I’m going to ask you something rather blunt: What matters most in terms of your work performance? Are you evaluated and potentially promoted based on how you feel about your job or how you actually perform your job? This, I believe, is one of the most important questions to consider as you decide if it is worth it for you to commit to doing your daily Z Technique or not.
I hear from countless potential students that they are curious but ultimately reluctant to try because they are “too busy” or simply don’t like the idea of becoming “one of those meditation types.” That’s good, because at Ziva we aren’t really into that, either. In fact, most of our students come to us looking for a tool to improve their performance rather than a way to become a “meditation type.” It really doesn’t matter how you feel about meditation itself. I’d encourage you to consider this: Does anyone care how they feel during the forty-eighth minute on the Stairmaster? Does anyone really give a second thought to whether or not they’re really enjoying the eight glasses of water they drink a day? Of course not. But what people do care about is whether their blood pressure is down and they have more energy. What you probably care about is whether your clothes fit you better, if your skin is more radiant, and if your mind is sharper. In other words, how you feel about the process of pursuing physical health doesn’t matter; all that ultimately matters are the real results that come from those lifestyle changes.
The same is true of meditation. If you decide that all you really need to improve your life is a different workout routine or a public speaking course or a cleaner diet, or even if you decide that all this talk about less stress and better performance is hooey, I’m not going to know the difference.
But you will.
You are the person who has to live with the decisions you make each day. Maybe those other changes really will do the trick for you, and if that’s the case, I wish you all the happiness in the world—truly. But if you’ve tried the same old changes before without lasting success, maybe it’s time to try something else.
If your professional life is stagnant or your home life feels stuck in a rut, or if you feel a mental block that ingenuity simply cannot permeate, you can wait . . . but for what?
Maybe new opportunities will land in your lap. Maybe that brilliant idea will suddenly come to you in a flash of genius. Maybe your health will magically improve. Maybe your muscle tone will increase and your cholesterol count will decrease and you’ll instantly become a paragon of physical fitness. Maybe your years of accumulated stress will all magically dissolve one day. Maybe things will get better by waiting. Maybe . . . but probably not.
You can wish for a new and improved version of you to live a new and improved version of your life, or you can do something new. As the saying goes, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” You are not insane—you’re amazing. You just have to be willing to trust yourself to cultivate that amazingness. One of my other favorite quotes is from Albert Einstein, who reportedly said, “No problem can be solved at the same state of consciousness with which it was created.” If you’re having some lingering problems you haven’t been able to solve for a while, maybe now is the time to try a practice that has been scientifically proven to increase your cognitive performance and up-level your state of consciousness. Now is the time to decide and commit. Make a promise to yourself and keep it. Every time you do, you build personal integrity.
In the realm of video games, “leveling up” means that a character has somehow won, achieved, or otherwise gained a higher level of success within the electronic world, which results in gaining new skills, new tools, or entry to other areas of the game. In other words, the character becomes a more advanced version of themselves.
In the real world, this same process has recently come to be known as “up-leveling.” An “up-leveler” (as we say at Ziva) is simply someone who wants to be better every day—someone who is committed to learning, growth, and cultivating their skill set or competencies to the point that they are able to access higher echelons of performance, contribution, and accomplishment.
I can see you rolling your eyes. Come on, Emily. Isn’t that just a fancy new term for self-help? Nope. Up-leveling is not just about improving self, it’s about getting better at life—and not just your own life but the lives of people around you. Like the old expression goes, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” When you begin to up-level your life, the people around you can’t help but benefit from your increased productivity, insight, wisdom, confidence, and empathy. They, in turn, become inspired and empowered to up-level their own lives.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to enjoy the benefits of being an up-leveler? Getting better at literally everything while also becoming a better person? Um, yes, please. I’ll take two. But up-leveling isn’t an accident; you have to be willing to lay the foundation that makes it possible. And it doesn’t just happen; you have to invest yourself in the process in order to yield the benefits. Up-leveling is not a stroke of luck; it’s a choice. When I use the term up-levelers, I’m referring not to people who stumbled into success (we all know at least one of those). I’m talking about people who actively and deliberately made the choice to raise their performance in life from one level to a higher one. Up-levelers are dedicated not just to pursuing short-term goals but to raising the quality of every aspect of their mind, body, relationships, and interactions with the world.
That is why I beat the drum of Mindfulness, Meditation, and Manifesting so steadily. These mental techniques offer the highest yield with the least amount of effort of any behavioral practice I know. If you want to up-level your life and enjoy all the benefits doing so brings to you and those around you, you have to be willing to do the work to break yourself out of some old patterns. All our habits bear reexamining periodically to make sure they are still consistent with our current beliefs, priorities, and goals. That is one of the hallmarks of a successful individual in any field: a willingness to adapt habits in a continual effort to improve. You can stay where you are, as you are, altering nothing about yourself but hoping that things will somehow change for you. Or you can make small but purposeful adaptations—just a few adjustments or tweaks to your daily schedule—and begin to see deep, fundamental changes and improvements in how you think, how you perceive the world, and who you are as a human being.
The choice is ultimately up to you, but as the saying goes, a year from now, you’ll wish you’d begun today.
Speaking of Einstein, he was just one of an impressive list of geniuses who seemed to grasp the significance of short, scheduled periods of rest during the day. Leonardo da Vinci famously followed a rather strange sleep pattern: Instead of going to bed at night, as is the current cultural norm, he instead opted to nap for fifteen or twenty minutes every four hours, around the clock. Sometimes he would sneak in slightly longer rests, but never more than two hours.
This practice, known as polyphasic sleeping, is a pretty extreme—almost manic—approach to slumber. But Aristotle, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and Salvador Dalí also engaged in brief, scheduled periods of repose during the day as a means of rejuvenating their minds and unblocking their ingenuity. Einstein was rumored to take twenty-minute “naps” when he couldn’t solve a problem, then come back to look at it from a fresh angle. This suggests to me that although he may not have had access to these particular techniques borne out of ancient India, he was cognizing his own way to access turiya, or that fourth state of consciousness. In fact, the writings of visionary inventor Tesla demonstrate that he was very familiar with the Vedas and the wisdom contained inside.1
No, I am not claiming that all of these visionaries were practiced meditators (that we know of, anyway), nor am I implying that you, too, will be able to peek behind the curtain of space and time if you just follow the Z Technique. (Though if you do, it would be awesome if you could give us a shout-out in your Nobel Prize acceptance speech!) But I am saying that the annals of history are full of extraordinary men and women who understood the importance of short periods of rejuvenating rest during the day as part of the creative process. Modes of thinking that are out of the ordinary require preparation that is out of the ordinary. More recently, Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor Srini Pillay suggested that we need to schedule time for our brains to unfocus every day so that we can better focus when needed.2 His research indicates that the brain experiences focus fatigue with our modern schedules. While Pillay suggests taking a nap, I would offer that the Z Technique is exactly the sort of restful activity that has no agenda to focus on and will provide a welcome respite from focus fatigue without giving you the sleep hangover that naps are famous for.
Between one and ten minutes after you lie down to rest, the brain begins to send out sleep spindles, which are bursts of brain activity as the mind begins to power down. At roughly the twenty-minute mark, the brain begins to produce theta waves, which indicate that it’s fully engaged in dreaming. Meditation, though different from napping, works with this same pattern of brain activity, allowing your body to get deep rest while the mind dips into this place that is beyond full waking consciousness but not yet in sleep.
If the idea of polyphasic sleep sounds as wildly inconvenient to you as it does to me, perhaps it’s worth exploring alternatives that operate under comparable, but far less extreme, principles. That, I believe, is the beauty of this practice: It is a productivity and creativity tool that allows you to unlock higher levels of functioning without disrupting your entire way of being, along with those of your family, neighbors, coworkers, and clients. Meditation allows you to up-level your life without upending it.
The list of geniuses I named above all recognized the value of cultivating short, practiced periods of repose. Of course, it’s impossible to prove their rest patterns directly contributed to their brilliant insight and output, but it certainly seems more than coincidental that some of the most extraordinary thinkers in history all followed variations on this pattern of behavior.
When we look at that impressive list of names, it’s easy to think, Yeah, but they’re geniuses. I mean, I may be smarter than the average bear or my idiot brother-in-law, but there is no way I’m like those guys. The good news is, it doesn’t matter if you’re the next da Vinci or Tesla; you’re uniquely positioned to impact the world with your own set of competencies, experiences, instincts, and ideas. Chances are, you’re pretty exceptional at something. And if you want to develop your own genius and drive your personal success, what better way than to study the habits of great geniuses of the past to see if there is something there worth imitating?
In 2016, Biological Psychiatry Journal published a study conducted by a team led by J. David Creswell, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University.3 What they found was that meditation decreased systemic inflammation in highly stressed job-seekers while increasing attention spans and improving the mental factors that control how a person behaves while trying to achieve a goal. In other words, meditation actually changed the way people thought about and dedicated themselves to achieving success, while also improving their physical health.
For those high achievers already in positions of authority and influence, the benefits of meditation are notable as well. After a fifteen-minute meditation, people made more confident and sound business decisions, according to a series of experiments conducted by an international team of researchers, which included a professor from the Wharton School of Business.4
Both our anecdotal evidence at Ziva and scientific evidence point to the fact that meditative rest seems to have a direct correlation to an improvement in our mental capacities and competencies, as well as a broadening effect on our ingenuity and creative problem-solving abilities. But why?
One of the biggest benefits of meditation is something we don’t talk about much because of how profoundly hippie-dippie it sounds: the expansion of consciousness.
Before you toss this book aside, thinking, I was with you up to this point, but now we’re just getting into ridiculousness, I’d like to take a moment to talk about what consciousness is in terms that don’t sound like I moonlight selling patchouli from the back of a VW bus.
Consciousness: The animating force inside all of us; the quality or state of being aware, especially of something within oneself.
Every living thing is expressing consciousness, but to varying degrees. For my dog, expanded consciousness might look like a realization that while there is one person offering a snack, there is a second one offering a belly rub—and then having to decide which person to go to. No great moral implications there. But for humans, when I talk about expanding consciousness, what I mean is our awareness of how we connect with the world and our place in it. The more consciousness a person has, the more joy, peace, equanimity, and connectedness that person will enjoy. Less consciousness can create more suffering and more feelings of isolation.
There are three telltale signs of how much consciousness you have:
How you perform in each of these matters has a direct impact on your personal and professional achievements. Consider, for example, your ability to hold many things in one awareness, or pull the lens back. Are you able to manage one project while pursuing leads and pitching ideas for the next one? Are you able to run a board meeting and be acutely aware of the hard facts of the negotiations while simultaneously noticing the emotional dynamics at play in the room? If you say yes, chances are that you’re headed for the corner office more quickly than the person who melts down when pulled off task by a simple question. Are you able to operate your car, drink your coffee, put the address of the soccer fields into your GPS, and keep your kids and the carpoolers in your back seat under some semblance of order while you mentally reflect on your tasks for this week? If so, you’re the superparent that all the other moms and dads marvel at.
Now think back to one of those days when you could barely manage one or two of those tasks at a time without freaking out, spilling your coffee, or forgetting something important you were supposed to be doing. Of course we’re all going to have bad days when nothing seems to go our way, but when your default setting is effortlessly holding many things in one awareness because you have the mental space from eradicating useless stress, you’re destined for a different kind of success.
And how does meditation accomplish this? When the right and left hemispheres of the brain are communicating with each other easily and effectively, your ability to work in the present while also dealing with whatever from the past or future is also knocking at your door will naturally improve. No matter what your job is, this ability to effectively pull the lens back on your scope of awareness is a highly beneficial skill.
What about the ability to detect subtleties? Why does it matter? In more common phrasing, this is a factor in your intuition. Those gut reactions and automatic judgment calls that inexplicably but undeniably tell you which way you ought to go don’t come out of nowhere—they are the result of your mind detecting and registering sometimes extremely subtle pieces of information that act like clues pointing you in the right direction.
No two things are the same. No two potential relationships, no two job applicants, no two ideas, no two proposals for a client, not even two grapefruits at the grocery store. Life is giving us a constant stream of decisions to make. As we discussed in chapter 7, the more we meditate, the less likely we are to make a mistake. Remember, a mistake is a “miss-take”—we took something to be one thing when in actuality, it was something else. Mistakes happen when we overlook something or make a judgment call that is clouded by longing.
In a professional setting, finely honed intuition can be the key to success. Truly great leaders often seem to have a knack for when to take a gamble and when to play it safe; when to take someone at their word and when to call a bluff; when to trust someone and when to cut ties. For some people, intuition is a gift; for others, it’s a skill they must actively cultivate. Either way, the ability to detect subtle differences in a more precise and accurate way is always an essential element in up-leveling your performance. When you use meditation to access your fulfillment internally, you erase that fog of longing; you clear the way for your perception to become keener and more consistently accurate.
Finally, let’s consider the ability to detect themes. How conscious are we of the themes at work around us every day? A theme is simply a pattern, and people, families, organizations, Nature—they are working in patterns all the time. Now, it’s pretty easy to detect other people’s patterns. We are all experts when it comes to our roommate or our best friend’s love life. We all have friends who call us at eleven p.m. for the fourth time that year, crying because they’ve been through yet another breakup or they’ve made yet another terrible life choice, and from where you sit, you can see plain as day the series of actions and decisions that they have engaged in that has put them in this same place yet again (or even deeper in the same hole).
But what about the ability to detect our own themes? How good are we, without the aid of a lot of counseling and a couple of major breakthroughs, at picking up on the patterns—in the choices we make, the actions we take, the relationships we develop or discard—in our own lives? Perhaps more than either of the other two attributes of higher states of consciousness, this is the one that has the greatest ramifications on both our professional and personal success.
As you continue to meditate, destress your nervous system, strengthen your right-and-left-brain balance, and sharpen your intuition, you will begin to feel your mental lens pull back to give you a wider scope of all the subtle details clamoring for your attention at once. In other words, you begin to see the forest rather than the trees. As your consciousness expands, you will be better able to recognize, identify, and name the patterns that have helped to craft the life you have right now. This understanding will allow you to put your time and attention on the themes that are constructive and take away your energy and resources from the themes that are destructive.
Expanded consciousness, you see, is not about mind trips with cosmic visions or dancing naked in the woods to become one with Nature—at least, not the way we’re exploring it in this book. (And if that’s your thing, you do you.) What the Z Technique will help you achieve is an awareness and elegance as you navigate the unending demands of your work life, home life, social life, and love life. You will find yourself handling your multitude of responsibilities with more grace and greater effectiveness. You will be more keenly attuned to the little clues that point you toward the best decisions, and you’ll be more able to spot and eliminate damaging patterns while fostering positive ones. This ability to view the world through both ends of the telescope—the big-picture patterns and the microscopic details—is the ultimate key to becoming the most amazing version of you.
Before we close this chapter, I’d like to look at how the expansion of consciousness you are now developing can help you move from downplaying your own abilities to celebrating your best self with no sense of guilt, apology, or backpedaling. As you start meditating, your “deserving power” increases. Deserving power is what you secretly believe you deserve. As you know, we don’t get what we want in life—we get what we believe we deserve. Over time, this increase in deserving power will help you break the apology addiction.
Deserving Power: What you believe you deserve.
Not long ago, a friend invited me over for dinner. She asked me to bring my favorite bottle of wine to pair with a special meal she was preparing. She’d been hungry to test out a new recipe and thought I would be the perfect guinea pig.
I arrived promptly at seven p.m., excited to try some delicious new cuisine that my friend had prepared with so much love. She invited me in and opened the entirely-too-expensive-for-a-screwtop wine I had brought. The timer went off, and when she presented her stunningly crafted meal, she placed it down on the table and immediately said, “I’m so sorry. This just didn’t turn out how I wanted it to. It’s probably terrible. It’s okay—you can tell me if it’s terrible. I won’t be offended. I’m not really much of a chef anyway.”
I hadn’t even had a chance to try the dish she had worked so hard to prepare, and already she felt as if she needed to ask forgiveness for the possibility that it might be less than perfect.
I used to do this all the time. I spent most of my teens and twenties apologizing constantly for things that were not my fault or even preemptively apologizing for something I’d created for someone else. This is a common trait in children of alcoholics. I don’t like to stereotype by gender, but I know from personal experience and from watching thousands of students that this tends to be something women struggle with more than men. Thankfully, as I began to grow in my practice, I was able to curb this behavior, but I know it’s still a rampant problem for many of us.
When we create something—whether it’s dinner for a friend, a presentation at work, a self-published memoir, or a new company—we are, by definition, bringing something from the un-manifest into the manifest. We’re stepping into the unknown and making ourselves vulnerable by putting into concrete terms something we had nurtured in our mind, which leaves our ideas and ourselves subject to other people’s judgment. That can be incredibly scary and lead to a less-than-elegant plague of self-consciousness and doubt. We often end up apologizing for our work, our choices, and even our very existence when someone bumps into us in the grocery store.
Here’s the reality: When faced with a deadline, important project, or creative challenge, none of us feel as if we have enough time or enough resources. I don’t know one creative person who has birthed something and then dropped the internal mic without a second thought. Most of us are constantly trying to figure out how we are lacking and how we can improve next time. That can make you feel really vulnerable, but it doesn’t give you permission to apologize for your work. So here is your challenge, if you choose to accept it: Don’t preface your future unveilings (of any kind) by pointing out and obsessing over every tiny flaw. You may judge something as imperfect, but others might not view it that way at all. When you apologize preemptively, you’re giving them permission to lead with disapproval.
And my friend’s dish, by the way, ended up being utterly delectable. Her worry and stress were for nothing; the whole meal tasted divine. But even if it hadn’t been great, we still enjoyed a wonderful evening of friendship and laughs together. That experience by itself would have made up for any failings in the food. And my hypothesis is that if she hadn’t preemptively apologized for something that did not need forgiveness, it may have tasted even sweeter. When we criticize our creations while presenting them, we are actually insulting the recipient if they enjoy it. Rude.
We all know that one of the most important elements of success is confidence—whether real or projected. No one wants to follow a shaky leader who second-guesses their own decisions and abilities. When I learned to meditate, I found a new and very different sense of confidence and trust in myself. This allowed me to snuff out my apology addiction pretty quickly. As I learned to hold multiple things in one awareness, I became much better at meeting all my obligations with a higher degree of proficiency; this gave me a stronger sense of my own capabilities. As I learned to trust my intuition, I found the confidence in my choices growing daily. And as I became more adept at detecting patterns in both myself and others, I felt my insight and creativity grow as I found new solutions and new ideas that took my life and my career in a direction I knew was going to have a powerful impact.
There is a second aspect to this, however, and that is to break the addiction to trying. In the famous words of Yoda, “Do or do not. There is no try.”
Trying is an attempt to achieve something. Are you trying to be successful? Trying to get in shape? Trying to save money? Trying to meditate? If the answer is yes, congratulations! You’ve made it. It’s happening now. You are currently succeeding at trying.
The thing is, though, trying isn’t enough. A tree doesn’t try to grow, it just grows. A flower doesn’t try to open, it just opens. Don’t try; do.
You never hear real power players say, “I’m trying.” They say, “I am doing.” Oprah didn’t say she was going to try to start a network. She just started it. You either do things or you don’t. The security blanket that trying gives us is false, stagnant, and dangerous.
I’m not suggesting laziness—just the opposite, in fact. Work is important and necessary. Take inspired action on your desires to accomplish and to do every single day. No one wants to pay to watch you do something with effort, but everyone will want to see you do your work with a sense of ease, confidence, and self-assuredness. We want to move into a space of working because we love the work and love creating for the sake of creating. We do the work so that we afford ourselves the luxury of effortlessness. This holds true for your new practice as well. You do the work of scheduling it, you do the work of bravely moving through the discomfort of the emotional detox, you do the work of getting your buns in the chair twice a day every day. If you do that, you afford yourself the luxury of effortlessness when you’re in the sitting itself.
As you continue your twice-daily practice, you’ll cultivate confidence in your brain’s ability to perceive and execute based on your own observations, insights, education, preparation, and experience. You have everything you need to actually make something happen. Most of us have spent a long time strengthening the “trying” muscle because it gives us an easy way out if we don’t succeed. Get rid of that safety net. Go out and do with elegance and confidence. You might “fail.” Do it anyway.
Once you break the apology addiction and the trying trap, you can step into the most amazing version of you. Ideally, we work passionately on the task at hand and do the best that we can with our current abilities and understanding. How do we find peace with such a bold shift in habits? Step 1: Scheduling and committing to your new twice-a-day habit. This will allow you to cultivate a level of ease that comes from trusting yourself and your ever-increasing cognitive capabilities.
Eyes-Open Exercise
Breaking the Apology Addiction
Many of us have varying degrees of apology addiction, and it shows up in a lot of different ways, from mindlessly saying “sorry” when someone bumps into you to qualifying your work when you present it. So here’s a challenge for you:
For one whole week, challenge yourself not to apologize. To keep track, find a special place in a journal, or even make a note in your handy smartphone, where you can keep a tally of each time you unnecessarily apologize and catch yourself after. See how many times you apologize unnecessarily in a week.
Pro tip: Don’t turn into a nightmare person. If you’ve actually wronged someone, or hurt someone, or if an apology is actually relevant and needed, then by all means ask for forgiveness. What I want you to keep track of for one week is how many times you mindlessly fall into an old habit of accepting blame for something that has nothing to do with fault. Notice how your self-perception changes when you stop engaging in this behavior for only a week, then decide if you want to keep the challenge going.
Ziva Case Study 6
Stress Less, Accomplish More
I started Ziva because I heard Emily had a highly sought-after practice aimed toward high achievers. I thought this might be exactly what I needed to learn, and who I needed to learn it from.
What I wanted was relief from stress, anxiety, and mild depression induced partly by heredity and partly by the daily trappings of being a full-time Realtor. Pre-Ziva, I was working about sixty to seventy hours a week, depending on the season. I was burned out, to say the least. When you feel chained to work all day, every day, it affects your entire life: You start to find social events an annoyance because they are taking you away from time that could be spent working; you take your stress out on those who you know will stick around; depression comes along when you use adrenaline to keep your head above the workload; you quit doing anything not work-production related; on rare days off, you find yourself staying in bed, half awake, for twelve-plus hours straight, attempting to “recharge” in some way.
So . . . yeah, I needed some help.
I spent three years on a mild antidepressant and decided that masking the symptoms wasn’t solving it for me. I needed to go inward and change something. Off the pills, on to the meditation.
I took the Ziva course and have been meditating twice a day for more than two years now.
Emily has this saying: “Stress less . . . accomplish more.” As a skeptic, I thought, Seriously? Come on! I am loving this Mindfulness, Meditation, and Manifesting thing, but that may be taking it a bit too far. Seven months later, at the height of the busy season in Florida real estate sales, I found myself working only forty to forty-five hours a week. At first I panicked, thinking, Am I failing as a Realtor? Why am I not working constantly? I heard from another Realtor; she worked twenty hours this weekend but I only worked six. Am I going to go hungry next month and lose everything because I’m not working as much as she is? Then I looked at my production numbers—and I actually had to check them twice because I didn’t believe what I was seeing! I actually sold more real estate in the first six months of this year of meditation than I did the entire previous year without taking fifteen precious minutes twice a day out of my packed schedule. That’s right—I worked less . . . and accomplished more. I also realized that I was sleeping better and had not felt the dark cloud of depression following me for months. I even found myself listening more and talking less.
Your changes may be similar or quite different, but I promise you that you will find the process worth the investment on many levels. I cannot recommend this practice enough.
Ziva Case Study 7
From Good to Great
My life was far from a mess when I started Ziva. In fact, life was already pretty damn good. I had a thriving business, a wonderful partner, and a beautiful one-year-old son.
Yet not all was perfect. With the demands of running a business and the seven-day-workweek life of an entrepreneur, plus being a new dad, life certainly was hectic at times. So much to do, constant interruptions—add sleep deprivation from a baby into the mix, and it became tough to get things done. As projects started to pile up, it got to the point where I was chronically feeling overwhelmed, always feeling like there was more to do than I had time for. My mind was constantly preoccupied, trying to keep track of everything I needed to do. That led to low-level stress and anxiety permeating my days. It became harder to get stuff done and find the motivation to do work, and I wasn’t able to relax and simply enjoy downtime with my family or really be in the moment when surfing or rock climbing. My sleep was disturbed because I couldn’t turn my mind off at night. My body was in a constant state of tension, including aches and pains due to stress. It started to sap my energy and impair cognitive performance, motivation, and physical performance during sports. It became a vicious cycle.
At some point during this cycle, I became conscious of the fact that I was losing the ability to be present and relaxed—to just laugh, play, and enjoy the moment. So I made the decision that it was time to start meditating again.
I say “again” because I had dabbled in many types of esoteric meditation years prior to starting my business, but nothing ever really stuck with me or became a daily practice.
Then I stumbled across Emily at a conference. She guided the whole group through a meditation, and I thought, Damn, this woman is great! I want to learn her style of meditation!
I made the decision to take her course about eight months ago, and I’m so glad I did.
What I’ve experienced is a profound relaxation, where everything calms down, and instead of all that tension and anxiety building up through the course of the day and then feeling wiped out, now I feel relaxed and refreshed all day long.
None of the demands on me changed in any way. The thing that changed is my brain, and my ability to handle those demands.
It is possible to go through life and do what you need to do while being stressed, low energy, lacking motivation, anxious, in a crappy mood, and not performing well mentally or physically. But you could do all the same things you need to do each day from a place of relaxation, serenity, joy, and even playfulness.
I spent years in the former state. Now—thanks to Ziva—I am squarely in the latter state, and I feel great!
All this because of these two little blocks of the 3 M’s. It’s like wiping the whiteboard clean twice a day. As soon as you do that, you go back into this beautiful place of relaxation.
I am getting more done than ever, I am present and relaxed with my family, my sleep is phenomenal, my surfing and climbing have never been better (I’ve never been more fearless or performed as well as I do now), and, most important, I am smiling and laughing while going through my day.
This practice has truly changed my brain, and if we had done before-and-after MRI scans, I have no doubt that would be verified. This is a practice I am committed to doing every day for the rest of my life.