Black Rest ThoughtPathways

Black Dream Escape is a collaboration between Onika Reigns and Windafire that centers Black and Indigenous rest as a primary component of holistic and mental health. Their project, Black Rest ThoughtPathways, is an online video series dedicated to Black and Indigenous rest practices. Each 30-40-minute session was uploaded to YouTube every Wednesday over the course of June 2020.

The sessions consist of reflections and guided imagery prompts based on Black and Indigenous rest concepts and begin and end with an original lullaby. The videos, which feature Reigns and Windafire as well as invited guests, include meditations, reflections, and music and follow the practices of their in-person community rest services. This series builds upon Black Dream Escape’s “Covid Care Series,” which they launched when the quarantine began.

Explore the entire Black Rest ThoughtPathways series on the Black Dream Escape YouTube channel.

Learn more about Black Dream Escape or book a session with one of their rest doulas.

Black Dream Escape is curated by rest doulas Onika Reigns and Windafire.

Onika Reigns is a musician, songwriter, licensed, historically poor Black, Native Queer therapist, with a Horticulture diploma, concentrating in healing gardens. She identified the need for Black Dream Escape as a labor and prison abolition activist, organizing in support of basic human rights and connecting those rights to quality of sleep. Her clinical social work has focused on how trauma affects marginalized communities, recognizing that therapy models are not culturally relevant and that oppression has left people mentally exhausted. As a rest doula, Onika has educated many communities, organizations, and individuals on the importance of Black and Indigenous rest and sleep.

Windafire is a Caribbean, Black Latine, Queer, Gender-Unified individual who inhabits a Y Chromosome body. As a healing artist with multiple initiations in African based faiths, he uses his art and music for health and healing. He views his role in the movements for social justice as a model and instructor for wellness, boundaries, and commitment to personal joy. Windafire has done an intensive study of medicinal plants and foraging and makes his own salves, lotions, tinctures and sprays which he has made available to activists.