How To Get Past Your Past | Yung Pueblo

Lessons learned from 12 years of serious meditation. Diego Perez https://yungpueblo.com/ is a meditator and #1 New York Times bestselling author who is widely known by his pen name, Yung Pueblo. His writing focuses on the power of self-healing, creating healthy relationships, and the wisdom that comes when we truly work on knowing ourselves. In this episode we talk about: How to burn off your mind's conditioning The suffering that comes from clinging in a world characterized by relentless change What selfless listening is, and how to do it The liberation that comes from equanimity Some of the incredibly valuable lessons he's learned from 12 years of meditation How to make better decisions for your future self How to have boundless compassion without being a pushover Why  being able to see perspectives outside of your own is a sign of intelligence and mental strength And much more Related Episodes: Jack Kornfield & Yung Pueblo On: How To Meditate When You're Freaking Out, the Limits of the Thinking Mind, & Balancing Self-Interest with Compassion https://www.danharris.com/p/jack-kornfield-and-yung-pueblo-on-7c0?utm_source=publication-search The Dharma of Instagram https://www.danharris.com/p/the-dharma-of-instagram-yung-pueblo-315?utm_source=publication-search Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT, Sleep https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF, Relationships https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J, Most Popular Episodes https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc Additional Resources: How To Love Better https://www.amazon.com/how-love-better-yung-pueblo/s?k=how+to+love+better+yung+pueblo The Inward Trilogy https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CG8S9YQC?binding=paperback&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tpbk Yung Pueblo on Substack https://yungpueblo.substack.com/ Yung Pueblo on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/yung_pueblo/?hl=en Insight Meditation Society http://dharma.org Dhamma.org http://dhamma.org

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing? Today, we're going to talk about how to get past your past, how not to be owned by your personal history, and how doing this can have a massive impact on how you relate to everybody else. And just a quick reminder here, I know I say this all the time, but I'm going to say it again. The research strongly suggests that the quality of your relationships is probably the most important variable when it comes to your overall happiness. But that's not all we're going to talk about today. My guest is Diego Perez, who you might know by his pen name, Yung Pueblo. Diego is extremely popular, not only as an author, but also as a social media presence. And he's got a new book. It's called How to Love Better. And so, yes, given the nature of his new book,

• 1:04Dan Harris?

  we are going to be talking about relationship skills, including avoiding blame, keeping an open mind, having compassion without being a doormat. But we're also going to take a deep dive into a fascinating list that Diego includes in this new book. It's a list of the 12 things he has learned after 12 years of serious meditation. And this guy is quite serious about meditation. He regularly does long meditation retreats, sometimes up to six weeks. So in this part of the discussion, the one where we're talking about what he's learned over the past 12 years, we talk about how to burn off your mind's conditioning, what that phrase means. We talk about the suffering that comes from clinging in a world characterized by ceaseless change.

• 1:47Dan Harris?

  And we talk about the liberation that comes from equanimity. So we've got a lot going on here. It's a great conversation. Love talking to Diego Perez, aka Yung Pueblo. And it's coming up right after this. Before we get started, I just want to make sure you know about all the cool stuff we've got going on over at DanHarris.com. That is my new-ish online community built with Substack, where paid subscribers can now listen to this podcast ad-free. Head over to podcast.danharris.com to set up ad-free listening today. If you're not a paid subscriber, you will be prompted to sign up when you go to podcast.danharris.com. Paid subscribers get lots of other stuff, including twice-monthly live sessions on video with me, where I guide

• 2:30Dan Harris?

  to meditation and then take your questions. Plus, you get cheat sheets for every episode of this podcast, which include a summary of the key takeaways and a full transcript. It's a lot of fun. You'll get to virtually meet lots of other folks who are interested in meditation. Community is a huge part of meditation that is often de-emphasized these days, but shouldn't be. Meditation and life in general is much more enjoyable in the carpool lane. Come on over to DanHarris.com and check it out. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to

• 3:15Dan Harris?

  sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at DanHarris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node

• 4:00Dan Harris?

  of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. Really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful.

• 4:43Dan Harris?

  You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show.

• 4:53Dan Harris?

  YoungPueblo/DiegoPerez, welcome back to the show.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Dan. I'm really happy to be here.

• 5:00Dan Harris?

  I'm happy you're here. So in the beginning of this book, you tell a story that I'd love to have you retell a little bit here, which is that in the early days of your marriage, and this is not uncommon, things were a little stormy at times. Can you talk about that?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, a little stormy sounds nice. It more so felt like a hurricane. It was an interesting, really powerful magnetic connection between my wife and I, where we really wanted to be together, but we just did not know how to care for each other. And we didn't even really know how to care for ourselves at the time either. So we felt the strong pull to be with each other, but we had very little self-awareness between the two of us, very little emotional maturity. What we experienced was basically a constant blame game for over a six-year period where we were together off and on. And it wasn't until we started meditating that ever so slowly did we start developing our individual self-awareness.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  And we started seeing like, okay, this feeling to place this blame on you every single time that I feel some sort of discontent in my mind, it actually has a lot to do with me and I need to start taking ownership over what I'm feeling. And that created a whole new chapter in our relationship.

• 6:15Dan Harris?

  So meditation made a huge impact on the sort of tone and tender of the relationship. Can you say a little bit more about the exact mechanism for that?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  How meditating affected the relationship?

• 6:26Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, we both went into meditating because we were interested in our personal development. I was particularly interested in my own healing. I had come out of this sort of a number of years of just abusing drugs and alcohol, pushing my body to the edge and doing that to really avoid sadness and anxiety that kept bubbling up inside of me. All of that led me to like a rock bottom moment where I almost lost my life from just overindulging in drugs and alcohol. And it was a wake up call and I had started changing my habits, put away all the hard drugs, started really, you know, taking steps forward into a new life.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  But it wasn't until I started meditating that I started seeing very significant changes in the way my mind felt. Like my mind started feeling lighter. I started feeling a new ability to like slow down and not just immediately react. And I went into meditating for my personal healing and my wife felt that same sort of like internal push to go meditate as well. And what we didn't really expect was that it was going to have such a big impact on our relationship. I went into it for healing, but I had so many positive externalities from it. You know, not only creativity started coming up, but I started seeing, accepting that

• 7:51Speaker 01

  my relationships were quite shallow, like my relationship with my parents, my relationship with my friends, with my wife. They were very surface level and that was because I was really disconnected from myself. And once that connection started growing, the ability to like listen to my partner more, the ability to really start owning the way I was reacting in my mind and realizing that it's not always her fault. You know, and so many other sort of emotional, the emotional skill sets started building. And it really began with just being able to close my eyes and sit with myself.

• 8:22Dan Harris?

  What's coming up in my head as you're talking is, and I don't know if this will land for you, but I'm sure you're familiar with the Satipatthana Sutta in Buddhism. This is one of the most famous discourses of the Buddha where he, and now I'm not explaining this to you because you know what I'm explaining more to the listener. Some listeners may be unfamiliar with this speech the Buddha gave where he outlined four ways to be mindful. And I won't go into the list, except to say that there's this refrain that comes up over and over, which is that you establish mindfulness internally, externally, and both internally and externally. Long way of saying meditation can help you be more self-aware, but it also can help you be more other-aware as well.

• 9:05Dan Harris?

  And so it can have, as you said, positive externalities. And am I hunting in the right direction here?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  I mean, absolutely. I love that you brought it back to the Satipatthana. That Polly line, "Atapisampajano satima," is one that like I'm always sort of leaning back on whenever, you know, when you're sitting there and you're meditating and whatever's coming up, it's like a line of clarity that can help you remember that, you know, you're coming back, back into the body, back into your awareness and trying to maintain that awareness as long as possible. But what's really interesting is that you can develop these skills to become more aware of yourself, but they're not just for you. You can take them and you can easily transfer them to other aspects of your life.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  And I think in the darkness of the meditation hall, sitting and meditating for hours, I started seeing that I was developing a new ability to just feel my own emotions, to be able to sit with whatever turbulence or disharmony or whatever sadness or anxiety would come up. And that same quality that I was developing, that resilience, I was then able to take that and have more patience whenever we would have arguments, right? Because I could sit there and hold not just space for my own turbulence, but a turbulent moment that we were having together. And I think that was just a massive gift that I didn't expect from this meditation journey.

• 10:33Dan Harris?

  You're Mr. Meditation now, so am I, I guess. And I'm just curious, because I know the answer for me. But do you ever screw things up in conflict with your wife?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have to apologize all the time. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not, I'm not perfect. I'm not enlightened. I'm just, I'm just another person who's like totally on the path. I love the path. I see the results. I'm really happy with the progress that I've made in the past 10 years. But, you know, I could use another 10,000 hours of meditation.

• 11:05Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, same here. Just going back to something you said earlier about not blaming the other person as much. I can't think that's the way you were saying, you know, you're in an argument and you're not. It reminds me, you know, I have these, I talk about these guys all the time. I have these sort of Buddhist inflected communications coaches. They come out of the same sort of meditative tradition. You and I are both Buddhist practitioners. You're, you're, you're more out of the Goenka school and I'm out of the Insight Meditation Society, which interestingly, they both have centers right near each other in Massachusetts.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  I think of them as like sister traditions.

• 11:46Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Even in the time of Ubhakkan in Burma in the 50s, his center was very, very close to Mahasi's center. They were just, you know, in the same town. So it's funny seeing that that similarity continues.

• 12:03Dan Harris?

  Yes, just to put some meat on the bone for listeners who might be unfamiliar with all of this. But back in Burma, or now Myanmar, there were many famous teachers in the middle of the last century. And Ubhakkan is one of them. And he was the teacher for this guy, S N Goenka, who was an Indian guy who was in Burma, I think on business and was learning meditation from this great master. And Goenka then went up and founded all of these centers all over the world in which you ended up getting trained. Am I, am I?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's pretty correct. Goenka is Burmese of Indian descent. So he ended up growing up in Burma and he ended up hearing about. You know, Ubhakhan and then training with him and trained with him for, I think it was like 12 or 14 years. Another interesting thing to note, too, is that these traditions are so well-respected. So in Lumbini, in the birthplace of the Buddha, I got to go there about a year ago. And there's a site where it said, you know, the place where supposedly the Buddha was born. And in this, I don't even know what to call it, but it's almost like a giant park. There are also a lot of different Buddhist traditions there.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  And the Mahasi monastery and the Goenka meditation center are the closest. For some reason, the people in Lumbini, when they were setting up that park, they allowed those two centers to be closest to where, you know, supposedly where the Buddha was born. I think it's almost like a sign of like respect for these two lineages because they've just affected so many people positively.

• 13:33Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. Just to pick up on that. So there was the Ubhakhan leading to Esang Goenka, leading to you. This sister tradition to then the Mahasi school, which is Mahasi Sayadaw, who is this incredible Burmese master, who then many of my teachers trained with that guy, like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. And then they set up the Insight Meditation Society along with Jack Kornfield, who I know you're close with and you've been on the show with Jack before. I'll put a link in the show notes to that. So anyway, there are these two traditions that there's a lot of discourse between these two traditions. And my communications teachers, Dan Clerman and Mudita Nisker, they're communications coaches, I should say.

• 14:17Dan Harris?

  They both come out of the Insight. They're in that whole world. I met them through Joseph Goldstein. And one of the things they've taught me is that nobody makes you feel a certain way. You're the one making yourself feel. And so when you're in an argument with your spouse or anybody else, well, you made me feel this. You made me feel this. No, you're attaching causality inappropriately. People's behavior may be objectionable, but they didn't make you feel a certain way. Does that land for you based on the themes of your new book?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  You explained it so clearly. And I think what I would add to it, too, is that The difficult thing is that someone can do something that's objectively harmful and wrong. But your perception and your reaction is happening in your own mind. And the intensity of that, of what you end up feeling, that turmoil, you know, very quickly, the mind likes to play games and the mind wants to figure out, how can I jump through these almost like illogical hoops to figure out how I can make this solely your fault and not accept it in responsibility? And granted, there are definitely times where you make mistakes and you should apologize. But what my wife and I started finding out when we started meditating was that

• 15:30Speaker 01

  anytime we would feel sort of internal discomfort, we would try to pick up some sort of old argument that may have been resolved or find some reason to figure out how I can point the finger at you and make this your fault. And it was a real like awakening moment for the both of us where it was like, wait, I'm actually not mad at you. I just didn't realize that I woke up and I didn't feel good. And my mind was looking for another reason to not only keep fueling that feeling of not feeling good, but trying to figure out, okay, how is this your fault? When really you have nothing to do with it. It's just my fault. I didn't sleep that many hours last night. I didn't take good care of my body because I was eating too much food the night before. And I woke up not feeling well.

• 16:16Dan Harris?

  What's the practice for when you experience a big bolt of rage in the middle of a conversation with, could be your romantic partner, could be a colleague, your boss, a friend or whatever? How not to be owned by it?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  There's a few, a few things to understand. I mean, one, our understanding of the changing nature of emotions has really helped us not like fully identify with what's happening. So when we talk about

• 16:47Speaker 01

  You know, I feel angry, or I feel sad, or I feel something. We don't really even use those words anymore. Now, when we talk between my wife and I, you know, I let her know like, oh, a lot of heaviness is moving through me. And sometimes it doesn't even have a name, or a lot of sadness is moving through me, or I feel, you know, something moving through as opposed to saying, I am this. So one is understanding that, okay, anger has arisen, but it's not something that like, you're always angry, or you're always going to be X, Y, and Z. So one is contextually understanding that this thing is passing through you, and it isn't, it isn't you. And then the other aspect of it is just slow down. Literally, being able to slow down and feel what's happening as opposed to just fueling it,

• 17:29Speaker 01

  and letting it take over your actions, is incredibly helpful, because then you can honor the reality of the moment, like honor what you're feeling, but then figure out, okay, am I going to sort of follow through on this? Do I need to speak about it? What do I need to do to address the situation? And just give yourself a little bit of time to act skillfully, as opposed to just reactively.

• 17:50Dan Harris?

  Yeah, so you mentioned two things there. The second was just slowing down, slowing down the pace, the sort of toppling forward nature of, of the mind, especially when, when in conflict, inserting some brakes or space in there as a circuit breaker. And then the first thing you talked was about, and this is what I want to pick up on, is this kind of linguistic, it might be a little awkward linguistic shift, instead of saying, I'm pissed, to there's a kind of heaviness moving through. And, you know, this reminds me of something, Joseph Goldstein, who we mentioned earlier, one of the co-founders of the Insight Meditation Society, he, he talks about this too, which is, with any powerful emotion, if you can

• 18:29Dan Harris?

  just switch from, I am, fill in the blank, I am scared, I am pissed, whatever, to there is anger, or there is fear.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  It's arisen.

• 18:39Dan Harris?

  Then you take the I out of it.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Right, because we're just like, we're so prone towards attachment and clinging, that whatever we see, whatever we feel very strongly, we want to just grab it. We want to grab it, and we want to be it. And, you know, I've noticed from meditating that emotions have this interesting. Quality where they try to expand themselves, whether it's, you know, if you're feeling joy, if you're feeling happiness, you want to share that with others, you want to, you know, let your peace permeate. And the same thing, when you're feeling angry, when you're feeling heavy, when you're feeling anxious, like that permeates outward and sometimes it may even become an invitation for someone to join you in your anger. Like, you know, either you say

• 19:24Speaker 01

  something that makes them upset, or you explain to them why you're upset, and you want them to also be angry on your behalf against another person. And I think it's quite difficult to just, you know, you want to feel your emotions, you want to honor the fact that they're there, because you don't want to be running away from yourself. But at the same time, you have to introduce yourself to subtlety. And there is the subtlety of being able to feel the emotion, observe the emotion, without just letting it dominate you.

• 19:52Dan Harris?

  Yeah. There is something extra magical and powerful to taking the letter I out of the scenario, because as soon as it's not your anger, it's just anger as like a passing weather meteorological phenomenon.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Totally. And it's just another thing. And that's something that the training, you know, for meditating has taught me is like, just embrace the truth of impermanence. Don't work against the universe, work with it. And the one thing that I'm, I keep learning over and over again, when I sit on the cushion, is just that everything is constantly changing. Everything is changing at the atomic level, the biological level, the cosmological level, the whole universe is just flowing forward like a river. And if I cling, if I attach to things, then I'm working against the universe and things are going to hurt, because I'm, I'm literally moving against the flow. So I can control what I can control, and I can communicate as well as I can in a relationship. But yeah, there are still going to be difficult

• 20:52Speaker 01

  moments, and let me work with them, let me be skillful, but let me not cling to the past.

• 20:58Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, I've, I continue to bump up against the same lesson in my own practice. And I can imagine somebody who maybe is a little bit newer to this saying, well, if you don't cling to the past. Well, there are two questions. One is, if you don't remember the past, are you going to be a doormat? Are you going to just be forgiving people for the unforgivable? And then the second part of this is, okay, yeah, you're right. Everything's changing all the time and the Buddhists are always talking about non-attachment. Don't be attached. That's the source of suffering. But does that mean that I'm detached from the people I love? And how does love fit into all of this? So I asked you just two huge questions there, so I'll split them and hold them in my mind.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Both of them have the same quality. And this is one of the values of these different, especially the Theravada practices, where you may enter into them and you start immediately seeing that the mind will initially be very black and white. It'll sway from extreme to extreme, where it's like, oh, if I can't have any attachments, does that mean that I can't have any goals in life? I can't do anything. I'm just going to be passive. Like, no, it's not like that. What it's doing is that it's introducing you to subtlety. So for example, yes, you don't want to be controlling in your relationship, because when you're very attached in a relationship, it will manifest through your actions as control. And if you're being controlling, then you're going to suck the life out of a relationship.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Instead, what you want to do is try to approach things from a point of trying to create commitments, where both you and your partner are very clearly explaining to each other, this is how I like my happiness to be supported. And you do your best. You're not going to do it perfectly, but you do try your best to show up for your partner in ways that are key and essential to them. But you're not always going to get it right, but at least that effort is there. And it's much more valuable to approach a relationship and try to design the foundation of the home of a relationship around commitments, as opposed to attachments and expectations. And especially when a lot of these expectations are quite silent and it's almost like you're setting up these little traps that your partner eventually falls into, because they're not even fully aware of how you want to support them.

• 23:10Dan Harris?

  I'm laughing just because that sounds familiar. I haven't been guilty of that myself. But just on this difference between love and attachment, like I sometimes joke about, I have this magical ability to inhabit the mind of my listeners. I can imagine people thinking, well, are you saying I should be detached from my spouse or my kid that I wouldn't care if something bad happened to them, et cetera, et cetera?

• 23:30Speaker 01

  No, I'm saying that the care is there, but it's more so compassion. It's an act of compassion where you're trying to show up for them and you're trying to be there for them and support them, but you're not trying to control them. So that doesn't mean, you know, a lot of people, when they hear that, when they hear about like love is freedom, they get scared because then they think, oh, does that mean that my partner can just sleep with whomever and that there's no rules? It's like, no, that's not what we're talking about. There's still, you're still building your home around commitments and we're here to be with each other. But what that really means is that you're allowing your partner to evolve, to change, for their preferences to change, so that you don't always feel forced to have the same

• 24:13Speaker 01

  interests, to eat the same foods, to, you're letting each other just blossom in the way that feels natural and correct to each other. And you're still there, you're still moving side by side along each other, but you're moving in freedom as opposed to trying to be the same person. You're more so just two rivers flowing alongside each other.

• 24:33Dan Harris?

  My wife and I have occasionally worked with this really brilliant and also Buddhist inflected marriage and couples counselor, Michael Vincent Miller. I've never had him on the show, but I want to. He's fantastic. And he talks about this tension in relationships between intimacy and individuality. This is a tension with parents, with romantic partners, that we have these seemingly competing desires for intimacy and for individuality. It feels to me that that's what you're, you're nodding in the same direction when you talk about love as freedom.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think everything is hyper situational, right? Like, the way your relationship has harmony and the way your relationship struggles can be quite unique from anybody else's relationship. But I think that, especially with intimacy, with individuality, with moving forward and freedom, it just requires not hardened rules, but it requires consistent communication so that you just know where your partner's at and you know that, you know, you don't need to hide your truth, like, as you're evolving, as your preferences are changing, because the way that, you know, your partner may have wanted their happiness to be supported last year, five years ago, 10 years ago, can be drastically different.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  I mean, my wife and I, we have this experience where whenever we go away to a 45-day meditation retreat.

• 26:00Dan Harris?

  Forty-five day?

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we've done a few, two 45 days, three 30 days. But Dan, when we come out, it's like I'm meeting a whole new person. You know, we come out, we don't know the way our preferences have shifted over that time, because you're just, you're burning so much conditioning so fast. And you come out and the world feels very fresh, very new. And it takes almost like a month and a half to, two months where we're like getting to know ourselves and each other. And we're not holding this current version and comparing it to the old version. And we're just letting each other evolve. And it's happened so many times where, you know, we come out and like, we just have different priorities as individuals, you know, compared to what we wanted before, even like down

• 26:46Speaker 01

  to like our taste of what we want to watch on TV, or where we want to go on trips, or how we want to design our lives. And it's honestly just been a joyful moment where it's like, you know, I want to get to know this person again because they're fresh and new.

• 27:01Dan Harris?

  You used a phrase there that I want to have you unpack, burning conditioning. But just to stay on, on the subject, when you say love is freedom, you don't mean, means you can do whatever the hell you want and cheat on your spouse or violate any number of norms. It means that you're giving the person you love the freedom to grow alongside you.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. To grow, to change, to like, just be who they want to be. And that can be something as small as like what they want to watch, what they want to read, like the hobbies that they want to do and the freedom to move about in the world. And you don't have to be plastered together all the time to be with each other.

• 27:45Dan Harris?

  Okay, let's go back to that intriguing phrase. You're talking about within the context of being on a 45 day meditation retreat, you're burning conditioning. What does that mean?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  That's a lovely question. It's fun talking to you because you have so much context. So the mind has this quality where the moment that it stops producing any new reactions, right, the mind is no longer reacting because the mind is very equanimous, even though, even if it's for like a second or two seconds or five minutes where there's stable equanimity, stable awareness, the mind is really in tune with reality as it is. The mind isn't really creating more new conditioning that hardens and weighs down the mind. Instead, what happens is that the old conditioning that's there very quickly starts, a better term is just evaporating. It starts burning away because you're no longer feeding it. Similar to like, you know, the way that you have to charge your iPhone

• 28:40Speaker 01

  and you're, you have to plug your iPhone in, charge it, and it has battery. The moment that you stop, you unplug it, you're no longer charging it. The battery slowly melts away. And when you're in one of these purification paths, like you're, you're literally purifying the mind of this hardened conditioning. And the moment that you stop reacting, the moment that you're actually equanimous, all that old stuff automatically starts burning away. And when you go away to these longer retreats, you know, I mean, in these retreats also, like it's people who, like my wife and I are usually the youngest people in the room. You know, a lot of people there have been meditating for. Forty, fifty years and you keep mentioning Joseph and the last retreat that we sat

• 29:23Speaker 01

  was with Barry and Kate Lapping and Barry Lapping, he was roommates with Joseph. You know, they were roommates like in India for years and you know, really like still friends to this day, but he was a teacher of that course and there's something where, you know, we spend the first fifteen days just sharpening the mind with Anapana, with the natural awareness of the breath and after fifteen days of being aware of the breath, the mind becomes so calm and so concentrated that the mind becomes quite powerful. It becomes like a canon. And the moment that you take that very sharpened awareness and turn it to the body, the truth of, you know, this law of nature, the truth of impermanence becomes starkly clear because

• 30:05Speaker 01

  the body doesn't feel solid. It looks solid. You can look in the mirror, but what you actually feel is almost like this rushing river of atoms where it's just like bubbling up and changing at incredibly rapid rates. And when you're in tune with that for days and days, you know, for weeks, you delete so much conditioning and you come out and you're like, wow, I still feel sadness. You know, it was funny, the last time I went, I finished a retreat and then literally three days later, I'm at South by Southwest, I'm speaking in front of four thousand people and as soon as I got up there, I'm like, oh, I should be feeling anxiety right now, but there was nothing. There was none. I was just like,

• 30:50Speaker 01

  it was so easy to just go into flow and I think it was directly related to, in that particular course, I went up against a lot of fear, like this, so much fear kept coming up, you know, fear that was not triggered by anything. It was just fear that was stored in my mind and, you know, fear and anxiety have this very deep relationship. So then I get on stage after the course is over and I was like, wow, I just could not believe how, how little anxiety I felt in that moment.

• 31:19Dan Harris?

  Let me see if I can restate some of that, just to make sure I get it and by extension, the listener, as you're right, it is fun for the two of us to talk because we do share so much context and I just always want to be sensitive to any listeners who might have some trouble keeping up because they haven't been, you know, marinating in the Dharma as long as you and I have.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:40Dan Harris?

  You know, a key aspect of Buddhist thought and practice is just seeing how everything is just this endless chain of cause and effect arising and passing away, causes and conditions. So every human, I sometimes, when I'm on my game, will look at every human as like having this vapor trail of incalculable numbers of causes and conditions that have led them to where they are in their body and in their mind right now, inclusive of their, you know, all the events of their life, but all the events of their ancestors' lives, you know, that leave a mark in the mind.

• 32:21Dan Harris?

  And so we're operating on this with this incalculable gumbo of causes and conditions at our backs all the time. And what happens in practice, deep practice especially, is because you're just awake and aware in the present moment, you're not creating new causes and conditions in the same way, and some of the old ones start to run out of steam. And so you're not owned by some of your historical neuroses the way you would be if you weren't practicing. Mind the neighborhood?

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you explained it beautifully and you use this sentence that I use all the time, too, "leave a mark on the mind." And I think that's something that, you know, these different Buddhist traditions have understood really well and that I think the Western world is understanding more so now than before, where the things that you feel very intensely throughout your life, whether it's in childhood or whether as an adult, if you feel something very intensely, some heartache, some anxiety, some whatever it could be, it leaves a mark on the mind. It shapes the mind. Mind and it affects the way that you're perceiving reality. It's like literally a thick lens with which you have to look through to try to see reality as it is. But you have all this conditioning there that's blocking your view.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  And it's challenging, but it's also, you know, one of the upsides is that the mind is quite malleable. So when I go away to retreats, it hit me that I'm just going to the mental gym. I'm literally just taking myself to the gym and I'm working on three specific qualities. I'm working on developing awareness, working on developing non-reaction, which is like my new favorite sort of like synonym for equanimity because equanimity is just like, that word is not that well used. And the third quality is compassion. And these are three qualities that every human being is born with, but they're not necessarily developed. They need strengthening. That's what I go to do and it's really radically changed my life, my choices, my behaviors,

• 34:26Speaker 01

  and the way I show up for my mom and my friends and my parents.

• 34:31Dan Harris?

  Yeah, and your wife and everybody.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:36Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Diego talks about what selfless listening is and how to do it. The liberation that comes from equanimity and some incredibly valuable lessons he's learned from 12 years of meditation. He made a list of the 12 things he learned after so many years of, of pretty hardcore practice. And we'll dive into that after the break.

• 35:00Dan Harris?

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• 35:45Dan Harris?

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• 36:45Dan Harris?

  So I'm going to make a little bit of a pivot in this conversation that we talked about before I started rolling. But before I do that, I want to put a little bit of a bow around the relationships aspect of this conversation because you have this new book where you're really talking about the connection between meditation and love. Just as a reminder, the book's called How to Love Better. And I want to make a pivot to sort of getting even deeper into your meditation practice in a second, but staying on the, on the subject of love. If I've understood your latest writing correctly, one of the primary points you're trying to make is that love is not a feeling. It's not just a feeling, it's a practice.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:31Dan Harris?

  Am I right about that? And if so, can you just hold forth on it a little bit?

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can even break it down between, there's a difference between feeling the love for something that you care about, right? Like love, you can use it to describe anything that's extremely important to you. Like, I love this, I love that. But what's really important in the relationship is that... It takes time to learn how to care for someone. Like, learning how to care for them compassionately, trying your best to understand, you know, their emotional history, understanding how they like to be supported. Like, these are things that you're developing over time and they don't just happen. It's not like your relationship's supposed to be easy all the time and exciting.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Like, this is stuff that was fed to us by, you know, clever storytelling for romantic comedies, where like you meet someone and then you have one sort of problem that you have to overcome and then you're happily ever after. Life is not like that. The same way that you have ups and downs as an individual, you are going to have ups and downs in your relationship. And there are clever ways to try to deal and face those ups and downs. I mean, one of the biggest points is really, especially in the moments when you're having arguments, doing your best to not strive to win the argument, but instead putting your energy into trying to understand each other. Like, one of the sentences by Thich Nhat Hanh that has really inspired

• 39:01Speaker 01

  the chapter, "The Art of Arguing" in the book, is "Love is understanding." And it's absolutely 100%, like, it just couldn't be said more clearly. But how do you get there? How do you get to that point? And that's where I talk about selfless listening. That's where I talk about taking turns describing the series of events and how things moved for each person and doing your best to see where your partner's coming from. And in the act of seeing each other, the tension slowly starts melting away. And it's something that is, you know, it's hard because we're really wired for defensiveness whenever we feel threatened. But we have to train ourselves to understand that, like, oh, like, I don't need to win this.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Actually, my goal should be to try to understand, like, why is this happening? And let's talk it out.

• 39:49Dan Harris?

  Well, you said a lot in there. I want to come back to love as understanding in a second, but I think as a top line notion, and this is very similar to what the aforementioned Michael Vincent Miller talks about, that we're sold this idea that we're going to go from, and this is me quoting here, "one enchanted evening to happily ever after."

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:09Dan Harris?

  But in fact, as Michael says, you know, love is not like, you know, we talk about falling in love as if it's actually like a passive in some way.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:19Dan Harris?

  But it is an active thing that you're building with somebody. And your reframe that love is a practice, not a feeling, is, I think, really helpful. The second thing, though, you talked about, after mentioning the Thich Nhat Hanh, who, just for the uninitiated, is a great Zen master who passed away a couple of years ago, and he talks about how he views love as understanding. And within the context of you talking about that, you mentioned selfless listening. What is that and how do we do it?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  A long time ago, I read this essay by Jiru Krishnamurti, and he was talking about being able to just see something where if you're looking at a tree, you're just looking at it, you're not projecting onto it, you're not thinking about something else, you're just fully taking in that moment. And this was around 2013, when I was first starting my meditation journey, and I was experiencing some of that on my own. So when I read this, I was like, oh, he's giving words to the things that I'm experiencing. And when we started bringing that quality into the way that we handle our arguments, where in a moment, okay, we're having an argument, but we have to understand that, one, the person

• 41:34Speaker 01

  that I'm arguing with is not my enemy. This is someone that I love. This is my partner, my roommate, my best friend, someone who's very important to me. So let me approach this argument without intensity and just do my best to try to listen selflessly. And what that really means is, in this moment, when I'm listening to my wife's story and hearing how things move for her, I'm not thinking about how to retort, I'm not thinking about how to jump in. I'm literally doing my best, even though it's quite challenging, I'm doing my best to listen to how things move for her, to try to understand where she's coming from. Like, how did she land into this moment? And then I can also, after that, share how I landed in this moment. And we have found that-

• 42:17Speaker 01

  So many times, like, one of us may need to do some apologizing, but when we can really see each other, when we can really see where each other is coming from, the tension does melt away.

• 42:27Dan Harris?

  It's the opposite of what has sometimes been called predatory listening, where you're just listening for the weaknesses in their argument so that you can exploit them. You're not really seeing them.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, I've, I've never heard that term. It sounds so scary. Predatory listening. That sounds great.

• 42:42Dan Harris?

  I heard it first from a Dharma teacher. I believe it was this teacher, Winnie Nazarko, who was giving a Dharma talk and I was listening to it and that's what she said. I don't know if she coined the phrase, but one technique that's really helped me, this goes back to these communications coaches I referenced earlier, Dan and Mudita, that, because I'm not naturally very selfless, I'm naturally selfish. And that's my conditioning. So there's this technique called reflective listening. I'm sure you've heard of it, where you, somebody says something to you, your wife or anybody, and you repeat back to them in your own words, the headline. And so it forces you to listen in a kind of journalistic way

• 43:24Dan Harris?

  so that you can repeat back to them the bones, as Mudita says, the bones of their message. And it's incredibly gratifying for the other person. And I play this little game where I try to see how many times I can get people I'm talking to to say back to me the word exactly. Because I've summed up their argument over and over well enough that they say exactly.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  That's really nice because you're, you're really, really honing in and training yourself to listen. I think that was one of the things I really struggled with too, was just listening, growing up. And I found that mistake and how it was like aggravating situations in the relationship. And it was clear, like, okay, that's the power of being in a relationship. You, that mirror is so stunningly clear. You're so deeply in proximity to another human being that what you're good at and what you're not good at is stunningly clear. And hopefully you have the time to, to work on it.

• 44:20Dan Harris?

  This is an escalation and amplification and elevation of this notion that love isn't just a passive state that you fall into. It is a relationship you actively make. And it's like a dojo, talk about a gym. I mean, this is the crucible in which you can really, it's a massive opportunity to develop as a human being.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been using the terminology, what you're doing in a relationship is you're designing a home. And we think about it in terms of the material aspects so often, but it's like, you're designing a home of like, what is this place going to feel like between the two of us? Like, how do we show up for each other? How do we handle arguments? How do we make sure that our nervous systems are calm in front of each other? So that you don't feel like you're like, you know, you don't have to have your guard up around me in any way. But it is like, I think the being in relationship, the combination of like, and this is totally right for for me as an individual, but the combination of being on this quest of meditation and simultaneously

• 45:21Speaker 01

  having a long-term relationship has been the two greatest points that feel like simultaneously, they're helping me grow because my wife is also my comrade in wisdom. Like, she is so serious about her own growth, and I trust her perception is quite clear. So it just helps me see like, you know, where I'm at. And we're honest with each other, you know, without being like petty or giving unnecessary feedback. But when a truth needs to be told, and I hear it from her, it really means a lot. And usually, it's coming from a place where, you know, she really wants what's best for me. And I think it's just so helpful. So I see myself, she sees me. And, you know, we help each other grow.

• 46:05Dan Harris?

  Yep. Okay, so you have this new book, it's called How to Love Better. And we just talked about some of the primary points you're trying to make in that book. Within the book, there's a list that really stuck out to me, that I was thinking that maybe in the second half of this conversation, we can focus on. We're not going to get to all of the 12 points in the list. You're such a good Buddhist, you make lists. The Buddhists love lists.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  I know, if you read the Sutras enough, it's everything's in a list.

• 46:33Dan Harris?

  Exactly. So you have this list, 12 lessons from 12 years of serious meditation, which I just found really interesting. We're not going to get to all 12, but I just was gonna maybe take through a few of these and, and hear what you have to say. The first lesson is, pain spreads through the web of humanity. Can you say more about that?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that became really clear to me in the earlier years. So I came from a background in nonprofit organizing. So I spent a lot of time being a part of movements and like just organizing people to make change like in their cities or in their schools. And I would see how much the world could be a better place. And like that, in combination with my love for history and just like reading about all these struggles that human beings have gone through. It's clear to me that we're often in this massive web together as human beings because we're so communal that it's almost like the hurt that someone has felt, they may intentionally or unintentionally pass it on to someone else.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  And like that, we keep passing on hurt in some form of another to each other. And that lesson felt really important to mention at the top because I do think that we live in this very precious historical moment, even with all of the chaos and all of the ups and downs and the political changes and whatnot. It feels like there's never been a time before, other than the time of the Buddha, where there are literally millions of people meditating. There are millions of people in therapy, millions of people who are like actively helping themselves like come out of past pain, come out of serious trauma, who are trying to heal themselves in some way or another.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  And what's really interesting is that I think historically, we do pass on pain to whomever is in proximity to us. But we have this opportunity now where people who are equipped with these tools, whatever we know, whether it's meditating or not, they're equipped with these tools that can help them transmute that pain. So if they do receive pain from others or receive pain, you know, in their childhood or whatnot, they can figure out how to deal with that, how to process it and how to let it go so that those that they're around, they don't pass on that pain to others. And inspires me a lot and gives me a lot of hope.

• 49:01Dan Harris?

  Yeah, more people burning their conditioning than probably at any point in human history. It is a hopeful sign. I'm not a Christian per se. I'm half Christian, half Jewish, but I'm not religious. But there is that, that thing Jesus said on the cross, you know, forgive them. They know not what they do. Hopefully I'm not mangling that because I really did go to temple more than I went to church.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:23Dan Harris?

  But I do think about like, if you just, there's this pathos to the human condition where all of these traumatized people, all of us, big T or little T, trauma with untrained minds, most of us.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:37Dan Harris?

  Walking around, passing our pathology on to others, banging up against each other like pinballs. And that's the pathos of the human pageant, really.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Whenever I think about someone who's fully in land, and I think about these archetypes like the Buddha or Jesus, these are beings that were so fully in unconditional love. Like that was their existence. Like that's the way the framework of their mind. You know how we live through ego? As you continue burning that conditioning, like we mentioned, your framework slowly starts shifting to become much more compassionate, compassion for yourself and compassion for others. And I think it is possible to take it to the ultimate level where you just exist in a framework of compassion. And what that

• 50:31Speaker 01

  means is when you look out onto the world, you don't see anyone as your enemy. No one is your enemy. There's just this flowing love. But even so, you know, there is, I think, that line that you were mentioning with Jesus on the cross, it just points out to ignorance. People just don't know what they're doing.

• 50:49Dan Harris?

  Yes. The second of your 12 lessons from 12 years of serious meditation, you've just brought us to nicely. Ego and the sense of self are not fundamentally real.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  I know. That's my favorite one. It's interesting. Sometimes people have a really tough time with that one and it trips them out. And I can understand it on an intellectual level because it might point towards.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Like nihilism or something like that. But that's not really what we're talking about here. It's just that when you just really cultivate the mind and train the mind and basically turn your mind into a microscope. There are times where, you know, when I'm in meditation retreats, it feels like I'm sitting at the edge of the universe. And I'm just really studying minute, studying like, how is reality structured? Like, how is this bound together? And, you know, you pointed at this earlier where you were talking about individuals and the causes and conditions that got them here. But you can also see that internally, they are a set of causes and conditions,

• 51:51Speaker 01

  that they're literally this bundle of mental and physical phenomena that have come together and are moving in these incredibly rapid speeds that create this sense of I. It makes you feel like, oh, I exist. But when you really sharpen the mind and you point that lens inward, it becomes quite clear that it isn't even that there's an observer. Even the observer itself starts melting away. And you start seeing that that which is observing also has a quality of arising and passing away, that your consciousness is arising and passing away. The way that you react is arising and passing away. So these components that come together to create the sense of I, they fluctuate just like everything else. They're also unsubstantial.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  And personally, for me, that experience is quite liberating because I can let myself change now. I'm like, I am changed. Like, understanding that I am change has been so helpful. And just like, I don't have to stick to this idea of Diego. Diego doesn't have to be this one thing all the time. I can just keep letting myself flow, letting myself evolve, making sure that I'm existing within the confines of trying to not harm myself and not harm other people. But then other than that, I'm free to do what I want. I think it's been very freeing to just let my identity evolve.

• 53:09Dan Harris?

  I love what you said about sitting on the edge of the universe. You've done way, way more retreat time than I have, to the extent that I've had maybe one or two moments of what you might call like real equanimity. And it does feel like You're just getting a glimpse into the gear works of the universe. Like you are just seeing everything arising and passing so quickly.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  So clearly.

• 53:34Dan Harris?

  And I'm aware that for me, like that, that was a big moment. But for like experienced meditators, that's just a Tuesday. So I don't want to make too much of these experiences on my side, you know, because I, I am a real baby in this realm, but it's a thrilling and freeing thing when you recognize, yeah, this whole world that seems so solid, like a real movie is actually 24 frames per second. And yeah, it can be scary and also really cool.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also very liberating and that feeling like I like, like I mentioned before, I'm not enlightened or anything like that. But when you think about the Buddhist teaching, it points to nirvana, the unconditioned, the truth that exists beyond mind and matter. And this experience of total freedom. And when I think about those terms like beyond mind and matter, as I've kept meditating, even though I haven't experienced it per se, I can feel like, oh, this is where this leads. This is totally heading towards like, cause to me beyond mind and matter means outside of the universe, because we're, there are so many levels of existence and mind and matter are literally the descriptor of this universe that we exist in.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  But I think you can just make the mind sharp enough that eventually it pierces right through.

• 54:51Dan Harris?

  Okay. So now you, you've, you've got a, some sort of molecular suspicion that the metaphysical claim, the core metaphysical claim of Buddhism, which is that nirvana is achievable and that nirvana is this experience, as you said, essentially outside of this universe, or at least not part of the universe that we generally have access to in our conventional lives. Your sense is even without having experienced it, the Buddha is pointing to something.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really clear and it feels like it's just, you know, what happens next? Cause you can literally feel like the way time starts slowing down, the way everything becomes so incredibly tranquil that the filaments, I don't even know what to call them, but these, these things that are binding together, the universe are ever so lightly melting away. And.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  To me, it's like, um, and I think in the beginning, when I first started meditating, that idea was so exciting, like, oh, wow, the potential to like be fully free and all that. And now I've learned to just like, that's the point of the practice. The point of the practice is to achieve ultimate liberation, but I'm not going to rush anything. I'm just going to keep practicing. Whatever happens, happens. I think it's become pretty clear, you know, to see that, yeah, I've traveled enough of this path to know where it leads.

• 56:11Dan Harris?

  Interesting. Well, you just picked up on something. I don't know if this is on your list of 12, but it's a core lesson for me and has been the relief of a lot of suffering that can come with practice. Early on in my meditative career, I would hear all this talk about Nirvana, or sometimes called Nibbana, or whatever. And then I would get ambitious. And ambition, you know, often doesn't feel very good. It's got a strivy, wanting, sweaty character to it. And so it's about holding two things in mind at the same time. One is, yeah, there is allegedly, at least, because I don't have as as strong a suspicion as you do, but there is allegedly a culmination to this path. And if you want it too much,

• 56:54Dan Harris?

  you can't get there. So you just shut up and do your meditation.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. The exact moment that you start craving it, the door closes. It's just not, just not even approachable. And it's funny, because um, I've seen it happen in myself, and I had to overcome that. And I've seen it happen to a lot of other people. But we learn and understand more of what the goal is. And then we start bringing this like Western capitalist, like productivity mentality to it. And it's like, how can I optimize? How can I get there faster? And this is the antithesis of that. This is like literally about how much can I just observe and allow my mind to be so utterly balanced that I'm letting these things unfold organically. And I think that's one of the hardest things because like, what's the Buddha really asking? He's just asking you to just observe. And that's like, one of the hardest things for a human being to do.

• 57:42Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 57:46Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Diego talks about how to make decisions for your future self, how to have so-called boundless compassion without being a pushover, and why being able to see perspectives outside of your own is a sign not only of intelligence, but also mental strength.

• 58:06Speaker 02

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• 58:38Dan Harris?

  Number three on your list is something that I resonate with quite a lot. Surround yourself with people who have the qualities you want to develop.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  I think that's one of the reasons why I've like, you know, my wife and I, we live now in Western Mass where there's a lot of meditators out here. And we've been living up here for four years and we lived in New York before that in New York City and it was just a wonderful time. And it was interesting being around in New York City, being around a lot of people who wanted to help the world in different ways, but also had a lot of ambition to like make these big goals and make them happen. And I think it was really helpful for me to be in New York City, even like being in New York City, like I got to meet you for the first time when we did the seven-minute

• 59:28Speaker 01

  thing that we made for your show in 2019 and, you know, meeting Elena Brower, just meeting different people that kickstarted my writing career. And I knew that once the writing career got established and I was like, okay, I've made some good connections, made some great friends. I'm like, I really want to grow on the practice. So I had to kind of move up here and just surround myself with people that I could learn from because, you know, I've only meditated what like maybe like somewhere between 12,000 and 13,000 hours. And that's not indicative of wisdom, that's just more indicative of effort.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  But like, I know a lot of people have meditated like 40, 50,000 hours and like, these people are weapons, you know, like their minds are just so strong and they've never written a book, never been on a podcast, they're just like quietly these beings of great wisdom. And I love being around people like that because they just, they help me grow.

• 1:00:19Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, the Buddha was not shy or subtle on this score. You know, when he talked about the three jewels, the three primary components of being a Buddhist, they were the Buddha, which is somewhat immodest, but he was basically holding himself up as an avatar of awakening, an example of the fact that this path does have a culmination and it is achievable. The second is the Dharma, which is the teachings of the Buddha. And the third jewel is the Sangha, the community. And it wasn't like an asterisk. It was the third jewel, an equal part of the trilogy. And it's often overlooked in our individualistic age.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's totally overlooked. Even with the monastics, the Sangha, we don't have as much understanding in the Western world about the like Buddhist Sangha. But there are times when I'm out here in Western Mass, I'm like, I see monks walking around up and down the hill. It's so cool. To me, it's like they've surrendered everything. They practice, they serve, and they have literally sort of donated their lives to the Dharma so that they can help the continuation of the teaching, helping the teaching continue existing for future generations. And I'm like, dang, that's some power. That's so, so amazing. So, super inspired by things like that.

• 1:01:41Dan Harris?

  I'm literally sitting here thinking, should I be moving to Western Massachusetts?

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  You gotta come hang out. It's cool. I went to your center a year and a half ago, got to give Donna to Biku and Halyo and just check out the whole center and it was just awesome.

• 1:01:55Dan Harris?

  It is, I wish it was my, well, it's definitely not my center. I know you didn't mean that, but.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, the one you go to, yeah.

• 1:02:03Dan Harris?

  The one I go to, yeah. Insight Meditation Society, everybody should check it out, dharma.org. While I'm at on the promotion tip, if people want to check out quote unquote your center, what's the website for that?

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  That's so funny. It's Dhamma, dharma.org, D H A M M A dot org.

• 1:02:19Dan Harris?

  Awesome.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we stick to the poly.

• 1:02:21Dan Harris?

  One typo can get you to one center or the next.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  I've seen it happen before with really cool results. Yeah, it's really awesome.

• 1:02:31Dan Harris?

  So number four on your list is your future is created by your present actions.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, that's a big one. I think I've seen the way that even within one lifetime, right? Because it's hard to talk about like other lifetimes because it's, you know, you don't really have much proof of that other than a feeling. But even within a lifetime, I've seen that as soon as I started improving my actions, let's say the actions that I started taking in 2012, 2013, 2014 have totally created what my 2020, 2022 look like. And the moment that I started intentionally, because I think a lot of times I was acting quite passively, unconsciously, I was just reacting and trying to, you know, move through life without a lot

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  of intention. But the moment I started activating the intention and started cultivating my habits and bringing a daily practice into my life, making sure that I always have time in the year to do these longer meditation retreats, the results have been extraordinary. And a lot of it is just helping me make better decisions. It's not like it's some magic that like, oh, you know, you do this thing and then some random thing from the sky comes and blesses your life. It's not like that. It's just that my decisions and how I move about has just become a lot clearer. And that's helped so much with the creativity. It's helped with the writing. It's helped with all these facets of life and all of it stemmed from the good actions that I've taken. So I think your actions that you put forward really set up

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  your future.

• 1:04:04Dan Harris?

  It's karma.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're literally building it. Every action, one step at a time.

• 1:04:09Dan Harris?

  Yeah, you're creating a new vapor trail.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:14Dan Harris?

  We have so much conditioning we can't control. And if you can, it's amazing to burn some off. But we can always start creating new conditioning right now.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Totally. We always have that opportunity, like Goenka, Sharon Salzberg, you know, all the good teachers, they say, start again.

• 1:04:31Dan Harris?

  Yes. Number five, make your compassion boundless.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  I think that's the challenging one. Like, we talked about that a little bit earlier about being able to look upon the world and see no one as your enemy. And people who don't cause harm, people who do cause harm, and understanding that even those who Do things that hurt others like they're struggling. They're really struggling in their mind because it's something that's happening in the mind that would even create a force of action in that manner that hurts another. So having that deeper sort of macro outlook on the human conditioning and being able to challenge yourself to make your compassion more boundless, to make your love. And this is, you know, we're talking about indirectly the practice of Metta where you're

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  really doing your best to share your merits with all beings. Like, may all beings be happy, may all beings be peaceful, may there be, you know, no strife in the world. And you notice the, the connection between having no aversion towards people or trying not to have aversion towards people and wishing them the best and that deeply supporting your own inner peace because you're not sort of like channeling all that turbulence and harboring all of that. Instead, you're giving them love.

• 1:05:49Dan Harris?

  This is timely discussion because I, and I'm sure you're getting a lot of this too, but I'm getting a lot of questions, you know, in the era of Trump, is compassion a viable strategy? I want to be clear as I ask this question, this podcast for everybody, whether you like Trump or don't like him. And I'm aware that I think the vast majority of people listening and the vast majority of the questions I'm getting along this line are from people who don't like Trump. But we're in an era of heightened polarization and division. And I am getting the sense that it's harder and harder to sell compassion. Maybe sell is not the right word, but to, to pitch people on compassion, I'm, I'm finding a lot of pushback on this.

• 1:06:33Dan Harris?

  So what do you say when you are confronted with people who push back?

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a subtlety there. There's a very important subtlety because compassion does not mean that you're a pushover. Compassion does not mean that you let people do whatever they want to do. What it really means is that you are doing your best to treat people well. And when you come across someone who is causing harm, you know, whether Trump or not, we're talking about any individual. When you come across someone who's causing harm, you do your best to stop them, but you do your best to stop them without hating them. You do your best to stop them out of compassion because they're harming others. And for the one getting harmed and the one doing the harming. And this is interesting because in the back in 2012. So I came into that first Goenka retreat with a very like a,

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  you know, social activist conditioning, quite left at the time. It was on day eight that Goenka talked about this exact thing that it just really deeply connected with me. He was like, you don't just let people harm others. You're not just going to stand there like a vegetable. You're not just going to let whatever happened, happened. Oh, that's all because of karma. It's not like that. When you come across something like that and it's in your direct line of sight, you do your best to speak up. You do your best to stop them if it's something that's on a very micro interpersonal level. But you make sure that you do that without hating the individual. You do it still with love in your heart. And the perfect example is like a small child. If you see a small child that is like really about to do something very dangerous

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  and you have to scream at them to stop them, to get their attention. It's not because you hate the kid, it's because you love them. And you're doing that from a loving place and you have to speak harshly because you need to get their attention.

• 1:08:19Dan Harris?

  I love that. The two like synonyms that I'm finding for compassion that I'm finding it go down a little easier with people. One is, goes back to the Thich Nhat Hanh thing as love is understanding.

• 1:08:33Dan Harris?

  Compassion is just understanding that we all have our vapor trails. We all have our causes and conditions and.

• 1:08:39Dan Harris?

  As Van Jones recently said to me, you know, it's not like anybody wakes up in the morning, decides to be a bad person.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46Dan Harris?

  You know, it's where everybody thinks they're doing the right thing. And so that that's just the the raw understanding and in no way precludes you from taking decisive action in disagreement. And the second is, the second like synonym is non hatred.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Dan Harris?

  You know, it's a very Buddhist way of saying it. It's it just means that you you can take the same actions. They just don't have to be based in hatred because hatred is not a clean burning fuel. It will burn you out over time. And so if you're drawing on the wellspring of compassion for yourself, for the people you care about, and even for the other person, because as you said earlier, a couple of paragraphs back, that people who are doing harm, like it's harming them, whether they're aware of it or not.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Immediately. It was even harming them before they even committed the action because they had to have this big burst of negative energy to even make that action happen. And it's creating these massive, deep, aversive imprints in their mind that are going to be with them for a long time. And I think one one last thing to add on this point that keeps coming up is like, I think all people, you know, wherever they are on the political spectrum, I think something that's important to work towards is not putting your views on a pedestal. It's just really, really important to understand that all views are imperfect. And this was one of the things that the Buddha warned the Sangha about before he died, where

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  he talked about how attachment to views could lead to division. And it's exactly what happened.

• 1:10:16Dan Harris?

  Yes, the Buddhist community fractured in some ways with some positive results. We now have these incredible.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:10:22Dan Harris?

  Schools of Buddhism, but it wasn't without turmoil.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:26Dan Harris?

  I do want to say that what you just said right there is essentially a different way of saying what you say in number seven on your 12 lessons, which is being able to see perspectives outside of your own is a sign of intelligence and mental strength.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  I think that's been like, I used to be so combative and like, and argumentative about political topics and especially when I was younger and, you know, really thought I had everything figured out. And what I've been learning over time is that I absolutely don't have everything figured out. And it would actually be quite beneficial instead of when I hear someone's view that I don't necessarily agree with, instead of fighting them on it, I've been leaning on

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Using these simple words, just tell me more. Like, I'm curious how you landed there. Like, just, you know, and without condescension, just with raw curiosity, like, tell me more. You know, you have to learn to pick your battles. Like, you don't need to fight every single person who has a different view from you. But in these moments where you do come across someone, just tell me more. You know, I want to understand how you got there. And I think that's been just so productive.

• 1:11:35Dan Harris?

  Well, we made it halfway through your list, and this is probably a good place to leave it. I'm going to ask you two questions that I always ask at the end of a conversation. One is, was there something you were hoping we would get to that we didn't get to?

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  No, I think this has been so fun, honestly. It's a breath of fresh air because it's a, I've been doing a lot of interviews to support the release of the book, but it's really nice having this Dharma context between the both of us to really kind of fully show where these lessons are coming from for How to Love Better.

• 1:12:07Dan Harris?

  I totally agree. I share that sentiment a million percent. And, you know, I just noticed over and over, I didn't sleep well last night. I can, that's neither here nor there in some sense, but I can be underslept or in a bad mood or busy, but if I'm talking Dharma.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23Dan Harris?

  It's, everything's okay.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  It's so fun. Yeah.

• 1:12:27Dan Harris?

  And so the second question I was, you kind of brought me to it nicely is, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book and also of your past books? And your Substack and just please give us all of it.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So How to Love Better, it'll be available on Amazon in bookstores. And it's my latest book. This one really focuses about relationships. It focuses on just developing harmony in relationships. Other than that, you can find me on Substack, youngpueblo.substack.com. It's one of my favorite places to really go deep on topics. Um, you know, I'm also sharing things on Instagram, Y U N G underscore P U E B L O on Instagram there. But a lot more of that is just short form and bite-sized reflection points. And I have a few other books, another nonfiction book called Lighter, and three poetry and prose books that are called the Inward Trilogy that people can get.

• 1:13:24Dan Harris?

  Excellent. We'll put links to all that in the show notes. I'll drop some links to my prior encounters with Diego slash YoungPueblo, so you can go deep.

• 1:13:34Dan Harris?

  Thank you so much for making the time to this. It was great to talk to you.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was awesome. Thank you so much.

• 1:13:42Dan Harris?

  Big thanks to Diego, AKA Yung Pueblo. Go check out his new book. Always love having him on. I'll put some links in the show notes to his prior appearances. Also, don't forget to check out what we're doing at danharris.com. If you sign up, you will get ad-free versions of this and every other podcast. You also get transcripts and key takeaways from every episode. Plus, you'll get the ability to interact with me on live video sessions where I guide a meditation and take your questions. Also, you can hit me up in the chat, too. I will answer most of the time. Final thing to do here is to thank everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

• 1:14:27Dan Harris?

  Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn from the Van Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

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