5. Why Do We Hate Rest?

In this episode, I open with a personal story a moment when my body quite literally forced me to stop. A swollen hand, a holiday hosting disaster waiting to happen, and a prescription I didn’t want to hear: “You need to rest.” But the deeper I sat with it, the more I realized rest wasn’t just about recovery. It was about reckoning with guilt, with conditioning, with history.

We dive into why so many of us feel like rest equals failure, how this belief is rooted in systems designed to keep us exhausted, and what it looks like to reclaim rest as a radical, ancestral, and liberating act.

What we cover in this episode:

• The story of how my body forced me to slow down right before hosting 25 people for Christmas
• Why rest felt like punishment and the guilt that came with pausing
• The historical roots of our resistance to rest, especially for Black folks
• How enslavement, capitalism, and white supremacy taught us to equate stillness with worthlessness
• Why “rest is torture” rang painfully true for me and so many others
• What ancestral wisdom teaches us about sustainable rest and community rejuvenation
• Examples of rest traditions from Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa
• How to reframe sleep and stillness as spiritual practices
• My favorite tool for reclaiming rest in the moment: The Ancestral Pause

Rest isn’t laziness. It’s legacy. If you’ve been feeling guilty for slowing down or unable to sit still without spiraling- know that it’s not just you. There are systems, stories, and deep ancestral memories behind those feelings. But there’s also power in reclaiming rest on your own terms. And you don’t have to wait for burnout to begin.

Let’s start now with breath, with intention, with one unapologetic pause at a time.