We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - 139. No More Grind: How to Finally Rest with Tricia Hersey

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

1. The Nap Ministry’s Nap Bishop shares small, concrete ways to bring rest into our own lives – especially when rest seems impossible.  2. Why so many of us feel like machines instead of humans ��� and the power of imagination as a spiritual practice to reconnect with our humanity and divinity. 3. Why grind culture – a collaboration of capitalism and white supremacy – wants to keep us exhausted, and how we can resist a culture of overwhelming busy-ness.   4. Why everything changes when we embrace ease as our birthright.  5. Creative ways to reimagine rest within our hectic daily lives.  About Tricia Tricia Hersey is a Chicago native who has called Georgia home for the last 12 years. She has over 20 years of experience as a multidisciplinary artist, writer, theologian and community organizer. She is the founder of The Nap Ministry, an organization that examines rest as a form of resistance and reparations by curating spaces for the community to rest via community rest activations, immersive workshops, performance art installations, and social media. Her research interests include Black liberation theology, womanism, somatics, and cultural trauma. She is the author of the upcoming book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto which will be published in October 2022. You can learn more about her work and the book at thenapministry.com. TW: @TheNapMinistry IG: @thenapministry

Hello everybody, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. We are here with Tricia Hersey. Trisha Hersey is a Chicago native who has called Georgia Home for the last 12 years. She has over 20 years of experience as a multidisciplinary artist, writer, theologian, and community organizer. She is the founder of the Nat Ministry, an organization that examines rest as a form of resistance and reparations. by curating spaces for the community to rest via community rest activations, immersive workshops, performance art installations, and social media. Her research interests include Black Liberation Theology, Womanism, Somatics, and Cultural Trauma. She is the author of Rest is Resistance, a manifesto.

You can learn more about Trish's extremely important and brilliant work. and her book at the nap ministry.com. Tricia, welcome. Oh, my goodness. Thank you. I love that good bio read. Oh, thank you. It's very much like black church.

You know, in the black church when they're visiting Reverend comes and they sit and they read his amazing bio or her bio, and the person sits there and they just kind of like take it in. I did that. You did that. Yeah, you kind of like,

Thank you. That's beautiful. Thank you. I'm excited to talk with you guys. We are too. I'm going to start by asking a question in a certain way that my sister said yesterday, please don't ask it this way. Okay? Okay. So I'm going to do it because I just feel it. So you started the Nat ministry. Yes. Trisha. But in diving deeply into your work over the last few weeks, what I said to sister yesterday is I feel like calling Trisha's work that Natman's work that Nat Minutes. would be like calling Jesus's work a walking ministry. Like, it's so deep and so important. So my sister said, just please don't say the thing about Jesus and walking. Okay, so I said the thing.

Clearly, look, sister, we made it through. You made it through. We made it through. And I was thinking it's more like calling the reproductive justice movement about the right to choose when really it's about liberation. And your work is not about naps. It's about liberation. Yes, you got it.

I'm so glad you. Thank you, sister. Yes, it is. Thank you because it is deep work. It is also, when I think about the work and me being a performance artist and theater artists, like I really did play up the idea of a nap ministry. And like it is in a lot of ways. It's ironic.

And I did try to play with the idea of a persona. Like I call myself the nap bishop. So it does have this irreverent playfulness in your face, guerrilla art, performance ritual vibe to it. And so I lead people in to be like, oh, this is about the nap. This is about naps. Everybody wants to sleep. And it's this beautiful, soft nap.

And then they get there and I'm ranting about white supremacy and capitalism and turn to burn down both systems. So I'm like, yeah. Have a pillow and then here's your flame throw to like burn these systems down so we can all live and be free, you know? So I love that. It's surprising, the mystery of that. That's what makes it really centered in an art practice. So for our listeners, you've said grind culture is a collaboration between capitalism and white supremacy.

Can you explain that? Absolutely. Yeah, I think a lot of this work, all of this work is really from a historical lens. You know, I was an archivist in seminary. So when I was in seminary, I was working in the archives on campus at Emory University. And so I'm really always been a student of history, a student of culture, and trying to figure out and look at things from the lens that it should be looked at, which is a lens of pulling back the veils and moving things back and seeing what's happening. And a lot of people don't know that capitalism was created on plantations, that it comes right out of the chatteled slave system. And they're like, you say down with capitalism and capitalism is trying to kill us. And this economic system that we're living under that's killing all of us and the planet itself.

Also, the planet is suffering because of it. They don't trace the roots back to the history of this idea of looking at a body as a machine. It's looking at a human body as not being divine. as seeing us all as a tool for the production of wealth, for profit over people. And so when you bring that back and you start to begin to really study the history of what happened on plantations, the history of the Middle Passes, transatlantic slave trade, the way this entire culture was built on the backs of

black and native people, then people are like, hmm, okay, that does sound super violent and super horrible, but we're all a part of it because we're all living in a system that moves like that. And so the system that I look at when I think about grind culture, I say, it's the same energy, the same ideology that was on those plantations, work all the time, have four or five jobs plus a side hustle, have your hobbies as a way to make money, never rest, never. It's the same energy that looked at human beings, my ancestors, as human machines who work 20 hours a day on plantations, who saw this unsustainable pace of machine level, production. It's still happening here in our corporations and in our world right now. And then you look at

white supremacy, this ideology, this systematic idea of a hierarchy on race. When you look at white supremacy being so violent and using bodies for centuries as tools of evil, like that's all white supremacy is looking at. It's devaluing our divinity. It's making everyone look at each other as not the divine miracles that we are. It's really caused a true brainwashing and spiritual deficiency in all of us to be under a system like white supremacy. So you blend those things together and you get grind culture, you get this idea of a body not being able to be owned by ourselves. Like I say a lot, I don't belong to capitalism. I don't belong to grind culture and I don't belong to white supremacy. You can't have me. I'm not the one be the one you're going to get. And so because of that,

I'm resting. I'm using rest as deviant. I'm using rest as devalism. I don't belong to white supremacy. You can't have me. I'm not the one. I'm vehicle to disrupt it, to disturb that idea, to push back. And so it really centers itself in history. I speak so much about the historical lens of Harriet Tubman, of the Maroons of North America, my ancestors who were jumping off slave ships and leaving plantations and hiding out in caves for 15 years, not fugitives, not runaways, they never were part of the system. They just never were. They were like in the system. The system was happening around. but they marooned and said, I'm not a part of it. To be in a world, but not of it.

You know, and so when I think about that, those are the deep links between what capitalism was doing. And when you do more research around slavery, plantation labor, read slave narratives, learn about what was happening, I mean, it's unimaginable brutality. It's unimaginable ideas that you would look at a divine body like that. And so that's where the idea of reclaiming our bodies as our own, reclaiming our spirits to not be connected to a system that sees us like that. And so, y'all refuse to donate my body to the system any longer.

And so I'm resting. Wow. I'm so thankful that you brought up the historic lens and that your book focuses so much on it. Yes. Because I think most of Americans that are raised and indoctrinated in this culture, like slavery. bad. Capitalism. Good. But when you think about the reality that there has only been two average American lifetimes between right now and slavery. And there is a very, very short line between enslaved women that the day they gave birth were forced to go out in the fields

and America being the only wealthy nation where we don't have. Oh, yeah. guaranteed paid parental. Absolutely. Like it is a direct line. Absolutely. We just need to make the connections. And I believe we can't make the connections for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that we're exhausted out of our minds.

And when you're exhausted and when you're on the grind and when you're trying to keep up with this unsustainable pace, there is no time to sit and make connections. So when I started resting, when I first started the organization, I just started personally experimenting with rest. Like, I would go to school on campus and I would just sleep on the quad all day. It became a moment where it was like, let the chips fall where they may. And I'm just going to come to school, get the attendance credit. But I'm dying from exhaustion right now.

And the more I started to do that, the more things made sense with my research, things made sense with my life. I've started getting better grades. I can make connections between what I was seeing and what I was feeling, what I was doing. Like, this disembodied disconnection that happens in a lot of. our bodies. People think not resting is just, oh, I'll get to it later, but what is really doing to us is disconnecting us from our bodies. We don't have no connection between what's going on in our bodies, in our hearts, in our minds, in our spirits. We can't connect with each other or ourselves. And so when we begin to rest, when we begin to take root and connect with ourselves and dream

and imagine, things begin to make sense. Connections begin to happen. And so, yes, I'm so glad you've raised about reproductive justice and what's happening. I see it all the time when I think about all the labor unions right now that are protesting. I am so excited about it. My father was a union organizer growing up, and so I grew up under that idea of power to the people, power to the workers. And I'm glad that people are now coming up out of the veil and being like the great resignation and seeing connections between, oh, my goodness. Like, I'm working five jobs and I still can't afford. rent. Why is that? Why is that? And so, yeah, the capitalism and white supremacy.

It's because one percent of Americans own 40 percent of the wealth, just like implantation times. Yes, exactly. The connections are rich. And so I talk about that in the book, and I encourage people to take a slow deprogramming. It's no rush to this. Like, be grateful for the time that we have to begin to gain ourselves back, to begin to step into the miracle of our bodies to slow down. There are no quick tips. There are no quick answers. There are no, what do I do to rest? Man, we got to come together and see this as a full on decolonizing movement, a movement of reclaiming ourselves and each other because the systems want us all dead in many different ways. The systems want us all working 24 hours a day in different ways.

So this work comes from a black liberation lens. I'm a black woman. I'm a woman. I'm a woman is. I am a person who understands that no one is free until we're all free, and I see the interconnectedness. But this work sits rooted in a human rights global ideal. Everyone is suffering, including the planet. The planet itself is suffering from the way that we're working it and not taking care of it. Climate change is so real. The planet is tired. It's exhausted. It's abuse. It won't stop. And so there needs to be a pause. There needs to be a pause, and we're going to have to take it. No one is going to give it to us, though. And Tricia, you focus so much on explaining to us in the book and that the exhaustion and the

inability to imagine is purposeful. Absolutely. Any stopping and thinking and asking questions and allowing your imagination is dangerous. It's very dangerous. Tell us more about that. It is purposeful that we are so exhausted and don't have time to think. We're easier to manipulate when you're like exhausted and don't have time to think. If we rest it, I think the systems know that it will be over for them.

That so many people will wake up and be like, wait a minute. You know, so to me, this work is really about awareness and pulling back veils. I see prayer to be a veil buster. Just saying where I see rest to be a veil buster. It bust up a veil. It pulls back one from that eye and maybe you can see a little. And if you can see a little and understand who you are and who's your. you are and what your right is as a human being, none of this terror of capitalism,

white supremacy, of racism, abelism, transphobia, all the things that are like gripping and degrading our divinity would not take place. And so, Bell Hooks, who is one of my favorites, speaks about imagination being the greatest tool for oppressed people. It is one of the greatest tools for oppressed people, for marginalized people, is imagination. And so when I think about a manifesto, that's why I wrote this to be a manifesto, the history of a manifesto. They're written from the point of view of being disillusioned, but bringing us back to hope. They're written to be almost like to challenge and provoke us, to say to us, there is a new way, and these are what I'm saying, the new way, this is what I believe, and it's not that.

And so that's really the history and beauty of a manifesto, is it asked the question, what do you believe? What do you feel? What can be real? What can we imagine? And I believe we can freedom dream. We can imagine ourselves free. Imagination is our greatest tool because the world that we live in now was imagined and thought up by people. Some folks sat down, mostly white men, sat down and was like, what we're going to do, what we're going to make, how we're going to create?

And what could it look like? What would it be? They sat down and invented and created this. And so we can imagine a new way. We can imagine a way, a new world and a new opportunity for, us to be rooted in that liberation. It is a political tool. It is a social justice tool. People think imagination is just frivolous. That's a thing of children and your daydreaming, you're wasting time. They want us to always be locked up and focused on work, focused on production,

focused on labor. But to be able to imagine and wander, that's where the ideas for liberation come. And I keep telling people that we'll never be able to get to this work. that we all want to see. A lot of people are now wanting to see a world filled with justice, wanting to see a world that's liberating. How will we get there from an exhausted state? How will we get there from our minds being exhausted? Because the neurology and the biology of that tells me our brains aren't even thinking in full capacity. Our brains aren't able to download new information. And what happens when we are exhausted? Sleep deprivation is a public health issue. we are not working in a way that our bodies could work.

And so to be exhausted is not going to be generative. It's not going to allow us to get to these imaginative, inventive, subversive, true things that we will need to move this culture towards one of freedom for all people. We just can't get there. You're not going to get there from being exhausted. So to continue to be on the grind and to be working yourself like this and not giving space to rest, will get us just more of the same. Yeah.

When you think about just the idea of get back to work, what that is is that still building somebody else's imagination of what the world should be as opposed to stopping and imagining for ourselves. Yes. It's a new year and instead of trying to reinvent myself, I've been asking a simpler question. What would actually support me right now? And honestly, a big part of that answer is my home. I want my space to feel calmer, more functional, and a little more like a place that can reflect my goals and energy for this year, which is why I've been turning to Wayfair. It's truly a one-stop

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a-l-m-a-com slash W-E-C-A-N. That point of being like, if you're listening to this right now and you're thinking, that sounds great, but I just can't even imagine a world in which I can take a nap. I can't imagine a world in which I can put it down.

What Trisha is saying is that the greatest oppression is when you cannot imagine a way. Like you cannot imagine a way out of your thing. Yeah. So you draw, so much inspiration from the freedom makers of your past, your ancestors who there was no way, and they made a way out of it. It's not like people did things always because there was a way to do it. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you. Oh, my God. I love her. Like, yes. You get it. Like, yes. People keep saying

that to me. And I really have so much empathy and compassion for them because I understand that the systems have socialized us since birth, even sometimes before birth, when I talk about my son in the book about my birth story with him. Like, the systems socialize and brainwash us from birth, everything is in collaboration, teaching us these things. And so when I see people who, like, they're desperate, like, that sound good, but I can't do it. And then I think about the people who are, like, typing me long, four-page, paragraph emails telling me why they can't rest. And I'm like, wow, that was five minutes of daydreaming right there. You're going to have to make choices. You're going to have to see your way out and have a perspective around. There's always

time to rest. And I believe that the true resistance part of rest is resistance is what we've really got to start to uncover a little more. This is not going to be easy work. We are trying to disrupt and push back against very violent systems. Grind culture is violence. White supremacy is violent. All these things are violent systems that are race. on us. And so to think that it is going to be hard, easy, to think that there isn't going to have to be some type of subversion, some type of inventive, imaginative. I think about my ancestors I call the trickster energy, the being able to exist in two different worlds, being able to build community within a culture that was so toxic and violent. My grandmother working two jobs, raising eight children, healing from post-traumatic stress because she, left Mississippi after seeing a lynching during Jim Crow terrorism. She came to Chicago. I say my ancestors floated on a spaceship that they built out of uncertainty and hope. They floated up north, away from the south, hoping for a new world. And they built new worlds within a world that didn't

want them free, that didn't see them as human beings. And so that's the resistance I pulled to. And no one can tell me that something is impossible. Like, I don't believe it. I don't know. a lot of people are in a place of feeling like there is impossibility, but manifestos in this work provoke impossibility. That's the whole purpose of them is for us to imagine something that's impossible. And so I think about my grandmother, ORA, who's taking a nap, who's resting her eyes 30 minutes to an hour every single day in between going to her two jobs. She had on her uniform from working at the arm hospital as a nursing assistant, still got her whites on. She'd be sitting on the couch with her eyes closed, eight children's, dozens of grandchildren. I'm one of her wild

grandchildren running in and out of her house, screaming, jumping on, she didn't move. That woman sat on that couch, held court for her own healing, and we begin to watch that, and we begin to respect that. Grandma's resting. She's sleeping. We'd be like, Grandma's sleeping, y'all, chill out, you know, be quiet. She say, I'm not sleeping. I'm resting my eyes. You know, every shut eye ain't sleep. I'm listening. She would say, I'm listening to God, I'm listening to the universe, I'm simply listening. And I wonder, what was that listening giving her, you know, to be a black woman in Chicago, you know, poverty all around her, raising all these children, trying to like have a way and have a new life outside of the South and the terror of that? What was she listening to?

What was she hearing? What was the silence? What was that evoking for her? What was this resting moment giving her? And so she becomes amused because I watched her rest. I watched her make space for her own rest every single day. I watched her slow down. I watched her uplift leisure.

And so we're going to have to reimagine rest. The reimagination, you're going to have to look at rest as not just being what you think it is. A full nap away from the kids with a pillow up, closed eyes, eye mask on, closed door, nobody. That's beautiful. Like, give me more of that. But in this culture, that's a lot. not going to be possible for all people. It's going to have to be reimagined ways of my grandmother resting on the couch with her eyes closed for 30 minutes centering her own body and her own self while

all of the world was still happening around her. She didn't care. She was going to sit on that couch and do that. And so I love that about her. I love about my dad waking up early before his job to sit and pray and read the paper. And I was like, why do you get up so early? He's like, because I want to have a moment where I can be human and not be on someone's clock. I can just be. So this idea of just being. And so I want people to take a deep breath, take a little breather, slow down,

and understand that this rest work and this rest idea is a meticulous love practice that will happen to us for the rest of our day. There is no rush to get it right now. There's grace. There's mercy. There's imagination. There's taking a walk.

There's having a cup of tea in the morning. It's taking a longer shower. all of these things are rest. All of these things are opportunities for us to connect with our body and mind. And so people get really desperate and really panicked about this idea because it's a paradigm shift. It's a mind shift. It's a full on shifting of your mind to understand that your rest is not a luxury. It is not something that you will add on once you're burnt out.

It really is the center of your life. It has to be the North Star. In a culture like this without a pause button, if you aren't centering rest and snatching rest and getting rest any way you can and making space for others to rest and looking at the ways in which you participate in grind culture, that you participate in white supremacy, that you participate in all these things. Like, this is a full on looking at yourself in a mirror and a full on healing modality. It's not just take a nap and get up and keep being racist, you know. Naps ain't going to save you. You know, if you haven't done that internal work, you know, to really... Go back to sleep.

You're not ready yet. Naps not going to save you. If you're looking at them as just that, you're not looking at this as a full-on political social justice. Deprogramming. What I hear you in your work and your book, it's not just change what rest is, but change why rest is. Yes. Because we are just taught just rest. Here's your eye mask that's $30 and here's your candle.

And it's also part of grind culture is buying this shit. And then so that you can rest so that you can come back and be more productive. And grind more. So you can help us build better. So you can help us build stronger white supremacy and patriotic. Like capitalism. Preach. And Trisha is saying, no, no.

That is not why we are resting. You're not resting so we can come back and build their shit better. No. We're resting so we can imagine what we want to build. instead. Yes. So we can resist. So we can give a pushback and a disruption. To take a nap and to resist and to say no, I'm not going to be on the clock right now to intentionally rest, even for 10 minutes a day, that is a disruption to this beast of a machine. I know people don't see themselves as being their one person being part of something that can change, but it is.

Like you doing that, my grandmother doing that was a disruption. That system wanted her on the clock 24 hours a day running from Jim Crow running from the Ku Klux Klan down in Mississippi getting away during a great migration and then she's centering her rest that is a disruption so I want people to like you said get deeper into the idea that this idea of productivity forget about it the idea of productivity has been taught to you by a capitalist system we don't want that curriculum we need new curriculum all of that that you learned that's done like I know you might have got an A in that class, but the curriculum is not that no more. Like, what we are

learning and trying to like take on is the idea that productivity is not what you think it is. That resting is a generative state. You generate ideas. You are connecting with your body. You are participating

in a spiritual practice. Resting is a spiritual practice. It connects you. I believe dreams and napping is allows you to have a portal. There's a portal that opens. that when you go into a rested state, that allows you to see things different, that allows you to have a moment outside of grind culture,

that allows you to connect with something deeper outside of yourself, connect with your ancestors, connect with what you want to be, connect with the dreams. And so this dreamscape, this portal idea, is really centered in Afro-Futurism, and my idea of understanding that we can dream ourselves free, that I've watched people dream themselves free. I watch my family dream themselves free

and pray themselves free and leap to freedom in ways that still to this day surprise me. And so to tap into that, I believe so much in human beings, I have so much hope. I believe in the deepest parts of ourselves that we are all divine, that are a miracle that we're here on earth. It is a miracle to be born. And so if that's the starting point,

anything that's trying to degrade that, and still there from us, I'm not with. Capitalism, exhaustion, white supremacy, work culture, racism, abelism, homophiles, anything that's degrading us from the true divine beings we are, we don't want that.

We want something different. And so people are always like, yeah, I want to rest so I can, you know, get ready to do more tomorrow. I got to rest to get myself boosted up so I can go hard tomorrow. No, there is no more hard. Like, we don't need toughness

and going hard no more. We need softness. We need care. We need community. We need collective healing. In its simplest but most profound form, the way you've talked about your work, is that these systems are built to separate us from our humanity. Yes.

And your work is to uplift what it is to be human. And that rest is simply the one of the vehicles. Yes. To tap into what it is to be human. Absolutely. One of the many, yes. Okay. So what to Tricia, Nat Bishop, does it mean to be human? Yes.

And how is that connected to this idea that our own liberation is inherent in our humanity? Yes. And we don't have to wait for any damn body, government, anybody. Nobody. That our liberation's already within us. What do we find at the seat of that humanity that we're looking for? You preached with that question. Yes.

All of that. The question is so good. Like, yes, because humanness, people always try to distill the information. And I say, simply, this work is just bringing us back to our natural state. This work is about making us more human, taking away this robotic, zombie machine-like thing that they've placed on us. When I was reading and researching all of the slave information and the narrative, and what was happening on plantations. They were literally building human machines.

They were trying to see how far they could push a human body. Could it be automated? Can they work 20 hours straight? Could we do 23 straight? How much could we feed them where they won't pass out in the fields? How much water could we give them? So they were really automating us and creating this idea of a machine-level pace for a human body.

So the disrespect of a human body is evident and key. This work brings you back to your natural state. the slowing down, the resting. It's such a magical moment spiritually, but it's also the neurology of it, the biology, the physiology of what's happening in our bodies when we rest. This book that I love called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. He's a neuroscientist.

In it, he talks about sleep and dreams. It's very scientific, but then it's also very beautiful in the way that he speaks about dream and the idea of when we sleep, what's happening in our brains. I love it. I'm like nerd out on neurology and neuroscience. When we sleep, there's a chemical that coats our brains that allows us to heal from trauma, that allows us to tap into our memory, that allows us to be more creative.

And so this idea of not doing that, of not allowing our bodies to be the full human, brilliant thing that it is is where the violence of it all comes in at. And so to me, to be human is to know that you are divine. It's to know that the person next to you is a divine being chosen to be on earth. That you don't belong to any of these systems. All this external world is all here. To be in this world but not of it is to understand that everything you need is already in you. That the power of your body, I say one of the tenets of the NAP ministry is

the body is a site of liberation. To think of it as a sight, the idea of the word sight, it is a site of liberation, all bodies. It doesn't matter what your body looks like, what color it is, the size. Every single body is a site of liberation. So that means wherever our bodies are, we can find rest, we can find liberation, that this body that we are placed in at birth allows us to always be in tune with liberation.

to always be in tune with the divine, to always have a direct connect to the divine. And the disconnect comes when we aren't understanding that, when we don't see ourselves that. People don't think they deserve rest. What this culture has done to us is ripped our self-esteem and self-worth. This time of year, I am always looking for my sweaters. Luckily, Quince has all of the staple. sweaters covered from soft Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like designer pieces without the markup to 100% silk tops and skirts for easy dressing up to perfectly cut denim for everyday wear.

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I'm a grinder and to tap into the realities of this for a lot of the white women that are listening to this podcast who benefit from the capitalism that they are working in with and accomplished to in some ways. Absolutely. What I would love to know is can you give us not just the liberation component, for our own selves. But as this form of activism, because trying to unlearn this, I'm just sitting here and I'm feeling like, oh, shit, I'm scared. Like, productivity is my thing. Yeah, I know.

That's how I operate. What is she saying? It's scary. It is very scary, yes. How do you temper some of that fear that I'm experiencing right now? Like, what are some things you can say to those listeners? That is a great question. It is very scary.

I will. let's just put that on the table right now. This work will not be easy. To shift a paradigm and to go up against violent systems that we're trying to disrupt against, that is a very scary proposition. It won't be easy. Not probably everyone will get this. You know, there is a place within the culture that the beast of this culture has eating so many of us alive that will we get to that liberation?

I believe, yes. I believe that there is always hope. If you're alive, I learned this when I was doing pastoral care, studying in seminary, trained as a chaplain. Where there is life, there is hope. Where there is breath, there is hope. Where you're breathing, there is hope. Where there's even, I would say, from my tradition, understanding that the end is just a beginning. Even in the other world, when you leave this earth, there's still hope.

You know, there's still moments that you can tap into because the end is just the beginning. And this is healing work. This is not work that's going to be just like, just go lay down, girl, you good? No, this is literally like a full collaboration. It may look like therapy. I'm in therapy. I have the privilege of being able to have a therapist. They may look like some other modalities of healing, you know, reiki, journaling, art, walking, prayer, dismantling your mind around, being accomplished to white supremacy.

You know, as a white person in this culture, you're going to have to go deep into the wells to begin to unravel the legacy that you come from of being a white person in a culture like this. There's a beautiful book called The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry. He's a white poet and artist. And he talks about this idea of how white people have not had the opportunity to heal from the wound, not even heal, but even to understand that there is a wound. Like, acknowledge. There is a wound on you. I know you think when you hear white supremacy and racism and slavery, you think, wow, the shit that was done to black people is horrible. But to understand that it was actually also killing you as well, it is spiritually killing you to a white person to believe that they're superior in some way to another divine human being, that is a spiritual deficiency.

That is a disconnection to your power and to who you are. So that has robbed you of your own humanity as well. And so people never feel that. They're always just like, oh, damn, I never thought about it like this. And that's why this work is global. It's not just for black people. They're like, is this work just for black people? Absolutely not.

It's for anyone who needs to disrupt and push back and heal from white supremacy and capitalism. Now, the ways in which you're going to have to do that are different. Like my history is a total different thing. Everybody has their own origin story. historic stories of how they're placed in this sick thing that was created, you know, not by us. And so we have to land in it. We have to feel it. And I will tell you that you will have to just feel that energy. You're going to have to just sit with the discomfort of that. And I say, sleep your way through it, rest your way through it, make small, small, small ways to start with it. 10 minutes a day of just sitting and resting, closing your eyes, not responding to an email,

making space in your calendar to not be doing nothing. If I have it in my calendar, rest days, chill days, Sabbath days, I have very clear boundaries around how I work. I don't do meetings over 30 minutes. If you want to do a meeting over 30 minutes, we probably can't work together. It only is set in my calendar. It's only a 30 minute. We're going to be concise. We're going to say it we're going to move on and we're going to go lay down and think and telepathically communicate that way. I think we just found that in the auto response for total liberation people. You heard it here first.

Tricia says, you'll ask one thing before we move on from this part because I just, I think some of the fear, and I'm going to say this wrong, but I'm going to say it. It's like whatever your, your ministry and what is the opposite of white feminism. Yeah. It's like, yes, it is. We have been indoctrinated. Yes. It's worse than had we never heard of feminism.

Yes. It's worse. It's like, because we were taught that feminism is to try to be the best at this horrific system. It's like, just lean in harder. Just be worse. Just be scrappier, just beat more people. Yes. So that's why it's so terrifying.

because it's the opposite of what we were told was winning. Yes, it is the opposite. It is a new idea. It is a new paradigm. The idea of perfectionism has been placed on us from birth. And when you think about white feminism, absolutely. You are literally trying to be a part of a system that hates you. Yes.

It hates you. It hates your guts. And you're uplifting it and making it richer and making it more. viable and making it more worse for everybody else. Yes. Terrible. And they're on the news saying we hate you.

We're passing bills. We hate you. And we're like, what else can we do for you? How can we make it richer? Yeah, that's why Trisha. It made me like catch my breath when you said our bodies are the site of liberation. I was like, yes, end.

Because I feel like my body is a site of oppression as well. Absolutely. When I, these systems, maybe because they would accept me, white supremacy, capitalism, it started with external tools. Yes. Very intentional external tools. But now is so internalized. Absolutely.

You don't need any more tools anymore. I'm doing that for you. Absolutely. We're doing a work for them. I have a quote in my book that says something like, we do the work for them when we don't see ourselves as. divine and perfect already. We're already helping them along. We're already like

creating and being a part of this system and helping them to oppress us even more. And so I say the buck stops with me, that the chips fall where they're made. I will never donate my body to a system by grinding that still owes my

ancestors reparations. That hates me. It's built upon the backs of people that is so violent. It took years to get here also. So I want people to understand if this is 10 to 15 years of study and research and experimentation and therapy and personal sleeping and resting. Like I experimented with my own body to be able to see how could I make a way.

I did it to save my own life. Rest saved my life. And I don't need nobody else to verify that. It saved my life and I did it for me. And from that understanding that I was saving my own life, because I'm a womanist and I understand that the holistic view like that, For me to be truly free, everyone around me also has to be free. I'm also a community activist for 20, 30 years. I was raised as a community activist.

My dad was one. I understood that there was a moment to be able to make this a collective and to share this information in a practice. So the first thing that I did was not get online and start lecturing. The first thing that I did is borrow yoga mats, blankets, and pillows from everybody I knew, wash them, and curated space with people to lay down. So our first event was 40 people who I did not know, sleeping for two hours in this nap little space that were created at an art studio. And people waking up, crying, and being like I took a nap in two years.

I dreamt about my grandmother. Thank you for making this space for me. People at every event, we've done hundreds, they wake up in tears. There's always so much emotion. It's so emotional to understand that you've been lied to, that you've been manipulated by a sister. that a system is oppressing you. Like to be able to start to see that is it's a grief moment. And we do have to sit in that grief.

And I think resting supports our grief and to be able to rest into the grief and to understand what's really happening in a practice, in experimentation, in actually doing it. I would prefer that people not even talk about they want to rest and retweet all our memes. Go lay your ass down. Like that's like use that moment to go. go, it'd be like my grandmother and close your eyes and sleep. This is a practice. This is like practice and theory put together. We have to rest. You won't be able to get to this message without experimenting with it, without daydreaming, without having a moment of imagination, of skygaze,

you know, slowing down and asking for the divine, the connection that you had with your own body, for making space for others to rest. You brought that up. The idea that I understand that women of color have been historically, even to this day now, on the front lines of making it easier for white women to have leisure, to have the nannies, they're the cleaning staff, they're doing things to make it so that you have a more leisurely life and that you have a life that seems like it's allowed to be able to slow down and just be. And so to begin to understand and see the connections between that and to begin to say, I don't want to be a part of that, I want to slowly find ways that I can push back and I can disrupt and I can make space for others to rest, that I cannot be an agent of grind culture.

Are you an agent of grind culture? Are you rushing people all the time? Do you have all these expectations around people? Are you pushing? Do you have boundaries? Are you upholding your own boundaries? And so people have to begin to do some internal work and to begin to look at themselves in a mirror

and to say, this is something that we're all in. It's a collective journey. What can I do? And the main thing that you can do is to begin to heal yourself is to begin to make space so that you are in a space. where you can feel like you're connected to the divine and that you're helping and you're seeing yourself

as simply someone who will no longer be a part of the oppression. Like, I'm done. You have to say that I'm done with it. It stops with me. And I think people have to get to that on their own time. Like, it takes time. Some people will hear my message

and it might be two years before they get it. Some people email me all the time. Like, I love what you're doing. But when I first heard, I was like, I don't know. I don't see how it can happen. And now I've set with it longer. I've started to take some more time off work.

You know, I've been reading more about the slave narrative, you told me to read. I've been reading Bell Hooks. I've been trying to slow down. I've just been trying to, like, sit and deepen into the word. Two years later, they'll be like, I get it now. I know. I'm resting. My life is changing.

I'm being able to see better. I can feel better. My health feels better. I'm able to make better connections. I'm living. You're more human. I'm more human. I'm a human being now. I'm a human being now.

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Visit Ixel.com slash we can to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. What you keep saying, which is what no one is willing to do is this phrase of let the chips fall where they met. Oh, God. But we trained in perfectionism and grind. Yep. believe that the worst thing in the earth is if anyone else sees us as not a perfect cog, right? That's it. Can you talk to us about what it has meant to you in your life to let the chips fall where they may, professionally, family?

This is the thing we're terrified. I can't stop. Or, what's the oar? And how do we survive the oar? Yes. I think this goes back to my upbringing in the black church, in the idea of black liberation theology and how I was raised by a, a black liberationist, you know, activist, black man in Chicago who would look at me and tell me, you're perfect because God created you. God is on your side. You're a black woman in this culture.

You're a black girl in this culture and there is nothing else that you need to do, but stay true to that. And just so I was never really taught in a lot of ways that I had to be perfect. I understood that there is no such thing as perfectionism. And I was boosted up and held up in a way that allowed me to just explore what it has meant to be able to say let the chips fall where they made professionally. I say no to 90% of things ask to me. It's a joke now that when people ask Trisha and that bitch would do something, she usually will say thank you, but no. I really don't overbook my calendar. I feel like if I do that, that it would not allow space for mystery, curiosity, and for the sacredness of what could happen in those spaces.

I want to say yes to things that I only feel like really a yes about. It's meant I've lost money. I've lost projects and I haven't been able to get on because they wanted to rush me and micromanage me and I had to return a call in two minutes. That's not the pace that I'm living on. I'm not working on the unsustainable pace that white supremacy, work culture wants me to. I just am not. And so blessings on your day, but I'm not going to do it. And so I've lost money.

I've lost opportunities. I really also feel like I'm an outlier in a lot of ways because the deeper I get into this, it can be lonely to be really frank about it. There isn't a lot of people around me who have got to the point where I'm at. And so grind culture has its grips. It just has its grips on people so tightly, even people in my own family, my own partner, my own brother, everybody. I'm like, let's go hang out and take a walk.

Let's go look at some ducks by the lake. And they're like, I got to go to work. I got my second job is coming. I got to do this. I mean, the way that our entire lives are built around labor and what we got to do next, that there's never a moment to just be. Specifically with black people,

we don't even understand what the word leisure means. What is a leisure? What's a hobby? You know, everything has to be monetized. Everything has to be a part of our life to be able to eat and live and make it. And so in a lot of ways, this is an outlier movement, and I feel like an outlier in a lot of ways,

and that people are beginning to see that grind culture does not have your best interest at heart. And so it's a slow, meticulous thing for people to get to that point. It's going to take years. And I'm also grateful for that. I'm grateful for the slowness. I say in the book, give thanks for the idea that this doesn't have to be rushed, that this doesn't have to be urgent. Like, why will we use the same tools

that have been taught to us to be urgent, to be rushed to try to heal? It just doesn't make sense. You have five minutes. Five minutes. Here's your bullets. Here's your bullets about how to... Where's my workshop?

Liberation. From 12 to 1215, I will rest. Yes. Liberation is a process. It's ongoing. It's always happening. Give thanks for that. Give thanks for not having to have it perfect right now

and not having to always have it right. And I also feel like the idea of this being an experimentation and this being work that is going to be expanded upon. These are the tenets of, I believe, that will help get us free. But expand on this work. This is your work to expand on. This is your work to experiment with. This work isn't static.

It's going to move. It's going to flow as things happen. You are the best teacher of what you know is right for your own body. your body is this beautiful temple that has all this information, but it can't share that information with you if you're in an exhaustive state. I have a mean where I talk about go like create a conference for your body. You know, like all these conferences that everybody wants to. How about you do a conference and that conference is a snap?

You just do an agenda. The conference call that I'm going to be on is one of sleeping and resting because in that state, I will be able to gain information and I can't get it in a way. Lake World. And so the more people can understand that this is not a waste of time, that there's information waiting for you in your dreams. There's information your body wants to share with you. There's information, I believe my ancestors want to give me, but they're like she won't stop. She won't slow down enough for us to be able to transmit, to download, to be able to grab and hold that information because you're always spinning on this wheel. And so to slow down is to

allow the portal to open, the antenna to open, the antenna to link in, to allow you to get some information, to allow you to see your way out, to heal your way out, to create a new world, really. It's creating new worlds. And you create a new world backwards, too, because when you talk about downloading the gifts from your ancestors, it's also so important to your work that you give to them. And when you talk about this being, a slow process, it's like they couldn't rest. Right. And you are gifting them the rest. Yes. And it's beautiful to then think about the next generation. Whatever the imaginations that you are dreaming that then will be radically different than the imaginations of the next generation.

Absolutely. You're giving back and then they're going to give to you. Yes, it is. It's imagination work. It's dream work. It's dream work. it's bending time. I believe when we rest, we bent time. We clear time. We allow for a new way to be made. And I love this idea when I think about reparations and I have a poem where I talk about this. And I say, I will recapture the dream space that was stolen from you. We'll be resurrected in our dreams.

And so for me to be able to recapture the dream space that was stolen from my ancestors in this dimension and the now, to say you, rest was stolen from you, your whole autonomy as a human was stolen from you. What could they have figured out if they were more rested? I believe that my answer just probably could have had really detail in more unique ways of escaping if they were rested.

I think about Harriet Tubman and her underground railroad and her prophecy of saying, my people are free. You know, she was screaming, my people are free. She woke up from a dream one day and it's documented. She was like, my people are free.

She said it in this tense. It wasn't there going to be free. They're free now. So this prophecy, the prophetic idea that we are free now. That the now is this is now. We don't have to wait for anyone to tell us that, to give us that. And I think about her stopping on the underground railroad walking to freedom and not having a map, not having a written map, but she did have a map. She had our internal spiritual map and she had the stars.

So she was a beautiful astronomer and she could track stars. and track the sky, but it's written that she stopped to pray so many times that there was no rush, even trying to run to freedom. It was freedom of death. They were caught. They would be killed. And so to understand that she wasn't even rushing trying to walk to freedom, to walk from Virginia to Philadelphia, walk from here to Canada, taking hundreds of people with her and stopping and never once being called.

Never once being called. And she's stopping to pray. But we can't. But people tell me they don't have a moment to take 10 minutes of a little day. session. Like, you got a cell phone, you got this, you got that, and they're stopping on the, running for their lives, stopping to pray to get, she would say she would get a word from God on which way to go. Should we go left at the river or right? Let me stop and she would feel that energy and she would go the other way. She never was caught. To be that in tune with spirit and your body and

the idea of slowing down, those are the people who I model. Those are the ones I say I gain, access from that to I know that this is not impossible. People would have thought a woman like that would have never stopped a pray. We got to get our bags. We got to run. The dogs are on us. But it wasn't that. She was understanding that we're in tune with our freedom, that our freedom is waiting for us, that our body wants to be well, that our body wants to be healthy, that our wellness is our way of life. This is a natural state to be more human. To be more human is to be well. It's to be connected. It's to understand that you don't have to run. It's to be a counter-narrative to say no to all that was taught to you.

Everything taught to you was a lie and it's not trying to benefit your divine body. So to begin to reimagine and bring new language and new ideas into that space, that's what rest can provide. And that's wellness. That is wellness. It's not, you remind me of, I keep thinking of the scripture. The kingdom is not out there. It's inside of you. Yeah, I love it.

And we are rushing out to whatever capitalism tells us where we will find our liberation. Like the system's out there. It's out there. And you're saying all it is, it's always been in here. The body is where you're liberated. Mm-hmm. Beautiful, yes. And it's like Audra Lord's caring for myself is self-preservation.

And that is an act of political warfare. Exactly. That's right. One of my favorites. I love Audrey Lord so much. I think the only child. The only challenge I see with your work, really, besides dismantling everything. Besides, yeah, trying to burn down capital.

Should be done by 2023. All wrapped up by this time next year. That's right. Is that it's so completely grounded in faith. Yes. And enough. Yes. Enoughness.

Yes. Enoughness. Now. Yes. That's what we're trying to. And we have enough. And to hear someone like you say, yeah, I turn down things all the time. But aren't you scared of being irrelevant? I'm never worried. No. I trust my, I trust

the divine timing of my life. I trust my gifts and talents that were given to me by God to make a way for me. I've always trusted that. I never have to worry about that. I just don't, my faith, when you talk about a faith walk, a leaping, a faith leap, it is deep, radical, radical faith to understand and to be courageous enough to push back against a system and say, I've had enough. And I trust the divine and I trust myself and my gifts to make space for what is possible. I really do. And so this is radical faith work. It's radical trusting work. And I know that that work will not happen overnight. I know that that is a slow, ongoing lifelong process that we want to have for ourselves. We want to pass on to our children, to our families, to our cultures, to our communities.

And so we can't do this work alone. This work is for the collective. It is for the community. I have written 55,000 words for my new book, and I don't mention self-care once in it. We noticed. I don't say the word. And it was on purpose. It's community care. It's communal care.

It's community. How will we make it alone? Community care will save us. We can't do this without each other. And toxic individualism has taught us that we don't need nobody else help. That's the lie. That's what's killing us. That's the lie of it all.

And so Martin Luther King, Jr., has been saying that we are mutually tied in this inescapable interconnectedness, whether we want to or not. And because of that, we have to see the collective as where the spirit lies and where our healing lies and making space for others to rest, for ourselves to rest, being a model for that. And going slow, I tell people go slow. This is 10 years, and I'm still just unraveling from it. This unraveling will be a lifetime. My son is 15 years old. And since he's been little, a baby, I've taught him this idea of slowing down of like chilling. He made up a word chillaxing, chilling and relaxing. So he's like, I'm going to go chillax. So even now that he's 15 and he's in high school and there's things like the speed of

high school life, he's a musician and an artist. And some days he'll wake him and be like, I just am tired and don't want to go to school today. Can I just take a break? You want to go for a walk? You know, chill out. If you can't finish your homework in time, you'll be okay. You're brilliant. You're teaching him enoughness. You're brilliant. You're doing for him what your dad did for you.

That doesn't matter. What matters is that you are divine and you are born and you exist. I'm like, you're brilliant. You'll figure it out. If you don't get that one quiz in today, believe me, hon, you'll be fine. Look at how brilliant you are. And so trust the divine energy and understand that the systems really are working in collaboration for you not to rest, public schools, churches, hospitals,

Every system in our culture is in collaboration for us not to rest. And so when you know that, it kind of gives you a boosted sense of energy to know they don't want this. They're all in collaboration for this not to happen. That's why it's a resistance. And that's why I see it as so important. And that's why I give myself grace. I do. You can get pulled and caught up in this grind.

One day you might have to stay up to two in a morning to finish your deadline. And you're like, what is going on with me? But understanding it's a balance. and it's going to be a full-on slow, slow go. Take time with yourself. Be careful with yourself. Be soft with each other. Be intuitive about what's necessary.

I say you are enough so many times in the book. I repeat so much in the book and I do that for a reason. People were like, there's a lot of repetition in the book. Yes, ma'am, it is because I believe our brainwashing calls for that. I believe our deep programming calls for repetition and the message you will keep repeating, the downloads will keep repeating. And it will become almost like a lullaby, this incantation over you to be like, what can we provoke and a spell cast over you to understand? I am enough now.

I don't have to do another thing. That was already given to me by birth. So I'm going to rest. Okay. So our next straight thing, Pod Squad, is obviously going to be just to start this one over again and listen again. Okay? Just going to hold things. Start over right now.

But lay down and close your eyes while you do it. Yes. Not necessarily right now. Take your time. Whenever. Yes. And we're changing the name of our podcast and we can do soft things. Or we don't have to do anything we don't want to do.

No. Trisha, I'm fully expecting as soon as this is over to try it. We have a meeting. But I'm expecting none of my staff to show up. Yes. Because they're going to say we can do no things. Yeah. Give them some grimes.

You are a revolution. For the rest of you, I'm just going to repeat, please. The upcoming book is called Rest is Resistance. Our copies, Trish, I'll just send you some pictures. Highlight it. Underline. I'm sure that's not how we're supposed to be reading it. I love a highlight.

I love underlying. Write in the books. That's my favorite thing. Yes. Okay. Rest is resistance, a manifesto. And you can learn more about Trisha's work and the book at the nap ministry.com. Get ready, everybody.

Go visit Trisha. Trisha, thank you so much for- My goodness. I've had so much fun. What if we all played with the question? Everyone who's listening to this, play with the question of it. Instead of asking yourself, what do I need to do today and in this life to get free, to fight for freedom?

Mm-hmm. What if you said, what if I'm already free? How would I act? And how would I fight if I were already free? That's it. That's the imagination word. Yes, ma'am. That's the question.

That's why everyone's going to be quitting. And then R-T is not going to be there. Yeah. This is my resignation. Everyone, everyone asked themselves that question except for sister Dina and Allison. Thank you, Trisha. Bye. We love you.

We believe in you. Go forth and rest. Thank you so much, guys. We'll talk soon. Bye. Okay. Bye. Bye.

We will see you next time. Pod Squad. Until then, rest. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence 13 Studios. Be sure to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast. podcast if you really liked it. If you didn't, don't worry about it. It's fine.