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Transcript
- 01:32 Detox Tip of the Day
- 03:52 About Emily Fletcher
- 09:34 About zivaMIND
- 14:41 Transcendence Meditation
- 19:58 Meditation Overdose
- 22:26 Misconceptions about Meditation
- 28:46 Improving Performance through Meditation
- 33:13 Meditation and Sex
- 36:02 Meditation and Addictions
- 38:24 More About zivaMIND
- 40:34 Where to Find Emily Fletcher
- 42:45 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today
Wendy Myers: Hello! Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. You can find me at myersdetox.com. Go check out the new MineralPower.com. That’s my healing and detox program that I’ve used to detox hundreds of clients, myself and my child. It’s a very, very effective program to increase your energy, to reduce brain fog and just generally improve your life and get your life back.
Today, we have Emily Fletcher on the podcast. She is amazing! I met her at the Bulletproof Conference. She is an expert on meditation. And today, we’re going to be talking about the benefits of meditation and why you want to start meditating today to improve your performance, improve your mood, improve your sleep. There’s just so many benefits.
This is a really fun podcast. I really enjoyed it. Emily has a lot of energy and she’s very positive. She’s just a very light spirit. I’m really happy to share this podcast with you today.
Please keep in mind that this podcast is for entertainment purposes only. It’s for information purposes only. So please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in anything that we suggest today on the show.
I want to start doing something pretty fun on the podcast. I want to give you guys a little detox tip, a little detox fact on every podcast from here on out. As you guys know, I’m very passionate about detoxification and educating people about the dangers of heavy metal toxicity.
The fact for today is about uranium. In Southern California – and this is a warning for anyone that lives in Southern California and Northern California as well. There are also other pockets of the country that have uranium toxicity. But in Southern California, uranium is in the tap water. I had my tap water checked after I discovered I had uranium on my hair mineral analysis. You can only see uranium on a hair test from Trace Elements. I think Doctors Data does them too, but I prefer Trace Elements Labs. I found uranium and I thought, “Hmmm… where is that coming from?”
I checked my tap water. Lo, and behold, there’s uranium in the tap water. And I noticed that many of my clients, almost all of them or a very large percentage of them that live in Southern California also have uranium toxicity as well.
It’s bad because it causes cancer and it also causes diabetes. As the more uranium toxic my clients are, they usually almost always have diabetes or pretty severe blood sugar issues.
So uranium is very, very toxic. I’ve seen it in a lot of children as well. My problem or my conundrum at first was that I have always since I was a teenager drink bottled water. I never had drank from the tap. I’ve always been very scared just intuitively of tap water especially in Los Angeles and where I used to live in San Diego. And so I was absorbing it in the shower.
And so now I’ve gotten a whole house filter from Pure Effects. This is the water filter that I recommend because they do filter out uranium. And I also have one on my tap as well. I got that first, so I actually don’t need that anymore now that I have a whole house filter.
But I just wanted to give you guys a little word of caution there. You need to be very careful about the water that you’re drinking and showering in.
Wendy Myers: So let’s get on with the show. Emily Fletcher is the founder of Ziva Meditation and the creator of ZivaMind.com. They were the world’s first online meditation training.
She’s a leading expert in the field who has helped over 1500 people become self-sufficient meditators. Emily discovered this practice during her 10-year career on Broadway which included roles in Chicago, the Producers and the Chorus Line. She expressed its immense physical and mental benefits during a high stress time in her career. Transformed by her practice, she traveled to Rishikesh, India to begin her years of training to become a teacher.
With her high performance background and intensive meditation training, Emily help successful individuals integrate meditation with their fast paced modern lives.
Emily has spoken at Harvard Business School. Summit Series, Awesomeness Fest and the Omega Institute. Even innovative companies like Google, Coca-Cola, Barclays Bank, Viacomm, Relativity Media and Sweet Green have all invited her to up-level company performance through meditation.
Emily, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Emily Fletcher: What a delight to be here. Thanks for having me.
Wendy Myers: Well, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about why you became a meditation teacher?
Emily Fletcher: I had a bit of a weird journey from Broadway showgirl to meditation teacher because like right now, I’m like no make-up and wet hair, but I used to be very fancy back in my day.
I was basically living my dream, doing the thing I wanted to do since I was eight years old and miserable. As a little girl, I thought that once I got in Broadway, my whole life was going to be sunshine and roses. And instead, it was girls eating tuna fish out of their can and complaining about the bunions. I was like, “Wait! This is not my dream.”
It was very confusing to me why I was doing the thing I always wanted to do, but was pretty miserable. I was understudying three of the lead roles which basically means that you show up to the theatre and have no idea who you’re going on for. Sometimes, they would switch me from one character to the other. I would just be chilling in my dressing room doing my taxes and they would say, “Emily Fletcher, to the stage.” I would start panicking, grab three costumes, run down seven flights of stairs and sometimes be onstage before I knew which role I was playing.
Some people are very good at that. I’m not one of them. I didn’t love that constant anxiety of not knowing what was going to happen. It started to wear on my body. I started going gray at 26. I started having insomnia. For about 18 months, I couldn’t sleep through the night. And I started getting injured quite a bit.
After a while, I just didn’t feel like myself. I didn’t feel like the version of me that moved to New York City believing that I could do whatever I wanted to do.
Thankfully, this girl sitting next to me in the dressing room had a harder job than I did. She was understudying five of the leads. And this woman was rocking it. I mean, every song she did, she sang as a celebration. Every dance she did was a celebration. Every bite of food, literally, every bite of food seemed like a celebration. I was like, “Girl, what do you know that I don’t know?” She said, “I meditate.” I was like, “Come on!”
This is almost ten years ago and people weren’t really talking about it then like they are now. I said, “How can you sitting quietly in a chair wasting your time help with this level of stress and anxiety?” She was like, “No, it helps my concentration, my performance anxiety, my immune function.”
So I didn’t believe her. I just kept being miserable and going gray and having insomnia.
And finally, I felt so embarrassed about my performance that I had to try something.
So, I went along with this intro to meditation talk, liked what I heard, signed up for this four day course. And on the first day of the first course, I was meditating, which I had no idea really what that meant, but I was in a different state of consciousness than I’ve ever been before. I liked it. And then that night, I slept through the night for the first time in 18 months.
Wendy Myers: Wow!
Emily Fletcher: Yeah. And I had every night since. That was almost ten years ago. I stopped getting sick, stopped getting injured, started enjoying my job again. I actually stop going gray as well. I’m 36 now. I was 26 when I started learning. I have like two gray hairs now. I was legitimately going gray when I started. That’s crazy to me.
But the big thing was that I started enjoying my job again, I was performing better, so much so that I said to myself, “Why does everybody not do this?”
So I left Broadway in 2009, went to India and started what became a three-year chain process to teach this. I opened up ZivaMEDITATION here in New York, in L.A. and started the world’s first online meditation training called ZivaMIND. It’s been the best, most rewarding and most creative thing I’ve ever done.
Wendy Myers: And you were at the Bulletproof Conference this year, correct?
Emily Fletcher: I was! I got to speak at the Bulletproof Conference and I was on the Bulletproof Radio which was really fun. And it’s funny. I had no idea, but it turns out that biohackers are really my sweet spot. I think it’s because people who are already in the land of optimizing their performance, they already understand that the body knows what it’s doing, we just have to set it up for success.
Even with detoxing, the body knows how to clean itself, but we have to stop toxifying ourselves, so we can give it a fighting chance of cleaning out. And meditation is quite similar.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. And I’ve been meditating for a number years. I can’t tell you how much it’s helped me. I recommend it to all my clients. It’s so important.
Wendy Myers: But I really liked the structure of your program and the simplicity of it. Can you tell us a little bit more about ZivaMEDITATION?
Emily Fletcher: Sure! Basically, the reason why I made Ziva Meditation was because I found this tool that helped me so much that I felt compelled and really inspired to share it with others. And then what started happening is that so many of my students were saying, “Emily, this thing has really changed my life. But my mom lives in Idaho” or, “Hey, I really want to share this with my brother-in-law, but he was in Zurich. What do I do?”
What I realized is that there are billions of people on the planet Earth that don’t have access to a teacher. And so I made ZivaMIND which is basically an 8-day program. It’s 20 minutes a day for eight consecutive days. And each day builds upon the previous day’s knowledge. So it really is a matriculation.
The idea there is I like to train people to become self-sufficient. I like to give people the keys to the cars. I like to teach them how to turn it on and to give them the driving instructions so that they don’t need me anymore. I really believe that any teacher worth his salt is something that makes you self-sufficient.
Some people would say, “This is not a great business plan.” But I actually think that it is. I think any healer, if their heart is in the right place, is like, “Let me give you the tools” and then you fly.
And that’s really what Ziva Mind is. It’s designed to make people self-sufficient so that they have a meditation practice that they can do every day, any time, anywhere. Meditation is only as good as the amount of times that you meditate. Showering is only as effective if you’re willing to shower every day. It’s the same thing with meditation.
Sometimes, it’s glorious and it feels great. But some days, it’s just a boring shower. It’s the same thing with meditation. Sometimes, it’s amazing and gurus and unicorns and lollipops. And a lot of times, it’s just a boring meditation. But you do it every day because it has this profound impact on your performance capabilities and the rest of your life.
So that’s really ZivaMIND. It’s eight days. And at the end of it, people have a practice to take with them for life. And then there’s also some guided visualizations.
One is called Ziva Performance to help people in high demand situations. One is Ziva Travels to help people with jetlags. It’s something they can do during take-off and landing and even with anxiety around travel. And there’s Ziva Sleeps which is to help with insomnia because I know first-hand how torturous insomnia is. And then there’s Ziva Release which is really there for the inevitable, what I like to call, unstressing that happens when people start a meditation practice.
I thought about writing a book called The Dark Side of Meditation. This is something that people don’t talk about too much and, again, it’s not a great sales pitch, but I think is important for people to know. For most people, when they start a meditation practice (and I’m sure your people will be very familiar with this), any time you start detox, usually, there’s some junk that starts to come up and out. And meditation is no different.
When most people start a practice, there tends to be a bit of old tiredness or a bit of old sadness or some old anxiety that will start to come up and out. And that’s really my job, help people through that.
So I created a guided meditation called Ziva Release which is just really there to be a virtual hug and for me to hold people’s hands, but I can’t actually be there to hold their hands. And we also have a really beautiful online community that I’ve created so that people feel support not only for me, but from the other thousands of ZivaMinders around the world. I answer every question that people post in our online forum, but it’s also nice to get people from other people. When you’re going through something with others, you feel a little less crazy and a little less alone and a little more willing to connect.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And that’s why I think it’s important. I view meditation kind of as an emotional detox where you’re able to release any kind of negative emotions you have. And people that have had trauma in the past or what-not, really, a lot of stuff can come up for them. But it’s very important. It’s very important to let that flow through and out of you.
Emily Fletcher: I 100% agree. And to that point, I do recommend that people who have been through pretty extreme trauma or people who are actively dealing with PTSD, I really recommend that they have a support system or a therapist in place, someone that they trust before they start any type of meditation training, but especially ZivaMIND because it online. I just want to make sure that people have that support system.
We have it online, but I have no way of making sure that someone finishes the program. And when big trauma start to come up, sometimes you just really need a hug.
And so I encourage people to just tell their roommate, tell your sister, tell your bestfriend, “Hey, I’m doing a bit of a mental/emotional detox this week. I might need a little extra love.”
I think it’s very good to take care of the body, the physical body while the soul is healing. I think of meditation as like a facial for your soul. Eventually, you’re going to look better, but you might have a little breakout in there.
Wendy Myers: I like that.
Wendy Myers: So what style of meditation is it that you teach?
Emily Fletcher: What I teach is basically like a self-induced transcendence style of meditation which is a fancy way of saying, “It’s kind of like taking a nap.” This style of meditation is like a supercharged power nap where you get to induce a verifiable fourth state of consciousness.
What do I mean when I say verifiable? I mean that if you were to hook your brain up to an EEG machine, there’s eight class points in the right brain and eight classic points in the left. And in waking, sleeping and dreaming states of consciousness, right and left brains are functioning separately from each other.
But in this state of consciousness that you access in this style of meditation, all 16 leads of the EG rise and fall in unison which I think is a pretty cool party trick, but people are like, “Why would I care? Why would I want my EEG leads to rise and fall in unison?”
And I would argue that everyone should. The left brain is in charge of the past and the future. It’s in charge of critical thought, analytical thought, math, balancing our check books. But for most of us, the left brain has gotten a little out of balance. We think, take action, achieve, make money, so we can be happy in the future. And our poor, little right brains tend to atrophy over time.
The right brain is the piece of us that is in charge of the right now, present moment awareness, intuition, color, connectedness, creative problem solving. All of these things are right brain phenomenon.
And if you look at a human brain, it actually splits down the middle, 50-50. I don’t think that nature makes mistakes. I don’t think that nature would’ve given us 50-50 if it wanted us to use 90-10.
So in this style of meditation that I teach, we’re really taking the right brain to the gym. It starts to increase brain cohesion. You start to light up the whole brain at the same time which is what ultimately increases your performance capabilities.
I’m of the mindset that we meditate to get good at life, not to get good at meditation because no one really cares if you’re good meditators. But everybody cares if you’re good at life. And one of the reasons why meditation makes you better at life is that you start to balance out, “Okay, I guess I have this critical mind. Yes, I can review the past and rehearse the future. But I’m equally balancing that with my present moment awareness, with my intuition and with my creative problem solving.”
And if you look at the really hyper successful people in the world, they tend to be the people that can do both, the people that are just not totally so artistically creative that they can’t balance their checkbook and conversely, not someone that’s so worried about the details that they can’t have any space for creative download. So that’s what I like there, the balance.
So basically, if you’re inducing this fourth state of consciousness which is different than waking, sleeping or dreaming, the benefit really comes from the deep rest that you get inside of that meditation. Rest is about five times deeper than sleep, so it’s basically like a supercharged power nap.
And then on the other side of that meditation, you don’t have a sleep hangover because you’ve been producing different chemicals in your brain than sleep chemicals.
And the 20-minute meditation, what we do in ZivaMIND is about 15 minutes. So if it’s five times deeper than sleep (I’m not great at math), but I think that’s about an hour. It’s like an hour and a half.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. I’ve read that. That’s fascinating. Twenty minutes of meditation equals an hour or two hours of sleep, whatever the equation is. But that’s fascinating. That’s so important for so many people that are getting six hours. They’re just so busy they can’t get enough sleep. It’s critically important.
Emily Fletcher: I 100% agree. As you know, sleep is a great time to detox. We’re not giving the body the rest that it needs and it’s not getting rid of all those toxins in the way that it’s meant. Most of us are feeling so exhausted and we’re just caffeinating our way through it which is exacerbating the problem, whereas the meditation actually gives you a sustainable form of rest.
I can’t stress that enough hilariously, that a lot of problem we try to solve externally. “I’m feeling stressed, let me smoke a joint… I’m feeling social anxiety, so let me drink more… I’m feeling tired, let me caffeinate more.”
My personal view on drugs is that if the Prozac [inaudible 00:18:53], then have fun. But I think you have to know what those cons are, I think you really have to understand what everything you put in your body is costing you in the near and the long-term.
And what I found with meditation is it gives you this hit of energy, but it’s not really costing you much. It might cost you the 15 minutes twice a day, but it also makes you self more efficiency.
This is pretty fascinating. The way I meditate is twice a day. I do it in the morning before breakfast, and then, at some point, before your evening meal, the mid-afternoon slot. But if you use this two meditation times, it’s a time for stress release, your body can actually start to use your sleep as a time for sleep. What happen is if you use body data monitoring devices, people’s sleep usually gets much deeper after only a few days of meditating which in turn makes it more efficient.
So whereas you might need eight, nine, ten hours of sleep before feeling rested, once you start a meditation practice, most people report that even after five or six hours, they feel pretty rested.
Wendy Myers: Hmmm… that’s amazing. That’s fascinating.
Wendy Myers: Can you OD on meditation? I had a couple of clients, one who is an Indian client, she went to a meditation weekend where they meditated for like ten hours a day. I know in India, they’re going hardcore with the meditation. Is that too much or…?
Emily Fletcher: It depends. I think if you’re in a retreat style setting, that’s what retreats are for. That would be very similar to doing some sort of a fast or a very intense cleanse where it’s like, “Hey, I’ve constructed my life with these next few days where I’m not really having much in-flow. I’m just all about outflow”
I think meditation retreats do serve their purpose. What I teach is meant to be integrated into your life.
People will talk about Vapassana retreats, these 10-day silent retreats. You’re not reading, you’re not making eye contact, you’re not speaking. You’re sitting in meditation for five to ten hours a day. Now that has a relevant role and a lot of people will get lots of insights that will happen in the last five to ten days if they can make it through the first four without losing their minds or leaving. The end of it tends to be quite nice.
But the trick is, most people report, by the time they’re home on the 405 or by the time they’ve gotten through the Lincoln tunnel, they’re honking the horn and flipping people off because it’s not really designed to be integrated into your daily life.
What I teach is actually designed for people with busy minds and busy lives. So it’s this type of meditation that is meant to be put into your everyday practice with kids and jobs and traffic and bosses and deadlines. It gives you a little bit more ease, a little bit more connection to that calm, quiet, inner contentedness, a little bit more rested relaxation and creativity. It’s like you’re topping up your tank of gas every day twice a day which is different than going away for retreat.
But to answer your actual question, yes, you can OD on meditation. And what that looks like usually is you’re crying in a corner and you’re not able to leave your house. It’s like it kicks up too much old stress. I don’t recommend it. So we basically want to stick to the 15 minutes twice a day program.
Wendy Myers: One of my favorite quotes is that prayer is like talking to God and meditation is listening to God. That’s one of my favorite quotes.
Emily Fletcher: That’s so beautiful.
Wendy Myers: Profound.
Wendy Myers: And so what are some of the common misconceptions about meditation?
Emily Fletcher: Oh, man! The big one is that people think that the point of meditation is to give their mind the command to stop thinking. They think, “Oh, well, I missed a day in school when they taught everyone to meditate. Everyone else already secretly knows how. So I’m already a failure because I don’t already magically know how to do this skill that I’ve never been taught how to do.”
“But somewhere through my yoga class, they’re listening to some free YouTube video, I learned that the point was to clear my mind. So okay, I’m going to sit down and I’m going to meditate.”
They sit down, they close their eyes and they’re like, “Okay, brain, stop thinking… well, I sure would like a snack… well, wait! That’s a thought. Wait! No, no. I’m thinking about how I’m thinking. I’m thinking about my thinking about my thinking. Oh, my God! I’m the worst meditator that lived. I quit!”
Wendy Myers: I’ve been there. I’ve definitely gotten that message before.
Emily Fletcher: Yeah. And it feels frustrating, right, because then you feel like you’re a failure and that you’re not able to do this magical meditation thing that everyone else in the world says is so great and so good for you. The thing is we humans will not do things for very long that we feel like we’re failing it. We quit.
And it makes me sad actually because then, I feel like people have potentially robbed themselves of a lifetime of bliss and fulfillment. I would argue that meditation is like any other skill. It takes a bit of practice. It takes a good teacher. And then it’s really easy. It’s like any other skill.
I think it’s so silly when people say, “Yeah, I’m going to do a meditation challenge.” It’s like, “Do you know how to meditate?” They’re like, “No.” “Why would you do that?” You’re like, “Let’s do a 21-day Japanese challenge and every day for 20 minutes a day, we’re all going to speak Japanese.” Well, if you don’t know how to speak Japanese, that’s a ridiculous thing to do. It’s the same with meditation. We’ve got to let ourselves be beginners before we expect ourselves to be experts.
That’s the first one. We think that the point is to give the mind the command to stop thinking.
But here’s the news. The mind thinks involuntarily just like the heart beats involuntarily. So giving the mind a command to stop thinking is as effective as trying to give the heart a command to stop beating. It doesn’t work.
Imagine how silly it would be to sit in a chair and say, “Okay, I’m going to meditate” and then you’re like, “Okay, nail, stop growing.” That’s not up to you.
And so similarly in meditation, at least in the style that I teach, we’re not interested in controlling the mind. We’re not interested in giving it a command to flat line. What we’re interested in is inducing that deep rest and de-exciting the nervous system in a way that creates order.
The tool that we use to do that are mantras. And the mantras that we use are meaningless primordial sounds, but it’s the sound quality of these mantras that helps to de-excite the nervous system. And when you de-excite the nervous system, you create order. And when you create order in the body, this lifetime of accumulated stresses can start to leave the body. That’s what allows us to perform better in our waking state.
I would argue that it has nothing to do with how many or few thoughts you’re having. It has to do with the level and quality of rest that you’re getting so that you’re more awake and more productive on the other side.
Wendy Myers: Now, I’ve been in yoga classes where it ends in some meditation. The whole class were doing the ohm vibration. It’s incredibly powerful and incredibly uplifting and relaxing and destressing at the same time. It’s amazing.
Emily Fletcher: Yeah, beautiful.
Wendy Myers: So are there any other misconceptions about meditation you want to talk about?
Emily Fletcher: Yes, I would say that one big one is that we think, “Okay, I’ve started meditating now and so I shouldn’t ever feel angry… I’m meditating now, I should never feel sad… I’m meditating, so I should never have another problem.” That’s not true. Meditation’s not magic. It’s not a magic wand. It’s not a magic pill. It’s a stress-relieving tool.
And I think the reason why we have those misconceptions is that we see people who are meditators and we’re like, “Whoa! She looks really beautiful and bright and happy and calm and collected. She handles things really elegantly. It seems like everything is always going her way.” But there’s a reason that’s why is happening and it’s not because that human isn’t feeling anything.
What I find is that meditation allows you to feel things more fully, more deeply actually, which allows you to move faster into the new now. It’s like the more you can bring this stuff up and out, the more quickly you can bring yourself into the new present moment.
And 99.99% of the time, we’re fine. If you’re watching this podcast on your MacBook Air, you’re fine. You’re drowning in abundance. You have a place to sleep, you have food to eat, you have people who love you. You may have had some shitty things happen to you in your life and that’s okay, that’s part of being a human.
But the reason why I think we have this misconception about meditators is that 99% of the time, if they are in the present moment, they’re fine. The things that we don’t have the proper tools to alleviate stress, and if something happens to us, then we start to shut down, we go into fight-or-flight, the body then goes into some level of PTSD. So we’re carrying each trauma with us into all of our new present moments.
Whereas the thing I like about meditation is it just allows you to not only handle the new traumas and stresses that happen more effectively, but release all of the old ones that have happened already. It’s not that you don’t get sad or you don’t get angry, if you just feel it, you feel it fully and then you move through it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, you create a new perspective because the majority of fears, anticipation of a future event or thinking about a past event, it’s a practice to learn to let that go.
Emily Fletcher: Yes, 100%. That’s basically the art of mindfulness which is different than what I teach. But I would call meditation “the art of bringing yourself into the present moment.”
What I have found is that as you meditate which I would define as a very intense stress-relieving tool, as you rid your body off those stresses, you become more mindful as a result. You now have a fighting chance of being present in the right now because your body is not riddled with PTSD or constant fight or flight.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Wendy Myers: So can you explain exactly how meditation helps to improve performance?
Emily Fletcher: Mm-hmmm… that’s my favorite thing to talk about. That’s really what we love to help people with at Ziva, people who are coming in meditation who want to perform at the top of their game. That includes everything from the boardroom to the bedroom to being onstage or being a mom.
Most of us want to perform at the top of our game. And I would say, secretly, that’s what all of us come to meditation. None of us do it because we want to be the best meditator in the land. We come to us mostly selfishly because we want to look hotter, be healthier, make more money, run our company more effectively.
And the reason why meditation helps with that is actually because it’s letting go of stress in the nervous system.
So let me talk about what stress does in the body because I think it’s relevant to talk about performance.
So if we want to understand how and why stress impacts the body, you got to go back in time a few thousands years. We’re hunting and gathering and a saber tooth tiger jumps out at us. Well, when we get stressed and we launch into that fight-or-flight stress reaction, the body launches into a series of chemical reaction.
Digestion floods with acid because we can’t afford t use up energy digesting food. We need that energy to handle the predatory attack. That same acid seeps onto your skin so that you don’t taste very good if you get bitten into by the tiger. Your blood thickens and coagulates, so if you get bitten, you don’t bleed to death. Your vision goes from here to here so that you’re not distracted from your opponent.
Bladder and bowels evacuate so that you’re light on your feet. And your immune system goes to the backburner because who cares if you’re going to get cancer if you’re about to be killed by a tiger? Again, we need all hands on deck to fight or flee this thing right now.
Also, adrenaline levels increase and cortisol levels increase. These are stress chemicals and they’re very acidic in nature. It’s not cute what adrenaline and cortisol do to the body over time. It’s infertility and erectile dysfunction, premature aging, balding and belly fat. It’s not great. It’s the equivalent of dumping acid into your body all day every day. That’s what staying stress does to the body.
So basically, this series of chemical reactions is very relevant, it’s very good for you if your demands are sabertooth tigers. If your demands are in-laws and flying and deadlines and break-ups and traffic, then this fight-or-flight stress reaction has become maladaptive and it’s now disallowing us from performing at the top of our game.
So here’s how that applies to performance. If your body is sending a lot of its mental and physical energy preparing for an imaginary tiger attack, then you do not have all of your faculties available to you for the present moment.
If your body is preparing for something that isn’t actually happening like a predatory attack, then you are not present to come back with a witty retort to your boyfriend who you’re fighting with. You are not available to come up with a creative solution to your boss who is yelling at you. You don’t have the bandwidth to figure out an alternative route of the highway when you see that there’s an accident ahead because you just don’t have your full computing power.
When the body is stressed, it’s equivalent with having a computer open with a lot of windows open. Actually, interesting fact, by the time we’re 20 years old, most of us have something around 10 million PCCs which is a ‘precognitive commitment’ which is just like a little, open window on our brain computer.
Imagine having 10 million open windows on your computer and then going to type an email. The cursor would be so far behind. You’re like, “Argh! Stupid computer, can’t even type an email.” Well, it’s not the computer’s fault. It’s using all of its energy to run these older relevant windows. That’s basically what stress is.
Stress is not bad for us. It’s not bad for the body to get stressed. It’s terrible for the body to stay stressed because not only does that acid start to accumulate, but it’s also robbing your brain of all of that computing power that it could have for performance capabilities. Does that make sense?
Wendy Myers: Absolutely, absolutely! That’s why I meditate, so I can come back with witty rertorts when my boyfriend and argue.
Emily Fletcher: A hundred percent! I think it’s a totally valid reason to meditate.
Wendy Myers: So what are some of meditation’s other benefits besides performance, et cetera?
Emily Fletcher: Hmmm… well, something I’ve accidentally branded myself as is the meditation sex guru because I started talking about – because to me, performance is performance is performance, whether you’re performing on a stage or in a boardroom or in a bedroom or as a parent. It’s like we want all of our faculties available to us in the right now.
And so I’d say one thing that’s kind of fun that no one’s really talking about is better sex. And it’s for all those same reasons that I just mentioned. When the body gets stressed, part of what adrenaline and cortisol does for you is that if you were to get bitten by that tiger, you wouldn’t feel it. Imagine people during a football game, they’ll break their leg and they’re still able to finish the game. They don’t even know that they’ve broken their leg until afterwards. That’s happening because they have so much adrenaline in their body.
So part of what those chemicals do is that it numbs sensation. Sex is a very sensational activity. It’s a five sensory experience. And if your body is riddled with cortisol and adrenaline, you’re not going to be able to see, smell, taste, touch and hear your partner as acutely as maybe we would like to.
So once we start to eradicate that stress from the nervous system, not only do we have more of our senses available to us, but also we start flooding the brain with dopamine and serotonin which are bliss chemicals. And that feels nice.
So if you’re starting your sexual activity from like a seven, then maybe you can get to a 12. But if you’re starting your sexual activity from a one or a two, then it takes a lot longer and a lot more work to get to a ten.
There are a lot of different chemical factors that are at play of why meditation makes sex better. One of them is a phenomenon called mirror neurons which is basically like our brains have little boomerangs in them. These mirror neurons, they come out and they dance with each other and then they report back.
So sometimes meditators will report that their lovers think that they’re psychic or they just feel like they’re a little intuitive because it’s like they can know what the person wants even before they want it.
And actually, mirror neurons, it’s why porn is a multibillion dollar industry. Mirror neurons are the thing that allow us to feel like we are having an experience even by watching someone else have the experience. If I were to cut myself right now, it might hurt a little bit if you were to watch that. Conversely, if you’re watching someone receive pleasure brings you more pleasure so sex can become this beautiful upward spiral instead of, “I’ll be happy when…” syndrome. “Let me just get this thing over with and then I can go back to my Facebook or my Netflix or whatever.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah, exactly.
Emily Fletcher: So better sex is one. Better performance.
Emily Fletcher: Oh, interestingly, a lot of people report a big reduction in addictions, all different kinds of addictions from coffee to cigarettes to pot to sex to sleeping pills. I feel a little hesitant to say but a lot of people can get off anti-anxiety and anti-depressants. That takes some time. I usually say it’s best to work with a teacher and your doctor after three to four months of a regular practice before you even think about getting off any pharmaceuticals.
But what’s been fascinating is that oftentimes people, even in the first week of meditating, they’ll say, “I just forgot to turn on my coffee machine this week… I just didn’t want to drink. I normally have a glass of wine every night, but I just forgot to open a bottle.” And it’s not that they’re putting rigid guidelines on themselves. It’s just that their preferences start to change.
And this is, to me, one of the most beautiful benefits of meditation. And obviously I’m biased. I know that this sounds dramatic. But to me, meditation gives you access to the thing that we’re all looking for.
We’re looking for this sense of fulfillment. We’re looking for this sense of connectedness. We’re looking for it everywhere, but it doesn’t exist. “Once I get married… once I get this other job… once I hire this new employee… once my company gets sold… once my kids get the F out of my house… once I divorce this guy…” We’re just splitting our happiness just further and further away and then we die. And that, to me, is not a fun way to go through life; whereas what meditation gives us in no uncertain terms is access to our bliss and fulfillment in the only place that they reside which is inside of us.
And then, strange – it’s not strange. But once you have access to that thing internally, you stop being under the illusion that the happiness lies on the other side of that next drink or that next joint or that next cigarette or that next Facebook post or whatever the thing that you happen to be addicted to.
We start to be self-referral for our happiness versus object-referral for our. I think that’s just a much more enjoyable way to go through life.
Wendy Myers: Well, I think I’m going to go and meditate after this podcast.
Emily Fletcher: Great! Then you’d better have some sex.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell us a little bit more (and I know you touched on it on the beginning of the podcast) about your ZivaMIND program and what people can expect and where they can find it.
Emily Fletcher: Yeah! It’s really easy. You’ll just find it at ZivaMind.com. I have a few videos on there that go a little bit deeper into the neuroscience of how this particular style of meditation impact the brain and body. And then if you sign up, then we send you a whole little welcome kit with a guided visualization for better sleep, we teach you when to schedule the sessions. You need about 20 minutes a day for about eight days for the training itself. And then each day, you’ll have a little homework assignment.
The first day, you would chose a mantra. I would teach you how to use it. And then each day – imagine that the mantra is like the key that operates the car of your mind. And then each day, there’s a little bit more driving instructions.
And we do some calls. So you get to have some Q&A time. And then I really recommend that people join our online community of Ziva minders because that’s a really big and important part of the training.
So each day, I’m sending email reminders and email lessons. But really, it’s a video training. And by that eighth day, people graduate and they have the practice to take with them for life.
And ideally, you’re meditating 15 minutes twice a day, which I get sounds like a ridiculously big amount of time, but the reality is – here’s my new favorite quote, “If Oprah has time to meditate, you have time to meditate.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah, [inaudible 00:39:50] for nothing.
Emily Fletcher: That’s right. Or my other favorite quote, people are like, “Emily, I don’t have time to meditate,” I’m like, “Okay. Do you have time to feel like crap?” That’s costing us time too.
And then, after that, you have the practice and I teach you how to do it as far as exercise goes and coffee and when to do it when you’re flying and what about labor or if you get sick so that people really have a really solid understanding of the practice.
And then once you go through the program, you don’t lose access to it. So let’s say in six months, if you wanted to refresh, if you’re like, “What was Emily saying about flying or what was she saying about doing it before bed?”, then you have access to that program for as long as the program exists.
Wendy Myers: Great! That’s fantastic.
Wendy Myers: And so can you tell us a little bit more about your background. Do you have another website where people can find you at?
Emily Fletcher: Yeah, there’s also ZivaMeditation.com. That’s a very beautiful window into our whole world. There are lots and lots of videos. I think we have like 75 videos on there. It’s in the Ziva Vault. That’s what we call it. We have blog posts and podcasts and articles that I’ve written.
So if people want to just get to know a little bit more about me and my training and the style that I teach, that’s all at ZivaMeditation.com. We have hundreds of testimonials from people all over the world talking about the specifically ways that meditation has impacted them. Sometimes, I feel like a used car salesman because I’m like, “It does this… it does this… it does this…” So it’s better to hear it from other people. And then you can read a little bit more about my background as well. That’s ZivaMeditation.com.
Oh, here’s a fun thing that we have. It’s something called the PDM Campaign which is the Public Display of Meditation campaign. I started it about four years ago back before when meditation was super cool, basically getting people to out themselves as meditators. So any time you find yourself meditating on a train or a plane or on a bus stop, take a little meditation selfie afterwards and post it on Instagram with the hashtag #ZivaPDM. And then we have a whole page of like thousands of them from all over the world of people meditating in the craziest spaces. So that’s fun to check out too.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and you do live events as well, right?
Emily Fletcher: Mm-hmmm… yes, I teach in New York and L.A. I teach usually every other week in New York City and then I go to L.A. every three months. I teach an in-person course. That’s the Ziva Meditation course. That’s two hours a day for four days. That’s a little bit more powerful.
The mantras are a little bit more powerful. People meditate for a little bit longer. And the unstressing is a little bit more intense, but worth it.
And then I’m actually doing my first event. I’m going to Greece in June. So I think I’m teaching my first course overseas the first week of June. I don’t know if you have people over there, but I’m excited about that.
Wendy Myers: Well, that’s amazing! That’s great. You’re going to Europe.
Wendy Myers: I have a question I like to ask all of my guests.
Emily Fletcher: Uh-oh.
Wendy Myers: What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today.
Emily Fletcher: Plastic, 100% plastic. I mean, I guess you could put petroleum, like all the petroleum products in that category.
I was thinking about doing a challenge because we do Ziva challenges every week. I was like, “What if we did one day without plastic – without buying it, without touching it, without it touching our food?” I don’t know that I could do it to be honest. I’m trying to think of an attainable, achieveable goal. What about half a day? Can we go half a day without touching or buying or having your food touch plastic? I don’t know the answer to that. And I think it’s a bit of a science experiment. And I think that we don’t know the fully effect of what it’s doing to us.
I also read this terrifying thing that by 2050, there’s going to be more plastic in the ocean than there are fish.
Wendy Myers: Oh, my gosh! I have not read that statistic. That’s frightening, absolutely frightening.
Emily Fletcher: To be honest, I have not fact checked that. But I was talking to my husband about it, I was like, “Well, let’s say it’s wrong. Let’s say it’s even 50%. Let’s say 50% of the amount of fish in the ocean will be that much plastic. Even that is a big time crisis.”
And to be honest, I’m not smart enough to figure out how to solve it. I don’t know how to solve it.But to me, we have to start moving away from these products that are contaminating our foods and our bodies, eating and drinking everything out of plastic and then wondering why we’re getting cancer when we’re 40 years old.
So it’s something I’m becoming increasingly aware of, but I think it’s number one. Even if it’s not impacting your personal health, it’s impacting the health of the planet which is impacting all of us.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And the phthalates that are the chemical in plastics, they’re present at the rate of a thousand times more than other chemicals in our body. It’s the most common chemical in them.
That’s why I’m such a big advocate of infrared saunas because you have to sweat these chemicals out of your body. And you can, you can sweat that and any kind of estrogenic chemical out of your body, using a sauna. That’s how people are going to protect themselves from cancer and other disease caused by these estrogenic chemicals.
Emily Fletcher: Wow! I don’t know too much about infrared sauna. Is that something you have to have in your house? Can you go places and do it?
Wendy Myers: I do if you want to have one in your house. When you’re first starting a detox program, you’ve never used a sauna, you need to do one five, six, seven days a week for two to three years. And then, after that, you can do it a couple of times a day. So you can go to a facility and do it, but definitely more economical financial and time-wise to have on your house.
Emily Fletcher: Okay, thank you for that. I didn’t know that.
Wendy Myers: I have a lot of info on my site on myersdetox.com about infrared saunas.
Emily Fletcher: Okay, thanks! And I’d love to share it with our people as well.
Wendy Myers: Oh, great! That’s fantastic!
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was so good. I’m feeling very, very inspired to get really hone in on my meditation practice. I can fall off the wagon sometimes. But I always get back on. So thank you so much, Emily.
Emily Fletcher: That’s right. And that’s the key, just start again. No guilt, no beating yourself up. You just start again.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, absolutely.
Well, listeners, if you want to learn more about me, you can go to myersdetox.com and my new healing and detox website, MineralPower.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
