139. No More Grind: How to Finally Rest with Tricia Hersey

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Hello, everybody.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

We are here.

with Tricia Hersey.

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 Rest is Resistance, a manifesto.

You can learn more about Tricia's extremely important and brilliant work and her book at the nappministry.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 the visiting reverend comes and they sit and they read the 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're like, okay, 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.

Tricia.

But in diving deeply into your work over the last few weeks,

what I said to sister yesterday is, I feel like calling Tricia's work that NAT ministry 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 in walking.

Okay.

So I said the thing.

Clearly, look, sister, we made it through.

And 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.

You got it.

Absolutely.

I'm so glad you.

Thank you, sister.

Yes, it is.

Thank you, because it is deep work.

It is, it, and it also,

when I think about the work and me being a performance artist and theater artist, 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 nat 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 trying to burn down both systems.

So I'm like, Yeah,

have a pillow.

And then here's your flamethrower to like burn these systems down so we can all live and be free, you know?

So I love that it is 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 chattel 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, as 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 past, this 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 are 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 to white supremacy.

You can't have me.

I'm not going to be the one you're going to get.

And so because of that, I'm resting.

I'm using rest as the 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 was happening around them, 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, yeah, I 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.

Because I think

most of Americans that are raised and indoctrinated in this culture are like slavery, oh, 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 guaranteed paid rentals.

Absolutely.

Like it is a direct lie.

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 a 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 our bodies.

People think not resting is just, oh, I'll get to it later, but what it's 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 raised that 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 like 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 why is that?

You know, like, why is that?

And so, yeah, the capitalism and why supreme.

It's because 1% of Americans own 40% of the wealth.

Exactly.

Just like implantation time.

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 this work comes from a black liberation lens.

I'm a black woman.

I am a womanist.

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 abused.

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 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

dangerous.

Tell us more about that.

It is purposeful that we are so exhausted and don't think that.

It's very dangerous.

We're easier to manipulate when you're like exhausted and don't have time to think.

If we rested, 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 busts 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 whose you are and what your right is as a human being, none of this terror of capitalism, white supremacy, of racism, ableism, transphobia, all the things that are like ripping and degrading our divinity will not take place.

And so.

Belle 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's a new way and these are what I'm saying the new ways.

This is what I believe and it's not that.

And so that's really the history and beauty of a manifesto is it asks 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 of by people.

Some folks sat down, mostly white men, sat down and was like, what we going to do?

You know, what we going to make?

How are we 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.

It's a thing of children and you're 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 world 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.

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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 even 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.

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 yes out of it it's not like people did things always because there was a way to do it exactly yeah exactly thank oh my god i love her like yes

you get it like thank god 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 desperate, like there's, that sound good, but I can't do it.

And then I think about the people who are like typing me long

four paid paragraph emails telling me why they can't rest.

And I'm like, wow.

That was, that was five minutes of daydreaming right there.

And you know, you're going to have to make choices.

You're going to have to see your way out and have a perspective around.

around it.

There's always time to rest.

And I believe that the true resistance part of rest is resistance is what we 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 raging on us.

And so to think that it is going to be 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 it 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 know a lot of people are in a place of feeling like there is impossibility, but manifestos and 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, Aura, 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 hospital as a nursing assistant, still got her whites on.

She'd be sitting on the couch with her eyes closed.

Eight children, dozens of grandchildren.

I'm one of her wild grandchildren running in and out of her house, screaming, jumping on couch.

She didn't move.

That woman sat on that couch and held court for her own healing.

And we began to watch that and we began to respect that.

Grandma's resting.

She's sleeping.

We'd be like, grandma's sleeping, y'all.

Chill out.

You know, be quiet.

And she'd 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 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 the muse 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 the 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 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 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 and 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 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, there'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, it's like naps ain't gonna 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.

Nap's not going to save you if you don't, 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, in your book, it's not just

change what rest is, but change why rest is.

Because we are just taught just rest.

Here's your eye mask that's $30 and here's your candle.

And that'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.

That's it.

And grind more.

So you can help us build better.

So you can help us build stronger white supremacy and like capitalism.

Free.

And shit.

Tricia is saying, no, no, that is not why we are resting.

We'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, this beast of a machine.

I know people don't see themselves as being, they're 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 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 the spiritual practice.

Resting is a spiritual practice.

It connects you.

I believe dreams and napping allows you to have a portal.

There's a portal that opens,

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 Afrofuturism and my idea of understanding that we can dream ourselves free, that I've watched people dream themselves free.

You know, I've watched 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 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 steal that from us, I'm not with.

Capitalism, exhaustion, white supremacy, work culture, racism, ableism, homophobia, 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 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

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 buddy, government, anybody.

Nobody.

That our liberation is 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 narratives 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

is 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.

And in it, he talks about sleep and dreams.

It's very scientific, but then it's also very beautiful in the 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 cults 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 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.

This, 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 NAT ministry is this the body is a site of liberation

to think of it as a site

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

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.

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This conversation is so, it's so for me, it's like from a professional athlete.

Like I'm a grinder.

I know, yes, you've been trained that way for your work.

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 who benefit from the capitalism that they're part of it are are working in with and accomplished to in some ways.

And I think

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.

That's how I'm doing it.

What is she saying?

What is she saying?

That'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 tape 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 eaten 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, training as a chaplain.

Where there is life, there is hope.

Where there is breath, there is hope.

Where you're breathing, there is hope.

Even I would save mine for my tradition, understanding that the end is just the beginning.

And 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.

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 your accomplished 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, to not even heal, but even to understand that there is a wound.

Like

knowledge, 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, 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 and 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.

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, it's set in my calendar.

It's only a 30-minute, we're going to be concise, we're going to say it, and 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 my auto response for total liberation, people.

You heard it in your first meeting.

Tricia says that.

Can I 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 you're, what your, your ministry and what you 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 at first 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.

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, 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?

Yes, yeah, that's why Trisha, it made me like catch my breath when you said, Our bodies are the site of liberation.

Yes,

I was like, Yes, and because I feel like my body is a site of oppression as well.

Because 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.

You're doing it for you.

Absolutely.

We're doing the 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 that 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, that has built upon the backs of people that is so violent.

It took years to get here also.

Like, so I want people to understand that 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 woman, it's not 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 praxis.

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 for 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 we created at an art studio and people waking up crying and being like, I haven't 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 and they're 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 system, that a system is oppressing you.

Like to be able to start to see that is 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 praxis, in experimentation, 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,

like use that moment to go and 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 skygazing, of slowing down and asking.

for the divine, the connection that you have 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 in 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 it, I was like, I don't know.

I don't see how it can happen.

And now I've sat with it longer.

I've started to take some more time off work.

You know, I've been reading more about the slave narratives 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 work.

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

i'm more human i'm more human i'm a human being now i'm a human being now yeah it takes so much courage though it's very courageous

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What you keep saying,

which is what no one is willing to do, is this phrase of let the chips fall where they may.

Oh, God.

But we, trained in perfectionism and grind,

believe that the worst thing in earth is if anyone else sees us as not a perfect cog, right?

Like,

can you talk to us about what it has meant to you in your life to let the chips fall where they may, professionally,

This is the thing we're terrified.

I can't stop.

Or, what's the or and how do we survive the or?

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 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 to let the chips fall where they made professionally.

I say no to 90% of things asked of me.

It's a joke now that when people ask Tricia and then 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 that I've 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.

Oh, 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 in 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 would 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 audrey move you have five minutes yeah five minutes here's your bullets here's your bullets about how to

where's my workshop liberation 12 to 12 15 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 exhausted state.

I have a meme where I talk about go like create a conference for your body, you know, like all these conferences that everybody wants.

How about you do a conference and that conference is a synap.

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 that I can't get in an awake world.

And so the more people can understand that this is not a waste of time, that this is, 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 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, 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.

And just like

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 it's bending time i believe when we rest we bend time we queer 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

um i will recapture the dream space that was stolen from you um will 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 in 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 arrested I believe that my ancestors probably could have had really detailed and more unique ways of escaping if they were arrested 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 they're gonna 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 uh to freedom and not having a map

not having a written map, but she did have a map.

She had her 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 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.

If 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 caught.

never once being caught.

And she's stopping to pray, but we can't, but then people tell me they don't have a moment to take 10 minutes of a little daydreaming 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 um a word from god on which way to go should we go left at the river or right

let me stop and and she would feel that energy and she would go the other way and she never was caught to be that in tune with spirit and your body and 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 to 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.

That this is a natural state to be more human.

To be more human is to be well, is to be connected, is to understand that you don't have to rush, is to be a counter-narrative 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.

If 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.

You're saying all it is, it's always been in here.

Here, the body is where you're liberated.

Beautiful.

Yes.

And it's like Audre Lorde's caring for myself, self-preservation.

And that is an act of political warfare.

Exactly.

That's right.

One of my favorites.

I love Audre Lorde so much.

I think the only challenge, the only challenge I see with your work, really,

besides dismantling everything.

Besides, yeah, trying to burn down cash.

It should be done by 2023.

Right.

All wrapped up by this time next year.

No problem.

Is that it's so completely grounded in faith

and enough.

Yes, enoughness.

Yes.

You are enough now.

Yes.

That's what we're saying.

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 a relevant?

I'm never scared of running.

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 the 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's 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, get my.

And 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 up and be like, I just, I'm tired.

I 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 a single person.

You're treating him enough.

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.

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 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 i you can get you can get pulled and caught up in this grind and one day you might have to stay up to two in the morning to finish a deadline and you're like what is going on with me but understand it's a balance and it's going to be a full on slow slow go and take time with yourself be 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 deprogramming calls for repetition, and the messages 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.

Trisha.

So our next great thing, Pod Squad, is obviously going to be just to start this one over again and listen again.

Okay.

It's just going to hold thing, start over right now.

But lay down and close your eyes while you do it.

Yes.

Not necessarily right now.

Take whenever.

Whenever.

And we're changing the name of our podcast to We Can Do Soft Things

or We Don't Have to Do Anything We Don't Want to do.

No, Trisha, I believe.

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.

Yeah.

Give them some grace.

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, Trisha, I'll just send you some pictures of them.

They're amazing.

Highlighted.

Underline.

I'm sure that's not how we're supposed to be reading it.

I love a highlight.

I love

writing 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 thenappministry.com.

Get ready, everybody.

Go visit Trisha.

Trisha, thank you so much for for

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 instead of asking yourself, what do I need to do today and in this life

to get free, to fight for freedom?

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 work.

Yes, ma'am.

That's the question.

That's why everyone's going to be quitting, and then my team's not going to be there.

Yeah.

This is my resignation.

Everyone asked themselves that question except our team.

First, sister, Deanette Allison.

Thank you, Tricia.

Bye.

We love you.

We believe in you.

Go forth and rest.

Thank you so much, guys.

We'll talk soon.

Bye.

Okay.

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.

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