Why Radical Rest Matters Now More Than Ever

This week, I broke down during an online physical therapy appointment meant to help me heal from the bodily trauma—and blessing—of giving birth. It’s been a year and a half since my baby was born, and my body has yet to fully recover. I often lose patience. 

When the appointment was over, I laid down and closed my eyes. As I drifted into darkness, a statement in the spirit of writer and activist Audre Lorde—that I once heard remixed in a Queer aerobic dance class—rang in my head: “The first step in taking care of the world, is taking care of yourself.”

I thought about how I was up at 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. taking care of the baby, and that tonight I felt called to watch the vice presidential debate (my civic duty?). I considered the bursts of energy needed for the cycle of diaper changes, feedings, and bathing that lay before me. In this still and stolen moment, I reflected on the steady grind of my 20s and 30s working three jobs to pursue a creative career in an expensive metropolitan city. I even worked among the “hustle victims” (and vultures) at the OG Girlboss.com. And now, approaching my 40s, grind culture has deepened and doubled before me. Daily, I am served Instagram images, along with exterior societal messages, that say things like: “Anything you can do, moms can do breastfeeding and one-handed.” 

For months, I followed this paradigm. Whipping up a salad for my family three days postpartum while still bleeding from childbirth. Pumping breast milk during Zoom calls. Setting the baby in his playpen in lieu of paying for childcare while completing complex Excel spreadsheets for my job. Many mothers, of course, do much more—without the resources I have like a supportive partner, solid health care, and stable housing. Why was I flaming out? 

A shift occurred when the baby started eating solids, and my body got a break from being the sole source of food. My insomnia quieted, and with more rest, I started to feel more like myself. Renewed energy allows me to feel empowered to, at least when I can, reject the multi-tasking mom trope with small acts of resistance.

This morning, for example, I put the hungry baby down. He started to wail, but I needed two hands to wash his sippy cup and pour his milk. I told him, lovingly, to please wait. I poured his milk and offered it to him. He quieted and began to fill his belly with happy gulps. 

“I love the softness you are allowing yourself,” Teresa ‘Toogie’ Barcelo tells me on the phone when I recount my new, slowed-down morning routine. Barcelo is an internationally acclaimed choreographer and movement artist who has worked with the likes of Alicia Keys, Xtina Aguilera, Dua Lipa, Katy Perry, Calvin Harris, and Sabrina Carpenter, among other mega global stars. She’s also a certified breath and meditation coach who’s been practicing meditation and, as she says, “radical rest” for the past 20 years. She recently developed an app called Toogie that shares these teachings with meditation prompts, breathwork sessions, and a mindful movement practice she calls “wiggle room.”

“In a society that measures our values based on productivity, choosing rest is radical…Resting is like an F.U. to the systems that don't serve us,” Barcelo says. “I often ask clients, and it can kind of feel like a silly question, but I say, ‘Are you a human being, or are you a human doing?’”

After all, Barcelo notes, it is being connected to our own humanity that gives us space to process the world around us, develop relationships with our communities, and be more genuine. 

“We've been indoctrinated to believe that we have to prioritize work and that taking care of our bodies is a privilege that you have to earn. And I just don't believe that,” Barcelo says. “I believe that if you take care of yourself, if you give yourself the proper nourishment, if you give yourself the rest, if you give yourself the space to not be doing, doing, doing all the time, you actually are just more pleasant to be around…Then that type of energy you carry when you walk into a room is contagious. So, if anything, it's actually job security.”

She recounts several times in her life when she took a pause in her successful dance career. It was in these phases of stillness and slowing down that she found solutions that led her to be a more authentic version of herself, and thrive. 

On set, she often does micro meditations during pauses in production. She takes lunch alone to eat mindfully and go on a walk. Barcelo gets to work 20 minutes early to breathe, hum, and collect herself before the sometimes frenetic day ahead. While this kind of flexibility is not available to all, Barcelo’s work is about finding small moments of respite. “I seize any opportunity when I have a sliver of a time,” Barcelo says. 

The poet and activist Tricia Hersey takes the idea of rest as radical even further. She is the author of the book “Rest as Resistance: A Manifesto” and the founder of the Nap Ministry, which explores rest as a vital tool for community healing through collective naps, immersive workshops, performance art pieces, and activism. Her work is largely devoted to rest as a form of resistance against the draining structures of  capitalism and white supremacy with philosophies rooted in a lineage of Black female activists, like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Harriet Tubman. 

In her book, she writes: “I feel like a legacy of exhaustion resides somewhere in all of us, but specifically resides in the bodies of those who have melanated skin.” She points towards the centuries of unpaid Black labor that built the United States and its resounding—and enduring—generational harm. While her Nap Ministry teachings have a Black Liberation lens, Hersey maintains that no one is free until our entire civilization is free. Her nap crusades are inclusive to all races and genders. 

“I hear so many repeat the myth of rest being a privilege, and I understand this concept and still deeply disagree with it. Rest is not a privilege because our bodies are still our own, no matter what the current systems teach us,” Hersey maintains in her manifesto. 

She points to her grandmother, a source of wisdom and inspiration for her work, who was raising eight children and working two jobs in Chicago—all while recovering from witnessing a lynching in a Jim Crow era Mississippi. Every day, Hersey accounts, she witnessed her grandmother take a 30-minute to one-hour rest in between her jobs, as her children and dozens of grandkids stomped through her home. Her grandmother would insist she wasn’t sleeping but “resting her eyes” and “listening to the universe.” Hersey marvels at how her grandmother took time for herself, and how that became respected by the entire family, as well as a muse for her own teachings. 

According to Hersey’s guidebook, rest might look different for various individuals. It doesn’t always look like a cozy nap in a bed or zen-like meditation. It might look like watching a bird fly by the subway window, taking a longer shower in the morning, or lingering over a cup of tea. 

One of the key aspects of integrating these practices is community. My long-time friend Lorinda Toledo, an educator and writer, is part of a group I’m cultivating to explore these ideas of rest—and get support. She sends me links to books like Laziness Does Not Exist by social psychologist Devon Price, who explores how an achievement mindset can hinder individuals, and podcasts featuring voices in this movement, like Adrienne Maree Brown, who identifies as a pleasure activist. 

Over the years, I’ve been astonished to watch Toledo, who I originally met as a fellow time-strapped and unpaid intern at an alternative weekly newspaper, quit jobs to focus on her creative work. Or step away from work to focus on her health. These moves, at the time, seemed so drastic that I didn’t always understand them. But now, becoming a mother has necessitated that I begin to uncoil my productivity beliefs in order to maintain my sanity. Both Barcelo and Hersey acknowledge this work takes decades to do, especially as, in the West, we are forced to continue operating under the specter of capitalism. 

It helps that my focus has shifted from work to family. Having a young child who can’t yet fully verbalize his needs and feelings reminds me of how basic—and needed—rest is. Without it my kid is cranky, crying, and on the edge of violence. With rest, he is exuberant, babbling to his stuffed animals, and inventing new words in a nascent baby language. A nap offers a cure-all and an invitation to imagine. 

For both of us. 

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