How Rest Can Fuel Personal and Collective Liberation – Interview with Rest Practitioner Taylor Elane
Taylor Elane is a rest practitioner, certified Yoga Nidra guide, and liberation-centered wellness educator. As the founder of House of Duafe, she supports Freedom Dreamers (caregivers, advocates, organizers, educators, and people leaders) and the mission-driven organizations working alongside them, in returning to ease, embodied safety, and their innate freedom. Her work sits at the intersection of peer-reviewed somatic science, ancestral wisdom, and organizational well-being, rooted in the belief that the people doing the most important work in the world deserve to be whole, not just functional.
There is a belief at the heart of everything House of Duafe does: we were born free, and rest is how we remember. At the House of Duafe, Yoga Nidra and nervous system care help Freedom Dreamers reclaim ease and safety – leveraging rest not as a retreat from liberation, but as the foundation that makes liberation and mission-driven work sustainable.
Taylor Elane, Rest Practitioner
What inspired you to create House of Duafe, and how do you integrate rest-centered wellness practices to promote both personal and collective liberation?
Six years ago, while holding an equity and inclusion role, I reached a point of exhaustion I could no longer ignore. In trying to support others' liberation, I had forgotten my own. It was my mother who offered the invitation back: "You have to remember to save you, too."
That was the beginning, from freedom fighting to freedom dreaming. On that path, I received my 200-hour yoga teacher certification and 50-hour Yoga Nidra guide certification, deepening my understanding of the mind-body-breath connection. These practices also led me back to duafe (doo-ah-fay) – an Adinkra symbol of the Akan culture, meaning "wooden comb," embodying care, patience, and love for self and others. I was ascribed this symbol as a child, and rest-centered practice reminded me of its essence: a tending to oneself inseparable from tending to the collective.
House of Duafe was born from that remembering. Rest is not a reward earned after suffering. It is a birthright, where personal restoration is inseparable from collective liberation. The truth is, we were born free. Rest is how we remember.
How does your focus on the peer-reviewed science and ancestral wisdom of Yoga Nidra and nervous system support help caregivers, advocates, and people leaders reclaim their sense of ease and safety?
Yoga Nidra is often called yogic sleep, a guided, sleep-like practice that brings the body to the threshold between awake and deep rest. Peer-reviewed research, including Datta et al. (2021), documents Yoga Nidra’s measurable effects on nervous system restoration, sleep quality, and stress reduction. These effects reach a physiological depth that conventional mindfulness rarely accesses.
But the science is only half the story. Yoga Nidra is ancestrally grounded, rooted in communal rest practices that predate grind culture. For caregivers and people leaders taught that their needs come last, this combination matters. Science gives permission; your body responds measurably (not just emotionally). The ancestral wisdom gives context; you are not discovering something new. You are remembering something that was always yours.
When someone finally exhales in a Yoga Nidra practice, their shoulders dropping and the breath deepening on its own, they are not simply relaxing. They are reclaiming and returning. To themselves. To their freedom. The practice of returning to freedom is what the House of Duafe supports.
What is a "Freedom Dreamer," and how does your approach empower individuals to connect their personal liberation with the liberation of their communities?
A Freedom Dreamer is someone committed to liberation for themselves, their communities, and the world. They’re rooted in a belief that inner freedom and collective freedom are inseparable. Freedom Dreamers include caregivers, advocates, educators, organizers, and people leaders driven by social justice values.
My approach recognizes that these roles require an empathy that ties your well-being to the well-being of others. That relational quality is a portal. When a Freedom Dreamer rests, they show their team that rest is possible and suddenly others have permission to honor their own humanity too. It ripples out. This is liberatory care in action.
Liberatory care goes deeper than self-care. Self-care can still operate within the logic of productivity. Liberatory care does not. When you rest, you model that it is possible. You disrupt the myth that grinding is the only way. In that way, rest is not selfish. It is solidarity.
How do you believe rest and ease play a critical role in achieving social justice and wellness for those working in high-stress environments, like educators and organizers?
Rest and ease are not luxuries for people doing this work. They are necessities. But settling into rest and ease feels hard for a reason, and we have to name that honestly.
The Freedom Dreamers I work with navigate real conditions that keep their bodies in activation: code-switching as constant embodied labor; hypervigilance as a survival strategy; moving through spaces where your race, gender, or body is surveilled requires the body to continuously ask, Is this safe? All of this, in addition to carrying the weight of care for others, means your own body's signals, such as hunger, exhaustion, or the need to rest, get overridden until you can't continue.
The systems we move through are not designed for rest. So your body's activation makes sense. And still, you deserve moments where the body can remember: I am safe, right now, to breathe. To be.
This is why rest and ease are critical. Settling into rest and ease is not about eliminating stress. It is about building capacity by offering your body evidence, in small moments, that grounding is available. That is what liberatory rest practices do.
How do you balance the need for rest with the drive for social change, and why is this balance essential for sustainable activism and leadership?
Balance can imply that rest and social change are opposing forces. At the House of Duafe, we believe they are the same movement. Rest is not a break from liberation work. It is how liberation work sustains itself.
Grind culture, the belief that worth is measured by output and that rest must be earned, is rooted in the same extractive systems social change seeks to dismantle. Tricia Hersey, the founder of the Nap Ministry, tells us this often. And when leaders internalize grind culture, the very system they are fighting begins to operate inside them. What I have seen in this work is that the most committed people are often the most depleted. Not because they lack passion, but because they have never been given permission or a practice to restore. And a depleted nervous system cannot access its best thinking, its deepest empathy, or its most strategic capacity. Van der Kolk's research makes this clear: chronic stress literally impairs the prefrontal cortex. That’s the seat of relational and strategic intelligence that social change requires.
So it’s not a matter of balancing rest with the drive for change. It’s a matter of establishing rest as the ground from which the drive for change is renewed. Sustainable activism and leadership are not built on sacrifice. They are built on the capacity to keep showing up – whole, regulated, and rooted. That is what the House of Duafe is here to cultivate. Not rest, instead of change. Rest as the foundation that makes change and people last.
If you’re ready to explore liberatory rest practices for yourself or your organization, visit the website, or begin with a free guided Yoga Nidra practice on Insight Timer.
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