The Dharma of Instagram | Yung Pueblo

[Music] From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [Music] Hey guys, social media is not at least the first blush seem like a hospitable environment for meditation, mindfulness, dharma, sanity, whatever you want to call it. There's at least some evidence to suggest that the more time you spend on social media, the less happy you will be. However, our guest this week, Diego Perez, has been able to build a massive following for what is essentially dharma Buddhist content on Instagram. He's got last I checked more than 600,000 followers on Instagram. Every day he puts out a post based on his experiences as a person in the world who's using this sort of ancient technology to improve his own life. And clearly, a lot of people want to hear it. So I'll keep this introduction very brief because he's a great storyteller and the way he came to the practice is quite interesting. But I just do want to highlight going in two things. One is we've had a lot of people request that we talk about the experience of being on a meditation retreat in this show. Diego does that for us. And I also want to point out that toward the end of the interview you're going to hear two of my colleagues, Laura Cobra and Chris Rios from Nightline, ask some questions to Diego because we're doing a story on him for Nightline and they were in the studio with their cameras recording as we recorded this interview for the podcast. I forgot to mention, by the way, that his name is Diego Perez, but the way the world knows him is Young Pueblo, which is the name of his Instagram account. And you'll hear him explain why he came to that name. All right, enough from me. Here we go. Young Pueblo. Well nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. I would love to hear your backstory. How did you get into meditation in the first place? Well, it was back in July of 2012 when I did my first course in the summer. And I had just overcome, it was a pretty serious year. Like that 2011 to 2012, I was basically pulling my life back together. I had gone pretty deep into just using pleasure and intoxicants like drugs and alcohol to get as far away from myself as possible. And I kind of hit rock bottom in that summer of 2011 and basically almost died. I felt like my body was just full of drugs and I was on the floor basically trying to pray myself back into life because I felt like I was having a heart attack. And I was 23 at the time, like I had to push my body that far to the edge. And literally just because I didn't know how to deal with my anxiety and my sadness. And from that moment when I was on the ground, they're really realizing that I could have really wasted my life. Like this is not how I want to go. I don't want to let my parents down, especially because my parents, you know, we immigrated from Ecuador when I was very young and my parents made such a giant sacrifice for me to even be in this country and have this opportunity. But in some ways, I was like, if I die now, I would have wasted every, you know, all of their efforts. And that sort of gave me a lot of courage to just stop doing all the hard drugs and start this like slow walk into being healthy again because I was like so overweight, so unhealthy, so sad and was constantly only thinking about what, like what's the next pleasure that I could have so that I don't have to feel like this. So the sadness, the underlying emotions that you were trying to get away from were they just part of your wiring or were they connected to life experiences that had been traumatic? Yeah, there, I mean besides like the trauma of poverty, like we grew up really poor, but how was always kind of wired that way? Even when I was really little, I always felt, you know, I was very extroverted, had a lot of friends, but just this like underlying sadness that kind of compounded over time. And it just grew and grew to the point where it became unmanageable and really destructive. Where did you grow up? So I grew up in Boston after we, so I was born in Waikid, Ecuador, and when I, we moved to Boston when I was four and a half and then I was there until I was 18 when I went to college. In Boston proper? Yeah, yeah, in Jamaica playing. And what were your folks doing to get by? It was tough. I was so, we were broke, like my mom was cleaning houses and my dad was working in a supermarket. And luckily we were able to live in Boston because my aunt who hadn't moved from Ecuador in the 60s, she and her husband had bought like a triple decker and they were renting it really cheap. One of the floors to us for like, you know, very, very cheap. And so you went off to college at 18 and then at 23 you're on the floor of your apartment. What, what, how bad did, what did it look like your, the drug abuse, the drinking, what did it, how bad did it get? It was so consistent. Not every day. It was kind of like a Monday to, no, sorry, from Wednesday to Monday. I think like two days were off. And, but even on two days that still be like smoking a lot of weed. And, but the weekend was very long. Like the school that I went to, especially at that time, I don't know what the culture is like there now, but, which was the Wesleyan University. That was just, that was great. Or, steج school. Yeah, no, it was great. And I learned a time when I was there and I love the experience that I had, but I definitely just sought out having fun or what I thought was fun way too much. And it became so consistent and like a norm that I didn't think anything was wrong. And then when I left there, I saw that I still had that like constant urge and craving to just continue that. And I wasn't in that environment that could produce it. So I had to like make situations to, you know, continue having this fun. So just got really heavy into cocaine. And to the point where I just felt like, like I couldn't even like walk very far without my heart feeling like it was going to explode. Yeah. Yeah. I've had my own experiences with that drug. Yeah. Yeah. Produced a panic attack from me on National Television, which wasn't thinking of it. Oh, yeah, yeah. So you've taken us through what appears to be a pretty hard bottom on the floor, trying to pry yourself back to some sense of normalcy. How did that land you on a meditation retreat? It sounds like a year later. It was exactly, I was almost exactly a year later. So I stopped the really hard drugs. And I started exercising and taking in super foods. I remember like the one of the first things I did was like buy this tub of spirit of barley grass and started consuming that because like I just never knew how to eat well. And I slowly started feeling better and better. Like, you know, having a relatively good diet helps balance the mind out a bit. So that was helping me see things a little more clearly. And then a friend of mine had been traveling in India and he did a 10 day Vipassana course. And he when he came. So this is also one of the people that I used to party with a ton, you know, do all the same drugs within everything. And he wrote an email after his experience and it was all about love, compassion and good well. So to me, I was like, what the hell happened? Like this person who I love, you know, I was like one of my brothers. Why is he talking about love now? Like what, you know, how, how is this experience so powerful that it made him write this email? So I immediately signed up and did one a few months later. And it was like dramatically changed my life. All right. And deeply in the end, just just for clarity of terms, Vipassana can be a confusing term on a number of levels. One of which, one of the levels is that Vipassana is a kind of meditation practiced in like many different ways. Yeah. And in many different ways. In the meditation world, when people say I'm going on a Vipassana retreat, they often mean I'm going on a retreat at a center established by a legendary teacher by the name of SN Gowenka, who was an Indian businessman who learned how to meditate while doing business in Burma. Yeah, exactly. And he then started creating meditation centers for lay people. And now they're all over the way you were telling me this in like 300 before we started a roll. It's about 300, yeah. Around the world. And so Vipassana is an ancient form of meditation. It's also called insight meditation taught outside of the Gowenka schools such as it is such as it is. But somehow in the meditation vernacular nowadays, when people say I'm going out of Vipassana retreat, they generally mean a Gowenka retreat. Yeah, definitely. I think Vipassana globally is sort of like the silent giant. Like there's so many Vipassana centers around the world and people practice it to different degrees. And I think that's what, yeah, what people think about. They think about Gowenka and Vipassana. What is a Gowenka retreat like and why was it such a big deal for you? It's a serious situation. So when you go into a Gowenka retreat, it's, you know, you first, you take a Val morality. So you're going to, you're not only are you taking noble silence like you won't speak for 10 days, but you are also, you know, you promise not to kill or steal or lie or have any, you know, no sexual activity and you're not going to take any intoxicants. So these like five hard rules that you're taking there and you're not speaking unless you're asking a teacher a question because, you know, outside of Gowenka, there's also teachers there who are helping you through the course. Going himself has passed away, but he does is teaching through audio and video tapes. Yeah, exactly. But then. While you're there, there are teachers who have been meditating for long periods of time and who are there to support you and answer your questions. But you first start with developing your concentration. You know, you work with Ana Pana for three and a half, three and a half four days. Define Ana Pana. It's awareness of the breath. Okay. Yeah. And I thought you started with awareness of the, I thought they were doing body scans for the first couple of days. That's what comes next. So you want to develop some degree of awareness and develop that concentration. So then you move to, you know, scanning the body and just seeing what's there. So you start by just feeling the breath coming in and going out, usually in the Goinkit tradition, have you ever been on a Goinkit retreat? Is it at the abdomen? No, no. So we actually focus right at the, in this area of the nose. So is it, is it specifically right on right at the top of the nostril? So for new students, the instructions change over the three days. It's slow. It becomes a really big area and slowly gets winded down to that little spot. A little spot at the top of your lip right where it hits the bottom of the nose. I have found, when I've done that before, it's a little bit like one time I was on a retreat and I was kind of freaking out. Yeah. But not doing well and I was doing more of an open awareness practice. Just noting whatever arises. And my teacher, Joseph Goldstein said, you know, I want you to kind of sit at the where your lip meets your nose. Yeah. And just feel, you don't have to do anything. Just feel, it's happening on its own. Just feel the, and it was like being prescribed the darmic version of valium. Yeah. Really, really relaxed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Relaxation and concentration go hand in hand, especially as like you get more and more concentrated. You tend to get incredibly relaxed. So the first three days, you're focusing on the breath. You're just calming down the mind. And then after that, you start observing things as they are to really gain that insight by observing the body systematically. Let me break that down. So is it the rest of the retreat where you're doing body scans? Yeah, for about seven days. And so I think it's pretty, it's a pretty particular practice. Can you walk us through how it actually goes? Yeah. So you just, you move down from head to feet through the body and later on, you move from feet to head as well. And you know, you work in different ways, but you're essentially just trying to take different areas of the body and see what natural bodily sensations you're feeling. And, you know, from that gain insight into impermanence and misery and no self. So that doesn't sound fun. Or just the way you describe it. It's not fun at all. It's not like a, you know, it's such a serious endeavor. Like you're literally there. The reason you go there is to deal with your mental patterns or those sort of like underlying impurities that are just, have been accumulated over time. Like all this conditioning that has been making you quite delusional. And you're there to release all that leg literally, just burn it all away. I know the answer to this because I've done retreats myself many times, but I suspect for the uninitiated, they may be thinking, how is it that watching your breath come and go and then systematically focusing on different parts of the body and feeling whatever sensations arise there? How would that confront you with your habitual thought patterns and a point you, and why would I want to be acquainted with something called misery or otherwise suffering? Yeah, it's interesting when you're dealing with, when you're working at the level of sensations on the body, you know, the example that I like most is when you're sleeping at night, your conscious mind is totally asleep, but your subconscious mind is still awake. And you can know like if you get, if your bedroom gets really hot, you take the covers up, you wake up with no covers on, gets really cold. Do you like wrap yourself up or if there's a mosquito, you're, you know, swatting in a way, even while you're asleep, and that demonstrates that your sensations on the body are connected to your subconscious. So when you're working with them, you can start releasing those underlying patterns that are there. I mean, I would say, if that all sounds spot on to me, but I would also say that another sort of much more, perhaps much more easily graspable answer to that is, as soon as you try to focus on one thing, your breath or the sensations in your body, you're going to notice that you're thinking a lot. You're distracting. You're thinking you're, you're, you're, you're nursing grudges, you're planning lunch, you're hating the teachers, you're wondering why you're here, you're wanting a Snickers bar, whatever. And it is that it is the consistent practice of bumping up against these habitual thought patterns, recognizing them, letting them go, and then going back to the breath or to the sensations of the body. I'm suddenly coming back. That's how you're starting to unpack, you're starting to see, oh my god, wow, I'm crazy. Yeah, because you're, you're whole, and it's so funny because that experience, especially those first three days, they give you the simplest task, like try to just be aware of your breath continuously for one minute. Impossible. It's almost impossible. It's like, and then you start figuring out that, oh, you thought you were so smart, you can't even do this thing. You're constantly jumping into the future, constantly jumping into the past, and it's funny because our conditioning pushes us away from the present, and you're literally throughout that whole process, you're developing this new faculty of the mind where you're literally just trying to accept reality as it is. Let me just be here right now. So you're on your first retreat, you're a year clean, it seems like. Yeah, yeah. What's it like for you? It was terrible. It was, it was the, by far the hardest thing I've ever done. I was thinking about leaving every day, and I realized finally around this seventh day, sixth day that it would be impossible for me to leave because it was 2012. It was the era before Uber. Like, I don't know when Uber exactly came out, but I didn't know about it. And I was in, I had been in Portland, Oregon at the time, learning how to farm, and I was spending three months on this farm. So I ended up catching a ride in our north to where the meditation center was in Washington state, and there was no way for me to get back. I didn't know when we were in the middle of nowhere, Washington. So I just knew that there was just no way for me to have to be here so I can get a ride back. And that's when I started really trying and working because it just felt, it was literally just so painful, like having to deal with myself and just at a whole deeper level and just see that I was so incredibly miserable. But after I did that course, I was able to practice at least at a very low level. I was able to practice. And even at that level, when I left, I felt like I had lost 100 pounds. I probably lost like four or five pounds, but I lost so much mental heaviness and I ended up writing to my friends and talking to them and letting them know. I honestly, I feel like I learned more in 10 days than in the four years of college that I just did. What did you learn? I just learned about change, about impermanence. That was a big thing just that if you deal with change as your enemy, you're never going to be peaceful. Like you have to just understand that there are always going to be ups and downs and you can enjoy you know when things are good, but don't become attached to them. Don't try to like recreate them constantly. Just be with what's happening in that moment. And then when things pass and things become you know difficult and tough, also try to be as you know have a balanced mind as you can, but that's also going to pass. How does watching your breath or the sensations in your body confront you with impermanence and change? Well, you literally feel especially when you're working with a sensation in the body, you can start feeling like you know these itches come and go, is tingling come and go and you just feel these naturally bodily sensations just constantly arising and passing. And that may sound superficial, but if your whole life is directed towards just watching the way your, the physical sensations and then all the little thoughts that are uninvited, that are flitting through and all your habitual thought patterns coming up and going. After a while, you start to see this is all just changing so fast that well a number of insights come out of that. One is grasping onto anything, pushing anything away is going to make me unhappy, otherwise known as misery or suffering. And there's nobody, this is all happening so fast, there's nobody in here I can call me. You know, I can't, I'm not in control of this, I'm not inviting all of this. I love that you've gotten that far because a lot of people sort of, they love the idea of me, they love the idea of I and some people really push against that, but when you start meditating really deeply, you start really feeling that what's happening right now is just because of speed, because of movement that's happening so fast, it's just mental and physical phenomena that are coming together as such rapid speeds that it makes the appearance of me, but if I go down and start feeling sensations like which one of these things that I'm feeling is actually me, especially when the moment that I feel it passes away. I mean, this is one of the most confusing things about Buddhism because people are like, what do you mean, you're telling me that the self is an illusion, I'm not really real, etc, etc. But I mean, it's, the Buddhists have a way of describing this actually starts to make much more sense and become much more graspable. There are two levels of reality. It's conventional truth and ultimate truth. There you go. Conventional truth, ultimate truth. Right, like I'm here, you're there. We're talking, I'm having fun on this. Yeah, I mean, we're having fun, but at the ultimate level, I'm just a series of rapidly moving subatomic particles. And that's okay. And people, it's new for most people to hear that about themselves, but it's not new, I mean, I'm we're sitting at a table, which I'm pounding right now. It's not going to, most people wouldn't argue that this table on some level is a table, but on a really important fundamental level is also spinning subatomic particles. So the same thing can be said in a way of the self of you. And when you loosen your idea or your identity of what you think is you, If reality becomes much more easier to manage. Like when you have this like set way and you really don't allow yourself to change and to grow and to become a better version of you, I remember when I was growing up, one of the things people used to pride themselves on was, I never changed, like I'm always gonna be the same. And now finally that's shifting and it's like, yeah, I'm growing, I'm changing. And who I was five years ago, I hope that's not the person that you're engaging with today. - So you did that first, that point was well made. You did that first retreat and then what happened next? - I was in shock and awe by how much more I could feel, how much more in touch I was one of my emotions. Before that retreat, I couldn't even cry. Like I was just like I was so blocked up. I remember that one of the first things when I got back to Portland, Oregon, I was with a friend in a car and he played this song and it was so beautiful like I just started crying. I was like this is, you know, I was so far away from myself and finally that distance was closing. And then I think about a week later I signed up for another course and so I ended up doing my second 10 day course two months later. - Wow, okay, that's that's because I did my first retreat in 2010 and was not eager to do it. I thought that was one of the most powerful things I'd ever done and I didn't wanna do it again. - Yeah, it's so intense. I know and I really was asking myself, like do I really wanna put myself through this again? 'Cause that was so hard, so incredibly such a big uphill battle but I couldn't deny that I felt better and I knew that I needed to keep going to really like overcome these issues. - It's been seven years now, how often do you go to a retreat now? - It changes every year, it depends on the workload but normally what I do is at least like a month long retreat once a year and then a series of different retreats where I serve or sit. - Serve or sit. - So serving is, you know, when you go to a meditation center and there are people meditating who are sitting the course actually meditating those 10 hours a day and there are also people who are serving who are just doing whatever the meditators need so that they can only focus on meditating. So we're cooking their meals, making sure that the environment is just totally set up for them to be able to only focus on meditating. So when you go and you serve, you're literally going into a situation where you're practicing selfless service and you're just, you know, you're volunteering, you're not gonna get anything for besides the qualities that you develop while you're there to support other people. - I realized we kind of skipped something because I didn't ask this basic question because I know too much about retreats but most people would want to know the following which is you just said meditating 10 hours a day. So can you run through what the schedule is like on a day of retreat? - Yeah, you wake up the bell rings at about, one bell rings at four in the morning, another one rings at four 20 and you should be in the hall by like four 30 in the morning and your first, you know, two hours or four 30 in the morning to six 30 and you have breakfast, you have a break in. - Two hour rock block first thing in the morning? - Yeah, but you're allowed to like, you know, you're moving at your pace. So this is what's recommended and then you do your best. You can take a break, you know, go for a quick walk, come back and you take your first break from six 30 to eight you have breakfast and then from eight to 11, you're again sitting for another block and then, you know, at the end of like each hour sit, you take a break for like five minutes and then you come back and keep going. Then 11, you have another lunch thing, you have a break until one and then from one to five, another, the bigger block of meditating and then from five to six, T time, you relax for an hour, six to seven and another sit, and seven to like about eight, 30 is a discourse, about, you know, more about the dharma, the dharma. And- - That's the videotape of ascending group. - Yeah, go ahead and go ahead and go ahead. And all throughout the day, you can ask questions to the teachers and after that as well. And then there's like a last block of about like 30, 40 minutes of meditating and you go to bed at nine, yeah. - Okay, yeah. - I mean, I'm familiar with it, although I would say mercifully in the retreats, I go to, they meditate, they rotate sitting meditation with walking meditation. So that's why it's moving more, not so at a go-in-co-retrie. - No, yeah, I think that's those are the difference between, 'cause you're practicing Mahasi. - Mahasi style. - Well, the inside meditation community is kind of founded here in the States by Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salisburg and Jack Cornfield. - Yeah. - There are lots of little flavors within that group. But many of those folks, Sharon, at least I know Sharon and Joseph, I don't know if Jack did too, but I think so. Trained with Goenka as well. They all trained with many teachers in the insight or Vipassana community over in India and Nepal back in the six, seven, seven, seven days and then brought the practice here. So there's Mahasi style, which is a strict Burmese style. Then there's Uteja Nia, which is sort of a less strict. There's the Thai forest tradition. There are all these little sub genres. - Like what you said, so the Burmese style generally can be characterized as strict. So we do, so the, what S. and Goenka was taught was by his teacher Sayaji Ubakan, who was a Burmese man and it's totally a Burmese style. So you're doing your best or you're trying your best. So like for example, my first course and the best that I can do is probably meditate between five to six hours that day. The rest of the time I was kind of hiding out in my bedroom, trying to like, you know, just dealing with this then intensity of what it was coming out from within me. But then over time I was able to, you know, grow and be able to do the 10 hours a day. - And so now you're spending months a year on retreat depending on the workload? - Yeah, yeah. It just, it just really works. So what I feel is, you know, I don't have any kids right now. It's just my wife and I. - 31. - 31, I don't have any kids. So just my wife and I, she's totally supportive. She also meditates. She just did her first 30 day course this summer and like now's the time to hit it. You know, now's the time, especially if I end up having kids later on like, I won't be able to go out of retreats as often. So when you say it really works, yeah. Unpack that. - You know, you can just deal with life on a level that is so much more creative. You have such a stronger ability to problem solve. You can deal with actually having equanimity, which is a faculty that the mind has, but you can absolutely strengthen that equanimity being the ability to be objective, to not react, you know, and not have any craving towards whatever's happening, not have any inversion towards it, but really just try your best to see things as they are. Cause real objectivity is very difficult, but at least trying to have some equanimity towards things is incredibly helpful in life, especially because everything's constantly changing. And what I found is just so much more inner peace and an ability to just, you know, accept my emotions as they are, like, cause I still, you know, I'll sometimes I'll wake up with sadness or I'll wake up with some degree of mental turbulence, but because I've cultivated greater self awareness, I can feel that and also accept it and not allow it to make my actions harsh towards other people. Cause that was the thing before, is like I was oblivious to what I was feeling, and then I would just be a jerk, you know, so being able to be like, oh right, I don't feel very good right now. Let me be gentle with my words. - So you still have, who sounds like you still have bad days, but you're less owned by the difficulty most? - Totally, it's just another thing, it's just passing. Like this morning was hectic, like I think I might have lost my passport, and I need to fly to San Diego on Saturday morning. So who knows, you know, maybe I lost it, maybe I didn't. But, but just, you know, I accepted that fact and I was like, all right, well, we'll figure it out. Hopefully I get there. Stay tuned, more of our conversation is on the way after this. Hey, it's Dan. I just wanna tell you about something I'm really proud of. The new community we are building over on my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. Here's something I believe with no reservation. Taking care of your own mind is not selfish. It's actually essential if you wanna show up for the world, if you wanna deal with the various emergencies on the planet right now. There is in fact a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. In other words, taking care of your own mind is good citizenship. I think about it like an upward spiral. You train your mind that makes you happier and less reactive because you're steadier, that improves your relationships with everybody around you. And because relationships are crucial to human happiness, you get even happier than your relationships get even better and up you go. Our mission over at this new app is to guide you through this process with a growing library of meditations from world class teachers like Seven A Slassy and Joseph Goldstein and on and on. Also add free access to our full podcast archive, exclusive live stream events where we guide meditations and take your questions, we do those every week, and much more. Head on over to DanHarris.com, you can try it for two weeks free. And if you cannot afford a subscription, we'll give you one, no questions asked. (upbeat music) Tell me about the birth of a young pueblo. Yeah, so young pueblo, when he come to existence, like 2014, so it's a name that just came to me. And, And it sort of like brings together my, like, you know, my Ecuadorianness and my Americanness. Like so, an Ecuador, there's this, the word poivolo is like commonly used to refer to the masses of people, specifically impoverished people. And when I started meditating, I started seeing that humanity is very young. Like especially if we start, so a lot of people think young poivolo is my name. It's not, it's more so, it's the name that I write under as social commentary. It's really meant to show that humanity as a collective. Like we have a lot of growing up to do. And what I like to bring people back to is remember when we were first going to school in kindergarten or whatnot. Your teachers were trying to teach you literally the simplest things to be honest, to clean up after yourself, to not hit each other and to generally be kind to one another. And some of us may be able to do that as individuals, but as a human collective, we don't know how to do those things at all. So to me, this century that we're living in, it's filled with vast challenges. And to be able to overcome those, humanity's really gonna have to grow up. So I try to focus my work on the transformation of the individual, 'cause I really think that transformation of the individual is the secret to a global piece. I think if people really can get themselves to a point where they at least understand that it's to their benefit to not harm others, then we'll definitely be able to use it as a foundation to build a better world. - So I'm just trying to, curious about your thought process here. You got, so it's 2014, you've been meditating for a couple of years just having a big impact. And you said, well, the career move, and the spiritual move here is to start an Instagram page in which I write poetry based on my meditative experiences. - Yeah, yeah, so I definitely didn't think it was like the career move. I was like, let me try this and see if this works. - What were you doing for work at that time? - I was doing consulting for a nonprofit that was helping, it was called a Design Studio for Social Intervention. So my background has always been in organizing an activism work. Like that's what I had, you know, I started in the world of organizing when I was about 15. And I really got to see how powerful people are when they come together around a common cause. But I saw that even though we were victorious, you know, campaign after campaign, we would win. - Campaign for what? - We would campaign for making different improvements in schools, making sure schools had the adequate computers that they needed or changing guidance counselor, guidelines all across Boston Public Schools. There were just different things that, you know, we would ask ourselves as a community, what would be better? And I remember at the time there was this, a lot of us fell, especially as people of color. We were, our guidance counselors had no high hopes for us. They just, they would, you know, we would tell them what we wanted. And what schools we wanted to go to, and they'd be like, nope, that's not gonna happen. You should just aim as low as you can. So we sort of forced Boston Public Schools to like recognize that issue. We even got to train some guidance counselors, but in their like charter about guidance counselors, we made sure that they were, you know, trying to help you for really support you in your goals. - So your post college, well, pre college, during college, post college, pre, a pretty young, well, - Getting bottom, pre meditation, the through line was active. - Yeah, different forms of activism throughout. In college, I just focused on college, 'cause I felt like I was in a brand new environment. Like I came from a really, really poor community that was very diverse. And then all of a sudden, I was with like, the children of the richest people in the country. So to me, that was like so mind blowing that I was like, let me just like figure I was going on. But after that, yeah, I jumped back into that, activism world, and what I found as I was meditating was that these things can support each other. Because people have always wanted to change the world for a better place. Like there's, you know, there's histories of that. A lot of things we have like the weekend, you know, people have fought for these things and made them come true. But one thing that I've found in myself is that if you don't deal with your internal issues, then at some point you're going to end up reproducing the thing that you're fighting against. So if we can not only combine, right, this is, you know, pushing forward and trying to create a better world, but simultaneously use the tools that are now widely available globally to heal ourselves, to actually do something about, you know, not only just like, you know, the internal like patriarchy racism or, you know, sexism, the things that are happening inside you, but you can even deeper than that and start dealing with your personal craving, your aversion or anything that might push you into harming yourself or another human being, that is going to be foundational to, I mean, it's going to just make all of our movements have such a bigger impact. - Do you ever hear from people in the activism world, you know, I'm going to get too happy, too complacent, too, I'm not going to be effective if I don't, if I meditate. - Yeah, that's a common thing. And I think even outside of activism, people are scared to lose their edge. But really, I think love is like a very active force. And there is, when you start dealing with your patterns, what arises is, you know, a new love, a new form of creativity, a new form of problem solving and like a new energy for life. But love is very active and love can also take hard actions. It's not just about, you know, making everything soft and quiet, but you can stand up for yourself. - Draw the line between what you do in meditation as you described it, paying attention to the passing sensations of the breath and the body to love. - So what I found is that a lot of what we think is human nature or what we've been taught in a Western world is that human nature is greedy, fearful, you know, totally self-interested. But when I started meditating, I started seeing that a lot of that stuff is sort of patterned in over time, whether it's through our own lives or evolutionarily. And when you start dealing with that conditioning and decreasing it, what naturally emerges is love, compassion and goodwill. And you start being able to live through this new lens. And to me, that's actually human nature. And what we thought was human nature is actually human habit. Like greed and all that, that's human habit. We've been conditioned that way. And love is actually real human nature, but it's in there. You just gotta get all the crap out. - And love is a devoted word. - Yeah. - It's a really loaded term. So when you say love, you couple it with goodwill. - Yeah. - What do you mean specifically when you talk about love? Because I think most of us, we hear that and then we picture scenes from Gone with the Wind. - Yeah, you should more so picture scenes from Martin Luther King's life. Like he was able to change the, make such an impact in history, but it was his love for people that made that happen. So it's not just romantic love or love between friends, but the love that can help you change the world. - There's a phrase that I quote a lot on the show that one of our earliest guests taught me. She is a Tibetan Lama, although she's a Western woman, one of the first women, especially Western women to become a Lama. And she was telling me that the Tibetan enlightenment in Tibetan the word roughly translates into a clearing away and a bringing forth. - Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's great. - It's basically what you just described. - Yeah, and then I think it's funny because I found that process happening within my own being, but when I examine historical figures like the Buddha, like Jesus or just even the people that I'm meditating with, we're all going through the same process where, we still feel the tinge is a breed and aversion and all of that, but they're decreasing over time. And just like this floodgate opens up and you are able to just be so much more in gentler with life. That's one of the things that I actively try to cultivate is when I look back at my past self, I was so harsh. Like I was always really harsh with my words or mean to people and now I try to live in a gentle way. Have you ever found yourself being harsh still? - Not as much, but for sure, but there's degrees to it, you know, so I can like notice things in my words for sure. And I mean, I have a lot of things to work on. - Oh, what do I do? (laughing) - So I kind of, do you read all this a little bit when we were talking about the birth of young people? So this is 2014, the idea was, okay, this is my pen name and I'm going to start posting on Instagram. - Yeah, so it's my pen name and I, you know, my whole thing is like, I'm not trying to specifically talk about meditation. I'm also just want to talk about what helps a human being transform and the possibility of transformation could see me. It was such a shock. Like I grew up in a time where, and I think that time has definitely changed now, especially in this decade that's ending, but I felt like if you have some type of like mental health issue or anything like that, you're just gonna have to deal with it for the rest of your life. Like nothing's gonna be able to actually heal it. So the fact that I was feeling like real healing was happening inside me, just, I found that be well, be well-during. So I started just writing about the fact that you could go from one place to another, you know, and over time it just became clear and clear and just talking about like how to engage with your anxiety and how to like set down goals and how to work towards them without craving and just different things that could be sort of universal. Like even if you were a meditator or not a meditator, you could find some use in helping these things make you think in different ways. - You have hundreds of thousands of followers. What do you think accounts for that? - Instagram's algorithm. (laughing) Come on, I mean, since you're gonna have to have to have an algorithm and many people don't have any followers. - Yeah, no, I think the message is definitely resonating with people. I also think we're sort of shifting it. Sorry, just to interrupt you one second. You're not posting pictures. All your posting is black text on white background. I know. So it's not super Instagram friendly. I'm taking hyper minimalism. I'm taking minimalism to a whole other level. I really wanted to make it so simple that it would either really help you digest that quickly or you would either not want it and you would just go somewhere else. It was funny because I was speaking with one of the first 100 people who worked at Instagram and he was like we had no idea that people would share words on Instagram. We literally thought it was just going to be pictures but we're so happy that it worked out that way. I mean it's like I think of your work as people are scrolling through getting this huge dose of FOMO and you know seeing people pose in front of their private jets with the hashtag #plast and it's just a miserable experience and then boom your thumb stops on like a bomb of wisdom from you. Yeah and that's what I'm hoping for because I really want to help people just like develop a new intellectual framework to see themselves in because right like meditating is something that happens at the level of experience. Like you're literally experiencing these things as opposed to you know intellectually digesting everything like you may do that after the retreat but really the healing liberation work happens through feeling and experiencing but to me it still seems worthwhile to just develop a new framework to think inside of and I'm hoping that I can support people and seeing themselves as beings that change or as beings that could actually grow or see what it feels like to be on the end before the healing and what it feels like after. But you could have chosen any medium, any platform but you decided to go to social media. Yeah I went to Instagram because that's just where everyone was hanging out. Like that's it had just become popular and I was like okay let me just put things up here and see how it goes. But what was part of you thinking well this is a place where a lot of negative emotions are generating so let's see if I can counteract that. Yeah yeah I mean I definitely was aware of like Instagram's abilities to just make people depressed if you hang out too long or depending on who you're following it can definitely be a place that brings you down but I think it'll get also be a place that amplifies who you want to be and who you want to grow into and I think that's something that people are you know they're using it more like that now hopefully. Well I think you're a big part of that you're really on the vanguard of using social media for something to wholesome. Can we just start looking at some of your posts and and deconstructing them? Yeah sure. I don't have a phone handy do you have a phone handy? My phone. Let me see. All right so can we can I pick a few of these? Yeah sure. All right I'm just picking at random here. Do you want to read it? You're even better at your voice. So the one Dan just picked is never forget the ones who saw greatness in you even in your darkest moments. So I wrote that one because I remember there were friends who in that period right before I had my like real rock bottom there were friends who two in particular my friend Karina and my friend Shaka they would call me periodically and I don't know if they knew that I was in a really dark moment but they always they knew that I could be I could I could do something good in my life because they had seen me I grew up with them. They were the people that I used to organize with when I was younger and when we were together you know we had so much power together and they just knew that I you know could be someone like who is also continuing to help people and all of that but um that's really important to not forget those people who saw you and you consider what you do poetry right correct? Yeah kind of I mean sometimes it's poetry sometimes it's just like a quote or it's an essay but I really like I don't care too much about like how I define these things I'm just I'm just writing and were you did you have a history of writing um no not at all I majored in economics so something moved in you that you were like all right I'm gonna start a instagram feed of literally like like like the mind was so rocky and I think like three retreats into it I was like wait I think I could write a poem and but literally like that density of the mind was decreased and all of a sudden all this creativity started flowing out it's so it had never I'd never planned to be I thought I was gonna be an investment banker but at that moment of the moment I think I could write a poem is like a bad cliche yeah and yeah it's it's the result is really good yeah all right let's keep going with some um just pick them at random and read whatever you want um a really short one that I like is observe accept release transform observe accept release transform that actually sounds like basic meditation instruction I was trying to really grasp what it requires to let go and I think whether you're in therapy whether you're meditating whether you're doing some type of somatic practice or like some type of like healing modality what you're doing is like you have some degree of observing you have to be able to just accept it and you know when you let go the transformation happens and you become a new you so let go is a people can get hung up on what that actually means how do you define that uh let it go it's it's tough because it's not just an intellectual process and more so it for me at least like when I'm meditating letting go is all happening through feeling and through being objective it's just let me just see what's happening there in the moment that you're seeing just what's there all the things that used to be tied up inside of you just start releasing very quickly and but it's different it's different for different practices so I can't completely define it I think um a lot of people sometimes that's probably the number one question that I get is how do you let go and I what I tell people is you have to find a practice that can take you into your subconscious because in your subconscious are all those underlying patterns that are forcing you to behave in a certain way and if you're able to deal with those patterns then the real work of letting go is happening so you can that can be through meditation or whatever you know I often will ask probably like once a month I'll ask what is helping you let go and people comment so many different things and I think it's amazing because there's there's much more techniques than I'm aware of out there let me talk about letting go and see if this resonates with you because I got hung up on this term when I first started getting interested in meditation it's struck me as struck me as resignation letting you know I'm an ambitious guy I've got things I want to do letting go seemed like the opposite of what I was looking to do so another way to say it is actually just letting be which also doesn't mean much but I can make that mean more so letting be in meditation is something comes up that's really difficult pain for me it's a lot of like restlessness like I want to get the hell out of here I hate this I hate every time around me blah blah blah and then you just try to watch that non-judgmentally one might even say journalistically yeah explore like was it feel like to be restless and that act of just being non-judgmentally aware mindful of whatever's happening allowing it to be is in is freeing in and of itself because then you're no longer caught up in it yeah you're just observing it from a distance that to me is the sort of simplest operationalizable definition of letting go I just heard I love that and I wanted to add to it like I just heard from someone that I look up to he was telling me a story about one of his friends who was talking to a meditation teacher that he really looked up to within the same tradition and he so this man asks this teacher you know how do I how do I deepen my practice and the teacher looks at him he says just accept like just accept accept whatever's happening inside you like don't don't try to change what's happening just accepted and then all that process of letting go happens rather quickly yeah I've heard the term self-liberate it self-liberates yeah there's something healing about just looking at things without being owned by them and and that is not a resignation it's for your all of your activist friends accepting letting be letting go doesn't mean you say yeah I'm gonna let greedy people walk all over me and you're gonna accept whatever's happening in your own mind right now so that when you take action it comes from a place of trying to genuinely be helpful instead of anger or hatred right there's I want to read another piece about letting go that might expound on any more further but I want we should also talk about goals versus craving because that's really important okay um so letting go does not mean you have given up and it does not mean you no longer care it just means that you are releasing the attachments of the past that keep getting in the way of your happiness and mental clarity letting go is the unbinding and disentangling of old behavior patterns that keep pulling you into unnecessary mental tension and worry when you can be okay with things not having gone a certain way life begins again making making peace with the past opens you up to love adventures and allows you to apply the lessons you have learned with a new calmness yeah because spending too much time stuck in the past blindly stuck in the past is stale and you're disconnected from the potential to actually do something fresh right now and that yeah so that makes complete sense and it in no way contradicts having the desire to make social change or to build a profitable business or whatever it is you your desires in the world may be yeah one of the things that really struck me as I kept meditating was realizing how much my like you know this sort of emotional history that we all carry like it leaves imprints like you think you feel an emotion and then it passes but it actually left an imprint on your subconscious and that all of that that's been imprinted over time is pushing you to behave and think and act in certain ways. So the past is continuously resurfing itself and pushing against all of your actions in the present moment. And it's tough because then you get caught in a cycle where you're just constantly recreating the past. - Goals versus craving. - So important. That's, I think one of the biggest things is learning how to work in a detached way. Like it's absolutely fine to have goals. Like a lot of people think that once you're meditating, you become a hermit, you become a monk, and then you kind of give everything up. And that's totally like, you know, monks are real. There's tons of them out there, and that's a way to live. But if you're a householder and you're a layperson, you gotta have goals. Like you have responsibilities to take care of. And it's fine to have goals and to pursue things, but you wanna make sure that your goal isn't so tied up with craving because if you're not able to achieve what you want, then immediately you fall into misery. That's how you know that your goal was actually a craving. And if you're able to work and you see, okay, I'm not getting what I want, and you're able to figure out, okay, how can I do this in a better way? Then you know that your goal was just a goal because you keep sort of moving forward without feeling that intensity of mental tension and worry and being disappointed in yourself. - Motivation is such a tricky issue. Some of them spend a lot of time thinking about it. Like at least what I'm trying to communicate is exactly in line with what you're saying. We can want to do things for really good, positive reasons. But if we look carefully, sometimes there's, well, I'll speak for myself, but I look carefully, there's a lot of ego in there. I wanna have more people listen to this podcast. I wanna have more followers on social media. I want more subscribers to my app. I want more people to buy my books. I want, I want, I want. And what meditation I found, the one area of utility for meditation is it helps you kind of see some of that and let it go, the seeing, the seeing of it makes it easier to let go so that you can act on sort of your better angels can be more up at the fore as opposed to all of your like, ugliness. - Yeah, now it's one of the tough things because my hope is to continue moving in a direction where I can just create more and more selflessly because I definitely have the same things come up. It's like, okay, how can I reach people in a way that all of this continues growing and growing, but now I've realized that young pueblo is really just an opportunity to serve people. It's an opportunity to make something useful and let me just focus on actually making things that are useful for people as opposed to worrying about, is this post gonna be popular and like, get X amount of thousands of likes and whatnot? - But you got bills to pay? - I do, but they're getting paid, but like, you know, I can't become obsessed with like, oh, now I have this much money, but now I need to double that, triple that, you know. If my responsibilities are taken care of, then that should be good. - One more question for me and then I wanna let some of the other folks in the room ask some questions. A common and I think, totally reasonable critique of the modern meditation movement in the United States is that it's very white. One little riff that I often go on in my public speeches is that we, the stereotype around meditation is that it's for people who live on the Upper West Side and shop at Whole Foods and go to Soul Cycle. And I don't say that with any hatred 'cause I'm all of those things. (laughing) And yet meditation was invented millennia ago by people in the Indian subcontinent and it is designed to help everybody with a mind, - Right. - Generate qualities that we care about, just like exercise is for anybody with a body to work on muscles we have. So what's your take on this critique? - I think it's sound, you know, that there's a certain degree of opportunity cost to going to a retreat. Like if you're not in an economic situation where you can actually take 10 days of work off and like that's a lot of pay that you're not receiving. And to do that, you know, it does require some type of like financial security or, you know, being young and you don't have them in responsibilities that people take care of. But I think in regards to accessibility, meditation and a lot of these healing techniques still have a way to go because either they're too expensive or there's so much time. But I think it's not to change everything 'cause I think it's absolutely fine to be able to meditate for 10 days. It's something very special and we should try to support people in doing that. But in India itself, I've been hearing about how the different local governments have seen such a positive impact that Vipassana has that there are different businesses and governments will be, they'll give you whatever money that you were gonna earn in those 10 days and you can go and meditate and you'll still, you know, so in terms of supporting mental health, that's like a huge thing that we can do. And if you support mental health and people, you know, can feel better, if people feel better and are more self-aware, then of course, they're gonna hurt each other less. And so, you know, that money that you're spending will be decreased in like police and, you know, jails and all that stuff. - So this is an unusual episode of the podcast because this is both a podcast and we're doing an interview that will run parts of which will run on a little show. We do a ABC News called Nightline. So we have two nightline producers in the room, Chris Rios and Laura Coburn, both amazing. I know they have questions. So Chris, can you speak loudly? Can you come closer to Diego's mic? - Yeah, so it's actually similar or it's related to the question, the last question you asked Dan. There's a lot of what you're saying that, you know, I'm a person of color, my parent's, Puerto Rican, is a lot of what you've been saying that speaks to me. And I'm just curious to know, maybe I should give some context, you know, I recently have, I started to go to therapy, you know, just to take care of my mental health. You know, we work in a very high stress industry. And I mentioned it to my father and who's someone who actually does practice meditation and is in tune with the spirituality, but that to him seemed like, you know, crazy. He was like, why? And I just wonder when you talk to your family or other people in your community, you know, what is their perception of what you do and what you've done and just sort of, you know, this practice of mindfulness and this practice of, you know, just taking care of your mental health. Yeah, I think especially for like the Latinx communities, it's just a whole new world. My mom and dad understand what I'm doing because I've talked to them so much about it, but I think generally my family, they don't really get what I'm doing. Like they get like the young pobler stuff and all that growing and all that's fine, but when I go to retreats and meditate, that is just, they can't conceptualize it that well, but what they do know is that I feel better, I'm happier, I smile more often, and I'm generally very kind to them. So they're not opposed to it because, you know, I'm moving in a good direction. What should Chris say to his dad, his skeptical dad? I mean, there's different ways to work with the mind, and I think people just need to work with the mind in a way that meets them where they're at. And if like, you know, his dad meditates great, that's working for him, fantastic, but if he doesn't feel like he wants to meditate and wants to use a therapist, that's fantastic. As long as he continues developing into a direction that fulfills his goals and makes him a gentle, good person. Also, I say this as a parent, we don't have to tell our parents everything. (laughing) Now, but I definitely get it because that is, you know, it's sort of like exploded from India out into the world, and it's just now like in the past few decades, like reaching the Western world. So for a lot of us, like whether you're Latinx or not, like this is very new stuff, and we're all trying to grapple with it and understand it, and you know, through our own conditioning. - LC, you get a question. - I am curious what your audience is like going off of that. I mean, what is your audience like, and are you able to connect with people from all different backgrounds and walks of life? - Yeah, it helps that we all have minds. So the structure of the mind is essentially the same, but the content of the mind are different according to our own personal histories. But we all have anxiety, we all have stress, we all have some degree of dissatisfaction or suffering, and being able to connect on the fact that, like the people who come, they all understand that, you know, they're not gonna buy their way to happiness. So some degree of internal work has to happen for them to just get to a better place inside of themselves. And the, you know, the, I mean, depends on where I go, you know, like when I went to London, it was like a very, very white, but also pretty diverse at the same time. And in different places, I don't know, the audience is primarily women and probably about 70% women. Over time, more men have been coming, which has been great too. It's balanced out a little bit, but it's generally pretty diverse. - Where do you see all this going? And how do you plan for the future without lapsing into too much craving? (laughs) - I see myself writing a few more books, and then I think I'm gonna take a break. I'm probably take a break for a few years to just keep deepening my own meditation work. I really see things like, I mean, things are continuing to grow, probably grow by like a thousand and a thousand followers a day. And that's great, and that's fine, but I don't know where it's all gonna go to be honest. I feel like what I'm doing right now feels good, and if I ever see that it's becoming so, you know, it's not how big it gets, but how I'm reacting to it is what matters in every-- If I find that I'm reacting to it too much and that I'm making more mental tension and I'm digressing or sort of moving backwards, then I'll have to put everything on a serious pause. Because my main number one goal is my personal growth and my personal freedom and not freedom in the sense of doing whatever you want and buying whatever you want but freedom in my mind, freedom from worry, stress and mental tension. You know, life is going to continue giving difficult things that you could be worried towards but it's my reaction that's making that worry actually happening. And if I find that I can have objective feelings towards things and just, you know, if I'm reacting too much, then something's not quite right. The final thing I do on every show is I sort of semi-facitiously call it the plug zone. So I want you to plug everything you do. And I also just want to point out for people, you have a book and you will talk about it in a second but you don't advertise on Instagram. You don't make any money there. So the way people want to support you is buying the book. Yeah, no. If you want to read more and depth about, you know, the things that I've been talking about and reading about, you can get my book inward. And W-A-R-D by Young Pueblo Y-U-N-G-P-U-E-B-L-O. Any Barnes and Nobles or bookstore around the world and you can also buy it on Amazon online. And if you want to follow along on Instagram, I'm at Young Pueblo Y-U-N-G_P-U-E-B-L-O. And yeah, if you want to hang out there, let's cool too. Anything I should have asked but didn't? Now, but we'll have to save that for the next interview. You're welcome back. You're doing great work. It's a pleasure to meet you. Yeah, no, this has been fantastic. Thank you for having me. All right. Diego/Young Pueblo really appreciate the time. He's doing fascinating things in the world, so it's fun to meet him. So good news for you. The voice mail this week will not be answered by me. They're going to be answered by our ace Ray Hausman who is an extremely experienced meditation teacher and she runs our coaching team at the 10% happier app. Those are the folks who answer questions from users night or day. And here we go. Here's voice mail number one from Kate, after which you'll hear Ray's response. Hi, my name is Kate and I am a big fan of the app and the podcast. I say thank you so much for providing those resources for people who are looking to improve their mindfulness habits. I am a mom of a gorgeous 16 month old and I'm sure that as a parent you're very aware of the effect that I can have on mindfulness habit. But my question is, most of the time my real meditation happened after she's gone to that at night and stuff. When do you recommend introducing mindfulness habits to kids? Are there any good resources for doing that? I know that she's pretty young at this point but we're just kind of trying to be planning ahead and thinking about the types of skills we want to be teaching her. So if we could have some kind of idea and some way to prepare for introducing those habits in whatever way is appropriate for age as soon as possible, that would be great. Thank you so much and it's for your response. I think again for everything that you and your team are doing. Hi, it's Ray. Thanks so much for reaching out, Kate. It's really fun to hear that you're a big fan of the app and the podcast and congratulations on being a mom. I don't personally have any recommendations on when it's best to introduce mindfulness to kids but I've certainly heard anecdotes that illustrate its benefits. These days there are some great resources available and I'm happy to share some with you. First there's a book called "Sitting Still Like A Frog," mindfulness exercises for kids and their parents by Eline Snell, which I've heard some good things about. Encouraging to check that out. There's a set of texts by Sumi Kim, who is one of the contributors of the talk section on the app, which is called "Sitting Together," a family-centered curriculum on meditation and Buddhist teachings. Teachers and parents alike might benefit from James Bares and Michelle Lillianna's collaborative work on a book called "Awakening Joy for Kids." I encourage you to check that out. I'll also name that there's a great Australian website which offers meditation resources for kids. It's called "Smiling Mind." There's plenty more out there and if you do a search for mindfulness on kids on the internet, you'll come up with more options. But I hope this gives you a good start. All right, thank you, Ray. Thank you, Kate. Here's the next voicemail from Dan in Austin, Texas. Hey, I've been on this kind of rebuilding path, if you will. Last year I started getting into meditation. I did some talk therapy last year. I've suffered from depression, anxiety. I've been a very anxious person my whole life and I've really never been present. I've led with my ego through most of my life, whether it be being in sports and becoming a teacher eventually to where I was up in front of parents and showcasing and showing off and talking and talking, which is not a bad thing. But as I started last year to really, after going through some personal matters to kind of regate where I'm at and what I could do to better my life, I realized that I need to have a total one-on-one deep switch for myself so that I could go ahead and focus on what really is holding me back. And I figure up to now that my ego is a big part of it. So that all said, as I become more present, more aware and meditating consistently and I'm breathing more, all those things that help me, I'm becoming more aware with people around me as well. And it's a struggle for me because my family is in no way like that. They don't do deep breathing. They all didn't go to college so it's tough to get to in the weeds about, you know, studious topics. They have anger issues there. Things like that that I really want to help them through but they don't want to help with. They don't want to change. So my struggle is now that I'm more aware and I want to avoid those sorts of behaviors myself, I'm finding it difficult to just communicate with those people that I love so much because now I feel as mentally, I'm in such a different place. And this is after I moved across the country three years ago with my wife so that makes it even harder because we had been together my whole life. So that's kind of where I'm at and I guess I'm just hoping to hear from you and see if you've maybe had a similar experience or heard of this or might know someone that would have a bit of advice on this topic but I appreciate everything you do for the community here. I'm a daily listener or at least want a new episode drops and I'm always a fan of yours. So thank you for everything you're doing and have a great new year. Big flop. Hi, it's Ray. Thanks for reaching out, Dan. It's fun to hear that you're such a big fan of the podcast. I'm sure many people can relate to the experience you're having. It can be challenging to maintain relationships with people from our past, even people we love when our perspective and orientation to life changes as a result of our engagement with a practice. I know this to be true for myself. And if we're able to find ways to meet our relational needs outside of these past or familial relationships, then it's possible that our presence or just our simple being alone can be a resource for these folks. So I really want to emphasize that it's not about teaching people to be different or trying to have them learn something new, trying to get them to engage with the practice. It's really a simple offering of our loving presence that we're aiming for. In order to offer that type of loving presence, it's important for us to have a clear sense of our own needs. It's very likely that especially in familial relationships, our own relational needs will arise. Some example of these needs might be, so for example for me, I have a need to be seen or I may have a need to feel understood or be understood. We want to develop an awareness of these needs and see if we can offer ourselves some sense of meeting them so that we aren't reacting to these people in our lives from the past or our families from a desire for them to offer us something or to be someone that they aren't able to. The practice supports us in accepting things just as they are. And part of what might be in the mix here is the pain that arises in the loss of what we thought our relationships would offer us. So we get to feel into the pain of that recognition. At least for right now, these people are not able to engage in the type of relationship or dialogues that we are ultimately interested in having. And in feeling this pain and letting it move through, it's possible you may notice that there's more flexibility in your ability to be with people right where they're at. course these processes are never linear. And we have to take care and be honest throughout as new layers of reconciling with these differences arise. I hope this is helpful. I wish you the best. Thank you, Ray. Really appreciate you kicking in and participating. We're going to do much more from Ray and other meditation teachers on the voicemail section of this show. Going forward, although I'll occasionally still jump in. If you want to leave us questions via voicemail, give us a call. The number is 646-883-836-646-883-836-836. Big thanks to our team. The people who do a ton of work making this show happen. Ryan Kessler, Samuel Johns, Grace Livingston, Lauren Hartsog, Tiffany O'Mahendro, Layton is working the boards today as I record this. We'll be back next week with another amazing episode.