Embodied Mindfulness with Mark Walsh: Healing, Humor & Trauma-Informed Coaching for a Disconnected World

In this Mindfulness Exercises Podcast episode, Sean Fargo sits down with Mark Walsh, founder of Embodiment Unlimited, to explore the profound connection between mindfulness, embodiment, and trauma-informed coaching.

Mark is a leading voice in embodied mindfulness, known for blending humor, honesty, and heart-centered awareness into the worlds of coaching, somatic psychology, and body-based transformation.Together, Sean and Mark dive into practical, embodied tools for:

• Reconnecting the body and mind through mindfulness and movement
• Cultivating self-awareness, resilience, and compassion through embodiment
• Creating healthy boundaries and overcoming people-pleasing tendencies
• Approaching trauma with sensitivity without fragility
• Bringing humor and authenticity back into mindfulness teaching
• Building a mindfulness or embodiment coaching business in the age of AI and disconnection

They also explore Mark’s 26-Pose Embodied Toolkit, discuss embodiment in war zones and leadership, and challenge the rise of politicized mindfulness with curiosity and courage.

👉 If you’re a coach, counselor, mindfulness teacher, or healer seeking to integrate embodied awareness into your work, this conversation will inspire new depth, courage, and laughter on your journey.⏱️ Chapters

00:00 – Introduction

02:37 - Mark’s story from addiction to martial arts and mindfulness

06:25 - The mental health cost of disembodiment

07:01 - What Presence Really Means

9:51 - Simple practices to reconnect with the body

15:16 - Meeting fear and discomfort with compassion

21:14 - The politics of Mindfulness

23:20 - Practical ways to explore posture and awareness

28:48 - Bringing embodiment into coaching and leadership

🔗 Learn more about Mark WalshInstagram - @warkmalshwww.embodimentunlimited.com

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Email: Sean@MindfulnessExercises.com

Mindfulness Exercises with Sean Fargo is a practical, grounded mindfulness podcast for people who want meditation to actually help in real life.

Hosted by Sean Fargo — a former Buddhist monk, mindfulness teacher, and founder of MindfulnessExercises.com — this podcast explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work.

Each episode offers a mix of:

• Practical mindfulness and meditation teachings
• Conversations with respected meditation teachers, clinicians, authors, and researchers
• Real-world insights for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and caregivers
• Gentle reflections for anyone navigating stress, anxiety, burnout, grief, or change

If you’re interested in:

• Mindfulness meditation for everyday life
• Trauma-sensitive and compassion-based practices
• Teaching mindfulness in an authentic, non-performative way
• Deepening your own practice while supporting others

…you’re in the right place.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:04

Welcome everyone to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. My name is Sean Fargo. Today I have the honor to be talking with a true pioneer in the embodiment world, Mark Walsh. He's an author, martial artist, trauma educator, and founder of Embodiment Unlimited. Mark holds an honors degree in psychology, obtained while wrestling with addiction and debt. He is an Aikido black belt. He's taught in more than 40 countries around the world and has certified over 2,000 embodiment coaches. He's worked with blue chip corporations, people in war zones, including sane Ukraine, NGOs, and still brings a blunt, witty, deeply human voice to the field of body-based transformation. His work asks a question: what happens when we stop seeing the body as a tag-along to the mind and start letting the body lead our healing, our leadership, and our creativity? In today's conversation, I'm looking forward to exploring these questions with Mark and digging into practical embodied tools that you can bring into your mindfulness practice, your coaching, and your support of others. Mark Walsh, it's been a long time coming. I know we've been corresponding for years now, especially around your conferences. And I've been really looking forward to chatting with you more in depth. You seem like one of the more interesting people in this space. So welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Yeah, nice to see you, mate. You you missed out, ex-Navy SEAL, Olympic athlete, what else, Stanford neuroscientist. This is the standard podcast guest these days, right? So I don't know. I've had a those things aren't true, but I've had a relatively interesting life and applied myself mostly to helping people get in their bodies and stay sane, like those, those two things, really. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

Well, we could all certainly use more of that. Mark, I understand you're from the UK and I know you're traveling a lot. You're in Croatia right now, but love to learn about how you found healing practices. I know you were a smart kid, classified as a genius growing up, growing up in a rural area, I believe. And I'm just kind of curious how you found mindfulness, meditation, and some of these practices that you're specialized in.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Sure. So I come from the Alabama of England, just to kind of place it. We're everyone's cousins and it's sort of rural but not nice. And uh, but it's right next to Cambridge, which is, you know, got the sort of intelligent intelligence, intelligentsia, kind of intellectual side. And I was in some ways, my challenge was that of Western civilization growing up, which is being cognitively smart, but really dumb in other ways. So I kind of read lots of books, parents were teachers and found school very easy, but then in my teen years, I ended up in all kinds of trouble in terms of morally, legally, in terms of alcohol and drugs, all sorts of ways. And I just wasn't having a very great time of it. And when I went to university to study psychology, I walked by the library on the first day and I thought, I don't think the answers in there. I'm not sure because I've been in the library a lot, and I don't think learning about things, cognitive knowledge is the place for me. I got into a little bit of trouble and I need to learn to fight. So I went into sort of martial arts dojo, which was at the university, because actually it's in the sports center, and really dived into that. And I walked into my first ever, it was then Aikido, I've studied many other things since, and I looked at it, and something like really deep in me was like, You need this, you need this to survive. It was like a drowning man seeing a raft. And I just devoted myself first to Aikido, and then I realized well, Aikido could teach you certain things, but it wouldn't teach you other things. Eventually kind of discovered the field of like somatics, embodiment, and this kind of world. Through that, mindfulness, of course, meditation, body therapy, you know, everything from dance to improv theater, and just really made that my life and followed that around the world.

SPEAKER_02 4:42

When you say survive, do you mean from a safety standpoint or from like a mental health standpoint?

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Well, I was definitely suicidal at that point and I was addicted. I mean, like a lot of young guys today, I was I was kind of hipster when it comes to depression and addiction. I was into it before it was widespread. So yeah, it was uh that was definitely a necessity for me. I hear there's people doing mindfulness now, you know, because they choose to out rather than out of necessity. But it was a survival level thing, absolutely. I on a this physical level, addiction level, uh on a spiritual level, we could say too, there was deep calling there as well. And you know, like most things, something helps you, eventually you learn to teach other people, to help other people, and it's been a pretty interesting time since then, taking into business, working with NGOs in war zones, training a lot of coaches. And now I'm I've almost come a full circle. I've you know, I've started working with young guys again who are like that. A lot of them are like that kid, you know, young adult who walked into that KJ dojo was an alcoholic at 18. So it's a nice sort of full circle happening now.

SPEAKER_02 5:48

Yeah, yeah, I'm coming off the heels of seeing a few people who I admired have committed suicide, and I think in their men. And I think generally speaking, it seems that they were prone to being a little bit head-based, a little intellectual. And certainly I'm not demonizing intellectualism, and we all need that, but they did seem to maybe live in their heads a little bit. And so there are these questions of what to do if we find ourselves feeling head-based. You know, I think a lot of people equate mindfulness with headfulness or brainfulness.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

With well, the name is a sort of British Victorian abomination, really, isn't it? You know, as a translation of the Pali, it's a terrible translation and it it focuses on the wrong piece, I would say. Yeah. Like, I mean, I'm sure you're aware of this, that it's there was a particular, probably uptight Victorian British gentleman who translated the you know, heartfelt remembrance as mindfulness.

SPEAKER_02 7:00

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, could you talk a little bit about how you view or or sense into the mind and what the mind is and how we can be present with ourselves?

SPEAKER_01 7:13

I'm a sort of intermediate level, let's say, mindfulness practitioner, right? Compared to a lot of people listening and a lot of your guests, I'd probably be more like a beginner. You know, I meditated regularly, daily for I don't know, getting on for 20 years, some serious Buddhist practice, monastics days, you know, lots of retreats. But my expertise is really the body, right? So for me, that's in some ways primary. What I love about the body is it's the most manifest aspect of who we are, like it's the bit we can we can change, we can get to it, right? So it's kind of if someone says change of mind, that's kind of tricky. But we can change our breath, we can change our posture, we can change our movement and helping people stay more in their bodies, more deeply, more of the body, more consistently, more of the time. You know, we've got that down to a pretty good art form, I'd say, in terms of lots and lots of students over the years, giving them different practices, and I can explain kind of how we do that. But it's certainly a skill set. You know, I'm developed an embodied intelligence model, and it's a set of skills you can teach people reliably and consistently, just like mindfulness skills. So, and you know, mindfulness is a base as well. So, all my students are asked to meditate, but they're they're asked to meditate in certain ways, right? Like they encourage more embodiment rather than dissociative ways or more, you know, imagination or other things that might be very cool, might be very useful, but might be better for a different purpose. Sure. Not sure if that answers your question, Sean.

SPEAKER_02 8:40

Yeah, well, I think that you may be a little bit more on the advanced side of things, you may not be giving yourself enough credit. My sense is that mindfulness is an embodied presence, and that as you referred to earlier, like there is a heart-centeredness here too. And that's one of the things that I really appreciate about your work is that you do help so many people find that embodied awareness, that heart-centeredness in I think all aspects of life, with you know, sitting, moving, standing, relational awareness. I love your videos on Instagram and YouTube, showing how people can use embodied awareness as we relate with others and attune to others' energies and our own energies in a somatic way. And I think that often gets underlooked in traditional quote-unquote mindfulness training. So I think you're ahead of the curve there. So I am curious, like, say, what are some of your go-to practices for people who are kind of new to embodiment and how to relate to our bodies from the body? Are there certain key practices or exercises or just even reflections for beginners that you are fond of to help people kind of get out of their head a little bit and find that balance? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

This is kind of program we put together. But the first thing I'd say is whatever you love. So anything which is connecting you to the body in a way which is not dissociative, you know, not just fitness, not just working on the body as an object or the objectified body you'll see in sort of fitness or dance sometimes. But it could be conscious dance, it could be yoga, it could be meditation, martial arts. Um, I'd say the first point of call would just be whatever you love and fall in love with that and just do that because you know, life's too short to do stuff you hate, right? So that's the entrance point. And that would be for the beginner, it's just like, you know, these we we send students to do these experiments and they get an improv class and they go to an Aikido class and they go to a yoga class, and that's great. And then for people who have been doing that already, I'd say, okay, how do you want to bring some balance to that? So, you know, you might sit and get a really exquisite sense of the body and the breath sitting meditating, but as you alluded to earlier, your relational embodiment might be kind of crap because you like I was once at a meditation retreat, the the teacher, Robert Bayer, a fantastic teacher, to see style from the UK, got a house, he'd got everyone to just stand up and move around and be aware of their bodies while walking around a room. And you know, all these kind of like on the spectrum introvert meditators were freaking out. And it was literally just it was literally just getting them to walk around a room, you know? And I was like, it's like good luck with doing some kind of tantra practice, acro yoga, or so you might want to bring some balance to your practice, both in terms of the skill sets it's bringing. Well, so yeah, so we we're we can all be more or less embodied as in consciously embodied, but then the next question becomes, what are we embodying? Right. So if someone says we use like a four elements model, if someone's very watery in their practice, they've done a lot of soft, fluid embodiment, they might want to take a more fierce, fiery practice. If someone's done a very structured practice, like an Aenga Yoga or something like that, Ashtanga Yoga, they might want to do a more like fun, creative, kind of airy practice, something like some kinds of dance or improv comedy. So that would be the sort of second level. So first level would just be do whatever you enjoy, second level would be bring some balance to that. So otherwise, you just get more and more neurotically, because people pick practices like themselves, right? So, like a friend of mine actually did a study at a big meditation center in Scotland, and 80% of people there were introverted. And that's statistically unlikely, right? Like just by accident. But it's it's certain people are choosing that practice. Whereas for me, my first silent retreat, you know, coming from sort of Anglo-Irish background, highly extroverted, having done lots of social practices was like utter torture, but actually really good for me to just kind of sit quietly. I remember I was like, I didn't read the details because I'm too ADHD to kind of read the forms and stuff they sent me. And you know, they did a talk, and then on the first day, it's like 20 years ago, they they said, Oh yeah, now we're gonna go into silence for five days. And I was just like, What the fuck? What can I still get hugs? How does this work? You know? So, you know, that I can accidentally balance for me that way. So uh yeah, and the other things I'd recommend would be uh, you know, definitely a sitting practice and a movement practice. Both is good, some kind of relational practice and lots of nature connection. Like if you want to get more in your body, get more in nature. Like I'm I'm doing two, three hours of phone calls a day walking along the seafront here in Croatia. That's pretty normal for me. I always live by a park or by the ocean just so I can be outdoors all day. Yeah, just like nature connection really helps. And then the third one would be like the people you're around. So you've got practices, places, and people, like three Ps, right? So the they're all important. People tend to geek out on the practices, but the places and the people also really matter. Like if you hang out with a bunch of embodiment guys in nature, you don't have to do that much yoga.

SPEAKER_02 13:59

Yeah, thank you for those four parts. I think a lot of us as mindfulness practitioners focus on one or two, but it's really nice to have the the others that you mentioned. I laughed when you were talking about how when people are simply asked to just walk around the room with each other, you know, sensing into their bodies and you know, freaking out. That used to be me when I left the monastery after being a monk for a couple years. I was asked to do that at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. And I didn't know how to do it because you know, I was doing a very isolated, independent practice in nature for two years. And it's like, oh, what does it mean to walk around all these different kinds of people, including women who I wasn't really allowed to get close to for two hours? Like, how do I navigate that? And and then all these questions popped up, like, like, who am I or what am I? And then the question that you pointed to, like, what are we embodying? And it was really insightful. And you know, it sounds so simple, but it can lead to a lot of you know awareness of like, oh, who what are we? Thank you for sharing that. I think a lot of people, as they're getting into their bodies more and more, feeling more embodied through some of these practices, they run into some scary places sometimes. So a lot of us carry trauma, anxiety, you know, addiction, as as you've pointed to. And what are some of your tips or suggestions for those of us who are navigating our bodies more intentionally and also kind of confronting some of this stored energy that lives in the body that made you feel scary?

SPEAKER_01 15:57

Okay, besides this, yeah, we definitely need to be trauma informed, but not trauma deformed. I think, you know, let's not get too worried. Like people have had bodies for a while and you know, working with bodies. But yeah, stuff can come up, that's for sure. Like I remember one retreat in the Colorado Mountains, and I was just all this trauma stuff was coming up, and I was just weeping, and you know, military jets were flying by, and every time they did, like my body would just shake, and you know, stuff, trauma stuff, various war zones I've been in would come out, and the teachers were mean to me there as well. So I felt like super isolated, and you know, stuff was coming up, and I think it's not just the body. I mean, I was also having like mad kind of visions of Catholic saints and stuff, like all sorts of stuff comes up for people in meditation, as you know, right? And this isn't on your tin of your little mindfulness app that says, Oh, this will be good for your stress, you know. Like uh, you know, I had three months when my entire body felt like warm champagne, and I called up a few friends. Uh, Miles Kessler, a friend of mine Israel, who's a pretty senior capacitor teacher and Shin Zen Young and said, What's going on? And they were able to help me a little bit, but you know, stuff can come up. I mean, that was very pleasant, but it's hard to do your accounts when you're made of liquid love. Pretty disruptive to my life. So, yeah, stuff can come up all sorts, and it's I think there's no excuse not to be trauma-informed now. Like, spend a couple of days on the internet, like David Trevellan's books, fantastic. Like, if you're teaching meditation, I know you have a lot of mindfulness teachers listening, just do the basics. But equally, don't be paranoid, you know. Like, I mean, this the teams I supervise in Ukraine working with soldiers who are doing you know retreats away from the front lines. I mean, yeah, they have to be pretty careful and stuff does come up. But I think you know, I think let's not be too paranoid. Otherwise, people approached it's kind of like the body's kind of like a dog. If you approach it with fear, it doesn't respond well. But if you approach it with love and head paths, it's probably going to work out okay. So, um, yeah, I'd say this is a kind of fine line. And I particularly in the States, the trauma world has got like super politicized and super sensitive, and you know, people telling me like we'll start off a circle, and everyone tells me their pronouns, and everyone tells me their mental illnesses, and it's you know, and their traumas, the massively oversharing, and it's all a little bit silly at this point. So I think you know, we could also assume that our students are robust adults, and you know, some basic stuff around consent and touch and choice and these kind of things is helpful, but let's not get let's not get too paranoid about the body.

SPEAKER_02 18:33

Yeah, I completely wholeheartedly agree with all of that. I co-host a uh trauma sensitivity training with David Trelevin, and yeah, I I think he's okay with me sharing this. There's you know, it's it's important to be trauma sensitive, but it's also important not to be trauma over sensitive, as you're pointing to. I love your metaphor of approaching a dog, you know, being afraid of the dog, that well, that the dog's not going to respond well to that. And uh people can kind of sense that fear if you're walking on eggshells. And also, you know, a lot of this work is healing because it's difficult, or you know, we run into our edges, or it just takes courage and to you know, not overwhelm the senses, but we do want to explore them, and that's where a lot of the healing comes. So thank you for for pointing to that.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

It's just that one would be like learning self-regulation skills as you get more sensitive, like that balance, like we call them centering skills, like basic bodily self-regulation skills. You know, therapy is an adjunct, trauma healing is an adjunct to mindfulness, I think is is super helpful there as well. And like keep a sense of humor. Like my favorite mindfulness teachers, of like whether it's Shenzhen or Junpo or different, you know, Dalai Lama, they've all got this good sense of humor. That somehow gets a bit lost in sort of Calvinist, you know, North American style mindfulness or sort of oversensitive, you know, Bay Area mindfulness, it gets a bit lost. That that sense of humor, which I do see in a lot of practitioners, you know, whether from Asia or America or wherever.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

Absolutely. Yeah, that's how I found the Dharma in mindfulness is through laughing at my teachers, or with them, I guess. Uh Arjan's tomato just made me laugh every single time I heard him. He was an abbot at a monastery close to the Alabama of England. And yeah, it helps to open the heart, not take ourselves too seriously. I live in Berkeley, California. The heart of I'm sorry, man.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

Sure, I'm so sorry. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

Well, I think a lot of people have this perception of me being extremely sensitive and you know, wearing fur all day and kind of being on, you know, the woke side of things with the capital W. And I'm I'm proud to say I'm I'm I'm not.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Well, with that haircut, you know, you could easily go to a skinhead rally. So uh you could you could send any of his. I mean, I think the politicization of bipolarists, particularly in the West Coast, is is a phenomenon that needs challenging because there's a lot of people out there who maybe they're like a cop in the Midwest, right? Even just to stay in the States, let alone the rest of the world, which definitely isn't signing up for it. Right. But like here in Croatia, I mean, you know, Catholic, conservative country, good luck doing good luck doing West Coast mindfulness in the way that has become highly politicized and I think very exclusionary, very elitist, and frankly unkind, just to put it simply. It's just it's a complete corruption of the Dharma, as far as I can tell. So upsetting some of your Berkeley friends. I want to want to lay that down. So you won't have many guests who say that at all.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

Well, we want to be authentic. You know, we we certainly want to have explorations with everybody on all sides to build empathy. And I think that extremes on both sides can feel a little racious, including some of the mindfulness teachers with some of these extreme views. And I think that they think that they're saying morally correct here. And it's funny because the more embodiment work I do and the more travel I do, the more I realize, oh, there's a bigger picture here. And I kind of see, you know, just borrowing a Buddhist phrase, like some ignorance on both sides. And usually we find, you know, balance in the middle more. I don't know. So yeah, I I completely agree with you, and I'm glad that you're being authentic with this and and not being afraid to call some of this out.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Not anymore, not anymore. I mean, 99% of your ancestors, 90% of the world, and 50% of your own country aren't complete idiots, right? Exactly. Like let's let's be humble enough to say that this incredibly new radical way of looking at the world, which may have some good stuff in, may have some useful stuff in. Let's be humble enough to say that this isn't a moral, the new moral regime that everyone else in the world must follow.

SPEAKER_02 23:18

Totally. Yeah, completely agree. I want to touch base on some of your, say, teacher trainings, your coaching programs. You know, a lot of our listeners are people who share mindfulness with others or integrate mindfulness into their coaching or yoga, etc. You have a framework, the 26 Pose Embodied Toolkit, part of your masters of embodiment coaching. And wondering if you could walk us through one or two poses from the perspective of a practitioner and maybe also as a guide in in helping others to find that in embodied pose.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Yes, embodied toolkit. I mean, just being more or less embodied is fantastic, right? To be embodied. But what we realize is it would be useful to give people a language of embodying different aspects of being human. So we started off with some yoga poses, like, you know, warrior pose, things that had good names for a reason, right? Warrior pose is called warrior pose for a reason. When you take it on, you kind of feel like, yeah, I can take up space and I'm very focused. It's not called kind of baby kitten pose, right? Like the person who named it was was smart. And then we realized, you know, there were some other poses we took from like tango or martial arts or different areas, or from studying sculpture and advertising's quite useful for sort of seeing kind of big poses because people that do maybe adverts aren't stupid. So if you're studying his art and all these different embodiment practices, we kind of came up with a language of like 26 poses, uh, which covers like a lot of human experience, very cross-cultural, kind of archetypal. People from various countries worked on them. It was like, okay, yeah, this, you know, let's take no versus yes. Yes is a lot more like the kind of Virgin Mary you'll see around here in Croatia, very open, arms to the side, palms open. There's a sort of might feel vulnerable for some people, but that's a pose. And we fine-tune them like how the eyes, how's the mouth, has the breath, and then no pose, which is much more like a karate pose. People couldn't look on YouTube if they just put in no pose if they're listening. Like that's super practice for I don't know. I coach people who are people pleasers or have boundary issues, or you know, they I don't know, they they're a bit too nice. That's quite the case for a lot of my Buddhist friends, actually. They're a bit too nice, you know, they're they're a little bit too much yes. They spent a lot of time practicing acceptance, and now they need to practice rejection. So we have a pose for that, and they can practice that in a concise way. As coaches, I might, as a coach, I might take someone through that. I might push on their hand in the pose if it's face-to-face coaching and say, okay, what do you need to say no to in your life and help them find that no? Or you could link them so we might connect the no pose to a self-care pose, which is kind of like a hug, where you hug yourself and kind of really seeing connecting it to the sense of looking after oneself. And you can be skillful as a coach with this, you could uh do meta practice doing it, you could combine it with a visualization maybe of hugging someone else till you can find that way of embodying that for yourself. And obviously, a skillful embodiment coach can move people between them, and it might be like, okay, we're gonna do no, but with the hand on the heart in order to find, like, you know, it's no because there's something I love. Or maybe it's being seen pose, which is like a big starfish, kind of like uh if you imagine Freddie Mercury doing a Wembley Arena rock star concert, you know, all the Buddhists who have spent all this time going in might need to spend a bit more time going out and um take up space to be seen, maybe for their marketing or their dating or some very practical problem. So there's a few kind of poses, and uh, there's a book if people are interested that takes people through all the technicalities.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

Beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, and for a lot for everyone listening, I really encourage you to check out uh Mark's socials and his website, embodimentunlimited.com. We'll put a link in the show notes and and share it with our audience. I agree. I think a lot of mindfulness practitioners do struggle with say boundaries and knowing what healthy boundaries look like. There are 10 they tend to be a lot of introvert, people pleasing, you know, like maybe overly passive, I guess might be a good word. But and I think they're near enemy of acceptance, right? Passivity. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Yeah. And and that's exactly what I was gonna say. That's funny. So I know for me, it took a while after the monastery to realize that boundaries are okay.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

Once you've dissolved into the universe and be one with everything. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 27:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:53

It's that's that's another step, right?

SPEAKER_02 27:56

Yeah. And it's not that the monastery explicitly taught me that boundaries are bad, but that's just kind of what I perceived, intuited somehow. And but yeah, like I was like one with everything. I was dissolving everything, I was accepting of everything. And you know, I kind of lost myself. And it took me years to realize what a healthy boundary looks like and how to how to navigate my own power and what agency looks like and what a healthy self looks like. And you know, a lot of that is in the body. So at embodimentunlimited.com, you have a a coaching program to be a certified embodiment coach for professionals. It does include trauma informed practices. Can you talk about who you help become embodiment coaches and how you help people integrate that into various professions?

SPEAKER_01 28:57

Yeah, first of all, thank you for the great advert for listeners. I didn't pay Sean to do that, but that's so much appreciated. We're that's our main job. The main work we do is helping embodiment coaches. What I realize is not everyone's gonna go deep into martial arts or yoga, but they can still work on their embodiment. Half the group are probably like pretty experienced coaches already, and they know that the body matters to that, but they don't know the nuts and bolts of it. It's just the sort of they go from the vague the body is important in coaching to okay, specifically, here's some things I can do with embodiment. So I'd say that's half the people I work with already, coaches, facilitators, trainers, some of them more like group trainers, and the other half are just wanting to become coaches. Maybe they're coming through the embodiment lens, you know, they've got some mindfulness skills, or they're coming through they dance or martial arts, something like that. And they go, you know, I also just want to work with normal people and I want to coach people. So, you know, working a bit less athletically, a bit more verbally, as well as the body. Um, so yeah, we take them through six months' course and we've been doing it for quite a few years. So pretty established with it. Give people a whole set of practices to get them more in their own bodies because that's key, not Just the tools and techniques. It's pretty well structured. We have German ladies in charge who keep it all very well structured. So I recommend recommend everyone have a German lady in charge of their life. Yeah. Between my chaos and their order, it pretty much works.

SPEAKER_02 30:15

Beautiful. That's great. I am really keen on your work there. And especially right now with the rise of artificial intelligence, screens, remote work, you know, there's a quote unquote epidemic of loneliness these days. I'm curious, like moving forward for embodiment coaches, like how do you recommend coaches to like say scale their influence and their impact? What niches do you find are underserved? And how do you suggest say mindfulness and embodiment coaches to reach more people, to scale their business, but also just their impact these days?

SPEAKER_01 31:04

Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to three questions there, but let me pan back for a minute. The first thing, a couple of years ago I realized that disembodiment is a big problem because it leads to lack of empathy, disconnection and polarization you were talking about earlier, uh, the kind of reactivity that we see in the political world, which seems to be sort of spiraling, and just on a personal level to basic misery, you know, in my case, addiction, mental health stuff, just general low-level misery that everyone seems to be in. It's very common. But then there's also the disconnection of community and technology is making that worse. And I mean, you're you're not that far from Silicon Valley, and we we should view the assault against our minds and communities being waged by Silicon Valley as an existential threat. I mean, it is. We've we've literally stopped breeding in the West. We've become such a death call. The Western culture is um in a period of decline anyway, but it's essentially with the help of technology and there's other factors, spiritual factors and various other um, this disconnection from the body, also from community, also from nature. So we could kind of look at this for an environmental lens, very much like kind of gesturize animist work, for example. And theologically, we're disconnected from spirituality, from divinity, from meaning, if we put it in a more secular context. So I call this the tetrarchy model of four disconnections from self, other nature, and meaning, or spirituality. That condition we find ourselves in is a sort of psychological Black Death or a psychological tipping point where our culture has been materially really successful, but psychologically is one of the worst cultures that's ever existed ever. And in terms of levels of medication, mental ill health, um, prison population in the States, you can add to that. We are a death cult, an absolute death cult. So that is a situation we're in. And to stop that death spoke, uh death cult kind of spiraling into its kind of AI technological solution to the Fermi paradox, this is where all the aliens go. We certainly need embodiment, but we need more than that. There's other pieces there, like the community building. I think we're seeing sort of religion come back in a big way, and I think very rightly, I think there's going to be an extremely big part of this. But in to sort of there's a big picture piece there, I wanted to wanted to say, but to come to your question in terms of what can a coach do, well, if you're only giving out information, you will be replaced by AI, because AI has made information worthless. So if we're not bringing presence, intuition, embodiment, maybe touch, like what are we doing that you know, Elon's robot monkeys can't? So that that's the first question I'd say, just like economically. Yeah, in terms of niches, I think often it's what you're called to because you can't do everything, right? Like, I'm very cool to work with young men again at the moment, you know, in terms of embodiment coaches, I see a lot work with boundaries or people pleasing, you know. But all my students work in different ways with different groups based on sort of who they feel, that sense of purpose, who they feel cool to work with. There's some parts there. So anything you want to restate, so there's a few questions there.

SPEAKER_02 34:05

Yeah, thank you for for that. I I'm I'm not the best interviewer here, so thank you for parsing that out for me. I appreciate that. Yeah, and I love the context of all that. I think I'd just like to echo that you know, finding a niche is it can be very fruitful in terms of acquiring new clients or students who feel really heard or seen. And I I think that you're touching on some niches that there's a big demand for around people pleasing and boundaries. I know some of the top podcasts these days are around not caring too much about what people think of you. And, you know, quite frankly, embodiment is the root of a lot of these challenges that society is facing. And so, you know, one take is to just find one of the biggest challenges that you see in our world, and then use embodiment coaching as an antidote or a solution. So I think that finding a niche can be really helpful. Speaking of podcasts, you have the embodiment coaching podcast.

SPEAKER_00 35:18

700 episodes or something by now. It's been like uh seven years, something like that. It's been going a while. So that's incredible.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

Enjoy as how you find it, but I enjoy it as a way to learn, you know, get to talk to interesting people that probably wouldn't give me their time otherwise. So that's pretty cool. Touche, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:34

So I do uh encourage people to check out the podcast. We'll put a link in the show notes. People can find Mark's Instagram, Wark Malsh. So it's Mark Walsh, but just a switching the M and the W. There's an embodiment coaching YouTube channel where you can find a lot of really informative and useful videos on how to feel more embodied and to help others. Of course, the flagship is embodimentunlimited.com, where you can find some great resources, learn more about Mark, and also sign up for some of his online conferences that he has with really stellar teachers. I can't recommend it enough. Mark, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I hope to do a round two with you again. And I do also want to just salute your work with people in war zones, including your Ukraine. And maybe this is another like multi-part question here for you.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

Like one question if you can. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:38

Come on, Sean, hit me up, we go. Well, I'd just like to hear like what message would you like to share with our community that you haven't shared yet so far? We've said most of what I'd like to say.

SPEAKER_01 36:50

What I'd what I'd say to this is be if there's mindfulness practitioners out there who've been trained in kind of Eastern arts, Buddhism, maybe coming from more like that West Coast point of view, lots of beautiful stuff in that. You know, I've trained in the West Coast, I've trained in Theravadan Buddhism with uh some of the people you mentioned, actually. Wonderful. And you know, I'd say also be open to what else is out there, whether it be the martial arts, whether it might be a Christian perspective, for example. I read um Theology of the Body by John Paul II just last week. I was blown away. It was absolutely fantastic, which I you know I would have been too prejudiced to read, you know, 10 years ago. Listen to your conservative friends, look what they're doing right as well. Like they they've got at least half a picture. You know, have that humility and we can start healing some of those gaps that exist in society. And you know, don't be afraid to do the work that really matters. You know, for me, I had lots of links in Ukraine, so it's there. For someone else, it might be another country. We can't we can't do everything, right? You can't do Sudan, Yemen, Palestine, you can't do everything. But it's like, you know, find something that matters to you, and or you know, or else what's the alternative? Just mindfulness teachers teaching, mindfulness teachers teaching, mindfulness teachers, right?

SPEAKER_02 37:59

Reach out a bit further than that. Love your perspective, Mark, and your humor too, I think, for a lot of us. If we're feeling a little dry, look for wise elders who have the sense of humor. So, Mark Walsh, thank you so much for helping me laugh today. And I've learned quite a bit in our short time here together today. Thank you for the great work that you're doing. I highly recommend everyone listening or watching to check out embodimentunlimited.com, Mark's YouTube channel, and the embodiment coaching podcast. If you're thinking about bringing more embodiment into your work helping others, I encourage you to check out the embodiment coaching certification. And if anyone has any questions around this, feel free to email me anytime at Sean at mindfulness exercises.com. Mark, thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you have a wonderful evening in Croatia walking on the beach. Thank you so much. Sean, real pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

Really, really nice to get together. So thank you.

SPEAKER_02 39:04

Yeah, likewise.