With a wave of her bangled brown fingertips to the melody of flutes and chimes, artist, theologian and academic Tricia Hersey enchanted a crowd into a dreamlike state of rest at Semicolon Books on North Michigan Avenue.
“The systems can’t have you,” Hersey said into the microphone, reading mantras while leading the crowd in a group daydreaming exercise on a recent Tuesday night.
The South Side native tackles many of society’s ills — racism, patriarchy, aggressive capitalism and ableism — through an undervalued yet impactful action: rest.
Hersey, the founder of a movement called the Nap Ministry, dubs herself the Nap Bishop and spreads her message to over half a million followers on her Instagram account, @thenapministry.
Her first book, “Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto,” became a New York Times bestseller in 2022, but Hersey has been talking about rest online and through her art for nearly a decade.
Hersey, who has degrees in public health and divinity, originated the “rest as resistance” and “rest as reparations” frameworks after experimenting with rest as an exhausted graduate student in seminary. Once she started napping, she felt happier and her grades improved. But she also felt more connected to her ancestors; her work was informed by the cultural trauma of slavery that she was studying as an archivist. Hersey described the transformation as “life-changing.”
The Nap Ministry began as performance art in 2017, with a small installation where 40 people joined Hersey in a collective nap. Since then, her message has morphed into multiple mediums and forms. Hersey, who now lives in Atlanta, has hosted over 100 collective naps, given lectures and facilitated meditations across the country. She’s even led a rest ritual in the bedroom of Jane Addams, and encourages her followers to dial in at her “Rest Hotline.”
At Semicolon, some of those followers and newcomers came out to see Hersey in discussion with journalist Natalie Moore on Hersey’s latest book, “We Will Rest! The Art of Escape,” released this month, and to learn what it means to take a moment to rest in community.
Moore recalled a time when she was trying to get ahead of chores on a weeknight.
“I was like, ‘If I do this, then I’ll have less to do tomorrow.’ But then I was really tired,” Moore said. “I thought, ‘What would my Nap Bishop say? She would say go lay down.’ Tricia is in my head a lot.”
At the event, Al Kelly, 33, of Rogers Park, said some of those seated in the crowd of mostly Black women woke up in tears — possibly because, for the first time, someone permitted them to rest.
“It was so emotional and allowed me to think creatively about things that I want to work on and achieve,” Kelly said.
Shortly after the program, Juliette Viassy, 33, a program manager who lives in the South Loop and is new to Hersey’s work, said this was her first time meditating after never being able to do it on her own.
Therapist Lyndsei Howze, 33, of Printers Row, who was also seated at the book talk, said she recommends Hersey’s work “to everybody who will listen” — from her clients to her own friends.
“A lot of mental health conditions come from lack of rest,” she said. “They come from exhaustion.”
Before discovering Hersey’s work this spring, Howze said she and her friends sporadically napped together in one friend’s apartment after an exhausting workweek. “It felt so good just to rest in community,” she said.
On Hersey’s book tour, she is leading exercises like this across the country.
“I think we need to collectively do this,” Hersey explained. “We need to learn again how to daydream because we’ve been told not to do it. I don’t think most people even have a daydreaming practice.”
Daydreaming, Hersey said, allows people to imagine a new world.
Hersey tells her followers that yes, you can rest, even when your agenda is packed, even between caregiving, commuting, jobs, bills, emails and other daily demands. And you don’t have to do it alone. There is a community of escape artists, she said of the people who opt out of grind and hustle culture, waiting to embrace you.
The book is part pocket prayer book, part instruction manual, with art and handmade typography by San Francisco-based artist George McCalman inspired by 19th-century abolitionist pamphlets, urging readers to reclaim their divine right to rest.
Hersey directs her readers like an operative with instructions for a classified mission.
“Let grind culture know you are not playing around,” she wrote in her book. “This is not a game or time to shrink. Your thriving depends on the art of escape.”
The reluctance to rest can be rooted in capitalist culture presenting rest as a reward for productivity instead of a physical and mental necessity. Hersey deconstructs this idea of grind culture, which she says is rooted in the combined effects of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism that “look at the body as not human.”
American culture encourages grind culture, Hersey said, but slowing down and building a ritual of rest can offset its toxicity.
The author eschews the ballooning billion-dollar self-care industry that encourages people to “save enough money and time off from work to fly away to an expensive retreat,” she wrote.
Instead, she says rest can happen anywhere you have a place to be comfortable: in nature, on a yoga mat, in the car between shifts, on a cozy couch after work.
Resting isn’t just napping either. She praises long showers, sipping warm tea, playing music, praying or numerous other relaxing activities that slow down the body.
“We’re in a crisis mode of deep sleep deprivation, deep lack of self-worth, (and) mental health,” said Hersey.
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from 2022, in Illinois about 37% of adults aren’t getting the rest they need at night. If ignored, the effects of sleep deprivation can have bigger implications later, Hersey said. In October, she lectured at a sleep conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, where her humanities work was featured alongside research from the world’s top neuroscientists.
Jennifer Mundt, a Northwestern clinician and professor of sleep medicine, psychiatry and behavioral sciences, praises Hersey for bringing the issue of sleep and rest to the public.
In a Tribune op-ed last year, Mundt argued that our culture focuses too heavily on sleep as something that must be earned rather than a vital aspect of health and that linking sleep to productivity is harmful and stigmatizing.
“Linking sleep and productivity is harmful because it overshadows the bevy of other reasons to prioritize sleep as an essential component of health,” Mundt wrote. “It also stigmatizes groups that are affected by sleep disparities and certain chronic sleep disorders.”
In a 30-year longitudinal study released in the spring by the New York University School of Social Work, people who worked long hours and late shifts reported the lowest sleep quality and lowest physical and mental functions, and the highest likelihood of reporting poor health and depression at age 50.
The study also showed that Black men and women with limited education “were more likely than others to shoulder the harmful links between nonstandard work schedules and sleep and health, worsening their probability of maintaining and nurturing their health as they approach middle adulthood.”
The CDC links sleeping fewer than seven hours a day to an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and more.
Although the Nap Ministry movement is new for her followers, Hersey’s written about her family’s practice of prioritizing rest, which informs her work. Her dad was a community organizer, a yardmaster for the Union Pacific Railroad Co. and an assistant pastor. Before long hours of work, he would dedicate hours each day to self-care. Hersey also grew up observing her grandma meditate for 30 minutes daily. Through rest, Hersey said she honors her ancestors who were enslaved and confronts generational trauma.
When “Rest Is Resistance” was released in 2022, Americans were navigating a pandemic and conversations on glaring racial disparities.
“We Will Rest!” comes on the heels of a historic presidential election where Black women fundraised for Vice President Kamala Harris and registered voters in a dizzying three-month campaign. Following Harris’ defeat, many of those women are finding self-care and preservation even more important.
“There are a lot of Black women announcing how exhausted they are,” Moore said. “This could be their entry point to get to know (Hersey’s) work, which is bigger than whatever political wind is blowing right now.”
Hersey said Chicagoans can meet kindred spirits in her environment of rest.
Haji Healing Salon, a wellness center, and the social justice-focused Free Street Theater are sites where Hersey honed her craft and found community.
In the fall, the theater put on “Rest/Reposo,” a performance featuring a community naptime outdoors in McKinley Park and in its Back of the Yards space. Haji is also an apothecary and hosts community healing activities, sound meditations and yoga classes.
“It is in Bronzeville; it’s a beautiful space owned by my friend Aya,” Hersey said, explaining how her community has helped her build the Nap Ministry. “When I first started the Nap Ministry, before I was even understanding what it was, she was like, come do your work here.”
“We Will Rest!” is a collection of poems, drawings and short passages. In contrast to her first book, Hersey said she leaned more into her artistic background; the art process alone took 18 months to complete. After a tough year for many, she considers it medicine for a “sick and exhausted” world.
“It’s its own sacred document,” Hersey said. “It’s something that, if you have it in your library and you have it with you, you may feel more human.”
