Discover the Trifecta of Mindfulness, Meditation and Manifesting | Emily Fletcher on Health Theory

We're actually giving the body rest, it's five times deeper than sleep, and that's not an insignificant point because when you give your body the rest that it needs, it knows how to heal itself. And one of the things that it's healing itself from is stress. But if you have a trauma story or some narrative going on, this brain machine is the thing that's responsible for printing every single cell in the body. So, if you haven't healed that trauma on a psychological level, then you might print the same cells in the body. Hey everyone, welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is Emily Fletcher. She's a former Broadway actress turned author and meditation expert who's written the book Stress Less, Accomplish More. She was named one of the top 100 women in wellness to watch, and she's spoken on meditation for performance at Google, Harvard Business School, Viacom, Wanderlust, A-Fest, and more. She's taught well over 15,000 people how to meditate, and she's been endorsed by health and wellness luminaries such as Dr. Mark Hyman, as well as leaders in the scientific community like Dr. Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology at Stanford. Which by the way is one of the things that I found most interesting is there's something about your approach to meditation that makes people like me who otherwise get a little like heebie-jeebie over some of the language and stuff, um you speak about it in a way that draws people in. And when I saw that you had this neurobiologist from Stanford who was like, "I was beyond skeptical when I first heard about Emily." And then almost by accident he ended up listening to you. What do you think it is about your approach to meditation, maybe some of your definitions around it, that make it so accessible to people who are otherwise quite skeptical? Well, I think the technique itself is designed for people like us. It's designed for people with busy minds and busy lives. It's not a monastic practice. So, what do you mean by that? Well, it's not made for monks. And so, a lot of the mindfulness that's out there, a lot of the {quote} meditation apps are actually teaching mindfulness, which was originally designed for monks, and it's been sort of watered down for a more mainstream audience. Whereas, what I teach at Ziva, even though it's 6,000 years old, it was originally designed to make you better at life. So, I think one, it works, and two, I think the delivery, I think partly my Broadway background, I like to make things entertaining. I'm not super into meditation as an identity. I think that we That's interesting. meditate to get good at life, not to get good at meditation. And so, for me, it's just a tool. And so, it's like, here's the science behind why stress is making us stupid, and here's the science behind why meditation can make you better at life. And when you say better at life, what do you mean? Well, I think that's different for everybody. Do you want to be a better mom? Do you want to be a better husband? Do you want to be better at your job? Better philanthropist. Uh, but when you're stressed, you're you're wasting your mental and physical energy, so you're not able to show up as the most amazing version of you. So, if you're committing to a daily discipline of meditating, then you basically have more cylinders. You have more mental and physical energy to really do the things that you want to do in your life. And for people that think that meditation is not for them, what is meditation? Like, at its most basic, and and I think that your differentiation of, um, breaking out mindfulness and meditation, I think it's actually pretty interesting, and I'd never heard anyone talk about that, and I realized I was confusing the two as well. So, how do you separate those two, and why is separating them and understanding the difference important? So, meditation at its most basic definition is a stress-relieving tool. That's it. It's a tool to help you get rid of stress in your body, so that you can do what you want to do in your life. Now, where this gets a little tricky is that most people are using the terms mindfulness and meditation as synonyms, but they're not actually the same thing. I would define mindfulness as the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment. Beautiful. Powerful. Necessary. Especially in this day and age, we've all become bulimic of the brain, and we're ingesting technology all day, every day. So, we practice mindfulness right now. We could take a mindful breath. We could feel our feet on the ground. And that's where everyone's like, "Oh, cooking is my meditation or exercise is my meditation." cuz they're saying, "I get present. I get mindful when I do those things." But exercise is not the same thing as the type of meditation that I teach at Ziva because there we're actually giving the body rest that's five times deeper than sleep. And that's not an insignificant point because when you give your body the rest that it needs, it knows how to heal itself. And one of the things that it's healing itself from is stress. Interestingly, not only the stress from the now, cuz that's what mindfulness does, the meditation is getting rid of the stress from your past. So, when you say that it's five times deeper than sleep, what do you mean by that? Well, I mean that your metabolic rate decreases, which simply means that your breathing slows. It doesn't make you gain weight. It just means your breathing chills out a little bit. Uh your heart rate slows, and your body temperature cools. And so, that happens within 30 to 45 seconds of practicing this technique. It's a different type of rest because when you're sleeping, your brain is chilling, but your body's on guard, you know? [snorts] We're actually sucking wind, preparing for that tiger attack so that if a tiger were to come in, we could quickly launch into fight or fight or flight. When we're meditating in this style, the opposite happens. Body is getting this deep healing rest, but brain is on guard. And so, it's almost the opposite of what everyone thinks of when they think of meditation. You're you're going to hear everything. It's almost like you have spidey senses. You're hyper aware and alert about your surroundings, but it is that mental alertness that allows your body to get that deep healing rest. And then you're more awake on the other side. So, when we're getting into that change so fast, what is it exactly that we're doing to pull out of the And it's probably worth talking about um the parasympathetic nervous system versus the sympathetic. And what are we doing physiologically that's moving us so rapidly from one to the other. Mhm. So, in the Ziva Technique and in what I teach in the book, we teach the three M's. So, mindfulness, which is kind of like the runway, it's something active for you to do. And I use a technique called come to your senses, which is really simple but very powerful. We're basically utilizing all five of your senses to bring yourself into the now. And I like it because it's active and most of us most of my high-performing clients say it's very challenging for them to go from running 90 miles an hour to just act goodbye, that deep healing rest that happens when they're meditating. So, we use that mindfulness as like an appetizer. So, I start by having people hear what they're hearing, the most prevalent and the most subtle, and then feel what you're feeling, see what you're seeing, taste what you're tasting, smell what you're smelling. And that does two things. One, it it when you use your five senses, it wakes up your right brain, which is in charge of the right now, and it gets people out of this idea of distractions. It's like, "Oh, I can hear the buzzing of the camera. Oh, I can hear the sirens outside. I can hear my dog barking." And instead of thinking, "Oh, I'm a bad meditator because I'm not deaf." It's like, "No, meditation's not going to make you a deaf person. Your your your eardrums are still going to work just fine. You're actually going to have spidey senses. You start to include everything that's going on inside of the experience, which makes it much more enjoyable because again, it's designed to be integrated into your life." Um and then we click into like the main course, which is the meditation. And in that, we're utilizing a tool called a mantra. And that word gets a little hijacked by the wellness industry. Um a lot of people use the term mantra to mean affirmation. You know, like, "I'm a strong angry woman." Or, "I want a million dollars." And those are um what I would call affirmations. The word mantra is a Sanskrit word. Man means mind and tra means vehicle. So, the mantras that we're using in the book and in the online course and in person are to varying degrees of efficacy or strength, but all of them act as mind anchors. So, they're designed to de-excite the nervous system. And when you de-excite something, you create order. When you create order in your body, that lifetime of accumulated stresses that we all have in our cellular memory can start to come up and out. And it is that purging, that catharsis of stress that's ultimately ultimately ushering us into a higher cognitive performance state. So, let's talk about the notion of like there's all this um sort of retained stress. Uh you talk about it being in the cellular memory. So, the first thing I was like is are all of our cells turn over every however many years. Um so, what exactly is retained and how exactly does meditation as being different from mindfulness allow us to um release that? Mhm. So, just being a human being on the planet Earth right now, your cells are getting damaged, right? Like UV radiation from the sun, free radicals, microwaves. Now, the radiation of our cell phones. Like all that is changing our DNA, our chromosomes, our cell our cellular performance, our mitochondria. It's what's impacting us. And so, when we go to sleep at night, it's almost like there's been a bunch of pot holes in the road in our in our cells, and then we sleep, those pot holes get filled in. It's like we repave the road each night when we sleep. And very similarly in meditation, because we're giving our body this deep healing rest, it's like it's just smoothing out the pot holes in the road. We're um letting everything heal in the way that nature designed. Like I don't think that nature intended for us to be sick, tired, and stressed. I think that nature wants us to be happy and healthy and vibrant, but because our modern-day lives are not really acting in accordance with nature, we're not in the sunshine as much as we should be. We're our feet are not on the soil as much as it should be. We're not having as much sex as we should be. Our food is not really food anymore. And so, we're doing a lot of things that are taking us out of alignment with nature. And so, the meditation I think is becoming real uh almost medicinal. And so, we need this deep healing rest to sort of combat our modern-day lives. Mhm. Okay, so going back to um the the sort of physical nature of what we're doing. So, we're getting into a mindful state, it's bringing us into the present. What is happening to the body in those moments because it's it's pretty profound. Mhm. So, in in the breath practices, which I will use breathwork almost as a warm-up, I'll use I'll do something called balancing breaths to kind of prime the brain and body to surrender into the meditation. Um but when you're using breathing techniques, which are so so powerful, there is always something to come back to and it's a little bit more effort and it requires a little bit more discipline. It's a bit of a shorter leash, which in this style of meditation is a much longer leash. I like to call it the lazy man's meditation because it's really it feels almost like taking a nap sitting up. You're not controlling your mind, you're not concentrating, you're not efforting. Um it's almost a surrendering practice and we Westerners don't like that word surrender. I will give you that. That was another thing reading the book I was like, in fact, tell people what's the difference between surrendering and giving up? Well, giving up is like you're surrendering in defeat. I quit, I I can't do it versus surrendering to me means surrendering at defeat. Surrendering at the feet of nature. It's trusting that nature has more information than we do. It's trusting that maybe just maybe there are forces at play that are bigger than our left brain individuality. And I think when you start meditating, you tap into that right brain, which I like in the right brain to a Wi-Fi router to where it's like the thing that allows you to plug into collective intelligence. It's the thing that allows you to download those creative ideas. And you've probably found this when you're meditating, you're just so much more creative, you're so much more in flow state and that's happening because you're quite literally taking that right brain to the gym and then you start firing on all cylinders in your waking state. Um but to go back to your original question about what's happening physiologically and and like where and why is stress stored and for so long, you're right, the body does regenerate cellularly every seven years, but if you have a trauma story or some narrative going on, this brain machine is the thing that's responsible for printing every single cell in the body. So, if you haven't healed that trauma on a psychological level, then you might print the the cells in the body. So, by the time the average American is 20 years old, we have approximately 10 million premature cognitive commitments, which is this background radiation that you're talking about. It's like these open windows on your brain machine. And most of us to survive had have had to minimize those, right? So, it's like they're all open, but they're minimized. But then when we start meditating, it's like we go in and we maximize those windows so that we can click X and get rid of them. So, as far as the practice itself, it's it's very much about letting go. It's very much about letting go of control, surrendering, and there's not too much for you to do. And and I know and honestly, that's where my job becomes a job because I live in New York, I teach busy New Yorkers, I teach, you know, Oscar, Tony, Emmy, Grammy Award winners. Like, you know, I'm teaching high-performing folks and they don't want to let go. They don't want to surrender. They're like, "I'm good, thanks. I'm going to I'm going to keep my illusion of control." [laughter] And so, honestly, my job becomes giving people the tools and enough intellectual knowledge that they trust the process and that they feel safe enough to let go. Mhm. It's interesting. Let's talk about that. It's one of those things you hear all the time, like, to let go or surrender to the process. I'm open to it, but I don't fully understand it. Yeah. So, it's not that I'm even resistant to it, it's that I don't get it enough to like really do it. Um and in your book, you talk you have a case study of a woman who was battling cancer. Mhm. And she talked about surrendering to the cancer, which of course, in my sensibility, I was like, "What?" Which she addresses, but walk walk us through how you can the what you're actually doing to surrender to something like your cancer treatment. Yep. So, think about last night when you went to bed. Right? You were like, "Okay, I'm I'm to turn off the lights. I'm going to put on my PJs, I'm going to get into bed, and put my phone on airplane, and then you lay down, and then you just fall asleep. [laughter] Right? Like you're not doing anything. Your body just slips into this other state of consciousness, starts running a whole host of reparative functions, and then you wake up, you're like, "Oh, I feel great. I feel fresh and clean and bright and shiny." Versus how you felt at 11:00 at night after a full day's work. And so similarly, when we do this type of meditation, you're not trying to meditate. Right? You're not like, "Oh, let me be the best best meditator in the land." And then, you know, through this process and through these mantras, it's like that letting go, that surrender happens. And and then what's cool is that when you let go in the practice, the brain starts flooding you with dopamine and serotonin, which are bliss chemicals. So it feels nice when you're doing it, so you start to trust this process of surrender. And then the beautiful byproduct of that is that that starts to bleed into your waking state. So because you're not so terrified of letting go, because you've been doing it every day twice a day, you start to be like, "Oh, maybe I can just ride this wave of life." And so Kathy is the woman's name who's who's doing the meditation through her cancer treatment, and she said, "You know, I didn't fight my cancer. I experienced my cancer." And and I think that's a really powerful shift, because anything we push against, it's going to push back with equal and opposite force. Right? Like what we resist persists. And so instead of going in and fighting cancer, she was healing. And she was experiencing it. When she was in pain, she was in pain. And and when she would meditate, it would allow her body to run these reparative functions so that her She still did a full, you know, Western medical treatment, but her ability to recover from those treatments was so much faster. Actually, her partner went to her doctor and said, "Hey, I don't know that the chemo's working, because she seems really happy, and she seems present, and she seems kind of healthy. Like are you sure the chemo's working?" And the doctor looks at her partner and said, "She's bald. Chemo's working. Whatever she's doing is helping her to manage the intensity of these treatments. Most of us have been living our lives in a little bit of an out of balance, overdeveloped left brain individuality. If I don't do it, no one will. No good deed goes unpunished. And we've just been letting the right brain atrophy. And so once you start taking that right brain to the gym through the meditation, just everything gets a little bit easier. So you don't have to work so hard. You said that you will ask people, "Hey, who in this audience has ever meditated?" And virtually every hand goes up. And then you ask, "And how many people do it every week?" And 90% of the hands go down. So what is it that that breaks that? Why do people struggle? Yeah. Two things. One, people think they're too busy to meditate. And two, they think that the point is to clear the mind. Those are the two huge barriers for folks. If you're too busy to meditate, that just means that you're prioritizing things that make you money over things that make you happy. And so it's like, "Okay, well, what if there was a tool that could actually make you more money and have better sex? Oh, yeah. And you're going to be a nicer person and enjoy your life a lot more." Everyone would say yes to that. Like when you frame it of like, "Are you willing to invest 2% of your day to make the other 98% more amazing?" The answer is, of course. Where I think that people have a block is that a lot of people have been doing like a free mindfulness app that they downloaded, did it for four or five days, didn't really see a return on their time investment, right? Because our time is our most valuable resource. You know this better than anyone. And so it's like, "If I'm going to invest 10 minutes of my time, I better be getting a return on that investment." And if people like us with busy minds and busy lives are doing a monastic type of meditation, they might not be getting the type of return that they need. It's not necessarily making them better with their kids or more productive at work or more creative. And so it just feels like a cute pedicure for your brain. And you're like, "Nobody Well, maybe when I get a little more a little bit more free time, I'll do that time wasting thing." Um and so I'm That's why I really wanted to break down the ROI of like, "Okay, for 15 minutes twice a day, you're going to get this many hours back of productivity. You're going to get this much deeper sleep. You're going to have this much more creativity." And obviously it's different for everyone, but I've seen some patterns unfold. Um and the second barrier to entry is this idea that people have to clear their mind. Yes, you may access different states of consciousness. You may find yourself in, you know, moments of thought-freeness, but it's not the point. And if you go in with an agenda of trying to clear your mind, then you're going to use effort. And if you use effort in this type of meditation, you mess the whole thing up. It's like you turn that mantra into a propeller when it wants to be an anchor. That's really interesting. So, here you are. You're not having fun anymore on Broadway. You're stressing out. You're going gray early. You're like, "I've got to do something different." So, what was that journey like and where did you struggle? Mhm. So, I'd say my big struggle was uh it's just the fact that being on Broadway wasn't the dream that I wanted it to be cuz I was very very deep in the I'll be happy when syndrome. Mhm. You know, once I get on Broadway, I will be happy. Once I get this boyfriend or this agent or this zero in my bank account. And I think that's ultimately what led to looking internally cuz and I I'm thankful that I achieved the dream early enough that I realized that that wasn't the pot of gold that I was waiting for. And then when I learned meditation, it there was no struggle. It was just like, "This is amazing. Why does everyone not do this?" And that's why I went so deep down the rabbit hole so quickly. When I did my teacher training, when I was meditating like 18 hours a week, transcribing books by hand in Sanskrit and apprenticing, I the thing that came up for me was very much the loss of my identity of being an actor cuz it's what I had done since I was in fourth grade and it was such a big part of the singing and dancing and acting and it was I was so identified with it that moving into becoming a meditation teacher, there was a mourning process that happened. So, as you're going through the meditation part, I I keep coming back to breathe through your diaphragm. Like do a belly breath. And so whenever I'm trying to get somebody new who's never meditated before, I come back to I had a very similar experience to you at least by way of explanation in that it was instant for me. Once I took my very first diaphragm breath, my life changed forever. Ah, so you had a great was like, "Whoa, that's so weird." Like it pulled cuz I've struggled with anxiety massively. And that was originally what led me to um doing this. And now I pushed back on meditation for a long time cuz it felt very forgive me, but it felt very feminine. And my thing was like I grew up a little too in touch with my feminine side. And so as an entrepreneur, what I had to learn was to toughen up. And so I thought, "Uh meditation, like that's pushing me in the wrong direction." And I finally met a Navy SEAL, Mark Divine, who you may or may not know. And he said, "Dude, stop being an [ __ ] Will you meditate?" And I was like, "All right, this guy is about as tough as they come. I'm going to give it a shot." And so he has a saying he calls um box breathing. Yeah. And I tried it and it made me feel out of breath. And I was like, "This is so weird." But that very first time that I breathed from my diaphragm, it felt right. So I was like, "There's something here to chase." And so I kept playing with the the breath of what part I held, what was long, what was short, until I could optimize the pleasure of each part of the breath cycle. And once I started focusing on that, then it was like, "Okay, this is amazing." And then I started listening to the sounds of nature. And there was something about the sound of nature that effortlessly got me into the moment cuz I would just hear the sound. That's all I had to do. And so I was like hyper present because I was actually hearing the birds or the waves or the thunder or whatever. Yeah. And so that anchored me. Every time my monkey mind is going crazy, I would just say return to the breath. Mhm. And so I just kept telling people there's a physiological thing here that you can do. Yeah. So what do you tell people to do when the monkey mind is going crazy? Is it say one? Is it like focus on the now? Like what how do you help them get through that so that they'll stick with it? Yeah. So, the monkey mind is basically that it's that background radiation. It's all those open windows. It's those premature cognitive commitments, which is happening every single time you've ever launched into fight or flight. Your body's left a little open window on your brain machine. And so then the world becomes a landmine field where you're just like trigger trigger trigger. The smell of my ex-boyfriend's cologne, Adele, it was the song that was playing when we broke up. The taste of strawberries makes me think of that time I almost got into a car accident and I was eating strawberries. So, it's just That's That's what that build-up of anxiety happens over time. And so because I teach people how to do this stuff on their own and I give people a practice that's every single day twice a day, it's like you're clearing out all those landmines. And you would start with the mindfulness, then you would move into the meditation, and you would you would pick up the word, but then it's if at any point it slips away, you let it slip away. So, it's almost like the mantra or the word becomes a forgetting device. It's And this sounds a little crazy, but it's designed to be forgotten. Right? So, it's like you put the key in the car and you have to have the right key for the right car. That's important, otherwise you're just sitting still in your driveway. You put it in, you learn how to turn it on, but then you let go of the key. You don't just sit there grinding the key in the ignition. [laughter] Right? Um and I think a lot of people think like oh, well it's the mantra so mantra mantra mantra mantra and they're trying to do meditation the way they do mindfulness of come back come back come back come back. And so this is why I'm such a stickler on the on the words because I think as these practices are becoming more and more popular, we have to get specific with our vernacular. So, mindfulness is amazing, but it's more disciplined. It's more focused. Meditation is more about letting go. So, yes you pick up this word, but then you're going to find that it it's custom designed to de-excite and to help us to access more subtle states of consciousness. And it's almost like you're walking into sleep. And I know I keep coming back to the when you went to sleep last night, you there was nothing that you did, right? You just laid down and then your body slept all on its own. Once you get the right key in the right car, you get the driving instructions, your body will fall into this meditation sweet state quite innocently and spontaneously. Mhm. What is some of the research showing? Like what are the the end states of meditation? Mhm. Well, one cool thing that happens is that it thickens your corpus callosum, which is the thin white strip that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain. And that's important because most of us have been hanging out in our left brains for our whole lives. All we have access to is our waking state. Um and then in this meditation thing, we're accessing the right brain. And in what's interesting also, to go back to this mindfulness meditation piece, is mindfulness where you're directing your focus, um where you're maybe coming back to the breath, a small part of the brain lights up but very, very bright, which is indifferent than in this style of meditation, the whole brain lights up but not as bright. And so it is it's like creating neuroplasticity and creating neurogenesis, and the whole brain is lighting up, so it's strengthening that corpus callosum. Now, why would you want a fat corpus callosum? Well, everyone should because it's quite literally the bridge between the critical mind and the creative mind. And so my theory here is that the stronger your corpus callosum is, the easier it is for you to come up with creative problem-solving ideas when it counts. You know, your boss yells at you, instead of shutting down and going blank, you can come up with the idea. Or if you get into a fight with your partner, and then it gets really heated, and then you like shut down and retreat to the bedroom, and then a couple of hours later you start coming up with all these witty comebacks, and you're like, why couldn't I have thought of that in the moment? Well, my theory is that the thicker your corpus callosum is, the easier it is for you to really be firing on all cylinders cuz no one cares how creative your ideas are in the shower, right? They care how creative your ideas are when you're giving the the presentation to the board, when you're teaching in front of your students, when you're on the field of play, whatever your field of play is. Um some of the other things is that it can reverse your body age by somewhere between 8 and 15 years, which is nuts. And I did that when I first started learning about this, I was like, "No way. This is not like a fountain of youth. It's not a magic pill." But here's the reality. Stress is prematurely aging us. And if you want proof of that, look at any president the day they take office and that same president 4 years later. It's like that they have the weight of the world on their shoulders and that takes a toll on the body. And we know how we look if we're not sleeping and drinking and stressed. It's like, "Ooh, ugh." Whereas how you look when you're on vacation, you're like, "Oh, I look great." And so meditation's like taking a vacation in your brain every day twice a day. And And what's happening is that it's strengthening your telomeres, which is like little casings at the end of your DNA and your chromosomes. And if those weaken and shorten, then your DNA can unravel faster. It's like, you know, the little caps at the end of your shoelaces. Um, I don't have a ton of science on this, but anecdotally, it seems to improve fertility. Um, there's a lot of case studies in the book about people who have gotten pregnant. I got pregnant on my first try 39. I have students at 44 who had the fertility markers of 18-year-olds after meditating for 2 years who previously were not even candidates for IVF. Um, actually one thing really interesting in the book. You showed some case studies of like blood and hormone levels. So, that was really, really interesting. What should people be tracking? Like, what are some things that um, are signs that you might be having a problem? And then what are some things that they should look for um, that show that well, this is really working. Well, I recommend that everybody check their just their own relationship with stress. So, in the In chapter 1, I even say like, "Pull out a piece of paper. Let's go. Like, how's your sleep? How's your stress? How's your anxiety? How's your road rage? How's your acid reflux? How's your How do you respond to high-demand situations? Do you bite your nails? How much money are you spending on therapy, coffee, alcohol, retail therapy, anonymous sex, um, you know, antidepressants, anti-anxiety?" And I'll give you a cliff's notes, the average American is spending $11,800 on that stuff per year. Woah. And it's treating the symptoms, not the cause. And when you go in and and do the meditation, it's like you learn it one time, and then you have this tool to take with you for life, and you're actually treating the root cause. You're actually saving yourself money in all this stuff that we've been kind of looking for the answer. But I recommend the big ones are sleep, right? So, how's your sleep? I think you're Is that an Oura Ring that you're wearing? Yeah. So, I've been working with them, and so we've been talking about how to like really incorporate a meditation interface into the ring, because right now most body data monitoring devices think that meditation is sleep. Mhm. And I think that we're nearing the the phase where we'll be technologically advanced enough for them to know the difference. That would also be really extraordinary to see to to gamify it and to see like, "Woah, I'm actually really getting a result here." What metric do you think um we should be paying attention to with that? Is it going to be heart rate variability? I don't know if that's impacted or not, but um what do you think we can actually track with that? Well, sleep is a big one. Um you know, I had insomnia, this thing cured my insomnia on the first day. I'd say that anecdotally, that's probably the number one benefit that people report is that their sleep just gets so much deeper, more refreshing, they need less of it over time. Usually in the first few weeks, they need more of it, cuz most people are working out of a sleep debt. So, they're just like exhausted. They're like, "I'm like, you promised me more energy. I'm so tired." And they get mad at me for a little while. But then, after if you keep you know, meditating, then your sleep Most people's sleep signatures look like this. Light, medium, deep, wake up. Light, medium, deep, wake up. Light, medium, deep, wake up. That lasts for eight or nine hours. They wake up in the morning, they're exhausted. Versus once you start meditating, most people's sleep goes light, medium, deep for six hours, medium, light, wake up. And so, you've shaved potentially a few hours off of the sleep that you need at night, but you're waking up feeling more refreshed and rested. So, if we go back to the original point of uh pain, which is I'm too busy to meditate. Well, if all meditation does for you is shave 1 hour off the sleep you need at night, then for a 30-minute time investment, you already have 30 extra minutes in your day. And that's to say nothing of an increase in productivity and creativity and clarity. Um, so I would say track your sleep uh, depth, length that you need, how do you feel in the morning based on the amount of hours of sleep that you got. Um, and then biting your nails, panic attacks, anxiety attacks. How many times a year do you get sick? How do you feel like you are performing in high demand situations. Uh, and some of it, you know, a lot of people are like, "How do I know if it's working, Emily?" And I'm like, "Your life will get better." And [snorts] and I don't I personally don't need a body data monitoring device to tell me that my life is getting better. Like I just know. Um, now that said, I think for the skeptics and the pragmatists in the beginning, it's very helpful to have tools like this so we can chart. Yeah. Yeah. For me that would be really cool. See in real time if, you know, you're getting into that zone or not. And I went through a really weird back injury where, um, I I was actually experiencing in my neck. So you have these things called scalenes that are like basically right by your clavicle and they had gotten so tight I couldn't stand comfortably. I couldn't sit comfortably. Everything was a nightmare. I finally understood what people mean when they said, "If I could just cry, I would feel better." And it was so frustrating. I was like, "If I could just cry, I would feel better. Like this is so miserable." And I ended up having to do biofeedback because the part of me that was the problem was actually my lower mid back, which I never would have guessed. It seemed impossible that that was affecting something up by my neck. But the physiotherapist was like, "Trust me, I've seen this before. This is the problem." And so as I was learning to fire that muscle, I was shocked at how at first I couldn't even imagine what he was talking about. Then he put the biofeedback device and then I could target it and I could get into that zone. So when you talk about sort of slipping through that bliss state, it's like I'm sure some people will struggle with that and they're not sure like is that what you're talking about? Did I do it? And And that's the question I've gotten a lot of run meditation. I'm sure you have as well. Like how do I know that it's working? And you said your life will get better. But there there might be that intermediate way to really show people like okay, this is the biometric signature of what we're looking for. Boom, you're in it. That would be really really interesting. Well, I think it does exist. You know, Muse the headband, it's very much designed for mindfulness. So, I say if people are going to practice what I teach in the book or Aziva, I say you can use it. You just have to turn the sound off because that is very It's almost like slapping you on the hand for having thoughts, which is the opposite of what I teach. I say that thoughts are not the enemy. You're allowed to have thoughts. The mind is going to think. And so many people report that that one piece of information, that thoughts are not the enemy of of meditation effort is, allows them to feel so liberated. You're going to have mental field trips. And just like when you sit down to meditate or do breathing, probably some random thoughts you know, pop into your mind. Okay, cool. So, when those thoughts come back, it's like you you're going to innocently and spontaneously realize that you're off of the practice. And when that realization comes up innocently and spontaneously, that's your cue to gently come back. It's just it's similar process just a much longer leash. Yeah. I actually really like the way that you talk about the mantra in the book. You said you're not going to like sort of consciously say it. You're going to let it bubble up from within. And I want you to think of it like the very attractive person at the bar. You don't run up and start talking to them a mile a minute. You be a little coy. And you know, you let it happen. And I thought okay, that actually makes a lot of sense. And so that whole effortless thing is is really starting to come together for me. I like the repetition of this is the lazy man's version. And in the book, oh god, I wish I could remember the exact words you used. But you translate I think It's word that means like Nishkam Karma Yoga. Which means? Union attained by action hardly taken. So, yoga means union. What are we unioning? We're unioning individuality with totality. Karma means action and nishkam means hardly taken. Right? So, we're not in there like, "Ah, I got to meditate. I got to get there." So, it is a decidedly more feminine approach. It's not so masculine. It's much more surrendered. It's much more receiving. Um So, nishkam karma yoga, union attained by action hardly taken. And this is where it's hard for us Westerners and certainly high-achieving Westerners. You know, we like to work hard and play hard. So, the idea of just sitting down and letting some other tool kind of do the work for us feels very foreign. But, if you look at real high performers, right? They're not doing all the work themselves. They learn how to delegate. They learn how to let other people take the reins at some point. And I find that with this practice, it's almost like you allow nature to take the reins from time to time. Um what do you mean by that? What am I receiving and what's the role of nature? Mm. Well, this might play a little bit into the third M of the technique, which is the manifesting, which is basically like you're setting your intention, right? Of what you want to have happen. And then it's it's allowing nature to do what nature is designed to do instead of thinking that we have to do everything on our own. Um and so, we're receiving, you're receiving abundance, joy, uh creativity, ideas, um whatever nature really has in store. But, it's not it's not a one-way conversation in either direction. We don't get to state everything we want and then it happens exactly at the when and the how that we want it. And neither is it fatalism. It's not like, "Well, I'll just let nature take the reins and whatever, whenever." It's a two-way conversation. We have 50% left brain individuality and we have 50% right totality. And so to me, it's always about finding that balance of like, yes, this is what I want and oh, it seems like nature has other things in store. So instead of just fighting it tooth and nail, let me see if I can dance this dance a little bit. Mhm. It's really interesting. You said in the book that exactly what you just said there and it hit me in the book when you said it and it hit me now when you just said it. I don't think that nature would give us 50% right and 50% left if we're meant to use them in 90/10 split. Mhm. I thought, wow, that's actually really interesting. Do you know who Kim Peek is? Mhm. So I Oh, this story is so interesting to me. So Kim Peek is the guy that Rain Man was based on. Real life. Um, a true savant and he obviously had wildly challenging developmental issues, but he had no corpus callosum. Wow. And so he could memorize memorize two books simultaneously, one with his left eye, one with his right eye. It's crazy. And so you begin to understand that part of what the corpus callosum is doing is allowing inhibitory impulses from the other side. So there's like this shutting down of a part and um, the what they're doing with um, uh, the magnetic I'm forgetting now the word for it, electromagnetic stimulation. It's where they put basically a big magnet up to a part of your brain and they can shut it down. And by turning off a part, like they took people and they said, "Draw a jaguar." Whatever. And people would draw it and then they would hit them with this magnet and then they would have them draw it again and they could draw better because they're turning off a region of the brain which actually stops people from being able to interpret what they're seeing in their head and actually draw it out. Now what the advantage to having that stopped is I'm not entirely sure, but the fact that it's a turning off of something that allows you to be better at something I think is really interesting. So that whole notion of you talking about getting the the brain working all at once across both sides is very fascinating because it's so different. And the way that I've always thought about meditation is that it takes me to a place that is calm and creative. So, I feel relaxed. I feel at ease to your point about surrendering and letting go and not trying to muscle my way through it. Um and then the more far-flung regions of my brain are able to connect, which is really really interesting. So, when I first started experiencing anxiety, the the analogy that was so perfect was when I'm not anxious, I feel like I have a superpower. And then when I'm anxious, it's like kryptonite and and it is all gone. And it is so weird to think that that's just me worrying about the outcome. That the very fact that I'm worried that something will go wrong, that I will [ __ ] up, that I won't be perfect, that people's perception of me will change, all of that, like it actually made me worse. Like it in a very real way where you could see it and test it. And I remember thinking um I I know what's happening to my brain. The blood is actually leaving my prefrontal cortex. It's going into the areas for fight or flight and it actually is making me dumber. And you talk about this that being stressed is quite literally making you dumber. And being able to get out from under that through meditation is super powerful. Um so, what is your hope? What do you hope that people will get from the book? And if you can tie that into the manifestation and how people can build a life that is closer to what they want for themselves. Mhm. Well, my hope for the book is that it inspires people to actually meditate. Because at this point the science is in. There's thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies. We know it's good for us. Everyone knows they should be meditating. Not that many people are actually meditating. And I mean like let's go home for Thanksgiving dinner and everyone meditates together before we have the meal meditating. I mean Christmas morning before we open our presents, we meditate as a family together. I mean just think how much more fun {slash} tolerable fa- you know, holidays would be if everyone wasn't so triggered and so in their anxiety and in their past and future. Um and so that's I really wanted the book to be a bit of a Trojan horse. It's like, you know, let's take the very powerful medicine that is meditation and let's wrap it in the candy coating of hey, it's going to help you make more money. It's going to help you have better sex. It's going to reverse your body age. You're not going to get sick as often. So why would you not do this? It can feel quite selfish to take this time for yourself if you have kids or a partner or a job. It's easy to get into that martyrdom story of everyone else needs me so I can't afford to take care of myself. But your family doesn't want you stressed. Your husband doesn't want you stressed. Your co-workers don't want you stupid. They want you present. They want you creative. They want you happy. They want you innovative. And so we need that blood that's all being run to the amygdala to the fight or flight center. We need that blood and dispersed to our whole brain. And I think big picture is like yes, selfishly we want to make ourselves better, but also as a species, we're being faced with some pretty big challenges. And it really will be up to this generation and the next generation decide whether or not we, you know, turn this bus around or drive it off the cliff. That's interesting. And so I think that we want to be firing on all cylinders so that we can really step up to these big challenges that we are being called to answer. What do you think some of those big challenges are that we're facing that are unique to now? Well, climate change is the big one for me. Let's let's innovate around it. This is an opportunity I think for huge business opportunities because there's big problems to solve. Racism, which is any like terrorism, anytime we see other people as separate from ourselves. I think another one is the fact that our food is not food anymore. The fact that we just have so many people on the planet that we're depleting the soil, that our food has changed. We're genetically modifying our food. I think that's impacting our our, you know, our gut chemistry, which is impacting our brain chemistry. So, I think that these are the the big three for me. Mhm. What do you think about social media? I think that it's a really powerful tool, and I think that you can use that tool for good or for evil. [laughter] And I think that it's uh it's just like any other drug, you know, you can have a glass of wine and it can really enhance a dinner. You can also drink a bottle of vodka and, you know, cry yourself to sleep in a bathtub. You know, like it's they're all tools. [laughter] Um and so, for me, social media, I just went through a very challenging postpartum period, and my pregnancy was a breeze, but my postpartum was brutal. And I I remember posting about it on Instagram, and I was like, "Okay, like I need help. Like I am in pain. I'm in physical pain, emotional pain." I don't I had no idea that this was going to be so hard. And they were sharing their tools and their tips and their tricks and just making me feel less alone. And in that moment, I was like, "Wow, this really can be a beautiful thing." So, I'm very grateful for that it exists, but I think that we have to be careful and know that it's a powerful tool. Yeah, my thing with social media, and I've been thinking about this a lot lately. We just had Cal Newport on the show, who wrote a book called Digital Minimalism. And I have to say, Cal, more than a lot of people, has really made me rethink things that I have sort of long-held cherished beliefs about. I had like this real uh epiphany here at the company, which is that I'm not being productive enough. And it's like your analogy of all those windows being open, they're minimized, but they're open. I think that's so powerful. And it was the way that you said that they're minimized that made me think, "Yeah, that is exactly what's happening." Like they're I'm I'm not sort of consciously aware that they're open, but when I think about all the little things dripping on my mind, just pulling it just enough attention. Mhm. And it I think social media is super powerful. Um I think that it's a total game changer. It certainly changed my life and I've seen it impact a lot of people super positively, but not understanding how to like give it a time and a space, um I think is where certainly where I was going wrong. And the fact that I would check my phone, in fact, Harpreet was talking about this. He said that the average person touches their phone, um 150 times a day, which is once every 6 minutes. And it's like if you just just hearing that, like once every 6 minutes that you're doing something, anything, it you're just breaking the cycle. You're never able to do that deep work. You're never able to really like go into something. And that was that is precisely why I think that your book is so important, that meditation is so critical, that people learn how to do this. Is it creates that space for people to go deep. It It starts closing those windows. And I think maybe one of the most important things it gives people a trained ability to oh, I'm in the sympathetic nervous system. I'm going to now rapidly get into the parasympathetic. Do you take cold showers? I do like a 45 seconds at the end. Hey, we'll count it. That's fantastic. [laughter] So, the interesting thing to me about cold showers is that it creates this massive sense of urgency. Like my body is like, "Get the [ __ ] out of the cold water." It is like screaming it. No matter how many times I do it, I have that same sense of urgency. Oh, thanks for saying that cuz I keep thinking it's going to get easier, but it's not going to get easier. for me. Okay. And but what has gotten easier is because I meditate, I'm like, "Oh, I know how to stop this." I can immediately downshift, the letting go that you talk about. I can um I haven't yet used a mantra. Trust me, after reading your book, I will be trying it. And this is actually been super helpful for me. I think even more than just the book. Now I get the like letting go, the jazz of it all. Um so, it'll be fun to experiment with that. Yeah. being in the shower, that sense of urgency, it's immediate, and I can diaphragm breathe, and what what I think of is just you're letting go to at a physical level. So, I'm relaxing all my muscles. I'm doing I'm I'm sort of thinking lazy. I'm channeling lazy, you know, like the relaxed. And it's so weird that in in the midst of that urgency, where my body is telling me you're about to die, bro. Yeah. It's like you can still just let it go and be chill. So, having people be able to do that, whether they're doing it just meditation or meditation mixed with a cold shower or something else to give them that ability to practice over and over and over the letting go and just like even now talking about I can feel myself like chilling out. It's super interesting. I think that this cold shower is like a mini Vipassana retreat. Have you ever done Vipassana? Like it's it's a 10-day silent meditation retreat. You're sitting for 10 hours a day. It is intense, and you're in extreme physical pain. It is not what I teach at all in the book. It's very monastic. It's very disciplined. It's very focused, but it was the most intense pain I've ever been in. It's like for the first 45 minutes, you're like, "Oh, I'm great. I'm awesome at this." And then minute 46, you're like, [laughter] "Certainly I'll have to amputate my legs. Certainly I'll never walk again." And I was like, "Oh, I might have to go back to Broadway. I might be a dancer again. Let me get all these pillows." And I had like four cushions. And finally the teacher calls me over, and he's not supposed to be talking either. And by like day four, I was like princess and the pea. And he goes, "Stop trying to not be miserable." And I was like, "Oh, I get it." And so it was it's that it's that it's a trying to not be miserable. It's that I'm in the shower, my body's freaking out. Let me fix it. If you can remind yourself, "I'm not in physical danger." If you have the ability to stop avoiding pain and chasing pleasure, if you can master that, you can master almost anything in your life. Mhm. That was super powerful. I want to talk a little bit more about the you shifting your identity and that you had that moment of mourning. I think that's really interesting. What do you tell people about that? Like if they bring up a similar issue that they're going through? Well, I know that for me it was it was a it was a form of un-stressing. It was all my minimized windows getting maximized and it was like a an intense physical and emotional detox and it happened that happened to be the story that I had attached to self too. Of like you're letting go of this lifetime of an acting career. And it it was sad but for for people when they start meditating their identity does change a little bit because it's shocking how many people are very attached to their anxiety actually. Like I just am anxious. I just have daddy issues. I just have abandonment issues. That's just who I am. Like that's not who you are. You're 24-hour day bliss. That's your birthright. Everything else is stress. And so when you start shedding that stuff you have to realize that wait, I'm actually God pretending to be human. And that's an identity shift. Like that's what's that Ram Dass Ram Dass quote? Treat every human as if they're God in drag. Wow. Which I love so much. But when and if that sounds sort of esoteric and religious just because I'm using the G word but I would define God as the collective intelligence of all that is. The collective consciousness of all that is. And when you start tapping into your right brain every day, you're no longer Emily Fletcher, a 39-year-old redheaded meditation teacher sitting at a set in LA, you just are. And it's like you practice these little mini transcendences, these little mini deaths every day so that when you walk up to the big transition, the big, you know, inevitable that we're all racing towards which is death, it becomes a little less terrifying. And so I think if you're if you're looking on that scale of identity shift then you being from like going from an anxious person to a chill person is not that terrifying. Your self-narrative is super powerful. What do you talk to people at all about that? Is that part of um what you help them with? So, I don't help people with their self-talk so much, except for the manifesting piece, which is really just giving people the tools to ask better questions. Because you ask terrible questions, you're going to get terrible answers. And most of us are thinking that we're manifesting or praying when we're asking questions like, "Why did she get a job and I didn't? When am I going to lose this weight? When am I going to get a boyfriend?" And we're just complaining, really. Instead of asking questions like, "How much money do I want to make? What does my dream relationship look like? What does my relationship with my body feel like?" Um and so, when we start asking better questions, we get better answers. And so, it's not necessarily the 24-hour day self-talk, it's just utilizing that sacred time at the end of the meditation uh to start planting these seeds for what you want your life to look like. Realizing how much agency we actually have over our lives, which is terrifying for some people because it's easier to play a victim and say, "Well, life's hard and these things have happened to me." And if you don't have food and water and you're in an unsafe environment, then you have to be in fight or flight. And it's much harder to manifest when you're in that state, but you might need to be for survival. So, I recognize that it is a luxury, but those of us that have it, that are privileged enough to be able to find access to these tools, I think that yes, selfishly we need to improve our own lives so that we can help to lift up the people around us. Yeah, and I like that you've talked about how manifesting isn't just magic thinking. Like, you still have to go take action to you know, make it come true. Mhm. And do you worry at all about people um like getting into that sort of aggressive push, push, push mentality when it comes to taking the action? Mostly myself. [laughter] I like for this book, for example, like I really wanted it to be a New York Times bestseller. And my team and I, we had like great ambitions and a strategy and you know, and I was manifesting about it and you know, our our numbers were amazing. Like, by numbers, we should have hit the Times list and then we didn't. And so, I had to be like, "Okay, well, now what?" You know? Like it So did I fail? Did like my manifesting not work? Am I going to be sad about it?" And And then Or do you realize that it's never about the goal? It's never about the thing that you think is going to deliver the happiness. It's always about what you accomplish on the way and the feeling that you think that goal will bring you. Right? And so now that we're on the other side of this book launch and looking at all the lives that we've touched and all the people that have written me on social media and said, "Hey, I meditated for the first time. My anxiety is gone. Hey, I haven't had a panic attack. My sleep is better. I feel more energized than I have in years." That's ultimately why I wrote the book. It wasn't to make the New York Times. Right? But it's a it's a motivating force because we humans are funny and we like to Our egos like to prove how good we are. But it's never about that. Right? It's always about who we're going to impact on the way. Yeah, I love that. Where can people find you online? Mhm. So Ziva, z i v a meditation.com is where our in-person classes, our online classes live. Uh the book is basically anywhere books are sold. You can go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million. Um and then we're all over social media just @zivameditation. All right. If people could make only one change to have the biggest impact on their life, what change do you think they should make? Well, this feels like a trick question for me because [laughter] mine is no question meditation. If we If we took that one off the table, yeah. second answer. Mhm. It's so obvious, but often the most profound truths are the simplest. It's exercise. You know, if you're meditating twice a day and exercising every day, your life is going to be amazing. Just full stop. Um and all the challenges that we face, we're so much better equipped to adapt to those challenges if we're exercising our brains and our bodies. I like that a lot. Mhm. All right, guys. Meditation, I'm telling you, it will change your life if you let it. It may not hit you right away, but if you keep at it, I'm telling you there's something there for everyone. I don't think there's anyone that shouldn't do it. If you haven't already, speaking of things that you should do, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was amazing. Thanks for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.