What Happens When You Stop Running From Yourself with Yung Pueblo

This week, I talk with Diego Perez—better known as Yung Pueblo—about healing, self-awareness, and what it takes to become lighter as you move through life. Yung shares how a period of drugs, alcohol, and numbing nearly cost him his life, and how learning to feel his emotions, tell himself the truth, and move his body helped him begin again. We explore how meditation reshaped his relationship with pain, what he’s learned from sitting silent retreats for up to 60 days, and why healing yourself may be one of the most important ways to help heal the world. We also talk about his wife Sarah’s early belief in his writing, the role intuition has played in his career, and why creating more space—not more commitments—has helped him reconnect with what matters most. This is a conversation about inner freedom, meaningful work, and becoming more compassionate along the way. Let’s get to it!

In this episode:

(00:00) – Intro
(00:47) – Trusting intuition and making room for new relationships
(02:41) – Hitting rock bottom
(05:28) – Growing up longing for peace
(07:07) – Losing the support of community in college
(10:48) – Yung’s first steps toward changing his life
(16:15) – Becoming a friend of the present moment
(18:31) – Meeting his wife, Sarah
(23:52) – Learning from his meditation teacher
(27:10) – The value of wise elders
(31:45) – Psychedelics vs. meditation
(35:16) – Acceptance as the path to letting go
(40:00) – Inside a 45-day silent meditation retreat
(50:12) – Deciding to become a writer
(53:22) – Betting on a creative career before there was proof
(55:50) – Following your intuition into the unknown
(58:41) – Turning inner work into creative work
(01:00:26) – What it means to be a “young humanity”
(01:07:09) – Rediscovering the joy of writing
(01:09:21) – Redesigning life to make room for creativity
(01:10:50) – Using values, intuition, and your nervous system to make decisions
(01:14:45) – How solitude changed Yung’s life and work
(01:17:20) – Focusing your energy on what matters most
(01:18:22) – Can compassion be good business?
(01:20:28) – Working with his wife and building a life together
(01:22:58) – Becoming world-class at listening to intuition
(01:24:17) – Yung’s most beautiful future
(01:25:41) – Who Yung is becoming

Key Takeaways

Real change starts when you stop running from what you feel: When Diego hit rock bottom, his first steps toward healing were remarkably simple: feel his emotions instead of numbing them, tell himself the truth, and start physically moving again. Transformation often begins not with a sophisticated new system, but by recognizing the behaviors that are keeping you stuck and deliberately choosing something different.
You heal the past by changing your relationship with the present: Old emotional patterns carry momentum, which is why we can find ourselves reacting to current situations through the lens of experiences that happened years ago. You can’t go back and rewrite what happened, but you can learn to recognize those patterns as they arise and choose a different response. Becoming more present gives you the opportunity to stop repeating your past.
Acceptance is what makes letting go possible: Healing isn’t about suppressing difficult emotions or thinking your way out of them. Diego describes learning to observe sadness, fear, and other painful sensations without reacting to them or turning them into something bigger. When you can accept what is happening inside you without fighting it, you stop feeding the patterns that keep the pain alive.
Create the thing you feel called to create before you know where it will lead: Diego spent years developing as a writer before there was much evidence that it would become a career. His experience is a reminder that intuition rarely arrives with a complete roadmap. Whether your work reaches ten people or a million, following through on an idea builds confidence, momentum, and the possibility of helping someone in ways you may never fully see.
A better life may require doing less, not accomplishing more: As Diego became more successful, overcommitting left his nervous system exhausted and made it harder to hear his own intuition. Creating more space—for sleep, exercise, relationships, solitude, meditation, and the work he actually loves—helped him reconnect with what mattered most. Instead of spreading your energy across every opportunity, identify the few things that deserve your attention and design your life around them.

Quotes

“If you want to deal with what happened to you before, become a friend of the present moment.” ~ Yung Pueblo

“What you don’t like is not actually the narrative that’s up there in your mind. What you don’t like is how it feels.” ~ Yung Pueblo

“If you don’t deal with what’s happening inside of you, if you don’t heal your emotional history, then you’re gonna replicate the thing that you hate.” ~ Yung Pueblo

“The pillars of external peace are gonna be built on the individual peace of human beings. A society can be so well designed externally, but if we are full of harm inside of ourselves, then harm will come out.” ~ Yung Pueblo

“I measure my life by: is my ego decreasing? If it’s growing, I’m moving in the wrong direction.” ~ Yung Pueblo

“The other side of letting go is acceptance” ~ Yung Pueblo

Resources and Links

Yung Pueblo’s Books