Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

by Tricia Hersey

I am in awe at what our bodies can hold. We must lighten our loads. Survival is not the end goal for liberation. We must thrive. We must rest.

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.

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. The Rest Is Resistance movement is a connection and a path back to our true nature. We are stripped down to who we really were before the terror of capitalism and white supremacy. We are enough. We are divine.

Resting as a form of resistance will be part of a lifelong unraveling. A mind shift, a slow and consistent practice filled with grace.

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.

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.

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.

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. I hear so many repeat the myth of rest being a privilege and I understand this concept and still deeply disagree with it. Rest is not a privilege because our bodies are still our own, no matter what the current systems teach us. The more we think of rest as a luxury, the more we buy into the systematic lies of grind culture. Our bodies and Spirits do not belong to capitalism, no matter how it is theorized and presented.

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.

I personally find it disrespectful and of utter disregard to allow myself to be boldly and proudly grinding my body into a state of exhaustion. It stops with me.

Grind culture is a collaboration between capitalism and white supremacy.

The people in my life found spaces to rest while navigating a racist culture, and they worked themselves into a deadly grind cycle to survive.

The lack of an open pathway to rest has never been given to most living in a capitalist system.

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. What we have internalized as productivity has been informed by a capitalist, ableist, patriarchal system. 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! Rest in this proclamation for a moment.

True liberation to me is to not be constantly attempting to prove our worth and ticking off to-do lists. To just be.

The trauma response is to keep going and to never stop. Grinding keeps us in a cycle of trauma; rest disturbs and disrupts this cycle. Rest is an ethos of reclaiming your body as your own. Rest provides a portal for healing, imagination, and communication with our Ancestors.

There are not enough words to explain to anyone what deep, tender rest feels like. Rest must be practiced daily until it becomes our foundation.

How many times have you attempted to connect with a friend or loved one but a brutal work schedule and a pull to hustle more have severed the connection, stolen your time together, or made it almost impossible to bond?