E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love

This week we dive deep into the transformative insights of writer Yung Pueblo, exploring his journey towards becoming a presence of love. He shares his experience of sitting through a 45-day Vipassana silent retreat, shedding light on how such profound stillness can deepen our wisdom and awareness. He discusses the importance of embracing impermanence and the practices necessary for honing the power of the mind while erasing conditioned responses. Reflecting on his personal evolution from darkness to brightness, Yung Pueblo reveals how he began sharing his poetry on Instagram, igniting a movement of self-love and healing. He opens up about the power of relationships to serve as a container for growth and transformation. He explores why love alone isn't sufficient for sustaining relationships, highlighting the value of solitude and the skills needed for cultivating long-term connections. Through discussions about the miracle of life, the significance of listening to our intuition, and staying grounded in spirituality, this episode is a heartfelt invitation to awaken and embody love in all aspects of life. Energy & focus without the jitters? Try MUDWTR & Get Up to 43% off + a free frother: https://mudwtr.com/knowthyself André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ 0:00 Intro 1:59 Writing as Yung Pueblo 3:33 Becoming a Presence of Love 5:11 Sitting a 45 Day Vipassana (Silent Retreat) 8:03 Deepening Our Sense of Wisdom & Awareness 16:36 Embracing Impermanence 19:48 Honing the Power of the Mind & Erasing Conditioning 29:07 His Life: Going From Darkness to Brightness 34:05 Starting His Instagram & Poetry 35:31 Ad: Mudwtr - Energy & Focus Without the Jitters 37:03 Facing off With the Ego 40:11 Relationships as a Container for Growth 45:35 The Qualities of Enlightened States 48:52 Learning to Love Better: From Arguments to Allowing 59:08 Why Love Isn’t Enough to Make a Relationship Work 1:01:44 The Value of Solitude 1:06:20 Skills for Cultivating Long Term Relationships 1:14:54 This Life is a Miracle 1:18:17 Listening to Intuition 1:22:58 Staying Grounded with Spirituality 1:27:43 The Power of Meditation 1:32:18 Mystical Experiences 1:38:52 Conclusion ___________ Diego Perez is a meditator and #1 New York Times bestselling author who is widely known by his pen name, Yung Pueblo. Online he has an audience of over 4 million people. His writing focuses on the power of self-healing, creating healthy relationships, and the wisdom that comes when we truly work on knowing ourselves. He has sold over 1.5 million books worldwide that have been translated into over 25 languages. Diego is a general partner at Wisdom Ventures and a founder of Ready Platform, a dating and relationship support app. Diego’s new book, How to Love Better, will be released in March 2025. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yung_pueblo/?hl=en Books: https://yungpueblo.com ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  There's something very different and powerful about the wisdom that comes from your own direct experience. It's not easy to be open to deleting your conditioning. You can talk to your therapist, you can talk to your teachers, you can, you know, read stuff online, but ultimately it's up to you to bring it into action, to make it real in your life. Vipassana, it's a path of purification that leads to the end of suffering. When you observe the body with this crisp clarity, what you get is this truth that's pervasive throughout the universe, this truth of impermanence. It's awareness, it's a sharpened awareness. The mind can become like a cannon, like it becomes so much stronger. I went into meditating because I needed to save myself. But in the act of saving myself, immediately I noticed that my relationships were very surface level

• 0:45Speaker 00

  and that I could do something about it. When you cultivate your emotional skillset so that you can have more peace in your mind, it immediately helps support you in your relationship. Through meditating has really helped me see that this life, it's a giant miracle.

• 1:06André Duqum?

  Diego Perez.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Hey, how's it going?

• 1:09André Duqum?

  Thanks for coming, man.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  I'm so happy to be here. I've been looking forward to this day for a while now, so I'm glad we get to connect.

• 1:16André Duqum?

  Me too, man. It's been really cool to see your content online. I feel like we always have these, you know, these parasocial relationships with people's content, their message.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27André Duqum?

  And you hope that they live up in person to the energy that you see online and pleasantly reassured that was the case.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Likewise, yeah. I wasn't, um, I wasn't trying to put any expectations, but I knew that like, just from what you were giving off, that it was gonna be good to be friends. And it was funny because like, it's fun to be on a podcast, but I was like, I think we should be friends.

• 1:51André Duqum?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:54André Duqum?

  So your pen name, Yung Pueblo, which a lot of people know you under, that means young people, right? What was the kind of setup for that in terms of how you feel like where we are, where humanity is?

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, the name, you know, it's funny. When I got on Instagram back in 2012, when I opened my account, that was a name that like immediately came to mind was Yung Pueblo. It didn't really take meaning until I started meditating and I started realizing how immature I was. And I'm like, wow, I have a lot of growing to do. But then I've always been a big fan of history and have been just, you know, read a lot of history books and have noticed how humanity as a whole is incredibly young. Like we just, you know, we don't know the basic fundamentals of what we try to teach children. And I'm talking collectively, right? As humanity as a whole, like we don't do, you know, we don't know how to clean up after ourselves. We don't know how to stop hitting each other. We don't know how to tell the truth.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  We don't know how to properly care for each other. So whatever we try to teach, you know, four-year-olds, three-year-olds, like collectively as a humanity, we haven't mastered these important things.

• 3:02André Duqum?

  Yeah, so you've been writing so much, sharing so much content, writing a lot of books. Your fifth one's coming out now, How to Love Better, which was amazing. And it's

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 3:13André Duqum?

  It's such an important reflection where we find ourselves like on the macro scale of humanity, but our own individual lives, learning how to love better. And for me, I feel like I have really devoted trying my best to become a presence of love in life and redefining like, what does that mean, you know, for me? And I'm curious, when I say that, becoming a presence of love, what comes to mind for you?

• 3:38Speaker 00

  It's awareness. It's a sharpened awareness. You know, you're aware of your own emotional range and you're also, because you're so tapped into yourself and you can see the movements of your mind, that helps you immediately develop a sense of compassion. And as you see others around you also moving through their emotional range, it helps you have empathy and compassion for them. And yeah, it's interesting because

• 4:04Speaker 00

  That's like one of my goals too, is like to try to, and I use a different terminology, like I'm just trying to move through the world gently. Where I felt like when I was younger, growing up, like I grew up in a lot of poverty. And that made me create a very like hard outer layer. And I felt like when I was younger, I was moving through the world rather roughly because I was, you know, in survival mode, trying to figure out how to get to the next week. But now I feel like I'm just trying to move through gently. And part of moving through the world gently is just, you know, being like a vehicle of love and trying to deliver as much kindness and compassion as I move through.

• 4:43André Duqum?

  There's innumerable paths and ways in which life reflects back to us. And then the practices that we take up on the journey and just living life has its way of refining us to deeper levels of awareness. Or pain that will lead us to make that choice to deepen our awareness. I know you have deep familiarity with both. And we were just chatting beforehand how Dhamma and Vipassana has been a big part of both of our journeys. And you recently came back from a 45 day silent retreat. How long ago?

• 5:17Speaker 00

  That was the beginning of 2024, so in January to February. Yeah, that was the second 45 day course that I did.

• 5:26André Duqum?

  And then, yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  And it was awesome.

• 5:30André Duqum?

  For people that aren't familiar with what Vipassana is, I'd love for you to share just what that consists of. Because quite frankly, sitting, for better or worse, you know, you're essentially alone for 45 days, meditating on average seven to 10 hours a day. And that sounds pretty intense.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the longer courses, you're sitting a lot. You're sitting like 11 hours a day. And there's no interaction. The teacher during the 45 day course only checks you two times during the 45 days. And It's, you know, they're literally like four-minute-long conversations, just asking, "How are you doing? How's it going?" And Vipassana, it's a path of purification that leads to the end of suffering. And it's really driven by observing reality as it is, where you're not trying to project onto reality, you're not trying to manipulate it. You're just rawly observing through the framework of the body. And when you observe the body with this crisp clarity,

• 6:34Speaker 00

  what you get is this truth that's pervasive throughout the universe, this truth of impermanence. And it's really interesting, like, you know, after going to the longer courses, it's become so sharply clear that embracing impermanence is the direct opposite of attachment. And we cling, we cling. And whenever we cling and we're attached to whatever it is that we want, you know, wanting things to exist in a very particular way, we suffer. And what Vipassana does is it essentially trains the mind to embrace impermanence. And that helps in every facet of life.

• 7:12André Duqum?

  So what's really unique about Vipassana and its path is really a scientific approach to the awakening and purification process of our spiritual journey. And an aspect, which is, you could say largely it's helping us cultivate, is panya, which is wisdom, right?

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:29André Duqum?

  And I love how they sort of break it down into the three different types of wisdom. You know, there's the wisdom acquired through external means, where you hear somebody, or maybe an Instagram quote.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:40André Duqum?

  That could lead to the second type, which is like an intellectual understanding. And then the third would be the experiential knowing, right? Where it's the wisdom that actually lives in you as you through you. And as somebody who's been such an advocate and leader and teacher and sharer of thoughts throughout the past decade, online especially, I'm curious what you think about the difference between those levels of knowing and wisdom?

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:06André Duqum?

  And how it's important to deepen our sense of wisdom?

• 8:10Speaker 00

  That's a lovely question. Yeah, sutta maya panya, chitta maya panya, bhavana maya panya. You know, it's interesting. I think it's, we can be really inspired by each other, hearing each other's wisdom and hearing about each other's experiences.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  And that can inform the mind. It can encourage you to behave in certain ways, in better ways. And then there's also, you know, the information that you can like, sort of spin around in your own mind and understand intellectually. But there's something very different and powerful about the wisdom that comes from your own direct experience. When you have these moments of either by being aware of what's happening internally or by moving through life and you're directly experiencing what you were doing wrong and the shift into doing it a little more skillfully. And how that just will bring you this deeper insight that can be quite life-changing. And I think that's why a lot of these, you know, whether there's different forms of Vipassana,

• 9:10Speaker 00

  but a lot of them are based in direct experience. And that's why they become such transformative tools for us. Because when you're in moving through that direct experience, it's like the reality of life and the reality of how to move about more skillfully just hits you so much harder than it can if you were reading a book. You know, and I say this often to like, to the audience, like, you can talk to your therapist, you can talk to your teachers, you can, you know, read stuff online, but ultimately it's up to you to bring it into action, to make it real in your life.

• 9:46André Duqum?

  Yeah, very much so breaking the barrier between our conscious and subconscious mind.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 9:52André Duqum?

  Because you speak and write so much about healing and the journey of awakening. And it is that process of bringing was once unconscious, these patterns and habits of our mind that control us without our full conscious awareness, to actually experiencing and seeing and facing off with the difficulties and pain of whatever is undealt with, that don't even necessarily have to have stories attached to them, right?

• 10:15Speaker 00

  No, no, I think it's, so that's an interesting point where it hit me a few years ago as I was meditating, how it's really valuable to understand your emotional history, what you've gone through and whatnot. But your healing is not really happening through intellectualizing. It's happening through your ability to just feel and be okay with what you're feeling, not making it worse, not suppressing it, you're just feeling it. And I think there's a lot of power in just realizing that.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  It's good to be informed, but you know, just swimming in the memories is not necessarily going to make it better. It's actually coming back into the contact with the body. And I think that's one of the things that's so powerful about Vipassana is like, and the Buddhist teaching in general, is that he figured out that anything that arises on the mind simultaneously arises with sensations. And we're not reacting to the thoughts, the memories, you know, all these things. You're reacting to how that makes you feel. You either like it, crave it, or you don't like it and you have aversion towards it. And that's what creates all that difficult conditioning that makes the mind really cloudy.

• 11:20André Duqum?

  I'd love to hear you break down in your words, the process of becoming aware of those more subtle sensations. For people that don't know Vipassana, where you first start with the observation of your breath, and then you're moving into the deeper awareness of the vibrations within your body. If you could share a little bit about that, and then we can dive deeper into it.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. It's really interesting. So you know, when you go to your 10 day courses, you'll start the first three and a half days with just being aware of the breath. And being aware of the natural breath, it's very difficult. It's not easy. You know, the mind just loves to jump around. But when you keep putting effort, a very calm effort towards it, and bringing yourself back to it, it makes the mind so calm and so sharp. And what ends up happening is that the mind, you know, the ability to be aware becomes magnified and strengthened. You know, I tell people, like, when you're going to these courses, it's like taking yourself to the mental gym. Like, you're specifically developing

• 12:20Speaker 00

  awareness, then developing non-reaction, and you're developing compassion. And once you develop that awareness, you then take that, you know, new strength, the strength that you've developed, you turn it into the body, and your body can feel so clear, in a way where you can always feel your body. You can feel when pain's happening, or when something pleasurable is happening. But you can feel your body to a new level of crispness that where it feels like, you know, there are times for me personally, where my body just feels like a rushing river of atoms, where it's just so clearly like, even in this moment, I can feel my hand. And it looks, you know, solid, but it doesn't feel solid.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  It feels like it's just changing vibrations.

• 13:09André Duqum?

  It's so fascinating because I think when it comes to wanting to grow in our life, a lot of people are familiar with physical change and seeing somebody go to the gym and get shredded and they have six pack abs or something. You can see the physicalness of it and the externalization of growth. But why mental health is largely also such a big epidemic is because it's invisible. We can't see into the aspects of each other's minds, you know, outside of the actions that come out and stem from them. But it's much more difficult to have a reference point for what it can feel like to be a liberated being where you're not so closely identified with this voice in our head that runs our life, that won't leave us the heck alone.

• 13:54André Duqum?

  And it's, it really is an amazing challenge for anybody who's listening, who hasn't already, just try to observe your breath continuously without broken attention for every inhale and exhale and see how long you can last, you know, because it is shockingly difficult. Our mind is, the habit of the mind just jumps right back in.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is, it is really difficult. Even trying to do it for one minute is like a massive challenge. It sounds so easy, but it's, it's very challenging and it's nice when you have those longer meditation courses, like the 45 day courses, you spend 15 days just practicing on upona, being aware of the breath. And over that time period, like, you know, the mind can become like a cannon, like it becomes so much stronger. And then when you then turn and point that attention for the last 30 days of a pasana, it's like the truth of the universe just hits you so clearly. It's like, wow, like the, you know, this, it feels like I, but it's just composition. It's just something that's flowing together, mental and physical phenomena moving at incredibly

• 15:01Speaker 00

  rapid speeds and you can feel the way all these different aspects of, you know, your, what you think of as your internal reality are just fluctuating and changing at incredibly rapid speeds. But I think what you're pointing to is like, it's important to realize that.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  The magic of paying attention to your mental health and trying to do something about it, like to make your mind less turbulent, the results of that are in changed behavior. Like when you see the changed behavior, like, you know, the way you see the change after going to the gym, it's like you're building your six pack abs and your muscles. But then it's like, wait, I know that I'm missing patience. Let me intentionally cultivate patience. And then you see that your patience is growing over time, or your ability to listen, or your ability to pull yourself outside of your own perspective and see the perspective of another. Like, those are things that are incredibly powerful and just as worthy as muscles. Yeah.

• 15:57André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's the experiential knowing that we were speaking to before. When you feel yourself as a being of flowing, continuous vibrations and not this solid I, this solid locus of thoughts and emotions, kind of somewhere crouched around here that's like, you know, kind of in a survival energy towards the external world. It takes it from knowledge to truly wisdom because you're living that experience. And, you know, I'd like to get your perspective on impermanence because it's such an important thing for us to, one, understand intellectually and then also deepen our experience of. Because life has this illusion of continuity.

• 16:39André Duqum?

  Like, for example, a lot of these lights that are around us are actually flickering, maybe hundreds of times per second, but because it's so fast, so rapid, we're not aware to the degree that it's actually not a full, continuous light source. And similarly, within our experience of life, we have this experience of being a solid self moving through solid space and time. And as you deepen from anapana to pappasana, you're starting to really experience that illusoriness.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, you get a really clear, like...

• 17:15Speaker 00

  You know, it just sort of jumps you into like what's true. It's just like, here's the shock of reality. Like, you're not this still, static thing. You're actually just composed. Like, it's a composition of all of these forces coming together. And I think it's really, like, I'm so grateful. Like, I think that's been one of my biggest points of gratitude, is understanding that my identity isn't static. And being able to feel the dynamism of it, to be able to feel like, you know, my body has a rushing river of atoms. And really clearly feel that, you know, which one of these atoms is me? Like, where is the focal point of my existence?

• 18:00Speaker 00

  If everything is arising and passing away at such incredibly rapid speeds? And you understand that, oh, it's actually okay. It actually is rather helpful to understand that you simultaneously exist and you don't exist. And being able to live with these two truths. Like Lady Saida said, you know, if you say you exist, that's true. If you say you don't exist, that's also true. Neither of them are lies. And this is something that you get, you know, because you, especially when you go to these Vipassana retreats, you are being exposed to the ultimate reality. Like, at the conventional level, you and I are having a conversation. At the ultimate level, what's happening, right? It's just atoms. It's just like subatomic particles moving at really rapid speeds. And we just happen to be like near each other.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  And I think knowing that has just given me so much liberty in like allowing my preferences to evolve, like allowing the past to be the past and like moving into the present with just openness and not being attached to the observer, right? Like, even with Vipassana, like, you know, some people say just, you know, be the observer, but even the observer melts away.

• 19:11André Duqum?

  It goes back to what you said at the beginning of deciding to live more gently. Like when you experience the impermanence of something, that there will be a first and last time that we do anything in life.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:22André Duqum?

  It changes radically how we approach all of our relationships, our career, our family, and how we engage with them, because as much as I love, you know, this conversation and meeting you, who knows what's gonna happen to either of us the next moment, you know?

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:39André Duqum?

  And that invites actually an immense presence and that brings so much more aliveness to life. On the path of deepening our awareness, I found, especially through, you know, studying through Dhamma and Vipassana, learning how there's three types of actions that we can have, you know, from the physical, which were all obvious, you know, are obvious to us, to the vocal, to our mental, which is the most subtle, and they put the most importance on because they're closest to the source of which where our impulses arise. I found that there's so much more importance on our mental, my mental volition.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:23André Duqum?

  Like I found that as a direct path to like the doorway, the gateway into my subconscious and unconscious, but also like where so much transformation comes. And so what, what is mental volition and how you would explain it?

• 20:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, um, you know, the intention that you're moving and using in like the way that you're, what's giving energy to your actions, right? There's so much, so much of life seems external, but what is the energy behind your actions? And that energy, that mental volition, you know, creates conditioning. It's, it's a different way of thinking about karma. It's like the internal component of karma where like your actions will literally shape your subconscious and they will return results at some point too. But I think understanding that. This conditioning is like, it's being built all the time from the moment that you're born, all throughout your life. I think sometimes in Western psychology, people think of the subconscious

• 21:21Speaker 00

  as something that's formed during childhood. But I think from this demonic perspective, the subconscious is, you know, it's aggregating things throughout the entirety of your life. Every time you have a very strong reaction to whatever it is that you're feeling, it's adding more imprints, you know, what Gomukji calls sankaras. It's like it's adding more and more imprints to the mind. And all of those imprints will affect your perception. Like it just makes your perception super cloudy, very past oriented, rather defensive and impulsive. So it's hard to live life where like you're like walking around with this like thick layer of, you know, basically having all of those past mental volitions just flooding your view

• 22:05Speaker 00

  so that you can't see reality clearly. And it's interesting, the process of vipassana makes, you know, it literally helps you stop creating more of this conditioning. And by stopping creating that conditioning, by just being non-reactive and being aware, all the old stuff melts away. And it's, that's why when I, you know, after I did my first course, when I came out of it, I didn't understand the technique, didn't know what was going on, barely, you know, barely made it through the first course, but I was like, my mind feels lighter. And now, looking back on it, it's like, oh, this, you know, even the small moments where I was able to meditate correctly, had a huge impact where like huge chunks of conditioning burned away and helped me see a little bit more clearly, helped my mind be a little bit calmer.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  And then I just, you know, so that first course was July of 2012. And then the second course was in September of 2012, because I was like, I gotta go back. Like I need to find out how this works.

• 23:01André Duqum?

  Similar timeframe when I sat my first 10 day, and then six months later went and served my first one.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:08André Duqum?

  Man, looking back, you really are able to connect the dots how for me, and I'm sure for you, like, that was such a big pivotal point of transformation. And you can see the change in how, you know, even if it puts you two degrees in a different direction in life, over the course of a decade, you're in a completely different zip code, you know?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's really powerful. Like, you know, it's funny, because sometimes people will go to courses and they may do one in their lifetime, but it like will really, it's a big impact that it has, and it helps delete conditioning. And I've noticed that, like, I went through a while where I wasn't meditating daily, and I was, you know, I think I did like four courses and one course of service before I started meditating daily. But even with those courses, like, my mind was radically different, like, even though I didn't bring the practice back to, you know, doing it daily. And then, once I did pick it up, date, and started meditating daily, that just like took the growth to a whole nother level.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  But it's surprising how, you know, those moments of being aware, and it goes back, you know, those lines in the Dhammapada where it's like, you know, you can do tons of different, like, you know, beautiful positive things, but the most powerful thing you can do is like, being aware for like a minute. And it's really true, like, you spend a few moments just being aware and being equanimous, and like, your life can just really change for the better.

• 24:36André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think somewhere in the Dhammapada, I believe the Buddha's reference as saying one minute of pure, proper awareness is worth more than a full lifetime of unawareness.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:46André Duqum?

  And that's quite a statement.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:48André Duqum?

  But it points to what you were speaking to about the color-tinted glasses that often we're living life through. It's not, in many ways, it's not actually an intimate experience with life, it's just conditioning, reacting to other conditioning that we're presented with in life.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're like, that's something that a lot of people have difficulty with, is that your perception and your reaction, they're happening inside of you. And your perception is very past-oriented, it's very oriented towards whatever it is that happened before, and you're just kind of moving through life, and whenever you see something... That is similar to what's happened before. Already the impulsiveness comes up, the reaction comes up of like, how do I defend myself in this situation? This reminds me of this person who hurt me in the past. And immediately the past comes roaring up. And it just repeats itself over and over and over again, until you put your foot down and you break the recreation of the past so that you can finally arrive into the present moment with choices.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  And that's something that I'm really also grateful for because, you know, the impulsiveness was so fast in the past that it made me feel like I didn't have a choice. Like it was just like, oh, that's the real me. You know, this anger, this sadness, this anxiety. But no, it's just, it's just the past trying to recreate survival mode. And having that sort of spaciousness of mind to be able to see, oh, there's my old reaction. There's the past trying to recreate itself. But you know, I'm gonna, I'm, I don't want to do that. I actually want to live intentionally and choose something new.

• 26:18André Duqum?

  I found the understanding of like how our mind works, you know, on the path to knowing ourself. If we want to actually know who we are and what life is, then it is delineating the path, the difference between what is us and what isn't us. And on that journey, like you said, it's really important to be mindful of what impressions we're accumulating. Because the conscious mind can always accept or reject, say, I like this, I don't like this.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:45André Duqum?

  But the subconscious mind is always recording. It only works through addition and multiplication.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:51André Duqum?

  And so that's why, especially I think since I first got introduced to like this path and various other meditative contemplative practices, the importance of guarding what you are impressed upon you, from the music you listen to, to the movies you watch, the people you hang around. All of it is without your full awareness.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:10André Duqum?

  And even the things that you're not aware of, because our awareness can only be around, can only perceive consciously, like a certain amount of bits of information.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:19André Duqum?

  Our subconscious, our body is picking up so much, like a sponge.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  It's a sponge. I was literally just telling this to a friend. I'm like, whether you like it or not, your mind is a sponge. And it is just swallowing everything and it's affecting.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Like, just the way you think, the way you show up in life. And you have to be really intentional about, you know, we were talking before we started recording. Like, one of the reasons my wife and I moved to the woods was we wanted to be around, there's a bunch of other, you know, there's a lot of meditation traditions that have sort of, you know, had important moments in Western Massachusetts. Like, Joseph Goethe and Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, they started a center in Western Mass. The first, the first Goancha G Center outside of India was in Western Mass, too. And there's a bunch of different monasteries, you know. And a lot of monks, there's just been a lot of different traditions that have,

• 28:17Speaker 00

  and people who are teachers who've just had a lot of like awakening moments there in Western Mass. So my wife and I were like, oh, let's go hang out with our like fellow meditator friends who've been meditating for like 20, 30, 40, 50 years and just like be around them, you know, learn from them. And I think it's been really nice because being around them and being around people who are actively cultivating their self-awareness, like actively cultivating their equanimity or non-reaction and are trying to live through meta, trying to live like with this loving kindness towards all beings. It's really nice, like, how can, you know, it's such a gift to give yourself.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  So it's been, I think that's been sort of reinforcing this positive conditioning for the two of us.

• 29:06André Duqum?

  And in the Chorus, a big teaching is the four types of people that, you know, those that are going from darkness to darkness.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:14André Duqum?

  Those that are going from darkness to brightness. Those that are going from brightness to darkness. And those that are going from brightness to brightness. And I think it's an important framework because it, it helps us reflect on which direction our life is going. If we're accumulating more unconscious impressions that are building towards a life of reaction or if we're going towards more awareness.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:38André Duqum?

  So I'm just curious if you'd like to reflect on a moment in your personal life where you went from darkness to darkness, to darkness to brightness, to now hopefully brightness to brightness.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:49André Duqum?

  Because I think, yeah, I just breathe some humanity into this as I know your journey in life has been. A quite a wild journey, very full spectrum.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  I think the biggest sort of darkness to darkness moment was really like the first half of my life. So I was, I was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in South America. And when I was four years old, my parents realized that there was no real sort of economic future for us there. And they wanted to, they thought it was better to take the risk of moving to the United States and seeing, you know, what would happen. And when you move to the United States, it's like rolling the dice. You just, you just don't know what you're gonna get. And I was fortunate that my, my parents are very hard workers, but my dad worked at a supermarket, my mom worked cleaning houses. So we were like, we were stuck in a very serious poverty trap.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  And as I was growing up, it was just a constant challenge, like literally a constant struggle, where my parents were always trying to figure out how to pay the rent. They were always, you know, trying to figure out how to fill the fridge. And I would see that struggle, you know, they would fight about it. They would try to figure, figure it out each month for like, you know, more than a, more than a decade. And in, things didn't really improve until my brother and I started getting older and we were, you know, able to get jobs as teenagers and just like, take that load off of my parents. But all of that created, like I mentioned earlier, a really kind of rough outer layer of me where I like, wasn't trying to like intentionally hurt people, but I was just

• 31:30Speaker 00

  like rough with my words and I was moving around in a very sort of defensive format. And as I got older and when I went to college, I didn't realize how big of an imprint all of that had on my subconscious, where I was so full of this scarcity mindset, so full of sadness, so full of anxiety, and I had no way to process it. You know, this is very like pre-wellness. So. You know, therapy wasn't as accessible as it is now. You know, I didn't know of anybody meditating. So when I got to college, I started picking up really bad habits, where I was really actively trying to run away from my emotions as fast as possible. And I was using drugs and alcohol as a medium for that,

• 32:15Speaker 00

  where I was partying constantly, doing a lot of drugs, and just like pushing my body to the edge. And it, you know, that was just like a long darkness to darkness moment. And it led to a rock bottom moment where I almost lost my life because I just did too many drugs one night. And my heart was like literally breaking, like it felt like it was exploding. And I talked to a doctor later and she said that, from what I was describing to her, that I had like a mild heart attack. And this was when I was 24, 23, 24 years old. And in that moment, I was like realizing that if I continued in this path, I was gonna die, like my body was just gonna give out on me.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  And I thought about my parents and how much they sacrificed and how hard they worked, you know, to give me a chance to make a life that's different from theirs. And it kind of woke me up to just realizing that I needed to do the opposite of what got me to that point. So to me, it was like, it all felt very intuitive, where if I was doing drugs, if I was doing drugs, I need to stop doing drugs. If I'm lying to myself about how I don't feel good, I need to admit to myself the truth. If I'm running away from my emotions, like instead of rolling up another joint, just spend time feeling the anxiety, feeling the sadness. And that was like the slow walk from darkness to light

• 33:42Speaker 00

  and just like trying to like, you know, be intentional about how am I crafting my life. And then about a year later from that rock bottom moment is when I did my first 10-day course. And that kind of just really picked up all the growth. Hmm. Yeah.

• 33:59André Duqum?

  Amazing, man. And at what point, I'm curious, did sharing your insights and your growth, and when did that come into the picture?

• 34:07Speaker 00

  That was in, so after the third 10-day course that I did, I started feeling that the changes that I was going through were significant. Like, I wasn't enlightened, I wasn't like fully healed, or fully wise, or anything like that. But I knew that I was on this growth journey. And I felt like I was learning a lot, and my intuition was really clear. It was like, just start writing, like, start writing. And even though you have a lot of growing to do, just start reflecting. And at the time, I was really inspired by the first-generation Instagram poets, like RM Drake and Rupee Coward. In like, 2014, they were like, getting bigger on Instagram. And I was like, oh, let me start writing little

• 34:50Speaker 00

  essays. So I would write like, little essays on the caption. And back then, you know, words and images, like memes, weren't as popular. So I would like, you know, go to the parks in the city, in like, New York City and everything, and take like, little pictures, and like, put up, you know, nice little pictures of nature, and like, write little essays about what I was, you know, reflecting on. And then I started taking the main idea of whatever I was writing about, or a little poem, and sharing them in, you know, black and white images. And then after that, things started picking up. So from 2014 to 2017, was when things really kind of got started for me in terms of like, the Yung Pueblo account.

• 35:31André Duqum?

  Hey fam. I hope that this episode with Diego is bringing you value and a sense of ease in your life. One thing that brings me joy in my life is my morning ritual. Having healthy habits in the morning that build a foundation for steady energy throughout the rest of the day to be our best self is a major key. And for me, every day, I start with shrooms.

• 35:53André Duqum?

  And not the psychedelic kind, but through a coffee alternative like the ones in Mudwater, where their blend contains adaptogenic mushrooms like lion's mane to support focus and chaga and reishi to support your immune system. For me, drinking something like cacao, which is in Mudwater, instead of coffee is a big win. I rarely go without it in the morning. And if you don't know, Mudwater is 100% organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, sugar-free, and vegan. I absolutely love this company. My good buddy Shane is the founder, and so I know how much intention they put into their creations, and they invest in mental wellness as well. I'm stoked to be partnering with them for 2025. If you want to give them

• 36:32André Duqum?

  a try, you can head to mudwtr.com/knowtheyself and grab a starter kit. Right now, our community at Know Theyself gets an exclusive deal, which is up to 43% off your entire order, plus a rechargeable frother, which is free. It comes in a little package like this with cool little sayings over it. It's pretty affordable for the like, quality of the product that it is. Again, it's up to 43% off at M U D W T R dot com slash know they self. I hope you enjoy.

• 37:04André Duqum?

  I'm curious, did you have any like egoic inflation in that period where I think there's the genuine urge to share insights that will be helpful to people? Did you have any ego stuff that came up on your process of gaining millions of followers?

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there that, you know, people think about the ego not just in the sense of like

• 37:23André Duqum?

  Grandiosity.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  As grandiosity, but there's also like, there's also ego in hating yourself, not thinking that you're good, and you're like inflating your ego in this like negative range. That, there was a lot of that happening where it wasn't like, like dude, I know I'm not the best writer. Like, I know I'm not like, um, you know, I like reflecting on things and sharing things that hopefully help people build self-awareness.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  But I was really hard on myself back then. Like, I was, you know, thinking about quitting all the time, thinking about, and this is also like a period where, um, like, I didn't have a lot of support from friends. Like, I didn't have a lot of, you know, a lot of people were confused. They're like, "Why are you doing this? Like, why are you, you know, writing about, why don't you just get a job?" And, um, and because I had been working in the nonprofit world for a long time, and I intentionally took a little pause and asked my wife if she could give me time to see if, like, writing could be a thing for, for us. And it was really fortunate that she did, but there was definitely ego inflation, definitely attachment to, like, you know, seeing numbers grow and stuff like that. But I think in my mind, the path, like, the Dhamma path that we're on,

• 38:33Speaker 00

  helped me see that if my ego is growing, my freedom is shrinking. So, like, I have to be really careful with that, because if my ego is growing, then I'm just going the other way. I'm going back into the dark.

• 38:45André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:46André Duqum?

  Yeah, if you want to be free.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, if I'm trying to be free, like, why would I? Yeah, I'm not gonna mess this up.

• 38:51André Duqum?

  And I think to a degree, it's inevitable, right? Like, I think it's, it's part of the path of, like, we find our way, we find some insight, and then we lose our way a little bit. And it's just like that balance of awareness and integration. Because we can have huge insights or awareness into certain aspects of life. And unless, like, we, we put that into practice and make that the new normal for us and integrate, then, yeah, it can be tough.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the ego's gonna try to grab anything, right? It's super sticky. So it's gonna try to grab whatever it can find, and it can be something as simple as, like, and I was thinking about this too, like, whether I was, you know, in the writing world or not, or, like, sharing stuff online. Like, the ego's gonna try to grow itself no matter what. So if I was still in the nonprofit world, it would have been like, "Why am I, why am I not a manager? Why am I not, like, you know, just grabbing some other type of superiority complex?" And I think have, being able to be aware of when the ego grabs something, and then coming back to the truth of impermanence, that's like, "Oh, actually, there's nothing really there." You know, "You fooled yourself again." And so it's, it makes it easier to let go.

• 39:56André Duqum?

  Yeah, and again, the inevitability of life being a, one giant mirror through all its different faces back to us of, um, our own gifts, our own inadequacies, our pain, the love that we can share, you know? And, and I'm looking forward to diving a little bit deeper into relationships also. You know, a lot of the topics of exploration in your new book. I think of just first off to start out like the mysteriousness of consciousness. Like, we have this human experience that is 100% self-contained, that just presents itself through the void of our face. Like, you know, I can't see you right now because I'm seeing through myself.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:38André Duqum?

  And that's amazing because the world presents itself to us. And yet, it creates difficulties because we're so close to our own shit. Like, we're literally looking through it as it oftentimes.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:51André Duqum?

  And that's, and so when I think of relationships and them as mirrors, through not just romantic connections, but through all different types of relationships, relationships through media, through friends and family, through the, you know, so many different aspects of it. It just, uh, it makes me think about like how this realm is set up and how mirrors and relationships serve in a very important necessity in our awakening journey. Because otherwise, there's so much stuff we can't see throughout, um, unless we have a proper mirror of our internal self.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've been reflecting on the point of relationships and it feels like relationships are this, almost a small little fitness space where we can learn the higher truths of unconditional love. So it gives you an opportunity to practice moments of unconditional love.

• 41:49André Duqum?

  Through the experience of like limitations.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, through this like confined moment where it's like, you know, both people come with past pain, both people have egos, both people have needs and wants and delusions and ignorance. And it's just this, you know, massive little bubble between human beings. And then we're trying to treat each other as best as possible, trying to learn how to care for each other. And it's interesting, I think of the, you know, beings who've reached ultimate points of evolution, like beings like the Buddha or Jesus or, you know, other human beings that have just taken that sort of, the development of where the human mind can go to the ultimate level. And They don't exist in a framework of ego. They exist in a framework of compassion. So like this ego framework that we live in, it can,

• 42:36Speaker 00

  and you feel that as you cultivate yourself, more of it starts shifting towards compassion, where it becomes easier to do what Krishna Murthy talks about, where it's like, just observe, like, don't project, just, just watch, just see what's happening. And when we're in a relationship, it's like, let me try my best to practice that. And it's funny how we keep, my wife and I, we're like, finding that the, the peace and harmony in our relationship is really coming from our ability to practice seeing each other without projecting, without trying to throw anything on to the situation and trying to just do our best to understand each other and like, live what Thich Nhat Hanh talks about,

• 43:20Speaker 00

  where, you know, love is understanding.

• 43:24André Duqum?

  And we can't understand and judge something at the same time, right?

• 43:29Speaker 00

  No, we have to listen, we have to listen. You know, it's interesting, I wanted to tell you this story. So one time I was fortunate to give food to a monk out in Western Mass. And I've, I've met a lot of people who've meditated in a lot of different traditions, a lot of really well-developed people, but only really like two that I really feel like have really seen beyond the universe. And this person that we were giving food to, he, um, so I went with my wife and our two friends. And the four of us, you know, we gave him his meal and then we were just like hanging out for an hour. And we were talking about Dhamma, talking about all this stuff.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  And at the end of it, my friend Rodrigo was like, hey, man, like, I was really trying to pinpoint. Like what was going on in my mind, but I was realizing that my experience of him were just projections. Like, there was nothing there. Like, he wasn't even like a, you know, he was just so much flowing Dhamma and compassion and freedom that there was no sense of self. He had no sense of self for us to stick onto. And I was trying to put it into words myself. I was like, yeah, I was like, I was feeling the same thing too. Like, I wasn't, like, there was nothing there for me to, like, grab onto. You know, there wasn't anything for me to project onto.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  So my experience of him was just like, me trying to like, narrow him down into a box of self, when he was just like, just utter freedom. And it was really, it was a really good experience to be around someone like that because then we see how much of our interactions are just like, what, how much stuff can I throw on you?

• 45:12André Duqum?

  Yeah, and then on the flip side, how much, through the cultivation of awareness, our presence can be an active force of liberation for everyone we come into contact with.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Exactly. It was a huge learning moment, being around someone who's like, really trying to do the total opposite besides harm you, just trying to like, be nourishing, compassionate, absolutely selfless. It's like, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful gift.

• 45:34André Duqum?

  What do you think are the qualities of that state when you tap into it? Like, you just mentioned a couple of compassion and understanding. What other ones would you say are the most predominant?

• 45:44Speaker 00

  I think the appreciation of complexity. I think that's one thing that is really hard for human beings. And Gengi talks about this, where, you know, part of growing on the path to Nibbana, to enlightenment, is like, being able to understand things from many different perspectives. You know, your perspective often feels like the biggest one, and we're really stuck in it and attached to it, but being able to see things from different angles.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  I think also being able to just understand and appreciate impermanence at so many different levels, where like, that truth of impermanence, it opens the, you know, the door to all the other, you know, the understanding of not-self, the understanding of dissatisfaction. Like, often people call it suffering and misery. Those are like giant words. I think it's really, I really enjoy dissatisfaction, because it's like, that, that explanation of dukkha feels really relatable. Because like, yeah, life, life is suffering sometimes, but often it is very dissatisfying, even when you have everything.

• 46:41André Duqum?

  I really like the appreciation of complexity because I think it's so easy and so simple to reduce people to objects and just like a simple way of understanding them. Like, it's actually a sign of it's a sign of intelligence to be able to be in the face of something complex, where there's many different dynamics, and to, uh, yeah, and to not reduce people down.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've been noticing that when when I started going deeper into meditation, that my thinking was very black and white, was like, it's either this or that, you know? And, uh, over time, because of this developing appreciation for complexity, it's not like either this or either that. There's just so much gray area. And being able to appreciate the gray and being able to like, you know, I love now when I'm interacting with someone who has different beliefs than I do. It doesn't create a combative energy inside of me. It's more an energy of curiosity. It's like, oh, like, tell me why. Tell me, tell me more. Tell me what you think.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  And that, that can only come from, you know, not falling into the black and white thinking.

• 47:57André Duqum?

  Do you think that our capacity to give love to others is limited to the degree we can give it to ourselves in many ways?

• 48:05Speaker 00

  I think to a certain extent. I think, um, it's tough. It's not, it's not so, um, there is obviously a very deep connection there, but I think there are times where you see parents like who struggle to love themselves and they do such an amazing job just setting things up better for their children than what they had when they were growing up. And I do think-

• 48:31André Duqum?

  Look at you appreciating the complexity.

• 48:34André Duqum?

  That was great, yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's, um, but I do feel like, even with that situation, if, you know, the parent is able to take time to love themselves even more, then they'll develop expansiveness and they'll be able to, you know, have even more patience, more listening and all the things that we've been talking about for the child. Yeah.

• 48:52André Duqum?

  What sparked your desire to write a book about love? When it's quite a, you know, filled industry?

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Everybody said everything about love. Yeah, I love that. I think it's, you know, it's one thing I tell writers all the time. People who want to get something out there and feel like their intuition is pointing them in that direction. I'm like, listen, everything has been said. That shouldn't stop you because nothing has been like, you have yet to share your perspective on these topics. And if you feel like you have something to say, you have to go out there and say it because you actually don't know who you're gonna help. You don't know who's gonna come across your book. And it may profoundly change their lives. But for me, I went into writing How to Love Better because honestly, I was just shocked.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Like, I went into meditating and paying attention to my habits because I needed to save myself. Like, I was like, you know, heading towards a train wreck. And, but in the act of saving myself and changing my life, immediately, I noticed that my relationships were very surface level and that I could do something about it, that I could improve them, that as I deepen that connection with myself, I could, you know, like, just have more, like, appreciation for my wife, like, get to know her again. And like, the same thing with my friends, with my mom and dad, like, being able to deepen

• 50:21Speaker 00

  those connections, really, it was directly tied to me being able to grow and build peace in my own mind. Yeah, so I think that bridge, that bridge between personal growth and how that impacts the way you show up in your relationship and how you can learn how to love better, just feels important to talk about.

• 50:42André Duqum?

  Yeah, when you say that, it just brings to mind how often we drag our history and who we think somebody is and how they should show up based off of who they've been in the past in every single moment. And in that perspective, it's like, we're not actually even engaging with somebody who, as they are in the moment, we're engaging with how we want them to be, how we expect them to be. And that, like, just sucks intimacy out of the equation.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, because then you're like, what? I'm literally interacting with an illusion? Like, I'm literally like, taking all these projections, forming them, bringing them into this present moment, and then I'm not even like, not even talking to you. I'm probably talking to the person who hurt me seven years ago. That sucks. That's not a good way to live. Yeah.

• 51:22André Duqum?

  And it's why I'm so glad we started this whole conversation, talking about the developing of awareness, because to the degree that we do that is to the degree we can actually be present with somebody and not just our projections of them.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think developing awareness just helps you honestly learn how to listen. Because you can, it's so easy to get caught in the mode where, let's say there's tension between us, and you're speaking, I'm trying to listen to you, but already, instead of listening to you, I'm thinking about how am I gonna retort? How am I gonna sort of try to prove my point using the words that you're saying? As opposed to just taking a moment to fully appreciate where you're coming from, to just suspend my need for dominance. Suspend my need for, you know, to just be right, and just accept that you also have a very valid perspective, and then I should take the time to hear it, and then hopefully you'll give me that opportunity as well.

• 52:18André Duqum?

  Yeah, I love that section in your book when you reflect on arguments, because it's something that I've thought of many times as well, where often we're under the presumption whenever arguments arise, and particularly the romantic relationships, but also any conversation where we have differing opinions, we feel like it's me versus you, and we're trying to win instead of trying to understand.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:43André Duqum?

  And shifting that perspective, instead of me versus you, it's us versus the problem.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it feels like, it's a big, it logically makes sense, but it's so, you have to untangle yourself from your emotions, from your reactions, to be able to even try to practice that, because it's, it's difficult. As soon as we get into an argument. You know, we're very much so driven by our evolutionary need to survive. So when we get into an argument, we feel like we may be cast aside by the group. We may, you know, like we're under threat in some way. So immediately, we feel like we're walking into a battle. But you have to remind yourself, like, who are you arguing with? Like, I'm arguing with the person I love. I'm, this is my best friend. Like, this is my roommate. This is like the, the homiest of homies, like the person I love the most, you know?

• 53:33Speaker 00

  So why am I acting like I'm under threat? And now let me try to shift my energy to try to do my best to see things from their perspective. And this is why, like, you know, in this book, I talk about a very specific form of compassion, where you intentionally try to let go of your perspective for a moment and step into the shoes of another person to see things from their view. And you find that when you do practice that and you're able to give that to each other, the tension evaporates. When I can really see the series of events from your point of view, and then you can see mine, we're like, oh, that's why this happened. And I think that's, that's only something that can happen when you really try to let go of winning.

• 54:16André Duqum?

  The guest we had on last week, Peter Crone, he has a saying that being right is the poor man's version of self-worth.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Oh, man, that's a good one. Yeah.

• 54:25André Duqum?

  And it really does feel like oftentimes, like, we're not trying to get to the objective truths of, of truth of something. We're trying to just be right in our perspective.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:36André Duqum?

  And again, it's one of those things that's very difficult to catch in the throes of unawareness by default. You're not aware to the function and the degree which this is happening, right?

• 54:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:46André Duqum?

  But again, in the process of growing our awareness, we can see and like, just question, question it a little bit more, you know, and then just create a little bit of a crack of awareness and, and inquisitiveness and curiosity when we, when we're difficult, when faced, you know, with these difficult situations.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's, um, it's really hard because the mind is so tricky. And I think when you're questioning, like, where is this coming from? You know, it starts that the mind will literally jump.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Through illogical hoops to be able to make it so that this tension that I'm feeling is your fault, even if you have nothing to do with it. And as my wife and I started, you know, we were together for a long time. We've been together for almost 17 years. The first six years of our relationship was before we started meditating. And that time period was highly chaotic. It felt like we were living in a hurricane. But when we started developing our individual self-awareness, we started realizing that, actually, I'm not mad at you. I just don't feel good. There's like heaviness moving through me. There's some tension moving through me. And what we accidentally started practicing, really out of the confine of the situation

• 56:05Speaker 00

  where, when the pandemic began, you know, we're living in our little apartment in New York City. And we were, you know, starting to get into these arguments, but then realizing, oh, like, actually, we're not mad at each other at all. And what we started doing instead was taking a moment when we would wake up to just tell each other immediately how we feel. And, you know, if, because sometimes you wake up and you don't immediately feel good. You're just like, I feel heavy or tired or, you know, I feel a little sick. And just having these little bits of information where like you yourself are naming how you're feeling and you're making yourself aware of it, and you're making your partner aware of it, it is so helpful because I felt like that decreased the amount of arguments we had probably by 80%.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Because I knew, I was like, oh, like, my girl just doesn't feel good today. Like, let me see how I can step up for her, how I can support her, and just like, you know, take things off her plate. And she, you know, she would also know, okay, I need to move gently through the day and vice versa. You know, whenever I would not feel good, I'm like, okay, well, let me be like gentle to myself and mindful of how I'm speaking, and also mindful of the way my mind's moving because it's going to try to make this someone else's fault.

• 57:16André Duqum?

  And we can only communicate to the degree we're aware of what our needs are and what our values are. So we have to like actually know what we need in order to be able to communicate it with another, which is the process of, you know, communication, which we're speaking to, real communication versus communication out of projections and tension.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. Like self-awareness is really difficult without like honesty and accountability. Like, because you can pay attention to yourself, but still try to make everything someone else's fault. But really, you know, being able to own the fact that like, oh, I just don't feel that good. And it doesn't really have anything to do with you. But the mind, like emotions like to grow, you know, whether it's a positive or a negative one. It tries to just expand itself and feed itself. So the, you know, the mind is always looking for more cannon fodder. And it'll just like, take whatever tension you're feeling or whatever anger you're feeling and try to think of some old thing that happened, you know, a year ago. And my wife and I had this really funny moment where, where it just like, it hit us so hard,

• 58:19Speaker 00

  the way the mind works, where I was working in the kitchen and she was in the living room and we were separately on our laptops for like, I think maybe like two and a half, three hours. And she comes into the room laughing. And she was like, she was like, I spent the last like hour trying to think of a reason to figure out why I don't feel good is your fault. And I just kept going back in time, further back in time, further back in time, just trying to rehash. And she like caught the mind as it's moving through this process. And she, and I was like, well, and she was laughing, right? She thought it was so funny, like seeing that inside of herself. And I was like, also being like, wow, like I do the same thing, but also I'm so grateful to you because you just saved us so many problems.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:07André Duqum?

  Man, I have a couple of people in my life who have been in a long-term relationship, like 20, 30, 40 years plus. And it's so different than the challenges that come up in, you know, the first five years of a relationship. And I'm just curious what you think about the saying that love isn't enough and that you need to like learn how to communicate. And I'm curious what you think the other aspects are that we need to really cultivate as skills within building a long-term relationship.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  This is a great question too, because I think we're like generationally in a very different moment. But I think for a lot of times, love was enough and people just decided like, because my wife and I, we had that same thing happen before we started meditating where we felt this ethereal connection towards each other that was so magnetic and I couldn't get away from it even if I wanted to. And there were times where we would break up, take breaks, you know, be apart, but we would just like come back together. And it came to a point where I was like, alright, like, you know, I'd rather just be miserable with you.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  I just, I love you and like, we don't have the skill set to really like bring harmony to this, but it was like, I, we just really liked being next to each other. And we, you know, embraced that, but we were fortunate that we started finding meditating. And I think for a lot of, you know, like therapy is very new, meditating is very new. Like, you know, it's been around for thousands of years, but it's become more commonly adopted by the dominant culture. And I think that these skills that we're learning to like heal our generational trauma, to like, you know, help change the way our habits manifest in daily life, to be intentional about showing each other care, it's a very new thing. So it depends on what kind of relationship you want.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  And I think for a lot of us, like, I'm also entirely grateful that my wife and I did develop self-awareness, did develop some emotional maturity so that we can understand that for the two of us, yeah, love isn't enough. And then there's this other component that is learning how to care for each other. Like, learning how to care for each other is a long-term, real process that is separate from just feeling how important we are to each other.

• 1:01:30André Duqum?

  Treating each other as best friends and roommates and and all of the other things that, you know, partners are to each other.

• 1:01:39André Duqum?

  I think it can be

• 1:01:42André Duqum?

  like, relationships can often default to the place where it becomes a comfort zone out of coping not being able to be comfortable alone.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:53André Duqum?

  And, and that can be a dangerous pitfall as well because we can only, I suppose, choose something to the degree in which we're free and we're like, we we bring a sense of willingness to it instead of like, it's our default and just our safety and our comfort zone, which is amazing, not, not, you know, saying he was wrong for wanting some comfort or safety, but how, how do you feel like our capacity to be good alone is a barometer for how much we've healed?

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  I think it's really critical. I think if we're alone and we're still looking for distraction while alone, then we're running away from our emotions. There's some agitation there that we're not fully accepting. And I think there's this beauty that I find when my wife and I go away to like 30 day meditation courses or 45 days. And we'll both be, you know, fully apart from each other, fully alone. You're like by yourself, no one's talking to you. No one's even making any eye contact with you. You're just like, you know, your eyes are downcast. And when we go away to these courses and spend all this time just with ourselves, cultivating ourselves,

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  deleting so much conditioning, you know, allowing this, all this heavy conditioning to evaporate. It creates this dynamic where when we come back together, we're like, it's like meeting a new person. You know, like in those 45 days, sometimes they feel like an eon long. Sometimes they feel like 10 days, 20 days, sometimes they go by fast. But During that time, we both went to war against ignorance. And we did our best to develop wisdom. And we come back and it's this meeting moment. So in those 45 day courses, you have two days of meta at the very end, where you start speaking and everyone starts like normalizing themselves again. And every time, I'm just like, we're both just like, oh, my gosh.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  Like, how are you? Like, how like, and we both in that moment are, we're rekindling our connection with each other and simultaneously understanding that we ourselves as individuals have to get to know ourselves again because so much conditioning has been deleted in that period. So the shows that you want to watch on TV, the movies you want to watch, the music you want to listen to, all that's changed. And you notice you like played your old favorite song and you're like, whoa, that is way too tense for me. I can't even hear that. You know, the energy coming off of it's way too strong. Or like the TV show and it's like, it's like, no, that's like too much. That's not, it doesn't even fit who we are now. And even down to like our meals and what we want to eat.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  So it's, it's a fun period where because we spent so much time alone and we were okay with being alone. It's like, I don't know, you get to meet the one you love again. It's nice.

• 1:04:40André Duqum?

  I want to read this quote that I saw in your book that I really loved. "There is an intrinsic and undeniable connection between the relationship you have with your own emotions and how well you will be able to show up for the emotions of those you love. If you run from your own tension, you will lack the experience to show up for the tension of others." And I think it just really invites this perspective of what it means to hold space for others to the degree we can for ourselves.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really, it's important to realize that because turning your attention inward and being able to really explore your own internal forest and being able to see your emotional history for what it is, the good and the bad. It's really challenging. Like, it's really hard to be able to see like, the bad things that happened to you and how much tension they've caused you. But in that process, when you're really observing yourself, you're developing patience. You're developing compassion. You're accepting your imperfections. You're developing all these qualities towards yourself that don't just have to stay with you. They're qualities that you can bring into every other aspect of your life, either into your relationships or into your work.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  So I think it's quite beautiful when people start realizing it. And I've found this, like, not just in myself, but, you know, people who do other modalities, who, you know, do different forms of therapy, whatever. You know, there's so many modalities out there. But you really find that when you cultivate those, your emotional skill set, so that you can have more peace in your mind, it immediately helps support you in your relationship because those skills don't just stay for you. You can share them with others.

• 1:06:20André Duqum?

  Have you found the skills you need to make it, let's say, year five through 10 in relationship are different than the first five?

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  later, as you know, the relationship, I mean, we've been together for so long. And every year, the amount of time changes. So it's hard to, like, you know, know the exact time. But we've been together for almost 17, probably 18 years this year. And I think the skill set that we're developing now is not craving or expecting the relationship to always be at a high level of excitement. You know, that excitement comes and goes. And I've even been realizing as meditating, like, you know, that excitement is just a more delicious form of agitation. And it's very, uh, you know, being okay with, like, boring, calm days together, days that you'll have no memory of.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  And but still being able to be present, to enjoy the day, to like, move about with gratitude, feels like a nice and worthy challenge. And I think, you know, being able to grow older together, like, we met really young. We were, she was 18 and I was 19. And I was just telling this to a friend. But being able to look at each other's faces, like,

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  My, my life is, when I think about the memories of my life, I don't see my face, I see her face. Because my experience of life is seeing her and the life that's happening around her. Like, I see my face way less than I see hers. And it's so cool now as we've gotten older, seeing the little wrinkles like developing, seeing the two of us get older together. And it makes me excited for like, you know, for us to be like little old people. It's pretty cool.

• 1:08:08André Duqum?

  Man, it really is cool to think about how long-term relationships were very much so being witness to each other's lives.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I get to see the whole thing.

• 1:08:17André Duqum?

  It's so cool.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  Dude, she, I'm like, I hope things are good from her angle because she has to see my ugly mind all the time, you know?

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26André Duqum?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  It's really funny, yeah. It's, um, it's something that hit me like a few years ago. I'm like, damn, my whole experience of life is like her face. Yeah.

• 1:08:37André Duqum?

  Man, yeah, it's, it's exciting. And I do think that it's, each generation is faced with problems and challenges unique to that generation. And I think because of social media and the ability to compare yourself, you know, at the ready to any relationship or couple goals that are out there. What would you say to a generation that has this perfection orientation towards relationships and people? And the grass is greener and, you know, I feel like that perspective robs us of the joy and beauty that comes from the longevity of something.

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  You have to be really, really careful with the craving for marginal improvement, where people will have a good relationship and they'll let go of that relationship for something that's maybe 2% better. That's not worth it. That's, you know, my friend Danielle, she mentions this all the time, where it's, it's not the relationship you get, it's the relationship you build. And I've totally have experienced that myself directly. And, you know, I think,

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  It's really, really hard when you are spoiled with choice. And we live in this society that's made like literally everything is designed to make your life easier. Every app, everything's trying to make something easier for you. And you're not gonna like Uber and DoorDash your way out of this. Like if you're really caring about your personal growth and really caring about developing a good relationship, it takes work and it's slow. And you have to be okay with that. And I think when I first, you know, when my wife and I first got together as kids, like we, we felt this deep connection to each other. And it would feel like we would slip into another world together.

• 1:10:24Speaker 00

  And it also felt like I was looking for her for eons. Like it felt like I was like, we had lost each other and like found each other again. And when we started meditating, it like, especially after the first few longer courses, it hit us and it was like, oh, like this is why we're together. Like, we've been doing this meditation path for a long time. It's been many lifetimes of us like meditating together, supporting each other in growing in wisdom. And when I think of her, she not only is like the love of my life, but she's like my comrade in wisdom. You know, she's just like, she's a weapon. Like she really is so good at developing wisdom and has great capacity for it.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  Like it is not, it's not easy to be open to deleting your conditioning. It's not easy to be open to the raw truths of the universe. Like, you know, you can take such deep steps into observing the universe where it literally feels like you are sitting at the very edge of existence, where existence is literally like coming apart at the seams. And you don't know what's on the other end, but she has this powerful ability to develop wisdom that I like really appreciate, you know, to be able to have that in my partner.

• 1:11:39André Duqum?

  It takes two big people to courageously love and love for my space of freedom, where you're holding somebody not with a tight grip, but with a loose palm and... To know that whatever happens in the next week, month, year, that if you guys decided to part ways, that the love that you share never goes anywhere. And to continually choose each other.

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04André Duqum?

  You know, and I think it's important to reflect on that. Like, it's a fundamental orientation to perceive a container of a relationship as a catalyst for your own soul's evolution and to be in service for that for the other person, too. And I think when people, when two individuals surrender to that, it is a completely different dynamic because both people are willing to change and they're willing to grow. And that's difficult. And the growth of the container will be limited if one person's not that, if they're not there in that, in their journey.

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think a lot of what you're pointing to is coming from, coming to a place where you're not trying to have your, the framework of your mind be driven by attachments. And as opposed to attachments, you're trying to arrive into the relationships around commitments. And when I think about, you know, love is freedom, it really is. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you get to do what you want, you sleep with whoever you want. Like, a lot of people get scared about that when they hear that in the context of relationships. It's more so love is freedom in the sense where I support you in evolving in whatever direction is best for you. And like, I have no control and no say over what your preferences are, you know, what your interests, how they may evolve over time.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  And, and I think that we, we had to learn that over time because we both find that the center point of our lives is the development of wisdom. Everything, everything else is sort of like, comes secondary to that. And I'm so grateful that I, that I'm able to be in such a nourishing relationship. But there's, I'm also like, Really just, it feels like I won the lottery. Cause I see other friends who are, you know, they move from one good relationship to another good relationship. And I think always, you know, putting so much of

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  what you want out of life to be the aspects of relationship, it's very challenging because I think it would be so time consuming and so like, you know, I'm just grateful that I have that fulfillment with my wife. And of course, there's like, you know, there's, there's so many different attractive people and all these things and things that you can sort of have your craving attach itself to. But it's like, I don't know, we're happy with the two of us and let's, let's like use this container of relationship as a way to help propel the both of us forward on this path of wisdom. Yeah.

• 1:14:32André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's like deepening intimacy and growth through the depth of one connection versus meandering and exploring for different, unique novelty and different connections. And, you know, it's, I mean.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  Chasing, chasing excitement, like I feel like that's a hard way to live. You know, that's, it's so fleeting. It's like, it's nothing.

• 1:14:52André Duqum?

  You don't have your roots in anything. Anything you want to share on the overlap between our own personal awakening journey, which we've opened up with, and becoming that presence of love for, for other relationships? Not even just romantically, but like, you know, our life is filled with relationships.

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. They're everywhere. Every, every person who crosses your path and then the longstanding relationship with you and yourself. I think when, you know, letting myself become more aware through meditating has really helped me see that this life is like, it's a giant miracle. It's such, so miraculous that whenever I'm encountering someone.

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  I do my best to, you know, to pay attention, to just be there and not like fly into my phone. And to do my best to see where this interaction is going and why it's happening and what's like the sort of the karmic situation around it. And to also just like practice that as much selflessness and presence as I can. Because yeah, sometimes you're very tired and you can only do so much. And other times, you know, you're at full strength and you can really give, you know, a high level of presence. But I feel like every moment is more special than we think. And things don't really happen accidentally. It feels like the more and the longer I meditate,

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  the more I see that the universe is like, is a series of forces. It's not like a being. It's like there are forces that are moving and affecting each other and coming together and, you know, really rapid connections. And that this sort of magnificent law of cause and effect is just like really impacting so many different aspects of reality in very quick ways. So if I'm having a moment, you know, I bought a coffee before I came here. And I made sure to leave a tip and to genuinely wish the person a really good day. And like these little things and it's like, oh, it feels good. It's like feels like the right thing to do.

• 1:17:07André Duqum?

  Yeah, it feels like the more we grow our awareness, the more we perceive the opportunities and the bountiful opportunities we have in our life to be even just a small agent of benevolence and change for the people that we come in contact with. And you start to pick up on things and there's a refinement of your intuition. I think I was, I was having a conversation, maybe it was like, I don't know, a year ago. I was on a hike with a friend. He's owner, founder of this really big company, but is like, was facing some good amount of difficulty in his life and like finding resistance. And I could see and just like, you know, could see the nature of his mind is so brilliant, moves so fast. And I asked him,

• 1:17:48André Duqum?

  Do you ever consider how your inability or lack of willingness to slow down is affecting your ability to speed up? And, you know, it was a big, it was a big like moment for him, you know? Because I think so many of us perceive things that we want, whether it's through comparison or maybe they're just genuine things we feel are for us. And yet we want them in that DoorDash Uber mentality, right? And we don't want to put in the work. And so I feel like so many things become revealed to us in the process of slowing down and being able to pay attention to how life works. And a big one of that is refining our capacity to listen to that inner voice and that intuition.

• 1:18:30André Duqum?

  And I'm curious what your thoughts are about intuition and the listening to it.

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, intuition feels like, I love that you connected it to slowing down because it feels it's so important to be able to slow down and not just get caught up in the rapidness of life. I think to me intuition feels like it leads towards your deepest aspirations and the karmic goodness that's waiting for you, you know? Like it's sort of, it's going to ask you to step outside your comfort zone. It's going to ask you to like really challenge, like intuition is not just like a simple like left, right, you know, which direction I should go in, but it's more so like asking you to move into the next chapter. So I feel to me intuition feels like a calm ebbing flow, like the way, you know, waves

• 1:19:20Speaker 00

  hit the ocean shore and it points you in a particular direction, but it's not like, it's not like, oh, I want ice cream tonight. You know, that's just like a random rambling of craving. So it keeps pointing.

• 1:19:33André Duqum?

  I think what I've truly tried, tried to strive for most of my life is the ability to see clearly and experience life as it is. And you can't do that when you're a state of survival, you know? And I look at the biggest decisions I've made in my life, when I look back and connect the dots that have led me to the most impact and growth. They were those subtle voices that I listened to, you know, that were like the wave on the beach shore, you know. Thankfully, and they can show up as screams when you don't listen to them for so long. But the refinement of our ability to listen to our inner voice, there is this freedom in realizing that we're not in control of our life.

• 1:20:18André Duqum?

  No one is. And there are forces within us that we can pay attention to, where life's intelligence, I feel like, is moving us in a direction. And the more that we listen and surrender to that voice, I feel strongly that the more our life is going to play out in a way that is of most benefit to most people and ourselves. What do you think about surrendering to that voice and intelligence?

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  That's really interesting. I feel like it's not, I love that positioning. And I think I come from it in an understanding that it's like, when it feels like a feeling and not a voice. I think the voices of the mind are very tricky. And they, you know, often are the sounds that reactions make. And they can seem rather wise, but it's like, you have to kind of lean on your values a little bit and see like, is this right action? Is this, you know, beneficial to me and to others? And checking in with yourself in that way. I also don't like, you know, in terms of like intelligence too, like I feel like the more that I've studied the universe,

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  the more mechanistic it seems. Like mechanistic in the sense where it's like a moving set of forces where like the universe is happening and you and I are here together because of motion. Because there's like this motion that's happening in the universe. And when things move and coalesce, it creates greater complexity. And I even had this moment where I was meditating and I was like, did life ever really even begin? Or did things just become more complex? And then this like idea of I started manifesting. Because when I observe myself and feel what composes this body.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  There's nothing there. There's really nothing there. And but what is there, what does give sort of direction is this like long force of actions that came before this moment, this long force of karmic flow that is, you know, manifesting and fruiting over time. So it's been, it's been interesting. And I think honestly, rather freeing, like I do, I believe we live in a universe of like many beings, right? There's just like so many invisible beings out there. But pointing towards one intelligence, I don't know, maybe a collective one. But I think that's also impermanent.

• 1:22:42André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think there's something inherently intelligent about the design from the Fibonacci and golden spiral sequences that, you know, go that are prevalent throughout all of nature's design to, you know, the ratios of our body and how it's comprised. I'm curious what you think as you, because I know especially in Vipassana and the practice of like observing life as it is and not through our own projections and belief. We're both in sort of a spiritual space, you know, and I get offers every day from people that want to channel intergalactic councils and angels and, you know, all, all sorts of things.

• 1:23:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, man. I love that.

• 1:23:24André Duqum?

  You know, like I get, I get all, and it's great. Like, you know, I don't want to deny, I don't deny or accept anything upon, you know, it being presented. But I do feel like there can be, especially in these spaces, people are quick to believe things, not just in the conspiratorial rabbit holes, you know, but about what life is and what's out there. And I think there's something freeing about just admitting that we don't know what's outside of our direct experience.

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  I love that. I couldn't agree with you more. And I think like my, my thing is like, right, treat people with respect. Like, I don't, I don't know. I can't prove that they're wrong. I also can't prove that they're right. So like, I don't know. So let me just suspend disbelief. But at the same time, like, I'm really careful with archetypes. I'm really careful with like putting my, putting more labels on top of myself. Like, I respect astrology, but I don't adhere to it. I don't like, you know, so I respect the different, there's so many different modalities of like numbers and designs and blah, blah, blah. There's all these things. But I don't wanna know. I don't care. Like, I'm just gonna move with like right action. I'm gonna move in a, in a manner where, you know, if, if I plant good actions in this present moment,

• 1:24:38Speaker 00

  then the future ones will be pretty good. You know, there will still be challenges, but I don't need to know what's gonna happen in the future. I just need to move intentionally with each step that's given to me. And like I've had people reach out to me all the time. They're like, you know, this famous person's astrologer wants to get ahold of you or this like, this person like, you know, if, if they knew when your birthday was and blah, blah, blah, they could tell you X, Y, and Z. I'm like, no, dude, I don't care. Don't give them my information. Like, I don't, I don't wanna hear about that. Like, if I focus on developing awareness, equanimity and compassion, I'm gonna be all right. And I think that's enough.

• 1:25:15André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:16André Duqum?

  Yeah. And it is that balance, right? Because it comes back to like living where I am open to the spontaneous synchronicity and coincidence that presents itself. And, you know, if somebody wants to, you know, send me a message and I happen to read it about my, how my Libra is in North, my North Node is in Libra or whatever. Like, ultimately, I'm in a similar position with you. And like, if anything is genuinely providing value and insight to where you're living better with greater awareness and compassion, and it comes in whatever form, then great, like.

• 1:25:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's, and it's no disrespect too. It's like, these are hard forms. Like, I, so much respect. But how much do I need? How much information do I need? Or is it really that I need more information? Or do I need to just be okay with what is? Cause I've found that, like, the past two years, the biggest lesson that I've learned in life and in meditating is to just accept. Like, this word, it's a different way of saying just observe. But just accepting what is because this attachment is so insidious to try to mold things and shape things. Even when you're meditating, you're sitting there and there's this slight inclination.

• 1:26:33Speaker 00

  Towards pleasantry. So slight, even ever so, like Gohan Kijin, the long meditation courses. He warns you, he's like, you gotta be so careful because even though you think you're being a economist, there's such a slight undercurrent of craving for what's pleasant as opposed to just accepting what is. And you find in like, you find that in what sensations are you paying attention to? And which ones are you accidentally ignoring? But it's, I think it's really, it's beautiful that we live in a world where there are so many different modalities that people can connect to because like to me, like some of the ones we mentioned, they can definitely be growth paths. But I don't, you know, I don't need that much information. I actually just need to accept.

• 1:27:18André Duqum?

  Yeah. And it's great that there are just as many people, there are paths, you know, and so many different ways up the mountain. And thank God we're not all on the same trail because it'd be very crowded. But also, we'd have the same view. And it's cool to be able to have the different views. And we were just talking beforehand a little bit of some of the different paths. And they all have their unique value in different ways. And I find for sure the scientific approach with Vipassana and Dhamma is really important. And how applicable it is to our immediacy of experience and the deepening of our awareness of whatever's happening. Like the teaching is to be observed where there's an abnormality in the breath and a biochemical sensation somewhere in the body that's attached to every sensation that's happening.

• 1:28:03André Duqum?

  Right? And so the fundamental craving we have for a pleasant experience of life drives us to do so many things and it goes so subtle, right? Like it gets deeper and deeper and more subtle and it's refinement.

• 1:28:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really powerful. I think there's like, there's so much to learn. And in the quiet moments of like, the meditation cell. Because in Gohan Kijin's tradition, you know, when you practice in the longer courses, you get like a place where you can meditate. That's almost like, like meditating in a little cave. And it's just like a little closet. And you're, you know, sitting there and it's like totally dark and you're there just meditating for hours. And you are flying through the universe. You are flying through it and you can feel.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  The way where, you know, like, I'm not enlightened or anything like that, but I know where this path leads. Like, I've seen enough of this path to be able to know what happens next and have gotten to points where, like, you know, either so deeply concentrated or so, so immersed in impermanence that everything is like, you know, slowly coming apart. You can see that everything is arising and passing away at such rapidity, but then it can get to a point where things really can slow down, really, really utterly slow down. And there is just this, like, level of tranquility where, you know, you can even feel the body itself just, like, slowly shutting down.

• 1:29:35Speaker 00

  And I think it's, you know, I have this gratitude to be able to see how not real I am. And knowing that and knowing that really helps whenever the ego tries to grab, when it's trying to grab more and trying to cling. Like, I always think about, you know, my, my life as a writer. And I'm like, I don't know how many books I'm gonna write, but at some point, I'm just gonna stop. You know, at some point, like, I don't wanna keep saying the same things over and over. I wanna make sure that each book has a point and, you know, some value that it's gonna deliver. But I know ultimately, like, I just wanna sit. I wanna meditate and I wanna serve. And, um, and it feels like that's easier, knowing that I'm not real, so I can just,

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  you know, let it go someday.

• 1:30:21André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:23André Duqum?

  There is both, again, the paradox of experiencing the no-self, right? And seeing how there is no solid Diego or Andre, right?

• 1:30:33Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:30:34André Duqum?

  And yet, there's still a unique perspective that life is, is, uh, has through your eyes that comes out in the words you write and speak. And I think we clarify that voice and perspective the more that we move through that conditioning. And it's like, you're just getting a more clear representation on reality. And then it comes through based off your own history and like, the way that you like to speak within the confines of the English language.

• 1:31:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:31:01André Duqum?

  You know, it's, it's, it's exciting to see.

• 1:31:04Speaker 00

  So much gets lost in language. It's really, really hard when you're like, spending hours, you know, with your eyes closed and experiencing reality, and then you try to put words to it. And it just, it, um...

• 1:31:17Speaker 00

  Almost like, it doesn't devalue it, that's too strong of a word, but it just, you get a glimpse, but not the totality of it.

• 1:31:25André Duqum?

  Yeah, the real transformation comes through experience, right? And I've had similar experiences where it's complete void of any thoughts, or like, you know, because you'll meditate for hundreds of hours and maybe not yet have the experience where you're completely still, where there's like zero, absolute zero thoughts for a prolonged period of time. And there is something, it's very trippy. It's like you're, the complete dissolution of any experience, and yet you come back to an experience of being somebody, you know, after some amount of time. It's so freeing, and then you, on the other hand, can have those extremely blissful, explosive, you know, I'm a being of light experience,

• 1:32:10André Duqum?

  where every particle in your body is humming at the frequency of love, and you're like, you're on one.

• 1:32:15Speaker 00

  I know, that's really cool. It's interesting, because there's, that's one thing that's, as you, you know, get more serious in a particular path, and you spend more time on it, you see that there's a lot of different experiences that you can have. And it's interesting where some people sometimes fall into the trap of like, thinking they're enlightened before they are, where like, because there's tons of things that can happen. Like, there are some experiences where, like what you were just naming, where the mind becomes so still, not saying anything for hours. You know, it's just like utter raw awareness, but you're still in the universe, you're still in there. And there are other moments where like, all the senses shut down, besides mind, and there's only darkness.

• 1:33:00Speaker 00

  And then, you know, you're just experiencing reality, but you're not hearing anything, it's just like, it's all gone. And like, you can just go on and on, so many different things. But it's, it's a, it's a long and tricky path at times, but it just makes me think about how important humility is, and how important it is to not develop like spiritual arrogance, because there are really powerful experiences, like some experiences I've had where I can barely, like, I don't even really talk about them, because they sound wild. They sound just like, you know... They, yeah, they sound, they sound different like to what, how, the way we commonly talk. But, and if I were.

• 1:33:39André Duqum?

  Would you be open to sharing it?

• 1:33:42Speaker 00

  You're setting me up, right? Yeah, I set myself up too.

• 1:33:45André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:45Speaker 00

  Uh, my bad. Um, yeah, I think like there was this one experience that I had where I was just so profoundly concentrated, like concentrated to like an, and, and a degree of honestly, just like perfection, where the, the mind was just like crisply aware. And, you know, you just take the onapana to the highest level. And my wife and I call it, um, strong concentration. We don't try to label it as like, you know, give it some special label, but we just like refer to it as like, you know, you're concentrated. There's sometimes when you're strongly concentrated, you could just concentrate for hours. And, you know, when you're concentrated,

• 1:34:26Speaker 00

  you reach levels of, of PT and Sukkha, like levels of, um, just this like pleasantness of mind and body that are extraordinary, that are, um, almost celestial. And you, there was a moment where I was just like, oh, this is what Maha Brahma feels like. Like this is, this is like the realm where like the, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of people believe that the universe was created by one being and this one being like dwells in a particular realm. And when you get really concentrated, you connect to those Brahma realms. And you can feel like how, just like this ultimate love and compassion.

• 1:35:09Speaker 00

  And I was in there for a little while and, um, for a few hours. And I was like, wow, this is like one of those experiences where if I didn't know better, I would come out of it and think, oh, I'm enlightened. But it's like, no, it was just, it was literally another impermanent experience. And I'm so grateful to go and get you. I think in like maybe past lives, I would have like tripped myself up and been like, oh, I did it. But it was, no, it was just like, it was cool, but it was also impermanent. Like I still feel. The mechanism of dukkha still functioning in the mind. So that wasn't it.

• 1:35:44André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45André Duqum?

  Yeah, of suffering.

• 1:35:46Speaker 00

  And the stories of other people's experiences can be a really interesting reference point of like,

• 1:35:53André Duqum?

  these things are possible. And then, once you go and experience and taste something that like that is plant the seed of like true transformation, I feel like in somebody's life. Because we've heard so many, I mean, whoever's listening, I know I've heard a lot of wild mystical stories.

• 1:36:10Speaker 00

  So many.

• 1:36:11André Duqum?

  It's great, they're great, great reading material, you know, and it's, it's interesting.

• 1:36:16Speaker 00

  One of my, one of my good friends, he's like the 70 year old guy. He, he's so awesome, but he like, he trained with Goenkichi really early on in like 71, 72. And at that time, there was also this teacher, you know, Menindraji? Menindra, he was Sharon Salzberg's teacher. He came out of the Mahasi tradition. And, but Menindraji told him once about some student that he had, some, some girl that was there that became a Sotapana, like the first level of enlightenment, according to the Theravada tradition. And this guy was like, well, I saw her, but then I realized like, how does that help me?

• 1:37:01Speaker 00

  Like, it doesn't help me at all. Like, okay, like if she's enlightened, great, but like, that's actually like, it's her experience, not mine. And there's no reason to like, even be a magnet to her. She's not even a teacher. Like, I've heard this from other teachers where the, the aspiration to teach, you know, some people can be enlightened and be terrible teachers, be like really not good at passing forward the information that they themselves, they were able to witness the truth beyond mind and matter, but they don't have that longstanding aspiration to develop this quality to teach and can't really pass it to you, can't really, you know?

• 1:37:39André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:39Speaker 00

  Help you.

• 1:37:42André Duqum?

  You can have an incredible experience and if you don't have the capacity for the communication of the inner realm, then it's tough to transmit that, you know? But then there are those teachers that have this way with words and this ability, you know, and it's so special.

• 1:37:57Speaker 00

  And sometimes those teachers will like postpone their enlightenment where they they can, but because of certain aspirations, they their enlightenment is held off to a certain particular moment where it will be most useful. But even though they themselves have not taken the dip, they can take you all the way there and beyond. And it's really interesting seeing that karma unfold in different people where Gohan Kaji and Ubhakkan, Gohan Kaji's teacher, from what I've heard of them, both of them were clear that they weren't enlightened, but especially Ubhakkan, Gohan Kaji too, like helped tons of people become enlightened. And they just like understood the path so well because they've, you know, lifetimes of being teachers and they'll be enlightened at some point, but who knows when?

• 1:38:42André Duqum?

  Well, thanks for sharing your relative degree of awareness and enlightenment with us on the podcast today. I mean, again, dude, when we first connected, I was also similarly just excited to build a friendship and, you know, the forgotten, the Buddhist term is slipping in my mind. It's like a spiritual friend. But, you know, I think it's really important to cultivate those, those connections and relationships that really help us, you know, reinforce our own path. And yeah, this, this community as well that's building and is interested in these kinds of conversations is just so, so cool to feel. We'll link down below where people can find How to Love Better and check out Diego and

• 1:39:27André Duqum?

  Yung Pueblo as his pen name throughout Instagram and social media platforms. Do you have any other last words before we head out?

• 1:39:33Speaker 00

  No, just utter gratitude. Thank you for the space to have this beautiful conversation and it's nice to, you know, have a conversation like this where we can really dive deeper into these things.

• 1:39:44André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:45André Duqum?

  My greatest joy. Thank you so much, my friend. Everybody, thanks for tuning into this episode. Until next time, be well.