The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Let Go Of Suffering And Embrace What Is with Yung Pueblo

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, ButcherBox, InsideTracker, BiOptimizers. I bet most of us can relate to having negative thoughts on repeat, whether we’ve actually stopped to think about it or not. Our minds have been conditioned and can get stuck on auto-pilot, making us feel helpless, unhappy, and lost. But just like every other aspect of well-being, we need to exercise our mental patterns to show them positive patterns and avenues for growth and change. My guest on today’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, Yung Pueblo, is a grounded and inspiring guide for how to spend more time with your thoughts and create new patterns. Diego Perez is a meditator and New York Times bestselling author who is widely known on Instagram and various social media networks through his pen name Yung Pueblo. Online he has an audience of nearly 3 million people. His writing focuses on the power of self-healing, creating healthy relationships, and the wisdom that comes when we truly work on knowing ourselves. His books include Inward, Clarity & Connection, and his most recent, Lighter, which was an instant New York Times bestseller. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, ButcherBox, InsideTracker, BiOptimizers. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. When you sign up today, ButcherBox will send you two pounds of 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef free in every box for the life of your subscription plus $20 off. To receive this offer, go to ButcherBox.com/farmacy. Right now InsideTracker is offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off Magnesium Breakthrough plus a special gift with purchase, so just head over to magbreakthrough.com/hyman with code hyman10. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): The story and inspiration behind Yung Pueblo’s new book, Lighter (6:41 / 2:50)  Yung Pueblo’s rock-bottom moment (9:20 / 6:30)  The practice that put Yung Pueblo on the path to healing and wisdom (12:52 / 9:52)  Why we suffer (16:36 / 14:08)  How our perception shapes our reality (24:15 / 21:47)  The importance of radical honesty and being honest with yourself (32:16 / 26:33)  Developing self-love, acceptance, and worth (38:23 / 32:55)  Navigating relationships and conflict (40:34 / 35:24)  Building healthy habits and Yung Pueblo’s daily practice (50:53 / 45:02)  Allowing yourself to recognize your progress (1:09:12 / 1:03:24)  Get a copy of Lighter: Let Go of the Past, Connect with the Present, and Expand the Future here.

Hi, Doctors Pharmacy listeners, it's Dr. Mark here. If you've been following me, you know that I'm obsessed with understanding the latest research on longevity and how we can apply it to our daily lives. So I wrote a book about it. Think of it as a roadmap to optimal aging. It's called Young Forever, and it comes out February 21st, 2023. It's never too early or too late to take control of your health, and this book will show you how.

Visit youngforeverbook.com to learn more and pre-order now. Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. A lot of the suffering that we encounter in our minds is because we reject impermanence, we reject change. And that creates so much mental tension, so much mental struggle. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me, helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as your framework for getting to the root cause. What's critical to understanding what each individual person and body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health. Looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables can help us find the most effective path to optimize health

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conversations that matter if you've ever felt lost or confused about who you are where you're going what's important in life how to integrate your own well-being with your actual day-to-day practices this is going to be the podcast you want to listen to because it's with a really inspiring man, someone I've not known personally until recently, but has really inspired me through his work and his writings. His name, you might be familiar with him as Young Pueblo, but his actual name is Diego Perez. And he's a meditator and New York Times bestselling author who's really known on social media, Instagram, and under this pen name, Young Pueblo, which we'll get into why he calls himself that. He has an audience of nearly 3 million people, which is a lot of people. And his writing focused on the power of self-healing, creating healthy relationships, and the wisdom that

comes when we truly work on knowing who we are. His books are really extraordinary. They're kind of meditations on life and love and growth and how we navigate without suffering because there's so much suffering in the world now. And they personally helped me a lot, particularly when I was going through rough moments in my life. The first one is Inward. This is about really the relation with yourself, clarity and connections, and more about our relationships with others and ourself in those relationships. And his most recent book, Lighter, is about his own personal journey and his own story about how he came to know what he knows, which is pretty remarkable for a young man. So I'm excited about having Young Pueblo on the podcast. His book is amazing it was an instant new york

times bestseller and i think there's no accident because he's really struck a chord with so many people about the things that struggle we struggle with today as a species so welcome thank you mark i'm so happy to be here i feel like this is a a long uh almost like a homecoming because you are a common name set in my household. And my wife and I have just benefited so much from all the work that you've been doing. And it's literally just like greatly impacted our health. So I'm very grateful to you. I'm happy to be talking to you today. Well, I think that's a mutual admiration society because your work has really helped my own personal journey for healing myself and my past and relationships and love. And it's great that we can help each other. Thank you.

Your first book was really remarkable. And it was, you know, they're written almost like prose poems. They're really easy to access. They're beautiful meditations on different aspects of our own soul and our own sort of psychology and our own relationship with ourself. And the inward was really about self-development and self-knowledge. Clarity and connection was more about interpersonal relationships. And your new book, Lighter, is sort of an extension on these themes. But it's more of a narrative description.

It's less poetry and more actual discovery of who you are, what led you to become who you are, what you've learned along the way, and how that sort of informed how you live your life. So can you tell us about how Lighter came to be? What was the inspiration for the book? And, and, you know, what, what are the sort of key themes in there that people, I think might be interested in hearing about? Sure. Um, so lighter, it was interesting when I started my writing journey, I knew that I wanted to, at some point put together a book that would have everything in it. And, um it. And I've really started off with writing about personal development, and started realizing through my own journey that, you know, once I

started getting to know myself better, starting to love myself better, starting to sort of give myself that hard medicine that I needed and started to realize that like, okay, there are qualities that are missing that I need to start developing. And not only for my own mental well-being, but as soon as that started springing forward, I realized that my relationships around me were changing. And that's when I started slowly going into the relationship and friendship writing that I've been doing. And really lighter just brings that all together in a way that shows you where it's coming from as well. So my story is included in there. And I get a chance to kind of connect it all to my background where, you know, I was born in Ecuador, came to the United States when I was four years old. My family and I, when we

got to the United States, we were living in Boston, it was where I grew up. But we were experiencing really extreme poverty. And the difficulty of, you know, my mom, she worked cleaning houses, my dad worked at a supermarket. So we were really stuck in a poverty trap. And that tension that we would feel as a family, it feels akin to, you know, a submarine that has gone way too far into the water and the pressure is just like starting to cave in. And that really made some big imprints in me where I felt so much sadness, anxiety, sort of a scarcity mindset that started developing. And it's, yeah, it snowballed into some pretty, pretty bad habits as I got older. And when I realized that my mind was just incredibly heavy, I was like, okay, I have to figure out a way to make my mind lighter. So you basically were in this sort of

first generation American. Your parents came from Ecuador to find a better life, but they kind of were stuck in the fate of many immigrants, which are doing jobs that are low paying, that keep them stuck in the cycle of poverty. And you grew up as a child in that, which I can imagine really influenced your view of the world and your view of yourself and lack and scarcity and maybe even affecting your self-worth. And looking at your story, you talked about how you got into drugs and you were doing all these horrible things and, you know, you kind of were trying to escape or not feel, but something kind of propelled you to start feeling. And it was a particular event that happened. Can you share about that event and what that was? Because it's not something most people would want to get, but I think it's worth talking about. Yeah, totally. So as I was mentioning, you know, I was developing this ability to just run away from myself as fast as possible. And it was mediated through drugs,

it was mediated through partying, mediated through, you know, just drinking and constantly externalizing myself so that I would never be alone. And it, you know, it got to a point where I was just pushing my body to the edge, like literally to the edge, I was so mentally unhealthy, so physically unhealthy. And there was one night where I just took a bunch of different drugs, and which was common for me at that point, but my body had had enough. And it got to the point where I just, my heart couldn't take it anymore. And I, you know, spent like two, two and a half hours laying on the floor, just trying to breathe myself back into life because it felt like my heart was exploding. And it was interesting. I talked to, you know, I had a doctor at that time, but talked to them

about a few months later and they said, oh, it sounds like you had a mild heart attack. And it was just a wake-up call I needed. I felt like I, in that moment when I was on the floor, I was thinking about how much my parents had sacrificed and gambled for us to have an opportunity to move our family forward. And I was kind of just tossing that away because I had no process to be able to handle my emotions or deal with them or even to take a look into the past. And, and I just didn't have the courage at the time. But then I knew that if I was going to live, if I was going to really be able to access and create a new life, that the only way to do that was to be able to feel, to let myself feel and be honest about what's in there. Quite amazing. I think, you know, from that point of pain, somehow you've, you know, come to sort of understand how to navigate a very complicated world of emotions and triggers and relationships and feelings around self-worth and self-knowledge that, that are hard to come by that they're sort of, you know,

when I read your stuff, I'm like, this is sort of the ancient wisdom of, you know, Eastern philosophy of Christian mystics of the Kabbalists of like, this is sort of like the stuff they're all looking for um and you know like we know one of the one of the things you recently shared on social media so real maturity is noticing your own inner turbulence and pausing before you project how you feel onto what's happening around you i mean just in that little nugget is so much wisdom about how our psychology works as we project our own view of reality onto the world around us and we create meaning from it and and our interpretation of what

that is causes us to be joyful or have suffering or be happy or sad or whatever it is that we create and so like these insights don't come easy um but you're just full of them and you're full of a way of sort of expressing them. And you talk about how this creativity came from your meditation practice. Somehow you went from this party animal, doing drugs, almost killing yourself, to almost being like a Zen monk who goes, you said you just came back from a 10-day meditation retreat.

And you're finding a way to sort of navigate this both not just uh in the monastery let's say but actually in your relationship with your partner and the work you do in the world how did you come to kind of get so wise so young and early it's funny i feel like um what i've really have done and have accomplished is being able to just put myself on the path like i've i have focused on um really learning the buddhist teaching and i've been really fortunate to you know find a practice that really works for me and that's something that i try to encourage to a lot of people is whether you're into meditation or not because people have a lot

of um you know they go through so many different types of trauma, the amount of accumulations that they acquire over their lifetime that affects their mind. It allows them to do different practices, and it'll, you know, connect you with something that hopefully meets you where you're at. And for me, it was this Vipassana meditation in the Goenka style. And what I've done is just, you know, I did my first course in July of 2012. And that was about almost exactly a year after that rock bottom moment. And what I noticed was that, you know, not only was it just incredibly difficult, that first course is rough. So for those of you who don't know what that is tell

us what that what that is what is the vipassana yeah so these are silent silent 10-day courses in a very sort of um rigorous burmese style um and goenka is a teacher who was taught by his teacher sayaji bakin and these teachings all originate from the Buddha's original teachings that emerged 2,600 years ago. And these are silent 10-day courses where you're meditating about 11 hours a day. And you start off the first three days. So you take the vow of silence. You start off three days being aware of the breath so you can concentrate and calm your mind. And after that, they give you the actual Vipassana practice where you start learning how to observe reality within the framework of the body. And that ultimately introduces you to the truth of

impermanence. And that truth of impermanence is so powerful that it's really the gateway to all the rest of wisdom. It's really the gateway to you learning about yourself fundamentally as, you know, in your own lifetime, like how you function, but it also shows you how the universe functions. And I really credit, you know, all that I've written and whatnot. It's all profoundly inspired by these truths that I've, you know, come into contact with as I've been meditating. And I'm not a perfect person. I'm not, you know, I don't pretend to be enlightened or anything like that. I still have a lot of rough edges. But I'm just another person that's, you know, on the path, like everybody else. Well, I mean, I want to come back to that concept of impermanence, because

I think most people don't know what that is. I mean, those who are familiar with Buddhist teachings and Buddhism, I actually majored in Buddhism in college. I don, those who are familiar with Buddhist teachings and Buddhism do. I actually majored in Buddhism in college. I don't know if you know that. Really? I had no idea. I'm a little weird. I was joking. I have ODD. I'm odd. And it was really, you know, back then that, you know, it was 40 plus years ago that I did my first 10 day meditation retreat. And, you know, watching your mind for 12 hours a day uh we had the harder version it was the the zen version which was 10 12 hours a day yeah and and you know that concept is hard for people to grasp because i think most of our suffering comes and this is really the core of the buddhist

teaching most of our suffering comes from our attachment and holding on to things and wanting them to be the same and yet the nature of the universe is that things change and are not the same and are constantly changing whether it's the weather or whether it's your body or whether it's your relationships or whatever it is and i think our our stuckness in wanting things to be be same and not being comfortable with the uncertainty of impermanence is what caused a lot of suffering. So, so can you talk more about this concept of impermanence from your perspective, perspective, and then, and then how we play with that is as a doorway to becoming happy and joyful.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of the suffering that we encounter in our minds is because we reject impermanence, we reject change. And that creates so much mental tension, so much mental struggle, because we, you know, there are things that we really like in life, and we want them to stay the same. We want the people that we like to be there. We want the situations to remain in a way that continue feeding that sort of calmness and pleasantness of life. But the reality is that at the mental level, at the atomic level, at the physical level, at the cosmic level, at the most minute levels possible, everything is constantly, constantly changing. And if we don't embrace that truth, that sort of natural flow of nature that's just constantly moving forward, then it's going to

hurt. It's going to hurt a lot. Because no matter how hard we try, we just can't keep things the same. We may be able to elongate things sometimes, but ultimately, whatever arises will pass away. And that doesn't need to be a truth that strikes fear in you. And that's something that I've been sort of working on in my own life and writing about is that a lot of times our relationship with change is one that's based on fear. But it can actually be, you know, that relationship can be evolved into one that's quite inspiring, where I know that I'm not always going to be here. I know that this situation won't be here. So let me bring presence into this situation.

Let me bring my attention here. Let me really try my best to connect with the people who are around me who are crossing my path in this moment because it's special. Like, we're not always going to have this. So like what that has done, it's morphed my relationship with my wife, morphed my relationship with my mom and dad. And these moments that we do share and we're able to connect, it's like, wow, like they're so precious. And I'm more so grateful to change because if you think about it fundamentally, if the universe wasn't constantly changing, if everything was static, you and I would not be here.

Nothing would exist. There would be no one would be here. So because of change, you and I can exist. We can learn. We can love. We can grow. We can, you know, really flourish and evolve. So change is difficult, but it also gives us an incredible opportunity.

It's true, but it's a tough one for people because people get comfortable with the way things are and they live in the fear of what's not here, what's going to change. And I can tell you at 63, I just turned 63, and impermanence definitely has a lot more relevance for me. And whether I live another 10 years or 50 or 80 years maybe i'm hoping on dying at 180 we'll see how that goes uh maybe you got a hundred do it for the rest of us man yeah i feel like it's a good goal maybe i got another 120 years left we'll see but i i think you know regardless there's an end and i think the preciousness of every interaction of every moment of every person is is is really a beautiful meditation because it brings you into the present moment of course if you feel like crap if you're not well if you know so there's a there's a saying

that you know a healthy man wants many things a sick man wants one thing right i think so there there is for sure that and i think i i think I personally have become much more clued into the preciousness of everything, like in every moment and every sunset of every experience I'm having. And David White, who's a poet who I love, talks about being in friendship with all things, which is realizing that you're in relationship with everything. The Native Americans have a prayer called Metakweasane, which means like, to all my relations, to all the living and breathing things, to the rocks, everything, literally you're in relationship with everything all the time. And I think we get pulled out of that when we're so attached to our own sort of individual self, our own ego, our own sense of separateness, which is really an illusion. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. I'm excited to share with you a brand that I trust whose product I've seen value in firsthand, InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a

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Now, this offer is only for a limited time. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm curious about how you kind of come to share with people this sort of illusion of separateness. It's, you know, kind of what you're saying now reminds me of something you said a little earlier. And there's that very common quote that's attributed to a number of people. But, you know, we don't see things as we are. We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. And what I try to do with some of my writing is expand on that. When we're interacting with reality, what is our perception doing? Our perception is actually seeing reality through our emotional history. It's seeing reality and not just through that emotional history that we carry from our past,

but it's combined with whatever is our current emotion. So we're seeing reality through these really thick lenses. And that sort of enhances that attachment that we have towards basically tying whatever we're seeing in the present present to something that happened in the past. And if anything in the present is sort of slightly reminding us of something positive or negative from the past, then immediately our emotions will just flow in these old directions and we'll be repeating the past over and over again.

So that creates a situation where I may be meeting someone and I won't be able to fully appreciate them because I'll just be seeing them through my own gunk, through the, all the old sort of conditioning that I've been carrying in my mind. And you won't be able to see that sort of unity or the potential love or the depth of a connection that could really be there because you're just looking at them through the unhealed parts of yourself. Yeah.

I mean, some of the things that I think happen in this framework of personal development, self-help and growth is this phenomenon called spiritual bypass. Sure. Where people can do all the yoga and meditation, all these practices, but they really haven't dealt with their fundamental framework and beliefs and their conditioning whether it's their epigenetics and inheriting trauma from past generations and just being a human on the planet you know let's face it it's been a hard thing over the last few hundred thousand years and that's that's literally wired into our dna whether it's our own trauma from our own personal stories.

And I sort of really have had a lot of recent sort of relationship with, you know, the world I came into with my mother and father being in a very conflictual relationship, my father not wanting me, my wanting an abortion. I mean, my mother being alone and depressed, you know, during her pregnancy and me being born into this environment and what that did just to my epigenetics and you know activating my sympathetic nervous system as a place of in the world as a place of danger and having to just deal with that um and each of us have our own story and so how do we sort of deal with the traumas and whether they're they're big traumas like abuse or micro traumas of just you know growing up in a dysfunctional family or relationship. Right. Um, how do we,

how do we take the things that you've learned as part of your self discovery and discovery of how to be in relationship to yourself and relationship to others and, and sort of heal that without doing the spiritual bypass? Yeah, I think that's, that's a great question. I find that this really sort of brings in what we were talking about in regards to impermanence, because we want to allow impermanence to influence our understanding of our own identity. So we should allow ourselves to learn about our past,

to see the way our relationship with our parents and whatnot affects the way that relationship with our parents and whatnot affects the way that we show up in life today and allow these things to inform us. But the moment that our trauma becomes our identity, then it makes for a very rigid healing situation. Because if we're like, oh, this is how I am because of this moment, and I'm always going to be like this, or this is how I constantly see myself, then it's going to slow down your evolution. So in some ways, I think we can do our best to understand ourselves, but then we also have to let it go because it's like, okay, I'm a changing, growing being. So let me flow with nature and allow myself to develop new interests,

new likes, you know, let go of old parts of myself that don't really serve me anymore, and start letting my idea of who I am, just continue blossoming. And in terms of spiritual bypassing, I think it's, it's tough, because the human mind can only process so much information at once. That's the reality of it, is that we can't process everything at once. And I think we get a little confused by the fact that the technological world of today is so fast, and information is constantly coming our way. It's we're constantly being inundated, and it's exhausting. You know, there's there, you know, you don't quite realize how much you take in and how much energy that burns because you're processing all of that.

So at one, you know, one of our challenges is to be able to develop our awareness and expand our awareness, but also in a sustainable manner, because there are times where, you know, you're going through a hard time and, you know, staying connected to every single part of everything that's happening in the world, that may not actually serve you. And in other times, you know, you want to be active, you want to be out there, you want to stay very informed, but those may be, you know, one year of your life versus another year of your life. And understanding that we have very different capacities, like, you know, there may be people out there who can not only, you know, have a beautiful business, but then they're also part of all these different organizations

and they're out there actively trying to change the world. And they're, you know, doing all these amazing things. And that's fantastic. You're helping all of us. Great. But then there are other people who have experienced so much trauma that all they can do is heal themselves.

But that's also beautiful. You're actually serving us by just focusing on healing yourself. Because if you heal yourself and you increase your ability to love yourself well, then that means you're going to be less likely to harm yourself and other people. Yeah. I think that's true. And I think one of the most helpful sort of frameworks i've ever learned about my own mind is that every every emotion every time i've triggered every um belief i have is is just my own interpretation of reality that yeah that i project i project my worldview onto the world and and so when i when i step back and go, okay, this is just

like one version of reality. This is not necessarily the truth with a capital T. Then I, then I can get free from believing all these stupid thoughts. You know, my, my friend, Daniel, I even talks about, uh, ants, automatic negative thoughts, right? He says, don't believe every stupid thought you have. And I think a lot of us are so embedded with our thoughts. And that's the beauty of meditation is it sort of creates this slowing down. So you can kind of watch your arising and your coming and going of thoughts and realize that you're not your thoughts. You're not your emotions. You're not your beliefs. You're not your body. You're not any of these things. And, and so, and I, I shared this on the podcast before but i

almost died about six years ago and i really had you know was in bed for six months and just unable to function and lost 30 pounds and was was in really just this almost vegetative state and i and i was in anything i was in my mind i was in my body i couldn't answer an email i couldn't do anything and i just lay there and i just got to be in the experience of this sort of place which actually was very happy and blissful yeah even despite the fact that my body was in agonizing pain I was I was sort of surrendered into this kind of peacefulness it was hard to explain but I realized that at that moment I everything changed for me and I I the ideas that I'd had sort of conceptually became more experiential and it was a very powerful moment to kind of start to sort of reorient my life to be more in integrity and I

think that's sort of the next topic I want to talk about was integrity and and honesty and I think you talked about this concept in your book lighter uh radical honesty yeah yeah what's radical honesty and and why why is it so important to have that? And what does that look like for each of us? I had no process. I didn't know how to really engage with my emotions, but I knew what the problem was. And the problem was that I had gotten to that rock bottom moment by continuously lying to myself. I did not want to admit to myself that I did not feel good. And when I realized, and I finally admit that, I was like, I'm not okay. Like, I don't feel good. I have way too much anxiety, way too much sadness. And that first acceptance of me just being like, I'm not okay. Like, I don't feel good. I have way too much anxiety, way too much sadness. And that first acceptance of me just being like, okay, this is true.

And now I can more so move forward. But I started realizing that I need to repeat that over and over again. Whenever I feel tension, instead of trying to, you know, roll up another joint or just go find some way to just run away from myself. Let me just sit with this discomfort. Let me feel whatever's there as opposed to trying to like scrub it away or ignore it in some manner. And radical honesty, it's a term that's been out there for a long time. But the way that I use the term is, is honesty between you and yourself. It's not about you and other people like this is just about you and yourself and whatever is coming up inside of you. And I think that being able to develop that radical honesty, it's a critical part of self love. And when you are able to, you know, see what's inside of you and accept what's there, whether it's good or bad,

then that will actually slowly start building your courage, building your inner strength. And you'll start actually seeing that the sort of tough emotions that you're having, they're actually not as fearful and as dangerous and as scary as you originally thought they were. Because I would run, you know, as if I was being chased by like a you know an animal or something like that and and once i started sitting with my anxiety i was like yeah this sucks but it's not that bad i'm okay like this isn't gonna take me out yeah yeah that's so so being radically honest is hard because you have to be honest with yourself you have to be honest with how you see

yourself and your beliefs and your thoughts and almost take a third party view of yourself because you get so attached to who we are and our identity and our beliefs about ourselves. And it's just so hard to undo that. Right. So, you know, doing this work and sort of letting go of these old stories and, um, you know, learning about letting go, um, how do, how do we put that into practice? Like, you know, learning about letting go. How do, how do we put that into practice? Like, you know, letting go is really hard. I'm gonna struggle with it. And we often make things harder for ourselves. So what, why, why is letting go so important and how do we have to keep doing this practice of letting go as part of our life? Well, this, this really, you know, to what you were

saying earlier about you realizing how you were creating your own narrative of what was happening in front of you. And one thing that I really appreciate that, you know, the Buddha and my teacher, SN Goenko, talks about is how wisdom is actually you being able to see things from different perspectives. So not just from your own perspective, but seeing whatever the truth may be from different angles and being able to see your own angle, put yourself in the feet of another person. It's just see the complexity of the situation as opposed to just creating some simplified self-centered story. That's just just this was not my fault this is somebody else's fault but seeing your own you know what what was what is the role that you played in

this situation and how may someone else have seen it i think um that can be so informing to your ability to let go because that's probably one of the first things we need to let go of is like okay i do have this one perception of what's happening in this moment, but there's more, there's more to understand. And people are seeing this in other ways. But letting go, I think it's the crux of healing. It's quite necessary to be able to even somehow process your emotions and let them go, because we don't realize that as soon as we're born, right, we're constantly reacting. And every reaction, it creates an imprint on the mind. It molds the subconscious. And this doesn't stop at childhood. And I think that's one of the things

that I think a lot of modern therapists kind of really hone in on those like first seven or so years of life. And they're very formative, but it doesn't stop there. You know, the big events that happened to you later, you know, the heartbreaks, the loss that, you know, the accident that you were talking about that you went through, these created massive imprints in your mind that are still playing themselves out that are still affecting the way that you act now. But it's you're acting now in relation to what happened before. And the letting go part is letting go of the energy of the past that you're still carrying. You're still bringing into the present over and over again. And the beautiful part of this modern age that we live in is that there's a lot of ways to let go.

You know, like I let go through meditating. Other people let go through the, you know, practices that their therapist may teach them. There's just a lot of different ways to go about it. And there's no like sort of one to five step, like this is how you let go. But knowing that the letting go often involves, really always involves you coming back to the present moment. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's hard because we do get so attached to our worldview and it's, and we think, you know, it's sort of come apart if we actually let go of what happened to us or if we move on or if we don't hold on to things. But, you know, I think we, we tend to poison ourselves by this constant holding on to our ways of seeing and whether it's in relationship or to ourselves. And I think one of the challenges for people, and I noticed this for myself, which people may find hard to explain given that I'm successful and you know blah blah blah is you know I realized that I had a certain level of self-worth and self-love but I really wasn't fully in it and and it sort of undermined my ability to love others to

actually choose the things that were good for me in life, to say yes to what was good and to say no to what didn't resonate with me. And so how do you kind of help guide people towards more self-acceptance, more self-love, more self-worth? Because it's sort of easy to talk about, but it's hard to do. Yeah, it is hard to do. Yeah, it is hard to do. And it's also hard to do in relation to like what society has or like what consumerism has created in regards to self love, where it's, you know, self love in terms of just kind of pleasing yourself, just like buying more things, giving us, you know, just the consumerist aspect of it. But I think real self-love, it is you basically trying actively and continuously to get to know yourself and to do whatever it is you need to do to heal yourself

and free yourself. So that's self-love. It's really an internal dynamic and it is hard. It's not something that's going to be easy, but the reason that we come back to it, the reason that I can come back to it personally is like, I literally can't make a bigger investment. Like it's the best investment that I could make, you know, I could, you know, be out there working and doing all these things, but all of it will just not whatever I may produce will not be as good. If I don't have a strong ability to accept myself deeply, a strong ability to balance that with self-love and understand that, you know, I should love myself deeply, but there's also things that I can, you know, different directions that I can grow in that

will help me become a better version of myself and just continue showing up into the world in a way that, you know, honors the emotions that I'm feeling, but it's still, you know, showing up in a way that I feel really genuinely good about. Yeah. It's sort of, it's sort of an internal journey first, but then, you know, the harder part is in being in a relationship, right? Whether with our family, our coworkers, our partner, you know, Ram Dass talks about how, you know, if you think you're enlightened, just go home for Thanksgiving. Right. And I think that that's the challenge for many of us is that we sort of seem to, I mean, we construct our reality where we think we're moving in the right direction and we may be, but then, you know, we're find ourselves

in relationship acting out these old unconscious patterns. So how, how can our relationships be part of our healing as opposed to creating more trauma for us, which they often do? Yeah, yeah. It's tough because relationships are sort of like incubators for growth, whether we want them to be or not. You know, they really accelerate us seeing the different parts of ourselves that are good and the really tough parts. I think whenever egos are in proximity of each other, it's only a, you know, a short, limited amount of time until there's conflict because egos, egos are rough. And when they rub up against each other, the friction is created. So we cannot help but find, you know, difficulties in the people that we love, but being able to understand that,

that it's not just about them, that the initial reaction may be you pointing the finger and being like, you made me feel this way. But when you develop self-awareness and you start realizing that actually, you know, I may have actually just gotten less hours of sleep last night. And this is why I woke up and didn't feel good. But then my mind wanted to figure out how this is your fault and place the blame on someone else. So yeah, there's one common practice that my wife and I try to do is, is we do our best to let each other know where we are in our emotional spectrum. And we let, you know, let each other know, like, how do I feel right now, instead of it sort of snowballing into this bigger narrative, we try to cut that narrative by just being in contact with each other about

how we feel in the moment pretty constantly. And so you wake up in the morning and you go, Hey, I'm feeling this, how are you feeling? Or how do you do that in practice? You have like a time to check in every day or. So the practice is really, you know, it's us, um, checking in first thing in the morning. It's, um, just letting us know like, okay, either I feel like a lot of anxiety passing through me right now, or I feel heavy right now, or my mood feels really short. That information not only helps the person who's feeling it acknowledge and own the fact that, okay, I don't feel great right now, I'm not going to try to fake it. And it lets your partner know, okay, that, you know, let me figure out ways to support them or just give them space or, you know, whatever it is so that we're both aware that one of us is a little short today. And it's been really funny because there was this one particular moment where, you know, my wife and I, my wife was feeling tough that day.

And her and I were working in different rooms, because we were both working from home at that time. And we, you know, we hadn't talked to each other for about like two, two and a half hours. And then she comes in. And she's like, you know, I just spent the last like three hours trying to figure out how, you know, me not feeling good right now is your fault. And she was like, it was so crazy. Like it was totally illogical, like had nothing to do with you. And there are these times where, you know, certainly the tough moments of our past will play into how we feel and how we act

and really the way that our character shows up. But it's not always like that in the minutiae of like regular everyday life where really sometimes it is because like maybe the day before I had too much sugar and now my mood's super low the next day, or I didn't get enough sleep last night. And now like, you know, I feel tired and what happens when you're tired, then you get angry, you know, you like it, um, being able to be aware of these things and honest with yourself and your partner or those around you who are with you. I think it actually stops a lot, a lot of unnecessary arguments from happening because surely sometimes your partner

will say something to you that they should apologize for. But I would say 90% of the time, it's like you just jumping through these illogical hoops, trying to like create a problem when there really is not a problem there. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think that's a tough thing to do in the live action dynamic relationship. But the more we can kind of slow it down and totally be in a non-reactive state is better off we're going to be in terms of our own self-awareness and our relationships um and and this you talked about the power of non-reaction uh but most people don't have a tool or a set of skills for not reacting to our feelings not you know you know we have a thought right and we have an emotion

and then we have a reaction right and i people say oh we have the emotion first i'm like not necessarily it may be instantaneous but we have some thought that triggers some almost instantaneous feeling and we then translate that into some reaction or action and that that's a pretty universal human pattern but how do we kind of create this more like slow motion where we maybe have this thought oh my partner just yelled at me or she criticized me or she i think she meant this but maybe she didn't and then you have this feeling of rejection or sadness or hurt or whatever and then you have your your your your actual expression of whatever that is how do you kind of kind of break that down in so people can actually have that present moment awareness to to not collapse all those three things into one

explosion which is what happens usually in relationship these reactions happen incredibly rapidly and they do so because the past of the mind is so loaded and so heavy that it makes it easy to just react with the intensity that you had that you did before. And it's funny, you know, because oftentimes we think it simultaneously arises with sensations on the body. And the thing that we don't like is how we feel. Like we forget and we don't know because our awareness isn't sharp enough. Like fear has a feeling in the body. Like anger has a feeling in the body. Lust, like craving, all of these things, you know, aversion, they all have feelings in the body. And what we don't like or what we crave, it's the literally the sensations on the body. And, um, I think one of the best ways to, you know, even outside of meditating is, is literally slowing down. I think

that is like the key because the problem is speed. It's like you're reacting so fast. You just fall back into this, you know, habit pattern of reaction, of blind reaction, really, and slowing yourself down so that you can actually process and see the different options that are there, you know, options where it's like, this is how I normally would have reacted. This is what I could do that would be a little more helpful in this situation. Or I could just walk away from this, you know, seeing more of what's there besides just going with the first impulse, because the first impulse will literally just be you repeating your past. Whereas if you take time to slow down, if you take time to literally turn your attention back into the present moment,

then you'll be able to come up with a much more genuine response that is connected to how you feel presently than just you repeating your past over and over again. We have to also remind ourselves too that when you meditate or when you're intentionally trying to cultivate any sort of quality in your mind, like present moment awareness, compassion, self-awareness, it's you taking yourself to the mental gym. Like you have to repeat this stuff over and over again. It doesn't just happen. It's not easy. It's, you know, you can't just like run a marathon, you have to, you know, start the long walks, like start the running systematically and trying over and over again. And then the quality of, you know, compassion will be there, then the quality of slowing down will be there. And

that will help you. But I think it takes that intention of, okay, I see the problem. Let me try to slow down. Okay, I didn't get it quite right. Let me try again. Okay. Now I was able to slow down a little bit. So there's, there's a lot that you can do, um, just in the raw form. But then other than that, like I really recommend to people, you're going to want to find a technique that meets you where you're at something that is challenging, but not overwhelming something that can really help you cultivate yourself. Yeah, that's true. I think you have to be able to withstand and hold the physiology of emotion without actually letting it just be expressed kind of in a messy way.

Totally. Feel it without becoming. Yeah. Right. And that's the hard part is like letting, like allowing yourself to slow down and not to go, okay, I'm going to have'm gonna have this like oh initial burst of like my gut is you know tense or my heart feels hurt or whatever is happening i feel a flood of like heat in my body you know there's these physiological responses

to what's happening and we tend to just jump into whatever those are, but to go, Oh, I'm just noticing, Oh, like I stubbed my toe. It hurts for a minute, but it doesn't mean I'm going to die. And I think you go, okay, well, I stubbed my toe. It's not comfortable, but then you kind of have to be able to have a response and, and instead of a reaction and, and that takes a slowing down. I think that's such a beautiful thing. I mean, you talk, you also talk about how, you know, part of the key to sort of living a happy life is sort of really focusing on self-love.

And part of that self-love and acceptance is about, you know, kind of building these positive habits, right? It's honesty. It's habit building. It's self-acceptance? It's honesty, it's habit building, it's self-acceptance, it's unconditional. And you talk about these three pillars that work both inside of you and also in your life externally to generate and support a kind of

a really more permanent and deep sense of self-love and acceptance. Because it's not something that most of us learn how to do is how do we love ourselves? How ourselves how do we accept ourselves and one of the practices we can do so maybe you can share how you deal about that for yourself and then your partnership and then how you know you kind of maybe suggest for people to start to think about it for themselves and everybody's got a different different path but totally yeah i think, you know, in terms of the positive, positive habit building, right, because a lot of what we want to do is, is undo the past by breaking down those like old heavy habits that we have that are, you know, I meditate every day, twice a day. I meditate two hours a day, one hour in the morning, one hour in the evening, and I've been doing that

now for about seven years, and it has been like radically life-changing, and I do that because that's what works for me, right? Like I'm very interested in learning, and I remember the first time that I took a 10 day course, when I when I spoke to my friends afterwards, I described to them, I was like, man, I was like, I learned more in 10 days than I did in four years of college. Like it, it really just opened up this whole new world. So that's why I put so much time I like invest time into meditating, because it is like the crux and the root of, um, all the other good things that are happening in my life, like my relationship with my wife, with work,

um, and with any type of new endeavor that I may do. Um, so in terms of positive habit building, that's key for me. My wife also, you know, meditates two hours a day. Wow. Two hours a day. That's a lot of time. It is. It's a lot of time. But it's funny, though, even though I do that, I still find time to waste. You know, like it's there's there's a lot of time in the day that just gets wasted with scrolling time that you're giving away to Netflix. You know, there's our time just like, I don't know, like I feel like this life, it's such

a beautiful, bountiful opportunity. And I actually have been able to increase my production after I started meditating two hours a day than before, like, I was just able to do a lot less things before that. So it you'd be surprised how much it increases your capacity. you're just able to you know see things much more clearly than just rolling in through the nonsense that's happening in your mind yeah i mean we go to the gym we eat well we focus on sleep but we don't practice what i call brainercise you know it's just working on this thing this gray matter that determines everything about your life i mean it's it's such an incredible thing because you know it

determines even how you relate to your body how you eat whether you prioritize sleep whether you take care of yourself like all the things that you need to do to be a whole person to be engaged in life in a positive way to be in relationships at work to be doing your purpose in the world to do your work whatever it is you you kind of have to handle this thing between your ears and yeah look we we learn so much about all the other aspects of well-being and health but very little about that and that that in a sense is the is the major determinant of everything else in our life of our happiness of our focus of our attention of our relationships of our longevity i mean i just finished a book on longevity called young forever and in it you know the mindset and beliefs are such a powerful

determinant of our longevity i mean if you had a for example meaning and purpose in your life your your life expectancy was increased by seven years. Wow. Which is a lot. That's seven years. I mean, if we eradicated cancer and heart disease from the face of the planet, we'd at most get a three to maybe five or six year life extension. Right. You're saying it's like having a positive mindset is better than curing all cancer and heart disease from the planet,

which is pretty amazing. Yeah. But having a purpose, that's really, that's really, um, illuminating. Cause I, so when I go away to meditate, like I, earlier this year, January to February, I was, um, I set a 45 day meditation course and in that 45 days. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and in those 45 day courses, there's a lot of people who like my wife and I were by far the youngest people there. And but most of the people were 50 and above. And most of them were really like in their deep 70s. And man, they look great. They look great. Like they're, you know, not only has like meditating for decades, help them like physically and visibly look young. But they have a purpose in life, you know, their, their purpose is to serve because a lot of them are also like assistant teachers who are, you know, conducting these courses and whatnot. And, but it's quite powerful to see the power of purpose because I think it can really drive you. And, and it's funny because my, my journey started with the mental aspect.

Like I knew that I had to get my mind right for my life to just develop some sort of stability and harmony. And once I started getting my mind right, I was like, oh, man, like I'm really unhealthy. Like I need to change the way I eat. Change the way I eat, like start exercising more, you know, just and building that consistency so that I can, you know, make my life longer and be able to serve well. And I've been really inspired by, you know, the way you talk about longevity and talking about it as like, being able to live well, as long as possible. And not just about, you know, extending your life, like, you know, to be able to be 60 for many years, like over and over and over and over again, like that's so powerful. And I

think, yeah, I've been really taking in the longevity information and applying it now, like I'm 35 years old now, but it's like, you know, start early. And hopefully I can be like a really dope, like 80 year old, you know. That's the point. Actually, there's a guy, you know, I'm in Costa Rica. And in the Nicoya Peninsula, which is one of the blue zones right now where people live very long. And there's a guy who tends the garden in the house I'm staying at who's 80 years old. And he works harder than anybody else. He rides his bike straight up this long kind of couple- mile hill to get to the property to work for the day. And he's so fit and so engaged and so strong. And, you know,

he's 80 years old. We don't think of a normal eight-year-old being a, you know, a hard, hard manual labor worker, but they are, you know, you can be, you can be. So I think, yeah, it's powerful. There was, I wanted to tell tell you there was a teacher who he passed away um a few months ago but this guy he was like in his deep 90s and man he looked great like he looked great he would teach so many courses and literally until the last moment of his life like he was like in the hospital teaching the nurses how to meditate like you know and passed away so peacefully and quietly and it was just like such a inspiring life to look at yeah yeah it's true i was watching a video about dick van dyke who's like you think i think the guy

would be dead by now because he was like still alive in the 60s he's like 95 years old or something and he works out every day he's married to someone who's like 40 years younger than him and he still dances he still does yoga he still acts i mean it's like people have you know the ability to be vibrant well into the later stage in life but it's really about how we relate to our own minds that keep us young or old yeah yeah i think um actually that kind of brings me to the question of how did you sort of create this pseudonym Young Pueblo? Because that's sort of an interesting thing to sort of have that as your forward facing identity. Yeah, it is interesting.

I feel like and it's also been a fortunate situation, too, because as everything has been growing, a lot of the attention just goes to Young Pueblo. And Diego Perez can just kind of like quietly do this in the background. And I've been loving that. I think it's, it's wonderful. But young Pueblo, it means young people.

And it's a name that combines my Ecuadorian-ness with my American-ness. And because in Ecuador, I mean, the word Pueblo is used in so many different ways, but for me, it means, you know, the masses of people. And when I started meditating, I was like, damn, like, I'm really immature.

Like, I'm, you know, I have a lot of growing up to do. But then I've always been this huge, you know, like history nerd. And I've, when I started turning my attention to what's been happening historically, where the world is now, I was like, wait, the whole world is young. Like, we literally still don't know how to collectively do these fundamental basic things, like the things that our teachers when we were in kindergarten were trying to teach us, like how to clean up after ourselves, how to be kind to one another, how to tell the truth, to not hit each other, to share. These are fundamental basic things that we may be able to do them as individuals and in small groups, but as a human collective, like we don't, we haven't mastered these basics at all. So to me,

young Pueblo is like, it helps me place all of my writing within this context, because it really feels like humanity is maturing, you know, over this like 100 year period. Yeah, that's beautiful. So it's really about sort of the maturation of our species and the sort of rising consciousness. So it's an interesting moment in history because maybe there's been many times like this in the past, but where there's sort of a rising consciousness and awareness and many people gravitating towards meditation, towards self-development, towards spirituality, towards psychedelics, and across like really wide spectrum of the population, including CEOs and political leaders. It was really fascinating. And at the same time, there's all this division and darkness and war and,

you know, kind of really kind of dark aspects of human behavior. And so we're, we're sort of, I wonder if we actually can come to a place where humans are more awake, where they are more integrated, where there is a better sort of framework for raising children for helping actually to develop these qualities of self awareness and and self-love and self-mastery and and mastery of our minds which is really the key to a happy life yeah because you know as a doctor like i can tell people to do what to do all day

long right for me it's not hard to cure diabetes or immunities or dementia or many many things it's about people you know following the the recommendations yeah yeah that's like okay here's what here's you have a human body here's what it takes to keep your body well and to cure disease uh and and we don't know everything about every disease obviously but for most of the stuff people are suffering with it's not that hard and yet people don't do it and the reason they don't do it is not because it's hard. They don't do it because of what's in their mind. And that's, that's the part that I think is the biggest challenge for people. I think it's, it's funny because, um, you know, I will sway back and forth because there are so

many difficulties in the world and it is quite out of balance. Um, but at the same time, like what gives me hope is that we really do live in unprecedented historic times. Like this is a time where all of the, you know, Eastern practices that have helped people for thousands of years have become globalized, are globally available now. And similar with Western practices that have been developed over the past few hundred years that also are deeply helping the body and the mind, they're also becoming more worldly available. And I think now that the world, we're in this place where there are literally millions and millions of people in the world who are meditating now. And there are millions and

millions and millions of people in the world who are seeing therapists and people who are actively trying to heal themselves in a way where if you were to look back, like, I don't think there have there are these many people, probably since the Buddhist time, but even then in the Buddhist time, there were a lot of people meditating, but it was kind of, you know, focused in northern India. And like, not like now, it's, it's, it's the world, man. It's, there's so many people who are actively cultivating themselves. And one thing that I, you know, have a lot of hope around is, is just that when you learn to love yourself better, and you're actively cultivating that self love, that willingness to intentionally or unintentionally harm another person, it also decreases because you know that that self-love is real if it slowly starts opening the door

to unconditional love for all beings as well. Because self-love is not self-centered. It's a motivator for you to evolve. But in that evolution, it'll open you to the compassion that helps you see like, oh, you know, it's actually to my benefit as well, for the people for my neighbor to also be healthy and happy, and building on these situations so that we're not as dominated by our past so that because you know, if you look at things historically, there have always been groups of people who try to change the world for the better. But the failure comes in that they never change their minds, right? So you can have these beautiful, powerful ideals. But then what happens when you get power, right power, it functions like a magnet, and it will pull out the roughest parts of your ego. So if you don't meditate, if you don't,

you know, have some sort of practice, then those roughest parts will start dominating you. And what will happen is that you start recreating the ills that you were once fighting against. And it has happened so many times historically. But I think this is the sort of silent movement that's happening now where, well, now we're actually changing our minds and we're still simultaneously trying to change the world for the better. So to me, it's like, that's, that's my like shining ray of hope. I think that's very, very insightful perspective, which is that unless we learn, it's not about self-love or self-acceptance as a narcissistic pursuit. It's really about self-love as a doorway to greater love in the world, to more compassion, to deeper interpersonal relationships that actually help to heal what's going on and heal divisions and create more connection to ourselves, to each other, to the planet. And so once you develop those things, you end the process of self-harm,

which is what most of us are in, a dynamic of some self-harm to some degree or another. And the Buddhist notion of compassion is important, but it's also not just out there, it's directed toward yourself. And there's a very uh famous guru who is the teacher of ram das and krishna das and you know for example daniel goldman who wrote emotional intelligence and many others and he you know his basic message

was really simple love everybody uh serve everybody and feed everybody and i think that everybody includes this yeah that your own yourself and i think for many years i never quite got that and uh and so i think that's sort of a beautiful message of of of learning how to build the awareness the practices the tools as meditation or other practices and there are many practices i yeah i for example use really deep journaling um from for my own self-awareness which was you know what is all this shit my head's saying like let me just like like like if you actually recorded what your inner dialogue was and you wrote it down yeah for most of us it's like a nightmare and if you said if you said those things to a friend or a partner, things you say to yourself, you would be the loneliest person in the world because no one would be in relation with you.

But we kind of put that on ourselves. And so learning how to change that inner dialogue, to put it out this thing in my head is doing. And then create some distance and say, what does my higher wisdom have to say about what my lower self is saying? And having that pattern of awareness, that was a very deep practice for me that helped me see my patterns in work and life with myself that I really resisted because we get so attached to our ideas and our sense of things, but it really helped me get so much freer. And when you're freer, then you, you, you are able to be in the world in a much more generative way, a much more creative way, a much more giving way in a way that actually

brings more light and love in the world rather than more darkness. So it's, it's beautiful. The messages that you convey Diego, it's, it's really important. I think if you haven't come across his work, you should definitely at least follow him on Instagram because every day there's like these beautiful little nuggets of wisdom and meditation. They're very simple but very profound and they really are great kind of little guidepost reminders along the way about how to actually live your life.

Check out his books, Inward and Clarity and Connection, and his new book, Lighter, which you can find everywhere. He's really kind of a light in the world. And I'm so grateful for your work and your wisdom. I wondered if there's any sort of other messages or things you want to convey about your new book, Lighter, or about things that we haven't quite covered that you think are important for people to understand about themselves and their own healing journey?

That's a good question. I think, um, I think probably the last important thing to convey is that it's really be, um, intentional about the moments when you do have a low mood, because it's really easy to forget how far you have come, how much progress you have made, and being able to suspend that self-analysis in those moments where like, you just don't feel that good. And you're like burdened by anxiety or sadness or something thick is passing through your mind. You know, just allow yourself to do a little less that day to relax a little bit and to, you know, when you actually do want to do some self analysis, you want to examine yourself from when you started to where you are now, not from today to yesterday. Like from today to yesterday, it's just going to be some pretty serious ups and downs, right? So if you look at that healing journey, it's super choppy, super, you know, forwards and

backwards. And it just reminds me of my own, you know, like my own journey with my health. Like, I know rice wasn't good for me, but how hard was it for me to stop eating rice? Like only just now this past year, am I comfortable with not eating it, right? But it took so long. Oh, you're from with not eating it? Right. But it took, it took so long. From Ecuador. So it's. Yeah, exactly.

It's like the key thing they're eating, but, but breaking, you know, breaking these like little habits that aren't, that aren't, um, you know, that aren't allowing our best self to show up. It takes time. So it's really about repetition and, and lighter is really just just a, it's a book that's there to help you sort of understand those like important thresholds that we cross when we're, you know, because there's chapters on self-love, chapters on healing,

chapters on emotional maturity, relationships. And it's really helped to feed that like intellectual side of that deeper inner experience that's happening. And it is such a beautiful title, lighter. I mean, to me, I don't know what it really meant to you. I created the title, but for me, it's how do we live more lightly with ourselves in relationship with the earth and with our lives. And I think that's a, that's such a beautiful framework for how to think about things. It's heavy.

It's heavy. Being human is really heavy. Being human now is heavy more than ever, I think. And, you know, I mean, we're closer to nuclear war than ever. Climate change, I mean, the inequities we're facing. And yet there's a way to live lightly and joyfully in the midst of it all. Totally. And, you know, the lighter really kind of sort of points to the heaviness that we carry in our mind. And it's, you know,

totally possible to relieve that heaviness through letting go. But the same lighter also points to the fact that, you know, I really believe enlightenment is possible. Like I've come across some incredibly wise people in my life. But enlightenment is difficult. It takes a lot of effort, you know, it takes right effort. But even though enlightenment may be difficult, it's really possible to become lighter. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for what you're doing, for the work you've done.

I encourage everybody to follow you. Go to Young Pueblo. That's Y-U-N-G underscore Pueblo, P-U-E-B-L-O on social media. Check out your website, which is also youngpueblo.com. And definitely check out the books, Inward, Clarity and Connection, and Lighter, which is a great meditation for the heaviness of the world now. And I'm really happy to see that it was the number one New York Times bestseller because, you know, that's not easy.

And it sort of speaks to the resonance of the message that you have, the importance of it. And it's beautiful. So thank you so much, Diego, for your work. And hopefully we'll get to see you in person soon, someday soon. Yeah, I would love that. Thank you so much, Mark. And thank you for all the work that you're doing for the world because you're just you're helping us out in tremendous ways. Thank you so much. And if you've loved this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment. Have you learned to live lighter in your own life

and learned about how to love yourself and accept yourself and know your own mind? And we'd love to hear how you've discovered yourself because it's something we can all learn from. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you like this conversation, I know you'll love my new book, Young Forever. If you pre-order this book now, you'll get access to my discount bundle with deals from all my favorite health and wellness brands. Visit youngforeverbook.com to order my

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This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.