Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show,

thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. Today we're going to be

talking about a topic where the common advice seems to pull us in two opposite directions.

On the one hand, there's this idea out there on social media,

that when things are hard for us, it's a sign that something isn't for us.

So we should just go with the flow and do what comes naturally.

On the other hand, there's the idea that resistance is a sign of growth,

and you should push through it.

Both are true sometimes, and both are problems when we take them a little bit too far.

And today I talked with Diego Perez about finding a healthy balance.

Diego is a serious meditator, a poet, and the best-selling author of a number of books,

including Inward, Clarity and Connection, and the best-selling author of a number of books, including inward, clarity and connection,

and how to love better. He writes under the pen name Young Pueblo and has over four million

followers on social media, which was a major topic of our conversation. He's also just come off a

60-day silent Vapasana retreat in India, which was a good starting

point for our conversation about effort, letting go, and trust in yourself.

And from there, we moved into something I've wanted to talk with him about for a while,

the tension between the kind of nuanced and long-form wisdom that the kind of deep meditative practice that he has points toward

and the more reductive attention-optimized content that social media usually rewards.

And Diego is a great person to talk with this about because he is both a fantastic meditator and

teacher and also is huge on social media. So we talked about why that

kind of prescriptive content is very appealing to people. I also asked Diego what he would

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