By Emily Fletcher, Founder, Ziva Meditation
You did it! Here we are at day three. I know that yesterday’s task was especially challenging, but I hope you pushed through the resistance and felt liberated by freeing yourself from your phone. As promised, today I’ll tell you about an extremely valuable tool. It releases stress and can lead to mind-blowing sex, raises at work, and the most shiny, authentic version of you.
Day Three: Let’s Detox
It’s 2017 and we have access to the world’s most advanced external tools when it comes to skincare (hello, Annmarie Gianni). But what if I told you that there is an internal tool you probably haven’t tried yet – and it can reverse your body age by up to 15 years?
Sounds crazy, right? It’s not. I’m talking about meditation and there are more and more studies heralding its ability to reverse your brain and body age each week. It has no side effects and, in a recent scientific study, Tufts University proved that meditation can increase skin elasticity and rejuvenation, making you look and feel more than a decade younger. To be clear, chasing youth is not the goal. Chasing the health and optimal performance that many of us enjoyed more of at a younger age is a more delicious goal, in my opinion. Youth and health are not synonyms, so best to be specific when cultivating your reality.
We all have two ages. Our chronological age, that number that graces our birthday cakes, and our biological age, which is measured by blood pressure, auditory performance, and visual performance. It’s essentially how old your body acts and feels.
Now, we don’t have any control over our chronological age, and why would you want to? But our biological age? That we can do something about.
We Heart: The Do’s and Don’ts of Meditating
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10 Easy Ways to Naturally Boost Your Mood
Stress was Making Me Gray at 26
Before I became a meditation teacher, I was a performer on Broadway. My last gig was to understudy for three of the leading roles in A Chorus Line, which means I was thrown onstage at a moment’s notice. It was so stressful that I started going gray at the tender age of twenty-six, and I had been plagued with insomnia for over 18 months. But, on the first day of my first meditation course I slept through the night…and I have every night since (and that was ten years ago). Soon after, I also stopped getting sick, I stopped getting injured and I even stopped going gray. It was amazing to see and feel this happening for myself, but it never gets old hearing the same results from my students.
When people ask me what my favorite thing about teaching meditation is, I always say, “selfishly, I love opening my email to find notes from students sharing how much their lives have changed since learning Ziva Meditation.” Not long ago I was in a cab between meetings when a notification popped up from one of my students, Jenna Dewan-Tatum:
“People keep noticing a change in me. They say, ‘you look so radiant!’”
If you’ve ever seen Jenna, you know she’s already radiant, but meditation has given her a megawatt glow.
How Meditation Actually Reverses Your Biological Age
While the benefits of meditation are seemingly endless (better sex, sleep, energy, and parking karma to name a few), I want to dive into is the science behind how meditation actually reverses your body age.
We all know that stress is bad for us, but I’m here to break the really bad news: doctors are calling stress the Black Plague of our century. Chronic stress can lead to any number of psychological and physical problems like heart attacks, hypertension, diabetes, asthma, chronic pain, insomnia, allergies, various skin disorders, depression, immune system weakness, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. And guess what? Your skin is not immune to stress. This is where psychodermatology comes in, the field of dermatology that focuses solely on the connection between human emotions and the health of our skin.
So, What Does Meditation Have to Do With it?
It is the most powerful stress-relieving tool we have. Let’s look at some stats of how meditators have been affected since starting a daily practice.
A recent study showed that meditators are hospitalized at rates of 87% less than non-meditators for heart disease, 55% less for benign and malignant tumors and 30% less for infectious diseases. Plus, research has shown that meditation increases focus & attention and improves multitasking ability. It can also improve memory, enhance creativity and improve out-of-the-box thinking. This thing is no joke.
Day 3 Challenge: zivaDETOX Guided Visualization
That’s why I’m so excited that our day three brain detox challenge is to experience a guided visualization created specifically for you: zivaDETOX. It’s a downloadable audio designed to help you move out of your critical mind and into your creative mind. There is huge power in guided visualization; it can bring you into the present moment and remind you that you don’t have to ‘clear your mind’ in order to get the benefits. I hope you love zivaDETOX and use it whenever you feel you need to. But the real power is in the meditation technique we teach at Ziva.
You must have seen lately how many game changers are coming out of the woodwork touting the benefits of meditation—everyone from the Seattle Seahawks to Oprah. It used to be the secret weapon of the super successful because they had access to meditation teachers that the rest of us didn’t—but we are on a mission to change that. This is why I created the world’s first online meditation training.
At Ziva we want to share meditation with as many people as possible. The Ziva Technique is a powerful combination of the best meditation, mindfulness and manifesting tools. You graduate from the training with a powerful practice to take with you for life. This practice is so powerful that you will be left feeling (and looking!) extraordinary. Please join me for a free intro to meditation talk in NYC, LA, San Diego, Tallahassee, or online from anywhere in the world at zivaMIND.com.
The following post Your Easy Three Day Brain Detox Day Three: Visualize was first published on Annmarie Skin Care.
