“I can’t meditate.”
This is the most common refrain I hear from would-be meditators. For some, “I can’t meditate” means “I want to meditate, but seriously, have you seen my schedule?” For others, “I can’t meditate” is far more literal: “I tried to meditate, but I couldn’t stop my mind from thinking.”
Both types of people are usually very sincere in their desire to practice meditation. Both types of people believe meditation is not a viable option for them. And both types of people are wrong.
The disconnect comes from a cultural misunderstanding of the term meditation. I think there’s one dude out there telling people that in order to meditate, you have to clear your mind. I wish I could find this guy and teach him how to meditate. While it is possible to access different states of consciousness, and humans are the only species that can do this at will, the point of meditation is not to clear the mind. I would argue that the “point” of meditation is to get good at life. So if you’ve ever tried meditation and felt frustrated because you couldn’t stop all those crazy thoughts, here’s some really good news: The mind thinks involuntarily, just like the heart beats involuntarily. One more time, for dramatic effect: The mind thinks involuntarily, just like the heart beats involuntarily. Just for kicks, take two seconds and try to give your heart a command to stop beating.
If you’re still reading this, I’ll assume you weren’t successful. It’s easy for us to see that trying to stop the heart from beating is fruitless, yet we continue to try to stop the mind from thinking. Then we feel like a meditation failure and we quit. Who wants to keep doing something that makes you feel as if you’re constantly failing? People who find one type of meditation unfulfilling, too time-consuming, or too difficult often reject anything that goes by the same name. The beauty of the Z Technique, however, is that it’s almost completely fail-proof—and it’s a tool that will help raise your performance in all areas of your life. This style of meditation is so simple that you actually have to try to screw it up. Combine that ease with the fact that meditation has been scientifically proven to improve nearly every area of your life without taking away your competitive edge, and I feel confident that you’re going to become a meditator (or an ex-ex-meditator, if we want to be really confusing), too. Once you have a technique that is designed for you and a bit of training on how properly to gauge your success, meditation can become an enjoyable part of your daily routine.
But here’s the rub: The word meditation has become like the word food. Blueberries, hot dogs, sushi, potato chips—they’re all food, but they all do wildly different things to your body. Similarly, there are hundreds of different styles of meditation, but Westerners tend to pile all the techniques under one umbrella term, even though these varying techniques do vastly different things to your brain and body.
Saying you don’t like meditation is like saying you don’t like food. Imagine going to a restaurant, looking at your server, and just ordering “food.” What’s the server supposed to do with that?
Meditation can be broken into a number of different styles: mindfulness, Zen, self-induced transcendence, Vipassana, Kundalini—just to name a few. Some schools of thought identify as few as five different forms; others break it down into more than twenty. For the purposes of this book, we will classify meditation into three main categories, or what I like to call the 3 M’s: Mindfulness, Meditation, and Manifesting. Just as eating a hamburger does different things to your body than drinking a chia seed smoothie, different styles of meditation light up different parts of the brain and require different degrees of effort and time. They can also have varying degrees of effectiveness on your performance off the proverbial cushion.
This is a very personal question, and one you’ll ultimately have to answer for yourself. I want to do everything in my power to give you the information you need to make an educated decision based on data and your own personal experience. In this book, I will be referring to two different techniques quite a lot: (1) The Ziva Technique, which is what I teach in person, and in our virtual course, zivaONLINE; and (2) The Z Technique, which, to reiterate, is an adaptation of the Ziva Technique. The Z Technique combines the same beautiful trifecta of Mindfulness, Meditation, and Manifesting, but in a gentler and more universal approach, since I am not able to deliver personal mantras or offer individualized training and guidance the way I can when working with students face-to-face.
To start, let’s get crystal clear on the differences between the 3 M’s that you will be learning in the coming pages. We’ll begin with the first two: mindfulness and meditation. Many people think these are the same, and even use the words as synonyms. This is problematic, especially as both practices are gaining popularity. One mental technique was originally designed for monks, and the other for people with busy minds and busy lives. With meditation becoming increasingly more mainstream, it will be helpful to be well versed on the differences between the two, and to develop a specificity of vocabulary so you don’t feel unnecessarily confused or frustrated.
Mindfulness is a “directed focus” mental practice, meaning that you have some point of concentration during the exercise. I would define it as the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment, and it is very effective at handling your stress in the right now.
Mindfulness: The art of bringing your awareness into the present moment. An effective tool for changing your level of stress in the right now.
Most mindfulness practices are designed to help you bring your awareness into the body and into the right now, making it a beautiful tool to help you stop incessantly reviewing the past and rehearsing the future. Where this can get confusing is when people use the word meditation when they’re actually referring to some type of mindfulness exercise in which you’re focusing your mind in a specific direction. Counting your breaths, visualizing, imagining a waterfall, listening to guided audio—all these would be versions of mindfulness. Most of the popular “meditation” apps or guided YouTube videos are shades of mindfulness. They are lovely, and can be incredibly useful for changing your mental state in the right now, but I use mindfulness as a runway into meditation. It gives my high-performing students something to do with their busy minds as they are preparing their bodies for the deep rest and surrender that is meditation. I think of mindfulness as the appetizer to the main course of the Ziva Technique—meditation. Mindfulness is a great tool to use if you’re stressed in the right now and want to feel better immediately. Similarly, if you have a headache and you take an aspirin, you start feeling results right away. If you’re stressed and you listen to a guided mindfulness exercise on your phone, it will help you feel better in the right now.
Meditation, as I define it, is helping you get rid of your stress from the past. Your body is a perfect accountant: Every all-nighter you’ve pulled, every bite of fast food you’ve ever eaten, and every shot of tequila you’ve done—it’s all stored in your cellular memory. Meditation gives the body deep, healing rest—rest that is actually deeper than sleep. When you give your body the rest it needs, it knows how to heal itself. One of the things it heals itself from is stress. The less stress you have in your body, the easier it is for you to perform at the top of your game.
The specific style of meditation I teach at Ziva has its roots in something called nishkam karma yoga, a Sanskrit term meaning “union attained by action hardly taken.” It is a six-thousand-year-old practice that is born out of the Vedas, an ancient body of knowledge originating in the Himalayas. The Vedas are the same beautiful body of knowledge from which stem yoga, Ayurvedic medicine, feng shui, and acupuncture. The word Veda means knowledge and this knowledge is 1,500 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza; in other words, this isn’t some new age hogwash or hipster-inspired fad.
Nishkam karma meditation requires no effort, no focused concentration, and, thankfully, no struggling to “clear the mind.” I like to think of it as the “lazy man’s meditation.” Instead of trying to force yourself into a cosmic abyss of black-hole nothingness, you allow the body to innocently and spontaneously access a deeply restful state. There is a tool that helps with this; it’s called a mantra.
Now, the word mantra needs some clarification as well because the wellness industry has hijacked this term. A mantra is not a slogan. It is not an affirmation, such as “I’m a strong, powerful woman!” or “I deserve abundance!” In actuality, the word mantra—Sanskrit for “mind vehicle”—is a word or sound used as an anchor to de-excite the nervous system, access more subtle states of consciousness, and induce deep, healing rest.
The Vedas: An ancient body of knowledge originating in Northern India, designed to help practitioners find renewal, balance, and wholeness of body, mind, and spirit. They are a human interpretation of the laws of Nature, not a doctrine or dogma.
Mantra: Sanskrit, from man = “mind” and tra = “vehicle.” A mantra is used as an anchor to de-excite the nervous system, access more subtle states of consciousness, and induce deep, healing rest.
When I teach people face-to-face, students are given their own personalized mantra, which helps them access a verifiable fourth state of consciousness that is different from waking, sleeping, or dreaming. In that fourth state of consciousness, you’re giving your body rest that is two to five times deeper than sleep. There will be more on the science behind this concept in chapter 4. One of the main things that differentiates our in-person training from zivaONLINE and the Z Technique are the mantras—what types we use for which training and how long you spend in the meditation portion. In zivaLIVE, which is face-to-face, you’re given a personalized but meaningless primordial sound; in zivaONLINE, you are taught a protocol for how to choose your own mantra from a curated list; for the Z Technique and the purposes of learning through a book, we will be using a gentler, universal mantra to access this rest. This deep rest allows you to feel more awake afterward. Imagine a supercharged power nap without the sleep hangover. And instead of needing an hour and a half with your eyes closed, you need only fifteen minutes—bonus: you can do it in your chair at work, on the train, or even with your kids screaming in the next room. The function that helps get rid of the old stresses we have been storing in our cellular and genetic memory is a de-excitation of the nervous system. When you de-excite something, you create order. When you create order in your cells, the stress can start to come up and out in a way that allows your brain to use more of its computing power for the task at hand, instead of wasting that energy managing old stress. This is one of the reasons that meditators tend to get more done in less time.
The specific technique we will be following in Stress Less, Accomplish More fuses ancient practices with modern neuroscience. There are elements of the 3 M’s distilled specifically for people who are out in the world, who are going after their dreams, and whose lives are a far cry from an insular, monastic existence. What you are about to learn is for people with busy minds and busy lives. Mindfulness helps you deal with stress in the present; meditation gets rid of stress from the past; and manifesting helps you clarify your dreams for the future.
Mindfulness, in its current form, is a derivative of styles of meditation that were originally designed for monks. If you think you might be a monk, this is not the book for you. (But I’m guessing the likelihood of you wanting to be a monk is low.) Monastic types are contributing to society in a different way than the rest of the population; their whole life is a meditation. This was news to me when I first started learning. I assumed that monks must be meditating at such an advanced level that they would be vibrating or levitating, but the reality is that if you’re in a state of meditation all day, you can afford to do a gentler practice. The rest of us, known in India as “householders”—that is, people with jobs and kids, companies to run, and bills to pay—have less time to meditate. We need a technique designed for us, one that allows us to drop in and access that deep, healing rest regardless of our external settings. That’s where the mantra comes into play. You will learn a universal mantra as part of the Z Technique; think of it as an anchor to help you access your least-excited state of awareness, the key to tapping the source of unlimited fulfillment that is inside us all.
The Z Technique is intended for those of us who are householders—who are getting things done and making big things happen on the physical plane. That doesn’t mean we can’t interact with another plane; it just means we don’t spend the majority of our time hanging out there. This style allows us to reap maximum benefits with minimal effort or time. It is designed for high performers. I define a high performer as anyone who wants to be better every day—someone who wants to use their gifts to leave the world better than they found it. Yes, some of us work in high-pressure, “high-stress” environments, but all of us want to get in, get out, and get on with life while life gets better.
High Performer: Someone who wants to be better every day, with the intention to leave the world better than they found it.
Finally, let’s dive into the third of the 3 M’s: manifesting. Manifesting is simply getting clear about precisely what you want to create in your life, or consciously curating a life you love. It is shocking to me how many people never take the time to get clear on their goals. When I ask my students what their dream job looks like, I often hear them justify their current job. When I ask people what their perfect relationship looks like, I often hear vague platitudes about respect and laughter. But just like placing an order at a restaurant, we have to be specific when calling in our dreams.
Most people don’t take the time to let Nature know exactly what it is they’d like to create. Manifestation tools help you get crystal clear on your desires so you start to act as if they are on the way. Think of it as placing your order with the great cosmic waitress at the great cosmic restaurant.
Manifesting: Designing a life you love. The act of being grateful for what you have while simultaneously imagining your dreams as if they are happening now. The process of manifesting is multifold: 1. Give thanks for what you have. 2. Clarify your goals. 3. Take time to imagine one goal as if it is happening now. 4. Detach from any outcome.
This process has the effect of closing the gap between your desires and those desires becoming reality.
Let me emphasize at the outset that manifesting is not “magical thinking.” This isn’t something you simply wish into being; you still have to get off the couch and take inspired action. Manifesting is the acknowledgment that thoughts become things. Once you learn the Z Technique, you’ll have a daily practice of manifesting directly after the deep rest and connection that meditation provides, which is a powerful time to create.
What makes manifesting so effective directly after meditation is that the meditation is helping you access that verifiable fourth state of consciousness, which is different from waking, sleeping, or dreaming. In this fourth state of consciousness, your right brain and left brain are functioning in unison. This is very similar to the state you are in when you fall into and out of sleep. Every time the brain transitions between waking and sleeping, it moves through a short window of this fourth state of consciousness, which is something I call “the bliss field.” We will also access this during the meditation portion of the Z Technique.
It has long been known that visualizing your ideal life as you fall asleep is a great way to fast-track your dreams to fruition. Neville Goddard wrote about this back in 1944 in his book Feeling Is the Secret. The amazing gift you’ll be giving yourself with your twice-a-day practice is triple the opportunities to plant these seeds for your future.
Just as you can achieve a deeper stretch and greater flexibility at the end of a workout, when your muscles are already warmed up and malleable, so, too, is manifestation a more effective tool at the end of meditation. In my personal experience and in guiding thousands of high achievers through this process, I have found that practicing meditation and manifesting together is so much more powerful than doing either on its own. You could meditate all day long, but if you never take the time to get clear about what it is you want, it’s much harder for Nature to bring you your order. Similarly, you could make hundreds of vision boards and hang them all around your home, or practice The Secret day in and day out, but if your body and mind are riddled with stress, you may not believe you deserve to step into your dream. The trick here is that we don’t get what we want in life, we get what we believe we deserve.
There are some schools of thought that suggest your desires are divinely inspired—that manifestation actually precedes the desire. This idea holds that your impulse for something is actually Nature letting you know what is already making its way toward you. You know how you can feel the wind rushing toward you through the subway tunnel before you ever hear the train approaching or actually see its lights? Or how you see the pink and orange clouds before the sun actually rises above the horizon at dawn? Desire and manifestation can be thought of as operating in the same way. (This is rather advanced, and we will revisit this concept once you have more practice under your belt.)
It doesn’t matter what type of meditation you’re practicing. If you don’t have any training, it’s very possible you’ll be judging yourself based on misinformation. Meditation is deceptively simple, but don’t confuse simplicity for weakness. As lovely as it would be to be able to give the mind a command to shut up, or turn off our built-in hearing aids, this is not the point. There’s nowhere on planet Earth that is completely silent, not even the caves of the Himalayas. If you sit down to meditate and a dog barks in the distance, a siren screams by, or your right bum cheek falls asleep—and your mind registers those sounds or sensations, as well as all the thoughts and images that go along with them—suddenly you’re on a mental field trip. (So much for achieving oneness with the universe.) Surely monks would never deign to let their minds wander to such unprofound things as their neighbor’s cranky pug or a tingling butt.
As a result, you chalk that meditation session up as a failure, and further, you see yourself as someone who has failed. The next time you sit down to meditate, you’re determined to do better, thinking, I’m not going to think this time. I’m not going to think this time. I’m not going to think this time . . . which is, of course, thinking. So you finish another meditation, and not only did you “fail” to clear your mind again, you have the added guilt of a second failed meditation attempt. You grit your teeth and buckle down for a third attempt, this time in a super-squishy seat in a perfectly soundproof room, so there are no possible distractions to stop you from reaching nirvana. Everything is going great; you’re comfortable, you’re relaxed, you run absolutely no risk of being disrupted by a noise from outside . . . and then your stomach rumbles. No problem—you manage to pull yourself back in, relishing the silence of your surroundings. Really, really relishing it. I mean, this has got to be the quietest place I’ve ever been. I can’t even hear the ambient noise of water in the pipes. Way to go, self, for paying a little extra for the deluxe soundproofing package! The guy at the hardware store said it would be worth it, and he was totally right and . . . crap. Now you’re thinking about how great you are at meditating and your home-improvement projects, no longer in the moment of thought-free Neverland. And you’ve “failed” at meditation yet again.
Rack up enough so-called failures in a row, and you’ll grow discouraged and eventually give up, because who wants to feel like they’re failing at something on a daily basis? You mess up, so you try harder, but the very effort that helps you succeed in most other areas of your life just guarantees another failure at meditation.
The Meditation Shame Spiral, I have found, is especially prevalent among high achievers. They’re often reluctant to even attempt meditation because they fear they won’t be any good at it. “I am afraid to even try, because my mind is just too busy to meditate,” they insist. “My mind is too busy to achieve anything like bliss.”
Meditation often feels intimidating for high achievers, who are used to doing and succeeding; they’re used to picking up new skills easily and have often built their identities on their ability to stare down every challenge. But here’s the secret they don’t like to talk about when they dust off their trophy cases: They naturally gravitate toward the very things that highlight their strengths and avoid the things that don’t. In other words, they like to operate in the areas where they know they can succeed. While this feels nice and validates the ego, it doesn’t lead to a life of growth.
Did I see you cringe a little as you read that last comment? Did it strike a little too close to home? Here’s the thing: I understand you, achievers, because I am one of you. I am the most achievement-driven achiever who ever tried to achieve at achieving, so I know what I’m talking about when I say our biggest fear as success-driven individuals is failure. And we usually aren’t particularly good at it, for the simple reason that we haven’t had much experience with it. So when we’re faced with a new skill set that seems like it may not play to our strengths, our first reaction is usually to dismiss it and move on to something where success is much more likely.
If this sounds familiar, I would encourage you to go into this book with an open mind. The techniques you’ll learn here are very different from the oh-so-frustrating “clear your mind” directives you probably received in the past. Take another look at the practice of meditation specifically because it’s just that—a practiced discipline. Even the most experienced in the field are constantly growing, hungry to discover new facets of their potential, to up-level their brains to higher states of consciousness, and to access a deeper connectedness. In other words, we are all constantly in a state of improvement. You already possess the ability to be a successful meditator because you have the ability to think a thought. More on that soon, but as I said earlier, we meditate to get good at life, not to get good at meditation. No one cares if we are good at meditation, though I wish they did—I love being the best at things (and I suspect you do, too). But the ultimate goal is never to become a world-class meditator. That’s just silly. What would be the point? Meditation is not a party trick you do to show off to your friends; meditation is the means to an end. The goal is, ultimately, the innumerable benefits of meditation and how they can shape our lives, enhance our performance, and improve our interactions in the world.
It is impossible to lose at meditation. Let me say that again: It is impossible to lose at meditation. Every act of delving into your least-excited state, every inspired decision you make as a result of your practice, every moment that you realize that you are enough is a victory. In other words, every time you engage in the practice, you’re winning. Achievers afraid to try meditation because they fear they won’t be good at it should let that sink in: Practicing the Z Technique guarantees you at least two successes a day.
So why does any of this matter? Even if the practice truly is quick and simple, what do we really gain or lose by incorporating it as a nonnegotiable part of our daily routine?
In the upcoming chapters, we will take a closer look at stress—its origins and its impact on every aspect of our health, down to the cellular level in our bodies. We will also examine the neuroscience behind meditation and the way it positively impacts the human brain in both objective and subjective measures. For now, though, I would simply like you to consider the very practical, utilitarian side of the question: Why should you dedicate any of your very precious and limited minutes, every day, to meditation?
Simply put, because it creates more time. Would you be willing to invest 2 percent of your day if you knew it would improve the other 98 percent? If so, buckle up, because that’s exactly what this book will teach you to do.
Let’s dive deeper into the concept of time, because that seems to be the most universal concern of all would-be meditators—especially high-performing, outcome-driven personalities. I hear it constantly: They are reluctant to try meditation because “I’m too busy to meditate” or “I barely have time to go to the bathroom or eat lunch, much less spend a quarter of an hour just sitting.”
Guess what? They’re right. I don’t have time for that, either. That’s the reason Ziva is so perfectly suited for people who are doers: It is doing. Just because the mind thinks involuntarily during meditation doesn’t mean it isn’t working; this tool goes after the root cause of stress, the thing that triggers so many negative physical and emotional responses.
Think about it: When your phone is plugged in, it’s not “just sitting,” is it? Of course not. It’s charging so it’ll be ready to be the most effective tool it can be when you need to use it. When your computer does that forced-shutdown thing, where it spends fifteen minutes upgrading while that little spinning wheel mocks you, is it “just sitting”? Sure, it may feel like that—it might even look like it—but your computer is actually engaged in a series of system cleanups that have been programmed specifically for the sake of making it a more efficient, more effective, and more powerful machine than it was before.
What if you never took the time to charge your phone? What if you never rebooted your computer so it could install updates? Would your tools be operating at optimum efficiency? When you don’t allow your mind the chance to refresh and rejuvenate itself, you’re denying it the chance to reach peak performance, and possibly even running it down to zero, at which point it’s physically incapable of performing the very tasks it was designed to do.
I’ve got plenty more of these analogies, but I’m going to stop here because I’m pretty sure you get the idea. The point is, when you engage in meditation that is made for you—not for monks—you’re literally creating time. You are optimizing your cognitive performance capabilities so you can get more done in less time. The Z Technique is the very opposite of doing nothing; it’s consciously and methodically creating an optimized space from which to operate with superior equipment and with your maximized abilities. Viewed in this way, meditation is so much more than “just sitting”; it’s updating and defragging your mental hardware so you can more effectively run whatever software you have as the operating system of your life, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Baha’i, any number of self-help regimens, secular humanism—pretty much everything but nihilism. (Though I have no doubt meditation would prove beneficial for nihilists, too.) Meditation is not a belief system or religious practice; it is a technique that will allow you to remove stress from your body while strengthening your mind.
I can tell you all about the scientifically verifiable benefits, as well as the anecdotal ones confirmed by my fifteen-thousand-plus students. I can cite scores of recent articles quoting high achievers who credit meditation as a key aspect of their success. I can even point to dozens of Fortune 500 companies that have embraced the practice company-wide. I can also tell you why various industry leaders, innovators, and influencers meditate. The one thing I cannot do is tell you why you should incorporate meditation into your daily routine. That ultimately has to come from you. You have to be the one to identify not only the goal but why you are pursuing it—the motivation that reaches beyond the moment the goal is reached. In other words, it’s great to celebrate crossing the finish line, but what prompted you to run the race in the first place?
Here’s some good news: You don’t have to have your life figured out to begin a meditation practice. Seriously. Just about every other self-help or personal improvement plan hinges on figuring out profound truths about yourself, your driving forces, and your inspirations before you begin to experience the positive results. Meditation is a tool that can actually help you discover those things along the way. As you begin to practice the plan laid out in this book, you’ll find that rather than being the goal itself, the Z Technique is actually just a means of moving your mind, intuition, creativity, and even your physical body toward realizing your goals and clarifying your motivations. As we discussed above, the word mantra literally means “mind vehicle,” moving you from one place to another. The only thing that matters, at this point, is the intention and desire to improve your current state of being. If you have that, you can begin on the journey and let the rest sort itself out as you go.
Are you ready for your first homework assignment? Write down your intention for picking up this book, no matter how vague, silly, or ambiguous it may feel right now. You could write something general, like “I want to enjoy my life more.” Or you could be much more specific, like “I want to get a promotion within the next six months.” You could even be more subjective, such as “I want my family to find common ground about politics” or “I want to be a better parent” or “I want to be a stronger force for good in the world.” Even if you have to say “I don’t know why I feel compelled to try meditation, but I’m out of other ideas,” that’s fine, too. There is absolutely no judgment here. (Remember, I got into meditating in part for the noble goal of not wanting gray hair in my twenties.)
I am reading Stress Less, Accomplish More because . . .
This is how stress is affecting my performance today:
On a scale of 1–10 (1 being the worst, 10 being the best), this is how I rate my:
Don’t skip this assignment. It can be tough to take an honest look at your relationship with stress. But seriously, don’t skip it. This will help you to gauge your success as you start a daily practice. It will also be fun to revisit this once you finish the book and have some meditation under your belt.
Once you have these answers written down, I would like you to give some thought to one more thing: your excuse for not trying meditation sooner.
Maybe you’re just learning about it for the first time. Maybe you had some misconceptions about what it was really all about. Maybe you used to practice but fell out of the habit. I suspect that at least some of you haven’t tried it because it sounded like a bunch of hippy-dippy, woo-woo magic talk. And I’m sure that for the vast majority of readers, simply not having the time for yet another thing on your calendar is at least a contributing factor in avoiding meditation. Whatever your reason, make a mental note of it—and be honest. The important thing is to be frank and authentic. Meditation is about accessing the best possible version of you, so don’t be afraid to be transparent as we begin this journey.
As we move forward in this book, I would encourage you to be gentle with yourself. Don’t think you have to set out to be the best meditator in all the land. Don’t worry if you find your mind far busier than you would like it to be. Don’t sweat the Sanskrit words and scientific terms I’ll be throwing at you.
Most important, let go of your preconceived notions of what meditation “should” look like and instead give yourself permission to enter this with beginner’s mind. Enjoy this as a wholly new (but time-tested) method for relieving stress and preparing your mind and body for heightened awareness and engagement with life.
This may all still sound a little nebulous, but I promise that it will begin to get clearer and more tangible as we progress. Right now, I just want you to ask yourself if you’re ready to commit to the intention of meditating. That’s it; there’s nothing more required of you at this point. Just commit to the intention—that’s enough for us to get started, and it may be enough to change the trajectory of the rest of your life.
Ziva Case Study 1
From $70,000 of Debt to $1.2 Million Earned in One Year
I saw Emily for the first time at a business mastermind group where she was speaking. There was something attractive about her, beyond her appearance and contagious smile. She was tapped into something more profound; her glow came from within. She was powerful yet calm and confident, and I knew right away I wanted some of what she was having.
Two months after seeing her onstage, I rearranged my schedule and traveled to New York City to attend her zivaLIVE course. I was already a meditator (of sorts), but I knew without a doubt that there was more to it, and I trusted that she could show me the way.
My situation was not terrible; life was not “that bad.” I had retired from a successful corporate job, I was happily married, the kids were almost out of the house, and I had started my own business in 2014. I was on the way to continued success . . . or so I thought.
Okay, the truth that no one knows is that I had accumulated $70,000 in debt and somehow burned through my $200,000 in savings in two short years. My new business was in the red, big time. My confidence was dwindling quickly; I was scattered and felt needy, which I hated. Despite all these demands, I knew the answers must reside within me, and that somewhere in this whole mess, there had to be a lesson I needed to learn.
However, I had absolutely no idea how to access those answers that supposedly resided within me.
Right after Emily’s first class, I felt better. Maybe it was a psychological high, but who cares! When first starting meditation, I’m not sure if it matters if it’s a placebo effect. I knew I was doing the right thing for me. So I made a commitment to my twice-per-day meditations.
I didn’t have any “extra” time in the morning for meditation, so I moved the alarm clock back. In the beginning it was just fifteen minutes, but now I wake up thirty minutes earlier than before. I use the first fifteen minutes for my meditation and the rest to joyfully take my time getting ready for the day. It is such a powerful psychological shift to feel ahead of schedule and prepared for the day, versus rushed and late right out of the gate.
After the first two weeks, I kept “forgetting” the second meditation. All the while, my sleep improved, I had more time, and my skin started to look better and more rested. Even though I was spending less time sleeping, I was more energized, and I began to be able to hear those answers that I knew resided inside me.
So, I thought, If once-a-day meditation can do this much good, what could committing to twice daily do? I decided to cut the BS and start “remembering” the afternoon meditation. I have to admit, at times it felt like torture. I feel there is still a part of me that wants to “forget about it,” but I can’t, and here’s why.
After one year of consistently taking two Ziva meditation breaks per day, I have:
What else can I say? Meditation is not about changing who you are, moving to a cave, or sitting cross-legged in a dark room waiting for something to happen. I have worked my buns off, and it hasn’t all been easy, but it’s been so incredibly rewarding.
I can’t imagine quitting now. There’s no going back for me, because the results are clear. Ziva has transformed my life.