Good Life Project - Diego Perez (Yung Pueblo) | Clarity & Connection
Episode Date: November 1, 2021Born in Guayaquil Ecuador, Deigo Perez - who is known by the pseudonym Yung Pueblo - moved with his family to Boston, where he saw his parents work relentless hours and struggle with poverty. He turne...d to activism and advocacy at a young age, then attended Wesleyan where his life devolved into partying and drugs that threatened to become his way of being as he moved into adulthood. But a moment of reckoning would awaken him both to his need to refocus on mental and physical wellbeing, as well as recenter meaning in his work and life.A quest was set in motion, one that would eventually lead Diego into a 10-day vipassana meditation experience that had a profound impact and would set him on a path of self-discovery, and an ever-deepening devotion to a now years-long, 2-hour-a-day meditation practice, regular extended retreats, and the pursuit of truth and wisdom. A part of that exploration also involved writing, and what began as a tool to process his own experiences eventually became a public writing practice. His words landed in a powerful way, amassing a global audience of millions of people, writing under the pseudonym, Yung Pueblo, which is both a reminder to him to stay grounded in a younger, growth mindset, and also a contained to frame this current season of work as a project that doesn’t constrain his own personal and professional growth. Diego’s new book, Clarity & Connection, shares many of his recent insights about life, meaning, love, work, self-awareness, and of course, clarity and connection.You can find Yung Pueblo at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Tara Brach about wisdom and compassion.My new book Sparked!-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Actually, some of your greatest power will come to light in groups.
And that's kind of what I learned was like as an individual, you do have power, but you can only do so much.
When you come into a group that can share a common cause, sky's the limit.
You know, you can really make serious change.
Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Diego Perez, who is known by the pseudonym Young Pueblo, moved with his family
to Boston at a very young age where he saw his parents really working relentless hours and
struggling with poverty. And he turned to activism and organizing and advocacy at a very young age,
then found himself attending Wesleyan, where his life kind of devolved into partying and drugs
that threatened to become his way of being as he moved
out of school and into adulthood. But a moment of reckoning would awaken him both to his need to
refocus on mental and physical well-being, as well as recenter meaning in his work and his life.
A quest was really set in motion, one that would eventually lead Diego into a 10-day Vipassana
meditation experience that
had this profound impact and would set him on a path of self-discovery and an ever-deepening
devotion to a now years-long, two-hour-a-day meditation practice, along with regular extended
retreats and the pursuit of truth and wisdom he wanted to see clearly, starting with himself.
And a part of that exploration, it also involved
writing. And what began as a kind of a tool to help him process his own experiences eventually
became a public writing practice. And as it did, his words landed in such a powerful way. It amassed
a global audience of millions of people as he wrote under the pseudonym Young Pueblo, which is both a
reminder to him to stay grounded in a younger growth mindset and also a container to frame
his current season of work as a project that doesn't constrain his own personal and professional
growth over time. Diego's new book, Clarity and Connection, shares many of his recent insights
about life and meaning and love and work and self-awareness and of course, clarity and connection, shares many of his recent insights about life and meaning and love and work and self-awareness, and of course, clarity and connection. So excited to share this conversation
with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here.
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That's uvic.ca slash future MBA.ayaquil, Ecuador.
Yeah, that's right.
And then to Boston.
How old were you when you actually made that journey?
I was tiny.
I was four years old.
And that's when I initially came over with my mom and dad and my brother.
And I have a little sister, but she was born here.
My brother was 10 years old when he made the trip.
Yeah. So you're itty bitty. Do you have any recollection or any sense of what it was there
for you? Or it's just sort of like a blur? No, but what's interesting is that there's a
clear divide in my memory where I have a tiny amount of fragmented images from living in Ecuador. Like I have one image of me playing
outside with a toy car in front of the house that we lived in, but my memory has really become crisp
and clear and more movie-like when I got to Boston. And that's probably because of, you know,
I was four years old, so who knows what's happening in a four-year-old's mind.
Um, but yeah, it all kind of really like in some way it feels like life starts, um, when
I turned four.
Yeah.
Have you had a chance or have you sat down with your family or do you know what inspired
the immigration from, uh, Ecuador to Boston?
Um, I think what really inspired, I think at that time, you know, my parents just like,
they didn't really feel like there was just a lot of economic opportunity for us. I grew up really
poor in Boston, but my mom and dad, the level of poverty that they experienced as children was like
to an even much higher degree. Like my mom, you know, hearing about her growing up, like her mother didn't even
have food for her to eat and would actually send her to the homes of neighbors so that hopefully
she'd be able to get a meal from a friend. And my grandmother, you know, she didn't know how to
read or write. So there was a stark sort of, you know, we were, my parents were really poor. And
then when we got to Boston, my family was really poor because my mom, she ended
up working cleaning houses and my dad worked in a supermarket.
Their wages were very low and we really struggled to like, you know, pay the rent.
And there was just a lot of financial stress in our house.
Yeah.
How did that land with you just individually as a kid, sort of being in that family culture
and seeing that around you?
Yeah, it was quite bewildering because I remember thinking even as someone who was really young,
like the world to me looked abundant, you know, from what I was seeing on TV, what I
would look out, what I would on TV, what I would look
out, what I would see outside, what I would see in the classroom. And it always seemed like a shock,
like why, like what's happening here? You know, like how are, how is this abundance not reaching
my home? And, and it was tough, you know, because a lot, my, my mom and dad, they loved each other.
They love each other deeply, but a lot of their fights, their disagreements, their conflict was around
like this struggle to make ends meet. So I saw that sort of structural pressure just push onto
my family. And it's, it was interesting seeing the difference between how they used to fight all the
time when I was little. But then as my
brother and I got older and we started working and we started adding to the family funds,
and especially now that we're adults and my sister is an adult, my parents don't have that stress.
And my parents, they barely have disagreements these days because their problems were really
structural. They were money related.
Yeah.
I mean, how does, I'm curious how that frames in your mind as a kid.
Like, what is important to strive for in life?
It felt to me like, you know, in the midst of searching for answers as to like, it made me want to study the world. It made me want to know,
you know, like, like why some people have less and others have more. And, and that really kind
of took me on a journey into activism and into understanding economics. Because that, that just
seemed like a whole nother world that, and that's actually what I ended up majoring in when I went to college because I wanted to understand how capitalism worked,
like how some people could have so much and others could have so little.
And is there a way to kind of like balance that out a bit?
Yeah.
What was the first step in for you to activism and organizing?
Because it sounds like it actually touched down pretty young in your life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I started pretty young. I started early on when I was 15 and my brother actually
introduced me to that world. I got into this organization called Boston Youth Organizing
Project and it was such a special place because there were adults who would support us by teaching
us how to organize and like organizing in the sense of like
being able to find a common cause for a group of people and strategizing as to how we were going to
make our goal come true. You know, whether that was at the city level or in our, you know,
in our schools, we, we really like made serious change as young people. And it was
cool because we would, you know, we'd learn how to organize and then we teach each other how to
organize and we would constantly be empowering each other to like make, to make change. And this
was all, you know, we were all really young, but it was pretty formative because I got to see pretty
quickly how, you know, a group of people
can become rather unstoppable if they, you know, have good values and are working together
for the betterment of many.
Yeah.
I mean, what a powerful experience to have, especially young in life, right?
Because I feel like so many of us, especially in sort of like the teen years and the early
years where it's this season where for so
many, you feel largely disempowered. You look at the world and you're like, this is a massive
machine. And I see all the people that are running this thing. And I like, who am I, you know,
to like, how, how can one voice seriously make any meaningful dent in that universe for you to
have an experience early on, which showed you
that no, actually, like you matter. It must've been so formative in so many ways, but not the
least of which showing you that you actually can make a difference, which I think is something that
so many people still struggle with far into adulthood. Yeah. And it's interesting because
we live in a super atomized society. So it's hard to really come in contact with your
power because you're actually some of your greatest power will come to light in groups.
And that's, that's kind of what I learned was like, as an individual, you do have power,
but you can only do so much when you come into a group that can share a common cause.
Ooh, sky's the limit. You know, you can really make serious change. And, and it
was really, you know, I felt really fortunate to be amongst a group of like really diverse young
people who had the same like economic background. A lot of us were immigrants as well. And we would
look at a situation and be like, oh yeah, we can change that. And we would be really confident
and we would go and we would win. We'd win all the time. So having that just showed me the power of people. be a part of significant change. The other curiosity as you're sharing that is there's
a phenomenon I've seen happen with so many folks, me included sometimes, where when you step into
a place of advocacy or organizing or activism, it's really easy to drop into a place where
binary thinking dominates the landscape. It's black or white. It's us versus them. There's
no middle ground. There's no gray. There's no argument. There's no partial win. It's the landscape. It's black or white. It's us versus them. There's no middle ground.
There's no gray.
There's no argument.
There's no partial win.
It's like there are only two choices.
And if you're not with us, then you're just against us or you don't get it.
And I'm wondering whether that mindset was a part of at least the early days of organizing
and putting energy behind different things.
Yeah, I think to a large extent, there was a lot of that mentality, you know, very strong,
like sort of like group psychology, we'd be working as a unit and we're like, you know,
you're part of us or you're not with us.
But I think there was definitely undertones of compassion there, even if they weren't fully matured.
Because we were lucky, like, you know, the adults who were working with us, they were
pretty compassionate people. They were never trying to dehumanize the people who were our
targets, the people that we would want to try to get something from. So that felt really formative.
And it felt like the roots of like the kind of the thinking
that I try to do now where, you know, to me, when I think about love, I mean, love is something
that can hold space for multiple perspectives and, and it's something that can allow for
complexity.
And I think that's, um, something that is not just growing in the like activist organizing
world, but all over the world, you world, that we can be able to still function
harmoniously without having to hate each other or demonize each other in certain ways. Because
at the end of the day, everybody makes mistakes. We're all incredibly imperfect human beings.
And what matters is, are we open to changing and being better?
Yeah, it's such an important question, especially in this to changing and being better? Yeah.
It's such an important question, especially in this moment in time, right?
Because we're all dropped into this space where there's so much disenfranchisement,
but there's also so much isolation and separatism and dehumanization.
It's sort of like, you know, there's an installation of beliefs and values that rise to the level
of identity.
And once that becomes that, it becomes brutally hard to back away from that,
even when you're presented with really strong evidence that it's not right.
And I feel like, yeah, I mean, I hope you're right in sort of like,
I feel like we have been dropped into this sea of pain of isolation and dehumanization. And, you know,
I'm waiting for that pendulum to swing back towards openness and realizing that we're sort of like
all part of like the same fiber of humanity. It sounds like you may be a little bit further along
in seeing and stepping into that space than I am at this point.
Yeah. I mean, it's a struggle. It's a struggle to have people who, you know, that there are people who exist in the world who don't like you because of different facets of your identity. And then there's also a struggle to be attached to different parts of your identity when in reality, there's nothing static about you. been so important to you seven years ago may mean nothing to you today because you've just grown in
so many different ways. And if you were to attach yourself and stick to that part of your identity,
you would actually be limiting your own flourishing. So I think even within the work
that I do within myself, I've really tried to sort of shift the way I see identity to just
to think about it as a flowing river, because it just keeps moving
and it'll move and sort of switch itself up in a way that can meet the moment as opposed to just
like trying to make the moment fit you, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, it definitely does. So a
lot of these seeds were installed early in you. You end up going to college, you go to Wesley and studying, exploring a lot of these things. I know you've described that time in your life as one where there was a big element of the pursuit of pleasure. And that involved a lot of partying, a lot of drugs, which is not entirely uncommon, like when kids go to college.
Oh, yeah. Very common. Yeah. Yeah. But it seems like there was something else going on with you. Like there was something
underneath that, that was not just sort of like a, your typical pleasure seeking experience.
Yeah. And I think in some ways, you know, that same root that was in me is in a lot of people.
There, there was just this like underlying anxiety and sadness that I did not want to admit to myself.
And for whatever reason, it just kept wanting to be in these environments
where there's a lot of alcohol, a lot of drugs
so that I could just keep avoiding
whatever it was that was happening inside me
and I couldn't embrace how I was in that moment
and because I couldn't embrace myself,
it just led to this snowballing of these patterns and they just became thicker and thicker over time. And it's tough, you know,
because it ended up happening in that college environment. But there were also a lot of things
about that environment that were positive, you know, like I was so grateful that I went to
Wesleyan because they really helped me learn how to think. But at the same time, like when I entered
into Wesleyan, I really did not know
myself. And because I didn't know myself, I ended up hurting myself. Yeah. I often wonder about
experiences like that where you have it, you know, there's a lot of duality in it. You know,
on the one hand you look, there's so much good that comes from the experience, but on the other hand, there's, you know, there's a lot of struggle that goes along, um, along with it for you. Um, what was it that was underneath it that you felt was
causing that sense of sadness or that sense of anxiety?
Yeah, I think that there were these long currents of, um, sort of like insecurity
that stemmed from being a child you know like being
moved from from ecuador and that were in a place where i was really surrounded by so much loving
family to having like a very small family where i was just because i had so many aunts and uncles
and cousins um we were a huge family in ecuador but then coming to the United States. So I lose that sort of emotional base. And then we get put into like the like the fitness space of like the United States where it's, but it's only a chance, you know, it's not,
it's nothing certain. And I think that's what a lot of people don't understand about the immigrant
experience. Cause like, I remember immigrating here and it's, um, having a lot of other friends
in like elementary school or middle school who, whose parents went through the same journey
and their stories are not successes, right? Like they continue to struggle because there isn't as much space for like accessibility
to wealth or accessibility to good jobs or accessibility to good education.
And it's tough, you know, it's really tough to make it.
But I think those that going through that journey, it just kept like augmenting this sense of not feeling secure and just like a lot of sadness because it was hard to see did not have the strength, like the internal fortitude
to accept how sad I was about it all, about how it all happened and why we had to struggle and,
or, you know, why it even happened in the first place. But, but when I started noticing,
cause I remember these moments like where I would be in college and I would, the party would be over and it'd be like five or six or seven in the morning. And I'd be in my room
before I go to sleep. And as soon as like the alcohol or the drugs are wearing off, like that's
the feeling I would feel. It was just sadness, just bubbling up. And that's the thing that I
was running away from. Yeah. I think we're learning so much more these days about the notion
of transgenerational trauma and how a trauma gets passed from generation to generation,
sometimes through shared experience, sometimes through just witnessing, sometimes through
something that is almost like less tangible, but it is sort of like this ethereal fabric that
transfers those patterns from
one generation to another. And it sounds like that was definitely part of your experience.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. You describe an experience, I guess it was probably shortly after coming out of Wesleyan,
where this all comes to a head and you're effectively brought to your knees.
Yeah. Yeah. Effectively brought to my back. I was on the ground your knees. Yeah. Yeah, effectively brought to my back.
I was on the ground laying down.
Yeah, there was one particular night where my body was like enough, you know, because I not only was ignoring the sort of like the thought-based part of my mind, but I was also
ignoring my body.
And my body was just could not tolerate any more of this like sort of
constant, you know, this constant unhealthiness that I was giving it. And I, yeah, that night
in particular, I mean, I just felt like my heart was totally out of rhythm, falling out of whack. I could barely breathe. And I felt like my life
was like slipping away. I really felt like I was in the balance. And in that moment, it was like
such a, it was like a long, like two and a half, three hour struggle where I was just like on the
ground, kind of just crying and thinking about my life and sort of like
thinking like, should I call an ambulance? Should I not? I was like really kind of full of shame
that I had even got myself to that point. And in that moment, you know, I thought a lot about my
parents, about how much they sacrificed for me to be in this country, for me to like, you know, get to the point where I've gotten in my life. And I felt that I needed to just make a change because like, and I kept
thinking about my time, you know, in the activist world, like before I ever started, you know,
doing drugs or anything like that and how empowered I felt and how good it felt to help people.
And I was like, wow, I've become so
self-centered only thinking about my pleasure that, and this has led me to such misery.
And, and in that moment, I decided to just like, kind of just put away the hard drugs
and not go back to them. And, and over time I like sort of weaned myself off of using anything.
And now, you know, I just, I drink water and breathe air.
That's what I do now.
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will vary. It sounds like also, you know, like a big part of this for you, while not immediate,
you know, like at some point, I guess it was a year, within a year or two,
you stumbled upon this thing called meditation, in particular, Vipassana.
Yeah, that's right.
And which is, can be just astoundingly disruptive and also transformative in a lot of ways.
I'm curious how you actually stumbled into
that experience, whether you proactively sought it out. And then the first time you actually did
attend a retreat, what that was like for you? Yeah, it was interesting. It kind of came to me
pretty serendipitously through one of my really good friends in college, someone that,
you know, is one of my best friends. And he ended up traveling through India and he was going
through a pretty transformational period in his life as well. And I think one of the families
that he was staying with told him about it and he ended up doing a 10-day course. You know,
I spent a lot of time
partying with him. And it's been fun sort of seeing the evolution of our friendship,
like we've been friends for, you know, more than a decade now, and sort of seeing its rough
beginnings and now like the slow but steady harmonization in our relationship. And, but he ended up doing a course and he wrote back an email to myself and
three other friends. And it was all about love, compassion, and goodwill. And I remember being
so shocked by that email and so surprised by it because he never talked about these things before.
And I realized at that point, and this was sort of like about six months after
that event that we just talked about, I had already been focusing on developing healthy habits,
on sort of spending time with myself, like really trying to sit with myself without meditating,
but just being with my emotions, even if they were hard. Because I realized that that was how I got there. I got to that tough point in my life by ignoring
the tough things that I felt. So I was like, okay, let me do the opposite and just be with them.
But after I heard about his meditation experience and him talking about love, compassion, and good
will, I knew I was like, whatever he got, I need the same thing. Like I need the same thing in my life. So I ended up doing a course, I think about almost like exactly a year after that event.
And I, you know, that was just one of the smartest decisions I've ever made. One of the hardest
things I've ever done because that first course is just so difficult. You know, we spend all of
our time being, you know, in our, the thought-based part
of our mind, the intellectual part of our mind, but we don't quite know how to be intentional
about experiencing what's happening in the body. And to be able to sort of like reset my mind in
that way, or try to reset my mind in that way, in allowing it to feel, you know, to feel reality
as about, as opposed to just thinking
about reality was just so immensely challenging, but I had never felt such deep healing before in
my life. So even after that 10 day course, I just kept going back because I knew I was like,
even though that was incredibly, incredibly difficult, the returns that I got from them
were from what I got from it was just much higher than
the effort I put in. Even though I had put in a bunch of effort, I was like, wow, I feel better
than ever before. So I need to keep going back. Yeah. That's so interesting. A couple of years
back, we had Tim Ferriss on the show and I've known Tim for years. And I remember him coming
to the studio and he had literally just gotten out of a 10 day
retreat.
And you could see in his eyes that there was a lot going on.
And it turned out for him that it was actually fairly profoundly traumatic.
Yeah.
There was a lot, a lot that came up, a lot that had to be processed after it.
He was very fortunate in that he had sort of like a
very wise mentor who happened to be one of the guys during the retreat who he was able to have
access to on almost a daily basis to help process some of the profound trauma that comes up. But
it can be one of those things where it's not necessarily a joyful experience,
but also it's not the type of thing where
you walk out after 10 days and you're like, okay, well, that was hard, but I learned a
lot and now I'm in a much better place.
It's like, no, it's sort of like you've got 10 days of seeing clearer than you ever
have before, but now you have to figure out what to do with what you've now seen more
clearly.
Yeah, that's really well put.
And I'm glad that you're, it's funny thinking about the Tim Ferriss experience besides juxtaposed
to like the Diego Perez experience.
Because he didn't meditate in the same tradition that I did.
But this is something that I try to be really sort of cautious about because I let people
know that I'm a meditator and I let them know that I meditate in the Guaynca tradition. But I also let
them know that healing is available to everyone, but how that healing looks or what path or what
method you take totally depends on your personal conditioning. So, you know, there are a lot of different forms of meditation,
light forms of meditation, harder forms of meditation. But then even if meditation is not
your thing, you know, try one of the very many forms of therapy that are out there,
because there are a lot of ways to process what's happening in your mind, the type of
conditioning that you've been carrying, the trauma that you've experienced. Healing is really
available. And there's a ways to go in terms of accessibility, but it's certainly more accessible than it's ever
been. But it's really critical for you to kind of measure out like, what can I actually tolerate?
And what would be good for me? You know, you should definitely do things that are challenging,
but you don't want to overwhelm yourself. And I think it's to each their own, you know. For me, I don't think I could have gone to a better place because it helped me see myself
and also purify a lot of that conditioning that was just so clogged up in my subconscious.
And that unbinding work just helped my mind feel lighter. And it's like you said, it's very
difficult to see yourself much more clearly than ever before. But I think that was just the best medicine that I personally could have taken,
but it's not necessarily for everyone. Yeah. And I think it depends so much also,
on what are you stepping back into? You know, like, do you have some form of support structure,
whether it's family or friends or more formal therapy or whatever it may be? Or are you stepping back into a life and a
world and a circumstance where it is brutally hard and agitating all of the things that have
brought you to this place and there's very little support? I think it's so unique,
the experience of that. And like you said, I love the fact that you sort of advocate for
stepping into a process of awakening in a way that is aligned with the
truth of who you are and where you are at any given moment in time. And we're all different.
That circumstance is different for each of us. And it's also totally relevant to the level of
trauma that you carry. If you carry very, very intense trauma, then your pathway into entering yourself may be something that needs to be a
little lighter so that you can process bit by bit in a way that feels manageable. Because what you
want for your healing journey is you want it to be something that's sustainable, something that
you can do lifelong. But if too much comes out too quickly and you just feel overwhelming and you just want
to close that door, then no progress gets made.
So you really got to find your own medicine.
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.
I know for you, so you come out of that and this becomes an inciting incident effectively
for what has now become a years long practice for you, a meditative practice.
So it's not just retreat based. It's
not like, hey, once a year, I'm going to dip into retreat. This is a commitment that you've made
for a bunch of years, for a lot of hours. And along the way, you're also stepping back into
your life, I guess, stepping back to a certain extent into organizing, but writing becomes a part of your experience as well. And I'm curious how that enters your experience, your work, because it never something that I looked at as something that I wanted to do or as a possibility for like a future serious endeavor.
You know, after I started meditating, I did a few courses and then I started, I kind of jumped back into that world. I was doing some like nonprofit consulting and some organizing work on the side
with this really great youth abolitionist group in Boston. And that, you know, felt very sort of
nourishing and correct in the moment. But then I kept feeling like as I kept, because I would go
to a few courses a year, I would like really make time because it felt like an important healing
period for me to do a few 10 day courses.
And also because I was still sort of like sampling it, you know, I wanted to really
make sure that the healing was real because I didn't want to be delusional.
You know, I was done with being delusional.
I was done with the lies.
I wanted to be as honest with myself as possible.
So I wanted to run a real experiment and see if this was actually giving me results. And when I started seeing that it was real and my mind felt lighter and, and also the
intensity of my reaction started decreasing, you know, I started because it used to go
through the same difficulties of life, the same ups and downs.
And, um, I noticed that, you know, I wasn't reacting as intensely as before, but there
was something else kind of happening in the background where this like bubble of creativity started coming up and I could feel, yeah, it was like, it just felt
like my mind had more space and not like bubbles, but like a spring was like opening up. And I
started writing very sort of sporadically at first. Like I remember I wrote a poem after my
first retreat. And then I
don't think I really wrote much for like four or five, six months. And then slowly it started
coming. And after a number of retreats, I felt, I was like, okay, I was like, I think the healing
is real. I know it's real, but I know that I'm not personally fully healed or anything like that.
But I feel like I'm on the journey and I should write about it.
Even though I'm not like, you know, wise or anything like that, I feel like there are
perspectives that I want to write about to try to sort of process the learning that I'm
doing myself.
And if I share them, like, let's see if they also resonate with other people.
And that's kind of when it picked up. So I did my first course in 2012.
It was July of 2012.
And then I started taking writing seriously.
It was about the very beginnings of 2015.
So it took a while for it to get started.
Yeah.
And you start sharing.
It's interesting because when you sort of look at the body of work that you've built and offered publicly over a period of years now, it's vast.
And it also, in a way, it defies description.
You know, you look at it and you're like, is it poetry?
Kind of.
Is it philosophy?
Kind of.
Is it theology?
Kind of.
Is it social science? Kind of. Is it social commentary? Kind of. Is it theology? Kind of. Is it social science?
Kind of.
Is it social commentary?
Kind of.
But it's interesting because you sort of stepped into this space where it feels like almost
the fact that you weren't somebody who studied the written form and devoted yourself to it
and the craft and knew all like who had come before you and the lineage and the structures, you know, before that, I wonder from the outside looking
in, it almost feels like it gave you the freedom to just step into it and, and do it the way
that just felt right to you rather than feeling constrained by what you thought was the appropriate
form stepping into it.
Does that feel landed anyways?
True.
I mean, I don't think the description has been more apt about what I do.
I appreciate you taking a look at that because it's funny.
I'm realizing now more and more, and especially looking back at things in retrospect, the
medium did not matter to me.
The message mattered.
And I felt like these reflections were bubbling up inside me. So I wanted to
just put them out there in a way that when, in a way that people could connect with.
And I also like, you know, did sort of do things strategically in the sense that I know in a time
where people are overwhelmed with information, minimalism would be good to combine different messages with minimalism
would feel right. And then I think over time, it started developing into something that might look
like poetry. But, you know, I'm not an academic poet, like it's not the type of like literary
poetry type, you know, the things where these journals that people put out great works, but,
but that's not my style. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm never trying to pretend to do that. I'm more so
writing in a prose slash like pop poetry format. That's a term that Lang Lave sort of created
a few years ago that kind of like summarizes this new wave of expression that is more so
like about flexibility. And it's just about how people
feel. Like even though, and that's one of the things that's the struggle of poetry, right?
It's like this ivory tower, like, do you have the skills to be a poet? Well, some people still do
these days and they still write poetry in that format, but now it also doesn't matter because
everyone has the right to share their perspective and. And some people may be attracted to it.
So I feel really sort of fortunate to be born at that time of creative freedom
and also like digital platforms where you can sort of leverage
and spread your work and see if other people find it useful.
Yeah, I love that.
I feel like we're in this time now where, you know,
the sort of the hallowed ways of how
you're supposed to do things has just kind of fallen away. And there are certain people who
certainly still have a dogged attachment to that form and structure. And there's a bit of an ivory
tower type of thing that gets wrapped around it. But I feel like the notion of being able to share
in a way that is open and accessible and real
is more important to a lot of people these days, both as a creator and as somebody who
might receive what's being created than the structure itself.
Not to say that there isn't a lot of grace and beauty in the art form and really studying.
Right.
Absolutely.
I think I read some of the classical poets and I'm just moved to tears in seconds.
And at the same time, I can read something you've written or read something Cleo Wade
puts out there or read something.
And it's the feeling.
And it's also the invitation that says, this was written for all of us.
You don't have to have a certain level of education or thoughtfulness or, you know, like linguistic
expertise in order to actually just let it land in your soul and know there's something true about it.
And I think it's beautiful because we can have space for the people who are, you know,
from that type of like academic rigor that they're creating their written art from. That's fantastic. Keep doing that.
But just because popular poetry has emerged
and more people now feel like they even have
the right to call themselves artists,
even though they weren't educated in a particular manner,
I think that's also really beautiful.
So it doesn't need to be combative.
I think there's just space for everybody.
Just do your own thing and keep going.
Yeah, no, a hundred percent.
You also decided to step into that space, into the domain with the pen name, Young Pueblo.
And I've heard you describe it, you know, a number of different ways and a number of
different reasons.
Most recently, I think I heard you describe it as a project effectively.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's totally a project.
So tell me more about, about that and what you mean by that. Cause I'm curious.
Yeah. I think, um, when I started writing, I just had the sense that I could write a few books,
not very many books. Like I'll just, I'll write a few and you know, I want to write
because I really have something to say, not because I feel like my career is dependent on it.
So I don't want to be a person who writes like 80 books.
I want to just write a good handful.
But I wanted to make sure to position the work within a proper frame.
And that was the frame that was resonating with me at the time, just realizing how human
beings as a whole, like as a collective,
we're very young. There are really fundamental things that we can do as individuals,
but that we do not know how to do at a collective level yet. Like the simple, like my favorite
example is think about when you were going to kindergarten and your teacher was trying to
teach you the most basic things, like cleaning up after yourself, not telling lies, not hitting other people,
being kind to one another, you know, these sort of fundamental things.
But if you were to scale that up to the human, like the level of humanity, we don't know
how to do those things at all.
You know, we're constantly, we're destroying the planet with the way that we produce things.
We're constantly harming each other.
And there isn't as much space for kindness that, and, you know, kindness and compassion
being a real measure for maturity.
I think we're growing into that.
And I know that I'm growing into that as well as an individual, but it felt like the idea
of Young Pueblo that all of humanity is young because Young Pueblo literally means young
people. It felt like just important to talk about these sort of reflective ideas,
these pieces that hopefully spur on self-awareness, and that it could be one of the very many things
that's helping humanity grow up. I love that. And I also have this curiosity,
there's like a little thing in my
head that's wondering something, which is that, you know, when, when you finally step into the
space of writing and sharing ideas, and then you say, okay, so I'm going to step into also this
pen name and it represents a number of different things for you. Was there anything in you that
also wondered, am I possibly using this as a way to hide as well?
Oh, that's funny.
Yeah, for sure.
I think it was like a skillful method.
Like I didn't know that it was going to be this big, but looking back on that moment,
like the name just really felt right.
And then once, you know,
we get to that place where it's like a hundred thousand followers, 500,000 followers at that
point, I was like, Oh, sweet. Like, I'm really glad that I made, that I made this name young
Pueblo because people think young Pueblo is famous, but they don't really know Diego behind,
you know, the creator behind the words. And that felt really good because I wanted to set
up even with the Instagram, because it all started from the Instagram account. I wanted to set things
up so that people would really focus on the ideas and the messages. And, you know, it's not the type
of account where I'm trying to like make my face famous. Like that's the last thing I want. I want
to hopefully make these ideas famous and like have them help create positive impact in the world.
But I don't, yeah, I don't want to like aggrandize myself in any way or like, I don't know.
That's just not what I'm trying to do.
Like I'm here for impact, but I'm not here for fame.
And Young Pueblo just feels like, like it was just a smart call.
Because now, you know, when I go out, people don't, they don't recognize me in the
street or anything like that. And, and I think that's healthy. Yeah. I, I, I love that. I know
a lot of people, um, think about how to step into a social space or share their art, share their
words, their thoughts, and there's a fear wrapped around it. And I think the hiding can sometimes be
hiding at a, from a place of fear, but also hiding from
can also be a positive thing in terms of like, well, let me just build healthy boundaries
around this and do what I can both just to protect me and my humanity and my ability
to be present in my life, but also to make it not about me and make it about the ideas.
And it feels like that was really the deeper motivation or at least part
of the motivation behind it for you. Yeah, definitely. I think that's been,
I think a really good call and it kind of, I don't know, in a way I hope, because I don't really,
can't tell how people are receiving things, but I hope it sort of decentralizes me as a creator
and more so makes about, makes different pieces about all of us.
You know, we've all felt heartbreak. We all know what sadness feels like. We all know what
the excitement of entering a new relationship is like. So hopefully we can find the generality
of the human experience inside of those words. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.
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Mayday, mayday.
We've been compromised.
The pilot's a hitman.
I knew you were going to be fun.
January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.
Mark Wahlberg.
You know what the difference between me and you is?
You're going to die.
Don't shoot him, we need him.
Y'all need a pilot.
Flight risk.
Let's dive a little bit into some of the ideas in your new book, because what started for you as a way to share regular ideas and thoughts on social platforms eventually turned into your first book, Inward, a couple of years ago, and now into this next book.
And I guess before we even get into the ideas,
my curiosity is, so the name of the book is Clarity and Connection. The first one was Inward.
What was it inside of you that made you say, it's time to write a next more substantial thing,
and this is what it needs to be? Oh, I liked the challenge and I knew
that was the direction I was heading in because I was enjoying minimalism
for a while, but then I very naturally started noticing that I was just writing more. And I was
like, let me not curb that, you know, let me just let it flow and see what comes out. I still try to
be rather sharp with the amount of words I use. I don't want to be like overly wordy because I think even with,
you know, the Clarity and Connection that that book has a lot more short essays, but even those
are trim because I'm still trying to maintain that sort of like young Pueblo quality. But yeah,
I mean, the new book has like three or four times the amount of words as the first book,
but it's still sort of
appeasable in the manner that it's like, you can open it up to any, any page and, you know,
read a few pieces and, and get a lot for your day to think about.
Yeah. It's interesting. Cause when I read what you've been writing and you compare this to
then inward and then to, you know, like years of things that you've been posting online,
there's an efficiency of language that feels like it's actually become more efficient over time.
I don't know whether you feel that or whether it's been an intentional practice.
I'm a huge fan as a writer of Hemingway and his just astonishing efficiency and use of
language.
He could throw out five words and break your heart open. And it feels like from the outside in that there
is a devotion of craft around that for you. Is that accurate?
Oh yeah. Oh, there's definitely, I mean, it's a lot. I think when I first started spending
intentional time thinking, okay, let me hone this voice as a writer, that has never really stopped. I'm always,
like when I come up with a piece or an idea, like, and I'm reading my work, what I'm doing is just
striking out words left and right. I'm just like trimming it down, trimming it down to just be as
clear as possible. Because there's a few things I try to keep in mind. Like not only am I trying
to make it accessible to any reader of any education level,
but I'm also trying to make it accessible to people who, you know, because English is the
lingua franca of the world, right? The whole vast majority of the world, that's the way the world
functions is through English a lot of the times. And a lot of people in the world know a little
bit of English. And I try to, you know,, now that I have a global big, big topic is the notion of
accumulation. Accumulation on a couple of different levels, but talk to me a little bit about this.
Yeah, there's, I mean, and I've really like, I've really owe this idea to the meditation,
right? To learning from S. N. Goenka and Seadju Bakken. And you really, once you start meditating, you start seeing how
every reaction the mind has actually accumulates a little pattern in the mind, right? It makes
an imprint and it adds up over time. And this is something that became so clear to me during like 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, where it was just
like, wow, like, you know, all these reactions, I'm just like encoding all of these ways to repeat
these same patterns in the past. So basically, like if I've reacted in the past with a lot of
anger, then I'm much more liable to react with anger in the future. And realizing
that the mind is malleable in that way where it can accumulate things, it can actually also let
things go. And that's our gateway to healing. And I found that so like, you know, I find it so
hopeful and it's like a real sigh of relief that I can actually let things go. And through different methods, you know,
we can actually peel back that system of accumulation and, um, and feel lighter.
Yeah. I mean, it, cause you really reflect if you think about the process of meditation
and not all meditations, but certain approaches to meditation, for sure. It's not about
stopping the flow of things into you. It's about allowing them in, but also being equally free and
allowing them to just process themselves out. It's about non-grasping as they move through.
It's about noticing and identifying. And it feels like that's the macro lens for what you're talking
about in the context of the way that thoughts and feelings and emotions accumulate inside of us.
And instead of making it a trap, like opening the door,
making it more like the wind blowing through a screen door on a summer porch or something like
that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting because I think in the past, I think it might
have changed a bit now, but I think the general American audience would have this idea of
meditation and thinking about it as something
that's really sort of bliss-oriented, that we're just doing it to become happier. And with a lot
of different meditations from the Buddha Dhamma, sort of from the orientation of the Buddha,
happiness is an ultimate goal, but the way to get there is through purification, right? You're
trying to
purify the mind, clean it out of all this like junk that you've accumulated over time. So you're
not necessarily going to be happy immediately, or you're not going to be like super joyful all of
the time. It's about being real with what's happening in the moment and developing a sense
of equanimity where you can observe what's happening without reacting to it, without craving
or without aversion, and you can be with what is. And through that ability to be a quantumist,
a lot of happiness does emerge from that. A lot of joy does emerge from that, from
just being able to see reality without constantly projecting onto it.
Yeah. You break the book into these five different parts. You start out with a look at self-awareness.
There's a piece you write on numbness and dissociation.
I wonder if you,
do you happen to have a copy of the book with you?
Would you be open to reading?
Yeah, can you tell me what page it is?
Yeah, page 11 actually was the piece I was thinking of.
After the trauma, I shifted into survival mode.
Unknowingly, I shielded my being with numbness.
Numb to letting others in. Numb to my inner turmoil. Numb to accepting what happened.
Unknowingly, I fell into a cycle of craving. Craving safety. Craving nourishment, craving no more pain. My reactions were large and loud. Anything that did not
go my way was perceived as a potential threat. My focus
centered on protecting my delicate sense of self. I had
little energy to place myself in anyone else's shoes. It took the constant feeling of dissatisfaction
and the exhaustion of never feeling at ease
for me to start pulling myself out of my disassociated way of living
and finally say enough to a constant state of defense
before awareness. I feel like that speaks to so many elements
of the moment that so many people are in right now. Yeah, it feels common. I took like,
you know, thinking back to different hard moments in my life, but I also,
I remember writing that and thinking about like, what does trauma feel like in the body?
Like from my own perspective and from others as well to see what that like navigating that
process really feels like.
And also from hearing, you know, from my own story, from hearing the stories of others,
there's that point of like dissatisfaction with the patterns that you've accumulated that sort of fuels you to
really start going inward. Yeah. So one of the other things that you explore is it comes out
of the category of what you call unbinding, which I think is kind of a fascinating word.
Tell me what you mean by that. Sort of similar to the point that I was making before about how we accumulate
things. A lot of times these things that we accumulated get knotted up into patterns. So
for me, it felt like the pattern of running away was something that was just so thickly knotted up
that when I started doing the opposite of that and spending time with my emotions, even when things got hard
and turbulent inside of me, it felt almost like I was trying to break through a wall
because all those patterns were so knotted up together. So I really had to put a lot of effort
into just doing something as simple as being with myself, as sitting down with myself and not trying
to run away. And in a way, it does feel
like those knots that we tie, we have to do some intentional unbinding of those knots.
Yeah. I feel like so many of us are in that process right now. And there's an assumption
that I think a lot of folks make that you speak to in this section, which is this notion that says,
let me put my life on hold while I
get this figured out while I like, while I do the healing work and then I'm going to come back like
a healed rock star and then I can start living again. And you argue against this approach.
Yeah. It's not my favorite approach because you only really find out if you've been successful
in your healing by how well you navigate the ups and downs of life.
By trying to remove yourself from life, you won't know how much progress you've really made.
And you almost have to let yourself be in the present moment and let life test you to see,
have my reaction levels changed? Am I being more compassionate? Am I actively taking care of my
self-love and honoring my boundaries even during difficult moments? And yeah, I think removing
yourself from life doesn't really support you and making as much progress as you can.
Yeah. I mean, as I was reading some of your thoughts on it, I also, I had this flash to,
you know, the Buddhist path is always fascinating to me because they've carved out two paths, As I was reading some of your thoughts on it, I also, I had this flash too.
You know, the Buddhist path is always fascinated me because they've carved out two paths, you know, the householder approach and the monastic path.
Yeah, yeah.
And there's this really fascinating acknowledgement of the fact that some people are going to
go and spend a lot of time in solitude or remove themselves from society.
And others are actually going to stay completely immersed in civil life
around them. And that there, you don't actually have to step out. If you make that choice,
if it's right for you, there's a way to do it. But if you also choose to be completely immersed
in life as it happens and swirls around you all day, there's also a way to do it that way.
You can be present in that life and also present in your own unfolding, in your own
process of liberation and collective liberation without having to extract yourself from it.
I always thought that was so prescient, the way that it was so clearly identified and there was
almost like a permission given to live and also do the work.
Yeah. I think it's quite beautiful. If you look back to the suttas that encode the
Buddhist teaching, rather the earliest sources of the Buddhist teaching, there are a lot of
different householders that become very enlightened. From Anathapindaka to Chitta,
there's just different people that the Buddhadha talks about um men and women who
just sort of take that next level leap and they're still householders you know they don't necessarily
take robes and become monks and there's nothing you know the work that i'm putting out there is
nothing against being a monk if that's what you so desire that's actually a beautiful thing to be
able to give your life you know because what because what do monks do? They're sort of
like donating their lives in service of the Dharma, which is beautiful. But if that's not for you,
that's great. You know, it's also not for me. I like having, you know, I like being married and
I like, you know, being able to move about my life in my own way. But that does not stop you from making serious process on the path of liberation.
Yeah.
Which also brings up really actually the next thing that you focus on, which is the fact
that so often, you know, we're actually not doing this in isolation, that we're doing
this in relationship with ourselves and with other people, with those that we love, with
intimate partners.
You're right.
It's not about finding a partner who has flawless emotional maturity. It's about finding someone who can
match your level of commitment, not just to the relationship, but commitment to heal themselves
so they can love better, see more clearly and have more presence. Tell me more.
Yeah. I mean, and that's the slow learning the slow learning that, that I've been doing from just being with
my wife, you know, cause we, I think a lot of these pieces that I wrote about partnership,
they emerged pretty directly from the experiences that I've had with my wife and how we've moved
into just like a whole different phase in our relationship now where like the first part of our relationship when
we were young, right? I was 19 and she was 18 when we first got together. But that first part
of our relationship was really tumultuous and turbulent. We didn't know ourselves. We didn't
know how to treat each other well. We kind of sort of stumbled through those years. You know, there was a lot of,
like a connection was real, but it wasn't yet deep and it had no emotional maturity because
I think your connection only really can get super deep when you are able to open up those layers of
yourself by getting to know yourself. And then you can then share, you can share them with another person and see how you can better harmonize together.
But ever since we both started meditating, she's a serious meditator too. She's gone through these
same transitions as well. And we've have found that a lot of times when we used to fall into
arguments, fall into conflict, a lot of that intensity has been removed
so that when we have, you know, what we used to have arguments, now they're more like discussions
or they're disagreements so that there's more sharing and more of us trying to understand
each other's perspectives as opposed to trying to win over each other or, you know, like trying to
one up each other in different ways. A lot of that, and in no ways is our relationship perfect
or anything like that. You know, we still have our struggles, but we have more tools with which
to properly like process our struggle. And our primary tool is our own personal inner work that
helps us just be more compassionate,
be more aware and be more, you know, just stop projecting onto each other all the time.
Yeah.
And I feel like those same tools allow us to maybe grasp our own past selves a little
bit less, you know, and past selves maybe meaning five minutes ago,
you know, the position that we argued fiercely for last week, you know, that I think the practice
sometimes allows you to zoom the lens out a little bit and kind of like when somebody counters that
position and you believe it strongly, rather than just say, okay, it's time to put the shields up
and defend like crazy. You're kind of like, okay, that's, you know, I identified strongly with this set of beliefs or this, this thought, and maybe I still do, but let me at least hold myself open
to the possibility that there's a different point of view here. And it's, you know, so it's not that
we're just completely surrendering ourselves to being remade on a daily basis, but maybe we hold
on a little bit less lightly along the way.
But you know, one of the things that I'm curious about is what happens when two people are
in a committed relationship and one is deep into a process of growth and one either isn't
at all, or they're on a much different path or the pace and the commitment is profoundly
different because that also can create its own
sense of friction? Yeah, that's a great question. I think I've seen a lot of examples in my life of
people being in really profound, deep relationships and also walking different paths.
Some people taking the path of therapy really seriously and getting a
lot of benefit from that, but then they're not so much into meditating. And I've seen relationships
really sort of blossom. I do see the challenges. I remember the one challenge in particular in my
relationship was when, like, I felt this very big aspiration to start meditating two hours a day because I was getting so much
from meditating.
I was like, I got to keep this going on a daily basis, really spend time on it to keep
this experiment going.
And I started doing that before my wife.
And there was a bit of a sort of an odd moment where she had started meditating as well,
doing the 10-day courses, but she wasn't
quite ready to start meditating two hours a day. So I think for a number of months, I'd say for
about five, six months, I just, you know, just felt really committed to it. And I kept going.
And eventually, you know, she was moving at her own speed. She also wanted to do this,
but she didn't feel quite
ready. And I tried my best to not push her or anything like that. And I made sure that she,
you know, she was okay with my decision to take time from our time together so that I could spend
it on myself. And she was really supportive of that. And eventually things sort of clicked for
her and she felt like she was ready and she started. But it was interesting seeing the opposite of
that where when, so she was done smoking marijuana before I was, she just was, you know,
it wasn't really serving her. And then for me, I felt like I needed a little more time with it.
And there was this period where she had totally stopped and I kind of kept smoking for a few more months. And she gave me the gift of her patience, right? Where she was just like, you
know, do your thing. Like, I know you want to stop and just like, you know, find your time,
move at your own speed. And that really helped me because I was able to feel like I didn't have a
lot of pressure hanging over me. And I was really able to work out things within myself and really see that, you know, this really is not serving me anymore.
And it's actually like limiting the depth of my meditation. So I, you know, I felt really
committed to going deeper. So I ended up letting it go. And that was also really beautiful. But
even realizing that we really do move at our own speeds. It's a hard
thing, but an important thing to embrace in long lasting committed relationships because
yeah, you're not going to heal at the same speeds. You're not going to rest at the same speeds.
You're really your own individual person. Yeah. Which brings communication really front and
center and openness and vulnerability, which I know are topics that are dear to our heart also. really your own individual person. Yeah. Which brings communication really front and center
and openness and vulnerability, which I know are topics that are dear to our heart also. And it
also really points to the very title of this book, Clarity and Connection. At the end of the day,
it all circles back to that. And it's almost like connection is to a certain extent, the by-product
of a devotion to seeing more clearly in the first place and then communicating what you
see and also being open to that being communicated back to you. I want to ask you about one other
thing before we start to wrap our conversation and something that I know I've heard bubbling up
in your conversations more and more recently, but I'm guessing it's something that you've been
dealing on for a long time, which is the notion of what you term structural compassion.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, um, it's funny.
I've been like that term.
Um, it's a term that hasn't been like fully developed yet.
I don't think anybody, and nobody really owns it, but to me, I see a lot of structural
harm in the world where a lot of different systems kind of crash upon each other.
And a lot of people end up getting hurt for different like if you take economic inequality, right, all around the world, that there are just so many people who just struggle to make their material ends meet.
And it's not like that, you know, they're not like
lazy or anything like that. They're just like, they're just stuck in a poverty trap. Cause I,
and I know from firsthand, like I know how hard my parents worked and how they literally were not
able to leave that poverty trap until my brother and I became older and started adding funds to
the family. You know, these structures that we exist
in, and you can take that to not just from economic inequality, but, you know, racism,
you can even look at climate change or, you know, patriarchy. You can just see how these different
loose and direct structures of harm, if we are able to sort of turn them upside down and intentionally
inject compassion into the situation, I hope that we can create something that we can call
structural compassion and be able to recognize that in different areas where people are being
either oppressed or hurt in some manner or another, we keep our eyes open to that and we
stay active in trying to just uplift all people. Because I really, I see a transition happening in
this century, hopefully, where we expand our idea of human rights to include that people are no
longer suffering in this intense way, in a material way, so that they can be educated, have health care,
have these sort of simple basic rights fully met globally around the world, so that we can all live
well. And I think a lot of people fear that because immediately they think like, oh, this is
like some strict form of communism. But it's like, no, it's just, we're just humanizing the world. We're just trying to, you know, help all people live well. And that doesn't mean that some people
aren't going to be wealthy. You know, people can still benefit from the things that they create,
but we do want to sort of remove that intense struggle that a lot of people go through. Like,
you know, there's still people dying from hunger, people dying from simple diseases that could be fixed and people suffering from different forms of racism. And, you know,
this, this like onslaught of climate change is about to befall us. Like, how are we going to
be able to interact compassionately with each other so that we can support all of us flourishing
and living well. Yeah.
That is the big question.
But the notion of structural compassion,
I just like that.
Yeah.
It paints it like a sort of like paints an image,
you know,
because we know that there's a lot of structural harm,
but let's move to a structural compassion.
Right.
Yeah.
It's like,
what would the systems of compassion to operationalize it at scale?
It's a really interesting question.
Yeah.
It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well.
So hanging out in this container of a good life project,
if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
To live a good life.
I think, I mean, for me, it's to develop as much equanimity as possible.
I think equanimity has been the real, the treasure that I've found in this life.
And I think it means, you know, spending time meditating.
Like I go to courses really often, but I would like to, as I get older, to go to more and more because I get so much from that.
And because I get so much from that, I'm able to give more.
Thank you. And even if you don't listen now, go ahead and click and download. So it's ready to play when you're on the go.
And of course, if you haven't already done so, go ahead and follow Good Life Project
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And if you appreciate the work that we've been doing here on Good Life Project, go check
out my new book, Sparked.
It'll reveal some incredibly eye-opening things about maybe one of your favorite subjects,
you, and then show you how to tap these insights to reimagine and
reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes,
or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller now. Until next time,
I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. We'll be right back. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?
You're going to die.
Don't shoot him. We need him.
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