#192: Rest is Resistance (featuring the work of Tricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry)

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hey there, beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. 

I have to tell you, I just got off a group coaching call and I am fired up, like genuinely fired up in the best possible way. And I knew immediately that what we talked about needed to become an episode because every single one of you needs to hear this. 

And then as I was researching for the episode, I came across a book by the same name as what I wanted to name this episode, Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. So I wrote the episode and then I read Tricia's book and it helped make the episode so much better. 

So here we go. I want to start with a confession, an actual confession, which will make sense in about two minutes. So if you've been listening for any amount of time or you know me, you know that I went to Catholic school for 12 years. 

12 years. And one of the things that 12 years of Catholic school gives you, along with a very complicated relationship with guilt, is a deep and abiding fear of sloth. Sloth, you know, one of the seven deadly sins, which means that rest, genuine, unproductive, lying on the couch for no fucking reason at all, rest, was not just laziness in the framework I was raised in. 

It was morally dangerous. It was the kind of thing you confess to a priest. Speaking of which, I was seven or eight years old the first time I went to confession in second grade, and I sat in that little booth trying to think of my sins, and I genuinely could not think of any. 

I was in second grade. I was a good kid. I hadn't done much of anything yet. So I made some up. I sat there and I invented sins to tell the priest because I was too afraid to say I didn't have any, which if you think about it, means the first thing confession ever taught me was to lie to a priest about sinning. 

I was in second grade and already performing goodness for an authority figure I was afraid of. And if that isn't a perfect origin story for a people-pleasing, rest-resistant, perfectionist overachiever, I don't know what is. 

So today we're talking about rest, why we don't let ourselves have it, where that comes from, and why I have come to believe that resting, genuinely unapologetic resting, is one of the most radical things a woman can do in this world at this moment. 

I want to introduce you today to the woman I mentioned at the start of the episode, Tricia Hersey, whose work has genuinely changed how I think about this. Tricia Miss Hersey is the founder of the NAP Ministry. 

She's a writer, a theologian, a performance artist, and a very important voice on rest and resistance, one of the most important ones that I have ever encountered. Her book is called Rest is Resistance, which is also where the title of today's episode kind of comes in. 

I had written the episode with "Rest is Resistance" as the title, and then I realized that she had a book. And I, of course, could not have a podcast episode and not delve into her work and talk about Tricia Hersey. 

So I want to weave some of her words into this conversation today because they deserve to be heard for sure. If this episode speaks to you, please go find her work. Follow the NAP Ministry. Buy her book. 

I'm going to suggest you purchase it and then read it while you're preparing to rest, because that is the kind of beautiful, layered, intentional act that I think Tricia would fully endorse. Okay, so where does the guilt that we all seem to get when we're resting come from? 

I want to start with the personal layer because I think it's important to understand your own specific history with rest before we zoom out to the bigger picture. For me, it was Catholic school and the concept of sloth as sin. 

The message absorbed over 12 very formative years of my life was that idle hands are the devil's playground, that productivity is virtue, that rest is something that has to be earned. And even then, you probably shouldn't enjoy it too much. 

I have done some personal IFS work specifically around my relationship with rest. And what I found when I got curious about the part of me that refuses to stop moving, what I found is exactly what you might expect, a very young part shaped by very old messages who genuinely believes that her worth is conditional on her output, that if she stops producing, she stops mattering or she becomes a bad person. 

And that rest is not just laziness, it is dangerous. Maybe your version didn't come from religion. Maybe it came from a parent who modeled relentless work as love. Maybe you had one of those parents who, as soon as they pulled up into the driveway and you were laying on the couch, you hopped up and made yourself look busy. 

Maybe it came from a culture that celebrated busyness as a status symbol. That definitely happens here in Westerville, Ohio, where I live. Maybe it came from being praised your whole life for achieving and never once for simply being. 

Whatever the source, I want you to hear this. In her book, Tricia writes, rest isn't a luxury, but an absolute necessity if we're going to survive and thrive. Rest isn't an afterthought, but a basic part of being human. 

Rest is a divine right. Rest is a human right. And again, that's from Tricia Hersey's book, Rest is Resistance. A divine right. A human right. Not a reward. Not something you earn after you've finished everything on the list. 

Not something you get to have once you've proved yourself worthy of it. In her book, she even goes on to say that she doesn't even like the idea of resting to recharge, because that implies that you're recharging to go back and feed the white supremacist, capitalistic, patriarchal society. 

So rest is a right that you already have, that you were born with. Let that land for a second before you keep listening. When you try to rest, genuine rest, not productive rest, not strategic recovery, not resting to recharge, just actual doing nothing rest. 

What comes up in your head? What does that voice in your head say? Does it sound like you should be doing something? You're wasting time. Other people are working right now. You haven't earned this. You're going to pay for this later. 

Those voices, and I'm sure there are many others. Those are just ones I came up with off the cuff. Those voices are not the truth. They are parts of you shaped by systems that were never designed with your well-being in mind. 

And I want to talk about those systems now. So the systems that we have been raised in in Western society need us to be exhausted. So this is going to get a little bit spicy, and I'm going to need you to stay with me if you're willing, consensually stay with me. 

The pressure you feel to constantly work, to constantly produce, to never fully stop, that pressure did not come from nowhere. It was constructed. Deliberately, systematically, constructed by white supremacist, colonial, capitalistic, and patriarchal structures that depend on your exhaustion to function. 

Capitalism needs workers who believe their value is determined by their productivity. It needs people who feel guilty when they rest. It needs people who measure their worth and output. We're afraid that stopping means they're falling behind. 

A workforce that knows how to rest, that feels genuinely entitled to rest, is a workforce that is much harder to exploit. Patriarchy, of course, needs women specifically to be busy. Busy with work, busy with care, busy with the emotional labor, the emotional weightlifting of every relationship in their orbit. 

Busy managing everyone else's comfort and needs. A woman who is resting is inconveniently a woman who is thinking. And a woman who is thinking tends to start asking some pretty inconvenient questions. 

Tricia Hersey names this plainly. She writes that grind culture is a sinister collaboration between capitalism and white supremacy, and that when we view our exhaustion through that lens, we can see that we're all caught up in this toxic system, not because we're weak, but because the system was designed to catch us up in it. 

I said to my coaching group recently that I want to be the kind of woman that this system finds genuinely threatening. The kind that in another era, they would have burned at the stake. Not because I'm inciting anything, but because I'm choosing loudly and completely on purpose not to play by rules that were designed to keep me small and exhausted and too busy to notice what's being done to me and everyone else around me. 

And Ms. Hersey frames it with this kind of vision that I find genuinely intriguing. Like hope, she says, rest is disruptive. It allows space for us to envision new possibilities. We must reimagine rest within a capitalistic system. 

For many, rest feels elusive, and there's no model for rest in our culture. She says, we must create the model and dream up new ways of being. We must create the model. We must dream up new ways of being. 

This is not small. This is not passive. This is an act of creation. And every time you rest without guilt, you're doing exactly that, building a new model, one nap at a time for yourself and for every woman watching you do it. 

And son, your young sons too. What if resting was your act of civil disobedience? What if taking a nap on a random Tuesday afternoon was, in the most literal sense, a refusal, a quiet but firm declaration that your worth is not your productivity, that your body is not a machine, that you do not consent to the terms and conditions of a system that has never had your best interests at heart. 

One of the women in my coaching group said something that really stopped me. She said, I want to do this for my daughter. I want to model it so she doesn't have to fight as hard for permission to rest as I have. 

Yes, that, exactly. Every time you rest without guilt, you're doing it for every person who comes after you. Okay, so what does it look like to actually rest? We've named the personal history. We've named the system. 

Now let's talk about what it actually looks like to rest when your nervous system has been trained for decades to equate stillness with danger. Because here's the honest truth. Knowing that rest is resistance does not automatically make it easy. 

Your nervous system does not care about your political analysis. It has been running a particular program for a very long time and reprogramming it takes practice. I also want to say that when I was listening to Tricia Hersey's book, I noticed this is repetitive. 

Like she's saying the same things in different ways over and over. And I was like, oh yes, of course it's repetitive because it has to be in order for it to sink in and to land. I've heard one message for 50-some odd years, and I'm just hearing this message for the past couple. 

Of course, it's going to have to be repetitive in order for it to sink in. I also want to gently name something else that Tricia raises in her book because I think it matters. She talks about how many of us have come to relate to rest in a capitalistic, consumer-driven way, turning it into something we purchase, something that requires a special location or a curated experience to count. 

Now, I want to be clear. I love a fancy retreat. I love going to Miraval. I host retreats. There is nothing wrong with a beautiful hotel or a spa weekend or a week where you go somewhere gorgeous where you completely unplug. 

Those things are wonderful. And I will never tell you not to do them. And I'm never going to stop doing them. But here is what Ms. Hersey pointed out. And I think she's right. If a five-star retreat is the only context in which you allow yourself to rest, if rest requires a plane ticket and a permission slip, then you are still operating inside the system. 

You've just made rest into another thing to consume, another box to check off the list, another achievement to post about. As she writes, this work is not about a one-day-only event that requires leaving your home. 

It's about a slow unraveling that will require our participation for the rest of our lives. A slow unraveling for our entire lives. A practice. So what does that practice actually look like? Here are four things. 

I'm sure there are more, but these are what I want to leave you with, these four. First, treat it like a meditation practice, not a performance. When you sit down to rest, your brain is going to immediately generate a list of things that you should be doing instead. 

This isn't a sign that you're doing rest wrong. This is just what a trained, high-achieving brain does. In meditation, when your mind wanders, hopefully you've learned not to judge yourself. You just gently bring your attention back. 

Rest works the same way. When your brain says, go do the laundry, you notice, ah, there's that part again, and you gently come back. The goal is not a perfectly blank, blissful mind. The goal is the practice of returning. 

The second thing, rest before you're running on empty. Most of us treat rest as a last resort. We rest when we collapse or when we get sick or when our body simply refuses to keep going. I want you to flip that. 

Rest before you need it desperately. Rest as maintenance, not as an emergency repair. Anything you put out into the world from a place of total depletion, whether that's your work, your parenting, your relationships, that's going to reflect that depletion. 

The most loving, most impactful version of you runs on a full tank. Resting is not selfish. It's how you show up fully for everything that matters. Third, I love this one. It is taken right from Trisha's book. 

And as soon as I heard her say it, I was like, oh, I have to include this in the episode. So Trisha introduces this idea. And I love it so much. I want to give it its own moment. We are obsessed with to-do lists. 

We measure our days by what we checked off. We feel virtuous when the list shrinks and anxious when it grows. What if you also kept a not-to-do list? Trisha's idea, a not-to-do list, the things you are actively choosing not to do today in service of rest, in service of your body, in service of your life. 

Because as she writes, resting is about getting people back to their truest selves, to what they were before Grand Culture told them their worth was connected to how many things they could check off a list. 

The not-to-do list, I see it as an act of reclamation, probably because Tricia told me it was. It's you deciding on purpose what you are not available for. Fourth, name it out loud. When you're resting, say so to yourself and maybe more importantly, to somebody else wherever it feels right. 

I'm resting right now. I'm choosing this. This is what I deserve. The voice that says you should be doing something gets louder in silence. Naming your choice is an act of authority over your own life. 

It is, if you'll allow me to say it one more time, an act of resistance. Before I close today, I want to leave you with one more direct quote from Tricia, because it is a question underneath all of this, the one I think your body has been waiting for you to ask. 

She says, and I quote, your body has important information to share with you, but it can only arrive to you in a rested state. What if you are missing so much of who you are because you are navigating life from a state of exhaustion? 

How much are we missing because we're constantly on the go and busy creating moments to fill calendars? When will we make space for our bodies to reflect and for our hearts to widen so that we can connect with who we are? 

I love that quote. How much of yourself are you missing? Sit with it, please. Really sit with that question. How much of myself am I missing by not resting, by being so busy, by being so productive? Not as a criticism, but as an invitation. 

Okay, here's what I want to leave you guys with today. The guilt you feel about resting is not a character flaw. It is the entirely predictable result of being a woman raised inside systems that needed you to feel that way. 

So for me, the Catholic school that taught me that sloth was a sin, the culture that maybe taught you that busyness was a virtue, the world that taught you your value was your productivity. Those messages were never about your well-being. 

They were about your compliance. And you get to choose to stop complying. I think of resting now as my personal act of defiance against every system that ever told me I had to earn my own existence, against 12 years of Catholic school, against a culture that profits from my exhaustion, against every voice that ever suggested I was only worthy when I was producing something. 

My IFS therapist and I came up with the idea that every time I lay down on the couch to take a nap or to rest, or I sit out in the sun with no agenda and just close my eyes, that I think of it as a big F you to the Catholic Church. 

And it works for me. So rest unapologetically, luxuriously, often, not because you've earned it, but because you are a human being and human beings require rest. And if the system finds that threatening, good. 

Let it. But I'll be over here on my couch being dangerous. And as I said before, before you go, please go find Tricia Hersey. Follow her. Follow the NAP Ministry. Please buy her book, Rest is Resistance. 

I want to suggest you order it right now. Read it the next time you are intentionally slowing down. Let her words be the thing that you listen to right before you rest. It is exactly the kind of beautiful, intentional, full-circle act that I think she and your body would love. 

I love you all so much. Thanks for listening to Your Favorite You. I'll see you next week.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

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You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

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Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!