Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

by Tricia Hersey

I hope you are reading this while laying down!

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.

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.

This book is a scream on a bullhorn for the collective to join me in disrupting and pushing back. The Nap Ministry is a warm blanket swaddling us all back to our deepes...

Survival is not the end goal for liberation. We must thrive. We must rest.

Her commitment to “resting her eyes” every day for thirty minutes was radical. Her ability to demand space to “just be” was a form of resistance.

“Every shut eye ain’t sleep. I am resting my eyes and listening for what God wants to tell me.”

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.

We are enough. We are divine.

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.”

I wish you rest today. I wish you a deep knowing that exhaustion is not a normal way of living. You are enough. You can rest. You must resist anything that doesn’t center your divinity as a human being. You are worthy of care.

Let this be a testimony to our collective survival and our present and future thriving. You don’t belong on the grind. Get off the violent cycle. It is burning down because we torched it. Grind culture can’t have you.

Grind culture is a collaboration between white supremacy and capitalism. It views our divine bodies as machines. Our worth is not connected to how much we produce.

TENETS OF THE NAP MINISTRY 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.

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. There is no way around this. 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.

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.

I could tell ten thousand stories about moments when I have been filled with exhaustion. So many moments of watching my parents exhausted, my grandparents exhausted. Ten thousand stories and examples of moments where my body was pushed to the brink of true damage and true disconnection.

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.

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. Nothing we accomplish in life is totally free of the influence of spirit and community. We do nothing alone.

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.

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.

As I have counseled people who have an extreme desire to slow down and rest, I have witnessed the subtle and bold ways grind culture has swallowed us whole.

Will you trust me and trust your divinity enough to believe it is indeed not hopeless? Can you trust, even for a second, that we can reside in a rested future? I ask for us to walk this road slowly together, lay down together and collectively care for each other in a way that makes rest possible.

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.

Resting our bodies and minds is a form of reverence. When we honor our bodies via rest, we are connecting to the deepest parts of ourselves. We are freedom-making. What stories are we holding deep inside that are untold and uncovered because we are too exhausted?

I have learned that one of the most concise and true ways to share the message of rest is to say: “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.

I’ve done this because I realize that it is so easy for us as a culture to attempt to engage with this work from a quick surface level. Social media makes it so seductive to quickly scroll and feel a high from the media presented. It allows for an engagement that lacks depth, slow study, and embodiment.

The designers of the platforms wants us there all day scrolling, spending money, and absorbing messages in a fast-paced, disconnected manner.

You are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn rest. Rest is not a luxury, a privilege, or a bonus we must wait for once we are burned out.

Overworking and the trauma of burnout continues to degrade our divinity. Once we know and remember we are divine, we will not participate and allow anything into our hearts and minds that is not loving and caring. We would treat ourselves and each other like the tender and powerful beings we are.

I am grateful we have a lifetime and our healing needs to not be rushed and urgent. We have a lifetime. We can go slow. We can go deep. We can go into the cracks.

of listening to what we know to be true. It is risk-taking to do the opposite of what the dominant culture wants.

Grind culture has normalized pushing our bodies to the brink of destruction. We proudly proclaim showing up to work or an event despite an injury, sickness, or mental break. We are praised and rewarded for ignoring our body’s need for rest, care, and repair. The cycle of grinding like a machine continues and becomes internalized as the only way.

We can build, rest, and usher in a new way that centers liberation and care, no matter what the systems continue to do. 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.

Rest meditation practice: Sit in a chair with your back upright and your feet firmly planted on the floor. Recline in a chair, on a bed, on a couch, in a hammock, on the floor. Scan your body and recognize any tension. Breathe deep. Imagine a world without limits. Inhale deeply from your belly, hold for four seconds, exhale slowly. Repeat.

REST! DREAM! RESIST! IMAGINE!

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. They moved mountains with their faith alone and created pathways for invention that I am still uncovering. They resisted every moment by existing in a world that was not welcoming or caring.

He would repeat, “You are a child of God divinely appointed and chosen to be on Earth.”

There is a large body of research that points to the sleep gap that exists between Black Americans and white Americans.

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. We have been bamboozled and led astray by a culture without a pause button. We are barely surviving from our sleep deprivation, worker exploitation, and exhaustion. We must rest.

We must ask ourselves the following questions and more: If I have been consistently exposed and brainwashed by the violence of grind culture since birth, do I really know what rest feels like? Do I have a model or guide for what it feels like to be rested while living inside a capitalist system? What would it feel like to be consistently rested? What does exhaustion look like for me? Am I navigating the world from a constant state of exhaustion? Who was I before the terror of the toxic systems? Who do I want to be? What have you been told about your worth and existence? How do you make space to transcend

I remember asking a history teacher in junior high that if women got the right to vote in 1920, did it include Black women? He ignored my question by saying he would get back to it, but never did. There is never an answer when you are erasing.

The term womanist was coined by Alice Walker in 1983. It appeared in her book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens and defines a womanist as “Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.”

Unlike white feminism, womanism holds space for race, class, and gender and understands the family and community of a Black woman are collaborators in the struggle for liberation. It seeks balance and flexibility. Womanism is what allows me to see rest as a tool for liberation.

It is dreamwork and alchemy.

A postmodern womanist theology strives for tangible representations of the good. The good includes justice, equality, discipleship, quality of life, acceptance and inclusion.”