Mark Divine [00:00:38]:
The five mountains are the five domains or developmental aspects that we all have, physical, mental, emotional, intuitional and spiritual. And my position is, or my experience is that when you train and develop these five things or five months in an integrated manner with, you know, things that you do every day, week, month and year, then you can accelerate, you can greatly accelerate your growth as a human being to higher stages of awareness and consciousness, deeper connection to others, to nature, to yourself, those types of things. And these are things that we all, or I should say most of us strive for if you’re a growth, mindset individual, which you, you are because you’re listening to this podcast. So a couple stories. First to get going on this idea of intuition. Once when I was at Seal Team 3, I was training with my platoon doing a firearms instruction course, really kind of a refresher. And we always use the crawl, walk, run. And so this, the very first day, we were going to get up and do a, just a, like a pistol recoil 25 yard shoot.

Mark Divine [00:01:46]:
And, and then go a little bit deeper, faster after that. And I was the first one heading to the range. It’s early in the morning, like 5:00am, it’s cold. And about halfway to the range, I suddenly had this very, very strong sensation that it felt like someone putting a hand on my shoulder. And it sounded like even though there was no sound, the word stop was being shouted in my ear. And so it was so shocking that I just stopped in my tracks. And as soon as I stopped, a teammate of mine 25 yards behind me had an accidental discharge as he was pulling his weapon out of his holster. And the bullet whizzed right by my right ear.

Mark Divine [00:02:30]:
Like I could feel the wind as it blasted by my ear. Had I not had that intuitive like punch right there at that time to stop in my tracks, that bullet would have gone right in the back of my head. Amazing. So that’s an example of instinctual intuition or gut intuition, which I’M going to talk more about in a second. I remember I was in Kodiak, Alaska with my team, same team, and we were traversing. It’s getting dark and it’s snowy, and this whole crevasse had kind of opened up on the right side and we weren’t roped in. And I started to get this spidey sense that things were not going to go well if I didn’t stop and rope in. And right when I started to have that sensation, which was also like an instinctual, intuitive hit, I could feel in my heart this intense fear that was not mine.

Mark Divine [00:03:30]:
Like it was this intense energy. And as soon as I felt that energy, I saw a teammate of mine named Swanson just slip and start to lose control. And he shouted. He shouted my name, actually my nickname, Cyborg. And so the energy that I felt in the heart was so compelling that it literally launched me out of my tracks. And I just leapt toward this guy who started racing toward this crevasse. And I was able to get there and leap on him. And we tumbled a bit and then I was able to dig my ice axe into the snow.

Mark Divine [00:04:07]:
And we came to a screeching halt about 2ft from the 600 foot drop off. That was an example of what I call empathic intuition or heart intuition, where you feel strongly the energy of another human being. And this can be from quite a distance as well. And then, of course, whether you act on it or not is really kind of the. The crux of this discussion about intuition. And last, I tell a story in my book the Way of the Seal a little bit also in my book Uncommon, where we dive deeply into these five mountains. Sitting on a meditation bench under the watchful eye of my Zen master In my early 20s, I began to experience imagery in my mind just spontaneously show up. And it was imagery of, like, me doing warrior things.

Mark Divine [00:05:00]:
Like it was warrior imagery. It was more like also a sensation that I was meant to be a warrior. And at the time I was working toward being a certified public accountant and I was working at Coopers and Lybrand in a consulting role. And so I was far from a warrior. That’s an example of what I call insight intuition. It just. It comes through direct perception or perceiving something in your mind, in your brain, that you didn’t necessarily know. Right.

Mark Divine [00:05:29]:
It’s coming from a different source, and that source could be your soul or it could be some transrational information. Right. So we’ll talk about that. So I’ve just talked about three different types of intuition. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what intuition is and a lot of overlap with the discussion about emotionality and sensation. So I want to just take my 15 minutes here and kind of like parse through it and see if we can get any clarity. Now back to the five mountains. The five mountains are physical, mental, emotional, intuitional and spiritual.

Mark Divine [00:06:07]:
And they are listed in that order for a reason. Largely, most of the work, I should say, is done in the first three three mountains. Physical healing the body, refining the body through somatic awareness, through stress management, proper nutrition, sleep, exercise, all those things. Strengthening the body and developing more courage with the body is really important because that allows the sensations of the body to be experienced with more clarity or with more fidelity, with more sensitivity. So then being the work of the mental mountain is to clarify the mind, strengthen the mind, develop the ability to hold your attention and to concentrate more. And also to expand the capacity of the mind to work both cross, what do you call it? Cross hemispheric, right or more an integrated left, right hemisphere, as well as to tap into the intelligence of your heart, mind and your gut mind, which both have neurons and neurological processing and neurochemicals and whatnot. So we get to, through the mental mountain train what I call whole mind thinking. And whole mind thinking then allows you to, in the work of the third mountain, through emotional development.

Mark Divine [00:07:23]:
Because you’ve done the work of purifying and strengthening and making the body more aware, more sensitive with whole mind thinking. Now you’re thinking with your whole body or using your whole body as part of your thinking. And so you’re able to perceive both sensations and the interpretations of those sensations more clearly. And so a good chunk of those sensations and interpretations we call emotions. And emotions, as we discussed in our last two episodes, really are about stored energy, primordial energy that is going, you know, that is designed to keep you safe, right? So fear is a great example of that. Also the energies of the subtle body that are going to lead to ultimately you experiencing peace and equanimity and joy and those types of things. So those are emotions. So where does intuition come in? Where does that fall in? Well, intuition are also overlap with sensations.

Mark Divine [00:08:32]:
So you have this sensation of the heart’s intuition or empathic intuition, which is very much of a physical sensation, but it’s not necessarily an emotion in the classic sense of how we define emotions, where you have an interpretation around a particular feeling that gets triggered or activated. Whereas an intuition from the heart’s empathic center, intuitive center, is going to be Picking up on somebody else’s energy. And the heart has the ability to project energy or information for a long distance. And so you can actually pick up the energy of either a group or an individual from quite far away. If your heart is open to it and you’re able to receive it and understand or maybe appreciate the energy and to be able to interpret it somehow. So that’s the heart, intuition, and then same thing with the gut. The gut, as I mentioned, is they call it the little brain. The gut has neurological processing power, it’s got neurons, and we don’t quite understand how it works.

Mark Divine [00:09:38]:
But the biome, all those little bugs in your gut communicate with us constantly. And of course they’re worried about their survival. So the gut instinctual intuition really is about recognizing danger because the, because your biome is going to recognize a certain danger, like in an, in an instant, well before your, your conscious mind will ever recognize it, if ever it’s for somehow some reason, it’s able to just pick up this information and transmit it to you. So if you’re not open enough to receive that or you don’t believe it, then you won’t receive it or you won’t act on it. And in that case it could be life threatening. So for instance, back to my shooting example, had I poo pooed it, had I not believed in this thing, these things, I would be dead. There’s many other times where in less dangerous situations where I ignored it and I paid a price for that. And so I’ve learned to always pay attention to the signals from my gut as well as my heart.

Mark Divine [00:10:43]:
As far as the direct perception of insight, this is something that really accrues more from being able to be still. So a long practice of meditation, spending a lot of time in nature and learning how to be still and just silence the chatter of your mind so you can move beyond the thinking and the emotions and just rest in that stillness. And in that stillness you’re able to perceive and receive messages either from within, you know, what you consider to be within your body. And that could be like from your heart itself, like the soul seated in the heart, or what we could call, and I used the term earlier, transrational, meaning it could be coming from outside of you. It could be like the thoughts of another person you’re picking up, which you might also call extrasensory perception. Or it might even be a message from a non physical being who is a supporter of you. Right. So if you believe in that type of thing, which I do, so that’s really what happens with intuition, it’s similar, it has similarities with emotions in the sense that they are sensations in your body, they arise within the body or they come from outside the body, but are received and interpreted through the body because the body is your interpretation machine.

Mark Divine [00:12:11]:
And most people don’t learn how to develop these three intuitional centers. Instinctual, empathic and insightful. In fact, if you do a Google search or AI search on intuition, you’re going to find that most academic view views on intuition really are about pattern recognition, like complexity theory. You’ve been experienced to a situation or environment or other people for over long periods of time and all that information gets kind of stored in your subconscious and then suddenly it’s, it’s able to be put together in a certain way for you at a moment when you need it. So that’s, I think that’s also appropriate to call intuition. But it’s a little bit different than my interpretation of the three different intuition centers and my experiences. I would more call that just pattern recognition. And it’s just the way your brain works.

Mark Divine [00:13:08]:
And Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow calls that interpretation of Those things a System 2 thinking. System 2 thinking is the rationale interpretation of what’s happening from system one, which is your subconscious mind. So the more experience you have, you know, the more mastery you have with something, the more time you have with an individual, you know, living together, working together, then the more your system to mind, I think I’ve got that right, is going to be able to interpret complex patterns that have built up over time. So we can also call that intuition, but we’ll call it pattern recognition intuition. So where do we go with all this? How do we train it? Well, I mentioned before, most of the work of the intuitive mountain training comes from or as a result of the work of the first three mountains. So as you work on yourself physically and mentally and emotionally, and you’ve got daily practices around the development of those three mountains, then what’s happening is you are getting more and more, your body’s getting purer and purer and your mind is getting much more clear and able to listen to and receive the signals and discern where they’re coming from. And you are clearing up a lot of emotional energy to be able to feel more. You’re letting the energy flow in your body so you’re able to feel more, which allows you to feel the sensation, the very, very subtle energy of your intuitive centers.

Mark Divine [00:14:50]:
So if you don’t do that work largely intuition can be Largely cut off or shut off from you. So it could be said that we ultimately will open up naturally to our capacity to experience intuition and actually more creativity as a result of working on ourselves physically, mentally and emotionally and reintegrating and becoming more of a whole mind thinker. But there are certain things that we can also do to stimulate our capacity to perceive and interpret our intuition. Right? So here’s a few of the ones that I used to work with with my seal fit academies. One of them from the Apache tradition, we would call the fox walk. So in the Apache tradition or any native tradition, of course, hunting is important skill. And they learned very early on that you can’t stalk a deer with your mind in an agitated state or by focusing on the deer. And so the hunters or the warriors would take a lot of time to clear their mind and clear their energy out of their body, clear their any agitation or anxiety.

Mark Divine [00:16:00]:
And that’s through a process of just sitting in nature, sitting in silence. And then they would go stalk the deer. And so when they got close to the deer, and when I say close, I mean far enough away where the deer is not going to detect them or smell them or anything. And of course, they’re all, you know, camouflaged as well as, as well as with smell as well as sight. But then they would deliberately not look at the deer. And they would use what I call wide angle vision. Right? Wide angle vision, which makes your. The energy kind of flow into your mind instead of coming out your eyes with the focus vision.

Mark Divine [00:16:33]:
So they all, they soften their gaze, go wide angle vision. They don’t look directly at the deer, and then they slow their breathing down, and they breathe in a very, very slow, deliberate, nostril manner, like our tactical breathing. And they do something called fox walk. And the fox walk, you ever seen a fox stalk its prey? You know, when it gets closer, it just walks like ridiculously slow because before it then pounces when it gets close enough. So a fox walk literally is like taking one step per minute with that soft gaze, breathing very, very slow through your nostrils. Now, this practice is incredible. I used to do it for like 30 to 40 minutes at a time with the students. And it gets you into an incredible flow state.

Mark Divine [00:17:18]:
Your brain settles down into an alpha wave length, and you can ultimately learn how to walk without making any sound, even if you’re stepping over twigs and leaves. And that’s how the Apache scouts and the other scouts could approach a deer and literally touch it. It’s incredible. So what a fun exercise. I encourage you to try it sometime in your living room. I wouldn’t do it out in public. I used to do that with the group at Sealfit where we would be fox walking down the street and boy did we get some interesting looks back then. So that’s one.

Mark Divine [00:17:50]:
Another one is just the practice of mindfulness. Right. So we’ve talked about. Mindfulness is helpful in the mental mountain development so that you can develop distance from your thinking. But mindfulness is also about body awareness. And so you can develop the mindfulness just to pay attention to the sensations in your body and begin to identify where they’re coming from. Is it an emotion or is it just a physical sensation that maybe has no meaning? Or is it maybe coming from your gut or your heart? So using mindfulness with the directed attention toward your body and the body sensations and feelings and energy is a really, really powerful way to really open up those intuitive centers. In addition, just spending more time in nature, right? Just immersing yourself in nature.

Mark Divine [00:18:47]:
So if you go out for a hike, for example, instead of being so destination oriented like I’ve got to get to the destination or being time bound oriented, where you’ve got to get there in a certain time or you got to be the first one to get to the top or anything that’s ego goal oriented, just set all that aside and just enjoy, really just observing everything that you can see. Taking more information in, taking time to just sit and let your mind kind of settle and sink into an environment and just notice what happens. Right. Generally we barge through nature environments and you know, the animals big and small can smell us from a long distance and they can hear us from a long distance away so that most generally they’re going to get out of your way. That’s why you don’t see a ton of animals when you go lunging up a trail. But if you can learn to be very quiet, either sitting or walking, then you’ll notice that the animals will come back out or they won’t be scared. I remember once I was at a yoga retreat or meditation retreat up in the Santa Cruz Mountains and I went for a hike. This is at the Mount Madonna Training Center.

Mark Divine [00:19:54]:
And they have like 400 acres, beautiful acres in the redwoods. Not redwoods, the sequoia trees, I think. No, they’re redwoods. Are they redwoods? Yeah. And I’m practicing not the fox walk, but practicing kind of wide angle of vision, deep breathing, really clearing my mind, just more of a mindful walk. And I came upon a family of deer and they did not bolt when they saw me. They felt very comfortable because I was in a state of open hearted, open minded awareness. And I looked at them as my friends and I wanted to hang out with them.

Mark Divine [00:20:22]:
So I just stopped, hung out with them for a little bit. Suddenly they all looked up the trail in the opposite direction and then bolted. And I sat there and said, oh, huh. They must have heard or smelled someone coming. And sure enough, about 30 seconds later, down the hill and around the corner come a couple people who are just jabbering away. So that’s an example of non mindful hiking what they were doing versus what I was doing. So that type of nature immersion with a clear mind with no goal, you just want to be immersed and feel into it and open your heart, is a phenomenal way to really open up your intuitive centers and to be able to experience the power of that intuition. And related to this also is sitting in silence in general like a silent retreat.

Mark Divine [00:21:14]:
So if you were to go to like a 10 or 11 day Vipassana silent retreat or anything really anything more than than 24 hours, even 24 hours is great if you just want to start there. But anytime where you just sit in silence, whether in a nature setting or in a temple or kind of a retreat center setting, it’s a phenomenal way to again settle the mind, let the dust settle of that monkey mind, let your emotions settle, let all the anxiety and agitation from everyday busyness kind of bleed off. And then within 48 hours and longer you’re able to tap into the intuitive centers and be able to experience some of the messaging that’s coming through. One last thing you can also, and this really relates mostly to the pattern recognition intuition that we talked about. But you can practice the art of noticing. This is something that we did in SEAL teams. We, for instance, we had a couple exercises, one we called the Kim Game, Keep in memory, which is interesting because this had a two part kind of benefit to it. So we would take a bunch of little random items, put them on a, you know, on the ground or on a table and cover them up and then we would uncover it.

Mark Divine [00:22:34]:
For a SEAL in training or even when we were doing this with our platoon, just to stimulate our mental mountain and we’d uncover it and you’d have one minute to observe everything that’s on the table and to try to memorize it and then we’d get covered again and then you’d have to recite back what you saw. And initially you’re just looking at the gross objects and Say, oh, I saw a watch or I saw a compass. But the more skilled you get at this, the more you learn to notice details. And so it’s not oh, I saw a watch. What you say is, oh, I saw a Casio watch and the time was 215. Or I saw a compass, a plastic compass, and it was pointing at, you know, 316 degrees or something like that. So you begin to notice much more. So that’s one way to practice noticing.

Mark Divine [00:23:25]:
Another would be, this is common for snipers, Sniper teams is to, or special activities, kind of recon teams is to travel the same route over and over and each time you travel it notice something different and unique that you hadn’t seen before. So you’re taking the time to really scan and look for details that you may not have seen before and just adding and adding, adding your ability. You’re opening the aperture, I should say, of your ability to be able to recognize the vast amount of information that is actually already flowing into your brain. So we know that your brain takes in millions of bits of information and yet you can only really perceive like a few thousand bits at a time. So by practicing noticing, you can expand the aperture and be able to make sense and to perceive more information. So there’s some valuable information or valuable tips for how to develop and open up to your natural intuition. So I hope you can practice some of those and find them valuable. Developing intuition is an important skill as we head into this artificial intelligence age of exponential technology and Vuca, volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

Mark Divine [00:24:45]:
I think the human skills of intuition and creativity and empathy and compassion, these things are going to be the most valuable skills for us in the future. And yet our whole, our whole setup of, of schooling, academia and even developmental programs are pretty much devoid of the type of training, you know, for the, for the corporate world or for leadership development that is going to develop those skills. You will find it in eastern traditions and meditation and yoga. You will find it in, in, you know, some other types of, you know, programs, but they’re not mainstream. So I’m here to suggest that you need to kind of bring these into mainstream if you’re a leader, bring them into your life or bring them into your organization so that you can begin to really open up the aperture to help your team be more intuitive and more creative, have that more access to spontaneous knowingness of direct perception, transrational knowledge, and so be more capable as a human being as AI takes over some of those other horizontal jobs. One last thing, there are some other Types of intuition to be aware of. I don’t know if there’s not much you can do about it except pay attention and learn to see how it affects you. But one of them is archetypal intuition.

Mark Divine [00:26:09]:
So this is like we talked a little bit about Carl Jung yesterday. There are kind of cultural archetypes that exist, and oftentimes we can find that we are involved in the energy of a cultural archetype ourselves or that we have a particular archetype that we’re kind of playing out karmically. And so if you can really tap into that. For instance, when I was meditating in my 20s, I kept having that sensation that I was a warrior. Well, that was an archetype. So the warrior is a very strong archetype. So I had to ask, is this something I’m tapping into, or is this something that is supposed to be my energy or my life arc? And that’s what I determined that it was like I was meant to be a warrior. And yet in my 20s, I was not a warrior.

Mark Divine [00:27:01]:
So that’s an example of archetypal intuition. Another would be genetic. Right. So ancestral intelligence, intuition. And this would be like to take a look at your ancestors and get a sense for like what was what, you know, what are the guiding energies, what are the dominant energies that went through the lineages. And to notice whether you’ve, you’ve got any of that energy in your life. And a lot of times you’ll see that there’s some ancestral kind of nudge or information that you can use to your advantage or it helps give you some insight. The other way genetic intuition plays out is through like birth order, right.

Mark Divine [00:27:44]:
And so, and, and there’s plenty of research on this, but if you’re first born, you’re going to have a certain type of framework that you’re fitting into when it comes to other people’s perceptions. And, and you’re also background of obvious’s perception of how you’re supposed to fulfill that role. So same thing with second, third, or fourth. Those aren’t ironclad, but there’s some valuable information there as well. Okay. At any rate, there you go. The power of intuition is undeniable. It saved my life and led to some incredible adventures as I learned to follow up on it on my warrior intuition and become a Navy SEAL and then follow up my intuition to start SEAL fit and to develop the training programs that have led to all this work.

Mark Divine [00:28:32]:
So I encourage you to really explore your intuition, your empathic intuition, your instinctual intuition, your insightful intuition, your pattern recognition intuition, as well as your genetic and ancestral archetypal intuition. Thanks for joining me today once again on the Mark Divine Show. Show notes will be [email protected] what else? Video will be on our YouTube channel and if you’re not on my newsletter subscription list, go to markdivine.com to subscribe. Divine Inspiration comes out every Tuesday with show notes from the week’s podcast. Incredible blog. A useful blog I should say. Hopefully some practice for you to try, as well as notes from some of our sponsors. So check it out.

Mark Divine [00:29:17]:
People love it. I hope you will too. If you haven’t rated or review the show, please do so wherever you listen because it’s very helpful for for people to find it. Shooting for 5,000 five star reviews this year, so any support there? Thanks so much. Amazing shout out to my awesome team. John Dahlgren Jet Studios Catherine Divine Hoo ya. You guys rock. Thanks so much for all your support.

Mark Divine [00:29:42]:
Couldn’t do it without you. So that’s it for today folks. Thanks for tuning in. Please share the Mark to Mind show with your friends if you find it valuable and keep coming back. Thanks for doing the work and till next time, go work on that intuition. Huya Divine out.