Photograph and styling by Denisse Ariana Pérez

Overview

So many of us are worker bees, trapped in a capitalist 9-to-5 grind mindset that leaves us sleep-deprived, exhausted, and unable to imagine. Nap bishop Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry, sees rest as a radical act of resistance and decolonization—particularly for Black people, whose rest has been and continues to be disrupted by white supremacy. Hersey speaks with brontë velez, a founding member of Lead to Life, about how to envision a new way of living that centers rest and liberation.

Key Takeaways

On the power of a metaphorically and literally dreaming our way to liberation:

That’s such a great question because that is the center of the work: this idea around a secretive, a metaphorical-literal dream space. I have uplifted that from the beginnings, when I started the work. The work began with me deep, deep in ancestor reverence and ancestor communication. It started there along with the ancestors, reading the slave narratives, working in archives, looking at photos, and really deeply going in and out of literal dream states where I felt like I was communicating with my ancestors. I would wake up in this unconscious state—between that liminal space of being awake and being asleep—and be having visions of my grandmother and visions of cotton fields and people laying down.

When you’re an archivist and you’re working in archives, it can be very overwhelming. When I first started working in them, one of the main archivists who I was training under was telling me that there will be many times when you’ll need to get up and you may get overwhelmed by the fact that you’re touching and you’re engaging with these objects that are real objects that people have held. They hold energy. And I was like, “I’m waiting for that, I want that. Overwhelm me.” I was here in Georgia holding documents that were slips of paper that would have a sale price of bodies—of Black bodies—and it was $20. Reading the slave narratives, thinking about how they were literal human machines—20 hour days. Uncovering all of this really traumatic cultural trauma and then taking a nap with it. Laying down and really uplifting my grandmother.

What came to me is that our dream space has been stolen, that there has been a theft, a complete theft. What could have happened if our ancestors had a space to rest, if they were allowed to dream. They may have received downloads from their ancestors and from God to say, “Go right, not left, and you will be free. Do this and you won’t be in slavery anymore. The button to that thing is here.” You know? These downloads that could have been given to us. Could our freedom have come quicker? I’m thinking about Harriet Tubman and her prophetic dreams, of waking up and saying, “My people are free.”

I think when we miss out on that dream space, we’re literally missing out on very important information, very important downloads and knowledge that are going to be for our benefit. I really literally believe that our path to our liberation, to really getting to the next dimension, is in dreams. It’s there. The information is waiting for us. The ancestors are like, “I wish they would just stop for a minute and lay down because I got the word for them.” They’re looking at us like grind machines and saying, “If they would lay down for a moment, I’m ready to come in through that dream space, that ancestral liminal space. I got a word, but I can’t give it to them in this dimension.” You know? If rest is another dimension, which I think it is, I think the more we go there, the more we’re going to wake up. The information is there for us.

On the need for unlearning the rituals of colonialism:

These odd ways in which we think we’re going to get our freedom. These odd ways of colonizing our own selves, of being colonized so deeply. When we talk about decolonization, we have to look at ourselves and understand we’ve been trained under the same curriculum, so we are colonizers as well.

On the radical solidarity in collective rest:

I think the pandemic has shown me great grief, great evidence and observation that we are literally at critical mass—and that’s why I keep telling people, “This is not about a soft, fluffy idea around just laying down. This is not some little fun, little cute thing. This is literally life or death.” It’s the matter of whether or not we’re going to stop and listen and slow down and reclaim our bodies and reclaim the Earth and honor ourselves and honor the Earth. We’re only going to be able to do that by slowing down. Rest is really literally going to be the foundation to build this new world. If we don’t catch that, if we don’t get that—not just in a meme and not just retweeting some bullshit—if we don’t really catch that in our hearts and minds and spirits and in our souls, and start to meticulously see resting as a love practice that’s going to save our lives and save the world, we’re done. So, that’s why I’m so passionate about this work, because I see it from that lens of: It’s decolonizing us, and it’s going to be allowing the Earth to be free. It’s a global bond for humanity, resting is.

On the biological and spiritual benefits of rest:

no one is talking about the sleep science and biologically what’s going on in our bodies when we don’t rest, in conjunction with how that affects our environment and our community and our culture and everyone around us. Our bodies are their own technology in that way. And so, when you ignore your body’s need to rest, you’re deeper and deeper into violence. And so, what does it mean to have an entire culture that is sleep deprived?

They’ve already claimed it as a crisis—a public health crisis—that we are so sleep deprived. So, you have a whole culture of millions and millions of people who are not getting adequate rest, which means that they’re not tapping into spirit. They’re not tapping into empathy. They’re not tapping into any type of care for their bodies. Their brains are eroding. They’re not healing from trauma. There’s a chemical that your brain is actually bathed in when you sleep. It’s in the book Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker—he’s a neuroscientist who’s been studying sleep for a long time. And I love this book because he talks about this chemical that your brain is literally bathed in when you’re going through a full REM sleep cycle. Your brain is bathed in this chemical, and it helps you to process trauma.

Sleep helps you to forget trauma. It helps you to process it and deal with trauma. So, when I think about the trauma of our bodies and the trauma that we are under every single day, and the fact that we aren’t resting and we aren’t sleeping—we’re really killing ourselves on a biological level. Cancer and high blood pressure and diabetes all come from sleeping less than six hours a day consistently.

On imagining freedom:

I have thousands of people in my inbox being like, “This sounds good and everything, but I got to work. I can’t even see how I can get 10 minutes to nap today.” If you can’t imagine how you could subversively and flexibly rest your eyes for 10 minutes, how could we ever imagine a world without police? How do we imagine a world without climate change? How do we imagine all these things where people can have justice and equality in a world where we weren’t killed by the police every day or shot in our sleep like Breonna Taylor? We can’t even imagine or get into the consciousness to be like, “You know what? I can close my eyes for 15 minutes. I can refuse. I can resist. I can say no. I can get off social media for two seconds. I can have a healthy boundary. I can refuse and resist and stop being a tool for grind culture.”

You can imagine it and do anything you want. We can imagine a new world. A new world is possible, but it’s not going to come from exhaustion.

Full Article: https://atmos.earth/rest-resistance-colonization-black-liberation/

Resting on and for the Earth w/ Tricia Hersey by Brontë Velez c/o Atmos

Overview

Key Takeaways