hi everyone welcome it's so wonderful to be here with all of you today um Welcome to our second day in the afternoon of our CFA Equity conference waves of resistance merging Waters as Pathways to Justice and healing Welcome to our session with with speaker Trisha hery author of rest's resistance and creator of the nap Ministry I am Tia maitlin the stem librarian at CSU San Marcos I'm a biracial Vietnamese white CIS woman in my early 40s I have medium length dark hair with bangs got a nice round face and I wear glasses my pronouns are she and her I'm going to get us through our or I'm going to begin our CFA practices at the beginning of all of our sessions starting first with our land acknowledgement we want to acknowledge that we gather as the California faculty Association on the traditional land of the California Indian people people past and present we honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have stewarded it throughout the generations this calls us to commit to continuing to learn how to be better stewards of the land we inhabit as well to recognize the land is an expression of gratitude and appreciation to those whose territory we reside on and a way of honoring the indigenous people who have been living and working on the land from time immemorial is important to understand understand the long history that has brought us to reside on the land of the California Indian people and to seek to understand our place within that history land acknowledgements do not exist in a past tense or historical context colonialism is a current ongoing process and we need to build our mindfulness of our present participation the California Indian people are very much a part of today's California living and working and caring for the land as they always have done acknowledging the land is an important indigenous protocol that we are honoring here today and to find the native lands on which you reside I invite you to visit the native land website and I'm joining you here from San Marcos on the unseated land of the louiso cyop pum peoples all right next I'm going to lead us in a short Community breath and this is from um the rest's resistance in the introduction I thought it was appropriate for our session today so what I'm first going to invite people to do is to close your eyes if that feels appropriate to you to feel the ground below your body and the sky above you to feel length in your spine and your body in whatever way feels good for you and I'm going to lead us through the introduction in the book as you're taking some nice slow deep breaths I want you to to imagine a world without oppression take more time here visualize softness breathe deep Envision a world centered in Justice stay here let's continue to take a few more deep breaths into the count of four hold at the top and then let out to four and as we start to get ready to rejoin each other take a couple of movements for whatever your body needs right now maybe you haven't been able to twist around a little bit in your chair all day you've been sitting in equity sessions maybe you want to reach up to the sky whatever you need to get um get your body moving in the way it needs and then next I'm going to read our Interruption practice statement let me just get that up as part of our continuing commitment to racial Justice work when we experience examples of racial narratives racism or whiteness in our meetings or as we conduct our business we will address it this means we can interrupt the meeting and draw the issue to one another's attention we will do this kindly with care and in good faith further as we engage interruptions we will take an intersectional approach reflecting the fact that white supremacy and racism operate in tandem with Interlocking Systems of Oppression of colonialism racial capitalism class CIS heteroat Archy and ableism this statement is a reminder that we commit to do this in the service of ending the system of racial oppression and for the folks who are in the webinar you have the Q&A option you can if you want to to interrupt for any reason during this meeting you can um use the key Q&A to do so and then I believe next we have our legistics notes from Jam all right thank you to Lisa um hello every everyone my name is Jamal I am the admin assistant for go admin assistant for governance and operations and I just have a little thing to share with y'all today uh thank you for coming and welcome to equity conference 2024 um so here's a few bits of helpful information for y'all today to update your name please update your name uh to reflect your full name pronouns and campus coose captioning and American Sign Language services are being provided today and to turn off on the Clos captioning you have to activate it by clicking on the show captions button at the bottom of your screen then click show subtitle to view the captions um ASO interpreters will be spotlighted throughout the webinar the chat and raised hand funes will be disabled but the Q&A feature will be enabled um please note that this session will be recorded and posted at a later date to our CFA YouTube page and Council for racial and social justice web page the audience interaction portion of equity sessions will not be reported also if you want to check out our Equity conference landing page I'm going to put the link in the chat right now and last but definitely not least is the um book giveaway so I'm going to drop into the chat again this link be one one of the first 25 people to submit this form and get a free copy of rest is resistance a Manifesto hard cover um we will notify you by email if you're one of Lucky 25 and that's all for me thanks so much J and if you haven't read this book you've got to get it so um submit there and if you aren't one of the lucky 25 then um still get your hands on a copy because it's so good but finally I want to introduce our speaker and give a brief overview of what the talk is going to be about so welcome we are so honored to be um learning with Trisha hery and the session today is rest's resistance rest's resistance is a battlecry a guide book a map for a movement and a field guide for the sleep deprived searching for justice and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of grind culture with capital G and capital c hery is going to talk to us about her book and philosophy which is rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black Liberation womanism sematics and afrofuturism prepare for practical advice delivered in her lyrical voice and informed by her deep experience in theology activism and performance art so without further Ado Trisha I would like to hand it off to you all right oh my goodness thank you so much toia and I'm so honored to be here you I don't know about you but it feels like today has just been kind of a a a hectic day you know there's moments of being pulled into grind culture moments of coming out and just moments where we try to find space for ourselves and so for today what I really hope is that this is a slow embodied relaxing slow energy if you've been inside of um different conferences and you've been to different classes today and you working today and you had to get up this morning get to work on time like there's a lot of rushing and things that this culture keeps us always going and doing and being hectic and my goal and my hope today is that this is a moment where we can spend time and just be in a space together where we can just hold space for silence and quiet and slowness and we don't have to rush and we don't have to think that there is some in game that we're together um really with the intention of holding space with each other and and the attempt is so important I always tell people they get so caught up and wanting to know how do I rest they even come to the um nap Ministry with so much anxiety around so how do I do it please explain and it's like this is going to going to be a lifelong beautiful slow meticulous love practice that is going to be subversive pervasive and for that we give thanks we give thanks that we don't have to rush our healing and so I'm just so grateful for this opportunity for this moment for this community for art I'm grateful for silence for the Alchemy of Educators thank you for being an educator and for being a part of this Rich Community with the California faculty Association thank you for thinking about Liberation in your classrooms and in your daily life I'm so grateful for anchors for the idea of an anchor I feel like rest to me is an anchor it's a buoy it boosts me up when my back is up against the wall it holds me in a space of such closeness and swaddles me I'm so grateful for dignity and I'm grateful for the idea of what education can be for us and for my entire life education has helped to rearrange my life you know I myself you know taught in the public school systems and then I went on to undergraduate and I went on to get my masters and I have a theology degree in graduate schools and the professors and the faculty and the people in those spaces really um were healing bombs it was so many who really were there because they really saw as a calling on their lives and for that I am so grateful because just like rest education and Educators who are looking thinking about Liberation who see education as a calling have helped to rearrange my life and so I've been rearranging my life with rest since 2016 when I first launched the NP Ministry I've been really taking the time to like celebrate rest and the idea of community care and so I want to just you know let you guys know give yourselves like um so much love today for coming and for being here and for just being curious you know I'm just hopeful that people are just curious about the idea of rest that this is an experimentation that we don't have to get it right right now that we don't have to know everything and be everything that we don't have to have this mapped out that we really are just coming to this work and coming to this idea with curios it and being curious about the ways rest is a political refusal against capitalism against white supremacy against patriarchy against ableism and all these interconnected systems that are causing us so much harm every day and so deep gratitude to um the California faculty Association for inviting me out and for trusting me truly to bring a word of care I hope this to be a word of care like if there's nothing else that you leave after this moment that you feel cared for that you feel seen that you feel um unique and that you understand that your individual story about how you're coming to the idea of Liberation how you're coming to Freedom is really important I really love the theme of this conference this year waves of resistance merging Waters Pathways to Justice and healing the idea of merging Waters as this pathway and how we can begin to continue to be a wave and to be in flow and to be aligned with the ways that Justice is all around us Liberation is always available to us rest is always available to us Care Community is always available to us and so rest is definitely a disruption and a push back against toxic system that's what I hope my work to be and so I want to just start right now and just have every continue on with this beautiful um breathing moment that tiia shared with us thank you so much I want us to kind of set ourselves up to be able to just rest and close our eyes I believe resting is a form that closing our eyes and daydreaming and silence is a form of rest it's not just about naps but quiet silence slowness breathing all of these beautiful forms of rest I am so grateful for so I want to just you know um give you the opportunity to um really understand that you can have rest you can have all these times to just slow down I want to share um this screen because I want to show you some pictures of my grandmother Ora if you read the book then you know so much about um my grandma and this idea of a space rest that another world is possible that's really you know my work deepens into so many ideas but today I really felt called you know felt Spirit to say you know what is the idea of it being another way possible the idea of resistance we always have to think about another way being possible and so I want us to close our eyes and I'm going to read um a beautiful meditation from my book from the chapter called Dreaming I like to think of it as a lullabi i like to think of the idea of reading these beautiful Liberation texts with our eyes closed so that and through some form of you know beautiful osmosis through the form of listening just the idea of listening to poems and listening to meditations and being silent and being grounded is definitely liberating and and is Justice work so close your eyes wherever you are feel free to have your screen off feel free to lay back lay down rest is real life conversations I don't know any other way to go rest is the road map the guiding force a truth teller rest is a meeting with self with a typed agenda rest is on your knees Whispering silently on the right side of your bed rest is lunchtime dreaming the energy of the Rastafarian who showed me how to pray standing up with my eyes open hands stretched wide because how will you see and know when prayers are answered rest is Holy oil for my head lightly connected on a silk pillow rest is holding us close rest is home and continue to stay into this portal of rest and I want to share a story about my grandma Aura this is my grandma Aura casting um she's an ancestor now she was um born in Vicksburg Mississippi and she is the muse of this work she taught me how to rest when I was a young girl and now that I look back on it I'm understanding what she was doing and so I want to name my maternal grandmother Ora Casten as the Muse because I never want to miss an opportunity to share her work and to speak her name because the ancestors want to be spoken and they want their names to be uplifted and they want to be seen as a guide for our lives and for right now and she is the guide and the story of my grandmother is that she was a refugee of Jim Crow terrorism in Mississippi and like millions of other black Americans during Jim Crow um and during the Great Migration they fled the South they left their homes for places up north and on in the West and so my grandmother told me that she had um witnessed some violence and that she knew that that will be the moment that she needed to leave and so I like to say that my grandmother built a spaceship of uncertainty out of Hope and she had a address from my aunt who also had lived in Chicago who had made it up there maybe a couple months before and she decided to jump on a bus and she floated herself up to the south side of Chicago go where I'm from raised eight children my mother is one of her eight and raised dozens and dozens of grandchildren I'm one of her many and what she would do every day once she landed in Chicago from Mississippi thinking that there will be more hope she will be away from the violence of terrorism of the KKK that she will be able to build a new world for herself and her family and she saw very quickly that it was still so many forces trying to crush her as a black poor woman um coming to to um the city from the South Side from the south and so she worked two jobs deep poverty she worked a job cleaning house cleaning um rooms at a psychiatric hospital so she was like a CNA and then she also cleaned homes for a family and so I remember her in her white she would always have on her white uniforms I remember her coming and I remember her sitting down on her yellow sofa in in the living room in between her two jobs she would sit every single day take a break before she had to go clock in the next job and she would sit on her couch no matter what was happening if the children were running in and out of the house if anything was going on she would hold space for her rest and she would sit with her eyes closed and she would just have her eyes closed and I always thought she was sleeping and so me as the young girl would always try to hold space for that that I would tell my cousin stop running in and out be quiet grandma asleep please quiet down and every time without even missing the beat without even opening her eyes she will say I'm not sleeping every shut eye ain't sleep I'm resting my eyes I'm listening I'm resting my eyes I'm listening and what were the downloads that she was receiving that allowed her to continue on that allow her to embody her own reclaiming of her time and her body in a culture in a space that wanted to see her working 24 hours a day two jobs and still could not hardly afford to pay the rent but in that moment she meditated and she said she was listening to God sometimes she would say I'm listening to the universe and many of time she would just say I'm listening there was no specific who it was a listening and so I would love for us to practice this resting my eyes practice because it deepens into the idea of how we can reimagine rest for ourselves that the culture is not going to give us rest that we're going to have to be subversive and flexible in inventive and begin to reimagine rest in so many infinite ways and for her it was resting her eyes and so I'm going to um put on a bell I'm going to hit this um gong and I want us to have that as our moment to understand we can close our eyes and intentionally rest our eyes in honor of my grandmother and in honor of the practice because resting is going to be a lifelong practice and so this is one practice that I will always love to share with people and teach them and so I'm going to hit on this and then once you hear the um Bell that is your moment to begin to rest your eyes and then I'll wait and I'll bring you out of the portal for rest and I'll ring it again and you'll know that's the moment to come out and so let's rest our eyes [Music] sh for for for for for [Applause] you can stay in the portal of rest thank you for honoring that rest moment and for honoring the practice of resting your eyes I want to take a moment you know my um work is really aligned deeply with Community Care I very specific specifically don't talk about this work as being a self-care I understand and love self-care but for this my our par specific framework around rest is resistance Community Care and rest are tied together and so I want to have a community care moment and just tap in and ask you have you had water today tea a moment of silence we just shared that together so that would be a yes did you stretch have you seen the sky have you taking a deep breath do you have a blanket a pillow a favorite pillow are you comfortable right now can you hear my voice this is an invitation you can turn off your video you can stretch out on the floor you can lay back in your office chair if there's a couch a bed you can Daydream you can just be and I always want to uplift that there's infinite ways to rest resting is anything that slows you down enough that you can connect with your B body and your mind that's why meditation and that resting your eyes moment of listening that my grandmother did every day 30 minutes to an hour and I want to uplift that she was Raising eight children and tons of grandchildren a huge family the matriarch of a family working two jobs cooking and hosting and there was space for her to rest because she crafted it she demanded it she held space for her rest it did not matter if we were running in and out of the house if something needed to be done she sat on that couch and taught us that this was her time to rest and everyone around had to honor it and so I want to make sure I uplift that and have you guys really tap into the idea that to make space for your rest you're going to have to craft it and invent it and be very clear and subversive and flexible about holding boundaries about what it means to rest about how long you should rest 10 minutes five minutes my grandmother would do 30 sometimes she would do an hour when she was really rushing I I've seen her rest her eyes for as short as 10 15 minutes but there was a moment for her to reclaim her body as her own and so some points today to daydream and meditate on for today and forever really is that daydreaming and resting is key to our healing that rest is a form of resistance in a culture like this and our bodies become this sight of Liberation that's why wherever our bodies are we can find rest we don't have to wait to save our money to go to a fancy Retreat Center we don't have to have a passport to leave our homes we don't have to have a fancy mattress we don't have to have money to go to the spa our bodies this Divine body that we were gifted at Birth and why this work is a human rights this work is about humanity and uplifts human rights is that it looks at all bodies as brilliant all bodies as possible all bodies as Divine and because of that it becomes our deepest sight of Liberation and number three we must reimagine rest like my grandmother not just see it as a nap where you can sit lay down for 20 minutes and cover your blanket and close the door and no one is there and that but that she reimagined and we can reimagine to be so many things um in my book I talk about a couple different examples of what resting can be I name ballet and dancing and listening to music and prayer and walking as rest and crocheting my sister is a beautiful crochet and Knitter as rest but these moments we can slow down and dis and disconnect from the noise of our culture and then we can reclaim our bodies as our own is rest rest is always available to us and then the fourth one for today um and always is to think about imagination as the key to creating and liberated world how we can imagine I'm resting my eyes my grandmother AA my favorite quote and what it does is it uplifts the beauty of slowing down and the power of making space to rest and what how when we make space for our own selves to rest when we honor our own boundaries and our own bodies we make space for others to rest we make it possible for others to see resting and our community begins to see resting is not some frivolous thing that we add on once we're exhausted and burnt out this frivolous thing that we see that we can add on once we're already on the edge but that it becomes a foundation for everything especially when you're working in education and especially when you're working and thinking about um your work from a lens of Liberation always um being inventive imagining being the one who can invent away being submers subversive like my ancestors and thinking about the ways that this culture has tricked us and manipulated us to think that that resting is something that is an afterthought that is lazy that is a luxury that it's a privilege it is none of those things resting is our human and divine right the idea of healthy boundaries and the idea of listening like my grandmother just listening listening to your body listening to each other listening to this beautiful um Divine body that wants to teach us so many things but we ignore it the culture teaches us to disconnect from it to disembody I'm tired I'm sleepy I don't feel well but just keep burning the midnight oil you know I'll rest when I'm dead all of these violent things that the culture has taught us about this beautiful Divine sight of Liberation that we've been gifted via birth so I want to read um it's so amazing thank you guys for offering to um have people to be able to get a copy of my book it really is means so much to me and from my book there's an excerpt where I talk about the idea of what it means to be more human I keep talking about this work being work that uplifts Humanity that this is work around being more human if I could distill this it will what this work is it's about taking us back to our Natural State Natural State our state of being human and so I'm going to read a short passage from the book from page 26 this work is a battlecry for being sick and tired of capitalism and white supremacy a resting place an alternative and temporary space of joy and Freedom the way both systems view human bodies is evil and unsustainable no one is being seen clearly within them and instead we are viewed as less than human and a machine to be used abused and overlooked this is a meditation on rest as resistance this is a meditation on rest as reparations this is a reverberation for my ancestors may my deeds in this life please them may the base of Drum Shake Liberation from trees may you join us as we rest resting our bodies and Minds the form of reverence and when we honor our bodies via rest we are connecting to the deepest part of ourselves we are Freedom dreaming we are Freedom making what stories are we holding deep inside that are Untold and uncovered covered because we are too exhausted this rest work is holding space for our memories our micro histories and all the things that make us human the idea of rest as resistance can be challenging to to distill in a few lines when I'm asked to do a quick take it's counterintuitive to believe rest to not be a place to waste time but instead a generative place of freedom and resistance we have never learned this in this culture the thought of not doing even for a short time is seen as lazy and unproductive so an explanation of rest as a form of justice is layered and nuanced and I have learned that one of the most concise and true ways to share this message is just to say rest makes us more human it brings us back to our humanness to be more human to be connected to who and what we truly are is at the heart of our rest movement so this is like a moment during the talk here to kind of you know begin to think about inquiry and I know a lot of people love to journal with my book and also with the rest deck and I really you know education is so important for the work at all of our rest events either online or virtual there's always moments that we deepen into the tenants of the rest work and we uplift um all of the things that have like grounded this work this work really comes out of a lens of uh Liberation Black Liberation um it comes out of womanism and sematics and AFR futurism and it comes out of the idea of freedom and equality and so these are some really beautiful questions I actually have been pondering and I go back to probably for seven years like I'll write them down and I'll have it in my journal and then I'll come back to it a couple months or a year later and then it it something will change and so this idea of documenting this idea of seeing rest as a lifelong practice this meticulous practice a love practice that is going to be continuous that's going to change as we evolve that's going to move as we move through navigating A system that really doesn't see us as true human beings and doesn't respect or see us as Divine and so because of that resting it wants to disrupt it wants to push back it wants to attempt to repair and to say no I know the truth I know know I've been manipulated I know it is a lie and I know that I am enough now so these are some questions if you guys want to if you if you're up I know some people may be in their dream space and I want you to stay there but if you if anyone wants to deepen into some of the work later these are some questions that I have actually found very um helpful they've helped me they've helped me to remember how to be vulnerable and intimate and they've been so tender for me as I'm moving through healing because this work is really a healing work it's uncovering what has been done to us and what has been told to us about our labor about our bodies about our worth and then from that we uncover the truth and so first question is how is your heart that could be a question for for the current for presently right now in this moment how is your heart or it also can be a question that has a little bit more FAL energy to it where it's thinking about how is your heart in in different moments or how will your heart be tomorrow how was your heart when you were younger how is your heart who are you being that's the second question if you want to write it down or just sit with it if one of these questions holds something for you and it feels some type of curiosity and you feel like um that's interesting what are you holding the next question is what story are you telling yourself and then what is a more liberating story that you can tell and I love these two questions how they play on with each other here because the first question what story are you telling yourself but then the second one assumes that you're probably telling a story that isn't liberating and that assumption comes because of the culture that we have been um born into we've been born into a a capitalist white supremacist patriarchal ableist culture and we're just assuming that based on that you know I talk about in my book like I name this brainwash and this manipulation starting from birth and I talk about my birth of having my son and how he was rushed out and how my birthing story was somewhat traumatic and that once he landed on on this side that then I begin to see how the systems are all at play I name all the systems are in collaboration to for us not to rest for us for us not to see each ourselves as whole for us not to see each other and ourselves as Divine um really worthy people who are worthy of life and who are worthy of care simply because we are alive the systems instead teach us we need to do something to be able to get worth no and so what's a more liberating story you can tell and then the the last two questions how can you create rest for yourself and others that's something that will change and that you may need to ponder and then the last one do you realize you don't have to earn rest so those are those question questions there there's so much inquiry and questions that really help to ground the work the book is full of questions and I'm always as an educator and as a person who loves inquiry and who loves to uncover like this work is experimentation I know I'm being seen as the nap bishop and the person who created the framework and I'm leading this rest um movement via the nap Ministry but in many ways I feel myself to be a collaborator with the culture and also an experimentor like this work is deeply experimental it's something I experimented on my own body um I tell the story of how I began to experiment with this because I had to save my own life the book opens up with rest saved my life and the unsustainable Pace that I was trying to keep up it was just so unsustainable that I knew if I did not stop that I would it would be you know lots of harm that I was doing to myself and so this work is is was an attempt and is an attempt for me to reclaim who I am and because of that I wanted to share with others but please know that it's an experimentation there is no binary of right or wrong there is not no binary of this way or that way it literally is a way for us to begin to tap into the energy and the um language and the Deep information that our bodies offer to us but I believe that our bodies can only provide these answers to us in a rested state in an exhausted state in a rushed state in a state of burnout and sleep deprivation we're just going to get more of the same and so I see resting becoming the foundation for us to go into this portal to receive information to receive a download to connect with our bodies and if we believe that our bodies are a teacher we believe that they have so much information to share with us about Liberation about Freedom about each other they allow to see ourselves clearly like I said none of us are really being seen clearly because of these systems that have put these blinders over our eyes and so to me resting is a veil Buster removes the veils it pushes back the veil a little bit and lets us peek around the corner to be like H that's interesting I don't know if that's true about me anymore I don't know if I need to live my life like that I I don't know if it I have to want to keep feeling like this I know that there's a better way a better way that really Roots ourselves in deep deep care for each other there's another inquiry that um I love I love this other question about how can we be more human when capitalism attempts to degrade our Divinity by seeing our bodies as mere machines and how do we reclaim our time how do we slowly and intentionally begin to find these small and large and connected ways to reclaim our time and um afro futurism and science fiction is really a beautiful um foundational piece for the ministry I really love Octavia Butler and I uplift her as one of another one of the muses of the work and I would suggest and offer if you're looking for some really beautiful work to escape into to tap into to feel held and to understand that you're not being unreasonable unreasonable because you want to live in a world that doesn't feel um stifling that doesn't feel um toxic that doesn't feel abusive like you're not being unreasonable that you are on path with wanting to see people filled with Justice and want to have a more just and easier World a soft place to land the world and the culture is so hard things are so tough It's so difficult in a lot of ways to just survive in this culture but we want to be past surviving we want thriving and so this book by Octavia Butler I really love it uplifts idea of imagination in this another world is possible parable of the so and in it there's a young woman who dis discovers that she has these powers and that she begins to learn and so this is a beautiful quote that I love it's one of my favorites and in it she's she says I'm learning to fly to levitate myself no one is teaching me I'm just learning on my own little by little dream Lesson by dream lesson so much so much Beauty in this piece I want to definitely um at the end of um um I want to make sure we have space for questions I know that that's built into the program and so I really want to open that up and that you begin to open your heart to the idea of this idea that no one is teaching me I'm just learning on my own it talks a lot about the innate qualities of us always our bodies know the way our bodies know that something is not right about the systems they know that something is not right about the way we feel exhausted the way we feel pushed the way we feel sleep deprived the way we feel rushed the urgency that is created in this world we our bodies know that something doesn't feel right something's a little off and we begin to see that show and manifest in our in our bodies via disease um you know physical disease our mental health you know we're talking deeply about mental health and how sleep deprivation and this urgent culture really affects that and you know um I have a in public health and I'm really really really into neuroscience and really think about the idea of brain health and also about the idea of just body and you know from a really scientific lens um what we're doing to our bodies when we don't rest is really we are robbing it and um there's so many studies that connect sleep deprivation to so many dis so much disease heart disease high blood pressure diabetes all these things that begin to like break down ourselves simply because we aren't getting enough rest we not we're not getting full sleep and so this idea of listening our bodies are screaming and trying to share with us that this pace is not is too much our our brains are saying the urgency the anxiety all of the things that are pushed on us is just too much and so how do we find places to create these temporary spaces of joy and freedom how do we find places to reimagine what resting can be and so this quote is really beautiful to me I'm learning to fly to levitate myself no one is teaching me I'm just learning on my own little by little dream Lesson by dream lesson so beautiful to me rest is a dream space there's a dream space waiting for us resting is vulnerable intimate communication rest feels like a heart massage it's deep heart work rest is an anchor rest gives us dignity rest is spiritual work I see our bodies as high technology our bodies know the way resting and connecting with our bodies helps us to remember that we are alive I love this um practice I learned in the sematics class that I was taking where you rub your hands together you try to get heat so do that with me if you feel led to rub your hands together and get that heat and then just press and just hold and and put that heat and just begin to press it onto your body start on your heart put sometimes I like to put it behind my neck on the top of my head um put my arm behind my back back if you can just squeezing and touching and creating this heat to remember you are alive you are aliveness and because you are alive you are granted deep Divine rights and one of those rights is to rest to have Leisure to have care to be seen as a human being and not as a machine that's here to Simply Be A Tool of production for a a a capitalist system rest reminds me of life it allows me to understand that we can transmute pain into joy that our bodies are this vessel of deep imagination and and deep technology for us here's one of a photo of me and some of the net ministers my friends resting outside in the grass here in Georgia and Atlanta where I'm at and I want to close out the um our time and slowly offer up some more energy I told you at the beginning that I really wanted this to feel like a slow down moment what a honor and how grateful we are to come together to share space with each other and how how unique and Brilliant it is that we can stop in the middle of our day and sit with each other and have silence I don't I don't think we understand how important and radical it is like in a culture like this that wants to see us going and going work two jobs like my grandmother work three do more keep pushing burn the Midnight Oil keep going push on pull yourself up don't stop don't quit you got this like all of these messages that don't offer space to be like man can I just take a breather can I sit back can I feel can I rest can I close my eyes can I breathe so to be able to do that in community as I'm looking on the participants list 93 people are in here what an honor what a radical moment Moment In Time For Us in the middle of the day to say we are going to intentionally rest together and that's really what started this work outside of me experimenting with my own body and just resting on couches and not thinking this will be anything except I was just trying to save my own life I never thought it would be all of this it would be a global movement and organization I would write books I just knew that something didn't feel right and I could couldn't keep up with the paste and I couldn't keep up with the past and I knew that there was something else and so as soon as I begin to rest and slow down and and take naps all over campus when I was at emry University and in between catnaps between classes at work and find spaces to lay down outside and instead of staying up late to do homework I would just late take a nap and and hope for the best and I got better grades because of that because I was just embodying this moment of that I am going to LEAP without a net and I'm going to trust rest more than I trust the systems I'm going to trust my body more than I trust the systems and so how radical it is for us to come together and do this right now with each other to hold space for some silence and so I want to read the closing of my book because it really is I would call it a sending forth it is something to send you forth into the world I made sure that it was the conclusion of the book and so that the last thing that people would read when they listen to the book they red that it will be this ending of sending forth this message that we are in this together that you're not being unreasonable that there's other in our community we all feel this it's not just you there is something off about the pace and it's just too much it's unsustainable and so this is why I started the ministry because I wanted it us to have Community I wanted us to understand and have a place where others felt the same way I said if I'm exhausted like this and now that I'm resting I'm I'm feeling so much better things change so quickly in my life then it must be others who want to share with this and that's why I began these small community rest events all over Atlanta and we've done now hundreds and hundreds all over the country and all over the world last year we went Australia in Amsterdam this year I'm going to Poland and Brussels and all all over the country we've been holding these inperson Collective rest events we've done hundreds of also virtual events and we've brought together you know hundreds and our memes have been shared by millions of people and we brought together this idea of we're not alone in this and so close your eyes as I read the conclusion and I want to make space for us to have some questions but I will leave you with the wish for our health and for our healing with wish for our resistance close your eyes and breathe deep let us send ourselves in each other's forth with this meditation go to your beds go to your couches find a hammock go into the portal of naps go there off you don't have to wait on permission from dominant culture your body is divine and Sovereign go to your spaces of rest joy and freedom create them in your imagination create them in your communities create them in your homes create create them in your work spaces create them in your heart Daydream collectively do all these things with others we will not heal alone we will not Thrive alone communal care is our Saving Grace in our communion Community Care will save us it is already saving us there will not be instant answers to our inquiries about rest as resistance we don't desire anything quick and instant because both ignore our complexities as human beings we must be more human we want to bathe and soak in our complexity ities we want to take our sweet time we want to tap into the bottomless well of wisdom and surprise waiting for us inside the portal of rest there is power and nuance and expansiveness go to the water go to the depths of the ocean inside of you float there rest there imagine and dream there it is game over for the lies of white supremacy and capitalism We Know Better the veils have been lifted and with each nap we are closer to seeing ourselves for who we truly are we know that this will not be easy as the systems will most likely gain more power before they ultimately burn themselves out we are more than what we have ever been told and we must continue seeing each other and ourselves no matter how distorted and exhausted we show up take to your beds accept all you have ignored and then rest more what does your body want what does your soul need what are the Whispers that have been silenced by the cranking Gears of grind culture what have we missed in our urgency and in our rushing this is just the beginning and for this truth we must be grateful for the awareness grateful for the information and grateful for the reclaimed power and time this is a transmission a Manifesto for the rest pilgrimage come back to it often keep it close the messages will keep repeating view it as evidence that you are not alone in your desire to be liberated from grind culture to be liberated from exhaustion our battlecry in Mantra we will rest say it in your hearts whisper it aloud repeated as you fall asleep tell your neighbor we we will rest we will rest we will rest thank you I love to make space for questions if anyone or comments or Curiosities disc Ries folks go ahead and use the Q&A feature if you want to ask ask some questions Anda thank you so much for leading us through that um you're right it felt so subversive to sit here in my office with my eyes closed everyone else was doing it too yes it's definitely good in the office right in that building right I love that okay oh and um so someone wrote in a comment this was beautiful I was surprised by how much emotion W up committed rest thank you I love thank you for that comment thank you for sharing it yeah emotion always I was so surprised by that when I um first started the work outside into the community like within me I understood how emotional I was when I was experimenting with this on my own body but when I began to share it in community the first time I told someone about it I hadn't even done one event but somebody was like what are you working on you know what are you up to I was like well I'm finishing school and I'm thinking about this idea around rest is resistance and thinking about doing a community thing with or resting and and I just explain kind of some of the tenants and where I was coming from and the person just started to cry and I was like are you okay and she I was like what's she was I just got to chill I just started to cry because I'm so tired she was like I'm so exhausted like I I want a nap right now she was she just was so moved by it and so you know T TOA we've done so many events and at every single event there's tears I've done hundreds wherever I go there's someone feels emotional this work Taps into a deep space um because it's work it's care work and when you're in a culture that you feel not cared for to have care work and to be able to slow down and and and get into what your body really wants and that's when it begins to The Healing Begins and so I'm I'm grateful for that thank you for sharing that okay and then um a question has come in from an and I think it it builds on one that I had I had also been thinking so I'm going to ask for both of us okay in your book you write I believe Academia is the headquarters for grind culture and it is a full circle moment that the energy idea for the N Ministry came to me while I was suffering from exhaustion in a graduate school program so I wonder if you could expand on this and how can we as Educators work against this for ourselves and for our students yeah that's a good question yeah I was in you know I was in graduate school in seminary at the C School of Theology at emry University um full-time I started in 2013 um technology was available th then but they did not have any hybrid programs there was nothing online you had to get yourself down to that campus every single day and I had a young child six years old at the time um full-time 8:00 in the morning all the way sometimes to 8:00 at night I mean if you looking the book I have my schedule in the book about how I got up early and what I did and when I look at that I'm like wow how did I keep that up yeah it got to a point where I was suffering from a lot of Health stuff migraines um inflammation I was not resting at all I was it just seemed normal like that everyone in my classrooms was staying up you know the library at Emory is open 24 hours so you can L people were literally living there they have showers in the basement I have friends who had sleeping bags and they would literally be sleeping under tables they would never leave they would be working on papers for literally 15 hours sometimes and so it just was a normal Pace it was like what was normal for everybody in my program and I attempted to keep up with it for the first year it's a three-year program and then slowly I saw my body breaking down and I just knew I couldn't do it I just um began at the same time I I think it's important that while I was in seminary I was studying cultural trauma like part of my thesis around my work as um a black liberation Theologian I was studying Black Liberation theology and I was studying cultural trauma and working in archives and looking at the pace that was happening to my ancestors bodies I was studying um slavery and um Shadow slavery and looking at the South and as a sight of all of these things and so I was studying what was happening um to my my ancestors bodies when they were enslaved on plantations 20 hour work days and I just became really obsessed with the histories and micro histories of the stories of them like how did how was this possible that you could work a body and automate a body to the point of where it would work literally 20 hours a day no breaks no stopping doing agriculture picking cotton picking tobacco working in rice fields and so it really moved me in a way because at the same time I was reading about this trauma that was happening culturally during Jim Crow terrorism through in child slavery and the transatlantic slave trait at the the same time I was feeling like as if I was having this deep trauma I was placing my body through on just trying to keep up with living of class of trying to pay rent of eating of going you know I had like worked a job at the student center and I also had two internships that were part of the program where I worked at churches and I worked at a senior citizens home as um a chaplain and so it was like is this literally really the schedule are you really assuming that a person can do this that I can work at the Student Center work two other internships and have a full schedule of 16 18 hours of credits of classes like it was just like yeah this is what it is and and then at the same time they would be putting us through this and then they will host like self-care days when they was like pizza and I was like that that's all we're getting for our mental health and self day is some free pizza no you need to change the scheduling this stuff this is not fitting for most people and so I really uplift the professors who I went to and told them that I was exhausted and I didn't know if I can keep up but I wanted to be in school and I love their class and that I needed to is there something that could be done and I and if there wasn't something that can be done that's okay too but I'm just letting you know I am going to be late with some of my assignments but I'm going to show up I'll never not miss a day I'm going to be here for attendance but I'm going to be late with some things like some you know and most of my professors um were very subversive with me they were like okay you know like I see that you're very you know engaged student I I know that you're you know going to do good things in the world so is there a way that we can reestablish the syllabus for you is there a way that you can get things in later is there something that could be done um and so I think I really looked love professors who would look at me as a human I think past the policies past you know without you know they also are working a job and have to protect theirselves so I don't you know I didn't want them to push it to the point of where they were doing something that would like put them at harm but there was a lot of Professor let me sit in their offices in between classes where I would just cry and it would be like you can sit on the couch and you know get yourself together you want some water who literally really saw me as a human and wanted to like collaborate with me on trying to finish the program I had some teachers who would have classes and they would like have half the class and they would always have a rest moment in the class and when it was nice outside we would have classes outside you know and that would help me to be able to daydream and skygaze and feel fresh air and so I would offer that professors and people who are Educators and working with students that you really have a moment to see them as a human being that you kind of become subversive and allow them to come to you and share with you what they're going through and try to find spaces and moments in your own lesson plans and in your own syllabus that will allow for a little bit more space that would you know it doesn't have to be this Fantastical thing like me where I start this whole organization but just these small little moments of care and um policies and ideas that's that listen to people and that allow time to be a little bit slower that really allow us to be with each other and share in this collaborative um journey of Education I know that is such a concept right seeing our students as humans just students um especially in this higher educ now as it is really just so focused on teach them so they can get a job teach them so they can do they have to get a job so making sure to see students Beyond there just as future workers yes yes absolutely that's why I named Academia as grind culture headquarters because of what you just said they don't they if to see someone as just a work or then you're just a part of the the Empire you're part of the machine you're just training them so they can go off and become workers who are also exploited and Abus at their jobs work over working over time not getting paid enough you know all of the things that capitalism um provides all the things that have to happen for that system to continue on and so our work is to be subversive and to uplifted and illuminated and to begin to be more human to have these just little small moments that Professor will let me sit on her couch and cry that alone helped me like it probably was a small thing to her but for me I just think back I've been out of school for a while now I just think back to Dr Teresa FR Brown who will be like honey whenever you want to sit on this couch she had a beautiful couch in her office come on in here if it's my door is open and so that really helped to ground me to have a moment so I appreciate her and we have a lot of questions I'm gonna combine some of them because I are getting at the same same concept really okay so uh Corey asks so thank you so much for sharing with us I'm loving reading book is part of my journey battling over working grind but I'm having trouble finishing it because I keep being drawn to start over and reread personally confused with the concept of rest as not a privilege under capitalism and white supremacy systems it seems like it is assess your conceptual conceptualization more yeah I totally understand why people would say it's a privilege absolutely but I think to tap into that a little bit more is I am coming from from a space of a deep being a liberationist you know being a person who looks at Liberation who doesn't really see the systems as something that I attune to of course I live here I have to follow the laws and the Order of the world you know or or there will be danger but at the same time I think spiritually I think telepathically psychologically I don't believe that the systems in that way own my body and I see my body as this Divine dwelling place that that that they can't have it I see it so it's a deep Pol politics of refusal that I'm I'm jumping into that I'm really trying to get into and to say to say that it is a privilege is to continue to like buy into these lies that to say that resting is a privilege when it's literally something that if you don't do you will die you know the same way with eating the same way with people not having food in this culture food Justice and you know people being UNH house like these ideas of deep Justice movements because I come from a Justice lens this work comes out of me being an activist and a community organizer since I was like 15 16 because I was raised by one and so it comes out of a deep Justice lens and I think when you begin to see it out of a community a Justice lens out of a politics of refusal it it comes out of an idea of maroonish thinking about my ancestors who were if in the book I talk about the maroons of North America who these enslave people who were jumping off slave ships who were leaving plantations and like going off into the woods and they were not fugitives they never claimed the idea of being a fugitive they would simply have said to the system I see what you're doing over there you have this system of slavery but I know that I am a human being and I say no to it so and I'm going to go off into this area and create my own world this third space this you know talk about the maroons they was some who was living in the in like the swamps in Virginia in in like the deep deep forest of Georgia and they were living for 15 years like not as Fus but they were having full own economies and lives and and like real culture and the people who were still left behind on the plantations were helping them but they were having their own you know ideas of living and so they deeply said no to a system and didn't allow what was happening um you know politically what was happening as far as the the laws of the land they they tapped into the divine power of who they were as human being I know this but no so the politics refus is what I lean into as a Justice worker and as a liberationist yes it seems like a privilege in a capitalist system but all of those systems were created and at the same time all those systems can be torn down and they can be Flex can be flexible within them and so yes capitalism uh racism anti-blackness tells me I'm a black woman um who in a culture I'm I'm a um descendant of enslaved people my um grandparents and great grandparents were share cry ERS and then enslave I'm all of that but at the same time I still can say no to a system and say you can't have me telepathically spiritually you can have me um I'm going to still attempt I'm still going to make an attempt to be free and I'm still going to push back and disrupt so it's really about looking at this work as Just A disruption it's just a disruption to say hey hello hi I see you here I know what you're saying but I say no to it I refuse and and because of that I believe that resting is not a privilege it is not a luxury it is a Divine human right and that's all I that's what I feel thank you okay we've got I think two more questions will we'll be able to answer about 10 more minutes okay this one was asked anonymously and I really appreciate the person for asking it because I have also thought about this as like a small fat person so the asker asks as a person I strugg so much with rest fat people are often seen as inherently lazy and academic grind culture doesn't create much space for honoring our bodies so often I feel as though I should be doing more with my fat body when what I really need to do is rest connections does your work have with the fat Liberation movement of yeah def my work is centered that's the second tent of the work really centers this work in a a disability Justice um lens in a fat movement in a lens of those who are outliers you know like um my grandmother being a very large um poor black woman who was a refugee from Jim Crow terrorism who left the south in the middle of the night and landed in Chicago suffering from PTSD and so absolutely I think that because my work has the idea of body Liberation and idea of looking at the body as no matter what this body shows up as a trans body a fat body a black body a poor body um any body any body that shows up I believe that all of our bodies that we've been granted with are this deep sight of Liberation if we have it and we have this body we can find rest and pleasure and we are we have Divine dignity because of that and so a lot of people in the um when I think about the idea of what a body can do and what this what the work you think about what capitalism wants to push a body to do and so my um research around enslavement and slavery and what they were doing to try to automate a body they really were trying to experiment capitalism experiment on black bodies and Native bodies to see what they could do how far could they push a body could they work at 20 hours could a woman have a baby in the fields while she's picking Cott in 100 degree heat could she have the baby and then once the baby is out the Midwife takes can she she immedi begin to continue picking cotton can a person pick 500 pounds of cotton in one day and if they didn't what it would be deep deep um Terror that happened to their bodies and so all of these things happen and so when I look at this work being centered deeply in um capitalism and looking at the history of capitalism and how capitalism was created on plantations and created around genocide and created around looking at a body as not a human being absolutely it pulls back the L to fat bodies to every single body because what the systems want is a body that is is thin is well is upright that can do what it needs to do you know how hard it is to get disability if you hurt yourself at work how hard it is to get any type of leave that's paid even I'm thinking about pregnant bodies when I was pregnant and how my job was like if you don't come back to work I know you not feeling well but you only got six weeks if you don't come back to work you lose your job and I lost my job so it's like this culture does not care how what it is it's like it needs a body to be ready to go and go and do for it and produce for it and so thank you for asking that question because yes I love to talk about it because I love that the second tenant is what makes this work grounded in that is that it looks at the sematics of body and it looks at the body being the deepest place of Liberation that's why it doesn't matter who you are or where you are if you have money if you need you can find Liberation when I think about my ancestors who literally had a body that they didn't even own that wasn't even theirs they had no autonomy they were enslaved and so and they still said no it doesn't matter I'm going to still be free I'm going to go here and I'm going to try to escape I'm GNA get on the Underground Railroad I'm going to create Jazz I'm going to create Blues I'm going to have babies I'm going to find ways to find spirituality and so I look to those people I look to my ancestors and I want others to look to the people who have been most um terrorized and most traumatized by this culture and it will be black bodies it will be native bodies it will be bodies that can't do it will you know I think about Harriet Tubman being disabled you know she had like a brain disorder that didn't allow that she fell asleep and thinking about when someone once someone was hurt they were tossed aside once their bodies couldn't they were limping they couldn't do something they would tossed aside and so yes as a fat body um and coming from a a family of people who are larger body people and understanding who I am as a black woman in this culture it is radical to say no to a system that sees you as Mir your machine and so thank you for asking that and I'm really uh could go on and on about that but I'll stop okay the last question is from Dr Sharon Elise um she asks and one says thank you for sharing the story about struggling through academ while working in parenting slm mothering that is my experience and now grandmothering and working how by a collective commitment to rest as resistance help us achieve a healthy work life balance have you seen examples of people doing this successfully as a collective or Community commitment yeah I have you know I'm here in Atlanta and that's where I live and there's a um a collective like Co J of of child care um like I wouldn't have made it through school if I didn't have work with them if I didn't have people being like I will watch your child you can trust me with your child like I have him like this work we cannot do this work alone that's why my work rest in community care I talk about Community Care I think I probably said it 50 times in the book like I just kept repeating it I use repetition as a tactic in my book so it's a Manifesto and so my book hopes what a Manifesto hopes to do traditionally is to bring about a new future is to like write about something that has not existed is to dream up a new world and so I always talk about the idea of this work could have easily been just me resting on the couch and L and feeling like immediately when I started to like rest and just started to find ways to rest and just like kind of leaped without a net and was like I don't care like I'm going to just see and I trust my body I immediately saw so many beautiful things happening to me like my body started to feel better physically I was a better mother I be to make connections between what I was studying in school and what I was learning and I just began to slow down so I could have I could have easily kept that to myself and just been like oh my God just TR should keep resting but because I'm a womanist because I'm a feminist and because I'm a person of liberations I understood that this has to be done in in Collective we have to begin to bring people together so they can experience this and so the first thing I did to create the nap Ministry was start doing free Collective rest events all over Atlanta sometimes two people would come sometimes 40 the first one we ever did 40 people came and they wouldn't wake up for two hours and it was like this beautiful experimentation around collectively resting and so the collective rest events I talk about them in my book are really what the work is the work is laying people down collectively building Community with each other around other people who are exhaust around other people who are curious about this work and so to go back to specifically about parenting I think the idea of co-ops and collaboratives and and finding people that you can trust and child care um work you know women and people who are parenting have always found ways to like share that work it takes it literally does take a village and so I would have made it out of school without these people that I'm still friends with right now who were like I can watch your son sometimes I would be on campus and one of my friends who was in this Co-op would be like I'm going be on that side of Campus um while you're in class I'll take my son's name is sahim I'll get sahim and take him to the cafeteria while you go and study and so when I say that this work cannot be done alone and that we have to tap into these Community spaces and really study Community movements and study deep deep Community work I think because I was raised as a community organizer and activist that it it it came very quick easy and quickly to me that I needed to do this with others that we had to like come together and so I just want people to really deepen into the idea of community and Community could be two people it doesn't have to be hundreds Community is where one or two or three are gathered and that alone to begin to build trust and energy around other people who feel the same is really where the magic lies Community Care will save us it's saving Our Lives I think that's the perfect thing to wrap up on uh it's I wish we could have all day to kind ofu in this and just really devote more time to it but I just want to thank you so much on behalf of the California faculty Association thank you for this time and for getting us to slow down and be subversive together in this moment