What if pleasure wasn’t just allowed on your spiritual path—but essential to it?
In this episode, I’m talking with Emily Fletcher, founder of Ziva Meditation and former Broadway star, about how pleasure, embodiment, and emotional alchemy can actually accelerate your healing and manifestation.
We explore:
🔹 The brain science behind why pleasure and stress can’t coexist
🔹 How to turn pain into power with Emily’s 3-step Ziva Magic formula
🔹 Sacred sexuality, tantra, and the union of masculine and feminine energies
🔹 Why creating somatic safety is the first step to spiritual awakening
Listen to reclaim pleasure as your birthright and your most potent medicine.
Register for Emily’s Ziva Magic Course here => https://cd371.isrefer.com/go/z-magic/Upliftedyoga
GUEST EXPERT: Emily Fletcher | @zivameditation
Founder of Ziva & host of Why Isn’t Everyone Doing This?, Emily has taught over 50k people how to transform their lives through powerful meditation and manifestation practices.
FREE Yoga Practice: Somatic Yoga Weight Loss Workout with Music | Exercises for Feminine Energy & Confidence
Relevant Blog: Ziva Magic Review: Emily Fletcher’s Manifesting Meditation Course Changed How I Call In What I Want
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
🐍 Kundalini 200-hour YTT
🎧 Also Listen to:
#318 – What Is Somatic Yoga?
#330 – Somatic Yoga vs. Traditional Yoga: Breaking Down How 5 Poses Differ in your Yoga Practice
#341 – How To Balance Your 3rd Eye with Guru Singh
© 2025 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
FREE Embodied Yoga Workshop (usually $67) Somatic Techniques & Cord Cutting Ritual
Transcript:
Brett Larkin:
It’s time for you to walk through the world with the confidence and serenity of someone who’s deeply tethered to their inner wisdom. If you have this insatiable hunger to uplift your personal life and make a bigger impact in your wellness career, leveraging yoga’s ancient wisdom, welcome. I’ve certified thousands of yoga instructors online, I teach to over half a million subscribers on YouTube, but I still haven’t remotely quenched my thirst for more yogic knowledge.
I’m Brett Larkin, founder of Uplifted Yoga, and this is the Uplifted Yoga Podcast. Let’s get started. What if pleasure wasn’t just allowed on your spiritual path, but essential to your awakening?
In this episode, I am talking to Emily Fletcher, the founder of Ziva Meditation. She’s a former Broadway star, and we’re going to talk about how pleasure, embodiment, and emotional alchemy can actually accelerate your healing and your manifestation. So we’re going to talk about how in the brain, pleasure and stress can’t coexist, how to turn your pain into power.
Emily has a three-step Ziva magic formula that she teaches around this, and we’ll get to experience some breath work at the end of the podcast with her as well. If you dig this podcast and you want to experience more of Emily’s energy, she is hosting a free three-hour event on July 22nd called Magic Maker. In that, she’s going to take you through her visualized, alchemized, magnetized process.
You’ll also get access to a quiz called What’s Blocking Your Magic, and I’m going to drop the link to the quiz and Emily’s free event down in the show notes. I am an affiliate for Emily’s Ziva Magic Embodied Manifesting course, so if that’s something that you decide to check out, absolutely let me know if you do go down that journey because I have a bonus gift that I will also send you. If you take her quiz, it’ll basically tell you, are you very visionary, like you have a clear vision, but your body actually hasn’t caught up to that vision?
Are you an alchemist, meaning you have very deep emotions, but you don’t have direction? Or are you already what she calls the magnet, meaning you have radiant energy, but your focus is scattered? She uses this quiz to kind of help you understand what’s holding you back from manifesting what you want.
Register for Emily’s free Magic Maker event on July 22nd and take her What’s Blocking Your Magic quiz in the link in the show notes. Now let’s get into the episode. Hi, Emily.
Welcome to the Uplifted Yoga Podcast. I’m really excited to have you on the show because today we’re going to talk about pleasure, somatics, embodiment, all my favorite topics, so I’m so glad to have you here. Welcome.
Emily Fletcher:
I’m really excited that we get to meet each other after being in each other’s orbits for so long that now we get to drop in. It feels like a real gift. Thank you for having me.
[Brett Larkin:]
And for those of you who don’t know Emily’s work, I’ve been aware of her for a long time and you’re going to be able to correct me on all of this, but I feel like you have a background in acting or something like that, which makes sense because you have this amazing voice and then that you really were focused on meditation, but very much for like the corporate world. I feel like a little bit like leaders and executives and then like a couple of years go by and it’s like you’re talking about like pleasure orgasms in your body and I’m like what and what happened? And I love that you were talking about even how like making that transition and making that shift to what you’re teaching now has been a journey and I know you’re still holding space for a lot of the meditation piece.
So please let me know if I butchered your informal bio and like all the teachers and yogis listening like a little bit about this journey because I talk so much to people about like serving a particular type of student or what we call the niche, but that evolves and as it evolves, it can actually be quite scary.
[Emily Fletcher:]
I think you did not butcher it at all. You got it. So I was on Broadway for 10 years, singing, dancing, acting, got really stressed, started suffering from insomnia and stress and anxiety and started going gray in my 20s, found meditation on the first day of my first course.
I was in a different state of consciousness that I had ever been in and I liked it, slept through the night for the first time in 18 months after my first course. And then I have every night since that was 18 years ago. And so I was like, wait, why isn’t everyone doing this?
It’s not just the name of my podcast. It’s like I am the type of person probably like you and I find something that works. I like want to share it with the world.
So I left Broadway. I went to India, trained for three years to be a meditation teacher. And so what I did was sort of like a PhD in the Vedas and it was a deep, intensive study, transcribing books by Sanskrit by hand for thousands of hours of apprenticing and then graduated, started Ziva, made the world’s first online meditation training, which I’m really proud of.
That was back in 2013. And like you said, I was really focused on helping. It was like meditation for performance, meditation for extraordinary performance.
And I was teaching CEOs and Oscar award winners and NBA athletes and Google and Harvard and Viacom and Apple and all these fancy pants places and kind of straddling that world between science and spirit and really making it accessible and attractive to mainstream audience. And then that was all going great. Had a book that came out in 2019, birthed a book and a baby at the same time, which I don’t recommend.
[Brett Larkin:]
Yeah. I’ve done it. I know it’s not, it’s not optimal.
[Emily Fletcher:]
It’s like the creative portal really opens, but like, why do we do that to ourselves? So then in 2020, you know, maybe you guys remember like the world really changed in 2020 and my world was no exception. So in addition to what some people are calling like the great pause, I went through like a massive spiritual awakening and, and actually a sexual awakening as well.
I asked for a divorce three weeks later was in ceremony and just a lot of energy came online. A lot of gifts came online. The next day I met my now best friend, Layla Martin.
I met this beautiful cosmic love, Adam Schlender, and then nature sort of fire hosing me with this PhD in sacred sexuality. And it felt like, okay, this is fun for me personally, but it felt like this is bigger than just for my own edification. It was, it felt like that the message was, Hey Emily, you know that thing that you did for meditation?
Well now it’s time for you to do this for the, with these even more potent and even more taboo tools. And I didn’t know then like the intensity, I mean, 2020 was obviously a big change, but that it felt like the warmup for the level of intensity and change that is happening on the planet right now. And I feel like we’re not going to own our way out of what is happening.
Like we’re going to need the most advanced human technology that we’ve been given. And that’s why I think the pleasure comes into play because it’s, it is just like, you know, if you skinned your knee, the doctor might give you a bandaid and a Tylenol. That’s different than if you get diagnosed with stage four cancer.
Right. And so like the world does not have a skinned knee right now. Like we’ve got some pretty intense diagnosis happening and with AI, everything’s going to speed up the intensity, the speed, the, um, you know, I, I call AI amplified intelligence that it’s just going to amplify whatever is.
And I am, I’m actually pro AI, but I’m also pro human intelligence. I’m pro human technology because I feel like the more in our bodies we can be, the more we have access to this brilliant, powerful host of internal pharmacology that nature has installed inside of us. Then we can utilize AI to amplify that, to amplify the bliss, the joy, the coherence, the regeneration.
Um, but if we are a globe of stressed out, sad, sick disembodied people, then AI will also amplify that. And so I think that’s why it’s, I’ve been getting these directives of like, Hey, back to the body, back to pleasure. And um, and that’s how Ziva magic was born is it’s really just a three part formula to help people visualize, alchemize and magnetize.
So to get clear on what is it that you want, alchemize anything that’s not an energetic match for that thing. And we do that through somatic dance. I’m excited to talk about somatics with you.
And then we magnetize by turning ourselves all the way on, like creating as much pleasure as we possibly can in the body. And sometimes that’s through sexual energy, sometimes it’s through breath or energy, but I believe that the better we feel, the better quality things we attract. So Ziva magic is essentially an embodied manifesting formula.
And then people can kind of throttle that to the degree to which they feel safe and comfortable in their own bodies.
[Brett Larkin:]
There’s so much, uh, to click into here. I mean, I just see so many parallels in our story, like, you know, you putting on the, putting on a meditation course in 2013 when it was really early. And I did the same with yoga teacher training.
I was like the first one to do it in 2015. And I got a lot of, to be honest, like people thought it was weird. Yoga Alliance was like, what are you doing?
So it’s just fun to, you know, see how much the industry’s changed, see how much online has become accepted and then AI really accelerating everything. And I’m actually coming out with a conscious, like feminine, relational AI course. So planting the seed for that, because like, it’s very similar to what you’re saying.
It’s like, it’s going to amplify what’s there and we can be in a relational co-creative model with an AI that amplifies our unique essence, which I think is really exciting.
[Emily Fletcher:]
Yeah. Celebrating you on that. Bravo.
[Brett Larkin:]
Yeah. And then, you know, I think you’re really tapping into this theme that so many of us are feeling, uh, and which, which why like somatic yoga is trending. It’s why what you’re doing is taking off and it’s like, everyone wants to go on the journey back into the body.
I feel like we’ve been kind of sold this lie that if we meditate hard enough and do enough pranayama and sit still enough and, you know, elevate our, uh, energy to the third eye enough all through really disciplined, rigorous techniques that honestly men have given us that we’ll get a gold star and that will feel better. And I feel like we’re all kind of waking up to, okay, yes, you know, traditional postural yoga has a place, but at the same time, you know, the goal isn’t to be calm all the time. I’m really talking about this reframe of like, our goal is actually to have the nervous system capacity to feel all of our feelings fully, like the depth of human emotion, because pain and pleasure are kind of like two sides of the same coin to really, you know, expand the range.
Yeah. For those of you who are listening and can’t see us, our arms are like, you know, doing the wacky thing. And, you know, a lot of us are afraid of pleasure is taboo and so many of us aren’t safe in our bodies.
Like, I just want to share this with you because I think it’s going to be relevant to maybe what you can teach us next, but I see so many people coming in, especially to our Kundalini track programs, and they are usually high Vata, meaning they have an excess of air. They’re attracted to these energy elevation practices, as was I, and like attracts, like, I talked about this in my first book, you’re like, the style of yoga you’re likely attracted to is not the style you need to actually come into balance. So I see us very much focused on these energy ascension practices, trying to leave the body.
And that was never the way, that was never the feminine path. I feel like we’ve been focused on the current of liberation up and out. And now we’re seeing this global shift to the current of manifestation, that down and in.
So many yogis, I feel like actually don’t feel safe in their body, or they feel disconnected for their body, or you see the body as a project to basically whip into shape, right? We want to refine the alignment, we want to be better, we want to, and it’s so beautiful, this journey that I’ve been on with somatic yoga, where it’s like, we’re letting go of that performative aspect. And making this actually, the pose is a container for emotional expression, it sounds very similar to what you’re, you’re doing.
So tell people a little bit about this three step process, maybe you can dial us into each step. And then I think, you know, this word manifestation is a word that it’s like, we’ve heard it thrown around for like decade, right, in the wellness community and the self help community. So I want you to really tell us like, what manifestation is for you, and how this is maybe different than like, you know, so much of like the mindset stuff that people have been fed, where it’s like, wish it and it will come true.
And then and then also, you know, let’s make sure to touch on trauma as well. And how you know, trauma, we leave the body. And could this framework work for someone who’s, you know, maybe actually not quite safe in their own skin yet?
[Emily Fletcher:]
Yeah, so it’s such beautiful questions. And I love the parallels here, because they’re big. And I think we’re both I mean, clearly, we’re both innovators.
And it’s like, we both have children that are about the same age. And so I think there’s something to when you can sense a global shift is happening. If I trust anything in my body, it’s that like, why isn’t everyone doing this?
Like, I’ve asked myself this question twice in my life, honestly, deeply. And the first one was with meditation was like, wait, this is the thing you guys like I used to be a seeker, I found it, it’s inside of me, why isn’t everyone meditating? And the second time I asked that question was when I found this embodied manifesting tool, and I found out that I could actually use my pleasure to pray, but that’s not you can’t just skip straight to the pleasure, to your point, like if you have trauma, pleasure is likely not that available to you.
If you don’t know how to feel the full range of your emotions and your pain, then your body will not feel safe enough to feel the full expression of your ecstasy. And so that’s really why Ziva Magic was born. So as I, as I mentioned, it’s a three-step formula and it’s visualize, alchemize, magnetize, and the visualize part is quite masculine.
Like to your point of like, we’ve been sold this idea that we could just transcend. We can just focus on what we want. We’ll just keep taking the energy up, focus on the third eye, meditate, transcend up, up, up, up, up, which is quite masculine and directional, right?
Like I’m choosing how I want to feel. I’m shifting my state, but the feminine is all about the internal journey, right? Like the hero’s journey is what can I accomplish on the external?
The heroine’s journey is what can I alchemize feel and transmute on the internal and one is not male. One is not female. We all have the masculine and feminine inside of us and we all need both.
Right. And as you know, I’m sure many people listening to this podcast knows like the work that you do on the inside, it in real time becomes the physical outpicturing of your 3d reality. And I think because we’ve been living in this hyper-masculine, hyper-achievement oriented world, we’ve just been thinking, well, if I could just make enough money, have enough people love me, get the career, get a resume that’s big enough.
Like then I will be happy. Then the internal work will take care of itself. And I think we’re realizing that we can no longer do that.
And many of us, myself included, like have achieved the stuff. You know, I got on Broadway. I have a seven figure business.
I have a kid. I got married. I have the house.
Like I got all the things and yet the feelings are still here. The feelings just want to be felt. The feelings are meant for feeling.
And in a culture where we’ve been trained since infancy to not feel our feelings, to have the safety and the permission and the playlist and the community where like, that is the gig where like you are here to fucking rage. You are here to let the tears flow. Like what a gift, right?
What a reclamation. And then what I’ve found is that the magic inside of Ziva magic is that the very same muscle that allows you to hold space for your pain is the same exact muscle that allows you to hold space for your pleasure. And so the more adept we get at diving into and feeling the profundity of that unexpressed anger or that unexpressed fear or those uncried tears, it’s like we trust our bodies more.
It’s like the body, the body’s like, Oh, I know I can go into the darkness and come through to the other side. So I actually trust myself to hold the intensity of pleasure. And actually, you know, according to like existential kink or, you know, a lot of Regina Thomas Shower’s work, Mama Gina, it’s like, it’s all arousal.
Rage, sorrow, fear, pleasure. It’s all just an arousal of the nervous system. Anything else, anything that we assign to it with our mind is a label.
And so again, if you can get good at feeling the arousal of the quote unquote intense emotions, then you trust yourself more to feel the pleasure. So basically what we do and what I’m going to do on, on July 22nd, I’m doing a free event called magic maker, and I’m going to walk people through live in real time, this process. Where I’m going to invite them to get really clear on what’s their vision.
Like, what would you love? How would you love to feel? What’s your vision of heaven on earth for you personally and for the planet?
Cause I believe that heaven is a vibration, not a destination, right? Like I’m not interested in some like transcendent version of heaven. I’m interested in our bodies being heaven right here, right now.
So what does heaven look like and feel like for you? That’s step one, the vision. And then the alchemized piece is basically finding out where am I not an energetic match for that?
Where do I not believe that I deserve love? Where do I not believe that I deserve abundance? And usually that comes to your point from trauma, right?
It’s some story. It’s some childhood event. It’s some defense mechanism that we developed as a survival mechanism that helped us when we were little.
But oftentimes we outgrow it as adults. And so we go in and we actually give the liberty and the, the, the luxury. Of having time and space to feel that, you know, with friends, with safety, with playlist, with music, where it’s almost like a game, right?
Where it’s like, let’s punch the pillow. Let’s rage out the thing versus like, no, there’s something wrong with me because I’m having a big feeling. So then as we move through alchemize, we, yes, we express the intensity, but we also sprinkle a little bit of pleasure, a little bit of turn on, on top.
And that is the thing that becomes the alchemical force. It’s that pleasure that transmutes the pain into fuel for the dream. And, and then the thing about that is that our turn on our magnet, our who has, right, which is really like the magnet and the generator of our body.
It can create a fire so intense that it really can alchemize one thing into another, and it’s the only thing I’ve found that can take someone’s extraordinary decades old trauma and shift it into fuel, like in very short order. Um, and, and, and, and admittedly, I know that a lot of people have sexual trauma, so it does require safety. It does require trust.
It requires going slow, but I feel like, you know, after 20 years in this business, I feel like that’s a superpower of mine of like pushing people right to the edge, but not past it. You know, like taking you up to the growth edge, but not past a boundary. And then when you go through that alchemical process, it’s like clearing the channel for the magnetize for just allowing yourself to feel as good as you possibly can.
And then from that place of feeling good, we start to attract higher and higher quality things. And that to me is what manifesting is to answer your last question is manifesting. I would define as consciously creating a life you love, like that’s it consciously creating a life you love.
And we’re all manifesting all the time. And what people don’t realize is that the unfelt feelings, the unexpressed trauma, the uncried tears might be keeping you from being an energetic match for the thing that you say that you want, because we don’t get what we want. We get who we are.
And that’s why I think this formula is so powerful is because it’s going to allow you to, to uncover the very thing that you thought was the block to the goal and help you realize that actually that is my superpower. That is the thing that’s going to help me magnetize it with even more ease and elegance.
[Brett Larkin:]
Yeah, it’s interesting. A lot of what you’re talking about often use this analogy of like a balloon reversing its course. I, I used to be a myofascial release therapist, so I feel like I used to actually feel stress in the body, right?
Like in our interconnective tissue. And I think we all are carrying, like you’re saying, the body has a story and it has these habitual bracing patterns connected to shame or things that happened in our childhood. And the way out is through, but we’re very resistant, as you said, to actually feeling our feelings.
And so I really think what most people are saying when they’re saying they’re stressed, right, is they’re actually saying that I don’t have capacity enough to mother myself and create safe space for myself to fully feel the depth of my emotional landscape. Stress is like when we’re resisting feeling an emotion and then this is the real kicker. It’s like that actually takes a ton of energy to resist and suppress feeling something takes so much energy.
I often talk about it’s like, if you’ve ever done those isometric, I also used to teach bar method like 20 years ago, but like, you know, you just like hold those like isometric contractions where you’re just holding a weight out and you’re not pulling it in, you’re just holding it. And that’s like what you’re doing when you’re not feeling. So I so like love the, this vision of, you know, creating a space where people can really, really fully feel.
And I’m curious, kind of like what, what does this look like on a daily basis for you? Like what would it look like to practice Siva magic as part of my daily practice, either tacking it on to my somatic yoga practice or my Kundalini practice or my vinyasa practice? You know, there’s so many different meditation styles, right?
Like we’ll often start with TM. And, and so what does this, does this mean like I’m kind of having an orgasm every day? Like what, what, what am I doing?
Like if I were going to take this in like a nugget size in my like yoga toolkit.
[Emily Fletcher:]
Yeah. What a great question. So, I mean, I would say if you already are doing like a full somatic yoga practice and a Kundalini practice and building that energy in the body, then adding on Siva magic may just, in all honesty, be a little redundant because this is in essence, like somatics and then pleasure, right?
And so I am working with Kundalini energy. I am working with life force energy, and I can say that to your audience, but one of my superpowers is taking these tools to a bit of a more mainstream audience, right? Of people who are a bit earlier on their journey, who might not know the word Kundalini or Yoni or Lingam or Tantra, like all those things might feel, they might create a contraction or fear.
And so really what I’ve done is I’ve taken the power and the profundity of these ancient tools and translated it into a way of like, Hey, this is just a tool that’s going to help you to get what you want. It’s going to help you to vibrate at a frequency where you become a match for the things that you desire. But, but for me personally, what I do is that I start my day with Siva meditation.
And so, and I usually, I try and do that before my son wakes up. So that’s like around six, 7am I’ll meditate first thing. So I’ll wake up, freshen up, meditate.
And then I do breakfast, get him to school. And then I usually have about an hour to myself before I start meetings. And that hour I might work out, do a sauna.
And, and that is when I would do my Siva magic practice. And I personally don’t do it every single day. Like as a, as a ceremony, I will do it likely two to three times a week is like a thing that I’m doing.
However, there’s two real use cases for Siva magic. One is a bit like I’m doing this as a practice, as a manifesting ceremony, as a way to feel my unfelt feelings, as a way to use my pleasure to pray. But the other way that we can use it is when you’re in rupture, like when you’re in upset, when the person breaks up with you, when the kid has the meltdown in the other room, when you’re feeling sad that whatever existential crisis is coming up, Siva magic, and especially the alchemized part, it’s like, it’s like you become the DJ for your soul, right?
So you can actually like put on a song and move through whatever it is to your point so that you’re not just holding that isometric weight of the unfelt feelings, which is costing us so much. It’s not the feeling of the feelings that’s expensive. It’s the avoiding of the feelings that is expensive and causes so much pain.
And so I find that once people learn this modality and they move through the 10 week training, cause even magic is a full 10 week ceremony. It’s like a 10 week training in visualize, alchemize magnetize. But then once you graduate, you have these tools to take with you for life and you have all these playlists and there’s like these express doses.
So what I do when I want to do it is I just literally hit play on the express dose and then you’ve got me and a whole beautiful crew. Like I basically shot a retreat like a documentary film. So you have myself, you have trauma informed therapists, you have sex love and relationship coaches all on set with me doing this practice together.
So you’re seeing their wins, their blocks, their fears, and you get to do it in what feels like community, even if you’re from the safety and privacy of your own home. So really it’s like the CliffsNotes is the express practice is like 22 minutes. You hit play.
I drop you in. What do you want? And then we dance anything that wants to move rage, sorrow.
You get to like be a little kid having a temper tantrum for a minute. And then we feel as good as possible. So that could be breath and energy moving you into sort of like an energetic orgasmic state.
And if you’re in the privacy of your own home and you want to do a full self-pleasure practice that is available to you. And I’ll just speak quickly. I don’t know that quickly, but there is something really potent that happens when you start to connect your desire to a peak pleasurable state, because the brain cannot produce stress chemistry and pleasure chemistry at the same time.
Like your brain is actually incapable of producing adrenaline and cortisol at the same time as it produces oxytocin, norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin, which is everything that gets released in pleasure. So it’s almost like you’re, you can, I don’t love the term override, but in a sense, you’re putting so much attention on the pleasure that there’s not too much space left over for the stress chemistry. And then from that place of pleasure, if you come back to the vision, you come back to the five senses reality of what it is that you would love.
Your brain starts to associate that dream with extraordinary pleasure. And that is why this has been used for thousands of years. This is why this has been a tantric practice for thousands of years in many different civilizations is that we knew that this is a way to basically combat self-sabotage.
And then when the opportunity arises, which it will, because I believe that our desires are divinely inspired. Then when the opportunity comes, you get to greet that like a long lost lover instead of like, no, this thing is going to make or break my career. So it’s, it’s really like, that’s why it starts to feel like magic is because you get your head, your heart and your hoo-ha deeply in coherence with each other and all pointed towards the dream from a place of safety.
And then it’s like, yeah, try and make that goal not show up.
[Brett Larkin:]
Yeah, I mean, so much of what you’re describing sounds so much like the somatic yoga classes I teach because we start and it’s always about creating safety. So if I have like an hour, 90 minutes with someone that looks like 15 minutes, right? Like regulation on the ground, you know, slow visualizations, getting into the body.
If it’s a short class, like most of the ones on YouTube, it’s like we’re doing extra receptive practices, like looking around the room, orienting, you know, touching the body and doing a five point hold practice, something that’s like tapping the body, something that’s helping me understand where I end and the world begins, right? Kind of like orient and know where I am in space. And then, yeah, usually I’m using yoga poses.
It’s like a launching off point for somatic exploration because I have the benefit, which doesn’t sound like you necessarily do, of knowing that everyone I’m working with is familiar with like the alphabet of asana, right? So we’re able to use kind of that common language, but then use it as a springboard, right? For you to start, you know, going off script essentially.
And then I like to layer in movements that I think close the stress cycle. So that’s kind of very similar to your tantrum, right? Stomping, punching, kicking, screaming, lots of music.
And then, you know, we’re winding that down. So it sounds, you know, like similar. And then the pleasure piece, I usually try to work with like a lot self-touch.
It doesn’t sound like I take it quite as far as you take it. And I love how far you take it because I’ve experienced that. I just don’t teach it yet.
But I know there’s like really magic potency there. And I have taken a couple of courses, you know, that are more focused on, you know, sexual manifestation and the sexual side of things. And I think it’s so exciting.
I think it’s like really on the bleeding edge, which is like why I also admire you because I know for some people it feels, it can feel, it’s like, what’s the right word? All of a sudden, it feels like a boundary is crossed. So I’m wondering, like, you know, before we lose you, can you tell us a little bit more about your study?
Because all my trainings are tantra-based. Everyone here is very familiar with like Shiva Shakti, Samkhya philosophy. You know, we read the Bhagavad Gita together.
Like we’re pretty coherent on a lot of the terms that maybe some other folks you talk to might not be. And, you know, this idea of like the Radiant Sutras, for example.
[Emily Fletcher:]
I just read them this morning. I have a trauma-informed therapist that facilitates on my retreats with me and she just gifted me the Radiant Sutras. And so I’ve been every morning reading them.
So I love that you just brought that up.
[Brett Larkin:]
Yes. It’s required reading in my, like one of my coaching trainings. It’s because it’s really, it’s so different.
It just makes you see like how the yoga sutras and so much of a little bit like the whitewashed yoga we’ve been handed down is so it’s just one piece of a much larger story. And it’s like, why don’t we know about these texts that, you know, that are so beautiful and talking about this love story within us, right? This, this like the union of Shiva and Shakti within you is the greatest love story ever told.
And I love what you said about like seeing these desires or things that might scare us or frighten us as like long lost lovers and kind of programming our, you know, head brain, gut brain and sexual centers brain to like have the coherence to recognize that as a lover. So, you know, the Tantra piece is so interesting to me. The tantrica is literally, she’s transforming energy through her body and allowing her body to be a vessel or a vehicle for Shiva and Shakti to make love to one another.
But tell us a little bit more, like how would you describe it in your language or from the research you’ve done?
[Emily Fletcher:]
Yeah. Thanks for asking. And I’ll start by saying that I’ve not, that just to be very honest, I’ve not done an extraordinary amount of like certifications, trainings, teacher trainings.
And, and I just want to be really honest about that. But, and what is also true is that there is a deep, deep gnosis inside of my body of like many, many, many lifetimes of doing this and going to Egypt and Greece and I’m, you know, priestess pilgrimages and going to Delphi and Eleusis and to the pyramids and, you know, both in Mexico and in Egypt, like, and every time I go feeling like a reclamation of like parts of me that have been doing this for many lifetimes or coming back online and waking up.
And so I’m just naming that for people who are like, Oh, I want someone with a double PhD and eight certifications. Like I am not that. And, and I get that there’s a little bit of danger here because there’s a lot of self-proclaimed gurus who are like, just God told me and here I am.
And so I’m straddling that line of like honoring the feminine body wisdom that is undeniable inside of me. And also taking my 16 years of mastery in meditation and holding space for people’s stress relief and studying the Vedas and sort of like transferring that mastery on the dial into this new territory. And I’ll say that when I say that I got sort of a makeshift PhD in sacred sexuality, a couple of things happened.
One, there was just like this Kundalini awakening that just happened sort of spontaneously. And then the next day I met Layla Martin, who is my best friend now. And I would say one of the world’s best tantra teachers.
I mean, I am biased, but she is a living master and extraordinary. And then I had the pleasure of living with Regina Tomaschauer for four and a half years, AKA Mama Gina, who’s been teaching goddess worship practices and pleasure practices for 30 years. And my work is very much inspired and influenced by both of them.
Like their, their transmissions are deep inside of Ziva magic. The Alchemize portion is very much influenced by Regina’s Swamping, which she’s been refining for 30 years. And, and then the Magnetize is very much my, my version of sex magic, which I learned from Layla.
So while I don’t have a lot of certifications, I have just like a depth of intimacy and training with these two living legends who are now two of my best friends. So there’s that. And then, but to speak to the masculine feminine piece, because this, I think is very interesting of that Shiva Shakti.
So like I said, most of us have been doing this sort of like transcend, we’ll do the yoga asanas, we’ll go to Shivasana, which is corpse pose, which is practicing dying, you know, we’ll transcend and then visualize it’s the masculine, but in Alchemize it’s the feminine, right? So it’s like, I’m going in, I’m going into the underworld. I’m on that Persephone journey in of going into the underworld and feeling all the unfelt feelings.
And to me, it’s that marriage of the masculine and feminine of like, here’s what I want. Here’s what I’m willing to feel that creates the polarity that creates the magnetism of the Magnetize. So even inside of the formula, you have the masculine, the feminine, and then the polarity of both.
And then what’s happening with inside of the breath work that we do. So if people don’t want to do a self-touch practice, if they want to keep it with breath and energy, I teach something called the lifegasm breath, where we’re basically doing this Kundalini draw, right? Where you’re bringing that energy from the root, from what I call the hoo-ha, because it’s like gender inclusive and it’s the anatomy and the energy center around it.
We’re bringing the energy up from the hoo-ha up into the brain. And thank you, Joe Dispenza. He’s really put the pineal gland back on the map, but it’s not just about the pineal gland.
It’s the pituitary gland as well. And I’m sure that you know this, but it’s like, it’s the masculine and the feminine inside of our own brains. The pineal looks like a lingam and the pituitary looks like a yoni.
And these two glands live inside of the marriage hall or the hall of Brahman inside of the brain. And so with this breath, you’re activating both of them. And so you’ll read in like the Magdalene texts that Yeshua and Magdalene were practicing these breath work, these tools to activate the Pingala, the masculine and the feminine.
And that there’s a secretion that happens inside of the seed of the inside of this hall of Brahman in our own brains to your own point of that we’re marrying the masculine and feminine inside of ourselves. And what gets secreted is, and I’m sure you know this, but it’s melatonin, which is the precursor to DMT, which is the God particle. So in no uncertain terms, we are turning up the dial on our own divinity.
We are producing more of our own God chemistry by doing this. And if you ask people how they feel post-orgasm, most people say like connected, pure, transcendent, divine, holy, blissful. Like that’s how we feel in that peak pleasure state, not dirty, shame, wrong, bad, isolated.
That’s all cultural conditioning. That’s usually religion keeping us from our own democratization of God. Right.
And just like psychedelics have been othered and, um, you know, we’ve been taught to be, they’ve been demonized, we’ve been taught to be afraid of them because psychedelics can give us our own visceral gnosis of our visceral gnosis of our own divinity. Sexual energy can do the same thing, but without using external pharmaceuticals, without using an external, but you’re basically getting that same psychedelic transcendent experience, but with your own internal pleasure chemistry.
[Brett Larkin:]
Can you give us a preview of like what this breath is like? Yeah. Just for like two minutes.
I mean, people might be driving, like we don’t need to do like full out, but I mean, you’re talking, I mean, you’re not going to like tease a pranayama technique and get off the show without giving us a little like taste of it. You got it. Or just, yeah.
Maybe, maybe you can walk it, walk us through it. I think that would be a really fun way to do.
[Emily Fletcher:]
And I will just say that just like you wouldn’t like, you’re likely not going to climax from like one final thrust if you’ve not had like foreplay and lovemaking and warm up. So I just want to name that I’ll teach you the breath, but you know, just like it’s part of a bigger picture.
[Brett Larkin:]
Yeah.
[Emily Fletcher:]
This is like one piece of a bigger puzzle and warm up preparation. All of that is key. So just like lovemaking, you know, we want to make sure the body is warm, but I will share the lifegasm breath.
And to your point, if you’re driving, this would not be a good time to do it. But if you’re at home, we’ll just do a few breaths and then I’ll walk us through it. So we’ll start with the hoo-ha breath, which is just in through the heart, out through the hoo-ha, in through the heart, out through the hoo-ha.
So again, your hoo-ha is your root. It’s your sexual center. It’s the anatomy and the energy around it.
And as you inhale, you want to squeeze your hoo-ha, squeeze your root. And as you exhale, you want to release. And then we’ll do a few rounds of that.
And then I’ll do a longer draw where it’s basically just a long, slow kundalini draw from the base, all the way up through the heart, up into the brain. And you want to bring your eyes, your energy, everything up to the very seat of the soul, to that third eye, which is where the pineal and pituitary are. And then it’s like we’re squeezing the whole cerebral spinal fluid, like a tube of toothpaste, activating that masculine and feminine inside of the brain.
We’ll hold at the top. We’ll keep squeezing. And then as we exhale, I want you to imagine that every single cell in your body could flood with bliss chemistry, that every single cell in your body starts to saturate with pleasure.
So we’ll do in through the nose and out through the mouth. And as you exhale, if it’s available to you, you can exhale in some sound. If not, if you’re at work, you can do this silently.
No one has to know that you’re doing this.
[Brett Larkin:]
So we’ll go in through the nose, out through the mouth, and then into the nose. I’m visualizing in through my belly and then out through the nose. I’m visualizing out through down there.
[Emily Fletcher:]
As we inhale through the nose, you’re going to imagine that the energy is coming through the heart, through the heart. And then as you exhale through the mouth, you’re going to imagine that the energy is coming out through your hoo-ha. So the imaginary cycle is heart, hoo-ha.
So in through the heart, out through the hoo-ha, and the actual breath will be in through the nose and out through the mouth. We’ll just do those as a little bit of a warmup, and then we’ll do the lifegasm breath, which is the hold. Okay, so here we go.
So ha, ha, ha, ha, making some sound on the exhale. Good. Speeding it up a little bit.
Big inhales, big exhales. Ha, ha, ha, ha, squeezing as you inhale, releasing as you exhale. So good.
Letting it be fun. Letting it feel good. We’ll do five more.
Last two. Last one. And then a big breath into your heart.
Inhaling, inhaling, inhaling into your heart, and then exhaling all the way to empty. And at the bottom of the exhale, I want you to imagine that your root could expand, that you could grow roots, that your hoo-ha is opening. And then a long, slow inhale, squeezing your root, squeezing your hoo-ha, bringing that creation energy, that pleasure energy up into your heart.
Keep inhaling. Another sip of air. Bring all of that energy up into your third eye, taking your eyes up and in.
Another sip of air, and imagine squeezing that energy from your hoo-ha all the way up into your head. One more sip of air, and on the count of three, imagine every cell in your body could flood with bliss and pleasure on three, two, one. And then just taking a big breath into your heart, letting the breath come back to natural and normal.
And just noticing if there’s just a tiny bit more life force, a tiny bit more electricity, a bit more pleasure coursing through your body, through your cells, and knowing that, you know, you could do a few rounds of that. And as we do a few rounds of that, we start to really activate that masculine and feminine, that internal union, and we start to flood the brain and body with bliss. So even from this place, if you want to think about something that you would love, how you’d love to feel today, sending some love and some bliss to people in your life, imagining what heaven on earth feels like for you in this chapter of your life, sending some gratitude for your breath, your body, and some love to every other person tuning into this podcast, past, present, and future, feeling this beautiful, coherent field of all these people starting to inhabit the frequency of heaven on earth, right here, right now. And in your own time, whenever you’re ready, we can slowly, gently open the eyes.
[Brett Larkin:]
Thank you for being willing to lead us through an impromptu practice. Definitely. I feel really very energized, felt very like Kundalini-esque to me.
Definitely felt the pleasure. I definitely felt a lot of energy ascension as well at the same time. So if you were listening and didn’t get to try this out, well, we’ll get this up on, on the socials, this little exercise.
But Emily, I just, I really want to thank you so much for, you know, coming on here, sharing your wisdom. And I think what’s really great is, you know, I have a really good sense of who this Ziva magic would be really appropriate for, right? Like someone who is, I love it.
Like teachers listening to this, you might have students who, you know, maybe want to explore this, but not so much through like a Kundalini yoga, like lens, or maybe just aren’t even interested in yoga at all. But this, this could be a place that could meet them. Or for you, if you, you know, you’re seasoned in a lot of these practices, maybe you’ve already done uplifted yoga for self mastery, which is like, you know, a big course where I start kind of introducing pleasure and like trying to prove that it’s in the yoga sutras, which was not easy, but like this could kind of like take that to the next level, like layering in the sexuality piece.
[Emily Fletcher:]
Yes.
[Brett Larkin:]
Yes. If that feels, you know, like safe for you or something that like you’re on that edge and you want to explore that. So we’re going to put the link for everything in the show notes to the free event, which is coming.
It’s really soon. So make sure to sign up if you want to join Emily’s free event. And then for her bigger course that’s launching soon, we’ll have the links down there as well.
I’m also going to link up for you all the podcast that recently aired, that was specifically about the pineal and pituitary gland and the exact location of the third eye that I did with Guru Singh a while back, because I think that plays into this conversation as well. So Emily, thanks so much. Like any, any just final parting words, thanks for spending time with us.
[Emily Fletcher:]
I’m just so grateful that nature has put us in each other’s orbit and I want to acknowledge and honor the, like you being a trailblazer and for bringing this work and the feminine side of these practices to people and for teaching so many teachers. And, and I guess I’ll just say that no matter where you are, like, like you said, this is a great tool for people who like maybe don’t think they can do yoga or people who are starting out. But I’ve also had people who are full blown Kundalini and Tantra and sacred sexuality practitioners who come and do this work.
And because there is a depth to the transmission that they really feel like it’s been like personally transformative for that for them. So I’d say if you’re curious, join me on July 22nd, we’ve got this a beautiful event and it’s going to be like a massive large scale activation, like thousands and thousands of people using their pleasure to pray at the same time. So if you have a dream or a desire or something that you want to like amplify your prayers, I’d say join me at that free live event.
And that’s a great way to decide for people. If they want to join me on, on the bigger journey of Ziva magic.
[Brett Larkin:]
Amazing. All right. Well, everyone think about how you can incorporate more pleasure into your day-to-day, whatever that looks like for you, however that feels safe for you.
And I’ll talk to you next week. Great. Thank you everyone.
[Emily Fletcher:]
Thank you, Brett.
[Brett Larkin:]
Loving what you’re learning on the podcast, apply the ancient science of yoga to your daily life surrounded by incredible peers in my uplifted 200 hour online yoga teacher training, or grow into your role as a leader of others in my 300 hour professional program for yoga teachers, which is also a high level business mastermind at any time. I would love to welcome you into my yoga for self mastery course to help you uncover your personal blueprint to serenity or join my uplifted yoga membership for an all access pass to my most popular yoga courses, thematic class plans, and practice calendars. Don’t forget to prioritize your wellbeing and get on your mat today from my heart to yours.
Namaste.
