No More Grind: How to Finally Rest with Tricia Hersey
October 13, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.
Glennon Doyle:
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.
Glennon Doyle:
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 TheNapMinistry.com.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Tricia, welcome.
Tricia Hersey:
Oh my goodness. Thank you. I love that good bio read.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, thank you.
Tricia Hersey:
It’s very much like Black church. In the Black church when the visiting reverend comes and they sit and they read his amazing bio or her bio and the person sits there and they just take it in and ah.
Amanda Doyle:
I did that.
Tricia Hersey:
You did that.
Amanda Doyle:
I did that.
Tricia Hersey:
Yeah. You’re like, “Okay.” Thank you. That’s beautiful. Thank you. I’m excited to talk with you guys.
Glennon Doyle:
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?
Tricia Hersey:
Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
So I’m going to do it because I just feel it. So you started The Nap Ministry-
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
… 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 The Nap Ministry would be like calling Jesus’s work a Walking Ministry.”
Glennon Doyle:
It’s so deep and so important.
Tricia Hersey:
Oh.
Glennon Doyle:
So my sister said, “Just please don’t say the thing about Jesus and walking.”
Tricia Hersey:
She said, “Please.”
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So I said the thing. Clearly, look, Sister, we made it through.
Tricia Hersey:
And you made it through.
Amanda Doyle:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes. You got it.
Amanda Doyle:
… is the way I… Okay.
Tricia Hersey:
Absolutely. I’m so glad you… Thank you, Sister. Yes, it is. Thank you. Because it is deep work and it also, when I think about the work and me being a performance artist and theater artist, I really did play up the idea of a Nap Ministry. And in a lot of ways, it’s ironic. And I did try to play with the idea of a persona. I call myself the Nap Bishop.
Tricia Hersey:
So it does have this irreverent playfulness, in your face, guerilla art, performance ritual vibe to it. And so I lead people in to be like, “Oh, this is about naps. Everybody wants to sleep and this is beautiful, soft nap.” And then they get there and I’m ranting about white supremacy and capitalism and trying a burn down both systems. So I’m like, “Yeah, have a pillow and then here’s your flame thrower to burn these systems down so we can all live and be free.” So I love that it is surprising, the mystery of that. That’s what makes it really centered in an art practice.
Glennon Doyle:
So for our listeners, you’ve said, “Grind culture is a collaboration between capitalism and white supremacy.” Can you explain that?
Tricia Hersey:
Absolutely. Yeah. I think all of this work is really from a historical lens. 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.
Tricia Hersey:
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. That 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.
Tricia Hersey:
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 Passage, 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.”
Tricia Hersey:
But we are all a part of it because we are 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.
Tricia Hersey:
It’s the same energy that looked at human beings, my ancestors, as human machines who worked 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.
Tricia Hersey:
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 in using bodies for centuries as tools of evil. 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.
Tricia Hersey:
So you blend those things together and you beget grind culture. You get this idea of a body not being able to be owned by ourselves. Like I say a lot, “I don’t belong to capitalism. I don’t belong to grind culture and I don’t belong to white supremacy.” You can’t have me, I’m not the one you’re going to get.
Tricia Hersey:
And so because of that, I’m resting. I’m using rest as a 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.
Tricia Hersey:
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 a part of the system. They just never were. 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.
Tricia Hersey:
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. So I’m resting.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Amanda Doyle:
I’m so thankful that you brought up the historic lens and that your book focuses so much on it.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Because I think most of Americans that are raised and indoctrinated in this culture 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 on the fields, and America being the only wealthy nation where we don’t have guaranteed paid parental leave.
Tricia Hersey:
Absolutely.
Amanda Doyle:
It is a direct line.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
So when I started resting, when I first started the organization, I just started personally experimenting with rest. I would go to school on campus and I would just sleep on the quad all day. It became a moment where it was like, “Let the chips fall where they may. And I’m just going to come to school, get the attendance credit, but I’m dying from exhaustion right now.”
Tricia Hersey:
And the more I started to do that, the more things made sense with my research, things made sense with my life. I started getting better grades. I could make connections between what I was seeing and what I was feeling, what I was doing. 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.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
I see it all the time when I think about all the labor unions right now that are protesting, I am so excited about it. My father was a union organizer growing up, and so I grew up under that idea of power to the people, power to the workers. And I’m glad that people are now coming up out of the veil and being like the Great Resignation and seeing connections between, “Oh my goodness, I’m working five jobs and I still can’t afford rent.” Why is that? Why is that? And so yeah, the capitalism, white supremacy-
Amanda Doyle:
It’s because 1% of Americans own 40% of the wealth.
Tricia Hersey:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
Just like in plantation times.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes, exactly. The connections are rich. And so I talk about that in the book.
Tricia Hersey:
And I encourage people to take a slow deprogramming. It’s no rush to this. 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?”
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
So 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 are 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’s going to give it to us though.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
And Tricia, you focus so much on explaining to us in the book that the exhaustion and the inability to imagine is purposeful.
Tricia Hersey:
Absolutely.
Glennon Doyle:
Any stopping and thinking and asking questions and allowing your imagination is dangerous to-
Tricia Hersey:
It’s very dangerous.
Glennon Doyle:
Tell us more about that. It is purposeful that we are so exhausted and don’t have time to think.
Tricia Hersey:
It’s very dangerous. We’re easier to manipulate when you’re exhausted and don’t have time to think.
Tricia Hersey:
If we rested, I think the systems know that it would be over for them, that so many people will wake up and be like, “Wait a minute.” So to me, this work is really about awareness and pulling back veils. I see prayer to be a veil buster, the same way I see rest to be a veil buster. It busts up the 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 gripping and degrading our divinity would not take place.
Tricia Hersey:
And so bell hooks was 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.
Tricia Hersey:
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 to challenge and provoke us to say to us, “There’s a new way and these are what I’m saying, the new way is. 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?”
Tricia Hersey:
And I believe we can freedom dream, and we can imagine ourselves free. Imagination is our greatest tool because the world that we live in now was imagine and thought up by people. Some folks sat down, mostly white men, sat down and was like, “What we going do? What we going to make? How 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.
Tricia Hersey:
We can imagine a way, a new world, and a new opportunity for us to be rooted in that liberation. It is a political tool. It is a social justice tool. People think imagination is just frivolous, “That’s a thing of children and you’re daydreaming and you’re wasting time.”
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
A lot of people are now wanting to see a world filled with justice, want 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?
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. When you think about just the idea of, “Get back to work,” what that is that’s still building somebody else’s imagination of what the world should be, as opposed to stopping and imagining for ourselves.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
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.”
Tricia Hersey:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
“I can’t even imagine a world in which I can put it down.” What Tricia is saying is that the greatest oppression is when you cannot imagine a way. You cannot imagine a way out of your thing.
Tricia Hersey:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
So you draw so much inspiration from the freedom makers of your past, your ancestors who there was no way, and they made a way out of it. It’s not like people did things always because there was a way to do it.
Tricia Hersey:
Exactly, exactly. Thank… Oh my God, I love her. Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, thank God.
Tricia Hersey:
You get it.
Amanda Doyle:
Thank God.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
The systems socialize and brainwash us from birth. Everything’s in collaboration teaching us these things. And so when I see people who they desperate, “That sound good, but I can’t do it.” And then I think about the people who are typing me long, four-paragraph emails telling me why they can’t rest. And I’m like, “Wow, that was five minutes of daydreaming right there.” You know what I mean?
Tricia Hersey:
You’re going to have to make choices. You’re going to have to see your way out and have a perspective around there’s always time to rest. And I believe that the true resistance part of rest as resistance is what we really got to start to uncover a little more.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
And so that’s the resistance I pulled to. And no one can tell me that something is impossible. 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 it, something that’s impossible.
Tricia Hersey:
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’d have 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.
Tricia Hersey:
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, be quiet.” And she say, “I’m not sleeping. I’m resting my eyes. 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.”
Tricia Hersey:
And I wonder, what was that listening, giving her? To be a Black woman in Chicago, poverty all around her, raising all these children, trying to 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.
Tricia Hersey:
And so we are going to have to reimagine rest. The re-imagination, you’re going to have to look at rest is 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, 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 reimagine ways of my grandmother resting on a couch with her eyes closed for 30 minutes, centering her own body and her own self, while all of the world was still happening around her. She didn’t care. She was going to sit on that couch and do that. And so I love that about her.
Tricia Hersey:
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.”
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
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, It’s taking a longer shower. All of these things are rest. All of these things are opportunities for us to connect with our body and mind.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
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. This is a full-on looking at yourself in a mirror in a full-on healing modality. It’s not just take a nap and get up and keep being racist. So naps ain’t going to save you if you haven’t done that internal work to really-
Amanda Doyle:
“Go back to sleep.”
Tricia Hersey:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
“You’re not ready yet.”
Tricia Hersey:
Nap’s not going to save you if you’re looking at them as just that and you’re not looking at this as a full-on political, social justice deprogramming.
Glennon Doyle:
What I hear you and in your work, in your book, it’s not just change what rest is, but change why rest is.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Because we are just taught, “Just rest. Here’s your eye mask, that’s $30 and here’s your candle.” 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-
Abby Wambach:
And grind more.
Tricia Hersey:
That’s it.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Tricia Hersey:
And grind more.
Glennon Doyle:
So you can help us build better. So you can help us build stronger white supremacy and patriarchy.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes. That’s it.
Glennon Doyle:
… capitalism.
Tricia Hersey:
Preach. Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Tricia is saying “No, no, That is not why we are resting.”
Tricia Hersey:
No.
Glennon Doyle:
We are not resting so we can come back and build their shit better.
Tricia Hersey:
No.
Glennon Doyle:
We are resting so we can imagine what we want to build instead.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes, so we can resist. So we can give a pushback and a disruption.
Tricia Hersey:
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 tool, this beast of a machine. I know people don’t see themselves as they’re one person being part of something that can change. But it is. 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 the Great Migration and then she’s centering her rest. That is a disruption.
Tricia Hersey:
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. I know you might have got an A in that class, but the curriculum is not that no more.
Tricia Hersey:
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 that when you go into a rested state that allows you to see things different, that allows you to have a moment outside of grind culture, that allows you to connect with something deeper outside of yourself, connect with your ancestors, connect with what you want to be, connect with the dreams.
Tricia Hersey:
And so this dream scape, this portal idea, is really centered in Afrofuturism. And my idea of understanding that we can dream ourselves free, that I watched people dream themselves free. 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.
Tricia Hersey:
And so to tap into that, I believe so much in human beings. I have so much hope. I believe in the deepest parts of ourselves that we are all divine, that are a miracle that we are 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.
Tricia Hersey:
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 get ready to do more tomorrow. I got to rest to get myself boosted up so I can go hard tomorrow.”
Tricia Hersey:
No, there is no more hard. We don’t need toughness and going hard no more. We mean softness. We need care. We need community. We need collective healing.
Amanda Doyle:
In its simplest but most profound form the way you’ve talked about your work, it’s that these systems are built to separate us from our humanity.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
And your work is to uplift what it is to be human. And that rest is simply the one of the vehicles-
Tricia Hersey:
Yes, one of the many.
Amanda Doyle:
… to tap into what it is to be human.
Tricia Hersey:
Absolutely. One of the many. Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Amanda Doyle:
So what to Tricia, Nap Bishop, does it mean to be human? And how is that connected to this idea that our own liberation is inherent in our humanity? And we don’t have to wait for any damn body, government, anybody.
Tricia Hersey:
Nobody.
Amanda Doyle:
That our liberation’s already within us. What do we find at the seat of that humanity that we’re look for?
Tricia Hersey:
Yes. You preached with that question. Yes! All of that. The question is so good. Yes.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
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 way that he speaks about dream. And the idea of when we sleep, what’s happening in our brains. I love it. I’m nerd out on neurology and neuroscience.
Tricia Hersey:
When we sleep, there’s a chemical that coats our brains that allows us to heal from trauma, that allows us to tap into our memory, that allows us to be more creative. And so this idea of not doing that, of not allowing our bodies to be the full human, brilliant thing that it is, is where the violence of it all comes in at.
Tricia Hersey:
And so to me, to be human is to know that you are divine. It’s to know that the person next to you is a divine being, chosen to be on earth. That you don’t belong to any of these systems. All this external world is all here. To be in this world, but not of it is to understand that everything you need is already in you, that the power of your body…
Tricia Hersey:
I say one of the tenets of The Nap Ministry is the body is a site of liberation. To think of it as a site, the idea of the word site. 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-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Sorry, it’s emotional.
Tricia Hersey:
… to always be with the divine, to always have a direct connect to the divine. And the disconnect comes when we aren’t understanding that, when we don’t see ourselves, that people don’t think they deserve rest. What this culture has done to us is ripped our self-esteem and self-worth.
Abby Wambach:
This conversation, it’s so for me, it’s like-
Glennon Doyle:
From a professional athlete.
Abby Wambach:
I’m a grinder.
Glennon Doyle:
Her body was used for a long time.
Tricia Hersey:
I know. Yes, you’ve been trained that way for your work.
Abby Wambach:
I’m a grinder. And to tap into the realities of this, for a lot of the white women that are listening to this podcast who benefit from the capitalism that they-
Tricia Hersey:
Glad you brought it up.
Abby Wambach:
… are working in, with, accompliced to, in some ways.
Tricia Hersey:
Absolutely.
Abby Wambach:
And I think what I would love to know is can 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. Productivity is my thing.”
Tricia Hersey:
Yeah, I know.
Glennon Doyle:
“What is she saying? What is she saying?”
Abby Wambach:
It’s scary.
Tricia Hersey:
It is.
Abby Wambach:
How do we-
Tricia Hersey:
It’s very scary. Yes.
Abby Wambach:
How do you temper some of that fear that I’m experiencing right now? What are some things you can say to those listeners?
Tricia Hersey:
That is a great question. It is very scary. 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 are trying to disrupt against, that is a very scary proposition. It won’t be easy. Not probably everyone will get this.
Tricia Hersey:
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, trained as a chaplain, where there is life, there is hope. Where there is breath, there is hope. Where you’re breathing, there is hope. Even, I would say for my tradition, understanding that the end is just the beginning. That even in the other world, when you leave this earth, there’s still hope. There’s still moments that you can tap into because the end is just the beginning.
Tricia Hersey:
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. That may look like some other modalities of healing, reiki, journaling, art, walking, prayer, dismantling your mind around your being accomplice to white supremacy.
Tricia Hersey:
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 being a white person in a culture like this.
Tricia Hersey:
There’s a beautiful book called The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry. He’s a white poet and artist. And he talks about this idea of how white people have not had the opportunity to heal from the wound, not even heal, but even to understand that there is a wound.
Amanda Doyle:
Acknowledge, yeah.
Tricia Hersey:
Acknowledge there is a wound on you. I know you think when you hear white supremacy and racism and slavery, you think, “Wow, the shit that was done to Black people is horrible.” But to understand that it was actually also killing you as well. It is spiritually killing you, to a white person to believe that they’re superior in some way to another divine human being. That is a spiritual deficiency, that is a disconnection to your power and to who you are. So that has robbed you of your own humanity as well. And so people never feel that. They’re always just, it’s like, “Oh, damn. I never thought about it like this.”
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
Now, the ways in which you’re going to have to do that are different. My history is a total different thing. And everybody has their own origin story and historic stories of how they’re placed in this sick thing that was created not by us. And so we have to land in it. We have to feel it.
Tricia Hersey:
And I will tell you that you will have to just feel that energy. You’re going to have to just sit with the discomfort of that. And I say sleep your way through it, rest your way through it. Make small, small, small ways to start with it. 10 minute day of just sitting and resting, closing your eyes, not responding to an email. Making space in your calendar to not be doing nothing.
Tricia Hersey:
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’s set in my calendar, it’s only a 30 minute. We 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.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m writing that in auto-response.
Amanda Doyle:
I think we just found the tool for total liberation, people.
Glennon Doyle:
30-minute meeting.
Amanda Doyle:
You heard it here first. Tricia says that no longer than 30 minute meetings.
Glennon Doyle:
Can I ask one thing before we move on from this part because I think some of the fear, and I’m going to say this wrong, but I’m just say it.
Tricia Hersey:
Please.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like what your ministry is the opposite of white feminism.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like-
Tricia Hersey:
Yes, it is.
Glennon Doyle:
We have been indoctrinated.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s worse than had we never heard of feminism.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes. You’re right, you’re right.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s worse. 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 scrappy or just beat more people.”
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
So that’s why it’s so terrifying at first.
Tricia Hersey:
It is.
Glennon Doyle:
Because it’s the opposite of what we were told was winning.
Tricia Hersey:
It is. 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.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Tricia Hersey:
It hates you.
Glennon Doyle:
Fuck!
Tricia Hersey:
It hates your guts-
Glennon Doyle:
Hates, hates.
Tricia Hersey:
And you’re uplifting it and making it richer and making it more viable and making it more productive.
Glennon Doyle:
Worse for everybody else.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
This is terrible.
Glennon Doyle:
And they’re on the news saying, “We hate you. We’re passing bills. We hate you.”
Tricia Hersey:
Literally.
Glennon Doyle:
And we’re like, “What else can we do for you?”
Tricia Hersey:
Right. “How can we make it richer?” Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. That’s why Tricia, it made me catch my breath when you said, “Our bodies are the site of liberation.”
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
I was like, ‘Yes, and.” Because I feel like my body is a site of oppression as well.
Tricia Hersey:
Absolutely.
Amanda Doyle:
Because these systems, maybe because they would accept me, white supremacy, capitalism, it started with external tools, very intentional external tools. But now is so internalized.
Tricia Hersey:
Absolutely.
Amanda Doyle:
You don’t need any more tools anymore. I’m doing that myself.
Tricia Hersey:
You’re doing it for you. Absolutely. We’re doing the work for them.
Tricia Hersey:
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 creating and being a part of this system and helping them to oppress us even more.
Tricia Hersey:
And so I say, “The buck stops with me, let the chips fall where they’re may.” 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.
Tricia Hersey:
It took years to get here also. 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. 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.
Tricia Hersey:
And from that understanding that I was saving my own life, because I’m a woman, it’s I understand that the holistic view that for me to be truly free, everyone around me also has to be free.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
So of 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, washed 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 in 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.”
Tricia Hersey:
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. To be able to start to see that is, it’s a grief moment. And we do have to sit in that grief. And I think resting supports our grief. And to be able to rest into the grief and to understand what’s really happening in a praxis, in experimentation, actually doing it.
Tricia Hersey:
I would prefer that people not even talk about, they want to rest and retweet all our memes. Go lay your ass down. Use that moment to go be like my grandmother and close your eyes and sleep. This is a praxis. This is practice and theory put together. We have to rest.
Tricia Hersey:
You won’t be able to get to this message without experimenting with it, without daydreaming, without having a moment of imagination, of sky gazing, of slowing down and asking for the divine, the connection that you had with your own body.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
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.”
Tricia Hersey:
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?
Tricia Hersey:
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?”
Tricia Hersey:
And the main thing that you can do is 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. “I’m done.” You have to say, “I’m done with it. It stops with me.” And I think people have to get to that on their own time. It takes time.
Tricia Hersey:
Some people will hear my message and it might be two years before they get it. Some people email me all the time, “I love what you’re doing. But when I first heard, I was like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t see how it can happen.’ And now I’ve set with it longer. I’ve started to take more time off of work. 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 sit and deepen into the work.”
Tricia Hersey:
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.”
Glennon Doyle:
Feel more human.
Tricia Hersey:
I’m more human.
Glennon Doyle:
Feel more human.
Tricia Hersey:
I’m more human.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I’m more human.
Tricia Hersey:
I’m a human being now. I’m a human being now. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It takes so much courage though.
Tricia Hersey:
It’s very courageous.
Glennon Doyle:
What you keep saying, which is what no one is willing to do, is this phrase of, “Let the chips fall where they may.”
Tricia Hersey:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
Oh God.
Glennon Doyle:
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?
Tricia Hersey:
That’s it.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to us about what it has meant to you in your life to let the chips fall where they may professionally, family.
Tricia Hersey:
Yeah, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
This is the thing we’re terrified.
Tricia Hersey:
Absolutely.
Glennon Doyle:
“I can’t stop.” Or, what’s the or? And how do we survive the or?
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Tricia Hersey:
I think this goes back to my upbringing in the Black church and the idea of Black Liberation Theology and how I was raised by a Black Liberationist, activist Black man in Chicago who would look at me and tell me, “You are 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.”
Tricia Hersey:
And 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.
Tricia Hersey:
What it has meant to be able to say, “Look, let chips fall where they may,” professionally? I say no to 90% of things asked of me. It’s a joke now that when people ask Tricia, the Nap Bishop, to do something, she usually will say, “Thank you. But no.”
Tricia Hersey:
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 really a yes about. It’s meant I’ve lost money, I’ve lost projects, and I haven’t been able to get on because they wanted to rush me and micromanage me and I had to return the 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.
Tricia Hersey:
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. Grind culture has its grips, ugh, it just has this grips on people so tightly. Even people in my own family, my own partner, my own brother, everybody.
Tricia Hersey:
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. 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.
Tricia Hersey:
Specifically with Black people, we don’t even understand what the word leisure means. What is a leisure? What’s a hobby? Everything has to be monetized. Everything has to be a part of our life to be able to eat and live and make it.
Tricia Hersey:
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 is 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. Why will we use the same tools that have been taught to us to be urgent, to be rushed, to try to heal. It just doesn’t make sense. Audre Lorde-
Glennon Doyle:
“You have five minutes.”
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
“Five minutes. Here’s your bullets. Here’s your bullets about how to… Where’s my workshop?”
Amanda Doyle:
“Remember, from 12:00 to 12:15, I will rest.”
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
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, 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. It’s going to move. It’s going to flow as things happen.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
I have a meme where I talk about, “Go create a conference for your body.” All these conferences that everybody wants us… How about you do a conference and that conference is just a nap. You just do an agenda. The conference call that I’m going to be on is one of sleeping and resting because in that state I will be able to gain information and I can’t get in an awake world.
Tricia Hersey:
And so the more people can understand that this is not a waste of time. 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.
Tricia Hersey:
And so to slow down is to allow the portal to open, the antenna to open, the antenna to link in, to allow you to get some information, to allow you to see your way out, to heal your way out, to create a new world, really. It’s creating new worlds.
Amanda Doyle:
And you create a new world backwards, too. Because when you talk about the 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, and you are gifting them the rest.
Tricia Hersey:
Absolutely. Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
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-
Tricia Hersey:
Absolutely.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re giving back and then they’re going to give to you.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes, it is. It’s imagination work, it’s dream work. It’s bending time. I believe when we rest, we bend time, we queer time. We allow for a new way to be made.
Tricia Hersey:
And I love this idea when I think about reparations. And I have a poem where I talk about this and I say, “I will recapture the dream space that was stolen from you. We’ll be resurrected in our dreams.” And so for me to be able to recapture the dream space that was stolen from my ancestors in this dimension, in the now, to say, “Rest was stolen from you. Your whole autonomy as a human was stolen from you.”
Tricia Hersey:
What could they have figured out if they were more rested? I believe that my ancestors probably could have had really detail in more unique ways of escaping if they were rested.
Tricia Hersey:
I think about Harriet Tubman and her Underground Railroad and her prophecy of saying, “My people are free.” 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 going to be free.” “They’re free now.”
Tricia Hersey:
So this prophecy, the prophetic idea that we are free now. This is now. We don’t have to wait for anyone to tell us that, to give us that. And I think about her stopping on the Underground Railroad, walking to freedom and not having a map. Not having a written map, but she did have a map. She had her internal spiritual map and she had the stars. So she was a beautiful astronomer and she could track stars and track the sky.
Tricia Hersey:
But it’s written that she stopped to pray so many times, that there was no rush even trying to run to freedom. It was freedom or 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.
Tricia Hersey:
But we can’t? Well, then people tell me they don’t have a moment to take 10 minutes of a little daydreaming session. You got a cell phone, you got this, you got that.
Tricia Hersey:
And they’re stopping on the running for their lives, stopping to pray to get… She would say she would get a word from God on which way to go. “Should we go left at the river or right? Let me stop.” And she would feel that energy and she would go the other way. And she never was caught.
Tricia Hersey:
To be that in tune with spirit in your body and the idea of slowing down, those are the people who I model. Those are the ones I say I gain access from. I know that this is not impossible.
Tricia Hersey:
People would’ve thought a woman like that would’ve 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.
Tricia Hersey:
To be more human is to be well, it’s to be connected. It’s to understand that you don’t have to rush. It’s to be a counter narrative to say no to all that was taught to you. Everything taught to you was a lie and it’s not trying to benefit your divine body. So to begin to reimagine and bring new language and new ideas into that space, that’s what rest can provide.
Glennon Doyle:
And that’s wellness.
Tricia Hersey:
That is wellness.
Glennon Doyle:
You remind me of, I keep thinking of the scripture, “The kingdom is not out there. It’s inside of you.”
Tricia Hersey:
Yeah, I love it.
Glennon Doyle:
And we are rushing out to whatever capitalism tells us, where we will find our liberation.
Tricia Hersey:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
The system’s out there.
Tricia Hersey:
It’s out there.
Glennon Doyle:
And you’re saying all it is, it’s always been in here.
Tricia Hersey:
It’s here. Absolutely.
Glennon Doyle:
The body is where you’re liberated.
Tricia Hersey:
Beautiful. Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
And it’s like Audre Lorde’s, “Caring for myself is self-preservation.” And that is an act of political warfare.
Tricia Hersey:
Exactly. That’s right. One of my favorites. I love Audre Lorde so much.
Glennon Doyle:
I think the only challenge I see with your work, really, besides dismantling everything-
Tricia Hersey:
Besides, yeah, trying to burn down capitalism.
Amanda Doyle:
Should be done by 2023.
Tricia Hersey:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
All wrapped up by this time next year.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
No problem.
Glennon Doyle:
… is that it’s so completely grounded in faith.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
And enough.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes, enoughness. Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Enoughness.
Tricia Hersey:
We are enough now. Yes.
Abby Wambach:
That’s what we’re trying to-
Glennon Doyle:
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 relevant?
Tricia Hersey:
I’m never worried, no.
Glennon Doyle:
Aren’t you scared of running out?
Tricia Hersey:
No. 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…
Tricia Hersey:
My faith, when you talk about a faith walk, a leaping, a faith leap. It is deep, radical, radical faith to understand and to be courageous enough to push back against a system and say, “I’ve had enough.” And I trust the divine and I trust myself and my gifts to make space for what is possible. I really do. And so this is radical faith work. It’s radical trusting work.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
I have written 55,000 words for my new book, and I don’t mention self-care once in it.
Glennon Doyle:
We noticed.
Tricia Hersey:
I don’t say the word self-
Glennon Doyle:
We noticed.
Tricia Hersey:
… and it was on purpose. It’s community care, it’s communal care. It’s community, how we make it along. Community care will save us. We can’t do this without each other.
Tricia Hersey:
And toxic individualism has taught us that we don’t need nobody else help. That’s the lie. That’s what’s killing us. That’s the lie of it all.
Tricia Hersey:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
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 chilling. He made up a word chillaxing, chilling and relaxing. So he’s like, “I fixing to go chillax, get my…”
Tricia Hersey:
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 am tired and don’t want to go to school today. Can I just have…” “Take a break. You want to go for a walk? Chill out. If you can’t finish your homework in time, you’ll be okay.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. You’re teaching him enoughness.
Tricia Hersey:
“You’re brilliant.” Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
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.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes. I’m like, “You are 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.”
Tricia Hersey:
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 gives you a boosted sense of energy to know, “They don’t want this. They’re all in collaboration for this not to happen.”
Tricia Hersey:
That’s why it’s a resistance. And that’s why I see it as so important. And that’s why I give myself grace. I do. You can get pulled and caught up in this grind. One day, you might have to stay up to 2:00 in the morning to finish a deadline and you’re like, “What is going on with me?”
Tricia Hersey:
But understanding it’s a balance and it’s going to be a full on slow, slow go. And take time with yourself. Be careful with yourself, be soft with each other. Be intuitive about what’s necessary. I say, “You are enough” so many times in the book, I repeat so much in the book and I do that for a reason. People were like, “There’s a lot of repetition in the book.” Yes ma’am, it is. Because I believe our brainwashing calls for that. I believe our deprogramming calls for repetition and the message 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.
Abby Wambach:
Damn.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Amanda Doyle:
Patricia.
Glennon Doyle:
So our Next Right Thing Pod Squad is obviously going to be just to start this one over again and listen again. Okay?
Abby Wambach:
That’s it.
Glennon Doyle:
Just going to whole thing, start over right now.
Abby Wambach:
But lay down and close your eyes while you do it.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Not necessarily right now.
Amanda Doyle:
Take your time.
Glennon Doyle:
Whenever, whenever.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. And we’re changing the name of our podcast to We Can Do Soft Things or-
Amanda Doyle:
We Don’t Have To Do Anything We Don’t Want To.
Glennon Doyle:
No, Tricia.
Tricia Hersey:
Yes!
Glennon Doyle:
I’m fully expecting as soon as this is over-
Abby Wambach:
We Can Do No Thing.
Glennon Doyle:
… we have a meeting, but I’m expecting none of my staff to show up.
Abby Wambach:
Yes. Because they’re going to say We Can Do No Things, actually.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, yeah.
Tricia Hersey:
Give them some grace.
Glennon Doyle:
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, Tricia, I’ll just send you some pictures coming up.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. They’re amazing.
Tricia Hersey:
Highlighted. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Underlined.
Abby Wambach:
Comes out in-
Glennon Doyle:
I’m sure that’s not how we’re supposed to be reading it.
Tricia Hersey:
Oh, I love a highlight. I love underline. Write in the books. That’s my favorite thing. Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Tricia Hersey:
They’re a tool.
Glennon Doyle:
Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. And you can learn more about Tricia’s work and the book at TheNapMinistry.com. Get ready, everybody go visit Tricia. Tricia, thank you so much for who you are in the world.
Tricia Hersey:
Goodness. I’ve had so much fun.
Amanda Doyle:
What if we all played with the question, everyone who’s listening to this, played with the question of it instead of asking yourself, “What do I need to do today and in this life to get free, to fight for freedom?” What if you said, “What if I’m already free? And how would I act and how would I fight if I were already free?”
Tricia Hersey:
That’s it. That’s the imagination work. Yes, ma’am. That’s the question.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s why everyone’s going to be quitting and then our team’s not going to be there.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. This is my resignation.
Glennon Doyle:
Everyone ask themselves that question, except-
Abby Wambach:
Our team.
Glennon Doyle:
… for Sister, Dynna, and Allison. Okay. Thank you, Tricia.
Tricia Hersey:
Bye.
Glennon Doyle:
We love you. We believe in you. Go forth and rest.
Tricia Hersey:
Thank you so much guys.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you.
Tricia Hersey:
We’ll talk soon. Bye.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Abby Wambach:
Bye.
Amanda Doyle:
Bye.
Glennon Doyle:
We will see you next time, Pod Squad. Until then, rest.