Rest in Crisis & Change

Slow Study Group

Program Dates TBA
Wednesdays 4-6pm PT / 7-9pm ET

Registration postponed until early 2025
Recordings will be available to all registrants

An 8-week course to strengthen your capacity for contradictions, conflict, chaos, crisis, and change through liberatory rest and community care

“In ‘hurrying up’ all the time, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises. We rush through into the same patterns we are used to.

Of course, there isn’t a single way to respond to crisis; there is no universally correct way. However the call to slow down works to bring us face to face with the invisible, the hidden, the unremarked, the yet-to-be-resolved.

Sometimes, what is the appropriate thing to do is not the effective thing to do.”

— Báyò Akómoláfé PhD

By the end of this course, you will have the foundational knowledge, frameworks, somatic skills, and values-aligned community of practice necessary to approach your daily life differently: awakened and aware, committed to culture change within and without, discerning and dangerous to the systems that would rather you stay small.

We develop these skills in community to not only survive, but to navigate an increasingly uncertain reality with more creativity, care, and choice.

Learning Outcomes

  • Develop your capacity to hold discomfort, tension, and nuance 

  • Cultivate body language fluency: the ability to attune to your somatic experience, gather insights about your needs, desires, and preferences, and make decisions informed by your truth

  • Nurture friendships rooted in rest-affirming culture where we celebrate and protect each other’s humanity, agency, and most authentic expression  

  • Connect the unrest you feel inside to the sociopolitical unrest in the world in ways that validate your lived experiences 

  • Learn the historical context and science behind our struggles to slow down and what it takes to heal

This is for the ones who…

  • Long to come in right relationship with their mind, body, heart, and soul 

  • Sense the futility of grinding ourselves to dust for “safety”… but struggle to slow down alone

  • Suspect that fear-based reactivity is inadequate for the crises of our lifetime

  • Want to take back their power by learning how to be with crisis and shape change

  • Have been attending Community Rest Sessions and are ready to go deeper in a focused container

  • Want to find their Restie Besties AKA friendships rooted in rest-affirming culture so that we can become our most free selves together 

  • Want to translate their commitment to liberation from the intellect into embodiment and community care

“A relaxed body is the most powerful body that you have.

And partly that’s because a relaxed body can choose what to do.”

— Prentis Hemphill

What you’ll get

  • Eight live 2-hour sessions on Zoom with access to the recordings

  • Frameworks, tools, and practices to support your ongoing rest-unrest journey

  • Lifetime access to the Rest in Crisis & Change Resource Library

  • Group chat to stay in touch with your cohort

  • A Restie Bestie (buddy) for accountability and support during the course

Curriculum

Session 1: Into the Crack

  • Welcome, setting the container, meet your cohort

  • Rewriting Our Rest Stories (RORS) framework for culture change

  • Introduction to the Somatic Check-In practice

  • Breakout group: Meet your Restie Besties

  • “Crossing the Threshold” group ritual and embodiment practice

Session 2: Crisis as a Force of Nature

  • Embodiment practice with Somatic Check-In

  • Unpacking the hidden creative potential of crisis

  • Having vs. belonging to unrest

  • Reacting vs. responding

  • What it takes to feel rested

Session 3: Disturbing the Peace

  • Embodiment practice with Somatic Check-In

  • Situating the struggle to slow down: why rest feels wrong / bad to you

  • History lesson: How Enlightenment-era ideologies influence how we treat our bodyminds

  • Destabilizing Western notions of “peace”

  • Peace, justice, and tension

  • Safety, safeness, and risk in relationships

Session 4: The Cultural Erasure of Rest

  • Embodiment practice with Somatic Check-In

  • Who am I / at rest?

  • Definitions of rest 

  • Basic-rest-and-activity cycle

  • The costs of survival 

  • Rest and informed decision-making

  • Confrontation, conflict, and crisis as healing

Session 5: Conditions for Culture Change

  • Embodiment practice with Somatic Check-In

  • Dialectical materialism as theory of change

  • Limits are liberating: operating within your actual (not imagined) capacity

  • Building capacity for discomfort

  • Being in the company of truth: rest as radical engagement

Session 6: Liberation is a Crisis of Form

  • Embodiment practice with Somatic Check-In

  • Un-demonizing darkness: on the necessity of natural darkness

  • Consent in a non-consensual world

  • The art of escape: dissociation as resource, trance states, dreams, and illegibility as freedom

  • Wielding your inner world-building technologies

Session 7: Rest & Digest

  • Embodiment practice with Somatic Check-In

  • Review of key frameworks, themes, and tools

  • Q&A

  • Review and reflect on learnings from Somatic Check-In

Session 8: Becoming the Crack

  • Somatic Check-In

  • Group commitments

  • “Crossing the Threshold” group ritual and embodiment practice

  • Gratitude, acknowledgement, celebrations

“I want to love more than death can harm.

And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night — we can live. And we will.”

— Ocean Vuong

Pricing

Utilize the green bottle image to identify which tier best suits your financial situation.

If you are a white-bodied person, please consider opting in at the higher end of the sliding scale!

The following payment plans are available: 2 monthly payments or 4 biweekly payments

Tier 1: $599

Tier 2: $799

Tier 3: $999

“I rate this workshop a 10/10. Cassandra is incredibly smart and her work is really well researched, I am very impressed coming from a scientific perspective. There are so many frauds out there but she TRULY is a healer!

I came away with a much greater understanding of what rest really means! I am going to more thoughtfully approach rest as a multifaceted component of my life. I felt so at peace the next day and wanted my friends to watch!”

— Rest in Crisis & Change Workshop Attendee (August 2024)

Unable to enroll this time around? You can experience Rest in Crisis & Change as a 2-hour virtual workshop for free.