There's an Off-Switch for Stress. Here's How to Build It | Kelly Boys
5/15/20261 hr 2 min
The simple practice and surprising benefits of yoga nidra, a guided lying-down meditation. Plus: parts work, core beliefs, and the blind spot effect.
This episode originally aired in December 2022.
Kelly Boys is a mindfulness trainer and coach. She has helped design and deliver mindfulness and resilience programs for the UN, Google, and San Quentin State Prison. She is also the author of The Blind Spot Effect: How to Stop Missing What's Right in Front of You.
Today we're going to talk specifically about a type of meditation that Kelly teaches called Yoga Nidra, which has been shown to help you sleep, improve your working memory, and decrease cravings.
In this episode we talk about:
- The difference between Yoga Nidra and mindfulness meditation, and how Kelly seeks to combine them
- The value of being able to both observe and high-five your demons
- Working with our "core beliefs" about ourselves and the world
- The calming power of drawing your attention to the back side of your body throughout the day
- Working with "opposites" as a way to get unstuck in difficult moments
- What Kelly means by the blind spot effect
- Setting intentions
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Harris· Host0:00
[upbeat music] This is the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [upbeat music] Hey, hey. How we doing everybody? Today, we're gonna take another run at something that is simultaneously a contemplative cliche and also a deeply desired psychological outcome: getting out of your head and into your body. So many of us want an escape route from the spinning, looping, fizzing stories in our head, and my guest today has some deeply practical suggestions. Said guest is Kelly Boys. She's a mindfulness trainer and coach. She has helped design and deliver mindfulness and resilience programs at the UN, Google, and the San Quentin State Prison. She's also the author of a book called The Blind Spot Effect. Today, we're gonna talk specifically about a type of meditation that Kelly teaches called yoga nidra, which has been shown to help you sleep, improve your working memory, and decrease cravings. I will let Kelly describe the practice, but just to say from the outset, you don't have to actually do the whole practice in order to benefit from what you're about to hear. Kelly does a great job, as you will hear, of extracting the active ingredients of yoga nidra in ways that you can integrate into your life immediately. I don't love adding stuff to your to-do list, so we won't. Just to say, this episode originally