Transcript: TRICIA HERSEY on Rest as Resistance /185
Ayana Young Welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry, originally aired in June of 2020. We hope you enjoy this special encore episode.
Tricia Hersey To not rest is really being violent towards your body. To align yourself with a system that says, “Your body doesn’t belong to you, keep working, you are simply a tool for our production- to align yourself with that is a slow spiritual death as well.
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I’m Ayana Young. I'm so excited to be joined by Tricia Hersey to speak on disrupting grind culture and finding liberation through rest.
Tricia is a Chicago native living in Atlanta with over 20 years of experience collaborating with communities as a performance artist, theater maker, spiritual director, and community organizer.
She is the founder of The Nap Ministry, an organization that examines rest as a form of resistance by curating safe spaces for the community to rest via Collective Napping Experiences, immersive workshops and performance art installations.
Her research interests include black liberation theology, womanism, somatics, and cultural trauma. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Public Health from Eastern Illinois University and a Master of Divinity from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University.
Oh goodness! Well, welcome to the show, Tricia. I really can't think of a better person to offer wisdom and guidance as we move through these strange and troubling times. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Tricia Hersey Thank you so much for having me. I’m honored to be here. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
Ayana Young Me too. To slowly ease into this conversation, I think it might be important to start with a bit of your own personal story and how you arrived at this work, exploring the realm of rest.
Tricia Hersey Yeah. I love to answer questions about the origins, because I think it's so important to ground it with this fast pace, digital sharing of information, and the sharing of hashtags. People quickly catch on to something and they take the message and it can just be swept away. But it’s so important to really ground this work and it’s personally important to me, because this work came out of a personal connection for me to really convene and also communicate with my ancestors.
As a person who's an artist and who was working in archives, who loves history, who was studying reparations theories while I was in graduate school, I started all of this kind of experimenting with ideas when I was a student in divinity school. I started there in 2013. I was there and I was a community activist and artist for 20 years. I had been doing that work in Chicago for years. Here I was showing up at a divinity school not really knowing what theology was, just knowing I have felt a calling to really study the concept of spirituality and creativity, and I was really drawn by black liberation theology. I was drawn in by reading a book called Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman, and then I also love James Cone, and my dad was a Pentecostal preacher and pastor of the Church of God in Christ in Chicago, one of the oldest black denominations in the country.
I came already with those ideas and here I landed in seminary, being able to be in the south, being in Atlanta, going to school there. Coming from the north, I was able to work in archives and really be able to touch documents and see what plantation labour was really doing for us. I was taking classes in cultural trauma. One of the classes in cultural trauma, I was studying Jim Crow segregation and taking somatics classes and thinking about what the body can hold and how trauma is held in the body.
And so I was interviewing Jim Crow survivors, wondering what redemption could look like. What it could look like for our bodies now. As a womanist scholar, I was really interested in micro-histories, like the small little details of our lives, because we believe that in our everyday experiences, in our everyday methods of problem-solving, we can really heal. I wanted to really know what was happening on these plantations. So I just become obsessed.
At the same time, I was going through so much trauma, personal trauma. I was in a white, predominantly white university. I really wasn't being heard at all while I was there. There were some really stellar teachers that reached out and held me in that space, teachers who were black. But for the most part, it was a very white institution, very conservative in the south.
Black Lives Matter was heating up. That movement was really heating up in 2013. There were lynchings constantly being played on TV. I was suffering from a lot of personal traumas. Two people in my family died. I was really not liking school. I was really feeling really traumatized by the whole process of being in a graduate school. So I just started resting and I started digging deeper into the archives. From that space of really learning about what was happening to my ancestors on plantations, how they were human machines, how they were one of capitalism's first experiments, and really diving into the details of what a day looked like for them as far as working. I just felt the calling and felt a pull with my ancestors to really rest for them. I started experimenting with performance art.
And so our first event was really a performance art piece that I put together called Transfiguration, where I was actually pulling together all of this research from our graduate studies and was going to do a one-woman show that included me reading slave narratives, sleeping on a bed, multimedia film. Just really concisely putting together what I had learned over these three and half years in seminary, and it was just going to be a one-woman show.
And part of the show was that people actually took a nap and rested with us, and I named the Nap Ministry. I named the space we were in a temple. Forty people showed up, and I couldn't wake them. It was two hours of people sleeping and waking up in tears, and crying, and there was a rest altar. It just all landed there, but I really just thought that would be the landing place and it will be the end of it. How many years later, I think four years later, we’ve had over 50 events and people kept asking, “When was the next one? When is the next one?”
So I really want to honor that this was really an experimentation of me as an artist, of me as a daughter and granddaughter of people who were so innovative and subversive and me really wanting to honor them and seeing rest as our reparations for them.
Ayana Young I think many of us come into relationship with harmful narratives of rest and productivity from a really early age. Particularly in the West, we’re taught to valorize grind culture and assign success or status to those who work hard to the point of exhaustion, let alone I think we also potentially get a sense of our purpose and personal fulfillment and personal value connected to this culture of productivity.
I’d like to dig a little bit deeper into where these narratives actually come from. Why are we so attached to the daily grind and what are the consequences when we feel like we can't slow down?
Tricia Hersey Yeah. I think why it’s like that, you cannot speak about sleep deprivation or grind culture without talking about white supremacy. I think you can't talk about any form of oppression without really naming white supremacy, colonization as a seed of it.
It's interesting when I first started the Nap Ministry, at least started putting things up on IG, because I always had it as my framework. White supremacy was always a framework. I’m studying slavery in the American South. I’m studying plantation labor. I’m looking at reparations theory. I'm studying Jim Crow terror, cultural trauma. How could we not speak about white supremacy? It was always in my framework. The IG page came later. This work was always already happening.
And people were really mad at me for even saying anything about white supremacy. When I first started being like, “Grind culture is making you not sleep. Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. I had so much hate thrown at me. So many people who were like, “That makes no sense. What is white supremacy have to do with sleeping?” So that’s the thing: white supremacy has bamboozled us to the point of where we really can’t even see what's really happening. That’s why rest is so important, because rest does give you the space to actually see what's happening.
When you talk about grind culture, grind culture is simply white supremacist work culture. White supremacist work culture is an extractive culture. It’s hustle culture. It’s seeing productivity as a function of your worth. Whatever white supremacy is doing on a global scale to us and has done, white supremacy has been using the body as a tool for destruction since the beginning of time. To not name and put white supremacy in the center of this would be…it doesn’t make sense. So you have to speak about it. When you speak about capitalism, you can’t speak about that without speaking about white supremacy.
I really was able to land that and understand that by studying what was happening during plantation labor. Studying what was happening during the transatlantic trade, the middle passage, centuries and centuries of plantation labor. What that all was, was capitalism beginning. It was all done as a tool to be produced, to make money. To really put the whole entire economic infrastructure of American culture was built off the backs of Native people and also Africans.
I think we are so used to ignoring and we think white supremacy is only one thing. It's being pulled over by the police. It’s poverty being a reality. White supremacy rules and is the oppressive hand of everything that is happening in our culture. Grind culture is nothing but a continuation of what was happening on plantations for centuries really.
I think the consequence of it is what we're seeing now. I mean, biologically, what is happening to our bodies when we don't sleep, sleep deprivation is a public health issue. It’s also a spiritual issue. It’s also a spiritual death that’s happening to us. It’s a physical and biological death that’s happening to our bodies. Our bodies are being used as a tool of oppression. They want to own our bodies.
When you look at it from a biological, from a spiritual, from a creative level, it’s really what is not going to allow us to really fully reach our full potential and really liberate ourselves and really fully be able to reach the full revolution.
Ayana Young Yeah. I absolutely agree with that, and I’m grateful how you’re weaving in the history of slavery and plantation labor as the foundational creation of capitalism. Grind culture as we know it, it's really I think important for us to be able to zoom out and see these interconnections. I’m thinking about the many ways in which late stage capitalism feeds off of various forms of forced, or invisibilized labor and violence against marginalized community. Of course, maintaining a population that is traumatized and isolated from their community, is endemic to capitalism.
You’ve given us a foundation of the connections between white supremacy and capitalism and this machine level pace of our society. I want to ask about, what does it mean for rest to be a right rather than a privilege, and maybe within that, you could also speak to this brainwashing that you've spoken about before why we are so attached to the daily grind, even though it's really hurting us.
Tricia Hersey Yeah. I’ve been hearing so many people keep saying “Rest is a privilege. It’s such a privilege to rest.” To me, when I hear it, it just continuously informs the concept that we are truly brainwashed and we really do believe that, we believe that to be able to lay our bodies down, to look at our bodies as what they are: divine holding places of liberation. I really think people need to really look at the biology and the science of sleep. There's a whole another level to this that people are not landing on as far as neurologically and what's happening in our brains.
I’ve been really—having a public health background and really being into community health—I’ve been really doing a lot of doing a lot of research around what happens to the body when it doesn't sleep. Even if you never want it to look at this from a concept of politics or social justice, if you never wanted to look at it from the spiritual lens. If you just simply wanted to stay landed in neurology, in biology and health: when you don't sleep, you’re literally killing your body. It's not a dramatic over-the-top thing to say that. Our organs begin to break down. To not rest really being violent towards your body. To align yourself with a system that says “Your body doesn't belong to you, keep working. You are simply a tool for our production.” To align yourself with that is a slow spiritual death as well.
The brainwashing, you talked about living in the west. From the you’re born, maybe sometimes before you’re born, while you're in the womb, they’re beginning the process of brainwashing us towards being tools for production, tools for capitalism. I say before the womb, because I'm thinking about when I was carrying my son and how he was large and they thought I was having twins, but I wasn’t. I kept telling them, “He’s just a big baby. I’m a tall woman. Everyone in my family is over 6-feet. We have big babies. It'll be fine.” The doctor pushed a Caesarian, because it was on timeline. She couldn't fit it in any other time, because this is when I can do it.
So even the concept of time of allowing my baby to come when he wanted to come out, he was even being rushed out the womb because of a medical system that doesn't look at us as human beings. Looks at us a number, as this patient who can just be rushed: “I have more patients to get to. Hurry up.”
That began, and then you talked about public school. If you know about public schools, they’re literally created for us to start the process of training young people to be young workers who’ll be able to leave the school system and go into a 9-to-5 corporate job to be able to sit still. To be able to sit at a desk. To not embody what their body wants. To refuse to see their bodies as divine. To start looking at quantity over quality. To ignore the pleas of caring and looking at flexibility.
All of these things are in us from a very early age, and everything in culture is supporting this. When I say that this is a hard resistance, when I say this is a resistance, it really is, because everything in culture is supporting us to not rest, to keep going, to ignore your body, to not sleep, to sleep when you're dead. All of these things that we've been socialized to believe is white supremacist work culture, brainwashing us from the time we’re little.
I used to work in schools and teach, and I remember young kids stressing out during finals. The way the whole academic system is set up is a violent situation. When I was in graduate school, it was like a badge of honor for people to stay up till 4 in the morning, sleep at the library, teachers giving you a thousand pages to read per day. If you have six classes, you’re supposed to sit, and you’re supposed to just make it happen. No one collaborating with other teachers to be like, “Maybe that’s too much for students. Maybe we can think about a way to help them to balance this out.”
And so everything in culture is working against us. So when we don't name that we've been brainwashed, that we need to deprogram, that we’re going to have to be really subversive and innovative and intentional and meticulous about deprogramming from this. It’s so important that we name it. And so I named sleep deprivation as a racial justice issue, as a social justice issue, as a public health issue. It’s key to any type of liberation, any freedom that we can get to is going to be centered around rest.
I also believe that our ancestors knew that. My ancestors knew that. Even though they had no autonomy over their bodies, were literally real human machines working 20 hours a day sometimes on plantations, in the sun, picking cotton, picking tobacco, all the other crops. They were human machines and they still found ways to subvert, slow down production, find joy, rest. I think it’s really time for us to start reimagining what all of this can look like. I’m always really, really surprised that so many people, when I say to them, “You should be able to take a 30-minute nap every day.”– “I could never rest. I could never do that. How?”
You know, I think about my ancestors and what they were going through and how they still found time to rest. So it just shows me how far and deep the process of brainwashing and accepting violence towards ourselves is happening, that we now in 2020 believe that we can’t take 10 minutes every day, close our eyes and meditate, or 30 minutes to rest, and we really literally feel like we cannot do it. And when we do do it, we feel extreme guilt and shame around it. That's why I named the brainwashing because of the fact that we’re participating in our own demise.
Ayana Young To think of your son – I mean, literally, from birth, the rushing of birth. I mean this is really entrenched. My gosh! Yeah.
Tricia Hersey Yes. We know the medical system is an industrial complex that sits right in white supremacy. Think about what's happening now and all of the people of color who are dying thinking about COVID-19. It’s uplifting and illuminating the healthcare system, which we've always known has been racist and anti-black and created off white supremacy. So we keep going back to that white supremacy. We keep going back to the systems that set everything up. It really touches everything.
Ayana Young Well, I’m wondering, I think it can be difficult for people to imagine what rest could look like beyond the act of sleeping or taking a nap. So how can our waking lives be full of rest or perhaps embody a sustained slowness within all that we do?
Tricia Hersey Yes. I love answering this question; it’s one of my favorites to dream about and imagine about, because I always get to tell the story of my maternal grandmother, who was a Jim Crow refugee from Mississippi and like millions of other black people left the South in hopes of running from Jim Crow terror that was happening in their southern states and for hopes of these new opportunities.
When I think about how she literally built a spaceship out of this uncertainty. She took the load on. She built this way to be like, “I'm going to leave and take my children. I don't know if I'll get a job there. I don't know anybody in Chicago. I'm a refugee, but I know I won't have my children lynched.”
Her and other brave black people on the Great Migration, which I uphold as one of the most inspiring things to me when I think about resistance and think about really imagining and leaping and being subversive and making a way out of no way. I think these are the things that we need to be tapping into right now, this ancient wisdom.
And so my grandmother left Mississippi, came to Chicago. My mother was one of her nine children. She worked two jobs in Chicago in the ‘50s. Two jobs, one, she was cleaning for people. Another, she worked at a hospital, like a psychiatric hospital, she was kind of like a CNA, taking care of the patients there. She did that. She went to church every day. She gardened, she took over a garden, this land that was next to her house. She never got any permits from the city. She took over almost 10 acres of land and made it a farm, a garden. She just was out there every day gardening. Raising nine children. I mean, so many grandchildren. I’m one of the grandchildren.
Her house was just this hub of activity, and every single day between her two jobs, and believe me, when I say she worked two jobs, she was on her feet all day and night cleaning for someone else, working in the hospital. But she sat on that couch and closed her eyes for 30 minutes every single day, and we always thought she was asleep. Us as children, my 15 or so cousins running around the house, being wild and crazy children, we’d always be saying, “Okay, be quiet. Grandma’s asleep. Grandma’s asleep, ya’ll. Don’t wake her up.” She would always without open her eyes say, “I'm not sleeping. Every shut eye ain’t sleep. I’m resting my eyes so I can hear what God is trying to say to me.”
Then later in her life, she started dealing with the illness. She had leukemia, and poverty abounded, she didn’t have much at all. For her to be able to sit, intentionally say she was going to rest for 30 minutes and close her eyes. When I was a child, I didn't understand it. I thought, “Oh! Grandma is just so different.” But now I think back on it, I say, “What was she holding in this space? What was she meditating on? What was she hearing from God that allowed her to be able to take such a leap? For her to imagine such a way for her to leave such violence that was happening to her and her family in Mississippi and come without any idea if it would work? She just had her radical faith and her radical idea that there has to be something better.
I think we have part of the brainwashing. Part of white supremacy has taken away our intuition. It’s allowed us to not imagine. When you’ve a stolen people's intuition, imagination, hope, you’ve pretty much taken everything from them, because those are the things that marginalized people, people who have been living under oppression for centuries, hold on to.
When I think about Harriet Tubman and her work on the Underground Railroad, and how her imagination led her to be able to be like, “I don't even know how to read. I don’t even know where I'm going. I don't have a map, but I just know that it’s freedom or death. I just know that I'm just going to walk this way and I just got a hold on until there’s something else better.”
I have noticed that in these four years of being with the Nap Ministry and counseling thousands of people and listening to their stories, that we’re at this critical place where we actually have lost our imagination. It’s been stolen. Grind culture has taken that from us, because grind culture refuses to see the divinity of you as a human being. If you buy into grind culture, you actually are aligning yourself with the concept that you’re not a divine human being and that your worth has already been given to you by the fact that you’re alive. Your birth is your worth.
To sit with your eyes closed for 10 minutes and daydream, that’s rest. To say “no more,” to look at your calendar as a sacred text, to really start to begin to heal the trauma inside of you that’s happened to you personally, the collective trauma that’s happened to us by living under a system that doesn't see us as a human being. The end result of all of this is that we have to begin to start naming our trauma, taking painful and uncomfortable steps to grieve it, to heal it and to see a new way.
So I’m very influenced by afrofuturism and the concept of deep, deep, deep imagination. And I see people so much being like, “That sounds nice, but I could never rest.” I'm wondering to myself, “Man! To think that we're in this day and age and we feel like rest is a privilege, then we don't even have opportunity in this space to find 10 minutes to look outside and stare out your window, deep, deep daydreaming, closing your eyes, breathing slowly.”
To me, rest, it’s just about more than naps. It’s really about an ethos and a perspective and a pushing back and a way of living, and a way of life that has slowed down, that is connected, that is magnetic, that is distilled down into a place where we really are looking at ourselves as who we really are. This is a spiritual work that’s happening for us to be able to allow ourselves to uplift the divinity of who we really are.
Ayana Young I want to say that in the past few years, it's been interesting to watch this kind of obsession emerge within mainstream culture around sleep and the marketing of self-care tied to an endless stream of consumption, of course. It seems as though people are quick to share your words on social media or retweet the memes that you create. But beyond this, what does it really mean to show up with integrity to this radical work?
Tricia Hersey Yeah. I love that you brought this up, because I want to name social media as an extension of capitalism. I want to name it right now. I know it's ironic that a lot of the work that people are knowing about me, it’s because of social media and I see it as a tool that can be used for some correction. It can be used to help in some ways. But for the most part, I'm very anti-technology and anti-social media in a lot of ways, because I see it as an extension of capitalism. I see the heart of it being that people, what I love about the concept and what underlies it, is that people just want to connect with each other. I love the beauty of interconnectedness, of people wanting to commune, of building community. Community care is a major tenet of the Nap Ministry. I love technology for what it tries to be and what people are longing for.
The power and the energy of people longing for community, of people wanting to be connected is a beautiful thing, but if we don't remember and always uplift that social media is really just another extension of capitalism, it’s a consumer-driven product with the people who own social media are billionaires. I think what I don't like about it is that it doesn't allow for deep work that’s intensively understood and slowly imagined. It’s quick paced. The digital realm is just, “Put up a hashtag and put it on something.”
I’ve been seeing a lot of people using the hashtag Rest is Resistance more like, to sell things, and a room full of people doing yoga saying, “Rest is Resistance” and I’m like, what are you resisting about? Do you even know what the resistance is about? How do you resist something that you can’t name? And so I really do think that this obsession that we have with talking about sleep and talking about rest is really like just a moment that's happening right now. It's an awareness that's coming up. But a lot of the awareness is for people to nap and sleep so they can be better workers, you know, “Be more productive. If you sleep more, you could be more productive.”
Actually the lens that I'm putting on it is actually, no, this is not about productivity. Productivity is and always has been a scam. We've been scammed. Exhaustion is not productivity. So I think the accountability piece is really hard. I'm glad you brought that up, because I'm in a place right now with my work where I’m really trying to understand what that looks like. What I did is my pushback against this consumerist, digital, quick sharing, really came when I started the Resurrect Rest School. I started that back in January. We had our first class. What it is, it’s a free school that I'm hosting based on the freedom schools of the 50s and 60s where people were in deep connective learning with each other.
So, people come together, shoulder to shoulder, looking in each other's eyes. We’re reading all of the texts that really centers the work. We’re reading bell hooks and we’re looking at womanism and we’re looking at soul care. We’re reading afrofuturist texts. We’re really deconstructing what this movement really is. It’s so important for me that this movement is continuously frameworked inside of theories, inside of like real stuff and it’s not becoming consumed and eaten up and becomes this extractive consumptive idea of “I put up a meme, Rest is Resistance.” And I wonder, I said to the people on IG the other day. I’m like, “Are ya’ll really resting or are you just retweeting the memes?” I’m trying to get some understanding about what’s really happening.
For me, the Resurrect Rest School was for needing to really be with people in real-life and touch their hands and see their eyes and lay them down with a blanket and pillow and see people really coming together and slowly, slowly learning and researching. I don’t believe that we can really deprogram from our brainwashing with quick, fast information that’s just thrown at us. It’s really going to be a slow meticulous, enormous effort, slowly understanding the background, slowly understanding what has happened and kind of have to be supported and fortified by information and by community coming together and holding space with each other to speak and really go deep into some uncomfortable conversations.
If we can’t talk about white supremacy and capitalism, how we actually are aligning ourselves with it and actually are the ones upholding it, we’re actually upholding grind culture. We don’t want to let it go. We don’t want to start talking about the uncomfortable trauma that has caused us to be addicted to grind culture and really want to do that hard work, then the accountability piece is going to be missed.
Ayana Young This is just so important how this rest-as-resistance can be co-opted, and that isn’t the Rest as Resistance with integrity. If you’re trying to Rest as Resistance to sell something or Rest as Resistance to be more productive, that’s absolutely not the core of what this work is, because our addiction and our brainwashing to consumer capitalism, high-speed, urgency, adrenaline, it’s like a response that we’ve become addicted to through the brainwashing. We can’t get out of the urgent addiction with more fast-paced, urgent responses. I also think when we use rest or self-care to maintain capitalism, we’re also completely forgetting the ecological component of rest. And I’ve really been inspired by you in thinking, when we rest, the Earth rests. If we’re not doing as much and if we’re slowing down, then there doesn’t need to be as much made, resources don’t need to be extracted at the same pace.
When we’re really fast and we’re doing all this stuff all the time, that has a consequence, because the Earth actually has to keep up with our desires and needs of the moment. And so if we say we care about the Earth, climate change, the Anthropocene extinction, we have to understand that if we are not slowing down, the Earth will never be able to slow down, because we are pushing the Earth to keep up with this grind culture, because the Earth is the basis to how we grind.
Tricia Hersey Yes. Exactly. The land needs to rest. It needs to be honored. When I think about land, it’s so important to me with this Ministry, because remember, I started by looking at what plantation labor was doing. How they were extracting from the Earth. Growing all of this agriculture and who were the people who were out there doing it? The violence that was happening? Why they were extracting from the Earth cotton, and sugar, and tobacco, all these things that they were growing in the Earth. It’s really important. The concept of land and liberation is closely connected to this work, because I really feel that the land and the people who were stewards of the land. The fact that they were stewards of the land in a violent meme, when I think about the violence that was happening in those fields and on those plantations and for centuries and centuries, the land being just cultivated and used and the lives who were dying out there under the heat, picking cotton. What does that say for our ancestor worship and ancestor communication and reverence to them when such violent things were happening in that space?
And so a lot of the work started with me resting outdoors, sleeping outside and doing public site installations outside and reclaiming the land, reclaiming the ancestors who were out there working in this southern heat with no type of stopping.
During my research, I was reading a lot of slave narratives and I was seeing how women were giving birth in the fields and then the midwife would take the baby, and they would keep working. They had 500 pounds of cotton each to pick a day. If you didn’t pick it, it was violence or death. To think about our world and our American culture starting and the culture of pretty much this entire economic infrastructure being built off so much violence that the land was having to take. When you think about lynchings and what the trees were seeing and what was happening in the land. And now, we’re aligning ourselves with that same system. What pain that must be causing our ancestors and what disrespect we’re continuing do to the land and to the Earth and to what’s around us. I think it’s so important. I’m so glad that you brought that up, about ecologically what’s going on and how all of this land and liberation is really connected.
Because you have to understand what was happening on plantations. We don’t really look at that. We know slavery happened, but to look at the micro details of a day-to-day, what it look like, I was able to find that out, they got up before the sun came up. Most of the time they worked 20-hour days sometimes and they would keep going. There were no breaks. There was no, “Oh, you don’t feel well, or you’re pregnant? Okay, keep picking,” and we know how hot it gets outside. Cotton is such a very hard plant to really work with.
I have cotton that I use a lot in a lot of our performance installations and just to touch it and feel it and to see how bodies were being connected to this plant that was hard to pick and pull and what that did to our bodies and what that also did to the land, because a lot of my friends are farmers and they talk about how soil regenerates and how many centuries on plantations they were just growing, growing, growing. It just never let the Earth ever stop to heal. It’s just, “All right, grow more cotton. Grow more. We need more people to do it.”
And so this industrial human machine level pace was started there and we’re actually continuing it. We’re doing it to ourselves now. We’re jumping on board and we’ve aligned ourselves and have been brainwashed to really be a supporter to uphold this type of work culture.
That’s where I want to disrupt and that’s why we say rest is a form of resistance, because it disrupts and it also pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. That’s one of our main things that we believe and one of tenants, is that there’s a pushback and the resistance and the disruption to a very specific thing that’s happening to us, that’s happened to the land, that’s continuing to happen to the land and to the resources that we are around and how we just need to slow it down. Things cannot be at this machine level pace.
But at this point, I think sometimes people are saying now that to slow down now, it feels more uncomfortable to them, because they’re so used to being on this grind machine.
Ayana Young Yeah, I think it is uncomfortable because it’s become habit. It’s become not only psychologically addictive with our value systems, but also I think the adrenaline our bodies somatically have gotten used to it. I think it is really challenging. But on this ecological thread, a question I’m sitting with is “slowing down in the context of resistance and direct action.” And I see this capitalist grind culture is quite literally killing us and seeding toxicity. But I’m wondering if we can separate this from the urgent action required to, say, stop a pipeline or shut down detention centers and private prisons or defend a forest from being logged. I’m curious what you think about bringing a culture of slowness and rest into movement spaces, facing so much trauma and state violence.
Tricia Hersey Yes. Yeah, I think it’s important to note that I am an activist and a community servant and this work started 20 years ago with me working in direct actions, leading workshops, trainings, being on the frontlines and movement spaces around violence, gun violence, school justice in Chicago. I understand the urgency, because you’re working on this timeline. Someone got killed today. We need to go there today. Someone was arrested in a way that was not humane. We need to be there now. How direct actions are really quick paced and have to be a reaction to what is going on. I understand that.
But I also understand that movement work is spiritual work. I’ve noticed that in a lot of movement spaces since I’ve been in them since I was in my 20s and I’m now 45, that the people working in movement work are folks who have been traumatized, just like everyone else, by their oppressive systems that we live under, and that we need healing too and that we need to understand that there is spiritual work that has been done for us behind the scenes that can help move movement work forward that isn’t going to be us killing ourselves and working 80-hour weeks and re-continuing to traumatize each other by copying white supremacist work culture.
That’s where the spiritual piece comes in. There’s work that has been done already for us behind the scenes that we can tap into. Native people understand this. African people understand this. We are losing those ancient techniques and those ancient understandings to be able to balance.
I’ve been in movement spaces where we’ve had trainings. We’re in a training literally all day for 12 hours. There’s no bathroom breaks. There’s no way to eat. There’s no concept of resting. It’s just like we really literally are continuing to use this white supremacist work culture to do our work. I don’t think that we can use the master’s tool to dismantle the master’s house. This is a beautiful quote by Audre Lorde. You can’t do that. It’s not going to work. I think that we’ve lost our way as movement workers and movement spaces.
We’ve also been caught up in the grind. We’ve also been working on deadlines and working on grants and things that have to be done, but I really believe that rest can be a portal in a third space, in a place that we can go and imagine and actually gain more knowledge of how we can actually do this work in a different way. If you believe that rest is a portal for invention, I believe that when we rest, that we can actually tap into some ideas, into some new energies, new ways of actually approaching this situation. We can never do that, because we also are grinding. I’ve actually done a lot of trainings with people who are in movement spaces right now, and a lot of them are suffering from so much mental health, physical health, working 80 hours a day, having brain aneurysms, being sick.
I did one here in Atlanta last year for some movement workers who were working on human rights campaigns. Everybody in the room was so exhausted. As soon as I asked them, “Are you guys tired?” They just started weeping and it was just like, “I’m tired. I’m sick. I keep going. I keep going, because the work has to be done.” But I don’t feel like we can actually get to liberation by repeating the same trauma that has been done to us. I just don’t believe that we have to be traumatized to be able to get to the other side. I won’t ever believe that we have to have some of our executive directors of some of these big organizations never take a day off work in a year.
Their children are suffering because they’re not home to be with them. I talked with a movement worker who was saying that she had a brain aneurysm. The next day she was up trying to like get online to organize a direct training. I don’t see how we believe that that energy and the spirit of that and the spiritual component of that is ever going to give us the results that we’re looking for.
And so I want to uplift spiritual work that’s been done for us and how our ancestors have done some things in the past that are still working for us right now. A part of grind culture makes us believe that if I don’t see the result of something, it’s not happening. If I’m not doing something, then it’s not happening. I think that that’s a false belief and I think that’s a belief rooted in white supremacy. I believe that there’s always things being done behind the scenes for our spiritual greatness, and there’s always things happening to be able to help get us to the other side.
When I keep going back to Harriet Tubman and going back to my ancestors who weren’t seeing anything happening, but they were believing and trusting in a greater power, looking up at the stars and following the path to freedom and just trusting and believing that there was – Their ancestors were already putting a word in for them and are already seeing them and they’re able to communicate with them. They’re able to use that energy to be able to come out with dynamic solutions now, and I don’t think that you can actually get to a liberative state if you’re exhausted in rest. I believe that the revolution will be lived by well rested people, people who are connected, who are inventive, who are tapped into the spiritual component of rest and what it can do for us.
Ayana Young So much wisdom that you just shared with us.
Tricia Hersey It’s a lot to process. Rest is a third space. It’s a portal for new ways. What type of innovative ideas can you offer to us? How can you heal from your own trauma?
A lot of these movement spaces are being led people who have unhealed trauma and they’re continuing to traumatize others.
Ayana Young I want to speak more to this rest as portal. In many ways, it seems that the Nap Ministry is about embodiment. As you name, our bodies also hold inherent wisdoms, strategies and tools for repair, and our bodies are so resilient. So I’d love if you could speak more to the importance of surrendering to our somatic intelligence. What resources are available for us within the unconscious wanderings of dream space?
Tricia Hersey Yeah. It’s so beautiful how you said that. Yeah, the third tenet of the Nap Ministry is, “Our bodies are a site of liberation.” So wherever our bodies are, we can find a liberative space. The somatics of all of that, I come from a background in black Pentecostalism, which looks at the body as being a space where the laying on of hands and the catching of the Holy Spirit, and they wake up and they just look so different. They look like they’ve healed from so many different things.
And so I really believe that we are missing the magic of what is happening on a somatic level in our bodies, that our bodies hold everything, the memory and the wisdom that’s there, the body wisdom, the body memory. If you aren’t resting and if we are at a sleep deprivation level, think at what level are our bodies and minds actually working. I believe that when you rest and go into that portal, that you could wake up with new ideas. The science of sleep tells us there are chemicals that are released in our brains when we sleep that actually can help us move through trauma, can help us to kind of heal ourselves. Our body is already this beautiful place that wants us to heal, that wants to be well, that can move at the space in the pace that is most ideal for us. We’ve forgotten that. We’ve totally just missed out on any of the sleep wisdom and the body wisdom. We’ve ignored it. We’ve ignored it for, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” We’ve ignored it all for productivity as a function of our worth, for perfectionism, for profit over life, for seeing burnout as normal. We see burnout as just a normal phase of life. It’s not normal to burn out. That’s not normal!
I think rest actually disrupts the cycle of trauma and I believe that grind culture is trauma towards us and also grind culture feeds off of trauma. To take a moment to intentionally say no and push back, my body doesn’t belong to capitalism. My body belongs to me. My body is a divine being. It is divinity inside, to embody that wisdom. Every time we feel like we want to rest and our body feels that and we ignore it, each time we ignore it is another moment of us putting trauma on to our physical bodies.
To intentionally do that is really such a beautiful offering for ourselves. I actually think collectively doing that together also is a direct action. We do our collective napping experiences. We’ve done them as large as 50 people in a room at the same time all taking a nap. That’s been kind of curated by myself, and I’m usually the only person who’s up and everyone else is resting and upholding space in the room. To feel the energy and for people to wake up together, and there’s been magical and spiritual things that have happened in this spaces. People have woken up and don’t even know each other and have had the same dreams.
People in the back of the room and be like, “I had a dream of this.” The other person is like, “I had the exact same dream. Can you pick up where I left off?” And it’s the exact same dream. People have woken up and will say, “I didn’t realize how I haven’t taken a nap in three years. Now I feel like I can take on the world.”
I really feel like, collectively, when we put our bodies in this space of healing together and honoring it, we’re doing so much for our future, for our liberation. I don’t think that we can get there without looking at rest for what it is. It’s a dream space, and I believe that it’s been stolen from us.
One of our other tenets is that we want it back, and we can reclaim it via rest. The dream space is this place where we can go and just be. I always thought this when I was studying my ancestors. I was like, “What could they have imagined and figured out if they were allowed a space to rest? Could they have been able to come up with plans that could have helped them escape a little bit quicker? Could they have been able to come up with ideas on how they could have revolted? What could have happened if we were allowed a space to rest? If they were allowed a space to actually go into a dream space? Could their freedom have been closer? Could they have had more intricate ways? Could the underground railroad have been even a larger system, because we have so many inventive ideas, because we were working on a well-rested mind and a well-rested body that was able to take on these oppressive systems?”
I think we must fortify our minds and our bodies, and rest is the way to be able to allow us to get there. I really believe that the more we rest, the more we’re able to wake up and use the sacredness to help fortify our movements.
I actually think that the powers that be don’t want us to rested. They know if we are rested and if we are at our full potential brain waves and if we’re thinking and connected, what could we figure out quicker? I feel like we’re in this dumb zombie phase. When you’re not rested, you’re like – And is sleep deprived. non-woke phase of just go with the flow and take things. I feel like the power, rest is like a power. It’s a slowing down that allows you to be able to be like, “You know what? I actually don’t want to be treated like this,”
Ayana Young Yes, the veil is lifted. I was reading “How to do nothing” by Jenny O’dell, and she writes “Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. I’m less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention. What happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again together.” And I love that, because it reminds me, reclaiming rest, reclaiming attention, reclaiming how we think and feel about the world, rather than this zombie vibe that you’re talking about, that we’re just in this complacent zombie hood, in the grind, not giving ourselves space to think, “Whoa, is this actually what I want to do with my life. Im really with, and I just have two more questions, and I was reading a paper you wrote for graduate school and it says, “When we stand in the gaps for each other and decide to be relentless in our support and witness, we can shift oppression. The beauty of this reality is that it repeats itself in many forms on our journey in life: childbirth, graduations, and protest marches, at weddings, in classrooms, with strangers on public transportation, in elevators, in courtrooms, in church pews, on war fields, on streets in gang territory and in death. We are intimately tied to each other. We find God through each other.” So beautiful.
Tricia Hersey It takes me back to when I wrote that, I kind of framed it around the concept of when my father died suddenly and how the community rallied around us in such a deep way that I actually – I felt the presence of people even though they weren’t around me. I felt as if hundreds of people were holding me up. I felt that in my body.
My mom also said that she felt like God was seeing us through other people, that the community became the hand of God. I don’t like to use the word self care. I always talk about community care, and I talk about soul care. I talk about community care as a practice of freedom and how I believe that we really cannot heal alone. That’s why I named our first signature program our collective napping experiences, which have since taken a hold because of what’s going on with this pandemic. We can’t be in spaces with each other physically.
Last year, we did close to 50 of them all over the country where we’ll go in and install safe places for the community to rest together, sacred spaces. We go in art direction and put our blankets and pillows. At every single event we’ve ever had, there is a rest altar built. Some of them are very elaborate 20 feet high, but some of them are just a small jar of cotton, or either a photo of my grandmother, who is a muse for resting. Her picture is always there. There’s always an altar there to ground the space. Even if there’re three people there or there’s 50 people there, there’s something unique about collectively resting and napping together. It’s like vintage intimacy. I think the piece that you just read, the quote, is really getting at this concept of intimacy and vulnerability. I think that that’s such a powerful place when we talk about liberating ourselves. When we talk about movement. When we talk about what a full resistance must look like. It must look like this intimate, vulnerable connectedness, this interdependence on each other, this interconnectedness. It’s so important.
We’re seeing it so much now, like I love Fannie Lou Hamer. One of her quote says, “No one’s free until we’re all free.” I’m a womanist. I don’t claim feminism at all. I claim womanism, because I believe womanists have understood the concept that all forms of oppression and all people are kind of tied together in that we have to restore the balance between people and the environment and nature and reconcile human life with the spiritual dimension of life.
Womanist theology and womanism as a whole looks at how we’re all interconnected, and intimacy, vulnerability, and soul care is so important to me, the care of our souls.
If we want to name another thing that’s been co-opted. They’ve coopted self care to mean going to buy an expensive facial, or going to a spa or buying some new $2,000 mattress to sleep on. I don’t rock with any of that. I feel like if we have our bodies, we have a liberative space. I feel like the concept of self care can’t really be got at until we start talking about what has happened on that soul level that we think that we aren’t worthy of a 10-minute nap? I really want to get to the heart of the issue and look deeply at the soul, and self care has been co-opted to be just consumerist capitalism. I also deeply believe that we can’t heal by ourselves, that we have to have community.
Ayana Young I think that the slowness that’s being – It’s like I can intellectually understand a lot of this stuff, but to somatically and spiritually let it sink in, it does take time and I’m really looking forward to laying down with this conversation again and letting it sink in. I’m really hoping that everybody who listens gets to listen in a time where they’re not feeling rushed, because I think everything is extremely life-changing with what you’re speaking to, and I don’t think we’re going to be able to deal with climate change or the Anthropocene extinction or colonization, capitalism, so on and so forth, without really listening deeply to your words and understanding that this is actually a necessary part of decolonization. This is actually a very necessary part for us to move forward. We cannot break down this system, as you were saying, with the master’s tools. That’s not going to work. So, I really appreciate that. For our last question today, I would love for you to walk us through your dreamscape, a world in which perhaps the daily grind ceases and business as usual is no longer an option.
Tricia Hersey [Sigh] I like to imagine this all the time. I think when I start imagining, the first query that comes up in my mind is, “How can we access pleasure, joy, and liberation if we’re too tired to experience it? If we’re so exhausted, how would we be able to recognize that we’ve reached our liberation? Will we be too tired to know it?”
And so I really think that, I call rest a meticulous love practice, the practice of love towards yourself, towards your community, that it is going to be meticulous, uncomfortable at times, and people are always like, “Oh my goodness! I want to rest. It’s just so hard.” I’m like, “Yes. I know. It’s going to be very hard.”
James Baldwin has a quote where he talks about the enormous effort it takes to really get to liberation that people aren’t born in a place, when they’re born under an oppressive system, where they’re able to just kind of imagine and feel in their bodies what it feels like to be liberated. I think it’s going to take us to be really imaginative, and I don’t think we’re able to get to that imaginative space without resting.
And so my dreamscape looks like really breaking down and burning down and pulling down white supremacy and capitalism. They both have to die. We can’t talk about any type of movement towards soul care, self care, getting to anywhere with those two systems continuing to exist. I think we have to see disruption and we have to reimagine what that can look like.
I think my grandmother who’s sitting on the couch for 30 minutes every day, when she was living as a woman running from Jim Crow terrorism, running from the KKK, when she’s sitting there for 30 minutes and closing her eyes, I believe that that fortifies me now.
To be honest, I really would think that I would love to see people detoxing from technology as much as they possibly can. I don’t think we’re going to be able to get to like the full liberation rest if we’re continuously scrolling and online.
I wrote a small blog post. I did a 30-day detox from social media, and I wrote up things that I learned from that 30-day period of being off of social media, email, and just any technology. People cannot make space for you to rest if they don’t know what it looks like to rest. But that goes back to that interconnectedness of we’re going to have to embody this message. My dream is that for every person who retweets one of our memes that take a nap right after they retweet it. If that could happen, I think we actually would be further towards our goal. I don’t think that form of technology is allowing us to really see that, because how they created social media, they’ve created it so that we never get off of it. The scroll technique is something that they’ve studied and researched so that our brain doesn’t know when to stop. We don’t know when to be full. To know that technology is working against us so that we don’t know how to stop and to feel full and then our brain is being triggered.
I’m very, very influenced by a sabbath and what a sabbath can be and the ancient technique of a sabbath, how a sabbath is really a radical pause, and what that could be. I’m really dreaming about embodiment, because I think people a lot of times hear the message and then they’re like, “Oh! That sounds okay.” But when they come to one of our nap events, when they actually take a nap, then they wake up and they’re like, “Oh my goodness! I never knew I could feel that way.”
I’m like laying folks down. It’s such an honor and I’m so humbled to be able to just lay a body down and to put a blanket over them. And now that we aren’t able to do them, because of what’s going on with this virus and pandemic, I want to be able to hold space for people in a spiritual way. I want to be like this pillow for them, just for them to really feel that you can lay down right now. You don’t have to wait. Time is now. You could take 10 minutes right now, and even 10 minutes every day. If we’re collectively doing that in large numbers, I believe that we can slow down capitalism. I believe that grind culture right now is on its knees. And so I imagine us being able to like help pull it down by actually collectively resting. Even in your homes right now, go take a nap.
I believe that a direct action could look like all of the movement leadership sleeping for a day. That would be a beautiful and magical pushback and a way for us to spiritually connect.
I’m always thinking about blankets and pillows and softness, softness in the real world and metaphorically. I’m thinking about ancient pausing and just stopping and slowing down. And I’m always thinking about grief and mourning and silence and how rest supports all of that.
Ayana Young Yes. Thank you for sharing a guiding dream to know that we can imagine beyond perhaps what we’ve been imagining to push our own limits of dreaming. It will be challenging, because we’re breaking addictions, we’re breaking that brainwashing that we spoke to earlier. But it’s such a worthy practice. It’s a necessary practice.
You have been a huge inspiration for us and for me personally. There are so many years where I thought self care and rest was for somebody else and it wasn’t actually necessary and I didn’t really have time to do that, because the world’s burning. It’s just was like, “No, I can’t do that and that’s not going to help me and it’s not going to help the Earth.” Because what I felt the Earth needed was this urgent response system all the time.
And since that “click” moment, I haven’t turned back. And like I said, I’m not perfect. There are definitely times where I’m like, “Oh! Darn it! I’m grinding again. I’m freaking grinding again. I got to get off the grind.”
It can be a challenging journey, but we can keep getting back on the horse, so to speak. Because I very much agree that the Earth is crying for us to rest. Such important work, and thank you so much spending this extra time with us. This has been amazing.
Tricia Hersey It’s been such an honor. I’ve had such an amazing time speaking with you. I’m so humbled. I’m so honored. I’m in awe really. It’s going to be a slow meticulous process, but to be able to just be easy on ourselves and be so soft with ourselves and vulnerable and intimate with each other around this, then we really can bring down and disrupt and push back. My dream is that this push back and disruption will lead to a full breakdown and a full burndown of these systems that are our neck failing. The more you can rest, the more you can stop. I’m always talking about deep daydreaming and reimagining what it can all look like. I think we have the power to do that. So I appreciate the time. Thank you. It’s been an amazing conversation.
Ayana Young Yes.
You’ve been listening to Tricia Hersey on For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. The music we are enjoying today was provided by Seba Kaapstad, Real J Wallace, and Beautiful Chorus. I’d like to thank our Podcast Production Team Francesca Glaspell, Andrew Storrs, Hannah Wilton, Aiden McCrae, Erica Ekrem, Carter Lou McElroy, Chris Hudson, and our guest producer, March Young.