If you think all meditation teachers float through life in a blissed-out haze, Emily Fletcher is here to prove you wrong.
This native of Tallahassee, Florida, and meditation master behind Ziva Meditation is a hundred percent presence, zero pretenses.
If you’re wondering why she has the “rizz” of a Broadway star, that’s because she was one. For a decade, she built her career performing in classics like Chicago, The Producers, and A Chorus Line. Night after night she went, until burnout kicked her a**.
But the turning point led her to discover meditation, which is why she’s always grateful for it. As she says, “The more gratitude you find for your past, the more faith you will have in your future.”
Who is Emily Fletcher?
Emily Fletcher, meditation maven? Absolutely. But she’s also a bestselling author, an international speaker, and the powerhouse behind Ziva Meditation, a groundbreaking method designed to help people rewire their brains for peak performance.
Ziva came to fruition after meditation helped her overcome burnout driven by a decade of performing on Broadway.
These days, you can expect Emily to share her wisdom and Mindvalley University and A-Fest. Her Mindvalley program and masterclass, The M Word, inspire people to ditch stress, sharpen their focus, and most importantly, trust their intuition.
“Emily’s calming presence brought me peace,” says Boyana Peeva, a Mindvalley member who not only overcame work stress but ultimately nixed projects that did not serve her. Her realization? “My mind was in the way,” she recalls. Letting go unlocked a deep knowing that she could always trust her instincts.
But all these achievements didn’t start without Emily’s fight for her life.
Emily Fletcher’s journey from burnout to bliss
Before she was teaching Google execs, Navy SEALs, and Hollywood elites how to meditate, Emily was struggling for a long time.
“I thought that once I got on Broadway, my whole life was going to be sunshine and roses,” Emily recalls her early days in The M Word. It didn’t help that she was surrounded by “girls eating tuna fish out of a can and complaining about their bunions.”
Behind the veil of “the dream job” was, alas, this constant pressure to jump into multiple roles with zero warnings—sometimes mid-show.
“I would be on stage before I even knew who I was,” she adds. “I’d just grab all three of my leotards, run down seven flights of stairs, and hope for the best.”
It wasn’t long before her body screamed for intervention. Symptoms like gray hair (popping up when she was just 26), insomnia, and anxiety started showing up. And she was burned out beyond belief—and so sick of it.
Then, two words from a fellow actress changed everything for her: “I meditate.”
Skeptical about it but desperate to change her life, Emily gave it a shot. The first night she meditated was all it took to convince her she’d found the antidote to her problems. “I slept through the night for the first time in 18 months,” she says.
And she’s been meditating every night ever since, repeating the best reward the practice can ever give her: a dialed-down stress response.
Her turning point
Upon witnessing her self-transformation, Emily decided Broadway was out and India was in.
She ditched the stage, the scripts, and the cycle of burnout and dove straight into studying meditation techniques there with the world’s top masters. Of course, she wasn’t about to disappear into the mountains forever. “I’m not that hardcore,” she laughs.
She had a bigger mission in mind: to bring it back to other stressed-out high achievers in her world. If meditation could pull her out of burnout, it could help them, too.
Emily also realized something else: people, especially in the West, love to exoticize meditation into some mystical, unattainable thing. As if you need to sit on a mountaintop in the lotus position all day week long to do it right.
She knew the stereotype camouflaged the truth: meditation isn’t about you all hell-bent on getting techniques right—it’s supposed to get you better at living. “No one gives a crap if you’re a good meditator,” she points out. “Everybody cares if you’re good at life.”
This epiphany laid the foundation for Ziva Meditation, her no-bullsh*t approach to rewiring the brain for peak performance.
The science and philosophy of Ziva Meditation
At Ziva Meditation, there’s no chanting endlessly in a temple or chasing some rigid version of enlightenment. The focus is simple: how to reprogram your subconscious mind to work better and handle stress more efficiently.
Unlike traditional meditation classes, which often focus on relaxation alone, the Ziva Technique—the heartbeat of Emily’s approach—is built for peak performance. It blends neuroscience, stress relief, and cognitive training into a system that’s practical, effective, and built for real life.
And it’s built on three pillars: mindfulness, meditation, and manifestation.
1. Mindfulness: handling stress in the moment
Mindfulness, Emily says, is a commitment to being in the present moment—where life happens. And the way we engage with it shapes everything else.
She likens it to “taking an aspirin when you have a headache—it helps you feel better.” Her analogy is spot on: research has shown that mindfulness improves your overall well-being and behavior while reducing psychological symptoms and emotional reactivity.
And the great thing is, you can decide to be “zen” at any time of the day with these steps:
- Come to your senses. If your mind won’t stop racing, anchor yourself in the now by noticing what you hear, see, feel, taste, and smell. “It pulls you into the present—where stress can’t touch you,” says Emily.
- Balance your breath. A simple mindful breathing technique—inhale for two counts, exhale for four—can instantly switch your nervous system into relaxation mode.
- Reset with gratitude. Before bed, list five things you’re grateful for. Doing this reinforces you to focus on what’s good in your life instead of what’s lacking.
Once you’re much more grounded, Emily says, it becomes easier to drop into a deep meditation—where the hardcore stress-busting work begins.
2. Meditation: eliminating stress from the past
While mindfulness helps you deal with stress in the moment, meditation clears out the stress you’ve been storing for years—the stuff weighing you down without you even realizing it.
The Ziva Technique will have you eprogramming your nervous system so you can finally exit the “survival” mode that’s long been running the show and stressing you out. It gives your body rest that’s two to five times deeper than sleep, triggering a natural detox process for your brain.
“When you start meditating, instead of a small part of the brain lighting up like it does in mindfulness, the whole brain lights up,” explains Emily on how it works.
Neuroscientifically speaking, that “lit” feeling is your brain’s gray matter increasing, your neural connections strengthening, and cortisol (the stress hormone) going down.
Here’s how to tap into it:
- Effortless silence. The biggest mistake you can make as a meditator is forcing it on yourself. Emily teaches that letting go of effort allows the mind to settle naturally. “The less you try, the deeper you go.”
- Treat your mind like a garden. When in doubt, “water the flowers.” In other words, where attention goes, energy flows. So, instead of replaying stressful moments, she encourages you to focus on the good, so the brain starts reinforcing it.
- Believe in progress over perfection. Skipped a session? No big deal. Just notice how you feel when you do it versus when you don’t.
And what’s wonderful is that you don’t have to sit for hours to feel the effects. Make it a 20-minute meditation practice, done daily and consistently, and suddenly you’re more focused, emotionally resilient, and mentally “zen.”
Here’s a session from Emily to get you started:
3. Manifestation: the real point of it all
That newfound state you’re now in—the daily bliss and flow—isn’t just so you can coast through life. It’s ultimately manifestation in action—a launchpad for making your dream life a reality.
“Meditation is like plugging in your location,” says Emily. “Manifesting is setting the destination.”
Those goals you’ve been waiting to do—move to a new city, get that dream house, set up a side hustle—become easier to achieve with a mind that works with you, not against you.
Here’s why: the brain doesn’t distinguish between past, present, and future experiences in the way we think it does. And science has shown that visualizing a future event activates the same neural networks as actually experiencing it.
That means when you get yourself into the meditative state and vividly imagine your goals, your brain begins wiring itself to expect them as reality.
Emily sees the effects of it happen all the time. The people who take meditation seriously? They write the book, get the promotion, attract the right relationships, and land all the deals they’ve been wanting to land.
She recalls, “I wake up to emails from my students every day: ‘Emily, my insomnia’s gone. My IBS is gone. I haven’t had a panic attack since I started meditating. I got a $120,000 scholarship that I didn’t even apply for.’”
Coincidence? Not likely. As Emily says, a trained mind is what makes sh*t happen.
Meditation is like plugging in your location. [And] manifesting is setting the destination.
— Emily Fletcher, trainer of Mindvalley’s The M Word program
Learn more with Emily Fletcher
Emily’s effort doesn’t stop at teaching meditation; she makes it impossible to ignore. As she puts it, “You invest 2% of your day in meditation to make the other 98% better.”
And if that sounds like a damn good trade-off, here are the resources she’s created so you can dive deeper into the world she’s created.
1. Programs
The M Word on Mindvalley
Forget everything you think you know about meditation. The M Word strips out the fluff and makes it practical, powerful, and impossible to ignore once you’re a Mindvalley member.
This 33-day program is built for people who want less stress, more energy, and a brain that fires on all cylinders. It fuses ancient meditation techniques with cutting-edge neuroscience, training you to tap into peak performance and laser-sharp intuition.
And it only takes a few minutes a day. You’ll master techniques that seamlessly fit into your schedule, turning meditation from a chore into your secret weapon.
Just ask Mindvalley member Nelson Pereira. After years of forcing himself through rigid 10-minute mindfulness sessions, he was stressed out—the opposite of what meditation’s supposed to be about. But Emily’s approach changed everything. “Thanks to The M Word technique, my meditation is so much more meaningful. Things come up and are released in effortless silence.” Now, his practice isn’t forced—it’s a priority. Effortlessly.
Want to step in Nelson’s shoes? Available on the Mindvalley membership, you can access Emily’s game-changing techniques anytime, anywhere.
Other programs
The “Emily Fletcher Ziva Meditation” saga continues in the form of more bite-sized meditation programs available on her official website. Their goal? To eliminate stress and rewire the brain for peak performance.
Take a peek into what each delivers for you:
- zivaONLINE. A quick dive into how to obliterate stress, boost focus, and stop feeling overwhelmed.
- Ziva Magic. A small playbook on clearing mental roadblocks, rewiring limiting beliefs, and making manifestation second nature.
- Moving into Mastery. A deep dive into Vedic wisdom and modern performance psychology, showing you how to upgrade your life across eight key areas.
- Ziva Kids. A fun, engaging meditation program for kids that teaches focus, emotional resilience, and self-regulation.
2. Books
Stress Less, Accomplish More
Forget everything you think you know about meditation. This book isn’t about sitting cross-legged for hours—it’s about getting sh*t done without burning out.
Here, Emily deep dives into both the spirituality and neuroscience of prepping the brain for peak performance, deep rest, and unstoppable focus.
Happy Baby Sleep Solutions
Co-authored with Diana Elledge, this one’s for the parents who are running on fumes.
If your kid’s sleep schedule is a mess and you haven’t had a full night’s rest in forever, Emily’s got the gentle, no-cry solutions to help your little one snooze better—so you can, too.
3. Podcast
Why Isn’t Everyone Doing This?
Emily isn’t here to play small. On her podcast, she dives into everything that rewires the brain—from meditation and breathwork to psychedelics and even sex tropes like BDSM.
Ensuring that she’s running on facts, she brings on scientists, healers, and thought leaders onto her show to share the game-changing tools that should be mainstream but aren’t (yet).
You can catch the podcast’s episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Once you’re tuned in? You’ll wonder why everyone’s not doing the good things she’s highlighting.
Awaken your unstoppable
If your brain’s an operating system, stress is the glitch that crashes the whole damn thing. But meditation? It’s the software update that helps clear your mental bugs, reboot your windows of perception, and get your mind running at top speed.
With Emily’s free masterclass on Mindvalley, How to Master Productivity at Work and Life with Higher Consciousness, you’ll learn to do just that. Expect to:
- Ditch the meditation myths that have been slowing you down,
- Steal the secrets of meditating billionaires, CEOs, and elite performers,
- Master Emily’s no-BS techniques that deliver real-world results,
- And so much more.
For Alex Maciel, a music producer in Mexico City, The M Word didn’t just teach him to meditate; it flipped the script on his sleep hygiene—and how he moves through life.
“Little did I know that I was signing up for a way better sleep, focus, being more patient with my daughters, and more. I definitely got way more than I expected,” he shares. Now, the mat is no longer a place of sleepy struggle; it’s where he resets and refuels so he can show up enthusiastically for himself and his loved ones on the daily.
Little did I know that I was signing up for a way better sleep, focus, being more patient with my daughters, and more. I definitely got way more than I expected.
— Alex Maciel, a Mindvalley member
Alex’s story proves that you don’t need meditation for meditation’s sake. You need it for all the energy, the focus, the unshakable ability it gives you so you can handle anything life throws your way.
And that transformation? It starts the moment you decide to claim it… with Mindvalley.
Welcome in.
