Tricia Hersey
speaker
156 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Tricia Hersey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
My grandmother doing that was a disruption. That system wanted her on the clock. 24 hours a day running from Jim Crow, running from the Ku Klux Klan down in Mississippi, getting away during a great migration. And then she's centering her rest. That is a disruption. So I want people to, like you said, get deeper into the idea that this idea of productivity, forget about it.
The idea of productivity has been taught to you by a capitalist system. We don't want that curriculum anymore. We need new curriculum. All of that that you learned, that's done. I know you might have got an A in that class, but the curriculum is not that no more. What we are learning and trying to take on is the idea that productivity is not what you think it is.
That resting is a generative state. You generate ideas. You are connecting with your body. You are participating in the spiritual practice. Resting is a spiritual practice. It connects you. I believe dreams and napping allows you to have a portal. There's a portal that opens you.
When you go into a rested state that allows you to see things different, that allows you to have a moment outside of grind culture, that allows you to connect with something deeper outside of yourself, connect with your ancestors, connect with... what you want to be, connect with the dreams.
And so this dreamscape, this portal idea is really centered in Afrofuturism and my idea of understanding that we can dream ourselves free, that I've watched people dream themselves free. You know, I've watched my family dream themselves free and pray themselves free and leap to freedom in ways that still to this day surprise me. And so to tap into that I believe so much in human beings.
I have so much hope. I believe in the deepest parts of ourselves that we are all divine, that a miracle that we're here on earth, it is a miracle to be born. And so if that's the starting point, anything that's trying to degrade that and steal that from us, I'm not with.
Capitalism, exhaustion, white supremacy, work culture, racism, ableism, anything that's degrading us from the true divine beings we are, we don't want that. We want something different. And so people are always like, yeah, I want to rest so I can, you know, get ready to do more tomorrow. I got to... Rest to get myself boosted up so I can go hard tomorrow. No, there is no more hard.
Like we don't need toughness and going hard no more. We need softness. We need care. We need community. We need collective healing.
Absolutely. One of the many, yes.
Yes.
Nobody.
You preached with that question. Yes. All of that. The question is so good. Like, yes, because humanness, people always try to distill the information. And I say, simply, this work is just bringing us back to our natural state. This work is about making us more human. taking away this robotic zombie machine-like thing that they've placed on us.
When I was reading and researching all of the slave information and the narratives and what was happening on plantations, they were literally building human machines. They were trying to see how far they could push a human body. Could it be automated? Can they work 20 hours straight? Could we do 23 straight? How much could we feed them where they won't pass out in the fields?
How much water could we give them? So they were really automating us and creating this idea of a machine level pace for a human body. So the disrespect of a human body is evident and key. This work brings you back to your natural state, the slowing down, the resting.
It's such a magical moment spiritually, but it's also the neurology of it, the biology, the physiology of what's happening in our bodies when we rest. This book that I love called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. He's a neuroscientist. And in it, he talks about sleep and dreams.
It's very scientific, but then it's also very beautiful in the way that he speaks about dreaming and the idea of when we sleep, what's happening in our brain. I love it. I'm like nerd out on neurology and neuroscience. When we sleep, there's a chemical that coats our brains that allows us to heal from trauma, that allows us to tap into our memory, that allows us to be more creative.
And so this idea of not doing that, of not allowing our bodies to be the full human, brilliant thing that it is, is where the violence of it all comes in at. And so to me, to be human is to know that you are divine.
is to know that the person next to you is a divine being chosen to be on earth that you don't belong to any of these systems this all this external world is all here to be in this world but not of it is to understand that everything you need is already in you that the power of your body i say one of the tenets of the nap ministry is this the body is a site of liberation To think of it as a site.
The idea of the word site. It is a site of liberation. All bodies. It doesn't matter what your body looks like, what color it is, the size. Every single body is a site of liberation. So that means wherever our bodies are, we can find rest. We can find liberation. That this body that we are placed in at birth allows us to always be in tune with liberation. Yeah.
to always be in tune with the divine, to always have a direct connect to the divine. And the disconnect comes when we aren't understanding that, when we don't see ourselves, that people don't think they deserve rest. What this culture has done to us is ripped our self-esteem and self-worth.
Showing 61–80 of 156 · page 4 of 8
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