[Season 3 Premiere] Catnaps! On Pilates and rest with Pilates practitioner Mary Bowen and The Nap Ministry founder Tricia Hersey, M.Div.

I know, that was such a great nap, Peanut. Oh shoot! It's 4pm. Are you late for your internship with Binkie and Snuggles? Welcome back to season 3 of 6 Degrees of Cats, the world's number one and only Cat-themed culture, history and science podcast in which I, Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B, my feline co-executive producers, Binkie, Snuggles and newest crew member, Peanut, navigate the weird, wild world from the past to the present with the help of an exceptional array of guest experts. All aboard!

Happy 2025! Yeah, Rip Van Winkle over here, connecting, well, reconnecting after what, a few months? Oh right. It's been a year. As you may have read on The Captain's Log, our newsletter, a new member has joined the crew, the aforementioned Peanut. She's on an internship rotation with the production team, you know, onboarding one-to-ones professional development. Anyway, welcome Peanut. We've also launched our donation portal after many requests.

Please click on the link in the show notes to keep this ship afloat. We're currently still independent, and because it's just us four now doing all of this, we love it and we want to keep doing it as long as we can. So thanks for both the moral and, if you're able, monetary support. It's also been really fun to go out in the community and meet a lot of our listeners and new friends and fames, so don't be shy, say hi if you see us out in the wild.

And that'll just be me, Captain Kitty, because Binky, Snuggles and Peanut are indoor cats. Beyond these happenings at SS-6 Degrees of Cats, a lot has transpired. I can't tell if it's the digital age, or if things truly are accelerating in a direction that really doesn't feel great, you know what I mean? We just have to take a day by day. I feel like cats have it figured out when it comes to navigating all of this chaos.

I mean, it's not like cats can plan ahead or save up for the winter, or even tell if they're gonna eat the next day. But then, when I gaze upon Binky, snoozing in the top of his tree, and Snuggles, coiled like a cinnamon roll in the corner of her couch, purring away, or a little Peanut, leaping into a jete onto the windowsill. They're just so unbothered, unhurried, and very unapologetic. They just have it figured out when it comes to sleeping, relaxing, and resting.

It kind of inspired me for this episode to look into how they make it so easy. So... In this episode of 6 Degrees of Cats, we're all going to take a giant nap together and then do a bunch of stretching. Just kidding. I've consulted with experts who also agree that we should take a page from the book of cat on this. I've been told that death, taxes, and change are the only constants in this life. Just think back to even five years ago.

Just start naming all the changes you've experienced personally, and then reflect on the technology, systems, and even geopolitical shifts that have happened. Yeah, that's a lot. And it actually is far more than our systems were designed to process. According to a 2022 World Health Organization report, even though the world and its current state is supposed to be designed around my species needs, coming back to my earlier statement. Who seems happier right now?

You or that pigeon on your window A/C unit harassing your cats! Much has been documented on the resiliency of kitties. Despite war, floods, fires, and massacres, here they are! In nearly the same shape and probably with the same attitude as the first kitty to charm a little proto-human girl gathering grains for the fam who is probably reincarnated to me. Cats are survivors. They are just so great at cating. I'm not the only one who noticed this intrinsic wisdom as I'm going to call it.

Take it from one Joseph R Pilates. Ring about! According to Joseph and Clara Pilates, their namesake method involves "gaining the mastery of your mind" over the complete control of your body. Yeah, I think he was inspired by cats. He was not soft. I think it was the beavening that died of him that he could never develop, and he just admired it. That was the most senior Pilates elder still teaching, who studied directly under Joseph Pilates. Born Mary, last name bowin' 94, still working full out.

I'll tell you about how I got to jail. This is 1959 I'm talking about. I was a secretary in the Irving Berlin Corporation office just to make some money while I was in theatre here and there all the time too. I read this article and there's this man standing there with a bare chest and a mane right here, bare legs. He looked like a human lion. And I thought, "Who is this?" And it says this is Joe Pilates Then he talked about what he calls "contrology" and where his studio is.

And then he said this line, "I base my methods on the baby and the cat." Okay, that's what got me to go to him and the man that I'd never had a baby and I'd never had a cat. I was glued into this Pilates cat connection when reading a vulgar article on the history of Pilates featuring fitness historian and now podcast legend Natalia Mehlmen Petrzela. According to her research, Pilates, the man, formed his exercise and movement philosophy I'll call it.

Her assistant as a gymnast touring in England ended abruptly during World War I. He and his German circus troop colleagues were interned at a prison camp on the Isle of Man. Fun fact, Max Katz, the ones with the little Bobtail, originate from that island. Anyway, it's possible that his experiments led to the creation of the transformer machine that's used in Pilates, but that might be apopopocryphal. That is a really hard word to pronounce.

This experimentation apparently transformed his and some of his fellow prisoners' physiques, allegedly even protecting them from the 1918 influenza epidemic. The way I remember him, he was like a cat. He just was. He was not an elaborate sinker. He wanted you to do these things, very simple and very non-indexual and not even intuitive, really like a cat. He was a bee, a solid bee.

You would feel sometimes something crawling up your back when you're lying on a mat and you're reaching forward and getting a stress and he started your tail and his hands would just climb up until he got to your head. It feels good, but you're going way forward. When he gets to the last spot, he gives you a big push and wow, you never knew you could be so tall. He just shows you there's so much more space than you're using.

I think we've already established that cats are fluid and that actually turns out to be one of the most important things about them. What he introduced us to is your whole body moving at once. No matter what move you're making, the whole body is involved in it. The cat is like that. It's totally all itself. It's not parts and pieces. The cat is probably the best example, complete rest and complete action. To relax that much is something a person hopes to get to.

Apparently these little Pilates mascots were practicing right alongside Joe and Clara at the studios. When I got there his cat had died, but for many years he had a cat. I would have loved to have been there when the cat was in the studio. I had 11 cats at one point and nobody's ever said, "Please, I don't want the cats here. I've been teaching for 49 years now." Nobody said that yet.

Mary emphasized the holistic nature of Pilates, how it integrates the mind body connection and helps us reconnect to the intuitive sense of healing that our kidneys just display so naturally. And that we can hopefully embody too. You know cats don't try to learn anything, cats are. They're just beings who they are and their teachers are that good. No, I have not only one cat now, but Amanda you would not believe this.

That after I've had cats we've had such love affairs and they've been so psychic and we've had every kind of thing. There's all themselves and that's the biggest thing we can achieve in this day of history. Most people are living too much from the mind, even thinking that's the best of a human is. All the best of human is all four functions interrelating and the mind has to learn not to think to come all the way into either your heart which is going to be opposite and unconscious.

The mind is only objective, feeling can only be subjective so there's a struggle in everyone depending on which is in the conscious which is in the unconscious. The unconscious that mysterious space we go when our bodies and brains are at total rest. Joe Pilates rightly noticed the ease and instinct, the systemic harmony of cats and motion and at rest. Case in point, Binky our now geriatric (sorry!), co-executive producer here.

This little guy sleeps at least 12 hours a day and for his age he's still as a kitten and tough as a tiger, something we notice when we have to pack him up to go to the vet. Cats can sleep up to 17 hours, not all at once obviously, more in fits and spurts and according to animal psychologist David Sands the expert that the BBC science publication tapped for an article on, well, cats and sleep. These hours are the accumulation of hour-long sleep sessions. Or say it with me. Catnaps.

That is one way that our kiddies conserve and replenish energy that their ancestors in the wild needed to both hunt and avoid being hunted during their most active periods dusk and dawn. There are far sweeter things to witness than a kiddie at rest. Aw, you sleep in heavenly peace, little one, just like a baby, which isn't as cute as you are, but I guess also inspired Pilates. Anyway, yeah they make it look so easy.

And yet for millions if not billions worldwide, sleep is kind of an elusive luxury. What the heck happened? As with cats, when we were born we were equipped with this capacity to sleep. And yet, according to a study by the National Sleep Foundation, nearly 40% of North American adults report having sleep problems. Sleep quality is on a downward trend. And I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that this in of itself constitutes a pandemic of sorts.

There's a well-documented correlation between sleep disorders and serious health conditions such as heart disease and strokes, not to mention the impact on cognition and mental health. People who have gone over 17 hours without sleep, before month thinking and memory tests, worse than someone with a blood alcohol limit at the level of legal impairment.

If you look around at all the problems we haven't solved and the ones that we're making worse, I think catnaps are not only individually restorative, they'll save the world. I'm serious, hear me out. After the break, my next expert will explain just how. My first book, "Rest in Resistance," the first sentence of the book is "Rest saved my life." That was one of the most well-rested humans I'm privileged to have met. My name is Trisha Hersey. I'm an artist, theologian, activist.

I have been an artist my entire life and went back to school in my early 40s to get my master's of divinity degree. I was burnt out from the deep trauma of worker exploitation of capitalism, working two or three jobs and still could barely afford rent. The systems have all been planned that way to keep us in this constant grinding, this mouse on the wheel, this trap of going and going and going.

So, I went to divinity school to study spirituality, to study human rights, to really uncover as an artist what that looked like to tap into these spaces that are kind of liminal. I believe art is a spiritual act, to be an artist, to be in tune with the divine. So I wanted to just process that into like examine the parallels between what it means to be a creative being, a creative human, and how that looks for spirituality.

And so, when I began resting and napping, immediately things started to make sense. My health got better. My body and spirit, I was given these beautiful dreams. I was seeing my grandmother who was an ancestor of my sleep. Just like Joe Pilates, Trisha is also inspired by the intrinsic innate wisdom that kiddies, and yeah babies, shown naturally. The systems have taught us you don't trust anything, not even your own body. When you look at animals and cats and young infants, how much they sleep.

You just have to trust the process and believe that things are going to work out for your good. Here we are. I'm alive, and you're alive, more or less, you know, thinking, feeling, breathing, but not without great effort. And for some of us, a lot of suffering. Everything about this world is built around a body that can never be at rest and always has to be in motion. Yes, we have to work to make income, to pay rent, to survive, and assist them. But this goes deeper than that.

This goes into a full on self hate. I don't feel beautiful enough. I don't feel good enough because I don't have this amount of money. Even though you're a day off, you can't just rest. Coming from an activist's lens, I said someone else is suffering under these systems. Someone else is killing themselves to be able to pay rent and feel like they aren't enough because they haven't stayed up 20 hours to work. You know, they're working for a job, they still can't make it.

Someone else needs to know this. That really led into what happened when I started The Nap Ministry. The Nap Ministry is a global organization that examines rest as a form of resistance. It examines the liberating power of rest as a tool for our liberation and for our justice. While The Nap Ministry is secular, Trisha's work follows a line of wisdom espoused by one bledched Capricorn you may have heard of. Yes, Jesus took naps.

I preached on this scripture that appears in the New Testament where Jesus is at the height of his ministry. People are understanding who he is, things are growing. Because of that, there's a lot of people clamoring for his time. Wherever he goes, there's crowds. There's people wanting him to pray. There's all these things that have happened as he's traversing across the country. And he goes and he's on a boat and he's sleeping.

He's taking the nap on some pillows and this huge storm has happened. And everyone who's on the boat with him is like, "Please, wake up, wake up. We're going to die." And he's just like, "Peace, be still." He's literally napping. They have to wake him up. Many, many cultures see naps as an essential part of the day. From the Spanish siesta to the Vietnamese mid-day nap to inemuri in Japan, it is in fact considered a small dose of nature's medicine for species beyond cats and humans.

Penguins, for example, take 10,000 micro-naps of 10 seconds at a time. When they say, "Go sleep on it." Because I didn't go sleep on it and then wake up and you have these new ideas resting brings us back to our human state. My work is really about bringing us back to our humanist. And it's important to understand why the exquisite orchestrations of our wake-sleep cycles, our systems of rest have been corrupted. I can't say enough, especially in a system now that has co-opped itself here.

Buying things, you need a new yoga mat. The creams for your face, everything has to be bought. We don't need to buy anything. Capitalism itself was created under the notion that human beings are machines. They used my ancestors, enslaved Africans, part of the transatlantic slave trade on plantations as a machine. We weren't born to simply be the cog in a wheel, to produce for an empire. Everyone on earth is a divine dwelling place for liberation, for justice, for love.

So that's really the heart of The Nap Ministry, uncovering who we are and not attaching our worth as beautiful human beings to how much we can do, how much work we can do, how much money we can make. In other words, feeding the machine that's grinding out our humanity at an ever more rapid pace isn't it. My work is simply a veilbuster. It is an illumination. I hope it to be just awareness that people can begin to see themselves outside of what the systems have lied to you about.

What we've internalized about our deep divine work. The work of The Nap Ministry is based on tenets of deep rest, deep community care. We're doing it together. We're holding space for other people to rest in the system. It doesn't see us as even deserving of rest. The thing that really grills the entire thing of the ministry is called the collective rest experience where I just brought people together. We lay down and go to sleep.

There's usually recorded music or live music and then we host this nap talk together. We explain what happened, did anyone dream, did you rest, did you nap? I like to think of napping almost as a kind of a pause button. While brain science researchers are still trying to figure out exactly where we go when we're napping, there have been tons of studies on the reparative impact of even five minutes of shut-eye. The medical industrial complex says it's your individual fault.

That your individual behaviors and choices are the sole determinants of your sleeplessness or your restlessness. I understand that white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchal culture has made us believe that we can do everything we want our own. Raga individualism is a death cult. We will die without each other. We need each other more than we want to admit. Martin Luther King, Jr. Fanny Lou Hamer, some of my mentors for activism all understood that no one is free until we're all free.

That's a direct quote from both of them. Our bodies are a site of liberation. Whatever our bodies are, we can find rats, we can find love, we can find care, we can find each other. And so it doesn't matter what that body looks like, how much it weighs, what color it is, what it can and cannot do. Our bodies simply are a divine dwelling place. So I think the heart of it is that rats will save us. Community care will save us. It is saving us.

Are we so lucky to have living, breathing models of this rest right in our own homes? This is why I came here. I wanted to talk about my cat Thor. We got Thor when he was five weeks old. I come home from school and there is this little cat, the Tuxedo cat. He literally was at the house for two hours and he was just running the house. It was his house. He was not afraid of us.

He was just bowling, walking around, sitting on my bookshelf, sitting on my books, looking at me like this is where I'm at. It's been so beautiful to just observe something from that small five weeks old to what he is now like the personality, the energy, how smart he is, how sweet he is. He like literally does not care. If it's time to sleep, I'm going to sleep. They were saying kittens sleep like 16, 18 hours a day. I read that I was like, wow, 18 hours, 16 hours a year, just napping.

You know, I'm talking to Thor. He sitting down. I thought we were hangin' out but he's sleeping now. I really looked at him as kind of like a mentor, a guide for when it comes to rest, the way they go in and out and just feel the energy and trust themselves, trust their bodies. And as Joe Pilates observed those years ago, cats serve as a reminder of this deep truth. Whatever is yet the deepest part of you, we can keep it coming in as long as we're alive.

Our sensey is what the body is in the senses all the time like cats, you know? And I can only last year did I learn to really sit, not do anything, not even a thought in my head, took me 93 years to get that planted and just be. So, you know, I'm still coming in. Thank you so much for that Mary. Within our bodies, within our communities, we have everything we need. Amen, Bishop Hersey. Congratulations to us, everybody. We solved it. Everyone will now have a full deep and restful sleep, right?

Yeah, no. There is some deep work ahead. And in the next episode, we'll hear more from Mary and Trisha in the dream space. Friends, I lost a lot of sleep over the past years since we went back into production, you know, over the same stuff that keeps you up at night, probably. And I'm really grateful to have this joyful creative platform to celebrate our beloved furry ones. And explore how we can keep making this world more weird, wild, and wonderful.

Speaking of wonderful, I want to thank wonderful experts. Very well in. And Trisha Hersey? While the opinions are my own, the research and work is theirs. If you'd like to learn more about them, please check out our show notes, which also include the references and research that went into this episode. And if you loved it, please do keep sharing our podcast and give us a five star rating wherever you listen and write us a glowing review.

To support the podcast, definitely check out our show notes or head to any of our accounts to click on the appropriate links to donate. For as little as a dollar a month, you can help keep us in ship shape. So we'll see you in our dreams. And remember, everything is connected. One, two, one, two, three, four!

6 Degrees of Cats is produced, written, edited, and hosted by yours truly, Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B. Please subscribe to our mailing list by going to linktr.ee/6degreesofcats or look us up on all those social media platforms. You'll be first in line for the extra audio and more treats if you connect with us there. All episodes are dedicated to the misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient, and the feared, and of course all the cats we've loved and lost.

I actually used to be afraid of cats, because my mother is deeply afraid of cats growing up. If you saw a cat outside, she screamed and ran into the house, so as a child. I got this fear of cats. I'm totally a cat-lady now. I bought him this bed, it's heated, it's like a really expensive little tent that he can go in there and sleep in. So he sleeps in there all day. He has a little chair out there. He sleeps on like a king.