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In this episode, I speak with Diego Perez, who writes under the pen name Yung Pueblo, which means “young people.” He chose the pen name Yung Pueblo as a commentary on where we are right now as a human species, holding a vision of what’s possible for us as we move from being such a young people to evolve and mature in the future. Diego Perez is a meditator and a writer. By some people he’s called a modern sage, a guiding light. I think of Diego as a warm space, that’s what I think of in my mind. I’ve had the chance to hang out with Diego on a couple of occasions. He’s such a special young person. He’s the author of the books Inward, Clarity and Connection. There’s an audiobook of Clarity and Connection through Sounds True. He’s also the author of a new book, which is what we’ll be talking about today. It’s called Lighter: Let Go of the Past, Connect with the Present, Expand the Future. Here’s my conversation with the very warm space of Diego Perez.
With that, let me bring forward this warm space of a friend, Diego Perez. Diego, hi.
Diego Perez (Yung Pueblo): Hey, Tami. It’s so good to see you. It’s been a little while.
TS: [Yes], it has. How you doing, friend?
DP: I’m doing pretty well. [Yes], I’m happy we get a chance to speak right now.
TS: To help our listeners get a chance to know a little bit about you, can we start with the fact that you were born in Ecuador and how you came here to the United States and the journey that you went on to commit yourself to healing?
DP: Sure, I was born in Ecuador in the city Huaquillas. That’s on the coast. I lived there with my family until I was about four years old. My mother and father decided that Ecuador was not the best place for us, that there would be more opportunity if we took the big risk of going to the United States. We ended up moving in 1982 to Boston, Massachusetts. It was just my mom, my dad, myself, and my brother. When we got here, it was just such a radical change from what life was like, because we left basically the vast 95% of our family in Ecuador and came to the various atomized United States. What we found was a lot of struggle. My mom, she ended up working cleaning houses; my dad worked at a supermarket. A lot of my memories from childhood, and I think a lot of my personal trauma, was seeing the struggle that they experienced just trying to keep our family afloat.
There was the constant battle of them trying to figure out how to pay rent every month and figuring out how to get us groceries. It was just a constant thing that lasted for, I think, about a decade and a half where we were really stuck in a poverty trap. I think experiencing that, seeing that, it really embedded a lot of sadness and anxiety inside of me, and it created a scarcity mindset. This fearful scarcity mindset that as I got older and I had no way of processing these emotions, they just slowly became very unhealthy habits.
When I got to college, I was even further removed from my home and was just in a totally new space and I think those habits just picked up. What it ended up looking like was that I was just constantly trying to run away from myself by seeking alcohol, seeking marijuana, partying as much as I can, doing a lot of different drugs, and just basically pushing my body to the edge week after week. It culminated with me hitting the rock-bottom moment about a year after I graduated from college, where I just did way too many drugs one night and my body was just utterly exhausted and I felt like my heart was going to explode. Basically, was just on the ground for two hours feeling like I was having a heart attack.
What dawned on me in that moment was that what got me there was that I had been lying to myself. I had been lying to myself. I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t feel good, that something was not right inside. I realized in that moment—I was like, “If lying to myself got me here, then what could pull me out is telling myself the truth.” That’s when I really started trying to find methods to make my mind lighter.
TS: The discovery of meditation, it seems like in your life, and I know for some people when they find their path it’s a big deal. It’s a really big deal, a kind of homecoming. It seems like that was the case for you. Can you share a bit about that?
DP: [Yes], it definitely felt like a really big deal. About a year after that rock-bottom moment, I stopped doing the hard drugs, started focusing on just being really honest with myself about whatever I was feeling, challenging myself to just feel the discomfort. This is before—I wasn’t meditating; I was just allowing myself to sit with the sadness, with the anxiety, with whatever was coming up.
But a year later, in the summer of 2012, I did my first silent 10-day vipassana course in the Goenka tradition, and that really just shook me wide open. It was by far the hardest thing I had ever done, and I really struggled in that first course. But when it was over, I realized that my mind felt significantly lighter, and I kept going back. I kept doing more courses, and I’ve been practicing in this method and this technique for about 10 years now. It does—it feels like a homecoming, and it felt like this is really what I had been looking for my whole life. That this method in particular works really well with my conditioning, and it just continues to give me these results that wow me.
TS: You talk about this process as a type of “unbinding”; that’s the word you use. I think it’s a really interesting word, and I wonder if you can share more about that? The healing process as unbinding from the types of patterning and knots that are in us from our youth.
DP: [Yes], it definitely feels like that. It feels like the mind is so heavily conditioned, and you used the word “knotted” up. It literally feels like there are just a limited set of reactions that my mind personally had when it dealt with difficult situations. It was either get really anxious about it, get really sad about it, and keep bouncing between the two. When I started meditating, I obviously still feel sadness and anxiety, but the intensity started decreasing. Not only did the intensity decrease, but I felt like my mind had more space. That was what really shocked me, was that I would be able to see my reaction or how I wanted to react without immediately falling into it. I was like, “OK, this is what I would normally do in this situation. This is what I’ve done for years, but actually now I have other opportunities to maybe—I could choose to just behave in a totally different way that actually will benefit me better.”
I think for a lot of us, healing is actually just the unbinding of these old patterns so that we can breathe, so that we can feel a little freer, so that we can see more instead of just repeat the past over and over again.
TS: You write, Diego, in Lighter about moving beyond a survival mindset as part of the healing process. I want to talk about that, because you mentioned how the poverty of your family was so formative in terms of there being this environment of stress and anxiety. I think a lot of us, even if we didn’t grow up in a lot of economic pressure, still notice that we’re very invested in survival concerns. Like, “Come on, of course.” It could be all economic survival, survival of our human form, our health. Tell me more about this notion of moving beyond a survival mindset in your own life, how that has worked for you.
DP: I think it’s been interesting because I’ve been understanding survival and ego go hand in hand. That’s our survival mechanism, and it makes sense evolutionarily where we’re trying to figure out how to get from here to tomorrow. We need to have that short-term thinking, that defensive thinking that comes from, really, the coalescing of ego. What I’ve been realizing is that living in that way can definitely get you through hard times, but it just didn’t give me any access to happiness. It didn’t help me feel calm or feel any peace.
What I’ve been realizing through meditating is that as opposed to living from a place of ego, I need to do my best to live from a place of compassion. To live from a place of being compassionate towards myself and being compassionate towards others. I’ve been seeing now that reframing life through that lens as opposed to just me, me, me, it’s moreso “let me do my best to take care of myself.” But at the same time, how can I bring harmony to the situations that I’m a part of? I think it’s taken a long time for me to basically break that conditioning of survival mode, because that’s just what I needed at that time in childhood to get me through it. But as an adult and as I’ve been meditating, it doesn’t help and doesn’t support my happiness. It feels way more aligned to live from a place of compassion.
TS: Can you give me an example, Diego, of when a survival mindset—it’s on you, it’s on you. Right in the moment, it’s on you and what you do on the spot?
DP: I think a lot of it is even simple moments. Seeing a friend do something really well or someone else in the writing world. Then the first thing that comes up is jealousy. I think of that as survival. But then it’s like that will be the first immediate reaction. Then I pause, and I ask myself, I’m like, “Wait.” I’m like, “Am I actually jealous?” Like, “No, I’m actually not missing anything out. I’m actually happy for them.” Being able to reframe that and not just repeat how I would’ve reacted in the past, but actually align myself with how I want to show up in the present and in the future, it takes that moment, it takes that slowing down. I think a lot of our first reactions are survival-mode reactions.
TS: Now, you mentioned “radical honesty” as something that you committed to early in your healing process. Tell us more about how you use that.
DP: [Yes], radical honesty, I mean it’s a term that’s been around for a long time, and people define it in different ways. But I like to think of it as the truth that you try to maintain between you and yourself. I didn’t have that. I was constantly lying to myself. I was constantly trying to just run away from my emotions, to just try to hide from any discomfort that I was feeling. When I saw how detrimental that was to my livelihood, I wanted to just do the opposite, and the opposite to me looked like tell myself the truth. If you don’t feel good, accept the fact that you don’t feel good. If you’re feeling anxiety right now, accept it, embrace it, let it be there. Radical honesty wasn’t just a mental component, but it was a challenge to myself of not just telling myself the truth, but let me actually sit here.
That first year after I stopped doing hard drugs, before I started meditating, I would literally just challenge myself to feel the anxiety as it comes up without immediately trying to roll up another joint, without immediately trying to just extrovert myself in some manner. I would just sit in my room and sit on my bed and just feel it. Literally feel what it was like in my body and my mind. It broke a lot of illusions. It didn’t feel all consuming; it didn’t feel like the end of the world. I started realizing, I was like, “Oh, I’m OK. This sucks, but I’m OK.”
TS: It sounds like the radical honesty was combined with a type of acceptance as you’re describing.
DP: Totally.
TS: [Yes], and you also write about something you call “strong determination.”
DP: Now, you know all about that.
TS: Well, it’s something that I think is often not emphasized that much on the healing journey, and yet you’re very clear about it. You say, “It will take real effort to break your old ways.” And then you go on, “People who heal themselves are lions.” I love that. “Heroes with exceptional bravery. I say this not to discourage you, but to make it clear that this journey is not fast, not easy.” There’s something that’s very sober in that, very sober.
DP: [Yes], I think a lot of healing is about repetition. We often don’t take into account that why our mind exists the way it does right now is because we’ve repeated the same reactions countless times since we were born. Over and over again, we’re building up this conditioning that has been very limiting for us, that hasn’t given us a lot of freedom. To try to strike a new path and build a new life, you’re going to have to repeat good habits over and over again and put in that effort that will basically allow you to embrace your own evolution. It takes time. It’s not a one-minute meditation or a five-minute solution or something. There’s no easy way out; it takes a lot of time to build the qualities up that your mind really needs. Present moment awareness, equanimity, compassion—they need to be cultivated. It’s not easy, but it’s incredibly beneficial, and often you’ll see results right away, but the greater results are over a long period of time.
TS: It sounds like these same qualities that have been important, critical, in your healing journey are also true in terms of you being a writer. This strong determination that it has taken for you to sit down and do as much writing as you have. I wonder if you can talk about that and how your commitment to meditation has helped you develop the strong determination that has then flowed into your writing.
DP: That’s a great question. It’s funny because they’re so intrinsically tied together, because I never knew that I wanted to be a writer. I never had that intention, never saw that life path even being a possibility. I never really wrote creatively as a child or as a young adult. But it wasn’t until I started meditating that the creativity started bubbling up. I still look back on that and am quite surprised that I never saw this coming. What I attribute it to is that I think for a lot of us, we accept the goals that society or our parents have embedded in us and a lot of that happens rather unconsciously. I thought because I grew up really poor, my best bet was to go into finance or go into investment banking. That’s what I was maneuvering myself towards. But then all of the difficulty that I was going through on the inside, all this unaddressed trauma, all this old knotted-up patterns that I had, was oblivious to, they were blocking me from doing that.
But when I started addressing all of what was happening inside of me, this new aspiration came up, and I was quite shocked by it. I think meditating has not only helped me see that I actually had a deeper aspiration to be a writer and it’s helped me connect with this beautiful part of my life, but it’s helped me accept the long journey. It’s helped me just realize that I’m not going to be good at it right away. That it’s going to take time for me to develop my voice as a writer, because I spent all of, I would say, 2014 to 2017 developing my voice as a writer. And just figuring out what topics I want to write about; how do I want to write about it? Is poetry a good format for me? Let me develop my ability to write essays. All of this took a lot of time to cultivate.
TS: Now you’re an intensive meditator, Diego. I think most people would describe how you approach meditation as being warrior-like or extremely intense. How would you describe it, and give our listeners a sense of what your practice is like, both retreat practice and daily practice?
DP: Sure, [yes]. It’s funny, I like to use the word “serious” meditator.
TS: “Serious” is good.
DP: Just because it’s a big part of my life. Myself, my wife, and all of our friends who meditate seriously in this tradition and another tradition—there’s a lot of people who meditate a lot; they’re all pretty calm people. But there’s this part about them that they’re very interested in learning, and they love the wisdom that you can access when you observe the body and the mind. I practice two hours a day. I practice an hour in the first half of the day, an hour in the second half of the day. I’ll meditate for an hour sometime after I wake up or after doing a few hours of work. Then I’ll meditate again sometime after dinner. I also go to retreats a few times a year. One of those times will be a longer course of 45 days or 30 days.
I design my life in a way where before I do anything else, when a new year opens up, I pick out when am I going to do my long course, where am I going to do it? Then after that comes all the work, and if I have a new book launch or if I’m writing a book. I really try to hold meditation as the centerpiece of my life, because I think without it, life would just be so much harder. I’ve seen the benefits of going to these long courses, of meditating daily, consistently now for, I think, almost seven years now. It’s given me so much, that I think about it as why would I not invest in myself? Why would I not invest in the thing that helps me be a good husband, to be a good son, helps me do a good job with my work, and helps me just keep taking these small steps forward on the path of liberation? Feels pretty critical to design my life in a way where I have time to meditate.
TS: You’re very clear in Lighter that your first commitment is to personal healing and meditation. That secondarily to that you’re a writer. That order seemed important to me. I wonder if you can talk about that, why it’s important to you to have that order in your life.
DP: Oh, [yes]. Thank you for that question. It feels important. I think a lot of times people think that I meditate to write better or to write, but that feels like an unforeseen externality. It’s just an unforeseen outcome. First, I went into meditation; I needed help. I needed to really start fresh and just do something about all this tension in my mind. I went into meditation for healing, but over time, as I better understood the Buddhist teaching, better understood why this meditation worked, I was introduced to the path of liberation.
To me, meditating is really about continuing my healing, taking steps forward on the path of liberation, and liberation being the potential for the freedom of all suffering. To cut that cord of craving so that suffering doesn’t continue in my mind. That’s totally a long, long journey, but taking steps forward towards that feels like a very important life goal to me. Then after that comes the writing and all the other things that I do. I think formatting and seeing my life in that manner has been pretty helpful. It’s helped me just stay focused with what’s important.
TS: Through your commitment to meditation, this intuition about writing emerged for you. You write about how the meditative path introduced a certain amount of clarity in your life, and then creativity, and then you were able to attune to your intuition. How does your intuition appear to you, Diego? I mean, do you hear voices, do you see images? What happens?
DP: It often appears as a very calm knowing. It feels very bodily to me; it feels almost like I have a little compass inside me that’s pointing me in a direction. It’s very different from the wildness and sporadic-ness of craving. It doesn’t feel mental, where the mind’s like, “Oh, I want ice cream. Oh, I want more of this, more of that.” Oftentimes, I feel like my intuition is pointing me in a direction that is challenging; it’s asking me to grow. It’s asking me to just step outside of my comfort zone.
I’ve seen this repeatedly over the last decade or so where my intuition was very adamant that I do start writing. Even though I didn’t listen to it right away—I didn’t listen to it for about a year or so before I really started—this persistence was there. It was like, “You should try.” Similarly, when my wife and I moved from Boston to New York City, it felt clear in me. I was like, “Oh, I think we should move to New York City now,” and she felt the same thing too. But it wasn’t an intellectual thing; it was more like my body wanted me to move in a particular direction.
TS: Tell me more about that, when you say that. A body compass—what are the sensations? What do you feel? How do you know?
DP: It doesn’t feel agitated. Cravings feel rather agitated in the mind, and it feels more like it’s emerging from the gut, and it feels peaceful. It feels like gentle waves just hitting at a particular note over and over again. What I find great about it is that even if I’m not ready to listen to it in that moment, it’ll appear. It’ll take months or whatnot for me to actually listen to it. It’ll just remind me that this is something I should do.
TS: Now, Diego, there are a lot of different approaches to meditation. Will you share with us what are you actually doing as you’re sitting for an hour in the first half and the second half of the day? What are you doing?
DP: Sure. What I’m doing is observing whatever’s arising and passing away in the body, within the framework of the body, with particular attention to impermanence. That’s probably one of the most immediate things that appears when you’re observing the body and the mind. What you feel, literally feeling, is—when a meditator elevates their awareness after meditating for years, they’re just much more able to feel the different sensations in the body. They can feel the intricacies of any pains or toughness, or they can feel the undercurrent of vibrations that are happening in your arms or legs or whatnot. It’s really just being in touch with those sensations and being able to observe them without reacting to them.
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TS: You write that change, impermanence, has been your greatest teacher. What have you learned? How has it changed you to spend so much time observing change happening at the level of sensation?
DP: I mean, it’s hard to even encapsulate how much I’ve learned from not just understanding impermanence intellectually, but being able to experience impermanence in the body. It’s a wisdom that really opens the door to the greater wisdom, to the understandings of dissatisfaction, of stress, of suffering. It also opens the door to understanding that this identity that I’ve been existing in is not fully substantial. That it also has these undercurrents of impermanence that reveal that it’s not fundamentally everything that I thought it was. I think understanding and really digging deeper into impermanence has helped me—not just the basics of being able to weather storms better, the understanding that, OK, this difficult moment, this is also something that’s impermanent. It may last for a while, but it’s also dominated by this law of change as well.
Similarly, I think probably the most helpful part has been inspiring me to be present with the people that I love. Because these moments that we share together—I mean, I was just with my parents yesterday in Boston, and that fragility of life is very clear. It’s like we’re not always going to be able to be together, so let me be with you. If I’m next to you, let me really pay attention to you and to be able to be open about the love that we have for each other. I think change itself—it’s been a blessing learning that we often struggle with change because we’re afraid that it will take things away. But I’m actually grateful to change, because change has given me the opportunity to have my parents. You and I, we wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for this moving change that really pushes the universe forward. If everything in the universe were static, none of us would exist; because things move, because things change, we can exist. I think we have this beautiful opportunity for growth, because change is the undercurrent of reality.
TS: Change does also take things away.
DP: [Yes.] That’s what I’m really saying. We often think of change as in that connotation, that it takes things away, so we fear it. But lately I’ve been thinking that’s true, but it’s also true that I would have nothing if it weren’t for change.
TS: I know you’ve become more expressive—you write about it in Lighter—in your love of other people and with your family. It sounds like that’s something that is happening with your parents and that this knowing of impermanence has encouraged you to come forward more. You write about hugging your father and how that changed your relationship. I wonder if you can share more, because I think that’s something people can really relate to.
DP: That felt important to add into the book, because I think for a lot of people, father figures aren’t yet as emotionally in tune or emotionally open as they were before or as they can be now, because a lot of people are changing now and becoming much more expressive. It was a similar thing for my father. He showed his love to us by how hard he worked for us, by how hard he kept our family afloat, and I was always grateful to him. I never doubted the love that he had for me, but it was a very silent love. It wasn’t very expressive. I started realizing that early on in my own healing journey, that the relationship between him and I was a bit stuck. We were going through the same moves over a few-year period where we’d laugh together, we’d talk about politics and talk about whatever needed to be taken care of, but we didn’t share our love for each other.
I realized, I was like, “Well, let me see what would happen if I change, if I change the way I interact with him.” I remember a day where he was coming home from work, and I decided to just give him a really big hug. I think I really caught him off guard. Over time, as I continued just telling him that I love him and telling him that I really appreciate him, I think me demonstrating that vulnerability welcomed his vulnerability, and he’s really changed over time. I mean, I was just with him yesterday, and he’s just very open about how much he loves us all. I think it’s been wonderful to meet this new side of him that was always in there but didn’t feel like he had the space to let it out.
TS: What would you say to someone who’s listening who feels inspired to perhaps share more of their vulnerability with someone, but is a little in between, if you will? Want to, a little nervous about it, awkward for sure.
DP: I think especially if you are on your own healing journey, you’ll be surprised how much can change with others as well. They don’t also need to be actively healing themselves; it’s just similar emotions will create doors where they can come through as well. Let’s say if you are presenting your vulnerability with another person, that gives them the opportunity to receive it and to come forth with vulnerability as well. They may not always come forth with vulnerability, but it gives them a chance. I think realize that if you’re changing your actions, it can actually really change the dynamic of a relationship, so it’s worth a shot, I think. You’ll be surprised by the results.
TS: Believe it or not. Diego, I want to talk more about change and about your experience of change as a meditator specifically. Because I think a lot of people, everything has a season, we all get it, let things go. I think at a certain level we get it. But I also know—and this is something you and I have talked about before, I’ve done the serious retreats in the vipassana style that you’re practicing, and that was part of my early introduction to meditation—that there’s a way that you’re putting under a magnifying glass what’s happening in your human experience, such that you’re noting change at a very subtle level. I want to hear more about what that’s like for you, if you will, the dissolution or whatever your version of that might be.
DP: [Yes], I think something that I like to go back to that really opened my eyes as to how I viewed myself was, during the longer courses, there are these repeated moments where you can become so aware, raise your ability, the awareness of your body, that quality of awareness to the point where your body, it just feels like it’s totally made up of almost an electric current, just vibrations. Everything is just vibrating in the body, and there’s no solidity anywhere. Everything is just moving and changing.
In those moments it becomes pristinely clear that what I thought was me, what I thought was I, this concept of self that I carried throughout my whole life, it’s not ultimately real. Even though Diego and Tami are having a conversation right now—it’s true you and I are having a conversation; we’re not lying about that—but also, what’s also true, a simultaneous truth, is that at the ultimate level, there isn’t anything fundamentally here. It’s just rapid changes of mental and physical phenomenon that are coming together at incredible speeds and creates the illusion of a sense of self. I think being able to literally feel that in the body, feel these rapid changes of, I guess sensations, energy just moving so incredibly rapidly that you know that it’s just impermanence happening at incredible speeds.
TS: You talk about us as a river, a river of life. Tell me more about this metaphor of the river.
DP: I enjoy this metaphor a lot because it gives us a lot of freedom. I remember growing up as a child and hearing so many people say, “I’ll never change,” and they’re proud of that. But then the more that I understood nature, everything in nature is changing and there’s this forward flow. If we’re existing in this river of reality that’s flowing forward, to try to fight against it would only cause greater suffering. In terms of identity, I’ve been realizing that as I continue taking steps forward, who I am, it’s just changing. It’s changing all the time. Even my wife and I, when we go to these 45-day courses, we know that at the end of those 45 days of meditating, our interests are going to be different. We’re not going to go back to wanting the same things that we wanted before the course started. It’s almost like we get to meet each other again, because we’re allowing what we like, what we dislike, what we want to spend time doing, it all just evolves as our conditioning decreases and as we keep healing ourselves.
TS: There’s a lot of excitement and potential and creativity in the unknown. But I also think sometimes it can be uncomfortable. But I wonder what you think about that, if that’s your experience at times. Like, “Whoa, everything’s so unknown. I feel so uncomfortable.”
DP: [Yes], I think it’s totally true. It’s very uncomfortable not knowing what’s going to happen next.
TS: Or not barely really knowing what’s happening. I mean, look how much your life has changed, Diego, in the last seven years. I mean, whoa!
DP: [Yes], I mean there’s a constant wow factor. I think that’s something that my wife and I talk a lot about too, is just we don’t know what’s going to happen next. We know what’s gotten us here now. I think what keeps me a little more relaxed about not knowing what’s going to happen next is that I really believe in the law of karma. I really believe in cause and effect. I try to not just walk gently, but I try to be a good son, help my mother and father, help my friends, try to give back to others. Using my present moment as a way to do good things I think ensures a lighter future to a certain degree. There may totally be things that are just out of my control, really difficult moments, but I really do believe that if I do good deeds, then in some way or another it’ll make the future a little more harmonious.
TS: Part of what makes your new book Lighter so powerful, in my experience of engaging with the book, is how in the last third you devote yourself to sharing, in your view, what’s possible for all of us in terms of the world as we’ve committed to our own personal healing. You refer to us as the healing generation. I was like, “Whoa, I’ve never heard anyone talk about it that way.” As more and more people are committed to their own healing, that it brings a new dimension to social change. I really want to talk with you about this, Diego. Tell me how you see this.
DP: I’m really glad that you’re bringing this up, Tami, because I feel like that was the original motivation for me to even start writing. The moment when I started really taking writing seriously, I was in the middle of just the activist world. I had been doing a lot of organizing, and the last group that I worked with was called Youth Against Mass Incarceration, and I was very aware that people coming together around a common cause can be really powerful. But I also knew that meditating was introducing me to this internal dynamic of liberation that felt equally important. That felt like doing my own healing work was really just illuminating my life from the inside out. I’ve been realizing that as people take their healing seriously, and especially in this moment of time where it feels historically unprecedented that there are just millions of people in the world who are actively meditating, millions of people in the world who are doing different forms of therapy, seeing therapists, who are trying to engage with their minds in a different way so that they can come out as better versions of themselves.
We just live in this beautiful time where we have access to modalities from the East, things from the West, Indigenous modalities. There’s just so much out there that can actually help us heal ourselves. That feels very different from, I would say even 20 years ago, 100 years ago. The only time that I can really think of is the time of the Buddha. But even then, most of that was isolated to Northern India where there were just tons and tons of people meditating at that time. But now it’s global, and I think the result of that is that as people heal themselves, as they develop their self-love, if the self-love is real, I think it slightly, slightly opens the door to unconditional love for all beings. It starts introducing you to that concept, introducing you to that way of living.
If that self-love continues growing, then you are just going to be less and less interested in harming others. Less interested in harming others directly, harming others indirectly. I think as more people essentially heal themselves, relieve themselves of past trauma, they’re going to be much more focused on not only creating a peaceful environment within their own lives, but spreading that environment. Letting that affect their institutions that they’re a part of, the businesses that they create, the people that they vote for, what they even imagine is possible in the world.
I’m excited to see how this period will be affected by all of the healing that’s happening, because one last point is that I really enjoy studying history. One thing that I see over and over in history is that there are always groups of people who want to try to change the world for the better. They have these ideals that they want to push forward, and sometimes they’re successful. I think one of the best examples is Robespierre from the French Revolution, that had these great ideals and was part of this group of people who wanted to just create democracy, create what would come after monarchy. They gained power, and what happened after that was this horrendous massacre, tens of thousands of people over a few-year period that were just massacred.
One thing I like to point out is that power, it functions like a magnet on the ego where it will pull out the roughest parts. That means that a lot of these people—that’s one example, but it’s happened over many times historically—when you do gain some degree of power, a lot of people who were once fighting for this great change, they end up re-creating the thing that they were once fighting against. We now have this opportunity in this modern time, this healing generation where it really includes anyone, anyone who’s a child to however old you may be, we have access to these tools that can help us alleviate our egos, not have them be so dense, to have us build new relationships with our communities, with power itself so that we don’t become these ugly versions of ourselves.
TS: I’m curious how you’ll respond to one of the critiques I hear a lot about people who are dedicated to healing. I’m sure where I’m going here, which is “Great, good for you, glad you’re healing, glad your world is peaceful and you have the spa candle lit and stuff, but it’s not really pouring out to create structural change. You’re not addressing structural change.” You introduce this term “structural compassion” and that those of us who are committed to personal healing, that there is a way we can connect that dot and also invest ourselves in structural compassion. I guess this is a two-part question. The first, why do you think so many people seem, and they do, seem to get stuck in the bubble bath of personal healing and not make the second step? Then what is required for us to make this combination so that we’re healing and we’re changing the forms that we live in?
DP: [Yes], it’s a great question. I think one thing to understand is that people have really different capacities. That’s something I’ve been learning over time is that there are some people who they can see their therapist, they can work their job, they can also give their time to different causes, and they have this great capacity. They can do a lot of things. Then there are other people who have serious mental health issues, and all they can really do is work on their mind, because that’s just how much they can tolerate at that moment. What I like to point out is that we do need to be able to function with our capacity and do our best to take our own healing seriously. Because ultimately, even if all you can do is heal yourself, then to me that means that the people who cross your path, there’s a lesser chance of them being harmed. I think that’s really powerful. That multiplied by millions and millions of people creates a much more peaceful environment.
Now, in terms of actual structural change, I think you’re the perfect example, Tami. You have built this huge thing that is providing this immense service. And not only do you provide so many fantastic tools for people through Sounds True, but you also have a Foundation attached to it that’s making literal change, literal important changes. It’s a powerful time that we live in where there are more people who are seeing their therapist, doing their meditations, doing the things that they need, but they’re designing their nonprofits or they’re designing their for-profit ventures in a way where compassion is still involved in that. Where they’re designing their products compassionately. I think it takes years to be able to see these greater results; it’s not going to happen next year. It’s going to take a few decades for us to see the greater results of where this giant healing generation is taking us. But I mean, I meet amazing people that do work like you all the time who are just building these incredible organizations that are for the common good. I think that that gives me a lot of hope.
TS: Did you come up with this term “structural compassion”? I never heard it before, before reading Lighter, or did you hear that from someone?
DP: It happened accidentally while I was talking to Sharon Salzberg. We did a podcast a few years ago, and we were talking about her book, and we were just going forward about structural harm and the term just came up. I don’t know if anybody has—
TS: No, it was a combustion of you and Sharon and her work with Real Change. Tell us what it means to you because, I mean, I think we hear so much about structural racism, structural harm, the waters we’re all swimming in. The notion that we could be swimming in waters of structural compassion, it’s mind blowing. I want to hear your vision of that.
DP: I like the term “structural compassion,” because it points our imagination in a different direction. We know we live in all these structures. We know about the patriarchy. We know about racism. We know about just the way that our economies are structured so that they exhaust the planet. So when I was using the term “structural compassion,” I know that I don’t have all the answers. I know that the last three chapters of the book, they’re not going to tell you like, “Step one, this is how you heal the world to step Z.” It’s not going to take you to the end of it. But I’m trying to create the conditions so that we can start thinking about what structural compassion means to us—if you’re an artist, or if you are in banking, or if you’re in the tech world, what does that mean? How can I support the creation of something that is actually compassionate?
I think, to me, it means that you have the welfare of others in mind. You want to have your own welfare in mind and simultaneously that you’re trying not to harm others intentionally or unintentionally. From that point, let’s see how can we design our businesses, how can we design our governments, how can we give more people access to power so that they feel like they’re the makers of their lives? But I feel like I am pushing that term forward, but I’m trying to create the space so that we can all figure out together what it really means.
TS: You said some very kind words about the work of Sounds True. I think you’re correct in that we’re trying to build in structural compassion to our organization, what we do. And I notice I have a lot of frustration. I have frustration about the bigger world that our small organization is a part of, and a sense of frustration around that. In your final chapter of Lighter is a new era, and you write, “I believe building a structurally compassionate world is possible. We have to believe it before we can build it.” Often, to be honest with you, I think, “[Yes], I can help create an organization like this, but the greater world?” I just think, “Come on, really? A new era, really?” I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel a little down, and so Diego, you’re my friend. What do you have to say?
DP: I think it’s rightfully so. I like to look at the work of the creator of The Social Dilemma. He’s a friend—his name is slipping at the moment—but he did this amazing talk at Wisdom 2.0 where he was pointing out that the way the Internet functions, especially if you’re on Twitter, if you’re on Facebook or Instagram or just the news cycle in general: the news that comes to the surface is normally the more extreme news. It’s the most dramatic thing that happens that gets the most clicks, the most negative situation that’s out there, that’s what comes to the surface. So it gives you a pretty skewed idea of what the world is actually like.
When I try to look at the world, I try to take a big step back as well, because obviously there are a lot of things that we need to address. But I’d rather be born now than have been born in 1969 or have been born earlier than that. I think about someone who’s really close to me who just last year was talking about how he didn’t want to have children because the world is so chaotic and dangerous and scary and so out of balance. It left me thinking. I thought about that for months after. I started asking myself, and I was like, “Wait.” I was like, “What has been a good period? What has been a good period of time to actually have children?” I was like, “1940? No, that was a terrible time. 1920? No, these are not great times,” especially for me as an Indigenous man. You keep going back: “1850? Horrible time.”
When you look at the greater scope, of the macro situation of what’s happening, the world is overall less dangerous than it was before. Child mortality rates, the amount of people that can read, all of these things have been moving in a positive direction where the world is slowly becoming a better place. I think that this healing generation, it’s not going to fix everything, but it’s going to just keep pushing us forward over this long spans of time into a better direction where we are much more cognizant of the harm that we can cause each other and we’re not just going to turn a blind eye to it.
TS: To end our conversation, Diego, I’m going to pull out my favorite quote from Lighter. Here it is: “We don’t just need each other; we are each other. And without each other, we cannot succeed.” What do you mean, “We are each other”?
DP: I think humans, we can’t exist in a vacuum. We are built to need community and to be able to allow that love to move forward and outward, really inspire our actions. I think it’s just bringing harmony into that community will just uplift us in such profound ways. I think really realizing, and just going back to what you were saying before, it’s true a lot of people keep their healing to themselves, but we should be inspired to share. Not just what we’ve learned, but to share loving actions, to share our harmony and to bring our harmony into the situations that we’re a part of and do our best in a balanced way, help ourselves but also help others.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Diego Perez, who writes under the pen name Yung Pueblo. He’s the author of the new book Lighter: Let Go of the Past, Connect with the Present, Expand the Future. If you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after-the-show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
