A Colorado Springs community gathered Saturday morning to take a nap

August 20, 2024

About 70 people gathered Saturday morning at a community center in the Hillside neighborhood of Colorado Springs. They greeted one another, sipped tea and found a seat in the airy, white room — then everyone lay down and closed their eyes.

It was a giant community nap.

Some drifted into a light doze. Others simply meditated. The luckiest settled into a deep slumber. But it seemed like everyone left the community nap feeling rested and rejuvenated, Amy Miller told The Washington Post.

“The neighbor next to me fell sound asleep. I could just hear her breathing change,” Miller, 61, laughed. “I just meditated; I never fell completely asleep. It was so restful anyways — and a great way to start a Saturday morning.”

Napping with strangers about an arm’s length away can bring solace. “Just kind of knowing everyone was in the same space and felt really comfortable … it was peaceful and safe and comforting and communal,” she said.

Colorado Springs resident and Pikes Peak Region Poet Laureate Ashley Cornelius organized the community nap after receiving a $7,500 Arts in Society grant, a fund supporting art projects focused on social issues in Colorado. She purchased yoga mats, blankets, tea blends and notebooks for attendees, and she paid facilitators to lead participants through a meditation and sound bath — all to encourage fellow residents in the historically Black neighborhood of Hillside to do one thing: rest — and not feel bad about it. People don’t rest enough, Cornelius said, particularly people of color.

“We’re so inundated with hustle and grind culture — to do more, and be excellent, all the time. I have personally felt so much guilt and shame about taking a break or resting, or taking [paid time off],” Cornelius said.

When people do finally rest, it’s often with the intention of being able to do more work, she said.

“Rest is the destination for this event,” Cornelius said. “Rest is for us. It’s our birthright, it’s our inheritance, and we have to use it for our mental health, for our physical health. Rest is just as important, if not more, than our productivity.”

Many adults do not get enough sleep, with nearly 40 percent of people ages 45-64 getting below the minimum recommended amount of seven hours per night, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some communities of color are sleeping even less: About 46 percent of Black adults do not get enough sleep, and nearly half of Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander adults are clocking less than seven hours, according to the CDC. In the waking hours, many younger Americans are increasingly dissatisfied with the country’s work culture, demanding more work-life balance and time off — and resisting, as Cornelius also calls it, “the grind.”

Colorado Springs residents seemed to resonate with a desire for more rest, Cornelius said. She originally planned for 50 community nappers — interest was high, so she bumped it up to 60, finally maxing out with 70 nappers.

People are just tired.

Miller, a high school teacher in Colorado Springs, saw Cornelius’s event promoted online. She was relaxing during her school district’s summer break, but she immediately knew she had to go.

“I love napping. It sounded right up my alley,” Miller said. “I registered as quickly as I could.”

For others, it wasn’t so easy. Kimberly Gold, the president and CEO of the Colorado Springs Black Chamber of Commerce, said she finds it hard to slow down.

“I, incorrectly, think that rest is reward. I think rest is something you earn,” said Gold, 40. “I am challenging myself to do something different, different than that grind culture, that hustle culture, that ‘go get it’ culture.”

“When I saw ‘community nap,’ I was intrigued. Though I am not a person who rests as much as I should, I definitely do like to sleep,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, man, I hope I don’t snore too loud.’”

So on a warm Saturday morning, she tied up her hair and set out in a loose, flowy outfit.

“I even brought a little face cream that you wear overnight and a lip mask,” she said.

She wasn’t relaxed that morning, though, pointing to a summer that was busier than she expected. “I was feeling like I had too much on my plate.”

Yoga mats lined the room. She sat on a pink one in the front row.

“I did tell my neighbors, to the left and right of me at the event, if I start to snore too loud, give me a nudge,” she said.

As soon as the event began, Gold slipped her eye mask — provided by the event — onto her face.

“I laid on my back, and it was like, ‘Oh, there’s parts of my body I’ve been ignoring. My lower back did not feel that good,’” Gold said.

She stretched and followed the guided meditation, she said, breathing deep to the sound bath — a set of singing bowls and a rainstick that filled the space with soothing ringing and whooshing, siphoning stress away.

“Even though I was in a room full of people, I felt by myself,” Gold said. Soon, her thoughts stilled. “I remember thinking nothing — only thinking of my breath, feeling my chest rise and fall.”

She fell asleep.

About 20 minutes later, Cornelius spoke gently, pulling participants from their snooze.

“I felt like I had a vacation,” Gold said. “I felt so reset.”

Nearby, on a blue mat, 25-year-old Regan Sanders said she felt similarly. “I definitely dozed,” Sanders said. When she awoke, she felt “incredibly relaxed and refreshed. And it just felt like a beautiful day.”

“We haven’t really napped together since kindergarten or pre-K,” Sanders said. “More moments of communal peace are super necessary.”

Cornelius said she hopes to make that happen. Saturday’s community nap was inspired by the work of Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry and self-anointed Nap Bishop, Cornelius said. Hersey’s work promotes that “rest is resistance” — opposition to the notion that people must be productive at all costs. Hersey’s work illuminates how rest comes in many forms, Cornelius added. This can mean napping, she said, but it can also mean sitting in the bathroom longer than you need to, or finding two minutes to step away from work and breathe.

As participants walked out together Saturday, it was close to noon and everyone seemed to be in high spirits, Miller said.

“A young man walked out with me and told me to just have a beautiful day.” It was all positivity and good feelings, she said.

Later that day, Miller ran into someone else who had attended the community nap. The women gushed over the lovely time they had, Miller said, but both had just one question: When are they going to do it again?

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