Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

by Tricia Hersey

Rest is anything that slows you down enough to connect with your body and mind. It is an ethos that holds firm to the body as a site of liberation. Active rest is also valuable rest. In active rest your body can move, swim, walk, dance, and tap into a portal.

When you are exhausted, you lack clarity and the ability to see deeply. Your intuition and imagination are stifled by a culture of overworking and disconnection.

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.

You were not just born to center your entire existence on work and labor.

The maroons were Black people navigating the terror of chattel slavery by refusing to be a part of it. For close to two centuries, they leaped off slave ships as they pulled up to the shores of North America to never be seen again, they organized and left plantations for the caves and deep woods of the South, they created their own communities outside of the slavery, and they were not fugitives and instead, living in a Third Space, a temporary place of joy and freedom.

Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons by Sylviane A. Diouf.

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.

Imagine a life outside of grind culture right now. You can create it because you are more powerful than you believe. We are more powerful than we believe. What liberation can you craft outside of grind culture? What information can you exchange with yourself and others to find rest? Are you ready to begin slowly by imagining what it would feel like to have everything you need? Are you curious enough to try rest?

The connection to your body is a spiritual experience.

None of the way we are living under capitalism is normal.

We learn how to make a way by building as we go.

We remain flexible and ready to shapeshift

Rest looks like tapping in and listening to what your body and soul want. It’s extra time while bathing, even an extra ten minutes of concentrated silence. Rest is taking a leisurely walk and dancing. Rest is a tea ritual allowing you to meditate while breathing in each warm sip. Rest is not returning an email immediately and maintaining healthy boundaries. Rest is honoring the boundaries of those you engage with. Rejecting urgency. Rest is detoxing from social media. Rest is listening and healing from individual trauma. Rest is journaling so you can be a witness to your own inner knowing without the energy of others.

How can we imagine a liberated world from a burned-out, quick-paced, exhausted state?

How can we build systems of care if we don’t even care for our own bodies and the bodies of others?

A politics of refusal is an ancient tactic.

long checklist of to-do’s will not replace a deep understanding of our enough-ness,

I am astonished at what my Ancestors were able to accomplish and create from an exhausted and sleep-deprived state. I place it in the category of divine miracle, and it creates a deep spaciousness for my hope about the future. I wonder about what our bodies can do in this dimension and this time from a rested and imaginative space. What could we heal? What could we figure out? How would our justice work look different if all involved were not sleep-deprived?

What do I feel called to do? How can I create space for me and my community to heal? What needs healing in me? Can the idea of unplugging and resting for a whole month be reimagined by creating smaller moments daily, weekly?

creating month-long Sabbaths from social media and labor. I have done this consistently and name it as one of the main ways I am able to continue to be inspired as an artist and activist in the midst of the beast of capitalism. What I have discovered has created space for me to be an antenna for infinite ideas and downloads. A container waiting to soak up what is already inside me while making space for the healing energy of silence. This is rest.

I stop to declare that there is enough, and I have done enough.

The everyday pace of our culture is not healthy, sustainable, nor liberating. We are living and participating in violence via a machine-level pace of functioning.

Creating a Sabbath is an opportunity for intense imagination work and collaboration with Spirit.

We are resting regardless of what any of these systems are doing. We are not waiting. We are not asking permission.

portal

this upbringing that allowed me to see liberation, community care, self-love, and imagination in real time.

I watched the Holy Spirit show up in the Pentecostal denomination and as a result I am very comfortable with embodiment and the idea of trusting deeply what is happening behind the...

Rest on a somatic level is a small resurrection.

A resurrection is a waking up into a new thing.

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.

I am grateful that Harriet Tubman was unrealistic when she decided to walk to freedom, guided by the stars, her intuition, and God.

All have made us believe we aren’t worthy and that we must prove ourselves by pushing hard every day to be able to receive love, care, rest, grace.

What if you are missing so much of who you are because you are navigating life from a state of exhaustion?

Grind culture keeps us out of our imagination and in a constant state of explanation, on the edge of tears, exhausted, triggered, and wondering.

Repetition is a powerful concept for deprogramming

Meditations for rest I deserve to rest now. I am worthy of rest. I am not lazy. How could I be lazy? My Ancestors are too brilliant for that. Capitalism wants my body to be a machine. I am not a machine. I am a magical and divine human being. I have the right to resist grind culture. I don’t have to earn rest. Do less, watch how I thrive. Ease is my birthright. I Will Rest!

Go to the water. Go to the depths of the ocean inside of you. Float there. Rest there. Imagine and dream there.