Mark Divine [00:00:47]:
Talked about how that is critically important as a foundation for all of the work you do developmentally. Because wherever you go there your body is, you don’t leave it behind. So many people when they do emotional or spiritual work, they just completely ignore their body and ultimately it leads to problems because they become literally disembodied and, you know, become essentially walking brains, but with no connection to really their feeling states, no awareness of the shadow and the patterns that have really drive their behavior and also shutting themselves off from what we call whole mind, which is the experience of using your body as your mind or your mind being infused throughout your body because they are not separate, they’re actually same. So we want to start with the physical to really get super healthy and learn how to move with awareness and grace, to be able to tap into the sensations and the feelings of your body as well as your heart mind and your gut mind. And also to kind of purify and detoxify the body as well as to clarify the mind and to slow down the thinking processes. All of that accrues just through physical training and physical health. So that was really the foundation physical. Now today I want to move on to mental mountain.

Mark Divine [00:02:08]:
Right. So what do I mean by the mental mountain? Start with a little story here. Right. Growing up in upstate New York, traditional education, public high school, college, you know, cranked out a whopping 2.8 GPA at Colgate University. The training was all a horizontal or linear meaning it was just packing information in, trying to remember it and trying to regurgitate it on a test. That’s pretty common. Like most of us have had that, that experience for education. And it was called education, it wasn’t called mental development.

Mark Divine [00:02:43]:
Right. So I’d never heard of mental development. And so what I thought I knew was a bunch of stuff we call that knowledge. And I thought that knowledge was going to make me better or somehow different, but it really didn’t. It just simply gave me some practical tools to use in the corporate structures that the educational system was designed to prop up and support. So my mind happened to be white collar work as a certified public accountant in the finance industry in New York. So there I went blithely into that career thinking, okay, I’ve got all this skills and all this knowledge and everything’s going to be great now. And so when I started meditating, some of you heard that story.

Mark Divine [00:03:31]:
I found a grandmaster martial artist who was also a Zen teacher. And I started training with him and I started to sit down and to just practice this thing he called Zen. And it turns out that that was an introduction to the mental mountain work. It was mental training, mental development that was radically different than trying to pack new knowledge into my brain and to train my brain to access that knowledge through memory and to then formulate it in sentences and put it back out there as like, hey, I know this thing and I’m smart. I can reconstruct these mental models and, and project them into the world through my, you know, my work and relationships and whatever. And so what I began to see when sitting on that little meditation bench was that everything that I had done was all basically external ideation and creating these mental structures based on language that were stored in memory banks that then got projected back out in the world to create my perception of reality. But it had nothing to do with who I actually was. And so sitting on the meditation bench was the first opportunity I had or chance I had to really examine what my mind was and how I thought what I thought.

Mark Divine [00:04:58]:
And then also to solely and almost imperceptibly at first, but then in an accelerated manner, change how my mind worked. So I want to talk a little bit about all of that. Mind you, this is not easy work. There’s something that we call the monkey mind. And the monkey mind is the nature of the mind to just jump all over the place, right? If you take the time to actually sit and reflect, or sit and just be with your thoughts, you notice that they just are like non stop and they seem to arise from nowhere. And then you can energize some thoughts and you can spin out of control with certain thoughts and emotions, or you can think yourself into a calm state. But most of these thoughts are just patterns. They say that we have like 60,000 of these every day and 80% of them are the same patterns and thoughts that we had yesterday and the day before.

Mark Divine [00:05:54]:
So we just keep on repeating the same things over and over and over. And that leads us into that trap of doing the same thing and expecting or hoping for different results. Because we’re just dragging our past into the present moment every day, which is ensuring that our future looks exactly like our past. So that is the untrained mind. The untrained mind is a mind that has been packed full of information that someone else tells you is important, packed full of belief systems and mental models and ideas and biases through your experiences, through your education and through your family, through the different institutions and media of your culture of origin. And then you just regurgitate that in most people for their entire lives. And unfortunately, that leads to pretty suboptimal results because a lot of that conditioning and programming is negative, fear based and layered with all sorts of trauma induced, childhood trauma induced patterns that protected the child but are not very effective or useful as an adult, especially in relationship with others. So when you ask why do mental training mark? The answer I would give you is because if you don’t, then you’re not free.

Mark Divine [00:07:09]:
You’re not, you’re not free of the conditioning and the patterns and those constructs and those, you know, the entire edifice of how you have been trained by the external world, exterior world, to believe in reality. So you’re not free. And the idea that you have free will is a fantasy right there. So ultimately, if you’re driven toward the notion of freedom, which most of us are, and that’s what we call waking up to a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset, is that you have this internal, like primal urge to expand. And what is that expansiveness? It’s freedom. It’s freedom from contraction, it’s freedom from limitation. It’s freedom from whatever’s holding you back. And ideally you would see that what’s holding you back is the mental conditioning and training that you’ve received throughout your life up until that moment that you seek freedom.

Mark Divine [00:08:04]:
So freedom can only come then by investigating the nature of the mind. And we call that meditation, right, meditation. You know, everyone has a different view of what that word means, but it’s simply paying attention to how the mind works. It’s the process of paying attention. Meditation is also could be talked about in the sense of the process of turning away from the bias toward action and toward the bias toward inaction. Said another way, it is the process of moving away from just a doing person to A being person. In other words, to be more okay with being quiet and to being silent, to being able to sit in silence and to be able to watch your thoughts, examine your thoughts, curate your thoughts, and then even move beyond your thoughts into what we call the witness and to experience the more ephemeral nature of your natural state, in which case you’re already free in that natural state and you’re already in a state of happiness and peace. But you’ve got to work your way there through the outer layers of the mind.

Mark Divine [00:09:15]:
At least us in the Western community who have been so hyper trained with that left mind, linear thinking packed full of concepts and knowledge that gets stored and then compartmentalized and then regurgitated. All that needs to be softened. And in the process, your ego starts to move beyond just identifying with the concepts and the beliefs that you normally would think of as you to a much more expansive sense of self. So your self awareness begins to expand and it begins to connect with source and with all that is. And so you develop this kind of sense of a both and that you are a spiritual being having this human existence, and that those structures and those ego identity things are not unhelpful, they are helpful, but they need to be purified, clarified and directed in the right manner. So you tame the ego, you take control of it, you put it in its proper place, and you lead from what we might call your higher self. This is all what happens. Those are the outcomes, let’s say, of mental mountain training or mental mountain development.

Mark Divine [00:10:30]:
Like I said, it’s not easy. So when I started on the zen bench with Mr. Nakamura, this is 1985, I literally called it concentration camp because it felt like I was a prisoner in my own mind. When you sit down, at least my experience, when I sat down and tried to concentrate, I noticed my mind was just all over the place. That monkey mind or popcorn mind was constantly thinking and churning. So it took a little bit of faith and I had a lot of trust in the teacher. So that’s one way to have a lot of. That’s one way to have faith and to stick with it.

Mark Divine [00:11:10]:
Because meditation requires, just like any physical training requires that you just do it and not do it once in a while, but you do it every single day. It also requires a few prerequisites, and one of them is that you are physically healthy and strong. Now, when I started training, I was extremely fit. I was an elite athlete, so I had all that box checked. But a lot of my clients come to me and they’re not extremely fit. And they’re not, I wouldn’t have to say, you don’t have to say extremely fit, but fit and healthy. And if you try to meditate and you’re unhealthy, like I said at the introduction to this, this podcast, you won’t succeed because your body is going to be too hyper aroused. It’s going to be full of stress and anxiety.

Mark Divine [00:11:55]:
And if your body’s full of that, then your brain, of course, which is part of your body, is going to be hyper aroused and anxious. And so you’re going to have a very difficult time concentrating and sitting comfortably right in the posture of meditation. So I noticed that that was a prerequisite. So that’s one of the things that I kind of, okay, check. If I hadn’t had that healthy body and brain, then the work would have been much more challenging for me. Also, because Nakamura was a traditional Zen teacher, they used the breath to concentrate the mind, to hold the attention steady. And so in those early days, I learned how important it was to control the breathing and to slow it down. And that began to stabilize the mind.

Mark Divine [00:12:41]:
So that’s the second prerequisite is we use the breath to stabilize the mind and to calm the body down in a process we call arousal control. So when you want to start mental training and you think, well, I’ve got to sit down and meditate, what you’re really going to do is you’re going to sit down and you close your mouth and you’re going to start breathing deeply through your nostrils and you’re going to slow that down to a count of five, and you can even add the holds. And yes, I’m describing box breathing. So you’re going to do five count, inhale, five count, hold, five count, exhale, five count, hold, or four count, if that’s a little too much for you. So what this is going to do now, it’s going to draw your attention inward. It’s going to calm your body down by activating that parasympathetic nervous system, massaging the vagus nerve. And because you’re concentrating on the box pattern and you’re holding your attention on that box pattern, then you’re stabilizing your mind and calming it down and really preparing it to do some other work with your mind. So this, this prerequisite right here, which we’ll call arousal control and attention control, leading to greater powers of concentration.

Mark Divine [00:13:51]:
Some and most people should do this for an extended period of time and not worry about anything else. This is meditation, right? But you’re getting some significant benefits from this. Arousal control, attention control, concentration. And you may work on this for a year or more. When I did this, that was all I did for several years. For several years. And our objective was to count to 10. So inhale without the box breathing, just the inhale, five count, exhale, five count.

Mark Divine [00:14:23]:
You try to count to 10 without thinking of anything else, just holding your attention on that. And I gotta tell you, it was very, very difficult. I remember the first time I did it, I think I got to 2 and realized I was thinking the whole time. So back to zero started over and got to two again. And it took me literally six months to where I could count to five and honestly say that I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was holding my attention on that count. The benefits to that, like I said, are enormous. Your ability to hold your attention, to become less distractible, to be able to concentrate more and to really focus on things with much more intense mental energy really greatly are greatly improved.

Mark Divine [00:15:05]:
But it’s not really the end all be all of meditation, right? So mental training then will bear fruit when you have that concentrated mind and you begin to turn that concentration inward, right? And you’re looking for a state of expansive awareness that is beyond the thinking, meaning you can observe and you’re aware of thinking happening, but your center of awareness is not the thoughts itself, meaning you’re not merged with your thoughts anymore. This will happen quite naturally when you do the concentration practice over time. Because what happens that concentration, you’re thinking of just one thing. And while you’re doing that, while you’re holding your attention on that one thing, you get really good at noticing when other thoughts start to come up. And what you also begin to notice is that the noticer is different than the thinker, right? So we’ll call that the witness. So as your witness opens up, you develop a greater sense of I ness that is not connected to thinkingness. Now, this is a real sea change for most people. It’s like their first awakening to, hey, I’m not my thoughts.

Mark Divine [00:16:21]:
And if I’m not my thoughts, then who am I? And that is one of the most profound questions you can ask in mental development and mental training. So we’ll call this mindfulness, right? And mindfulness is certainly something that is not unique to my training. It’s been part of the American culture for some time now. But the challenge people have with mindfulness is it’s somewhat of an advanced practice. And if you haven’t practiced the arousal control, attention control, and Concentration, then mindfulness doesn’t come very easily, especially if your body is kind of agitated and you’re anxious. So the way I like to look at this is, you know, crawl, walk, run, just like if you go into a gym and I used to train a lot of CrossFit athletes and if you have never had any experience with some of the advanced movements, then you don’t just, you know, don’t just start doing them at full load or what they’re called rx. You’ve got to work your way slowly learning the fundamentals and functional movement patterns. And you might not do some of these more advanced movements for a couple of years.

Mark Divine [00:17:26]:
Similar with meditation, right? There’s mindfulness is an advanced skill. And so you’ve got to lay the foundations of the physical mountain and then concentration, arousal control and attention control. So anyways, what we’re talking about with Mental Mountain is this foundational work to transform not what you think, but how your mind works. And you develop the capacity to use your whole mind, which is, you know, both left and right hemisphere being online simultaneously. We call that simultaneous mind, where you’re aware that you are aware and you are aware that you’re thinking while simultaneously being able to be engaged in the thinking and communicating process. Right? So that’s a powerful skill. Both contextual awareness and content awareness online simultaneously. That is something that will accrue through this practice.

Mark Divine [00:18:28]:
Also you begin to connect to your heart and your gut. So different seats of intuition. We’ll talk about that more when we get to the intuitive mountain. But that whole mind experience of embodied mind begins to open up to you. And you have a lot more access to information and sources of intelligence that you didn’t have before. So you’re expanding your mental capacity. So the last thing I want to say is all of this then sets the stage for a couple different and very unique and powerful mental skills to be further developed. And one of them is what we call direct perception, the ability to receive information transrationally.

Mark Divine [00:19:20]:
Right? And so these are things that you might have thought about in the past and thought, well, that doesn’t make sense. Or that that’s not real. Like exocentry perception, right, or receiving information from outside the body or whatever. Well, let me tell you, this is all very, very real, right? There is no separation between body minds, it’s all a perception. And so as you train your mind, you’re able to receive information, right, that is not generated within your mind. So that is a very powerful skill. One that in many ways has saved my life countless times when I was in the seals. And the other skill when I’ll do a separate discussion about this is the ability to see within.

Mark Divine [00:20:12]:
We call that insight. So you have the capacity to begin to see things right? To have internal vision. We’ll call that envisioning. And also to really enhance your visual capacity through visualization and imagination, which makes you much more creative. And you can begin to use that skill of envisioning and imagination and visualization to help you heal from past wounds as well as to create a powerful vision for your future. And we’ll talk about that a little bit in a moment in the next podcast. All right, so that’s that. Thanks so much for joining me.

Mark Divine [00:20:52]:
That is the mental mountain. We’ll have much more to say on this stuff in the future as we neck it down and get more granular and well, there you have it. Thanks for joining me. Today on the Mark Divine Show. Show Notes will be up on our website, markdivine.com and the video will be on the YouTube channel, so just check it out. If you’re not subscribed to my newsletter, check out or you can [email protected] comes out every Tuesday. It’s called Divine Inspiration and we got an incredible new set of supplements out you go. Check them [email protected] some unique combinations, such as our Electro Greens, which is a high quality greens supplement combined with an electrolyte.

Mark Divine [00:21:34]:
It’s great stuff. Call out to JET Studios, John Dahlgren and Catherine Demine, who help produce the show and the newsletter every week and do incredible work behind the scenes. And if you haven’t ready to review the show, please do so wherever you listen to help us stay relevant and help other people find it. So that’s it till next time. Keep doing the physical work and add box breathing and this mental mountain work to your repertoire. But do it every day. Five minutes, that’s all you need. Hooyah.

Mark Divine [00:22:07]:
Divine out.