By Michele Judith Mitchell, Founder — Ubuntu Village USA
May 3, 2026 · Health & Wellness · Ancestral Wisdom & Spiritual Exploration
It is Sunday morning. The light is soft. Somewhere, a kettle is on. Somewhere else, an alarm is going off because someone must answer one more email, finish one more load, and prove worthiness one more time.
I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it before you answer.
What if the most radical thing you do this week is nothing at all?
It’s not the productive kind of nothing, not the I-rested-so-I-could-perform-better-on-Monday kind. I mean the unhurried, unjustified, ungoverned nothing. The kind our grandmothers knew. The kind the sun itself takes when it dips below the horizon and refuses to apologize for the darkness.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the United States. The mainstream conversation will, as it does every year, hand us a season of self-care apps, breathing exercises between meetings, and gentle reminders to “take a break.” Useful, but small. Quietly individual. Quietly insufficient.
At Ubuntu Village, we want to offer a deeper invitation—one our ancestors already wrote into the fabric of the week.
Rest is not the reward you earn after the work is done.
Rest is the inheritance you were born holding.
And reclaiming it — especially as Black, Brown, Indigenous, and diasporic people whose labor was stolen for centuries — is not laziness. It is liberation theology in the body.
The Theft
Before we can speak of the sacredness of rest, we have to name what happened to it.
The transatlantic slave trade did not only steal land, lineage, and language. It stole time itself. It stole the right of an entire people to lie down in the middle of the day. It stole the cycle from sundown to sundown, harvest to fallow, woman-in-blood to woman-in-prayer. The plantation clock replaced the village drum. Productivity replaced presence.
That theft did not end with abolition. It mutated. It became the gospel of the grind. It became the unspoken rule that a Black woman’s worth is measured in how much she carries before she breaks. It became the exhaustion my mother knew. The exhaustion that her mother knew. The exhaustion you may be carrying in your shoulders right now as you read this post.
In the previous post in this series, Ancestral Medicine for Modern Anxiety, we spoke about reclaiming calm. This post is the next breath of that same conversation. You cannot manage anxiety within a system that profits from your depletion. At some point, you have to step out of the system — even if only for a Sunday — and remember what your nervous system is made for.
The Lineages — How Our Ancestors Practiced Rest
Across the African continent and the diaspora, rest was never absence. It was ceremony.
In Yoruba tradition, ọjọ́ ìsinmi—the day of rest—is not a hollow day. It is the day the body returns to itself. The day the orí, the inner head, can be heard. Sunday is not just the calendar’s pause; it is a spiritual technology.
In the villages where the djembe is born, drumming circles after planting and after harvest were not performances for outsiders. Their nervous system is set to a rhythm. They were the body that downshifted from labor into community, from striving into being. The drum says, “You are home now. You can put it down.”
The Black church built an entire week around Sunday. For our grandmothers who scrubbed other women’s floors six days a week, Sunday was not optional. The hat, the dress, the slow procession down the aisle, and the long lunch after—these were not vanity. These were the public, communal insistences that we are still whole. We are still beloved. The world does not get to have Sunday.
In Bantu philosophy, from which the word “Ubuntu” comes, rest is communal because the person is communal. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu—a person is a person through other people. To rest alone, while your village burns out around you, is not rest. To rest together is to weave the net that catches us all.
This is why a single nap will not save you. The nap is a beginning. The culture of rest is the best medicine.
The Theology — Tricia Hersey and the Nap Ministry
If you have not yet sat at the feet of Tricia Hersey and The Nap Ministry, let the present moment be your invitation.
Hersey, a daughter of the Black church and a granddaughter of sharecroppers, has spent the last decade preaching one sermon over and over: rest is resistance. Her book, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, names what we already feel in our bones—that grind culture is the modern descendant of plantation logic and that lying down is a way of saying no to the machine.
She writes from the same well our great-grandmothers drew from. She is not introducing rest to Black people. She is reminding us that we have always known.
Her theology is simple and seismic:
- The body is a site of liberation.
- Sleep is a portal.
- Daydreaming is a form of resistance.
- You do not have to earn rest. You were born deserving it.
This is not self-help. This is ancestral instruction.
The Science — Why Stillness Heals
For those who need the data alongside the drum, the science is now catching up to what the elders knew.
Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score documents what generations of Black and Indigenous communities already lived: trauma is stored in the body, and the body must be the doorway through which healing comes. Talk alone is not enough. The nervous system needs time, breath, rhythm, and safety to release what it has been holding.
Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory describes the vagus nerve as the long silver cord between gut, heart, and face—the nerve that registers safety. When we are constantly in motion, constantly producing, the vagus is locked in fight-or-flight. When we slow down—truly slow down, in the company of people who love us, with food cooking and hands free—the vagus shifts the body into rest-and-digest. Repair begins. Inflammation eases. Sleep deepens. The immune system remembers itself.
In other words, the long Sunday meal at your auntie’s house was not just food. It was vagal toning. It was medicine. It still is.
A Sunday Practice — An Invitation, Not a Prescription
I will not give you a five-step morning routine. That would betray the whole point. Instead, here is a small loosening — a doorway, not a discipline.
This Sunday, try one of these. Just one.
- Refuse one obligation. Without explanation. Without guilt.
- Eat slowly. Let the meal take an hour. Let someone you love eat with you.
- Sit on the floor. No screen. No book. Just the floor and your own breath, for ten minutes.
- Light a candle for someone in your lineage who never got to rest. Tell them out loud: I am resting today, on your behalf and my own.
- Take a nap with the windows open. Let the wind do what it has always done.
- Call no one. Or call only the one person who will let you say nothing.
You will notice, perhaps, a discomfort. A small voice that says what you should be doing. That voice is not yours. That voice is the overseer’s voice, dressed up in a productivity app. You may thank it for its concern. And then you may close your eyes anyway.
And if the discomfort goes deeper than a Sunday can reach—if what surfaces when you finally lie down is grief, panic, memory, or a weight you cannot put down alone—please know that the village extends beyond this page. Therapy for Black Girls and Therapy for Black Men maintain directories of culturally competent clinicians, and The Loveland Foundation offers therapy support for Black women and girls. Rest is the door. Sometimes, a guide is what helps you walk through it.
The Village Is Watching—and Resting With You
Here is the truth Ubuntu has always known: your rest is not only yours.
When you rest, you give the people around you permission to rest. When a mother lies down, her daughter learns that lying down is permitted. When a community elder takes Sunday off, the young workers in the village learn that life is not only labor. Rest, like trauma, is intergenerational. We pass it forward, or we fail to.
This Mental Health Awareness Month, the deepest mental health intervention available to us is not a new app or a new diagnosis. It is the radical, inherited, ancestral act of putting it down.
Put it down today.
Pick it up tomorrow if you must.
But know that the resting itself is the medicine.
I am because we are. And together, when we rest, we heal.
A Note from the Village
This piece is part of an ongoing conversation. If you are walking with anxiety, you may also want to read Ancestral Medicine for Modern Anxiety and Echoes of the Earth: Reclaiming Our Inner Peace from the Unseen. And if you are curious about the body itself as a sacred ecosystem, You Are Not Just a Human Being — You Are an Entire Living City is waiting for you.
Resources & Sources
Books
- Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (Little, Brown Spark, 2022). Publisher page
- Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Penguin, 2014). Author resource page
- Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Central Recovery Press, 2017). Author site
- Toni Morrison, Beloved (Knopf, 1987) — for the literary witness of what was stolen and what is being reclaimed.
Movements & Organizations
- The Nap Ministry — Founded by Tricia Hersey. Workshops, immersive experiences, and writing focused on rest as a form of reparations.
- Mental Health America — Mental Health Awareness Month — National observance background and free screening tools.
- Therapy for Black Girls — Therapist directory and podcast led by Dr. Joy Harden Bradford.
- Therapy for Black Men — Directory of culturally competent clinicians.
- Black Mental Health Alliance — Education, training, advocacy, and a “Find a Therapist” tool.
- The Loveland Foundation — Therapy fund for Black women and girls, founded by Rachel Cargle.
Frameworks
- Polyvagal Institute — Stephen Porges’ work on the nervous system, safety, and connection.
- Mental Health America — Black & African American Mental Health — Statistics, cultural context, and practitioner resources.
Lineage notes
The Yoruba phrase ọjọ́ ìsinmi (day of rest) is drawn from oral tradition and contemporary Yoruba-language scholarship; spelling reflects standard Yoruba diacritics. The reference to djembe circles and post-labor drumming reflects practices documented across Mande-speaking West African communities (Mali, Guinea, Senegal, Burkina Faso). The Bantu philosophy of Ubuntu is most often cited from Southern African (Nguni-language) traditions and is the spiritual root of Ubuntu Village’s name and mission. Where we name a tradition, we name it with humility—these lineages are alive; they are not ours to flatten, and we encourage readers to seek out teachers from within these traditions for deeper study.
Editorial standards
This post was written in alignment with Ubuntu Village’s Ethical Storytelling Policy. No identifiable community members are featured. Lineages are named, contextualized, and credited.
If this writing met you where you are, share it with someone whose shoulders are too high. Tell them the village said it was time to put it down.
Ubuntu — I am because we are. And together, we heal.
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