Mark Divine's Blog, page 56

Weekly Monster Mash – 1/7/2016

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, ROM drills then, 200m run, 15-10-5: Barbell Thruster, Burpee.

Work Capacity: “SPEHAR”

For time:

100x Thruster (135)
100x Chest to Bar Pull up
6 Mile run

Durability:Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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The Mark Divine BLOG: Developing Heart

Developing Heart

 

January 8th marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of Kokoro Yoga ™. Kokoro, from Japanese culture, means “heart” and would translate better as “spirit” or “wholeness.” The term caught my attention when I considered what happened to the warrior-athletes who boldly step into the crucible experience of our SEALFIT 50-hour camp. There was more than mental and physical toughness happening in those events. There was an ineffable feeling of tapping into heart, of connecting to deep spiritual strength and of opening up more “mind” than ever before. So Kokoro seemed an appropriate idea and name for that event, and it stuck.

A massive challenge such as a crucible event like Kokoro Camp, or a crisis, will create a temporary experience of kokoro. But there is a more refined way to connect to the permanent experience of heart and wholeness. That is through a daily, disciplined practice of integration. And thus, Kokoro Yoga evolved to be a daily practice of heart for our clients, born out of my personal training.

Kokoro Yoga is based on traditional yoga, in particular with a connection to its warrior roots which have been lost to the modern world. I have been training in the martial arts and modern yoga for many years and note the strong connection between the two. Kokoro Yoga was spontaneously created when I was in Iraq in 2004, as an integration of functional fitness, traditional yoga and martial arts techniques. I wanted to continue my inner training while with the SEALs there but also needed to keep fit and centered while in the most negative and challenging environment I had ever experienced…combat. The effects were dramatic so a few years later I began delivering it to SEAL candidates and other SEALFIT athletes. We considered it the “working in” to balance all the working out we did….and it worked.

Kokoro Yoga is a personal practice for your inner self – which leaves behind any quasi-spiritual words and connection to a religion you may not be interested in. It doesn’t require spandex pants or even a mat. It is designed to meet you where you are at, and not embarrass you because you can’t put your leg behind your head, nor make you wonder where the beef is if you are a SEAL.

Every training session is meant to be custom fit to your needs – whether they be physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. Last year Catherine Divine (my stepdaughter and head instructor) and I put together a free 30-Day Kokoro Yoga Challenge to expose our tribe to this unique and extremely rewarding training method. We intended it to be a one-time thing, but the response was so strong we decided to offer it annually. Here are some ways that Kokoro Yoga is unique when compared with typical studio yoga in the West.

Both a Practice and a Lifestyle: Kokoro Yoga can be both a practice, providing powerful tools to aid in your physical and mental training, as well as a set of principles for living an enriched, unbeatable life.

Flexible and Variable: Variety is the spice of life and Kokoro Yoga is flexible, providing for maximum variability to meet your specific needs. Doing the same rigidly fixed form year in and year out will lead to a rut, burnout and injury. Variety is a good thing that can be found by changing up pose sequences for a particular effect, changing the duration based on your time and intention, and also flexing your practice into the times of the day that you train.

Intentional: Rather than just hitting a yoga class for a workout, we are clear about the intention for our training, and the result for each session. Kokoro Yoga can be performed to enhance athleticism, to develop strong leadership traits, and for spiritual enlightenment. In the case of a warrior, these goals are relevant and will be developed with the methods employed throughout the challenge.

Balanced: Train hard, train soft. Train long, train short. We use yoga to find balance in our bodies, minds and lives. We seek a balance between effort and surrender, between work and recovery.

Adaptable: We adapt the movements to our bodies rather than try to adapt our body to the pose. With Kokoro Yoga, you approach a pose with your own level of flexibility, mobility, functional fitness and prior injuries that you need to adapt for.

Integrated: Accelerated growth occurs when we embody training in an integrated manner. You will be developing yourself along the five mountains of Unbeatable Mind: physically, mentally, morally, emotionally, intuitionally and spiritually. These intelligences become deeply connected when you actively integrate the training of them, unlocking your full potential as a human.

So you can see that Kokoro Yoga can do far more for you than just work up a sweat. It is about deepening your warrior spirit, merging your heart and mind into your actions. Ultimately it will help you achieve your maximum potential. It is a practice to fulfill my favorite mantra “day by day, in every way, I get better and better.” I encourage you to join us for the upcoming 30-day challenge and experience the magic yourself!

–Mark Divine

P.S. Start the new year right by developing a new daily ritual, gain mental clarity and focus and make positive, healthy changes to your body by joining me, Catherine and countless others for our free The 30-Day Kokoro Yoga Challenge. Starting on January 9th, 2017, all you need is 15 minutes a day for 30 days to make impactful changes to your mind, body and spirit. To learn more about the challenge and sign up, CLICK HERE.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 12/31/2016

Saturday

Baseline:  Pre-SOP and box breathing, ROM drills then, Rpw 500m, Foam roll, calf & IT band focus.

Work Capacity: Complete for time with a swim buddy:

2 mile swim
8 mile run
13 mile ruck
10 rounds:

5x Dead hang Pull up
10x Push up
15x Air Squat

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 12/24/2016

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, ROM drills then 5 min. Double under – every time you break or mess up = 5x Burpees

Work Capacity: 90 min. AMRAP:

200m Farmer Carry (55/35)
100m Walking lunge
5x Wall Walks
400m Run with Sandbag (40/30)

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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The Mark Divine BLOG: Simple Is Not Easy

Simple is Not Easy

Once upon a time a benevolent ruler, interested in educating his subjects, sent his wise men into his realms to discover the meaning of life. They returned a year later with seventeen volumes of information. Thinking there must be a simpler truth, he ordered them to condense it to a single volume, which they did after much consternation and deliberation on what to cut. The King was impressed but pushed them to simplify further by condensing it to a paragraph, and then again to a single sentence. The work was considered impossible by the wise men, but with the incentive to keep their heads, they prevailed. The results did not impress the learned of the kingdom, who took pride in their ability to comprehend the unnecessarily complex. But the words were priceless to the “ordinary people.”

The late Steve Jobs is quoted as saying: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. When you start looking at a problem, it seems really simple—because you don’t understand its complexity. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don’t work. Then you get into the problem and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going and find the key underlying principle of the problem and sort of come full circle with a beautiful, elegant solution that works. And that’s what we wanted to do with Mac.” (Wired Magazine, November 2011)

So, according to Jobs, simplicity is found on the other side of complexity. The wise men would not have been able to find that one sentence meaning of life had they not first unearthed the seventeen volumes. The work of finding simplicity on the other side of complexity requires trial and error, a distilling of essential truth from the mass of data, information and knowledge. Complex knowledge comes when data is collected, sorted and compiled into information, then analyzed and presented as knowledge. Knowledge must then be challenged, tested and stripped of all non-essential elements to get to simple. It is the work of the poet, the expert coder and the musician to find simplicity on the other side of complexity, to see the beauty and elegance in the center of clutter, and to not just resist the urge to add, but to induce a subtraction.

In a world of almost unlimited choice and diversity, it is easy to be enamored with complicated products, projects, and concepts presented to solve our many problems. But once in a while, a Steve Jobs comes along and reminds us that keeping things simple can bring us freedom. Some simple challenges for 2017:

• Seek the simpler plan

• Subtract rules and regulations; instead, lead with intent

• Answer email in less than three sentences

• Use simple tools that don’t need to be plugged in

• Eat simple foods, avoid complicated diets

• Simply smile, and resist the urge to fill space with irrelevance

Clearly simple is not easy. It takes discipline to constantly ask what else can go, what can we say no to, how can this be simplified? I often frustrate my team by asking, “does it pass the KISS test?” when presented with an offer or plan that makes my brain hurt. I want them to do more work, ask more questions, and seek the simplicity beyond their complexity, to find that one sentence solution.

Discipline, focus, concentration, and creativity are the deep skills of simplicity. The Unbeatable Mind training will cultivate these skills. Sitting in a quiet room, away from distraction to allow your mind to settle into a challenge is a good way to start. Then ask some probing questions, such as:

• How is this adding value?

• Why is this necessary?

• What can I eliminate?

• What would happen if I killed this part or idea?

Simplicity is a skill that can be practiced daily. Oh yeah, still wondering what that one sentence meaning of life was? So am I! Share your thoughts on what the one sentence was with me on Twitter.

–Mark Divine

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Weekly Monster Mash – 12/17/2016

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, ROM drills then, 2 rounds: 200m run, 10x Burpees.

Work Capacity: For time and reps:

10 mile run, right into..
20 min. AMRAP of Burpees.

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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A Display of Effortless Perfection at the Unbeatable Mind Retreat

Shibumi – on display at the 2017 Unbeatable Mind Retreat

The Japanese term Shibumi means “effortless perfection,” and it is the results of countless hours of passionate mastery of specialized skills, powered by the mental refinement that accrues over time from that work. Shibumi is similar to flow, with the exception that flow can occur when reading, writing or sitting with your kids. Shibumi, however, is flow experience while performing your craft, such that it looks and feels perfect and effortless. I was humbled to see many examples of it at our Unbeatable Mind Planning Retreat last weekend. Here I would like to focus on a single powerful insight from each of the masters of their craft who presented.

The way you eat is not your fault. This from nutritional expert Robb Wolfe. We are hard wired to desire variety and to eat when food is available. We survived up to a couple hundred years ago, by eating what was seasonably available or brought in by the hunters. Often this wasn’t much, at least not anything near the plentitude that is available today. We ate sparingly, seasonally and when food was served. Thus, we strove to eat as much variety as possible to get nutrient balance, and as much as possible because food may not be available tomorrow. Unfortunately, that wiring is still with us and works against us in our modern world of plenty. What to do? Well, that would be a second insight, and I only promised one! (hint, you can see Robb in our digital bundle video, or come next year).

Your blood-brain barrier can leak. And that leaking will impair optimal brain performance. Yes, I was surprised also, to learn that our brains can leak. Perhaps it helps explain why my thoughts have spilled into this blog so easily. Ben Greenfield is an expert in body and brain optimization and with great humor cued us on what causes a leaky blood-brain barrier and how to prevent it with fueling, supplementation, and other cool tricks.

You can breathe for optimal physical and spiritual health. Ok, this one is not new, since I have been trumpeting it for years, but it is worth revisiting again and again because we are also conditioned to breathe poorly by our hectic, seat-filled society. Sitting all the time weakens our breathing muscles, and too often we hold our breath unintentionally or pant through our mouths twenty or more times a minute. These dysfunctional breathing patterns lead to ill-health and troubled mental-emotional balance. Breath expert Dan Brule reminds us to breathe slowly through our noses in a circular pattern. That means we pay close attention to how we exhale after the inhale, and vice versa. Each breath can be 8 or 10 seconds for the complete circle, leaving us with 6 to 8 breaths per minute. Practice this daily for 10 years and you will be super healthy and enlightened. Who is with me?

Focus on your passion, and soon you could ski off the top of the world. I must say that Jimmy Chin was such an inspiration to me and captured the essence of humble mastery that I try so hard to achieve myself and to teach. Jimmy’s love for climbing led him to abandon his parent’s dream for his medical career, as he became a climbing dirtbag (he used as a term of endearment for him and his dirt-poor climbing pals in Yosemite). After learning he had a sideline passion for photographing places and people off-limits to other photojournalists, he was drawn to the big Eurasian mountains, including Meru (you must see his documentary called Meru), and he climbed, then skied off the summit of Mount Everest! Despite this unbelievable feat, there is not a speck of ego in Jimmy. His intense focus and tolerance for risk have tempered his mind like a finely sharpened sword. I hope we see Jimmy at a future Unbeatable or SEALFIT event.

Being bold, unreasonable and outrageous may just make you a billionaire. Our current mindset, even our success, is a limiting factor closing off possibilities for something much bigger in our lives. We learned this lesson from Jesse Itzler, who wrangled his way into a rapping career as a skinny white kid, then parlayed that into a successful entrepreneurial career in music, luxury air travel and big time sports. Jesse’s energy and bold thinking is inspiring and spurred me to think how my own thinking is holding me back. His book, Living with a SEAL is a great read and will answer your next question: how does he do it? We hope to see Jesse back again next year as well.

Living heroically doesn’t mean you need to risk your life! My friend Robert Schoultz is a 30-year SEAL officer and leadership professor who is on his own spiritual journey. From him, we learned that to live heroically means that to become self-aware and in constant conversation with our higher minds – about what is real, what is right, and how we can find simplicity on the other side of complexity. Bob is another example of a humble warrior, and if you haven’t heard him speak at the Unbeatable Mind retreat, he will be back. I challenged him to speak on how to raise heroic kids next year.

It’s the size of your heart, not your arms, that matters! I was literally stunned into silence by Kyle Maynard, who left me speechless and only able to utter “let’s box breathe” after his presentation. Kyle, who was born without arms and legs below the elbow and knee joints, has led an extraordinary life – including being a wrestling champ, MMA fighter, successful gym owner and world-renowned speaker. Oh, by the way, he also bear-crawled up Kilimanjaro and Aconcagua! Kyle realized early in life that his limitation was not his disability, but his mind.  He’s committed to thinking big and living boldly…and serves as a living example for all of humanity. And his heart, wow, you must experience what true Kokoro spirit feels like in his presence!

Our words matter, a lot. I have learned through my own speaking that mastery in speaking is about great storytelling. And Greg Amundson is a great story teller. He reminded us that how we use our words impacts how we influence others, and how we cultivate our minds. Greg introduced a practice called “First Word” which we can all include into our morning ritual. The practice is simply to be very aware in the formulation of our first words in the morning – ensuring they are powerful, positive and impactful. What a beautiful practice, thanks, Greg, we look forward to seeing you on the road teaching Kokoro Yoga in 2017!

So, there you have it, some amazing insights from the masters who presented at the 2017 Unbeatable Mind Planning Retreat. Look for the digital bundle of the event, which we will release in January. Until then, continue your journey to self-mastery in service, and you will soon be performing with your own shibumi!

Hooyah,

Mark Divine

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Weekly Monster Mash – 12/10/2016

Work Capacity: For time:

3 mile run with Sandbag on back (40lb)
30 Rounds:

5x Pull up
10x Push up
15x Air Squat


3 mile run (no sandbag)

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 12/3/2016

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, ROM drills then, 21-15-9 reps: Squat tuck jumps, plyo push up, V- up.

Work Capacity: 5 Rounds for time:

1k row
1k Ruck (40lb)
1k Run

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 11/26/2016

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, ROM drills then, 21-15-9 reps: Squat tuck jumps, plyo push up, V- up.

Work Capacity: For time:

2 mile run
100x Pull up
100x Box Jump
100x Push up
100x Wall Ball
100x Burpees
2 mile run

Durability: Warrior yoga or Active Stretch.  Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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