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This is my truth. I don’t need anyone else to verify this nor do I need complicated theories to support what I know to be true in my heart, my body, and my Spirit.
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.
Survival is not the end goal for liberation. We must thrive. We must rest.
My inspiration to rest is deep and expansive. I’m inspired by invention and the opportunity to craft something new from scratch. I’m inspired by remixing and being subversive. I am inspired by disruption and tenderness. I am inspired by imagination. I am inspired by grief, mourning, and lament. I believe deeply in vulnerable, generative spaces for healing. I am inspired by rest, daydreaming, and sleep.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 veil being removed. This is the beginning of the new world we can create. So, stay here in rest, even for a few minutes each day before leaping into the comfort of intellectualizing this rest work.
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.
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. 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.
many reading this book have never sat with the grief and pain associated with attaching your worth to productivity and money.
Being a parent has opened my eyes up to the ways grind culture successfully begins its socialization of fear and urgency. Even before my son was born the medical industry was rushing him out of my womb.
What struck me about this experience is the deep ways in which capitalism was given full power to control and drive my son’s entrance into the world. Grind culture has taken over every facet of our lives. The real fear of what could happen if we step into the unknown is crafted by capitalism and its cult of busyness and productivity. We are wrapped up in a web that feels inescapable and hopeless.
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.
clearly remember the moment it clicked for me how a capitalist, patriarchal, ableist, anti-Black system could never make space for the success I wanted for myself.
We must see our bodies as a miracle, and a place of reverence where existing in exhaustion is not normal or acceptable. 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.
The lack of an open pathway to rest has never been given to most living in a capitalist system.
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
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“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.”2 For me, the beauty of womanism is its holistic view of change. It centers the deep shared commitment Black women have to their family and community. 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.
“Not all evil can be overcome in this world, and yet a postmodern womanist theology maintains hope in the struggle to creatively and constructively respond to it. Sometimes feelings of discord are the result of the conflicts in this world. Sometimes liberation is not possible, but survival and quality of life are. All-encompassing health, wholeness, unity, and salvation are never fully attained in this world. As we constantly become, we are constantly vulnerable to evil and constantly capable of overcoming it. In postmodern womanist theology, salvation is an activity. Each new moment brings
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How do we transform grief to power? Lay and rest in these questions. We don’t have to have a complete answer to everything right now. We don’t have to know everything. We don’t have to be everything. We don’t have to do everything. There is space for the unknown. There is space for curiosity and mystery. There is space to just allow rest to settle and answer the questions for us.
Rest isn’t a luxury, but an absolute necessity if we’re going to survive and thrive. Rest isn’t an afterthought, but a basic part of being human. Rest is a divine right. Rest is a human right. We come into the world prepared to love, care, and rest.
We will be healing from our brainwashing from grind culture forever. We must be vigilant about the ways in which we will flow in and out of the grips of grind culture. There will be days when you will be pulled back into the system and will find yourself spinning, dizzy with the effects of hyperproductivity. 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.
Can you imagine a few hours a day of not being connected to your phones or email inboxes? What feelings rise inside when you imagine it? What if this day was extended to a full day or a full week? A month? What would you replace the hours of online engagement with? Could a hobby be cultivated during this time that could give you pleasure? Would you have more time to daydream, rest, nap? Would you go to bed earlier? Does it feel stressful to think about not having your phone nearby? What has the pervasive nature of social media and cell phones done to our quiet time?
social media is an extension of capitalism. It is a marketing tool.
The goal is to keep you scrolling long enough that you become a consumer.
was not born to simply exhaust myself inside a violent system.
My freedom from grind culture is intimately tied up in the healing and liberation of all those around me.
