0:02:01 - Speaker 1 Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to Ever Forward Radio. If you have not yet done so quick, just take two seconds, smash the thumbs up button, the subscribe or follow on whichever podcast platform you're tuning in, listening or watching. Today I'm in studio here on our New York tour, as it continues with Emily Fletcher. We're diving into how to leverage meditation for performance, not the way that you may be heard. We're gonna be talking about what it is, what it is not, and how to use it to stress less and to achieve more. Emily, welcome to the show.

0:02:33 - Speaker 2 I'm so happy that we're here. We're over here now. We're here. We're here we are doing it.

0:02:40 - Speaker 1 And what I've loved most about understanding your approach to meditation is kind of twofold. With everybody that I have on the show, I feel like you embody something really, really well and you have a unique approach to it. But it's not just out of nowhere. You have a reason for why this matters most to you, for you, and then you do my favorite thing you didn't keep it to yourself. You have begun to share it with the world. So for that I just say thank you and welcome.

0:03:05 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I am one of those people. If I find something that works, I start shouting it from the rooftop. So like, why isn't everyone doing this?

0:03:12 - Speaker 1 Right, which is a little foreshadowing there. Well, you, know, to a lot of new projects you have going on. That's exactly right.

0:03:17 - Speaker 2 But it's honest, like when I found meditation, I was like, wait, you guys, I found the key. Like I found the thing that we're all looking for, that thing that you think you're going to get on the other side of money and the person and the company and your perfect body fat and the amazing amount of ketones. Like you think you're going to feel this way and actually it's right inside of us, right Like this, this bliss, this performance, this mental acuity, this physical stamina, like all of these things are available inside of our bodies, but we're all looking for them externally. And so when I found this practice, it cured my insomnia on the first day, I stopped going gray, I didn't get sick for eight and a half years and it improved my performance so dramatically that I was like, truly, why isn't everyone doing this? So I left Broadway. I was on Broadway for 10 years, singing, dancing, acting so arguably like an elite performer at the top of my game.

0:04:08 - Speaker 1 Living your dream. Uh huh, Living your dream, but not feeling like you're living a dream. I understand.

0:04:13 - Speaker 2 Yeah, like I was doing the thing I'd wanted to do since I was in fourth grade and I really thought that once I got on Broadway, it was be sunshine and roses. You know, I was picturing like martinis, with Liza and Sardis, and instead it was like girls crying over their bunions, leading to an official out of a can, and I was like, wait, this is not my dream. And I just thought, okay, well, the next show, the next boyfriend, the next zero in the bank account, the next agent. And I did that for a decade. And then I found this particular style of meditation and it changed my performance so dramatically that I was like whoa.

So I left Broadway, I went to India, I trained for three years to be a teacher and then I started Ziva and since then I've taught over 50,000 people the Ziva technique, which I'm very proud of. So it's mindfulness, meditation and manifesting. That's the Ziva technique, and what I'm known for is giving people the keys to the kingdom, like here's the keys to the car, here's the driving instructions, and now you have this tool to take with you for life. You're not dependent on me, you're not dependent on an app, you're not dependent on your phone, you don't have to go into the belly of the beast to unplug, like who wants to go to their phone to unplug who wants to use an app to meditate, counterproductive right.

0:03:24 - Speaker 1 Yeah, this, this is what we're trying to get away from more often than not nowadays.

0:03:28 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it is the ultimate addiction, and so if people are using and it's not, it's no shade on apps. I'm so glad that they exist. I think that it's been an amazing gateway drug. I think it's really helped the stigma around meditation. And yet to me, using your phone to meditate is like having an AA meeting in a liquor store. It's like why would you do that? It's just too tempting, it's too delicious, it's too sticky in there. So what I teach is Ziva. Yes, we do use an online platform actually made the world's first online meditation training, which I'm also really proud of, amazing and so we use the technology to deliver the course, but after that you don't need technology anymore. You just close your eyes and remember that you're God pretending to be human on a plane, on a bus, at your office, with your kids screaming in the next room, and it has been the single best performance tool of my entire life.

0:04:17 - Speaker 1 Already, you're talking about meditation in a way that is relatively new for me.

But, thanks to people like you and so many other great guests, I feel like I've got a gotten a glimpse of this extra secret sauce layer. But for a lot of people listening and watching when we hear meditation, we think one thing we think it is meant to look like this, it is meant to feel like this, but you're talking about using something that we think is supposed to be a come down method, but you're actually saying leveraging it to go to perform, to drop in.

0:04:49 - Speaker 2 Really that's interesting. I've never thought about it. I mean, of course, like, yes, I come down like a wind down, a relax. That's how most people see meditation, and yet for me it's giving my body deep rest, rest that is five times deeper than sleep. And that's a really important point, because if you could get an hour and a half worth of sleep in 15 minutes without a sleep hangover, oh my God, that would be goals right there, Right, but I mean that mid afternoon you want the coffee, your eyes are going crossed, you're making mistakes, your, your body's having to produce cortisol and adrenaline to sort of give you that third wind.

And then that is the very thing, that's the internal pharmacology that keeps your sleep from being good, that's the thing that decreases your sleep latency, that's the thing that prematurely ages you, because that adrenaline and cortisol are acidic in nature and so it's almost like you're cooking yourself. But and it's a gross analogy but adrenaline and cortisol are acidic and so it creates heat and inflammation in the body. That prematurely ages us. It decreases skin elasticity, it decreases brain elasticity, it decreases your digestive ability, your hormone function, your sex drive. Like, cortisol and adrenaline are not our friends if they're out of balance, right.

0:06:00 - Speaker 1 Necessary, but in check in the appropriate correct the devils in the dose with all of it right.

0:06:05 - Speaker 2 It's not like a mistake that the body makes it, but because we've basically created this whole world that is not in accordance with nature, we're having to produce too much adrenaline and cortisol, which is prematurely basically creating inflammation and aging.

So with Ziva, what we do is that we not only get rid of the adrenaline and cortisol, but we start to flood the brain and body with dopamine and serotonin internally, which is different than like scrolling through Instagram and getting that dopamine hit right.

When you start to produce it internally, the body is like oh, I can make this myself, oh, I can be self sufficient for my fulfillment, I can be self sufficient for my happiness. And so when you start to produce that internal dopamine and serotonin, many things happen. One, the body becomes more alkaline, right, which is like a green juice for your brain. We're all trying to become more alkaline, decreases inflammation, digestion improves, hormone function improves, sex drive increases. And because you're basically getting out of fight or flight, which is, you know, fear protection. And when we're in fight or flight, the amygdala, which is the fear center of the brain, that lights up. That takes a lot of energy in our brain to run the amygdala, oh yeah. So when we get out of that fear, we get out of that fight or flight, we move into what I call stay and play, and then all that energy and blood Instead of rest and digest.

0:07:18 - Speaker 1 Well, yeah, I just think stay and play is more fun. I love that version. Yeah, I love that version.

0:07:22 - Speaker 2 You could fight or flee or you could stay and play. But it's hard to play when that fear center of your brain is putting on alarm bells. Are you a threat? Are you gonna kill me? Is this food killing me? Are my kids gonna kill me? You know, it's just constant distraction and stress. So when we calm down the amygdala, the fear center, then all of that blood, all of that energy that was being used to run the fear center can start to be evenly distributed on the rest of the brain. So if you look at brain scans of regular meditators, both in meditation and just in their resting state, the whole brain is lit up. It's like looking at a brain on LSD or on psilocybin, which, by the way, is lit up, like it's different than alcohol, right, like alcohol is killing neurogenesis, it's decreasing the brain's ability to create new neurons. The opposite happens with meditation.

0:08:11 - Speaker 1 What if we meditated while on psilocybin? So I've done that, I've done that. I'm curious about that.

0:08:18 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and there's two schools of thought there, like one on one hand, to change your state of consciousness from an already altered state is not that beneficial, and I'm a bit of a purist, like I'm like, don't cross streams. Like, if you're gonna meditate, honor that, be in the meditation. And if you're gonna do psilocybin, honor that medicine. Now, what I have done before is I've dosed and then gone into meditation while the body is digesting and while the psilocybin is getting effect.

I was gonna say, since I said that out loud, it'd be kind of hard once you're in that session to really okay, let me meditate, but maybe starting there, while you're digesting and saying to kind of so if you do an intention setting ceremony, like really infuse the medicine with your intention, ingest it and then, while it's taking effect, you're so still, you're starting to tune in to the subtle sensations in the body and then you can actually watch as that visual cortex in the brain starts to light up. You see that even with your eyes closed and then when you go to open your eyes, your sensory perception is so tuned to the subtleties it can really be a beautiful like boosters, so you need less medicine.

0:09:20 - Speaker 1 I know exactly what you're talking about, as you're describing that so eloquently. By the way, that's what I've done many times to kind of do some of my at home yoga take some silhouettes, maybe like a micro dose or like a one gram ish kind of thing, to then drop into a yoga practice and that's exactly as I'm warming up and loosening the body, the mind is allowing me to kind of really tap in, to kind of feel where and how I'm loosening up the body even more.

So I guess I was doing it and wasn't even realizing it, and so you kind of described it. So thank you.

0:09:51 - Speaker 2 Yeah, great, I love it. And my rule of the drugs, by the way, is if the pros outweigh the cons, then have fun. But we really have to know what the pros are and what the cons are, and that changes depending on your stage of life. You know, like for me, alcohol in my 20s didn't feel that disruptive or destructive, but now in my mid 40s, like alcohol costs too much, oh my God, yeah, it costs me too much.

0:10:12 - Speaker 1 Mentally consciousness wise, sleep wise and I said Financially, financially, yeah, I used to sell like when I would.

0:10:19 - Speaker 2 When I was like doing my intro talk for Ziva, I'd be like look, this course pays for itself in booze alone in six months.

0:10:25 - Speaker 1 Cause cocktails are like $14 a pop in New York City. This course is equivalent of two and a half happy hours. There you go, exactly. Yeah, you're good.

0:10:31 - Speaker 2 I actually did do the math on this and the average American between coffee, cigarettes, sleeping pills, anti-anxiety, anti-depressants and therapy, the average American spends $10,800 per year on all of those things that I just mentioned and all of those I would consider to be band-aids, except for therapy. But meditation is actually healing the root cause of the stress. You're not playing whack-a-mole with the symptoms. You're actually going in and not even creating a state change like we do with breath work or mindfulness, but you're creating a trait change. You're actually healing your body on a cellular level. So you're creating this foundational change that stays with you for the rest of your life.

0:11:11 - Speaker 1 Now, how many times do we need to meditate in this kind of manner before we get these benefits you're talking about? Can we have a one and done, or do we need to really train the mind and body to get to this point?

0:11:22 - Speaker 2 Great question. So for a one and done. That's more of like a state change. So if you went to do like a one hour breath work session. You're gonna probably have some visuals you're gonna have. Breath work can be as psychoactive as ayahuasca.

0:11:38 - Speaker 1 I had my first out of body experience during a breath work session.

0:11:41 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and so it's powerful and beautiful and I would consider that like a peak experience and similar to psychedelics.

This style of meditation is the opposite of that. It is not a peak experience. It is like a nap sitting up, you are getting rest that is five times deeper than sleep, but without the sleep hangover. And what you're doing is that you're de-exciting the nervous system. And when you de-excite something, you create order. When you create order in your body, then the lifetime of accumulated stresses that we all have in our cellular memory can start to come up and out. And when that stress starts to come up and out of the body, this is the thing that improves our performance. This is the thing that improves our cognitive function. Our sexual function, our hormonal function, our digestion, like all these things, get better because stress is the thing that's making us stupid, sick and slow. There's a reason why you can't find your keys when they're in your hand when you're trying to leave the house.

It's like if you're stressed and late your brain is in fight or flight Again. That amygdala is taking over. You don't have all hands on deck for the task at hand. So Ziva's not a one and done it is. What I do is I train people to be self-sufficient. Usually, when I teach in person, it's four days, so it's about an hour and a half a day for four days.

Online, which is our most popular training, it's about 15 minutes a day for 15 days, and the idea is that once you graduate, you then have these three ancient technologies of mindfulness, meditation and manifesting to take with you for life. And the idea is that you're doing it every day, twice a day, for life, Like you wouldn't go a day without brushing your teeth. I don't want people to go a day without meditating and people who are addicted to coffee it's not like the coffee you drank two weeks ago was gonna give you energy today. It's like you wanna do it every day, not only for like how good you feel when you're doing it, not only for that high that you get afterwards, but also because of the cumulative benefit every single time you get to the chair. It's not dissimilar to exercise right. It's like every day you're getting stronger. Every day your vascular system is getting more healthy. Every day. Your muscles are getting bigger and if you think about your lifting at the gym, you increase the size of your bicep by 27%.

0:13:41 - Speaker 1 It'd be like Well, not me. I've been trying to increase size of my bicep for like 15 years and this is not the card.

0:13:46 - Speaker 2 Well, I mean, you look great. Well, thank you, come on.

0:13:50 - Speaker 1 It's not my genetics, that's for sure. Strength maybe, but not size.

0:13:55 - Speaker 2 Okay. So you could even imagine, like, if that is challenging, if building mass is challenging, then a 27% increase would be like whoa, you would pay attention to that. Well, meditation can increase the size of your hippocampus by 27%, and the hippocampus is the thing that's in charge of so many different modalities inside of the brain and body. So when people are like, oh, I don't have time to meditate, I'm like Okay, do you have time to be sick, stupid and slow? Do you have time to not manage the machine that is printing every single cell in your body and making every single decision in your life? No, the answer is no. You cannot afford that, and neither can the species. Like. The thing is we are living in a very interesting time, Right, like it is literally make it or break it. Time not for the planet. Plans can be fine. The question is humans, Whether without us yeah, Correct, like will humans be able to live on this planet or not, and for how long? And we're talking in the decades, hundreds of years. It's not like the time is literally now.

0:14:52 - Speaker 1 Look at the timeline we've been given with. We've been given with regenerative agriculture, talking about how much soil and time we have left to really be able to feed everybody.

0:15:02 - Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like less than 50 years, exactly yeah it's a few decades. Soil is depleted, right. So I have a four year old son. He's 54 years old. There's no arable land on planet Earth Like there's more plastic in the ocean than fish by the time he's 25, like this is not, it turns out, christopher Nolan was onto something with Interstellar, you know.

Well, interstellar. And also Chris Nolan with the inception. He did the inception right. I've never wanted to interview someone more about their spiritual practice because, well, we'll get into this in a minute, but the three layers of time is straight out of the Vedas.

0:15:32 - Speaker 1 Well, you know he's a huge psycho knot.

0:15:34 - Speaker 2 Oh, that tracks.

0:15:35 - Speaker 1 All of his movies I've heard come from a drop-in that he's had in a journey which explains inception and tenet and interstellar and all these things Because I've been studying the Vedas for like 16 years and the Vedas are a beautiful ancient body of knowledge V-E-D-A soundscript word.

0:15:51 - Speaker 2 That means knowledge, knowledge of what? Knowledge of nature, like a human interpretation of natural law, and in it there's three different layers of time that correspond with three different layers of consciousness. And I was deep in studying the Vedas when I saw inception. And you know, there's like the car going off the bridge, there's the dude in Japan that lives for 100 years, and then there's them in the different layers and I was like, oh my gosh, chris Nolan, he's looking at the three layers of time. He must be studying the Vedas. But the thing is the Vedas aren't a specific doctrine. Again, it's just a human interpretation of natural law and anyone can tap into natural law. Anyone can see it through breath work, psychedelics, meditation, sometimes studying with ancient masters or studying ancient lineages from masters. But back to the point earlier of just the idea of could you do one and done, or is it a?

practice, and really, with Ziva, the idea is that it is a practice because, like I look forward to my meditation, I can't imagine getting through the day without meditation. I only have a four year old son, and so last night my sleep is great ever since I learned to meditate, but last night I only slept for one hour. There's no way I could be here and be forming complete sentences on one hour.

0:17:02 - Speaker 1 You're here today after getting one hour of sleep last night. That is correct.

0:17:05 - Speaker 2 Wow, and if I had not meditated this morning, if I did not have 16 years now of meditation under my belt, my brain wouldn't be functioning the way that it is. It would be, probably and it might be a little hard to corral me, but it would be harder had I not meditated this morning.

0:17:22 - Speaker 1 When did you know that this approach to meditation was the hack, was the biohack was the thing to lean into when being able to perform at the level that you needed or wanted to was not in the cards, given the circumstances for the day?

0:17:39 - Speaker 2 Yeah, great question. I mean, for me I was living my dream, Like I had arrived and I was miserable, and so the fact that I had insomnia and was going great and was getting sick, even though I was living my dream on Broadway. When I found this thing on the first day of my first class, I slept through the night for the first time in 18 months and I have every night since, and that was 16 years ago, I mean I know last night, but that was because, my son not because I'm insomnia, but because I was already- in my first class and so I was like, wow, this is it.

Because I actually prided myself on being a seeker. I watched the Secret when I was 22. I was listening to Joe Dispenza at 18. I would say I was an early adopter to this sort of like woo-woo, manifesting spirituality stuff. It was like late 90s, early 2000s, and I prided myself on it. I was like, oh, what's the next thing, what's the next book? I was always seeking, seeking, seeking, and then when I found this modality, I was like, oh, I'm not a seeker anymore, I found it and it is right inside of me.

And what was so beautiful is that all the different softwares that I had studied, all the different sort of philosophies that I had studied, were able to integrate once I had the tool to upgrade my hard drive. So meditation is a hardware upgrade. All of the like, religions, self-help books these are software updates and it's very hard to run high-level software on a PC from 1995. And that's what most people are doing. We have no shortage of information, right? And especially in the age of AI, you're like hey, chat GBT, teach me anything about anything. In 15 seconds you will have the answer. We have no shortage of information. What we need to be focusing on is making sure that our machines, our brain machines, have the capability and the stamina and the bandwidth to be able to process and to adapt to this, to the rate of change that we are entering as a species.

0:19:35 - Speaker 1 I love this kind of approach to hardware and software. It's not one that I haven't heard before, or at these terms. I think the audience is probably familiar with this as well. We are the hardware, the body is the hardware, and then our beliefs, our thoughts, our emotions, whatever we're introducing into it, becomes the software that we attempt to have run it right.

Would there ever be a situation where the software is not right for the hardware, or vice versa? Is there ever a situation, I guess? What I'm really trying to ask here is how would we know if we're trying to load the wrong software onto hardware that is not ready to receive it?

0:20:16 - Speaker 2 I don't know that it's wrong or right software, I think it's more bandwidth and processing power. So if we think about that, the hardware, that the computer is the brain and the body, the nervous system, and if that machine is spending a lot of its energy and power dealing with stress, which is expensive, right? So when the body goes into fight or flight, it's preparing for a predatory attack. So it thinks the tiger's coming. So skin will get acidic, so we don't taste very good to the tiger. If we get bitten into, that acidity seeps into our digestion to shut down digestion, because it takes a lot of energy to digest our food. Blood thickens and coagulates. So if we get bitten into we don't bleed out.

So this fight or flight thing is very useful if our demands are predatory attacks. If our demands are not predatory attacks, then the amount of energy that it takes to be in that survival is very expensive. It costs the brain and body a lot, it runs down our power source. And so then from there, if you're trying to then incorporate the entirety of knowledge available on the planet Earth that humans have ever cognized through artificial intelligence that has an IQ of 1,000, where the smartest human has an IQ of 160, like if your machine is already taxed, if it's already tired, then to try to put very high level software on a tired, taxed machine is going to create more stress. And that's what most people are feeling Like. Just take a look around People are in information overload and they're trying should I be keto? Should I not be keto? Should I be vegan? Should I not be vegan? Should I be lifting? Should I not be lifting? Everybody has an opinion.

0:21:51 - Speaker 1 And then the question why things aren't working, because we're trying to do all the damn things.

0:21:54 - Speaker 2 Exactly, and we're not. We're digging a lot of three foot wells, which is one part of it, versus just going deep into one modality, and then the other piece is that we're looking externally for the information versus having the capacity to listen to our own intuition, which is something we haven't even touched on yet. It's like a huge benefit, but it's like people are always trying to quiet their mind when it comes to meditation, and to me, it's not about quieting the mind. People want to quiet their mind because they don't like what their brain is saying.

If you change your biochemistry from adrenaline and cortisol to dopamine and serotonin, if you change it from stress to bliss, you'll actually start to like what your brain is saying. You don't care that much about shutting it up. But then what's so cool is that when you do turn on the volume on that fear voice, then you can start to hear the whispers of intuition, the whispers of inspiration. And this is why every high performer, every elite athlete starts their day with meditation. Tim Ferriss is that 90% of his podcast guests start their day with meditation, 90% of the highest performers in the world. That's not because they have extra time.

0:22:58 - Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

0:22:59 - Speaker 2 Right, they're doing it because they know it improves their performance.

0:23:02 - Speaker 1 Which kind of brings me into a section I wanted to get into with you In studying your approach to meditation. It reminded me of something that I've found through a lot of different modalities and I think the listener can relate to as well when we kind of find the thing that works, that feels good, it doesn't feel like it was an outside thing, it feels like finally, oh you know what. This reminds me of an intuition, an emotion, something from before. It feels like I went more in and to kind of even more. I think I have a quote here from one of your pieces of content about even feeling divinely inspired, like it's so inward that it's almost upward. I've heard you say that our desires are divinely inspired and that nature put them there. Does this mean that what we want most for our life is also what life wants most for us?

0:23:59 - Speaker 2 That's so beautifully said. It makes me want to cry.

0:24:02 - Speaker 1 You can. I've done it before in the show. I'm a big fan of tears.

0:24:06 - Speaker 2 But it's that roomy quote that what you seek is in you. What you seek is also seeking you, and I very much believe that. And where this does require a level of mastery, and why I believe that meditation is actually a precursor and must be a foundation for manifesting because this is what we're talking about.

Right Like your desires, being divinely inspired, like playing the 5D game when it comes to magnetizing the things that you want, and I do believe that what you seek is seeking you. What you want also wants you, and even if it's not true, it's more fun to go through life with that belief. Oh my gosh.

Right Like if you're seeking your partner and your love, it's way more fun to believe that they are also out there looking for you than to be in the frame of like, oh God, there's no good men out there, oh, there's no good partners out there, Nobody wants me. Like. That's not a fun mindset, right To go on a hunt way. So I do believe that. But as far as our desires being divinely inspired, if you were to ask a heroin addict what they want, they're going to say I want more heroin. If you ask a workaholic what they want, they're going to say more work. And so where this requires a level of mastery is knowing the difference between an addictive longing and an intuitive desire. And it is virtually impossible, at least in my experience, to tell the difference between an addictive longing and intuitive desire if you do not have a daily meditation practice. Because meditation is the thing that is flooding your brain and body with that internal bliss chemistry. It is the thing that is giving you access to the bliss, to the fulfillment, in the only place that it resides, which is inside of you. And so if you are proving to your brain and body that, hey, I can tap into the source of fulfillment, I can access this internally in a self-sufficient way. What that gives you is a level of detachment right Of like okay.

So I woke up this morning, I floated myself with dope meat and serotonin, and yet I still want to sleep with that guy. I still want to make a million dollars, I still want that house. Why, Well, I would argue then, that nature is using your desires as a cue as to where she wants to use you to go and deliver your fulfillment. So, pre-meditation, most of us are like bags of need we're running around looking to be fulfilled. Please date me, please hire me, please buy my things so that I can validate myself and feel fulfilled. I did it on Broadway. I'd be on Broadway like please approve of me, please love me, and nothing is harder to watch than someone Literally applaud me.

Yeah, like nothing's harder to watch than someone who is needy to the audience. Right and there's nothing no date is worse than being on a date with someone who is needy, right? I'm like, oh my God, I'm 44 years old and I'm afraid that my eggs are drying up. Can you please impregnate me by next week?

0:26:46 - Speaker 1 Why haven't you called?

0:26:47 - Speaker 2 back. Yeah, there you go.

Detachment is sexy, and so when you start to have this internal access to your own bliss chemistry, you create an imperative ingredient in manifesting, which is detachment. Right, detachment is sexy, neediness is not. And detachment doesn't mean like depressive, giving up. It means opening up your hand so that you can actually receive the thing that nature wants for you. Right, like, your desires are different than my desires, and so where do you think those desires came from? I really believe that if you're tuning in and if you're listening to that still small voice inside, then our desires can become like a GPS of like where nature is queuing you again, where she wants to use you to deliver your fulfillment, not where you need to go to fill yourself up. And again, even if it's not true, even if everything that I'm saying is BS, it is more fun to live your life as if that is the truth.

0:27:44 - Speaker 1 Absolutely and just I can give you in the audience a personal chime in. I wouldn't say that I have a daily yet meditation practice, but meditation has it has been rolling in over the years and for me it really does show up exactly how you're describing right now, as I never thought to describe it as detachment, but I definitely get on board with it. It's this, just out of nowhere, absolutely correct timing of pausing and separating from the desired outcome, and it has really given me so much more than I ever thought that I needed or wanted or even thought was capable of, because I had intention going into this task, this project, this thing, whatever, but through meditation and just allowing that pause, that detachment moment to happen, I have more often than not realized that I'm already there.

The intention and the hard work and the realistic goal and putting myself in pursuit has magically aligned, intersected at the right moment where surrender needs to happen.

0:28:54 - Speaker 2 That's the game, right Like that's the game clear intention and absolute surrender, and that requires a level of mastery, that requires a level of trust in yourself and in nature, and I love the use of word magic.

0:29:05 - Speaker 1 So I have this.

0:29:07 - Speaker 2 I have a great relationship with magic and I just started a six month mastermind called evidence of magic and we are doing some wild stuff in this container Like I know what you're moving on to and the kind of the next phase of your world is really, really a big jump, really a big jump.

0:29:26 - Speaker 1 So what is what are you most excited about now going into this next phase? What does that look like?

0:29:31 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so I'll sort of like allude to it. So in this, in this Keep us wanting a little bit more.

Yeah, like it's like there's 26 folks in this particular six month mastermind and it's not the people that you would think would be coming to do like meditation or manifesting or embodiment work. We've got a guy who just sold his defense contracting company as a member of the CIA, two people from the Navy, a mother of 10, none of them have ever been on meditation retreats. They've never done medicine work and they've never done which is the thing I'm getting into now Sacred sexuality.

0:30:02 - Speaker 1 Yeah.

0:30:02 - Speaker 2 So what I've been teaching for now 13 years is mindfulness, meditation and manifesting, and I managed to build a whole career on rebranding meditation as a productivity tool, and I am, I stand by it. I would do it again if we were living in the age that we were 13 years ago. But we're not Like we're not in this hyper driven, hyper achievement, hyper accomplishment oriented sort of like hyper masculine achieve world anymore, Like we're moving into one of alignment, we're moving into one of trust and detachment and like celebrating what we've already accomplished and like when is it enough? And it's, it's more. It's more feminine. It's not female, but it is more feminine in nature.

0:30:42 - Speaker 1 I guess recently shout out Anna call it moving into the soft girl era. Everyone's having a soft girl summer now Maybe maybe you know soft human era. Yeah, I love that, so like the more feminine energy.

0:30:53 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and like last year. So Ziva's now been a company for 13 years, and last year we had our biggest year ever. I taught more people to meditate, we've grossed more, and I took a two month sabbatical. Now I am the. I'm the only teacher at Ziva. I am the CEO of the company, I am the one creating the content, and so it's not out.

0:31:09 - Speaker 1 You it doesn't.

0:31:10 - Speaker 2 Yeah the machine doesn't go without me. And so the fact I mean like that felt like magic that I was able to sit back and have softness and have listening and and tune in to how does nature want to use me. And then, not only did it not hurt the company, we had our biggest year ever, which suggests to me that we are entering a new era, and and it is one of alignment and then also that was due a lot to this evidence of magic.

So what we're using, what I'm sharing with folks that I'm so lit up about, is basically an advanced manifesting tool which is, instead of just feeling into your dream Cause we know by now like thoughts become things feeling is the secret, joe Dispenza. Like thank you, you know, to the folks who did the secret, thank you to Abraham Hicks. Like, bravo, we get it. It has become part of the zeitgeist, I imagine, for your listeners. Like they get that. Like if I put my intention on something and I can feel it as if it's happened, I'm going to start to magnetize that thing to me, right?

Joe Dispenza says that, um, you know, a clear intention with an elevated emotion is the way to start to expedite manifestation. And that is all true. And I am a masterful manifester and I've been teaching manifesting for many, many years, tens of thousands of people and what I realized is that I was manifesting from the neck up and it's, it works. But if you want to supercharge your manifestations, there's a way for you to get your head, your heart and your hoo-ha all in alignment with each other. And, yes, everybody has a hoo-ha, it's all genders, okay, it's all genders. And it's both your anatomy and the energy center around it, right and when, when that and that's like a jiffy Generator and also an actual magnet for your dreams. And if you can get your hoo-ha, your heart and your head into coherence with each other and then start to build the sensations that make you feel good, so dopamine, serotonin, if you start to add oxytocin, the love hormone, you start to add norefranephrin and adrenaline, then we start to really kick up that internal biochemistry.

0:33:08 - Speaker 1 That's a whole different ride.

0:33:09 - Speaker 2 Yeah, whole different ride and and you're increasing just the actual like amplitude inside of your body. So what I'm calling this is pleasure prayer, where you're basically using your pleasure to pray, and that might be a little maybe I don't know triggering or blasphemous for people who have been conditioned to think that their pleasure is wrong or bad or a sin, or conditioned to think that it's shameful, and so I like so much empathy for that and so much love and compassion for that. But what I would, my argument to that would be well, hey, god gave you that, like God literally installed we don't have to do anything, it just gets activated.

0:33:49 - Speaker 1 Yeah, given the right circumstances, yeah.

0:33:51 - Speaker 2 Like that feeling is inside of you, and if God is everywhere and inside of everything, that includes inside of your desire, that includes inside of your pleasure, and if you can get clear on what your prayer is and then start to build this pleasure through your body, then at the moment of peak pleasure it's like you're offering and dedicating that pleasure to the thing that you're looking to magnetize and it's like you're setting up a beacon to your dreams. And again it's like that, that, who, how energy that do I call creation energy. It becomes both the generator and the magnet for the dreams. I love that.

0:34:22 - Speaker 1 I love that If you could kind of briefly, beyond what you just described, just elaborate on my words here, kind of this next level of energy source, because I am there, I've been there and I've kind of leaned into, first and foremost, letting go of a lot of shame around, even acknowledging that I want to talk about that. I want to think about growing up Southern Baptist in a very conservative home.

Yeah, so you know, you know to lean into this feeling of sensuality, of sexual energy. Not even I'm not talking about applying it in sexual intercourse or in what we believe common sexuality to be described as, but there's a really unique power, a really unique source of creativity of energy that has shown up for me in very interesting ways. That has led to some incredible creative flows and performance, all the things we've been talking about. So can you kind of expand on that a little bit for us?

0:35:33 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and thank you for differentiating sexual energy from sexualizing something. Right Like you can be in your sexual energy, you can harness it, you can utilize it, you can direct it, without ever hitting on anyone, without ever wanting to sleep with someone.

Like. They are different things. Just like you know the heat from an oven like can bake a cake, that heat could also burn your skin. It's just heat. It's like how are you using? You could use the heat to curl your hair. You could use the heat to warm your home. There's a lot of different uses for heat. It is not inherently good or bad, it is not inherently creative or destructive, it just is. And the same is true of sexual energy. You can harness it anywhere you want. You really can direct it in ways that aren't even sexual, and so I call it creation energy, because it is the most creative force on the planet and it could create a baby, the most divine, holy, god-like thing we can do.

Create a baby with this creation energy. You could create a company with it. You could create your own physique. You could create an album. I look at Adele and Taylor Swift right, they went through breakups so ostensibly they had sexual energy that was being utilized and harnessed into a relationship they break up.

They now have that sexual energy. They direct it into the creativity of the album and I imagine everyone listening has had a moment where you went through a breakup. The sexual energy that was being invested into a partner now wants to go somewhere and you could either drink yourself into a puddle you could just use the energy to destroy or you can utilize that sexual energy, that creation energy, and harness it and start to hitch it to your dreams. And that's really what I'm doing. That's what I'm teaching people how to do, and I have visions of like stadiums of people 80,000 people climaxing at the same time, holding a shared dream for the species, people at sacred sites all around the world getting into coherence with themselves and each other and holding a vision for the planet Like this, because I'm like y'all, it's go time. Like I mean, new York City is engulfed in smoke. Right now, our planet is literally on fire and if you're like this is crazy, you can't have people harnessing their sexual energy in a stadium. I'm like what's crazy is letting the species go extinct because we're not utilizing the most creative force that nature gave us because of some shame and programming from some dead dudes. What Not on my watch. That is not the planet or the relationship with sexuality that I want to hand to my son.

0:37:57 - Speaker 1 Yes, that's, that's got to be where. You know, we got to have you back. That's I want to. I want to go there, I want to go there, but we got to be mindful of your time here today. I do have one final question to bring back to the theme of the show. Everything you're talking about is absolutely a unique way in which we can move forward in life. To help us keep moving ever forward, I say when you hear those words, I always ask my guests what is living a life ever forward mean to you?

0:38:24 - Speaker 2 To me it comes back to the Vedas and according to the Vedas, there's no such thing as good or bad, there is no such thing as right or wrong. There is simply creation, maintenance and destruction. And if you lead with creation, if you are moving ever forward, ever expanding, ever creating, the maintenance is naturally in second place and destruction is naturally in third. And life flows pretty elegantly because we are supporting nature in her one theme. But if we start to lead with maintenance, then creation goes to the back burner, that ever forward energy goes to the back burner, and then destruction is nipping at our heels. And then we all know what it looks like when destruction comes through.

It's not bad, but it's not elegant. Destruction is making way for creation. So, truly like, if you want to be in flow state, you want to be at your peak performance, you want to stay in that ever forward mindset, we have to prioritize leading with creation, what's new, what wants to be birthed through me? How can I evolve, how can I up level and not even to get anywhere? But because it feels good to evolve, it feels good to create. We create for the sake of creating.

0:39:26 - Speaker 1 One of my favorite answers I've heard in a long time not to discredit anybody else's answer. There's never a right or wrong answer. But that hit, that hit your fire your energy is palpable. You guys got a chance to check out this video because you're going to feel Emily. Check out Eva meditation, check out everything we have linked down the show notes. Where can they go right now to connect with you more?

0:39:47 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so the thing I'm most excited about is my new podcast, which we alluded to at the beginning. It's called why isn't?

0:39:51 - Speaker 1 Everyone Doing.

0:39:52 - Speaker 2 This. It has been such. I mean talk about creating for the sake of creating. I mean, you know you've been early to the game, but it's such a joy to get to experience this, so why isn't everyone doing? This is the name of the podcast. And then we're all over social at Ziva meditation and actually I'm going to get into the conversation and actually have a free masterclass if people want to check it out and get into the neuroscience of this.

So that's Ziva meditationcom slash podcast and they can really get into like the science behind why this, this style of meditation, is so different and why folks like Andrew Huberman and Mark Hyman and the Navy SEALs and Google and Apple are using it.

0:40:25 - Speaker 1 If you put Huberman Navy SEALs, that's good enough for me in the same sentence. I'm hooked.

0:40:33 - Speaker 2 I'm going to check it out so again.

0:40:34 - Speaker 1 That will all be linked down, the video notes for you guys. Thank you. Thank you so much for making this happen. Yeah, I felt this one, I needed this one. This is great Thank you my pleasure.

0:40:42 - Speaker 2 Thank you for having me.