By Arden Berry | Staff Writer

Tina Baghdasaryan, a local certified yoga instructor, will provide yoga services at a discount to Baylor students as part of her new studio, NeuroMental Wellness.

According to the NeuroMental Wellness Facebook page, the services listed include meditation, yoga for kids, adults and beginners and sound therapy.

Baghdasaryan originally moved to Waco from California last year for the Baylor Ph.D. program in entrepreneurship. Due to medical issues, however, she withdrew after one semester due to physical-level panic attacks.

“I decided that I probably need to follow my path of alternative healing and taking care of myself,” Baghdasaryan said.

But Baghdasaryan wasn’t done with Waco yet.

“I have a willingness and connection in terms of liking it and wanting to be here and connect with the community to offer those wonderful services that I am here to do,” Baghdasaryan said.

Baghdasaryan said she has wanted to focus on yoga for a long time. She’s done different forms of yoga and meditation, but has never been an instructor.

“And as I am planning to do for the future physical place, probably I will open my physical space sometimes at the end of 2026,” Baghdasaryan said. “I said, ‘OK, I guess that’s the time to do it.’”

Baghdasaryan’s yoga pathway began about 15 years ago. She had gone to spas and treatment centers from her youth and loved the experience, so she went to Thailand to study Thai yoga massage therapy.

“Instead of you doing those yoga poses, someone is helping you to stretch your body,” Baghdasaryan said. “It’s a wonderful experience.”

She then worked as a contractor with the U.S. Embassy in Armenia, offering yoga services to diplomats and their families. She later moved to California, where she received a master’s in business administration at California State University in Los Angeles and in technology management at the University of California Santa Barbara. In California, she worked as a massage therapist, learned Kriya Yoga, a meditation technique, for three years. She also learned Bikram Yoga, a style of hot yoga, and eventually discovered sound therapy.

According to a study on Eastern Integrative Medicine and Ancient Sound Healing Treatments for Stress, sound healing involves playing instruments, such as Tibetan singing bowls, and meditating as a treatment for stress.

“One observational study found that participants experiencing Tibetan singing bowl sound meditation had significant reductions in tension, anxiety and depressed mood, and even had significant reduction in physical pain scores,” the study reads.

Baghdasaryan said sound therapy helped end her panic attacks at the physical level.

“I was very disturbed by my panic attacks,” Baghdasaryan said. “The level of fear, I couldn’t understand, even though I had the conversation in my mind, but it was so loud, I couldn’t hear what it was saying. It became a noise, you know. So these whole practices, different modalities of yoga, different types of approach to yoga, finally, and the last path was the music therapy and sound therapy. So it silenced my mind.”

Keiko Sudani, a marriage and family therapist Baghdasaryan met in California, said she recommends yoga to her patients. She said yoga may help college students as well.

“I can imagine being a college student is a very stressful time in life,” Sudani said. “And it is not unusual to develop mental illnesses during college years under prolonged stress. So I think it’s strongly recommended to any students there.”

While Baghdasaryan said the physical yoga space will not open until the end of 2026, Baghdasaryan has information on her Facebook and has started uploading yoga videos to her YouTube channel. She said she hopes to have a website up by February with the full list of services and prices available.

“I’m hoping to do my physical space by the end of next year, but [for] online classes and one-on-one meetings, the sessions are already available with the student discount price,” Baghdasaryan said.

She said students who show their student ID can receive a student discount to see if her services will work for them.

“My lovely experience, my dream of doing my Ph.D. in research that never became, I said, ‘This is not my path,’” Baghdasaryan said. “But anyway, I’m very happy. And I’m very much happy to be in this community, very exciting community to me.”