Cultivating a culture of collective rest, joy, and ritual
If there is a universal truth that has risen up from the “new normal” we’ve entered into through the pandemic, it is that the pace we’ve been keeping was already unsustainable. This truth has been exposed in every corner of our lives and simply knowing it doesn’t mean that the paradigm has fully shifted.
Rest is not only a tool of resistance and radical self-love, it is energy work that allows us to realign to a way of being that is in right relationship with our spirit. Rest is absolutely critical to our future selves and the next generations. The way that we move towards this truth is through strategic re-visioning of ourselves, our communities, and our organizations.
This is my work as an organizational consultant and intuitive coach, and to do this work through an ancestral lens is not something everyone is ready or willing to do. I can’t (and won’t) force any person or organization to do this work, but I can hold up a mirror and reflect what is existing within the systems and the people.
When you have the kind of rest that you need, something opens up for you, and the way you show up for community care can evolve in new ways.
Rest as liberatory practice and legacy for the future
The rest narrative is a foreign one in many of our bodies. We have been working, mostly without recognition or reward for so long that we might find it strange to even think about rest. When I ask what their great-grandparents did, many of the folks I am in contact with tell stories of farming, manual labor, and rearing rich people’s children. When something is foreign in our bodies, we have to retrace and find out what happened. We must look at our lineage and figure out what’s really stopping us from embracing rest for ourselves and for others.
Rest is also a thruway and an endpoint. This question of rest is particularly amplified in spaces working on economic justice and immigration. I find that those spaces have been so heavily focused on the front lines of survival and emergency response that it feels exhausting. There is often no relief because we can’t reimagine ourselves from the inside, and we think we can’t stop the struggle. We believe we are going to save everyone in crisis. Front-line organizing is often crippled by structural racism and elitism built inside philanthropic organizations “fighting for the working poor.” For some organizers, rest is a necessary endpoint. I have seen too many without a strong set of boundaries and foundation collapse inside the system. This happens because no one advocated for them to truly rest, and because they couldn’t see themselves clearly in a moment of crisis so closely connected to their familial experience.
Redefining the internal systems and structures in our organizations is also a rest strategy. It means we need to divert, pause, maybe even stop and consider whether the systems, roles, and structures need reimagining. If we believe in healthy workplaces and lives for the people we work with and advocate for, we need to model that internally. If we can’t, we should be aware we are trapped in a collective trauma response tied to colonized ways of being. We can make rest a throughway by giving ourselves permission to reimagine how we relate to others, changing roles, changing positional authority, and other systems.
Here are some rest examples in a system:
Change the management system on your team to be more mission-driven
Change the purpose and role of feedback in conversations, evals, and professional development
Create a sabbatical strategy for your most worked/exhausted staff (that’s not always managers)
Paid parental, sick leave, family leave, and vacation.
Eliminate preferential treatment of staff based on personality. (I’m seeing that more often)
In a couple of recent facilitation sessions, participants asked:
How do we cultivate a joyful alternative to white supremacy culture at work?
I am going to give you the secret formula to start answering this question.
Ready?
Are you sure? Okay.
The answer is to build trust through action.
Here is the secret list for executive and team leaders:
Gather a group of staff on your team of different identities and levels of positional authority.
Make a list of the bias, and equity topics that people of color on your team have presented/ not presented AND that have gone unanswered.
Make a list of these topics and the number of years these topics have gone unanswered.
Believe the staff bringing you the data.
Those in positional authority, ask yourself honestly, what’s stopping you from opening the gate to resolve these questions on your team?
I am not trying to be sarcastic. I’m just deeply committed to multiple forms of rest and joy for the workforce, including my own as an interventionist and healer for teams.
I want the next call and request I get to be from a team of folks thriving in their system and asking me to deepen their relationships through joy and ritual.
May it be so. Àṣẹ. So be it.
My coaching program, Wild Dreams, is taking new shape as a self-paced course for the Fall/Winter 2022 season. If you are looking for the tools to reimagine rest, purpose, and what the future holds for you, I invite you to sign up for the waitlist to learn more as we gear up for the launch of this course.