How To Achieve Inner Peace. No, Really. | Yung Pueblo

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Inner peace is one of the great contemplative cliches. It's on the Mount Rushmore of spiritual cliches. But if you can look past all the violence that has been done to the concept through rogue repetition often in very cheesy ways, I mean, who would not want inner peace? Some sort of reduction in the mental churn that dominates so much of so many of our lives. But then the question becomes, how do you actually get inner peace? And that is what we're gonna talk about today with my guest, Diego Perez, who is a best selling author who is widely known by his pen name, Young Pueblo. Diego has sold nearly 2,000,000 books worldwide, but he is not only a writer in the years during which he has been appearing on this show. He's become an increasingly deep student of the dharma. He does many, many long meditation retreats. He's got a new book out called Journey, The Year That Changes Everything, and in it, Diego includes a list called the 11 rules of inner peace. So we're gonna talk about this list on the show today. Diego Perez, welcome back to the show. Hey, Dan. Thank you so much for having me again, and I like that we're gonna go through the 11 rules of inner peace. And I remember a few years ago when we first talked, like, any good Buddhist, you have to use your lists wisely. Yes. The Buddha, as many people listening know, was a compulsive list maker. As you've gone deeper and deeper into the dharma a a k a the teachings of the Buddha, you've become quite a list maker yourself. There are lists all throughout this new book, Journey. Yeah, that's right. There's a few lists, poetry, short prose, a few sort of paragraphs of reflective material, all to help people on this, you know, not easy journey of building self awareness and inner peace. And that's something I wanna, you know, just be honest about. Like, lot of people want to find the easiest route possible to inner peace, but like all of the best beautiful things in life, they don't come easy, they take work. What do you mean... And I'm specifically asking, like, what do you, Diego, mean when you use the words inner peace? You know, I think about it as the ability to have a strong degree of self awareness when you can see when the mind is creating tension, and letting yourself have the spaciousness that you need to not immediately react to the negative things that are happening, so you're approaching reality with a sense of wisdom that everything is impermanent, so you're allowing yourself to enjoy the beautiful moments, and in the difficult moments that are bound to happen in life, you understand that yes, this is tough right now, but I don't need to make it worse for …