Have you ever wanted something deeply, only to discover that pursuing it brought up fear, self-doubt, insecurity, or old emotional wounds you didn’t even realize were there?
According to Emily Fletcher, that’s not necessarily a sign you’re on the wrong path. It may actually be a sign you’re on the right one.
Today, I’m excited to share my conversation with Emily, founder of Ziva Meditation and one of the most insightful teachers I know when it comes to meditation, personal growth, spirituality, and manifestation.
One of the central themes of our discussion is the idea that our deepest desires may have more meaning than we realize. Rather than viewing desire as something to suppress or ignore, Emily sees it as a source of guidance. The things we are most drawn toward may reveal important clues about our growth, purpose, and the direction life is inviting us to move.
At the same time, she believes meaningful goals often surface unresolved fears, insecurities, and limiting beliefs. Instead of seeing those challenges as roadblocks, Emily views them as invitations to grow.
We also explore a fascinating perspective on how reality is shaped. Emily argues that manifestation is happening all the time, whether we’re aware of it or not. The thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and assumptions we carry each day may be quietly shaping the experiences we create and attract.
Whether or not you consider yourself interested in manifestation, I think you’ll find this conversation thought-provoking because it ultimately centers on questions we all wrestle with.
Take the Next Step: Join the Free Magic Maker Live Experience
If today’s conversation resonates with you and you’re tired of feeling like you’re pushing uphill to reach your goals, Emily is hosting a free, 3-day live event called Magic Maker.
On July 16, 21, and 23, she will be sharing her 4-part formula—a potent blend of ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience—designed to help you dissolve stress at a cellular level and create from a state of alignment rather than burnout. It’s the perfect practical deep-dive into the concepts we explore in this episode.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Emily and I discuss:
- Why she believes desire can serve as a powerful catalyst for personal growth
- The difference between pursuing goals from a place of fulfillment versus a place of lack
- How meditation may help uncover the beliefs and emotional patterns shaping your reality
- Why meaningful goals often bring unresolved fears, insecurities, and limiting beliefs to the surface
- Emily’s perspective on spirituality and the importance of connecting with unseen aspects of life
- The relationship between manifestation, nervous system regulation, and emotional well-being
- Why self-awareness may be one of the most important ingredients for creating lasting change
- How meditation and other practices help people access deeper states of awareness
- The role of presence, intentionality, and emotional resilience in shaping the future
- Why Emily views manifestation as a powerful tool for transformation rather than simply a method for getting what you want
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Transcript
Ari Whitten: Hey, this is Ari. Welcome back to The Energy Blueprint Podcast. With me in this episode, for the fourth time on the show, is my good friend Emily Fletcher, who is the founder of Ziva and the host of the Why Isn’t Everyone Doing This? podcast. She’s an international speaker whose superpower is making esoteric tools accessible to a mainstream audience, teaching over 60,000 people meditation and manifesting over the last couple decades.
Her newest body of work, Ziva Magic, is an embodied manifesting course that empowers people with psychosomatic tools to deeply experience their emotions, allowing them to fully express their feelings in all their glory, their rage, their sorrow, their fear, all that good stuff. From this foundation, she helps participants harness their creation energy, their sexual energy, to fuel their manifestations. This is an invitation to go deeper, to explore the science of manifestation, and to unlock the potential that’s always been within us, within you.
Emily’s teachings guide you through the pathways of the body, mind, and spirit, showing you how to tap into your inherent ability to create. With all of that said, this is a wonderful conversation. We get into all sorts of interesting territory related to meditation, spirituality, manifestation, sexual energy, ekstasis, intentionality, and the intersection and relationships between all of those things.
If you’re interested in any of these topics, if you’re interested in the relationships between spirituality, sexuality, manifestation, I think you’re going to love this conversation. With no further ado, enjoy this podcast with Emily Fletcher. Emily, welcome back to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you on again.
Emily Fletcher: Do I get a five-timers jacket? Are we at number five yet or what?
Ari: I just watched the last episode we did a few years ago, and there was some discussion whether it was your third time or fourth time. Actually, I think in that episode we figured out that you had been on three times, and what you had negotiated for was that on the fourth time you asked for an Energy Blueprint tiara.
Emily: [gasps] Yes.
Ari: I do have that in the mail. It’s on the way to your home as we speak. [laughs]
Emily: Thank goodness. [laughs] Anything that just affirms my sovereign power, anything that brings me back to my pageant girl roots.
[laughter]
Ari: Your pageant girl roots. I didn’t know you were a pageant girl.
The Pageant Roots of Feminine Excellence
Emily: I wasn’t actually a pageant girl. I was Florida’s Junior Miss in 1997, which was the largest scholarship program for women other than sports. It was 50% scholastic and test scores and interview. Actually, I brag that when I went into the nationals, the cumulative GPA was 4.6. We had a woman who was the kicker for her high school football team. There was people who were playing instruments at the inaugural balls for presidents.
It was the first time for me, being from Tallahassee, Florida, where I felt like I was a small fish in a big pond. I was like, “Oh, there’s young women out here who are up to really exciting and inspiring things.” My friends in college made fun of me. They called me Miss, Miss, Miss, but it was actually really good for me. It paid for my first two years of school, and I think, more importantly, raised my standards for myself because I was surrounded with such feminine excellence.
Ari: Beautiful. Beauty and brains at the same time. That’s great. I like it. In our last conversation, and I did actually just watch the whole thing, there was some really funny moments in that discussion talking about vision boards and sex and manifesting, combining all three at the same time, things of that nature.
Emily: Having sex on your vision board? [laughs]
Ari: Exactly. [laughs] If you remember, there was a funny moment in the conversation where I suggested doing that.
Emily: Oh, [crosstalk].
Ari: Then you started laughing, and then all of a sudden you pause, and you’re like, “actually, that might be a good idea.” [laughs]
Emily: Should we do that? I think there’s a business model here where you can print a photo on a blanket. We could have someone make a vision board collage of their dreams and then print it onto a blanket, and then make love to their dreams on the blanket.
Ari: I like it. I think that’s a very smart idea. If you remember from that conversation, I negotiated for royalties if you ended up using that idea later on.
Emily: Here we go. I haven’t done it yet, but maybe we go on a new business model together.
Pleasure as a Prayer: Activating Your Internal Pharmacy
Ari: [laughs]I know that a lot of your work comes out of your own personal life and your experiences and your own personal evolution. When we first met 10 years ago, you were married, and you were not a mother. Then shortly thereafter, you became a mother, you went through a divorce, you met a couple of very influential people who became mentors to you, and you entered this whole world of sacred sex and manifestation. Not sacred sex, correct me if I’m wrong.
Emily: Sacred sexuality, but I think more than that, using pleasure to pray. I only make the distinction because I would not consider myself a tantra teacher. I don’t consider myself someone who’s so interested in teaching or working with the 3D realms of sex, as we would call it in the West, like physical intercourse. I think it’s great and beautiful and magical. For me, the thing that is exciting about it is using the internal neurochemistry that nature has given us as a pathway to the divine and activating the internal pharmacy so that we can experience the frequency of heaven on earth.
Ari: I love that. Thank you. That’s way better than I would’ve put it. The key thought, though, being that you’ve navigated so much in your own personal life, and it’s inspired the work that you’re doing. At this point, we haven’t talked in, I don’t know, two years, three years, four years-
Emily: So long.
Ari: -something like that, but I’m curious–
Emily: How do we just keep getting hotter?
Ari: What’s that?
Emily: I said, how do we just keep getting hotter?
Ari: [laughs] I know, right? I know. We’re very skilled in that regard.
Emily: This [crosstalk] energy stuff might work.
[laughter]
Ari: That’s right. That’s right. I think it’s a testament to both of our methods, right?
Emily: Yes.
Embodied Manifesting: Navigating Insecurity While Dreaming Big
Ari: I’m curious what’s been going on in your personal life in the last few years and how has it inspired the work you’re doing now?
Emily: [laughs] It makes me want to laugh because I just ran a retreat this weekend, and the woman was like, “You should really write a book or make a movie or a TV show of your life.” The thing is, it’s so wild. It’s so amazing that no one would believe it. It would have to be fictionalized because it’s so– I brag that my baseline is exquisite and the amount of magic and miracles and fun and adventures that are happening are better than I knew to pray for.
Two days ago, I was on my BioMat crying my eyes out for two hours, and my friend, Rosa, was just holding me while I was purging and feeling a lot of feelings. For me, that is part of what I love about this work is that it doesn’t just meet you when everything’s going great. I think a lot of manifestation methods are like, “Just make more money, call in more love, like be the frequency of your future self, embody it, believe that it’s real,” which is a valid thing. There is value to merging with your future self. Our thoughts do become things, and our reticular activating system and the filtration device of the brain is all real, and we can talk about that.
I find that a lot of manifestation methods and even spiritual work and meditation methods don’t actually meet people when they’re in the shitter. When life is lifing, and things are hard, and you are heartbroken, or you are grieving, or you are scared, or you don’t believe in your dreams, or your unworthiness is up, or your triggers are up. It’s like, “What about all of those times, which are very much part of the human experience?”
That’s really been the thing that I’ve been dancing in for the past four or five years is what I would call embodied manifesting, which is really– We talked about the last one, which is head, heart, and hoo-ha, mind, emotions, and root, all in coherence and pointed towards not just what you want, but who you want to be. That’s where I think manifesting is a really advanced spiritual practice, because I think that our desires are so uniquely our own. Your desires are different than mine, and they’re so specialized, and so are our limiting beliefs, so are our triggers. They’re so uniquely our own.
If you look at both your attractions and your triggers as a treasure map to your soul, then manifestation can become one of the most advanced spiritual practices that there is, because you have the simultaneity of this thing that you deeply desire. I believe that our desires are divinely inspired, and then the more that you want it, the more your unworthiness and your triggers and your childhood trauma is going to get kicked up. Then what do you do with that disparity? To me, that is the magic of manifestation if done well.
That’s what I feel really proud of, is how I’ve been navigating the simultaneity of the dreams getting bigger, the opportunities getting bigger, and then inside of that, all of my unworthiness getting kicked up. Both dreams that are better than I knew to pray for and the ones that I thought were so big they were insane, the ones that were just so big that I’d just be like, “Eff it.” Of course, I want to have 80,000 people in a stadium manifesting heaven on earth. Guess what? Three weeks ago, I had a dude text me a photo. He was like, “Oh, Emily, here’s the stadium that I’m building.” I’m actually being invited to kick off massive global movements where we’re going to be turning our stadiums into temples and praying for things in Egypt.
To give a special example of this, last October I took a group of people to Egypt on a pilgrimage up the Nile. We finished in Cairo at the pyramids, and we planted prayers for ceremony at scale at the pyramids. I don’t understand why in my mind, but my body knows that this feels like part of my dharmic imperative. Part of why I incarnated is to help to shift the antenna of those pyramids. I think that they are designed to be a bit of a bridge between the celestial and the terrestrial, and right now, they feel a little off.
Anyway, long story short, one year to the day, there is going to be a ceremony at the pyramids of 13,000 people, which is exactly the number that I was manifesting at that ceremony. It’s stuff like that, it’s like, “What do you mean a ceremony in a Muslim country? Are you insane?” Things like that just keep happening. With that comes little Emily being like, “Who are you to dream that big? Who are you to walk as a white lady into a Muslim country doing practices like this? Who are you to stand in the center of a stadium?” It’s been this beautiful dance of the simultaneity of the worthiness getting bigger, the dreams getting bigger, and then dancing with all of the fears and insecurities that come up.
The New Pyramid Discoveries: Copper Cylinders & Hidden Chambers
Ari: Wow. Quick side note, digression onto the pyramids. I read recently, and this was major news, so I’m sure you’re familiar with it. I remember hearing some story about some new discovery relating to the pyramids and what’s underneath them. I confess that I did not look into it deeply, so I don’t have any knowledge of whether this is legit or any of that. Do you have any insights into what was discovered and the implications of it?
Emily: Yes. Couple of big discoveries. One very connected to and the other one not at all. One is that Robert Edward Grant, who’s a polymath, and he says he has visitations from Leonardo da Vinci in his dreams, who was also a polymath. And he basically discovered a new chamber– Interesting. I’ll have to fact-check that one. He says that he discovered a new chamber inside of the Great Pyramid, and he did that by laying Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and then the coordinates of the pyramid on top of it.
Ari: Wow.
Emily: Every chakra point on the Vitruvian Man lines up with one of the chambers of the pyramids, except for the throat. The throat was missing. He went in with a team of Japanese scientists, and they heat-mapped, and they found a tomb inside of the Great Pyramid in 2025. It’s one of the most studied buildings on the planet, and yet here was this thing hiding in plain sight. That’s, to me, the magic of these temples, and it’s not just the pyramids in Egypt, it’s almost all of the ancient temples. They’re hiding clues in plain sight.
I can talk more about that in a moment, but what you’re talking about, the thing that was all over the news, was basically a team of Italian scientists. Again, with the new technology that’s coming out, we can basically see underneath the pyramids. There are 8 cylinders underneath the Great Pyramid that go 3 kilometers into the earth. Just think about that for a minute, 3 kilometers into the earth, perfect cylinders coiled around the outside with copper.
Ari: Wow.
Emily: Then just a few weeks ago, they discovered a whole tunnel system between the three pyramids. People are saying that this is really just the tip of the iceberg, that this is like leading to an entire underground civilization. I do not have science to support this, but I’ve read a lot of channeled texts, meaning someone goes into an altered state or they access some sort of a right-brain, let’s say, intuitive knowing versus a left-brain fact-based research.
Just naming the caveat, take that with all the grains of salt that you want your community is very science-based. I’ve read a lot of channeled texts of people who feel like they have access and connection to these ancient civilizations, and many of them say that there was the flood event, which almost every sacred text from the Bible to the Quran talks about a big flood event on the planet, and that much of civilization was forced underground for a period of time.
My hypothesis, and this is just Emily Fletcher’s hypothesis, this is nobody’s accurate history, is that these tunnel systems and these underground civilizations is where people went after whatever this society-shifting, planetary-shifting event was. Much of the knowledge, much of these tools are taken literally underground before we reemerge at whatever point that we did.
Just to go a little bit deeper in the conspiracy rabbit hole, just on Diary Of A CEO this week, Graham Hancock is on the show. Graham Hancock, even three years ago, would have been considered way too fringe to be on a show as mainstream as Diary Of A CEO, but he’s dedicated his life to ancient civilizations. He said that he is about to go into a heart surgery and he didn’t want to die without bringing this knowledge into the mainstream. He basically is showing a lot of evidence around, we think that recorded human history ends 6,000 years ago, and he’s like, “No, at least 20,000 years ago, and here’s all my receipts. Here’s all of my proof on that.”
Consciousness Over Technology: How the Pyramids Were Really Built
Why that should matter to anyone listening to this, I believe, is that it seems true to me that humans had access to a different state of consciousness that we do not have access to right now. My hypothesis there is that it is proven by the very fact that the pyramids exist. The pyramids are a good example of this, because right now, if you or I were to build the pyramids with the biggest budget, the biggest engineering team on the planet in 2026, we couldn’t do it. We don’t actually have the technology or the tools to build what was built however many thousands of years ago. That just opens up a question mark to me of, “How, why, who?”
I used to think it was aliens. I used to think all kinds of crazy stuff. Now my very simple hypothesis is that it was actually a state of consciousness that humans were in through collaboration, through coherence, through connection that allowed us to access collectively different states of consciousness that opened up a different relationship with the physical laws of the universe.
I’m way over my pay grade right now, and I don’t claim to know the answers with my mind, but the work that I’ve done to answer your original question is like being so in touch with my body and the gnosis that comes through, the wisdom and intelligence that comes into my cells that transcends my intellect. Every time I follow that gnosis, every time I follow those clues–
When I started planning the trip to Egypt and when I started working on Egypt, I didn’t know about these tunnels. They hadn’t even discovered those things. That times 100 keeps happening, and so it feels like a fun little treasure map. I feel like right now we have an opportunity as a species to rediscover these clues hiding in plain sight because it seems clear to me that the current systems are at a minimum changing, at a worst being destroyed. The systems that we have built on unsustainable foundations are crumbling in real time.
Rather than being fatalistic about that or freaking out about that or trying to hold on to the past, to me, the point of spiritual practice is to tune you into what comes next, to lead with creation. In Sanskrit, the word “rishi” means seer, and a seer is how present are you in the right now? Because the present moment is the future in the making. Are your spiritual practices getting you so here now, so in your body that you can actually intuit what’s coming next?
To me, the reason why I take these pilgrimages to these sacred sites is so that we can go and get the clues, get the transmissions both from the land and from these buildings so that we can more elegantly architect what comes on the other phase of this destruction, the creation that inevitably will come as we build the more beautiful Earth that our hearts know is possible.
Ari: I love that. I was having a really interesting conversation yesterday with a friend’s mom who is in her 70s now, and she’s led this really interesting life where her husband, who is a boat builder and sailor, 35 years ago they had this vision to set out to sail the world together. They ended up basically stopping in the South Pacific and essentially spending the last 30 years there living on a boat and getting to know the people of many different islands there, but especially in a country called Kiribati.
They were kind of accepted as family by this essentially traditional living hunter-gatherer people, still living, maybe not technically uncontacted tribe, but essentially living as a tribe, the way humans lived for most of human evolution prior to the Industrial Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, living in the traditional ancestral ways that humans have lived.
We started having this conversation yesterday, and actually, I’m so interested that I asked to get together with her for dinner tomorrow night because I wanted to learn more about this. The way she was describing these people is that they communicate in a totally different way. She described them as like half whales and half people in the way that they communicate through feeling, through transmitting without words and symbols for everything, but a direct transmission.
She described how over the years, over the decades of getting to know these people, that her and her husband were accepted as family, and they were given these transmissions from these people about this different way of communicating. She described it as like entering other worlds through direct feeling with these people. Anyway, some of what you were just describing made me think of this conversation with this woman and how I’m excited to have this conversation with her tomorrow to learn more about this. I feel like it’s tying into what you’re talking about here.
The Power of the Crone: Why Menopausal Women Were Historically Feared
Emily: Some things that are coming through is, one, humans and whales are the only species, to my knowledge, where the female goes through menopause. I think that that’s germane to this conversation because the womb, which is this outrageously powerful vortex, it’s this portal between the unmanifest and the manifest, which is really what I want to talk about, is that in order to manifest, you have to go into the unmanifest.
In order to create a life that you want, you have to be willing to go into the unknown. I think we’re being catapulted into the unknown as a society right now, but we have this technology inside of our bodies, especially in the feminine bodies, and so why does the human female, and why do whales, go through menopause?
Now, some people would argue that it’s because childbirth is so dangerous, that the mortality rate historically has been so high to go through childbirth, that we actually want to protect the wisdom of the crone. We want to protect the wisdom of the female and similarly with whales. I just led a retreat this weekend, and it was all menopausal women, and it was so exquisite. It’s not just the dangers of childbirth, but it’s also the energetics, the energy that it takes to raise, birth, nurse, feed a human being, that takes so much of the resource from the feminine intelligence, which happens through the body.
When women transition through menopause, and they become these crones, they become these elders, if we don’t murder them, which millions, not hundreds of thousands, it was millions of women, mostly crones, mostly menopausal women, who were burned at the stake, millions. That I do not think is an accident. What I witnessed this weekend and what I’m starting to see inside of myself is there is a level of power, there is a level of sovereignty, there’s a level of reclamation, and there is a level of Gnostic wisdom that comes through from a woman who feels safe and from a woman who is no longer dedicating her life force to child rearing.
In a lot of civilizations, we would have a council of menopausal women that were counseling the king, that were counseling the elders, that were counseling the men. I am not like, “The future is female.” I don’t believe that. I think that heaven on earth requires a balance of the masculine and feminine, and our biology teaches us that. If you look inside of a human brain, in what they call the marriage hall or the hall of Brahman, which is the seat of the soul in the center of the brain, you have the pineal and the pituitary. You have the masculine and the feminine. It looks like a lingam and a womb.
I think we’ve just been so out of balance for so long that we’ve forgotten the outrageous intelligence of the body that historically has been held in the feminine. By that, it’s not just the womb, but also the feminine’s role is to descend into the darkness, to go into the darker emotions, the sadness, the grief. Even in ancient Celtic societies, they had– I’m forgetting the word right now. I think it’s maybe “keening.” It was a group of women, and they were basically professional mourners. They were professional grievers.
They would go to funerals, and they would wail, and they would sing these sort of atonal– what is it called? Not harmonic, but dissonant sounds. They would wail and grieve, not just for themselves and not just for the person who had died, but so that everyone at that funeral could grieve their dog who died, the divorce they were going through, their partner who cheated on them, the business deal that fell through, so that that grief doesn’t get stuck in the body, but rather gets metabolized and alchemized in real time.
Historically, that has been the role of the feminine, and that’s very much the work that we’re doing inside of Ziva, where we’re giving people tools to embody their grief, to embody their rage, and to move it through and to alchemize. Then when you do that, you clear your channel for more light, more joy, more bliss, more ecstasy to come in. When you do that, and again, especially in the feminine body, but it happens in all bodies, you can go into these other realms. You can access the field, you can access the quantum field.
I’ve been teaching people how to access the field for 20 years through meditation, through using mantra and de-excitation. That’s one way to get to the field, and it is potent, and it can change your whole nervous system and create safety in the body. I discovered in the past few years that there’s another way to access the field, and that is through ekstasis. It’s through breath and joy and dance and even pleasure.
The beautiful thing is that when you access the field through both ways, through the de-excitation and the excitation, what happens is that the nervous system gets grounded and safe through the meditation, but then it becomes magnetic through these other realms, through the pleasure. It’s like you really start bending reality because you’re shifting the frequency of your electromagnetic field, which changes the way that it is interacting with the field. It feels like you’re accessing other realms, but to me, it’s actually just mastery over this realm. It’s understanding the laws of nature and how our bodies are always impacting every room that we’re in.
I diverted into Ziva, but the other thing I want to say about this and the people who are communicating with other realms or in other ways is twofold. One, a lot of native civilizations, like Native Americans, they would send smoke signals, and a lot of people thought that that was like Morse code, where there would be letters or something very literal. Actually, I’ve recently become friends with a Lakota elder, and he said that the smoke signal was basically just like, “Hey, pay attention, tune into the field.” The smoke signal does not have the message. It’s an indicator that you need to tune into the field, and we’re going to communicate on some other nonverbal plane.
The Telepathy Tapes: Neurodivergence and Unseen Communication
We’ve all had touches of that. “Oh, I was just thinking about you when you called. I dreamt about you last night, and then you showed up.” Most of us have at least glimpsed this in our reality, but I think that the untapped potential here is huge, and I think that that is evidenced by The Telepathy Tapes. Have you watched that or listened to that-
Ari: No.
Emily: –The Telepathy Tapes. It was the number one podcast in the world last year, more popular than Joe Rogan. It’s all about nonverbal autistic children, who, historically, we’ve treated like imbeciles. We’ve treated them like they had special needs, but actually, they’re, most of them, savants, really, really developed gifts in different realms, but they just weren’t fully in their bodies, so they couldn’t actually speak. Some of them are spellers, so they’ll use a pad, and they’ll spell. Some of them, if they get touched in a certain way, can actually make sounds.
This podcast that became wildly popular, hundreds of millions of downloads and views, this woman interviewed parents and these children and discovered that these people who were nonverbal, these children were actually telepathic and that they were communicating in different realms in different ways, that they were tuning into a certain state of consciousness and connecting. They were proving it because Susie’s mom in Idaho would say she’s fallen in love with Bobby in Philadelphia.
This podcaster found Bobby’s mom and like, “Oh, yes, Bobby’s talking about Susie.” That was one plane. These nonverbal kids are finding each other telepathically and falling in love and teaching each other, but the crazy part was that they were meeting in big conferences on the Hill. They would have thousands of people tuning into the same state of consciousness and having conferences in the unseen realms, teaching each other languages, falling in love, learning–
I think that the popularity of that show and perhaps even this wild wave of autism that is happening, this whole wave of neurodivergence, potentially is preparing us for how the human brain is going to change with AI. If AI starts to do our memory holding and even our linguistic and data processing, we are potentially going to have so much consciousness available that we may be able to communicate in multisensorial ways, as if we’re all on mushrooms or as if we’re all telepathic, or perhaps what these people have been doing on that island that your friend went to visit.
Ari: That’s a very interesting hypothesis, and I would say an optimistic one for all of the cognitive offloading that’s going to be done to AI in the coming years and decades, and for the young generations who are going to grow up cognitively offloading all their hard cognitive work to AI. Let’s pray that something good comes out of that. I wish I could say I’m as optimistic as you are, but I hope you’re right.
Emily: Can I share one piece that made me optimistic?
Ari: Yes.
How AI and Indigenous Wisdom Will Evolve Human Cognition
Emily: I interviewed a guy named Jere Simpson on my podcast, and he’s brilliant. He’s been called the entrepreneur of our generation and got arrested by the CIA when he was 15 for hacking, and then the CIA was like, “Oh, just come work for us.” Anyway, he has been working with AI for nine years, and he’s been feeding it indigenous wisdom for a long–Maybe not nine, but he’s early in, and he’s basically working under the premise that if we can train AI on the indigenous wisdom, it is smarter and faster than us, and it will get to the idea that there’s no such thing as a zero-sum game.
His theory is that, similarly to the way that the discovery of fire created the biggest jump in human cognition, our brains got bigger, our skulls got bigger, we started going upright, we started having language, we started writing on cave walls once we discovered fire. Before that, we couldn’t predigest our food. We were eating raw meat, we were eating all of the roughage, and our bodies, our stomachs, our digestion had to work so hard just to digest the food that it was taking all that potential blood and energy away from our brains and into the stomachs. Then once we had fire, all of that energy became available, and we had a big shift in consciousness.
His theory is that if the AI is doing a lot of the “grunt work” for our brains and we’re not using it anymore as a storage center or even a processing center, the consciousness does not go away. The inherent capacity of the machine is still there. What if we get to free up that consciousness to start to communicate in multisensorial or heightened ways?
Ari: Very interesting. Again, I hope it’s correct. I pray it’s correct.
Emily: Look, what we put our attention on grows, and so it is. Let’s bring this into the zeitgeist more than we’re all going to be in WALL-E.
Ari: Agreed. [laughs] Cheers to that. Let’s pray we don’t end up in WALL-E.
[laughter]
Emily: We’re kind of in WALL-E now. [crosstalk]
Ari: We are, yes, or Idiocracy. One of the two. I want to circle back to meditation, spirituality, dancing, ekstasis, all of these things. Maybe I want to start with first principles. I know that each one of these things I’m about to ask you, you could talk about for five hours. Instead, I want you to talk about it for like a minute or two or something like that.
There are certain terms here that overlap with the work that you do: “spirituality,” “manifestation,” and those words are used differently by lots of different people. The meaning of “spirituality,” it’s a vague term. It can mean lots of different things to lots of different people. I’d love to know how you define it. Then I want to talk about how you define manifestation, and then I want to go a bit deeper into that and the link between the two.
The True Definition of Spirituality and Meditation
Emily: I would say spirituality, for me, is communing with the unseen realms, communing with the energetics, communing with how does this tree feel to me versus this tree? How does this person feel to me versus this person? How does this place feel in my body versus this place? Communing with the unseen realms, like my inner child. I can’t see her. I can’t see little Emily, but I know that when I put my attention on her and when I let her feel safe and held, my life gets better.
I can’t see God, but I know that when I put my attention on the collective consciousness of all that is, the organizing force of nature, I feel more trust and surrender, and I see more beauty in the now. For me, spirituality is communing with the unseen realms, and then ultimately bridging the seen and the unseen.
To go to your next question, would be around meditation. What is meditation? That word gets thrown around a lot, and I think because it’s become so popular, it’s almost worse now. [laughs] When I first started teaching 20 years ago, no one really had an opinion or experience of it, and so I could just reach people who were naive and new, and they were like, “Okay, this is meditation.”
Now I have to work against so much programming, and people have been fed so much slop when it comes to meditation that I have to differentiate what Ziva is versus people call literally everything a meditation. I’m like, “No, that’s just ketamine. No, that’s just fighting with your friend. No, that’s just scrolling through Instagram.”
[laughter]
Emily: A walk in the woods is amazing, not meditation. To me, meditation, specifically with Ziva, we’ve talked about this before, but you’re accessing a verifiable fourth state of consciousness, different than waking, sleeping, or dreaming. In that fourth state of consciousness, you’re strengthening the corpus callosum, which is the bridge between the right and left hemispheres. You’re actually making the bridge between the seen and the unseen realms bigger.
This is my big mission in the past few years is to help people to become bridges between heaven and earth, to help them to embody the frequency of heaven on earth, because I believe that heaven is a vibration, not a destination, and that is available right here, right now, through our bodies. Meditation is an extraordinarily important precursor to manifestation. Meditation, I would define as bridging the seen and the unseen realms. Specifically, what I teach is that you’re giving your body really deep rest so you can get rid of the stress in your body to download more of your real self, more of the highest version of you.
What I’ve noticed is that when you start with meditation and then move into manifestation, that is where the real magic happens, that is where you start to play with what feels like magic. Now, it’s not magic, and I’m happy to go into the neuroscience and the chemistry and all of that, but it does feel like magic when you first de-excite the nervous system, access the quantum realm, and then get curious about what would I love. Even that part, that’s simple. To me, manifestation is asking the question, “What would I love?” So simple.
Ari: Here’s what I’m curious about, and you alluded to some of this, but when we talk about manifestation, I think there’s an interesting way that it intersects with spirituality. In the sense of, let’s imagine somebody who is, let’s say, not “very spiritual,” who is maybe just interested in satisfying their egoic desires. I want to be alpha, and I want to make a ton of money and drive a Lamborghini and wear a Rolex and get hot chicks. I want to manifest. Can your methods help me achieve that?
As opposed to someone who is connected to that unseen realm, who is in their vocation, who is in the process of doing work that is meaningful to the world, that is not purely about satisfying their own egoic desires. I’m curious how you think about manifestation in those different contexts.
Addictive Longing vs. Intuitive Desire: Healing Your Egoic Void
Emily: It’s such a good question and a really important one, because the answer is my methods can help you manifest all that stuff. I built a whole career on it of stress less, accomplish more, meditation for extraordinary performance, and it was very intentional. I was like, “I’m going to wrap this candy coating on top of this medicine because I just want people to take the medicine.”
That was 20 years ago, and people weren’t ready to hear it. They weren’t ready for spiritual practices, they weren’t ready for pilgrimages, they weren’t ready for the level and the depth of the transmission. I was like, “Hey,” I’m just talking about meditation right now, “here’s this thing that’s going to help you make more money and have better sex.” It worked, and 250,000 people later, I’ve taught.
Here’s the thing: why I felt in integrity doing that is that I actually don’t care why people start meditating. You could start meditating because you want the Lamborghini and the Rolex and the hot chicks and the more zeros in your bank account, but if you’re actually accessing the unmanifest, if you are actually eradicating the stresses in your nervous system, then you are going to heal that wounding that is putting you into what I would call an addictive longing. This is where the differentiation comes in in your question. It’s knowing the difference between an addictive longing and an intuitive desire.
To me, it is the meditation that bifurcates that. It is the meditation preceding the manifestation that gives you access to your own bliss and fulfillment in the only place that it resides, which is inside of you, and in the only time that it resides, which is right now. If you don’t have a sustainable, repeatable means by which to access that, then probably all of your desires are egoic. All of your desires are trying to fill an internal void from an external source. I’m not even going to judge that as good or bad, it just is.
Once you have a technique to fill yourself up from the source, to flood your own brain and body with dopamine and serotonin, then you can start to trust your desires more. You can start to trust that your desires are, in fact, divinely inspired, because what happens when you precede the manifestation with the meditation is that you no longer believe that your fulfillment lies on the other side of the Rolex and the hot chicks and the bunch of money.
You know, viscerally, your body knows that your bliss is inside of you. You might still want to sleep with the hot girl, you might still want the Rolex, and then the question becomes, why? Why do I have that desire? I would argue that that desire is there because it is now an indicator of where nature would have you deliver your fulfillment, not where you need to go to fill yourself up.
The Vedas vs. Buddhism: Is Life Suffering or Ultimate Bliss?
This is a really important distinction between the lineage that I was trained in, which is the Vedas versus Buddhism and a lot of the monastic practices that are out there. I think it’s why a lot of people think spirituality is hard and a lot of people are even afraid to even start because there’s a secret piece of them that’s like, “If I start, I won’t want to do my job anymore and I’ll leave my wife and I won’t want to make money and I’ll just be meditating in a garden for the rest of my life.” Those are monastic practices. For 99.9% of us, we’re not monks. We’re householders.
The core tenet that really matters here is that the core tenet of Buddhism is that life is suffering, and if you can transcend your desires, then you transcend suffering. The core tenet of the Vedas, which is what I teach, is that life is bliss. 24-hour-a-day bliss, that’s your birthright, and that anything keeping you from experiencing that is stress. If you get rid of the stress through the meditation, then you’re accessing the fulfillment inside of you, and then the desires become your GPS of where nature wants you to go and deliver your fulfillment.
Then I would argue that the desires get really important because I really want to listen to my instruction manual. Where would God like to use me to go and deliver my fulfillment to the land? This is where I think the manifestation then comes into play and where it can become really valuable.
Ari: That was such a good answer. When I asked that question, I did not imagine that you would have that good of an answer. I was listening to you, and I was like, “Wow, that’s really freaking good.”
Emily: Thank you.
Ari: Well done.
Emily: Almost like I’ve been teaching this for 20 years.
Ari: It’s almost like that. I feel like I just want to end the interview right now. That was such a good answer, but we’re not. We’re not going to. We’re going to carry on.
Emily: Thank you. I feel seen and delighted. I feel like I’m writing a webinar right now because we’re doing this three-day free event, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. I want to take that transcript and put it into the event because I think that was really good. [laughs]
Ari: Yes, it was. It was really, really good. Even just thinking about it for myself, I found it a deeply insightful way of thinking about that intersection just in my own life. Thank you for that.
Emily: The beautiful thing is that that thing can also be applied no matter where you are on your spiritual journey because it’s never about the action, and it’s also never about the thing that you’re manifesting. It’s always about the come from. It’s about the state of consciousness from which we are taking the action. A lot of us are trying to look for what’s the 10 easy steps to my dream body, or what’s the 10 easy steps to launching a 7-figure launch? We’re looking for the steps, the actions, and that matters.
Strategy matters to some degree. It’s not irrelevant. If you are not managing the field, if you are not managing your state of consciousness, the state of consciousness from which you are taking the actions, the strategy becomes almost irrelevant. I’m single right now, and so I could go on the dating apps. I could go on the date. I could say the things. I could wear the dress. If I, in my core, do not feel worthy, if I, in my core, have not healed my wounding of being afraid of a power match of a man, it doesn’t matter what I say or how many dates I go on or what my Hinge profile looks like. The come from, the state of consciousness is going to override all of the strategy.
Ari: With that in mind, how does one differentiate in their own internal states? Because obviously, our inner worlds are– what’s the right word? Messy.
Emily: Dynamic?
Ari: What was that?
Emily: Dynamic?
Ari: Yes, dynamic, messy. There’s a lot of transience to thoughts and feelings. Things come and go, desires come and go, feelings, emotions. How does one know if their desires to manifest a particular thing are coming from the right place or not? Are there any sort of red flags or signs that allows one to differentiate in that regard?
Red Flags: Is Your Intent Coming from Fear or Love?
Emily: I would say first is, do I have a reliable, sustainable, and self-sufficient way to access source, nature, bliss, God, whatever you want to call that which cannot be named. It could be yoga, breathwork, meditation, whatever you’re doing to remind yourself that you are one wave on an ocean of consciousness. Do you have a repeatable practice there? If you do, you’re already a lot of steps in the right direction. A lot of people in AA, it’s like going to the meetings, having their sponsor, that level of community. For some people, it’s dance. I am here to tell you I think you should be meditating. It’s the only way.
[laughter]
Ari: I’m not here to tell you what to do, but you should definitely be meditating.
Emily: Correct. [laughs] It’s like, “That’s a lie. I’m leaving [unintelligible 00:47:15].” If I had a magic wand–
Ari: Just own it, the fact that you are here to tell people what to do.
Emily: That’s right. In this regard, yes, I’m very dictatorial. Why isn’t everyone meditating? My podcast is called Why Isn’t Everyone Doing This? because I legitimately want everyone to be both meditating and using their pleasure to pray. Step one: Can I trust that my desires are divinely inspired versus an addictive longing? I would say, do you have a regular practice to remind yourself that you’re God pretending to be human? If so, you’re probably a lot closer.
Then I’d say the second point would be– Look, I’m dancing with this every day, I dance with this every day, multiple times a day. I don’t think this is a one-and-done. I think this is a practice like riding a bike. For me, it’s getting really curious about what’s my why? What’s my come from? Why do I want to do this launch? Why do I want to go on this date? Why do I want to make this money? Why do I want to throw this party for my son? What do I think will happen on the other side of that?
This is going to sound cheesy and simple, but I do think it’s true. Is it coming from fear or love? Am I taking the action out of fear, that I’m afraid something bad will happen if I don’t, or I’m afraid that I’m in such pain now, but if I can just get through this hell, then I will get to heaven, which is essentially the “I’ll Be Happy When” syndrome. Am I taking the action out of fear, or am I fulfilled, am I safe, am I worthy, and I’m taking this action out of a creative expression of letting the divine work through me, which is, by the way, what art is. Art, all of it, and ideally, our lives are becoming works of art. How does the divine want to use me as a vessel of creative expression?
The Reticular Activating System: Modulating Your Personal Field
Ari: So good. This question is inspired by something I was listening to this morning on my walk with my dogs. I was listening to an Alan Watts lecture, and he was talking about things related to manifestation. It was kind of an unusual lecture as far as his work goes. Essentially, he made the argument– Actually, maybe I’ll just phrase this as a question to you. Do you think that we are manifesting all the time at every moment?
Emily: I do. I do. That’s actually what I open my whole webinar with Magic Maker open, so like, “Hey, you might not believe in manifestation, you might think it’s woo, you might think I can’t manifest, but the reality is we are all manifesting all of the time.” Our thoughts become things, our beliefs become things. Where that gets tricky is that 99.9% of the universe is happening in the unseen realms, and that certainly is true of our minds.
We have access to such precious little of what is actually happening in our cognition and in the energetics. We’ve all seen this, like our best friend who keeps dating the same men. It’s just like, “God, here she goes in the same pattern again,” or our mom who’s drinking the Chardonnay. We can see everyone else’s patterns much better than we can see our own, but that’s usually coming out of some wounding or some limiting belief.
Until we address the tectonic thing that is creating the unworthiness or creating the limiting belief, then many of us are manifesting things that we don’t really love, and we don’t understand it. It’s like we put ourselves in these invisible cages.
For me, part of the beauty of intentional manifestation, because I do agree that it’s happening all the time, is that you get to get access into the unseen realms, you get to get your hands on the wheels of the thing that is actually creating your reality, and then in so doing, liberate yourself from the invisible cage and start to actually create, co-create, with nature, getting mastery over your electromagnetic field, and knowing how you are impacting every room that you walk in.
An example of this would be, imagine you have twins, two twin dudes. They’re same age, same height, same hair color, same eye color, same outfit. They’re going through, I don’t know, a boardwalk. They’re going for a walk on a boardwalk on a beach. Someone whispers in each of their ears. In one of their ears, they say, “You need to really be careful. There’s a lot of dangerous characters around. Economy’s crazy. People are out. There’s people who have gotten hurt, robbed, mugged. Watch your back.”
The other dude, someone whispers in his ear, he’s like, “Hey, this is the most fun place I’ve ever been. Everyone is so nice. There’s extraordinarily hot people here and the most delicious food. Just enjoy. Savor every second.” That is really changing their reticular activating system, which is the filtration device through which they are perceiving reality, but it’s also changing their electromagnetic field, because one is radiating positivity, optimism, magnetism, curiosity, and the other one is radiating fear.
We now can prove it, that your toroidal field, which is the field of emanation that happens from just head and heart coherence. Forget about hoo-ha. We’ll talk about that later. We know now through the HeartMath Institute that when you get your head and heart in coherence, the field that emanates out of you is, some people say, 60 times more powerful. There are other people that say 5,000 times more powerful. Let’s just be judicious and say 60X, that your field of influence gets 60 times bigger when you’re in a state of love and coherence and safety.
That’s going to impact what you’re manifesting, who you meet, their interaction with you. Do they give you a discount or not? Does someone ask you out? Does someone hire you? Does someone give you the parking spot? All of that stuff is happening micro-second- micro-decision over micro-second. A lot of us, it’s just passing us by, and so we’re staying unnecessarily in victim mentality. I would argue, yes, I think we’re manifesting all the time.
Ari: There’s a really fascinating-
Emily: What does Alan Watts say?
Ari: He agrees with you. I think there’s a really interesting implication that comes out of this. The breath is an interesting thing when it comes to human physiology because the breath is both happening automatically without your conscious awareness or intention, and you can control it. Alan Watts actually makes the argument that’s part of why so many meditation traditions have you focus on the breath, is to play with this boundary between what you control and what happens of its own accord.
I think there’s a really interesting implication that comes out of the idea that we’re manifesting all the time because many of us have this childlike view of the universe and who’s controlling it and so on.
We have this childlike view of manifestation where we think that if we spend a few minutes asking God for the things we want, “I really need that promotion. Could you make that happen? I could use some more money right now,” that just that conversation, those words of communication are the meaningful thing because I set out to manifest, I ask God to give me these things that I want, as opposed to the idea that you’re manifesting at every moment and the universe is responding to your way of being.
To not just the words you speak when you decide you want to ask for something, but to every moment of the way you’re walking through life and the thoughts you’re thinking, the emotions you’re feeling, your actions, and the universe is responding to that, more in the automatic way where it’s happening of its own accord rather than, “I’m intending to do this right now.”
I’m just interested in how you conceptualize that dynamic because if it’s happening all the time, then the goal of manifestation is less about, “Hey, I’d really love this and this and this. Can you please give me these things I want?” It becomes more a process of inner transformation.
Emily: Absolutely. So well said. As you were saying, the image that came through was a kid peeing in a pool. Stay with me.
[laughter]
If you pee in a pool, at least to start, you have a field of urine. You’ve clouded your field with urine and uric acid. Then that is going to interact with the field of the pool. That’s what I’m getting at, that manifestation is about you not controlling, but understanding how to modulate what it is that is emanating out in your field. Are you peeing in the pool? Are you peeing negativity and self-doubt and pessimism and fear? Then the pool can’t help but react to that fear and amplify it or dissipate it or bring it back to you.
Here we go. [laughs] Let’s say instead of peeing in the pool, you’re releasing amrita, which is the sacred waters of the feminine body that come from we don’t even know where because there’s nowhere in the body that makes that much fluid, so they actually feel like they’re coming from heaven– The art is formerly known as squirting, I’m trying to rebrand as Goddess Gushing. Let’s say you release amrita-
Ari: I like the rebranding. That’s good.
Emily: Thank you.
Ari: I haven’t heard that before.
Emily: Let’s say you’re releasing amrita into the pool– By the way, this is just real-time. Thanks for staying with me on this.
Ari: I’m with you. I’m very intrigued by this conversation, I have to say. I don’t know if I’ve ever been this intrigued by a conversation.
Emily: Thank you. Blushing. Amrita comes from the Sanskrit word “mrit”, is where we get our term “mort”, “mortality”, and “a” in Sanskrit is negating. Amrit is anti-death. This is literally the fluid of life, the elixir of life. There are stem cells inside of it. It is one of the most nourishing magical elixirs on the planet. It’s one of the most healing substances on the planet.
Let’s say instead of peeing in the pool, instead you’re releasing amrita in the pool. Now this is the field that is all around you. Now the field of the pool is interacting with this healing, generative, miraculous substance. That’s what I mean when I say you’re manifesting all the time. You are emanating some kind of frequency all the time, and the universe is constantly dancing with that emanation.
Manifestation does not mean that God is a short order cook and that you get to beg for shit. It means that you get clear about what your desires are. Are those desires coming from a place of fulfillment, or are they coming from a place of lack? Then who do I need to be to become an energetic match for this desire? Then that’s really what I teach. I teach people how to get clear on that desire, and then I teach them how to become an energetic match for that which they desire so that they are emanating the frequency of love, abundance, safety, planetary paradise, whatever it is that they want to manifest.
One of the things that I feel proud of that I do feel like differentiates me from a lot of other manifestation teachers is that a lot of manifestation teachers are very much focused on, like you said, the Rolex and the car and the money and the boyfriend, whatever it is. A big part of my manifestations and then part of why I do this practice is that I believe that if enough people can prove to themselves that they can affect their own reality, that they can bend reality and change their own timelines into one that is more loving and pleasurable and generative and safe, that if enough people do that, then we can together, collectively, start to manifest our version of heaven on earth, our version of planetary paradise.
That’s really why I’m doing this, is that I feel like we need a whole army of people who remember these ancient modalities, because they’re all ancient. I didn’t make any of this stuff up, but I’ve been such a student of so many different ancient traditions for so many decades now that it’s like, I’ve just put them together in what I think is the most relevant formula for these times that we’re going into, which are intense.
We’re already in intense times, and it ain’t slowing down. You know what I mean? Things are going to speed up and get more intense. I think the ability for people to regulate their nervous systems, to come home to themselves, to feel safe inside of themselves, and then be very intentional about what reality they want to create is going to be increasingly more important as the turbulence on the planet kicks up.
We saw this in COVID. You were an amazing example of this during COVID. You were so steady. You were so grounded. You were so looking at what you believed to be true and naming what you believed to be true, not letting yourself go into a lot of the fear and speculation that so many people were going into. I think COVID was just a tiny little warm-up for the level of intensity that is coming, and not to be fatalistic about it. I’m actually quite optimistic about the future. I’m excited for the shit that is not sustainable to be destroyed.
Ari: Yes, me too.
Emily: I want people to be grounded in themselves and to be equipped to fill themselves up from the source and to consciously create the more beautiful earth that our hearts know is possible because otherwise there’s going to be a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Ari: I think we’re in a very Shiva-The-Destroyer moment right now in our timeline.
Emily: Shiva is not just the destroyer. He’s the destroyer of irrelevance.
Ari: Yes, agreed. This is something I know you talk about. I remember when I actually took your course in person, what, nine years ago, maybe eight or nine years ago, you talked quite a bit about destruction being a necessary precursor for creation. Now we’re talking about that on a civilizational scale, and I think we’re in this destruction phase. Like you, I’m very excited for the opportunities of what gets to emerge as all of these irrelevant structures are being destroyed.
Emily: I’m also sensitive to the level of potential suffering that will come. It’s not going to be costless. There will be a cost to that. I think it’s really important that right now, while things are relatively safe and stable, that we really take the time to ground ourselves and to get the internal buttressing. Just like you want to have your grains and your protein, you want to have your to-go get packed externally, I think we also need our internal tools really substantiated.
Ari: Agreed. I want to connect now to sexuality and ecstasis. Did you call it ecstosis earlier?
Emily: Ecstasis.
Ari: Ecstatis. That was really fascinating the way you were describing this earlier, the downward movement to ground into being, to ground into spirituality, and then this upward movement into ecstasis. Let’s go deeper into that and how you see the role of sexual energy tying into all of this.
Emily: The core belief here would be that when you access the field, you get access to what you want. It’s the silly analogy we were just making with the pool, that your field, the frequency that you’re putting out, is not only impacting reality, but rather creating your reality, because it is creating the lens through which you are experiencing reality, it is shifting the energetic frequency of that around you.
If you believe in the double slit experiment- not believe in it, but if you want to apply the double slit experiment to this, which is basically that every particle is existing in multiple places at one time until it is observed, and once you observe it, that is what fixes it in a time and a space, then the state of consciousness with which the observer is observing, there’s no way that doesn’t impact the particle itself.
Core belief here is that when you access the field, you get access to what you want. That’s what manifestation is. It’s, “What would I love?” I’ve been teaching for almost 20 years now to people to access the field through meditation, through using a mantra, which is basically impacting something called cymatics, which is the science of sound, which is the de-excitation of the nervous system. Through that de-excitation, through that rest, there’s a dissolving of the individuality into the totality, and you access source consciousness.
Many of us have been there either in a meditation or breathwork or just before sleep, but it’s that pre-hypnagogic state just between waking and sleeping. That’s what we access in Ziva Meditation. Then what we do in Ziva Magic is that we access the same field, but not through de-excitation, but rather through excitation. Sometimes I do this through breath, sometimes I do this through dance, and sometimes I do it through pleasure, through actually teaching people how to build the life force, or what I would call creation energy, in their body.
Reclaiming Sexual Energy from Shame and Distortion
I call life force or ecstatic energy creation energy because it is the most creative force on the planet. It’s the only thing, to my knowledge, that can create another human being, one of the most divine creative things that we have access to, which is why I believe it has been so outrageously shamed, conditioned. We’ve been divorced from this flavor of our own divinity because it is that fucking powerful. People who remember how creative and powerful they are very hard to control.
Part of my mission inside of all this work is to give people the tools to reclaim their body as their own, to reclaim their pleasure as fully, to reclaim the nature-given neurochemical cocktail that can usher us into states of consciousness where your body is releasing, yes, adrenaline, oxytocin, yes, dopamine, serotonin, all of the stuff that you get in meditation, but then also love, also norepinephrine, also this heightened sensation.
I’ve been asking people now for five years, “How do you feel in that post-orgasmic state?” Most people will say “Bliss, holy, connected, pure, powerful.” It’s such a beautiful picture that they paint when they’re in that state, and yet, for thousands of years, we’ve been trained to believe that that is bad, that that is wrong, that that’s a sin, that that is unholy, that that is dangerous. There’s been such a distortion around our sexual energy. There’s been such a distortion around our life force.
I could talk about that for a really long time, and I won’t, but I think it’s obvious. If you just look at the fact that our children are being educated around sexuality through porn, the level of distortion that is happening through the Epstein files, through the rape academy, through the misogyny, through the very fact that women cannot be in places of spiritual leadership inside of many churches, the fact that we only have 2% of leaders in government that are women is a direct result, in my opinion, of men associating their sexuality through porn and shame.
Because we live in a predominantly heterosexual society, if you link your sexuality to shame, then anytime you see a woman that wakes up your desire and wakes up your pleasure, you now map her to the shame that you originally associated your sexual energy with. I think that is why we have created such an imbalance in our civilization. This has nothing to do with man-hating. This has everything to do with, “I’m very interested in how do we unlock the frequency of heaven on earth?” I think that, required in that is the balance of masculine and feminine.
We are so far from that on the planet right now. I think that if we want to see the planetary balance of the masculine and feminine energy change, we have to access it inside of ourselves. That is part of what I teach inside of these modalities, is that when you start to use your pleasure, you start to wake up the life force and the creation energy from your root up into your heart and up into your third eye, up into your head.
Then at the moment of peak pleasure, you’re basically sending all of that to your dream, you’re sending all of that pleasure that accesses that creation energy to the dream. Then from that place of safety and bliss and fulfillment, you basically come back into the five-senses reality of that which you desire.
When you do that, when you map your desire to that state of bliss and pleasure and fulfillment, you start to create safety inside of the body. The dream starts to feel safe. You’re also increasing the neuroplasticity and you’re training your body to receive the dream as if it were a long-lost lover and not something that is scary or something that could make or break you.
Just to finish the masculine and feminine piece, one of the things that we do when we do Ziva Magic, when we build, intentionally, the ecstasis or the life force energy is that you wake up– People call it Kundalini energy, which is just life force energy. You see in the caduceus symbol, the American Medical Association, which is the two snakes spiraling around the sword? That is a euphemism for the spine, and then these two energetic channels called the Ida and the Pingala. They represent these two energetic channels, which is the masculine and feminine.
When you get to a certain state of consciousness, when we do one of the breath holds that we do, your brain starts to release melatonin, which is the precursor to DMT, which is the God particle. Inside of these practices, you’re actually secreting DMT or the God particle inside of your brain, inside of that Hall of Brahman that I was talking about earlier, that has the masculine and the feminine.
By balancing and activating the masculine and feminine inside of our own brains, we are increasing our divinity, we are turning up the dial on our divinity. I don’t mean that as a euphemism. I mean actually increasing our God chemistry inside of our own brains. That’s why I believe that heaven is a vibration, not a destination, because I know that we can access that through our bodies.
Trauma Witnessed in Community: Emily’s 21-Hour Shamanic Journey
Ari: You just made me think of a night I had about a month or two ago- let’s see, a month ago, how long ago was it? six weeks ago when I was down in Nosara. I did a beautiful psilocybin journey with my partner, Marcella. I was over there suffering, crying for most of it, dealing with a lot of stuff that needed to be healed.
Emily: [unintelligible 01:11:52]
Ari: I had a beautiful experience, and it was really incredible, one of my best ever. I did a lot of stuff that I needed to work through. The whole time, Marcella was next to me on the bed, really in a state of ecstasis. She was doing this the whole time. That was the motion that her body wanted to do that.
Emily: Weaving?
Ari: Yes.
Emily: Anything else you want to share? [laughs]
Ari: No. I could share plenty. I know you had a beautiful journey of your own recently.
Emily: I did something this weekend?
Ari: No. What, three weeks ago? Something like that.
Emily: Oh yes. The body work?
Ari: Yes. Do you want to share any of that? You don’t have to.
Emily: Yes, I’m happy to. First of all, what a gift that you have a wife that you can do these medicine journeys with, and that I’m sure is so embodied, and that she is weaving that masculine and feminine, that she’s holding space for you to go through and compost that, which is ready to be composted. That’s what I believe is the role of the mushrooms. They turn death into life. It’s the role in the forest. It can do that inside of us, that all of the versions of ourselves that have died, they get to be composted to create fertile soil for the seeds that are coming.
That’s very much what we do inside of Zika Magic as well, where we’re alchemizing the grief, the rage, the fear, and letting it be witnessed and expressed so that it composts the shit into fertilizer, it composts the fear into fuel for the dreams.
This weekend, I actually led a retreat. I had five menopausal women on this journey. I’ve never done all women before. I’ve never done something so small. I’ve actually never served psilocybin before. I’ve done ketamine on my retreats before, but never mushrooms. It was exquisite, so beautiful to watch these women, and specifically menopausal women, so deeply in their bodies, so deeply in their pleasure. I was like, “Oh, I get why they were burned at the stake.” There’s that much power. It’s world-shifting. I felt so lucky. I was the one facilitating, but they were counseling me. I was the lucky recipient of the collective intelligence that was coming through this coven of elders. It was so good.
Same, I led a retreat in Greece this year. I took 20 people on a pilgrimage to sacred sites in Greece, including Delphi, which is where the oracles used to advise the kings and the philosophical leaders, and also, the priestesses used to serve medicine to the people who basically created Western civilization as we know it. Yes, that’s all I’ll say about that.
My ceremony, a few weeks ago, it was 21 hours. I had this amazing man who– his name is Kyle. He was actually just on Aubrey Marcus’s podcast this week. He’s been practicing body work for 20 years. He came over. We did 10 hours of therapy. Basically, he’s like, “Tell me your whole life story. No long story short. Tell me all of it.” He was just watching every move that I made, every hand gesture. You can tell he’s just trained his consciousness to be so attuned.
Honestly, even if we had never done any body work, just to be listened to and witnessed with no time constraints was so healing. I believe that trauma witnessed in community can be transmuted. It was just beautiful to be witnessed, to have such presence and attention.
Then at 1:00 in the morning, we got on the table. At 1:00 in the morning, we did medicine. This man is a full shaman, medicine man, body worker, facial manipulation, dom. He was working in so many different realms. Basically, he’s taking you through your entire life’s journey through touch. It was really, rally beautiful. We finished at 9:00 in the morning. I am 47 years old. I have no business staying up all night. [laughs] We finished at 9:00 in the morning. My phone, for four days, did not recognize me. I had to put in my code into my phone because it didn’t recognize my face ID, which was a fun external validation of the fact that I was shifting my field.
For me, the big thing that came from that was twofold. One, having more fun getting my needs met and even admitting that I have needs because my wounding is self-sufficiency and vigilance like, “Oh, I’ll just do it all myself. I’ll be a single mom and CEO and I’ll just do it all myself.”
Ari: You do pretty well with that, I have to say.
Emily: Thanks. I’ve built cathedrals in the sky. I have built these temples in the unseen realm and they’re empty. It’s heartbreaking to me. The amount of beauty that I have crafted inside of this temple that is my body and that is these temples in the unseen realms and so much of the way that I worship is through pleasure that it just feels like– I know the sadness comes from longing, but it feels like it would be better if this temple was inhabited. [laughs] It would be better.
Ari: For sure.
Emily: I’m actively softening into the safety of having needs, that it’s okay to be dependent, and that we’re not meant to do any of this alone, and then having fun getting those needs met or even those desires met. That was one thing.
The other thing that came through, which I think brings us all the way back to your original question, is that it’s not the action, it’s the “come-from”. What is the state of consciousness from which I am taking the action? For me, my unworthiness shows up as proving like, “Oh, let me audition. Let me show you how smart I am. Let me show you, whatever, how pretty I am, how talented I am, how conscious I am.” Again, there’s this– I don’t even know how subtle it is, but it’s just proving.
Ari: It’s not subtle at all. It’s totally overt. No, I’m just messing with you. [laughs]
Emily: I don’t know. Even just how fast I talk. It’s like, “Where did that come from?” Part of it is generosity and enthusiasm, but there’s some percentage that is proving. That’s the thing that I’ve been dancing with. I don’t know if I need to calibrate my speed, but if the enthusiasm is coming from generosity, that’s very different than coming from, “Look how smart I am,” or, “I hope you like me.”
That was a big thing of the ceremony. It’s something I’ve been looking at moment over moment, and I think speaks to what you were originally asking about one of the dangers of manifestation, which is like, “Is the ‘come-from’ whole or not? Is the action, is the desire coming from a place of fulfillment, or is it coming from a place of need?”
The Monastic Trap: Why Monks and Householders Need Different Practices
Ari: There’s a really interesting way that thing that you’re just referring to, this intentionality, actually intersects with meditation and the desire even to meditate, to begin a meditation practice. I heard this distinction recently, and it was fascinating to me that I had never thought of this before. This requires a bit of explanation. We have these studies that have existed for, I don’t know, 20, 30 years on, let’s say, Tibetan monks, where they take these Tibetan monks and they put them in a brain scanner and they’re like, “Let’s look at the activity of different regions of your brain. We can measure your contentment, your happiness.”
What we find is this link between monks who meditate tend to be happier people. We can explain that through these brain scans, we can reduce it down to activity in this region of the brain and say, “Meditation makes you happier because it builds this part of the brain and therefore you become happier.”
A Westerner hears this and is like, “I want to take up meditation because I want to be happier. I want to be a happier person.” What’s interesting there, and it’s a subtle thing that’s going on here, because the monk is not meditating because they selfishly want to be happy, just for their own desire to be happy. They’re meditating to ease the suffering of all sentient beings in the world, to bring value to the world around them.
Which invites the question, “How much of the happiness that one is deriving from this practice is from sitting and let’s say focusing on your breath or doing some other specific meditation practice, and how much of it is actually from the intentionality component of why you are meditating in the first place?”
Emily: That’s such a good question. I’ve actually never contemplated that specific thing of, what is the impact of the generosity behind the intention to start? That’s really brilliant. I would love to see a study on that, if you’ve got a group of people who weren’t meditating, but they had a desire to contribute joy to the planet, versus people who are meditating, because there’s a way you could send love to the planet. People would call that meditation because people call everything meditation. I would actually really love to see a bifurcation there, and that would be cool.
Ari: Totally. One last thing. I’ll say from a personal perspective, when I first got into meditation, I don’t know, I was maybe 20 years old, 19 years old or something, and I was exploring, my desires were very much selfish, egoic-driven desires. I wanted to have more happiness. I wanted to have more equanimity. I wanted to have supernatural powers. I wanted to develop psychic powers and see people’s auras. It was all very much egoic intentions as far as why I was exploring these meditative practices in the first place.
Emily: How’d it go doing it?
Ari: Amazing. You can’t tell my psychic abilities and supernatural powers? They’re not evident right now?
Emily: You’re doing pretty great.
Ari: [laughs] What I’ll say is that I do things for different reasons now.
Emily: Look, I don’t know if I’m the perfect person to answer this question or the worst person to answer this question. The first seven chapters of my book are all literally called The Selfish Reasons Why to Meditate. There’s a whole chapter on better sex, there’s a whole chapter on reversing your body age, and there’s a whole chapter on increasing your productivity. Again, that was very intentional. I was like, “Let me wrap this medicine in the candy coating of meeting people where they are,” because if they don’t take the medicine, it doesn’t really matter.
I think that if the practice works, if whatever the technique is that you’re doing actually plugs you into the divine, gives you access to that which cannot be named, it is going to impact the come-from. It’s going to impact the state of consciousness with which you were taking every subsequent action. To your point, there’s a complexity here that matters because you’re both speaking about the type of person who’s meditating, the type of practice that they are doing, and the intention behind it.
I would argue that we have monks and non-monks, 99% of the world that is not monastic, 1% that is. Then the monastic practices are and should be different than non-monks. Their point of meditating is to contribute to planetary happiness, is to launder the collective consciousness, which is different than the role of householders. We are doing different practices. What I teach as a householder lineage, and you’re only doing 20 minutes twice a day once you’re initiated because you’re using a mantra that’s helping you to fast-track the access to the divine, versus monks are oftentimes meditating all day.
Vipassana is a derivation of a monastic practice. Vipassana was actually a derivation of a Buddhist practice. They’re trying to get to this space of equanimity where you’re not chasing the desire to retire, nor are you trying to avoid the pain. You’re just cool with what is, and you’re sending love to the planet, which is the metta meditation, which is also Buddhist. To me, it’s like we can’t just use this one blanket term called meditation. That would be like calling all sports sports. Golf and football are wildly different. Ziva Meditation is wildly different from Vipassana, which is wildly different from metta, which is wildly different from breathwork.
I think that to your point, there is value in examining, is it the intention to help that was making them happy? Was it the fact that they actually had transcended their desires because they were monks and didn’t want to sleep with people or make money because that was just their nature, or was it a byproduct of the practice? Either way, what feels very important to highlight is that non-monks doing monastic practices is a little bit of a recipe for confusion.
I think that that’s what’s happening in the West right now, where people think that meditation is hard and they can’t clear their mind. My headspace was 100 million people downloaded it and only 1 million paid users. It’s like, “I don’t think that’s because meditation doesn’t work.” I think it’s because we got fetishized around monks. Jay Shetty’s the number one personal brand on the planet built on being a monk. It’s like, “I don’t want to be a monk.”
Ari: In this conversation, and I want to be respectful of your time here, we’ve gone about half an hour over our original allotted time. Of course, we could talk all day. I’m sure you have a lot more to say. Having known you for nearly a decade now, maybe actually a decade, I know that you have lots to teach. I love listening to you. I love listening to the way you speak. I’m happy to spend another several hours here in this conversation.
Emily: Two more hours, everybody. Buckle up. Get some snacks.
[laughter]
Ari: I know. I have yet to eat breakfast and it’s 1:30 PM, so I do need some snacks. Given that I haven’t stuck to the script in this conversation, I haven’t followed the outline and the suggested topics and questions from your team that they gave me for doing these interviews– I love that I can do that with you where we can just sit down and have a conversation, let it unfold organically, and you can answer the questions that come to my mind so beautifully.
Given that this conversation has unfolded organically in this way, I’m curious, knowing what we’ve spoken about so far, if there’s anything that comes to your mind as an important piece of what you want to teach that you haven’t yet communicated in this podcast.
Emily: I feel like I’ve pointed to it in other ways, but I’d like to really simply link a few dots together. I could wax poetic for a long time, but if there’s one takeaway that I want people to bring with them, it is that meditation and manifesting are really two sides of the same coin, that in order to manifest what it is that you desire– I really feel unattached if that desire is selfish or not, because if you’re manifesting for the planet, you’re part of that. If you’re manifesting for yourself, you are the species.
For me, I feel like it all works out in the end if the practices work. To me, it’s like if you want to manifest that which you desire for yourself or for the planet, you first have to access the un-manifest, that in order to really get what you want, you need to first access the field, the unseen realms. This is something that I don’t see many people talking about.
A lot of people are talking about meditation, a lot of people are talking about manifesting, but not many people are really saying that, “Hey, these are two sides of the same coin. If you try to do one without the other, if you try and manifest, especially through pleasure without meditation, it’s not grounded. If you try and manifest through meditation without the pleasure, it’s not magnetic.”
If you can access the field, both through the de-excitation and the excitation, you actually become the magnet. You become a vibrational mass for that which you desire. Then rather than God being a short order cook answering your prayers, you just start to vibrate at a frequency of wholeness, joy, generosity, pleasure, and clarity about what it is that you actually desire, and then your whole reality starts to shift to reflect that. That’s really what I love teaching people. I’ve spent almost 20 years refining this, crafting this, and have become living proof of this in my life. The stuff that I’m at, stadiums, Egypt, sacred sites. It’s nutso, the stuff that’s coming through.
Then in my students’ lives too, I’m watching them as their prayers are being answered, as things they didn’t even know to pray for are coming through. It’s happening because they are shifting their own state of consciousness. They are shifting their frequency into one of joy and wholeness and generosity. That is a really beautiful thing. I feel optimistic about a future where more people are equipped with those tools of going into the un-manifest to manifest heaven on earth.
Ari: Beautiful. By the way, on that last note, this is something that I heard you say- I don’t know how many years ago, but the idea of bringing the frequency of heaven to earth, I forget exactly where I heard you say it. Maybe it was in person, in the course, or just in a conversation that we had in one of these podcasts. I remember it was many years ago at this point. That is something that, actually, I do every morning.
I start my day with that mantra that I got from you. For the sake of my family, for the sake of my work, that’s the first intention that I set each day after I wake up, is bringing the frequency of heaven to earth in all the work that I do. I just wanted to let you know that that’s from you.
Emily: That makes me so happy. Thank you, Ari, because you have such a big sphere of influence. Your family is so beautiful. I know that you’ve changed the lives of so many people. The fact that you are putting that in your prayers and remembering to be an antenna and to bring that frequency– Just to invite people into that visualization, what if we were to imagine a billion people tuning their channel, tuning their antennas to the frequency of allowing heaven to vibrate through themselves into their families, into their work, into their workplaces, into their gardens, into their food, into their lovemaking, into the art that they’re making, into the music that they’re creating?
It’s not like we have to invent some new technology to cure some disease. We have this technology inside of our bodies with our breath, with our pleasure, with our neurochemistry. These ancient tools have been around for thousands and thousands of years. It’s simply a matter of remembering to practice them, and then oftentimes doing that with a lineage, with some community, and some accountability.
Free 3-Day Event: How to Become a Magic Maker
Ari: Emily, last thing is, I know you have a new program that you’re launching soon. Is it a program? Is it an event? I don’t know the details of what exactly it is. It’s called Magic Maker, I believe. Let people know about that, when it’s launching, what it is, and why they should join you.
Emily: It’s both. It’s a three-day live event called Magic Maker. It starts on July 16th. This will be a few hours a day, July 16th, 23rd and 25th. As you can tell, I have a lot to say. To do it all in one day is too much. We’re going to give people time to digest, to practice, to get into the manifestation field, to prove that magic is real. By the way, again, when I say magic, I’m going to back it up with a lot of history and a lot of neuroscience. It feels like magic, but it’s not actually magic. People are going to come and actually prove to their bodies how they can start to shift their reality by working with these ancient tools.
The event is totally free. You have the link, but it’s just Magic Maker. It starts on July 16th. Then if people want to deepen with me, they’ll be invited into a beautiful container called the Ziva Experience. This is where I’m going to teach my two flagship modalities, which is meditation and embodied manifesting. They’ll actually be initiated in these two different lineages. This is the first time I remember doing this in my career. It’s like I’m putting together my whole life’s work into the two most potent modalities that I think are so much better together. It’s like the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts.
I would say, for anyone who has manifested something, they’re like, “Oh, I’ve manifested love, but my career is in the shitter,” or, “I can manifest a job, no problem, but I’m still stuck in this love cycle,” if you’ve tasted magic, but you want to understand how to dance with it more reliably, this would be a great event for you. If you simply are curious about the neuroscience of these historic and ancient tools, if you want ancient tools to be a little bit more sexy and fun, if you’ve tried meditation before and quit, if there’s something that you really desire and you would love to receive it in a more pleasurable way, all of these things will be there.
Also, last year we had 30,000 people show up. There’s something to also being in ceremony with that many people. It’s like the prayers get amplified. Your desires get magnified. You could even come just for the free event, do the practices with me, plant the prayers, and then see what shifts in your reality.
Ari: Emily, I’m personally super excited for this. I would like to go deeper with you into this course and learn more from you. I have to say it is a joy having these conversations with you. When I first met you 10 years ago, you were already very impressive as a teacher, as a speaker, in your knowledge, in your ability to communicate, in your eloquence.
I have to say you’re 500% better now. I just want to applaud you in my amazement and appreciation for your continued evolution as a teacher and a speaker. I’m in awe of how wonderful you are. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast again and sharing your wisdom and your eloquence and your passion with my audience. It is an absolute joy.
Emily: Oh, thank you, Ari. It’s my pleasure. It’s almost like this stuff works. It’s almost like the meditation, the manifesting makes you more radiant. [laughs]
Ari: 100%. I need some more of that.
Emily: Come on. Get in here.
Ari: All right, we’re going to publish the link. We’re going to promote your course and do all that good stuff. I’m super excited for this. Thank you so much, my friend. I look forward to talking to you again, hopefully sometime soon.
Emily: Yay, thank you, Ari. Bye, everyone.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
04:04 – The Pageant Roots of Feminine Excellence
06:13 – Pleasure as a Prayer: Activating Your Internal Pharmacy
07:53 – Embodied Manifesting: Navigating Insecurity While Dreaming Big
13:23 – The New Pyramid Discoveries: Copper Cylinders & Hidden Chambers
17:36 – Consciousness Over Technology: How the Pyramids Were Really Built
23:02 – The Power of the Crone: Why Menopausal Women Were Historically Feared
29:11 – The Telepathy Tapes: Neurodivergence and Unseen Communication
32:11 – How AI and Indigenous Wisdom Will Evolve Human Cognition
35:24 – The True Definition of Spirituality and Meditation
40:37 – Addictive Longing vs. Intuitive Desire: Healing Your Egoic Void
43:14 – The Vedas vs. Buddhism: Is Life Suffering or Ultimate Bliss?
47:41 – Red Flags: Is Your Intent Coming from Fear or Love?
50:31 – The Reticular Activating System: Modulating Your Personal Field
1:07:11 – Reclaiming Sexual Energy from Shame and Distortion
1:12:36 – Trauma Witnessed in Community: Emily’s 21-Hour Shamanic Journey
1:20:40 – The Monastic Trap: Why Monks and Householders Need Different Practices
1:34:29 – Free 3-Day Event: How to Become a Magic Maker
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