for this time, but that mountain will be here for a long time, and has been. So that’s why I invite in those elemental energies, or the sequoias, the redwoods. There’s memory there. There’s resilience embodied in that, and they are ancestors around us that we’re—luckily, we’re privy to be in relationship with them, which feels really potent.
Tami Simon: I wonder if you can speak to that person when it comes to calling on agents of protection—maybe it’s spiritual teachers from the past, or someone from their own lineage—and they say, “I can sense a presence, maybe it can even talk to me, but is that just my imagination? I don’t know the difference between imagining it and it being, quote-unquote, really there.”
Michelle Johnson: Yeah, I appreciate this question and curiosity. I love this, because I think a lot of us have been conditioned not to trust what we cannot see, the intangible. And I do invite people to connect with the mystery of this. In some ways, your question makes me think about—whether or not it’s my imagination maybe doesn’t matter, because I’m actually calling on that entity to provide some sort of benevolent support to me, and maybe that’s all that matters in that moment.
And so even if people can’t trust that, because they’re like, “My mind is in the way, I’m thinking this up, I’m making it up”—maybe it doesn’t matter, because the intention is actually what matters, which is to call on that protection, and then to notice, “Oh, I noticed that shift in the quality of my relationship with whatever it might be,” or, “I felt protected today in this way because I called on this particular ancestor, or teacher, or teaching, or affirmation, or mantra, or animal energy”—that I engaged in that intentional practice. I think that’s what matters more than anything. And to practice moving our mind out of the way, not overthinking, “Is this real, is it not real”—because then we’re just caught, we’re somewhere else, we’ve moved away from the intention. So, trust it.
Tami Simon: I appreciate that response a lot, because the impacts are there, and obvious, and palpable, and I think people feel them even if they’re unclear about the type of presence it is, or what its ontological roots are, or whatever. There’s the actual experience, the phenomenon of receiving the protection and support, and I think people can sense that.
Now, Michelle, to get to know you a little bit better—because in You Are Protected, you say some pretty outrageous and interesting things about your own clarity and the confidence you have in that, and you tell a story about your birth that sounded quite difficult to me, and then later in the book you refer to it as auspicious. I thought, okay, that’s really interesting, that Michelle has gotten to a place where this very difficult start she refers to as auspicious. So I wonder if you can bring our listeners into your birth, and your special capacities.
Michelle Johnson: Yeah, thank you. So, when I was born, I was born two months early, so I was a preemie. At the time, where I was, in Richmond, Virginia, they didn’t have a preemie unit. They had to do an emergency C-section because I was losing oxygen, which has everything to do with my story, and I’ll share a little bit about that, and what I ended up doing—like being a yoga teacher and teaching people how to breathe. I think it goes back to that. Not that I have a memory of it—I want to be clear with people, I don’t remember coming into this incarnation, I don’t have a conscious memory of that. This story is a story my mother told me, but also, she was in and out of consciousness at different times. But I know I was early by two months, and I know I was tiny—I was two pounds, three ounces, and you could hold me in your hand. And because they didn’t have a preemie unit, I was taken to a different hospital, and I was without my mom for nine days—which anyone who knows anything about birth stories, and how defining they can be, and the importance of connection with family during those first moments and days after, will understand that it’s significant that I didn’t see my mom. She wasn’t near me. She didn’t hold me for nine days. She felt me, though, she talks about—she has special capacities too. She was concerned for me and praying for me, which I think had a lot to do with why I survived. In 1975, with no preemie unit where I was, a two-pound, three-ounce baby could have died easily. My lungs were underdeveloped, and I was in the hospital for a month in an incubator. I tell many people, I think my nervous system—I’ve done a lot of work around this—formed around overstimulation: lights, sounds, being picked up by people I didn’t know, who weren’t related to me, probed, tubes. People can just imagine that experience, in a little, tiny body, as someone who’s just come in.
And the other thing that happened is the placenta came out before me—I was losing oxygen, they pulled me out. Now, there’s a medical explanation for this, I’m sure, but I also think about the energetics of it, and how auspicious it is that the placenta and afterbirth came out before I actually came into the world. I also think that has a lot to do with my work, because a lot of what I do is say, “We need to excavate and look at what has happened to understand why we’re here now.” That, coupled with the inability to breathe, and then teaching folks how to breathe, and the importance of breath, and how life-giving it is.
I also—this isn’t in the book, but I want to name that my mother and my grandmother—my mom doesn’t have premonitions anymore, that I know of; she has Alzheimer’s, so she’s in connection with other realms now, in a different way. But as a child, my mother had premonitions, my grandmother had premonitions. So I put all of that together to say that I think I came in with—and this isn’t to say others don’t come in with this too—but with some knowing, and some choice about, are you going to survive here, do you need to be here now, and the desire and decision to then stay. Because I had to fight to live. My lungs had to work very hard, and I had machines helping me, but I also think there was will connected to that. I think that has to do with that clarity—being a clear channel, knowing I’m here on purpose. I believe that about others as well, and the desire to do really meaningful work and make some contribution while I’m here. I think that goes back to my birth story. So, throughout time, knowing this lineage of premonitions and inner wisdom—although we didn’t talk about them very much—it let me know there’s some other realm of experience that goes on. My mother is tapping into it when she knows something, and then it happens.
So, do I have that? When I was a young child, I felt very connected to spirit. I felt like I received messages from spirit in different ways, often in the more-than-human world. That continues to happen now, and it’s just been strengthened throughout time, as I’ve learned to trust my inner wisdom and intuition.
So that’s the short version of that story.
Tami Simon: One of the things that’s really interesting to me is that sometimes when people have a difficult birth story, they go on to attribute a lot of their suffering and struggles to it—”this happened, that happened.” And yet you’re turning that all upside down, in a way, and proclaiming it as part of your initiation, your purpose here. I wonder how that became so clear to you.
Michelle Johnson: Yeah, I hadn’t thought about it that way, so thank you—like, “Oh, right, you connected that to purpose,” and feeling so grounded in that. I think part of the reason this happened, flipping it on its head, is my mother. She’s very important to me—her name is Clara, and she’s very strong-willed. She’s the strongest person I know, and I see a lot of her in me. So I name her, because I think she modeled purpose rooted in service to me. And that became part of the story of who I am, because—she was a special ed teacher for 32 years, she was the caregiver archetype, taking care of people. She’s in a different way now, because of her disease, but for most of her life, she was the one showing up, advocating, and I have a lot of that in me, and that’s from her. So I think that strength, that willfulness, that form of stubbornness that’s sometimes challenging, and other times the sticktoitiveness—”I’m here, I’m here on purpose, even if I’m a little confused about what it is right now, I know there’s a purpose, I will root in that so I can stay here”—and not be wrapped up in the noise of the world, and stay focused on what I need to do here, in connection with the outer world. So I think it’s my mom—that’s where I learned to keep going, and to try to do something other than just survive, to really thrive, but certainly to survive, and to be creative. I think my mom is so creative—she was like, “If it doesn’t work out the first time, then you do it this way, and then you do it this way.” That technology of shape-shifting, of resilience, of trying again—that is my mother to a T. So I think I have that, and that’s why this narrative is the way it is, about how I came in and why I’m here.
Tami Simon: You mentioned this gift of premonitions running in your family, and that it’s something you have. Have you ever had a premonition about something that’s been really important to you?
Michelle Johnson: My premonitions are a bit different than my mom’s. A lot of times my mom’s—and at one point she didn’t want to keep having them—are about death, or things we may not want to encounter but are part of life happening. That’s how her premonitions would come. Mine aren’t always a warning about something. Often they’re an awareness, or a vision, that something is about to happen in a particular way.
An example of this: about two years ago—you mentioned in my bio that I’m a spiritual director—I hadn’t even thought about going to a spiritual direction program. That wasn’t in my—I didn’t even know what it was, I didn’t know the field of study of spiritual direction at all. And what dropped down was this download, which felt like a premonition, and also a knowing that that was my next move. I was walking outside: “This is where you’re going, Michelle. This is what you’re doing.” And I was kind of like, “Huh, I don’t even know what that is, I don’t know why I would do that now.” About two weeks later, I’m in conversation with a spiritual director, and then, eventually—and this premonition, and vision, and knowing is personal to me—I’m in a conversation, and then ultimately ended up going through this sixteen-month spiritual direction program. Not part of my path, not what I thought I would do, but I heard and felt, “This is what is next for you.” And I listened enough to say, “Yes, this is the direction you go.”
I also have dreams all the time—that’s personal—but I have dreams about, sometimes, natural disasters, and then I wake up to the news that that’s exactly what has happened. I had that about, I think it was the island of Maui—this was a little while ago, where there was a huge flood, and I dreamt about it the night before. Woke up to the news of that. Or in Antarctica, there was a building that contained a bunch of the oldest seeds—we will need these seeds if we are to survive—and I had a dream about seeds and Antarctica, and I woke up, and that was the first thing I read on my phone. So a lot of times they happen that way, for more global things, I’ll say. But more personal, it’s like a download and intuition.
Tami Simon: Your name, Cassandra—first of all, it came to your mom in an interesting, prophetic sort of way. And then I looked up more about Cassandra, and it’s a prophet—the qualities of a prophetess. And of course I have to ask you, Michelle, because we’re in a time where so many people are trying to look into a crystal ball, if they had one, to see how we get through this very difficult period in human history. What does Michelle Cassandra see?
Michelle Johnson: Yeah, I mean, I think I see what a lot of people feel. And I don’t say this to scare anyone—I think the fear is palpable, it’s present for most of us. I think it’s going to—and I’ve actually heard some of the Insights at the Edge episodes where people have said, “It’s going to get worse.” And that’s not just from watching the moves that are being made now—that’s more definitely an inner knowing. And I think most of us actually know that, but are afraid to connect with it. But so many people talk about the long dark, this time where there is generativity happening, but there’s so much destruction, and I think we’re not through that yet, is what I’ll say.
I also think—I’m not a prepper, in the way people talk about preparing, although it’s on my mind. But I think the way that I live right now is going to be vastly different, and the way we live in our communities will be different, and more collective action, and connection, and care will be necessary for us to survive.
And I’m not trying to scare people—I could, but most of us understand this.
Tami Simon: You asked—I did. I just don’t want people to think, “She’s doomsday.” I’m not. It’s the opposite. In your introduction—and I read this out loud, and thought about it several times when I wrote it—it’s in your written bio: “She works from an inner knowing that we can, will, and must heal individually and collectively.” I thought, huh, that’s very strong. An inner knowing that we can, individually and collectively—that’s a very strong statement. How did that statement occur to you, and exist so strongly in you, that you wanted to put it in your bio?
Michelle Johnson: Yeah, because I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen individuals—in my own life, when I’ve had really challenging times, I’ve seen myself move through, but I’ve also witnessed, given the different roles I’ve played before—as a therapist for a long time, as an intuitive healer, someone who sits with people—I’ve seen people reckon with things that are utterly overwhelming, and destabilizing, and disintegrating, and come into their wholeness through that. Many of us have witnessed that within ourselves and around us. I’ve also seen the more-than-human world do this, from destruction to creation, time and time again, and many of us have witnessed that as well. And I’ve also sat in many collectives where the focus is healing, and where we’ve worked through things that might be in the way of that, like deep rifts, or conflicts, or fractures.
So I know we have the capacity to heal. It’s just whether or not we put our energy toward that. And I also know that there’s so much distraction that I can move away from that intention of healing by doom-scrolling for an hour a day. That doesn’t feed my spirit. It’s not necessarily witnessing, which I think is important—knowing what is going on. But sometimes it’s just numbing out, looking at it, and being in despair. That’s not feeding me spiritually. That’s not feeding us. That doesn’t help heal us, really—it dysregulates us more. And so I’ve seen it happen a thousand times, and I know that we can do this, and I have to believe it’s true.
Tami Simon: Every time you say the phrase “the more-than-human world,” some part of me giggles a little inside. And, of course, I think I know what you mean by it—you’re referencing the unseen world, the many dimensions, the natural world. But there’s a part of me that’s like, God, the world is so much more immense than whatever we might associate with, quote-unquote, “the human world.” I find it a funny phrase, in a way.
Michelle Johnson: Yeah. I heard it years ago in an ecotherapy program, and it struck me in that way—like, oh, right, we don’t need to focus on humans so much. I mean, we need to change behavior, but the world is vast, we are small in that way. Let us remember our place.
Tami Simon: In your new book, I love to read the acknowledgments—I read every word in them, I love to see it. And the part of your acknowledgments that got my attention was when you were addressing your mom, and you said, “Mom, this might be the first time that you learn how witchy I am.” And, Michelle Cassandra, this is a witchy book—you have a section on spell work, that we can actually cast spells to bring in forces. And I learned that you have a cauldron—a 250-year-old cauldron—and you use this cauldron for spell work for protection.
Michelle Johnson: Yes. I love spell casting, and that I’ve come out as this witch to my mom—a good witch, right, a witch with the intention that’s centered on healing, in the way we just spoke about. I had a small—I still have this little baby cauldron that I used for a lot of different spells. And then, in 2020, I said to my—I have various circles that I sit in, called goddess groups, and people of all genders are part of them, but we call them goddess groups—I was like, “We need a big cauldron now, y’all.” So we got this 250-year-old cauldron. We got two: one stays with me, and one stays with another person who’s part of that circle.
And so, often, I engage in spell work in a group, and also individually. And spell work is really about setting an intention for what we want to happen, doing something to fuel that intention, plus calling in that protective circle of some sort. You can cast a circle by calling in directions and elements, and the above and the below, protecting your work, setting your intention, fueling that intention through ingredients you might put in a cauldron, or through sound, or through movement, or through prayer, or blessings. And then waiting to see what happens.
So the spells that are in You Are Protected are for protection. They call in the archetypes, they use natural curios, there’s an ancestral practice, or spell, in there, and a blessing to the ancestors, the invocation to the four directions—the cardinal directions—and then the above and below, and the energy within us.
And I thought that might be useful for people, because there’s a lot on the internet about witchiness, or spells, that may not be grounded in the intention I have, which is: How do we find our center and sustain our energy, so that we can continue to show up in our lives in a meaningful way?
So all these spells are about that, in this book, although I do spells at the turn of the seasons—I’ll do one on the fall equinox with the cauldron, I do one at the winter solstice, and other times of the year, depending on what it is I wish to uplift. And then we wait and see what happens.
So, all sorts of spells.
Tami Simon: Most of us don’t have a cauldron, but we might have a mixing bowl. If you were to teach a simple spell for protection, what would you suggest?
Michelle Johnson: I’m going to name salt, because most of us have access to salt, and many people understand salt as a protective agent. One way to work with it—you don’t even need the mixing bowl—is you can use salt. I’ve also written about which salt you might be more connected to; there are different colors of salt, but you can use the salt that’s in your kitchen. You can put it—I do this routinely—in different corners of your house, or a particular room in the house that may feel like there’s energetic residue, or you just want to clear that energy. You can also put it around your house—I do this as well—facing the different cardinal directions.
If you put it in your house, often I’ll put it in the corners, leave it there for a little while, and then sweep it up. That is the act of clearing away anything that needs to be cleared away. At the same time, I can call in protection for my home, protection for my space, protection for the sanctuary, which feels so important to me.
So people can do that. That’s the spell that came to me—you just need salt and a broom, or something to sweep up the salt, and you can leave it there for one day or longer, depending. You can even get—in a few corners of my house, I have chunks of Himalayan salt, just in the corner—and then sweep around that, and cleanse them, and put them back.
So that’s a simple spell.
Tami Simon: In the chapter on spell work, you also introduce the idea that we can create a sigil, and I was like, “Oh, I’ve never heard this before.” I’m not that familiar with spell casting, but I thought, I want to create a sigil. So I wonder if you could explain to our listeners how we do this.
Michelle Johnson: Yes. So a sigil can be a symbol—that’s what it becomes. But it can start with a word. In this case, for protection, you can write an affirmation about protection, like, “I call my energy back to me now, and I am fully protected.” It can start that long, and then you shorten it, like, “I’m fully protected,” or even to “protected”—one word, and you know what that means.
And then you cross out any letters that are repeated in the word, and then you organize those letters into a symbol that is meaningful to you. Don’t overthink it. So, “protected” has one P, so that would stay, and you would put that wherever you wanted—you could even turn it the opposite way, or upside down, and create that symbol in a way that resonates for you.
You can do this through writing—I’ve had people do this through painting or drawing, so it just depends. You could even do this with objects from the natural world to create your sigil and that symbol. And then you have to infuse it—much like we set an intention for spell work, and then charge that with movement, or sound, or prayer, or blessing, or ingredients in the cauldron, and smoke and fire.
The sigil is the same way—you charge it in some way. You can charge it with sound, you can charge it with breath, you can sit and meditate on that symbol, you can charge it with fire, you could place it in your space to look at. So think about one way you want to charge it—which means amplify the energy of it—and then you wait.
It is a spell. You wait and see what happens. But I have some sigils I’ve created that are in little jars—they’ve been with me for a year. I created one several years ago to balance out levity and grief, because I do a lot of grief work, and was feeling the heaviness of that, and just wanted some balance between the two, and more levity. I created one and have it in this little magic jar, where I added little jewels, and sand, and other things that were meaningful, and it sits right behind my desk—this tiny little jar. So you can keep it, or you can release it, by burning—that’s the easiest way—but there are other ways you can work with it; if you have paper that dissolves in water, you could give it to water.
So that’s a sigil, and you can make them for all sorts of things, not just protection—whatever it is that you wish to call in.
Tami Simon: What would you say to someone who says, “You know, I don’t think I need protection—I feel good, I’m in my own energy field, and all this talk about protection—I get it, you’re not keeping things out, but I don’t think this is really something that’s needed”? Would you say, “That person could be missing something,” or would you say, “Well, whatever—maybe they’re right for them”?
Michelle Johnson: Yeah, I think it depends. There are people who’ve done a lot of spiritual work to maintain their energy center and energy field, and they’re in it every day, in some way—almost so much that they don’t notice they’re in it. They meditate every day, or they connect with the more-than-human world every day, or they feel grounded and centered within themselves—I’m not going to judge that. Great. And I would say that, given the malevolent energies we spoke about earlier, that we, as a collective, are all up against something, and it’s depleting. So it’s important for us to ask the question of where does our energy go, and what are those practices that help us maintain it, and to be invested in those as part of our spiritual hygiene. That’s what I would say to that person—that sometimes we don’t know—when I’ve written about them as vampiric energies, but the way people can relate to them is, everyone’s probably had a conversation with someone at some point in their lives, and they’ve left it feeling energetically drained. It may be the content the person shared, or maybe their energy, or maybe they didn’t even ask you how you’re doing—they just kept talking about themselves, which can feel like heavy stuckness. So everyone can relate to that. I think, for that reason alone, we need protection, and clearing of that kind of vampiric energy—that’s not necessarily malevolent by nature; the example I gave, there may just be a lack of awareness for that person. But I think we encounter a lot of different seen and unseen forces that affect our energy field, and some curiosity about the ways in which that happens feels important. So that’s why protection feels important as well.
Tami Simon: This idea, spiritual hygiene—that’s not a phrase I’ve ever heard before. Tell us what you mean by it.
Michelle Johnson: I think about it like physical hygiene—we can think about mental hygiene too. What do we do, perhaps every day, to tend our inner sanctuary, this vessel and container we’re in? For physical hygiene—so I don’t have to go to the dentist over and over—I brush my teeth twice a day, and I floss. That’s part of my hygiene plan. I take care of my body in various ways—part of physical hygiene. I meditate to work with my mind and the rest of my being—that’s mental hygiene. And for spiritual hygiene, I call on my ancestors to help, and my spirit guides. So this spiritual hygiene is like any one of those practices. It’s just as simple as what you do to take care of your body each day, but think about taking care of your spirit, and have a practice—hopefully daily—that you do to tend yourself in that way. That’s what spiritual hygiene is.
Tami Simon: To end our conversation, Michelle, in a similar way that we began, by sealing us in a container of protection—I pushed you on the prophetic quality of your middle name, Cassandra, and asked you about our time, and you said, “You know, Tami, a lot of us feel how difficult this long dark is, that we are in as a human”—and, speaking now from my own sense of feeling the pulse of our time, people have a greater openness, feeling the support of the more-than-human world, because humans are in such a precarious situation, and we need so much help. So I wonder if we could end by invoking protection for our human species, in some way, your—dare I say—spiritual direction?
Michelle Johnson: Yes. Okay. It’s here. Yes. So I’ll invite us to move into a similar posture to the one we moved into at the beginning. People can find a way to be—you can find a way to be. And for some, eyes open might work, or eyes closed. Take a deep breath in, and a deep breath out. And feel that protective circle around you, around us. Take a breath into the circle, and then a deep breath out.
Once again, feel your connection to the earth, and notice what is above you. Notice what is at the right, what is at the left, what is at the front, what is at the back of you.
And you can imagine now the collective, together in a circle, cloaked in protection—from below and above, at the right side and left, at the front and the back.
Feeling this collective circle, and collective energy, and the blanket of protection that is available to us, and ever-present. Taking a deep breath in, a deep breath out.
Calling in all of the protective, archetypal energies, and benevolent, and healthy, and well ancestral energies—the elemental energies: air, fire, water, earth, above, below. Calling in protective animal energies, and natural curios, such as rose, and rosemary, obsidian, black tourmaline, salt. Calling these protective agents into our collective circle now, to remind us of this cloak of protection that is available to us now and forevermore, and inviting us to tend to ourselves and the collective.
Engendering this experience of protection—yes, for ourselves, but also for one another. That extension of care, of collective care, of holding each other as sacred and precious.
Taking another deep breath in here, and a deep breath out, and sealing our time together. And it is so. So mote it be.
Tami Simon: Thank you, Michelle Cassandra Johnson, author of the new book, You Are Protected: Invoking Spiritual Support to Sustain Your Energy—a beautiful guidebook for our time. Thank you, Michelle.
Michelle Johnson: Thank you, Tami.
Tami Simon: Great to be with you.
Michelle Johnson: Good to be with you.
Thank you for listening. I’d also like to invite you to join us on Sounds True One, where you can enjoy early, ad-free access to episodes of Insights at the Edge*. Sounds True One is our premium membership platform. It’s built around live classes and online events, award-winning specials, intimate learning experiences, and Q&A sessions with the world’s leading wisdom teachers. You can get your first month free at join.soundstrue.com.*
The Sounds True Podcast Network.
