#restisresistance

The Saturnian Freeze: Why Your "Laziness" Is Actually Unprocessed Grief

I once sat across from a client who apologized for being lazy. She had not left her bed in four days. But when I read her body like an ancient text — not the DSM, the soma — I saw no lethargy. I saw a funeral in progress.

We call it executive dysfunction. The alchemists called it nigredo: the blackening that precedes all transformation. Your "laziness" is not a character flaw. It is Saturn's freeze, the cosmic insistence that you stop producing so your grief can finally speak. In somatic terms, the body has entered a sacred stillness; the nervous system is not shut down, it is processing what the mind refused to bury properly.

Capitalism taught you that stillness is sin. But the old texts knew better: the witch who cannot rise from her bed is not cursed. She is uninitiated in her own mourning. The freeze is a psychic opening, not a closing. The energy you think you have lost is not gone — it is underground, feeding roots you cannot yet see. I mapped this exact pattern — the freeze, the grief beneath the guilt, and the ritual to thaw it — in Garden of the Mind. Forty pages of citations, somatic protocols, and the clearing ritual your spirit is waiting for. Link in bio.

https://shortlink.uk/1v84p

Today's Self-Preservation Advice 🌿

Let your rest be non-negotiable.

You do not have to earn rest. Your body deserves softness and recovery without guilt. When you slow down, you give your mind and spirit room to reset. Honor the signals your body sends. Resting is not laziness. It is necessary for survival.

Today, we honor the quiet strength behind every task, every gesture, every moment of showing up. Labor Day isn't just a break—it's a reminder:

🛠️ That purpose lives in the everyday

🧠 That creativity is labor, too

💛 That rest is a radical act of self-respect.

To the ones who build, care, write, teach, lead, and love—your work matters. Even when it's unseen. Especially then. So breathe deep. Stretch out. Let your labor be honored. Let your rest be sacred.

Not all progress is visible. Not every step forward is loud, dramatic, or marked by a finished product. Sometimes, the most important work we do happens behind the scenes—where no one claps, no one comments, and no one even knows it’s happening but us.

This is the work you don’t see:

Untangling a thought you’ve been wrestling with for days

Sitting with grief without trying to rush through it

Choosing rest over productivity

Saying no when everything in your nervous system wants to say yes

Being honest with yourself, even when it’s uncomfortable

None of that is easy. But it counts.

We live in a culture that rewards output, visibility, and the appearance of having it all together. But the invisible work—the emotional labor, the boundary-setting, the inner shifts—that’s where resilience grows. That’s where real change starts.

So if this week has felt quiet, hard, slow, or foggy… You might be doing more work than you realize. And that work matters.

This is your reminder that doing your best does not mean doing everything. You are not a machine. You are not a one-person solution to every global injustice, family emergency, inbox overflow, and existential threat.

And you don’t need to be.

Your best might look different every day. It might be sending an email. Watering the plants. Writing a single sentence. Or just getting out of bed. That counts.

We’re building something slow and true here. Whether it’s a poem, a zine, a garden, or a blog post—it matters.

You matter.

Show up in whatever way you can today. That’s enough.

A study resource. Get into this. The website and information is brilliant. So necessary for us all to understand the ways this culture functions and our alignment with it. How we are all harmed by it in different ways. We uphold this. The “A sense of urgency” is one that I go back to often as I examine our “Rest is Resistance” framework.

“Applying the urgency of racial and social justice to our every day lives in ways that perpetuate power imbalance and disregard for our need to breathe and pause and reflect.”

Link is in bio for this extensive website under: “White Supremacy Culture Characteristics.” It will take slow study to deepen into the principles. Take your time. Turning off comments because you haven’t done the homework of actually spending time in the website and reading and journaling and resting in between to be pontificating yet. Go slow. Get off SOCIAL MEDIA platforms typing so much in these threads. We Will Rest!

Art by: @lemaniegrace

(follow Melanie’s page. Truly gifted artist)

Credit to all the authors of this work.

#NewExhibit

@nyucbvc Presents "Rest is Power"

September 7 - October 22, 2023

The 20 Cooper Square Gallery

New York University

20 Cooper Sq. #NYC

Opening Reception:

Thursday, September 7, 2023, 5 - 7:30pm

Reposted from @nyucbvc The Center for Black Visual Culture presents an exhibition that amplifies visual narratives of rest for global Black people. In a selection of artworks that span #photography, #painting, and #newmedia, the curators underscore Black rest as a radical act of resistance. We invite you to our new space at 20 Cooper Square to experience artwork in which Black Rest resists, revives, and replenishes.

More info: cbvc.nyu.edu

Reposted from @cmxnr Let’s talk about rest. 🫂 Earlier this summer, the NYU Center for Black Visual Culture (@nyucbvc) invited an intimate group of organizers, curators, scholars, and artists to engage in the Black Rest Project in Venice during @labiennale. A car-free place of connecting islands and bridges, by design, the cityscape prompted our collective slow down. Together we considered how organizations and ways of being uphold extractive systems where the value of a person is determined by how much they produce. Inspired by Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, by Tricia Hersey of @thenapministry, new frameworks, language, collaborations, and alternative models emerged as equanimous paths forward.

Join us on this ongoing journey, and namely on September 7 in New York for the Center’s fall exhibition: Rest is Power. In a selection of artworks that span photography, painting, and new media, the curators underscore Black rest as a radical act of resistance. Among the 30 astonishing participants, Miami-based artists and #cmxnr collaborators @corneliustulloch and Chris Friday (@_kinyobi_) will exhibit alongside @carriemaeweems and Gordon Parks.

Overwhelming gratitude to our fellow Black Rest Project committee members and to guiding lights Dr. Deborah Willis (@debwillisphoto) and Dr. Joan Morgan (@joanmorgan).

This photograph by Season Four artist Lisa Leone (@thereallisaleone) of Joan in her element in Miami Beach will also be on view at Rest is Power.