From DRUGS to MEDITATION: My Journey of HEALING & Finding INNER PEACE | Yung Pueblo EP 617

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11Do you feel like we can, as human beings, find peace if we have pain, sadness, or darkness inside of us, and we're always running away from it or numbing it? No, there's no way. I think you're just, it's almost like you're being hunted. You know, like you're running, but like your emotions are hunting you. They're trying to like find you in some way or another to get you to acknowledge them. and try to process them. How can you walk around with such a heavy load? Fast forward a year later, like I stopped all the hard drugs, started changing my habits, started eating a little bit better, started exercising, started examining my relationships.

0:49And you know, it was sad because I started noticing how shallow all of my relationships were. But when I started meditating, and I was even more so had to practice being with my emotions, I went through that, you know, It was a silent 10-day meditation course, first one I had ever done, and it was so difficult. I can't imagine. But at the end of it, I felt like my mind had lost like 100 pounds. Holy cow. You know? And I was like, how do I, like, my mind feels better. That's when it showed me, I was like, oh, you can actually heal yourself. That's, I think, the reason why I'm here now. What do you think happens if we never process and acknowledge our emotions?

1:29I think repetition. So you keep repeating, you keep sort of living through, going through the motion, and you end up slowly just accumulating more and more density because you're just repeating the same reactive habit patterns over and over again. And we don't realize that every reaction, it creates an imprint on the mind, and it predisposes the mind to react in the same way, to perceive in the same way. So you can just get denser and denser and denser. Yeah, I think these reactions cause our nervous system to then follow suit and react and be on more high alert, which causes chronic stress, chronic illness and disease in the body as well.

2:09When our mind is not able to address the pains of the past and process it correctly. You do a 10 day silent meditation retreat and then afterwards, are you all in two hours a day or do you get away from it for a while, come back later? Yeah, it takes, it took me a while. It took me like two years to start meditating two hours a day where I would just, I didn't understand what was happening in the meditation course. Like I, I didn't quite understand why it was working, but I knew I felt better, right? Like I was like, do my best to follow the instructions and meditation instructions. And so that was the July of 2012 was the first one.

2:45When I realized that I felt better, I ended up signing up for another one two months later. A 10-day one. Yeah. So I signed up. Silent 10 days. Silent again. Yeah. And then the second one was September of 2012. And it got the same result. I was like, shoot. I was like, I feel better again. You know, like I feel better. Dang it. This thing works. Oh, man. And it was tough. It was tough going back into it the second time because I knew how like how hard it is. It's demanding. Yeah, it's really demanding. I mean, you're there, you're meditating like 10 plus hours a day. You can't speak to anyone.

3:15You're not speaking to anyone. You know, if you have questions to the teachers, You can ask them questions, clarification and whatnot. But you're really there almost for that 10-day period practicing living like a monk. You're not going to become a monk or anything like that, but it's a monk-type life. Okay, so that's 11 years ago when you did this, I guess, 10, 11 years ago when you start this. And you were in a relationship with your now wife before then, I guess for probably four or five years. Yeah, yeah. So we were together about six years before the first meditation course. And so that first six year period, like we got together young, like she was 18 and I was 19.

3:57We met in college. Immediately there was a connection there. Like immediately we, you know, became great friends. We're hanging out alone all the time. You know, we were like friends first for a while. and I think after three months we realized that there were feelings there and we got together but there was just connection and there was just there was probably zero emotional maturity between the two of us we didn't know how to process our own emotions we didn't know how to argue in a manner that would be productive we you know all we knew was blame was the battle to win arguments and really like I you know now that I think about it it's really like it's dominance like if you want to win an argument, right?

4:39It's, it's, what are you trying to do? It's, you want to dominate the narrative. It was a rough, we were like in this tough hurricane for six years together and we'd, you know, we'd break up, get back together and, and, and, but we never could really pull fully apart because the connection was just so undeniable. So we kept trying to figure out like, how can we do this better? And it wasn't until we started meditating that ever so slowly harmony started arising in our relationship. And now, I mean, we're in a far better, there's nothing, there's nothing perfect about the picture, right? But we're in a far better place because healing has happened inside of both of us as individuals.

5:18Self-awareness has developed. So there's less projection between us. And we've developed that calmness so that we can have patience when we have to like talk through, you know, more serious things. It sounds like you both had your, your own wounds or your own past pains or whatever it might be. When two people get together and they haven't healed their past, what typically happens from experience that you've seen over the last 10 years of couples you've met or stories you've heard? So this is the thing that I find really often is like whenever two people are in close proximity, whether they're in a relationship or not an intimate relationship or not that you literally have two egos and these two egos when they rub up against each other sometimes there's going to be friction like egos are rough right it's almost like two rocks you rub the right rocks and there's going to be fire right so when we carry that past pain they're dense they're super rough and when you do that healing work you smooth out that roughness you decrease that density that you're carrying so that you can have more self awareness when points of friction happen because those are undeniable you're not going to like heal yourself and then never more will you like have arguments or anything like that that's unrealistic but you can sort of maintain your inner harmony or try your best to while something difficult is happening yeah i love that you're kept using this word harmony because that's what i feel like i've been developing within me for the last few years in my healing journey at this stage of healing because I feel like healing is a journey and you're to keep healing forever but this stage of healing it's been the the word and the theme has always been harmony and developing it within me yeah and really not worrying what's happening around me but as long as I create that within me I'm going to have more peace in my external world and when two people in relationship develop cultivate harmony cultivate a beautiful garden inside of them as opposed to you know, a desert or rocky mountains inside of them, it's easier to navigate challenges in life.

7:24Can I ask you, so what does, like, harmony feel like for you? Peace. Peace. Nice. Like laying on a calm beach and just hearing waves, like, gently grazing the sand. That's so good. And just calm. It's funny because I'm, like, I'm thinking to myself when I was listening to you talk, like, how do I perceive harmony? It's clarity and peace. Yes. Yeah.

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8:46Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.