Illuminating Our True Nature: Yogic Practices for Personal and Collective Healing

Dissolve hurtful patterns and emotional hardship through the five yogic points of suffering, or kleshas.

Includes powerful and practical meditations, mantras, asanas, reflection questions, and more, to reduce our suffering--and the suffering of others.

We all get stuck in hurtful patterns that continue to create more suffering in our lives. In yoga philosophy, these patterns are known as the five kleshas. In this wise, practical guide, Michelle Cassandra Johnson offers us a path toward developing a deeper understanding of them and how they hijack us emotionally.

The five kleshas are: ignorance (avidya); overidentification with ego (asmita); attachment to desire or pleasure (raga); aversion or avoidance (dvesha); and fear of death or letting go (abhinivesha). Each one leads us to create tendencies and karma that move us away from realizing and remembering our true nature and seeing ourselves as separate from one another and the planet. In yogic terms, this perpetuates a constant cycle of pain for us all.

Readers will learn to:
- deepen their connection with self and others;
- look at their relationship and attachment to pleasure and aversion to discomfort;
- notice more fully how their actions affect others;
- meet each moment as it arises and ride the waves of life as they come;
- and much more

Johnson offers us a way to find a sense of clarity, groundedness, and equanimity within ourselves by working through the kleshas one-by-one using asana, pranayama, mudra, mantra, reflection questions, and meditation.

MICHELLE JOHNSON is an activist, social justice warrior, author, anti-racism consultant and trainer, intuitive healer, and yoga teacher and practitioner. She has led dismantling racism work in many settings for over two decades and has a background and two decades of practice as a clinical social worker. Michelle’s work centers on healing from individual and collective trauma, coming back into wholeness and aligning the mind, body, spirit, and heart. She has a BA from the College of William and Mary and an MA in social work from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is the author of We Heal Together, Finding Refuge, and Skill in Action.​