How To Get Past Your Past | Yung Pueblo

What It Covers

Author Diego Perez (Yung Pueblo) joins Dan Harris to explore how meditation transforms relationships over twelve years of serious practice. Drawing from his book *How to Love Better*, Perez connects Buddhist concepts — impermanence, equanimity, ego dissolution — to practical relationship skills including blame reduction, selfless listening, and building love as an active practice rather than a passive feeling.

Key Questions Answered

• •Blame Reduction Through Meditation: When Perez and his wife began meditating separately, they independently discovered that internal discomfort — not their partner's behavior — was driving most arguments. The practice revealed a pattern: the mind searches for external targets to explain internal unease. Recognizing that waking up feeling unwell after poor sleep or overeating was the actual source of conflict, not the partner, fundamentally restructured how they handled disagreements.
• •Linguistic Reframing of Emotions: Shifting from "I am angry" to "anger is moving through me" or "heaviness is arising" removes personal identification from emotional states. This mirrors Joseph Goldstein's teaching of replacing "I am scared" with "there is fear." The reframe works because emotions attempt to expand and recruit others; removing the "I" disrupts that cycle and creates observational distance, making skillful response more accessible than reactive escalation.
• •Selfless Listening as Conflict Tool: During arguments, the goal shifts from winning to understanding — a principle drawn from Thich Nhat Hanh's framing that love is understanding. Selfless listening means fully absorbing a partner's account of events without mentally preparing a rebuttal. Paired with reflective listening — repeating back the core of what was said in your own words — this technique dissolves tension by making each person feel genuinely seen rather than strategically countered.
• •Burning Conditioning Through Extended Retreat: In long meditation retreats (Perez has completed multiple 30-to-45-day sits), the mind stops generating new reactive conditioning. Old conditioning then begins dissolving automatically — similar to a battery draining once unplugged. After one 45-day retreat, Perez spoke in front of 4,000 people at South by Southwest three days later and experienced near-zero anxiety, directly attributing this to fear-based conditioning that had surfaced and cleared during the retreat.
• •Commitments Over Attachments in Relationships: Attachment in relationships manifests as control, which depletes relational energy. The alternative is building the relationship around explicit commitments — each partner clearly communicating how they want their happiness supported — rather than silent expectations that function as unannounced traps. After extended retreats, Perez and his wife treat each other as new people, allowing preferences, priorities, and identities to evolve without comparing to prior versions.
• •Compassion Without Being a Pushover: Boundless compassion does not mean passivity toward harm. The operative distinction is stopping harmful behavior without hatred toward the person causing it. Perez uses the example of screaming at a child about to do something dangerous — the urgency comes from love, not hatred. Applied politically, this means opposing harmful actions decisively while recognizing that people causing harm are themselves suffering, and that hatred is an unsustainable fuel that burns out the person carrying it.