About Our Guest- Emily Fletcher – Ziva Meditation
Emily Fletcher is the founder of Ziva Meditation and the leading expert in meditation for performance. She has taught over 25,000 people the skill of meditation. She is an international speaker and author. Her best-selling book, Stress Less, Accomplish More, debuted at #7 out of all books on Amazon and has been translated into 12 languages.
The New York Times, Good Morning America, The Today Show, Vogue and ABC have all featured Emily’s work. She’s been named one of the top 100 women in wellness to watch and has spoken at Apple, Google and Harvard Business School.
Ziva graduates include Oscar, Grammy, & Emmy award winners, Navy SEALS & NBA players.
The Ziva Technique is a powerful combination of mindfulness, meditation and manifesting designed to help you get better at life, not meditation.
Learn more about Emily and Ziva at ZivaMeditation.com.
Full Podcast Transcription
Emily Fletcher 00:02
You know all of this, but I feel like it used car salesmen sometimes when I start listing off all the benefits, and people started saying, well, like how can meditation do all these different things? I said the better question that we should be asking is, how to stress is messing so many things up?
Diva Nagula 00:19
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of From Doctor to Patient. Today, I have Emily Fletcher, who’s present with me today. She is the founder of Ziva meditation, and the leading experts in meditation for performance. She’s taught over 25,000 people the skill of meditation. She’s an international speaker and author, her best selling book, Stress Less, Accomplish More, debuted at number seven out of all the books on Amazon, and has been translated into 12 languages. The New York Times, Good Morning America, The Today Show, Vogue, and ABC have all featured Emily’s work. She has been named one of the top 100 women in wellness to watch and has spoken at Apple, Google and Harvard Business School. Ziva graduates include Oscar, Grammy and Emmy Award winners, Navy Seals and NBA players. The Ziva technique is a powerful combination of mindfulness meditation, and manifesting designed to help you get better at life, not just meditation. Emily, how are you?
Emily Fletcher 01:35
I’m feeling really charged up. As I said, today, I went to a call with some graduates. And it’s always nice to just connect human to human and to hear how things are impacting people. And it’s a beautiful day here in New York City. And a wee bit nervous because I’m leading, like a global meditation this afternoon. But it’s I’ve decided to do a vigil, because I feel like we need a like a collective funeral just because we’re all mourning something. And one hand, I’m concerned about people who’ve actually passed from COVID alone. And then so many funerals have been canceled or done virtually, you know, for actual death. But then there’s deaths of industries and jobs and careers and companies. And there’s so much changing that I feel like we don’t take a moment to acknowledge it and mourn it properly, that we’re gonna prolong the suffering. But anyway, I’m just, who wants to dive headfirst into a funeral? Apparently, me. I don’t know why I choose to do this stuff to myself, but here we are.
Diva Nagula 02:40
Well, you have such an interesting story. I mean, you had a previous life before you got into meditation world, what was the transition and the impetus of the transformational change that you underwent?
Emily Fletcher 02:53
Well there’s two versions of the story. The first is I was living my dream on Broadway, but suffering from insomnia and sickness and stress and going gray at 26. And then I found meditation and it cured my insomnia stuff started going great, I didn’t get sick for eight years,
it was just my whole life, my whole performance got better. And so I thought, Why does everyone not do this? Went to India started a three year training process to teach and then came back and started. I wasn’t in India that whole time. But my training process was pretty intensive. And then, I guess the other part of that is, when I was in my teacher training, I was definitely mourning, the loss of my identity and my career as an actress, because it’s what I had done since I was little since I was like seven or eight years old, not professionally. But I started training when I was seven. And so that was a that was sad, you know, just letting go of that. But interestingly, when I first started, for the first maybe three years that I was teaching, I was still acting and still teaching acting. And then it became very clear where nature wanted to use me. My agents would be like, hey, can we get more headshots and resumes and I would never bring them, three months would go by, I would have taught hundreds of people to meditate, but still no headshots or resume. So it was just like, my brain had to catch up with my body. I was definitely voting with my time and attention long before my intellect came into the party.
Diva Nagula 04:17
Right, right. But I’m really fascinated about how your story in terms of how you quickly changed your insomnia. And were you just kind of trying it out for the first time when meditation was brought to your attention? And did it immediately take effect in terms of its benefits? Or did it take some time?
Emily Fletcher 04:38
For me, it was pretty immediate and very powerful. But it’s so you got to think this is 12 years ago, okay. So it’s before Headspace, before Calm, before Oprah-Chopra challenges, before everyone had body data monitoring devices. Meditation was really not very mainstream 12 years ago, and also online courses weren’t that mainstream. Apps were around, but not really the like wellness body data tracking type, they weren’t very popular yet. And so really, if you wanted to learn meditation 12 years ago, it was like you’re either going to the monastery or you’re studying Buddhism in a city, or like occasionally a teacher would come through a town and teach an intensive, and that’s what I did. I had a teacher was in town from London. And I took a four day intensive. But it was just a few hours a day for four days. But my first class, I was in a different state of consciousness that I had ever been in before, and I liked it. And then that night, I slept through the night for the first time in 18 months. And I have every night since that was almost 12 years ago. And so that’s not everyone’s experience, I would say our number one benefit at Ziva is insomnia. And it’s just so tangible and fast, because most insomnia is stress related. So if you start to manage your stress during the day, then the insomnia gets much better at night. I’m also, I’m sure you’re familiar with Ayurvedic medicine, I’m also Vata dominant. And so a typical Vata imbalance is nervousness and anxiety and insomnia. And because the type of meditation that I teach is quite grounding, it’s very much de-exciting the nervous system. So it can turn up the volume on the Kapha energy, that Earth and water energy, typically people like me, well Vata people are very fast change, and we’re very responsive to things. And when it’s such a clear, Vata imbalance, the meditation really helps to shift it quickly. And I found that to be pretty, pretty true throughout, there are some people where it’s just slow and steady, like, I know, this is good for me, but I’m really not seeing that many benefits. And I’m, like, just stay the course, and some people are just more gradual.
Diva Nagula 06:45
Yeah. And out of curiosity, where did the name Ziva come from?
Emily Fletcher 06:50
Oh so that’s when I was doing my teacher training and I was meditating about 18 hours a week, that’s many hours a day. So I was full blown out of my mind, like, just every stress I’ve ever had in my whole life is coming up and out. Lots of sadness, lots of anger. And I was simultaneously like starting the company, I was doing the training on like, the ancient knowledge and the wisdom and purifying the physiology, but also knew that I’d be wanting to put this out into the world. And so I was just brainstorming ideas for a company and I remember like, absolute meditation was in there because I was working as a vodka somallier at the time. So my now husband, my then boyfriend, I was just saying, I’m trying to figure out a name and trying to figure out him and he’s like, when you just make up a word. And he’s like Google, Yahoo, Akamai, like, you know, these made up words, and I was like, No, just making up a word. And then during a meditation, I just had this like lightbulb moment. And I said, oh, I should use the Sanskrit word for bliss. And so I went, and I looked it up Sanskrit, for word for bliss. Well, turns out there’s 14 Sanskrit words for bliss. Which is so indicative, right? Like there’s 12 different words for snow in new languages. So it’s like, where you put your attention there’s different flavors of it. And so I saw Ziva, and I just like out of all 14 of them. That one really resonated with me. And then I looked up what Ziva means and it’s also a Hebrew feminine name. That means one who was radiant or kind. And I thought well bliss, radiance and kindness. Come on. So there we are.
Diva Nagula 08:32
Beautiful. I love that. And I like it more because it rhymes with my name Diva so there.
Emily Fletcher 08:37
Actually I thought about Diva. Like, always, I mean, now I’m thinking of so many names. We were toying with like, GuruDiva.com because the word like guru and the word diva are so kind of gross that putting them together almost canceled them out, or just, you got to just throw spaghetti against the wall.
Diva Nagula 08:57
Exactly. Exactly. So interesting. So a lot of folks are, are aware of meditation, which is awesome. And it’s just now getting people to commit to it. And there’s a lot of resistance with dedicating some time a day and then understanding that the benefits take some time, sometimes they might feel the first time. What do you tell people, you know, when they have so much resistance, in terms of sitting down for 15-20 minutes and actually going through the process of meditation?
Emily Fletcher 09:29
Yeah, good question. So it’s a multi fold problem, because we all we all think we’re the busiest person in the land. Right? And so to tell people to sacrifice their most valuable resource which is their time in order to sit still and do nothing which will be perceived as a waste of time, especially to someone who doesn’t have a visceral reaction of the return on investment yet. It just seems like absurd. People like you don’t know my day. You don’t know my stress. You don’t know my kids. You don’t know my husband, you don’t know my boss, I can’t meditate, I can’t afford that time. And so really, I’ve sort of built my entire career on this one problem, which is reframing meditation as the productivity tool that it is and can be meaning that it’s going to give you more time, you’re just going to have more time in your day, your sleep is going to be more efficient, you’re going to get sick less often, your to do list that used to take you five hours will start to take you three, the decision that used to take you three months to make takes you 30 seconds to make, the you losing your temper on your kids and then having to apologize, that just stops, your creativity is stronger. And when you really start to do the math, on how much time all those mistakes, all those indecisions all those sick days, all of that hemming and hawing like what that’s really costing us in time. And then if you start to add in the financial piece into the equation of what is stress costing you physically, right, and you know this better than anyone, like our stress is not just a mental disease, if our mind is sick, our body becomes sick. And so meditation is not just a mental tool, it’s also preventing any number of inflammation diseases because according to Ayurvedic medicine, inflammation is acid or heat. And when we get stressed, the body is very acidic. So we’re meditating, we’re making the body more alkaline, we’re cooling the body. And so that can help with IBS. It can help with arthritis, it can help with degenerative mental diseases over the long term, it can help immune diseases, it can help autoimmune diseases. And really you know, all of this, but I feel like a used car salesman, sometimes when I start listing off all the benefits, and people started saying, well, like, how can meditation do all these different things? I said, the better question that we should be asking is, how is stress messing so many things up? And especially right now, in this pandemic, everyone’s on high alert, the news is changing. Every day industries are changing every day we’re in the middle of a social revolution, as well. And so people, their identities are changing what they knew to be history is changing. And all of these things can really inflame our mind and our bodies. And one of the most beautiful benefits of meditation I find is the ability to adapt, right? You adapt without being rigidly attached to one thing. And we want an adaptive body, we want an adaptive mind. And it’s hard to achieve that when you’re chronically stressed when you’re chronically in fight or flight. And so we start to break it down, like the biology and the neuro chemistry of it for folks but you keep pointing everything back to how it’s going to give them more time how they’re going to perform better at the things that they love, then it starts to become a no brainer. I just find that not that many people are having that conversation, a lot of folks are leading with the spiritual benefits, they’re leading with the altruistic benefits. And that’s great. And that will happen too. But I’m just a big fan of meeting people where they are.
Diva Nagula 13:07
And that’s a very good point, I talk a lot about how we need to get out of fight or flight. And being in a heightened state in the sympathetic state is obviously just horrible for our bodies, since it’s where most of us are living out on a constant basis. And it’s the root cause of the leading cause for many chronic disease that we see in society, including cancer. And I truly believe that one of the things that happened to me was that I was born into this world in a state of fight or flight, and I never got out of it. I tell the story that about a year ago, I started to do breathing exercises for the very first time, and I’ve meditated on and off that using transcendental meditation, but this was different, and where I actually learned to breathe from my diaphragm and not from my chest. And I didn’t realize that I was always a chest breather. And I swear from that moment on, I was a firm believer in the power of breathing exercises, which is a form of meditation. And it’s just now I can feel the benefits in almost immediately. And so I tend to train people or teach people breathing exercises, and even though it’s a form of meditation, it’s kind of like my flat, let’s just do something that I know will be impactful so quickly. But there’s a lot of people that are out there that thrive on on stress, right, we’re talking about we need to de stress ourselves that because that’ll allow us more time or increase, reasonable thinking or cognition is improved. But a lot of people even including myself, I used to thrive on the stress and that’s what used to give me the energy but in fact, it was doing the opposite of is depleting my energy. And I didn’t know that until I got sick.
Emily Fletcher 14:45
Thank you for sharing that. And I have some questions. Do you mind sharing like what what do you mean when you were born into fight or flight? Did you have a near death experience at birth?
Diva Nagula 14:54
No, it was just came to me recently that I feel that my mother was kind of in a state of trauma during the last trimester, she and my dad moved from India to the States. And they didn’t have any family and my dad was at work. So she didn’t have anybody. And when I was born, she didn’t speak the language. She didn’t know anyone in the last three months of her life, I mean, other third trimester, she lost a lot of weight, because she was under a lot of stress, emotionally, and physically didn’t have anyone to help her. So obviously, when I was in utero, I felt all that stress. So when I came out into this world, I was in fight or flight. And my parents would always comment and joke around that was a very tough baby, because I was always crying constantly. And it couldn’t be soothed. And I think it’s because I was experiencing the trauma that my mom had went through the last three months of the pregnancy. So I feel that that’s where issues started for me. And I never really found out how to be soothed. And so those are some issues that I’ve been dealing with. But for me, it’s a big deal, just learning that that was an issue and that I was always in a state of fight or flight. And now I understand I preach how important it is to get out of that state and do mindfulness techniques and strategies to get more into a parasympathetic rest and digest state.
Emily Fletcher 16:16
Thank you for sharing that. And I fully agree, I’m on the board of and created some of the meditation content for a company called Expectful which specializes in pre-natal, and like pregnancy, meditation, and he wants to make meditation as common in pregnancy, as prenatal vitamins, these babies need to be absorbing the bliss chemistry and having I have a two year old now. But having meditated through my pregnancy and the birth and postpartum, everybody walks to the fire in their own way. But I think anything that we can do to reduce maternal stress is infinitely beneficial for the baby. And it’s interesting that you’ve gone into a career of healing, you know, having gone through that as a baby. And then what kind of breathwork did you find?
Diva Nagula 17:05
So for me, it was really not necessarily the breathwork itself, it was just learning the technique of breathing from my diaphragm. And that was the thing that was the most effective. And for me, box breathing was really effective for me, ujjayi breathing was one was a technique that I learned from pranayama teacher. And that was very powerful for me. But really, it was just learning to breathe from the diaphragm and taking deep breaths. And I think you teach the 2 inhale and the 4 exhale, and I was doing that as well. So those are really cool things that I learned. And I just tell people people say, I don’t want to meditate, like, Well, let me just teach you how to do some breathing exercises. And you can use this when you’re stressed out. Or even if you have one minute a day, doing that six, seven times a day, it’s a start. And a lot of people combined, because they can spare a minute or two here and there and the elevator, or in a car at a stoplight or something like that. They can do that. It’s a easy as that. But in terms of, of the meditation self, I mean, you’re probably more up to speed on the science behind it than I am. Can you talk and chat a little bit about the science of how meditation works on our brains and our bodies?
Emily Fletcher 18:20
Yeah, there’s some exciting stuff coming out. So I what’s most exciting to me as of late is that meditation can improve your IQ and actually increase your IQ by something up to 12 points. And I was like, Whoa, like that just seems like such a tangible marker. The other cool thing is that it can thicken your corpus callosum, which is the bridge between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. And then I was like, you know, why would I want a fat corpus callosum. And it’s like, what it’s quite literally the bridge between your creative mind and your critical mind, the past in the future, and the present moment, the masculine and the feminine. And so we really want that bridge to be as thick as possible so that when you’re in the middle of a high demand situation, you have access to creative problem solving ideas, because you know, we’re all brilliant rehearsing the speech in the shower, before the presentation, but it doesn’t matter how brilliant the rehearsal matters, how present you are in the moment when the heat is on. There’s no this is older, but they said that meditators performed up to 44% higher on something called the tripartite a performance variability test, which is a fancy way of saying they could do three things well, at the same time, they can perform a task quickly, accurately and all while remaining calm. 44% better than non meditators. And so because most of us can do it quickly and accurately, but we get stressed, or we do it calm and we do it accurately, but it takes a really long time. But to do it quickly, accurately, and all remaining calm, meditators perform much, much higher. So other things are, we know that now meditation can reverse your body age by somewhere between 8-14 years and I know those seem like big disparate numbers. So feel free to fact check me on that. But either way, like if it’s 8 and you’re 40, like, who doesn’t want the biological age of 32? And I think that it’s, the longer you meditate, the more cumulative those benefits become. And I have a whole chapter in the book. So the book is called Stress Less, Accomplish More, and there’s a whole chapter called the legit fountain of youth. And I was so hesitant to name it that because I hate that our society chases youth, when I think what we really should be chasing is health.
Diva Nagula 20:43 I love that.
Emily Fletcher 20:43
Right? But that’s why I was like, why just put the legit in parentheticals, because nobody wants like a 60 year old who’s trying to pretend like they’re 20 it’s just not a good look. We want like the healthiest, most vibrant, amazing, strong, 60 year old and so why are we all so terrified of aging? And I think it’s because we’re terrified of pain, we’re terrified of sickness, we’re terrified of death. And it’s like, well, what if death might be assumed at least for our generations, but maybe not your generations? But what if the sickness? What if the atrophy, what if the pain? What if those things aren’t guaranteed?
Diva Nagula 21:25 Exactly!
Emily Fletcher 21:25
What if we just keep getting better and evolving and optimizing until our bodies are irrelevant. And so it’s one of the things that I’m most attracted to about the Vedas is that we just keep evolving our state of consciousness until we’re in such a high state of consciousness that this body is not relevant, but that we want to take such good care of the body that whenever die, we want to take it off like we would an expensive suit, you know that we would hang it up and take care versus like just crumpling it up and trashing it, and like, leaving it in the corner. There’s like a karmic cyclical thing about that, which I really enjoy that you’re respectful and kind and taking care of your body up until the moment that you’re not in it. So I just think so much of what we assume in the West about aging and sickness and pain and disease hasn’t been our habit, but it’s not necessarily our nature. We assume that it’s normal, because we see everyone else suffering from the same things around us. But the way that we’re eating the way that we’re living is not normal, and is not natural. And so when we start to find that our feet is in the earth, and we’re having more sunlight, and we’re going to bed earlier and waking up with the sun and meditating and exercising and having more sex, it’s like, oh, maybe if I act in accordance with nature, maybe my body knows how to heal. It’s not rocket science. And yet, we’re all so addicted to our screens, and our sugar and alcohol and our processed food and our plastics and our drugs. And you know, so I get it.
Diva Nagula 23:48
Obviously, you were mentioning earlier about the number of companies that are out there and apps that that are great for people, because they have so much to choose from. But first, what’s the Ziva technique and what differentiates Ziva technique from all the other meditation apps and techniques that are out there?
Emily Fletcher 24:18
Yeah. Well, it is amazing that there is so much but it’s also a little confusing, especially when you don’t have any guidance or a teacher or any training and you don’t know if you should be doing monk meditation or regular person meditation. Should you be doing breath work? Should you focus or not focused? And so the apps, it’s almost like the tyranny of choice because even if you choose one app, well then you’ve got to go in and choose from 10,000 different teachers and 40,000 different styles. And now you’re kind of stressing about your meditation. Also, the whole idea of like going to your phone to unplug is a little bit of a mystery to me. It’s like why would you have an AA meeting inside of a liquor store? Like I don’t really get that. So I think it can be a good gateway drug. I think that they’ve done a lot of beautiful wall destroying, people who thought they weren’t meditators, people thought it was too woo-woo. I think it’s taken so much of the stigma out, the apps have, which I’m very grateful for it. But what most apps are teaching is what I would call mindfulness. So I define mindfulness is the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment, which is amazing at dealing with your stress in the now, it’s really good at creating a state change. Like my boss yelled at me today. Let me do you know, five minutes of this breathing exercise, I feel better in the now beautiful, necessary. The thing that makes Ziva so special is that we have a trifecta of mindfulness, which I just mentioned, meditation, which is different, which I’m going to talk about, and manifesting. So the three M’s is really what makes up the Ziva technique. So we do start with mindfulness and breathwork, that state change that immediately get people out of fight or flight, so that we can even contemplate sitting through a meditation. And then the meditation as I would define it is very good at getting rid of your stress from the past, okay, it’s creating a trait change, not just a state change, it’s going in and healing you on a cellular level. So in the style of meditation that I teach at Ziva, we’re giving the body rest, it’s approximately five times deeper than sleep. We know that because metabolic rate decreases, heart rate slows, body temperature cools. And as you know, when we give the body rest, it knows how to heal itself. And what the cool thing here is that it’s not only healing stress from today, it’s healing that stress from your birth, from your divorce, from your firing, from your pandemic, even potentially, the stuff that we’ve inherited from, you know, I’ve seen papers on is meant that we can hand inherit trauma for as many as two generations, certainly the utero, but I’ve heard people quote, as much as seven. What’s your take on that? Do you know how many generations we can inherit?
Diva Nagula 27:02
I think there was a paper that did a study on on mice. Yeah, and I can’t remember the entire details of the study. But the essence of the study was that they had a mother mouse that was actually traumatized. And then they bred it with another. And the trauma characteristics were actually seen in offspring. And I want to say it’s four generations, but it could be seven, I can’t remember the actual number. But it was something like that.
Emily Fletcher 27:28
I think in the mice, it’s seven, they’ve proven up to seven, in humans, I’ve only been able to find two to three. Yeah. But it’s harder to do with humans because like we weren’t doing these studies three generations ago. So either way, like, even if you’re just healing your trauma, from your moment of birth until now, like that’s still really significant. And I like to think that you’re stopping handing that down to your children, and hopefully even healing things that you’ve inherited. So there’s that sort of mindfulness, really good at dealing with your stress and the now, meditation really good at dealing with your stress in the past. And the way that that is relevant and the way it ties into our first question about time, which is really everyone’s big fear, I’m too busy to meditate, I don’t have time to meditate. What people are really saying is, I can’t afford to waste my time, which is true, I wouldn’t even argue that we can’t afford to spend our time. But once people understand that you’re investing your time, and once you start to see that the return on that investment is exponential, that you do get much more back than what you’re putting in. Then it’s like, Oh, I get it. And the reason why you get more time in your day is this healing phenomenon. It’s eradicating the stress from your nervous system. That’s what makes your brain better. That’s what makes your immune system better. It’s not just the state change piece of it. And so then we end sort of like the desert course of Ziva is the manifesting. And that I can get some IRAs from the medical community or from my high achieving community, but it’s really simple. It’s just you, consciously creating the life you love. It’s you getting intentional about what you want your life to look like. And most of us even think that we’re manifesting, but we’re secretly complaining. We’re like, why does she have a boyfriend and I don’t? Why did he get a raise that I didn’t? Why is this pandemic happening to me right now? And we think we’re moving towards something better, but we’re actually just resisting what is or complaining about what is. And so it’s so simple to manifesting. But we do it after the meditation when the right and left hemispheres of the brain are functioning in unison, where we’ve de excited the nervous system. And we simply ask the question, what would I love right now? What would I love right now? And it’s the simplest, but you notice it’s not what do I want? Not what do I need? Because that puts you into lack that puts you into fear. But what would I love which puts you into spirit into possibility and what would I love right now present moment awareness. Not What did my parents want me to do? Not what did I major in in college? What not what’s going to look good on Instagram? What would I love right now. And I recommend that people start small, and that they start with gratitude. And then it can get bigger and bigger. But what I found is that this trifecta this using the mindfulness as the appetizer, diving into this healing meditation as the main course, and then finishing with the manifesting about what you want your future to look like. It’s just the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And that’s really where the special sauce comes in with Ziva The other thing that’s really unique about us is that we train people to be self sufficient. So our flagship training is called Ziva online, and it’s a 15 day course. And it’s a matriculation. And it’s designed to be the last meditation course you ever need. I mean, of course, you could always advance if you wanted to. But it will give you a daily practice that you can take with you for life. It’s not an app, where you have to keep coming back, you don’t need Wi Fi, or headphones, or incense, or finger cymbals or my voice or timers. It’s just you have these tools, and you can take them to the grave. You can do them on a bus, on a plane in your office, your kids yelling in the next room. So it’s meant to be integrated into life. It’s not a monastic practice, which so many of the mindfulness tools that are out there were actually are actually derivations of monastic practices. So if you think about like Andy, the founder of Headspace, he was a monk. You know, Jay Shetty, who’s one of the most famous like wisdom teachers was a monk. And that’s all awesome. But I actually needed the power in vivo comes from the fact that even though the foundation of the practice is 6000 years old, it was made for people with busy minds and busy lives. So it’s not a derivation of a monastic practice.
Diva Nagula 31:42
It’s very interesting, because to me what you’re teaching in your technique. It’s very holistic and very spiritual in nature. And I appreciate that, because that’s kind of the path that I’ve taken in my life is more spiritual approach. And this technique very much like it resonates with me. And of course, I’m maybe I’m a little biased because you had your training in India but…
Emily Fletcher 32:08
Do you go back much I know you were born here. But do you ever go to like, where your parents were born?
Diva Nagula 32:12
I haven’t been back in about 12 years or so. So I’m due for a visit. And when I went back 12 years ago, it was a huge change. With the globalization that was taking place, and you wouldn’t seen the changes in India, I could only imagine what it is now and heard stories, how modern it is and how Western eyes the entire country has become. But yeah, I mean, it’s great that they have some westernization that’s going on. But sometimes they’re even sacrificing some of these older Eastern techniques that it’s where it came from. And a lot of people now are leaving that behind. And they’re really espousing the westernization of culture. So it’s a little disappointing seeing that, but it’s nice to know that, meditation and yoga and these types of things, it really came from the east. And so, one of these days, I want to go back and and do a Vipassana or something of that nature.
Emily Fletcher 33:11
I actually did Vipassana in India, in Southern India. So I did my first training in Northern India and Rishikesh, but I did the Vipassana in Southern India. But interestingly, so my teacher’s teacher’s teacher, since about the 1920s, actually, like very consciously was like, go to America, teach in America, like India is now looking into America for pop culture. And so many of the techniques had started to die, and people weren’t practicing them as much. And so they were like, go teach in America, because India is looking to America, and they will look and then it will come back. And I have a decent amount of students from India that take the course because when we see where in the globe people sign up, so it’s interesting.
Diva Nagula 33:58
I read somewhere that there was some Ziva students that have actually increased their income
while just putting in a few hours of starting the ZIVA technique.
Emily Fletcher 34:09
Oh, yeah. So we had a woman that said, I got a $120,000 scholarship that I did not apply for. I was like, well, that’s new. Normally, you’d have to at least apply for the scholarship. I used to teach actors. Like when because I was an actress. When I first started teaching. A lot of my students were actors. And that’s such a mental game. It’s such a confidence game. It’s such a detachment game. And so these people were already very talented, but sometimes they’re we get nervous and they would sabotage themselves at the audition. And so when they just had this one tool, their talent was able to shine through and they would start booking job after job this one actor had gone from being unemployed. So he’s now nominated for an Emmy for a guest star on Will & Grace. And that happened in like months. And so it’s just so fun to watch.
Diva Nagula 34:56
So it’s all about that manifesting!
Emily Fletcher 34:58 Yeah, so good.
Diva Nagula 34:59
Awesome. That’s awesome. Well, Emily, I want to leave with our listeners – what’s the best way
that they can find you online and if they want to learn about the Ziva technique?
Emily Fletcher 35:13
I mean, so the easiest is our brand spanking new website. We just launched a new baby a few weeks ago. So it’s ZivaMeditation.com so like your name, but with Z. And there you can find our online course you can find the book. There’s actually a beautiful self care center there, which is all free, because I’ve been doing global meditations every week since the beginning of the pandemic. So there’s a lot of them there, plus interviews with guest experts. So anything you want you can find at ZivaMeditation.com. Oh, and one thing is that our online course that I mentioned, right now, we’re offering it free of charge a full scholarship to frontline workers, doctors, nurses, EMTs, respiratory therapists, we’ve actually we just crossed the $1 million mark, we’ve given away a million dollars in scholarships since the beginning of the pandemic.
Diva Nagula 36:02
Oh, wow. That’s awesome.
Emily Fletcher 36:04
Yes, I feel really proud of that. And it’s also 50% off for everyone else right now, because I know
that unemployment is really high.
Diva Nagula 36:10
Yeah, that is so wonderful. Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been a
pleasure to have you on the show.
Emily Fletcher 36:17
Thank you for having me. And thanks for the work that you’re doing in the world.