Everything is temporary.
There's never been a permanent emotion.
Like, all of them are temporary.
There's never been a storm in the history of the universe that's lasted forever.
Hey guys, how you doing?
Hope you're having a good week so far.
My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.
Whilst many of us dedicate countless hours to our careers and work, we don't tend to devote the same amount of time to the basics of emotional awareness.
Yet this week's guest believes that this may well be the most important skill we can learn.
Today's guest is Diego Perez, widely known by his pen name Young Pueblo.
Diego is followed by millions of people all around the world who are keen to learn from his wisdom and he's the author of multiple best -selling books including his very latest How to Love Better, The Path to Deeper Connection Through Growth, Kindness and Compassion.
In our conversation you will hear about Diego's remarkable journey from addiction to transformation and how meditation became the cornerstone of his recovery.
He also beautifully articulates why he considers his daily two -hour meditation practice the best investment he's ever made, cultivating three essential qualities, self -awareness, non -reactivity, and compassion.
You'll also learn about the art of conscious communication, the concept of selfless listening, the three key ingredients for thriving relationships and how to navigate conflict in relationships constructively and use it as an opportunity for growth.
Whether you are currently in a relationship or not, this conversation is full of powerful insights that will absolutely help you on your path to a more contented life.
It's a conversation about courage, love and growth, but it's also a conversation that helps us to deeply understand that it is our relationships that can be our greatest teachers I wanted to start off by asking you about meditation sure you meditate I believe for two hours every single day that's right
every single day why is that because it's the best investment I've ever made it's uh it has absolutely transformed my life for the better internally in my own mind.
And it's elevated my relationships to a whole another level of depth that I didn't really have access to before.
I think I was sort of shocked by the, like how much I get back from meditating because I went into it as an experiment.
But then when I came back out, my mind was lighter.
So I tried it out a bunch of times, went to a few silent 10 day retreats.
And when I started meditating daily, the progress was tremendous.
There'll be some people who have stumbled across this conversation who I believe will be thinking, Diego, listen, two hours a day, you don't get my life.
I'm busy. I've got kids.
I've got work pressures.
I've got ABC that I have to do each day.
You know, what would you say to someone like that who feels that two hours of meditation is unrealistic for them?
I think you start where you can, you know, it also felt unrealistic to me too, until I started seeing that there was time, you know, there was a lot of time where, you know, I'd wake up in the morning and I would kind of dilly dally and do whatnot, take my time to really start my day.
And then now when I get up, I just get up and start meditating or in the evening, the same thing too, where I just cut out an hour from Netflix and just meditate and I can still watch some shows before I go to bed.
So there is some time there.
I know some people have extremely busy lives, but I think of it as like, how would I remove what profoundly helps me?
Like, it's almost like, why would I not allow myself to drink water?
You know, like I think of meditation in a similar vein where it's like water is so nourishing to me I need it every day uh for meditating as well it feels like it's something that's just helping me learn and grow and keep developing my self -awareness so it's a gift that I'm giving to myself what I find
interesting about meditation I'm also a fan like you although to be completely transparent I don't do two hours a day although I will say over the last couple of days reading your books, researching you and your life, you've really got me thinking about, well, Rangan, what would your life look like
if you did meditate for two hours a day?
So first of all, your approach is inspiring me actually at the moment to make me think, maybe this is something I can start to increase in my own life.
I think with a lot of practices that people want to engage with for their health or their happiness or their relationships.
They kind of know the outcome before they start.
They know the outcome that they want.
So for example, someone may start moving their body and working out because they know it's going to give them energy or make them feel different or help them lower their anxiety.
And I would say with five minutes of movement, you can feel a difference straight away.
Totally. Is it fair to say that with meditation that you know that return on investment question that we have to ask ourselves do you think that's a little bit more cloudy for people that they don't really understand what they're gonna get so they try and go it ain't working yeah especially because a lot
of people think that you know the point of meditating is to like stop all your thoughts and it's not that's not really the point at all and also when you look at meditating as a whole meditating is like just there are so many different traditions there are so many different types and these different
types of meditation have different goals you know some are very bliss oriented the one that I practice is oriented towards building equanimity a sense of balance non -reactiveness and meditating itself especially in this vipassana tradition we focus on developing the qualities of self -awareness non -reaction and compassion so you're
literally taking yourself to the mental gym you know these are qualities that your mind is born with, but they are like muscles that haven't been really strengthened.
So to me, it's like, you have to know what you want to get out of it.
And I think non -reaction was the key element that I was missing in my life, where I was just getting so attached to everything, creating so much mental tension in my own mind.
And once I started being able to observe that everything changes, so why am I really holding on?
It helped tremendously.
I can't imagine there's anyone listening Diego who doesn't want those three things more self -awareness the ability to be non -reactive and the ability to have more compassion totally but these things take training they don't just happen overnight they literally require cultivation the same way you know
you're not just going to run a marathon tomorrow you have to train for it if you have those three things or as you cultivate those three things I imagine that one would be one would feel calmer.
They'd feel happier.
They'd probably be healthier in many ways, right?
So I guess what I'm leading to is if these are things you have to cultivate, are they our natural state or are they things that are not our natural state that we have to work on in order to get?
Oh, that's a really good question.
It's interesting because when the mind is really clear and it's not clinging to anything, the mind is automatically aware, automatically compassionate.
It is really clear in its decision making and it's quite creative.
but we unconsciously gather so much conditioning like literally, I mean, one of the key things that I learned that helps me understand myself and why my mind was the way that it was in the past was that every single time that you react you are creating an imprint in the subconscious of the mind that is molding
and shaping your mind so that you are not only perceiving the present through the lens of the past but you are reacting in the way that you used to so let's say in the past when you would defend yourself with anger, that anger is more likely to come up because you're constantly looking at reality.
It's like, oh, this reminds me of the thing that threatened me before.
So now the anger flies up.
But for people, they think that's their natural selves.
That's actually incorrect.
That's just their past reappearing through this impulsiveness.
Yeah, no, I love that.
I always think about this idea of whether happiness is our default state or not.
Because some people push back against that, go, no, it's not, we're wired to survive.
and I believe happiness is our default state actually and one of the things that leads me to that conclusion is my experience of being a father so when my kids were little when they were young you literally you just see them being present yeah they're in the moment they're fully absorbed in what's happening
they're content they can't be happy right so my belief is that happiness is our default state, but society, culture, education, conditioning, it trains it out of us.
Yeah. And you see that like what you're pointing to is that the mind is a sponge.
The mind is like just soaking in everything, all different, you know, everything that it's reading, the people that it's around, it's just consuming so much conditioning.
And over time, that will not only shape your personality, but it also shape the behavior patterns that cause difficulty in your life.
And that's why to me, like when I go and I put my time, like right before I came here to see you, I meditated for an hour on the train and that hour helped just calm my mind, help it develop its awareness and support me in clear decision -making.
Okay. So you've got a train roughly two hours from London to my studio.
Okay. So I observed this when I get that train regularly myself.
Yeah. You take that train all the time.
I do. A lot less over the last few years.
In the last few weeks and months because of my book launch, I've been getting it a lot.
But what I observe, and of course, I don't know what people have got on in their earbuds, right?
People could be meditating, right?
But I imagine the vast majority of people on that train that you just took are not meditating, right?
I would imagine most of them are either working.
They're hitting the keyboard.
They're hitting the keyboard.
Or even if they've got their eyes shut and they've got their headphones on, they're listening to a podcast, they're listening to music, they're listening to the news, they're watching something on Netflix, whatever it might be.
Yet you have chosen on that journey, when you could have done all of those things, you chose to meditate.
So that's really interesting to me.
What is it that you know about meditation that maybe the people around you don't know?
I think, I mean, I just, I've had a lot of experience with it.
I think when I, when I did that silent 10 day course, it was so stunningly difficult to be by myself, to not be speaking to other people, to, to just be with the emotions that I used to dedicate my life, you know, literally running away from them, to getting, getting as far away from my emotions as
possible because I was scared to feel.
And after getting over that fear and just allowing myself to feel whatever's arising and passing in the body um I started realizing that there is just a great opportunity here for growth for learning I mean I finished the first silent 10 -day course and I felt like I had learned more in those 10 days
than four years of university and it was so shocking to me so whenever I do um you know every I've been meditating two hours a day now for I think like nine years.
And I just know that the investment is too, like the results of the investment are too big to pass up.
So when I sit there, I close my eyes, I'm observing my body, feeling whatever is there.
And that outcome is that, you know, I come out, my mind is calmer, I'm able to, you know, check in with my partner, because she was also meditating.
And then we also got on our laptops, but I think we were able to make decisions that felt just much more aligned.
One of my philosophies, Diego, is that the reason people struggle to make changes that last in their lives is often because of an internal agitation that they feel that they're not aware of, right?
So again, these three things you're talking about, self -awareness, non -reactivity, and compassion.
Okay. If we just take non -reactivity as an example, I was at Euston yesterday, so the station in London.
Okay. I got the journey that you got yesterday.
And what was really interesting is that all the trains were cancelled for three hours.
There was an incident somewhere along the line and Euston station in the middle of the day was turning into chaos okay i was observing lots of people getting stressed out um and i do feel a sense of any calm these days so i was able to watch that and go wow i think that would have been me a few years
ago you know going oh man i can't believe it this has happened you know i had to get back whatever right and so where i think that gets in the way of people for their health at least, is that what I think a lot of people don't realize is that they are actually generating that internal stress.
They don't realize that they think it's the external event that caused that in them.
I don't think a lot of people realize that, no, that external event is out of my control.
It's actually a neutral event.
I am choosing whether I know it or not to generate that internal stress.
And that internal stress will then have to be neutralized in some way.
Now, if you then get on a train, you ain't going to be doing it in a healthy way.
Most people are going to neutralize that emotional stress that they created with sugar, with more caffeine, with alcohol, with numbing their minds with something.
And so I believe, and what's really fascinating for me, and we're going to talk about meditation relationships for sure, but I think what you're talking about there, these qualities that you have cultivated within yourself through meditating are gonna have such profound effects on people that they don't
even realize. Yeah.
And you know, what's interesting too, is I really believe that one of the most empowering things that you can understand is that your perception and your reaction are happening in you, in your mind and in your body.
So we think that these external events, they can be quite challenging.
Like people can, can do things to you that are disagreeable, that are not good, that are objectively wrong, but then you still have to understand that your perception and your reaction is happening inside of you.
So then what does that mean?
Am I going to cause myself more misery than I need to?
Like, am I going to make my own stress bigger than it really needs to be?
Because that's something where, um, it feels like such a valuable skill to learn is to not throw more fuel onto the fire.
Let's say you have a lot of anxiety coming up.
You're there, you're waiting at the train station and you are irritated.
But why am I gonna try to fuel that irritation?
Why am I gonna make it bigger?
Let me just observe it, feel it, and then it'll pass away like every other emotion.
And as you say, you mentioned on your journey that by meditating for an hour, then when you then open your laptop and try to do your emails, you had a clarity, you can make decisions, right?
So let's relay that to, let's say the parents who's stuck at Houston and who is thinking, damn, I have to pick up my child from school in three hours.
This train being cancelled now causes a problem.
Which is completely understandable because you want to pick up your child.
But what you're saying is the situation may not be the way you want it to be.
The train cancelled.
Who wants that? No one wants it to be.
But if you don't then generate more and more internal stress, you're probably going to feel calmer and be able to go, okay, I can't control that.
There's an incident on the line.
This train ain't going for a few hours.
Okay. Who can I phone?
Let me solve the problem.
Let me solve the problem.
Whereas you stressing about it is not going to help you solve it.
Right. And when you call the person who could potentially help you and they just feel your stress oozing all over the place.
Like it's, um, it'll be much easier to just, you know, to solve the situation with a calm mind.
I really believe a calm mind has incredible decision -making power.
And that's something that is a gift that only you can give to yourself.
So why not just lean on observing the emotions that are happening as opposed to reacting and making them bigger and bigger and I'm bigger.
You said that it's almost a decade since you've been meditating with two hours a day.
OK.
