Barrett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. The journey of personal development, becoming a more excellent and extraordinary individual, can sometimes seem a little abstract. That's why it's helpful to imagine as Mark Divine does, as a set of five metaphorical mountains to scale. Mark is a retired Navy SEAL commander, professor leadership, a yogi, the creator of fitness and mindset programs like SEALFIT and Unbeatable
Mind and an author. He combines his two decades of military service with the study of martial arts and Zen meditation to create the holistic, warrior-munk development philosophy that informs his work, including his latest book, Uncommon. Simple principles for an extraordinary life. Stay in the show, Mark acts as a guide to the topography of the five mountains of personal development and the daily practices that will help you summit them. We talk about why mastering the
physical mountain comes first and climbing the Intuitional Mountain comes forth. The Navy SEAL breathing practice that will help you develop your meta-cognition, how the Japanese concept of icky guy can help you find your purpose in life, and much more. After the show is over, check out our show notes at a-wim.is-slash-five mountains. Alright, Mark Devine, welcome back to the show. Right, super stoked to be on the art of mailing us.
Well, yeah, the last time we had John, it was over 10 years ago. Right. It's been a while. Lots happen in 10 years, huh? A lot has happened in 10 years, and I want to catch up with what you've been doing. So, you got a new book out called Uncommon. What's your aim with this book? Like, what are you trying to do with this book and how does it pick up where you left off with some of your other things you've written about, like, the way of the SEAL and things like that?
Yeah, so really, it's kind of a sequel to Unbeatable Mind. Unbeatable Mind is kind of the whole training philosophy, more like a personal memoir, but it introduced the whole integrated vertical accelerated development that I've been now teaching since 2006, starting with SEAL Fit and then Unbeatable Mind of Program. And in there, in that program, I kind of lay out how, first of all, we have the potential to become self-evolutionary, meaning we can take control
of our growth and we can accelerate it. If we do certain things, and then that idea of kind of that self-mastery, that personal mastery is actually really important in motivating. And I found it through, obviously, martial arts and being a Navy SEAL and through Zen and
meditation, but there's many different paths to that. In Unbeatable Mind, I laid out the whole philosophy and I introduced this idea of the five mountains, which are the five developmental areas that we really need to take control of and then begin to access greater capacity, but we do it in a way that is integrated, meaning it's like the typical Westerner is taught that the body is something you drag to the gym and it's just about health or looking
at the bathing suit or bodybuilding. And the mind, well, that's really just what it is. And it's really a function of the brain and we have education and we have certificates and podcasts, but that's the extent of mind training. And the emotions forget about it. Most guys don't even go there, but emotional development is something that happens when you break down. Intuition isn't even talked about. And spiritual life is really about
your beliefs. And so all these are kind of like separate aspects of your life. They're not brought together into an integrated whole. So the experience of the typical Westerner is it common and it's one of kind of separation, separated from yourself, separated from others. These different aspects of yourself, which I call the five mountains physical, mental, emotional, intuational, and spiritual, are also separate. And inevitably that leads
to suboptimal performance. It leads to burnout. It leads to that quiet life of desperation that Theroux talks about because you're not tapping into your full potential and living a life of purpose. Okay, so this is all about holistic personal development. So I think you're right. I think a lot of times when really guys in the West approach self improvement, they just think, well, I'm going to get fit. And they
might do really well there. They're working out every day, increasing their PRs, but other areas of their life are suffering as a consequence. That's right. It's one dimensional. And they say, well, I'm going to be fit. And then of course, there's tons and tons of folks out there, especially like my Navy SEAL peers are saying, you know, be hard, right? Just be hard. Go harder, you know, suck it up, better cup. And there's times to be hard, but there's
times to be soft, right? It's you have to have that balance of the you and the young, hard and the soft. And yet the soft isn't taught. And most guys are like, that's going to make me weak. Like when I used to train Navy SEAL candidates, which we still do, I don't, you know, I had a training center in incentives for 10 years and we train them every day. We used to talk about, you know, if the tsunami comes, which is every day in
buds, SEAL training, would you rather be the mighty oak or the reed? And they're like, well, you know, someone would say the mighty oak. And I said, no, the mighty oak is going to get washed away by the tsunami. But the reed is just going to lay down and then bounce right back up to resilient. So the point where we teach him is that neither one is right or wrong, you want to develop both. You want to be the mighty oak when you need to be
in that and the reed when you need to be. And in order to do that, you need to develop both aspects, hard and the soft, the in and the young. And the soft is found in the inner domain. So the physical mountain, you can develop the oak, develop your body to be strong and resilient. But you also have to develop that flexibility and the durability through exercises like yoga and, you know, core development and that type of stuff that's, you know,
you know, you need to do what most people don't do it. But then the real soft side is to bounce through the mental, emotional, intuitive and spiritual development where you're really tapping into, you know, the inner power and insight. And the sense of knowing this of when to kind of lay down your sword and, you know, lay down and let the tsunami wash over you so you can jump back into the fight.
So you mentioned there, you have spent your career post serving in the seals training could be Navy seals to get ready for buds, but you've also shifted to other types of personal development coaching. Right. I'm curious in your experience with working with individuals who say they want to make a change in their life. They want to improve themselves, but don't like what have you found like what keeps people from making those changes they
say they want in their lives? There's a lot of obstacles fear, right, is one. So there's this desire, but then there is this fear of failure. There's fear of change. There's a fear of the unknown. And you can even take it deeper that there's these underlying condition patterns that are fear based or negative based that keep coming up and tend to tend to
torpedo your efforts. So so many people and you've seen this, I'm sure, with your programs that, you know, people will start and be all going, oh, but then they meet an obstacle. And there's always obstacles out there, right, but they haven't learned that the obstacles the way it was Ryan Holiday would say. And so when that obstacle comes and they feel some shame come up or some guilt that they screwed up or they feel some judgment from
others, they immediately activate this kind of shame based fear condition thinking. And they say, well, I'm not worthy for this or I'm not good enough or this isn't for me, right. This program isn't right for me. And then they quit. And then the energy of like, oh, but I want to improve comes back up. And so they look for the next shiny thing. We go to another program. And then they repeat this pattern over and over. And so people
bounce around from program to program. And then they torpedo themselves because of this underlying unaddressed shadow self side, which is also the work of the emotional mountain in the book. That's one of the major obstacles. The other one is the people like patients in our society that we've been taught that everything is, you know, supposed to be easy and quick. And as you know, and most of your listeners know that like when it comes to
development, patients is the virtue. And especially when it comes to the development of the inner domain, it's not like tracking your deadlifts. You know, I mean, you can't really point toward the development until after it's happened. And you maybe you have some evidence from someone like your wife or your significant other coming to you and say, man, something's really different. And you're like, oh, really? I guess you're right. It's very subtle until it's
not. Right? And so people start meditating or they start a breath practice or whatever it is. And they get into it. And maybe they get healthier because we got a physical, you know, health component, fitness and et cetera. But the inner domain stuff is just hard to see. And so then they develop this sense of uncertainty. Like they doubt the program really works. And so when they start doubting, then they stop adhering to the discipline daily
practice. And then they have evident, they begin to see evidence that it doesn't work. Because the real juice in any developmental program is doing daily work. This even relates to physical development. It would be useless to go to the gym once a week and do all your weight training in two hours, once a week. I mean, it would have some benefits, but you're likely to get injured. You're not going to make that much progress. Same thing with the
work of mental, emotional, intuitive, and spiritual development. It's a daily practice. And you can build it in different parts of your day, morning, ritual, leaving ritual and then kind of throughout your day, even the way you train physically can become an integrated practice. And so people will think, well, I'm going to do all that work on the weekend. And it doesn't work that way. So they lose faith, so to speak, that it works because
they're not doing the work. Those are some of the key obstacles. Yeah. So fear, the lack of patience. We also talk about other things. It's just people have reasons like, well, I can't make the change at once. They just don't have the time or they don't have the money. Right. But you talk about, you know, look, self improvement or these things you want to do to improve yourself, it's nothing fancy. You can do this in just 30 minutes
a day. It doesn't take that long. And I know when people say, like, I just don't have the time to work out. I don't have the time to do this sort of personal work, whether it's managing my stress. I just like, man, you don't have the time to not take the time.
I agree with that. Right. So eventually it's going to bite you. Eventually you're at the stop and you're going to have to take care of the situation, whether you have a health scare and you're at the spin time at the hospital or just time at the doctor office or you have some sort of marital problem because you didn't take the time to get your anger under
control. You're going to be spending a lot of time. So eventually you're going to have to pay the fiddler might as well pay it on your terms instead of the fate's terms. Yeah. So those two obstacles are are nonsensical time and money. First of all, the most profound practices are free. I have never, I've seen someone charge for breath training, but breath
practice is free. And you can learn it from a free video. And the breath, you know, doing breath practice like our box breathing training every day is a profound practice that crosses all five mountains and will integrate you just if that's all you did that would be enough as if you did it every day with awareness for 20 to 30 minutes. You don't need a gym.
You know, I'm a big proponent of austere training, working outside, working with a team, working with cool tools that fit in the trunk of your car like sandbags and weight vests. And so physical training is free except for the cost of maybe a couple tools and parachorts and water bottle. You don't need a fancy gym membership. You don't need a yoga studio membership. Any of that stuff because all that you just need a few tools, simple, the better
and then you just need to do them every day. And meditation is free. And then back to the time, like you said, you know, you've got 30 minutes when you wake up in the morning because you're feeling this 30 minutes was something. And generally speaking, it's not going to be conducive to your growth, right? You wake up and you immediately start engage in, you know, obsessive thinking, you're checking your email or you're reading the news.
None of that's really going to lead you where you want to go. So all you got to do is just take that 30 minutes, which you're doing something else, unproductive and just shift and ritualize a very productive morning routine, morning ritual. And that alone could be a game or well, let's talk about these metaphorical mountains that you've developed for personal development. And the first mountain is physicality, which is all about our physical health.
Why did you start there? Well, my experience and I'm a lifetime martial artist and also obviously, you know, a Navy seal and also a yogi, the physical body. So first of all, the body and the mind are not separate. So when you're training the body, you're training
your mind. And so you're already beginning to work on the mental mind. And we know that like all of those of us who are involved in competitive sports and endurance athletics, like there's a definite aspect of it that is training your mind for concentration, for attention, for awareness, situation awareness, for even opening up the heart mind, especially with team sports, especially in the seals, you know, that really had a profound effect
on me to open up my heart and to really learn different ways to love human beings. You know, the idea of laying your life down for your teammates is just an act of supreme love. So physical development is training your mind, let's start there. Now secondly, if you're physically unhealthy or diseased or drugged up, then your brain, which is part of your body,
is physically unhealthy and is going to be suboptimal. So if we want to do mental development work and emotional development and intuitive, if we want to evolve and grow, we've got to start with the body and get the body really healthy. Because of the body healthy, the brain's going to be healthy, the brain's healthy, the mind's going to be healthy, and you're going to have the capacity to do the work on the other mountains. At a very simplest
level, you'll be less distracted and distractable. You'll be able to sit comfortably in meditation, your mindfulness or box breathing without agitation, without the discomfort. You're going to have more clarity because of the electrochemical balance in your body. You're home, your static balance and all the stress will have been bled off through the physical training.
And also at a very practical level, some of those obstacles we talked about, another obstacle is that your body is not healthy or you're injured and that becomes a real big distraction for you, which captures your mind. So you're not thinking about meditation and yoga if you're injured or if you're sick. And so I think this is really important because again, our culture is working against us in most of these areas. It's working against
us in health. The typical sad American diet, standard American diet is an unhealthy diet. So you don't want to prescribe to that. Most of the food that sold barcoded in packages is unhealthy for us. So we want to get back to really simple, principle-based fueling, our body eating when we're hungry, learning to fast and intermittent fast, eating really close to the earth, foods, whole foods and high quality foods and also learn to move your
body every day, both through different forms of exercise and somatic practices. And get out in nature, like I said, be outside every day because we're not separate from nature. We need to be in nature and there's profound motivation and mood and both emotional and physical benefits for being outside. We want to have a community of practice training with a team of people who are dedicated to our success and not trying to beat us all
the time. So those are some of the things that we do to get healthy. It's simple. You have to over-complicate it. Even when it comes to physical training, everything you need is really free. You can get some tremendous workouts, programs, even chat, GBT will gin them up for you. The point is just to get out and do it and to be consistent with your
practice. Figure it out and make it as important, the physical training and the nutrition that make that all like a practice for optimizing the bodies and the brain so that you can really go deeper and deeper to plumb the depth so the mental emotion intuitive and spiritual mountains so that you can tap into this raw potential that you have. You know, in seal that we call it 20x. You're capable of 20 times more than you think you are, but that
capability is found on the inside. It's found in your field of potential and you're hiding it from yourself through your distractions, your addictions and through this outer focus and even through an unhealthy body. I wanted to dig deeper on this idea of exercising having a physical practice outside of nature and with other people. You're really big on this. What does that look like? What do you do and what are some things that our listeners
could do to incorporate this? Yeah, I mean, fun stuff. Exercise should feel like play. It should be really joyful. So one way that is really joyful is variety. I never do the same workout. Rarely do the same workout twice. And if I do it's because it's a really effective one. It's fun and I just like, okay, this is a staple. Many people work train harder. They think they need to train longer and you don't. I train 20 minutes a day.
20 minutes of physical of high intensity with weight training and also 20 minutes of yoga. And so 40 minutes is pretty much all that I need. And the maintenance, you know, it's like to fly with all you do is just spin it every day and once your body gets up to that ideal fitness, you don't need to put in countless hours unless you're training for something specific like the seals or, you know, to do some big event type thing. And that's specific
training. I'm talking about optimized performance generalized training. You know, I train outside every day unless it's like pouring rain, but even if it's light rain, it just feels really good. And I train with the team. Right now, my team is my wife, but I've always trained with the team, you know, starting the seal teams and then in my seal fit program. And just there's something about it because you learn to take your eyes off yourself and put it on your teammate and make sure that
everything is safe and you're not trying to beat them. And a little healthy competition is good, but you know, it should be co-opitation, you know, it's not your ego. So training outdoors has a benefit emotionally, like I said, it affects your mood. There's something about being connected in nature that makes you feel connected to yourself. And it helps you develop more situational awareness and a feeling of connection, which then allows you to be more connected to yourself and
to others. So there's a deep emotional kind of spillover effect there. And then training with a team or even a significant other has incredible emotional mountain benefits. Like Sandy and I, my wife and I have been training together for several years now. And I kind of wish we had done it way sooner. And what an incredible experience it's been for our relationship. Now, I say a couple of the trains
together, flourish this together. So by training together, again, you're moving away from this just being a physical exercise by taking it outside. Now it is a mental and emotional and even a spiritual kind of developmental practice and simplicity, right? As I said, lots of variety, but simplicity. I mean, the tools that I use, I still use a barbell here and there, but mostly at Sandbag, kettlebell, weight vest, a lot of body weight. I still have a rowing machine. So that's good,
only because I don't love running anymore much. I've done a lot of running in my life, so I don't serve me anymore. But I do a lot of rucking and rowing and we put it all together every day. I was like, okay, what does the body need? Okay, so we're going to do four rounds. We'll do five or a meter row, 10 bench wrists, you know, 20 kettlebell swings, 30 sit-ups and we'll do that. We'll do four rounds of that or five rounds of that. It takes 20 minutes and it's a phenomenal
workout. You know, stuff like that. You know, go to a park, take your weight vest into the wilderness, take your sandbag. There's some of the principles. Be simple, get outside, make it fun, play, do it with other people, but do it every day. Yeah. No, if listeners who are wanting to find something like that, have you heard of F3 Nation? I have. Yeah. So we've had the guys who started it on the podcast a while back ago, but for those who aren't familiar, it's all around the world.
There's these boot camps. They're free to go. They're geared towards men. They're in the morning, usually before work, where I like 536. They have like these free bodyweight boot camps outside with other guys. So if you're looking for that, I like the idea of fitness where it's holistic, where you're trying to also not only nurture the body, but also the soul by being outside. And with other people, check out F3 Nation.com. You can find a location near you, because I'm
sure there is one. That's killer. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break for your words more sponsors. And now back to the show. We'll talk about that second mountain. That's the mental mountain. And this is all about developing what you call medic cognition. For those who aren't familiar with this idea, what is medic cognition? Sure. Well, that's like the first step in the mental mountain. Medic cognition is the capacity to think about your thinking, which requires you
develop the capacity to be able to watch your thinking, to be able to look at it. So like basic level of medic cognition is like journaling where you're like, okay, hot. What was my thought process there? And was it effective? What were the results? What could I have done different? It's like a personal debrief, but you're thinking about your thinking. And a lot of people do that, and they do it well. But the mental mountain training for us is to develop the capacity to do that
in real time. And I call this simultaneous mind where you're cultivating your witnessing capacity, your contextual awareness, where you can begin to experience your thoughts, emotions, and things that are happening to you as if from a distance. Like you've partitioned the hard drive of your mind, and you set up as the watcher, I call it the Sentinel in my book, The Way of the Seal. And you're looking across to the left hemisphere of your mind, which is the content awareness,
and you're actually able to see your thoughts coming and going. But there's a space between them, which gives you your power back, because instead of just being merged with your thinking in a reactionary mode, you now have this space to be able to observe that thought and to orient yourself to it like the Udalupe. And say, do I want to like jump on board the bandwagon, or do I want to just let that one go? And then you choose wisely. And so this is the beginning of developing of
discernment and wisdom. And so the path to get there is through training your mind, really, to narrow its focus. So that's attention control and concentration training. And we use the box breathing practice for that. So box breathing has this first fundamental layer is a rousal control, you know, bleeding off stress, triggering the person with a nervous system, all the kind of
benefits that come from that deep diaphragmatic breathing. But because you're breathing in that box pattern and you're counting the reps, counting the, you know, the, you know, five seconds in, five seconds in a hole, five seconds out, five seconds in a hole, or you're holding your attention there, and you're able to hold your attention on that pattern for longer and longer periods of time. And that develops concentration. So you have a rousal control, attention control, and concentration.
So what this does is it gathers up the energy of a mind that has been conditioned to be very distracted, you know, that kind of bouncing ball, thinking pattern, that monkey mind that they talk about in Eastern traditions. And so you're, you're able to begin to focus your energy more. And then when you begin to work on this witnessing awareness, it'll happen automatically, but we try to spur it on to facilitate it's happening quicker through our practices and
unbeal mind. And so that what we have you do is kind of set up that watch your metaphorically in your mind, like we simulate it. And the more you do that, the more that simulations kind of dissolves, and it becomes a real experience of witnessing. And first, it's intermittent, like you have to practice it, and then you kind of slide back into merge with your thoughts. And then over time, you then crack open a small space that stays there. It's permanent. And then
the practice basically widens that space. That space between you as the observer, the witness, and the thoughts that are happening. This is a profound practice. It's not, you know, it has great benefits, obviously, for relationships, because you have the ability to kind of like intercept yourself when you go right into reactionary mode when you get triggered. It has great benefit for dealing with any kind of crisis, because you become the calm center in the storm. You're
able to navigate your team through it, because you're non-reactionary. And it's got great benefits in terms of overall peace of mind and contentment, because you become much less attached to the outcomes, because you see those stories, those dramas of life, those things that play out, and you see that you begin to see that they play out over and over and over the same ones. And you're like, oh my god, look at that. I used to be just swept up in now that. And now I can see it for what it
is. And you can start to de-energize the negative patterns and replace it with, you know, things that are positive and productive. And life gets really simple, and you become very like aware of what to say no to and what to say yes to. And you stop like getting tangled in things that you shouldn't be getting entangled in. So that's what the mental mountain is about. It's not just packing more content into your head. It's actually moving away from needing that content toward developing wisdom.
Okay, so for this, the daily practice is that box breathing. Correct. That's going to help you start being able to harness your... Box breathing is the way in breath. Breath is the bridge between the body and the mind and the spirit. So like I said at a fundamental level, box breathing is a physiological practice you are slowing down your breathing. You're retraining yourself to breathe six breaths per minute, which is five seconds in, five seconds out. Call that the tactical breath.
And it brings great, great physiological, psychological emotional benefits and health benefits. But because you're breathing that pattern, you're also training that attention control and concentration. So now the box breathing is bridging between the physiological, psychological, training the mind.
Then we layer on the box breathing the way we teach it is like a stacked practice. So now you're deliberately training the attention control and the concentration while you're doing the breathing practice. And then you add in the mindful awareness witnessing. So there's like four things now. A rouse of control, attention control, concentration and witnessing. And that's developing that meant a cognitive capability to be separate from the thoughts and emotions. At the end of our box
breathing practice, then we do a visualization practice. And so now we're training our minds natural capacity to imagine or fantasize and we're getting rid of the fantasies and we're using our imagination to create a future reality in our mind that is based upon an emergent concept of who we are and why we're on this plane, why we're on this planet are calling. That's that spiritual mountain I'm talking about. That sense of like, what is our purpose? Why are we here? What are we going to do
about it? Then you create a vision of that. And after your practice every morning, you evoke that vision and you add energy to it. And so what you're doing there in a future state is you're creating a memory of your desired future. It's very powerful. So instead of like worrying about the future or catastrophizing, you like you actually remember who you really are and why you're on this planet and what you're supposed to do about it. And that becomes like a steady companion. It's always
there for you to remind you, especially in the stressful times. Okay, so you wake up, you could do the box breathing for five minutes after the box breathing. 20 minutes, I recommend. 20 minutes, yeah, I think you say start off with five minutes, work your way up to 20 minutes. Right. Minimum of five minutes, you can get a lot of the arousal control benefits. So a lot of people, they need to do this kind of in sequence as opposed to like all in one practice because
they're just not ready for it. They're physically and mentally they just need to focus on their health. All the things we talked about in the physical mountain and then just box breath for five minutes for the arousal control and just start bleeding off all that excess stress. Everyone's in hyper-arousal in the West. You know, we're over committed, we're stressed, we're rushing from here and there. The time commitments are crazy. And all of that is mind-generated fantasy that's causing
an enormous amount of stress. So the box breathing basically re-energizes the parasympathetic pathway because it gets atrophied. You're always stuck in this sympathetic nervous system response. And you overcompensate with tons of coffee or alcohol or you know, working out like a man, man. So we want to down-regulate and that takes some time. Then as you extend those box breathing sessions, that will allow you to exercise that focus and attention and concentration. Right. Exactly.
So when you're ready, you extend the box breathing session to 10, 20 minutes, then you turn it into attention control concentration training. You work on that for a while and to your mind, it's really, it's like sharpening that saw. You know, that's your one sword cut that we saw. Just sharpen that saw into your mind is really sharp, really focused, less distractable. You can hold your attention on
that box pattern without distraction for over 60, 70% of the time. Then you're ready to move on to the mind-flow awareness, which is like setting up shop as the witness and beginning to cultivate the process of separating from your thoughts. It may have already started happening because this, like I said earlier, will naturally open up as part of this practice. That's what happened to me with my Zen practice. Zen practice was really a concentration practice. I started at 21, four years
before I went in the seals. As my mind became more and more sharp and able to concentrate, then quite naturally that witnessing capacity began to open up. I can't explain exactly why, but I think that it's just decreasing the clutter, you know, like the concept of no mind or
you know, taming the ego or taming the monkey mind. It makes sense now because as you concentrate, your energy that one's thought stream, just focusing on the box pattern, all those other thoughts that are distracting you, that you thought were so important that you thought were you, they begin to settle down and you realize it, wow, you're still here, you're completely aware, but there's no thoughts in my field of awareness except for that pattern of breath. Then when you
drop that off, you're like, wow, I'm still here and I'm not even doing that. But then all of a sudden, you're like, wait, I'm thinking, there's a thought. But then you're like, wait, that thought is happening. It's not who I am. I'm this field of awareness. I am the ground of being which this thought is arising. It's a profound shift in your whole like mental makeup, which like I said,
is like a turning point in life. And then after that, you can do a visualization practice. And if you want to be hearing this and be like, visualization, it sounds pretty hokey, but you use this as a, you were a collegiate swimmer, right? And use this as a seal too. Visualization is a crucial skill. The body mind doesn't really differentiate between things you visualize and things you participate in or see. And so it's the only place where you can have perfect practice is in your mind's eye.
And it'll have a profound benefit. So it's good to visualize important physical activities, you know, sporting events, but we can also, if you're not involved in that, or even if you are, but it's important to note that visualization can also be used for this idea of becoming who you really meant to be. So many of us are living those lives a quiet desperation where we're trapped in these bodies where we're like, God, I wish night. I think I could be a lot healthier,
better looking, lose this weight, be stronger. Yes, you can. But you got to be able to see it first in your mind's eye. And it has to be the right things too, Brett. You can't be fantastical about it, right? You're not going to just visualize being Superman or Superman and have it happen. It's got to be right for you. I can see you doing a visualization practice for whenever you're in a
situation where your kids are just being crazy and they're just annoying you. And instead of doing your typical grumpy, annoyed, tense dad routine, you visualize yourself being like, okay, how do I want to be in that situation? Yes. Or it could be at work too when you're in a high intense negotiation where you're dealing with the difficult employee, visualize yourself like, how do I want to act in that situation? Right. And you do that like the morning ritual. We call that
winning in your mind before you step foot in the battle ground of your day. So you dirt dive the day. Dirt dive is a term we use in the seals to like we would mentally visualize and do all of our missions in our mind. And the dirt dive came from the diving missions. Like we would literally visualize it and walk the dive. You know, you're spending four hours underwater. You're not coming up and peaking and taking you know, bearings like your underwater. And so you got to know in your mind.
You're running, you're running the whole thing in your mind. Well, same thing. You can dirt dive your day like you're talking about. You see yourself being present and positive with your kids, not getting you know triggered and reactionary, not sitting on your phone, checking your email. You visualize yourself being there for them. Same thing with your important meetings and whatnot. And invariably those interactions go much smoother because your body mind has already set the
expectation that it's going to be a positive and productive situation. And the more you do that, then the more those become like the new normal. But you can also, Brett, visualize like this, like saying this future me, we call it the future self, sometimes future me, which is like a sometime in the future. It doesn't really matter. But it's like, it's like the ideal version
you resolve. Most people never tap into this, but it's the ideal version of yourself. You're perfect health, perfectly fit, radiating youthful vitality and completely 100% aligned with your purpose and calling why you kind of came through this, you know, to this plane to like to grow and to learn and to evolve. And your loved ones are healthy and thriving around you and whatever way you engage with the world, whatever your mission is, is radically successful. And you you evoke this
image and you add energy to it. So it's very similar. Like instead of dirt diving your day, you're dirt diving your life. Oh, so that's the second round, the mental part of yourself.
The third round is the emotional mountain. And what's interesting, I think some of the practice we've already talked about, the physicality and doing the box breathing and continue your mental game, you know, on track, that can go a long way in helping you climb this emotional mountain because as we've been talking about, our emotions are connected to our mind because sometimes the emotions we experience are because of the thoughts we have. We learn that from cognitive behavioral
therapy. And then also our bodies can cause our emotions to get out of wax. So just by exercising, regularly doing box breathing, doing this sort of things, they can go a long way to help regulate our emotions. But what are the practices do you recommend people doing so they get a handle on their emotions? So their emotions are, it's not about stifling emotions because emotions, it was what drives us. But how we can guide our emotions to take us to where we want to go.
Yes, that's great. So the emotions and intuition are just different aspects of the mind. But you know, I felt it's helpful to kind of like parse them out because there are different practices and there's different language around, especially the emotional mountain that you can benefit from, like the field of therapy and psychology. So in the mental mountain, physical mental mountain, we learn emotional control. And I think a lot of people think a lot of guys especially think,
oh yeah, I've developed that emotional control. I'm in control. And it's helpful to be in control. So you don't torpedo certain situations or look weak in the middle of a crisis and those things. And so that's great. It's a valuable skill. But it's part of it. It's kind of like the oak part. Remember I talked about the oak and the reed. You want to be strong in the face of a crisis. But you don't want to be unaware of emotional patterns that are actually harming the team or
harming you. And a lot of times when we'd stop at the physical and mental and we developed that emotional control, then we think we're squared away. And in fact, you're the one that's actually the limiting factor because of some sort of pattern. And it could be really overt or could be subtle. But the recurring pattern based upon some sort of childhood trauma or some traumatic event in your life. And it's unresolved. And at the time it happened, usually as an early childhood, these things
happen. You know, you didn't have the skillful means to be able to process that situation, the energy in a way that was led to forgiveness and to letting the energy flow. And so the energy gets trapped. And the mind will associate certain feelings to that as well as thoughts that get triggered when that emotional pattern gets triggered. So these thoughts and emotions are really closely aligned because they're born from the same energy. So for me, the emotional mountain
work is really about developing the capacity to go back in your history. We call it recapitulation. And to go back and to re-engage those situations that cause the pattern to begin with, to release that energy and to recontextualize it and to let go that you're holding onto, to forgive yourself and to forgive others. It takes a lot of courage. This is why, again, a lot of I kind of harp on men. You need to be doing this emotional work because otherwise,
you're limiting yourself. You get stuck. You can have great strides in your physical and mental. But then you get stuck because these patterns just keep coming back. It's like you're dragging a whole bag of hangar and eggs behind you and they just are spilling out. And so this is what my book steering down the wolf was. It's like you got to stare down the fear wolf and release all these negative patterns that you have. And it takes courage. But once you begin to experience the joy
and the release of letting go of some of that stuff, then it becomes very motivating. You're like, oh, this is just part of my development. This is the next step of my development. It doesn't mean I'm a bad person or I'm a weak person or I'm a I'm mushy for doing this emotional work. It's just, this is actually critical so that I can show up as a whole person. And I'm not the one that's the
limiting factor on the team. You know, oftentimes the leader is the one who lacks the trust and respect because they're trying to show up as the one who has the answers and is perfect or is in charge and and everyone knows that they're not perfect. They're not always in charge. They don't have all the answers. But when they see that the leader doesn't admit that to himself, then it shuts down the conversation. So yeah, in the book, you provide how to go through this recapitulation
practice. So you can sort of get out of that loop you're in journaling can be another tool in this. And I imagine if things are really bad, like therapy, I need to see a professional counselor to help you work yourself. Then look at a therapist as a coach, right? You have a fitness coach. Oftentimes you get a nutrition coach. You might even have a cognitive coach, like an executive coach who can help you think about your thinking and makes better decisions.
Why not have an emotional coach? And some of them are very good. Okay. The fourth mountain is the Intuitional mountain. Sure. A lot of listeners, typically, other listeners are mostly guys that go intuition. What the heck is that? How do you define intuition and what role did intuition play in your career as a seal? Extremely important role. Intuition for me is knowing something without knowing how or why you know it. There's several forms of it. First, we have that gut intuition. We now
know that your gut, your biome and the interagnerous system is part of your brain system. It has neurological processing. It's got neurons. And so you are actually communicating with your biome, with millions of bugs down there. And for some reason, they have access to information that your
brain doesn't and they're trying to communicate that to you. The reason intuition mountain is fourth and not third or second is it's generally not accessible to you if your body's out of shape and it's not healthy because your mind is captured at the outer level of the dis-ease imbalance. And it's generally not going to be accessible to you if your mind is racing around and completely distracted and you're constantly absorbed in distractions. TV, YouTube, email, text, this, that
and the other thing. Too busy, right? So you're not going to be able to tap your initials. So you got to train your mind to be less distractable and to do the things we talked about in the middle month. And it's not going to be accessible to you if you have all these emotional patterns that are
clacks on, screaming at you every day. So you got to do the emotional work to let go and bleed off and to release that emotional energy which is so loud, I guess, or the feeling sensations overwhelm any kind of the subtle feelings that you need to be able to feel into or experience from the intuitive mountain from your gut and from your heart. So by doing the work of the first three mountains, your intuitive side actually kind of naturally opens up. But then there's things
that we can do to facilitate the speed up that process. One is to trust your gut, so to speak, to trust your heart, to be able to listen carefully and quietly to the messages and then act on them to believe it, to not override it with your fear mind or your rational mind. Most people override it and then they don't trust it. In silence, back to our time and nature, everything we talked about has a spillover effect. Like the training we talked about in the first mountain,
all will affect all five mountains, as I mentioned. We have to just parse them out so that we are clear about what's happening and then we can accelerate the journey by adding some training. But time and nature and stillness really is probably the best thing for developing that intuitive insight. So you had the gut, the gut's instinctual intelligence really is about avoiding danger
or moving toward opportunities. It's very kind of basic level survival and it's experience more as like a tug or a feeling in your belly or anytime there's a danger, it's felt like a contraction or like I had an experience in the seals where I was walking up to a firing range to do some shooting and I felt the word stop. I felt it in my gut and it almost felt like a hand on my shoulder and I just stopped in my tracks and the incident I stopped, teammate of mine had an accidental
discharge behind me and the bullet like whizzed by me. I felt the wind of the bullet by my right air. If I had taken the next step, I would have gone in back in my head. So that was the guts intuition saying, you know, stop or else we're all going to die. Correct. It's intense. The second source of intuition is your heart. So the heart also has neurological processing capacity. It's got neurons. It's got an incredible range of experience.
Like the heart's energy can be experienced from across the room whereas the mind, the brain's energy is trapped behind the cranium and so it doesn't, you can't really feel the force of it outside. It doesn't project well except through the eyes. So the heart when you learn to open up and sit and rest with your heart and you know, really feel into the heart, that's the source of real empathy. Like what other human beings are feeling, even thinking and then also what you're
emitting, right? You get very sensitive to the fact that if you're all agitated and you're closed down then guess why? You're setting the conditions with those around you for them to be agitated and also to feel your close downness and so you're going to shut the conversation down. So you listen to that and you feel into that and you maintain an open heart and begin to really also sense what other people are feeling and how they're doing and so then you can attune
to that. You begin to take their perspective and ask better questions and maybe not push his heart or just really kind of be a better leader, a better person. So that's that heart intuition which is empathy, compassion, wisdom. Then the third intuition is really does come from the brain and it comes through a process of relaxing the mind to be opening up to what the yogi tradition calls direct perception, perceiving information or knowingness that is beyond knowledge.
So it's not content. It comes from this witnessing awareness that we talked about earlier where you suddenly just know something and you don't really have any reason to know it or understanding how you know it but you know it and that's profound. Like for me that's why I think sitting in silence and these practices are the most important thing but we shouldn't waste time not doing it because all of my good ideas come from that direct perception these days. That's where all the insight
come from. So that intuition I call insight seeing within. It's so very important again is so hidden from most people because they just don't trust it. They think it's woo but again you know you're dealing with such a limited range of perceptual capacity by training through training the mind, the emotions and your intuition you can open that aperture. So you begin to see and experience far more. You know we already know the brain takes in like vastly more information than it can
process or will is willing to process. Anything that is unusual or can't be categorized it literally just gets blocked or the gap just gets filled in. Most people wouldn't believe it but a lot of things that they see are just like painted in by the brain. It's not really there. The Apache Scouts knew this in there in the way they would scout and track you know like they would
literally they call the hiding and plane site. They knew where to stand because they knew that the Western mind the way it was trained would look at that take that information in and if they were standing up to the tree they would just see the tree or if they're standing looking like a rock they would just see a rock but they're actually looking at a human being but the mind just says no
that it's not a human being is rock and so it paints a rock there. So that's incredible. So through this training and development process you can open up your aperture so you're taking in and perceiving more information and when you do that suddenly you're like oh I get it now this is real this is real I bet. I had teammates in my self-wood profound experiences in the military and the seals all of it in the realm of intuition like intuiting where IEDs were going to be planted or
going off and being right about it most of the time. Intuiting you know whether you're going to be safe or not I have a Master Chief Friend who is at most effort reef which they're trying to rescue the CA guy named Nikki Spain and he was with a special forces team and they were pinned down and
this guy just had this intuitive hit that it was his time he needed to get up and you know basically take care of this himself so here's the seal just like gets up in the midst of this firefight and starts navigating and just taking out the enemy left and right and and Lily fights his
way into the compound like destroys the enemy and he describes the experience as this incredible intuitive moment where time slowed down and he could just see literally see the bullets leaving the muscles of the rifles you can navigate around them he could see which targets where the one's
right wants to take out and everything happened in this super slow motion and that was all because he had developed this incredible intuitive capacity to be able to perceive in this manner because you know the mind is really it creates the construct of time and space the body experience space
and mind experience time so as you develop these skills and open up the aperture of your mind then you have a different relationship time and space so that's really what the intuitive mountain is all about is like getting yourself to where your whole experience of life is much more
ephemeral you really start to move beyond just like hard physical materialism to like you start to experience the metaphysical and the psychic realms and you have these experiences that are just profound and you see that you know it's always been that way you just kind of hit it from
yourself okay to climb that intuition mountain continue your meditative practices the other important thing I got from there make time for silence you know the constantly be consuming new information just let yourself work with the stuff you already got and then when you have one
of those intuitive moments act on it act on trust it trust it let's start at the final mountain was the spiritual mountain I like how you talked about this Japanese idea what about your how you say icky guy yeah tell us about eke guy how are they can help us climb the spiritual mountain of
our lives you know it's a profound idea I've been teaching for years that you can uncover your purpose you know I talked about it as a calling earlier but it's inside it's like part of that heart intuition it's the primal urge that brought you into this into this place it's not about
a job or a career it's about this archetypal energy so for me it was warrior now teacher warrior leader and teacher kind of the dominant archetypal energies which are my purpose my purpose is here to fulfill that energy and to learn and grow so everyone has that so we want to do these practices
to be able to sit in silence be able to allow that to be revealed to us that's still quiet voice that you're like oh yeah that's it but then of course it's not enough like our world needs us our team our family needs us so I'm not advocating that people become all like foo foo
spiritual and then suddenly become really a luke away from the world or apart from the world or go to an ashram or it's in monastery I mean there's select few who maybe that's right for but no for most of us like we need to be engaged in the world so this is all about showing up as a whole
person whole mind not split mind and to be able to show up in a way that is like in complete alignment like that future vision self I described it's in complete alignment with your calling your hair is on fire because you're doing what you're passionate about you're in alignment with
your principles but then the question is okay so if I know all that what am I going to do about it what's my mission that's where you could guy comes in because the model says okay given all that stuff I just talked about you know why you're on this planet you know what you're passionate about
you know what your principles are now what does the world need and how do your skills align with what the world needs great that's another layer to think about and reflect on in journal and then what can you get paid for right because you know we a lot of people struggle with this when they're
trying to work through transformation like yeah but I'm really passionate about you know gardening and being outside and everything but out you know there's no career there or I'm I'm walking away from banking I don't know how I could do that and so you could guy kind of helps us with a model
to like really align our calling with meaningful work in the world in service the whole idea of like for me spirituality the spiritual mind is not about religion or dogma again it's about getting the mind to do a phase shift away from just you know thinking with the ego mergers their thoughts to
suddenly being oh I see that I'm actually spirit having a human existence so the spiritual mountain for us is to kind of deeply embody that idea of I'm spirit having this human existence and making sure that the reason you came out of this planet you're fulfilling you're embodying it you're
fulfilling it you're not accruing anymore negative karma you're getting the lessons that you need and in order to get the lessons that you need you need to be doing what you're meant to do or else you're going to miss the bow that was the whole purpose of the bog of agitas and the story
of Arjuna and Krishna Arjuna was a warrior but he didn't want to go fight his brothers and his cousins who were in the opposing force who were claiming the kingdom and he was having a moment like I don't yet want to fight and you know most people in our society will say well he's evolved right he's
practicing a hymnsa or a piece but Krishna who is his chariotere who represented God you know had a little slapdown with him and said listen Arjuna you have to fight because that's your Dharma that's why you came into this world and if you don't do it then you're going to accrue negative karma and
you're going to bring great suffering to yourself and you'll have to come back and repeat this whole thing so that fifth mountain spiritual mountain is all about living a life on purpose in service in a way that only you are meant to do on this planet and so the practice for this is just taking time to actually think about those things I think that's hard for a lot of guys they're just so busy with life work family they don't make time for that well sit sit with them is probably best and then
think about it yeah if you're just thinking then you're using the wrong side of your brain the wrong faculty it's okay to do some thinking and let me start there you know with like what is my architect and there's like the anagram any a gram and you know Jungian architect she can start
looking at those you can look at the arc of your life and be like oh yeah you know like in my early 20s I was getting my MBA CPA working as a you know in public accounting finance but while I was sitting on the on that meditation bench on the Zen bench you know after a year or so of
training I started to keep get these feelings these sensations these intuitive hits that I was meant to be a warrior and so so that created this disconnect now with that information I could start contemplating like oh that's interesting if I'm meant to be a warrior why am I in finance
that's not a warriorly path and so you start to ask better questions but it wouldn't have happened if I had just started thinking because I'd be wrapped up in kudashtar woodas and judgment you know what people are gonna think if I do something different I don't know what to do it's different so
I think sitting in silence and allowing the developing the capacity to be still still of your thoughts still of your emotions to be able to feel those intuitive messages of your of your gut in your heart especially in this case but you can't be quiet if you don't have the
physical mental emotional and intuitive skills to be able to like sit in quiet and and be able listen to the messages that tell you oh this is my calling and what will be revealed to you is this sense of how you're supposed to show up in the world so everything we've talked about really
like the it's hard to say like there are practices like we have a practice in the spiritual mountain around like visualizing yourself at the end of your life writing your own epitaph from the perspective of a best friend you know looking back at your life as if you're at the end and saying
well how did I live how did I do and it could be very revealing stuff like that also visualizing your future self which I talked about first that starts out kind of as a imagination but eventually you start getting information again from your subconscious or from your intuitive realm that
starts to fill in some holes and gaps and it's just being a shift so those are great practices and then that that metacognition and contemplation about like where you think you need and want to be and what you're supposed to be doing based upon your growing clarity of your purpose and principles
and passions versus kind of what you're doing right now and how you've lived in the past and that that can lead to some great insights well mark this has been a great conversation working people go to learn more about the book and your work the website readoncommon.com will still have
I guess some cool bonuses you got some discounts on gear and supplements as well as a real cool journal and and also I'm going to do a group training for folks who order from that site so it's readoncommon.com people can find find me at my website markdivine.com or email me at info
at markdivine.com and social media at real mark divine last name is about DIVI any thanks so much breath for doing this this is really enjoyable thank you thanks mark has been a pleasure my guest there's mark divine he's the author of the book uncommon it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you find morphmage about his work at his website markdivine.com also check
at our shunuts at a whim. is slash five mountains we find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the a whim podcast make sure check out our website at artofmanless.com refinder podcast archives and while you're there sign up for a newsletter
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