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My commitment to rest as a form of resistance came from my everyday experiences of being a part of the machine-level pace of our culture and surviving the trauma of the terror of poverty, exhaustion, white supremacy, and capitalism.
The audacity to proclaim freedom via rest in the now. Rest has been revolutionary for my soul. This book is a testimony and testament of my refusal to donate my body to a system that still owes a debt to my Ancestors for the theft of their labor and DreamSpace. I refuse to push my body to the brink of exhaustion and destruction. Let the chips fall where they may. I trust myself more than capitalism. Our refusal will make space for abundance. We will have to leap and trust rest. May the ground underneath hold us, and if we must collapse, may a soft pillow be there.
My rest resurrection begins with my desperation to find relief from my own exhaustion via curiosity, experimentation, and self-preservation.
Survival is not the end goal for liberation. We must thrive. We must rest.
Whenever I would inquire if she was sleeping, her response was always the same: “Every shut eye ain’t sleep. I am resting my eyes and listening for what God wants to tell me.” While all the world around her was attempting to crush her Spirit, she rested and resisted the beast of grind culture.
Our collective rest will not be easy. All of culture is collaborating for us not to rest. I understand this deeply. We are sleep-deprived because the systems view us as machines, but bodies are not machines. Our bodies are a site of liberation. We are divine and our rest is divine. There is synergy, interconnectedness, and deep communal healing within our rest movement. I believe rest, sleep, naps, daydreaming, and slowing down can help us all wake up to see the truth of ourselves. Rest is a healing portal to our deepest selves. Rest is care. Rest is radical.
Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. Both these toxic systems refuse to see the inherent divinity in human beings and have used bodies as a tool for production, evil, and destruction for centuries. Grind culture has made us all human machines, willing and ready to donate our lives to a capitalist system that thrives by placing profits over people.
Rest is radical because it disrupts the lie that we are not doing enough. It shouts: “No, that is a lie. I am enough. I am worthy now and always because I am here.”
We are stripped down to who we really were before the terror of capitalism and white supremacy. We are enough. We are divine. Our bodies don’t belong to these toxic systems.
You don’t belong on the grind.
Imagine a world without oppression. Take more time here. Visualize softness. Breathe deep. Envision a world centered in justice. Stay here.
In our bodies we have our temples. It is the only thing we own. Our bodies are a tool agent for change. A site of liberation. Our bodies know. The time to rest is now. Our collective rest will change the world because our rest resides in a Spirit of refusal and disruption. Rest is our protest. Rest is resistance. Rest is reparations.
Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. Our bodies are a site of liberation. Naps provide a portal to imagine, invent, and heal. Our DreamSpace has been stolen and we want it back. We will reclaim it via rest.
Capitalism was created on plantations. The roots of it are violence and theft.
Capitalism has cornered us in such a way that we only can comprehend two options. 1: Work at a machine level, from a disconnected and exhausted place, or 2: Make space for rest and space to connect with our highest selves while fearing how we will eat and live. This rigid binary, combined with the violent reality of poverty, keeps us in a place of sleep deprivation and constant hustling to survive. The work of liberation from these lies resides in our deprogramming and tapping into the power of rest and in our ability to be flexible and subversive. There are more than two options. The
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To be colonized is to accept and buy into the lie of our worth being connected to how much we get done. Keep repeating to yourself: I am enough now.
We have all participated willingly and unwillingly in the allure of grind culture. We have done this because since birth, we slowly are indoctrinated into the cult of urgency and disconnection via white supremacy culture.
when we do listen to our bodies and take rest, many feel extreme guilt and shame. Embrace knowing that you have been manipulated and scammed by a violent system as powerful evidence. Now with this knowledge you can grieve, repair, rest, and heal. We can rejoice for the beauty of a...
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Sleep deprivation is a public health issue and a spiritual issue. It is a spiritual issue for a few reasons. We have been trained to believe that everything we accomplish is because of our own pushing alone. This is false because there is a spiritual dimension that exists in all things and in everything we do. To understand that we are spiritual beings navigating life in a material world opens us to the possibilities of rest as a spiritual practice. Our entire living is a spiritual practice.
Nothing we accomplish in life is totally free of the influence of spirit and community. We do nothing alone.
We need each other in more ways than we are allowed to believe. This work is about radical community care.
Grieving the reality of being manipulated to believe we are not enough, divine, or valuable outside of our accomplishments and bank account is a central part of our rest work.
We falsely believe hard work guarantees success in a capitalist system.
The “success” grind culture props up centers constant labor, material wealth, and overworking as a badge of honor.
Resting is about the beginning process of undoing trauma so that we can thrive and evolve back to our natural state: a state of ease and rest. We are meant to survive, and ultimately thrive, because we are divine.
I believe academia is the headquarters for grind culture, and it is a full-circle moment that the energy and idea for The Nap Ministry came to me while I was suffering from exhaustion in a graduate school program.
Our bodies are divine and a site of liberation. Wherever our bodies are, we can find, snatch, and center rest.
What stories are we holding deep inside that are untold and uncovered because we are too exhausted? This rest work is holding space for our memories, our microhistories, and all the things that make us human.
“Rest makes us more human. It brings us back to our human-ness.” To be more human. To be connected to who and what we truly are is at the heart of our rest movement.
easy for us as a culture to attempt to engage with this work from a quick surface level.
This work is about more than simply naps and sleep, it is a full unraveling from the grips of our toxic understanding of our self-worth as divine human beings.
Grieving in this culture is not done and is seen as a waste of time because grieving is a powerful place of reverence and liberation. A grieving person is a healed person. Can you guess why our culture does not want a healed person in it?
You are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn rest. Rest is not a luxury, a privilege, or a bonus we must w...
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I trust the Creator and my Ancestors to always make space for my gifts and talents without needing to work myself into exhaustion.
I believe the powers that be don’t want us rested because they know that if we rest enough, we are going to figure out what is really happening and overturn the entire system. Exhaustion keeps us numb, keeps us zombie-like, and keeps us on their clock.
I don’t belong to the systems. They cannot have me. I will never donate my body to a system that views it as only a tool for its production.
Get up today and tomorrow and think to yourself: “When and where can I find a moment of rest?” You can plot and plan for ten minutes at your desk, thirty minutes of weekend napping, or one minute of resting your eyes. Keep pondering and making space for the time to detox from technology. Listen. What day will you be able to remove one app from your phone in an effort to retain expansiveness for yourself? How will you be able to one day say no to a request that doesn’t serve you? To build firm yet caring boundaries that teach us all the meaning of community care? All these things are a form of
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“This joy that I have / The world didn’t give it to me / The world didn’t give it / The world can’t take it away.”
Rest is a portal. Silence is a pillow. Sabbath our lifeline. Pausing our compass. Go get your healing. Be disruptive. Push back. Slow down. Take a nap.
America is not a welcoming place to all bodies. America was built on the backs of Black and Indigenous people who labored without rest for centuries as the country built its economic power. White supremacy became a vehicle to poison the hearts and minds of an entire nation to view human beings as less than divine. Rest is resistance because it is a counternarrative to the script of capitalism and white supremacy for all people.
An experimentation in how to push a human body to a machine-level pace for centuries led by white people dizzy with hate and brainwashed by a system that trained them to look at a divine, human body as property to be owned.
Grind culture is a collaboration between capitalism and white supremacy. Capitalism is from the plantation. Our current system of labor was made from this paradigm.
The beauty of resting knows that we are blessed to have a body, to be chosen to be alive, to breathe, to make choices, and to proclaim that our bodies are our own, is a deep practice in care. It is the beginning of a revolution, radical, and a resistance.
REST! DREAM! RESIST! IMAGINE!
The doors of the Nap Temple are open. Won’t you come? This is an invitation for weary souls to rest. This is a resistance. This is a protest. This is a counternarrative to the lie that we all aren’t doing enough. We are enough. This is a counternarrative to the lie that our worth is tied to the grind of capitalism and the lie of white supremacy. You are enough simply by being alive. Thank you for living. Thank you for resisting. Thank you for creating. Thank you for dreaming. Thank you for resting. We believe that our healing can visit us while we are napping. While we are resting. While we
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I want you to firmly plant yourself inside your imagination. Take refuge in the beauty and power of our community care. Take root in our daydreaming. We can rest, build, and usher in a new way. We center rest and care no matter what the systems say. Rest is a portal. Silence is our pillow. Hold silence with me now. Take a deep, full breath. Hold for four seconds. Release the shame you feel when resting. It does not belong to you.
They straddled the lines between exhaustion and always thriving.
Underneath all his laboring was this imaginative and creative man who had many artistic goals stomped out by grind culture’s need for us to work like a machine.
I remember asking, “Why do you get up so early when you don’t have to be at work until later?” He replied, “I want to have a few moments in the day that belong to just me before I clock in.” A moment to be human and to settle into his body to connect with his Creator.
we as a culture don’t have clarity about what rest is and can be. These limitations and confusions have been created in us. We are born knowing how to rest and listen to what our bodies need. It’s second nature and an inner knowing. Infants and children follow their body cues and, without doing so, would not survive. This inner knowing is slowly stolen from us as we replace it with disconnection.
