Conversations with a Navy Seal

Hello Olivia, nice to meet you. I'm Olivia. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. I was just saying while I was doing like a little intro that I don't think I've ever talked to a former Navy seal before, so I'm very excited about this. And for those that don't know you, I feel like my audience might not be aware of who you are.

So maybe you could give like a little background and how you got into, you know, being in this position that you've been in these past years and um, yeah, and then we can just really dive into it. It sounds great. I'll try to keep it short because I'm a little older than you. I don't know. Yeah, so, um, being a seal is actually my second career, my first career. And then this relates to actually the topic or the

subject of your podcast Second Chances. You know, I followed all my all the right things, you know, the right things my parents wanted me to do, the culture, you know, went to great college called Colgate. After Colgate University, I went down in New York to UM to work and also to go to school and m b A at n y U. So within two, you know, two and a half years, I had an m b A and a c p A. And I was working on Wall Street and I was off to the races. Right, Pretty cool, right,

except I was miserable. I literally hated my job. I hated myself for not be passionate I guess about life, and I was miserable, you know, as I was looking at life like everything started to get gray. And remember telling my dad I was at a wedding and he was like, what's wrong with you? And I said, no, I'm just not happy. And at least I had this self awareness to say that. What saved me Olivia was UM.

I found meditation at twenty one years old. All right, this is I found meditation through a zen master who was my martial arts instructor, and I spent a lot of time. I loved it because it gave me a reprieve from, you know, kind of the self imposed suffering I was experienced trying to be something that I wasn't as a white collar professional, as I wasn't interested really

or passionate about money. I really wanted to do something interesting and important, but I just didn't know what and I thought that was what I was supposed to do because that was the story I was living. But meditation changed my brain, changed the way I thought, gave me new insights, new perspectives, and literally showed me kind of like my soul's calling, which was to be a warrior.

And as soon as I accepted that, Olivia, I actually literally had a synchrono synchronicity experience where I I learned about the Navy Seals just by walking past the Navy recruiter's office and there was a big poster on the window that said be someone special and it had you know, cool guys happening, you know what I mean. Not sure you'd be interested, but a lot of your male listeners

will be like, yeah, I know what, cool guys. And I was just smitten by this idea and it and so right there, right this notion that I was going to be a warrior. I meant to be a warrior. This disconnect with what I was actually doing and then suddenly seeing what's possible, and I had this major kind of paradigm shift. It took a little while for me to grow the cohones to actually go for it, but

that's a whole another story. So I joined the Seals at went through UM class one seven zero was onnor Man. Remember one graduate. With my class, we had five hardcore warriors and only UM nineteen of us graduated and I was number one graduate. And then I had an amazing twenty year career as a Seal ten active duty, ten reserve. But a lot of my combat experience came as a reservist, and that led me to UM kind of where I am. I'm you know, huge experience UM formative there, you know,

traveling the fifty or sixty different countries and wow. But anyways, I could go into more detail, but I don't want to bore you. No, this isn't boring. That's why you're on the podcast. We want to know. But can I actually ask you something about meditation because this is a little bit of like a personal question, But I really wanted to get into meditating for a long time and firm like maybe from like a like a beginner's standpoint,

what is like what's the first step? And then do you think if you hadn't had done meditation and found that you would not have probably gotten into the I wouldn't have even considered it, and I certainly wouldn't have done as well l as I did meditation. I think is the master skill. Uh, And it's it's the number one skill that we need to our tool that we need to use to develop our minds to deal with

the you know, the exponential age which we're in. As you're aware like your your generation will be the leaders um and in the way your minds have been trained is is not it's not going to be able to cope with what's coming because this it was traged the same way the train, the same way my mind was to be trained. Until I found meditation. We cannot face and we cannot handle the explosive change that's happening with just you know, school knowledge right with information, we're out

of the information age, We're in the conceptual age. So what we need is basically massive creativity and spontaneity and intuitiveness and and the ability to conceive of new things. That that is found through meditation and creative endeavors, you know, like what you're doing here. And so you know, I'm

not a big fan of traditional education anymore. I know it's great to have the credentials that I have, but I haven't touched my m b A and I haven't touched my b A. I don't use anything that I learned. But you know, I don't regret doing that training. I just I just don't think it's it's um relevant for the age that we're in, and there's new ways of learning. So back to your question, Meditation for me its the

science of mental development beyond just downloading knowledge. Like to teach you in school, meditation is not just calming your body or just about the health benefits. It is about training your mind to expand your ability to perceive more, to to understand why you exist and why you do what you do, and to and to make better decisions. And then also to teach you how to UM control your attention and maintain radical concentration so you can you know,

accomplish a worthy mission or worthy goal. How do you start that? Like, what's the Because for me, when I think of meditation, I think of like sitting in silence and like not letting my brain wander and trying to focus on I guess nothing. Essentially, I feel like that's like that maybe like a misconception that is, that's not wrong. But UM, there are there are several skills that are

trained with meditation. This is one of the reasons why people struggled with It's not really explained or taught very well. The skill that you just described trains concentration, and it's UM it's important UM to learn concentration so that you can control that attention. So that's a skill. It's also important to develop mindful awareness of what patterns and um background you know, that have that have conditioned your current life or the story that you're living, so that you

can rewrite the script of your life. And assuming it's not written properly, because I don't want to make that assumption, but for many people the script that they're living out is conditioned by their family and by their culture and religion, and it's not going to serve of them very well ultimately. And so mindfulness training helps us become aware of the background of why we do what we do with the context. So that's important. And you see, my business is called

unbautiful mind so we we teach these things. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, most people really flail and have trouble when they start meditation, especially younger individuals like yourself, because there really is a progression. Just like you know, are you an athlete? I know most of the people listen to have some athletic skills. Imagine you do as well, right, I actually am. Yeah, I'm pretty athletic. I one Athlete of the Year when I was twelve. That's the only

flex I have. Yeah. So, so what's your sport? I used to play basketball and soccer and volleyball when I was younger. Okay, well let's choose soccer. Right. So when you started soccer, when you first saw a soccer ball or someone you know toss it to you, your parents bought it for you. You didn't just go out and suddenly play like pelee, right or some master. You know, you literally had to learn how to dribble that ball.

You have to learn the rules of the game. You have to learn how to kick, you have to learn how to run with the ball. There's all sorts of skills that you had to work with and and you learn those skills in what we would call a crawl walk run manner. That's how we would say it in the Seals. You you work like first you it's baby steps. What are the real fundamental basics? Well, meditation is very similar, right, and so jumping into mindfulness meditation is like going from

zero to hero. And so there's fundamental things that you need to do to your brain and your mind and your body to be able to even have the capacity to sit and meditate. So what I teach is basically a breathing technique that de stresses the body and calms the mind. I call box breathing, and that is like someone just handing you the soccer ball and teaching how to dribble it. It's it's really basic training, but it's even hard for h Yeah, and I've been teaching that

since two thousand seven. I think I was the first person to actually call it box breath and teach it.

And so it's like that's how you start. And if I were to, you know, if you were my client, I would say, okay, Olivia, we're gonna just sit down and we'renna close our eyes and we're an inhale for five seconds, and we'll hold our breath for five seconds, and then when exhale for five seconds, and then when to hold our breath on the exhale for five seconds, and initially for the first you know, three months, we're not going to really worry about what our brain is

doing or what our mind is doing. We're just holding our attention on keeping that pattern going, and we're gonna do it for a minimum five minutes up to twenty minutes a day. Ideally it's twenty minutes a day. This is one of the reasons this practice alone was probably why it was so successful in silk trending, because I was always calm and and my and the instructors are like masters at causing chaos and fear, and I was

always really calm because I had trained this practice. Were you ever in a like a real life situation where you had to like, like, let's say you're in the seal, something insane is happening. Do you could you have time to take a moment and like start doing this. It is the master skill for everything, so once you train it, Like one example is I was in UM. I was jumping out of an airplane, UM with a yeah and UM.

And it was at night. This is a static line jump, not a free fall jump, so I didn't have as much you know, control over the canopy. Like it's not very nimble the static line, and so I UM. But it was second off the deck or off the ramp of the helicopter. And it was a beautiful night, so I was actually taking in the sceniories, like the moon was out. It was just stunning. It was in the desert of California, was training, and suddenly I saw the

first jumper coming right towards me. Now he should have been way away from me, but he somehow did a full three sixty and was coming right toward me. And our procedures are you know, if someone's gonna come at you and you're gonna have a mid our cllision, then each of you pull your right toggle, which is like steering to the right. Well I pulled my right and he pulled his left, and he collided with me. And so we were only about nine feet high at that

point in time. So he collides in my parachute just disappears. It folds up into a ball, right, and I start plumbing to the earth right picking up speed, and I have about eight seconds to live. And immediately I started box breathing, like immediately, because I had trained it, I didn't go into fear. I didn't freak out. It just started inhale hold exhale hold, and I did like one cycle and my calmp my head went calm, and I all my um safety precautions you know, flooded back to

me that we had trained, you know. And so I looked up and I grabbed my rises and I started shaking it and nothing happened. And I knew I didn't have time to do that again. So I punched my reserve or pulled the ripcord and punchment reserve, threw it out shook, that didn't catch any on. Boxed breathing, still calm.

I'm down to like two d three feet. I look back up, I grabbed my risers and I'm just breathing, and I had this sensation that you know, this isn't my time, Like this was so calm, yeah, and so um clear, and I felt like I had all the time in the world. It's one of the things that meditation and breathing does is it gets you really present and present moment. You feel like you have all this time.

So I shook the risers again and all of a sudden poof, you know, like fifty ft above the ground, they caught air and I landed and I landed like a ton of potatoes, you know, sacotatoes, and the miracle, I didn't break any bonds. But that's an exact so many examples like that that, um, you know, it got me really fascinated with kind of this idea of, you

know what, what's possible with the mind? You know, can you slow time down really like like you see movies with the ninja advanced martial arts, or can you speed it up? And I believe that you can. I believe that the human being has just this vast potential and when you train your mind. But if you don't train your mind, then you just end up being kind of common and a victim or buffeted by you know, everybody else's needs for you. So that's really important to train yourself.

If you're not training yourself in the world's training you on. Yeah, it's so interesting too because I'm such a big believer and everything you're talking about, Like I think, the like the power we hold and the control we have over our own selves is like insane to me. I was

reading this book called a New Earth. I don't know if you've read it, Yeah, but it kind of reminds me a lot of what you're saying, and I think it is just like I think a lot of people go to a different place where they're like I have to like freak out about this or they I feel like we don't take the time as humans to realize that we do have control over situations. So just like hearing you speak about this is like inspiring for me.

Who I'm not jumping out of airplanes or putting my life in risk every day, but still there's something to be taken away from it. When you were in the Seals, what did you learn like the most about teamwork? And is it it's one of those things you know when you're in that probably you can't do it alone. I would assume they call it the Seal teams for a reason, not the Seal individuals. Um nothing great is accomplished alone. In my opinion, you need a team. You know, even

your podcast, you've got a team running. Can you imagine being everything on your own. I've got a podcast, It's crazy. I've got like eight people in work and the Seals um. First off, I learned that it's it's a little bit counterintuitive, but you have to place as much emphasis and care as much about your teammates as you care about yourself. And you know, as you place emphasis on yourself. That's

not common for a lot of people. Most people put all, you know, all their attention on theirselves because they're in that egoic stage of development. And then they show up for the team and put out a little bit or some but they don't put it out for the teammate. They put it out so that they don't screw up orusly, they look you know, they look good, or they don't let their teammate down. With the Seals, we learned that literally, our teammates are radically important to us and we can't

accomplish the mission without them, and we will. Literally we have such an incredible deep respect and trust and love for them that we're willing to die for them. I mean that's the incredible level of teaming. Most people only experience that, like if you're a mother and a child or a father and a child. You know, just to

wrap up, what's like one? I know that obviously meditation we've talked about for a second is very important too, But what's one life skill you think you could give to somebody or in your program that you've created, UM, which what's it called Unbeatable Mind? Is there? Well, your company, beautiful Unbeautable Mind is our training. We've got to this new UM, a new program coming out in March called Unbuild Mind for the Exponential Age? Is this all online? Like?

Could could any human sign up online? Anybody can do this? UM? You don't have to come to a live event for that. We we love our live events because that's where we really go deep and do the immersive and bodied work. But this program, because especially since Covid, I realized the only way we're going to reach more people is to do virtual training, and so we shifted. UM we're in

a virtual company just like most companies now. And so this program is eight weeks long and in it I teach how to develop what I call the five minds of unbeatable mind, the body mind, the contextual mind, the strategic mind, the extended mind, and the integrated mind. And each one of these minds that we all have when they're together, it's just your whole mind. But each one of these has a unique way to train at unique tools to train. Right. Um, probably the most profound is

what we've already talked about, box breathing. Right, So if everyone just started there, but you turned box breathing into a stacked practice. Stacked practices when you combine different elements of training into a singular training session. So if you did twenty minutes of box breathing. The way that I do it and I teach it to my advanced students is to start out just like I told you. Just start out just breathing, just following that pattern, and that

calms your body and your brain down. It literally really slows down the brain waves into an alpha low bay to hi alpha state, which is conducive for for learning and and opening up to whole mine your heart and your biome. And then we um then we lock onto the box and we visual eyes the box, or we we insite a mantra, right, And so that then takes the training the breathwork into a concentration practice which deepens our ability to control our attention seals called the attention control.

And so then we learn how to really focus. We learned how to declutter, We learned how to clear our mind, which is where you started and said that's hard. Yeah, it is hard, but you start with just calming the body. And then we start by focusing radically on just one thing without worrying about when your mind wanders off, you

just bring it back when you recognize that. So that deepens, lengthens your ability to concentrate in terms of duration, and it gives you makes you less distractable, so you can hold your attention. And so that I would do that for the second five minutes. Then the third five minutes, I do the mindful awareness where I just release the gas pedal on the concentration, which means I'm not efforting

as much, relaxing my effort. But I create a meta cognitive shift where I put my awareness in one side of my brain and my right hemisphere, and I pretend this is a little bit pretend, but you imagine that you're watching the thinker. So the left hemisphere of your brain is more the the strategic thinking mind with the right hemisphere is your contextual mind. And so you create this meta cognitive shift where you just start to watch

passively the thoughts that arise in your mind. And this begins to give you the sense of I am not my thoughts, and yet I can observe my thoughts and emotions as they arise and fall, and so you you you gain great um separation from the whipp saws of your thoughts and the dramas. And it also creates that space so you can become non reactionary and instead pause and the seals we use the acronym p B T A.

You pause, you breathe. That would be then you think, and thinking is like analyzing the quality of the thoughts and what's happening, and then you act as opposed to just acting. So that's the third scale and then the four skill. It's it's in two parts. One is to stop efforting whatsoever and to turn inward, meaning when I'm watching my thoughts, I'm literally still forward focused looking for thoughts.

Turning inward means you literally turn your awareness around and you look for awareness itself, and over time you find that aspect of yourself that is just aware of being alive, beyond thoughts and emotion, even beyond space and time and um that practice right there is what I just described is like um holy grail for developing the whole mind thinking.

And whole mind thinking, I think is essentially where we need to go as humanity because it connects the heart and the gut with the head, and we are allowed allows ourselves to use all of that thinking passive, even our our body and the energetic field around our body as part of our you know thing? Can you know? Being? Are thinking? Right? We just have so much more information to so many more tools available so we make better decisions. Wow. I will definitely take a lot away from this interview.

Thank you so much for coming on my podcast and sharing your story and sharing all the amazing things that you know over the years. I promise right now I will definitely be trying to get into meditation after this. I feel very inspired. Thank you. There is no try. That's what Yoda said, do not period. Thank you so much. I hope I get to chat to you soon in the future at some point. If you ever want to

come back with more stories, You're always welcomed. I love to love too, and if anyone wants to know about that training, they just go to my personal website, Mark Divine dot com and will help you perfect. Great. Do you have social media that people can follow you on? I feel like that's really what Instagram is at Real Mark Divine. Facebook's at Real Mark Divine. Twitter is Mark Divine, So do I v I I need you to can google that. But thank you so much, thank you so much,

thank you. It's nice to meet you. Good luck for everything, nice to meet you to thank you you as well. Thank you. Hi