about house of duafe | where rest and ease are liberatory care practices
Led by Taylor Elane, house of duafe (pronounced "doo-ah-fay") is a rest-centered wellness practice supporting both organizations and individuals in reconnecting to ease, safety, and liberatory ways of being. Whether within a workplace, a community organization, or one-on-one, our work centers the nervous system, honors lived experience, and expands the capacity for ease, embodiment, and connection.
We serve:
Individuals seeking empowering rest practices to reclaim their freedom
Organizations, teams, and groups seeking sustainable well-being, community care, and equity-rooted support
Taylor intentionally holds space for all bodies to explore rest practices in accessible and culturally responsive ways. We honor how social systems and social identities impact our ability to rest, soften, and be well. Through modalities such as Yoga Nidra, restorative yoga, meditation, and somatic nervous-system practices, Taylor creates soft, culturally responsive spaces for rest and repair.
Our work is for you if you’re on a journey to unlearning survival mode, repairing burnout patterns, and rebuilding a relationship to rest that feels safe, spacious, and innate. With a well-rested body and regulated nervous system, we build greater capacity to care for ourselves, our communities, and the world we're creating together.
Together, we return to choice. We return to dignity. We return to our freedom.
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house of duafe guides individuals (Freedom Dreamers) and the organizations working with them back to their innate freedom through restorative Yoga Nidra, settling nervous system care, and liberatory reclamation.
Who is a Freedom Dreamer?Someone committed to liberation for themselves, their communities, and the world. Freedom Dreamers believe that inner freedom and collective freedom are inseparable, and that building a more liberated world begins with remembering we were born free.
Freedom Dreamers can include caregivers, advocates, helpers, educators, organizers, and people leaders driven by social justice values.
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Liberatory Rest
Rest as reclamation, resistance, and remembrance of our innate freedom.
Accessibility & Equity
Practices designed with cultural, environmental, and systemic realities in mind.
Embodied Safety
Gentle, trauma-informed approaches that ground, soothe, and regulate.
Ancestral Wisdom
Honoring tradition, lineage, and ancestral technologies of rest and care.
Collective Care
Rest as a contribution to community well-being and lasting transformation.
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Across all settings, our work is guided by three core pillars of liberation-centered rest:
1. Rest as Rememberance | Restorative Yoga Nidra
Our signature modality of deep rest and guided inner restoration. Through sacred stillness and ancestral remembrance, the body unwinds, the heart softens, and the mind slows just enough to reset to ease.2. Embodied Safety | Settling Nervous System Support
Evidence-based tools that expand capacity, safety, and resilience for individuals and communities.
This includes trauma-informed, somatic practices such as breathwork, settling rituals, and everyday tools for shifting out of urgency and into grounded presence.
3. Liberatory Care | Freedom Reclamation
Guided practices to unlearn grind culture, over-functioning, and survival mode. We reclaim our freedom to rest and ease as a birthright through reflection, ritual, and inner rewiring for building sustainable capacity in the work we’re called to do.
Taylor Elane
Rest Practioner
about Taylor Elane | rest practitioner
For Taylor Elane, house of duafe offers a comforting invitation to reclaim rest and ease as a divine right for herself and others.
Duafe (pronounced "doo-ah-fay") means “wooden comb”. An Adinkra symbol from the Akan culture, duafe embodies femininity, patience, prudence, love, and care for Self and others. Growing up, Taylor was ascribed the duafe symbol by her mother in recognition of the caring and prudent qualities Taylor innately embodied.
Decades later, the COVID-19 pandemic and racial reckoning of 2020 required Taylor to take a caring approach toward her nervous system regulation and well-being. Such an approach centered on cultivating rest and ease moment-to-moment, especially while Taylor held equity-based leadership roles. From non-performative yoga, meditation, naps, daydreaming, journaling, and more, Taylor discovered the power of intentional and active rest for Self-care and soothing her nervous system to avoid burnout.
This personal, daily practice helped Taylor connect to an embodied freedom to just be as a Black and Indigenous woman. Craving more knowledge and trauma-informed embodied practices, Taylor became a student of traditional and Non-performative Yoga® with iya, receiving her 200-HR Non-performative Yoga® instructor certification in 2021. Two years later, Taylor received her 50-HR certification in Yoga Nidra, or “sleep yoga”, with Ashe Yoga Collective to dive into the evidence-based restorative benefits of yoga and sleep-like meditation.
Since then, Taylor has personally practiced and guided Non-performative Yoga®, meditation, breathwork, and Yoga Nidra as liberatory care practices to support a new culture of rest and well-being for all. As both a certified equity and inclusion consultant and a certified trauma-informed and team resilience specialist, Taylor embeds culturally responsive, intersectional, and liberatory frameworks within her guided practices to center rest for those most impacted by systems of inequity.
Taylor’s Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and International & Global Studies underpins her approach, providing a foundation for examining societal complexities, applying cultural responsiveness, and fostering equitable environments.