In this episode Mark Devine, a retired Navy SEAL commander, founder of SealFit and Unbeatable Mind, and New York Times bestselling author shares his journey from Wall Street to the Navy SEALs, emphasizing the transformative power of meditation and Zen practices. He discusses the balance between ‘yin and yang’ life approaches, the importance of physical, mental, and emotional development, and how his training methods have evolved over the years. The discussion highlights how integrating self-awareness, compassion, and mental training can lead to extraordinary performance and effective leadership. Marcus and Mark also delve into the essence of true warrior leaders and the evolution of Devine’s perspective on what it means to be a warrior.
Episode Highlights:
04:04 Journey to Zen and Martial Arts
04:23 From Wall Street to Navy SEALs
31:00 The Yin and Yang of Personal Growth
33:15 The Warrior’s Path: Oak and Reed
33:42 Merging the Hard and Soft
34:54 Witnessing Awareness and Ego
43:44 The Essence of True Leadership
Mark Divine, from upstate New York, graduated from Colgate University where he focused on athletic endeavors like swimming, rowing, and triathlon racing. He began his career as a CPA at Coopers & Lybrand in NYC, serving clients like Solomon Brothers and Paine Webber. After earning an MBA from NYU Stern, he pursued his dream of becoming a Navy SEAL officer, graduating as the honor-man of his class. He served for nine years on active duty and eleven in the reserves. Mark co-founded Coronado Brewing Company, launched NavySEALs.com, and developed the SEALFIT program, incorporating his Unbeatable Mind warrior development model.
You can learn more about Mark at: markdivine.com
Episode Transcript:
00:30
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you wanna know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words instead, observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Commander Mark Devine.
00:59
is the founder of SealFit, Unbeatable Mind, and the Mark Devine Courage Foundation for Veterans Suffering from PTSD. He’s also a retired Navy Seal Commander, New York Times bestselling author, and coach to elite performers. The Mark Devine Show covers a wide range of subjects featuring global change agents, guests from all walks of life. The show focuses on physical, emotional, and spiritual growth, elite performance, as well as flow and resilience.
01:26
His mission is to inspire 100 million to a path of integration based on the unbeatable mind system in which he has developed and trained special operators with stunning success. The system of a whole person vertical development is now taught to executives and corporate teams, professional sports teams and other professionals seeking elite levels of performance. He’s a highly in demand keynote speaker as well. Mark, thank you so much for being here today and for taking the time. I appreciate you. Thanks, Marcus. I always chuckle.
01:56
When I hear those introductions like that. Right, you’re like, man, this guy sounds impressive. I want to talk to this person. Keep going, keep going. You make me feel pretty good. I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time and I’ve listened to your podcasts for a long time. Awesome. As a matter of fact, I remember a podcast that you had with Tom Bilyeu many years ago and you’re the man that introduced Tom to meditation. Correct? That’s right. Now it’s like a mainstay of his teaching. That’s awesome. Isn’t it interesting?
02:26
It’s surprising that a person of his level hadn’t had any sort of meditation practice up to that point correct well again that I mean I think that was like eight years ago. Mm-hmm, right maybe yeah Lots of change actually in eight years. So I think you know breath work and meditation are Becoming much more widely I talked about and kind of accepted although I still think the the teaching of them is
02:55
incomplete or it’s flawed in a lot of cases. Tom is a real go-getter. He’s a classic achiever. Whatever he does, he just throws himself at it and wants to do it at a high level. And so I think that he was kind of intrigued by the performance gains and kind of like the way that meditation can kind of sharpen your focus and help you basically achieve.
03:24
better results in the world. So it can do all those things. It’s certainly not why I meditate. Right? So it’d be fun to talk a little bit more about all that. At the same time, regardless of whether you’re doing breath work or meditation or visualization, the practice is, however you’re taught, even if it’s taught with ineffective or incomplete means, it cracks the door open.
03:54
that will allow you to slide through and discover your own truths on your own. I think that’s really what happened with me. I pretty much, I had a profound luck to find Zen meditation when I was 21 through my martial arts instructor. So I was in Manhattan working, this is before the SEALs. I didn’t join the SEALs until I was 25. So my first…
04:24
career was on Wall Street as a CPA, working for Cooper’s and Libran, now part of Sonris Cooper. And we were going to NYU business school at night. It’s part of a cohort, get my MBA and, you know, kind of like live in the American dream, off to the races, so to speak, going to go earn a lot of money, you know, and get those degrees, MBA, CPA, and, you know, maybe then shift over to trading or investment banking. That was kind of the path that was laid out for me.
04:55
Fortunately, I was also a, I was an athlete, you know, an endurance athlete in high school and college. And I always saw myself as a lifetime athlete. So when I got to New York, you know, I had to figure out how to build that into my routine. And so in the evening, I had a couple hours between work and school because, you know, Coopers would have to let us off, you know, as part of this cohort with plenty of time.
05:24
you know, take care of business, get down to the school. And so for me, that was a good opportunity to do some training. And so I found, stumbled into this martial arts school thinking, oh, that’d be probably an interesting way to train, you know, like hour long classes, I could probably squeeze it in, you know? And so I started studying this karate program under the watchful eye of the founder of the whole style called Sato. His name was Tanashi Nakamura.
05:53
came from Japan to run up Kokuchai. This guy is a legend in Japan. Phenomenal, amazing guy. And what I saw in him was so different than anything I’ve seen in another human being. There was a way he carried himself that was just different, qualitatively.
06:11
And I, you know, I kind of, I was intrigued by that. Didn’t understand it, but I was intrigued. It was like, that’s interesting. You know, um, a few months into the training, I stayed to watch the black boat class and after the black boat class, they turned the lights off and people were kind of like getting quiet and leaving the room, but there was a group of about 10 people who stayed in the corner and one of them lit a candle and they got these wooden benches out. And Nakamura, you know, went over to them and they sat down and
06:41
And so I asked someone on my way out, I said, what are they doing? No, that’s the Zen class. It was like Zen. Anyways, yeah, so I asked if I could join that class. I learned a little bit about Zen, read Suzuki’s books, Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind. Yes. It’s phenomenal. Again, I understood about 10% of it, but it opened my mind to the idea that the mind can be trained.
07:10
beyond just like content. Like there’s something you can do with your mind that changes the nature of how it works. This isn’t taught in our school systems. It’s not part of our lexicon here in the West. Mental development, first of all, people don’t even know what that means. I think maybe, right, you’re just talking about learning things. Like, oh yeah, listen to more podcasts, read more books. That’s not what I’m talking, packing more content in is not mental development.
07:40
And so that kind of opened my aperture like, oh, there’s a way and a path, a means to actually expand your mental capacity and whatever that means. And there are descriptions in there, but they were way beyond really understanding, like the swinging door. He talks about the mind just being a swinging door. And what does he mean by that? At any rate, so I asked Nakamura if I could join and I started studying Zen at 21.
08:10
Wow. And, um, that transformed my life.
08:18
transformed everything, transformed the way my mind worked, transformed my capacity to like, understand the story that I had been living and why I ended up in New York as an MBA, CPA, you know, from all the conditioning in my childhood and my family’s, you know, all the other things that people put on me that I accepted. And then I was able to deconstruct that story and then open up to new possibilities in this story. And that was…
08:47
I would drop off into these void moments about nine to 12 months into my training, my Zen training, I would be able to access these without any effort, just suddenly fall off a cliff into the void, into the non-dual realm of whatever. And whenever I kind of came out of those experiences, man, it was just incredible. Everything was so rich.
09:17
thick and like the air was like electricity. And I always had some kind of information or knowingness, not knowledge, but a knowingness, and I kept coming back with this knowingness that I was a warrior.
09:32
And yet here I am working away becoming a CPA. I’m like, what? There’s a big gap here, a big disconnect, you know? Yeah. Between what I was feeling and sensing on the meditation bench was my calling, my purpose and what I was actually doing in the world. And so I started to have to ask better questions. If not that, then what? Then how am I supposed to be a warrior? You know, that type of thing. Anyways, so that, my journey with meditation, it’s very,
10:02
intimate to me, very important to me because I’ve experienced firsthand how incredibly transformative it can be. I’ve also done a lot of trial and error, you know, and that those formative experiences and then, you know, getting into the seals and literally crushing the seals. I give credit to meditation for, you know, for me being honor man of my class. You know, 19 graduates out of 185 and I was number one and my whole boat crew graduated with me of seven.
10:32
So seven of us out of 19, and it’s because I taught my boat crew box breathing. I taught them how to stay calm, you know, in the midst of the storm, and every day is a storm at Seal Training. I taught them how to visualize success and what that looked like. And so we had a shared vision for what that looked like. And that meant that we shared vision for us was that we were all standing there in graduation day. So my team’s success, you know, was my success.
11:02
Right? So that was my early experience building an elite team where, you know, if you’ve got your teammates back and they’ve got your back, right. You unlock this massive potential because you’re not thinking about yourself. You’re thinking about the team.
11:19
Anyways, all that came that self-awareness, the situational awareness, the attention control, the concentration, all of that came from my meditation practice. Right? And so later on, you know, in the seals and then when I got out, I just became like this rabidly passionate about like as you are, and a lot of listeners about like everything to do with like peak performance, how the mind works, how to, you know, any kind of developmental path. And so I explored pretty much everything.
11:49
that I could find that made sense to me. One of the systems that made sense to me was yoga, right? And another one was Tibetan Buddhism, like Zha-jin, the deep path of mental development through that really wise tradition. I continued my martial arts studies, but most of my kind of learning and training came from the Eastern paths of the…
12:18
the meditative path of Buddhism as well as yoga, and also Western psychotherapy, depth psychology, right? And then a ton of trial and error, especially when it comes to around to like using visualization and imagery work, because there wasn’t, there’s not a whole lot of training around that, at least in the Western world. So I did a lot of trial and error. And anyway, so it all began to coalesce into
12:46
into my training with seal candidates, you know, and that’s why I launched my launch seal fit, I wanted to bring these things back. And so I had to find a way to kind of codify it and to deliver it to an audience that was very skeptical and very critical of, you know, any kind of. Training. And so I had to strip all the food out of the Kung Fu, all the GAH out of the yoga. Yeah.
13:13
Yes. And I had to develop a system that just like delivered really quick results, demonstrable results and was believable and understandable by, you know, young warriors. That’s why, you know, I don’t talk about Pranayama. I talk, I literally say, we’re going to do this breathing. We’re going to breathe in box pattern. We’ll call it box breathing. And here’s why we’re going to do this. Right. And, and give them the science behind it and give them the practical, you know, actin on verba.
13:42
rationale like why they need to be doing this so they survive with a gunfight, you know, and so that they’re calm under pressure and, you know, they bleed off all that excess stress and they wore it off post-traumatic stress and they’re like laughing, they’re like, yeah, I get it. Right? But if I were to have sat down and said, you know, we’re going to do some ancient yogic practice called pranayama, they would have rolled their eyes in the back of the head and said, well, I can’t do this. This is against my religion. And I actually had seal.
14:11
my seal instructors be like, I can’t walk into your room because it’s against my religion. I’m like, really? Okay. Anyways, I’m kind of rambling here, but no, I, I love this. And I love that you, you touched on it from the very beginning. So many times, uh, Westerners, dare I say, especially when they’re trying to look at peak performance, they’re like, I’m going to take a piece of this. I’m going to take a piece of that. I’m going to shining ball. Exactly. And we’re trying to ram them together, even though they’re incongruent.
14:40
But what you’re describing is you can’t really teach a lot of this stuff, but you can express it in a way that helps them experience it. That’s right. Yeah. When you’re talking about the inward journey.
14:55
The everyone’s experience is going to be different, right? It’s a subjective experience. And so all that you can do is like provide pointers, right? And this is why, like in the Zen tradition, the Coans and the Zen teachers, you know, they weren’t really teachers. They were just pointers. They’re pointing a way and then they’ll, you know, they’ll ask questions and they’ll point another way. Give pointing out instructions that they call them. So this is very similar process. You know, what I’m trying to do is get people.
15:24
in my program, first of all, to kind of orient themselves to be, to acknowledge that they can become self evolutionary, that they have everything within them and within their means to navigate toward perfect health, perfectly long, healthy lifespan, near and dear to your heart, and to tap into this immense potential, ultimately unlimited potential. And so they have this capacity to do that.
15:55
So they’ve got to understand that, appreciate that, and have the desire for that. Okay, so that’s kind of like step one. And then step two is great, I’m with you, Mark. Now what? And so the now what is what I’ve kind of like tracked the code on, right? Because like you said, it’s not a bunch of hacks, it’s not, you know, you got to get off the train of just chasing the next shiny thing, right? Because, you know, that’s a start, stop, start, stop, start, stop, and what you really need is a consistent daily practice.
16:24
And also we need to stop thinking of ourselves as these kind of fractured separated individuals and start to think of ourselves as whole and start training that way. And so we train in what called an integrated manner. And I’d break that down into the five mountains. Physically, mentally, emotionally, intuitionally, and spiritually. In fact the whole book, the book on common simple principles for extraordinary life, those are the five sections. And they’re important and
16:54
for a reason because the what next question, if someone comes to me one on one and I’m like, okay, let’s assess your physical capacity. Are you healthy? Is your body functioning optimally or do we have limitations? Most of the time Westerners will have limitations. Great. You’re not going to succeed in the mental mountain. You’re not going to succeed with meditation until you get the body healthy.
17:25
Right. And they’re like, why? Because body and the brain, right. Are saying the body is the brain and the body is the mind. So if your body isn’t healthy, your brain isn’t healthy. If your brain isn’t healthy, your mind is not going to be able to be effectively oriented in the way that you need to orient it to meditate effectively. So the physical mountain is the first. It doesn’t mean we don’t do any training in the mental or emotional or intuitive mountains, but it’s the first.
17:54
And in the training of the physical mountain, we begin the training of the mental mountain. Because one of the key tools of the physical mountain training is breath control. Right? So we start the box breathing right there and breath is the bridge between the body, the mind and the spirit. So just the act of training breath control for physiological balancing, you know, and reducing stress, what we call arousal control.
18:21
will naturally begin to strengthen your mind.
18:26
and will lead into the other tools of the mental mountain development. So that’s a key point that we want to reintegrate. We want to develop ourselves in a way that takes these different things that our society or our academics or even medical cultures kind of separate. They look at the body as separate from the mind. It’s not. They look at, you know, you look at training the body by going to the gym to get healthy or strong.
18:55
as opposed to for development. So we’ve got to change that, right? Because training the body is, when done a certain way, will lead to development, right? We know that from the warrior traditions, right? In the seals, you know, you use the body, you sharpen the sword of the body, you’re sharpening the sword of the mind, and then, you know, that takes you through a developmental journey that will evolve you to higher states of awareness and capacity and perspectives.
19:24
So physical mind is really kind of like first and foremost for that foundation. And again, that’s not taught. Like if you go to a mindfulness class or you think you’re gonna pick up Headspace and just download an app for meditation and you sit there and your body’s all agitated and you’re distracted and your mind’s racing and you’re like, I’m not effective. I suck at meditation. Most people say that and they quit because it’s not a pleasant experience.
19:54
and it’s because their body hasn’t let off all that stress. It’s not comfortable sitting in silence yet. This is why in the yoga tradition, if you know anything about the eight limbs, Ashtanga, not Ashtanga yoga, the American practice, but the eight limbs, the asana, the physical practice, came before breath work, which came before sensory awareness training, which came before concentration training.
20:22
And so there’s a developmental path that says, get your body healthy first. And then that’ll allow the breath work to take root, which turns your attention inward, starts drawing your attention inward. And then we begin to close down the senses to eliminate distractions of the outer world, and then we can begin the work of concentration. I was very fortunate because when I, you know, this is why Zen and the martial arts go hand in hand is like, you’re already fit.
20:53
and you’re already working with the breath. And so when you sit down on that bench, you’ve already passed the first test, the physical mountain test. So you’re, you know, generally are gonna have more success.
21:04
So that’s a key point. I started teaching these seals this practice. They were already healthy, but we got them physically stronger and we immediately started teaching them breath control and visualization and concentration and attention control and how to be an exceptional teammate, which gets into the emotional development. So open up and check your ego at the door and be able to receive really painful feedback when you screwed up.
21:34
You know, those things are really helpful, but our culture just dances around it. And, you know, it’s very hard, you know, to call people out without feeling them, feeling like you’re insulting them. And, and the seals are very good and very good at that emotional development and really opening it up the compassion center. I don’t know if you’ve met any team guys, but like they’re actually extraordinarily compassionate most of them, not all, but most, you know, it’s, it’s more common for.
22:04
team guys to hug each other and say, I love you brother, then it is not. Right, and it’s because of that. We literally force ourselves to take our eyes off ourself and make sure that our team is front and center. And so we develop a love for a team that is unusual. Anyway, so that’s all part of that development. That’s the emotional mountain, right? Yeah. So we bring all these together.
22:30
We bring tools from the physical development, mental development, emotional development, intuitive development. And then the spiritual side really is not so much a, it is a practice, but it’s really more of a flowering, you know, a ripening into wholeness. I love that. And uncommon is out now for everybody that’s listening. You can order your copies of it. I recommend getting it for all the things we’re describing. And back to what you’re saying. Um, I think that was.
22:59
Especially like you said, these top tier operators, seals, things like that. People underestimate how much work in these other spheres that have to go on before they can achieve these other physical components. And I think that’s something that they underestimate. They just think, you know, we’re, we’re just trying to be a person that slugs somebody over the head with a club better than somebody else. And it’s like, well, there’s obviously a martial component, but in order to get to that point, this true, almost what you’re describing, this motion, this ability to step back.
23:29
to have this no-mindedness to see the situation as it is, irrespective of if I’m correct or incorrect or if I’m in the right or the wrong, that’s not important. What’s important is what is the truth? Can I radically accept it? And then what am I willing to do to move forward in the process of doing that? But if our ego is attached, or if we’re worried about being correct or what somebody else believes, we’re already behind the power curve at that point. That’s right. You gotta get out of your head and into your heart.
23:58
The heart operates at the speed of infinity. And so you get spontaneous knowingness, spontaneous action. The brain constructs time and space, and so it’s linear, and so it’s much slower. And it tends, because it’s the survival mechanism, it tends to veer toward the negative. It’s always gonna look at the glass as half empty, and the heart will always see it as half full. But you know.
24:27
That’s a platypter. How do you get out of your head and into your heart? Through training or through life, you know, smacking you down many, many, many times. And, you know, I found this kind of usually a combination of both is effective because life’s going to, you know, the more development work you do, the more challenges get thrown your way. It’s like a school house. Right. And those who are up for the more severe, you know, severe tests are those who do the more severe training.
24:58
So if you’re on this path and you’re, and you’re inspired to develop yourself and tap into that kind of potential that we’re talking about, then also prepare yourself to embrace the suck and, and learn how to revel in that hardship. Because it’s coming your way. It’s, it’s in route right now as we speak. So we can either do what we can to prepare or we can have the audacity to be surprised when we get ambushed by it. But the decision is ours right now in this moment. And when you get ambushed, you don’t.
25:28
You know, you don’t run, you don’t hide. You put, you put a smile on you. So yeah, here we are. Bring it. Let’s go. Yeah, let’s go. Absolutely. Game time, right? It’s game time. And, um, because you recognize that in that obstacle, in that challenge, you know, it’s like Ryan Haldis, the obstacle is the way that’s where the juice is. Right. You know, completely. I got, I was feeling complacent back, you know, before COVID.
25:57
And so I launched my PhD. I was like, I’m going to go finish something I started back in 2000, but then I had to interrupt when I got recalled to go to Iraq and I didn’t finish my PhD mainly because I didn’t want to, I saw in Iraq that I didn’t want to be an academic, I wanted to develop leaders. And so that’s, I came home and left the program and started my business. You know, 20 some odd years later, you know, I was, I was feeling complacent. I needed another challenge. You know,
26:27
Like you, I’ve done every physical challenge, you know, and they just don’t, I just don’t need to go like kick myself in the Jimmy, right? To prove anything. Right. So I wanted to kind of that intellectual challenge. And so I got my PhD and it sucked. And I’m finishing up my dissertation right now, but boy, I tell you what, you know, it feels good to endure the suffering and to get through it all and to, you know, gain the insights into.
26:56
It’s evolutionary, right? You evolve. Yes, yeah. You become a different person as a result of those. And if you do it with self-awareness, then you become a better person, you know? Because you can almost become a different person, but also be bitter from hardships. And so the idea is to learn how to embrace the suck, come get through the hardship with resiliency, which means that you do it with self-awareness, you’re scanning for the opportunities to grow and to gain insights, even from the…
27:26
And even from where you supposedly screwed up and you learned to just love the perspective, right. And the growth that accrues from the challenge. Yeah. And we couldn’t have found that perspective from any other place. If we had to be in that place of hardship, that’s why it called a crucible. And we are at Sealfit. We offer crucibles for people to come go through a curated Jimmy kicking the Jimmy challenge.
27:55
50 hour nonstop physical, mental team training, a model effort of the seals, hell week is a, is a good one. And a lot of we’ve had people from, you know, many different countries all over the world attend that we still run them to this day. We’re growing almost 20 years. Wow. That’s you. You’re the ones that really like created that sort of, right? A lot of people are trying to do something similar now, but you guys were way ahead of the curve on that. And I believe that it’s that depth of knowledge and experience that you have that makes it so different.
28:25
Um, I was speaking to Dr. Michael Autrelink. Um, I have a lot of people asking questions for me to ask you. And I questioned the hippos, which I thought was brilliant was how has your mentality of the, your mentality of what the warrior is, how has that model evolved from that first time you started engaging in this pursuit at 21 to now from the teams, from leading and developing leaders and men and teams to where you are.
28:55
right now finishing your doctorate? That’s a good question. Thank you, Mo. Yeah. I think I had a much more one-dimensional view of what a warrior was back in the day, even though I believed in kind of the, more the Eastern view of mastery, you know, the warriors and someone who masters themself. And I also saw that combination of kind of like,
29:22
the Zen and the martial arts, because of my experience with Nakamura, like the samurai, able to sit silently, but coiled, the spring is coiled, but he’s still calm, ready to, like if he gets ambushed, he’s on your attacker before the attacker even is aware of it, right? And so I always just thought that that was a mental and physical game, right? Like the harder I train,
29:52
The more I train, the longer I train, the more disciplined I am. You know, it’s kind of like the, the Jaco willing or, or Goggins kind of story. Like, right. And so I was like that. I was like a bad-ass. My nickname, my nickname in the seals was cyborg. Right. Nice. Yeah. Because I could go longer, harder, faster and barely ever, you know,
30:18
If it wasn’t a smile, it was a smirk because I was enjoying it. Right. And so as I evolved, you know, I was like, okay, so first of all, I had some breakdowns because that’s unsustainable. Eventually you hit the wall.
30:38
And it wasn’t until I found yoga that I found the counterbalance to that. So that was all using the Eastern idea of the yen and the young. That was all young training. That was a hard, go hard, do more. You’re capable of 40% more push through all those mental toughness skills. Even, you know, the breath control, the positive self-talk, you know, imagery work, performance, psychology, all of that is young is hard push. Go do.
31:07
you can. And that’s great. But it’s only half the equation, Marcus. It’s only half the equation. The rest of the equation is the Yin practices. And that is recovery. That is silence and solitude. That’s the rest and digest, both psychologically and physiologically. And that’s the journey within, whereas the yang is the journey outward. And so it’s not dissimilar to
31:37
in their 20s and 30s and 40s, it’s an outward path. Like you’re out in the world, you’re accomplishing things, you’re building businesses and you’re building a family and you’re trying to make your mark in the world or make your mark in the world. And then, as you get a little bit older and you’ve had some of those challenges and lessons and you’ve started to get a little wiser, then not everyone, but for a certain number of people,
32:06
percentage of population, they start to turn inward. So that becomes the inward path, the indwelling path. And, you know, pointing points on the bird becomes less important. You know, doing works of service, you know, making sure you’re living your purpose, making sure that you’re developing good relationships as opposed to breaking relationships. Right. And so in other words, you’re refining the ego or you’re taming the ego.
32:35
and you’re turning inward. So that’s all the yin path. Now, what I learned is that a warrior, last warrior slash leader, slash good human, really should be developing both of these simultaneously. Right. You know, when the SEALs would come train with me, I used to have a training center in Encinitas, you know, we’d have interns or SEAL candidates and we have, we’d run these, Michael went through one of our three week academies. And so these are like live in.
33:05
Extraordinary training. You know, we train five in the morning until 10 at night, you know, seven days a week, doing all sorts of incredible things. Um, we used to tell these guys, you know, when the tsunami comes, would you rather be the mighty Oak or the Reed? Right. And so they get it like, Oh yeah. Our message was it’s you want to be both.
33:32
But when the tsunami comes, you want to shift from oak to reed so that you can just lay down and then pop back up when the floodwaters pass. And so now my view of the warrior is the warrior is someone who is the mighty oak when he needs to be the mighty oak and is the reed when he needs to be the reed. Has developed a
33:57
you know, the ability to merge the hard with the soft and the soft with the hard.
34:04
and can act with wei wu wei, which is action without the actor, meaning ego-less action, mooshin, no mind.
34:14
And so that’s the yin practices that develop the motion, not the yang, because it’s an inward journey. And it’s the inward journey to the heart and to the witness. And the two of those ultimately merge, but they can, some people find it through the heart initially, and other people find it through the witness. It’s like the difference between Jani yoga and Bhakti yoga. I like to say that we want to do both because it’s going to accelerate our journey.
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accelerate our revolution. And so we want to open the heart and develop that compassion, that loving kindness and that forgiveness. Those are the practices there. While we simultaneously deepen our path of meditation to get through the outer layers of the mind so that we can connect to that witnessing awareness, which is beyond thoughts and emotions.
35:14
when we can rest with an open heart and a witnessing mind, that’s when the way we’re way, that’s when the ego clearly is seen for what it is. Your whole life is seen as now as a construct or as the metaphor of it, it’s like a dream. It’s being lived through this body-mind instrument. And from that witnessing perspective, you see that you once had a mistaken identity.
35:43
meaning like you were hiding the reality from yourself. And so you mistook yourself to be a separate individual named Marcus. And I mistook myself to be a separate individual named Mark.
36:01
But then you see from that witnessing perspective that everything you thought you were was just a bunch of ideas and conditioning. And it’s a construct, meaning it was built from the ground up after birth, but it wasn’t real. It’s no more real than the idea of money is real or the state of Texas is real. It’s just an idea. It has a certain reality, yes, in that we kind of coalesce.
36:31
around the idea that Texas is a real state, but you know, when it comes to like ultimate reality, even the idea of a state or a country or, you know, boundaries, it’s just mind created fantasy. So you begin to see your life as a mind created fantasy is like, wow, look at that. Holy shit, man, I’ve really created some messes haven’t I? And also some created some beauty. It’s awesome. So it’s, it’s free to you become
37:00
liberated. That’s why they call them, you know, liberation or realization or awakening. So that’s all part and parcel of like developing this yin yang. You can’t get there by forcing it. You get there by surrendering. Absolutely. And so the yang practices are all essentially strengthening the ego to get it to a place where you it’s strong enough to say, okay, you’re a bunch of bullshit that it can actually drop itself, set itself aside.
37:31
Right? Yes. You got to be somebody before you can be nobody. Otherwise you can go do meditation and have like mystical experiences and the, the not strengthened ego, meaning the ego that has a lot of pathological development, you know, or incomplete development will take that and own it.
37:58
And this is why you see so much like spiritual egoism in our world, in our country. Yeah. Lots of fragility in that. Exactly. So this path of yang is, is important, but it’s incomplete. So then we need the yin path, which is the indwelling, the turning within, and we need to train our mind how to do that. And kind of lead it like a, like training a horse gently, right? Lead it.
38:28
forward, right? That experience is where it can then develop trust. Say, okay, this is not going to kill me. Right. If I, if I have like non-dual experiences, doesn’t make me special. I’m not more important than other people. I’m not any better. Nor is it going to turn me into some saint. You know, I’m still going to have all that conditioning and patterns, I just, they just don’t convince me. Right. And so you’ve got to essentially, you know,
38:57
You don’t kill the ego. Like I had some say to me the other day, yeah. And I, on LSD, I had an ego death experience. And I said, well, you would have, you would have died then. Right. Yeah, absolutely. No. So you didn’t have an ego death, right? An ego death would be akin to like walking around like a zombie personality, completely zapped. Right. And that does happen, right? You know, I think a frontal lobotomy would probably do.
39:26
for brain damage, you know? So there’s no such thing as killing the ego. What we do is train the ego. You train the personality to take its proper place instead of being the God to being servant to your higher power or to the witnessing awareness to source energy that runs through all of us.
39:50
And so that takes a delicate practice and there’s a certain type of, you know, path you need to follow to guide your mind and your psychology to that work and let go. When I spoke to Robert Greener about this, we talked about the sin, his practice, Dogen and that idea of the exactly what you’re describing, just letting all illusion fall away. Just having this radical acceptance of what’s really happening.
40:17
without expectation, without saying what it should be or where it ought to be or what I think it’s not even about. No projection, no judgment. Just radical acceptance. That’s a great way. I love that description. That’s exactly right. So the ego, when the ego is involved, it’s judging. And you’re gonna get that secondary layer of inner dialogue. When the ego is not involved, something happens and you’re just observing it and say, that’s interesting. And here’s the other thing.
40:47
Again, that rational mind ego is the construct, right? Your brain constructs time and space. So the ego is always in the past or the future. It is never in the present. So if you’re thinking, if you’re constructing thoughts, or you’ve lassoed onto a thought stream that’s flowing through the brain, then you’re not present.
41:13
And so that’s the other test, like pure presence, witnessing awareness, like you are watching those thoughts, you see them, but you’re not caught up in them. And so it’s like the ocean becomes really calm. If you imagine the thoughts as those waves on the ocean, the average person is in a pretty choppy sea. But when you do these practices and develop this capacity to be more observant and radically
41:42
in a present state, in the present state, all the thoughts which are either past or future begin to settle down, because they’re not getting the energy, you’re not engaging with them. You know, we’re not agitating them in the process. Not agitating them, you’re not, you know, it’s like, if you put energy in the system, you’re gonna get an equal amount of energy back, but if you stop energizing thought patterns, then they start to calm down. And the ones that are…
42:06
the most agitating and the most destructive are the ones that you’ve been feeding a lot in the past. And so those take the longest time to slow down, which is why when you develop these practices, you can suddenly, those become starkly obvious to you. Whereas before they were hidden amongst all the other waves. And that, and those, you can actually do a little bit more work on to deconstruct the storyline and also to diffuse the, you know, the origin energy, right, the usually trauma induced energy that caused those.
42:36
patterns to arise. And so you can deconstruct those patterns. I want to deconstruct them all, but you know, it’s okay, you just want to deconstruct the destructive ones. Right. It’s all about that repetition, that practice, that skill set. And I love how you’re doing this from this place of self realization of self leadership, because that’s the foundation that informs how you’re leading how you’ve led in absolutely men in combat teams, all these high peak performers because
43:06
Once we see it within ourselves and we recognize it and we can witness it, it’s so much easier to witness it when we see somebody else grappling with their own ego, grappling with their own confirmation or cognitive bias. And now we can step back. And now we ask them, we don’t say you’re wrong. We just say, is it possible that from this orientation, perhaps this is a potential. And now they, and it’s easier. Naturally you become a really good coach because a you’ve got an open heart. So you really care about other people genuinely.
43:36
not a tactic, and you’re able to observe, you know, you can activate the OODA loop for them and say, okay, this is what’s happening. Do you think that’s the biggest misconception about leadership is that we, because most people do it from top down, they think I have to be the leader, I have to be the one that has all the right ideas, but they’re not coming from a place of compassion and like, just love. And I think because that’s such a hollow place, it’s not a sustainable foundation to build anything worth having. Right. Yeah, I think.
44:05
First of all, leadership really is just about relationships. And imagine having a hierarchical relationship with your wife, top down. How well do you think that would work? Not very well. So it doesn’t work with anybody. It shuts people down. You know, I use air quotes for like bureaucratic organizations, but they’re operating at the lowest possible level of productivity because of this hierarchical.
44:34
organization which basically puts everyone into the lowest level of consciousness where they’re just cogs in the wheel. And they feel it and they don’t feel appreciated so they just go to work. They do the absolute minimum and they leave. That’s not performance. It’s not what we’re trying to create as leaders. So for us, leadership is about first leading yourself to be able to be open-hearted, compassionate.
45:03
loving, a self-aware, kind, forgiving, right? And then with those qualities, we enter into our relationships with our team, even our bosses and whatnot, with those qualities. And guess what? They respond very differently. And so you could call that leadership, I’m getting a PhD in leadership, tell you what, you know.
45:31
that would be my shortest course in leadership is, develop yourself, have those qualities that you would want others to have, and then show up with those and see what happens. And guess what? The humility that that develops means that you couldn’t possibly think you have all the answers. In fact, you’re gonna go into the room immediately assuming that the team will come up with a better solution than you have. And you’re just gonna, you’ll have your ideas and just say, here’s some ideas, but.
46:02
Right. You get, you get out of your own way. My book staring down the Wolf is all about as like I was leaders. We really needed to get out of our own way and do the work, emotional development and the shadow work so that we’re not the limiting factors on our team anymore. Yeah. And as you say, as we do that self-development work on ourselves, it emboldens other to do the same thing. And if we ever think that we’re at that point where we get it all figured out,
46:28
What do they say in Zen? When you think that you’re enlightened, go spend the holidays with your family. Yes. And then it keeps you honest and you go, oh yeah, I still have a lot of work to do. So it’s a never ending process, but in that process is the progress and that’s where we can find that fulfillment, especially when it’s an entire team, whether it be a team of six or a team of 600. And now, as you were saying, people may not be able to put their finger on it, but they can absolutely feel it when you lead with compassion and love.
46:56
Cause that means trust. That means understanding. That’s not just idea of gotcha, oh, you were wrong. We get caught up in the semantics of those things. But if we come back to this, again, this heartfelt foundation, everything else can flow the way it should. Yeah. And the heart is where miracles happen, right? We’re talking about stepping out of the circle of time and into the circle of love. And in the circle of love, like that’s…
47:25
spontaneous knowingness, unbelievable creativity, passion, right? And the solutions, you imagine that a team operating in a circle of love, like the solutions that evoke are transformative that come out of that and it’s quite spontaneously. Whereas in that circle of time, which is where most people operate, right?
47:53
that there’s very distinct sense of causality, right? I do this, it causes that. In the circle of love, you see that as false.
48:06
Right? In the circle of love, the idea that the effect comes before the cause is equally as valid as the cause causing an effect. And you see that everything is connected and everything that happens is a result of an infinite number of inputs. And so with that perspective, you become like judgment just drops away. You know, like we say shit happens.
48:36
Because it happens. So what? Move on. There it is. And you stop putting energy into the system unless you’re very clear about how that energy is going to affect all stakeholders.
48:54
And so life becomes really simple. This is why simplicity is one of the warrior virtues. Absolutely. Life becomes very simple. You stop engaging in things that you don’t need to engage in. It’s gotta be an absolute hell yes. If it’s not, it’s an absolute hell no. You stopped sitting on boards and committees and HOAs and PTAs and you just look at all this stuff as kind of laughable. And…
49:21
You’re like, no, why? Cause it’s getting in, it’s interfering. It’s getting in the way of your, uh, sanity of your clarity and your charity. Right. Yes. I won’t take anything unless it’s really important, any meetings before 10 30 in the morning, because I, I sacrosanct that time from when I wake up five 30 or six to 10 30 is my time and my wife’s time.
49:47
We do our morning practice together, our meditation together. We do our yoga together. We do our workout together. Sauna cold plunge. Why do I protect my time like that? Because, you know, I call it winning in my mind before I step foot in the battlefield, that is the most important thing for me because all my good ideas, all my capacity to think clearly, my capacity to write clearly, to speak in podcasts clearly, all of it comes from the practice. It doesn’t come from being busy during those hours. Right. So.
50:16
my request for people and my hope for people is to just stop doing so much. Stop thinking you need to be so busy. Don’t buy into the bullshit and start spending time in silence. Every day just go for a nice long walk in the nature. Do it on the beach here in San Diego. Go up, just sit in silence. Silence is the most important thing for you to do. Don’t waste time not doing it. You don’t even need like some step one meditation practice.
50:44
do this and then step two, do that and look for this, pointing out that it’s helpful. Like that’s what we do provide that with Unveil Mind. We take people on that journey. But if you were to just sit in silence every day and just truly embrace the silence and just let the mind settle, I mean, that’s a profound meditation. Just let the mind settle. Stop thinking, stop engaging with the thinking. This is what I mean. Don’t energize the thoughts. Thoughts will happen. Here’s the big thing.
51:14
You’re not doing the thinking. This is the big mistake in belief. Everyone thinks that they’re thinking, but they’re not. Thoughts are happening. Your body is more like a flute, and thoughts are like the breath blowing through it. Music is happening. The breath of life flows through the body, and the music that comes out is your thoughts and your creativity and ideas and inspiration. The idea that there’s a separate individual self doing it is the cause of suffering.
51:41
So sit in silence and begin to see that oh that that thoughts happening. I didn’t do anything Well, then who is this I? Who is this I that just said that?
51:53
And then you’re like, holy shit, I used to think that I was my thinking. And now I see that thoughts are just happening and there’s no separate, there’s no, it’s empty. It’s, you know, that’s the bruiser. It’s empty of self. There’s it’s empty of any idea of Mark. Mark is not there. Mark was an idea, mistaken identity. And so just sitting in silence can lead you there. Like the Buddha said, you can find enlightenment in a single breath. If you pay close enough.
52:23
You can’t do it if you’re just running around like chicken with his head cut off all the time. I love it. It’s so true and it’s that notion of emptying everything. We cultivate that empty space like you’re saying intentionally and some people will say, well, what will I get out of this? Well, you’re not going to find enlightenment in that moment even if you’ve been practicing it for a while, but what you will find is better capacity to have more bandwidth.
52:52
to have these realizations later, to have the capacity to adapt, to have that skill, to be able to respond instead of just reacting. And that in and of itself sometimes- That’s enormously beneficial. That’s exactly what we’re doing. Yeah, you don’t lose anything, you gain everything, in my opinion, by stopping and sitting and spending more time in silence and making it a daily practice. The benefits will be obvious first, kind of in the feeling of more grounded and peaceful and calmer.
53:22
Right. But then as you develop what you just said, this non-reactivity, because you’re, you know, you’re separating from the thoughts, the thoughts are happening, but you just not, you don’t take them as seriously anymore. And you’re like, wow. So then the dramas fall off. And when people who used to trigger you come and try to trigger you again, which they will, you just smile and wave. Interesting. See that? Look at that funny guy trying to trigger me again, not buying into it. It could be your mother-in-law. You were, you know,
53:51
or your father or it could be, you know, even that father inside of you that, you know, you’ve never really gotten over. And those things come up, those patterns and you just smile at them. This is what we mean by non-attachment. Things will happen. Triggers will still come. Stuff will, you know, people will try to take from you or steal from you. And, but you know, you just don’t turn it into this horrific story that captures you for.
54:21
hours or days. You smile and wave, let it go, let the energy dissipate. If you have to deal with the situation as a warrior, you deal with the situation, but you deal with it with awareness and with love. You know, the warrior is the last one to actually use a weapon, believe it or not. People don’t understand that. We train for violence so that we don’t have to use the weapon. And if we use the weapon as usually as a shield for others more than this.
54:50
Adversarial component, but again until you’ve done that training most people are like, oh, this is just sort of this Aggressive thing it’s like only at the very last resort. Yeah, I wish all the military members had that Had that been a kind of warrior mindset, you know, even in the seals it wasn’t I don’t even know how many percentage probably less than 50% Yeah, but you don’t have to be in the military to be a warrior
55:20
The point of being a warrior is to do the difficult things and to do awareness and a smile on your face. Yes, absolutely. Mark Devine, I could talk to you for hours. Started with meditation and done a deep dive. To everyone that’s listening, I hope you took notes. I hope you go back and listen to this again. And I hope you go grab Uncommon and all the other books that Mark explained, talked about. Where can we find out more about Uncommon, about Seelfit, about…
55:50
learning more from you and everything that you have going. Yeah, thanks, Mark. Thanks so much for the interview and your fantastic interviewer. I love your style. I can tell you you’re far along in your journey. Thank you. That means a lot to me. I was gonna say, I could keep talking like this forever. Oh, I know, I love it. We just happened to record a great conversation as far as I’m concerned, so it was awesome. That’s right. Well, the book, Uncommon, Simple Principles of Distorting Your Life, of course, will be available on Amazon or wherever.
56:19
Read uncommon.com is the official website for it. Absolutely. And probably get some bonuses there and stuff. Um, still after the launch, uh, unbeatable mind is the training that we’ve been talking about that’s really kind of, it’s for everybody. It’s not for seals seal fit is for hardcore warrior athletes. Um, or people who are training, you know, training, want to do a crucible. You can learn that at seal fit.com, but unbeal mind.com is really kind of the
56:48
vertical development where I try, you know, the goal is to evolve your consciousness to become more whole, right? To reintegrate, to tap into these greater potential performance connection and service. We have a 30 day challenge as a kind of great starting point. We have a year long course called the foundation course, you know, a couple of events we run every year that, you know, we go into the principles, that type of stuff. And we have a coach certification program. We’ve got close to 600 certified coaches now. Outstanding.
57:16
That’s a great place to learn that. My Mark Devine show, you can find that just wherever you listen to podcasts. And yeah, any of those sound interesting. If you have any questions, just send us an email, info at unbeatablemind.com. Absolutely. Mark, thank you for everything that you do and for taking the time and for your pragmatic wisdom today. Yeah, thank you, Marcus. It’s been an honor. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
