Mark Divine [00:00:43]:
So today I’m going to continue my discussion on the second of those five mountains, which is the Mental Mountain. The five mountains are physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual. And I’ll dig into each one of those in order. So in the first discussion of the Mental Mountain, we talked about the story of how I got exposed to mental training through my Zen training when I was 21 years old, and how it was a dramatic shift or change in how my mind was being trained and used. Prior to that, it was all academic linear knowledge being stuffed in, stored in memory. And then we work on your memory to try to improve your. Your capacity to recall correctly and accurately. The problem with this as an only way of training your mind is that you become very externally focused, you become very linear because it reinforces the linear construct of time, and it also reinforces your ego, in a sense, that you become more and more identified with your knowledge and your accomplishments around that knowledge, right? And so this is a problem, right, if you wake up and you want to do any type of, like, real development work because things aren’t necessarily going great in your life.

Mark Divine [00:02:01]:
And I know many people, especially the clients that I talk to, where they’ve got great success, but they’re feeling like things aren’t going great, there’s something they’re missing, and they’re leaving, leading that or heading quickly toward that life of quiet desperation that Thoreau talked about. So I’d mentioned earlier that ultimately, if you’re listening to this, you probably had this experience of wanting more freedom in your life and recognizing that there’s something holding you back. And it’s because of the way your mind has been trained, right, to think that knowledge is power when it actually becomes ultimately an obstacle to freedom. So I learned on the meditation bench under the watchful eye of Master Tadashi Nakamura, that there’s another way to train the mind. And, and we train it through whole mind Training and the process, of course you’ve heard the word is called meditation. And meditation simply means the control of your attention or learning how to pay attention. But then like, what are you paying attention to? That’s a whole nother discussion, right? There’s so there’s literally hundreds if not thousands of meditation techniques that you can all kind of bucket under this idea of meditation. And they all have some value, but they’re meant to be used in kind of a sequence or different types of life or to develop a certain type of skill.

Mark Divine [00:03:21]:
So my hope here is to kind of like parse through and give you some clarity on what these different techniques are. In my last show, part one on the Mental Mountain, I discussed three of these techniques. One was arousal control. And arousal control is simply using the breath nostril breathing to, to calm the body down and to get out of a state of hyperarousal and to reactivate your parasympathetic, rest and digest aspect of your nervous system, which calms your body down, which calms your brain down and gives you the capacity to go deeper with your work. The second skill is attention control. Attention control is being able to develop the capacity to hold your attention on one thing. And when I teach, I have them hold it on the process of breathing through the nose. And we do something called box breathing, which is a four part practice.

Mark Divine [00:04:13]:
Inhaling, holding your breath, exhaling, hold each one with the same duration. And we prescribe 5 seconds for each 5 second inhale, 5 second hold, 5 second exhale, and 5 second hold. This practice of attention control channels your energy and crowds out other thoughts. So it’s a concentration practice in addition to attention control. And it trains your mind to hold that attention on that one thing that you’re doing. And you can use other things. Like we also teach using a mantra or an external object like a candle or a picture. And those things, those also work.

Mark Divine [00:04:51]:
But holding your attention on the breath has the additional benefit of the arousal control. So you get kind of two practices in one, arousal control and attention control. Now as you start to develop, you know, greater capacity to hold your attention on that one thing, that box breathing pattern, then you develop deeper powers of concentration. This isn’t just being able to hold your attention for longer, but you’re actually strengthening your mind to be more focused like a laser beam as opposed to a floodlight. So those three really powerful skills that need to be developed roughly in sequence. The fourth skill that opens up naturally is, is what we’ll call mindfulness, or I’ve also called mindful awareness. This is where, through that process of attention control and concentration, you become more and more acutely aware of when your mind pops off the concentration. And it either becomes split, like you have a split attention, like part of your mind is focusing on the concentrating practice of the breath, and part of your mind is wandering around the hay field, you know, examining all the funny things out there.

Mark Divine [00:05:57]:
And so you notice that, and you’re like, huh, that’s interesting. Or you notice when your attention is completely popped off the object of attention and is wandering around, and how often you get caught up in those thoughts. And so that noticing begins to open up what we call mindfulness, which is the capacity to just observe the thinking. Now, the first step of mindfulness is actually what we’ll call meditation or metacognition, which is thinking about your thinking. So you’re still the thinker, and you’re now thinking about the quality of your thinking, which means you go back into memory and you think, how did my thinking go on that thing? And the hope is that you can learn something and improve your thinking. So we can also bucket contemplation into this category of thinking about your thinking, metacognition and journaling, right? All very good practices because it’s going to improve the quality of your linear, rational thinking. But the more advanced skill is to move beyond thinking to pure awareness, to be aware of and observant of your thinking without actually thinking about it, but to be aware of it. So now you’ve moved beyond the thinking mind into the contextual mind, which you could loosely relate to the right hemisphere of your mind or your brain.

Mark Divine [00:07:16]:
So your contextual awareness is now aware of everything to include your thoughts, everything in and around you, which is inclusive of the thoughts. And so the sea change that happens in your life here is that you suddenly recognize that you’re more than your thoughts. Thoughts are occurring, but you are not your thoughts. You disengage. You become somewhat detached and curious about your thoughts. And this is awesome, because you want to ultimately move toward freedom. You want to be free of those negative thought patterns and the same thought patterns that just occur every day, day in and day out. And so mindfulness will lead you to this awareness that you are not your thoughts.

Mark Divine [00:07:58]:
And then you begin to be able to see the patterns of those thoughts. You see negative patterns, see patterns that aren’t supporting you, see patterns that come out of the background completely hidden from your view we’ll call the shadow. You know from trauma or things that happened in your past. And now you can take those thoughts patterns and you can work with them. And we’ll get more into that when we talk about the emotional mountain. So already we’ve had, you know, this idea of meditation has led to these great skills, right? Arousal control, attention control, concentration, metacognition and mindfulness. Well, the fourth skill that I want to talk about is, is, and I alluded to at the end of our last podcast on the mental mountain is imagery, right? The capacity to use imagery and insight in very powerful ways. So what are we talking about? Let’s define some things.

Mark Divine [00:08:55]:
So we all have the most, I should say not all, but most of us have imagery associated with our memories and our projections. So memories is, you know, again, linear based thinking, left brain thinking, it’s all stretched out and through what we call our experience as time. And so if you’re, if you have memory, if you have a memory, you’re going to have an image associated with that. The image may or may not be accurate. Most of the time it’s not accurate, but it’s your perception of an event and that gets stored in your memory bank, right? And then you have. All future imagery is somehow connected to your representations of reality that is stored in memory but projected into a future sense state. And so if all you do is store imagery and then project it in the future, then ultimately you’re ensuring that your future looks like your past. So we want to begin to train our minds to change our mental representations from the past to be more positive, more powerful and infused with the lessons of the past, as opposed to the tragedies and traumas and the victimhood of the past.

Mark Divine [00:10:17]:
So that as a platform for projecting into the future, we’ve got a much more, a much more powerful and positive memory bank that we’re drawing from. So we call this purifying your memories. Furthermore, when we project into the future, we can take control and through a process of refinement using our imagination, where we begin to be able to insert new thoughts, new ideas, some of which we’ve never experienced. Or maybe we’re associating it with something we’ve read or we’ve seen about someone else’s life or some vision of the future, which is a possible future, we can begin to create imagery around the future that we can then practice and we’ll call that a future self vision. Now, quick story. When I was training to be a Navy seal, which came two years into my meditation practice in New York City, 1987, all these things that I just talked about began to transform my mind so that we call that meta nasis, transforming how your mind works, not the content, but the mechanism of your thinking processes. And so that led to me experiencing that moment of separation, that mindfulness, where I noticed that I was not my thinking, I wasn’t my thoughts, I was not my thinking. I was something different.

Mark Divine [00:11:43]:
And so I began to explore that, like, what is that? Who is that? And I started to get imagery and sensations about being a warrior. So that was pretty cool because I’d never experienced that. And suddenly I’m thinking, well, gosh, maybe I’m supposed to be a warrior. And yet I’m a cpa. I’m working on becoming a CPA and working on Wall Street. So I stayed with that. And I went through an entire process that took about a year to really recognize that the entire story that I was living, that I had been trained and conditioned to live, was not my story. Right.

Mark Divine [00:12:18]:
It was a story of our culture, a story of my family. It was a story even of my academic institutions. But it wasn’t my story, because my story, which was coming from a very different place, was that I was meant to be a warrior. And so I started to really lean into that and said, well, if that’s how I’m going to be, then how. If that’s what I am, then how am I supposed to be a warrior? And by asking better questions, then I was planting the seeds to be shown how. And that’s when I learned of the Navy seals. I tell that story in my book, the Way of the seal, and also in Be All Mind. So once I learned of the Navy SEALs, it was very clear to me, like, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that’s where I was supposed to head.

Mark Divine [00:13:00]:
And so that gave me great confidence and courage to. To basically, you know, set the stage for me to leave behind all that I was doing in New York. Mba, cpa, all that work. I knew that I was meant to be a Navy seal, and that was going to be left behind, and I was going to go for it. But it’s not easy to get into the seals. And so I had to direct all of my mental power toward securing my spot in the Navy seals. And as a civilian officer, I was being told that I had a very little chance of getting a slot because they took maybe one to two people a year. So because I was clear, my meditation has shown me that’s what I needed to be.

Mark Divine [00:13:41]:
That’s where I was headed. I began to construct a image of a future me going through Navy SEAL training. And I used for cannon fire, for, you know, visual fire, for visual aid. The one video that I could find about the seals, this is again, 1987. There was one video on a cassette, eight track, actually. And this was a recruiting video titled Be Someone Special. And it had a lot of cool imagery of individuals going through all three phases of BUDS training and conducting a mock mission. It’s a great video.

Mark Divine [00:14:17]:
So I watched this video many times and I planted that imagery in my mind. And then what I did was I, I inserted myself into that video, right? A mental representation of myself. And I put that video, I put that timeframe out about 18 months to 2 years. So I knew that that’s how long it would take me, right, to get through all the wickets, to finish up what I was doing, get into the seals, and to get through Navy SEAL training. So I saw myself as best I could, first through imagination, going through all of the different phases of training and graduating. And then that imagination turned into something that came alive for me, right? It wasn’t imagined anymore, it was real. And so that’s where imagination becomes visualization. When you shift from creating a new image in your head that you haven’t had before and adding color and detail to it.

Mark Divine [00:15:07]:
So that’s imagination to where now that locks in and it becomes stabilized. And now you begin to practice that and we’ll call that visualization. So I began to visualize this future state. And it’s very important to note that, that even though I was practicing skills, this was very different than a sports application. A sports application would be like, you know, a lot of the. What’s the word I’m looking for? A lot of the studies they’ve done on sports visualization, for instance, shooting basketball hoops, right? If you visualize shooting hoops, you can have perfect practice. You can hit, you know, you can hit it every single time. Whereas in the physical world, if you practice, you’re not going to hit it every time.

Mark Divine [00:15:50]:
And so visualization practice tends to actually be more effective than just real world practice. But you combine the two, right now you’ve got a one, two punch that’s very, very powerful. So this is well known. And every elite athlete uses practice visualization. But what if you want to actually, what if you don’t have the character, the skills yet to do something that is very important to you, that’s aligned with your mission, your purpose and your calling? Like becoming a Navy SEAL was, well, then, then you do a version of the practice, but you’re practicing not doing. You’re practicing being you’re practicing becoming the individual worthy of that big hairy ass accomplishment, that big goal. So that’s what I was doing. I began to practice a future state of becoming worthy to be a Navy seal.

Mark Divine [00:16:40]:
And I was just going on blind faith right at this time. But I had all the physical training. I was doing the physical training. I was doing my martial arts. I was running and swimming. I had a lot of the foundational work done. But I credit this visualization practice with the ultimate success. Months into this practice, right? This is a daily practice.

Mark Divine [00:17:00]:
I did it at the end of my meditation every morning, 20 minutes, doing my box breathing, doing the attention control, arousal control, concentration, mindfulness. At the end, I would insert, I would bring up this image and I would practice it for two to three minutes. I had a profound shift in my sense of self and awareness about nine months into this practice. And I can only kind of talk to about, talk about it in the sense I went from desiring and hoping to be a Navy SEAL to a sense of absolute certainty that it was my destiny. And I think it was that moment where my visualization practice had affected at the level of consciousness to the point where it was a done deal. Like there was no way that it was not going to happen because I had already made it happen. And I call that winning in your mind. I had won in my mind.

Mark Divine [00:17:56]:
And a couple days after I had that experience, my recruiter called me and said, mark, congratulations. You have received one of the two billets to go to Officer Kennedy School with a guarantee to go to SEAL training following that. I credit the visualization practice for that. So visualization is a powerful tool and it often falls into the bucket of meditation, which is, you know, paying attention, right? Because now you’re paying attention to creating, constructing the future that you want, while simultaneously, you know, reliving and healing from the past so it doesn’t drag you down or slow you down. Anyway, so I think we’ll stop there. A lot of other things to talk about when it comes to mental development, you know, the importance of positivity. Coming back and talking more about how do you control your attention in extreme circumstances or high risk or high tension circumstances. So we’ll get into all those tools and techniques down the road.

Mark Divine [00:19:01]:
But for now, add visualization. Add imagination and visualization in a future state to your morning routine. And if you have an evening ritual, which I highly recommend, you want to add a past regressive visualization to clear up any regrets and for your healing work. Thanks for joining me today on the Mark Divine Show. I hope you find this information useful and you put it into practice because if you do, it will transform your life. Until next time, this is Mark Divine. Show notes are up at my website, markdivine.com video will be on our YouTube channel. Check out my new [email protected] you might love the electrogreens and some of the other cool things that we have there.

Mark Divine [00:19:47]:
Awesome stuff. Also, if you’re not on my newsletter, if you’re not on my email list, if you’re not. Also, if you haven’t subscribed to my newsletter, you might want to check that out. It comes out every Tuesday. It’s called Divine Inspiration. I’ve got a blog, I’ve got show notes for the podcast and other cool things there. So go to markdevine.com to subscribe. Thanks to John Dahlgrim and Catherine Divine who helped produce this show and bring incredible, incredible imagery to you every week.

Mark Divine [00:20:18]:
And final thing is if you haven’t rated and reviewed the show, wherever you listen, please consider doing so. Very grateful. It’s helpful to stay at the top of the ranks. It’s helpful to. It’s helpful. It’s very helpful. It’s super helpful. So I can do it.

Mark Divine [00:20:39]:
It’s really helpful. You know I don’t like asking, but please do. Until next time, stay focused, do the work and develop that mental mountain. Oh yeah, Divine Outlook.