We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - Make Rest Your Revolution with Tricia Hersey

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

362. Make Rest Your Revolution with Tricia Hersey Tricia Hersey (artist, theologian, poet, activist) returns; Abby, Glennon and Amanda talk to Tricia about her foundations, philosophies and approaches to resistance through the medium of rest:  Discover: Tricia talks about the founding of the Nap Ministry; what she learned from her grandmother Tricia discusses her 2024 book, We Will Rest! The Art of Escape Why trickster/dreamer energy is essential to revolutionary thinking  Deconstructing the system using somatics, education and community  The craft of authentic listening and trusting your intuition To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go faster forward together. In Life, Interact. digital future for Canadians. Let's go faster forward together. In Life, Interact. Dear Pod Squad, I cannot believe that we recorded this episode a week before the election because I cannot imagine any person or topic I need to hear from or about more than Trisha Hersey on how to escape the matrix. That is what today is about. about how to live in a oppressive, controlling atmosphere and still find ways of being free and joyful

and full of life. This conversation is a gift and it is right on time. I'm gonna listen to it over and over again. It's the trickster energy that she says, we live in this world, but they can't have us. We can't let them just take us and have us. We are going to live with trickster energy to keep our joy, keep our dignity, keep our life force through all of it.

Yep. Let's go. Hi, Pod Squad. You know, podcasters are often saying this, a conversation will change your life and that annoys me. But this time, it is true. This conversation, if you open your mind and heart enough, it could change your life. Okay? And the reason why is because the conversation you're about to hear is from Trisha Hersey.

I'm going to read to you part of her new book which will let you know whether or not this conversation is for you. Here we go. Are you exhausted? Are you waiting for permission to slow down? Are you waiting to save up enough money and time off from work to fly away to an expensive retreat in another land? Are you waiting for the powers that be to create policies that are drenched with care and room for you to get off the grind? Are you feeling guilt and

shame when you rest? Are you hoping for deliverance from pushing through at all costs? Are you feeling guilt and shame when you rest? Are you hoping for deliverance from pushing through at all costs? Are you waiting for permission? I have felt like I am waiting to add more life to my life for so long, and I have felt like there's a part of me that is dormant because I am so busy adulting that I have forgotten how to human, and that I live off of a list and that that crushes the magic in my life, that I might be making a living, but I have forgotten why life is worth living. The woman who you're about to hear from has taught me and so many millions of others how to live in this world where we are in the talents of so many millions of others how to live in this world where we are in the talents of so many things,

capitalism, racism, misogyny, all of it, all the isms, hustle culture too, and also find pockets of freedom that change our life. Today, she's gonna talk about how to do that using something called trickster energy, which when you think of a trickster, it's just a being that lives in the same world you do and still finds ways to subvert, resist, revive, create magic. We are going to talk about how to create magic in our lives. And we're gonna do that with the Tricia Hersey,

who is a multidisciplinary artist, theologian, escape artist, and founder of the Knapp Ministry. She is the global pioneer and originator of the Rest as Resistance and Rest as Reparations frameworks. And she collaborates with communities all over the world to create sacred spaces where the liberatory, restorative, and disruptive power of rest can take hold.

Trisha's work is seeded within the soils of Black radical thought, semantics, Afrofuturism, womanism, and liberation theology. She is a Chicago native who believes in daydreaming, porch sitting, and poetry. Her latest book, We Will Rest, the art of escape, which will live forever in my living room is available now. After this conversation, please also go back and listen to our prior spellbinding conversation

with Trisha, episode 139. It's called No More Grind, How to Finally Rest with Trisha Hersey. By the end of this episode, I want you to be able to channel one place in your day in your life where you will find this magic of which Trisha speaks and I know is real. Welcome Trisha Hersey. Hi. Oh my, look at the books behind you. Wait, turn around. It's so cute.

Of course. Of course. It's my escape manual. Display. A display item. It's so good, Trisha. It's so good. How are you guys doing?

I'm delighted because you are a very important person to me. So this is an important hour for me and I'm really grateful that you offered us one of your hours. I'm so excited. Yeah, I was like, I want to talk to them again. Can we do that? So yeah, I'm excited. I was listening yesterday back to our original conversation we had. Yeah. And I was like, that was amazing. I mean, I was really impressed by us. When I'm mostly you. Yeah. It was a community.

It was a great time. I remember it so much. And just think about that. That was what? 2022, it seems like a whole century has went by. Can you believe it? Like, I don't even understand. Like, when I think about 2020 and then now, like just the pandemic era world,

I'm very confused most times with what year it is. Me too. And what's going on. I can't believe it. That's two years ago. And now here we are about to get into 2025. So yeah, but Trisha that's because you're escaping. You're not in the regular timeline anymore. No, I am not. No, you are in a different place. You are in the time, but not of the time.

Yes, which I want to talk about, which is so great and inspiring, but it's also quite challenging to live in a world like an outlier like that. That's the new thing that I've been deepening into, like the idea of kind of feeling like, hmm, something's a little different about how I'm living and then not being able to connect with people around you. Because every single person around me hasn't really begun

the process of dismantling grind culture in their life. And so people are always like, why don't you get some mentors, some people who are like doing things like you and some people who are doing business like you said you can have. I have a mentor was telling me this. I'm like, I don't know anybody everybody I know is like all my friends who are like entrepreneurs and doing work that is really amazing. They're like working 80 hours a week, you know, not just they're in it and they want to like start it. And I understand it to be like this lifelong process, but I've been really thinking about the idea of loneliness. You know, I've been thinking about the idea of this public health issue of loneliness and what it means to be connected, but not connected.

And I've been thinking about actually volunteering at a senior citizens home that I used to be a chaplain at. You know, I went to seminary to be a chaplain. And so I was an intern there for years. And so all my friends were like 80 and over and they would like hang out with me all day. They had time to sit and play bingo, watch movies, go on walls, go to the park, like the children, the animals, and then the ones who are retired. Pod Squad, we're back with Trisha Hersey. And if you have not listened to our first episode with Trisha Hershey, you must go back and listen. If you haven't, it's okay. We will also have Trisha introduce herself again to you if you are someone who doesn't know her yet.

And if you are someone who doesn't know her or her work yet, I'm excited for you. excited for you. Because to me, in my last couple years of trying to figure life out, Trisha and her work have been just in my mind and heart every single day. Wow. Wow. Truly, truly. And in this moment where we are all feeling caught, stuck, trapped in the talons of something or other, where we feel in some ways we have lost the life in our life and the humanity in our humanness and the magic and the freedom of life. You are helping us all learn to see why we feel stuck, number one, and then how to escape.

And not in a binary way, right? In sort of this magical little tastes of freedom and liberation and joy and magic. Yeah. So first, can you, Trisha, tell us, for somebody who doesn't know your work yet, how would you want them to hear who you are and what you do? Thank you so much. Yeah, that's a good question. I think for someone who has never heard of my work,

I would always wanna say I'm an artist. Like I'm most proud of being an artist. I'm most proud of more than being a theologian, an activist, you know, a writer or author. I am an artist and I've been an artist since I was a child. And I think artists will save the world. I think artists are saving the world. I have a son who's 17 years old when he was in my womb.

I prayed over him every day. I want him to be an artist. I want to raise an artist. My first baby, I want to bring an artist to the world. I would read James Baldwin to him and play jazz music. And I was like, the world needs more artists. They need someone who thinks like the way an artist thinks, the one who can have vision, who can push back.

And so I think that's who I am. My work is liberation work. I'm just, I'm an experimenter. I think my work is merely things that I'm curious about, that I wanna lean into, that I feel like have helped save my life. And I'm just really curious about how to disrupt. I'm a disruptor by birth.

I want to disrupt anything, any narrative that's speaking to us that says that we aren't enough, that says that we aren't divine, that says that everything we have is when we came into the earth that we are a miracle. And so anything that's against that, I'm trying to pull it down. And so whatever way I can do that, through writing, through the nap ministry, through poetry, through raising an artist, a son, all of these things, I want my work to uplift humanity, to be something that just makes you curious. I just want someone to cock their head a little and be like, hmm, I don't know about,

something's a little off about that. Just I wanna be on the numbers and be like, I raised my hand and said, hey, that's not right. You know, I want that to go down in history that I actually raised my hand and was like, ah, nah. All of the stuff that you are saying about us is not true. The patriarchy, ableism, capitalism, all that stuff,

it just feels wrong to me. And I want to be in the archives and say, Trisha said something about it, even though it may have not come down in her lifetime. She was like, uh-uh, no, absolutely not. And so that's my work, I think in a nutshell. When you start the nap ministry, talk to us about your grandmother in her chair,

your father. What made Trisha start going, huh, wait, what? This doesn't feel right. Like Trisha, my entire life has been my face like, wait, this doesn't feel right. So what didn't feel right? And what did you feel like people needed to see and to escape? Yeah, specifically, that's a good question about the NAP Ministry because the NAP Ministry is one of my newest projects. Like I've been an artist since I was like a working artist doing projects, creating

things since I was probably, you know, 15, 16 years old in high school. So this is the newest project. And so for the NAP Ministry, what started to come to be, I think it's really a cocktail, a beautiful cocktail of everything I've ever done in my life. To being a poet, to being a writer, being raised by an activist. My dad was a community organizer and activist, union organizer, a preacher growing up in the Black Pentecostal Church, you know, having that spiritual foundation. My grandmother being a refugee from Jim Crow terrorism, me being her favorite grandchild.

She told me I was her favorite. So I like set up under this woman all the time. She was my boo. Like that was me and her. And so being up under her and watching how she moved and navigated the world she was in. And then just always being encouraged to be an artist, always being encouraged to write.

And so poetry would be my first influx into art. And then from there it turned into plays and performance art and theater and all these things. But then that ministry came to be when I started to really be like, I can't do this. It's the pace. When I began seminary, when I began theology school in 2013, not even the first semester, first two weeks when we got those first syllabus and I was trying to keep up, I was like, I don't know. I was sitting on the side of the, on a porch on these little steps near a psychology building on the phone with my husband crying. Like, I don't know what I've got myself into. I don't think I can do this. He's like

school literally started two weeks ago. I'm like, I know. You don't see these syllabus. You don't. I don't know if I can keep up like there's 500 pages to read a week per class. So there's like thousands of pages. We have a six year old baby. How am I going to get him? I don't, I can't afford it. What are we going to do? And so I just stay with it. And the more I stay with it, the more I was like, this is an unsustainable pace. I won't be able to keep up with this. And then I think what made it so beautiful is what I was studying. I was studying cultural trauma.

That was like my main reason is like I was in the archives studying the idea of what trauma has done to us as a culture. So I was really looking at Jim Crow, terrorism survivors, like interviewing people who had survived Jim Crow and studying plantation labor in the South, you know, reading the ideas of what was happening around our bodies, the somatics of slavery and what it did to our bodies and our minds. And then I was studying that at the same time I was exhausted. I was having headaches. I was not feeling well mentally. I couldn't keep up. I was studying that at the same time I was exhausted. I was having headaches.

I was not feeling well mentally. I couldn't keep up. I was poor. I was super broke. Another thing about academia doesn't look at adult students. So you're like, literally, I used to work a job. Now I have to be in school full time because they didn't have online back in 2013.

Now everything is online. I could have done it at home. I would have been perfect. But I had to be on campus from eight in the morning until 6 p.m. every day. So trying to juggle that and not working. And I just started to be like, I can't keep up. When I was studying slave narratives and reading

what was going on in their bodies. And I just said, I wonder what it would feel like if they could have rested. I thought to myself, man, if they even had a moment during those 20 hours of working, what could it have felt like? Well, I'll try. So I just started experimenting on my own body.

It was just me really being at the point of where I'm going to die if I keep up with this pace. I'm physically not going to feel well. If I fail out, I'll just fail out. I really got to let the chips fall where they may moment. I hope no one gets there, because it's not a pretty place. I hope that we can start the moment of like working before that. But if I fail out of school because I'm sleeping class, so be it.

I trust myself. If I can't get this together, I trust myself. I just had to deeply trust myself, my ancestors and what I could trickster and maneuver and be, you know, in and figure out and be very subversive. So it was an experiment. I thought I never knew it would actually work. I didn't care if it failed. I was okay with that. I just knew I was going to lay down. And so I just started napping everywhere. And I think I did that immediately. I felt better. I was like, oh, I can make it to class today. I feel like I can do it. I was just, it was like a day by day thing and it just kept going. It kept going. Things started to make sense. Dreams started to happen. My brain started to rest. I was getting better

grades. I started to have dreams about my grandmother coming to me. She's an ancestor now. She was laying me down and taking naps with her while I was dreaming. It was just like these magical things. I was taking naps with her while I was dreaming. And it was just like these magical things. I was taking naps on the couch, waking up with the book on my chest from reading, waking up and going to take a test and getting A's on it. It was like, I didn't even finish reading that, but maybe osmosis worked.

I don't know, like the brain, whatever's happening. Brain level. No, I get that. Scientific wise, I'm understanding neuroscience in so many ways that you need that moment. And I think it was just a let the chips fall where they may moment. And I just use everything that I had from all that past. And I just said, I'll experiment and being an artist. I'm not afraid to do that. That's why I want to be an artist because artists aren't afraid

to experiment. They aren't afraid to try things. They aren't afraid to see what could work. They actually get joy from that. They actually feel most activated when they're experimenting. ["Tis the Season"] Tis the season for shopping. And whether that is really exciting news for you or really tragic news for you, I have something to make it a little brighter.

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She went in seeking peace and clarity and beauty of God, and instead found grind culture even in that realm. And then decided, wait a minute, what if instead of trusting this outer structure that's telling me I have to keep hustling, what if instead of that I go inside and I trust this yearning and longing inside of me that is saying, I need to rest. I need to rest. Because connecting that with ancestors,

tell us about what you used to see your grandmother do in her chair. She would rest her eyes every single day. She worked two jobs. She was raising eight children and dozens and dozens and dozens of grandchildren. She was suffering from PTSD, you know, deeply, poverty deep. And so she in between jobs with her uniform still on from the one job about to go to the next one, she would sit on her couch and close her eyes and rest her eyes for 30 minutes to an

hour every day it could be babies jumping off of tables running out the house she held space like a silent little force there on that couch and just close her eyes and she told me she was resting her eyes she wasn't sleeping I thought she was asleep she said every shut-eye ain't sleep she was resting her eyes. She wasn't sleeping. I thought she was asleep. She said, every shut eye ain't sleep. I'm resting my eyes. I'm listening. She would say, I'm listening to God.

Sometimes she would just say, I'm listening to the universe. But this listening, like, what was the downloads that were happening? What was she hearing? What was helping her to be able to make space and make a way for herself in a world that really wanted to crush her and didn't love her. This Black woman refugee from Mississippi, Jim Crotera, she left to come to Chicago.

And so I uplift the people during the Great Migration, the millions who migrated from the South and went to the North, to the West, as the ultimate tricksters, as the ultimate escape artists. My grandmother as the ultimate escape artist. My grandmother was a deep escape artist, literally, you know, getting on a bus and traveling from Mississippi up to Chicago, knew one person, an aunt who had went before, didn't have a job, didn't know anybody there, didn't want to leave Mississippi. She told me, she was like, I love Mississippi. I had a farm there. That's my home. I loved it. But when you're watching

lynchings happening, when you're under the terror of this Jim Crow deep, deep racial terror, what is the choice? And so she decided to leave. Many stayed. And I'm also grateful for the ones who decided to become escape artists and tricksters right in the South. But millions and millions left. Like that's the largest, you know, escape of people in our history in the United States. And so my grandmother was one of those magicians, you know? And so she landed in Chicago and she rested and she garden and she prayed and she made a way

to raise these eight children and grandchildren and still reclaim her body as her own. Like she held space for that. What a beautiful model, I think. And since grind culture, capitalism, racism, all of the isms are all made of lies. If we do not find that magical place, if we do not become escape artists, if we do not return to whatever we call it, God, inner self, inside, we will never hear the truth because if we stay outward all the time.

Now what is so beautiful about, and especially in your new work, oh God, journal, this can be perceived as a binary. Like what do you mean? I don't have time to take a nap. What do you mean? I can't work, not work. I either work or don't work. I either nap or don't nap.

I either, and this is not Pod Squad. This is not what Trisha is talking about. Trisha is an effing genius. Trisha just spoke at the Nobel, I don't know, party. What the hell was that? Okay, Trisha knows this is not a binary. What Trisha is talking about is while we are in this world, while we are stuck inside this world,

how do we find the magic portal each day? Just enough to have magic in our lives, okay? Tricia, the more I think about you and this trickster energy that people, artists... I mean, of course you want artists to be your first thing, because in all of those other categories, theologian, those are all structural. Artist is the only one that's totally trickster. That's totally individual. I see it everywhere now, Trisha.

I see the trickster energy. Good. In so many different places, people. Really? Can you explain trickster energy? Yeah. Tell me who you explain trickster energy? Yeah. Tell me who you're seeing. Like, let's get into this.

Yeah, but that's a good point, Tricia. For people who have not yet read, we will rest. Yes. Tell us what the trickster energy is. And I'm going to set you up with two of your pages to introduce you introducing trickster. Okay. Yeah.

I am the trickster assigned as the debt collector Two of your pages to introduce you introducing Trickster. Okay. Yeah. I am the Trickster, assigned as the debt collector by my ancestors, resting to reclaim the dream space stolen. Pay up. And I am the Trickster, the one who squinted her eyes, cocked her head, recognized the lies, peeped the scam. Who's a trickster? What's a trickster? What are we escaping from? The way I love to think about a trickster is they come out of this ancient tales and

fables and myths. You see them in many cultures, African tricksters, and you see them in African American cultures. Like these have been myths and legends and ancient stories and tales have been told for thousands and thousands of years. This idea of this person who was resourceful, you know, I think about Anansi the spider and the African trickster, these African tales. Like I think about Brer Rabbit, you know, when you think about African-American tales that you heard these stories as young children, This resistance in the face of oppression, these trickster values that are like shapeshifters. They're like using their intelligence to disrupt, to be mischievous. They're like really outcast. They're like messengers. In a lot of ways, I think about the idea of a trickster being someone who saw what was going on, peeped it, but didn't immediately say that.

They held that inside to be able to start using it. You know, I think about Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad and all the people on the Underground Railroad. I uplift my favorite trickster of all time in this book, Henry Box Brown. When this book came to be, my editor was like, you're thinking about writing a new book? What are we thinking about writing a new book? What are we thinking about with the new book?

What are you thinking? I was like, I don't know exactly what I'm thinking, but I have to talk about Henry Box Brown. A lot of people have never heard of this, this beautiful trickster, this man who mailed himself in a box. Every time I say it, I just can't even understand. He mailed himself in a box for 27 hours. It mailed itself inside of a box to an abolitionist office in Philadelphia from Virginia.

And then I found out later, I've been really researching him, that he then went on, once he came out of the box and was in Philadelphia, to become a magician, a real life magician, a performance artist, a theater maker who tour all over Canada in these different personas and created like real magic and like almost like a Houdini type magician figure. I was like, I don't know what the book is going to be about. We have to talk about this man. Like this is the ultimate trickster to me. I think about these people who like are questioning authority. They're finding whatever they can.

They're using the inner power and humanness in them to say, wait a minute, there's something that I see that's happening. They always are disrupting things that are toxic. It's always, they're pushing back against things, these values that they disapprove of, these values that everyone in the culture loves. But they're saying the value is wrong, you know?

And so for me, the trickster, the whole Nat ministry itself is a trickster experiment. From everything that I thought about when I thought about the Nat ministry, people think the Nat ministry just came, I just want to be online, being cute and fun. Like, I literally planned out what I was going to roll out when I thought about the nat ministry. The idea that I'm a nat bishop. That alone is just ridiculous. You know, I'm this Black woman who named herself a bishop. This bishop of rash.

You know, I used to have a costume where I would wear this bishop outfit and I would walk in on a bed. And, you know, this whole performance art idea of bringing people in, I wanted them to say, oh, there's this woman who's calling herself a bishop. She's talking about lay down. And as soon as I got them,

as soon as they was like, this sounds cute. I'll come and get a pillow. And I just started going crazy about capitalism. Let's call everybody an agent of white supremacy. You need to, you know, you, I just started just like laying in on slavery and just all of the dark things that no one wants to talk about.

But I pulled them in with with here's some lavender oil. I was spraying lavender oil with people at events and I was putting them on pillows and then they would wake up from the event like, oh, how do you feel like, oh my gosh, I haven't had a nap like that. And I haven't napped in 10 years. Oh yeah. Do you know why you haven't napped in 10 years? Capitalism. And I would just go on for 45 minutes about the history of capitalism and white supremacy and why we got to get free. Like I do this all the time. I get booked by lots of people from corporations who want me to come and talk about burnout.

Would you come and talk about burnout? Yeah, of course. They are not wise. Oh, the reason burnout exists because you're exploiting your workers. Exactly. There's no such thing as burnout. And they're like, that wasn't what you put in the outline. You know? So it's like, I want to use this as a way to bring people in and then educate.

Yes. For people to begin to open up, they have to feel what it feels like to have been manipulated by a system. And they'd only do that by actually resting their bodies. And so the idea of putting somatics with education, the idea of community rest events with like actual talk backs, nap talk where people can talk about what happened, the idea of looking at dreaming and looking at daydreaming and as also a form of resistance, bringing people in so that we can begin to open them up. And I think napping and resting is the ultimate way to do that. It's the ultimate way to get people

to see for their own selves. I want people to see for their own selves. I don't want people to have to think I'm their leader. See for your own self. Your body is telling you, your body knows, your body's screaming that this is an assault that's happening on you. If you could just listen, the way is already there for you. And so that's what I wanted. I wanted them to think they had a leader and a bishop, but then the bishop is just like, I am not the leader of this. Your body is the leader. So let me give you some examples of trickster energy that I have witnessed since being steeped in your work. Tell me. Well, we have a kid who's been on the path of all the fancy education and all the things.

Okay. I was talking to him recently and he said, I think I want to, for a long while after I graduate, work at a coffee shop. And I said, okay, tell me more. And he said, I think I want to find a way where my body can do good service work, but my mind is still mine. Ooh, he said that. He said, I don't want to rent my mind out.

I don't want to rent my mind out to some company, to some whatever, to someone. I want to have my mind be mine. I want to go through my day doing service with my body, but I want in my mind to be able to be, he's a writer, to be creating, to be dreaming, to be imagining all day long. I want my mind to stay my own. That's good. That's some extra energy. Recently we had Jillian Anderson on the podcast. She talked about how she and her husband at the end of a day will get under the duvet and it'll just be the two of them under there

and then she'll just start cackling with joy. And what is that? Under the duvet is the only place together where they're not in the talons of somebody who is bossing them around. Yes, it's protected space, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I have a friend who is what you would think of

as famous and productive and bossed around a lot. And she has decided she will only take direction from the voice that speaks to her first thing in the morning, which she calls God. And she will only do what that voice tells her during the day and nothing else, no matter who else tells her what's important. Love it.

That's radical. That's so radical because, oh, I love it. Mine are a little bit simpler, which is Trisha. I love a simple. I go to my yoga class to just sit and breathe, and everyone starts doing hard things, and I feel pressured to do the hard things they're doing. Right, right.

But because I don't want to look stupid. But then I remember I am there as a trickster for my magic and I do not do what they tell me. I just sit there and do easy things. You lay on that mat and do your Stan Childs pose for the whole time, yeah. Yes, exactly. I feel like that's trickster energy, right?

It is. It's really the energy that's associated with just doing what you feel is necessary for your survival and success. Not listening to what the values of the dominant culture or what the community is saying to you. Like the dominant culture is saying, keep going, don't listen to your body, push, burn the midnight oil.

If you burn out, that's fine. And for us to say no, I'm going to say no to that. That is deep, deep energy of escape. It's like you are an escape artist. You're an artist, a person who's beginning to understand you can create your path for escape. You can do that on your own, in your own little small ways. I love indigenous and cultures always talk about these ideas

of temporary spaces of joy and freedom. We understand them to be temporary because we aren't foolish. We see what we're in. We see that we're living in empire, you know, that this is all around us. We don't have to wait for empire to begin to change its mind. People always ask, and I was just on the panel, they were like, what do we do

while capitalism is still blazing around us? Do we just have to wait for capitalism to fall before we can get our rest? I said, wait, what? Wait for what? Like, I'm not waiting for nothing. Capitalism may never fall in my lifetime, but that doesn't mean I'm not now in the moment with the life that I have right now, finding ways to disrupt it. My work is just simply a disruption. I'm not attempting in any way to try to like, think that this is the end all be all. It is simply a disruption and a disruption is so powerful. That's what a trickster energy is. It's an energy of disruption. It's my ancestors slowing down working when they were in those cotton fields. Like there's these work slowdowns they would do. They would just tell other people secretly, today we're just going to all slow down working. We ain't going to go as fast. You know, meet me over here behind this barn and we're going to, you know, come up with a way we're going to like go see if we can escape. The Underground Railroad, the fact that it's an Underground Railroad, like it's so brilliant to me that these different posts that they were finding,

Harriet Tubman reading the stars, reading the astronomy to be able to know which way was the right way. Like the cover of the book is actually the big differ in the North Star. It's all about follow the stars, follow the light. I dedicate the book to my son, to Harriet Tubman, to other tricksters who see themselves as more powerful than the systems. If you just follow the light, whatever that light may be, you know, the inside light in your heart. My ancestors following the literal lights of these stars to know that this was way north. This is how we get to Philadelphia, how we get to Canada, how we get the hell up out

of here. You know, this is how we get our freedom. How do we follow the light in ourselves when it's been so dimmed by the world around us telling us these lies, telling us we aren't enough? I think the idea of enoughness is like just key to this work. Many people say, no one's ever told me that I'm enough. Like in their entire lives, adults, like I always think that I have to do more, be better, keep pushing, and we're killing ourselves with this

unattainable idea of enoughness. I just wanted to ask a question because I think a lot of folks who are listening to this right now are probably wondering the same thing I am. I have too much hustle in me for sure. Folks who are listening to this right now are probably wondering the same thing I am. Tell me. I have too much hustle in me for sure. And I am definitely trying to figure out how to kind of escape the hustle culture that I have labeled as my survival. Yes. I have labeled it as my survival. And Glenn and Trisha, you guys were talking a little bit earlier about trusting yourself. And I think one of the issues I'm feeling right now is that I think that there's safety

in letting somebody else decide in the hustle culture. So I guess my question is, are there any kind of steps that I can take as like a beginner of how to trust myself in the beginning phases of trying to get outside of hustle culture and capitalism. Yes. When I think about trusting yourself, like this is something I've been trying to teach my son, you know, from a very young age.

I keep saying to him, this idea of intuition. And he's like, mommy, what's intuition? You know, what does that mean? And I was like, it just means this idea of what's the kind of the I was like, it just means this idea of what's the kind of the first things that you hear just listening and being able to say, even if you don't listen to it, but you just acknowledge that you, I heard it and I'm gonna go the other way. You know, I heard it, I should not need to calm, I need to slow it down,

I need to stop her. I heard it. You don't have to immediately follow it, but just, I think the more that you could begin to say to it, I hear you. Okay. Right now I'm just not ready to kind of follow what you're saying, but I do hear you. I think that allows for it to begin to almost strengthen itself. You know, it needs to grow a little bit more. It's like, I hear you, I'm feeding you a little bit of water. I hear you, but I'm still finna go and do what I want to do. I'm going to still, I tell it to my songs. I said, you can listen and it's going to say something. You can ignore it and that's fine. But I want you to acknowledge it. It wants to be acknowledged. It wants to be like, yeah, I think the intuition to me is the Holy Spirit. This guide

in your life that's trying to guide you and tell you right or wrong. But I'm at a point now where if I don't listen to it, I just expect something to just fall apart. It just happened to me. I just was like, I said, everything kept telling me that. I just was like, I don't, I said, everything kept telling me that girl don't do that. I was like, nah, I want to do this because I feel like I want to do it. And then it just automatically just started in. Every day it was like another block

for I would get a call like, oh, that fell apart. Oh, it just kept, it was literally three, four times in a row it kept falling apart. And I finally acknowledged it was like, it fell apart. And things do sometimes fall apart, but I acknowledged kept falling apart. I finally acknowledge it was like, it fell apart. And things do sometimes fall apart. But I acknowledge the falling apartness of it and saw it as a lesson. I think some people here, their intuition don't

acknowledge it. They just say, they don't even think it exists. They don't even feel like it's there. They just keep going on their own understanding of things on their own hustle on their own survival methods that they've learned because of whatever in their life, the trauma, how they were raised, their lifestyle, their childhood, whatever it was that had you to be like, I have to hustle to survive, which is real talk. It's real. Like I understand

the idea. It's very scary to not listen to that because for so many, it is a true thing. I tell that to people all the time. I'm not out here telling you thinking that poverty isn't a real thing and straight up being out here without anything is not real in a culture that we live in. It almost pushes you to the point where you have to feel like you have to keep going. If I stop, I'll be homeless. I won't have money. I'll die. No one else will support me.

The community is not here. Like we're in a place right now. We are so individualized and trained that way that we believe that. And it's true. It could possibly be true, but I just want people to acknowledge that the intuition is even saying anything to you. Just to be like, I hear you.

I want to come back and ask, is that helpful to you? Yeah, I do take a nap every day. So I participate a lot in this notion. Nice. However, I am starting to think about what a quote unquote retirement life would look like. How you're going to finish out.

Yeah. And it's hard to extract myself from income earning because it's just like such a lifeline, right? Of course. For me and for the family. And I'm having quite a bit of trouble with the idea of not earning income any longer. That's something that brings me quite a bit of stress. And yet there's something that's also still calling me to it.

And I can't figure out which to listen to. It's like, yes, this for sure. And also I'm scared for sure. I understand that. Yeah, we opened up talking about the binary. I talked about that in the first book. I said, people, when I talked to them about this work, they was like, that sounds so sweet, Trisha. And this is what they'll say to me. It was like, that sounds good, girl, but I got to work to eat. I'm like, oh my God. I did not say don't work, so I want you to eat. I want

you to like really have a good life. That's not what I'm saying. But because we've been trained on a binary, it doesn't have to be that way. Like, I want to open people up to the idea of flexibility and this nuanced thinking that 10 things can be true at the same time, you know, or infinite things can be true at the same time. And there's no tension around it. There's no controversy. It takes a while. It takes deep healing work to really center into that. I'm not there because I still catch myself on the binary a lot of times because we've been trained that way. This is the curriculum we got from the time we were born. From the time you were a baby, your parents, whatever they were on, they

taught this to schools, religion, everything in your life got to now to where you're like, I could never think about, you know, thinking in a different way. But yeah, it isn't the idea of either or. It's like all those things. And I want people to be scared. I want people to say, I'm frightened. I was terrified of all of this. I was terrified of the idea of people thinking like, well, how am I going to take a nap, girl,

when I got to like, I'm in poverty. I come from a legacy of poverty. I'm the first person in my entire family to go to college. So I feel like it's even richer for me as a black woman coming from a legacy of enslavement. You know, sharecroppers, I had answers who were enslaved on plantation to be telling people to go lay down. Like, I'm going to lay down. They're like, who do you think you are? You know, like, lay down. Like your whole entire family built the whole legacy of this world. And so I understand the scariness. And I think to me, it's the idea of pushing back by deepening into our intuition, by deepening into the light, just

like acknowledging that letting it grow and letting us be in community, you know, with each other in that. And I think that this work is opening up our ideas around what it means to slow down and what that looks like in everyone's life. It's going to be different for everyone. It's different, but it's the same. What I think is so interesting about your work is that there's some kind of exchange like this, where like what Abby just said, like what if I can't do that? I can't, and it becomes very intellectualized.

And we can get into that spinning. We will never win there because you're're right, in that brain space, which is all your conditioning, you can't beat capitalism. You can't ever have enough. You're right, you can't. Never, yeah. But there's another place to go, is what you're saying.

Your brain will never convince you that you can stop. But there's another place you can go, and it reminds me very much of in spiritual traditions when Jesus just keeps saying, okay, just taste and see. Yes. I'm not arguing anymore. Yeah, just you gotta see. Yeah. Just taste and see. And then I won't have to argue with you anymore because if you taste this, it will change who you are. And that's why Trisha invites us to this thing, take a nap, do the thing. And then actually doesn't have to argue with us anymore,

because my experiences, when I find these third magical places, which I am more and more committed to, as Abby knows, every single day. Yes. Even when it means I say no to a million other things that any sane person would be saying yes to or doing. Yeah.

There is some magic there that changes who we are cellularly. It makes me less useful to capitalism, but more likely to save the world, more likely to feel deeply connected to other human beings, the world won't allow us to experience that connectedness because it needs us to be okay with killing each other, to be okay with not caring about each other, to be okay with getting ours and not in this magical place. There is something that happens that connects me so deeply to that I can no longer be violently careless. Yeah.

There is something that's happening where she is inviting us to. And when we say there's a binary, I can't do it. Whenever I tell myself that, I think of this story you tell about Harriet Tubman and I say, Glennon Doyle. Yeah, exactly. I need you to decide if what you are saying, Glennon Doyle, is that your job is more important and stressful

than Harriet Tubman's. Yeah, while the bloodhounds are running after her. You can't rest today on a random Tuesday because you have too many emails, but Harriet Tubman sat down and rested while the bloodhounds were after her. Yeah. It's like, when you deepen into the history,

it's almost like the choice has to be made. Like you got to start making some real, like my son would say, some real gangster decisions. Like you got to really start deepening into the idea. What am I going to choose? Who do I want to be? What do I want my heart and soul to feel like? What do I want? Like, and I love what you said about capitalism.

Well, you'll never be able to get out of your mind thinking about that. Like don't stay there. People are always here. We got to get out of your mind thinking about that. Like, don't stay there. People are always here. We got to get into our heart and to our body. That's why this work could have never been possible without the collective mapping experiences. That is the work. The work isn't the IG page. It's not the books.

The work is me rolling out the yoga mats, the blankets, the pillows when I was tired and didn't have $25. I would just roll them out, barring yoga mats from people around me and my mom and pillows and just inviting people to come rest with me in Atlanta and these little local free spaces. And people were coming. Sometimes it would be one person. Sometimes it would be 10 and they would just lay down. They will all go to sleep and they will all wake up in tears. I've never did an event. I've done thousands. But someone didn't wake up in tears, bawling, because that is the somatic work. That is a spiritual work. You got to

taste and see this. You have to lay down with us, waking up having dreams, people having the same dreams, like this portal that rest provides. It is a literal portal. So the more we go there, the more we're going to wake up, the more we can allow ourselves that freedom, this moment of freedom dream. And I love daydreaming. I love slowing down in any way possible that allows that intuition, that voice to come together. And so the work really is these collective rest events. And I want people, even if they can't ever come to an event, that they do these in their homes, that they have home nap events. People are replicating this work all over the world. You know, I get videos and links from people all over who are doing rest events out at parks, doing it at home, yoga studios. Like it's, they're happening all

over the world. And so when people wake up, they're like, I haven't taken a nap ever in my life. The last time I took a nap was when I was in a preschool, when they have preschool nap time. You know, no one has had a collective moment where they can rest and feel care with each other. This moment of care, this deep community care of someone laying next to you, breathing and sleeping. That is the work. I'll never stop doing that.

I'm going on my book tour coming up in November for my new book, We Will Rest, and I'm gonna be doing collective daydreaming activations with live musicians and sound healers who are gonna to be coming with music and we're going to be together. People need to feel what is happening because when you come from there, when you feel that, that's the radical work, that's the trickster work to bring people together in a world that is so divided, to lay their eyes and close their selves and feel a moment of deep care. You don't need to go to a retreat center.

You don't need to pay thousands of dollars. I'm anti all of the retreats. I don't like, I see it so much online. I wanna say right now, do not stop it. This is not to make capitalism and consumerism and tourism industry more rich. Close your eyes right now in this chair, like my grandmother who was sitting on her couch.

Lay down in your bed, go to a neighbor's house, go in the backyard and put some camping tents out, invite people over, bring people together to experience what it feels like to be cared for, to experience what it feels like to be a trickster, to lay your eyes and close your eyes on capitalism's clock is the ultimate escape. Like to say, you know what, I could be doing the email right now, but instead I'm napping with my friend right here. We're gonna intentionally rest together.

That to me is the ultimate radical form of protest. And I want people to see it just as being that simple and that powerful that we don't need all this extras. You know, when I always say, I'm nervous about something, I feel afraid of this because you care. You care about your life, you care about your legacy, you care about, you know, your living and who you can share your life with. Of course you care.

Capitalism doesn't care about you at all. It hates your guts. White supremacy hates you. Patriarchy hates you. It doesn't care about you. So who are you going to care more for? Who gets to the deepness of that more? I feel like I want to give a little bit more

to myself and my community than to the system. So if I can shift that a little bit, even if it could just happen a little, I don't need it to be the full under, I need it just to shift. I don't need people to cock their heads. It's a veil lifted. And that's enough for me.

That really is. If one person cocked that head and said, you know what, I'm gonna rest my eyes. I know I'm better than what the sisters have told me. I know that I don't belong to them. I know I'm better than what the sisters have told me. I know that I don't belong to them. I know that my body belongs to me. That if they can do that, that's enough for me. My body belongs to me. That's all I need. Really. That's all I need. One trickster to join me. I need one escape artist with me. You know what I mean? And that's enough. One is enough.

And the third place, the napping place, the trickster energy, for me, probably because of my nervous system, it's not a nap, actually. And maybe it will be eventually. But for me, it's when I stop and turn all the lights out and breathe consciously. I just breathe consciously, pay attention to my breath. I feel like no one I've ever explained this to

understands what I'm trying to say, but I know that you will. It's that I paint now. And what is true about my painting, and I don't mean this in a self-deprecating way, I'm just saying it's not good. It's not like anything that anyone will ever be like, wow, you should take that widely. And what is important about that to me

is that is one of the reasons why it feels safe to me. Because so many things about artistry What is important about that to me is that is one of the reasons why it feels safe to me. Because so many things about artistry can be quickly hijacked by capitalism. There's this story in this book I love by Jenny O'Dell, which reminds me of a different version of your work. But there's this tree that was in Oakland and when the foresters came and wiped out all the trees in the area, and it was so tragic, but there was this one tree that was left because it was so crooked that it couldn't be used as a material to build something else.

And so the inherent flaw of the tree and its uselessness to the loggers is what made it survive. Saved it, yes. And my painting is useless to the lagers is what made it survive. And my painting is useless to the lagers. And that's what makes it feel safe to me. No one is ever gonna take it. It is just for me. And so that is trickster energy. Become useless.

People need to know that you don't have to be in service to a system like this, a system that hates you. You can begin to trickster energy to begin to deepen yourself when you're almost away from where you're so useless that you're not even of service to it. I don't want to be in service to it. I'm a part of it because I'm in it. I live here. I have to eat. I have to pay bills, but I want to find other opportunities and spiritual ways that I can disconnect from that energy. And you do that by being in community. Capitalism doesn't want us to like care for each other.

That's why my dad as a union organizer was doing a lot of his work secretly. You know, he was in the house doing secret union meetings. My mother would be in the back cooking for everybody who was there. They were secretly working on how they were gonna like go up against these huge corporations that would treat their employers like nothing. And so I understood the idea of underground

and secret. My dad would be like, we can't tell nobody about this. The brothers are coming over tonight. He was working with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. So electricity in Chicago. He was one of the union captains there. And they will always be thinking of ways to go underground and trick and how can we come from different ways and my mother back there feeding and I'm in the room listening like what are they up to you know making their signs and who was going to help this person if they lost their job who will be able to help pay their rent you know like they actually work together around this idea we might lose our our jobs, but we're gonna like, no one is going to go across that line because we're union strong and employees matter.

And so this idea of deep community, of seeing what other people need and how we can help each other, we won't make it without that. Doing this alone and just trying to like figure this out on your own is just more of the same. Like it has to be done in deep community. If I fall, there needs to be a soft space available to me. And I want my work to really feel like a soft space to land and that you feel like you're not being unreasonable. You know, that's why I really wrote the new book. I wrote this new book so that people don't feel like they're being

unreasonable. I want you to be like, you're not being unreasonable that you're exhausted and you're tired, that you want to take a nap. That's not an unreasonable thing. It's okay that you feel that way. So, yeah. It's also, I hate when we have to end with Tricia. Yeah. The new book also has the trickster energy on every page. Yes. Like, it feels like the medium of it is the thing.

And so it unlocks it in a way that regular pros can't. Can not do. Right. And I appreciate that so much. The art, the art. Yeah, the art. The different parts. Every page feels like it. I love this drawing of this woman in flight.

Oh, yes. Oh, God. Well, you know what that drawing is? Your work, and it's resurrection. It's, your work is, to me, is all about resurrection. It's, your work is to me is all about resurrection. It's about, yes, we are in this world where we are told we have to earn a living. Think about that.

But there is a part of us that we get to resurrect that is our humanity, that is magic, and we can visit it each day. Yes. Mostly when we find any minute where we are useless. Yeah. Yes. Find a time to are useless. Yeah. Yes. Find a time to be useless.

And I'm really wanting to get people more radicalized and more deep into the idea that no one's going to do this for you, that you don't have to wait, that you can close your damn eyes right now, that you can like, you know, be in community with other people and that the idea of escape really is a spiritual practice. I want people to lean into the idea of escape really is a spiritual practice. I want people to lean into the idea of the spirit like working within us. We can't do this by ourselves by just trying to figure it out with our little exhausted, tired brains. You know, our brains are so fragile. I just came from a science conference two weeks ago and I was blown away

by the neuroscience of what's happening to our brain when we don't sleep. We're literally brain damaging our brains so we can't even think straight because of lack of chronic sleep restriction, which is literally not even a long time. It's five days without more than five hours of sleep a day. So if you sleep less than five hours every day for a total of five days in a row, your brain is already showing signs of deep damage. So much is happening to our brains, we don't rest. Like the sleep sign and stuff really blew me away. And so when I heard that, I was like, wow,

no wonder we're like this, you know? No wonder we're so like exhausted and mental health crisis is so rich and we're so disconnected from our bodies because to not sleep really puts us in a very precarious situation bi biologically, in so many ways. But spiritually, I think it's even worse. Okay, and next time, next time,

I'm gonna beg you to come back, and then I wanna discuss what happens next, because when you employ a lot of trickster energy into your life, and you start to see that everything is just the fucking Hunger Games and you are in the arena. Yeah. And then you start to change a little bit and then you start to feel very lonely because you don't have anyone to play with you because everyone's still in the Hunger Games.

That's what I'm thinking about for my next book. Really deepening into the idea of relationships. Yes. With this platonic family, romantic community, like what is left behind when we have a Hunger Games mentality around all the exhausted ones? Yeah. Good. How do the tricksters do when they're together?

Like, what is a community of tricksters looks like? Because what you said before we started recording that, I'm like, wow. You said, you know, I don't know. I, I've been thinking about just going to volunteer at the local, I think what you said, retirement center. Yeah. Yeah. The retirement center. And I told Abby recently, the only thing I can think of that makes sense now is I think I'm just going to call the local elementary school and ask them if they need help with

the kids, like reading. That's what I used to do with my life. That is literally the only thing that makes sense to me right now. I know they're the ones I wanna be around too. The children and the elders and the animals. Those are the three people I think are gonna help lead the new movement that we're trying to create

in our own exhausted brains. So yeah, I'm really excited about this new book. I'm so proud of it. You should be proud. It's gorgeous. Thank you. If you're being useful, you're being used. Yes! That's what's happening. So, if you feel uncomfortable feeling useless,

at least you can be like, at least I'm not being used. Yes. Okay. Here's the book. Rest is Resistance. This is the first one. To me, at least I'm not being used. Yes. Okay. Here's the book. Rest is Resistance. This is the first one. To me, this is like the why. Why. And then we will rest. The art of escape is the how. It's like, here's theologian Tricia, here's Mystic Tricia. Okay?

Yes, I love that. That's a great... I love that. We should do book reviews. You're like, this is her. And Podspod, I think just go get these books and then just talk to us about where you find your trickster energy. I want to know. I want more trickster energy in my life. I want more.

I want to find more ways to go to this third place. I want to know how you do it because I want more of it in my life. And Trisha, thanks for being our bishop. I'm your bishop. I'm so excited. I can't wait. You guys are in LA, right? Yes, we're in LA.

Okay, I'm gonna be coming to LA in 2024. I'm gonna email you guys. Please do. I'm gonna see you. We gotta get some lunch or something. I wanna come take a nap. Come take a nap. Yes, I'll host a little nap thing for you.

I'm gonna be there already, I'm looking at my calendars, I'll be out there. Can you send us those dates? I would so love to meet you. I would love to meet you. I love speaking with you guys. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me on.

I'm just so grateful. Out of all the things, I was like, I have to do them again. As I'm getting on this publicity run, you know how it is. Yes, we do know how it is. OK, Pod Squad, I'm going to end with this. When you send Tricia an email, you will get an auto-reply that says, basically it says, I'll get back to you whenever I'm gonna get back to you.

But then it says, trust the divine timing of our connection. Oh, yes. It does. Email trickster energy. It does say that. I wish I had that line back when I was dating terrible men. Yeah. Trust the divine timing of us never seeing each other again. Email Trickster Energy. It does say that. I wish I had that line back when I was dating terrible men.

Yeah. Trust the divine timing of us never seeing each other again. Yes, let's trust it. Please trust anything. Let's trust that. OK. Pod Squad, we love you. Go get all of Trisha's work.

Go forth and be Tricksters. We love you. Thank you. We will rest, guys. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

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