Waking Up to the Joys of Life With Kelly Boys
Boys, a mindfulness trainer and coach, on experiencing life at its true clarity and depth
Hi friends,
Do you practice yoga? Late last year, during an acute bout with anxiety, I began a regular yoga practice. I'd practiced here and there since high school, but when I made yoga a real ritual, the effects were profound: relaxed mind, sharpened concentration, greater mind and body awareness. It felt like the ideal combination of the physical exercise I love with a form of meditation and breath work, soothing my tension and anxiety.
As I rolled out my mat each day, usually in the morning, I stepped into a serene space of calm. I discovered an inner stillness and sense of presence. I peeled away layers of tension, finding a more centered, grounded version of myself.
Yoga is healthy exercise, but more so, it has evolved into a journey of self-discovery and healing. The benefits of yoga seeped into my life, creating clearer, joyful days. The anxiety that once clouded my days began to (mostly) melt away, replaced by quiet confidence and inner peace. Yoga became more than physical flexibility — it gave me the tools to flow with grace through whatever emerges. Even five- and 10-minute Peloton yoga sessions before work or in the middle of the day are nice resets I look forward to. Some days, Ally and I wake up and practice together or join nearby yoga classes to decompress and heal with our neighbors in the evening.
My growing love and appreciation for yoga led me to the work of wonderful, world-class instructors, including Kelly Boys, a mindfulness trainer who has worked with the United Nations, companies like Google, and people in prison, among other groups. Kelly, a Cincinnati native who lives in Los Angeles, specializes in the NSDR (non-sleep deep rest) practice of yoga nidra. Here’s more of her bio:
“Kelly has developed a unique blend of mindfulness-based yoga nidra. She specializes in NSDR (non sleep deep rest) and her yoga nidra teaching focuses on deep rest and integrating nondual spiritual wisdom. It is practiced in a lying-down position and promotes relaxation as well as transformative psychological healing. Kelly teaches self-inquiry groups, classes and retreats focused on this practice.
*NSDR was coined by neuroscientist and Stanford professor Dr. Andrew Huberman to describe the yoga nidra practice of being motionless yet aware, which evidence suggests can increase neuroplasticity and heart rate variability, as well as reset dopamine levels.”
Earlier this summer, Kelly and I spoke via phone to discuss her work, book, meditation, blind spots, and more. Our interview has been edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
How did you come into your work of healing?
After a divorce, I really started exploring other ways of thinking. When I was young, I went to Japan for a year, teaching English, and being exposed to a new language, Shintoism, and Buddhism. I finished my degree in intercultural religious studies because I was curious how different cultures express their spirituality.
For years, I was solidly in the yoga world, and when I encountered yoga nidra, I decided this is what I wanted to devote my life to. I still practice the movement of yoga, but I shifted it out of the focus on the physical and to the focus on meditation.
That Japanese experience sounds lovely.
I was young, in my 20s, and I picked up the language. Their aesthetic is in the sense of honoring time, space and objects. Everyone seemed collectively aware of one another. It’s a much different culture from the states.
Can you briefly explain the concept of non-sleep deep rest (NSDR)?
It's a practice where you're ideally lying down or reclining. Perhaps the lights are dim and you're in a setting where you're stimulating the body to know it's time to rest. The idea is that you’re taking 10 to 20 minutes to practice, where you go into a deep state of relaxation. There’s some breathwork technique and body-sensing. The idea is that your mind is still aware, but the body begins to shift into either light stages of sleep or deep stages of relaxation. This kind of simultaneous fact of having an aware mind and a deeply relaxed body brings about a level of rejuvenation and restoration in the nervous system that is hard to access through other means. It’s a really unique state, I’m fascinated by it, and I’ve been practicing it for 17 years.
You can use NSDR whether you want to down-regulate your nervous system into a state of restoration for physical health and mental vigor, or you can use it to fall asleep. You can use it to inquire spiritually and ask, who am I? What is all this? You can also use it to inquire into all of your thinking patterns and core beliefs, plus any images and memories. You can use it for essentially the whole map of meditation.
The entry point for most people is something like, “I want to be able to quickly down regulate my nervous system because I know it will increase my heart rate variability, give me a dopamine increase and help me feel refreshed at the end of a very short time period.”
What kinds of benefits have you noticed?
I’ve used it for nervous system down regulation, so I could very quickly down-regulate my nervous system from moments of trigger or activation. That’s priceless.
Another benefit was when I worked with anxiety and had panic attacks every time I got on a plane. I was really working with anxiety and some PTSD from an abusive marriage. The practice helped me meet, welcome, and understand anxiety as body sensations. I could then develop resources for well-being and calmness that I really have intrinsically. But I needed to uncover and develop it into strong, real resources that I could go to when these moments of panic would arise.
Third, the huge part of my relationship with the practice is that it's helped me to both discover and integrate spiritual realization and insight. I’ve used the practice to understand who I am, who I am not. The practice of yoga is settling the mind into silence.
Most people really are coming into the practice where I came in: with anxiety or with stress in their life or just wanting to sleep better.
What kind of benefits do you feel from your journaling practice?
I journal every morning because it’s a place to cleanse your mind. It’s part of my morning practices. It’s a cleansing. It can sometimes be a single paragraph of writing. That dovetails into my intentions for the day, for the week, and for the larger time period. I find myself motivated to act on those intentions.
Journaling helps me organize my thoughts and my heartfelt desire for my life, which is to share tools to relieve suffering and promote spiritual awakening. I may write about active self care or something I’d like to do for someone or an attitude I want to have for the day. I check in with myself in a rigorous, honest way that’s also kind. It’s a relational practice in a way.
We're all sort of just gravitated to pick up our phone. I’m trying to break up with my phone like most people.
I've been using the lockbox. It's amazing. It really helps.
Will you lock your phone away for an hour?
Several hours, usually. You're able to really take a break from it. You don’t have social media, and there are certain things I don’t have access to at all. If I take a break from my phone for less than three hours, I find the phone is still in my consciousness. But when I hear that phone lock up, I feel so happy inside.
Does it help you get into a flow state with work?
Yes. I also just listen for the flow. I wait for it. It’s a disciplined lack of discipline and it's like an undisciplined discipline where I'm just listening and waiting for it. I've learned to let go when it's not happening. I just wait for it. It’s a natural kind of attention to the process and to what’s unfolding.
What is something powerful you have come to realize?
My heartfelt purpose is my work, and that’s what I’m here to do. Whether it’s successful or not is not my business, but I’m going to do my own thing with it. Another piece: Understanding that with your heartfelt purpose, the outcome does not matter. It’s just about knowing what you’re here to give or do or be. The outcome takes care of itself. Failure isn’t a problem at all; it’s just what happens sometimes. What matters is that I act in alignment with what I know I am. Of course, it won’t be perfect, but it’s about the joy in the process, not the outcome.
You’ve taken a nontraditional “career” route that must have required courage. Did you have fears starting out, or was it mostly relaxing knowing that you have followed your heart and compass?
Well, it is relaxing to know I’m following this path. I feel I’m in tune with my own sense of what’s here for me. And then you're following that to the best of your ability, knowing that it will always be continually updated. That’s relieving, but it hasn’t been easy because I've made really tough decisions. Before, I would be focused on what’s best for everyone, but I realized that what’s best for me is also best for everybody. Those two have really overlapped now, and there's just a trust in my own kind of sense of things. I know I could be wrong at any moment. That's fine too, but I'm just willing to take a risk.
No hard decision I've made on this career path — and I've made some hard ones — has been something that I would regret. I guess that’s taken some form of courage because, at 48, I haven’t had a traditional life. Like, I went for a year to this cabin in the woods. I meditated and had a spiritual awakening when I was in my early 30s.
Wow. What was the cabin experience like?
Life changing. It was on Mayne Island in the southern Gulf Islands chain of British Columbia. It changed everything because, right before, I had this insight that I wasn't who I had held myself to be, among other beliefs. I went on Craigslist, got a job nannying part time so I could be in the cabin meditating, with no indoor plumbing. It’s pretty out there. I was able to go all the way in and through the process of meeting the dissolution of notions of self and then come back through the other side, really rebuilding and understanding from a whole new way.
Suddenly, there was motivation that came from what’s most essential. When I really let go, a beautiful integration and synthesis of things happened. It took a lot of work, and I had a lot of mentors. I learned how to move through the world without the typical defenses and identities I had built. It was a rebuilding process. This is why I think meditation should come as a prescription, but also with a warning label because if you really go all the way with it, you're questioning who you are. Not everyone wants to do that, and not everyone wants to do what I did in the woods. I don’t think everyone should, but it was my path to go that deeply with it.
What prompted you to write The Blind Spot Effect? (Author Tara Brach: “The Blind Spot Effect is a fresh and illuminating take on how to step out of lifelong patterns that keep snagging us.”)
I was once asked, if you were to write a book, what would it be about? I said, “Probably, blind spots, because I’m swimming in my own.” I’m really curious about the unconscious and what we don’t see, and how obvious it is to others. She said, well, just give me a few pages. I wrote a few on it, and then a few more, and then I got a book deal. It ended up being everything I knew until that point that I could articulate on a page.
How do you define blind spots and how can we be aware of them?
A blind spot is something in your field of awareness that you're actually not seeing. We all have something that’s either glaringly obvious to others. When we look at our behaviors, patterns and emotions with curiosity and kindness, we can uncover blind spots, and discover the gift that was hidden along with them.
Uncovering our blind spots and bringing them into the light helps us become more whole and integrated as a person and spiritual being. We all have blind spots. When we work with them, we can see them and understand our own patterns. For example, my blind spot was that I will hold other peoples’ blind spots — I’ll collude with them and act like I don’t see them. I blur it out. It would land me in tough situations. When I began to see that and why I did that — trying to stay safe — and uncovering that, I could welcome a part of me and see the gift in it.
When you work with companies like Google, what do you focus on?
For Google, it was about mindfulness. With the United Nations, we did a program that was basically mindfulness and resilience for humanitarian workers. Right now, I’m working on a project with two former U.S. congressmen on mindfulness and stoicism for politicians. I like that kind of consulting where I help create mindfulness.
I’m doing a project at Yale with John Kao to create a whole yoga, non-sleep deep rest protocol for creativity that will be in a course offered to anyone at Yale. I’m also writing another book.
You’ve also worked with veterans suffering from PTSD and other people in prisons, including teaching yoga nidra in San Quentin State Prison with the Prison Yoga Project. How does your work help inmates heal?
To some people, when they implement these practices, they say it’s a total lifeline. They say it’s the only time they feel like they’re not in prison.
One guy had served in a military special ops team where he was in a team of five or six where they do hostage-rescue missions. They did about 100 missions just fine, and then on the last mission, he lost his whole team. His buddy died in his arms, which was completely traumatic. Then he became a hit man and ended up in prison. He’s now paroled, and he’s doing all kinds of good work with folks in prison. He would listen to an NSDR practice on repeat, which helped him with suicidality and helped him regulate.
Powerful story. What do you like to read?
I love reading. I really like David Whyte, he’s so poetic and deep. I read I Am That Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. It’s a big yellow book of his talks, from an Indian teacher whose words have been transformative for me. I also like reading poetry, the classics, and science fiction. I read a variety of things. Science fiction is really interesting because it expands the boundaries of what’s real and possible. I love magical realism, and Haruki Murakami is my favorite author. The Power of Now also really affected me.
There is an old Zen saying: “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day. Unless you're too busy, then you should sit for an hour.” And many of us may feel like we’re always rushing, or we can’t catch a break, or we’re always swimming against the tide.
There’s this idea of, “I need to meditate.” Some folks make it a chore, or they say they’ve been sitting in meditation for 10 minutes a day for two years and they don’t know what they’re doing, that it doesn’t benefit them. That’s when I get really interested. I say, OK, what’s going on here? Maybe that’s not the right practice for you.
It’s about witnessing your experience, noticing your thoughts and emotions, and the fact that you’re just cultivating the capacity to notice. If that’s all you do for five minutes, you’re building that muscle of self awareness and mindfulness with kindness and curiosity. Even just five minutes of trying to notice your mind means you’re training yourself to meet the moment with more awareness.
For more, check out Kelly’s website and YouTube channel.
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Celebrate your gifts,
Matthew