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Live Show: Yung Pueblo on Relationships, Change, and Mindfulness

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logo of podcast Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson

Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson

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Diego Perez (Yung Pueblo): 我在厄瓜多尔长大,家境贫寒,童年经历给我带来了很多悲伤和焦虑。后来,我通过药物和酒精来逃避这些情绪,最终差点失去生命。23岁那年,我开始学习冥想,这彻底改变了我的生活。冥想让我能够处理过去创伤,提升自我觉察、非反应性和同情心。这些品质不仅帮助我更好地了解自己,也改善了我与妻子、父母和其他人的关系。我和妻子通过坦诚沟通建立了新的关系文化,不再互相指责,而是专注于表达自身感受。我们学会了以开放的心态去爱和被爱,并理解到承诺胜过依恋,承诺源于自身,而非对伴侣的控制。在日常生活中,我们也实践着预防性沟通,即每天早上和下午都会分享彼此的感受,这有助于减少冲突,提升关系质量。即使在长期稳定的关系中,冲突依然存在,但通过冥想练习,我们可以减轻冲突的强度,并以更平静的方式解决问题。我们也学会了接受彼此的不断变化,并持续努力解决问题。长期的静坐冥想让我对宇宙的运行规律有了更深刻的理解,也让我更加能够接受变化,并与之和谐相处。放下精神上的紧张感后,剩下的不是空虚,而是慈悲、平静和无私的喜悦。 Forrest Hansen: 在与Diego的对话中,我深受启发。他分享的冥想经验,以及如何通过冥想改善人际关系,让我对亲密关系有了新的理解。特别是关于‘以开放的双手去爱’的观点,以及如何练习接受爱,让我印象深刻。Diego提到的‘预防性沟通’也是非常有价值的,它强调日常情感交流的重要性,有助于减少误解和冲突。此外,Diego还谈到了‘学生心态’的重要性,以及如何避免‘精神傲慢’,持续学习和成长。他强调了接纳变化的重要性,以及如何与宇宙和谐相处。总的来说,这次对话让我对个人成长和人际关系有了更深刻的理解,也让我对冥想练习有了更浓厚的兴趣。

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Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. Today's episode is a special one for me. About a month ago, I was invited to host a live conversation at City Arts and Lectures in San Francisco by my friend, poet, author, and longtime meditator, Diego Perez. Diego is better known to most by his pen name, Young Pueblo, and City Arts is an absolute institution in the Bay Area.

They have hosted so many incredible people over the years, and there were over 1,300 people in attendance. This made it easily the biggest live event that I've ever been a part of, and the conversation also aired on NPR and over 130 public radio stations around the country. It was an incredibly unique experience. I was very grateful to have the opportunity to do it, and I was really proud of it, so I wanted to share it with our podcast listeners as well.

Diego and I had an honest and even at times really very funny conversation about relationships change and what it means to love with an open hand. Diego shared his personal story, how his meditative practice reshaped both his mind and his relationships, and he also offered a lot of practical advice from his new book, How to Love Better.

Before we get into the episode, just a quick reminder about subscribing to the podcast if you haven't subscribed yet. And you can also find us on Patreon if you would like to support the podcast in other ways. That's patreon.com/beingwellpodcast. Here's my conversation with Diego Perez at City Arts & Lectures. I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to City Arts and Lectures, a season of talks and onstage conversations with some of the most celebrated writers, artists, and thinkers of our day, recorded before an audience at the Sidney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco. Our guest today is poet, author, and meditator Diego Perez, better known by his pen name, Young Pueblo.

A popular voice in the self-improvement space, Pueblo is known for his writing in books and on social media, focusing on personal development and healthy relationships. His newest book is How to Love Better, the path to deeper connection through growth, kindness, and compassion.

On March 14th, 2025, Pueblo came to the Sidney Goldstein Theater to talk to Forrest Hansen, co-author of Resilient, how to grow an unshakable core of calm, strength, and happiness, and host of the podcast, Being Well. Join us now for a conversation with young Pueblo. Hey, everybody. Can you all hear us well? Yeah? All right. Thank you so much for coming. I just have to say that

Honestly, when I land in your airport, and I've said this multiple times to my wife, it feels like I'm coming home. And I don't feel that everywhere. And I'm always kind of talking to my wife. I'm like, should we move to San Francisco? And we're working on it. We're working on it. Yeah. And Forrest, thank you so much.

for helping us out tonight. I could not be happier to be here with everybody. Thank you so much for inviting me to do it. I also thought that it was kind of a beautiful life imitating art moment because you've done all of this writing about relaxing attachment and being open to change. And then, so of course, a couple of days before your big event, all of a sudden everything changes and you have to just roll with the punches. So it's kind of beautiful. Totally. And I felt like when...

When I heard that Jillian was sick, of course she was extremely apologetic, but it was a situation she couldn't control. But then I was like, wait, this is the perfect moment to reconnect Sensitive Boys Club, which is for us and I. Sensitive Boys Club. Have you always been a member of the Sensitive Boys Club, Diego? I think so, honestly. I think so.

Did your incredibly deep meditative practice, that's the basis of your work, do you think that increased your sensitivity or decreased your sensitivity? Oh, definitely increased. Definitely increased. I used to pretend to be rough, pretend to have a hard outer layer, but I think the meditating helped me stop pretending so I can just be whatever's happening inside. How did you come to that practice? Maybe that's a good place to start. Sure. So...

I came to it and it really originates with where I was born. I was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador in South America. And yeah, some Ecuadorians out here. Nice. It's good to hear that. I'm always trying to represent. So I was born in Ecuador and my family, we were just very poor. And my dad was

pretty brave and bold. And he went first to the United States to kind of check out what the environment was like. And after a few months, he called my mom and was like, I think we should move here. And she was

You know, they wanted to bring us over to the United States for a chance. But when we got over here, it was a moment where we realized that we were just stuck in this classic American poverty trap. It was very difficult growing up where I would see my parents fighting often because they were always trying to figure out how to pay the rent. They were trying to put food in the fridge. And...

All of that to say that it had a big imprint on my mind. It imprinted a lot of sadness, a lot of anxiety. It imprinted this sort of mindset of scarcity. And because life felt really rough, I put on a very sort of rough outer layer

And it's sort of, you know, as time moved forward, I didn't really have a way to process it, right? I didn't have a, you know, I didn't even know that I could access therapy. I didn't have any sort of meditation practice. And these things hardened over time. They kept becoming these patterns where I felt like I was quite rough with my interactions. And when I got to college, it felt...

quite challenging because my emotions were immediately calling for my attention and I didn't know what to do. So what I ended up doing was just running away from my emotions as fast as possible through the medium of drugs, through the medium of alcohol, through the medium of partying. And I ended up pushing my mind and body to the brink where I almost ended up losing my life when I was about 23 years old. And

I knew that if I continued the way that I was going, that I was just going to pass away. And all that to say that I ended up going to meditation about a year after that and knowing that I really needed to just reformat my mind, build my mind into a whole different set. Because in that rock bottom moment, I knew that I needed to stop the hard drugs.

And I was able to have the strength to put the hard drugs away, but my mind still felt heavy. My mind still felt unprocessed. And when I started meditating, I got there and was like, I need to open up a new chapter in my life. Can you remember any particular moments of insight that you had either during meditation itself or coming out of it where all of that was kind of made clear to you in a very visceral way? Yeah, I think there were a lot of moments, especially in the first few courses where I had...

been ignoring so much of myself and my life and my emotional history. I remember spending so much time having these like, almost like memory flashbacks of moments of joy when my little sister was born and she was born when I was 10 years old and watching her grow up. And then the difficulty of like when I was transitioning

into high school and then into college and no longer really having that deep connection with her anymore because I was so busy with my own life.

And all of these things I was just like kind of oblivious to and hiding from. And when I was there sitting meditating, it became so clear like how important these relationships were, not just with my sister, my mom and dad, my wife, but I started realizing how superficial they all were because I was so deeply disconnected to myself. Like because I couldn't feel myself, I couldn't really engage with their difficult emotions and I couldn't really understand

offer up any depth for them to be able to then offer their own depth for us to go deeper together. And I think that was hard. It was hard to feel that multiple times and then, but then kind of turn that around and use it as a point of inspiration to offer more presence when I had time with them. What supported you in starting being able to access that inside of yourself so you could come forward more authentically inside of your relationships?

I think what really helped was, and this was sort of the shock, and that's sort of like the initial inspiration of writing How to Love Better, was that I went into meditating to save myself, like for sure, a million percent. But what was shocking about it was that

I went into meditating and I was immediately in the mental gym, building the qualities of awareness, building the quality of non-reaction, building the quality of compassion. And through learning how to accept myself, how to listen to myself, how to have compassion for myself, I was reshaping my mind. But then when I leave the retreat and I come out,

these qualities weren't just for me. They were like immediately there for, you know, the moments when I'm like seeing my wife again and I'm like, okay, like let's talk more, let's get to know each other more. And when I saw my parents again and all of these qualities that were, honestly, I was building for myself, just reignited, it felt like a moment of renaissance for my relationships. - So Sarah, your wife is here tonight. Shout out to Sarah.

- Sarah's a gem. So what really changed inside of your relationship with her based off of your practice, like granularly? - Granularly? - Yeah, kind of specifically, how is it different? - Yeah, very specifically. I love that. The main, main thing is that we started telling each other the truth and that was hard. And it was like layers and layers of the truth, you know, like, I think we started being much more honest about

we felt for each other. I mean, one of the main, sort of the main first things that I reckoned with was that when I did my first meditation course, Sarah and I were actually on a break. And it was one of those moments where it was like, we had broken up a few times, been on a few breaks, got back together. We were really bad at staying apart. We just like would immediately come back together. But in that meditation course, I remember being like,

why am I being so dumb? Like, this is so like, what, what is going on? Like, I obviously want to be with her and I need to just like be okay. Like be okay with being with this amazing person. And, and I think a lot of that was due to just honestly like youthfulness and society and culture and like,

you know, seeing, like thinking that dating a bunch of different people is really cool or something like that. And I always felt sort of pulled on both ends. But one thing was just sort of owning up to the fact of like being absolutely willing to build a long-term relationship with her and build a life with her. And then the other end of that was realizing that we needed new culture. And I think it

came down to how we spoke to each other. We started speaking to each other with truth. And once the meditating arrived into our lives, I did my first course in July of 2012. Sarah did her first course in July and March of 2013 out of her own will. She was very interested in it from the beginning. And we had this moment where we realized that

the first part of our relationship was just a giant blame game. We were just constantly pointing the finger at each other. Whenever I would feel tension in my mind, my mind would try to figure out how is it her fault. And whenever she would feel tension in her mind, she would do the same thing. And it was just this back and forth of like, how can I make sure that I don't have to take any ownership over these emotions? And we're constantly projecting onto each other this

It was a, honestly, we were living in a hurricane. But once we started meditating, it became, you know, the self-awareness that was building up became unavoidable. And we both started realizing like, oh, this actually isn't about you. I actually just don't feel good. And my mind is trying to give me a reason to fight. This is so interesting because I think that it connects to

The crux of how you write about relationships, which is about relaxing attachment in a lot of different ways. That's also a core goal of meditative practice in general. Totally. You open the hand, relax around craving, you know, see that by clinging onto things, we only push them further away from us.

At the same time, in a relationship, you are literally attached to this person. Elizabeth, my fiancee, is also here tonight. I would like to think that Elizabeth is quite attached to me. I'm pretty darn attached to her. I love her dearly. And so there's this kind of push-pull in it, right? And I'm wondering how you think about that. I love that. I think there is the reality of building a life together, but...

what I found very useful in the relationship, and this might just be sort of a subtle shift in conceptualizing how we're working together, but to me, attachment feels so tense, honestly.

the attachments that we have in the mind. And of course, we're not speaking about, like we're not talking about attachment theory. That's like a very sort of different mode of attachment. We're talking about old school attachment, like what the Buddha was talking about and the type of attachment where you're craving for things to exist in a very particular way.

And what I've found in my life, and Sarah's observed the same thing inside of her, is that the attachments that you have in your mind, they manifest as the attempt to control. And when you're coming from a place of control, you are slowly sucking the life out of a relationship. And...

as opposed to coming from a place of attachment, it feels much more generative to come from a place of commitment where the commitment is happening inside of myself. It's a very active process where I'm like, I'm committed to being with you. I'm committed to building a life with you. And

all I really have control over is my own actions and how I can show up in this relationship. But the other person is simultaneously choosing to be with you and is trying to do their best to support your happiness.

but they can't really control you and they try not to. - The best way that I've ever heard about talking about this actually comes from Elizabeth. And I don't know if I've told you this story before, but there were probably fewer people listening when I told it to you, so I'm gonna tell it again. But the best line I've ever heard about it was there was this critical moment in our relationship and I'll never forget what she said. She said, "Forest, I knew I had to love you with an open hand." And that feeling of like the bird lands on the hand

And the desire is to keep the bird close to you, right? But it's then hanging onto the bird that it actually wants to leave, right? But in opening the hand, that takes a lot of courage. That's a hard thing to do. And so there's kind of this like profound vulnerability, I think, in what you're describing here. I love that you're using, that's so smart about the open hand because I've been thinking about the open hand in the sense that

only with open hands can you give and only with open hands can you receive. And when the relationship between Sarah and I started, I was a terrible receiver. Like I was so, and I think a lot of this comes from growing up really poor and there are

not being a lot of things coming my way. And whenever things would come, I'd hang onto them very tightly. And because a lot of time, we would have years where there would be gifts, other years where there wouldn't be gifts, it created a dynamic in my mind where whenever it was my birthday, I was so awkward.

Like, and Sarah's love, you know, had to deal with that with me. And it was, it was very challenging because I was, she would try to give to me and I like just didn't know how to receive. But we, I think we did our best and that was definitely became clear. And I think that's,

A lot of what we're talking about in terms of relationship is understanding and not fighting the giant mirror that's in front of you, showing you what you're good at and what you need to work on. Yeah. Love will show you what you need to work on is a line from the book that I think really stood out to me and really just landed for me personally. In that opening, that's a very courageous act. Even sometimes in the receiving, it can be kind of a courageous act too. It's certainly a very vulnerable one. Were there ways that you developed more comfort with that over time?

I think I understood very quickly from meditating that the minds that we carry are absolutely built out of repetition. And that means the conditioning that we have, you know, think about it. If you're sort of, your inclination is to react with anger and that's sort of your defensive mode. Whenever you feel a challenge or whenever your mind perceives a challenge, very quickly anger will roar up again. And...

What I learned is that it's okay to be clumsy in your new attempt to be a different way. So to me, it was like, okay, I'm bad at receiving. So let me do my best to be gracious, to be grateful, to accept and to let her love me, honestly, because that's really what it was. And it felt super odd at first, but over time it was like, okay, it's become second nature. It's good to train yourself and to be okay with training the mind. And I think

Honestly, because of the way that society is shaped today, when you think about all the apps that are on your phones, and this is like any app on your phone, all of them are trying to make life easier, trying to make life more pleasurable. And very quickly in our minds, we think that

okay, I want every part of life to be like that. And even my personal transformation work, even my relationship work, I want it to be smooth and easy. And things are not necessarily going to be like that. And I think one thing I found, honestly, from all the, you know, the hours and years of meditating is that happiness, happiness requires training. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

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Want more? Check out shopify.com slash beingwell, all lowercase, and learn how to create the best retail experiences without complexity. Shopify.com slash beingwell. Now, back to the show. Probably my favorite section of your most recent book, the one that's on the table with us tonight, How to Love Better.

It's titled The Student Mentality and Spiritual Arrogance. Oh, I'm glad you caught that one. I had to put it in there. I was bold. No one has mentioned that one. That's pretty cool. So beginner's mindset is essentially what you're talking about to a certain degree. And you're also talking about the risks of expertise and a certain kind of insidious knowing that can creep in that can really subvert both your personal development and your ability to show up effectively inside of a relationship.

Yeah, totally. I think that was a section that felt really just so valuable to write. And honestly, it just felt important for me because I wanted to keep remembering that. To me, it's felt throughout my whole meditation career, it's felt so important to only see myself as a student.

And I know if you were to like, and this sounds really weird. If you were to like look at the stats, like I've meditated a lot. I've meditated about like- - You've clocked your time. - I've clocked in a lot of time. Yeah. - You've got your 10,000 hours for sure. Yeah. - Yeah. We did a rough estimate and it's like around 13,000 now. And it's a lot of time. But honestly, when I look around at my peers, the people that I'm meditating with, I got nothing on them. Nothing. Like my teacher, Barry Lapping,

he would be upset if I even say this, right? He's probably meditated around 50,000 hours. He's like 76. - Wow. - Like what I've, and this is of course, like the range of hours does not equate to wisdom. It sort of equates to like how important it is to you, the focus, the effort, but not necessarily wisdom itself. But to me, when I think about those sort of, you know,

people who really just like keep walking forward on this path and are only teachers because their teacher told them to be a teacher. You know, their teacher requested, "Hey, you've learned enough, you should teach now." I think that's something that's really important in all of us who are in this sort of like personal growth field, because oftentimes when we find something that really works for us well,

the immediate reaction is to think, oh, this is gonna work for everybody. This is perfect for everyone. But really what that section calls to is understanding that one, you always have more to learn. And two, what works for you is not necessarily going to work for somebody else.

So the deeper that you get into a relationship with somebody, the better you get to know them. The more you learn about them, hopefully the more you learn about yourself along the way. And that can make it very, very easy to become less of a beginner and more of an expert. I start to make assumptions about what Elizabeth thinks, how she's going to react to something. I probably do the same thing with Sarah. And this is like a very quiet process. And I'm wondering if you found anything that helps you reconnect to

with that feeling of don't know mind or being a beginner inside of your relationship? - Messing up. Like I gotta tell you. - Act of correction. - Yeah, I messed up real good a few weeks ago. - Do you wanna tell us about it? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll tell you about it. It was glorious. It was like, so about two years ago,

So Sarah's not only my wife, but also my manager. She has a really risky business, you know? But she's the best. - That's what we call a dual relationship. - Yeah, yeah, totally. She takes 90%. It's expensive. But so we were traveling a lot for, and I think this was back in 2022. And in all that traveling, she was noticing that it was really affecting her health.

And I, you know, obviously it was supportive. I was like, hey, I was like, you definitely, I love when you come with me, but you don't have to come with me to everything. So what ended up happening was that I started changing my language a bit so that she didn't feel pressure to come. And I, instead of saying, hey, we have to go to, you know, New York or something like that, I would say, oh, I have to go to New York on this day. And fast forward to last month,

I was talking about how we had to go to, you know, I had to go to London and, or no, sorry, I had to go to Boston. And I told her, I got to go to Boston. And she looks at me and she's like, I don't want to be left out. And I was like, dang, I was like, I, you know, I am sorry. And we ended up talking and then it was a good moment where we were taking turns because at first it was unclear what was happening to me. It was like,

why is she upset? Why is there tension? And then as she started explaining, she wanted to make sure that she not only felt invited, but that she had her own

power over her own decisions that she, you know, she wanted to come, she can come. And I was like, oh, of course. I was like, you're more, of course, more than welcome to and whatnot. But then in that moment, it became clear. And it was like, oh, this is happening because of two years ago, because I was trying to support your happiness two years ago. So I changed the language so that you didn't feel obligated to come. And I was like, happy to change it again.

I want you to feel invited. But what that showed me was that it's really valuable to not just make that, you know, sort of,

unconsciously think that you know what's best because of what you talked about two years ago and to honestly just check in more often. - Yeah, yeah. You're in a relationship with an ongoing process, not a static person. - Totally. - That's what really came out in that moment, right? And you saw the change over time. - Highly dynamic. - Totally. I think this relates a little bit to what you call preventative communication. - Yeah. - It's a great style of talking. Could you speak to it a little bit? - Yeah, it's my favorite thing. I feel like it's saved us both so much time and energy.

We've noticed that whenever arguments arise between us, there are absolutely times when one of us makes a mistake and one of us needs to apologize. But then honestly, like the other sort of like 70% of the time, it's because we're just in proximity to each other. And...

We've all been there. Yeah, and this is a tricky thing about relationships, right? Is that whomever you're next to, whether it's your roommate, family members, your intimate partner, they're going to see the best of you and they're going to see the worst of you. And there are times where

You wake up and you just don't feel good. Sometimes there's a reason, you know, someone at work said something to you that you wake up and you're still thinking about, or you ate food too late so you didn't get restful sleep. There's so many different possibilities. So what we ended up practicing was just when we would wake up in the morning, just we would automatically tell each other how we feel. And sometimes

we can just explain to each other, you know, wherever it is that we are in our emotional range and you can feel some heaviness, you feel tired, you feel, you know, upset, or you feel great, whatever it could be. And,

whenever she tells me that she doesn't feel good, I'm like, hell yes, thank you. Because, and not in the sense, of course, I want her to feel good as often as she can, but in the sense that you're giving me the information I need to be able to give you space, support you, you know, whatever it is that we need. So you're kind of, by telling me how you feel, you're setting me up for success to be able to do my part to support this relationship.

You're creating a culture of communication. You're constantly checking in. You're talking all the time about it. There's a lot of vulnerability in it because you have to be open about how you're actually thinking and how you're actually feeling. And also, I think a kind of subtle part of it is that you're seeing how quickly those feelings change.

that there's an arc to them over time and you might feel one way in the morning and a different way in the afternoon, you know? And just like that, that seeing of the transient nature of them then like helps you soften the attachment to them. It's even gotten to the point for us where we like,

more often than not, we'll describe it as like, oh, there's heaviness moving through me. Or like, I just feel like, you know, some like sadness moving through or something like that. And we're not really saying I'm sad or I'm upset or I'm tired because it's literally so transitory. And the other

The other thing that's worth mentioning is that it's so valuable also for the person who's feeling it. The person who's feeling whatever tension is there, whatever you want to name it, they become aware of it because sometimes we pretend to feel good. And sometimes we're just like trying our best to fight whatever it is that we're feeling. And in the moment of really just accepting it, you're also aware

taking a little bit of power away from it by yes, it's still there, the heaviness is there, but it has less of a chance to play games with your mind and dig up something from the past so that it becomes bigger.

One of the stories of yours that I really love is actually about your in-laws, and they're arguing, and they're having an argument, and one of them says to the other, hey, I want to have a lot of arguments with you. Yeah. Which I thought was just a beautiful line. Like, I want to have a lot of arguments with you, but you need to speak to me a little bit differently if we're going to do this. Yeah. What a...

10 out of 10 style of communication. Yeah, right. Yeah. Just stuck the landing on that one. So there are already a couple of things you've named here, like relaxing around attachment. We talked about opening the hand a little bit, this style of communicating. Are there other kind of key mindset shifts that you've noticed that you think really support having a healthier relationship? Yeah. I think one of the biggest ones is understanding that the two of us

we are ever changing beings. And we touched on this lightly before, but it's so fundamental. Like I feel committed to the relationship,

I love being with her. I have no control over her interests, what she wants to put her time into, what kind of work she wants to do, what books she reads, like nothing dude. Like she's just her own person. She's on her own sort of mission. And I'm lucky that she wants to do her mission alongside me while I do mine, whatever that could be. And this was explicitly highlighted to us when

we started doing longer retreats. We started doing retreats of like, you know, 30 days of silence, 45 days of silence. We'd go to the meditation course and we would be apart the whole time. When you're meditating for that extended period of time,

We, you know, we practice in this Vipassana tradition where you're basically building equanimity, balance of mind, non-reactiveness. But when you do that, what ends up happening is that a lot of old conditioning is just deleted. So a lot of the dense patterns that you would have, they lighten up, they release. And a lot of, you know, what used to make your mind feel heavy, it's

But what that ends up happening, what ends up happening from that is that you finish the retreat and your tastes change. Even down to like what kind of foods you want to eat, what TV shows you want to watch. I remember the experience of,

having a playlist that I would work out to. And then when I finished a retreat, I'd go and work out again and I'd put that same playlist on and I'm like, no way. Like I can't, I can't even, it's like, just doesn't, it just feels like a whole different vibration. So that's happening to us as individuals where it's like so much change has happened within us and we're getting to know ourselves, but it also happened to her. And we come out of the course and it's like, I'm getting to know a whole new version of Sarah and

And it's challenging, but also honestly, it's really fun. And I think that's one of the funner parts of our relationship because who knows what she's going to say? Like, I have no idea. Well, and also I think it's maybe a little revealing about what we tend to prioritize or say that we care about in a relationship because we're taught to prioritize consistency, right?

a lot of the time. Like I want to know how my partner is going to be in a particular kind of situation. I want to be able to predict what they're going to do. - Yeah. - And so what you're describing, like it's another open hand moment, right? - Yeah. - It could not be what you expect. It could be something you didn't want. Like you have to relinquish that feeling of control over it. And that is very frightening for people.

Was that ever scary for you or were you just a natural here? No, no, no. It was scary. I remember when we finished the first few longer meditation retreats, our first question to each other would be like, are you okay? Are you okay? And we're like, yeah, yeah, we're good, good, good. And then still love me, right? And like, she would be like, I love you.

My fear is that she became enlightened and she just wouldn't need me anymore. And her fear is that, not that I would become enlightened, but that I would want to become a monk. And each time we're like, no, no, we like having our life. We like paying bills and living our life together. But it's so fun to be able to get to know each other again. And honestly, it's just shown me that

What we do get to repeat is that commitment. But then other than that, this person that I see, this person whose face I know better than my own face, because I see her face more than my own, she just keeps evolving. She just keeps changing. And we, I mean, we used to like, you know, when we were in our twenties, we love to listen to like a lot of really like

intense music and go to loud parties. And now we go on these really nice long walks. And that's one of the funnest things we do together. In Massachusetts, we have these things called rail trails. I don't know if you have them out here in California, but they are old train lines that aren't in use anymore. So they will pull out the tracks and it's these long,

that go on for miles and miles and miles and there'll be trees on both sides and we'll just like walk for mad long and it's so fun. This is the most wholesome man alive. Sorry, I'm just, I'm finding my footing after that one for a second. I know, I say it with so much excitement, but honestly, you got to do it sometime. It's really, it's really fun.

So do you mind if I actually ask you a question about these long retreats that you do? Yeah, yeah, sure. So you will go for a 45-day retreat, and these are sometimes done in silence? Always in silence. Silence. Always, yeah. So 45 days. 45 days. You and yourself. Yep. What are you doing? Sitting at the very edge of the universe. It's super, it's very challenging. It's challenging to be there, but...

It's pretty cool, so check it out. So this, these bodies that we all have, they're a sort of microcosm, a small subset of the universe. And we think the universe is out there, but it's actually in here.

it's pretty wild. Like not only are you going to learn a lot about why your patterns are the way they are, but you're going to start learning fundamental laws of the universe. And I think the most primary laws is this law of impermanence. And you see it through all of my writing and you're like, okay, young people writes another article. Of course, it's about change. You know, it's like, it's just like change is the dopest thing. It's literally, it's

that's the thing that we don't like about life. We don't like change. We have a combative relationship with change, but the embracing of change is the key to your peace. It's the key to opening up the gates of wisdom. And it's the key to harmony in your relationship because you

The embracing of change is the direct opposite of attachment. And what I've learned is that you have to work with the universe as opposed to against it. And our universe is just flowing forward at the atomic level, the biological level, the cosmological level. Everything is changing and just flowing forward. And when you're hanging on with your attachments,

You're trying to stand in this gigantic river holding on and it's just knocking you down. So instead you have to learn how to flow. You do have some degree of control over your actions and then that's it. That moment though, when you first encounter it, often through some kind of practice, it's going to vary person to person where you let go of the rope and you feel like,

I don't know if I'm allowed to swear here, but I would normally swear there. You really get that granular feeling of whether it's more of a not self-experience or it's that feeling of the constant change that's kind of running underneath everything. That can be very destabilizing for a person. Like that's a lot to bump into. Yeah, it depends. So it's not nihilism. It's not like an idea like, oh, there's nothing. It's more so...

and the power of direct experience that is stabilized with non-reaction.

And that those, these two things sort of need to go together. So when you're able to really fundament, I mean, there are literally moments where when you're in a long 45 day meditation retreat, you'll spend the first 15 days just being aware of the breath, like being aware of the breath coming in and going out. When you do that, the mind becomes so powerful. The mind gets so sharp. It becomes like a canning.

And then you turn that awareness away from your breath and into the body. And the body can sometimes feel like a rushing river of atoms. And it's very distinct that there is no fundamental you because you can ask yourself like, which one of these changing vibrations is me? And by the time you even point your attention to it, it's gone.

And it's so distinct, but honestly, being able to feel that truth that this is not self, that this conception of Diego is really just mental and physical phenomena that's moving at very rapid speeds, it's actually really liberating because then I can allow myself to change. I can allow my preferences to evolve. I don't have to stick to one view of what this is because I can move with it.

a combination of my values, my intuition and my nervous system. And then it feels much more clear. Like, oh, when I first met Forrest, I was like, we're friends, you know? And, but that's something where like,

If I had a very tight conception of who my friends are and these are my friends forever, none of that would have been possible. So better to flow than to cling. For the record, I felt very much the same way. I know we finished. I went on his pod. He let me come on his podcast. And at the end of the conversation, we were like, are we friends? Like what's going on? Did we just become best friends? No, for sure. For sure. So I,

I hope you take this question the right way. We're about to find out. So you and Sarah are both like very far along the path in terms of this practice. How do you guys argue with each other? I mean, sometimes things get spicy for sure.

But I think whenever, I think we're a little calmer. Like we feel, you know, we feel the same emotions that everybody feels. We're all moving through the same range of emotions. I love what Jiddu Krishnamurti says. He was like, you think you're different, but you're not. Like we're just, we're all literally experiencing the same emotions to different degrees. And I think one thing we both found is that we,

still feel the heavy stuff, but because we cling to it less, the intensity of it is much lighter. And I think what's been really interesting, and this is something that I want to put words to, but it's something that has become much more clear lately, is that as we have developed more harmony between the two of us, and as we've sort of fine-tuned the culture between the two of us, life has not gotten easier.

Like life has still been challenging where now it feels like, okay, we love each other, but we do a ton of problem solving together. You know, my mom is sick. She's like dealing with health issues. I've had other family members who have been sick and we've had other family members have, you know, so many different types of troubles. And as a team, we like try to figure out

what is the best thing to do to support our family members? And it's not easy. Yeah, the problems haven't changed, but your ability to interact with them has. Totally. And one of the main things is that we're just moving slower. It's like, we don't feel the rush. It's like, oh, we have to decide about this big thing right now. It's like, let's take our time. Let's move intentionally and then figure out what our part is in this and how we can support. So you're describing a relationship that still has a fair amount of conflict in it.

Yeah. I mean, there's always something happening. It's always like somebody's hurt, somebody's this, somebody's that. And it's hard. That's one of the tough parts of life. I had to have this long conversation with my dad that Sarah and I had this conversation with my dad actually. And we had just had a big loss in the family and my dad was grieving it, which was right. You should be grieving and feeling the heaviness of the emotion. But

My dad had this mentality of, okay, but if this one problem is fixed, we're all going to be okay. And I was like, nah, man, we're not. Like that, you know, we can fix this, but then someone else is going to get sick. Something else is going to happen. Like the challenges are going to continue coming and what's better is

what's much more of an effective use of your energy is not to try to control everything and pacify everything. You can do your best, but it's more so to like internally prepare yourself to be able to understand that like, yeah, these challenges are gonna come and we're gonna do our best as a family. - So what makes it not nihilism? So what I mean by that is that like, as you encounter this, things are changing, they're constantly falling apart, the sand is loose beneath your feet.

And you had a moment earlier when we were talking where you said, but it's not nihilism though. There's something that's actually really beautiful and generative about it. So I'm wondering what the feeling is that you're finding that makes it feel that way to you. That's a nice question. I think what makes it not nihilism is that when you alleviate a lot of the tension in the mind and a lot of that sort of heaviness burns away, what's left is

what the Buddha called the Brahma Viharas, which are the divine abodes, which are compassion, equanimity, selfless joy, you know, literally being able to see the happiness of another and also feel happiness for them. And these are, to me, have not only become evident qualities of the mind, but are a set of values. So it's not like in life you can do whatever you want. It's

you should be able to do whatever you want as long as you're not hurting anybody. And like, to me, like, that's cool. Like you do whatever you want, but if you're going to hurt people, that's not cool. We can't support you in that. But compassion feels like not only is that something that the universe is trying to teach you, because I mean, the way that you create your present is coming from your past. Like your actions will come together to form your present and then you

what you're doing now will set up your future. So compassion feels evident. It feels good to be a good friend, to do good things to others, to put in good work because there will be fruits to those seeds that you planted. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment.

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Now, back to the show.

So we're going to take a little bit of time here to answer some questions. And the first one got to a follow-up I almost asked you about something that you were talking about. So it was perfect timing. How do you structure time for intentional relationship check-ins without it feeling too high stakes and stressful? Thank you so much for asking that. I would have been so upset if I left that out.

Don't structure it. Don't like, don't, it's not a sit down. Sit for the paradigm. It's the most chillest thing where you literally, you wake up and it's almost like we do it with each other unprompted. We're just like, we wake up and this is how I feel. And then sometime in the middle of the afternoon,

we'll just mention again how we feel. And then if there's ever a big shift inside one of us, we just vocalize it. You know, we're like, I feel stressed or the stress is moving through me or whatever it is. But what makes it effective is how we,

unimposing it feels. It's not taking up your time. It's just receiving a little bit of information. You don't necessarily need to have a big conversation about it in the moment unless the person needs to talk and feel supported in that way. But it's a very light touch moment that makes it work. Yeah, I think that lowering the stakes here is kind of the whole game. Yeah. Where you get to practice with the really, really small version of this. Like what's the 1% version of the relationship check-in that you just can't mess up?

You know, the 1% like tap on the shoulder, hey, how you doing? Or whatever it is that you're doing. And you just get the practice of that. And over time, it becomes more like the natural water that you're swelling in inside of the relationship. Totally, totally. It's more so about getting the information out and then you keep moving on. And you're never basically expecting your partner to read your mind. And if you want support, you let them know. It's very, a beautiful thing. Just be like, hey, like I need you for a moment. Yeah. Yeah.

- Another great question. What are the key steps two people must take to rebuild a relationship after past hurt so they can move forward in a healthier way? - That's a lovely question. - Yeah. - Hurt's gonna happen. We all enter into relationships with attachments, with old pain, with very sort of specific patterns that we need to become aware of and then undo.

So it's very easy for, you know, when you have two people, you have these two egos and egos are rough. So when they come across each other, it's very easy for there to be friction. And so it's easy. You know, I mean, my wife and I experience this all the time. You know, you say something or you say something and it's a little too edgy or something like that. And then you're like, oh, wow, I'm sorry. I have to apologize.

I think it's really valuable to just know that you can repair through honesty. Like dishonesty literally creates distance.

Dishonesty creates distance between you and yourself when you're not being honest about what's happening inside you with what you're feeling. And it creates distance between you and your partner when you're just sort of glossing over the truth or skipping it completely. So it's important to just, you know, tell each other the truth. And then if you're

you're open to repair to do the work of forgiveness. Sometimes you have to forgive multiple times for the same thing because you feel that hurt appearing over and over. But then if you're able to both, you know, let it go as best as you can and then step forward. You know, I remember times where we would have arguments and the argument would call up deep emotions. And I remember this specific time where Sarah was,

upset with me about something that I used to do and I had to remind her. And I was like, oh, I don't do that anymore. I was like, I stopped doing that like, you know, two years ago. She was like, you don't do that no more, right? Yeah.

So what do you think helps with the trust aspect of it? I think it's hard, but it's just burying the truth. Like honestly, burying the truth and knowing like, you know, even the things that you don't want to hear, you hear them, you lay it all out on the table. And then that's what offers you to have a clean slate. And I think having that culture where honesty is welcome just helps you

I don't know, know that this is what's feeding your connection. - Yeah, and such a huge question for people I think is, do you really feel like you're on the same team? - Yeah. - And if you're the transgressor in this case, you feel like you messed something up,

what can you do to help the other person feel like you're on their team again, that you've gotten back on the boat, you're rowing back in the same direction, right? Like what's going to accomplish that? And that's probably going to vary a lot person to person, but I think that feeling is something we really search for. I love how transgressor is such an intense word.

And ultimately it comes down to change behavior. - Yeah. - Right? Change behavior. And change behavior may take time for it to change your perception of the person because you're going to keep, you know, the perception that we have right now is highly, highly coded with the past. So it takes time for us to relearn, okay, this, you know, this is a person who's very different. They're making changes.

Oh, great question. I find social media to be a really toxic space. Me too. So I read your books. How do you navigate life online? It sucks. And this is spoken as somebody with 3 million Instagram followers. Yeah. It's tough out there. It's hard. It's hard. It's...

I don't know, it's really tough because my hope for social media that it's a forum for people to have a conversation with each other, but it's become so honestly pleasure oriented that it messes our minds up. It just like really messes up the mind. I'll have moments where, so,

One of the fortunate experiences that I get is I go away to the retreat. The first thing I do when I get there is they lock my phone away. Like they take the phone, put it in a bag, lock it away. I get it back at the end.

What that allows is that my senses become normal human senses. Like it's not necessarily something special, but as soon as I'm away from the phone, five, six, seven days with no phone, and honestly, I can see more leaves in a tree. I'm looking down, I'm on the ground walking and I can see more rocks. Like everything just looks so much more vibrant and I can feel myself so much more clearly.

You slap that phone into my hand, probably about three days, four days into it, I can feel all my senses dimming. And I'm like, damn, we're all just living like this? And I think it's very challenging. So you have to build discipline with your phone where, sure, phones connect us, totally fine to get enjoyment from the phone, but...

there needs to be some connection with self and with nature for us to feel like holistic human beings where you're not always running away from yourself, right? You're spending time with some degree of self-reflection and, you know, being able to witness this beautiful planet that we're on, to be able to have moments where you walk or, you know, you're outside or you're just engaging with people. So I think it's really challenging and we have to be really careful with social media. Yeah.

The number one piece of advice, the most common piece of advice that I've heard on the podcast that I do is spend less time online. Yeah. From everyone who's been on. That's like the number one most common piece. I know. And it's my, we're all here because of the internet. I'm over here telling you like, be careful. You beat me to the question, Diego. I can't ask you, man. You're somebody who creates a lot of online content. You got a huge following online. How do you feel about all of that? Don't tell Mark Zuckerberg.

But I'm trying to put a lot more energy into Substack and writing longer articles instead of...

You know, the quick hits on Instagram. So the Instagram is great. You get the information out there. You let people know about your working on, but I try to use it in a way where if you like the little reflection that I'm putting out, then maybe you'll give a little more time to the longer article. And then if you like the article, then you'll read the book. So I try to set it up in that way. But yeah, just be careful with your minds, honestly. It's, yeah, the internet's rough.

I think be careful with your minds. The internet is rough. It should be a bumper sticker. So as we wander toward the end here, they told me that I could ask you a question if I wanted to also. And do you mind if I ask you about your pen name?

Yeah, sure. So you write under the name Young Pueblo. That's how most people know you. I know you as Diego. But I know that that name has a meaning that's attached to it that's meaningful for you and we didn't talk about it tonight. So would you like to share it? Yeah, I'm happy to share about that. I had so many opportunities to just drop the pen name, but...

I like it. I, you know, so like I said, I'm from Guayaquil and in Guayaquil, the word pueblo is very commonly used to refer to the masses of people. And the young is just sort of like, it's like me bringing together my American-ness and my Ecuadorian-ness, but it literally means young people. When I started meditating, it became really clear to me

that I am woefully immature. Like so, so immature. And then I've, you know, when I told Sarah that I wanted to write, I also came up, I came with a backup plan. I was like, hey, give me a little bit of time. This doesn't work. I'm going to become a high school history teacher.

So I love history. I read a lot of history. And when I started realizing how immature I was, you know, I thought about human history and I was like, oh wow. I was like, humanity is very immature. Like hugely immature. When we think about humanity as a collective,

We don't know how to do the basic things that we try to teach a three-year-old or a four-year-old. You know, how to clean up after yourself, how to share, how to be kind to one another, how to tell each other the truth, how to not hit each other. Like fundamental human basic skills, we have not collectively mastered them at all. So to me, Young Pueblo is not really my name. It's like, it's a reminder to me that

We are in this, the beginning of an arc that will lead us to humanity maturing. And I think it's amazing.

It's easy to lose hope when you turn on the news, but what always re-inspires me is knowing that there are millions of people out there seeing a therapist, millions of people out there meditating, millions of people out there using some self-reflective modality or another. People literally who are

tired of being miserable. Like literally being miserable has gone out of style. And there are so many of us who are literally trying to say no to the past, let go of the past pain. And what that does is it introduces you to self-love. And I believe that if the self-love is real, then it's going to

open the door to unconditional love for all beings. It's not gonna be perfect unconditional love, but it's gonna open the door. Why? Because when you start observing your mind and you start observing your emotional history, you see the way you struggle. And then you start to notice, I'm not the only one. And that helps develop compassion because the same way that you struggle, other people struggle. And I think, yeah, it's an important thing. That was beautifully said. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Young Fight Club, everyone. Thank you all so much. Thank you.

This was such a cool experience for me, and I had just a great time both talking with Diego, getting the Sensitive Boys Club back together, and being with everyone who was there live. It's something that I will probably always remember doing. Diego is so easy to talk to just as a person, and we had a very wide-ranging conversation that included his upbringing, how meditation changed not just his inner world, but his relationships.

We also talked about the tension between attachment and commitment and how two people can grow together without needing to stay the same. I loved the part about keeping an open hand in our relationships. I'll always remember Elizabeth saying that. And I'm glad that you can make a little guest appearance in this conversation that focused on our relationships.

And I thought there was something actually quite vulnerable in Diego naming how hard that was for him at first, that kind of open-handed approach, particularly the receiving aspect of it, how he didn't really know how to let Sarah love him. And he actually had to kind of train himself to be comfortable with receiving. We don't normally think of receiving as something you need to train yourself in. Getting a gift should be pretty easy, right?

But as somebody who has always struggled to take a compliment without cringing a bit internally, I definitely felt his pain here.

We also got into what changes when two people are really willing to tell each other the truth. Not just the big dramatic truths, but the daily emotional check-ins, the small admissions, the here's what's happening inside of me right now. Diego called this preventative communication. Other people have called it a bunch of other things, but I think that preventative communication is really a great term for it. And it's basically the antidote to mind reading.

You're giving the other person the information that they need to succeed, and you're implicitly asking for that back from them in return. And when you build that kind of culture, the ask goes from an implicit ask to an explicit ask. You get more comfortable going, hey, here's what's going on in me. What's happening for you?

And this was a big theme throughout how Diego talks and thinks about relationships. These are small, everyday acts of connection. You're creating a culture of honesty and transparency without overly formalizing it.

Then in the middle of the conversation, we focused on change, how Diego's life changed through his meditative practice and how real growth is often experienced as a kind of relaxation. There's this feeling of opening that can be present for people. We're letting go of tension. We have that moment where we're willing to let go of the rope.

As Diego said, happiness requires training. And that training includes getting comfortable with a degree of impermanence. It's when we stop clinging so hard, stop closing the hand that's crushing the bird, that things tend to go a lot more smoothly for us.

And this related really nicely to a lot of what we've been talking about on the podcast recently, about beginner's mind and maintaining that kind of beginner's mind toward yourself. And I thought there was a lot of overlap between that and the section in Diego's book titled On the Student Mentality and Spiritual Arrogance. As we become experts on something, as we learn about ourselves and the people around us, we start to make a lot of assumptions. It's natural to start doing this. After all, the brain is a pattern-finding machine.

But we don't want to be too committed to that learning that we've done. We don't want it to narrow our field of view too much. We want to maintain a sense of possibility that allows things to actually change.

Then toward the end of the conversation, this idea came up that's really stuck with me since I talked with Diego. And it was when I asked him about the difference between nihilism and the emptiness that's often talked about as an aspect of meditative practice. And Diego responded by saying that when we let go of a lot of the tension in the mind, what's left isn't emptiness, it's compassion, it's equanimity, it's selfless joy. These deeper qualities emerge when we become very present.

And I thought this was a great summary of the conversation as a whole because that's to some extent what supports our relationships as well. Compassion, presence, and releasing our attachment to the stuff that doesn't matter so much so we can create more space for the things that do.

And if I had to neatly summarize what's changed the most in my relationship over the eight years that I've been in it, it's that last piece. It's letting go of the stuff that doesn't matter so much because that's the stuff that tends to get in the way of real connection.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. This one was a bit different for us. I don't often have the opportunity to talk to a live audience that's this big. I really appreciated Diego asking me to fill in when there was an opportunity to do that. And yeah, I feel like I've said a bunch of times already that this was so cool and I loved it so much. And I

I'm just really happy to be able to share it with all of you who listen to the podcast as well. So as always, I would love to hear from you. You can leave a comment on YouTube, you can send me an email at [email protected], or you can leave a rating and a review wherever you listen to podcasts. That really helps us out. And if you'd like to support the show more directly, you can find us on Patreon at patreon.com/beingwellpodcast.

Just a few dollars a month gets you access to bonus content like episode transcripts. And of course, the best way and the least expensive way to support the show is to tell a friend about it. Word of mouth is easily the best way that we reach new people. And on a personal level, it's just always really cool to me when people tell me the story of having told some friend about it who started listening to the show. I don't know why, but it's just such a human way that the show reaches new people. And I just really appreciate it.

it. So thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon.