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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today, we're talking about how to get past your past, how not to be owned by your personal history, and how doing so can have a massive impact on how you relate to other people.
And a reminder, the research strongly suggests that the quality of your relationships is perhaps the most important variable when it comes to your happiness. So getting past your past and then relating more successfully to other people puts you on an upward spiral. So we're going to talk about that today. We're going to talk about lots of other things as well.
My guest is the great Diego Perez, who you may know by the name Young Pueblo. He's an extremely popular author and social media presence. We had him on the show back in 2025 to talk about a book he had just released at the time called How to Love Better. And we're bringing that episode back today because it's really good.
And I should say that Diego has got a new book coming out in the fall called Journey, The Year That Changes Everything, 365 Daily Reflections to Build Self-Awareness and Inner Peace. And you can find him on Instagram and also on Substack. In this episode, we talk a lot about relationship skills, including avoiding blame, keeping an open mind, having compassion without being a doormat.
We also take a deep dive into a fascinating list that Diego includes in his last book, a list of the 12 things he's learned after 12 years of serious meditation. I took a lot away from that part of the discussion.
this is a guy who regularly does long meditation retreats sometimes up to six weeks at a time so he's really earned his place in the broader contemplative world a few other things we'll talk about in this conversation how to burn off your mind's conditioning he'll explain what that means the suffering that comes from clinging in a world characterized by relentless change the liberation that comes from equanimity in the face of relentless change why being able to see perspectives outside of your own is actually a sign of
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Chapter 2: How can you get past your past?
strength and intelligence, and much more. A few things before we hear from our sponsors. We've got this awesome new series launching soon on my new-ish meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. Many people ask me, how do I get started in Buddhism? How do I learn more about it? How do I go deeper? So we are now going to provide a solution.
Every week this summer for eight weeks, every Sunday, the great Buddhist teacher, Sharon Salzberg, is going to host a live session. every Sunday at four, starting on July 12th at 4 p.m. Eastern, then running for eight weeks. And every week, she's going to break down one aspect of the foundational Buddhist list, the Eightfold Path, the Noble Eightfold Path.
This is the Buddha's cookbook for human happiness.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of relationships in happiness?
It talks about how to get better at seeing the world clearly, how to get better at meditation, how to get better at dealing with other people, how to get better at work It really is quite comprehensive. And like I said, it is a great way to dip your toe into Buddhism. Or if you've already learned quite a bit about the Dharma, this is a great way to go deeper.
Sharon, during these eight live sessions, will guide a meditation, talk a little bit about one aspect of the Eightfold Path, and then take your questions. Of course, if you miss any of the live sessions, you can always watch them on demand. You can get all of this on the aforementioned 10% with Dan Harris meditation app. If you want to get the app, it's at danharris.com.
Again, that's danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. I hope you'll come check it out. We'll get started with Diego Perez, a.k.a. Young Pueblo, right after this.
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Young Pueblo slash Diego Perez, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, Dan. I'm really happy to be here. I'm happy you're here. So in the beginning of this book, you tell a story that I'd love to have you retell a little bit here, which is that in the early days of your marriage, and this is not uncommon, things were a little stormy at times. Can you talk about that?
Yeah, I mean, a little stormy sounds nice. It more so felt like a hurricane. It was an interesting... really powerful magnetic connection between my wife and i where we really wanted to be together but we just did not know how to care for each other and we didn't even really know how to care for ourselves at the time either so we felt the strong pull to be with each other but um
We had very little self-awareness between the two of us, very little emotional maturity. What we experienced was basically a constant blame game for over a six-year period where we were together off and on. And it wasn't until we started meditating that...
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Chapter 4: What does selfless listening mean and how can you practice it?
All of that led me to like a rock bottom moment where I, I almost lost my life from just overindulging in drugs and alcohol. And it... was a wake-up call and I had started changing my habits, put away all the hard drugs, started really, you know, taking steps forward into a new life. But it wasn't until I started meditating that I started seeing very significant changes in the way my mind felt.
Like my mind started feeling lighter. I started feeling a new ability to like slow down and not just immediately react. And I went into meditating for my personal healing and my wife,
Chapter 5: How does meditation help in personal growth?
felt that same sort of like internal push to go meditate as well. And what we didn't really expect was that it was going to have such a big impact on our relationship. I went into it for healing, but I had so many positive externalities from it. Not only creativity started coming up, but I started seeing, accepting that
My relationships were quite shallow, like my relationship with my parents, my relationship with my friends, with my wife. They were very surface level, and that was because I was really disconnected from myself.
And once that connection started growing, the ability to listen to my partner more, the ability to really start owning the way I was reacting in my mind and realizing that it's not always her fault. you know, and so many other sort of emotional, the emotional skill set started building. And it really began with just being able to close my eyes and sit with myself.
What's coming up in my head as you're talking is, and I don't know if this will land for you, but I'm sure you're familiar with the Satipatthana Sutta in Buddhism.
Chapter 6: How does equanimity lead to liberation?
This is one of the most famous discourses of the Buddha where he, and now I'm not explaining this to you because you know what I'm explaining it more to the listener. Some listeners may be unfamiliar with this Speech the Buddha gave where he outlined four ways to be mindful.
And I won't go into the list, except to say that there's this refrain that comes up over and over, which is that you establish mindfulness internally, externally, and both internally and externally. long way of saying meditation can help you be more self-aware, but it also can help you be more other aware as well. And so it can have, as you said, positive externalities.
And am I hunting in the right direction here?
I mean, absolutely. I love that you brought it back to the Satipatthana. That Pali line, Atapi Sampajano Satima is one that like, I'm always sort of leaning back on whenever, you know, when you're sitting there and you're meditating and
Whatever's coming up, it's like a line of clarity that can help you remember that, you know, you're coming back, back into the body, back into your awareness and trying to maintain that awareness as long as possible. But what's really interesting is that you can develop these skills to become more aware of yourself. but they're not just for you.
You can take them and you can easily transfer them to other aspects of your life. And I think in the darkness of the meditation hall, sitting and meditating for hours, I started seeing that I was developing a new ability to just feel my own emotions, to be able to sit with whatever turbulence or disharmony or whatever sadness or anxiety would come up.
And that same quality that I was developing, that resilience, I was then able to take that and have more patience whenever we would have arguments, right? Because I could sit there and hold not just space for my own turbulence, but a turbulent moment that we were having together. And I think that was just a massive gift that I didn't expect from this meditation journey.
You're Mr. Meditation now. So am I, I guess. And I'm just curious because I know the answer for me, but do you ever screw things up in conflict with your wife? Yeah. I have to apologize all the time.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I'm not, I'm not perfect. I'm not enlightened. I'm just, I'm just another person who's like totally on the path. I love the path. I see the results. I'm really happy with the progress that I've made in the past 10 years, but you know, I could use another 10,000 hours of meditation.
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Chapter 7: What are the benefits of making decisions for your future self?
Yeah. Yeah. Same here. Just going back to something you said earlier about not blaming the other person as much. I can't think that's the way you were saying, you know, you're in an argument and you're not It reminds me, you know, I have these, I talk about these guys all the time. I have these sort of Buddhist inflected communications coaches.
They come out of the same sort of meditative tradition. You and I are both Buddhist practitioners. You're more out of the Goenka school and I'm out of the Insight Meditation Society, which interestingly, they both have centers right near each other in Massachusetts.
I think of them as like sister traditions.
Yes, yes.
Even in the time of Ubakan in Burma in the 50s, his center was very, very close to Mahasi's center. They were just, you know, in the same town. So it's funny seeing that that similarity continues.
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Chapter 8: How can you cultivate boundless compassion without being a pushover?
Yes. Just to put some meat on the bone for listeners who might be unfamiliar with all of this, but back in Burma or now Myanmar, there were many famous teachers in the middle of the last century. And Ubakin is one of them. And he was the teacher for this guy, S. N. Goenka, who was an Indian guy who was in Burma, I think on business and was famous. learning meditation from this great master.
And Goenka then went up and founded all of these centers all over the world in which you ended up getting trained. Am I, am I?
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's pretty correct. Goenka is a Burmese of Indian descent. So he ended up growing up in Burma and he ended up hearing about and then training with him and trained with him for, I think it was like 12 or 14 years. Another interesting thing to note too is that these traditions are so well-respected.
So in Lumbini, in the birthplace of the Buddha, I got to go there about a year ago and there's a site where it said, you know, the place where supposedly the Buddha was born. And in this, I don't even know what to call it, but it's almost like a giant park. There are also a lot of different Buddhist traditions there. And the Mahasi Monastery and the Goenka Meditation Center are the closest.
For some reason, the people in Lumbini, when they were setting up that park, they allowed those two centers to be closest to where, you know, supposedly where the Buddha was born, I think it's almost like a sign of like respect for these two lineages because they've just affected so many people positively.
Yeah. Yeah. Just to pick up on that. So there was the Ubakan leading to SN Goenka leading to you, this sister tradition to then the Mahasi school, which is Mahasi Sayadaw, who is this incredible Burmese Master, who then many of my teachers trained with that guy like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg.
And then they set up the Insight Meditation Society along with Jack Kornfield, who I know you're close with and you've been on the show with Jack before. I'll put a link in the show notes to that. So anyway, there are these two traditions that there's a lot of discourse between these two traditions.
And my communications teachers, Dan Klerman and Mudita Nisgar, they're communications coaches, I should say. They both come out of the insight. They're in that whole world. I met them through Joseph Goldstein. And one of the things they've taught me is that nobody makes you feel a certain way. You're the one making yourself feel.
And so when you're in an argument with your spouse or anybody else and, well, you made me feel this, you made me feel this. No, you're attaching causality inappropriately. People's behavior may be objectionable, but they didn't make you feel a certain way. Does that land for you based on the themes of your new book?
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