Rest in Crisis & Change
Slow Study Group
An 8-week slow study group to develop the skills, structures, and support systems to practice liberatory rest in your life and relationships
Registration is now closed
If you are interested this course, sign up for the waitlist to be informed on upcoming cohorts!
Liberatory rest empowers you and the people around you to become more free through shared practice of and commitment to rest-affirming culture.
We prioritize these skills in community to not only survive better, but to navigate an increasingly unstable reality with more creativity, care, and choice.
This introductory course will teach you how to rest even when the conditions are far from ideal. Each week we'll gather to practice rest, develop your toolkit of go-to practices for stress, and workshop the challenges and discomfort that can come with slowing down.
You’ll cultivate the somatic awareness, relational skills, values-aligned friendships, and increased capacity for discomfort necessary to show up with agency, vision, and response-ability in times of crisis and change.
“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
The Skills
Listen to your body: how to honor your needs, desires, and resistance in real time
Develop your capacity to digest and shape change
Orient to uncertainty with greater resource, curiosity, and self-trust
Explore the relational, creative, and spiritual realms of rest (it’s more than “self-care”)
Uncover the transformative potential of natural darkness
Practice community care: how to communicate needs, make requests, ask for help, and negotiate care
Learn how to create the conditions for rest in your daily life
Experience rest-affirming culture where we stand for 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 and heal shame
Ground in the historical context and science behind our struggles to slow down
This is for the ones who…
Sense the futility of hustling for “safety”… but struggle to slow down without a support system
Desire meaningful relationships rooted in honesty, non-judgment, and liberating ourselves together
Long to come into right relationship with their mind, body, heart, and soul to come home to themselves
Want to take back their power by learning how to be with, listen to, and shape crisis and change
Have attended Community Rest Sessions and are ready to go deeper in a focused container with others
Want to be in a community of practice with values-aligned people who care about each other
Want to take their commitment to liberation out of the intellect and into the body and their relationships
“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
The Support Systems
Eight live 2-hour sessions on Zoom featuring lecture, experiential exercises, and embodiment practice
Access to replays
Frameworks, tools, and practices to support your liberatory rest healing journey
Lifetime access to the Rest in Crisis & Change Resource Library
Group chat to stay in touch with your cohort
A Restie Bestie (accountability buddy) for support during the course
The Structure
Session 1: Into the Crack
Welcome: introductions, setting the container
Spirit of Unrest practice
Orientation: RORS framework, Somatic Check-In
Breakout group: Meet your Restie Bestie
“Crossing the Threshold” group ritual
Session 2: The Many Faces of Change
Embodiment practice with Somatic Check-In
Unpacking the hidden creative potential of crisis
Unpacking conflict, contradiction, crisis, chaos, confrontation, and contraction
What it actually 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 and the invention of electricity desecrated rest
Destabilizing Western notions of “peace”
Safety, safeness, and navigating risk in relationships
Session 4: The Cultural Erasure of Rest
Embodiment practice with Somatic Check-In
Who am I / at rest?
Definitions of rest and rest-unrest polarity
Basic-rest-and-activity cycle
The costs of survival
Rest informed decision-making
Session 5: Conditions for Rest
Embodiment practice with Somatic Check-In
Creating conditions for rest
Limits are liberating: operating within your actual (not imagined) capacity
Building capacity for discomfort and truth
Session 6: Liberation is a Crisis of Form
Embodiment practice with Somatic Check-In
Befriending natural darkness
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
Review and reflect on Somatic Check-In logs
Q&A
Session 8: Becoming the Crack
Somatic Check-In
Group commitments
Gratitude, acknowledgement, celebrations
“Crossing the Threshold” group ritual
“The collapse is happening.
I think what we have to do right now is ask ourselves and each other how do we become skillful in navigating our walk in the dark?”
— Francis Weller
Sliding Scale Pricing
Please utilize the green bottle model to the right to identify the tier that best suits your financial situation. On the registration form, you will indicate which tier and payment plan you prefer.
3-month payment plans are available
Tier 1: $400
Tier 2: $600
Tier 3: $800
Tier 4: $1,000
“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)