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Kokoro Yoga: Maximize Your Human Potential and Develop the Spirit of a Warrior--the SEALfit Way: Maximize your human potential and develop the spirit of a warrior
New York Times bestselling author and former U.S. Navy SEAL Mark Divine’s Kokoro Yoga is not your traditional yoga book. Coach Divine’s integrated training curriculum is an intense physical workout designed for both the nation’s elite special ops soldiers and any athlete with the heart and mind of a warrior.
His yoga sequences are focused to adapt to all physical and mental capabilities, combining breathing, meditation, and visualization into both traditional poses as well as cross-training/combat-conditioning exercises. Coach Divine’s decades of experience with amateur and professional athletes, active and aspiring Navy SEALs, and wounded warriors uniquely qualifies him as an expert motivator and teacher.
Kokoro Yoga develops a harmonious balance between mental and physical toughness, strength, and sense of purpose. Inside you will find short digestible sequences that will help any athlete hone their fitness routine to reach their fullest potential. With Kokoro Yoga the practitioner will:
* get an unbeatable full-body workout through body-weight functional movements that can be done at home or on the on go;
* increase flexibility while building long lean muscle mass;
* enhance your workouts with deep muscle recovery;
* improve physical and mental balance, focus, and control at all levels—including a special segment designed for those recovering from PTSD;
* find emotional, intuitional, and Kokoro (heart) spiritual harmony to achieve peak performance.
Coach Divine’s methods have been tested by the toughest warriors in the world. Use this book as a guide to experience the profound power of yoga as a developmental system that will allow you to break through any barriers holding you back.
His yoga sequences are focused to adapt to all physical and mental capabilities, combining breathing, meditation, and visualization into both traditional poses as well as cross-training/combat-conditioning exercises. Coach Divine’s decades of experience with amateur and professional athletes, active and aspiring Navy SEALs, and wounded warriors uniquely qualifies him as an expert motivator and teacher.
Kokoro Yoga develops a harmonious balance between mental and physical toughness, strength, and sense of purpose. Inside you will find short digestible sequences that will help any athlete hone their fitness routine to reach their fullest potential. With Kokoro Yoga the practitioner will:
* get an unbeatable full-body workout through body-weight functional movements that can be done at home or on the on go;
* increase flexibility while building long lean muscle mass;
* enhance your workouts with deep muscle recovery;
* improve physical and mental balance, focus, and control at all levels—including a special segment designed for those recovering from PTSD;
* find emotional, intuitional, and Kokoro (heart) spiritual harmony to achieve peak performance.
Coach Divine’s methods have been tested by the toughest warriors in the world. Use this book as a guide to experience the profound power of yoga as a developmental system that will allow you to break through any barriers holding you back.
288 pages, Paperback
First published April 12, 2016
189 people are currently reading
774 people want to read
About the author
Mark Divine
45 books167 followersMARK DIVINE is a former Navy SEAL and has trained thousands of aspiring Navy SEALs. He owns and runs the SEALFIT Training Center in San Diego, California where he trains thousands of professional athletes, military professionals, SWAT, First Responders, SOF candidates and everyday people looking to build strength and character.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 21, 2016
Like many yoga practitioners, I’m never sure whether to be dismayed, amused, or pleased by the explosion of new styles of yoga. It’s nothing new. Yoga has been branching out since its early days. But today’s flavors tend toward the frivolous, usually involve shoving yoga together with something else generally likable, and said two things are in some cases largely inconsistent. There’s marijuana yoga, dog yoga, karaoke yoga, and tantrum yoga. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a Häagen-Dazs Yoga. Hell, if I was a bit less lazy and more unscrupulous I’d have made a mint from my patented SELFIE YOGA (™ -pending), which involves modifying impressive looking poses so that an individual can take their own pics for FaceBook. (You’re welcome; to whomever the driven sleeze-bag is that turns that idea into a thing.)
I, therefore, tend to approach books like Mark Divine’s “Kokoro Yoga” with a measure of skepticism. That said, I found that this book offered a respectable vision of yoga that might even succeed in bringing a new demographic into the fold. Divine is a former Navy SEAL who developed a fitness empire called SEALFIT, a system that combines fitness ideas from the famous Special Operations unit with ideas from civilian sports and exercise science, such as high intensity interval training (HIIT.)
Incidentally, “kokoro” is the Japanese word for heart / mind (heart and mind were inexorably entwined for Japanese in the era in which the term came into being.) Divine mentions that “Warrior Yoga” would have been his first choice, but that was already taken. The author appeals to warriors with this approach to yoga. He does this in several ways. Firstly, and encouragingly, he doesn’t neglect the mind, but rather puts it front and center by emphasizing the need for mental strength and clarity. My biggest problem with the plethora of new yogas is that they usually forget that it’s ultimately about calming the mind, and instead of providing an environment conducive to looking inward, they embrace or create all sorts of distractions (loud pop music, mirrors everywhere, nudity, animals, ice cream, circus clowns, etc.) Divine doesn’t just make a new fitness fad, he argues for the need for all of the eight limbs of yoga—not neglecting yama and niyama—and emphasizes how yoga served as a calming and clarifying tool for him and not just as a means to be more bendy.
Second, he adds components to balance out the dimensions of fitness. If you are a yogi / yogini, and you want a yoga body; yoga is all you need. However, if you are a martial artist, cop, or soldier, you also need strength, speed (then, by definition, power), and cardiovascular endurance, as well as those aspects yoga offers (e.g. breath control, flexibility, core strength, posture, and mental clarity.) Again, I’m often dismayed by attempts to round out yoga with functional strength building and cardiovascular endurance. I understand the desire to combine them into one workout. Besides the fact that some people need a more balanced approach to fitness, not everybody has time to do multiple workouts multiple times a day. Still, one can’t just ram these components together willy-nilly because if one needs to be in a space to observe one’s breath while being still and one is coming out of having done 100 burpees, it’s probably not going to work so well. I haven’t yet done any of the sequences from the book, but it looks like this shouldn’t a problem, at least not for individuals who are moderately fit. I’m less confident about the value of mixing in elements of chi gong and “cardio kickboxing,” which is suggested by the system. It’s certainly not that I’m opposed to either chi gong or functional martial arts training, but there’s a lot of important detail in those activities and this format risks some horrible half-assery. (Yes, sometimes you get chocolate in peanut butter and get a Reese’s cup, but more often you get sausage in the pudding. Two things being great, by no means ensures they will be great together.)
Finally, Divine puts his approach in the language of soldiers, using concepts like “strategy” and “tactics” and eschewing Sanskrit terminology. The book begins with an anecdote about going into a combat zone as a Reserve officer, which describes his use of yoga to help him get his mind in the right place. He also talks extensively about his practice of martial arts.
There are eight chapters and three appendices to the book. They proceed from the aforementioned story through a look at the general approach, looking at the eight limbs of yoga, before getting into the details. The penultimate chapter sums up research on some of the benefits of yoga, and the last chapter offers advice about how to set up one’s sadhana (personal practice) with the Kokoro Yoga approach in mind. The appendices offer information about functional conditioning exercises, combat conditioning, and module building.
Overall, I think this is a useful book that provides some interesting thoughts on yoga. You may or may not find that it’s the approach for you, but it’s worth checking out. The photos are well-done—though some readers may wish there were more related to the functional conditioning exercises (but he’s got other books for that, it seems.)
I’d recommend this book for those interested in how a yoga practice might be integrated with other aspects of fitness without losing track of the core yogic objectives.
I, therefore, tend to approach books like Mark Divine’s “Kokoro Yoga” with a measure of skepticism. That said, I found that this book offered a respectable vision of yoga that might even succeed in bringing a new demographic into the fold. Divine is a former Navy SEAL who developed a fitness empire called SEALFIT, a system that combines fitness ideas from the famous Special Operations unit with ideas from civilian sports and exercise science, such as high intensity interval training (HIIT.)
Incidentally, “kokoro” is the Japanese word for heart / mind (heart and mind were inexorably entwined for Japanese in the era in which the term came into being.) Divine mentions that “Warrior Yoga” would have been his first choice, but that was already taken. The author appeals to warriors with this approach to yoga. He does this in several ways. Firstly, and encouragingly, he doesn’t neglect the mind, but rather puts it front and center by emphasizing the need for mental strength and clarity. My biggest problem with the plethora of new yogas is that they usually forget that it’s ultimately about calming the mind, and instead of providing an environment conducive to looking inward, they embrace or create all sorts of distractions (loud pop music, mirrors everywhere, nudity, animals, ice cream, circus clowns, etc.) Divine doesn’t just make a new fitness fad, he argues for the need for all of the eight limbs of yoga—not neglecting yama and niyama—and emphasizes how yoga served as a calming and clarifying tool for him and not just as a means to be more bendy.
Second, he adds components to balance out the dimensions of fitness. If you are a yogi / yogini, and you want a yoga body; yoga is all you need. However, if you are a martial artist, cop, or soldier, you also need strength, speed (then, by definition, power), and cardiovascular endurance, as well as those aspects yoga offers (e.g. breath control, flexibility, core strength, posture, and mental clarity.) Again, I’m often dismayed by attempts to round out yoga with functional strength building and cardiovascular endurance. I understand the desire to combine them into one workout. Besides the fact that some people need a more balanced approach to fitness, not everybody has time to do multiple workouts multiple times a day. Still, one can’t just ram these components together willy-nilly because if one needs to be in a space to observe one’s breath while being still and one is coming out of having done 100 burpees, it’s probably not going to work so well. I haven’t yet done any of the sequences from the book, but it looks like this shouldn’t a problem, at least not for individuals who are moderately fit. I’m less confident about the value of mixing in elements of chi gong and “cardio kickboxing,” which is suggested by the system. It’s certainly not that I’m opposed to either chi gong or functional martial arts training, but there’s a lot of important detail in those activities and this format risks some horrible half-assery. (Yes, sometimes you get chocolate in peanut butter and get a Reese’s cup, but more often you get sausage in the pudding. Two things being great, by no means ensures they will be great together.)
Finally, Divine puts his approach in the language of soldiers, using concepts like “strategy” and “tactics” and eschewing Sanskrit terminology. The book begins with an anecdote about going into a combat zone as a Reserve officer, which describes his use of yoga to help him get his mind in the right place. He also talks extensively about his practice of martial arts.
There are eight chapters and three appendices to the book. They proceed from the aforementioned story through a look at the general approach, looking at the eight limbs of yoga, before getting into the details. The penultimate chapter sums up research on some of the benefits of yoga, and the last chapter offers advice about how to set up one’s sadhana (personal practice) with the Kokoro Yoga approach in mind. The appendices offer information about functional conditioning exercises, combat conditioning, and module building.
Overall, I think this is a useful book that provides some interesting thoughts on yoga. You may or may not find that it’s the approach for you, but it’s worth checking out. The photos are well-done—though some readers may wish there were more related to the functional conditioning exercises (but he’s got other books for that, it seems.)
I’d recommend this book for those interested in how a yoga practice might be integrated with other aspects of fitness without losing track of the core yogic objectives.
November 19, 2018
I love the idea that yoga can used to help veterans with PTSD. For me, that was one of the most powerful aspects of this book. However, there are some simple (but not easy) aspects here -- poses, breathing, etc. -- that are very useful for all of us. The author makes this easy to understand, even for a yoga novice like me.
August 24, 2017
Deep, thought provoking, thorough
This book is an excellent melding of physical, mental, and spiritual practice. It pays out a flexible template for exercises of the body, mind, and heart without setting rigid standards.
This book is an excellent melding of physical, mental, and spiritual practice. It pays out a flexible template for exercises of the body, mind, and heart without setting rigid standards.
June 18, 2019
Great routines and philosophy
December 4, 2022
Has some nice sequences but less detailed than other yoga books
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews