WithinReach Wishes You A Restful, Joyous and Healing Winter Season

This month, we hope you find plenty of time to rest, celebrate or be in community with the ones you love. Winter celebrations and holidays can be stressful and carry expectations to show up in ways that create extra labor for our bodies and minds. That’s why we hope you fill this season with things to honor yourself and your health. 

During this season, we hope you can use teachings from artist, chaplin and community organizer, Tricia Hersey and use rest as a form or radical resistance. To quote Hersey, “rest is resistance, because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy” and “resting is an act that can help reclaim our humanity, and our right to be human, not machines who are just here to labor and enrich our employers.” 

Resources & Discussion Questions for December Affinity Groups

In this month’s affinity groups, we want to center Tricia Hersey’s teachings through “Rest is Resistance” and the Nap Ministry as using rest to further social justice and our own bodily autonomy, especially within Black communities. We hope these teachings can shine light on ways you can disrupt capitalism, white supremacy and other systems of oppression through rest. Please engage with the resources and discussion questions below to help guide you in your learnings, reflections and conversations during affinity groups.

Note: The resources are organized by required and optional learnings with estimated timeframes to complete each resource. 

Required/Priority Resources

• (3 mins) Breaking down the myth of the “strong Black woman”: In this clip, Activist Ianne Fields Stewart and the Nap Ministry founder Tricia Hersey discuss the need to dismantle the "strong Black woman" trope. 
• (3-5 mins) “Permission To Not Be in Survival Mode: How Rest Liberates Black People”: “While rest is important for all people, the Rest is Resistance movement is particularly tied to the Black community because of the discrimination, racism and abuse that have plagued Black people for generations.” 
• (5-7 mins) “The Pursuit of Rest Under Capitalism”: “More than before, these times make it necessary to access rest and fortification for bodies as finite as ours, so that we may return to daily functioning and presence.”  
• (8 mins) “How to think about rest as a form of resistance”: In this NPR podcast, Shereen Marisol Meraji speaks with Trisha Hersey, author of "Rest Is Resistance," about fighting against the feeling that our productivity equates to our worth. 

Optional Resources 

• Purchase: Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey 
• Learn more about The Nap Ministry: Our work is seeded within the soils of Black radical thought, somatics, Afrofuturism, womanism, and liberation theology, and is a guide for how to collectively deprogram, decolonize, and unravel ourselves from the wreckage of capitalism and white supremacy. 
• (10 mins) Eight-Hour Day Movement: This website provides history on how the 8-hour workweek came about and the role of unions, especially those that were integrated early on like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 
• (20+ mins) Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture: This website provides an in-depth look at some of the characteristics of white supremacy culture. The author, Tema Okun, has updated the characteristics to incorporate more of an intersectional lens and ways to explore its’ nuances and complexities. 

Discussion Questions (Note: these questions were adapted or copied from the Rest is Resistance Discussion Guide document)

1. What does rest look like to you? How do you practice rest to push back against oppressive systems you live in? 
2. Tricia uplifts the importance of deepening into this work not just from the surface level of napping alone but reiterates that “This is about more than naps.” In what ways is this work about social justice, liberation and resistance? 
3. How does characteristics of White Supremacy or White Supremacy culture prevent us from resting? 
4. Who taught you how to rest? How can you make space for others to rest? 
5. Write a list of wishes you’d like to see for a rested world. Begin each with, “I wish you...” 

What else is happening this month?