Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

by Tricia Hersey

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.

Each time I arose from a rest moment, things felt different. I looked different, my thinking was different, things that I couldn’t work out while awake made sense after a nap.

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 possibilities are infinite, although living under a capitalist system is to be confronted with a model of scarcity. This space makes you falsely believe there is not enough of everything: not enough money, not enough care, not enough love, not enough attention, not enough peace, not enough connection, not enough time. There is abundance.

So, stay here in rest, even for a few minutes each day before leaping into the comfort of intellectualizing this rest work. Resting is an embodied practice and a lifelong unraveling. It is not something that can be trendy, quick, or shallow. Resting is ancient, slow, and connected work that will take hold of you in ways that may be surprising. Let deprogramming from grind culture surprise you. Let your entire being slowly begin to shift. Get lost in rest. Pull up the blankets, search for softness and be open to the ways rest will surprise and calm you.

Much of our resistance to rest, sleep, and slowing down is an ego problem. You believe you can and must do it all because of our obsession with individualism and our disconnection to spirituality.

I understand that many reading this book have never sat with the grief and pain associated with attaching your worth to productivity and money. This fact alone is enough reason to rest. But you cannot simply just tell someone who has been traumatized by capitalism since birth to consistently lay down and rest without addressing the reality of our brainwashing. When we finally wake up to the truth of what a machine-level pace of labor has done to our physical bodies, our self-esteem, and our Spirits, the unraveling begins.

The real fear of what could happen if we step into the unknown is crafted by capitalism and its cult of busyness and productivity.

This blatant disregard of his body and the unnecessary embarrassment he and other students suffer in public school systems begin the process of learning to ignore the needs of your body.

Many people believe grind culture is this pie-in-the-sky monster directing our every move, when in reality, we become grind culture. We are grind culture. Grind culture is our everyday behaviors, expectations, and engagements with each other and the world around us.

It’s counterintuitive to believe rest to be not a place to waste time but instead a generative place of freedom and resistance. We have never learned this in our culture. The thought of not doing, even for a short time, is seen as lazy and unproductive.

But there is always an incomplete understanding when you are engaging on social media because it has been created to be an extension of capitalism. The designers of the platforms wants us there all day scrolling, spending money, and absorbing messages in a fast-paced, disconnected manner.

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.

I watched my father get up every morning at four a.m. He would drag himself out of bed to sit at the kitchen table to read three newspapers, study his Bible, and pray silently. He would do this for almost two hours before he needed to leave for work at six. 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.”

The Rest Is Resistance framework also does not believe in the toxic idea that we are resting to recharge and rejuvenate so we can be prepared to give more output to capitalism.

Our drive and obsession to always be in a state of “productivity” leads us to the path of exhaustion, guilt, and shame. We falsely believe we are not doing enough and that we must always be guiding our lives toward more labor.

The distinction that must be repeated as many times as necessary is this: We are not resting to be productive. We are resting simply because it is our divine right to do so. That is it!

The concept of filling up your cup first, so you can have enough in it to pour to others feels off balance. It reeks of the capitalist language that is now a part of our daily mantras.

The work is to first gain deep awareness that the pace at which this culture is functioning is not normal or sustainable. This understanding offers an invitation for the collective pilgrimage we are on as we attempt to disrupt and push back against a system that has no pause button. Stay here for a while. Stay in the space of knowing that you are not a failure, inadequate or unworthy because you are tired and want to rest. There is no need to now attempt to figure this all out today and to be totally on board to embracing rest in a way that doesn’t feel right to you. This protest against grind culture is for you to create in your own body.

Without examining the hold social media has over our lives, we will never be able to push any rest movement forward. It’s simply not possible because social media is an extension of capitalism. It is a marketing tool. The developers and designers of our current platforms are not leaders of a billion-dollar industry simply so we can all stay connected to our family, friends, and communities. It is used for this successfully by many, but please remember it is not the goal for capitalists. The goal is to keep you scrolling long enough that you become a consumer. The goal is for you to buy, buy some more, and stay on as long as possible until that happens.

We are not resting because we are online for hours and hours a day, distracted and exhausted.

The belief that what one does and experiences does not affect everyone around them is a myth and disease that Americans severely suffer from. When we don’t take our own rest while holding space for others around us to rest, we are functioning like the systems we want to gain freedom from.

“An important distinction must be made: liberation and freedom are not the same. Liberation is a process. Freedom is a temporary state of being. Liberation is dynamic. It never ends.”2 Reading her work was the first time I began to rest in the beauty of liberation being a lifelong practice. This ultimately gave me the permission and vision to take up to dreaming. There was time now to just be. Before experiencing this revelation, I believed that I had to figure out everything in my internal and external life that was causing me harm and correct it immediately with the information I had in front of me.

was told the opposite: that you had to always be doing labor to fix. I didn’t see my body as a place of infinite wisdom but instead saw it as a tool to be used to push, create, figure out, and do.

I know there are many who have misunderstood the totality of our message of rest. I am learning by observing the patterns that have emerged on our social media accounts over the years. Many have purposely ignored the social justice and political thread that runs through. It can be easier to believe resting is simply about retiring to your bed when you are tired instead of beginning the messy process of deconstructing your own beliefs and behaviors that are aligned with white supremacy and capitalism.

I don’t want a seat at the table of the oppressor.

We must spiritually disconnect from the shenanigans of grind culture while physically still living in it. A metaphysical and spiritual refusal must be developed deep within. Capitalism may not fall in our lifetimes, and it is not redeemable, so the work is to begin to reclaim your body and time in ways that seem impossible to imagine. We must imagine. The time to rest and resist is now. We cannot afford to wait for the powers that be to create space for us to have moments of deep rest and care. If we wait, we will forever be caught up in the daily grind. To resist now means we will have to decide on rest as a reimagined way of life.

Rest is journaling so you can be a witness to your own inner knowing without the energy of others.

There is a trend happening in speaking and writing about rest. Most of the culture is not actually resting. The trend of talking and writing about it is rooted in capitalism, toxic group think, and opportunity—both connected to grind culture and the way media consumes and extracts.

We have the ability to imagine a Sabbath that is unique to us and only us.

I believe the deepest part of oppression lies in the theft of our imagination. I love when someone says, “I’m speechless. I am without words.” In our culture we live in our heads always ready to theorize, analyze, and make sense out of everything. In rest and dreaming, we surrender to the unknown. We can allow a moment of freedom. We can test out what it feels like to be without the limits of capitalism.