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
That is a great question. It is very scary. Let's just put that on tape right now. This work will not be easy. To shift a paradigm and to go up against violent systems that we're trying to disrupt against, that is a very scary proposition. It won't be easy. Not probably everyone will get this.
You know, there is a place within the culture that the beast of this culture has eaten so many of us alive that will we get to that liberation? No. I believe, yes, I believe that there is always hope. If you're alive, I learned this when I was doing pastoral care, studying in seminary, trained as a chaplain. Where there is life, there is hope. Where there is breath, there is hope.
Where you're breathing, there is hope. Even I would say from my tradition, understanding that the end is just the beginning. Even in the other world, when you leave this earth, there's still hope. You know, there's still moments that you can tap into because the end is just the beginning. This is healing work. This is not work that's going to be just like, just go lay down, girl. You good?
No, this is literally like a full collaboration. It may look like therapy. I'm in therapy. I have the privilege of being able to have a therapist. They may look like some other modalities of healing, you know, Reiki, journaling, art, walking, prayer. dismantling your mind around your being accomplished to white supremacy.
You know, as a white person in this culture, you're going to have to go deep into the wells to begin to unravel the legacy that you come from of being a white person in a culture like this. There's a beautiful book called The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry. He's a white poet and artist. And he talks about this idea of how white people have not had the opportunity to heal from the wound.
Not even heal, but even to understand that there is a wound. Acknowledge. Acknowledge. There is a wound on you. I know you think when you hear white supremacy and racism and slavery, you think, wow, the shit that was done to black people is horrible. But to understand that it was actually also killing you as well.
It is spiritually killing you, a white person, to believe that they're superior in some way to another divine human being. That is a spiritual deficiency. That is a disconnection to your power and to who you are. So that has robbed you of your own humanity as well. And so people never feel that. They're always just like, oh, damn, I never thought about it like this.
And that's why this work is global. It's not just for Black people. They're like, is this work just for Black people? Absolutely not. It's for anyone involved. Who needs to disrupt and push back and heal from white supremacy and capitalism. Now, the ways in which you're going to have to do that are different. Like my history is a total different thing.
Everybody has their own origin story, historic stories of how they're placed in this sick situation. That was created, you know, not by us. And so we have to land in it. We have to feel it. And I will tell you that you will have to just feel that energy. You're going to have to just sit with the discomfort of that. And I say sleep your way through it. Rest your way through it.
Make small, small, small ways to start. Start with the 10 minutes a day of just sitting and resting. Closing your eyes, not responding to an email, making space in your calendar to not be doing nothing. If I have it in my calendar, rest days, chill days, Sabbath days, I have very clear boundaries around how I work. I don't do meetings over 30 minutes.
If you want to do a meeting over 30 minutes, we probably can't work together. It only is set in my calendar. It's only a 30 minute. We're going to be concise. We're going to say it and we're going to move on. and we're going to go lay down and telepathically communicate that way.
It is. Yes, it is the opposite. It is a new idea. It is a new paradigm. The idea of perfectionism has been placed on us from birth. And when you think about white feminism, absolutely. You are literally trying to be a part of a system that hates you. Yes. It hates you. Fuck! It hates your guts. And you're uplifting it and making it richer and making it more...
Viable and making it worse for everybody else.
And we're like, what else can we do for you? How can we make it richer? Yes. Yeah.
You're doing it for you. Absolutely. We're doing the work for them. I have a quote in my book that says something like, we do the work for them, When we don't see ourselves as divine and perfect already, we're already helping them along. We're already like creating and being a part of this system and helping them to oppress us even more.
And so I say the buck stops with me, that the chips fall where they're made. I will never donate my body to a system by grinding that still owes my ancestors reparations. That hates me. It's built upon the backs of people that is so violent. It took years to get here also.
So I want people to understand that this is 10 to 15 years of study and research and experimentation and therapy and personal sleeping and resting. I experimented with my own body to be able to see how could I make a way. I did it to save my own life.
rest saved my life and I don't need nobody else to verify that it saved my life and I did it for me and from that understanding that I was saving my own life because I'm a womanist and I understand that the holistic view like that for me to be truly free everyone around me also has to be free I'm also a community activist for 20-30 years I was raised as a community activist. My dad was one.
I understood that there was a moment to be able to make this a collective and to share this information in a praxis. So the first thing that I did was not get online and start lecturing. The first thing that I did is borrow yoga mats, blankets, and pillows from everybody I knew, wash them, and curated space for people to lay down. So our first event was 40 people who I did not know
sleeping for two hours in this nap little space that we created at an art studio and people waking up crying and being like, I haven't took a nap in two years. I dreamt about my grandmother. Thank you for making the space for me. People at every event, we've done hundreds. They wake up and they're in tears. There's always so much emotion.
Showing 81–100 of 156 · page 5 of 8
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