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I.

For this third installment in the Inter-Dimensional Music Extraordinary Laziness series1, we turn to the work of artist, theologian, and Nap Ministry founder Tricia Hersey. Her practice is extraordinary to me in that her clear-eyed aphorisms on the importance of taking it easy remain accessible to a mainline “Live, Laugh, Love” audience2, while simultaneously foregrounding the death cult logic of capitalist economic systems. Or as she puts it in the language3 featured on our program,

Your rest is not a luxury. It is not something that you will add on once you’re burnt out. It really is the center of your life, it has to be the north star. In a culture like this without a pause button, if you aren’t centering rest, and snatching rest and getting rest any way you can, and making space for others to rest, and looking at the ways in which you participate in grind culture, that you participate in white supremacy, that you participate in all these things. This is a full-on looking at yourself in a mirror in a full-on healing modality. It’s not just take a nap and get up and keep being racist. Naps ain’t gonna save you!

As Hersey reminds us throughout her work, this message is first and foremost for Black women – the people who work the hardest, at some of the most important jobs, and for the least compensation. But like clean water and breathable air, we all deserve rest. If only so that we might consider how to use our privilege to make space for others to rest.

Hersey’s voice is a welcome complement to my Zen practice, and her expressly political message of “rest as resistance” helps me to understand and further commit to what I see as the radical foundations of mindfulness practice. She offers me an essential clarification and validation that the appropriation of Zen into exploitative worker management programs like AmaZen is expressly at odds with pretty much everything I’ve learned in 25 years as a slop-style borderline heretical Zen student. All the more helpful in identifying the rise of right wing Buddhabros and their attempts to cloak fascist interpretations of the dharma as “apolitical.” A strategy I’ve become well-acquainted with in my forays into hunting and outing Nazis and other white supremacists in metal.

I first encountered Nap Ministry through my partner Rachel. She returned from a 2021 visit to the Promise, Witness, Remembrance exhibition at Louisville’s Speed Museum with a deep enthusiasm for Hersey’s “radical encouragement to live” …

The exhibition “reflects on the life of Breonna Taylor, her killing in 2020, and the year of protests that followed, in Louisville and around the world.” Nap Ministry’s contributions offered a respite from intense feelings of grief and anger, without dismissing or avoiding those righteous reactions to Taylor’s murder, and the violence against Black people that is a core value of cop culture. It’s important to not look away, but it’s also important to not look constantly.

II.

Buddhism sometimes suffers for its lack of clarification regarding the difference between being “nice,” and being “kind.” To be nice is to be agreeable. Kindness is an expression of compassion. Calling out racism and confronting oppressors is not always a nice thing to do. But it is almost surely an act of kindness.

Hersey’s language that I’ve featured on this episode reminds me of this part of Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen that I return to often:

To practice rest as resistance is not to give up on work, or effort, but to keep work in its place. To not let the white supremacist ideology of grindset/hustle/entrepreneurial culture infect everything in our lives, from art-making to medicine journeying to meditation to napping. These activities can be effective and pleasurable as ends in and of themselves. They are not more worthwhile – and are perhaps less worthwhile – as monetized hobbies, or if we’re recharging our bodies and minds for self-centered reasons, only to return to participating and perpetuating the capitalist machinations that burn us all out.

“It’s not just take a nap and get up and keep being racist. Naps ain’t gonna save you!”

Being lazy, meditating, or medicine journeying won’t save you either. To paraphrase my teacher Linc from earlier in the Extraordinary Laziness series, if these things don’t help us to be more kind in general, we’re not practicing correctly.

Hersey’s popularity with such a broad audience is a rare moment of optimism in these dark times. It’s a message that is universal, and sadly lacking from mainstream progressive language. Regardless of who we vote for we’re all tired, and we all deserve rest, not condescending and deeply uninspiring policies like forgiving up to $20,000 in student loans for Federal Pell Grant recipients who start a new business in a disadvantaged community. Or as David Graeber put it on Extraordinary Laziness II, “It’s not our pleasures that are destroying the world. It’s our puritanism, our feeling that we have to suffer in order to deserve those pleasures. If we want to save the world, we’re going to have to stop working.”

Void Contemplation Tactics

ID Music: Extraordinary Laziness II

a month ago · 3 likes · 6 comments · Daniel Chamberlin

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blessing up and blessing down,
Daniel

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Inter-Dimensional Music 20230203
North America's Gnarliest Mix for centering rest and making space for others to rest

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For this third part in our ongoing series on the virtues of laziness, we'll hear language from artist, theologian, and Nap Ministry founder Tricia Hersey on resisting grind culture, centering rest in our own lives, and making space for others to rest.

Over the course of our practice we'll hear bits and pieces from various long-form ambient and drone compositions. Including Éliane Radigue’s extraordinary Jetsun Mila, one of the visionary artist’s durational works informed by her Buddhist practice. The accompany video flyer includes an excerpt from Efrim Manuel Menuck’s – of GY!BE – contribution to the highly recommended Longform Editions series. We’ll also hear a layered blend of ambient music from Corrupted, the best Japanese sludge metal band that sings primarily in Spanish.

It’s a mostly mellow experience, despite a detour toward the end into Tzompantli’s hypnotic death metal rituals, intended by the artist as "an offering, to the indigenous peoples, nations & tribes of the North, South, East & West of the American continents."Our program begins, and comes to an end, with excerpts from 1982’s top-ranking New Age trance tape, The Trance Tape, by Ojas.

Most of the original compositions sampled here are over 20-minutes long: I’ve been wanting to make a live mix hybridizing my favorite parts for awhile now. I think it’s a real good one!

artist – work
Ojas - The Trance Tape (excerpt)
Efrim Manuel Menuck - Starling Troubles Sparrow
Corrupted - VIII - El Mundo
Corrupted - III - Sangre
Éliane Radigue - Jetsun Mila
Catherine Christer Hennix - Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis
Yoshi Wada - Earth Horns with Electronic Drone (Part 3)
Growing - The Great Comedown
Tzompantli - Eltequi
Ojas - The Trance Tape (excerpt)
😑 Tricia Hersey

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1

Find part one here:

Void Contemplation Tactics

ID Music: Extraordinary Laziness I

a month ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Daniel Chamberlin

and part two here:

Void Contemplation Tactics

ID Music: Extraordinary Laziness II

a month ago · 3 likes · 6 comments · Daniel Chamberlin

2

At least that’s what 527,000 Instagram followers and a six week waiting period for her new Rest as Resistance book on my library app suggests to me. It’s very inspiring and encouraging!

3

As excerpted and remixed from the We Can Do Hard Things podcast, which I don’t know anything about beyond they hosted Tricia Hersey in October 2022.

Void Contemplation Tactics

ID Music: Extraordinary Laziness III