Reflections on Awakening & Becoming a Presence of Love | Yung Pueblo

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 therapists 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 Vasa 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 the sharpened awareness the mind can become like a cannon like it becomes so much stronger I went into meditating because I needed to save myself but in the act of saving myself immediately I noticed that my relationships were very surface level 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 [Music] Diego Perez hey how's it going

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 it's been really cool To see your content online I feel like we always have these you know these Paras social relationships with people's content their message yeah and you hope that they live up in person to the energy that you see online and uh pleasantly reassured that was the case likewise yeah I wasn't um I wasn't trying to put any expectations but I knew that like

just from what you were giving off that it was going to be good To be friends and it was funny because like it's fun to be on the podcast but I was like I think we should be friends yeah 100% so your pen name Young poblo which a lot of people know you under that means young people right what was the kind of uh set up for that in terms of how you feel like where we are where humanity is 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 poblo it didn't really take meaning until I started meditating and I started realizing how immature I was and I'm like wow I have a lot of growing to do but then I've always been a big fan of history and have been just you know read a lot of history books and have noticed how Humanity as a whole is incredibly young like we just you know we don't know the basic fundamentals of What we try to teach children and

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 we don't know how to properly care for each other so whatever we try to teach you know fouryear olds threeyear olds like collectively as a Humanity we haven't mastered these important things yeah that so you've Been writing so much sharing so much content writing a lot of books your fifth one's coming out now how to

love better which was was amazing and it's thank you it's such an important reflection where we find ourselves like on the macro scale of humanity but our own individual lives learning how to love better and for me I feel like I really devoted trying my best to become a presence of love in life and redefining like what does that mean you Know for me and I'm curious when I say that becoming a presence of love what comes to mind for you it's awareness it's a sharpened awareness you know you're aware of your own emotional range

and you're also because you're so tapped into yourself and you can see the movements of your mind that helps you immediately develop a sense of compassion and as you see others around you also moving through their emotional range it helps you have empathy and Compassion for them and yeah it's interesting cuz that's like one of my goals too is like to try to and I I use a different terminology like I'm just trying to move through the World Gently where I felt like when I was younger growing up like I grew up in a lot

of poverty and that made me create a very like hard outer layer and um I felt like when I was younger I was moving through the world rather roughly CU I was you know in survival mode trying to figure Out how to get to the next week um but now I feel like I'm just trying to move through gently and part of moving through the World Gently is just you know being like a a vehicle of love and trying to deliver as much kindness and compassion as I move through there's innumerable paths and ways in

which life reflects back to us and then the practices that we take up on the journey and just living life has its way of refining us to deeper levels of Awareness um or pain that will lead us to make that choice to Deep in our awareness I know you have deep familiarity with both and we were just chatting beforehand how dhama and vasana has been a big part of both of our Journeys um and you recently came back from a 45 day silent Retreat how long ago that was the beginning of 2024 so okay January

to February yeah that was the second 45 day course that I did and then yeah and um it was awesome For people that uh aren't familiar with what Vasan is I'd love for you to share just uh what that consists of because quite frankly sitting um For Better or Worse you know you're essentially alone for 45 days meditating on average s to 10 hours a day um and that sounds pretty intense yeah in the longer courses you're sitting a lot you're sitting like 11 hours a day and um 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 4 minute long conversations just asking how are you doing how's it going and um and vasana it's a it's a path of purification that leads to the end of suffering and um 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 crisp Clarity what you get is this

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

is really a scientific approach to The Awakening and purification process of our spiritual journey and an aspect uh which is you could say largely it's helping us cultivate is PA which is wisdom right yeah and I love how they sort of break It down into the three different types of wisdom you know there's the wisdom acquired through external means where you hear somebody or maybe an Instagram quote that could lead to the second type which is like an intellectual understanding mhm and then the third would be the experiential knowing right where it's that the wisdom

that actually lives in you as you through you and as somebody who's been such a Advocate and um leader and teacher and sharer of Thoughts throughout the past decade online especially I'm curious what you think about the difference between those levels of knowing and wisdom and uh how it's important to deepen our sense of wisdom that's a lovely question um yeah Su B you know it's it's interesting I think it's we can be really inspired by each other hearing each other's wisdom and hearing about each other's experiences and that can inform the mind It can

encourage you to behave in certain ways in better ways and then there's also you know the information that you can like sort of spin around in your own mind and understand intellectually but there's something very different and Powerful about the wisdom that comes from your own direct experience when you have these moments of either by being aware of what's Happening internally or by moving through life and you're directly Experiencing what you were doing wrong and the shift into doing it a little more skill Y and how that just will bring you this deeper Insight that

can be quite life-changing and I think that's why a lot of these you know whether there's different forms of apasa but a lot of them are based in direct experience and that's why they become such transformative tools for us because when you're in moving through that direct experience It's like the reality of life and the reality of how to move about more skillfully just hits you so much harder than it can if you were reading a book you know and I say this often to like to the audience like you can talk to your therapist

you can talk to your teachers you can you know read stuff online but ultimately it's up to you to bring it into action to make it real in your life yeah yeah very much so breaking the barrier between our conscious and Subconscious mind exactly yeah because you speak and write so much about healing and the journey of Awakening and it is that process of bringing was once unconscious these patterns and habits of our mind that control us without our full conscious awareness to actually experiencing and seeing and facing off with the difficulties and pain of

whatever is undal with that don't even necessarily have to have stories attached to them Right now now I think it's it's so that's an interesting point where it hit me a few years ago as I was meditating how it's really valuable to understand your emotional history what you've gone through and whatnot but your healing is not really happening through intellectualizing it's happening through your ability to just feel and be okay with what you're feeling not making it worse not suppressing it you're just feeling it and I think there's a lot of Power in just realizing

that it's good to be informed but you know just swimming in the memories is not necessarily going to make it better it's actually coming back into the contact with the body and I think that's one of the things that's so powerful about vapas is like in 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 the Thoughts the memories you know all these things you're reacting to how that makes you feel you know you either like it crave it

or you don't like it and you have a verion to towards it and that's what creates all that difficult conditioning that makes the mind really cloudy I'd love to hear you break down in your words the process of becoming aware of those more subtle Sensations for people that don't know vapas where you first start with the observation of Your breath and then you're moving into the deeper awareness of the vibrations within your body um if you could share a little bit about that and then we can dive deeper into it yeah sure it's it's really

interesting so you you know when you go to your 10day courses you'll start the first three and a half days with just being aware of the breath and being aware of the natural breath it's very difficult it's not easy you know the mind just loves to jump around but When you keep putting effort a very calm effort towards it and bringing yourself back to it it makes the mind so calm and so sharp and what ends up happening is that the mind you know the ability to be aware becomes magnified and strengthened you know I

tell people like when you're going to these courses it's like taking yourself to the mental gym like you're specifically developing awareness then developing non-reaction and you're developing compassion and once you Develop that awareness you then take that you know new strength strength that you've developed you turn it into the body and your body can feel so clear in a way where you're you're you can always feel your body you can feel when Pain's happening or when something pleasurable is happening but you can feel your body to a new level of crispness that where it feels

like you know there are times for me personally where my body just Feels like a Rushing River of atoms where it's just so clearly like even in this moment I can feel my hand and it looks you know solid but it doesn't feel solid it feels like it's just changing vibrations it's so fascinating because I think when it comes to to wanting to grow in our life a lot of people are familiar with physical change and seeing somebody go to the gym and get shredded and they have six-pack abs or something you can see the

physicalness of it and The externalization of growth but why mental health is largely also such a big epidemic is because is invisible yeah we can't see into the aspects of each other's minds you know outside of the actions that come out and stem from them but it it's much more difficult to have a reference point for what it can feel like to be a liberated being where you're not so closely identified with this voice in our head that runs our life that won't leave us the heck alone And it's it's it really is an amazing

challenge for anybody who's listening who hasn't already just try to observe your breath um continuously without broken attention for every inhale and exhale and see how long you can last you know because it is shockingly difficult our mind just the habit of the mind just jumps right back in yeah it is it is really difficult even trying to do it for one minute is like a massive challenge it sounds so easy but it's It's 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 aasa it's like the truth of the universe just hits you so clearly it's like wow like you know this it Feels like I but it's just composition it's just something that's flowing together mental and physical phenomena moving at incredibly rapid speeds and you can feel the way all these different aspects of you

know your what you think of as your internal reality are just fluctuating and changing at incredibly rapid speeds but I think what you're pointing to is like it's important to realize that the magic of paying attention to Your mental health and trying to do something about it like to make your mind less turbulent the results of that are in changed Behavior like when you see the change 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 in your muscles but then it's like wait

I know that I'm missing patience let me intentionally cultivate patience and then you see that your patience is growing over time or Your ability to listen or your ability to pull yourself outside of your own perspective and see the perspective of another like those are things that um are incredibly powerful and just as worthy as muscles yeah yeah it's it's the experiential knowing that we were speaking to before when you feel yourself as a being of flowing continuous vibrations and not this solid eye this solid Locust of thoughts and Emotions kind of somewhere crouched around

here that's like you know uh kind of in in a survival energy towards the external World it takes it from knowledge to truly wisdom because you're living that experience and you know I'd like to get your perspective on yeah impermanence because it's such an important thing for us to one understand intellectually and then also deepen our experience of because life has this illusion of continuity like for example A lot of these lights that are around us are actually flickering maybe hundreds of times per second but because it's so fast so rapid we're not aware to

the degree that it's actually not a full continuous light source yeah and similarly within our experience of life we have this experience of being a solid self moving through solid space and time and as you deepen from anapana to Vasa you're starting to really experience that ucer 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 um like I'm so grateful like I think that's that's been one of my um biggest points of gratitude is understanding that my identity isn't static and being able to feel the dynamism of it to be Able to feel like you know my body has a Rushing River of atoms and really clearly feel that you know which one of these atoms is me like where am am is 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 soda said you Know if you say you exist that's true if you say you don't exist that's also true neither of them are lies and um this is something that you get you know because you you go especially when you go to these foser you are being exposed to the Ultimate Reality like at the conventional level you and I are having a conversation at the ultimate level what's happening right it's

just atoms it's just like subatomic particles moving at really Rapid speeds and we just happen to be like near each other um and I think knowing that has just given me so much Liberty in 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 the Observer right like even even with vasana like you know some people say just you know be the Observer but even the Observer melts away it goes back to what you said in The beginning of

deciding to live more gently like when you experience the impermanence of something that there will be a first and last time that we do anything in life yeah it changes radically how we approach all of our relationships our career our family and how we engage with them because as much as I love you know this conversation and meeting you who knows what's going to happen to either of us the next moment you know and and that invites actually An immense presence and and and that brings so much more aliveness to life on the path of

deepening our awareness I found um especially through you know studying through DH and basa learning how there's three types of actions that we can have you know from the physical which we're all obvious you know are obvious to us to the vocal to our mental which is the most subtle and they put the most importance on because they're closest to the source of which We're our impulses arise I found that there's so much more importance on our mental my mental volition like I I found that as a direct path to like the the doorway the

Gateway into my subconscious and unconscious but also like where so much transformation comes and so what what is mental volition and and how you would explain it yeah I think um you know the intention that you're moving and using 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 valtion you know creates conditioning it's it's it's a different way of thinking about Karma K 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 um but I think understanding that this conditioning is like it's being Built all the time from the moment that you're born all throughout your life I think sometimes in Western psychology people think of the subconscious as something that's formed during childhood but I think from this doic perspective the sub conscious is you know it's aggregating things throughout the entirety of your life every time you have a very strong reaction to whatever it is that you're feeling it's adding more imprints

you know what guankui Calls Sara 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 you know 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 aosta makes you know it literally helps you stop creating more of this conditioning

and by stopping creating that conditioning by just being non-reactive and being aware um all the old stuff melts away and it's that's why when I you know after I did my first course when I came out of it I I didn't understand the technique te didn't know what was going on barely you know barely made it through the first course but I Was like my mind feels lighter and now looking back on it it's like oh this you know even the small moments where I was able to meditate correctly had a huge impact where like

huge chunks of conditioning burned away and helped me see a little bit more clearly help 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 cuz I was like I got to go back like I need to find out How this works similar time frame when I sat my first 10day and then six months later went and served my first one and man looking back you really are able to connect the dots how for me

and I'm sure for you like that was such a big pivotal point of of transformation and you can see the change and how it you know even if it puts you to D degrees in a different direction in life over the course of a decade you're in a Completely different zip code you know yeah yeah it's really powerful like you know it's funny because sometimes people will go to courses and they may do one in their lifetime but it like will really it's a big impact that it has and it helps delete conditioning and I've

noticed that like I I went through a while where I wasn't meditating daily and I was you know I think I did like four courses and and one course of service before I Started meditating daily but even with those courses like my mind was radically different like even though I didn't bring the practice back to the to you know doing it daily and then once I did pick it up da and started meditating daily that just like took the growth to a whole another level but it's surprising how you know those moments of being aware

and it goes back you know those those lines in the dapada where it's like you know you can do tons of Different like you know beautiful positive things but the most powerful thing you can do is like being aware for like a minute and and it's really true like you spend a few moments just being aware and being a Quantus and like your life can just really change for the better yeah I think somewhere in the dapada I believe the Buddha is referenced as saying one minute of pure proper awareness is worth more than a

full lifetime of unawareness yeah and That's quite a statement yeah but it it it points to what you were speaking to about the color tinted glasses that often we're living life through it's not in many ways it's not actually an intimate experience with life it's just conditioning reacting to other conditioning that we presented with in life yeah you're like that's something that a lot of people have difficulty with is that your perception and your reaction they're happening inside of you And your perception is very past oriented it's very oriented towards whatever it is that happened

before and you're just kind of moving through life and whenever you see something that is similar to what's happened before already the impulsiveness comes up the reaction comes up of like how do I defend myself in this situation this reminds me of this person who hurt me in the past and immediately the past comes roaring up and it just repeats itself Over and over and over again until you put your foot down and you break the recreation of the past so that you can finally arrive into the present moment with choices and that's something that

I'm really also grateful for because you know the impulsiveness was so fast in the past that it made me feel like I didn't have a choice like it was just like oh that's the real me you know this anger this sadness this iety but no it's just the it's just the past trying to Recreate survival mode and having that sort of spaciousness of mind to be able to see oh there's my old reaction there's the past trying to recreate itself but you know I'm going to I'm I don't want to do that I actually want

to live intentionally and choose something new I found the understanding of like how our mind works you know on the path to knowing oursel if we want to actually know who we are and what life is then it is delineating the path uh the Difference between what is us and what isn't us and on that Journey like you said it's really important to be mindful of what Impressions we're accumulating because the conscious mind can always accept or reject say I like this I don't like this but the subconscious mind is always recording it only works

through addition and multiplication and so that's why especially I think since I first got introduced to like this path and various other meditative Contemplative practices the importance of guarding what you are impressed upon you from the music you listen to to the movies you watch the people you hang around all of it is without your full awareness yeah and even the things that you're not aware of because our awareness can only be around um can only perceive consciously like a certain amount of bits of information our subconscious our body is picking up so like a

sponge 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 like just the way you think the way you show up in life and you have to be really intentional about you know we were talking before we started recording like one of the reasons my wife and I moved to the woods was we wanted to be around there's a bunch of other you know there's a lot of Med Meditation Traditions that have

sort of you know had important moments in Western Massachusetts like Joseph Goen and Jack cornfield and Sharon salsburg they started to Center in western Mass the first the first Goan Center outside of India was in western Mass too and there's a bunch of different monasteries you know um and a lot of monks there's just been a lot of different Traditions that have and people who are teachers who've just had a lot of like Awakening Moments there in western Mass so my wife and I were like oh let's go hang out with our like fellow meditator

friends who've been meditating for like 20 30 40 50 years and just like be around them you know learn from them and um 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 equinity or non-reaction and are trying to live Through meta trying to live like with this loving kindness towards all beings it's really nice like how can you know it's such a gift to give yourself so it's been um I think that's been sort of reinforcing this positive conditioning for the

two of us yeah in in the chorus a big teaching is the four types of people that you know those that are going from Darkness to Darkness yeah those that are going from Darkness to brightness those that are going from Brightness to Darkness and those that are going from brightness to brightness and I think it's an important framework because it it helps us reflect on which direction our life is going if we're accumulating more unconscious Impressions that are building towards a life of reaction or or we're going towards more awareness yeah so I'm just curious

if you'd like to reflect on a moment in your personal life where you went from Darkness to Darkness to Darkness to brightness to now hopefully brightness to brightness um because I think yeah I just breathe some Humanity into this as I know your journey in life has been a a quite a wild Journey very full spectrum yeah yeah um I think the biggest sort of Darkness to Darkness moment was really like the the first half of my life so I was um I was born in wakil Ecuador in South America and when I was four

years old my parents Realized that there was no real sort of economic future for us there and they wanted to they thought it was better to take the risk of moving to the United States and seeing you know what would happen and when you move to the United States it's like rolling the dice you just you just don't know what you're going to get and I was fortunate that my my parents are very hard workers but my dad worked at a supermarket my mom worked cleaning houses so we were like We were stuck in a

very serious poverty trap 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 um they were always you know trying to figure out how to fill the fridge and I would see that struggle you know they would fight about it they would try to figure figure it out each month for like you know more than a more than a decade and and things didn't Really improve until my brother and I started getting older and we

were you know able to get jobs as teenagers and just like take that load off of my parents um but all of that created like I mentioned earlier a really kind of rough outer layer of me where I like wasn't trying to like intentionally hurt people but I was just like rough with my words and I was moving around um in a very sort of defensive format and as I got older and when I went to college I Didn't realize how big of an imprint all of that had on my subconscious where I was so

full of this scarcity mindset so full of sadness so full of anxiety and I had no way to process it you know this is very like pre- wellness so you know therapy wasn't as accessible as it as it is now you know I didn't know of anybody meditating so when I got to college I um 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 a long Darkness to Darkness moment and it led to a rock bottom moment where I almost lost my life because I just did too many drugs one night and my heart was like literally breaking like it felt like it was exploding and um 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 in that moment I was like realizing that if I continued in this path I was going to die like I was 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 work you know to to give me a chance to make a life that's different from theirs And it kind of woke me up to just realizing that I needed to do the opposite of what got me to that point so to me it was like it all felt very

intuitive where if I was doing drug drugs if I was doing drugs I need to stop doing drugs if I'm lying to myself about how I don't feel good I need to admit to myself the truth if I'm running away from my emotions like instead of rolling up another joint just spend time feeling the anxiety feeling the sadness And that was like the slow walk from Darkness to light and just like trying to like um you know be intentional about how am I crafting my life and then about a year later from That Rock Bottom

moment um is when I did my first 10day course and that kind of just really picked up all the growth H yeah amazing man and at what point I'm curious did uh sharing your insights and your growth and when did that come into the Picture that was in um so after the third 10day course that I did um I started feeling that the changes that I was going through were significant like I I KN 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 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 rupe cower in like 2014 they were like getting bigger on Instagram and I was like oh let me start writing little essays so I would write like little essays on the caption and back then

um you know words and images like me weren't as popular so I would like you know go to the parks in the city in like New York City and Everything and take like little pictures and like put up you know nice little pictures of Nature and like write little essays about what I was you know reflecting on and then I started taking the main idea of whatever I was writing about or a little poem and um sharing them in you know black and white images and then after that things started picking up so from 2014

to 2017 was when things really kind of got started for me in terms of like the Young poblo account hey fam I hope that this episode with Diego is bringing you value and a sense of ease in your life one thing that brings me joy in my life is my morning ritual having healthy habits in the morning that build a foundation for steady energy throughout the rest of the day to be our best self is a major key and for me every day I start with shrooms and not the Psychedelic kind but through a coffee

alternative like the Ones in mudw water where their blend contains adaptogenic mushrooms like Lion's man to support focus and chaga and Rishi to support your immune system for me drinking something like cacao which is in mud water instead of coffee is a big win I rarely go without it in the morning and if you don't know mudwater is 100% organic non-o gluten-free sugar-free and vegan I absolutely love this company my good buddy Shane is the founder and so I know How much intention they put into their creations and they invest in Wellness as well I'm

stoked to be partnering with them for 2025 if you want to give them a try you can head to mudwater docomo thyself and grab a starter kit right now our community at no thyself gets an exclusive deal which is up to 43% off your entire order plus a rechargeable frother which is free it comes in a little package like this with cool little sayings over it um it's pretty Affordable for the like quality of the product that it is again it's up to 43% off at mu dwt.com thyself I hope you enjoy I'm curious was

did you have any like egoic inflation in that period where um I think there's the genuine urge to share insights that would be helpful to people did you have any ego stuff that came up on your process of gaining millions of Followers yeah I think there that 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 that there was a lot of that happening

where it wasn't like like dude I know I'm not the best writer like I know I'm not like um you know I like reflecting On things and sharing um 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 um like I didn't have a lot of support from friends like I didn't have a lot you know a lot of people were confused they're like why are you doing this like

why are you you know writing about why Don't you just get a job and um and because I had been working in the nonprofit world for a long time and I 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 that she did but there was definitely ego inflation definitely attachment to like you know seeing numbers grow and stuff like that but I think in my mind the path like the dhama 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 yeah yeah 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 and I think to a degree it's inevitable right like I think it's it's part of the path of like we find our way we find some ins And

then we lose our way a little bit and it's just like that balance of awareness and integration um because we can have huge insights or awareness into certain aspects of life and unless like we we put that into practice and make that the new normal for us and integrate then yeah it can be tough yeah and the ego's 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 I was thinking about this too like

whether I was you know the writing world or not or like sharing stuff online like the ego is going to try to grow itself no matter what so if I was still in the nonprofit world it would have been like why am I why am I not a manager why am I not like you know just grabbing some other type of superiority complex and I think have being able to be aware of when the ego grabs something and then coming back to the truth of impermanence That's like oh actually there's nothing really there you know

you fooled yourself again so it's it makes it easier to let go yeah and again the inevitability of life being a one giant mirror through all its different faces back to us of um our own gifts our own inad inadequacies our pain the love that we can share you know and and I'm looking forward to diving a little bit deeper into relationships also you know a lot of the topics of exploration in Your new book I think of just first off to start out like the mysterious mysteriousness of Consciousness like we have this Human Experience

that is 100% self-contained that just presents itself through the void of our face like you know I can't see you right now because I'm seeing through myself yeah and that's amazing because the world presents itself to us and yet it creates difficulties because we're so close to our own [ __ ] like We're literally looking through it as it often times and that's and and so when I when I think of relationships and them as mirrors through not just romantic connections but through all different types of relationships relationships through media yeah through friends and family

through the you know um so so many different aspects of it it just uh it makes me think about like how this realm is set up and how yeah um mirrors and relationships serve an a very Important necessity in our Awakening Journey because otherwise there's so much stuff we can't see throughout um when unless we have a proper mirror of our internal self 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 and through the Experience of like liit yeah through this this like confined moment where it's like you know both people come with past pain both people have e OS both people have needs and wants and delusions and ignorance and it's just this you know massive little bubble between human beings and then we're trying to treat each other as best as possible trying to learn how to care for each other and it's interesting I think of the you know beings who've reached Ultimate points of evolution like

beings like the Buddha or Jesus or you know other human beings that have just taken that sort of the development of where the human mind can go to the ultimate level and they don't exist in a framework of ego they exist in a framework of compassion so like this ego framework that we live in it can and you feel that as you cultivate yourself more of it starts shifting towards compassion where It becomes easier to do what you know Krishna M talks about where it's like just observe like don't project just just watch just see

what's happening um and when we're in a relationship it's like let me try my best to practice that and it's it's funny how we keep uh my wife and I we're like finding that the the peace and Harmony in our relationship is really coming from our ability to practice seeing each other without projecting without trying to Throw anything onto the situation and trying to just do our best to understand each other and like live what tikn Han talks about where you know love is understanding and we can't understand and judge something at the same time

right no we have to listen we have to listen you know how um it's interesting I wanted to tell you the story so one time I was fortunate to give food to a monk out in western Mass and I've I've met a lot of people who've meditated in A lot of different traditions and a lot of really well-developed people but only really like two that I really feel like um have really seen beyond the universe and this person that we were giving food to he um so I went with my wife and our two friends

and the four of us you know we gave him his meal and then we were just like hanging out for an hour and we were talking about DH talking about all this stuff And at the end of it my friend Rodrigo was like Hey man like I was really trying to pinpoint like what was going on in my mind but I was realizing that my experience of him were just projections like there was nothing there like he wasn't even like a you know he was just so much flowing Dharma and compassion and freedom that there

was no sense of Ste no he had no sense of self for us to stick on to and I was trying to put it Into words myself I was like yeah I was like I was feeling the same thing too like I wasn't like there was nothing there for me to like grab on to 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 cuz then we see how much of our interactions are just Like what how much stuff can I throw on you yeah and then on the flip side how much through the cultivation of awareness our presence can be an active force of Liberation for everyone we come into contact with exactly oh it's a huge learning moment being around someone who's like really trying to do the total opposite besides you just trying to like be nourishing compassionate absolutely selfless it's like it's beautiful it's a beautiful gift

what do you think are the Qualities of that state when you tap into it like you just mentioned a couple of compassion and understanding what other ones would you say are the most predominant I think um the appreciation of complexity I think that's one thing that is really hard for human beings and GUI talks about this where you know part of growing on the path to nibana to Enlightenment is like being able to understand things from many different perspectives you know your perspective Often feels like the biggest one and we're really stuck in it and

attached to it but being able to see things from different angles um I think also being able to just understand and appreciate impermanence at so many different levels where like that truth of impermanence it opens the you know the door to all the other you know the understanding of not self the understanding of dissatisfaction like often people call it suffering and misery those are like Giant words I think it's really I really enjoyed the satisfaction because it's like that that explanation of Dua um feels really relatable because like yeah life life is suffering sometimes but

often it is very dissatisfying even when you have everything I really like the appreciation of complexity because I think it's so easy and so simple to reduce people to objects and just uh s like simple way of understanding them Like it's actually a sign of it's a sign of intelligence to be able to be in the face of something complex where there's many different Dynamics and to uh yeah and to not reduce people down yeah I've been noticing that when when I started going deeper into meditation that my thinking was very black and white was

like it's either this or that you know and uh over time because of this developing appreciation for Complexity it's not like either this or either that there's just so much gray area and being able to appreciate the gray and being able to like you know I love now when I'm interacting with someone who has different beliefs than I do um it it doesn't create a combative energy inside of me it's more an energy of curiosity it's like oh like tell me why tell me tell me more tell me what you think and that that can

only come from you know not falling into the black And white thinking do you think that our capacity to give love to others is limited to the degree we can give it to ourselves in many ways I think to a certain extent I think um it's tough it's not it's not so um there is obviously a very deep connection there but I think there are times where you see parents like who struggle to love themselves and they do such an amazing job just setting things up better for their children than what They had when they

were growing up and I I do think at you appreciating the complexity that was great yeah yeah I think it's um but I do feel like even with that situation if you know the parent is able to take time to love themselves even more then they'll develop expansiveness and they'll be able to you know have even more patience more listening and all the things that we've been talking about for the child yeah what uh sparked your desire to Write a book about love when it's quite a you know filled industry everybody said everything about love

yeah I love that I think it's um you know that's one one thing I tell writers all the time people who who want to get something out there and feel like their intuition is pointing them in that direction I'm like listen everything has been said that shouldn't stop you because nothing has been like you have yet to Share your perspective on these topics and if you feel like you have something to say you have to go out there and say it because you you actually don't know who you're going to help you don't know who's

going to come across your book and it may profoundly change their lives um but for me I went into writing how to love better because honestly I was just shocked like I went into meditating and paying attention to my habits because I I needed to save Myself like I was like you know heading towards a train wreck and but in the act of saving myself and changing my life immediately I noticed that my relationships were very surface level and that I could do something about it that I can improve them that as I deepen that

connection with myself I could you know like just have more like appreciation for my wife like get to know her again and like the same thing with my friends with my mom and dad like Being able to deepen those connections um really it was directly tied to me being able to grow and build peace in my own mind yeah so I think 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 um just feels important to

talk about yeah when you say that it just brings to mind how often we drag our history and in who we think somebody Is and how they should show up based off of who they've been in the past in every single moment and in that perspective it's like we're not actually even engaging with somebody who as they are in the moment we're engaging with how we want them to be how we expect them to be and that like just sucks intimacy out of the equation yeah because then you're like what I'm literally interacting with an

illusion like I'm literally like taking all these Projections forming them bringing them into this present moment and then I'm not even like not even talking to you I'm probably talking to the person who hurt me seven years ago that sucks that's not a good way to live yeah and it's why I'm so glad we started this whole conversation talking about the developing of a awareness because to the degree that we do that is to the degree we can actually be present with somebody and not just our our projections of them 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 going to retort how am I going to sort of try to prove my point using the words that you're that you're saying as opposed to just taking a moment to fully appreciate Where you're coming from to just suspend my need for dominance suspend my need for you know to

just be right and just accept that you also have a very valid perspective and then I should take the time to hear it and then hopefully you'll give me that opportunity as well yeah I love that section in your book when you reflect on arguments it's because it's something that I've thought of many times as well where often we're under the presumption whenever arguments Arise in um in particularly the Romantic relationships but also any conversation where we have differ opinions we feel like it's me versus you and we're trying to win instead of trying to

understand yeah and shifting that perspective instead of me versus you it's US versus the problem yeah yeah it feels like it's a big it logically makes sense but it's so you have to untangle yourself from your emotions from your reactions to be able to even try to practice that Because it's it's difficult as soon as we get into an argument you know we're very much so driven by our evolutionary need to survive so when we get into an argument we feel like we may be cast aside by the group we may you know um like

we're under threat in some way so immediately we feel like we're walking into a battle but you have to remind yourself like who are you arguing with like I'm arguing with the person I love I'm this is my best friends like this is My roommate this is like the the homiest of homies like the person I love the most you know so why am I acting like I'm under threat and now let me try to shift my energy to try to do my best to see things from their perspective and this is why like you

know in this book I talk about a very specific form of compassion where you intentionally try to let go of your perspective for a moment and step into the shoes of another person to see things from their View and you find that when you do practice that and you're able to give that to each other the tension evaporates when I can really see the series of events from your point of view and then you can see mine we're like oh that's why this happened and I think that's that's only something that can happen when you

really try to let go of winning the guess we had on last week Peter cron he has a saying that being right is the poor man's version of Selfworth oh man that's a good one yeah and it really does feel like often times like we're not trying to get to the objective truth of of truth of something we're trying to just be right in our perspective yeah and uh again it's one of those things that's very difficult to catch in the throws of unawareness by default you're not aware to the function in the degree which

this is happening right yeah but again in the process of growing our awareness we can See and like just uh question question it a little bit more you know and and just create a little bit of a crack of awareness and and inquisitiveness and curiosity when we when we're diff faced you know with these difficult situations yeah I think it's um it's really hard because the mind is so tricky and I think when you're questioning like where is this coming from you know start 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 you know we were together for a long time we've we've been together for almost 17 years the first six years of our relationship was before we started meditating and the that time period was highly chaotic um it felt like we were living in a hurricane but when we started developing our individual self-awareness we started Realizing that actually I'm not mad at you I just don't feel good there's

like heaviness moving through me there's some tension moving through me and what we accidentally started practicing really out of the confine of the situation where when the pandemic began um you know we're living in our little apartment in New York City and we were you know starting to get into these arguments but then realizing oh like actually we're not mad at each Other at all and what we started doing instead was taking a moment when we would wake up to just tell each other immediately how we feel and you know if cuz sometimes you wake

up and you don't immediately feel good you're just like I feel heavy or tired or you know I feel a little sick and just having these little bits of information where like you yourself are naming how you're feeling and you're making yourself aware of it and you're Making your partner aware of it it is so helpful because that 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 like let me see how I can step up for

her how I can support her and just like you know take things off her plate and she you know she would also know okay I need to move gently through the day and vice versa you know whenever I would not feel good I'm like Okay well let me be like gentle to myself and mindful of how I'm speaking and also mindful of the way my mind's moving because it's going to try to make this someone else's fault and we can only communicate to the degree we're aware of what our needs are and what our values

are right so we have to like actually know what we need in order to be able to communicate it with another which is the process of you know communication which we're speaking to Real communication versus communication out of projections and tension yeah right like self-awareness is really difficult without like honesty and accountability like because you can pay attention to yourself but still try to make everything someone else's fault but really you know being able to own the fact that like oh I just don't feel that good and it doesn't really have anything to do with

you but the mind like emotions like to grow you know whether It's a positive or A negative one it tries to just expand itself and feed itself so the the you know the mind is always looking for more Canon fodder and it'll just like take whatever tension you're feeling or whatever anger you're feeling and try to think of some old thing that happened you know a year ago and my wife and I had this really funny moment where where it just like it hit us so hard 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 2 and a half 3 hours and she comes into the room laughing and she was like she's like I spent the last like hour trying to think of a reason to figure out why I don't feel good is your fault and I just kept going back in time further back in time further back in time just trying to rehash and she' like caught the mind as it's moving through This process and she and

I was like well and she's laughing right she thought it so funny like seeing that inside of herself and I was like also being like wow like I do the same thing but also I'm so grateful to you because you just saved us so many problems yeah man I I have a couple people in my life who have been in a long-term relationship like 20 30 40 years plus and it's so different than the challenges that come up in you know The first five years of a relationship and I'm just curious what you think about

the saying that love isn't enough and that you need to like learn how to communicate and I'm curious what you think the other aspects are that we need to really cultivate as skills within uh building a long-term relationship this is a great question too because I think we're like gener generationally in a very different moment um but I think for a lot of times love was enough and People just decided like and because my wife and I we had that same thing happened before we started meditating where we felt this ethereal connection towards each other

that was so magnetic and I couldn't get away from it even if I wanted to and there were times where we would break up take breaks you know be a part but we just like come back together and it came to a point where I was like all right like you know I I'd rather just be miserable with you like I Just I love you and like we don't have the skill set to really like bring Harmony to this but it was like I we just really liked being next to each other and we you

know embraced that but we were fortunate that we started finding meditating and I think for a lot of you know like therapy is very new meditating is very new like you know it's been around for thousands of years but it's become more commonly adopted by the dominant culture and I think that These skills that we're learning to like heal our generational trauma to like you know help change the way our habits manifest in daily life to be intentional about showing each other care uh it's a very new thing so it depends on what kind of

relationship you want and I think for a lot of us like I'm also en entirely grateful that my wife and I did develop self-awareness did develop some emotional maturity so that we can understand that for the two of us yeah Love isn't enough and then there's this other component that is learning how to care for each other like learning how to care for each other is a long-term real process that is separate from just feeling how important we are to each other treating each other as best friends and roommates and and all the other things

that you know partners are to each other I think it can be like relationships can often default to the place where it becomes a comfort Zone um out of coping not being able to be comfortable alone like and and and that can be a dangerous Pitfall as well because we can only I suppose choose something to the degree in which we're free and we're like we bring a sense of willingness to it instead of like it's our default and just our safety and our comfort zone which is amazing not not you know saying anyone's wrong

for wanting some comfort or safety but how how do you feel like our capacity to be Good alone is a barometer for how much we've healed 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 you're

like by yourself no one's talking to you no one's even making any eye contact with you you're just like you know your eyes are downcast and and when we go away to these courses and spend all this time just with ourselves cultivating ourselves deleting so much conditioning you know allowing this all all this heavy conditioning to evaporate um it creates this Dynamic where when we come back together we're like it's like meeting a new person you know like in Those 45 days sometimes they feel like an eon long sometimes they feel like 10 days 20

days sometimes they go by fast but during that time we both went to war against ignorance and we you know we did our best to develop wisdom and we come back and it's like this this meeting moment so in those 45-day courses you have two days of meta at the very end where you start speaking and you know everyone starts like normalizing themselves again and every time I'm just Like we're both just like oh my gosh like how are you like how like and we both in that moment are we're rekindling our connection with each

other and simultaneously understanding that we ourselves as individuals have to get to know ourselves again because so much conditioning has been deleted in that period so the the shows that you want to watch on TV the movies you want to watch the music you want to listen to all that's changed and you notice you like Played your old favorite song and you're like whoa that is way too tense for me I can't even hear that you know that the energy coming off of it's way too strong or like the TV show and it's like it's

like no that's like too much that's not it doesn't even fit who we are now and even down to like our meals and what we want to eat so it's it's a fun period where because we spend 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 I want to read this quote that I saw in your book that I really loved um there is an intrinsic and undeniable connection between the relationship you have with your own emotions and

how well you will be able to show up for the emotions of those you love if you run from your own tension you will lack the experience to show up for the tension of others and I think it just really invites this perspective of what it means to hold Space for others to the degree we can for ourself yeah it's really it's important to realize that because turning your attention Inward and being able to really explore your own internal forest and being able to see your emotional history for what it is the good and the

bad it's really challenging like it's really hard to be able to see like the bad things that happened to you and how much tension they've caused you but in that process when you're really Observing yourself you're developing patience you're developing compassion you're accepting your imperfections you're developing all these qualities towards yourself that don't just have to stay with you they're they're qualities that you can bring into every other aspect of your life either into your relationships or into your work so I think it's quite beautiful when people start realizing it and I've found this like

not just in myself but you know People who do other modalities who you know do different forms of therapy whatever you know there's so many modalities out there but you really find that when you cultivate those your emotional skill set so that you can have more peace in your mind it immediately helps support you in your relationship because those skills don't just stay for you you can share them with others have you found the skills you Need to make it let's say year 5 through 10 in relationship are different than the first five 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 uh you know know the exact time but we've been together for almost 17 probably 18 years this year and I think the skill set that we're developing now is not craving or Expecting the relationship to always be at a high level of excitement you know that excitement comes and goes and I've even been realizing as was meditating like you know that excitement is just a a more delicious form

of agitation and it's very uh you know being okay with like boring calm days together days that you have you'll have no memory of and but still being able to be present to enjoy the day to like move about with gratitude um feels like a nice and Worthy Challenge and I think you know being able to grow older to together like we met really young we were she was 18 and I was 19 and I was just telling this to a friend but being able to look at each other's faces like my my life is

when I think about the memories of my life I don't see my face I see her face because my experience of life is seeing her and the life that's happening around her like I see my face way less than I see hers and It's so cool now as we've gotten older um 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 man it really is cool to think about how long-term relationships

were very much so being witnessed to each other's lives yeah I get to see the whole thing like dude she 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 um it's something that hit me like a few years ago I'm like damn my whole experience of life is like her face yeah man yeah it's it's exciting and and I do think that it it's each generation is faced with problems and challenges unique to that

generation and I think because of social media and the ability to compare your You know at the right to any relationship or couple goals that are out there what would you say to a generation that has this Perfection orientation towards relationships and people and the grass is greener and yeah um you know I feel like it that perspective robs us of the joy and and beauty that comes from the longevity of something 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 you know my friend Danielle she mentions this all the time where it's it's not the relationship you get it's the relationship you build and I've totally have experienced that myself directly and you know I think it's really really hard when you are spoiled with choice and we live in this Society that's made like literally Everything is designed to make your life easier every app everything's trying to make something easier for you and you're not going to like Uber and door Dash your

way out of this like if you're really caring about your personal growth and really caring about developing a good relationship it takes work and it's slow and you have to be okay with that and I think when I first you know when my wife and I first got together as kids like we we felt this deep connection to Each other and it it would feel like we would slip into another world together and it also felt like I was looking for her for eons like it felt like I was like we had lost each other

and like found each other again and when we started meditating it like especially after the first few longer courses it hit us and it was like oh like this is why we're together like we've been doing this meditation path for a long time it's Been many lifetimes of us like meditating together supporting each other and growing in wisdom and when I think her she 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 like she really is so good at developing wisdom

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

to have that in my partner it takes two big people to courageously uh love and love from a Space of Freedom where you're holding somebody not with a tight grip but with a loose palm and to know that whatever happens in the next week month year that if you guys decided to part way that the love that you share never goes anywhere and to continually choose each other you know and and I think it's important to reflect on that like it's a fundamental orientation to perceive a container of a relationship as a catalyst for your

own Soul's Evolution and to be in service For that for the other person too and I think when people when two individuals surrender to that is a completely different Dynamic cuzz both people are willing to change and they're they're willing to grow and mhm that's difficult and the the growth of the container will be limited if one person's not that if if if they're not there in that in their Journey yeah and I think a lot of what you're pointing to is coming from coming to a place where you're not trying to Have your the

framework of your mind be driven by attachments and as opposed to attachments you're trying to arrive into the relationships around commitments and when I think about you know love is freedom it really is but it doesn't necessarily mean that you get to do what you want you sleep with whoever you want like a lot of people get scared about that when they hear that in the context of relationships it's more so love is freedom in the sense Where I support you in evolving in whatever direction is best for you and like I have no control

and no say over what your preferences are you know what your interests how they may evolve over time and and I think that we we had to learn that over time because we both find that the center point of Our Lives is the development of wisdom everything everything else just sort of like comes secondary to that and I'm so grateful that I that I'm able to be in such a Nourishing relationship but there's I'm also like really just it feels like I won the lottery because I see other friends who are you know they move

from one good relationship to another good relationship and I think always you know putting so much of um what you want out of life to be the aspects of relationship it's very challenging because I think it would be so timec consuming and So like um you know I'm just grateful that I have that Fulfillment with my wife and of course there's like you know there's there's so many different Attractive people and all these things and things that you can sort of have your craving attach itself to but it's like oh know we're happy with the

two of us and let's let's like use this container of relationship as a way to help Propel the both of us forward on this path of wisdom yeah yeah it's like deepening intimacy and growth through the depth of one Connection versus Meandering and exploring for different unique novelty and different connections and you know it's it I mean chasing chasing excitement like I feel like that's a hard way to live yeah you know that's it's so fleeting it's like it's nothing have your roots and everything yeah anything you want to share on the overlap between her

own personal Awakening Journey which we's opened up with and um becoming that presence of Love for for other relationships not even just romantically but like you know we our life is filled with relationships yeah totally they're everywhere every every person who crosses your path and then the long-standing relationship of VI 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 I do my best to you know to pay attention

to just to just be there and not like fly into my phone and to do my best to um see where this interaction is going and why it's happening and what's like the sort of the karmic situation around it and to also just like practice that as much selflessness and presence as I can because yeah sometimes you're very tired and you can only do so much and other times you know you're you're At full strength and you can really give you know a high level of presence but I feel like every moment is more special

than we think and things don't really happen accidentally it feels like the more the more and the longer I meditate the more I see that the universe is like is a series of forces it's not like a a a being it's like there are forces that are moving and affecting each other and coming together in you know really rapid connections um And that this sort of magnificent law of cause and effect is just like really impacting so many different aspects of reality in very quick ways so if I'm having a moment you know I bought

a coffee before I came here and um 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's it feels good it's like feels like the right thing to do yeah it feels like the more we grow our awareness the More we perceive the opportunities and the Bountiful opportunities we have in our life to be even just a small agent of benevolence and change for the people that we come in contact with and you start to pick up on things

and there's a refinement of your intuition I think I was I was having a conversation maybe it was like I don't know a year ago I was on a hike with a friend he's owner founder of this really big company but it's like was facing Some good amount of difficulty in his life um and like finding resistance and I could see and just like you know could see the nature of his mind is so brilliant moves so fast and I asked him do you ever consider how your inability or lack of willingness to slow down

is affecting your ability to speak speed up and you know it was a big it was a big like moment for him you know because I think so many of us perceive things that we want whether it's through Comparison or maybe they're just genuine things we feel are for us and yet we want them in that door Dash Uber mentality right and we don't want to put in the work and um so I I feel like so many things become revealed to us in the process of slowing down and being able to pay attention to

how life works and a big one of that is uh refining our capacity to listen to that inner voice and that intuition and I'm curious what your thoughts are about Intuition and the uh listening to it 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 the rapidness of life um 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 um it's going to ask you to step outside your comfort zone it's going to ask you to like really Chall like intuition is not just like a a simple like left right you know which direction I should go in but it's more so like asking you to to move into 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 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 I think what I've truly Tried tried to strive for most in my life is the ability to see clearly and experience life as it is and you can't do that when you're a state of survival you know and I look at the biggest decisions I've made in my life when I look back and connect the dots that have led me to the the most impact and growth they were those subtle voices that I listened to you know that were like the wave

on the beach shore you know thankfully um and they can show up by Screams when you don't listen to them for so long but the refinement of our ability to listen to our inner voice uh there is this freedom in realizing that we're not in control of our life no one is and there are forces within us that we can pay attention to where life intelligence I feel like is moving us in a direction and the more that we listen and surrender to that voice I feel strongly that the more our life is is going

to play out in a way That is of most benefit to most people and ourselves what do you think about surrendering to that voice and intelligence that's really interesting I feel like it's not it I love that um positioning and I think I I come from it a in an 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 um they you Know often are the sounds that reactions make and they can seem rather wise but it's like you have

to kind of lean on your values a little bit and see like is this right action is this you know beneficial to me and to others and checking in with yourself in that way I also don't like you know in terms of like intelligence too like I feel like the more that I've studied the universe the more mechanistic it seems like and mechanistic in the sense where it's like A moving set of forces where like the universe is happening and you and I are here together because of motion because there's like this motion that's happening

in the universe and when things move and coales it creates greater complexity and I even had this moment where I was meditating and I was like did life ever really even begin or did things just become more complex and then this like idea of I started manifesting because when I observe Myself and feel what composes this body there's nothing there there's really nothing there and but what is there what does give sort of direction is this like long force of actions that came before this moment this long force of karmic flow that is um you

know manifesting and fruiting over time so it's been a it's been interesting 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 pointing towards one intelligence I don't know maybe a collective one but I think that's also impermanent yeah I think there's something inherently intelligent about the design from the Fibonacci and golden spiral sequences that you know go that are uh prevalent throughout all of Nature's design to you know the ratios of our body and

how it's comprised I'm curious what you think as you because I know especially in vasana And the practice of like observing life as it is and not through our own projections and belief we're both in sort of a spiritual space you know and I get offers every day from people that want to channel Intergalactic councils and angels and you know all all sorts of things yeah oh man I love that you know like I get I get all and it's great like you know I don't want to deny I don't deny or accept anything upon

you know it being Present it but I do feel like there can be especially in these spaces um people are quick to believe things um not just in the conspiratorial rabbit holes you know but um about what life is and what's out there and I think there's something freeing about just admitting that we don't know what's outside of our direct experience I love that I couldn't agree with you more and I think like my thing is like right treat people with respect like I don't I don't know I Can't prove that they're wrong I also

can't prove that they're right so like I don't know so let me just suspend disbelief but at the same time like I'm really careful with archetypes I'm really careful with like putting putting more labels on top of myself like I respect astrology but I don't adhere to it I don't like you know so I respect the different Mo 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 like right action I'm going

to move in a in a manner where you know if if I plant good actions in this present moment then the future ones will be pretty good you know 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 like I've had people reach out to me all the Time they're like you know this F famous person's astrologer wants to get a hold of you or this like this person like you know if if they

knew when your birthday was and blah blah blah they could tell you XYZ I'm like no dude I don't care don't give them my information like I I don't want to hear about that like if I focus on developing awareness equinity and compassion I'm going to be all right and I think that's enough yeah yeah yeah and it is that balance right because it Comes back to like living where I am open to the spontaneous synchronicity and coincidence that presents itself and you know if somebody wants to you know send me a message and I

happen to read it about my how my Libra is in North my North Noe is in Libra or whatever like ultimately I'm in a similar position with you and like if anything is genuinely providing value and insight to where you're living better with greater awareness and compassion and it comes in Whatever form then great like and 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 like this word it's a different way of saying just observe but just accepting what it is Because this attack is so Insidious to try to mold things and shape things even when you're meditating you're sitting there and there's this slight inclination towards pleasantry so slight even ever so like going K in the long the long meditation courses he warns you he's like you got to be

so careful because even though you think you're being a quanus there's such a slight undercurrent of craving for what's pleasant as opposed to just Accepting what is and you find in like you find that in what Sensations are you paying attention to and which ones are you accidentally ignoring 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 the some of the ones we mentioned they can definitely be growth paths but I don't you

know I don't need that much information I actually just need to Accept yeah and it's great that there are just as many people there are paths you know and so many different up the mountain and thank God we're not all on the same Trail cuz it would be very crowded but also we we'd have the same view and it's cool to to be able to have the different views and we were just talking be beforehand a little bit of some of the different paths and um they all have their unique value in in different ways

and I find for sure the Scientific approach with Vasa and damama is is is really important and how applicable it is to our immediacy of experience and the deepening of our awareness of whatever is happening like the teaching is to be observe where there's an abnormality in the breath and a biochemical sensation somewhere in the body that's attached to every sensation that's happening right and so the the fundamental craving we have for a pleasant experience of Life drives us to Do so many things and it goes so subtle right like it gets deeper and deeper

and and more subtle in its refinement yeah it's really powerful I think there's like there's so much to learn and in the quiet moment ments of like uh the meditation cell because in goas 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 um like meditating in a little cave and it's just like a Little closet um and you're you know sitting there and it's like totally dark and you're there just meditating for hours and you are flying through the universe you

are flying through it and you can feel 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 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 I think it's you know I have this gratitude to be able to see how not real I am and knowing that and knowing that really helps whenever the ego tries to grab where 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 you know at some point like I 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 yeah yeah there both again the Paradox of experiencing

the no self right and and seeing how there is no solid Diego or Andre right and yet There's still a unique perspective that life is is uh has through your eyes that comes out in the words you write and speak and I think we clarify that voice and perspective the more that uh we move through that conditioning and it's like you're just getting a more clear representation on real and then it comes through based off your own history and like the way that you like to speak within the confines of the English language and you

know it's it's It's exciting um to see so much gets lost in language it's really really hard when you're like spending hours you know with your eyes closed and experiencing reality and then you try to put words to it and it just it um almost like it doesn't devaluate that's too strong of a word but it just you get a glimpse but not the totality of it yeah the real transformation comes through experience right And I've had similar experiences where it's complete void of any thoughts or like you know because you'll you'll meditate for hundreds

of hours and maybe not yet have the experience where you're completely still where there's like zero absolute zero thoughts for a prolonged period of time and there is something it's very trippy it's like you're the the complete dissolution of an any experience and yet you come back to an Experience of being somebody you know after some amount of time it's so freeing and then you on the other hand can have those extremely Blissful explosive you know I'm a being of light experience where every particle in your body is humming at the frequency of love and

you're like you're on one I know that's really cool it's interesting because there's that's one thing that's um as you you know get more serious in a particular path and you spend more time On it you see that there's a lot of different experiences that you can have and it's it's interesting where some people sometimes fall into the Trap of like thinking they're enlightened before they are where like because there 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 a Raw awareness but you're still in the universe you're still in there and there are other moments where like all the senses shut down besides mind and there's only darkness and you know you're just experiencing reality but you're not hearing anything it's just like theal gone um and like you can just go on and on so many different things but it's um it's a it's a long and tricky path at times but it just makes me think about how important humility is And how important it

is to not develop like spiritual arrogance because there are really powerful experiences like some experiences I've had where I can barely like I don't even really talk about them because they sound wild they sound just like you know they yeah they sound they sound different like um to what how the way we commonly talk but and if I were would you be open to Shar you're setting me up right yeah I Set myself up too uh my bad um yeah I think like there was this one experience that I had where I was just so

Prof only concentrated like concentrated to like an an an a degree of honestly just like Perfection where the 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 um strong concentration we don't try to label it as like you know give it some special label but we just like refer to It as like you know you're concentrated there's sometimes when you're strongly concentrated you could just concentrated for hours and you know when you're concentrated you reach levels of of py

and Suka like levels of um just this like pleasantness of mind and body that are extraordinary that are um almost uh Celestial and you there was a a moment where I was just like oh this is what mahab Brahma feels like like This is this is like the the realm where like 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 and I was in there for a little while and um for a few hours and I was like wow this is like one of those Experiences where if I didn't know better I would come out of it and think oh I'm enlightened but it's like no it was just it was literally another impermanent experience and I'm so grateful to go 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 the mechanism of um of Dua still functioning in the mind so that Wasn't it yeah yeah yeah I was suffering and the stories of other people's experiences can be a really interesting reference point of like these things are possible and then once you go and experience and taste something that like that is plants the seed of like true transformation I feel like in somebody's life um because we've heard so many I mean whoever's listening I know I've heard a lot of wild mystical

stories and it's great they're great great reading Material you know and it's it's interesting um one one of my um one of my good uh friends he's like the 70y old guy he um he's so awesome but he like he trained with GOI really early on in like 7172 and um at that time there was also this teacher um you know manindra G manindra he was um Sharon salburg teacher he came out of the mahasi tradition and um but menra G told him once about some student that he had some some girl that was There

that became a soana like the first level of Enlightenment according to the darada 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 Enlighten great but like that's actually like it's her experience not mine and there's no reason to like even be a magnet to her she's not even a teacher like I've heard this from other teachers where the the Aspiration to teach you know some people can be enlightened and be terrible teachers be

like really not good at passing for forward the information that they themselves they were able to witness the truth Beyond mind and matter but they don't have that longstanding aspiration to develop this quality to teach and can't really pass it to you can't really you know yeah help you yeah you can have an an incredible experience and if you don't have the Capacity for the communication of the inner realm then it's tough to transmit that you know but then there are those teachers that this way with words and this ability you know and it's so

special and sometimes those teachers will like postpone their Enlightenment where they they they can but because of certain aspirations they their Enlightenment is held off to a certain particular moment where it will be most useful but even though they themselves Have not taken the dip they can take you all the way there and Beyond and it's really interesting scene that Karma unfold in different people where ganki and uak Gangi teacher um from what I've heard of them both of them were clear that they weren't enlightened but especially ubac gr too like helped tons of people

become enlightened and they just like understood the past so well because they've you know lifetimes of being teachers and they'll be Enlightened at some point but who knows when well thanks for sharing your your relative degree of awareness and Enlightenment with us on the podcast today I mean uh again dude when we first connected I was also similar they just excited to build a friendship and um you know the uh forgot the the Buddhist term is slipping in my mind that's like a spiritual friend um but you know I think it's really important to to

cultivate those those Connections and relationships uh that really help us you know reinforce our our own path and yeah this uh this community as well that's building and is interested in these kind of conversations just so so cool to feel we'll link down below where people can find how to love better and uh check out Diego and young Pueblo as his pen name throughout Instagram and social media platforms do you have any other last words before we head out no just utter Gratitude thank you for the space to have this beautiful conversation and it's nice

to um you know have a conversation like this where we can really dive deeper into these things yeah yeah my greatest joy thank you so much my friend everybody thanks for tuning into this episode until next time be well [Music]