Iman Mohamed
@iman
storyteller, strategist, lover of rest and play
Iman Mohamed
practicerestinleisure.substack.com
To be sensual or sensuous is to be in the presence of your own soul. Wordsworth, careful of the dignity of the senses, wrote that, ‘pleasure is the tribute we owe to our dignity as human beings.’ This is a profoundly spiritual perspective. Your senses link you intimately with the divine within and around you.
John O'Donohue • Anam Cara: 25th Anniversary Edition
Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers... See more
Tony Tulathimutte • The Rejection Plot
Rejection is a lack of happening, there is no plot change you are exactly where you were. “tis better to have loved and lost than to never have been loved at all”.
The real crisis isn’t that we are overwhelmed by other people’s suffering. We are collapsing because we have learned how to witness it without entering it, without letting it rearrange us, without making space for it to mean anything.
Tamara • The Attention Economy Is Making Us Emotionally Poor
“I’ve cried harder watching a movie than I did reading about someone’s loss, because the movie asked more of me. Because it slowed me down.”
In all of this I am complicit.
jouissance
Quick Reference
[French ‘enjoyment’, connoting jouir ‘to come’ in the sexual sense]
1. In psychoanalytic theory, for Lacan, an erotic ecstasy beyond the Freudian ‘pleasure principle’, akin to the ‘death drive’ since entering the symbolic order requires its loss, normalizing and regulating pleasure ( plaisir ). The subsequent lack of... See more
Quick Reference
[French ‘enjoyment’, connoting jouir ‘to come’ in the sexual sense]
1. In psychoanalytic theory, for Lacan, an erotic ecstasy beyond the Freudian ‘pleasure principle’, akin to the ‘death drive’ since entering the symbolic order requires its loss, normalizing and regulating pleasure ( plaisir ). The subsequent lack of... See more
jouissance
Pleasure to the point of pain?
As theologian Walter Brueggeman writes on rest and sabbath—it’s a “pause that transforms.” Rest— of people, of land, of resources— is always linked to flourishing, not scarcity. Practiced in times of plenty and proven in times of crisis.
Paul Venuto • feed updates
When we can begin to tap into the deep vessel of who we truly are, so many things would end about oppression. I believe the powers that be don’t want us rested because they know that if we rest enough, we are going to figure out what is really happening and overturn the entire system. Exhaustion keeps us numb, keeps us zombie-like, and keeps us on... See more
The Founder of the Nap Ministry on the Ways Rest Can Be a Form of Resistance
Resistance in our Rest Is Resistance framework means we rest no matter what the systems say. We reimagine rest for ourselves. We craft spaces of physical, spiritual, and psychological rest to disrupt and push back against white supremacy and capitalism. It is a lifelong deprogramming.
Tricia Hersey • Rest Is Resistance
Transcendence and transgression are twin dimensions of the negative: both involve going above and beyond the already known. Just as they are being extirpated from the erotic, so they are also losing their place in the aesthetic. Contemporary art, Han argues in Saving Beauty (2015), has become the expressive organ of a ‘ society of positivity ’, as... See more
Oliver Balch • Thought-tinkering – the Korean German philosopher Byung-Chul Han | Aeon Essays
Under digital capitalism, the Other vanishes, and each of us becomes a flattening “I am seen so I am” construct. Surfaces (think: Jeff Koons, iPhones) get glossy, stripping away traces of labor, resistance, or nuance—what Han calls the “smooth aesthetic.”
Recently I learned about Lacan’s concept of jouissance, which I’ve come to understand as pleasure that becomes so intense it’s hard to distinguish from pain. I’m fairly certain this describes the high of answering anxiety’s biggest questions: binging on information, hoarding social validation, buying stuff, so much stuff, crafting five-year plans.... See more
Explores Lacan's idea of jouissance as a state where pleasure and pain blur, using it to illustrate how our compulsive behaviors to soothe inner emptiness can be both intensely gratifying and deeply unsettling.