Mark Divine: From Navy SEAL to Mindful Warrior

In this episode of The Asset Mindset Podcast, host Daniel Fielding sits down with former Navy SEAL and SealFit founder Mark Divine to explore the mental tools behind elite performance. Mark shares his unlikely journey from CPA to SEAL Commander and unpacks the power of meditation, mindfulness, and the Five Mountains of personal development. Learn how to rewire your brain through breathwork, visualization, and living with purpose and intention.

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Transcript

Meet Mark Divine & Origin Story

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Welcome back to the Asset Mindset Podcast. We have a great episode for you today. We have someone that embodies the asset mindset or positive thinking and helps others learn and grow and have that just mindset like a seal. And he would happen to have a thing called seal fit. Mark Devine is here with us today. He's an author, written many books, and it is such a privilege to have you here, my friend and brother, because you are doing and living with what I deem as the asset mindset. And I'm so glad for my audience to be able to get to know you and learn about what you're doing. So with that, say hello and introduce yourself to the audience.

SPEAKER_02 0:48

Yeah, thanks, Dan. I appreciate you having me on the show. It means a lot. So as you mentioned, um people call me Mark Divine. That's what my parents named me, anyways. So I went with it. Didn't have much choice. Um I was a Navy SEAL for 20 years. Uh retired as a commander in 11. Uh, tours in Iraq and throughout the Middle East and also Southeast Asia and a few other places. Um what's really interesting about my story is prior to the Navy SEALs, I was actually a CPA. I was working on Wall Street, um, had a bunch of big finance clients like Solomon, you know, clients that don't exist anymore. Solomon Brothers, Payne Weber, Drexel, Burnham, Lambert. These firms went down in the big blaze of glory. Um and so what's unique about kind of my journey, which led to me basically my current career started in the, you know, was kind of forged in that pre-Navy SEAL days, is that I I started working on my mindset um deliberately when I was 21. And this is, you know, way before any of the culture of mindset books and, you know, personal development stuff that we have today even existed. And the reason that came about is because I was a I was a pretty uh serious endurance athlete. And um and when I left Colgate University where I swam and road crew and ran triathlons and such and started this career in Manhattan, um, you know, I I saw everyone around me as like fat and pasty and and miserable and just chasing money. Right? I'm sure your audience know something about that, right? If you get the money and you don't have your health, then what use is it? And I said, There's no way that's gonna be me. I'm gonna be a lifetime athlete, a lifetime, you know, I'm gonna be fit for life. I just knew that inside of me. Nobody taught me, and I just said, that's that's me. So every morning I would go out and run like six miles and come home and stretch, and um, and then I would go to the gym at lunchtime when everyone else went out to get their burgers and whatever. And then in the evening, because I was going to NYU business school, as part of my program at Cooper's and Librand, which is now Pricewaterhouse, Cooper's, um, they would let us off at five because we had to be down at the World Trade Center for NYU business school, steering school of business around 7.30. Of course, that's two half, two and a half hour blocked that yours truly looked at as another training time, right? So I was like, I want to do some more training, right? Uh I don't want to just go home and eat and, you know, sit around. But I couldn't really figure out what to fit in that time frame, right? That didn't involve a lot of logistics. One day I was walking home, kind of pondering this, and I stumbled across a uh martial arts studio. There it didn't wasn't just any martial arts studio, though. This was the world headquarters of Sato Karate. And the founder was Mr. Tadashi Nakamura. I went upstairs and I met my first true uh master and and teacher, like my first true teacher. Nakamura's legendary within that space. Um But what was truly unique about him to me, Dan, was um when I I noticed it when I first saw him. Like there was something different about him as a human being that I've never seen before. Now, granted, I grew up in a small town in upstate New York, but I, you know, I met thousands of people throughout my years at Colgate and in New York and whatever, and I'd never seen anything like this. There was a lightness about him, a spontaneity, a um an air of just I guess now the word would be mastery. And I was like, holy shit, like whatever he's doing or has done, like I want a taste of that because I didn't feel any of that. So I signed up and started training in traditional karate. This story I'll I'll try to keep it a little bit shorter so you can ask some questions, but it it can get interesting because um at first I was in it for I I I wanted kind of multidimensional training, so I was really excited to find this. Um I had a college freshman roommate named Dave Bowman, who was a real jerk when I met him. You know, he he would just do everything he could to piss off you know the girls in the dorm, and you know, he's a big ego. Well, and I was an academic, you know, I was an academic kind of so-so B student, and I was a you know competitive swimmer, so I spent a lot of time swimming. Anyways, Dave ended up finding a karate at Colgate called uh Shirtachan. And so we started studying karate. Well, four years go by, and I'm four years older, and I'm still a B student, and I got four years of swimming under my belt, but I didn't really feel any different. I hadn't really had gone through much much of a transformation. And Dave had completely transformed. Like he was a completely different person. I saw in him a deep respect, discipline, right, focus. Um He wasn't a jerk anymore. And he was heading off to Japan to you know continue his karate studies and um to teach English. So I remember that. And so when I found this martial art, I was really excited. I said, I think maybe there's something here that could be more about physical exercise, could lead to some sort of transformation, body, mind, and spirit. And boy was I right. But what was um what led to that for me wasn't just the physical training. So it turns out that Nakamura was also a Zen master. And he actually led a Zen meditation class every Thursday night, and I was able to join that class. So at 21, I started meditating. Started out with these Thursday sessions. Of course, we meditated a little bit before and every class, after every class. But I was um I immediately found it to be really um helpful, which is like the opposite experience that most people have with meditation. Right. I I I I have some theories as to why, but I won't go into them right now, but I find it really helpful. So I took up, I bought myself a little Zazen wooden bench and I took up meditation every morning for 20 minutes. And I went through, you know, this and I'll kind of stop the story here, but I went through such an incredible transformation of my mind. You know, metanoia, right? Complete transformation, not just what I thought, but how my mind worked. And I opened up and I saw that the story that I was living was not my story. I was not meant to be a CPA, MBA, go out and make a lot of money. And that and that was a complete fail, actually. In fact, if I kept on on that path, it would lead to a lot of suffering. For me.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Yeah, yeah.

Martial Arts, Zen, And Transformation

SPEAKER_02 7:20

Well, that's not how I was meant to make money. And uh what I what kept coming to me in my meditations when I dropped off into kind of the deepest, you know, timeless, spaceless places, was that I was a warrior and I was meant to be a warrior. So I started asking, how's that supposed to happen? How am I supposed to be a warrior? And this is 1987. We didn't know anything about the Navy SEALs. They were completely a secret back then. About 700 people in the organization. So I uh when I decided that I had to listen to that voice and I was meant to be a warrior, that's when the SEALs revealed themselves to me. The walking, this is synchronicity of play, walking home from work, um pondering how to be a warrior, I pass his Navy recruiting office, and there's this big poster. It says be someone special on it, and it's got pictures of Navy SEALs doing cool shit. And I just looked at that and said, that's me. That's what I'm supposed to be doing. So 1989, I received my MBA from Stern School of Business. I get my CPA certificate after four painful tries to pass that test. I get my first degree black belt and I walk away from everything. I go to Officer Candidate School with a direct follow-on to SEAL training, Bud's class 170, where I graduate as honor man, number one guy in my class. And my so 185 students, all badasses, started. 19 of us graduated, and there I was, number one, with my entire boat crew of six others who had started with me in the first week. And because I had taught them skills that I had learned from the Kamora, skills such as controlling my breath, uh, controlling my emotions, monitoring my thoughts and emotions and not getting swept up by them, seeing them as temporary things like waves passing by. Um, being able to soften the grip of my ego enough to really radically put my eyes on my teammates and genuinely care for them, care for their success, which is different than everybody else in the class. It was dog eat dog, which is pretty much like the business world, right? Stuff like that. So I taught it to my team, and I would, we just sailed through and literally thrived. So that formative experience was so profound that I wanted to eventually get back to it, right? So it wasn't until later in my SEAL career where I got asked to put together a nationwide mentoring program for SEAL trainees. And ended up doing that, um, I had uh transitioned to the reserves so I could actually do it as a business guy. And I had a one-year contract, a 10-year contract that ended up being a one-year contract because the whole thing got stolen from me by Blackwater, USA Eric Prince's company. What a gem that guy is. And um so I turned my attention and said, okay, if if it's not, and by the way, we kicked ass on that contract. We just crushed it. And Blackwater took everyone, the guys I had employed and you know, put them under their umbrella. Um I said, well, I don't I wasn't meant to be a government contractor. Um that's a dog eat dog business. So what can I do to like really continue this mission, but be able to be more innovative than the government would allow me? And that's what came. Uh SEAL FIT came out of that. So I launched SEALFIT in 2006 and started training special operators of allied countries, U.S. and allied countries, like how to really think, um think, act, and lead to dominate the most challenging circumstances in life, which is combat. And we train thousands now. That's my story. Study.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Oh, that's an amazing story. And I and I I love the martial arts. I have a soft spot for that as well. Um, Dragon Warrior Code, when I was a teenager, you know, just the first few lines, like, I am what I am because I choose to be. Was I as a teenager, like, whoa, I can actually choose. Like, I choose my path. Like, yeah, things can happen, but emotions or events, like I'm still steering the ship. You know, I'm the captain of my ship.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

And yeah, most people never get there because it's one thing to it's one thing to intellectually understand those words. It's another thing to know it.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

It's the difference between knowing and knowledge. Everyone chases knowledge and and it doesn't really you're chasing your tail because it didn't get you anywhere. It's knowing, which is direct experiencing.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Yeah. And in the English language, we really don't have a word for that. In Spanish, because I've taken some Spanish, because being a Green Beret, that was my language. Conozco. That's the difference. You know, when you're conosco. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:38

Yeah, gnosis gnosis is knowing, but that's a that's to know personally.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

You know, rather than like, oh, you can know of a place. Like I I know of Bogota, Colombia, but I conosco, like I I've been there. Not saying that I have, but it's uh you know, that's how the word is. And I I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think it's so empowering the martial arts. And like when you saw that master, like I was blessed to um be under a Tai Chi master.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

And I was, yeah, Han and uh Huey was his son, which is kind of funny. But it was a semester college class that I got to go to. I took martial arts when I was a teenager, but then I I anyway, in college, and I was just exactly like you. There was just something about him that was different.

SPEAKER_02 12:27

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

It was the total package. Mind, body, and soul were all tied together, unified, at peace, and just it it was amazing. And and studying under him, you know, I first did my you know, Kibadacchi horse dance, and I'm down low and I'm trying to be all cool, you know, show look how low I can go in parallel. And he kind of smirks on his face, doesn't say a word, and just kicks the inside of my knee. And I'm like, oh, because he goes, that's American style. He goes, this, and you know, and like when you really ride a horse, you don't have your legs spread out, you know, as wide as possible. You know, you you're in a more practical stance, almost like a boxer stand. And I was just like mind-blown. And he would talk and he would stand on one foot and squat down and up, down and up with one leg as he's speaking. Yeah. And I'm just like, how like what? Yeah. Totally blew me away. So yeah, I I know what you're saying on that. And that's I think what you're trying to share with the world is there's so much more out there, potential-wise. Right. And the more you can have to be.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

And then 20 times again. But you gotta train yourself, right? If you're not training your mind, someone else is training it for you. And the results will speak for itself. And but there's a deliberate process to training your mind. Like we, you know, um special forces, Navy SEALs, we benefit to some degree of mind training, right? Like the skills that we learn, you know, now they teach um a lot of the skills that I started introducing at BUDS, like breath control, box breathing, they're teaching at BUDS. And and I know that a lot of um special forces training has picked up a lot of this stuff. Um mindfulness, concentration, right, visualization. It never was taught when I went through training. They didn't really pick it up until SEAL fit started sending 90% of our graduates graduate BUDs. That's the only one I can track. I don't try I can't track the PJs or the Green Berets or Marines. 90% of the SEAL candidates who worked with SEAL fit graduate buds. That's crazy, isn't it, compared to 90% fail rate. But anyways, back to the point. Um, martial arts is a comprehensive, integrated developmental system, training the mind, the body, and the spirit to come back together to be perceived and experienced as one wholeness. And from that perspective, like that the term shibumi comes to mind. It's effortless perfection. Life is experiences, effortless perfection. We might say flow in our English language, where it's just spontaneous. That's what I observed in Nakamura, that's what you observed in your Tai Chi master. It's spontaneous, it look it appears effortless, um, and and it's empty of ego, meaning it's like it's happening. It's not Daniel doing it or Mark doing it. It's just kind of flowing through us. I experience that with my books, right? Or when I give a speech, like Mark is completely absent. And the and the conversation, I'm actually quite interested. Mark is quite interested to see what's going to come out of his mouth.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

I'll have to go to one of your events. I want to see it.

Finding The SEAL Path And Leadership

SPEAKER_02 15:42

Exactly right. I can tell you some crazy stories. But you think about combat, right? Um, warriors who are really highly trained, like special operators, you know, when they're in a flow state in combat, you know, time is malleable, right, as we know. Uh, you can slow everything down, like where you have it seems like you have all the time in the world to get the beat on the next you know, enemy. Um it is experienced as happening without any subject or object. Meaning like Mark is not making decisions and taking actions, it's just it's just happening. I mean, these can be like really episodic or just, you know, a brief moment that this happens, but the more you kind of surrender to that and train it and allow it, the longer and longer periods of time this can happen.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

No, absolutely. Yeah, the flow, the groove.

SPEAKER_02 16:40

Yeah, the groove, the flow. Um we had a master chief, and his name is alluding me, was at SEAL team three, who was at Abu Ghrab. And they knew that Nicky Spain was there. He was a CIA officer that had been kidnapped. And he was in he was actually augmenting a Green Bray A-team. And they as they got close, they got, you know, they were compromised and they were pinned down under fire. And what I'm gonna say is no judgment against the A-Team. They do they were doing the right thing. They were keeping their heads down and returning fire. Well, this master chief was also a martial artist, and you know again, this is not something that he he sat there and as a personality thought, I'm gonna do this. He just started, he just got up and said, I need to, you know, this is happening. Like it he couldn't do it. It's that spontaneousness. And he started um moving shoot, moving, you know, from hindsight to hide sight, but everything he the way he described it was everything was in radically slow motion. Right? He could see each enemy combatant, you know, beginning to take a beat on him and he would take him out and then moved another position. And he said the energy was like really or the air and the energy run was really thick, almost like thick with static electricity. And he fought his way into the compound. Right, and finally the the A-team kind of got up and followed him in. It's like, holy shit, what's this guy doing? When they got in there, like they had killed almost 20 of these guys these insurgents, and they found Nicky Spain's body, he'd already been killed. That's what I'm talking about, right? So so special forces um are one of the few people in the world who, besides like hardcore martial artists who work under the tutelage of a master, who kind of get a similar experience. But often it's um it's not complete or it's done almost like some people get it and some people don't. You know what I mean? Like I I have other SEALs friends of mine who I'm like, they're clueless about what I'm talking about. And there's some guys who've never been in the teams. I'm sure you've experienced that too. The 10% rule.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Yeah, there's always funny. But no, I I like you know, your your message and everything, and your warrior's heart or your spirit, and but we're talking at elite levels. So how do we start someone that's you know just learning about Mark, just learning about Daniel Fielding or the asset mindset or whatnot? How do we get them started where they start to see their potential?

Flow States And Combat Stories

SPEAKER_02 19:20

That's a great question. Um, okay. Where do I start? Everyone is dealt with the same deck of cards, right? You come into this body and you get a name, and then you the training begins. Right? But reference my saying, if you're not training yourself, someone else is training you. So for your entire life, you were trained. You're trained by your parents, trained by some fucked up academic model that was designed for the industrial age, that is basically also designed to limit you, to trap you in mediocrity. You're trained by your church and your, you know, now social media, all of it designed to to distract you and to make you crave certain things, to look for your power and success outside of yourself. So that's an untrained mind. So I'm assuming whenever I work with a client, I'm just assuming that's where they're there, that's who they are, and they don't know it. And that's not judgment. It's just it's just the default state. And what that leads to is what the what they call the default mode network in your mind. Like it's that it's that um Daniel Kahneman System one mind that is like making subconscious decisions, right? You're constantly just projecting and reacting, and you're completely merged with your thoughts, and your stimulus comes in and you ride it just like a Bronco, right? And you don't drive any differentiation between I am that thought, I am that emotion, I am this reaction to oh, I am not that. Those are those are things that are happening. That's interesting, that's curious. So most people, um, a good percentage of all humanity is completely merged with their thoughts and emotions and and their story. So when someone comes to me, it's usually because something isn't working. They're burnout, right? And and by the way, because the world is getting way more like fast, perception is getting really fast, technology's exploding, AI's on us, everyone's got we have more existential threats than we can count on our both hands now facing us. You know what I mean? Is it is it global warming? Is it asteroids? Is it AI? Is it is it the polar shifts? I mean, is it aliens? What's it gonna be, right? Is it the next pandemic? And so everyone's in a state of fear. And if you're in a state of fear, you're um you can't think straight, right? You're you're out of whack. You got too much cortisol running through your system. And what actually happens is your parasympathetic nervous system atrophies, it shuts down. And so, in order to feel alive and to stay awake, or you know, over to compensate from the lack of sleep and the hyperarousal, uh, you know, we either work out like madmen, so we get addicted to CrossFit or something like that. I know so many CrossFit addicts because I had a CrossFit gym for 10 years, like they're they are almost worse than alcoholics. Um you get district uh uh addicted to distraction, entertainment, alcohol, sex, porn, whatever. You name it. And um, of course that adds insult to injury until there's a breakdown. Now, breakdowns are tremendous opportunities, but my preference is to start your training before the breakdown. Breakdown will happen eventually. It'll be a disease or a disaster. And that's again, that's a wake-up call. But you don't want to bring that suffering in your life if it's not necessary. And it's generally usually not necessary if you begin to uh change that whole cycle of um you know, kind of self-abuse that you've been taught is normal. Anyways, that's the backdrop. So, where do I start? Well, I have a program I call five mountains, five mountain training. Those are the five mountains are kind of you you use the term mind-body-spirit, which is pretty common for yoga and martial arts. So this is just a little expanded from that. It's physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual. Those are five domains or five aspects of you as a human being. There there happen to be important ones. There are others, like you you could say musical or artistic or whatever, kinesthetic. But kind of kinesthetic fits within physical. So I um I they're in that order for a reason because that's the that's kind of the the training progression, right? Okay. We start so someone comes to me and um and your body is completely out of whack. Right. Haven't uh maybe they they've fallen off working out, maybe they were an athlete in high school but haven't done much since then. That's pretty common. Uh so they're gonna be they're carrying too much weight. They're gonna be um in a state of hyperarousal, and they're not gonna be sleeping well. Um, you know, they're gonna be like, well, I only get I only get or need five hours of sleep at night. And I'm like, eh, no. Right. Um there don't they don't really have a legitimate physical training plan and they're not eating well. So we really have to start with the basics. You know, crawl, walk, run. Like, like when we used to go shoot, did we start right shooting out of helicopters at moving targets? No. We started with a 25-yard pistol shoot, you know what I mean? Requal. So getting your body healthy is kind of like that 25-yard requal. Like you get that freaking body healthy. Because if your body gets healthy, guess what's also healthy? Your brain. So your body comes back into balance, your brain gets healthier, which means it's gonna be less agitated, it's gonna be able to operate in a more of a alpha, low beta alpha state instead of the gamma state of the cortisol adrenaline-driven, you know, uh anxiety guy person. Now, simultaneously to working on getting your body healthy, and we do that through what we call the six pillars. Like, you gotta dial in your fitness plan, right? Functional movement, simple, you know, principle-based fitness, um, including durability, including um um like movement practices. So we didn't, you know, we kind of separate movement and exercise, even though they really can be the same thing. Like in a uh like Tai Chi, you didn't look at Tai Chi and say, oh, this is my exercise regimen.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:30

You didn't. I don't look at yoga as exercise. I do yoga every day. It's not exercise, it's movement, it's mindful movement. So mindful movement, exercise, three to five times a week minimum. Um, get your sleep dialed in. You need to get six to seven hours, six and a half to seven and a half hours of sleep, depending on your body type, every night. So you can use all the sleep hygiene stuff and plenty of people talk about that. Um, cut back on the alcohol, cut back on the stimulation, you know, the electronic stimulation, uh cut back, if not cut out all news sources, because it's very negative, unless it's highly vetted, right, for you. And you can trust it. And um get out in nature more. Get some morning sunlight, take a walk around the park, around the beach, in the mountains, try to do that every day. Um, it's really powerful. And uh dial in your nutrition. And just like fitness, it's it's it's functional nutrition, it's principle-based. I'm not asking anyone to file, you know, follow any special diet like carnivore or keto or anything like that. But I do ask you to think about fast mimicking, intermittent fasting or choleric restriction, um, eating really high quality meats and vegetables and fats, and cutting out sugar and starches as much as possible, 80 to 90% of the time. So all of that now has a profound effect on your brain and your heart health and your gut health, which happen to be the three primary centers of thought. Your brain, your heart, and your gut all have the neurons, neurological processing, neurochemicals, et cetera. They're all part of your entire, well, your body, entire body is part of your mind system, let's call it. But those are the three primary brains that you have. Most people focus on this one up here. That's like the controlling executive agent that brings all that together and makes sense. But you want your three brain systems to be really healthy. Because then they become trainable. And that's a really important point. The reason a lot of people fail at meditation is they're not trainable yet. Because they sit down to meditate and their brain is all three brains are all agitated. They're getting mixed signals, monkey minds racing. You know, it's it's uncomfortable, and they're drawn to the next distraction. And so they fail. So it's not it's not appropriate to teach mindfulness to someone who hasn't done preparatory work. It's like when when Karate Kid went to Mr. Miyagi, he didn't teach him the secret stuff right away. He said, go paint the fence, wax on, wax off, whatever. That was preparatory work. So preparatory work is get your body healthy and get those three parts of your brain healthy. And then while we're doing this, still part of the physical training, we begin a practice of controlled breathing, box breathing. Because what box breathing will do, which is nostril breathing, deep diaphragmatic, moving the air deep into your lower recess of your lungs, which most people use about 40% of the lungs, right? And breathing through your nose, learning to close your mouth, breathe through your nose constantly, and slowing the breath down to ultimately what you're looking for is six breaths per minute, which is five-second inhale, five second exhale. Six of those is a minute. So box breathing is doing five-second inhale, five-second hold, five-second exhale, five-second hold, which is three breaths per minute, with those holds. And we teach this as a daily practice, 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening. It has a profound effect of reactivating the parasympathetic nervous system, your rest and digest, which allows for the release of all that excess stress and anxiety that's been built up that led to the burnout. But it also becomes a rewiring of your automatic breathing process. And again, automatically or without thought, the average human breathes like 16 to 20 something times per minute. And a lot of that's through the mouth. And so they're constantly activating the sympathetic, reinforcing that sympathetic overactivation. So by box breathing, we're reintroducing the parasympathetic, we're activating the parasympathetic, which balances off that sympathetic and also bleeds off stress. And you're training your automatic breathing system, your automatic nervous system, to breathe in five count inhale and a five count exhale. Because when you drop those holds off and you're breathing naturally during the day, eventually you'll just be re doing five count in, five count out through the nose. And that keeps you in a state of perfect equanimity, homeostatic balance. So right there, you know, that depending upon where the individual is. Like if you came to me and your former special forces soldier, I mean, I could get you to the to stage two within a month or a few weeks, assuming you hadn't fallen off the wagon too much with your fitness. You know. But for someone who hasn't trained like us, it could take six months.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:26

It's so important to get that foundational work in. Now, stage two is we turn the now the body's getting healthy, agitation is bled off, um, they're starting to eat better, sleep better, their moods have improved, their optimism is improved, they're much more positive. Um, but we haven't done anything to train the mind beyond uh the arousal control. So what we'll do is, and this can happen naturally or sooner, but I'm you know, speaking of it in stages, is we take that box breathing practice and we turn it into a concentration and attention control practice. Because people don't know how to control their attention. Everyone's vying for their attention, right? And so they're throwing their attention all over the place, which is like, let's say every day you have a piggy bank of a thousand energy units, and everywhere you place your attention, you have to, you know, you have to basically put a credit in, an energy credit or two.

unknown 31:24

Right?

Starting The Journey For Beginners

SPEAKER_02 31:25

Scroll your social media, there goes a couple energy credits, right? Read the news, there goes 20 energy credits, right? Or 500 maybe, right? And so you're giving all this attention to all these other things out there, and suddenly by mid-afternoon, you're down to zero. So attention control is really important because you want to develop the capacity to shut off all that distraction and not allow it to steal any energy credits, and to radically focus on that which you need to focus on. Now, later on, you'll have more discernment about what's the right thing to focus on. That's like stage three of the training. Stage two is just to be able to focus, concentrate for a long period of time. Now, Tai Chi, um kata in karate, um qigong, these things where you have to do like one period, you know, one type of movement that's like hard to learn. Like some of the Tai Chi forms that I learned were like 100 movements long. But once you learn it, right, doing that is a concentration practice. Attention control on the move, concentrating on the move so you're not distracted. If you get distracted, you lose yourself. So we use box breathing and we follow the pattern of breathing very, very closely. Like Inspector Cluseau, you're like watching every movement of the breath in the inhelm, coming in, and then the hold, and we can even visualize the box pattern. We have an app, an unbeatable mind, that has an actual visual with sound. It's a great way to hold your attention on the box breathing. So now we've got arousal control going on through the deep diaphragmatic nostril breathing, which is massaging the vagus nerve, activating the parasympathetic nervous system. You've got attention control going on because you're willfully intending to focus only on the box breathing and nothing else. And you've got concentration training going on because as you get better and better at this, you're able to hold your attention on that box pattern for longer and longer periods of time, which actually strengthens your mind and allows you to get more things done because you're more focused. That's the second stage. The third stage is where people want to start. They're teachers, and they're like, oh, mindfulness, right? You're gonna sit and watch your thoughts. And people just sit and think, right? Or they just sit and follow some guided app and they're not really able to watch your thoughts because they're completely merged with them. So what happens is as you get good in developing concentration, and you can hold your attention on that box pattern, or box pattern in the mantra is actually the way I do it, because a mantra develops a positive mindset. Um, if as if you can hold your attention there for greater than 50% of the time, you're making great progress. And what happens naturally at that point is you begin to differentiate from the the thinker from the watcher. I call it the witness. Because, you know, you're you're concentrating and you know you're supposed to be concentrating, suddenly you'll notice that you're thinking about what's for dinner. And you're like, oh, I don't want to do that, bring it back. And eventually you go, wait a minute. Who who's this person that is noticing that I'm also thinking about dinner? Are there two of me? And the answer is yes. Right? There's this witnessing awareness quality that we have that's always ever present is actually our true higher self-identity. It's the thread that threads all of our thoughts and emotions and memories together. Without it, there'd be huge gaps. And um, and then there's that thinking that goes on. Some thoughts are spontaneous, some thoughts come through us, some thoughts are generative, and some thoughts are ruminative. Maybe like ruminating on a thought that you think was yours. And suddenly you have this experience that is called mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition of being mindful that that thinking is happening, but knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's not who you are. You're somebody else. And in that space, you've heard they're like, open up the space between thought and reaction. Well, I say open up the space between your real self and the thought, which then leads to the reaction. Now you're doubly protected. So become radically aware and non-reactive, and you get to see the patterns of those thoughts. And this is what happened to me on the Zen bench, and I talked about in New York City. I began to see the patterns of my thoughts, and I began to investigate them once I could see the patterns and say, what, that's not me. Those are thoughts. Well, look at that. Where the frick did those thoughts come from? Oh, they're all that's from my dad, that's from my mom, that's from my education, that's from Colgate. This thought that I had to go to New York and make a lot of money, that came from my friends at Colgate, who were all, you know, from downstate New York and from rich families whose dads were in finance. And I thought that was pretty cool because we all had boats.

SPEAKER_01 36:19

Being able to observe oneself is incredible. When you can get to that, because most people don't have that awareness. And in the drug, trained in our culture. Yeah, yeah. It's to seek the Tao in the void or the way in the void, you know, that the that is just it's incredible to see somebody start to grasp that. It's incredible to go through it yourself. Yeah. Uh it's something like you just said, it's not taught. And I think it needs to be taught. And I hope, listeners out there, that you're able to do this. And please hit pause and go in the link in the bios and find out more from Mark if you want to reach out to him. He's got great programs. You're going to want to check out what he's doing. And I'm sure as you hear, he's got a good voice and method in which he teaches. And I can't wait for you to hear more about the five mountains that he has um that he's talking about. But yeah, absolutely. This is powerful stuff. And please share more, because this is great.

Five Mountains Framework Explained

SPEAKER_02 37:21

Yeah. Well, I like what you're saying then um so when most people are thinking, well that you know it's easy for you to say that stuff, Mark. You've been training for over 40 years. Right. It's never like the the time to start is now. If not now, when? Right? And if not you, who? We used to say that in the teams, right? Like Nobody else is gonna do this mission, so if not us, then who? It's gotta be done. Um Nakamura, after his Thursday meditations, we'd meditate for 45 minutes. He would come behind us with a a wooden sword, and you could feel his presence, and and you put your hands together if you wanted him to smack you with it. It was pretty funny. We all did it because it's part of the culture. This is the And so what they're trying to do is like if you're in a deep state of absorption, but you're still merged with a sense of ego, like I I am doing this meditation. This smack on your shoulder can lead to a sudden shift of perspective. And they call that Satori, like a sudden awakening. And then what's the shift of perspective? Shift of perspective is back to this holy shit, this is happening, and Mark is not involved. That's the highest spiritual truth that is that anybody can come to. But it's it's a distant fantasy for most because they're so wrapped up in their story. So I love what you said early on when we started this thing, is that you can change. Like things aren't working out for you. Great. Great opportunity. Change it. You know, you want to change everything about yourself. If you don't like the body, you can change it. It takes work, it takes time, but you can change it. Right. If you don't like your job, you want to start a business, completely doable. But you gotta believe it first. Right? Um So if not now, when, if not you, who? Right? You you got one chance of this life. After these Thursday sessions, um, where we didn't the 45 minutes that got smacked on the shoulder, Nakamura would have a little like Garshan talk or a little Zen talk. I love he had one of those chalkboards and he'd get his little white chalk and he'd write the kanji characters out. And of course none of us knew what they said, but then grace gratefully he wrote the English translation. One of them was one day, one lifetime. This had such a profound effect on me because like it was a light bulb going off. He said, Listen, and he first, from the warrior's perspective, and you can appreciate this, like today might be your last. So make it be so pay attention. Right? Attention to detail, right? Without attention to detail, you could get killed. And even if you do get, you know, even if it is your last, you want to make sure that you go out well. You know what I mean? That's why, you know, that's why you see guys in this in the teams and and other um services, you know, like Mark Lee, who will take a grenade for his teammates to save them. He's like, people are gonna die. And these are my teammates. And I guess this is my day, because I'm you know, are all getting fragged. And so he jumps on the grenade. Um That's one day in one lifetime. Now now your listeners are gonna be thinking, I don't you know, I don't I don't want to jump on a grenade. Well, you don't have to. What I'm asking you to do is pay attention to the most important things today. Because it, you know, it could be the last day you have. So that was kind of the warrior perspective. The other perspective is and and another saying kind of comes in handy here is from Buds. And I we used to first day I ran into the SEAL compound with my class shouting, Hooya, 170, hoo ya. There was a big sign that said the only easy day was yesterday. Of course, my first thought was, Oh, that means today's gonna really suck. But what it really means is don't obsess about the past. And don't carry any regrets. Because it's it doesn't it exists only in your memory, and your memory is not a good representation of what actually happened. It's just one perspective, and it's limited and it's flawed, and it's gonna be colored by your development and your emotions. So yesterday's gone. Furthermore, don't spend your time fretting about tomorrow. All the critics of what is and what's what's it gonna be like tomorrow and right because tomorrow hasn't happened. Tomorrow's right now just a figment of your imagination. It's a mind-generated fantasy. So an untrained mind is bouncing between past with regrets, critic of what is wishes, and the future fantasies. So this idea of one day, one lifetime is today is what you have. Yesterday's a it's gone. It's a memory, and tomorrow's a fantasy. So if you want to be great in this world, right, don't live from memory and don't live in fantasy. Live for now. And that doesn't mean go out in a hedonistic, you know, you know Bacchanellian festival. It's quite the opposite. It means get really serious about living your life. And if you're really serious about living your life, then then you're not gonna want anybody controlling you. And you want total freedom. I don't know a human being alive who isn't motivated by freedom. And so when you begin to investigate your mind, you realize you're not free. You're in the clutches of all this training and conditioning and uh and a culture and a society, even a government that has so much, so many tentacles inside of you that you you can't possibly be free. The idea of free will is a total fantasy for someone who's not, you know, highly trained individual and has freed themselves from all that conditioning, all that story. So I implore listeners to like get this one day, one lifetime mentality and say, oh, this is serious shit. Because today's the only day I have. Now, you can say, well, I'll wait till tomorrow, because tomorrow will be the only day I have. I'll go, yeah. But you know, tomorrow will be the new today, but you gotta start. If you keep kicking the can down the road, you know, you're gonna get your ass kicked by the can eventually.

unknown 44:30

Right?

SPEAKER_02 44:30

Because that's that's controlling your life. That's resistance. Resistance to to the perceived pain of the training that I'm talking about. But as you know, just like in Green Beret or Navy's SEAL training, at first it sucks, and then it's fun. Once you push through the resistance, right? Yeah. You know what I mean? So everyone who starts training with me, within months, they're absolutely having a ball. And the physical training sessions, which are hard, but they're they're hard designed to get you through the resistance fast to where then it's fun. And it's team-based, and you're you're doing I mean, you're just solving problems, having a ball. Um, and then the mental training becomes indispensable. The box breathing, concentration, attention control, mindfulness, it may become so indispensable because you have it dawns on you suddenly that this is the missing link. And that you'd outsource your brain to other people, other institutions, and now it's that now you're taking it back, or your mind. And so it becomes as important to you as eating and sleeping. And we work those into the morning and evening rituals, the mental training. And so and that's why we call it ritual, because they're really it's sacred time. The minute you get up in the morning, you begin your your gratitude, and then you go into your box breathing in the in a way that I describe rouse control, attention control, concentration. And at the end you visualize your ideal future self in alignment with your calling. Do your journaling, get really clear about what's the most important thing for your day. That's one day, one lifetime thinking. It's like we call it winning in your mind before you step foot in the battlefield. That was a great Sun Tzu quote. Victorious warriors win in their mind first, everyone else goes to war hoping to win. This is why Navy SEALs are so damn good at what they do in Green Brays. Like we we visualize every friggin' op. And we do it obviously with videos and with lots of imagery, but we also do it inside our head. And we win in our mind before we hop on the bird or get in the boat, you know?

SPEAKER_01 46:32

Well, yeah. How many times did I think about blowing the door and putting the charge on before I actually did it? 100%. You know, the placement, visualization, all that stuff. Yeah, it's it's incredible. And I think people need to realize, and I I like and not knocking CrossFit by any means, but people that go and do something like that, they're going through the motion still, like in the world. It's this type of mindfulness becomes a lifestyle. Right. It's a philosophy that you live by. It's not something, hey, I go to the gym and from five to seven those two hours, that's what I'm doing. No, this becomes a philosophy.

SPEAKER_02 47:11

It affects everything, like you said.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 47:13

We call it integrated training. Training versus working out. Working out is like going to a CrossFit, you know, spraying and praying with your pull-ups and hoping you don't get injured. And it's all about the ego putting points on the board, and half the people are cheating doing so. What we're talking about is being really mindful. So your workout becomes an integrated development, right? So you visualize, you visualize the entire thing beforehand. You see yourself doing the movement safely. You know what the outcome is going to be, and you know you're going to be a better person as a result of this training session. And then you move with awareness. So it's like mindful movement, just like Tai Chi, but you might be swinging a kettlebell instead. You practice what we call the big four skills. You're controlling your breathing, you're controlling your internal dialogue, got a positive mantra, right? You're you don't allow any negativity in. One of the best ways to do that is to train with the team, just like we did. And you know, when you're when your teammates are suffering, you help them out. And when you help someone out, you leave a carbon copy on yourself. It's the way the fastest way back into positive territory. And imagery work, like constantly remembering, like, this is why I'm doing this, this is my why, this is who I am, really, or this is the emergent self. That's why we have clients develop an ideal self image, a future self-image that is like super fit, super healthy, radiating, youthful vitality, younger looking, and operating at a very high level of integrated wholeness, right? Love, compassion, world-centric perspective, right? No fear, no lack, no limitation. And we have them keep practicing, practicing, practicing. What you're doing when you practice a visualization like that is you're creating a memory of a desired future. So in your hardest moments, whether it's a hardcore workout or some crisis happens, that memory is there for you instead of memory of some disaster or something that didn't work out in the past or what happened yesterday.

SPEAKER_01 49:00

Yeah, you're changing your belief system.

SPEAKER_02 49:03

It changes your belief system of what's possible, right?

SPEAKER_01 49:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:07

So everything changes. And eventually, you know, these rituals are like morning ritual, evening ritual, and then we ask ask people to do little spot drills during the day. I just described how you train your turn your uh physical training into like integrated five-mountain training. But during the day, you can add these little moments, like at the end of every deep work period, clear your just go clear your mind entirely. Just take a walk around the building, do some box breathing, do some burpees, uh push-ups, squats, um, and just stack up little training things like that throughout the day. Some physical, some mental, some emotional. It could be going around and work and expressing gratitude and stuff like that. All these things have a cumulative effect. So let's say you do half an hour in the morning, half an hour evening, there's an hour, then you do another maybe total half an hour, you get an hour and a half of integrated development, training the body, mind, and spirit. Eventually, though, and I think you were kind of alluding to this, wherever you go, there's your practice. The term sadhana comes to mind or sagu, which comes from akido. It's everything's practice.

unknown 50:11

Right?

SPEAKER_02 50:11

And there's a there's a great quote from Aristotle. I I forget the Greek term, but everything is practice. Wherever you go, there's your practice. You're in conversation, are you sitting there like judging and you know, conceptualizing your very clever response and you haven't heard a word that was being said, that's default mode network. But if you sit there slowly breathing five count in, five count out through your nose, and you're watching your thoughts have reactions or kind of be stimulated or be you know interested and curious about what's happening in the conversation, that's that's practice. That's active listening or mindful listening. Anytime something happens that is unpleasant, right, it's gonna trigger a response to run away, right? Because we move, we try to run away from unpleasant things, things that make us uncomfortable in pain, and we run toward pleasant things and things that you know bring us pleasure. So you watch that too. Because a lot of times the things that are uncomfortable is exactly what we need to face. Like that crucial conversation from that per, you know, that jerk who keeps on dropping the land grenades, you know, and but you're avoiding conflict avoidance, so you just keep avoiding it. And then your resentment builds up. So it's practice to just stand your ground and turn toward that and say, you know what? As uncomfortable as this is, we have to talk about that.

unknown 51:34

Right.

SPEAKER_02 51:36

So there's your practice.

Breathwork, Attention, And Mindfulness

SPEAKER_01 51:37

Yeah, I I love how you're teaching that, and it should be throughout the day and your your your lifestyle and everything you're doing. It's funny, like I have animals in a farm. When I unload those 50-pound bags of food, I don't just throw them on my shoulder. I'll do some presses as I'm walking over to put it like you can find things everywhere. You're loading groceries in, you're turning and twisting, maybe squat down a little bit, do something. Even with the conversation, you're listening to your spouse or your kid, instead of having your mind judge and run, like you said, do some focused breathing, really be an active listener. How can you help and improve that person's mindset? If they're in a bad place, how can you take them to maybe a place of gratitude? Like, yeah, I know today was a really tough day, but you know, we're gonna have ice cream or we're going out to dinner, or you can point them in whatever direction, give them a hug, maybe. Maybe they need some physical touch. So absolutely, this isn't something you just do occasionally. If you're gonna have that awareness or enlightenment, or like I'd say, living with the asset mindset philosophy, it is all day, year round. Yeah, you're gonna stumble sometimes, but when you have that awareness and you're watching yourself and saying, oh, this is an emotion. I'm reacting, I'm not being a participant. And you want to be a participant, not just someone, you know, in the military seals Green Berets, we joke sometimes, we get tired, you're just droning. You don't want to go through life droning. Don't do that. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 53:17

I have clients come to me and say, you know, just the simple act of put putting your cell phone down and just box breathing, right? Or tact with tactical breathing is without you know, without the holes. Five cut in, five cut out. When you're with your kids, right? It's completely transform their relationship with them. Your kids just want you to be present, right? That's it. Just be there with them. Be interested in what they're doing. You can't do that if you're on the phone all the time. You know? Because you're you're so important that you've got to send these emails out or text. You know, spend twenty minutes. That's all you need is like a few minutes with them and it's gold. Same thing with your spouse. So just a a few subtle changes, right? Talk about um negative. Like your brain is five times as negative as positive. It's just the way it's wired. And um and that is capitalized on by the news cycle, right? By governments, it keeps everyone in a state of crisis and everyone in a state of fear. So you're again, you're not free if you succumb to that.

unknown 54:22

Right?

SPEAKER_02 54:23

If you're sitting there watching TV and network news, and if you are believing all the bullshit, right, then you're not free. You're being you're pawned, you're being used. And all that negativity is weakening you. We know from kinesiology that negative thoughts actually weaken you, positive thoughts strengthen you. So here you are all day long with negative thoughts coming in at you, and you're believing them and you're getting weaker. And what that leads to, all and then childhood conditioning. Like, you know, everybody has some some form of trauma. You know, I grew up with an alcoholic father and he was a rager, and so there was that you know some negative dialogue that I had to like just learn how to dispel, which took me some time in my twenties to figure that out. I call it you got to feed the courage wolf. So feeding the courage wolf is basically developing the capacity for positive internal dialogue, and you charge it with heart energy. Coura core means heart, so courage means from the heart. And um and ultimately you get to a place where you truly love yourself and you have true compassion and empathy, and you have a positive view of the future and an abundance mindset and optimism as opposed to pessimism. And, you know, my dad was very snarky with his humor, and it wasn't very funny, but it was, you know, he thought it was hilarious, and sometimes we laughed, but it was snarky humor, um, derision, that type of thing, scorn type humor. Uh it's all extraordinarily corrosive and negative. You know? So you gotta learn to see that where you participate. And you gotta starve that. So you gotta starve the fear wolf. Right? You don't fight it, because whatever you fight actually grows. So instead of like fighting, oh, I can't have that negative thought, you stupid head, right? Which is gonna be most people talking to themselves, you say, you know what, just turn away from that negative thought and do something compassionate. Just say, you know, that's not who I am. I love myself, I love myself. Or start with, I like myself. I I had trouble with I love myself at first. You know, I had I had a sight of parents that never once said I love you. And so I didn't really know how or whether. I didn't know how to do that, or even that it was important. I remember when I was um right around the time that I started this training with Nakamura, I stumbled upon Brian Tracy's work. You know, he's a pretty world-famous sales leader, motivational speaker. And the old cassette tapes, you know, kind of also stumbled around Tony Robbins at the time, so they were interesting and helpful. But I remember what he said is like most people actually don't have a good, you know, view of who they are. If you grew up in a traumatic family childhood, like, you're not gonna have a high self-esteem, right? You're gonna have some shortfall. You may think you're not good looking, you may think you're not worthy, you may think you're not strong, you're competent. For me, I didn't think I was very smart. I mean, for God's sakes, I got a PhD. Um And he said, you know what? None of it's true. It's just it's just conditioning. So we got to override that. And and so your mantra is just this I like myself, I like myself, I like myself, I like myself. And you're gonna say it. If it's a thousand times a day, great, thousand times a day. It's the moment you wake up, just start saying, I like myself, I like myself, I like myself. I was like, that sounds really silly, but I'm gonna try it. And sure as shit, after about three months of doing this, I was like, I felt so much better about myself. Right? I was starting to get override all that negative talk with this simple, very profound practice.

SPEAKER_01 58:07

Yeah, it can be something that simple. Yeah, it but it really can be something that simple to really start the ball moving. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 58:16

In fact, I encourage you to look. A lot of people want to complexify things. We love doing that in the West here. They want to make these complicated formulas and patterns and you know, have 16 practices stacked into one. So all you need to do is those four skills that I talked about. Like begin your box breathing practice to slow your breath down, deep diaphragmatic breath to get control of the arousal response, reactivate your parasitic nervous system. That practice then will lead into concentration attention control. And then the second one is learn how to talk positively to yourself and to others. It's ridiculously powerful and important, and it strengthens you and it deepens relationship and connection. And the third is learn how to visualize and create that powerful positive vision of your future. And if it's your future, then it's the future of your world too. You know, we don't have one world out there. There's eight billion worlds in human eyes. There's an infinite number of worlds given all the other life forms. Everyone's experiencing their own world and mistaking it for someone else's. It's not true. So take charge of your world. That's what Gandhi meant by be the change you you want to see. Change your world, and then the change in your world will begin to affect other people's worlds. And that happens with vision, creating a powerful vision of you and your future, positive, abundant, perfectly healthy, radiating, youthful vitality, in alignment with your calling. And practice it every day just like you would practice breaching that door until it becomes who you are. And the fourth skill is get radically focused on the most important thing that you're supposed to do today and do it.

SPEAKER_01 59:55

Yep. Live in the now. You know, in the moment. And and I'll tell you, listeners, And I'm sure Mark will attest to this. If you start living this way with this mindset, you'll be at peace every night when you go to bed. You ever have those nights where you try, you know, you lay down and then you be, oh, I didn't get this done or I didn't get that done, or oh, I'm scared about this, or scared. If you start living with this mindfulness and this philosophy, you'll go to bed at peace because you know what? I had a great day. I did great things. I spent time with great people. I was aware of everything that was going on. I took care of my body. I did so you will be able to fall asleep and go to bed. Your stress levels will go down. So many good things will happen. And man, Mark, I I feel like we could keep going on and on because this stuff is so deep. It's generational, it's part of the human being and spirit. And I believe what God, our plan and mission was on this earth was to learn these things. I agree. We're not here just to go to a job, work in a cubicle, come back, mold along, go eat, sleep, you know, like it. We are here to grow. And if you're listening to the podcast, yeah, you're here to evolve, to grow, and we appreciate you. And once again, if you want to learn more about Mark, find out about all his books. He's written multiple books, go into the link in the description. And of course, follow, like, and subscribe, the Asset Mindset Podcast. And most of all, own your power.