Akriza is an anagram of Zakari. Zachary, my name means “God remembers.” or for me simply just “remembering.” I didn’t design that. I discovered it. Remembering is my core ethos. And for me, remembering means one thing: presence.
Where Zachary is what the divine remembers me as, Akriza is what I call myself into being.
I remember always being fascinated with words and writing. I don’t know why I stopped. Maybe I just got too busy. Especially fascinating to me is the concept of wordplay. Pig latin is where you put the first letter of a word at the end, and add an “ay” sound after it. Zachary becomes Acharyzay, and since that isn’t something that you can even read, I made it Akriza. I knew that was it. It’s my name, and it means something.
The journey of my name honestly goes way back. For as long as I can remember I was called Zach. I never chose that. Until one day I realized that’s not my name, that’s just what people default to calling me. Zach has no meaning and honestly isn’t a great sound to my ears. As a producer and an audiophile it started to drive me nuts. I started to introduce myself as Zachary when I realized this and to this day, at least 50% of the time, people still call me Zach. Nobody meets a Grace and calls her Gray. But you can’t really mess up Akriza. Some people say “akreeeza”, I prefer “akriihhhza”, more like the chri in chris. But honestly, it doesn’t bother me as much as Zach does.
So there I was with a name, one that was mine, and I thought…
What do I call into being with this name?
It’s not an easy question to answer. Especially when you first decide that you want to bring something into this world. What’s the point? Honestly, it’s something I’ve been figuring out my whole life. There’s something that feels entirely wrong about the attention grabbing, and clout chasing. This energy of competition and ego was preventing me from starting anything or sharing anything. It had no purpose.
Although it was never about clout for me, posting and performing still feels like being in the spotlight and asking people to watch. It honestly feels like a lot to ask. I just wanted to be an artist, because art just is. It’s such a beautiful expression of the soul. It feels fully human and human alone. It has the power to make you feel something. Then I realized, that’s it. I want people to feel.
People would always ask me, are you on drugs? I would reply no, I’m sober just high on life! I think mostly cause of my energy, my smile, my passion, etc. I just love life and I live life in a big way. Though I realized, at some point, that shining my light and living in my highest expression has the power to inspire someone else to live theirs. And maybe, just maybe, that could be my role in creating a better world. The world I’ve always wanted to see. Make and share art, with purpose and conviction, and inspire others to do the same. And the more I’ve grown, the more I’ve let go of ego and identity to a name or my craft, the more I get it. And I want to share that with whoever is here to listen.
Every name has a meaning. Names are spells. Words are spells. What we call ourselves and what we are named has weight and most of us, like myself, never had a chance to choose the name. It just came and you were that because the name was always there; the remembering was the work.
People always say, “I am bad at names, sorry” when they meet someone. But why? That’s a program that’s been running for a long time in the collective. By claiming that you are bad at something, you are. But, if you stop identifying with being bad at names there’s only one other option: to be good at names. I stopped being bad at names the moment I started paying attention to people. The moment I stopped unconsciously claiming this thing that everyone else claims on themselves. It’s the same with everything else, even your name. That’s all attention is. That’s all remembering is.
But here’s the trap. A name is a technology for remembering — and anything we use to remember, we can end up relying on to remember. A name, a ceremony, a substance. You can use any of them to bypass the deeper work. The actual real work. The work of purging what you were programmed with. Actually sitting with it, feeling it, giving it to God.
I know because I fell in. For a long time I was pretending to be Akriza. And I think people felt that. I was relying on an alter ego to fit in. To be somebody to the people around me. Chasing an idea of what I wanted built from what everyone else was doing. But there was more to it than bass shows and festivals. There was more than escaping my feelings. It took losing everything to learn the difference.
Some people pick their own names, but why?
I chose Akriza because I wanted to share something with the world. I didn’t always know what. A lot of the confusion around what I wanted to share and who I am was given to me by my friends, my family, my work, my life’s path that somehow feels pre-destined, society, my programming, my traumas, my pain, my love, and my loss. The human experience. Which I am so grateful for because it has led me here.
We live in duality, two realities always at the same time: living and dying with every breath. But, it’s attention that turns a name — or a life — from something given into something chosen. A choice to live in your deep soul’s calling, to shift from dying to living. Deeply knowing yourself by fully experiencing every thought, feeling, action, word, spell, name… and taking full responsibility for all of it and acting with conviction and non-attachment to the outcome of anything.
But it takes time, and silence, and feeling to even understand what a real yes feels like in your body. Which is easier said than done in today’s day and age.
This presence is my life’s purpose. It’s synonymous with my name, to remember. To remember in every moment that this body, these thoughts, everything I own is not mine. The only thing that I have is the continuous moment towards the fate of exiting this life. I want to exit my life with no fear, only conviction. This is when the movie goes out but the screen stays on. What’s after? I don’t know, but I firmly believe that consciousness is fundamental to reality. That consciousness creates reality, everything we witness and see. And therefore we are that. What is that? I call it God.
I believe you only have one choice in this life. There is no Free Will. At least not authorship over circumstance, only over attention. To me that means that there is only one choice in every moment: to be a function of biology, environment, circumstance, or to be fully present with all of it. Not letting yourself be victim but recognizing that everything is happening for you, not against you.
Even the hard times.
Recently… I just left everything. My home, my friends, my dream of performing for 10k+ people, my career, my everything. The dissolving was the point, but it was hard to die so many times to so many things. It’s like doing surgery on your soul, and let me tell you it’s painful.
I was alone, in Fort Collins Colorado, in a tiny ass apartment on the side of the freeway. I had recently left my dream home in California to build a new life around a scene. I just got out of a relationship with the woman that convinced me to move out of my small town. My car had just died in the middle of the desert. It was winter, cold and rainy, living an hour outside of Denver (where I actually wanted to be), and I was utterly alone, lost, and confused. Why would God bring me here to have me lose interest in the thing I thought I wanted most? To be seen, to be heard, to make an impact. I just couldn’t see myself making impact in an already broken system. And being a DJ was not it. Live Nation, the big labels, Insomniac… this ladder you have to climb and the attention you have to grab and the politics of it all. Even relying on anyone to do what it was that I came here to do felt wrong. And what I saw in those rooms was a lot of dissociation just to get through. Not everyone. But enough to see the shape of the life it was asking me to want.
When you close your eyes and forget your past, your future, and your name — there is a space there you can’t get and can’t lose, can’t gain and never had. No joy, no grief. It just is. That is the place I am talking about.
Technology for remembering has been invented all around the world to access this place. Plant medicine, breathwork, meditation, dance, music, ceremony, fasting, etc. All with one intention, to dissolve the self, the ego. And all of these technologies that evolved, independently of one another, are here to show us that there is more to consciousness than the ego. When you dissolve and let go it somehow feels bigger and more real than this physical reality. I can’t ignore that.
When I live from this place, this presence, and when I take the time to know myself, to feel, to practice taking full responsibility for everything (never projecting), and only saying yes to my TRUE FULL YES in my body — I find that life is magic. For me it’s simply giving every moment to God, presence, the I am, whatever you want to call it. I’ll keep saying God.
Even the spiritual scene has been hijacked. Same hierarchy, same gatekeepers, same performance. It’s just mushrooms and cacao instead of wine and bread. Facilitators, ticket tiers, the five-figure retreats, it costs you $200/hour just for me to be your friend. And the pitch is that the way in is always something you buy. A substance, a ticket, a container. But the thing I found didn’t require anything external. It cost me a winter, alone, in a cold apartment. It cost me everything I owned in a storage unit and moving back to a room in my parents’ house in Portland, OR. The house I grew up in.
I was without direction. And so I just sat with myself. I spent mornings in tea practice every day for hours. Moving the body. Getting outside. Sitting with the pain. Sitting with the loss. Taking full accountability for being there. Not blaming anyone for my circumstance. Feeling everything and purging this identity and who I thought I was — a hero to the people, a savior to myself. Taking time in silence, in my own personal ceremony with myself, without the attachment to the outcome of becoming anything at all.
And that’s the practice. Listening. Silence. Detachment from outcomes. Channeling is what I call it — opening your channel for outer wisdom that just comes in, once the programs and the victimhood and the fear are purged out of the way. It works like writing music. I really have no idea where the thoughts or feelings come from. I sit down, I start, and then it’s there.
And what came through, that winter, was something within telling me: if I wanted to make the impact I wanted, I had to start building. So I got to work. I started Audio Alchemy Collective, Thronos, Trailer Club. Each one is the same practice wearing different clothes. The music is remembering out loud. The collective is remembering together. Everything I build under this name is technology for remembering — the same technology the tea and the silence were. I built in silence for a year and a half. I left the US and moved to Peru to sit in the Andes and channel my soul’s calling. And now the time has come to stop hiding. Writing is my first step.
I believe that if you can’t give the hard times to God, samsara will hand you the same loop again. But the loop was never a wheel. It’s a spiral. Same lesson, shorter timeline — every pass you’re either spiraling up and out or deeper down. I know loops. I build music out of them. A loop isn’t stuck. A loop is what carries you. The Gita says life’s purpose is to be with God at the moment of death. I believe it. But the way to actually get there is to face everything how you want to face death. If you’re attached to outcomes, riding the same pass over and over, how are you going to approach that moment?
If you aren’t able to approach death with courage and conviction how can you even live? Most people live in fear and suffering. I choose not to. Jesus prayed for his crucifiers and met death by giving it all to God. That’s how I want to live my life. That’s the standard I hold, not the level I claim. Give it all to God. The only way to get good at anything, like names… and even dying… is to practice. Every day. To hold this conviction for your purpose, that can only come from deeply knowing yourself and taking the time to.
This is remembering. This is presence. This is Akriza. I am Zachary. I didn’t come here to win. I came here to remember, and to die remembering.
My name, both of them, means remembering. I am here to help whoever’s listening remember who they are. Akriza is what that remembering sounds like. Your name means something too. Go look. Ask AI: “Give me an onomastic reading on my full name, FIRST MIDDLE LAST. Give me the light side, the shadow side of each name, and the full story arc of my name at the end.” That feeling? That’s what this is all about.
