Mark Divine | Positive Neurodiversity: Kokoro Spirit & The 5 Mountains | Wellness Force #Podcast

If you're not training yourself, the world's training you. And let's just look at the results, right? When you do nothing and the world trains you with all this negative and, you know, negativism and consumerism and, you know, whatever you tap into, then how's that going for you? But when you take responsibility for training yourself, right, and you train yourself physically and mentally and emotionally, and you're making steady progress day in and day out, then. Then you can ask yourself after six months, how's that going for you compared to when I was not training myself? And guess you're going to be a completely different person. We call that transformation.

Mark, welcome back to Wellness Force. It's been five years. Thank you for being here.

Wow, I can't believe it's been that long. Josh, so great to see you.

It's a trip. Five years ago, my 37th birthday. I'm 41. I just had my son. He's. His name is Nova. Congratulations.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. And so now I'm like, okay, I'm looking back on this timeline, Mark, you. I didn't know you before 2015. Sky and Tamara, when they were married. Christopson and the Quantified self movement and, you know, Finding Gold, I believe was the movie, right? Or the Olympic movie. And I. And I learned about your coaching, and I learned about the five mountains, and I learned about your work, and I mean, I was hooked right away. So I just want to say thank you. You have been a massive part of. Of me being a solid father, me conquering my own five mountains and millions of people across the world, man. So huge gratitude for you to start the show.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

You're welcome.

You did the work, though.

I did the work. And I'll link this in the show notes so we all can look at this. And by the way, if you're feeling inspired from what Mark shares, go and do one of these events. They will literally change your life. Literally, figuratively, mentally, spiritually, emotionally. Mark, this. This goal that you have, we were talking about before we hit the record button. 100 million people to be really the most optimized version, the most loving version, the most present version in the world. Just tell people if they don't know anything about you, maybe they're like, literally just seeing you right now on Wellness Force.

Who are you?

In a couple sentences.

Oh, boy.

I know. That's a nice pigeonhole. Put you put your back against the wall.

Wait, how many words have I already?

A paragraph. A paragraph.

Yeah.

If people have never heard of you.

The super short version.

Yeah.

Retired Navy SEALs, Zen Master, lifetime martial artist and yoga instructor who innovated a program to teach Navy SEALs how to be more world centric, caring, compassionate and survivable in their job. That led to thousands and thousands of professionals and corporate teams leveraging the same training, which had a profound effect on the seals. And it's being taught now with the seals. And it's built upon how I train myself starting from the early 20s, but now, through my own innovation, continue to train myself. And what has now become the world's first integrated development program that unlocks massive potential, allows an individual operated at both optimal and peak performance, radically deepens connection at a human heart level, and helps an individual unlock or uncover their purpose in life and to create a mission around it so they can make an impact in the world.

That's a nice.

My mission is to teach this, to bring this way of unbeatable, this way of tapping into your full potential and service to mankind to 100 million people by 2045. Right, that's. That might be at the low end. Yeah.

No, I mean, I've always felt, ever since day one when I met you, and then going through your programs personally, there is a experience that you have that not too many people have. And I remember it was five years ago, I don't even look at notes, I just remember it so boldly. I was like, Mark, at the end of the show in 20, 2016, 2017, I was like, how do you, how do we integr all this stuff? And you're like, well, you have to actually go through it and you have to have experiential learning, you have to have experience. And so many people, Mark, are trying to find the shortcut. What are the five things? You know, you could look at the five mountains, but in order for you to have experiential wisdom to embody the virtues of the five mountains, it's a totally different scenario. And you yourself have been through your own mountains in the past four years. You know, since we talked like your business and your pivots, like 2017 to now. What's one of the most challenging, yet also one of the most fruitful events that have occurred for you in either business or self mastery or health.

Gosh, you know, there have been so many. And once you set yourself in on a accelerated developmental path, because that's essentially what the five mountain path is or five mountain training, that we take responsibility for developing ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, intuitionally and spiritually and as you know, I use the term kokoro, which is a Japanese warrior term that means whole mind or merge your heart and mind into your actions. So instead of spirituality, I use that term, even though I kind of often drop spirituality in there. Once you begin to train yourself this way and you make it as important as eating and sleeping in your life, then it unlocks this accelerated growth. We call it vertical growth. So as opposed to learning a skill from the level of awareness that you're at, which you'll get better at doing that skill, what we're doing is evolving our level of awareness so that whatever skills you have and you gain, you're actually performing them from a higher level of awareness, which means you have greater perspective, you have greater care and concern for larger and larger sphere of people. Ultimately that ends up being absolute care and concern and inclusion of all sentient beings on this planet and beyond. But let's just say for this planet that we're seeking to develop people to the world centric care and concern level, where all of our actions are taken and our decisions are made in the context that what's good for me must be good for humanity. So this affects everything that we do, affects our business missions, it affects our family, affects the food that we eat and buy and the organizations that we support. And it's not a tactic, it flows genuinely from your heart because that's where the development, the vertical development leads you to higher and higher stages of consciousness and awareness, ultimately to the highest that is accessible to you in this lifetime. So anyways, back to your question. So in 2016, September 2016, I had an individual who, who threw, literally threw his heart into the Kokoro event. And Kokoro, you've alluded to events that we run. One of the types of events we run are called crucibles and this is through my company, sealfit. Crucibles are really intense, extended duration physical, mental, emotional team training events. So we have a 12 hour, we have a 24 hour, and we have a 50 hour event. They were modeled loosely after the SEAL Fit or the Navy SEAL Hell Week, which as many listeners know, Hell Week is the infamous, you know, week long of training that the seals do. And in their basic underwater demolition SEAL training school, where we essentially train for six days straight around the clock with no sleep. And it's an extraordinary experience because when you get done with that event, life is just different, right? There's, there's very little that can hurt you. There's very little that you're afraid of. There's Very little, you know, that's going to keep you from accomplishing, you know, what's in front of you. So the, the 50 hour Kokoro camp is like that. Well, I had an individual named Kirk, an amazing guy who had been, you know, plant training to do this. He had a fitness community called Metal Forger. He had, you know, he was working toward this. He had a lot of support for it. This is like a life goal for him. This is his. One of his major bucket list items. You know, the Kokoro thing, Josh, as you probably are aware, it is. It is a big deal, right? It's a big deal. It's not for the faint of heart. I mean, you've got to train your ass off for this thing, sometimes for nine months to 18 months, sometimes longer. And you know, generally speaking, less than half the people who try it complete it. Well, Kirk died the moment we finished the camp. He had a massive heart attack, literally. He. He waited, his spirit helped, kept him alive until the moment, literally the second that I said, congratulations. Kokoro Camp 45, you are secured. Hoo yah. He fell over dead, God bless him. And we shouldn't. Nothing we could do to revive the poor guy. Well, that was traumatic for me, you know, like, who the heck would want anything like that? And of course, it's not about me. It's about his family and Kirk. And you know, we went through this really torturous period where I, like, I really questioned whether I would continue to do this event. You know, I really thought maybe I should end it. Maybe I'm not supposed to do it. I've never told this story before on a podcast, but I had another event scheduled down in Mexico the following week. It was a. Another program that I run called Kokoro Yoga, which is kind of approaching the five mountains from the exact opposite in the spectrum where a seal fit. Crucibles are extreme physical, mental. Kokoro yoga is extreme spiritual and intuition. And as part of that, one of my head instructors, actually my stepdaughter Catherine, had arranged for any of the clients to go see a shaman. And of course I was like, I definitely want to do that. You know, I'm up for all these experiences. So I saw this shaman and he had an interpreter. And as soon as, you know, the shamans just started like putting his hands around me, gathering information, whatever shamans do. And as soon as he got done with about a minute of that, the interpreter, he looked at the interpreter and said something. The interpreter looked at me and said, you have some questions? To ask. And at the time, I wasn't thinking I had any questions, but as soon as he said that, a question popped into my mind, and I said, yes, I do. He said, should I keep doing. No, I, I. The first question was, was it my fault? Right? Because I, I had guilt associated with that. Like, I had done something by creating this program, by leading the program, and I was there at the last event, you know, and I, you know, perhaps I could have noticed something going on with Kirk. You know, I should have stopped it, but I didn't, I didn't see anything. Right. I wasn't aware that he was dying, but I had a lot of guilt associated with it. So I said, was it my fault? And as soon as I asked the question, the shaman turned to the interpreter, and then the interpreter turned to me and she said, you know, Don Jose or whatever his name was, says that Kirk is here. Like, I never said anything about Kirk, but he says Kirk is here. And he says that from his perspective, you are a great man, and it was certainly not your fault. Wow. I know, right? And then the second question popped in my head, and it was, should I continue to do the events? And he immediately answered and said, if you don't do it, someone else will, and other people might get. Someone else might get hurt or something like that. I don't know what the exact implication was about the following, but basically said, if you don't do it, someone else will. And so I decided then and there to continue to run it, you know, but I really upped our standards in terms of all the medical procedures and, you know, the prerequisites and really, you know, heart checks before people come to the events. And we've never had another incident since, but it was profound. And of course, then, you know, two years, the day, you know, we had to deal with a lawsuit, and, you know, all that we don't have to talk about, but it was an enormously powerful growth experience for me because, you know, I had to deal with the surfacing of a lot of emotions, you know, starting with the guilt, starting with the feelings. You know, a lot of the, the childhood trauma that I went through started to, you know, really accelerate coming out. And I. And so it really hearkened in kind of a final phase of my emotional mountain development. And I've done a lot of work in the emotional mountain over the years to include therapy and EMDR and things like the Hoffman process, But this really, really ushered in kind of like the capstone period of, like, let's clear all of this stuff up finally, you know, anything that stemmed from my family of origin, which had a lot of abuse and alcohol issues, you know, surrounding it, that, of course, affected me. It's extraordinary.

Wow.

And to this day, you know, I'm very proud of the. The events. I had to completely retool our staff. Like all the staff that I had, you know, are no longer with me, you know, from that era.

Is it because they themselves went through the trauma of what occurred as well?

Partly, yeah. You know, and there was a lot of, like, people second guessing each other and. And a lot of people thought, you know, some of my coaches just thought that either I would quit doing the events or the company was going to fail. Right. That, you know, they were just. They were just independent contractors and they had big egos. And so there was, you know, the fallout was just kind of like that. And then one of them started recruiting a few others to joined his business, which was a direct competitor with me, and they were starting to steal my clients. And I was like, okay, you know, you guys are all gone, we're all gone. And I completely rebuilt the staff, retooled everything. So, of course, you know, there was more than just this incident that I had to deal with. And then Covid hits and all of our events get shut down again. Yeah. So I think a lot of listeners and yourself included, probably have just been through an extraordinary time in the last 18 to 24 months. And now that we're on, or we hopefully are on the other side of that, we can look back and we can see the good. Right. And that's one of. One of my big lessons is, like, especially with all the emotional shadow work, I look back and I don't play the victim to anything. Like, I am super excited, not excited, but I'm really grateful for my parents and their dysfunction because it led to some enormous benefits in my life. And I can see. I can see why it happened. And. And if you believe in the spiritual precept, the eastern concept that you choose your parents, you know, to. To kind of kickstart your karmic journey in this life, then I have full responsibility.

Do you believe that?

I do. Absolutely. I do. So I take full responsibility for entering into that, you know, family dynamic for whatever needs. It made me one hell of a Navy seal. There was nothing that the SEAL instructors could do to hurt me that, you know, my father couldn't do 20 times worse. You know, I think you find a lot of traumatized children in the military or spec ops because they thrive in that environment. Right. They're very, very good at what they do, at controlling their emotions and not feeling, you know, the pain as much as other human beings feel pain, you know, so that's one of the reasons that, you know, I think I chose those parents that, you know, that set of parents, man, I got a hell.

Of a. I got to pump the brakes because you gave us so much. I just want to say thank you for sharing that story I had heard. I didn't know the details, so just huge honor to you and huge honor to Kirk and huge honor to what he represents. And how interesting is it that your fifth mountain, this kokoro, and we're going to talk about the five mountains. Obviously the fifth mountain is this indomitable spirit. It's this unconquerable spirit.

Right.

And how, how is it such a metaphor for you, Mark, that your entire life and business is built on this fifth mountain and in the public spotlight, you have to go through your own fifth mountain?

That's right.

I mean, it's surreal.

It's. It is surreal. And it's one of the things that I try really, really hard in my life to do is that I eat my own dog food. I, I am a student of my own training model and system. And there is no there, there, there's no guru status that anybody is ever going to have in my system, including me. We are all humans working our asses off and taking responsibility for evolving ourselves and, and serving others. And so of course I'm going to have work to do and of course it's going to be played out at a painful and public level because, you know, that's where I'm at. Right. The, the more evolved you get, the more acute the lessons become, but also the more adept you are at handling them. So I'm very grateful for Kirk. You know, he's. He was one of my most profound teachers and I've had some profound teachers, but, you know, he's probably, he's right.

Up there with that shaman that Catherine took you to. Was that shaman like a medicine shaman or was it more of just a. Like a spiritual mentor to people?

I think he was both. He was a healer, but, you know, he was trained as a shaman. So he wasn't a hack by any stretch of the imagination. You know, he had a lifelong of training from a very young age. So, you know, the shaman, the shamanistic traditions is, you know, they're just basically familiar and can navigate the non physical, whereas most people are unfamiliar and disconnected and often don't even Believe in the non physical. Sure. And so from, from the non physical perspective, death is just a transition, you know, from this one form of physical matter, life, material life, to a non physical life, which is really our birthright and the eternal state. And, and so from that perspective, Kirk is either still there hanging out and learning or he's decided to come back and take another go at it. And that's, you know, I think there's enough evidence now even in the Western scientific and medical communities through near death experiences as astral travel, remote viewing, you know, et cetera, et cetera, that you can almost put a, a button in that and say that's truth. Now, like I, I think there's starting to be. Again, most people would be like, that's not, you know, you can't say that, Mark. But it's only because they haven't studied the literature. Yeah, right. They haven't seen the thousands and thousands and thousands of case studies are run. People who describe the exact same experience in near death experiences where they literally go to the heavenly realm, they have conversations with peop, with an individual or two or more and they, they learn. Okay, yeah, this is, this is what it's all about. But it's not, not your time or they give them a choice and then, you know, they go back. It's fascinating.

The remote view has been used by the military for a long time, for decades. Remote viewing, there's multiple documentaries. You can just do a quick Google search. You have always struck me as a man who's spiritual. Yet this fourth mountain of awareness and intuition, is that the spiritual aspect or is it really like the, the Mountain four and the Mountain five? Because in your world, in the world of professional development and corporates and really like a meritocracy where, you know, things are built on the, the fruit that one yields. Having conversations about spirituality, remote viewing these kind of esoteric concepts can be pretty challenging. Like how do you walk that razor's edge?

I don't have conversations exactly like this one. Let's put it that way. Yeah, not talking about ayahuasca and shamans with my tribe, my clients. I find it fascinating personally, but when it comes to the five mountains and my corporate clients, the fourth mountain, intuition really is the result of the integration of your, your whole mind. So most people live out of their brain and they conflate your brain, the brain's activity to mind activity, you know, and there's a large body of thought that says in neuroscience that says essentially mind is the mind and awareness comes from the, you Know complexity and pattern recognition of brain activity of neurons firing and memory is the connection of different neural patterns firing. This is not accurate in my view. In my opinion, mind exists independent of the brain, but needs the workings of the brain to make meaning in this physical world. It doesn't need it in the non physical. But even then, just thinking of the brain in your head as your brain, as your whole brain is, is also incomplete because your heart is part of your brain system. And we know that the heart has hundreds of millions of neurons and neurotransmitters and your biome and your gut and the enteric nervous system is part of your brain. And there's three or 400 neurons and neurotransmitters down there. And I would submit that your entire body actually is. And also the field of energy around your body, the etheric field, is also part of your mind system. So your brain is your body. And your mind uses the body brain as well as the energy around it to interact and make meaning with the, you know, with the material world. So the training of unbeatable mind is really powerful because when we train ourselves physically, mentally and emotionally, what we're doing is we're working to connect and integrate all those physical aspects of the mind, the brain, the body, you know, the brain brain, the head brain, the heart brain, the belly brain, and the body brain. And then we're also working simultaneously to expand our knowing is our perception, so that we begin to experience mind independent of the body as well. Now that's the first three mountains. And there's very concrete things that we do on our training plan that are daily, weekly, you know, monthly, quarterly, annually, that can begin to integrate and accelerate this experience that I'm describing. Now, the fourth mountain, intuition, as best as I can describe it, is the intelligence that accrues as this integration occurs. Because suddenly you're able to perceive and understand the messages coming from your heart brain and your biome brain and your body brain. And also what we call transrational knowledge, which is information that comes from outside of you altogether. That kind of like knowing something without knowing how or why you know something.

Is that something pulled from the quantum or the collective consciousness?

Is that what you mean? Both. It could be collective consciousness. It could be from another human being, right. That you're in contact with. Like that's the remote viewing kind of human to human remote viewing.

Almost like quantum entanglement where somebody calls you, you were thinking about them at the same time.

Totally, yeah. So that, that kind of gut feeling that something's going to happen. That's intuition, feeling into the energy of a room, you know, or the energy of another human being through your heart. That's, you know, another form of intuition, getting imagery, you know, so this is a powerful one that works with both remote viewing, but also for future template work where you're in unbuild mind. We have a process where we take people through a meditative practice into a deep state of that whole mind awareness where they're outside of their brain mind, but they're still able to use the imaging faculty of the brain in order to perceive a future that they desire or which you could also say is their birthright, like the future. Josh Trent, you know, as a fully evolved, enlightened human being, completely in alignment with your purpose and your mission in life and executing it at a huge level in 20 years, right? So you go into and you envision that first it's like imagination and then it starts to solidify into an actual image that the more you connect with that, the more you bring it back into your consciousness or, and, or practice it, the more certain it becomes. And I believe it's essentially like a memory. Like the more you think back to a traumatic memory, the more solid it gets and the more you kind of get stuck around that. That's why like talk therapy can actually be damaging if you're not trying to do something with that memory. And so what we're doing is we're creating a memory of a possible future and turning it into a probable future, which creates like a gravitational pull toward it. So that's the intuitional mountain. We work with the whole mind to be able to perceive and receive information from, from the whole mind and from the whole, from the body mind. And then the fifth mountain, Kokoro, as you aptly said, it's like warrior spirit, non quitting spirit and domino spirit. But also it means whole mind and also means merge heart, mind in action. So it really depends upon how you want to translate the word itself. But for us it means living in integration, living from that future purpose now and living your whole self from the whole mind, right? And so it's, it's like, it's like, it's like practicing now as a master or pretending to be a master now. You know, like one of the really cool features of Zodge and Tibetan Buddhism is as you set up your meditation practice, you assume the position or the posture, the mental posture of a master. You fake it till you make it. It's pretty cool.

Do you believe it till you see It. I mean, which one is it?

The better way to say it? Yeah, I love that you believe it until you see it, or you. Till you become it. Because the idea here is that we're perfect already. We are already enlightened. We just don't recognize it. Right? We are already our most healthy version of ourself. We just. We just don't recognize it. We don't believe it yet. So in a sense, even with health and, and, and weight issues and et cetera, et cetera, everyone is their optimal self. They just don't believe it. You know, they haven't, haven't quite gotten there yet. They're still dealing with trust issues and shame issues and whatever, you know, insert your issue, which is holding you back from believing that you are your ideal weight, you are your ideal size, you are your ideal body, and you're perfect the way you are. And so Kokoro is to live from the position of the master as if that is who you are now, because it is. And to be doing what you're supposed to be doing in this planet, even if that will change as you grow in the future, you're doing the best version of it that you can now. And my life is a great example that, you know, for. The version of it in 2005 was me running a nationwide mentoring program for SEAL candidates. The version in 2007 or 8 was running, building and running seal fit so I could teach Spec Ops candidates what I really wanted to teach them. Not on a, you know, not what the government would allow me to teach them. And the version that arose in 2011 was to bring this and more evolved version of this training of five months into professionals and leaders and corporate teams. And then the version that's evolving now, right, is a global mission of training and inspiring thousands of other certified, unbeatable mind coaches who can bring this to a hundred million people.

I love so much the mountains because I went through a training called Mitt in 2014, mastery and transformational training. They talked about this method of being called be do have, but most people flip it backwards. And you alluded to this when the masters sit down for meditation. So if I'm having a million dollars, what am I doing to get those million dollars? Well, actually, the most important question is who am I being? You know, how am I showing up today with you, Mark? Am I attentive? Am I listening? Or am I just waiting till you stop talking so I can chime in? Which is what a lot of conversations in this world fucking seem like, where we're never really listening to each other, where I was trying to usurp each other. It's almost like what. What Moore and Gillette talk about as the high chair tyrant. You know, it's like, I want to get mine, you get yours, and then we'll get see where all the chips lie. And I feel like what you've presented to us here, and especially with your work in Five Mountains, if y' all haven't gotten Unbeatable Mind yet, this is the book right here you're watching on YouTube. This book I read after I met you in 2016 in person, I met Dan Brulee. That took me on a huge path in my life where I studied the art of breath. I went to Thailand for a month.

Good for you.

And did breathwork training in Koh Phanyan. And then about a year and a half ago, we put out our Breathe Breath and wellness program. I credit you in the program. I learned box breathing from you at the Unbeatable Mind event, which is so cool. And I think about the ways that we all show up. I bring it back to the be do have model. If someone is listening and they're like, wow, I really like what Mark is saying. This fundamentals of the five mountains and even the framework of the be do and have the starting place for everyone is the physical. The physical is really the crucible that we all get to experience. I'm carrying some extra weight. I had a. A son recently. I'm under slept. So, you know, you guys understand time to rebalance. So my question to you with, with that, you know, pre frame is the things that you've seen in students for now close to 20 plus years or more. Is there a common thread when it comes to the the same challenges that we all face? Let's talk specifically about men, the masculine, and then we can go to the feminine. What are some of the core challenges that we all face when it comes to the physical preparation? That first mountain where some of the excuses you always hear and what's the rationalization behind that?

Yeah, well, I think it's the biggest challenge we face is it's really the opposite of what I'm trying to do with unbeatable mind. In terms of, you know, with unbeatable mind, I say here are the five mountains. We're going to train yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, intuition, spiritually, as if those were five different or separate things so that we can reintegrate them to become one. Well, the problem is they aren't five separate things, but we've been taught in our society that they are separate and distinct. And so when it comes to physical training, the biggest challenge people have is first, mental, mental discipline, the mental focus, the mental staying power, right? The desire, the motivation, you know, on down the list, the knowing what to do, the lack of knowledge, the lack of awareness of how important it is. You know, on that last point, you know, you'll see a lot of people get into development and they want to jump right from zero to hero and go right into, you know, I'm going to do mindfulness, right?

Yeah.

Well, you can't sit and do mindfulness if your body's all out of whack. Your body, your body won't allow you to. Your brain won't allow you to. This is why so many people fail. You've got to start with the body to get the body in balance and. Which gets the brain imbalance and calms the brain down. That's just physical development and box breathing, which is a physical practice. And then the second challenge, closely related, the first is the emotional mountain, right? So you start your physical training and maybe it's all going well, and maybe you get a coach and, you know, you go get a CrossFit certification, you're all good, but suddenly, three months in, you know, you. You are on an ego trip and you're trying to, you know, beat someone doing Olympic lists that you have no right to be doing, and you. You severely injure yourself. And that was all emotion, right? That was the inability to control, you know, an urge to be better or just prove you're perfect or, you know, to. To slap someone else down, put them in their place. You know, this is all stuff that is ingrained in us but is all negative in our society, right? That's just one example. There could be a host of other examples of how some emotional, subconscious pattern or conditioning will trip the individual up and take them off the path of physical development. So it's impossible to separate physical training from mental training and emotional training. However. However, we can begin with the physical training because as you aptly put it, this is where we always start because we got to get the body into balance. It's similar to the eight limbs. You're familiar with the eight limbs of yoga and Patanjali's yoga sutras. You know, the first two limbs essentially are the do's and the don'ts, or ethical principles, right? And. And just. And disciplines have been individual that have nothing to do with yoga that we think of yoga, then the third limb, and these are meant to be like, get that right first, right. Because one of them is like purity, balance, restraint, you know, like don't overeat, don't over drink, you know, discipline they call the tapas. So yeah, you got to develop all those in order to have a physical practice. But the third limb is the asana, the physical practice. This is what most people in America think is yoga. Just the stretchy, Benji twisty sweaty stuff that was just a third of the eight limbs. The fourth limb then is breath work. The fifth is concentration. The six is meditation. The seventh or I miss. Oh the seventh, whatever fifth six is sensory deprivation and then meditation and then, and then you have, you know, samadhi or the integration experience, the union experience, the non dual experience which is a practice in and of itself. So same thing with us and with my belief system is that we've got to train the physical but it doesn't mean that we don't simultaneously train the mental and emotional. This is why that we are big on team training. Right. One of the best ways to train the first few layers of emotional development is to train with a team and to have a coach. So that's what Seal fit and unveil mind does. And so when you have a team and a coach, you have accountability issues, you are forced to show up and put out, right? You're going to get called out, right. If you do something stupid, if you lead with your ego or if you put someone down or if you know, you do the shadow stuff, it spills out. When you train together and you're going to get called out on that and you're going to be made aware of it and then you get to work on it and your coach can help you or something. You take to your therapist and you're going to be taught to put your teammates interests in front of your own. Right? Which is probably the, the very first and most pronounced shift in awareness that has an emotional anchor to it is like this isn't just about us. And you know, we're taught as Westerners to have that staunch individualism or go it alone, lone ranger attitude. It's we have to move from the ego to the ethnocentric to get to the world centric, you know, stage of development. Ethocentrism is practiced by really putting the needs of your team in front of yours. Most people are comfortable with this with their family, but they're not comfortable when it comes to a team. They enter a team with a competitive mindset and what we teach others in our folks is and through it's Both training as well as working together is that you put your teammates in front of you. First comes the mission, second comes your teammates in the team, and then third is you. However, in order for you to put them first, you've got to take care of yourself. So it's a really, it's, it's kind of uncanny. So self leadership, leading the team and being led by the team are all the skills that need to come together into how you show up. And that requires a lot of emotional.

Maturity and emotional intelligence. And Mark, I gotta chime in here because, gosh, there's such a paradox you're talking about. If somebody was, let's say, born in a situation where it was like a broken home, or the parental example was not modeling physical, emotional, spiritual, or even financial health, that gets encoded much like a cattle gets branded into the subconscious. And so that's where you talk about in your work. The emotional baggage that we carry. If the body is a subconscious mind, if I'm carrying extra weight in my body, it's just a clear representation of whatever my subconscious is struggling with, trying to get my attention with.

So.

So for people that come into these situations where they're maybe it's their first time training on a team and their, their shit's coming up, it's like, hey, they're leading from the ego. They're not really there for their teammates. How do you coach them in a way to first make them aware of that way of being? And then how do you transition them to having it be more of a we instead of an I?

Well, this is why it's important to have other skilled teammates, you know, who are a little bit further along the path, and then a coach who is also operating from the higher perspective and walking the talk because the feedback is not withheld, but the way it's delivered is really unique. And it's delivered in a way that the individual who's delivering the feedback is really taking responsibility for how that feedback lands. And it must not cannot land as in a negative way whatsoever, in a way that's going to put the individual down or make them feel less than or make them feel scolded or whatever. Now the first time or the second time, the individual may project onto that, right, that they're being put down. But then, you know, again, the skilled coach can quickly see and experience that projection and be able to flip that and say, no, that's actually. This is not what I'm saying. This is not what we're dealing with here. You know, this is very similar to how the Navy seals and other great special operators groups handle emotional and growing awareness of mission success. Or, you know, the. What's going to lead to mission success is the debrief process that happens after every training mission and every real world mission. And every individual has to recount what went well and what didn't go well from their perspective, both from what they did, their actions as well as if they saw anything, another one in anyone else that was either outstanding and would lead to growing capabilities in the team or something that was dangerous or, you know, could reduce the capabilities of the team. And these debriefs could take an hour or two sometimes or more or longer. And. But it was always delivered just very, very matter of factly and not about the person. It was never about the person. It was about the learning. And so new people, you know, it took them a few times to get used to this, but then once they got used to that, they really started to be very receptive and eager for the feedback because they recognize that this was for the best of the team and that the teammates wanted the best of them, wanted them to be their best. That's why they were giving that, that specific feedback. Now it can get painful if the individual receiving the feedback receives the same feedback two, three or more times and doesn't take action on it. You know what I mean? So if this, if the feedback was very specific and, you know, like I said, they just, they just ignore it or they don't do anything to rectify it, that's when there's a more serious discussion that's had. And oftentimes the individual will be asked to leave the team because he's not taking it seriously.

And that can be fractaled out into literally any phase of life. Because I have hired and fired people as contractors for the business. And sometimes I'm like, you know, I've told this person in very clear, succinct language without emotion, hey, I need this by this date at this situation and things aren't fulfilled. And I've had to have conversations with people where there was clear communication said and the people still took it personally. What is it about our psyche, Mark, that makes us take things so personally in business and life? Is it the things from childhood that weren't processed and effectively let go of? Is that really always boiled down to that or is it something more nuanced?

I really think it's that we have a very fragile society. You know, we are not taught emotional developmental tools and models early on. We're not modeled. It Men in particular are even fearful of it, you know, that, you know, doing the emotional work is, is hard for a lot of men. You know, they want to project the image of being tough. It's like baked into our DNA, and it's also baked into how we were raised by our fathers.

And we saw John Wayne, you know, and we saw these, these silent figures where it's like, oh, well, that's what a real man is. It's like, well, not really. They're not integrated.

They're not integrated.

No.

And being, you know, people have also a jaded vision of what it means to be tough. Right. The John Wayne vision, the mighty oak, you know, is the first to get blown over when, you know, when the storm comes or the heavy winds come. Yeah. But can be really useful in certain circumstances, especially like in a crisis. Right. You want to, in a crisis, you want to suddenly become the oak and be there for people and be the strong one. But when the tsunami is coming toward you, you want to be like a reed that can bend over and roll with the punches and just pop right back up, you know, so the most mentally tough people that I've ever worked with, even in the SEAL teams, were extremely emotionally aware. And there are huggers and, you know, crying is not a problem. They were able to tap into and experience the full range of emotions. And I had to learn that, like I said, my. My upbringing was. Caused me to kind of really shunt my range of emotions. And so I had to learn how to open up, you know, and it took me some time, but it's extraordinarily important. And I couldn't imagine my life now without that. And I'm. I'm way tougher than I ever was before I opened up, you know.

When you say open up, what do you mean by that? Because some people might hear that phrase and it might seem almost like a stranger. When you say open up, do you mean literally open up? The energetic heart chakra? Do you mean see other people's views as maybe your own? Like, how do you, how do you define opening up?

I think that there's two terms that I co opt from Ken Wilber. One is clearing up, and the other is opening up. Clearing up is like. Is like dealing with the shadow, the traumas, you know, the micro and macro traumas that happened in our early developmental stages to unlock repressed or denied energy. Right. Or, you know, and we have stories that we attach to that energy, and then that stories lead to different emotional patterns or even like we're talking about now the suppression of emotional patterns. So by clearing up the emotional shadow of our past, we then get to open up to more experience the broader range of emotional energy, which also brings us an opening to a broader perspective in life. Right. An ability to connect to other people because of our emotional awareness. And we're like tuning into ourselves allows us to tune into others. There's a vibrational quality, this attached to this. And then also opening up to greater perspectives because you have more, an expanded sense of care and concern for others because you can start to see and feel, feel things from their perspective. So you're right, opening up can mean a number of things. I think they kind of go hand in hand. The more you clear up, the more you open up. But then you can also have some practices around opening up, you know, like heart centered meditation, really, and like putting your awareness in your heart and experiencing the heart, opening and allowing the intelligence of the heart to kind of merge with your mind or your brain and your decision making process, those types of things.

Because when we go through trauma, things get stored. You know, whether you study Bruce Lipton's work or not, I think we all can know that, like when you get touched in a certain way or when you go through trauma, there is an issue that gets stored in a tissue. And so I definitely can feel this. There are some people, Mark, that they can't even get massaged because they say things like, oh, I just don't even like the feeling of it. But really there's always something deeper, whether it is considered positive or negative. And actually in the positive focus section of Unbeatable Mind, you talk about this exact thing. Rooting out negative emotions, beliefs and behaviors that will hold you back can take considerable time and effort. This step is where many fall off the path. But the process, developing mental control is essential before you can move on. Even slight progress leads to a radical shift in awareness and growth. But the challenge is how do we develop the grit, whatever word, whatever nomenclature you want to describe, to actually face that. Because, let's be real, when you start to uncover the past, when you start to uncover things that have occurred, they can be so overwhelming to the nervous system. It could be almost like an immediate shutdown, right? So how do you see that come up in your trainings? And even working with clients you've worked with so many people that have probably deep trauma, which maybe even drove them to do the events, you know, and do the physical, cathartic work. How do you hold the space for that? It's a very deep nuanced. Question. I know, but I think it's really related to this because most people will kick out their training as soon as the trauma surfaces.

The. You're right, everyone is going to have stuff come up and they're going to have times where, like, I can't. I'm not sure I can go through. And then. And on the flip side, you're going to have experiences where you break through and you think, aha. Oh, I've got it. I think I'm done, right? I had one client recently be like, oh, yeah, my. My therapist fired me. And I said, really? Why? She goes, well, you know, because she said, I pretty much, I've got it, you know, I'm done, you know, nothing left to work on. And I just started laughing and I said, yeah, yeah, that's exactly why she fired you. You know, she fired you because you weren't willing to go there to the next level and you're wasting your time, huh? So there is no there there. So we, you know, we hold the mirror up to our clients and say, listen, either congratulations, that's a great insight and breakthrough. Now get back to work, right? Because there's more insights, more lessons. There's no there there, right? This is a journey. It's not a destination. And then on the. On the flip side, you know, it is easy for people to fall off the path when they hit those major obstacles, those major owls. And so this is where the other mountains come in. So then we say just, you know, when this happens, you know, acknowledge it. You're going to go through the pain and suffering. Lean into it, but don't stop your other training. You know, go back to the drawing board. You know, crawl, walk, run. Go back to your physical training. Keep going to the gym, right? Or to the training center. Keep doing your box breathing, practice, and just keep journaling, right? Keep doing your rituals. If you fall off the ritual, get. Get back on. Just. Just do. And then eventually what happens is we develop in ourselves and we develop at unbeatable in our clients, a literally fierce desire and commitment to our own growth. Regardless of what comes up, regardless of the success or the, you know, perceived failures, it becomes so urgent to us that we can't. We never would consider stopping. We would never consider leaving it behind. We would never even have the thought that I've made it or that I'm there or that I'm better than someone else or that I'm. I wonder if I'm a guru or I wonder if I'm enlightening. It doesn't matter. You just show up. And we call that, that experience, the one day, one life principle. It's like every day is a lifetime of learning and growth and a lifetime opportunity to evolve yourself and to serve more powerfully. And then when that day is over, it's like a metaphorical death. You're done with that day, but you're, you know, you could be done with your life and so be happy. Like, I had a good friend who had. Who passed away Saturday. He had a massive aneurysm, we think, you know, he didn't wake up that morning thinking, this is going to be my last day. Right. So I'm. I'm hoping that he put everything into that day and that when the moment he acknowledged that he was going out, he was like, this was a day well lived, and this was a life well lived. The only way to know that is to commit to your evolution and to do the best you can every day. And then, and then the more nuanced you get with your practice, it becomes every minute and then every second, and then moment to moment to moment to moment to moment to moment, you're so present and so aware that every thought that comes up, every emotion that comes up, every experience you have, every interaction you have is an opportunity to ask, you know, how can I use this moment to evolve and serve? And it becomes a just part of your awareness. How can you use this moment to evolve and serve? And this is, you know, this is a state of perpetual flow also, because in that perpetual flow state, the best is always going to come out of you because you're able to ask and answer that question in real time.

You train the flow state from experience. And if something comes up to bring one out of flow, like maybe incessant monkey mind thought, I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough, whatever it is. So some of these things, Mark, are just handed down from fathers to sons, from grandfathers to fathers to sons. There is a generational component to the things that you describe, and I don't want to reductionize your work. I think you've done an incredible job at taking massively complex things and breaking them down into digestible bites for people. But on the backside of that, there's so much nuance and so much discovery. Even if you look at the work of Mark Wolin and past life trauma and generational trauma.

Yeah.

Have you seen this yourself? Personally, like, and with clients where you've done perfect training with them, they. They have their OODA loop. They understand who they are, they're great at situational awareness, yet for whatever reason, they sabotage. And you can't always create a clear bridge in this lifetime, is it. First of all, do you believe in the generational aspect? And secondly, how do you address it?

I do believe in the generational aspect, and I also believe in the karmic aspect. Right. That we have karma, that we come into our life that we need to kind of resolve. And we can also create karma in this life. And also from the generational or epigenetic standpoint, we do pick up patterns that run back many, many generations. And they will affect us. They affect your behavior. And it's largely subconscious, as you mentioned, and you can resolve all of that in this lifetime, but it requires the type of commitment to your training, you know, to the training that we're talking about here. It's not realistic to think that someone who hasn't done any of this training or trained themselves in this way is going to go from, you know, one moment they, they're doing nothing. Next moment they read unbeatable mind and suddenly, you know, they've got it right and they're. And they're acting as a master and they're. They're able to burn off karma in real time.

Even if they watch all the tiktoks with all the five best practices in one day.

Not going to happen. And I'm not going to say it hasn't happened. You know, there have been examples like spontaneous enlightenment, many of them, but it's very rare. Yeah. And even with spontaneous enlightenment, you know, you might mistake it. You know, there's a growing sense in the meditation community that something was missed in how meditation was brought to the west and to America. They missed the emotional part. Like in my yoga teachings, it was very clear to me that emotional development was part and parcel of your practice of meditation. Right. And Tibetan Buddhism and, you know, there's Buddhist psychology, like, it's, it's all like, yes, we are evolving ourselves and having this spiritual awakening where we're connected to the non dual. And we had this sense of being a spiritual being, having this human existence. That's great. In fact, Wilbur would call that waking up. But then there's also this need to kind of grow up your perspective to, you know, evolve yourself, because, you know, we want to be operating from the highest stage of development, accessible. And just waking up to the spiritual side of things doesn't get us there. It doesn't automatically shift you the highest stage of development, nor does it automatically clean up your. Your emotional shadow and your multi Generational.

Yes.

You know, patterns. Yeah. So we have to. We want to work on waking up, and then we want to simultaneously work on growing up. We want to simultaneously work on cleaning up the past. Not just our life, but multiple, you know, generations, or at least how those multiple generations fed into your family of origin, which fed into you. And then as we do that, we begin to open up like we talked about earlier, open up to more perspective, open up to more heart, open up to more comparison, passion. Open up to the positive qualities and eradicate the negative qualities that we've been handed and are, you know, constantly being fed in our culture. And that way we can show up with Kokoro with our heart and mind merged into action.

So the way.

It's not. It's not easy work like it is. Yeah, but it's.

There's a lot simultaneously going on. Wake up, clean up, and then really, like at the end of it, we can open up through all these things. The demands for just the modern human being, forget if it's man or woman, the demands that we're all facing right now as entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs. It doesn't matter how you run your business. You know, if you have a vision, if you have a purpose, and you're executing on that purpose. I haven't seen from at least what I can tell, any more challenging time than now. Do you share that? It doesn't mean that it's not impossible. It's not possible. It's not impossible.

I think it's perception, you know, now is no different than 20 years ago or 100 years ago. Technology is different, which leads to the perception of the pace of change. And also the. The population is different, which leads to perception of more interaction. Right. There's more people. So all of that is something you can manage. Right. By removing the things that aren't serving you. Right. Removing people that don't serve you, removing obligation commitments that don't serve you, removing technology that doesn't serve you, at least, you know, temporarily. So you have. You're not always connected to your iPhone, for instance. So, yes, some things have changed, but no, we're still human beings. It's still messy. It's still, you know, a spiritual being having a human existence for the purpose of growth. There's going to be pain and suffering. That's what it's about. Right. And to your point, yes, it seems daunting to think, oh, my gosh, this guy Divine is saying, you've got to train yourself physically and mentally and emotionally and intuitively and Spiritually, and I've got to do all these different things. I don't have the time for it. And that's false, too, right? Listen, here's the. Probably one of the biggest takeaways. If you're not training yourself, the world's training you. And let's just look at the results, right? When you do nothing in the world trains you with all this negative and, you know, negativity and consumerism and, you know, whatever you tap into, then how's that going for you? But when you take responsibility for training yourself, right, and you train yourself physically and mentally and emotionally, and you're making steady progress day in and day out, then. Then you can ask yourself, after six months, how's that going for you compared to when I was not training myself? And guess what? You're going to be a completely different person. We call that transformation. So take responsibility for training yourself, which means you got to make some different decisions about how you spend your time and where you put your attention and who you hang out with. Part of the training is to help you figure out those choices, right? To be able to think more clearly about who you are, why you're on this planet, and what you need to do about it. In which case, usually we say, start removing things, simplify, declutter, and get more focus so you can bring more energy into your training for mastery and more energy into your service, which is in alignment with your purpose. The second thing to consider is that. And we know that physical training, which is, you know, the most rote slash methodical thing that we do, that takes a lot of time, right? Physical training, you know, you don't have to spend a lot of time. You know, there are. There are some people who say you get tremendous benefit with three times 20 minutes a week, you know, which is true. I prefer to do five times an hour, plus five times an hour of yoga. You know what I mean? So I'm doing two hours of, like, movement and physical training five times a week. And then.

But you don't seem to me like the kind of man that views that as work. It's an enjoyment for you.

It's pure pleasure. It's pure pleasure. And I do it with my wife or my team, and I do it outside. And, you know, I. It's just.

It's part of who you are.

Just part of who I am. And I love it, right? So if I didn't love it as much, I probably would find a simpler way to do it, but I wouldn't not do it. Plus, I do you know, I keto. And like I said, it's just. I love the movement part because I'm a physical being at heart, but the mental, emotional practices, the being part, it doesn't take much time. 20 minutes in the morning, Right. Of breathing, meditation, and visualization will have a profound impact. Right. The key is to do it every day. Key is to do it every day. It's way better to do a daily practice, even of five minutes a day than it is to do five hours on a weekend, you know? Yes, you got to do it every day. And so I don't know how many people who can't commit to five to 20 minutes. Right. Especially if they're cutting out something that's unproductive or is distracting, you know, so it doesn't, you know, that's just a story that you don't have time to do this type of developmental work. It's a flawed story.

I don't know how much you leverage. I know you've studied in depth Wilbur's work. I'm not sure if you've studied Hawkins or Letting Go or the frequency of emotions. The lowest human emotion is shame. And a lot of what I believe you've covered ground on today is giving people the practical tools. We're linking everything about the five mountains and your programs. But along with that is people's shit coming up and just recognizing that actual emotions hold frequency so it modulates, just like jumping on a trampoline. If I'm jumping at one, then. Well, then that frequency is 1. Certain emotions make us modulate higher than lower and. And shame is the lowest emotion we could ever experience. Yet I believe, Mark, and I'm curious how you feel. Shame is what is making the most money in marketing. It is what is keeping people in jail mentally and spiritually. And it is honestly the thing that I believe is driving the division of whether you're Republican or Democrat, a good boy or a bad boy. What is this shame aspect? And as we round out the conversation, how have you personally worked through shame based on what you shared about family life, based on what you see in the world? And if you could just speak from the place you are today about how you both engage with and also overcome shame?

Yeah, that's such a great question. And Hawkins's work is, I think, profound and vastly underappreciated everybody.

One of my favorite books in the world is Letting Go.

Everyone has Phenomenal in Power versus Force, which is kind of his seminal work, and Letting Go and then Eye and the Eye. The Eyes are just Phenomenal. He's a. He's a treasure. Passed away, of course, in 2014. I think he's a treasure. Shame is the lowest, you know, on his scale of consciousness, which is zero to a thousand. It ranks at 20, vibrational 20. Now, of course, you can tap into that energy and work with it with, through shadow work through, you know.

Not.

Just talk therapy, but shadow work in the form of a deep psychosomatic, you know, work, right. When psychosomatic means mind, body, basically. This is where massage and emdr, somatic touch therapy, or different forms, you know, of modalities where you're trying to. You're getting the shame out of the nervous system or out of the tissue where it's. Or like you said before, and it's true that you. When you have these traumatic events where we experience shame, let's. Let's just use sexual abuse as an example. Or you can even have shame from physical abuse or watching your. One of your parents get abused. This is what happened in my family. And, and so that gets stored in a certain way. And then you either can't access an emotion or whatever story you. You placed on that, you know, it's going to come out in some sort of way that is harmful to you. And you call that sabotage. You see a lot of sabotaging behavior from shame. There's a lot of shame in our culture. There's a lot of positive aspects of our culture, too. So let me give you an example of a positive aspect. You know, we know that courage, right, is a. Is really the defining demarcation line between the negative energies and the positive energies, right? And so on this hierarchy of energies, you have shame and guilt and jealousy and rage and all that. And all the way up to pride. Pride is negative. It's like 190 or 180 or something like that. And then at 200, we have a shift to positive energies. And that shifting point is courage. So there's a tremendous amount of courage that Americans have, right? I've served in the military. I've never been, you know, I can't even describe to you the amount of courage that I saw in my military teammates.

I could imagine.

And our, you know, the police force, which is getting shamed today, has extraordinary courage, right, to show up and do their job in the face of danger. And to teachers who are teaching, you know, in. In the situations that they're teaching, and the first responders, right, have this enormous amount of courage. And I think entrepreneurs, like, we're an extraordinarily entrepreneurial culture. We have passive courage. So that courage, as you know from Hawkins work, higher vibrational qualities, it's not an arithmetic equation, it's geometric. So if you had million people displaying courage, it can wipe out the negative energy of 100 million people who are displaying shame or who are projecting shame. So that's how I think that why, you know, why America is largely. And even Hawkins said this. We, we shifted to positive territory as a culture where our culture was above 200 back in the 90s. I think it was 99 or, or somewhere around there. Maybe it was 89. But prior to that, we were in that 100. We were in pride, you know, which kind of makes sense. There's still a lot of pride in this culture, but we've shifted to the positive territory. And that also kind of lines up with the New Age theorists and the Eastern practices that say, or traditions that say they were kind of heading into a higher vibrational period. Now the, the Indians use the term Yuga or, or, or what does that mean? Kind of like, I guess period, long period of time. This is a yuga. So we're coming out of the Kali Yuga, which is the darkest, you know, and their philosophy or cosmology has to do with the, the position of the, our solar system relative to the galactic center. And so the farther you are away from the galactic center, the darker, you know, you get and the less vibrational energy is available to access. That's why the Dark Ages and, you know, the last few thousand years have been really kind of tough for humanity. But we're coming out of that. We're heading into another Yuga that is much more spiritually evolved, and we're going to access more consciousness and more higher vibrational states. So we're seeing that playing out in our culture. So that's, you know, to be fair, when I ever experienced, when I started to practice this and started to experience or tapped into shame or guilt or those lower vibrational qualities, I immediately went to courage. In fact, you see that all throughout my training program. If you look behind me in the video, you know, it's a picture of me staring down a wolf. And that's also in the COVID of my book, Unbeatable Mind. And that idea there is to stare down the wolf of fear and to feed the wolf of courage. The wolf of fear is your brain. The wolf of courage is your heart. In fact, courage comes from the root word cure, which is French for heart. So go right into your heart when you experience shame. And your heart can't experience negative Emotions and just observe it from your heart and courageously step forward and continue on and move away from the shame and to bring positive, you know, some positive quality to that story that you're telling yourself that you know, when you tap into or you, you become aware of the I can't and the I won't and the I'm not good enough stories. You step into your heart and courage and you begin to tell yourself otherwise. I can, I will.

Hawkins talks about this big space between the head and the heart and you have the space behind you between the wolf and yourself. That's a really cool corollary that I'm just.

And then you actively practice the feeding the courage wolf is to actively practice the higher vibrational qualities. Letting go is to practice acceptance of what is right. So like if there was abuse and it led to shame, courage has me to face that and recognize that that is what is I can't change. Doesn't serve me to hold on to being a victim. It doesn't serve me to judge and hold on, you know, hold negative energy toward the perpetrator. What will serve me best is to forgive myself and to forgive the other. Doesn't mean you have to like the other just to forgive them. And that act of forgiveness and acceptance is at a high vibrational quality. Right. 3, 400. And then we get into, you know, love and universal love. Universal love is at 6, 600 or 560 to 600. And you know, even if we had just a few thousand people living out of universal love, it has the vibrational quality to smash, you know, the rest of humanity that's operating out of fear out of those negative lower qualities, you know. This is why my mission of training and inspiring 100 million people to be world centric care and concern compassionate individuals is basically that. Can you imagine 100 million people vibrating at the level of 560 or 600, you know, from universal love? Profound effect. I can imagine it this planet. I'm sure you probably agree with this or I hope you agree with this, or you may agree with this. I don't want to predict anything on you, but the, the problems we have in this planet, yes, they'll be solved through action, but they are first solved through a shift in consciousness, right? Just like Gandhi said, you know, be the change you want to see in the world. First comes the shift in consciousness, then comes the more evolved action which then changes the physical universe. But the just the shift in consciousness will actually change the earth, right? Will heal the earth, sure.

But the only Way, Mark, we're going to get that shift in consciousness is if we're spending our attention wisely.

That's right.

Otherwise, like you said, if we're not training, we're being trained.

We're being trained.

So literally, we're being trained.

Trust me, those individuals who run and own those corporations and the governmental bodies and whatever you know, may exist above that, they know how this game works. They know that in order to be fully free, a human being would not need them. A fully free and autonomous human being who is in control of their own thoughts and emotions, doesn't need the corporations or the government, and they don't want that. So they do everything in their power to keep people in a state of fear and to keep people in a state of lower vibrational quality so that they can buy their goods and be under their thumb or under their control. You know, all of this. That's a fact.

Well, it's an utter fact. And that's what we're seeing. Why I believe, and I don't know how you feel that COVID 19 and that the stuff that we've gone through is actually a gift. It's not a bypass, it's not mumbo jumbo. Everyone I know, including myself, had to pivot as hard as we've ever pivoted in anything. The way that we approach our health, our business, even our relationships. Look at what we're doing. We're not doing this in person, right? We're doing this virtual, but yet we can still hold the space as if it was in person. You would have never imagined this 30 years ago. When you were in the teams, when you first started training, you had no idea, or maybe you did, that you would be leading a movement that would reach millions of people across the world, that you'd be having a conversation on an interview that reaches tens of thousands of people through a camera that goes into outer space. Like, none of us can predict the amazing, fun, exciting things that are going to happen. So, Mark, like, what are you most excited about in the future? If what you didn't know 20 years ago has beared this fruit for you now, what are you most excited about? That you may just pontificate with me for fun about what could be in the future?

Well, I think you just teed that up really well because many people have a very gloomy view of the future. You know, economic just, you know, dissemblement.

You know, if they depend on the system. Potentially, yes.

Right.

Potentially.

Well, that's right. I mean, there are going to be people who end up in the wrong place at the wrong time because they didn't develop the mindset and the free, you know, the autonomous thinking and, you know, belief systems that you develop as someone who trains their mind. And so where I'm going with this is I have an extraordinarily optimistic vision of the future because I believe that not only are people of our age group and you're, you're younger than I am, but, you know, 40 and above, starting to really, really get on board with this idea of, you know, taking charge of their own health, you know, spirituality and freedom through training themselves and optimizing themselves and serving others. But there's a whole generation behind us in their teens and twenties and even younger who are literally being born like that. And they're growing up with this extraordinary interconnected global platform. Information accessible at all times a day. They're growing up with people like us who are the pioneers and the trailblazers feeding them information that wasn't even available, you know, or, or it was, but it's very hard to find, you know. You know, in the early days of my learning and research, I was like pulling old texts off of library shelves, you know what I mean? It was hard to find the right stuff and it now accessible and readily available to them. And also I think their consciousness is a little bit evolved at a vibrational quality that we didn't have, you know, when we were five or six is here in the universe and they're both tapping into it and they're bringing it right. And so in 20 years, you're going to see leadership at all levels look, look very different. It's going to look at, at a normal, like, common level, like it does at the fringe level today with, you know, highly evolved social entrepreneurs with change the world missions. That's going to be everybody, that's going to be every corporation. You won't even be able to be on business without being able to state what good you're doing for the world and having results, right? Demonstrating and not just using as a marketing slick, you know, ad line. And we are going to get to a place sometime between 2030 and 2040 where there's a, the tipping point, let's just say a positive tipping point. So instead of the negative now, if we did nothing, there probably would be a negative tipping point where we'd see the collapse. And you know, there might be the World War iii and you know, we might still have some of those things. There might. I'm not saying that all negativity is going to go away and, you know, that suddenly everyone's going to give up their nuclear weapons. But I sure see a future where people do recognize that that's just not good for humanity, you know, to be pointing nukes at each other and to be in fear and to be constantly armored up and defending ourselves because, you know, to defend yourself is essentially to. To invite attack. And so everyone, you know, all these major powers who are all defended up are essentially just waiting to be attacked. And. And that's. So they're projecting attack me. And so they will be attacked. So until we change the consciousness level of all the humans, then we can change the consciousness level of the. Of the governing systems, whatever they look like, in 20 years to say, okay, lay down the weapon, right? Let's lead first with the heart and then recognize that there may be some evil in the world that we have to deal with. But let's not lead with violence. Let's not invest in violence as our first, you know, action. You know, it's, yes, 15% of our overall budget. And of course, you know, the strategists would say, well, how do you. How do you get there? Everyone would need to lay down their arms simultaneously. And. And I said, yeah, that's true. Right. There has to be a radical shift in consciousness where everyone says, you know what? This is effing stupid. Let's lay down our arms. You know, let's turn the. Let's just destroy the nukes. We'll do them one at a time. Right, you first. Or let's do it all at the same time. You know what I mean? Whatever. There's got to be a way, right? There's always a way. Yes. So I see a tipping point where, you know, first millions and then 100 million, and then, you know, what, if it doesn't matter the numbers, then a billion people are all vibrating at a world centric, universal, love, caring, concern level. And that affects everything. Everything starts to change. Even the systems that we know aren't going to survive. The new system arises like grass growing through the cracks of the old system until the old system becomes completely obsolete. I don't see collapse.net where suddenly everything collapses in this global famine. And I think that we're way more res than people give us credit for human beings. You saw that with the pandemic, and that's kind of where this all started. Yeah. And we're building more and more resiliency into the system every day. And yes, some of that's at a governmental level, but most of it's just at the entrepreneurial level, I think America is leading the charge or the, you know, the Western world is leading the charge, especially in America, in spite of what people think and what they read. And it has nothing to do with American exceptionalism. It's just our entrepreneurial spirit and that's one of our greatest gifts. The entrepreneurial spirit combined with spiritual wisdom is one of the most powerful transformative forces that humanity has at its fingertips right now.

I've so enjoyed this conversation, Mark. So many things to go even deeper on, maybe at a later date down the road because, gosh, the concepts you've brought today, obviously these five mountains, the physical, the mental, the emotional, the kokoro, the awareness and the intuition. Understanding who we are at a core level is what makes us change. It's what changes the world. It's what allows us to evolve. It's in, by the way, the word of love. The word love is in evolve. So I see you as a man who, you know, you've been in the trenches, you've been able to craft this life and create this real vision of now serving upwards to 100 million plus people so they can be conscious, so they can be caring, so they can really be of service to the world. How do you see wellness now? You know, I asked you this question five years ago and with all you've been through, the changes, both on a spiritual level, on a personal level that you've been through, do you have a recipe or a formula for wellness? Like, how does Mark Devine live his life?

Well today, you know, we've covered so much of this in terms of the training because I mentioned that I eat my own dog food, I do my own five mountain training. For me, wellness is a one day at a time thing, right? Balance is found every day. We start by, by balancing our system and winning in our mind through our morning routine. So I have a disciplined morning routine that is absolutely a blessing and super enjoyable and I wouldn't start my day without it, right? So it includes things like, you know, you find out a lot of morning routines, not that different, but I do my, I do my breathing exercise we call box breathing. Within that I also kind of refine my mind, right? I refine the quality of my thinking, the quality of my speech, internal speech, and I check back in with that imagery of my future state, you know, me accomplishing that mission that we've talked about. And I also spend time connecting with universal spirit, you know, or witness, basically non dual witness, you know, unity consciousness. I spend time really just Tapping into that and experiencing that and connecting to that.

And I'm a fun way of saying.

God or a different way of saying God, but you just say God if you will, but as I could understand him through my own spirit, through my own awareness. Right. So it's non conceptual. So that's why labeling, it doesn't really do me much justice because I'm not looking for a label. I'm, I'm not looking for a word. I'm looking for an experience and then experiences beyond thought, beyond emotion, beyond space and beyond time. So that's what I'm tapping into. And it's very, very restorative. It's very, very peaceful. And essentially when I can tap into that, which I can do pretty easily in the morning and I can do it, you know, now fairly quickly in midday and in the evening, then everything's just all right. There's nothing that could hurt. So that's the kind of the framework. And then I've got some practices that I do with my wife that are. You could put in kind of the emotional and spiritual development. It's, it's, it's incredibly powerful. It's almost like 20 times more powerful to do emotional and spiritual work with a partner.

Yeah.

And boy, when I figured that out and my wife and I figured out, we've really kind of gone through some massive growth because we do it together. And there's some things, you know, I'm doing my thing and she's doing her thing, but we're doing it together and there's together things that we can share. So we have some practices that we do.

Can you give us just one of those practices? I don't expect you to give them all, but just one of those practices that couples watching.

I remember from Hawkins. Hawkins references a couple different programs that people who are in the programs, they all vibrated in that, in the universal love or the love, you know, above 500. One was the Course of Miracles and the other was like Alanon or one of the AA 12 step programs. So like I'm not in AA, I've been to AA before and I think it's a wonderful program. And you know, the alcohol issues in my life have largely battled those, you know, in terms of the destructive power of alcohol. And that was all part of my shadow work. But I, I still think the 12 step program is absolutely profound. And the readings associated with Al Anon, particularly like Al Anon is like Alcoholic Anonymous for children or people who live with alcoholics. Right. So you don't have to be in quote unquote, a drinker to be, you know, to benefit from Al Anon. In fact, it's extraordinarily powerful. So at any rate, both Al Anon and the Course in Miracles are part of our morning ritual. And so we'll read something from both traditions and we'll reflect upon it and we'll meditate on it. And I think they're both profound traditions that really, really help with both spiritual and emotional awakening and development. So that's part of the my morning ritual. Then we have a smoothie and I usually drink a few, like the top inch or so of my smoothie. My smoothie is, you know, fresh fruits and vegetables. Plus I had this supplement called Ample and I put a few other things in there and it's a full meal and it usually holds me from the time I take those first few sips till about 2 in the afternoon. And I have some supplements, some longevity supplements that I take and some nootropics that I take and I bring drink those with my smoothie. Then I'll go into my office where I have my training center and I have my old Seal Fit CrossFit gym and I have an aikido studio here and my podcast. So it's what I use my office for because we're pretty remote now as a company and. And then my wife comes with me and then we do yoga, like 30 minutes of yoga. And I've got a specific routine that I take her through and we do it together. And then we do another 20 minutes of breathing exercises and then we do our Seal Fit Operator workout minus one little piece which is called stamina, which takes too long for us. So that takes about 50 to 55 minutes. Where we do strength training, we do a high intensity interval workout which is like a little CrossFit wad, usually 15, 15 to 20 minutes. And we do a pretty rigorous warmup as well. That's my morning ritual, you know, from, you know, when I wake up at 5:30am until usually 9 or 9:30 and I don't take any appointments until 10am every morning.

And you're militant about that. I mean, that's your time for you, it's my time.

Yeah. You know, as far as my nutrition, I intermittent fast. So I my first, I have that little sip just so my supplements don't, you know, cause any problems in my stomach. Sure. And just give me a little energy. But then I'll drink the rest of the smoothie after the workout. So my first meal isn't until 9:30. Really so it's big or 10. So that, and my last meal is going to be at you know, 7:00pm the night before. So there's one version of intermittent fast then on Mondays I do a 24 hour fast every, every Monday. And I eat, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a strict diet person. I, I eat when I'm hungry and I eat as close to the earth as possible. The freshest vegetables and fruits and, and I do eat meat. I've tried vegetarian and it didn't work for me. I almost ate my arm off after a year because I wasn't willing to change my physical training and I just needed more and more protein than I could possibly get. So I, I eat less than the average by far. You're probably at 30% less than most people eat. So just eat less, eat as close to the earth as possible and eat when you're hungry. So that's kind of leads to me to basically two to two and a half meals a day and intermittent fasting and whatnot. So my, my fueling plan is pretty solid. And I get a minimum of seven and a half, usually eight hours of sleep every night. And I track that with my aura ring, you know and it's kind of a fun little game to check my aura sleep score every morning and I'm usually above 90 between 88 and 90.

For you do not want to see my score right now as a month old infant is in my house. And for all the parents out there, we give you love and I totally respect parents. Mark, you know you are, you're, you're a parent to your business, you're a father really to this movement. So thank you so much man for being this example. So many people, they, they have great marketing, they have all the shiny bells and whistles but when it really comes down to conversation, they don't have what we talked about in the very beginning. And that is the experiential learning, the experiential wisdom you have that. I'm grateful for you sharing that and I'm grateful for the change you've made in my life. So thank you for coming on Wellness Force and please tell people where they can take the first step with you. You know, where they can connect with you and learn with you and, and grow with you.

That's awesome. Thanks Josh. It's been a real honor. I really appreciate you. So markdivine.com is my website. It's getting a facelift, but shares all the basic info there and then you know, the training we're talking about is unbeatablemind.com and a great entry level program we have is@unbeatablemind.com forward slash challenge. And it's a 30 day challenge with a 15 minutes of work a day, a video training from me that we cover, a lot of the things we talked about like box breathing and witnessing and all that, and then some journaling. It's a great, great program and I think it's free. And then if you like it and you want to keep it, you pay $99. So it's free up front. But so envymind.com challenge is probably a great place to start if you're interested in learning more.

Excellent.

Appreciate you. Thank you very much.

Appreciate you too, Mark. And thank you to all the people that are with us. Until Mark and I see you again, we're both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon.

It.