Your Brain During Yoga Nidra

What Happens in the Brain During Yoga Nidra?

Yoga Nidra—also known as yogic sleep—is more than just guided relaxation. It’s a deeply restorative practice that takes your brain and body through profound shifts in consciousness and chemistry. But what’s actually happening in your brain when you practice Yoga Nidra?

Let’s break it down.

Brainwave Shifts: The Gateway to Healing

During Yoga Nidra, your brain naturally slows down its activity. You move from the fast-paced beta waves of everyday thinking to the slower, more meditative alpha and theta waves, and sometimes into delta waves, which are typically found in deep, dreamless sleep.

• Alpha waves (8–12 Hz): Light relaxation, reflective state

• Theta waves (4–8 Hz): Deep meditation, creativity, subconscious access

• Delta waves (0.5–4 Hz): Deep rest and regeneration

Even though your body may appear to be sleeping, your mind stays gently aware, allowing for deep rest without losing consciousness. This is a unique quality of Yoga Nidra that sets it apart from ordinary sleep.

Neurochemical Changes: Nature’s Healing Cocktail

Yoga Nidra helps the body release a cascade of calming and healing chemicals:

• ↓ Cortisol – the stress hormone decreases, helping reduce anxiety, inflammation, and tension

• ↑ GABA (Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid) – promotes calmness and mental clarity, often deficient in people with anxiety disorders

• ↑ Serotonin – enhances mood and helps with emotional balance

• ↑ Melatonin – supports your sleep-wake cycle and encourages deeper, more restful sleep

• ↑ Dopamine – provides feelings of pleasure and reward, often released in meditative states

These shifts make Yoga Nidra a powerful tool for stress relief, emotional regulation, sleep improvement, and nervous system repair.

Parasympathetic Activation: Rest & Digest

Yoga Nidra activates the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the "rest and digest" mode. This is the opposite of the stress-based "fight or flight" response. When this system is engaged, your heart rate slows, your breathing deepens, and your body begins to repair itself.

This is primarily achieved through vagus nerve stimulation, which connects the brain to vital organs and regulates relaxation.

In Summary

Yoga Nidra is like a reset button for your nervous system. It slows your brainwaves, reduces stress hormones, boosts mood-balancing neurotransmitters, and shifts you into a deeply healing state.

Whether you’re looking to reduce anxiety, improve sleep, or simply experience more peace in your body, Yoga Nidra offers a powerful and accessible path inward.

The Deep Connection Between Sleep and Mental Health: Why It Matters for Marginalized Communities

Rest Is Resistance: The Crucial Link Between Sleep and Mental Health — And Why Equity Matters

Sleep is one of the most essential pillars of physical and mental health. It regulates mood, supports memory, helps us manage stress, and is crucial for emotional resilience. Yet, in the conversation about mental health, sleep is often overlooked. Even more overlooked is how deeply systemic inequities affect who gets to rest — and who doesn’t.

Across race, gender, and sexuality, the ability to sleep well is not just a personal issue — it’s a public health and social justice concern. Let’s unpack why sleep matters, how inequality shows up in our rest, and how we can take steps to reclaim restorative sleep.

Why Sleep Matters for Mental Health

When we sleep, our brains go into recovery mode. Emotional experiences are processed, stress hormones like cortisol decrease, and the nervous system recalibrates. A lack of sleep can increase irritability, anxiety, depressive symptoms, and even make existing mental health conditions harder to manage.

Chronic sleep deprivation is linked with:

• Increased risk of depression and anxiety

• Heightened emotional reactivity

• Poor concentration and memory

• Impaired judgment and decision-making

• Increased risk of suicidal ideation

Despite how fundamental rest is to our wellbeing, not everyone gets equal access to it.

Racial Disparities in Sleep: The Rest Gap

Black Americans, on average, get significantly less sleep than white Americans. Studies have consistently shown that Black individuals are more likely to experience:

• Short sleep duration (less than 6 hours per night)

• Lower sleep quality

• Greater sleep disturbances

This disparity is not simply due to personal habits — it’s tied to structural racism and systemic stress. Factors like neighborhood noise, over-policing, shift work, environmental injustice, and the cumulative toll of racism (known as weathering) contribute to chronic stress and disrupted sleep.

Dr. Monique Morris coined the term “rest is resistance,” underscoring that for Black communities, rest is not only self-care but a radical act of reclaiming humanity in the face of exploitation and exhaustion.

Queer and Trans People and Sleep Disruption

Queer and trans folks also face unique sleep challenges. Research suggests that LGBTQ+ individuals experience higher rates of insomnia, nightmares, and sleep disturbances all of which are linked to:

• Minority stress and hypervigilance

• Family rejection or unsafe living conditions

• Hormone therapy and its impact on sleep cycles

• Anxiety or trauma related to gender dysphoria and discrimination

For trans individuals, disrupted sleep may also be tied to the mismatch between their gender identity and their sleeping arrangements, or physical discomfort due to binding, tucking, or hormone-related changes.

Like racial disparities in sleep, these challenges are not inherent to queer or trans identity they are byproducts of living in a society that too often marginalizes and stigmatizes them.

Tips to Improve Sleep and Promote Rest

While structural change is essential to closing the sleep equity gap, there are also personal practices that can help improve sleep quality. These practices are not a fix for systemic issues, but they can offer relief and resilience:

1. Create a Sleep Ritual

Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day, even on weekends. A consistent rhythm helps regulate your internal clock.

2. Set the Scene

Make your sleeping environment as restful as possible: low light, comfortable bedding, cool temperature, and minimal noise. Use earplugs, blackout curtains, or white noise if needed.

3. Unplug to Wind Down

Limit screen time at least 30–60 minutes before bed. The blue light from devices can interfere with melatonin, the hormone that helps you fall asleep.

4. Mind the Mind

Try journaling before bed to release racing thoughts. Practices like meditation, yoga nidra, or deep breathing can help soothe your nervous system.

5. Limit Stimulants

Avoid caffeine, nicotine, and heavy meals close to bedtime. Alcohol might make you sleepy, but it often disrupts deeper sleep cycles.

6. Affirm Your Right to Rest

Especially for marginalized folks, internalized pressure to keep going can make rest feel unsafe or unearned. Affirmations like “I deserve to rest” or “My rest is powerful” can help counter this narrative.

Sleep as Self-Liberation

Sleep is not a luxury, it’s a biological and spiritual necessity. For people navigating systems of oppression, reclaiming rest can be part of healing and liberation. It’s a way to say: My wellbeing matters. My body is worthy of care. I do not need to burn out to prove my value.

As we advocate for better mental health for all, we must also fight for conditions that make true rest possible; safe housing, livable wages, inclusive healthcare, and communities free from violence and discrimination.

Until then, we rest where we can. Because rest is more than sleep it is resistance, recovery, and radical self-love.

BLOOM: A QTBIPOC Wellness Journey

Bloom: A QTBIPOC Wellness Journey

There’s something sacred about watching a flower bloom.
It doesn’t rush.
It doesn’t demand attention.
It simply opens—when the conditions are right.

This is the heart of Bloom: A QTBIPOC Wellness Journey a series of workshops that i have been working on in collaboration with JoySpace e.V for queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color who are seeking spaces of softness, healing, and belonging.

In a world where many of us have had to armor up just to survive, Bloom invites us to slow down, exhale, and return to ourselves. It’s a space to reconnect with our bodies, our breath, and each other. A space where we are not only safe—but celebrated.

Why “Bloom”?

Healing is not linear. It’s not a single breakthrough or a destination we finally reach.
It’s a process. A relationship. A rhythm.
Like tending to a garden, healing requires patience, intention, and care.

Bloom centers the slow, beautiful unfolding that happens when we are nurtured by community, by rest, and by practices that honor our full selves.

What You’ll Experience

The Bloom series is designed to support QTBIPOC individuals across emotional, spiritual, and physical dimensions of healing. Through weekly workshops, you’ll be invited to explore:

🌿 Expressive Healing

• Expressive arts therapy using movement, music, and visual art for emotional release

💫 Somatic & Body-Based Practices

• Somatic experiencing for embodied trauma healing

• Breathwork and sound healing to reconnect with your body’s wisdom

🌀 Movement & Embodiment

• Queer-centered yoga with space for reflection and grounded presence and joy

💖 Community & Reflection

• Peer-led sessions by QTBIPOC based in Berlin who specialise in mental health and wellness

• Meditation, mindfulness, and journaling workshops to support ongoing inner work

Each session in the series offers a different way to reconnect with self, with ancestors, with the earth, and with community. There is no pressure to bloom on anyone else’s timeline. You are enough, exactly where you are in your journey.

A Note on Access & Care

I believe wellness is a right not a luxury. Bloom is about creating access to healing practices that are often out of reach for our communities. I’ve designed this series with cultural relevance, financial accessibility, and emotional safety at the center. All event are free to attend, some are online to increase the accessibilty, and those held in person we will do our best to accommodate your needs as best we can.

Whether you’re just beginning your healing journey or deep in your process, you are welcome here.

Join Us

Bloom is an invitation:
To soften.
To root.
To rise.
To heal.
To bloom.

We hope you’ll join us in this community of care.

This event is curated by me, Kemoy(@kemoy.de), in collaboration with JOY Collective e.V, a non-profit dedicated to community wellbeing, and made possible thanks to Lululemon Community Wellbeing grant.

Aligning Your Habits with the Life You Want to Live

Resetting Your Week

It’s easy to get caught in the cycle of surviving the week—checking boxes, rushing through routines, reacting to stress. But what if each week became a soft landing and a fresh beginning? A time to realign with your values, reset your energy, and live more intentionally?

Resetting your week isn’t about perfection—it’s about creating small, meaningful shifts that help you feel more grounded, connected, and on purpose. Physically, mentally, and emotionally, these resets can help bring you back to yourself.

Physical Reset: Move, Nourish, Rest

Your body is your foundation. Taking care of it helps regulate your mood, energy, and focus.

Try:

• Sunday body scan: Gently stretch or do a short movement practice (yoga, walk, or dance). Notice where tension is held.

• Plan simple, nourishing meals: Prep a few ingredients or write down easy meal ideas to reduce decision fatigue during the week.

• Reset your sleep rhythm: Choose a wind-down ritual to improve rest—dim lights, read, stretch, or sip herbal tea.

Consistency over intensity is key. Small actions build trust between you and your body.

Mental Reset: Organize, Reflect, Intend

Clearing mental clutter helps you focus on what really matters. Your week doesn’t need to be packed—it needs to be aligned.

Try:

• Brain dump: Write down everything on your mind. Prioritize 1–3 key intentions.

• Habit tracking: Choose 1–2 supportive habits to track this week (like drinking water, moving, journaling, limiting screen time). Use a calendar, app, or paper tracker—whatever feels doable.

• Weekly reflection: Ask: What worked last week? What drained me? What can I shift?

Tracking habits offers clarity and accountability—it also helps identify patterns that keep you stuck or move you forward.

Emotional Reset: Connect, Release, Ground

Emotions build up during the week. Without space to feel and process them, they can spill out in ways that disconnect you from yourself and others.

Try:

• Name your emotions: Use a check-in journal to write, “Right now I feel…” without judgment.

• Let it out: Cry, laugh, talk it out, move your body—emotions need expression.

• Do one thing that brings you joy or peace. Even 15 minutes of creativity, nature, or solitude can refill your emotional reserves.

You don't have to "fix" your feelings—just make room for them.

Living in Alignment: Visualize the Life You Want

Visualization isn’t wishful thinking—it’s a brain-training tool. Neuroscience shows that when you vividly imagine a scenario (like handling stress calmly or showing up confidently), your brain creates new neural pathways as if you're already doing it.

This is how athletes, performers, and people healing from trauma use visualization to build new habits and identities.

Try this weekly exercise:

• Close your eyes and picture the version of you living in alignment. What are they doing? How do they speak to themselves? How do they spend their time?

• Ask: What’s one small choice I can make this week to live more like that version of me?

• Write it down. Keep it visible.

The more you act like the person you want to become, the more that version of you becomes real.

Journal Prompts for Your Weekly Reset

• What do I want to feel more of this week? Less of?

• What does “living in alignment” mean for me right now?

• What habit or pattern is asking to be let go of? What’s ready to begin?

• What would the “future me” thank me for doing this week?

Final Thoughts

You don’t need a major overhaul to reset your week. You need intention, consistency, and compassion. Aligning your life with your values happens in the small choices: the five-minute pause, the nourishing meal, the kind thought toward yourself, the one new habit you’re brave enough to try.

Let each week be a return to who you truly are—not a to-do list, but a rhythm, a relationship, a reminder.

Leaning Into Discomfort

Afraid to Change? Why Can Lead to Growth and Healing

Change is rarely easy. Even when we know a habit or behavior isn’t serving us—staying up too late, avoiding conflict, procrastinating, overcommitting—letting it go can feel deeply uncomfortable. This is a normal and often overlooked part of healing: the fear of changing.

We might ask ourselves, What if I fail? What if I lose people? What if it gets worse before it gets better? These fears are not signs of weakness—they’re signs of humanity. But they don’t have to hold us back. In fact, discomfort is often a signal that something important is happening.

Why Change Feels Scary

From a psychological perspective, our brains are wired to seek safety and predictability. Even unhealthy patterns can feel “safe” because they’re familiar. When we try to change, our nervous system may interpret it as a threat—even if the change is positive.

Some common fears around change include:

• Fear of losing control

• Fear of the unknown

• Fear of being seen in a new way

• Fear of failure or disappointment

• Fear of feeling emotions that habits helped avoid

These fears can lead to resistance, sabotage, or retreating back to old behaviors. But understanding this fear is key to moving through it.

The Role of Discomfort in Healing

Discomfort isn’t the enemy of growth—it’s the doorway. In therapy and personal development, we often talk about the “window of tolerance.” This is the range where we can feel challenged but not overwhelmed. When we gently stretch that window, we build emotional resilience.

Leaning into discomfort might look like:

• Saying no when you’re used to saying yes

• Feeling your feelings instead of numbing them

• Sitting with silence instead of filling space

• Taking action even when self-doubt is loud

These small acts of courage help rewire your nervous system, building new pathways of safety and possibility.

How to Move Through the Fear of Change

Here are ways to support yourself when the discomfort of change feels overwhelming:

1. Name the Fear
   Say it out loud or write it down: I’m afraid that if I change, I’ll lose control / be rejected / feel vulnerable. Naming the fear reduces its power and invites self-compassion.

2. Take Tiny Steps
   Change doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Micro-changes—like drinking a glass of water in the morning, or pausing before reacting—can build momentum and confidence.

3. Feel It, Don’t Fix It
   Instead of pushing discomfort away, try to stay with it for a few breaths. Ask: What is this feeling trying to teach me? Discomfort often carries insight.

4. Celebrate Effort, Not Outcome
   Whether the change “sticks” right away or not, honor your courage to try. Every attempt counts toward rewiring old patterns.

5. Anchor to Your “Why”
   Remind yourself of the deeper reasons you want to change—freedom, peace, presence, health, connection. Keep these reasons visible to ground you during hard moments.

Affirmations for Courageous Change

• I can feel discomfort and still move forward.

• Growth requires risk, and I am worthy of transformation.

• Even small steps create powerful change.

• I am allowed to outgrow what no longer serves me.

• Fear is part of change, not a stop sign.

Final Thoughts

Change is hard—and that’s okay. The discomfort you feel isn’t a sign to stop. It’s often a sign that you're on the edge of something meaningful. Trust that moving through fear, with gentleness and intention, can lead you closer to the life you want to live.

Healing and growth ask us to risk the unfamiliar for the sake of something deeper: freedom, authenticity, and wholeness.

You don’t have to be fearless. You just have to be willing.