Welcome to another episode of The Unbeatable Mind podcast with Mark Divine. This week, we’re continuing the journey through Five Mountain Development. In this episode, the spotlight is on the Emotional Mountain, often a stumbling block for many on their personal growth journey. Mark shares his personal experiences and insights, revealing how emotional development is integral to overall well-being. From therapy to mindfulness practices, he explains the significance of understanding and overcoming deep-seated emotional patterns. Whether you're a seasoned seeker or new to personal development, this episode offers valuable perspectives and practical advice on navigating the emotional terrain. Tune in as we continue on this transformative journey towards self-discovery and empowerment.
Newsletter Bio:
Mark Divine, Ph.D., is the host of The Mark Divine Show, a solo podcast focused on developing mental toughness, emotional resilience, and intuitive leadership. A Navy SEAL veteran and leadership expert, Mark graduated as Honor Man of SEAL BUD/S class 170 and served 20 years in the SEAL teams, retiring as Commander in 2011. He is also the founder of SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind, programs designed to enhance physical, mental, and emotional performance.
Mark holds a Ph.D. in Global Leadership and Change and has practiced Zen meditation and breathwork for over 30 years. His unique approach to leadership blends holistic, whole-person development with a focus on unlocking human potential. He has authored several bestselling books, including Unbeatable Mind and The Way of the SEAL. Mark lives in Encinitas, CA, with his wife, Sandy, their children, spirited grandchildren, and dogs, and is driven by a mission to inspire 100 million people to develop greater mental toughness, intuition, and compassion.
“Emotions are just that — energy in motion. They’re your interpretation of your own felt experiences” – Mark Divine
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sealfit/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/markdivineleadership/
Mark Divine:
Hi, this is Mark Divine. Welcome to the Mark Divine Show. So stoked to have you here with me today. Where we dive into topics related to holistic development, integration, positive psychology, consciousness awareness, spiritual development and the like. Anything that really fires me up and I hope it fires you up as well. Today I’m excited to continue our discussion of what I call five Mountain development. Five Mountain development is an aspect of a program that I developed called Unbeatable Mind which develops individuals and teams holistically in an integrated manner to create vertical growth. Vertical growth means growth that changes who you are, how you think, and that sends you along a developmental path to higher states of awareness, greater perspective, more openness, more compassion, more inclusiveness, more world centric, in other words.
Mark Divine:
So as opposed to horizontal development, which just gives you new skills and maybe skills as well as knowledge that allow you to maybe be more effective at the stage that you are at already. So we’re trying to unlock growth and we’re trying to accelerate growth. The five mountains are the five developmental aspects or five domains that all humans possess. They are physical, mental, emotional, intuitional and spiritual. I did a deep dive on the physical mountain and then recently a deep dive in a couple sessions on the mental mountain. And today we’re going to talk about the third, the emotional mountain, which is kind of the linchpin where a lot of people get stuck. These are all related. The five mountains are co developed.
Mark Divine:
It’s not like you develop one and then you move on to the other and then the other. Because ultimately we’re looking at reintegration, right? So the process of doing the training and developing yourself, or what we call the work, is to develop yourself across all five mountains simultaneously. So that ultimately the experience is one of reintegration. So that they’re all experiences, one whole. And you don’t distinguish or differentiate physical from mental, from emotional, from intuitional and from spiritual. They all co arise as one experience of wholeness. Whole mind, whole body mind. That is really a profound shift in perspective and awareness that I hope that everyone will get to experience in their lives.
Mark Divine:
But it takes work. That’s why we say this is a lifetime practice. And the practice is done right here where you’re at right here now today. One day, one lifetime. You do the work right now. So the fact that you’re listening to this means that you are committed to doing the work. So super stoked to have you here for that. So quick story around my five mountain journey and why the emotional mountain is so important.
Mark Divine:
So the physical mountain for me Came easy largely because of the physical aptitude I had given God given at birth with this body, as well as having a mother and a father who are relatively athletic or at least active. So I grew up hiking in Adironic mountains and swimming in the lakes up there. Got into competitive sports through swimming and then soccer and tennis and those types of things. 12 varsity letters. I recruited this swim competitively at Colgate University, and then I rode crew, became a martial artist, and then a Navy seal. So obviously, Physical Mountain for me was something that was relatively not easy, but something that I could wrap my physical brain around and discipline myself because I, I could see the results both in my physiology and my physical makeup, as well as performance. And so in our culture, which is very performance driven and individualistic, physical training, physical mountain, and sports and athletics tend to get a high priority and a lot of money and attention. We see that obviously in our culture with NFL and these sports teams and these individuals making hundreds of millions of dollars, how that focus is there.
Mark Divine:
So physical Mountain for a lot of people, though, who aren’t super athletes, really is just about maintaining health and a relative level of fitness as appropriate for your age and your body type. And it’s very important, and I addressed this in the discussion about the physical mountain. It’s very important that, that you take that seriously. Because as you learn through these podcasts and through my work and others as well, the body and the mind are not separate. They’re not two different things. So if you want to have a healthy mind and you want to have healthy thinking, and then the next corollary there is healthy thinking will lead to healthy emotionality or emotional awareness. If you want to have healthy emotional awareness, then you need healthy thinking. If you want to have healthy thinking, you need a healthy body.
Mark Divine:
So the body really is the foundation or the crux of all the work that we do. And this is unique because in America, at least in our culture, physical training has really been kind of divorced from emotional work or even mental work, especially spiritual work. And what my position is is that it can’t be right, the physical foundation, the physical projection that you have into this work world, right? As a spiritual being, having a physical body is the crux. So you take care of that body through healthy activities. And I address those in terms of what we call the six pillars, Physical fitness and movement as learning how to, like, move your body somatically, well, exercise it, you know, functionally and those types of things, then nutrition and fueling, like learning what to eat, when to eat, and why you eat and then disciplining yourself to eat in a very, very healthy manner, right really close to, there’s high quality foods. And then sleep and recovery. That’s the third of the six pillars. Learning how to sleep very well.
Mark Divine:
Building recovery into your fitness regimen. Building recovery into your day. I spent a lot of time talking about this concept of our, our proclivity to bias toward action and toward doing and to this cultural kind of training that not doing something is a waste of time or you’re not being productive. And I want you to flip that script. Some of the most productive time that you will ever spend is not doing anything. Learning to recover. Taking time after important meetings, taking time after exercise, taking time after, you know, strenuous work periods. And just using that time to just sit and to learn how to sit in silence and be quiet and to receive and to restore.
Mark Divine:
So you have a balance between activity and doingness as well as beingness and inactivity. And those two become the yin and the yang of your life and bring you back into balance. So those are three of the six pillars. And then the fourth is essentially stress management. So using breath control techniques such as box breathing and, and tactical breathing, which I went into in depth to manage your stress and to get out of hyper arousal and to develop the capacity to control your arousal response. That is key. And also looking at your environment, removing stressors from your environment, including stressful people. The fourth is getting out in nature.
Mark Divine:
Like really learning to spend time in nature. I mean, I felt, I’m so grateful that I grew up in a beautiful area in upstate New York in the Adirondack Mountains, with thousands of acres around me and all these freshwater lakes. And so I spent a lot of time outside and I learned to just love nature. And I learned how powerful a teacher nature can be and how powerful it is for grounding and for health and for optimism and positive mindset. All of that can come from spending time in nature. We’re not separate from nature, so we want to learn to be in it and to, to be stewards of it and to recognize that it’s part of us. So that’s the fifth. And then last is to recognize, and we’re going to talk more about this later, that we’re not alone.
Mark Divine:
We grow and flourish in a community. Right? So think of to move from an I to an us mindset and to develop your. Develop your life with communities of practitioners and communities of supporters. So those are the six pillars that we really dial into and develop a physical foundation that is powerful, strong, resilient and balanced. So that the brain and the rest of your mental structures can really go to work on mental and emotional development. I’m not going to dig into the mental mountain much, but suffice it to say that it’s very difficult to really separate the discussion of mental mountain training and emotional training because they really are kind of hand in glove. Emotional work is the felt experience and interpretation of those felt experiences, which obviously, you know, overlaps with mental mountain training which is developing the cognitive capacity to discern things a little bit more clearly, to eradicate biases, to reconstruct your storyline, to develop mindfulness, concentration, attention control, and to expand your notion of what the mind is beyond just the brain and its left right hemisphere, contextual and content awareness into heart, mind and belly mind or gut mind capacities. So you get into what we call whole mind thinking.
Mark Divine:
It is this whole mind thinking combined with your physical aptitude, your physical awareness, which gives you great interoception and proprioception and capacity to discern the sensations in your body that allow us to do the mental, the emotional mountain work with a lot more effectiveness. So back to my story. I had the capacity, strong physical capacity as an athlete and growing up in the wilderness, spending a lot of time in nature. And then when I got into Zen training when I was 21, so I started to do some real mental development. And I would say that some mental development accrues through traditional education. Obviously you’re going to develop some concentration memory skills, you know, obviously reading and writing, those are going to develop some mental skills, but they’re really rather limited and left brain linear skills. So we tend to really over develop or hyper develop the left brain linear rational processes which are important, but they’re just part of the story of your mind. And so that was fairly well developed in me.
Mark Divine:
But then when I started meditating, doing the work of Zen, which included attention control, concentration, mindfulness and opening up to non dual awareness, then my whole mind started to work more effectively, both contextually, which is right hemispheric thinking and non linear, as well as supporting that and being able to observe the contextual or the content side of things, which is the linear left brain thinking. And so that was the first benefit of the mental development was this opening up of contextual awareness, a witnessing capacity to be able to observe the thoughts in real time and to begin to separate my identity from those thoughts. And so there was the witness and then there was the thinker. Now that as I described in the discussion on the mental mountain was a transformative experience for me. And for those of you who have gone through that, you know what I’m talking about, it’s very transformative to shift your identity from I am the thoughts to I observe those thoughts, but I am not those thoughts. And then again, you can from there go begin to explore who is that? That is the witness. And that leads to more spiritual development discussions. So then I also began to notice that the thinking was not always accurate and the thinking was not always positive, and the thinking was not always thoughts that I even could equate as my own.
Mark Divine:
And what I mean by that is that there were a lot of plants, there was a lot of belief systems and stories and thought patterns, which I just was. Once I investigated them, I noticed that they were just flat out false or not mine, meaning I didn’t really identify with them. They were planted there by my family by, you know, beliefs from the church and by, you know, culture and, you know, news and media and stuff like that. So the mental mountain development was really profound for me because it allowed me to identify storylines that weren’t productive or supportive of who I was becoming, and I was able to begin to rewrite the script of those stories. So that was all powerful work. And that led me up to my 30s. And at this time, I hadn’t done a whole lot of emotional work. I mean, there was some emotional work that accrued from being a Navy SEAL and going through training and being held accountable at a high level.
Mark Divine:
There was some emotional work as a result of some abject failures in relationships, dealing with some of the traumas of childhood and some of the family patterns, but no real deep awareness of what was driving the emotional behaviors and patterns in my life. That work began. The emotional mountain work for me began when I took up therapy in my early 30s. And it’s a slow process and it’s still ongoing. So that’s why I say the emotional mountain is really the most challenging of all of the five mountains. And it has to be built upon a solid foundation of physical and mental development. It doesn’t mean you need to wait. But to do emotional development without or separated from, or devoid of both physical and mental work is usually very limiting and often doesn’t lead to optimal results.
Mark Divine:
So a great example of that lack of awareness. This is funny story. When I, after I got married and my wife Sandy is a therapist herself, I remember telling her that I had the perfect family and I believed I had a perfect family. And in a lot of ways, they are perfect. Perfect in their dysfunctions like a lot of families, in fact, probably most. It wasn’t until years later that, you know, the work that I was doing really kind of revealed that there was a lot there that was not so perfect. And yet all the way into my early 30s, you know, I was trained to believe that this family I grew up in, which had a lot of alcoholism and rage and codependence, was perfect because I was baked in that system. It became what I call my background of obviousness.
Mark Divine:
And so it was completely hidden from my view, which is what we call the shadow in the therapeutic terms.
Tracy Duhs:
Were you allowed to feel your feelings in your family system?
Mark Divine:
What’s that voice? Was that in my head? So that’s a great point, Catherine. No, and that’s why it was an imperfect system, you know, like a good healthy family system. Emotions are acknowledged, you’re allowed to have your own thoughts and feelings. They are applauded and encouraged. And yet there’s solid boundaries for the children so they don’t kind of stray too far off the reservation. In my family, the emotions weren’t discussed, they were just expressed. You weren’t necessarily allowed to have your own opinions, you were told what to think. And because of some of the violence and other things that were going on, a lot of emotional energy got suppressed and repressed.
Mark Divine:
And that’s what we’ll talk about in a bit. Leads to kind of broken off parts or trauma induced patterns that then serve you well as a kid to protect you, but don’t serve you as an adult. And you got to do the work to expose those and eradicate them. So the work is important. And I’m speaking from experience. That’s kind of the. The whole point here is I’ve done personally the work at a physical level. Clearly I continue to do the work.
Mark Divine:
I train every day. I continue to do the work at a mental level every day through concentration meditation, mindfulness awareness practices. And I continue to do the emotional work every day because it’s not something that is devoid of other work. It’s not something you do once a week or at a retreat. Like emotional work is a day by day. Eventually it’s a moment to moment. In fact, mindfulness practice really to me is mostly about emotional awareness because emotions drive our behaviors. And I think it’s wrong to think of mindfulness as only a mental practice where you’re just looking at your thoughts.
Mark Divine:
You’re actually looking at your thoughts, patterns, emotions, shadow, the whole kind of makeup of that background of obviousness which is obvious to everybody but you. So I know a little bit of what I’m talking about. At the same time, I will admit that I’m not a trained psychologist, I’m not a trained therapist. I am a coach. And as an executive coach to top business executives and leaders and Navy Seals, we tend to spend a lot of time on the emotional mountain because that’s where people get stuck. But at the same time, if someone’s dealing with real deeply seated trauma issues from childhood, things such as abuse or alcoholism or codependence, narcissism, you know, shame based shame and guilt based traumas, then it’s really important that you get some professional help. So what are emotions? Emotions are, you know, I love the term emotions like energy and motion. Emotions are felt experiences.
Mark Divine:
They’re, they’re bodily sensations or affects. So an affect is something like a mood where you can’t like necessarily pinpoint a sensation in the body. Or it can be an actual physical sensation that you can geolocate, like in your heart or your gut, or tightness in your chest, that type of thing. So those are two things. So a sensation, just as a sensation, is just a sensation, but it becomes an emotion when you add an interpretation to the sensation. So if you feel like an upwelling in your gut, and then you might interpret that as fear or anxiety, and then you might look for the source of what’s causing that or what’s triggering that fear or anxiety. And often what you identify as a source isn’t a true source because the fear, anxiety might be related to some stuck energy that you’ve trapped. When you carved out a part of yourself as a child, when you experienced something that was unloving or dangerous, seemingly dangerous.
Mark Divine:
And so you kind of trap that energy. And so it might be triggering some outside event, might trigger that experience of anxiety or fear. So that would be how a sensation works. An affect is more of a mood or, you know, like, I guess, low grade depression. I’m not going to say depression itself because there’s a lot of ways we can talk about depression. There’s physiological, psychological and trauma based depressions. But if you could have a mood of, let’s say apathy, which is a form of depression, that’s more of an affect. It’s just kind of there, like it just hangs over you or hangs inside of you.
Mark Divine:
And there’s an interpretation around that as well. And there might be several interpretations because that affect might actually be part of what triggers other, other things that go on in your life that are perceived as negative or discomfort inducing. Right. The Affect of apathy could trigger regret, remorse, grief, anger, those types of things, all negative emotions based upon different things that happen in your life. Because underlying that affect of apathy is some sort of shame. And that shame is going to be induced or created through some childhood traumas, usually long term period of just not being taken care of, not being loved. So there’s different ways that we experience emotions. So remember I said sensations are affects that have interpretations.
Mark Divine:
There’s, there’s experienced in the body. But because the mind and the body are not separate, we also get the interpretation. So the mind becomes part of it. Right. This is what I mean by you can’t separate emotions from the body, the physical mountain and the mind, the mental mountain. But because they’re all kind of interrelated or co created. But you can have gross experiences and subtle experiences. So the gross physical body is really like your muscles, your joints, your organs.
Mark Divine:
Right. And so when you’re most sensations and affects are stored in that physical or gross body, but there’s also this subtle body. The subtle body is, is more the energetic state. And you can have energy body emotional patterns or disruptors. And this is why when you look at the Hindu or the Indian yoga tradition of the chakra systems and the six major chakras, you can actually relate them to certain emotional energies. Right. So your root chakra at the base of the spine is related to feelings of security or insecurity, groundedness, that type of thing. And those are our subtle body kind of emotional feelings.
Mark Divine:
It’s more of like just a sense of beingness. Right. And then your second chakra, which is around the belly button is going to be related to your feeling of power or powerlessness or creative energy. Actually that was third chakra.
Tracy Duhs:
Yes, yes. Thirds power.
Mark Divine:
Yeah. The second chakra is going to be related to your feeling of I guess sexual maturity or immaturity, your feeling of potency and creativity as a human being. Right. Sensuality and sensuality. Thanks Catherine. The third chakra which is around the solar plexus is the seed of power. And you can relate that to the martial arts Dantian or Hara concept which is building power in the belly. So that third chakra, what that relates to is really cleansing and purifying that third chakra so that energy flows through it.
Mark Divine:
And you’re not, you don’t have stuck energy around power and in feeling of being in control and you know, being, feeling important in the world.
Tracy Duhs:
And that’s why you see people that are in high positions of power with really big bellies because they’re abusing and over exerting their power and dominating others.
Mark Divine:
That’s really interesting. What’s also you could say, like when you look at ancient pictures of the Buddha, right, he had a big belly.
Tracy Duhs:
He did.
Mark Divine:
And a lot of pictures of the ancient Zen masters and even martial artists or like samurai, they had a well developed belly. But it was very different than kind of the western concept of the tight ripped abs.
Tracy Duhs:
And it wasn’t with a concave chest and then a belly.
Mark Divine:
That’s right. The chest was strong too.
Tracy Duhs:
The chest, the whole body was strong. So they, the difference in the image I created was usually those people have concave chest and skinny legs with this big belly. And that’s usually a representation.
Mark Divine:
That’s not good.
Tracy Duhs:
All right, I have a question for you around stomach aches or headaches and emotions too.
Mark Divine:
Okay, well, let me get back to that.
Tracy Duhs:
Okay.
Mark Divine:
The next chakra real quick is the heart center or anahata. And so this chakra is going to be associated with feelings of empathy and love, or not feeling loved and not feeling any compassion, right? So being closed off, right. The next one is the throat center. Positively you feel like you heard you’ve got a voice, what you say matters. And if you don’t have a strong throat chakra energy, then you’re going to feel like you don’t have a voice, like you’re not being heard. And what you say doesn’t matter. So that’s, that’s important really to pay attention to that. The next chakra is around your third eye between your pituitary and pineal glands.
Mark Divine:
And this has to do with insight, right? Or whether you’re kind of, or whether you lack insight. So we want to have a finely developed chakra there to really open our capacity to perceive more, to see more inwardly as opposed to being cut off from that and just thinking everything is objective and what we see out in front of us. And the final chakra really is the crown chakra. And this one really is the experience of oneness, of connection with all that is or that divine energy. So if that’s not open, you’re not going to feel connected, you’re going to feel isolated and separated. And so we want to work on that at any rate. So those are the subtle body interpretation of emotions. I want to get back to your question in a bit.
Mark Divine:
We’ll probably need to cut this off in a bit here and move on to part two. But experience of emotions have another a number of different ways we experience them. One is pure physiologically, right? So you can experience some fear based emotion or anxiety, and you’re going to experience it as a increase in your heart rate or some other bodily sensation. I addressed that a little while ago. But it can also be expressive, meaning you don’t really have a physiological feeling, but you might just like have a flinch response to something. Right? And that normally we think of like a flinch or an expressive response coming from some external stimulus. But you all know it can also happen from some internal sense of something happening. It can even come from a daydream or a fantasy that suddenly just kind of like startles you.
Mark Divine:
But emotions can do the same thing. They cause some sort of expressive response. Clearly, as we mentioned, there is also mental activity associated with emotion. So you may have an emotion and because you haven’t been trained to feel or to geolocate it or to even notice it in your body, you may simply notice that you’re starting to think, think about it. In fact, I would suggest that most guys are kind of stuck there in their head. And so, and I certainly was for most of my life for over 30 years, where if you had said, hey, how are you feeling, Mark? I’d be like, fine, I feel fine.
Tracy Duhs:
And feelings inwardly not expressed.
Mark Divine:
Yeah, thank you. So we know that fine. I used to say fine means fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and extremely emotional. But also his feelings not inwardly expressed. So if you don’t have a sense of like, oh, I don’t feel anything, well, guess what, that’s great. Now you know that you got some work to do. But also you know that you do have mental processing around what those emotions might mean, and that’s the interpretations. And I’m here to tell you that most of, if not all of your interpretations are wrong.
Mark Divine:
That’s why this is so important. To do this work. We could also have behavioral. Now behavioral adaptations to emotions are things that, that kind of are developed over time. So with behaviors you might just like for instance, you experience some sort of discomfort which is an emotion, maybe you haven’t identified what it is, but then because of that discomfort, you immediately go to the fridge and grab a Coke or grab a donut or something, because that temporarily relieves the discomfort. Of course, that behavior will lead to other long term problems of discomfort in the form of disease or being overweight. It can also be phenomenological in the terms of. And this kind of gets to Catherine’s question.
Mark Divine:
So you might have an emotional pattern or trigger that phenomenologically shows up as stomach ache or pain in your stomach or a heartache. Right. Or a headache even. So you could have those phenomenological things happen to you based upon emotional patterns and they could repeat over and over and over, you know, And I think that’d be great research into like migraines and whatnot. Because, yes, there are just physical things that are wrong, maybe something in your environment or some toxins you’ve taken in, but you can also take in emotional or mental toxins that then express themselves through physiological adaptations like headaches and heartaches and stuff like that.
Tracy Duhs:
My migraines were like that, Mark. I had migraines from the age of 8 until I was 25. And then I realized that they were a stress and fear response and that because I felt out of control and I didn’t want to feel the fear, I would get migraines and I would shut down for a couple days.
Mark Divine:
Wow.
Tracy Duhs:
And the minute when once I made the connection emotionally through meditation more than therapy, I’ve never had a migraine again in the last 20 years.
Mark Divine:
Isn’t that interesting? Matt, thanks for sharing that. Because that is so important for people to realize that the whole mind, body, somatic connection that oftentimes you can heal physical problems through emotional development, emotional awareness, and like Catherine said, awareness of the stuck emotion or the blocked emotion or the repressed emotion often is enough, right? Just often the awareness itself, the objectification, to be able to take that part out of you and look at it and say, ah, I see you now and I don’t need to repress you. I can experience that energy without the headache, so to speak, that’s often enough to just release that. That effect. And then the last one is what I’ll call evaluate. Evaluative. Evaluative.
Tracy Duhs:
Evaluative.
Mark Divine:
Evaluative. Thank you. The last one is evaluative. You’re going to fail to edit it, right? The last one is evaluative. But I don’t think you say it like that. Evaluative. And so evaluative is like, like a sensation. Like, I guess it’s similar to an affect like I talked about earlier, but.
Mark Divine:
But you could have a sense of like, dread. That would be an evaluative or brooding, like something bad is going to happen. You know, a lot of times, Catherine, you just said this the other day. You just have this sense that something bad is going to happen.
Tracy Duhs:
Right.
Mark Divine:
In our, in our culture, that’s like an evaluative thing where you’re picking up both internal and external signals, a lot of pattern recognition, and it just gives you the sensation that Then you put some evaluation on and say this is not good. Right. And I tell you what, this, this particular one, evaluative is very, very close to intuition. So when we get to the intuitive mountain next, when we get to that discussion, there’s, there’s probably not a ton of difference between an evaluative sensation as an emotion and evaluative sensation as intuition. There are some distinctions, but they’re very closely related.
Tracy Duhs:
And maybe it’s your higher self trying to get your mental, emotional self to be aware and that’s the intuition speaking to the emotion.
Mark Divine:
Yeah, I think that’s highly likely that you have that kind of causal energy that’s nudging you, your higher self. That’s also likely that you know, and this is more of a metaphysical discussion, that there are guides, guardians.
Tracy Duhs:
Yeah, absolutely.
Mark Divine:
Non physical beings who are there to support us. I certainly have experienced that in my life. Some of you listening might think that’s ridiculous and others are like, yeah, totally with you Mark. But it’s certainly my experience that we have non physical partners, supporters, beings who have our interests at heart. And frankly there are also very likely that there are non physical beings who don’t have our interests. And we certainly, I’ve had a lot of discussions with people who feel, are quite certain that they, they had something like that in their lives and they were able to get rid of it through different experiences and work that they did. So there’s a lot, there’s a lot to this discussion of emotions. We’re just kind of chipping, chipping away at the surface of it.
Mark Divine:
A few more comments and then we’ll kind of wrap up here. Emotions can be short and acute, like happen like bam, really quick and, and just be like a shock to your system. Then that’s what acute means. And this can be like joy, like a sudden sense of joy when you see a sunset or someone, you know, you see a new baby and that pure, you know, grace of a baby’s eyes or can be like the shock of rage. Right. That then passes quickly. Or the emotion can be long term and chronic. Very similar to what we talked about when it comes to apathy or some long term moods that just you can’t shake.
Mark Divine:
And grief obviously, or on the positive side, just a feeling of contentment. Right, That’s a cultivated feeling of contentment. We’re going to talk about that in our next session. How do we develop that? And the last thing I’ll say is emotions can be both conscious or unconscious meaning. Okay, so what would be a conscious emotion well, if you hate yourself, that’s a conscious emotion, meaning you are consciously aware that you don’t like yourself. Like okay, that’s not good. We’re going to have to work on that, right? We’re going to develop some positive mindset and start to learn to love yourself. But when you weren’t loved as a child, it’s not so easy to suddenly love yourself.
Mark Divine:
So it’s a practice, it becomes a practice. So that’s something you’re consciously aware of. Or let’s say you’re jealous, right? So jealousy, you know, the seven deadly sins. Let’s say you’re jealous of another person or you’re jealous of someone else’s success, then you’re aware of that, that is an emotion that you’re consciously aware of. And also you probably have a bodily sensation around, but you can also be quite unaware or unconscious of the emotions. And where I see this a lot is people are unconscious of regrets and they have to like be pointed out that they’re carrying this regret, this deep sense of like loss or you know, coulda, shoulda, woulda about events in the past. But it’s kind of bubbling below the surface. They’re not really consciously aware of it.
Mark Divine:
And when they do become consciously aware of it then they can eradicate that regret or shame again is another one. Shame is, can be so insidious and deep that it just shows up in behaviors that are either self destructive or aggrandizing, right? So you either put yourself in a one down position amongst others where you think you’re not good enough or you know, can’t compare to them and you’re looking for external validation all the time or you’re in a position of one upmanship with grandiosity where you think you’re better than anyone and you have the more narcissistic behaviors. And I tell you what, from all the narcissists or shame based activities that I’ve participated in or seen others participate in, most, most are completely unaware, hidden from view. Part of that background of obviousness that we go to work on with our emotional mountain work. Okay, I’ve covered quite a lot of territory to introduce the subject of emotions and emotional mountains in the next discussion we’re going to get into talking about how do we work on bringing these emotions to the surface, making yourself aware of them, how do we train positive internal dialogue, how do we feed the courage wolf those types of things and what are some common emotional support systems from the realm of psychology and even Eastern Buddhist psychology teachings. So stay Tuned for that emotional Mountain Part 2 thanks for joining me today on the Mark Divine Show. I hope you enjoy these teaching style solo class. Please let me know if you do or if you prefer to see other conversations or other topics, please let us know.
Mark Divine:
You can reach out to me at infoarkdivine.com show notes will be posted on the website markdivine.com along with the episode. The episode will drop every Tuesday through our newsletter and every Wednesday through Apple and Spotify and wherever you listen. Speaking of my newsletter, Divine Inspiration comes out every Tuesday. If you’re not on the subscriber list, please go to markdivine.com to subscribe. You’ll find it very useful. We have a weekly blog show notes from the show. So you can get a synopsis of what’s happening, a practice, a weekly practice to try and other things that come across my desk and including our incredible sponsors. So thanks for that.
Mark Divine:
If you haven’t rated or reviewed the show, please consider doing so wherever you listen. It’s very helpful to keep us at the top of the rankings and to help others find the show. Shout out to my incredible team, John at JET Studios and Katherine Divine who help produce this show with a high degree of quality every single week. Couldn’t do it without you guys. Ouya.
Tracy Duhs:
Thanks.
Mark Divine:
And yeah, that’s it. Do the work, stay focused, be positive and don’t shy from that emotional mountain. It’s really important. Until next time, it’s your host, Mark Divine out. Hoo ya.
Tracy Duhs:
Good one. How was the questions was that.
Mark Divine:
I liked that. That was really fun.
Tracy Duhs:
Does that disrupt when you first did. I was like whoa, that’s really cool. Okay.
Mark Divine:
Originally I was thinking at the end but no, that was cool. Cool.
Tracy Duhs:
Okay. Okay.
Mark Divine:
Yes.
Tracy Duhs:
Like I’m like I feel like I’m interrupting but that I’m trying to time it so I’m not being.
Mark Divine:
No, that’s perfect.
Tracy Duhs:
Okay.
Mark Divine:
I really like that.
Tracy Duhs:
Okay. I have one thought around when you talk, when you talk about you know, physical, mental, emotional, that’s probably all my.
Mark Divine:
CIS stuff, you know in the six.
Tracy Duhs:
Pillars was like one and I. Maybe you can bring it up at the beginning or don’t say it at all but with people that live in food deserts, you know.
Mark Divine:
Yeah. Interesting.
Tracy Duhs:
That are in gang territory.
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