Yung Pueblo
Appearances
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
yeah, you get a really clear, like, 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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?
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Like, where is the focal point of my existence 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 Sayadaw said, you know, if you say you exist, that's true.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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?
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
It's just atoms, just like subatomic particles moving at really rapid speeds. And we just happen to be like near each other. And I think knowing that has just given me so much liberty and like allowing my preferences to evolve, like allowing the past be the past and like moving into the present with just openness and not being attached to
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah, I think, you know, the intention that you're moving and using and 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, it creates conditioning. It's a different way of thinking about karma.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
yeah the 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 young young 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
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
I think sometimes in Western psychology, people think of the subconscious as something that's formed during childhood. But I think from this dharmic 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
You know, what Goenkaji 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 pass-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
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
basically having all of those past mental volitions just flooding your view so that you can't see reality clearly. And it's interesting, the process of Vipassana makes, 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And 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, that's...
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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. And then I just, you know, so that first course was July of 2012. And then the second course was in September of 2012. Cause I was like, I gotta go back.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Like I need to find out how this works.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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. Yeah. 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And then once I did pick it up and started meditating daily, that just like took the growth to a whole nother level. 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 a quantumist and like your life can just really change for the better.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
yeah, 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
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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. And that's something that I'm really also grateful for because
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
But you know, I don't want to do that. I actually want to live intentionally and choose something new.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 everything. like just the way you think, the way you show up in life.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, they started a center in Western Mass. The first Goenkaji 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, and people who are teachers who just had a lot of like awakening moments there in Western Mass. So
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
We don't know how to properly care for each other. So whatever we try to teach children, you know, four-year-olds, three-year-olds, like collectively as a humanity, we haven't mastered these important things.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 Metta, trying to live like with this loving kindness, towards all beings, it's really nice. It's such a gift to give yourself.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
So I think that's been sort of reinforcing this positive conditioning for the two of us.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah, yeah. I think the biggest sort of darkness to darkness moment was really like the first half of my life. So 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
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
you know, what would happen. And when you move to the United States, it's like rolling the dice. You just don't know what you're going to get. And I was fortunate that 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 it out each month for like, you know, more than a decade.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And things didn't really improve until my brother and I started getting older and we were able to get jobs as teenagers and just take that load off of my parents.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
But all of that created, like I mentioned earlier, a really kind of rough outer layer of me where I wasn't trying to intentionally hurt people, but I was just 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...
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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...
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 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 a long darkness, a darkness moment.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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, um,
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
In that moment, I was realizing that if I continued in this path, I was going to die. My body was just going to give out on me. And I thought about my parents and how much they sacrificed and how hard they worked 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
That was like the slow walk from darkness to light 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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, I knew I wasn't like, you know, 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 cower in like 2014 they were like getting bigger on instagram
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And I was like, oh, let me start writing little 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
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 Young Pueblo account.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
It's awareness. It's a sharpened awareness. 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah, I think there, you know, people think about the ego not just in the sense of like... Grandiosity. 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. There was a lot of that happening where it wasn't like, like, dude, I know I'm not the best writer.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Like, I know I'm not like, you know, I like reflecting on things and sharing things that hopefully help people build self-awareness. 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
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 non-profit world for a long time and i um 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 was really fortunate as she did but
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah. If you want to be free. Yeah. If I'm trying to be free, like why would I? Yeah. I'm not going to mess this up.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah. And the ego is going to try to grab anything, right? It's super sticky. So it's going to 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 is going to try to grow itself no matter what.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
So if I was still in the nonprofit world, it would have been like, why am I not a manager? Why am I not like, you know, just... grabbing some other type of superiority complex. And I think 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
So it makes it easier to let go.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And yeah, it's interesting because that's like one of my goals too. It's 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
So like this ego framework that we live in, it can, and you feel that as you cultivate yourself, more of it starts shifting towards compassion, where it becomes easier to do what, you know, Krishnamurti talks about, where it's like, just observe, like don't project, 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And it's funny how we keep, my wife and I, we're like finding that 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 onto the situation and trying to just do our best to understand each other and live what Thich Nhat Hanh talks about where love is understanding.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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. And But now I feel like I'm just trying to move through gently.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And this person that we were giving food to, he, so I went with my wife and our two friends. And the four of us, 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. And at the end of it, my friend Rodrigo was like, hey man, I was really trying to pinpoint like what was going on in my mind.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 dharma and compassion and freedom that there was no sense of stealth. 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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. 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Cause then we see how much of our interactions are just like, what, how much stuff can I throw on you? Yeah.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Exactly. Always 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
I think the appreciation of complexity. I think that's one thing that is really hard for human beings. And Goenkaji 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
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
being able to see things from different angles. 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 door to all the other, 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...
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
I really enjoy dissatisfaction because it's like that explanation of dukkha feels really relatable because like, yeah, life is suffering sometimes, but often it is very dissatisfying even when you have everything.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah. I've been noticing that when I started going deeper into meditation, that my thinking was very black and white. It was like, it's either this or that. And 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 more. Tell me what you think. And that can only come from, you know, not falling into the black and white thinking.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
I think to a certain extent. I think it's tough. It's not so... 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. I do think.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
That was great.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah. I think it's, 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. Yeah.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Everybody said everything about love. Yeah, I love that. I think it's, you know, that's one thing I tell writers all the time, people who want to get something out there and feel like their intuition's 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
I went into meditating and paying attention to my habits because I needed to save myself. I was 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...
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 those connections, really it was directly tied to me being able to grow and build peace in my own mind.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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?
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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...
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
How long ago? That was the beginning of 2024. So January to February. Yeah, that was the second 45-day course that I did. And it was awesome. Yeah.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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. This is my best friend. Like, this is my roommate. This is like the homiest of homies, like the person I love the most, you know? So, Why am I acting like I'm under threat?
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 only something that can happen when you really try to let go of winning.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah, I think 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, starts that the mind will literally jump 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, we were together for a long time.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 heaviness moving through me.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
There's some tension moving through me. And what we accidentally started practicing really out of the confine of the situation 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 Because sometimes you wake up and you don't immediately feel good. You're just like, I feel heavy or tired or I feel a little sick.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And just having these little bits of information where 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%. Because I knew, I was like, oh, like my girl just doesn't feel good today.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And my wife and I had this really funny moment where it just like, it hit us so hard 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
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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's laughing, right? She thought it was so funny, like seeing that inside of herself.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah. In 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 in Vipassana, it's a path of purification that leads to the end of suffering.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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, all right, like, you know, I'd rather just be miserable with you. I love you.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And like, we don't have the skillset 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, embrace 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
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
more commonly adopted by the dominant culture. And I think that these skills that we're learning to heal our generational trauma, to 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And I think for a lot of us, 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
I think it's really critical. I think if we are 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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, what you get is this truth that's pervasive throughout the universe, this truth of impermanence.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And when we go away to these courses and spend all this time just with ourselves, cultivating ourselves, deleting so much conditioning, allowing all this heavy conditioning to evaporate, it creates this dynamic where when we come back together, it's like meeting a new person. In those 45 days, sometimes they feel like an eon long. Sometimes they feel like 10 days, 20 days.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 like 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And every time I'm just like, we're both just like, oh my gosh, like, how are you? 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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're 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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. 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
But in the act of saving myself, immediately I noticed that my relationships were very surface level and that I could do something about it. When you cultivate your emotional skill set 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. Hey, how's it going?
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah. 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 happen to you and how much tension they've caused you.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
So I think it's quite beautiful when people start realizing it. And I've found this, like, not just in myself, but...
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 skillset 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah, I think 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And it's really interesting, 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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, being okay with boring, calm days together, days that you'll have no memory of, but still being able to be present to enjoy the day, to move about with gratitude, feels like a nice and worthy challenge.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And I think being able to grow older together, we met really young. 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 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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. Yeah.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah, I get to see the whole thing.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
I'm like, I hope things are good from her angle because she has to see my ugly mug all the time, you know? Yeah. Yeah, man. It's really funny, yeah. 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. Man.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And I've totally have experienced that myself directly. And, you know, I think It's really, really hard when you are spoiled with choice. And we live in a 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 going to like Uber and DoorDash your way out of this.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 felt this deep connection to each other and it would feel like we would slip into another world together.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 together, 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And what Vipassana does is it essentially trains the mind to embrace impermanence. And that helps in every facet of life.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
It's been many lifetimes of us like meditating together, supporting each other and growing in wisdom. And when I think of her, she's not only is like the love of my life, but she's like my comrade in wisdom. You know, she just like, She's a weapon. She really is so good at developing wisdom and has great capacity for it. It's not easy to be open to deleting your conditioning.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
It's not easy to be open to the raw truths of the universe. 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah, and I think a lot of what you're pointing to is coming to a place where you're not trying to have 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
But it doesn't necessarily mean that you get to do what you want, you sleep with whoever you want. 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And I have no control and no say over what your preferences are, what your interests, how they may evolve over time. And I think that we had to learn that over time because... we both find that the center point of our lives is the development of wisdom. Everything else is sort of like, comes secondary to that.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And I'm so grateful 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 because I see other friends who are, you know, they move from one good relationship to another good relationship.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And I think always, you know, putting so much of 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, yeah, You know, I'm just grateful that I have that fulfillment with my wife.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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, oh no, 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. Yeah.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Like, I feel like that's a hard way to live. You know, it's so fleeting. It's like, it's nothing. You don't have your roots and everything. Yeah.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah, totally. They're everywhere. 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,
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
I do my best 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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And other times, you're at full strength and you can really give 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, the more I see that the universe is a series of forces. It's not like a being.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
It's like there are forces that are moving and affecting each other and coming together in really rapid connections. And that this magnificent law of cause and effect is just really impacting so many different aspects of reality in very quick ways.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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, it feels like the right thing to do.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 gonna ask you to step outside your comfort zone.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
It's gonna 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 hit the ocean shore and it points you in a particular direction, but it's not,
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
That's really interesting. I feel like it's not, I love that positioning. And I think I come from it in understanding that it's like, one, it feels like a feeling and not a voice. I think the voices of the mind are very tricky and very, they, you know, often are the sounds that reactions make and they can seem rather wise, but it's like,
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 the more mechanistic it seems like and mechanistic in the sense where it's like
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E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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?
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
That's a lovely question. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I think we can be really inspired by each other, hearing each other's wisdom and hearing about each other's experiences. And that can inform the mind. It can encourage you to behave in certain ways and better ways.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And then this like idea of I started manifesting. Because when I observe myself manifesting, and feel what composes this body, there's nothing there. There's really nothing there. 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, um, you know, manifesting and fruiting over time.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
So it's been a, 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, um,
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
I love that. I couldn't agree with you more. And I think my thing is treat people with respect. I don't know. I can't prove that they're wrong. I also can't prove that they're right. So I don't know. So let me just suspend disbelief. But at the same time, I'm really careful with archetypes. I'm really careful with putting more labels on top of myself.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Like I respect astrology, but I don't adhere to it. I don't like, you know, so I respect the different mode. There's so many different modalities of like numbers and designs and blah, blah, blah. There's all these things, but I don't want to know. I don't care. Like, I'm just going to move with, right action.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
I'm going to move in a manner where if I plant good actions in this present moment, then the future ones will be pretty good. There will still be challenges, but I don't need to know what's going to happen in the future. I just need to move intentionally with each step that's given to me. And I've had people reach out to me all the time. They're like,
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
you know, this famous person's astrologer wants to get ahold of you or this person, like, you know, 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 want to hear about that. Like, if I focus on developing awareness, equanimity, and compassion, I'm going to be all right.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And I think that's enough. Yeah.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And it's no disrespect too. It's like, these are art 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? Because I found that Like the past two years, the biggest lesson that I've learned in life and in meditating is to just accept.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 a slight inclination towards pleasantry.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
so slight, even ever so like going to G in a long, long meditation courses, he warns you, he's like, you gotta be so careful because even though you think you're being a quantumist, there's such a slight undercurrent of craving for what's pleasant as opposed to just accepting what is.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And you find in like, you find that in what sensations are you paying attention to and which ones are you accidentally ignoring? Um, 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
But I don't, you know, I don't need that much information. I actually just need to accept.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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, whether there's different forms of Vipassana,
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 Goenka's tradition, you know, in the, 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And you're, you know, sitting there and it's like totally dark and you're there just meditating for hours. And
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
you are flying through the universe you are flying through it and you can feel 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 um know what happens next and have gotten to points where like you know either so deeply concentrated or so so immersed in impermanence that
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
um 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 and um
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
I think 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 going to write, but at some point I'm just going to stop.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
You know, at some point, like I don't want to keep saying the same things over and over. I want to make sure that each book has a point and, you know, some value that it's going to deliver. But I know ultimately, like, I just want to sit, I want to meditate and I want to serve. And, um, And it feels like that's easier knowing that I'm not real. So I can just, you know, let it go someday.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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?
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And you're like, yeah, you're on one. 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
You're still in there. And there are other moments where like, All the senses shut down besides mind. And there's only darkness. And you're just experiencing reality, but you're not hearing anything. It's just like, it's all gone. And you can just go on and on, so many different things. But it's a long and tricky path at times, but it just makes me think about how important humility is.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 Yeah, they sound different to the way we commonly talk. Would you be open to sharing them? You're setting me up, right?
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah, I set myself up too. My bad. Yeah, I think there was this one experience that I had where I was just so profoundly concentrated. Concentrated to a degree of, honestly, just perfection, where the mind was just like, crisply aware and, you know, you just take the anapana to the highest level. And my wife and I call it strong concentration.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 some times when you're strongly concentrated, you could just concentrate it for hours.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And, you know, when you're concentrated, you reach levels of PT and Sukha, like levels of just this like pleasantness of mind and body that are extraordinary, that are almost celestial. And you, there was a moment where I was just like, oh, this is what Mahabrahma feels like.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And I was in there for a little while and 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 Goenkaji.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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. Yeah.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Um, one of my, um, one of my good, uh, friends, he's like the 70 year old guy. He, um, he's so awesome, but he like, he trained with Goenkaji really early on in like 71, 72. And, um, At that time, there was also this teacher, you know, Manindraji? Manindra, he was Sharon Salzberg's teacher. He came out of the Mahasi tradition.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
But Manindraji told him once about some student that he had, some girl that was there that became a Sotapanna, 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? Like, it doesn't help me at all. Like, okay, like if she's enlightened, great.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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,
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 long standing aspiration to develop this quality to teach and can't really pass it to you. Can't really, you know, help you.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And sometimes those teachers will like postpone their enlightenment where 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And it's really interesting seeing that karma unfold in different people where Goenkaji and Uba Ken, Goenkaji's teacher, from what I've heard of them, both of them were clear that they weren't enlightened, but especially Uba Ken and Goenkaji too, like helped tons of people become enlightened. And they just understood the path so well because they've lifetimes of being teachers.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And they'll be enlightened at some point, but who knows when.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
No, no. I think 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
You're just feeling it. And I think there's a lot of power in just realizing that It's good to be informed, but just swimming in the memories is not necessarily going to make it better. It's actually coming back into the contact with the body.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
And I think that's one of the things that's so powerful about Vipassana 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
You know, 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Thanks for coming, man. 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. Me too, man.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah, sure. It's really interesting. So 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. The mind just loves to jump around.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
But when you keep putting effort, a very calm effort towards it and bring yourself back to it, it makes the mind so calm and so sharp. And what ends up happening is that the mind, the ability to be aware becomes magnified and strengthened. I tell people like when you're going to these courses, it's like taking yourself to the mental gym.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Like you're specifically developing awareness, you're then developing non-reaction and you're developing compassion. And once you develop that awareness, you then take that 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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 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 like you know, solid, but it doesn't feel solid.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
It feels like it's just changing vibrations.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Yeah, it is really difficult. Even trying to do it for one minute is like a massive challenge. It sounds so easy, but it's...
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
it's um very challenging and it's nice when you have those longer meditation courses like the 45 day courses you spend 15 days just practicing anapana 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 vipassana
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
It's like the truth of the universe just hits you so clearly. It's like, wow. It feels like I, but it's just composition. It's just something that's flowing together, mental and physical phenomena moving at incredibly rapid speeds. And you can feel the way all of these different aspects of what you think of as your internal reality are just fluctuating and changing at incredibly rapid speeds.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
But I think what you're pointing to is it's important to realize that 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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
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.
Know Thyself
E135 - Yung Pueblo: Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love
Likewise. Yeah. I wasn't I wasn't trying to put any expectations, but I knew that like just from what you were giving off that it was going to be good. good to be friends. And it was funny because it's fun to be on a podcast, but I was like, I think we should be friends.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah, I mean, you literally end up building your piece brick by brick. And I love that you, you know, came to your own conclusion there. But it's like ignorance is not bliss, dude. Ignorance is suffering. It's just what I'm just going to be exhausted, stressed, full of tension, full of anxiety, always like missing the beautiful moment that's right in front of me. I don't want to live like that.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I think that's one thing that's special about the time that we live in today is that being miserable, it's going out of style. It feels like so many people are exhausted by... I grew up in a way where if you had a mental ailment or a physical ailment, you were just going to have to deal with it for the rest of your life. But I think so many people are...
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
looking at whatever it is that's ailing them, making life harder, and they're actively looking for solutions. And if there isn't one out there, they're building companies to find it. They're creating new science to do it. They're just like, no, let's find a way to live at a higher or optimal level. I find that really inspiring.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
But even what you were saying before, it's making me remember that we live in a society that...
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
is trying to make everything easier for us every single aspect of you think about all the apps on your phone they're all sort of designed to make life easier so we live in this like uber door dash society and you can't bring that mentality into your personal growth you also can't bring that mentality into your relationship so there's definitely skills that you can develop but
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
honestly, you have to build your piece brick by brick. And I think it's, I've noticed that over time, you know, like I've done so many meditation retreats. I've probably meditated for over 12, 13,000 hours. And it's like, you know, maybe after five, 6,000 hours when I was like, okay, my mind is very different from how it was before.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And it was literally like, I'm training to live happier, to have more peace, to have more freedom. And it's the same way that you don't just run a marathon, you have to train for it. And you don't just like learn a language, you know, you have to learn it over time.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And I think that's one of the harder aspects of self-development that people have to accept is that it's nice and slow and you gotta be there for the long journey. And, you know, and you know that something is good. Like I remember after that first 10 day retreat, When I left, my mind felt undeniably lighter, but only by like maybe 3%.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
But it was so noticeable to me because my mind felt so damn heavy before that. And that's why I was like, you know, I got to go back because I don't even really understand what I went through. I need to go learn more. And as I've gone, I still feel the same set of emotions like everybody else. But anxiety, sadness, these heavier things, I feel them, but I don't grab them.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I don't throw more fuel onto that fire. I don't make them bigger than they need to be. I'm grateful that I put in the work because it was hard, man, but I still have a long way to go.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Absolutely. And it's funny too, because like, as soon as you said that, it made me think like, no one's going to come save you, but there are going to be people that randomly appear that will inspire you. And they may even help you with whatever method it is that you're trying to learn, you know, like I wasn't going to. I didn't just teach myself meditating. I went to a teacher. They taught me.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
They corrected me over time. It took me years to be able to really make the actual practice of meditation much more efficient as opposed to making it clunky and... The mind doesn't want to observe the present moment. The mind is constantly trying to fight that. And it's really hard to just observe reality as it is. The mind is constantly trying to interject the past or the future onto that.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And so it took a lot of teachers to, you know, for me asking questions and corrections, but ultimately who put in the effort, it was my own mind. No one's going to come and meditate for you, dude. No, no one, no one's going to give you their enlightenment. No one's going to transmit peace to you.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Oh, that's really interesting. I think what's really worked for me is just honestly realizing how flimsy thoughts are, flimsy and insubstantial. So to me, when I find myself getting caught up in a thought stream or some narrative that's just building tension, I have to pull myself back and I'm like, wait, why am I hanging on to this thing that's so incredibly impermanent?
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Like, you know, you may have be around people who have great energy and are nonjudgmental, but those are very sort of temporary things. And I think it was, it was interesting. Like, I remember what, before I started meditating, I, um, I did mushrooms a few times, tried acid a few times, and I found that these were almost really pretty powerful intellectual experiences where I felt better.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
It felt better in my body, and my mind was just connecting to all these different ideas. But it felt like I was almost taking a peek at a new world and opening a window. But when I started meditating, it was like, dude, I cracked that window open and just put my legs right through and I was walking in a whole new world. And even days later, you know, I was like, everything is shinier and brighter.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Like I literally remember, you know, after... I think on like day seven, day eight of the first course, and it still continues on now, I remember looking at a tree and being like, holy shit, I can see more branches and more leaves than I could before. Like my mind wasn't even able to cognize at that level because it was so busy.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And I think it was a shock over time how our senses and literally all of our abilities are dulled by the tension that we unconsciously carry. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Why am I just allowing anxiety and tension and heaviness to just continue bubbling up in my mind when you know, I'm the one causing this tension, so let me let it go. It's wild to think how much stress and suffering we have caused ourselves. Yeah, and I think that's like the key medicine, right?
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
who we allow to influence us, because I've seen that work in multiple ways. My wife and I, we both stopped drinking and just taking any intoxicants. It's been a number of years. It's been since 2016 since I last drank and smoked marijuana or did anything, taking zero intoxicants. And I've noticed over time, not only did I have to rebuild...
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
friendships, because so much of friendship is pretty ritualistic. Like, you know, we come together, we smoke a joint, we come together, we have a drink. But I realized that, you know, my key friends, the ones that I've been friends with for years, after a few months, they really didn't care. They got over it pretty quickly.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
But there was an interesting dynamic where when my wife and I were, you know, we would go out to dinner with friends and whatnot, or be at a party. Like, One time we were talking, we were like, hey, are they drinking less than they normally do because they're around us? Are we having some sort of unsaid thing?
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
We're not asking them not to drink, but just because we're around, they totally slow down and we find some sort of balance. And the other end of that is that in 2020, my wife and I, we moved up to Western Massachusetts. And this little town out here that's near the meditation center that we often go to. And out here, there are so many people who have been meditating for decades.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Like people who've been meditating way more than I have, you know, like 20,000, 30, 40, 50,000 hours of meditation. I've been meditating for decades and decades. And these people are weapons. Like their minds are just literally, you would not believe how cultivated they are. And these are people who, they don't write books. They don't have Instagrams.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
They're just so, like all they do is serve others and they just, you know, they generate peace and they have simple lives and work, but they're such hardcore meditators. And being around these people,
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
has helped sort of fire up and like give even more energy to that effort that i'm applying in my own mind because i'm around them and i'm like like i want to be like this dude when i'm 70. you know like this this guy's like when i think about like you know my teacher barry like this guy is just like he's 76 so unafraid of death like so kind doesn't want to hurt anyone and anything
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
and is so simultaneously living in his power. Like he is a leader and he's just like, you feel his peace move with him and he doesn't get caught up in other people's sort of like energetic troubles. And it's awesome. So to me, I'm like, damn, I'm trying to be like this dude.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah, I think it's because you end up changing the play. I think normally when we have long-term relationships or friendships, we sort of fall into this rhythm of how we do things, the things we joke about. And when you start really applying the fact that identity is flexible, that your preferences can evolve, that you can change your emotional skill set and improve it,
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
It's really hard to accept the fact that like the person who hurt you can't heal you and ultimately your perception and your reaction, all of this of which is happening inside your own mind, that's where the real trouble lies. You know, when you understand that your perception is coded heavily by the past and that it's influencing the way you're seeing things in the present moment.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
then that's going to, you know, it's going to directly impact the way that you behave and show up in interpersonal situations. Some people are taken aback and have noticed that, you know, like I remember when I stopped, when I first stopped doing cocaine, like back in like 2011, like I used to party all the time. And I remember this one guy who, he was stressed that I stopped.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
He was like, just so like some, it was calling to him. And I remember he like screamed at me and was like, dude, stop being a bitch. Like do, you know, just like do the line.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah. And I'm like, haven't seen this guy since. He's just on the other side of the world. I don't even know where. I wish him the best. And I can tell that it wasn't really about me. It scared him about himself. But I think when you start changing, yeah, some people are going to be absolutely repelled, but also new people are going to appear.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I think it was at that same time that I ended up meeting one of my best friends, Anwar, who is just so dedicated to his personal growth and his fitness. And it was like, this is like the exact friend that I needed at that moment when I was trying to develop a healthier mind and a healthier body.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And you're not actually seeing them clearly. You're just seeing them through this like heavy coated lens of old pain, old sort of inclinations, sort of defensive, like survivalist mode of living. Makes it really hard to engage with something genuinely. So I honestly, when people, you know, ask me, how do you become happy? Well, you have to embrace mental training. You have to train the mind.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
,,,,,, ,,,,,, ,,,,,,, ,,,,,,, ,,,,,,, ,,,,,, You know, that's real wisdom right there.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah. Yeah, you know, I've been noticing more and more lately that I try to lean in on like the three internal guides, which are your values, your intuition, and your nervous system. You know, so when I'm trying to make like big decisions, I have a set of values, right? Probably the most important one is like, I don't want to hurt myself and I don't want to hurt other people.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
So that's like a key framework that I try to exist inside of. And then the other end is like, is my intuition pushing me towards this direction? Does this feel correct? And the other side of that is with your nervous system is like, Am I already so overworked that I feel fried? Like, do I feel fried already? And if I add this, is it going to make things worse or better?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And using those three guides, I think has been super helpful because Like I said before, thoughts are flimsy. I don't give them a lot of credence. They're not very, you know, stable. But I think with, you know, intuition hasn't really led me astray. It's really been, and it's not like, it's not an often thing. It's not like something that, you know, it's not telling you left or right.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
It's just, it will come slowly, especially with big chapters. Like it'll help open up new chapters in my life. And I'm glad I've been able to listen. Where does self-love come from, in your opinion? I think it just, it comes from embracing the fact that there's a lot inside of you.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I think self-love is literally just turning that lens inward and you having deep, deep acceptance over your emotional history. You know, the good things that have happened, the tough things that have happened, you're sort of cognizant of it, you're aware of it, you're able to hold that history inside of yourself and you're simultaneously saying, okay, I've felt a lot of pain in the past.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I'm very imperfect, but I'm going to choose to start developing qualities that are going to help me make better decisions in life. So it's a mixture of self-acceptance and embracing personal transformation. And I think it comes from what we were talking about earlier. People are just exhausted by being miserable.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
It felt like when I was growing up in the 90s, it didn't feel very emotionally hopeful, if I were to say. It was just like, You're kind of stuck. Whatever their situation is, is what you have. And I think part of the reason that this wellness movement has exploded is that people are like, I need to figure out how to be happier.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And part of that has been interesting is figuring out, okay, I need to spend more attention on myself and try to cultivate myself. But that immediately, that personal inner work shines a light on what you can do better in your relationships.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I think so, yeah. I mean, it's tricky too because you want to be able to accept yourself and part of self-love is that deep self-acceptance. But human beings also, we like a project. I think we, whether it's work or outside of work or personal or hobby, whatever it is, we like having things to do.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And I think a lot of us, when we notice how much of life is relational and interpersonal, it shines a light on the fact that it's worth your time to put effort into like, improving whatever it is that's making your life harder because you're the maker of your own suffering by large. So understanding where am I creating points of difficulty for myself and what can I do to remove them?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
But you have to balance that out because you're simultaneously enough and you also have room to grow.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
it was initially translated as misery or suffering. And that sounds so intense. It sounds like- Super not dialed. Right. And I think that's the reality for some people, for sure. Their lives have been horribly difficult and if they were to give it a word, they would give it suffering. I think for a lot of us, it's on the other end of the spectrum where
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
dukkha can also be translated into stress or dissatisfaction, where instead of saying life is suffering, it's like life is dissatisfactory or life is stressful. And that I can definitely relate to. There's definitely been parts of life that have been full of suffering, but I think the vast majority of the time, there is that sense of dissatisfaction.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And like being aware of that has been so helpful because you can live in a life where, you know, you can have the type of life where a lot of things just don't work out for you and it's a constant struggle and you could recognize that as dissatisfactory. But then there's also the times when Things do go well for you and you do accrue victory after victory, but you're still incredibly dissatisfied.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
You're still looking to build another business. You're looking to do your next big thing and you're just appreciating nothing. So that's another type of suffering. And I think being aware of that helps build
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
create the beginning of peace really because when you understand how the mind is geared towards dissatisfaction when you're able to relieve those attachments and you make the mind lighter what you end up getting are what's called the brahma viharas where it's just uh the divine abodes where you get so much more equanimity so much more loving kindness so much more compassion and um
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
joy for the happiness of others which is like you know one of the key elements of friendship like to be able to you know have victories like one of our mutual friends like sahil bloom right um he was telling me how you know he had a great time talking with you and then i was just talking into talking him to with him today and we were celebrating that he was on the new york times bestseller again and you know we were like myself and our other friend sarah kubrick we were like
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
both in the chat room and it was like, we felt so much joy for this guy. No jealousy, just pure joy. Like he worked so hard for this victory and we're celebrating him.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And I think those, those things are hard to have without recognizing first that life has this dissatisfying quality, but if you put right effort into it, then you can relieve that tension so that you can have these different types of joy, different types of peace.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Right. And I think, I mean, you're hitting on a key thing too here where letting go is not a one-time event. So once you kind of see yourself going into the loop, jumping back in, sort of like... giving power again to like the old traumatic moment of someone hurting you. Like, yeah, someone did hurt you, but who's the one picking it back up?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Like, who's the one, like, you know, it's encoded in your perception and then you keep reacting to that emotional response to it over and over again. And that's what's making your mind heavy. And I think instead of just sort of existing passively in that, you have to kind of take your power back and tell yourself, okay, what is my mind clinging to?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
There's this element that's clear in all the examples that you gave where human beings are sensation-oriented, where we crave pleasant sensations. That's why we're trying to heighten what you were mentioning, to bring ourselves to the present moment.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
and because we're really craving and seeking after these moments of deep deep pleasure literally like the feeling of pleasure in the body that can manifest as a lot of different ways um and that's the thing that we get attached to is like we we crave the things that feel good literally at the level of sensations and we hate the things that don't feel good at the level of sensations um
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
when the Buddha was meditating, what he realized is that his way to freedom was not only in the body, but was through the level of experiencing sensations and being able to be fully observant and to see them as they are. And part of that was bringing in the element of equanimity, the element of mental balance, where you're not reacting to something, you're just observing it as it is.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And I think from the time deepest inside out, it's almost, you become a lot more successful when you can develop that sense of equanimity with all of your sensations. When you're able to just like feel, you know, you feel something painful and you're like, okay, that's painful, but you're not necessarily reacting to it. And the same thing with, you know, the things that are super pleasurable.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And it's quite powerful, man. Like, you know, when I go away to the longer retreats, like we're essentially cultivating that level of equanimity with anything that we feel. And the mind gets so heightened.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
It gets so powerful over time, especially if you spend, you know, these longer 45-day retreats, you spend 15 days being aware of the breath and taking that ability to concentrate to a whole nother level. And then you take the last 30 days where you take that concentration and turn it away from the breath, but into the body.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And if my mind is clinging in this moment, what does that mean? I'm no longer in the present. I'm like swimming around in my mind. And it's the same way where either dealing with trauma from the past or with dealing with attachments of the future. Like I want...
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And it turns the mind into like a cannon where you can feel the body at a level that's just so more oriented to ultimate truth because your hands and the rest of your body, it doesn't feel like it's solid. It feels like it's just changing vibrations that are moving at incredibly rapid speeds. And I think having those experiences has been really helpful in the moments where
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
you're a little more sensitive in a positive way where you can just like feel, you know, the breeze that you were talking about. You can feel, you know, a friend having their hand on your back and everything just becomes shinier and more vibrant, but you're also a lot less attached to it because you understand that all of these things are highly impermanent.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And there's some, you know, because a lot of the things I'm curious about your sort of meditation background, because there are different forms of Vipassana from the Theravada Buddhist background.
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And there's so many different styles of meditating, but some of the Vipassanas are a little more mind and thought oriented and others are more feeling oriented, where it's like you're just directly going into the body
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
X and Y, you know, like all these things to happen in a very particular way and you're craving all of that, then the mind is just riddled with tension. But I think it's a difficult thing because sometimes people go to an extreme where they're like, oh, so what does that mean? I do nothing, want nothing. It's like, no, it's having desires and goals in a balanced manner.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
You know, it's funny. It's like, I think people do, do feel like that. I think meditation has a way to, you know, grow in the culture, but a lot of these traditions, you know, with chins and young with go Anka with, um, Joseph goals, you know, like all these different traditions that are out there with Jack Kornfield, um,
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
a lot of it is really result-oriented and it's really based in like regular mundane life. You know, it's not like some like spiritual esoteric thing that's way out there. It's more so based on like what qualities you need to cultivate. Because honestly, really like when I go to retreats, it's just the mental gym.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
It's literally like you're going to the gym, you're building awareness, you're building equanimity, you're building compassion, and then your life changes after that. But I'm always like, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I was so...
Modern Wisdom
#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I felt at home when I got there into the meditation hall because there were people there who were like doctors and consultants and people who like, I don't know, people who had big jobs, small jobs, teachers, professors, students. It was all of these regular people and you're being given a teaching that isn't trying to convert you into Buddhism or anything like that.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
So I don't think of myself as a Buddhist, but I do... have a high respect for the buddhist teaching like i i personally believe the buddha understood the human mind better than anyone else in human history and um but you know i don't need to like convert into a religion to like make use of that teaching yeah
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
They can come on Instagram, youngpueblo, Y-U-N-G underscore P-U-E-B-L-O. Also on Substack and my new book, How to Love Better, which is basically a bridge between personal growth and new harmony and relationships. You can find that in bookstores, on Amazon, wherever books are. But thank you, man. This has been a real, real joy. I feel like we can just keep wrapping on. Well, we will do.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I'll see you very soon. I appreciate you, man. Awesome. Thank you.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Like, can you move forward towards your goal in a strategic way without causing yourself tons of suffering in the process? And I think that's something that, you know, honestly, I've had to learn the hard way because I have goals, but I realize, you know, with each book launch, I'm realizing like, how am I handling this? Am I handling it a little better than before?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And I can really measure that by the mixture of productivity and what the stress level is.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah. And honestly, another higher level of that, too, is like I'm actually noticing that I can be more productive with less stress if I just allow myself to do my best in each situation and then let it go. It is what it is.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
It's quite a challenge, too, because I think a lot of times when we get caught up in the social aspect of life where, you know, the things that you're trying to achieve, the circles that you want to be a part of, just, you know, the value that you want to bring to the world, I think it's really... And this happens to so many people that...
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
their success, they can't even enjoy it because the mind is so untrained. The mind is so geared towards, okay, I accomplished this, what's next? What else can I do after that? And there's very little joy in that. So I think like one thing that I found pretty often was when I go away to meditation retreats, I'm going, and it's basically, I'm taking myself to a mental gym.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
I'm specifically focusing on cultivating three qualities, cultivating awareness, cultivating non-reaction, and cultivating compassion for myself and others. And those three qualities, over time, yes, you can become an extraordinarily elite meditator, can really walk this path that leads to the end of suffering, but in the process, what it really does is it just makes life brighter, shinier.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
It improves your decision-making. It makes you way more productive with way less tension. And I think to me, it's like, it's the best investment I've ever made. You know, it's like better than investing in the S&P 500 for 20, 30 years. So to me, when people ask me, they're like, why do you meditate daily? It's, you know, you're so busy. It takes up so much time.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And I'm like, because it improves every facet of my life. And it makes the moments of victory so much sweeter. Like the moments that I get to spend with my parents, with my wife, with friends, You know, when I am able to accomplish something, it's like I can be with it and engage with so much more presence. And then when it's done, it's done and I'm okay.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And I can move forward, but in a way where I didn't miss the previous moment, if that makes sense.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
Yeah. Thank you. I mean, you broke it down really beautifully and it's like, hopefully this sentence builds a little bit of self-awareness, right? Because we're highly imperfect and we're bound to make mistakes.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
That's one of the saddest moments in life, too, because I've gone through the same thing, where I've had beautiful moments. People or friends are coming together to celebrate my birthday, and before I started meditating, you know, I'd look around all these people wanting to share and joy. And my mind is only thinking about the one person who's missing or, you know, why is X, Y, and Z not here?
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And it's like, dude, you missed it. You missed it. You missed literally the miracle of even having people who want to come up and show up for you. And To me, honestly, that was exhausting. And it was simultaneously sad, but also empowering. When I did start meditating, I did my first silent tender retreat in July of 2012.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And it hit me right off the bat how superficial all of my relationships were, like how superficial my relationship was with my wife, with my parents, with my friends. And I was like, but I noticed off the bat, I'm like, oh, it's because I'm highly disconnected from myself. I've spent years running away from my emotions.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
And as soon as I saw my emotions, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm terribly disconnected.
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#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
But the reality is that in the process of accepting how imperfect you are, it's almost like you take your power back and you're like, okay, well, I know what I'm good at and I know what I'm not good at. So let me try to build some new, you know, some new skills along the way.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
We've been so impacted by romantic comedies and what we see on television, and it just makes love look so easy. But the reality of love, especially when you talk to people who've been married for 20, 30, 40 years, it's like...
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
of course there there are consistent disagreements similar fights will pop up over and over again but they've learned they've developed their own sort of systems their own culture between the two of them to be able to handle that so that there's some productiveness coming out of these arguments so what you just said i mean i think if you were to ask people
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Yeah, the mind loves to cling and it will sort of slip into attachment very unconsciously. And I think it's hard. I wish I can give people an easy answer that like, oh, these are the five steps of letting go. And for any mind on the earth, this is what you can follow and do. But that's just not realistic.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
I think one of the special things that we don't quite fully accept and understand about this historical moment is that There are so many different modalities that people are encountering and using and utilizing to really improve their lives. And through different therapy methods, you can learn how to let go. Through different forms of meditation, you can learn how to let go.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Even through self-reflection and simple acceptance of the past and letting the past be what it is. But I think we live in a special time where people know that they should let go They know that the idea of letting go would be beneficial in their lives. And then they find their own route to get to that point.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Even that, right, we were talking about that sort of like evolutionary tendency and it feels almost animalistic when you are, you know, you've fallen into an argument and all of a sudden you feel like you're in a battle and the only option is to gain dominance, to like, you know, have your viewpoint be the dominant one and for the other person to yield.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
And what my wife and I learned over trial and error and over years of making these mistakes is that when we're both trying to win, we actually both lose. We leave the argument dissatisfied and sure, there are times when people have to apologize, but
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
there's still a great value in switching the framework from trying to win to trying to understand each other and taking literally taking a moment to try to understand where she's coming from, understands like, you know, how did the series of events move for her and get to this point and how, and you know, why is she feeling like this in this moment?
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
And then simultaneously her giving me that opportunity to share and show that you know, how I got to this point.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
And there's this magic that happens when you really try to understand each other, because when you can really see a person and where they're coming from, yes, there may still be a need for accountability, for apologies, but the attention fizzles out and evaporates much more easily when you can see each other clearly.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
You know, it happened over weeks and months. A lot of the times what would happen is that our minds, you know, we'd wake up in the morning and we weren't really aware of how we felt. And then whatever tension we were feeling in the mind would try to make itself into more tension. And they would try to find reasons to figure out how is this tension in my mind her fault and vice versa.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
And it was a very interesting dynamic where we found that in both our minds, we would try to jump through hoops to be able to blame each other. And sometimes it was legitimate, but a lot of the times it wasn't. And what we found to counteract that was, okay, how about when we wake up in the morning, let's just let each other immediately know how we feel.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Like, oh, I feel good today, or I'm feeling a little sick, or I'm feeling tired, or what happened at work the previous day is still nagging me. Just having a little bit more of information. Now that I know if she's feeling down, to me, it's like, oh, great.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Now I know that I have to support her a little better through the day, move around her a little more gently, and just give her her space if that's what she needs. And I think that it's been really helpful.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Yeah, Mike, and it's devastatingly simple, right? It's like so, so simple, but we forget that we can just speak it. And there's so much power in, you know, if I'm the one that's feeling down that day, or I feel a lot of anxiety moving through me or sadness or, you know, whatever emotion it could be. But in the act of naming it, I'm helping myself and I'm helping her.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Like I'm becoming fully aware. Okay, you're accepting how you feel and you're aware of it. So be mindful of what's happening in your mind. What stories is your mind creating to make that feeling worse? And simultaneously, she has the information she needs for the both of us to be on good footing with each other.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
yeah so impermanence what i really mean is just the fundamental law of change right like in this universe that we live in everything is constantly changing at the atomic level the biological level the cosmological level everything is in motion it's it's changing and when you start really embracing that you see that
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
the difficult moments in life, like they're going to change at some point that no storm in the history of the universe has lasted forever. These storms have a beginning and they have an end. So that means the tough times in your life, the dark moments in your life, they'll have a beginning and an end, which when you really embrace that truth, it makes it a little easier to move through the storm.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
all good moments also have a beginning and an end and what that does instead of scaring you and making you feel fearful that everything good that you like will go away it actually should inspire you to be more present because you know the moments that i have with my parents the moments that i have with friends like i don't those moments are not infinite so if i'm with them let me be very aware and present with them so i can really enjoy that connection and
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
I think in terms of a daily example, my wife is also like, we're a team together. So a lot of life has just become problem solving together. So if we have some issue with the car or something happens, and instead of just reacting with anger, it's like, okay, let's slow down a second and let's see. Let's calmly figure out what we need to do to move this situation forward.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Who do we need to call and find some solution where we would have done that anyways, but instead of rolling in anger and rolling in tension, we solve it with a little more peace.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
I think what we try to do is we check in with... How important is it to you? It could be something minimal where it's like, do you want to watch this movie? Do you want to watch that movie? And it just depends on who wants it more and who cares about it more. And usually we let that person take the lead.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
And if it's something really oppositional, if it's like a big work decision or something like that, I think we try to find a middle ground that actually feels good to the both of us. And if there's something that she totally disagrees with, then I trust her wisdom. And I will really take into account and sort of examine in myself, am I missing something here?
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
And we'll have longer conversations about it. But normally, if it's something small, we let whoever cares about it more take the lead. And if it's something big, we don't mind slowing down before we make a final decision.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
I think it's easy. It's like, I check in within myself if it's, you know, if she really wants to watch Pitch Perfect, like it's not my favorite movie, but if that's what, if she really feels like she wants to enjoy it, then, It's fine with me. I think we both just sort of check in, like, how is my sort of inner resilience today? And I know that this will give my partner great joy.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
And then, you know, see if you can actually just support them and giving them that hour and a half of joy that they want.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Yeah, the biggest question I get is, should I break up with my boyfriend? And my answer is, I don't know. We just met. I have no idea. Yeah, I think a lot of these things are, you know, people like we live in a culture where so much of it is designed to make life easier for things to be faster. Like we live in the culture of Uber and DoorDash, right? Like everything is just super fast and easy.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
But relationships are not like that. Personal growth is not like that. These are things that are gradual. These are long journeys. So I try to remind people that, yeah, You have to throw away the attachment to perfection because even the most epic, beautiful relationship that you could have is going to have down moments. It's going to have challenges.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
There are going to be moments where it's very trying and you have to see if it's right for you to continue. And I just think the most beautiful things of life, like if you want to build inner peace, if you want to build harmony, harmony in your relationship, if you want to build better connection with friends, these are all things that are gradual. They take time.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
It's very consistent. And the former question that I used to get, you know, back in like, uh, Probably from 2017 to 2020, it was like, how do I let go? Which I'm glad we talked about. But lately, I think in the past four years, that's been the number one question is like, my boyfriend does X, Y, and Z, and I'll get a big paragraph about it in the DMs. And I have no idea. I don't know.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
And if anything, I'm only seeing one side of the story. I have no idea.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Yeah, we've never met. Like, yeah, that's really funny. But I think I'm always trying to, you know, My hope is to inspire people to take back their power. So ultimately, I've written articles about it and pieces about it, but you have to get comfortable with leading yourself.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
You have to get comfortable with checking in with your intuition, checking in with your values, checking in with how you feel next to a person. Do I feel calm around them? Do I feel safe around them? And then make the answer for yourself.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
yeah yeah and i think what i've learned that's really key in letting go is simply acceptance it's you know oftentimes we'll have a very tumultuous relationship with the past especially if someone made some you know egregious error or hurt us in some way but
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
when we can really fully just accept what happened you know and you'll notice this whether you're you know working with a therapist or you know working with um in a meditation tradition or something but Peace becomes available to you after you accept what is. And there may still be more to do, but this acceptance aspect is just fundamental in being able to open up to a new chapter.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Yeah, it's not necessarily forever more intellectually ruminating on it. That's not quite as helpful. It's more so like a feeling tone where you... when the memory comes up, you've realized that you have gained enough. You're no longer fighting it. Whether you like it or not, you're just like, okay, this was part of my history. This was part of what helped form me, but life is still okay.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
I'm still able to move forward. I'm still able to have good relationships. There's so much to be grateful for. And
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
and it hasn't broken me it hasn't stopped me so i think developing a a good relationship with um what happened in the past where it's not like accepting as in like you're becoming passive but it's just like this is something immovable immovable in my history and it's not going to stop me from thriving
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
Yeah, thank you so much. This was really fun.
Something You Should Know
Why Your Memory is Perfectly Imperfect & How to Love Better
The difficult moments in life, they're going to change at some point. No storm in the history of the universe has lasted forever. So that means the tough times in your life, the dark moments in your life, they'll have a beginning and an end, which when you really embrace that truth, it makes it a little easier to move through the storm.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So not just from your own perspective, but seeing whatever the truth may be, from different angles, and being able to see your own angle, put yourself in the feet of another person's just see the complexity of the situation, as opposed to just
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
creating some simplified self-centered story that's just this is not my fault this is somebody else's fault but seeing your own you know what what was what is the role that you played in this situation and how may someone else have seen it i think um
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
that can be so informing to your ability to let go because that's probably one of the first things we need to let go of is like okay i do have this one perception of what's happening in this moment but there's more there's more to understand and people are seeing this in other ways but letting go i think it's the crux of healing it's um quite necessary to be able to
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
even somehow process your emotions and let them go because we don't realize that as soon as we're born, right, we're constantly reacting and every reaction, it creates an imprint on the mind, it molds the subconscious. And this doesn't stop at childhood.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And I think that's one of the things that I think a lot of modern therapists kind of really hone in on those like first seven or so years of life and And they're very formative, but it doesn't stop there.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
The big events that happened to you later, the heartbreaks, the loss, the accident that you were talking about that you went through, these created massive imprints in your mind that are still playing themselves out, that are still affecting the way that you act now. But you're acting now in relation to what happened before. And the letting go part is,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
letting go of the energy of the past that you're still carrying that you're still bringing into the present over and over again and the beautiful part of the this modern age that we live in is that there's a lot of ways to let go you know like i let go through meditating other people let go through the you know the practices that their therapists may teach them um there's just a lot of different ways to go about it and there's no like sort of one to five step like this is how you let go but uh knowing that
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
the letting go often involves, really always involves you coming back to the present moment.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And if we don't embrace that truth, that sort of natural flow of nature that's just constantly moving forward, then it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt a lot. Because no matter how hard we try, we just can't keep things the same. We may be able to elongate things sometimes, but ultimately, whatever arises will pass away. And that doesn't need to be a truth that strikes fear in you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Yeah, it is hard to do. And it's also hard to do in relation to like what society has or like what consumerism has created in regards to self-love where it's, you know, self-love in terms of just kind of pleasing yourself, just like buying more things, giving us, you know, just the consumerist aspect of it. But I think real self-love.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
It is you basically trying actively and continuously to get to know yourself and to do whatever it is you need to do to heal yourself and free yourself. So that's self-love. It's really an internal dynamic and it is hard.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
It's not something that's going to be easy, but the reason that we come back to it, the reason that I can come back to it personally is like, I literally can't make a bigger investment. Like it's the best investment that I could make. You know, I could, you know,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
be out there working and doing all these things but all of it will just not whatever i may produce will not be as good if i don't have a strong ability to accept myself deeply a strong ability to balance that with self-love and understand that you know i should love myself deeply but there's also things that i can you know different directions that i can grow in
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
That will help me become a better version of myself and just continue showing up into the world in a way that, you know, honors the emotions that I'm feeling, but it's still, you know, showing up in a way that I feel really genuinely good about.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Yeah, yeah. It's tough because relationships are sort of like incubators for growth, whether we want them to be or not. They really accelerate us seeing the different parts of ourselves that are good and the really tough parts. I think whenever egos are in proximity of each other, it's only a... You know, a short, limited amount of time until there's conflict because egos are rough.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And when they rub up against each other, the friction is created. So we cannot help but find, you know, difficulties in the people that we love, but being able to understand that. That it's not just about them, that the initial reaction may be you pointing the finger and being like, you made me feel this way.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But when you develop self-awareness and you start realizing that actually, you know, I may have actually just gotten less hours of sleep last night. And this is why I woke up and didn't feel good. But then my mind wanted to figure out how this is your fault and place the blame on someone else. So, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
There's one common practice that my wife and I try to do is we do our best to let each other know where we are in our emotional spectrum. And we let each other know, like, how do I feel right now? Instead of it sort of snowballing into this bigger narrative, we try to cut that narrative by just being in contact with each other about how we feel in the moment pretty constantly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And that's something that I've been sort of working on in my own life and writing about is that a lot of times our relationship with change is one that's based on fear, but it can actually be, you know, that relationship can be evolved into one that's quite inspiring where I know that I'm not always going to be here. I know that this situation won't be here.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So the practice is really, you know, it's us checking in first thing in the morning. It's just letting us know like,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
okay, either I feel like a lot of anxiety passing through me right now, or I feel heavy right now, or my mood feels really short, that information not only helps the person who's feeling it acknowledge and own the fact that, okay, I don't feel great right now, and I'm not gonna try to fake it, and it lets your partner know,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
okay, that, you know, let me figure out ways to support them or just give them space or, you know, whatever it is so that we're both aware that one of us is a little short today.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And it's been really funny because there was this one particular moment where, you know, my wife and I, my wife was feeling tough that day and her and I were working in different rooms because we were both working from home at that time. And we hadn't talked to each other for about two, two and a half hours.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And then she comes in and she's like, I just spent the last three hours trying to figure out how me not feeling good right now is your fault. And she was like, it was so crazy. It was totally illogical. It had nothing to do with you. And there are these times where certainly... the tough moments of our past will play into how we feel and how we act and really the way that our character shows up.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But it's not always like that in the minutia of like regular everyday life where really sometimes it is because like maybe the day before I had too much sugar and now my mood's super low the next day, or I didn't get enough sleep last night. And now like, you know, I feel tired and what happens when you're tired, then you get angry. You know, you like,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Being able to be aware of these things and honest with yourself and your partner or those around you who are with you, I think it actually stops a lot, a lot of unnecessary arguments from happening because surely sometimes your partner will say something to you that they should apologize for.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But I would say 90% of the time, it's like you just jumping through these illogical hoops trying to create a problem when there really is not a problem there.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So let me bring presence into this situation. Let me bring my attention here. Let me really try my best to connect with the people who are around me who are crossing my path in this moment because it's special. We're not always going to have this. So what that has done, it's morphed my relationship with my wife, morphed my relationship with my mom and dad.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And these moments that we do share and we're able to connect, it's like, wow, they're so precious. And I'm more so grateful to change because If you think about it fundamentally, if the universe wasn't constantly changing, if everything was static, you and I would not be here. Nothing would exist. There would be no one would be here. So because of change, you and I can exist. We can learn.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But the reality is that at the mental level, at the atomic level, at the physical level, at the cosmic level, at the most minute levels possible, everything is constantly, constantly changing. And if we don't embrace that truth, then it's going to hurt.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
We can love. We can grow. We can, you know, really flourish and evolve. So change is difficult, but it also gives us an incredible opportunity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Maybe you got to do it for the rest of us, man. Yeah. I feel like it's a good goal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
It's, you know, kind of what you're saying now reminds me of something you said a little earlier. And there's that very common quote that's attributed to a number of people. But, you know, we don't see things as we are. We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. And what I try to do with some of my writing is like expand on that. Right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
When we're interacting with reality, what is our perception doing? our perception is actually seeing reality through our emotional history. It's seeing reality, and not just through that emotional history that we carry from our past, but it's combined with whatever is our current emotion. So we're seeing reality through these really thick lenses, and that
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
sort of enhances that attachment that we have towards basically tying whatever we're seeing in the present to something that happened in the past. And if anything in the present is sort of slightly reminding us of something positive or negative from the past, then immediately our emotions will just flow in these old directions and we'll be repeating the past over and over again.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So that creates a situation where I may be meeting someone and I won't be able to fully appreciate them because I'll just be seeing them through my own gunk, through all the old sort of conditioning that I've been carrying in my mind.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And you won't be able to see that sort of unity or the potential love or the depth of a connection that could really be there because you're just looking at them through the unhealed parts of yourself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I find that this really sort of brings in what we were talking about in regards to impermanence, because we want to allow impermanence to influence our understanding of our own identity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So we should allow ourselves to learn about our past, to see the way our relationship with our parents and whatnot affects the way that we show up in life today and allow these things to inform us. But the moment that our trauma becomes our identity, then it makes for a very rigid healing situation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Because if we're like, oh, this is how I am because of this moment, and I'm always going to be like this, or this is how I constantly see myself, then it's going to slow down your evolution. So in some ways, I think we can do our best to understand ourselves, but then we also have to let it go because it's like, okay, I'm a changing, growing being.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So let me flow with nature and allow myself to develop new interests, new likes, let go of old parts of myself that don't really serve me anymore and start letting my idea of who I am just continue blossoming. And in terms of spiritual bypassing, I think, it's tough because the human mind can only process so much information at once.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
That's the reality of it, is that we can't process everything at once. And I think we get a little confused by the fact that the technological world of today is so fast and information is constantly coming our way. We're constantly being inundated and it's exhausting. You know, you don't quite realize how much you take in and how much energy that burns because you're processing all of that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So at one, you know, one of our challenges is to be able to develop our awareness and expand our awareness, but also in a sustainable manner, because there are times where you know, you're going through a hard time and, you know, staying connected to every single part of everything that's happening in the world, that may not actually serve you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And in other times, you know, you want to be active, you want to be out there, you want to stay very informed, but those may be, you know, one year of your life versus another year of your life. And understanding that we have very different capacities, like, you know, there may be people out there who,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
can not only you know have a beautiful business but then they're also part of all these different organizations and they're out there actively trying to change the world and they're you know doing all these amazing things and that's fantastic you're helping all of us great but then there are other people who have experienced so much trauma that all they can do is heal themselves
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But that's also beautiful. You're actually serving us by just focusing on healing yourself. Because if you heal yourself and you increase your ability to love yourself well, then that means you're going to be less likely to harm yourself and other people.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
A lot of the suffering that we encounter in our minds is because we reject impermanence, we reject change. And that creates so much mental tension, so much mental struggle because there are things that we really like in life and we want them to stay the same.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Yeah, radical honesty is just so critical, so valuable, especially as the first step. And even before I started meditating, I found that, you know, I had no technique, I had no process, I didn't know how to really engage with my emotions, but I knew
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
what the problem was and the problem was that i had gotten to that rock bottom moment by continuously lying to myself i did not want to admit to myself that i did not feel good and when i realized and i finally admit that i was like i'm not okay like i don't feel good i have way too much anxiety way too much sadness and that first acceptance of me just being like, okay, this, this is true.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And now I can more so move forward. But I started realizing that I need to repeat that over and over again, whenever I feel tension, instead of trying to, you know, roll up another joint or just go find some way to just run away from myself. Let me just sit with this discomfort. Let me feel whatever's there as opposed to trying to like scrub it away or ignore it in some manner.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And radical honesty, it's a term that's been out there for a long time, but the way that I use the term is honesty between you and yourself. It's not about you and other people. This is just about you and yourself and whatever is coming up inside of you. And I think that being able to develop that radical honesty, it's a critical part of self-love. And when you are able to
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
you know, see what's inside of you and accept what's there, whether it's good or bad, then that will actually slowly start building your courage, building your inner strength. And you'll start actually seeing that the sort of tough emotions that you're having, they're actually not as fearful and as dangerous and as scary as you originally thought they were. Because I would run
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
you know, as if I was being chased by like a, you know, an animal or something like that. And once I started sitting with my anxiety, I was like, yeah, this sucks, but it's not that bad. I'm okay. Like, this isn't going to take me out. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
We want the people that we like to be there, we want the situations to remain in a way that continue feeding that sort of calmness and pleasantness of life. But the reality is that at the mental level, at the atomic level, at the physical level, at the cosmic level, at the most minute levels possible, everything is constantly, constantly changing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Well, this, um, this really, you know, to what you were saying earlier about you realizing how you were creating your own narrative of what was happening in front of you. And one thing that I really appreciate that the you know, the Buddha and my teacher SN Goenko talks about is how wisdom is actually you being able to see things from different perspectives.