CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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[Cheerful theme music begins]

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land.

Yung Pueblo’s (Diego Perez) path to deep healing began after years of drug use had taken a toll on his mind and body. Searching for a way forward, he found that by honestly examining and addressing the anxieties and fears that he had been running away from, he no longer felt like a stranger inside of his heart and mind. Once he dedicated himself to meditation and trusting his intuition, he started to finally feel mentally lighter—with more love emerging from within. This was not an easy journey, and it's one that he is still on, but it showed him that real healing is possible. 

In this episode, CIIS Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Damali Robertson joins Yung Pueblo for an inspiring conversation exploring how we can all move forward in our healing—from learning self-compassion to letting go, to becoming emotionally mature. Drawing upon insights from his life and latest book, Lighter, Yung Pueblo shares that as our minds begin to stop feeling overburdened with tension, we can reconnect with the present, and the world around us will become more inviting, crisp, and newly vibrant.

This episode was recorded during an in-person and live streamed event at First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco on October 14th, 2022. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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Damali Robertson: Hi, everyone.

Diego Perez (Yung Pueblo): Hey, everyone. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming.

Damali: Yes, we are so excited to be here and Diego, I'm so excited to be talking to you tonight. I have a ton of questions, but before I dive in, I want to say how much I loved your book, Lighter.

Diego: Thank you.

Damali: Yeah, I really thought the book offered us a gift. So, thank you for that. All right, so the first thing that I really want to ask you is how are you doing tonight? How is your heart?

Diego: Thank you for asking. I feel…I feel a little like stunned. So, I found out, I think two days ago, that my book was a number one New York Times bestseller [Clapping and cheering from audience] [Diego laughs] and it was totally unexpected. I didn't personally see it coming. I knew it was going to do well, people were going to buy it, but I didn't think it was going to be that many people. So, I feel happy, but at the same time, it's like, it's going to take me a few days to process it. But I'm really happy that my mom and dad are super pumped. They're thrilled. [All laugh] And yeah, I feel good.

Damali: Good. I'm really glad to hear that. I have, like I said, many, many questions

for you. So, I'm just going to dive in. [Diego: Sure.] I'm just going to dive in. You know, in the book, you talked about, you started out talking about your experiences with the 10-day silent meditation retreats and I had a friend say to me, I could not be silent for 10 whole days. That's not possible and I really wondered, you know, what did that feel like in that, like, especially the first couple days? What got you through that 10-day experience?

Diego: The first one was brutally difficult. Like, no lie. I remember I did the first one, it was July of 2012, and I had never done anything like that before. I think I had meditated once for like 20 minutes and I didn't know what I was doing. I was just like my wife and I, we just sat on the ground. We closed our eyes, you know, the timer and then it was like, nothing happened, you know. But then we decided to do this 10-day course because our friend Sam, after he did his 10-day course, he wrote us this email and it was so different from anything else that he had said to me before and this was someone that I had partied a ton with, like, you know, spent so much time just doing silly things and now he was writing to me about love, compassion, and goodwill [laughs] and I was like, what? I was like, what happened? [Damali laughs]

So that was like the motivation was like, whatever happened to him, I need that, whatever it is. So, I went into it just not knowing what it was about. It was really hard. Like, I literally couldn't sit still. I was often, you know, like, walking out of the meditation hall, and walking back in and just feeling so much tension and it was actually because the practice was working and it wasn't until like day eight, where I kind of settled down.

But after it was done, I knew that something had really changed, you know, like that, that my mind felt better than ever before, I really felt that my mind felt lighter. It was enough, you know, like, sort of enough deconditioning happens that I knew that I needed to go back because I didn't understand it. I didn't really, you know, deeply appreciate the practice yet. So, I signed up for another one in September of 2012 and then over time, I kept doing them and I still do them now. But they're just so super powerful.

Damali: Yeah, and I feel like in the book, you credited that practice in particular for

healing, for supporting your healing journey as one tool and it really, you know, left me thinking, it sounds like something that, a practice that could be available to many people and I wonder, why do you think it's so important to have a practice? Why do you think it's so important to begin a healing journey?

Diego: I think it's one of the best ways that we can invest in ourselves. I feel like all of us who are here, really all of us who are alive in the planet right now, like we live in a really special time, a very difficult time, but also a time that's historically unprecedented, where you have all these different modalities from, you know, the Eastern world, the Western world, Indigenous practices, you just have so much available to you that can actually create a tangible difference in your mind and heart and, you know, so whether your thing is like, meditating or whether it's therapy, there are a lot of different avenues that you can use to heal yourself. So, why not do it?

Like, even if you haven’t experienced very serious trauma, there's something important to realize where every time you have a strong reaction, every time you have a strong reaction of anger, or sadness, or jealousy, or whatever it is that you're feeling very strongly, it imprints itself onto the mind, and it predisposes you to feeling that again and again. So, when you realize that your mind is slowly accumulating, slowly getting knotted up, it actually limits your future. It actually creates a situation where you're repeating the past over and over again. So, if you want to live a more expansive present and future, then it calls for some deconditioning work, which is basically healing yourself.

Damali: Yeah, thank you. And with that, it brings me to a question about reactivity. I mean, I can’t tell you, so often I hear people say, this person made me do this, this person made me angry, this person, you know, it's like a lot of finger pointing, [Diego: Mhm.] and I think that often leads to a lot of reactions, you know? But I think you state really kind of, you know, I think, thankfully, I'm glad you state this, but I'd love you to expound on it here that we're responsible for how we react. That, you know, there's no one making us do anything, and this is me paraphrasing, but you know, you point to responsibility. So, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about the reactivity that arises, but also our responsibility in that.

Diego: Yeah, I think it's really, it's an unpopular truth, right? It would be a lot easier if we could just point and say, you know, it's because of you, this is how I feel. And to a certain degree, that's true, but you also have to realize that your perception and your reaction is happening in your own mind. So even if someone says something offensive to you, does something, you know, egregious towards you, like that doesn't take away from the action. Like what they did is totally wrong, right? But at the same time, what's happening in the mind, it's you, it's your mind replaying that situation over and over again in a way where it's increasing that heaviness and when we want to reclaim our power, we're not actually reclaiming our power from someone else, we're reclaiming our power from these blind habit patterns that are happening in our minds, where we're just like, so quick to anger, so quick to sadness or anxiety. It just happens before we even realize that we have a choice. But when you start taking the healing seriously, it slows things down where you can start seeing more options that you didn't quite see before, and I think that's the really empowering piece.

Damali: Yeah and I mean, I was just having a conversation today with someone that really feels connected to this in that they were trying to understand why someone says something to them in this way and you know, that this whole piece and it brought back to me like, well, no matter what that person said, you have something that you, a way that you can react and respond and so thank you for that. It does also connect, I think, to self-love, [Diego: Totally. Yeah.] and you talk a lot about self-love in the book, right? [Diego: Yeah.] And in the best way, because I think a lot of us are still figuring that out. Self-love. How do you think self-love plays into the way that we respond, especially when we're triggered?

Diego: Yeah, I think it's interesting because self-love is this sort of amorphous, like personalized situation for yourself. Like the way that you love yourself is not going to be the way that you love yourself. It's going to be very dependent on you engaging with your emotional history and trying to find out like, what is it that I need to do to heal myself and free myself? Like, that's what I think of self-love. Like, self-love is a very internal dynamic. It's not you buying yourself more stuff. You know, it's not that sort of more mainstream idea of self-love. When I think of self-love, it opens you up to yourself. It helps you navigate your own inner universe and when you are taking a look inward, what you end up finding often is that the thing that's causing your struggle in your mind is actually your own reaction. Like the thing that's making you say things that you later regret or the thing that's making you do things and you're like, ah, but it's this, this literally this past that's appearing over and over again through your reactions and I think self-love is you turning around, turning that lens inward, looking inward and just starting to see like, oh, there are things that I need to address in here and even if I need to change something, ultimately I have to accept it all. Like I have to really deeply just accept the way I am, the good and the rough, like accept all of it and then still have that self-love energy motivate you into cultivating the qualities of mind that could make your life better.

Damali: Thank you and just digging in on that just a little bit more, because I do think many of us struggle with the idea of self-love because we think of being self-centered and I can just give an example as a parent, when my children were born, I thought that I had to love them more and pour all the love into them and if I did things for me, it was selfish. If I prioritize me, it felt selfish and I have been conditioned when you use the word conditioned, it's like, I've been conditioned into that and so I really found myself struggling with self-love because I thought my job was to do this thing. Now I'm realizing if I love me and really prioritize me, then I am available to love more to my children, my community. So, could you just talk a little bit more about that distinction between self-love and the perception that we're doing something self-centered?

Diego: I think it's funny because I find that in myself and just like what I observe in the human condition is that we generally sway from extreme to extreme, right? We're like, we'll either become too self-focused or we'll become too sort of like just trying to please people and do what the people around us want us to do. But I think real self-love has a few caveats, right? It's meant to be a balancer. It's meant to be a rejuvenating thing and nourishing so that you can better show up for yourself and for the people around you that you really love, the people that you work with, your friends, your family, your intimate partners. Like if there's no self-love, if there's no, and I'm talking active self-love, like you literally doing the things that will help nourish you and free you, then it's going to create a situation where your relationship is no longer rejuvenating. You know, it's no longer like that connection isn't fully there because the connection inside of you isn't fully there. So, in a, I think in a lot of ways like, self-love is the missing piece for all of us. Like it helps us gain that energy to just embrace our evolution and to just show up in daily life. So, without it, I mean, it's not, I don't think it's selfish at all. I think it's actually just critical and necessary and to each one of us, we have to figure out what it really means to us.

Damali: Yeah, and I mean, as we're saying self-love and healing feel very connected. Like it feels like they're together really. [Diego: Totally, totally.] Companions and when I think about healing, I want to dig in just a little bit more on healing and I want to ask, do you think there's anything that cannot be healed or anyone that cannot be, do you think there's anything beyond, you know, repair or healing?

Diego: Oh, that's an interesting question. Well, nothing can be forgotten, right? Like there's things that can't be forgotten, but our reaction to what we remember can definitely change. The mind is incredibly malleable. What matters is what you put into it and what you really allow it to do. But no, I think healing is possible as long as the individual is willing to try and not just try, but to try again and again. Because if you think about it, the reactive patterns of our minds, they've been happening our entire lives. Like since you were a baby, like over and over and over and over countless reactions and they've built up over time. So, when a lot of people, you know, they enter their healing journeys, they expect these like bountiful and immediate results that just are life changing, you know, with five minutes of meditation. But like, that's not going to cut it, right? You got to like, there may be something there, but you got to keep going at it. Because if you want to develop the quality of presence, then you have to build it up like a muscle. You know, like when I think of meditating, like meditating is literally a

mental gym. Like when I go to retreats, it's like, okay, I'm going to go work out my mind for 30 days and I'm building the qualities of self-awareness, I'm building the quality of equanimity and generally just that sort of ability to slow down and move intentionally.

Damali: Yeah. I mean, I've had teachers say it's a lifelong journey, it's continually unfolding. Would you agree with that?

Diego: Oh, totally. I think it's, I think it's totally, and it depends on the path that you walk, right? So, there's, there's healing, where I think of healing as, you know that the healing has been real, if you're able to decrease the intensity of the reaction. So, if you realize that you've been able to respond to a situation with a little less anger, then that's a lot of healing has happened there. If you're able to, like, deal with a situation with a little less mental turbulence than normal, then that's, that's powerful. That's progress.

But then there's also, I think, liberation. So, in terms of like, an actual spiritual path, like for me personally, like meditation, the Vipassana meditation that I'm a part of, the, you know, the retreats that I go to, I went to them for healing. But over time, as I started understanding the Buddha's teaching more and more, it opened me up to the possibility of liberation and I thought that was just a wonderful opportunity, you know, and liberation is a very long path. But what it basically offers you is this opportunity to end suffering, like to literally to, to come out of suffering as, as a whole and I think that's just so, it's difficult to do, but it's possible and in a lot of ways, I think of healing and liberation moving alongside each other for a long time, they'll like, do that similar work, but liberation itself, it just takes itself to a whole, you know, further step, like we're talking like, you know, Jesus and the Buddha and I think every single individual has that capacity, but it takes a lot of work. So that's why I wrote Lighter because it's very difficult to become enlightened, but it's totally possible to make your mind lighter.

Damali: Thank you and, you know, your mention of liberation made me actually think about activism as well, and made me think about our activists, you know, we are in a world where there's a lot happening, and we have a lot of activism and engaged folks and so I wanted to ask you a little bit about activism for just a moment. I think in our culture, activists sometimes get criticism, you know, and I think though, that it takes a lot of courage, and it takes a lot of power and commitment to be an activist and as someone who was an activist, can you just tell us what was the best part of that? What was the best part of being an activist?

Diego: The best part is, we were talking about this a little bit backstage. I think the best part is encountering a real life situation, and then coming together with a group of people and even if it's like 15, 20, or 90 people, and you look at the situation, and you're like, we're going to change that and then you actually do, you know, you actually change the material conditions of that moment, or whatever it is that's happening in your city, or your school, or your nation, whatever it is and I've, so I've been in the, I started off in the activism organizing world when I was about, like I just turned 15 and that was, I think, some of the most like, formative experiences that I've had in my life was just realizing that you can come around a common cause, and you can actually change what's in front of you and I found it so nourishing and powerful.

But I knew that, like, I was part of a group that was called Boston Youth Organizing Project, and we would win, like we would win a lot. Like we made a lot of changes in Boston. But still, the sadness and anxiety in my mind were still there, right? That, like, tension in my mind was still there and it wasn't until when I turned 24, and I started meditating, that I started seeing, I was like, oh, I was like, liberation doesn't just have an external dynamic, right? It's, it's, it can, we can create a situation where life allows all of us to flourish, like all individuals, no matter where you come from. So that, to me, that's what I think of as external liberation.

But there's an internal dynamic to it, where I can free my mind, like I can heal myself so that I no longer carry this mental weight anymore and I think it's, you know, we're fortunate that we live in a time where, you know, there's, there's obviously a lot of work that we have to do to make the world a better place. Like this century that we live in has some daunting challenges. But at the same time, there's this healing generation emerging, and a healing generation that all of us are a part of, like all of us, no matter how, you know, whatever your age may be, if you're a baby, or if you're 99 years old, like, we all have access to therapy, to meditation, to just different forms, different modalities that can actually make a tangible change in your mind and I think that's what's going to create this, like, next wave of organizers and activists that are going to help, it's going to help them be more creative and be able to look at old problems in new ways, and to just be able to imagine different structures that we can live in different, more compassionate structures and I think sometimes activists get a bad rep, but I'm glad that people even have the courage to want to change the world, because now that we can combine that with healing, it's going to make it way more powerful.

Damali: Yeah, me too and you know, we again, we're talking backstage and I did ask, and I want to ask again, just a little bit more about the activists, where, you know, we see the rage, we see the burnout, we see the overwhelm. I think there's this mix, because activists, I think, just go hard. I mean, there's so much energy devoted to the change. So why do you think, and do you think it's imperative or important for this group in particular, to lean into self-care and to healing?

Diego: There's this thing, so besides meditating a lot, I also really like studying history and there's this thing that you see repeatedly happen in history, where there are groups of people who want to change the world and sometimes they win, sometimes they gain power and what often ends up happening is that the power that they gain functions like a magnet on the ego that literally pulls out the roughest parts of the ego and you give it a few years, and what ends up happening is they recreate the social ills that they were once fighting against and you see that happen over and over.

One of my favorite examples is the French Revolution. There's this guy, Robespierre, who was so great, so many people loved him and then him and his group of people gained power, and they started slaughtering people. They slaughtered, I think it was around 10,000 people. It was called the Red Terrors. I forget the exact name of it. But it was horrible.

But can you imagine what the potential is there to be able to take ideals that are great ideals, to make the world more compassionate, to make the world, just to support those conditions for human flourishing, for human dignity. But if you can support a person through that by giving them the tools to help heal themselves, I think that creates the situation where when power does come, when situations do change, the magnet of power won't have that much roughness to grab on when it shines on the ego and I just think that, yeah, that's what gives me hope over and over, because the world is, it's hard to have hope oftentimes. It's hard to have hope.

But knowing that millions and millions and millions of people are actively healing themselves, that literally opens the door for peace and that self-love that we were talking about earlier, like when people truly increase their self-love, that's not just for them. It opens the door ever so slightly to unconditional love for all beings, even if it's not perfect. But there's more compassion there to look upon another human being and be like, oh, I have no interest in hurting them. I have no interest in hurting them and as more and more people feel that, I think it's going to create just a massive wave of change.

Damali: Yeah, thank you. I mean, your book, I just felt was such a beautiful ode to the

individual and to the collective, you know, and that I think moving between individual, collective, you did that masterfully in the book. [Diego: Thank you.] So, I just really am so grateful. So, in the book, you also quoted someone who said, a change in one is [Diego: …a change in millions.] I think I got that in what you just said, that when we change us, it's like a ripple out. It kind of reminds me that if I do my inner work, I will contribute to a better world and, you know, do you agree with that?

Diego: Oh, totally. Totally and different people have different capacities, right? I think oftentimes, we feel like we should all be doing the same, like we should all be doing the same amount of work or the same amount of like, you know, if I'm fighting for these particular rights for these people, that everyone should be doing the same amount of things. It's like, no, we all have different interests. We all have different ways of showing up for the world and if your capacity is such that all you can handle is to deal with your own mental health, that's a ton. That's a ton. That's more than what a lot of other people are doing. You know, to be able to really deal with your mental health or mental illness, whatever it is you're going through, that is going to create a more harmonious environment inside of you and around you and to be able to, like when I think of humanity, I think about it as a web of points, right, and if there are just more and more points in this web that we all share, where harm is not allowed to enter, right. Where I'm not going to harm you, you're not going to harm me and if someone may harm me, I have the tools to process that harm so that it doesn't weigh me down for the rest of my life and I don't pass it on to other people. I think being able to enhance that web that we all share and just create it, just make it more peaceful than it already is, it's like, oof, that's huge.

Damali: Yeah, thank you for making that point about the fact that just doing the best you can for you contributes to a more harmonious collective so that you might not be an activist…

Diego: Totally and then there are going to be other people who can heal themselves and they can be a part of multiple campaigns and they can, you know, and great, thank you for your energy, but not everybody has that type of energy.

Damali: Right. Yeah. Yeah, thank you for that. I do want to go back to like the individual experience, you know, the self-love, this healing journey and pick out a couple pieces to ask you about.

Attachment, I think change, the fear of change and our clinging to things, right? So, I confess that I am struggling often with attachment. When something changes abruptly in particular, I can feel really destabilized and like, oh, I don't like that feeling. Right? I have a hard time. But I know I'm not alone. Why do you think so many people struggle with change?

Diego: Yeah, we all struggle with it. I think it's because the mind is geared towards survival first. I think that's like, the predominant mode of the mind is like, I'm a hunter gatherer. How can I make it from here to there? Right. Like, from today to tomorrow. So, when you think about that mode of survival, this is why survival tendencies wrap themselves around trauma, because it's like, I need safety, right? I need to survive. But the thing about survival mentality and the ego love survival, like that's the purpose of the ego, the ego formulates a sense of I so that you can figure out how I get from here to there.

But we don't live in that type of society anymore. We live in such a complex, robust and sometimes abundant society. But if we want to really be happy, if we want to live better lives, we need to figure out how to cultivate our minds in a way where we're not living from a place of ego. Instead, we're living from a place of compassion, compassion for ourselves and compassion for other people. But when you think about what's keeping the ego together, it's just a massive series of attachments. It's like, I'm, you know, I'm Diego and I love Sarah and my mom is so and so, and it's like all these things that I just want to continue existing and every time I think of ego, it's like my hand goes like this. It's like I'm clinging grabbing something, you know, but that attachment, it can be soothed, it can be overcome, it can be sort of, you know, instead of having this like, gripped hand, you can live with a more open hand, and I think it's, it's possible, but it takes work.

Damali: It takes work. I think that's an understatement. Thank you. There's something that you said about the path to security being found in letting go. There's something along those lines and I thought to myself, it felt counterintuitive. It doesn't feel like what I'm processing. I'm like, really? Like, I can feel more secure by letting go? But I'd love to hear, like, what you intend with that thought around letting go actually gives us, I think, a little bit more security, I’m curious.

Diego: I think that's a great question. I think it's something that I find repeatedly in my own life. When I really want something to happen, my energy just gets so knotted up. Like, I just be like, I can feel how I'm full of blocks, right? Like, this like attachment to wanting something to happen. It makes a tangible difference and it makes it a lot harder for things to flow to you, with more ease, and it also makes it a lot harder for you to be able to see the difference between an attachment and a goal and that's something that I like to always point out, is that we live in a world where, I don't know if there are any monks here, but none of us are monks, right? We all have lives, we have jobs, we have families, people we love, and it's fine for us to have desires. That's one thing that I find that was tough about the introduction of the Buddhist teaching and a lot of Eastern teachings into the Western world, was that they refer to desire as a source of suffering, as a source of misery. But the way that our teacher, S. N. Goenka, the one who teaches the meditative Vipassana courses, talks about it as craving, right? Craving being the source of misery and those are two very different things, like desire and craving.

Craving has tension wrapped around in it. Craving is like, if you don't get what you crave, not only in the pursuit of trying to get what you crave, you're already so tense the whole time, and then when you don't get it, you are so upset. You're just rolling in the turbulence in your mind, and it's lasting for hours, and it's very different from having a goal, right? Having something that you're like, oh, I really want to achieve this, and let me keep trying. Let me figure out a good way to do this and then when you don't get what you want, you're like, okay, wow, I didn't get what I want, but let me go back to the drawing board. Let me sort of strategize a little more and figure out how I can do things better so I can keep working towards what I want to develop or what I want to happen, and it was funny because that was one of the first questions that I asked my first Vipassana teacher. I was like, wasn't the Buddha craving enlightenment? He was like, no. He was like, there's a huge difference between a craving and a goal. Like the Buddha, he realized multiple times over and over that he wasn't enlightened, and that he needed to figure out a better way to meditate, and eventually got what he was seeking.

Damali: Wow, I love the distinction between the craving and the desire and then the goal. I love that, thank you. I think, thinking again about the individual and our work, feelings, I think, are something that we're always working through as well and you said in the book that you can feel it without becoming it and I really thought that was huge. Like for me, it was a huge like, oh. Because I think there's two sides to this, that people are often avoiding feelings. It's too hard sometimes to feel. And then on the other side, they attach to the feeling. I am angry, I am sad, I am, I am, I am. There's a lot of those and I wondered, it sounds like you're saying, both are good, feel, please feel. But don't become the feeling. And I would love to hear you just talk a little bit more about that.

Diego: Yeah, I think that's like the skill. Like, the skill and I intentionally mentioned it multiple times in Lighter because I wanted to just hit it in like, as many different ways. Like can I talk about it as a fire? Can I talk about it as like, in so many different metaphors? But I think a lot of people that, not just meditators, but people who turn that lens inward, whether you're working with a therapist or whatever it is that you're doing, where you're really trying to understand yourself better, what you end up finding is that over time it creates more space in the mind. Like you being aware of your mental movements, it allows this spaciousness so that you can essentially encounter the different emotions, see them fluctuate, and simultaneously be with them without letting them take control, or without feeding them and letting them, you know, take over your actions and run away with your thoughts and to the point where you wake up in the morning and you're like, oh wow, like, you know, I don't feel great today and that's fine.

You know, I'm gonna be gentle towards myself today. I'm going to, you know, not demand myself to, you know, check off so many things off the list. I'm just gonna take it a little easier today. I'm gonna let the people around me know, like, you know, like if I ever feel like that, I let my wife know right in the morning. I'm just like, oh, I don't feel that good and then it's like, great, I know and she knows and you know, and if it's the reverse, like we figure out ways to support each other, but being able to just acknowledge and let yourself feel like, okay, I don't feel great, but now let me just be with it and walk with it because it's just another impermanent thing. It's another thing that's gonna change and then when you don't find yourself feeding that fire, it actually burns away a lot faster.

Damali: Yeah. Thank you and I mean, I noted the difference in language. I am angry is very different than anger has come up. Yeah. I am anxious and it is very different than, I have a lot of anxiety moving through me and why do you think it's important to name those things in those very kind of very distinct ways that you share in the book?

Diego: I think it's more truthful, right? It's easier to realize that like, it's all a changing situation. Everything that's happening inside of you, all of these emotions that you're feeling, they're constantly changing. You can spend one day and you can feel anger that day. You can feel jealousy that day. You can feel like all these, like, you know, this, we have this huge spectrum of emotions and when you start relating to your emotions in a way where they're just another changing situation, I think it's become so, it just becomes so, so helpful.

So, like one practice that was sort of built out of that was my wife and I, we realized that we need to communicate better about how we feel. So, when we wake up in the morning, and a few times throughout the day, we just let each other know, like, this is how I feel. You know, this is what's happening inside me and being able to name it, like for yourself, that's like a huge bonus. Like you're like, oh, I'm acknowledging like, okay, there's this like, you know, sort of like heavy mind moving through me, this tiredness moving through me, or like I feel short tempered today and being able to say it in a way where it's like, it's temporary, it's not who I am. Like I am not sadness, right? Sadness is just moving through me. It makes it so helpful so that both people know or whomever you're in proximity towards, when you're both aware, it makes it a lot easier to not fall into the trap of like unnecessary arguments.

Because so many times, emotions, if you don't pay attention to what's happening in your mind, then it's very easy for your mind to just like, whisk you away into these like, illogical arguments and it's so funny, because I see that happening in myself. It's like, sometimes I'll be upset and I'll try to figure out how it's my wife's fault [Diego, Damali, and audience laugh] and it's not her fault at all and this happens to the both of us like, repeatedly, but now it's just helpful to be like, oh, like this is how I'm feeling and like in a lot of times, it's not that deep and then this is something that as people who are actively healing themselves, realize that, you know, the things that happened to your childhood, like it's really important to understand like where your dynamics are coming from, but it's also very easy to become way too focused on the past and it's really valuable to realize that your healing is actually happening in the present moment with how you relate to how you're feeling in that moment.

So, if you get too stuck on the past, and you're like, oh, like I feel this way because you know, this specific thing happened with my mom back in the, you know, when I was a child, like that may be so, but some days you don't feel good and you're short tempered because you had six hours of sleep instead of eight hours of sleep. You know, like sometimes it's just not that deep. [audience laughs] But what matters is the opportunity of healing is still there, right? It's still available to you because you still have, okay, I have this tense situation inside of me, but how am I gonna show up for it? How am I gonna deal with it? and you can still sort of like burn away whatever emotion is coming up by just giving it the space that it needs without becoming it.

Damali: Yeah, I love that. I love the entire book, but anyway. I wanna talk a little bit about your relationship with your wife, Sarah. [Diego: Sure.] and you know, you do talk about, and I know friends of mine and I talk about the, you complete the narrative, you know, oh, I met you and I found myself kind of stuff that we get taught and the conditioning and the deconditioning that needs to happen is so evident and I love the way that you wrote about that in the book and so I wanna ask you, you know, in particular in your relationship with your wife, you know, this idea that you're on a journey, a healing journey, she's on a healing journey, and then there's the relationship So it feels like there's almost three components at work.

Diego: Yeah, exactly.

Damali: Tell us a little bit about that and how you found that.

Diego: It became clear over time. So, like a little backstory, right? My wife and I first got together when she was 18 and I was 19 and it was a mess. [Diego, Damali, and audience laugh] Like it was the first like six years of our relationship. It was rough because like I didn't know myself, she didn't know herself. We were just like figuring it out. Like it was clear that there was a strong connection between the two of us, but there was nothing to hold the connection. Like there was no, like if you added up our emotional maturity, it would equal zero, you know? [laughter]

Like, and the change came, you know, and it was funny too because a lot of times in that six-year period, like there were so many times where we almost didn't make it. Times where we actually even like, broke up temporarily and then got back together, but it was rough and if it weren't for us starting to meditate and do our separate individual work, what slowly started happening was that harmony started manifesting within ourselves as individuals and we started building the quality, probably the most critical quality that was missing in the both of us was self-awareness. Like I couldn't, like I didn't see myself. I couldn't see myself and when I started to see myself, I was like, oh, like I'm being an idiot.

Like, and over time we were able to, like when we had disagreements, we were able to just slow it down, to calm it down because we used to like, really get into it, and have these crazy fights. Both of us were trying to win and that was like the big change, right? Was like we were constantly trying to win and what's funny now, when I think about what we were doing in the past, like we were both vying for domination. Like, ‘cause what is winning? Like winning is like, I win, you lose and because we were both trying to win, like the fights would just last so long and they'd be exhausting, and they would drag out for days. But over time we realized that it's not about winning.

It's about understanding each other and there's something beautiful, like Thich Nhat Hanh talks about understanding as a form of love and I really understand why now, because when we change the situation between the two of us so that when we would have arguments, it's like, okay, I wanna hear what you're feeling. Like, I wanna hear your perspective and I'm gonna do my best to listen to it selflessly. Like, I just wanna hear what's happening to you and like what your story is and then when she tells her story, then I tell my story and like that, we take turns to just do our best to understand each other and it's funny because the moment when we understand each other, like the energy of the argument just fizzles out and we can just be like, oh, okay, it's done. But I think it was a slow build, and like we're not perfect at all. Like we're working on it, but it's been a beautiful journey just like having calmer fights. It's like the best thing. [Damali: It sounds like not trying to win.] No, yeah, nobody's trying to win anymore. Yeah, we both win now.

Damali: Yeah, and Thich Nhat Hanh, he has a talk about the four elements of love that I listened to, and he does talk about understanding and he's such a beautiful teacher. I just wanna take a moment to bring him into the space.

Diego: Yeah.

Damali: Emotional maturity, you mentioned it in that, you know, in that stream of thought that you just shared. I think it is a phenomenal gift, emotional maturity. You know, in your book, you outline and you kind of go into detail about what that looks like and the elements of emotional maturity. Can you just share a little bit more about emotional maturity and why it's so key, especially in relationships?

Diego: I think you get to see the emotional maturity in relationships, right? There are moments where, like building off of what we were talking about earlier, right? When you're feeling some sort of heavy emotion or another, and you realize it, you give it the space it needs, and then you give it the time. Like you don't know how long it'll be there, but you're intentionally not trying to feed it. When you do that, you're actually creating a situation where you're no longer going to project that onto another person and I think that's like the crux of emotional maturity, is like, I feel heavy right now, but I'm not gonna throw this on you and when you're able to do that for the people around you, oh, your relationships are gonna flourish. Like you're gonna be able to go so much deeper with each other and I think like, it takes time, right? It takes skill, but it's absolutely possible because the same way it was possible for us to like roll in anger and roll in sadness, it's also possible for us to like, stand up in our emotional maturity, but it takes repetition. Like I really think that in a lot of ways, healing is repetition and that's where our emotional maturity comes from, yeah.

Damali: Thank you. Another relationship that you share about in the book was the relationship with your dad and how that changed and for any of us who have ever had the struggles with challenged parental relationships, I thought it was like a beam of hope for those of us. So, I wanted to just talk a little bit about that because what I got from it was that he didn't change. Your perception of him changed and his story changed, which made it really powerful for me because you weren't asking him to be different. [Diego: No, yeah.] You were different and the relationship changed. Can you say some more about that story? Maybe retell a little bit of it and how it changed.

Diego: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for seeing me so clearly there. So, I was born in Ecuador, in Guayaquil, and my family came here when I was about four years old and when we got to the United States, it was just so difficult. My mom worked cleaning houses. My dad worked at a supermarket and for years, like for more than like two decades, like we were stuck in a poverty trap where we were just like my brother and I, in the household, we constantly saw how my parents were struggling to pay rent. They were struggling to figure out how they were gonna gather money for groceries and we would see this repeatedly, like month after month. What was hard about it was that like, I always knew that my dad, especially like he loves us, like he loves us so much. But the way he shows his love is in a very like old school manner, provider.

You know, like I'm gonna give you the things that you need to live. But he wasn't very vocal about his emotions. He wasn't very, you know, like hug you and tell you you're doing a great job type person and when I started meditating, I realized that my relationship with my dad and with my mom, I mean, really like everybody around me, all the relationships were stuck, and they were superficial. So, what I sort of challenged myself to do was like, I'm like, I'm so grateful to my dad, like so, so grateful. Like it was his idea for us to come here and we were lucky enough that it actually worked out. You know, like coming to the United States is a huge risk and it doesn't work out for everybody. I've seen it not work out for a lot of people.

The example I like to give is that when I was going to high school in the Boston Public Schools, if you were a Latino, if you were Latinx, you had a 50% chance of graduating high school. Like 50%, that means like people were dropping like flies. So, there was a lot of people that came to the United States, and it did not work out. But my family was, we were lucky. It did work out and when I started meditating, I started looking at my dad in a different way where it was like, I saw that our relationship was just like in this monotonous repetition, and I realized that I wanted to show him the love that I had for him.

So, there was this one particular day that I remember where my dad comes home from work and I just like, give him a big hug. I totally catch him off guard, you know, like give him a big hug and I think over time, I was just like hugging him more often, telling him that I love him, and he softened up. It was really interesting to see and now he's like a very different person. Like he, you know, like my dad, like he hasn't gone to see a therapist. He doesn't meditate. But I think something about the space changing and like me being more open with my mom, being more loving with my dad, it just like the space was a little safer. So, his vulnerability started coming forward and I started learning much more about him. He started vocalizing how much he loved all of us and I'm really grateful to my past self for having that courage because if not, I think we would just have had that same stale relationship where like, it was clear that we loved each other, but nobody was vocalizing it.

Damali: Yeah, I'm so glad. That's a beautiful story. [Diego: Thank you.] Yeah, yeah. I wanna ask one last relationship-esque question and this is for the people who struggle with forgiveness in particular. I think forgiveness can be challenging depending on how we feel, what's happened, and if someone hurt us, and I heard you in the book, I read in the book, where you talk a lot about violence and you talk a lot about boundaries and so I wanna ask that question. There's a thing that you say about building boundaries is different than building a wall and I think that people perceive if I forgive, people will just walk all over me, and I wonder how you think boundaries plays into forgiving and then if you could just say what you mean when you say boundaries is different than building a wall.

Diego: That's a great question. I think our boundaries go back to the root, right? They emerge from your ability to love yourself and I think like, what you said is so exact. People think that if they show kindness, they show compassion, they show forgiveness, that people are just gonna walk all over them. There are so many people who are afraid to give because that same person doesn't give back to you in the same manner. But what's important to really understand is that especially with boundaries, they're useful. Like you use them to build the life that you want to live, to a life where you can intentionally like, design a space for yourself that isn't full of people that aren't gonna like, just be like, ravenous and upset with you and like, there are totally some people that, yeah, you do need to keep away from.

Like boundaries are not something to end all problems. I think that's what some people kind of wish for boundaries. Like you're not gonna get out of all difficult situations. Like that's just not possible. Because there's so much that none of us control, right? We can't really control each other. We can only control ourselves. But there's this difference because when you build a wall, and I think that's what a lot of us do, is that we build these walls because like, either someone is too tough to deal with, or something inside of us is too tough to deal with. So, it's like, we just, we can't, you know, and we're gonna fortify and build that wall and we're just gonna turn our backs on it and keep moving forward.

But the thing about boundaries is that they're flexible. Like you may have a particular boundary in a moment, like with workmates or with your boss or with whomever, right, whatever it is that you're building up in the moment. But that boundary, you may not need it a year from now. You may not, you know, because there, you have the choice of deciding what you're going to heal in the moment and sometimes you may have so much to heal that it makes sense to only deal with a particular part of your story and all of it and I think people like, like a lot of people, like the term spiritual bypassing, it's become so kind of like, it's become so intense where it's like, yeah, you're supposed to like accept everything at once and it's like, what if everything is too much to accept at once? You know, there's like so much going on. There's so much going on.

So, if you're a person who's dealt with so much trauma or, you know, there's so many mental health issues, then of course, like you're gonna want to like, deal with certain things at once and then deal with things later as you're building your strength. So don't ever feel like you're like, oh, if you're a spiritual person, you have to like, be 100% accepting of yourself 24/7. It's like, make sure that your healing is sustainable because it's easy to bring up too many things at once. Like if you bring up too many things at once and you kind of scare yourself and you're like, whoa, I don't even want to see what else is in there and you just stop your journey, then that's obviously not good because you want to put time into it.

So, I find that we need to be really, just really aware that it's fine to build boundaries. It's helpful to build boundaries, like intentionally design your life, running away from something for the rest of your life. Like that's building a wall and that's obviously not gonna be helpful, but it's your choice about when you wanna deal with something. So yeah, do it in a way that's sustainable for you.

Damali: Thank you and I have one final question.

Diego: Oh, sure.

Damali: Because I want people to know that this book also offers a lot of ideas about our collective good, about what might be possible beyond what we're currently experiencing. And so, you have this idea in there about social media and platforms and things that could be designed with the user's wellbeing in mind, and I really didn't want us to close out without talking about the new world we can imagine together and if you could just say a few words about that.

Diego: I love that we're talking about this in San Francisco. [audience laughs] Like, I don't know if y'all realize, but you have like, you’ve built the world. [Damali and audience laugh] Like it's strange, you know? Like oftentimes, like I lived in New York City for seven years and like New York City, like we think we're like the capital of the world. But in a huge way, like y'all built the internet. [audience laughs] And it has its like, great things about it, of course, but we're starting to realize that there are massive problems with the way that we've constructed the internet.

One thing that sort of, kind of like honestly, it frightens me a little bit is how there are so many companies now that are like multi-billion dollar companies, even trillion dollar companies that are, like they have so much research that they've created to design their algorithms and these algorithms are pointed to our heads and they're just deeply, deeply enhancing our craving. They're making us not like the way we look at ourselves, the way we see ourselves. They're making us want things that we actually don't need at all. They're even making us think people are our enemies when they're not. Or like there's just so much misinformation happening.

So, there's this sort of struggle between tech and the human mind where tech has become so powerful that it's literally quietly making you think things that you're not even realizing you're thinking and what I've seen from it is that there has to be another way and this happens often, right? This happens like where new technologies will emerge and they become really powerful really quickly and there needs to be like, something that creates a balance.

And myself, Jack Kornfield, my friend Soren, who, he created this wonderful conference called Wisdom 2.0, another friend Bradley Horowitz, who, he led the team that developed Gmail, and our two friends Ruchika and Cecily. Ruchika, she led the wellbeing and learning department at Google and Cecily is this like, powerhouse lawyer who's also the COO of this huge crypto firm. We decided to create this company called Wisdom Ventures because we realized that the internet is like, has become this almost like, hostile environment and we need to put funding into companies that are going to do exactly what you said, that they're going to design whatever their product may be to design it in a compassionate manner, to design it in a way where yes, you will get to like have your fun or get the product that you're looking for, but it's not something that's gonna have shady stuff in the background where it's like, doing bad things to your information or making you have more craving than you already have. So yeah, we started working on Wisdom Ventures and trying to find companies, whether they're wellness companies or whether they're just like, new forms of social media, like just whatever we have now, we're trying to just develop the next decade of it in a much more humanistic manner. Like the type of companies that are just gonna support our mental wellbeing. So, I'm pretty excited about that.

Damali: Me too. Thank you so much for that. I know we're imagining a better world right now as we speak, so thank you. So, we have one last question, this is a big one. Do you consider yourself to be fully healed?

Diego: Oh, that's a good question. [Damali laughs] No, no, I got a lot of issues. [Diego, Damali, and audience laugh] Yeah, no, I'm definitely in the midst of the journey. When I felt like I should start writing, I felt that even though you know you're not fully healed, you know you're not fully wise, you know you have a long way to go, just start writing. Just start writing, like start writing, start reflecting on what you're learning on, and hopefully other people may be inspired to take their own healing seriously, to know that healing is even possible and that was like my initial motivation and it continues to be my motivation. But no, I feel like I definitely appreciate how far I've come. Like when, like my old life, before I started meditating, it feels like a second life. Like, it feels like a different life and the way I am now has changed substantially, but I still have, like there's so much more that I can learn, so much more that I can let go of.

Damali: Hmm, well thank you for that and thank you for that honesty, right?

Diego: Yeah, for sure.

Damali: It's like a beautiful quality and thank you all for being here tonight. It has been my pleasure to be here and to have Diego here.

Diego: Thank you.

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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