Emily Fletcher breaks down the three M's: mindfulness for present awareness, meditation as a fourth state of consciousness that syncs brain hemispheres, and manifesting to consciously create your life. She includes a guided breath exercise and explains why combining meditation with clear intent works better than either alone.
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Let's talk about the three M's. What are the three M's? Mindfulness, meditation, and manifesting. And these three M's have really become the trifecta that is the Ziva technique, which is what I teach. So mindfulness I would define as the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment. Beautiful, right? Practice that right now, right? And let's just do it, right? Just close your eyes. You don't even have to put your pens down. Just close your eyes and just take a big, delicious inhale and exhale. So good. And this time, as you inhale, I want you to actually feel the breath as it enters your nostrils. And as you exhale, I want you to feel the tactile sensation as it exits your nostrils. Really good. And open your eyes. So that was like a mindful moment, right? That was one mindful breath. Where we brought our awareness into this moment is the right now. So anytime you are directing your focus, anytime you are doing a guided visualization, anytime you're focusing on your breath, counting your breath, visualizing your chakras, imagining a waterfall, I would put that in the category of mindfulness, right? Waking state, left brain practice, and you're directing your focus. Now, this is an interesting time to be alive, because neuroscience is catching up to what these Indian dudes have been saying for 6,000 years. And now, not only can we prove that meditation is good for you, but now we can start to prove how different styles of meditation are impacting the brain differently. So in mindfulness, where you're directing your focus, a smaller part of the brain lights up, but very, very bright, which is sort of indicative to how mindfulness is helpful to you. If you practice mindfulness, you notice that you get very good at focusing on tasks. You get very good at putting one foot in front of the other and being very present where you are right here, right now. Let's talk about the second M meditation. And I want, for a moment, I'm going to ask you guys a favor, and I want you to take everything you've ever heard about meditation, and I want you to throw it out the window just for these next few minutes that we have together. Meditation, as I would define it, is basically when we're accessing a verifiable fourth state of consciousness. So different than waking, different than sleeping, and different than dreaming, when you start to cultivate a meditation practice, you actually move into a fourth state of consciousness, okay? And in this state of consciousness, the right and left hemispheres of the brain start to function in unison. And this Is important because your left brain is in charge of the past and the future, and your right brain is in charge of the right now. Left brain, critical thought. Right brain, creative thought. Left brain, I suck. I suck. I suck. I'm in a dialogue with cats eating my face. Right brain, write that book. Call that guy. Start that company. Okay, so we actually want to have both of these guys functioning at the same time. Right brain and left brain. So when we start meditating, we're accessing this fourth state of consciousness. And when I say that it's like a verifiable state of consciousness, what I mean is that if you were to hook your brain up to an EEG machine, which is electroencephalography hardware, there are eight classic points on the right brain and eight classic points on the left. And in waking, sleeping, and dreaming states of consciousness, the right and left hemispheres of the brain are functioning separately. But in this fourth state of consciousness, all 16 leads of EEG rise and fall in unison. And that starts to increase something called neuroplasticity. And neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change itself. It also increases something called neurogenesis, which is the brain's ability to generate new brain cells. Okay? And that's happening because you have this whole brain cohesion happening when you're doing this. Practice Mindfulness. Very good at dealing with your stress in the now. Meditation. Very good at dealing with your stress from the past. Now let's move into the third M. Manifesting. Manifesting as consciously creating a life you love. It's amazing to me how many people I meet in a day, and I ask them, well, what's your dream job? How much money do you want to be making? What do you want your relationship to look like? How do you want your relationship with your body to feel? And they're just like, I just. I'm not making it funny right now. And my husband doesn't understand understanding this stuff. It's like they immediately go to the complaint when I ask them what they want. It's like they can't even articulate it without starting with the complaint. But what I have found is that the combination of meditation and manifesting is infinitely more powerful than either one alone. Right? Because you can meditate all day, but if you're not clear about what it is that you want, then it's very hard for nature to give it to you. And conversely, you could make vision boards all day long. But if you don't believe that you deserve your dream, it ain't coming.
