Congratulations! You’ve done your research, you’re committed to this journey, and you’re ready to see your performance improve in every area of your life. Here’s where things start to get especially interesting: After a few weeks of twice-a-day sittings and once you’ve moved through the initial phases of mental and physical detox, you will probably notice the effects of your Z Technique beginning to extend beyond the workplace and spill over into your everyday life. This is a phenomenon I have affectionately dubbed “better parking karma,” and it’s real. Don’t be freaked out by the sudden uptick in “coincidences” in your life—it simply means the effects of your daily discipline and action of getting into the chair are beginning to permeate your body, mind, and performance.
I want to clarify what I mean by karma. In the West, the concept has generally been used to reference a kind of cosmic bank account, where the good you do to or for others is eventually paid back to you, and any bad you experience is the result of negative actions from your past that have to be burned off to reset the balance. This is a misconception, however; a literal translation of the Sanskrit word karma is “action.” When I talk about improving your parking karma, I’m not referring to the payback of good deeds on your soul or what the universe owes you or any kind of punishment for something done in the past. Karma is simply the actions you take and the ripple effect of those actions in your life.
Karma: Literally translated, karma simply means “action.”
Dharma: Your life’s path or journey.
(It should be noted that these terms link back to the ancient wisdom contained in the Vedas. The Vedas are a human interpretation of the laws of Nature and are not a religious dogma or doctrine.)
Dharma, on the other hand, is the Sanskrit word used to describe your life’s path or greater purpose. The way karma and dharma work together can be illustrated by thinking about driving down a nicely paved six-lane highway. Dharma is the actual trajectory of your trip, while karma is either the smooth flow of traffic that allows you to arrive at your destination with ease and elegance, or the rumble strips on the shoulder, there to wake you up and get you back in your lane if you start to swerve off your path.
If we look at karma in this way—as gentle bumps to let us know when we are off course, or serendipity to affirm we are on our path—we can better understand how the effects of adding mindfulness, meditation, and manifesting into your day can spread far beyond the boundaries of your professional or personal life. As your consciousness expands, you’ll likely begin to notice more and more happy “coincidences” in your life, whether it’s finding parking at exactly the right time, or making connections with people who perfectly match desires you (or they) have been wanting to fulfill. This beautiful symphony of serendipity and synchronicity is a blending of your deepening intuition combined with the fog of neediness being wiped from the lens of your understanding. As your confidence in trusting your own instincts and inner voice grows, you’ll begin to find that your actions become more decisive and meaningful, even if you aren’t always initially sure of the reasoning behind them. I call this strengthening of your intuition, or Nature’s GPS.
Let’s revisit the concept of simultaneity of consciousness. As you continue to commit to your twice-a-day sittings, your increased ability to hold multiple things in one awareness will allow you to pick up on subtle, almost imperceptible clues, which, in turn, will allow you to read situations faster and with more accuracy. You may subconsciously begin recognizing and internalizing patterns for when your favorite businesses are less busy, meaning better parking and shorter lines. Your mental directory of facts about people’s lives may start improving, so you’re suddenly finding that seemingly unrelated acquaintances actually have resources and goals that align, thus enabling each to accomplish more. In other words, the life you up-level may not only be your own.
The best advice I can give to people who find themselves noticing an uptick in serendipity is simply to “follow charm”; in other words, go with your gut. That is the beauty of honing your intuition: You will grow increasingly confident in trusting where it leads you. This kind of intuition allows you to read situations as they are and act accordingly, rather than trying to force one course of events or another. When we detach ourselves from the outcome, we allow things to be as they are rather than as we force them to be. By no means am I advocating that you merely become a passive observer of life; rather, I want you to give yourself permission to encounter the world authentically and deliver your fulfillment to the real needs you are uniquely positioned to meet. When things feel serendipitous, that is karma indicating that you’re delivering your fulfillment exactly where you’re meant to. And because of your ever-expanding ability to recognize subtlety, you’ll also have an ever-expanding ability to provide solutions and connections.
Let me share a personal example. One sunny day a few years ago, I was walking to work at Ziva in New York City when I suddenly found myself having a serious “download” for chocolate. I am all too familiar with what a chocolate addiction looks like. This was different; it was Nature downloading a desire. I paused for just a moment to marvel at what a weird sensation it was to come on so suddenly and be so strong—I wasn’t pregnant, and I don’t have much of a sweet tooth anymore, but I could not shake the feeling that I absolutely had to have chocolate ASAP. I doubled back to step into the bakery I had just passed, thinking maybe something in there would take care of the craving, and found myself face-to-face with an old friend of mine named Pam. I was thrilled to see her, as we had fallen out of touch over the past few years, and we ended up spending some time catching up. Pam and I had done a national tour of The Producers together, and she was now a licensed massage therapist, but she shared that she had recently done a yoga teacher training and was feeling a desire to combine her massage and yoga in some way. She was struggling with finding a direction that felt right, and I suggested that she look into Ayurveda, as there are branches of it that incorporate elements of both touch and yoga. She lit up at the suggestion and said that was exactly the sort of direction she had wanted to go, but hadn’t been sure of the right path. I immediately put her in touch with my Ayurvedic doctor, and she is now training to be a practitioner.
After we hugged good-bye and went our separate ways, I realized that my chocolate craving had gone away, and I hadn’t even had so much as a bite of a brownie. That’s when I realized that the craving had never been about me getting chocolate at all; it had simply been my brain’s way of getting my attention, or Nature’s way of cuing me as to where it wanted to use me to share a gift. Perhaps I saw Pam through the window as I passed, but since it had been such a long time since we had seen each other, I didn’t consciously register that I knew her. Perhaps there was something bigger at play. In order to trigger my body to turn around, my mind cued an overwhelming craving to get me inside that bakery so I would recognize and reconnect with an old friend. And as a result of that “chance” meeting, I was able to offer my knowledge of Ayurvedic medicine and help Pam get on the smoothly paved road of her dharma. What seemed like nothing more than a chocolate craving was really my intuition steering me to an opportunity to deliver my fulfillment to a friend so that she could find her own fulfillment in turn. The key here is a shift in perception.
The habitual reaction, when faced with hard times, is “Why is this happening to me?” What I would encourage you to think instead is, “Why is this happening for me?” Going back to the image of the rumble strips on the side of the highway, what is the better reaction: to bemoan the fact that you’re driving over the loud, bumpy things, or to recognize the warning they are issuing you and course correct? The same principle is at work here. When you shift your focus from things happening to you (making you a victim) to recognizing that they are happening for you (for your growth, development, and ultimate strengthening), you not only take back your power in life but also come to recognize the much bigger implications and echoes of your actions. There is both a cause for the event you’re experiencing right now and a lesson to be learned from it—past, present, and future all coming together to help you evaluate your current reality. (Thank goodness your right brain is getting strong enough to hold its own alongside leftie, huh?) As you continue to let the belief that things are happening for you—that God, Nature, the universe, or whatever higher power you believe in is on your side and using karma as a way to guide you toward your higher purpose—you’ll find it gets easier to discover the lesson and direction in every circumstance. When we see the rough patches in life as guidance rather than punishment, we start to ask better questions. And as you follow charm (that is, listen to your gut) as it leads you toward the beautiful surprises life has in store for you, whether it’s something as seemingly insignificant as an open table at a popular restaurant or as major as a chance encounter with the executive you’ve been trying to get a meeting with for six months, you’ll find that you are an influencer in the world, and the world you influence is so much bigger than you realize.
A concept that has been gaining a lot of traction in recent years is what is commonly known as “flow state.” The term was coined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi to describe the mental state in which a person has seemingly supernatural intuition, sometimes to the point of losing a sense of time, that results in tremendous accomplishment at a very high level. Athletes call it “being in the zone.” You’ve probably experienced it yourself—you started working on a project, performance, or physical feat, and time seemed to stand still or slow down and your instincts became finely tuned. You may have even felt like you were outside yourself as you managed to succeed again and again, topping your previous performance each time. Flow state usually only lasts a few minutes, a few hours, tops, but what you can accomplish within that short span of time tends to dwarf your accomplishments when you’re outside of flow state.
The idea is nothing new; it has been a recognized part of Eastern thinking for thousands of years—the human brain can generate tremendous results when it’s able to access higher states of consciousness beyond the basic waking state. When a person’s brain kicks into that higher mode of operation, it’s firing rapidly, churning out ideas and executing movements, but without the hindrance of self-consciousness or doubt. Remember back in chapter 4 when we discussed the alpha and theta waves that help the brain transition from waking to sleeping? Studies have found that alpha and theta waves take over when a person enters flow state as well. Have you ever marveled at the creativity of your dreams, or woken up thinking, That would make such a good movie/novel/product/idea? When you’re in that in-between state, not quite dreaming, you don’t have that left-brain, critical voice of inhibition to make you second-guess yourself or to tell you that whatever you’re dreaming can’t be done.
But how do we tap into flow state? There are two ways. The first is simply to start working on something, cross your fingers, and hope really hard that flow state comes. But as my brilliant husband often reminds me, hope is not a strategy. If hoping for flow state was all it took to bring it on, we would all be slipping into it every time we stepped onstage, sat down to work, went for a jog, or attempted anything at all. For most of us, our brains are not trained to dip into this in-between state without either jerking back into full, waking consciousness or else drifting straight into sleep.
The second way to access flow state is to train your body and mind to easily enter into and then substantiate that state of consciousness into your waking state. And the way to do that is—wait for it—a regular meditation practice. (Oh, come on. You had to know that was coming.)
Meditation produces the same alpha and theta waves in the brain that almost-sleep and flow state produce. The longer you cultivate a daily practice, the more innocently you’ll start to access that place of extraordinary creativity, innovation, and execution. The more comfortable you get with allowing your brain to explore that space, the more seamless and natural it will be to tap into it even when you’re not in a meditation session. And if you choose to pursue even deeper forms of meditation as part of your personal journey, you’ll likely find that flow state becomes your new norm.
One of the ways you can deepen your practice, if that feels charming, is to dive into our fifteen-day online training, zivaONLINE, at www.zivameditation.com/online. One of the graduates of the online training shared with me that her body feels like a new Google self-driving car and she doesn’t have to drive anymore. Talk about mastering flow!
This is what another zivaONLINE student, Larry Sark, shared about his experience with flow, offering some powerful words of encouragement for you as you start your journey:
As a recovering perfectionist and workaholic, zivaONLINE has changed my life. I started a few months ago and made the twice-daily practice of the 3 M’s a nonnegotiable part of my life. I have been through emotionally challenging times since then. However, I am much more in flow, patient, and flexible in life. I am more focused and productive at work. I get more done in less time, which means work doesn’t occupy my entire life anymore. I am now able to enjoy life even more. If you are just starting, this is a game changer. Please give yourself the time you need to get used to it and make meditation a part of your daily routine. The people around you will thank you.
But how does your ability to more easily tap into flow state affect the world around you? When you’re tapped into something bigger than yourself, not only does it allow you to perform at a higher level, but you also free up more of your time and energy to help other people and inspire them to up-level their own performance. What most of us truly desire is the experience we think we will have once we achieve our goals: freedom, fulfillment, comfort. You need to ask yourself whether it’s more satisfying to chase those feelings by pursuing empty stuff or to earn them through your performance in your job and in life, and how you can in turn convert that success into better decisions that will impact your family, your company, your community, and even the planet at large.
I know you may be a whopping two days into your meditation career right now, so healing the world may feel like it’s a few steps away, but I want to give you a preview of coming attractions. How can sitting quietly in a chair twice a day impact the world? On a small scale, I can say with confidence that when you start meditating, you become much more intuitive about what your body is actually asking for to perform at peak efficiency. Something as simple as getting more in tune with your body’s demands can change the way you eat, shop, move, think, and connect with other people. On a bigger scale, it’s worth noting that the same connection that makes you more empathetic also makes you more generous. When you meditate, you light up something called the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that processes information about people we perceive as different. You also strengthen the connection between the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the insula, which is the empathy center of the brain. The result is that you become more empathetic toward people you perceive as different.
This can also have the effect of making you more generous. When the neurotransmitters that help these parts of the brain communicate are strengthened, people become better able to feel and to give. If you move out of the “I’ll be happy when . . .” syndrome and allow meditation to remind you that your happiness can never be found externally, then your relationship with your desires changes. You may still want to make a lot of money, but you’ll no longer be under the illusion that piles of money are going to make you happy. You will instead allow your desires to be indicators of where Nature is using you to deliver your fulfillment along the way to your desires. This helps you transition from old feelings of greed and lack to ones of abundance and generosity.
In fact, in a scientific study,1 meditators were proven to act with more generosity than nonmeditators. When we shift our primary focus from acquiring gobs of money to delivering fulfillment, we help nudge the needle of our cultural thinking little by little away from scarcity thinking, which is what fuels greed, into a mind-set of abundance, which fuels generosity.
Most of us are familiar with the old adage from Gandhi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” But this lesser-known Gandhi quote perfectly sums up the point I want to make: “As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world . . . but in being able to remake ourselves.” When we personally grow our empathy, we grow our capacity for love and shrink our capacity for anything that opposes that empathy.
The Dalai Lama said, “If we were to teach every eight-year-old to meditate, we would end war within a generation.” Does your decision to begin a meditation practice somehow mean that someone seven thousand miles away will suddenly be inspired to begin one, too? No. But your decision is increasing the world’s capacity for empathy, even if just by one person. And that is significant. As you heal yourself, you help to heal the collective.
The reasons you choose to begin your meditation journey are your own, and the results that come of it are going to impact your own life most of all. But what you choose to do with those results—the decrease in your stress, the increase in your health and creative energy, your expanded consciousness and increasing empathy, your developing intuition and sense of fulfillment—has the potential to create a legacy of impact that will resonate far beyond your own life and potentially even your own lifetime.
Eyes-Closed Exercise
Superpower Pose
While writing this book I often imagine stress as the villain, you as the hero, and these powerful mental techniques as your new superpower. In this exercise we’re going to activate the brain, the breath, and the body to get into the mind space of success right off the bat. Our body language is affected by our mental state, and conversely, our mental state is affected by our body language, so let’s create the physical posture of victory so we can get into that mental state. Start by bringing your arms over your head to make a giant V shape or what referees do to signal a touchdown. Make sure your palms are open and facing each other.
Holding this pose, we are going to start something called “breath of fire,” a fast in/out through the nostrils. Begin by softening your jaw; let your lips part. Soften your brow and begin to quickly inhale and exhale through both nostrils at the same time. You can start slow, but eventually you want to build up to a quick pace as if you are an excited, panting puppy. (But pant through your nostrils, not your mouth.)
Breathe quickly for 30 seconds, softening the face and letting the impulse for the breath start with the belly. If you take a peek at your belly, you should see it quickly rising and falling. Your arms may start to ache a little, and that’s okay. If you’re standing and start to feel light-headed, you may want to sit down. (This will all get easier the more you practice.)
Now lower your arms, close your eyes, and take a moment to check in. What is the most prevalent body sensation happening right now? How do you feel now compared with how you felt before you started? Can you feel the blood flowing back into your arms? Take a moment to assimilate that feeling of joy and victory into every cell of your body.
Begin again. Bring your arms over your head into the V shape, palms open and facing each other. Now begin the breath of fire again, this time for 45 seconds.
Allow yourself to be a vessel for Nature to work through you. Imagine yourself as a channel for energy, ideas, and intuition to flow through. Get your ego, your doubts, and your attachment to outcome out of the way. You are simply the conductor. Picture yourself as a giant antenna with energy entering your body through your arms and the top of your head, traveling down your body, and grounding through your feet. Enjoy the simultaneity of lightness and groundedness happening in your body right now, then finish the breath of fire and drop your arms.
Take another moment to substantiate that sensation and see how you feel different from when you started. Do this exercise as needed when you desire a confidence boost or ahead of a big event.
For a demonstration and guidance on this, visit www.zivameditation.com/bookbonus.