PODCAST · health
Meditation and Beyond
by Elliott S. Dacher, M.D.
In Meditation and Beyond you will discover a uniquely different approach to meditation. There are two traditional aims of meditation. The first is cultivating a healthy human life. The second is transcending our limited day-to-day consciousness to discover our true self and its extraordinary qualities of human flourishing. Our first session begins by focusing on two quick and sure methods of calming the mind. Whenever your mind is out of control, these will be your go-to practices.one that is simple, surprisingly effortless, and goes directly to the essence of meditation. The first aim of meditation is to diminish, stress, calm the mind, decrease reactivity, and improve the quality of our relationships. The second aim of meditation is the heart and true essence of meditation. This approach cuts through the limitations of day-to-day living and reveals the precious gold of human life - a sustained serenity, natural wisdom, unchanging happiness, and boundless freedom. . We learn how to
Episodes
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When the "I" Falls Silent
Send us Fan Mail What happens when the familiar sense of “I” grows quiet—even for a moment? What remains is not emptiness, but a spacious, living awareness that has always been here. In this episode, we explore how meditation reveals our essential nature by allowing thoughts to liberate…
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Real But Not True
Send us Fan Mail What if everything you experience – thoughts, emotions, sensations, even the world itself –arises nowhere other than within the mind? This is not a philosophical idea to be believed, but a truth to be directly known. Like a night dream that feels utterly real until the moment of...
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Unraveling the Monkey Mind
Send us Fan Mail We weren’t born with a restless mind. We arrived in this world spacious, open, and untouched – like awareness itself. So how did that vast clarity become a chattering “me”? What silent shift pulls us from our natural wholeness into the frantic monkey mind? In this episode we...
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The Habit That Made the Monkey Mind
Send us Fan Mail Have you ever wondered why your mind refuses to sit still—why thoughts surge, swirl, and rehearse themselves as if on an endless loop? The answer isn’t mysterious or psychological jargon. It comes down to one simple, ancient habit: the mind’s impulse to grab hold of fleeting...
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Discovering the Nature of Mind
Send us Fan Mail Behind the restless flow of thoughts lies a vast, silent field of awareness – the natural mind that precedes and sustains all experience. We live mostly within a fragment of this wholeness, mistaking our conditioned patterns, stories, and identities for the entirety of who we…
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Bottom-Up – Top-Down
Send us Fan Mail A question that all meditators confront is how to stabilize the qualities we experience in our natural state – serenity, spontaneous realizations, freedom from conditioning, and a natural simplicity and ease. These qualities often appear only as fleeting experiences, easily...
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Freedom from the Known
Send us Fan Mail We are born with a simple, clear, and open awareness. Yet, this pristine consciousness is short lived. As we navigate life, our experiences – linked to external approval or criticism – progressively reduce our scope of consciousness to limited ways of perceiving reality…
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Where Stillness Waits: Beyond Circumstantial Calm
Send us Fan Mail We have all experienced moments of circumstantial calmness – whether through a relaxing walk in nature, immersion in art and beauty, or through music, yoga, intimacy, meditation, and other such events that can calm mind and body. These moments offer a respite from the overactive...
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The Peak Experience
Send us Fan Mail A peak experience is a fleeting moment of profound inner peace, harmony, flow, and oneness. It’s T.S. Eliot’s image of children playing innocently in the apple tree, Wordsworth’s moment of splendor in the grass, or you and I “lost” in nature, wonderment, exuberance, beauty, art,...
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The Vanishing ‘I’: Finding Freedom in "Otherness"
Send us Fan Mail Shantideva, a famous 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk, shared with us a very wise realization: "All the suffering in the world comes from seeking pleasure for oneself. All the happiness in the world comes from seeking pleasure for others." When we desire that others be free of...
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Liberation on Arising: The Secret of Mental Stillness
Send us Fan Mail "Self-liberation on arising" describes the natural dissolution of thoughts, feelings, and sensations when the mind refrains from grasping, elaborating, or fixating on them. Mental appearances arise and pass naturally, but fixation extends their lifespan, leading to suffering and...
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This Precious Life
Send us Fan Mail "This Precious Life" explores the human journey from the expansive, limitless consciousness of childhood, to the constricted identity shaped by societal demands and ego, and in fortunate ones the return to the precious essence of an expanded conscousness. Eastern traditions...
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The Gap: Glimpses of Essence
Send us Fan Mail This podcast explores the distinction between two aspects of self: the essential self, characterized by unconditioned awareness present from birth, and the personal (ego) self, a constructed identity shaped by experiences and societal conditioning. The ego self narrows our...
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Virtual Reality to True Being
Send us Fan Mail Simply stated, virtual reality is an experience that on first glance appears real but on further examination is found not to be real. The experience seems real, looks real, and sounds real, but it is isn’t. It doesn't appear in the manner in which it appears. In addition to…
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Zooming In – Zooming Out
Send us Fan Mail "Zooming In – Zooming Out" explores the practice of reconnecting with our fundamental, unconditioned awareness, which we are born with but often lose touch with as our ego and personal identity develop. This is called "Zooming-In." When we need to navigate day-to-day life, we...
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Personal Love – Essence Love
Send us Fan Mail We can begin by agreeing that there are two fundamental kinds of love – personal love and essence love. Although the first, personal love, may take many forms, it is characterized by the love of one person for another within the scope of our usual mind/body life. That love will...
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Seen But Not Real – Not Seen But Real
Send us Fan Mail A desert mirage, an echo, train tracks appearing to meet in the distance, and magic tricks are among those experiences that we can see or hear, but they are not actually real. These are sensory-based illusions that we initially think are real, but later learn that they are not...
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Reclaiming Your Center: Small Self to True Self
Send us Fan Mail Our lives are influenced and guided by our sense of “self.” When we refer to our self – I believe, I think, I feel – it is important to ask what self, what “I,” are we referring to. Is it our customary, personal day-to-day self, or our natural, inner self? Which “self” have we...
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The Decisive Experience
Send us Fan Mail We have all had moments when the tumult of life stops and clear and truthful insights arise from the depth of our being. We call them “aha” experiences. These moments of understanding are neither planned nor organized. They come unexpectedly and spontaneously. They are brief and...
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Come to Me as a Child
Send us Fan Mail A child is born with a clear, pure awareness. Not an awareness of this or that or an awareness accompanied by interpretations, commentary, judgments, or preferences. A simple clear awareness is experienced without labels and filled with a natural wonder, awe and curiosity. And…
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Glimpses of Beyond
Send us Fan Mail We have all experienced glimpses of a larger consciousness that lies beyond our personal identity and day-to-day life. These glimpses are characterized by a sense of flow, ease, wholeness, peace, delight, and freedom. They are a welcome release from the day-to-day struggles of…
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Consciousness: The Ground of All Being
Send us Fan Mail Consciousness is not a “thing.” It has no form, shape, color, texture, weight, mass, contour, or location. These qualities refer to tangible objects with tangible characteristics that can be described and communicated through language. That is not so with consciousness. Although…
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The "Mere I"
Send us Fan Mail There are five increasingly complex and dysfunctional levels of ego development, the development of our personal "I." These are: the Mere "I," the Reified "I," the Self-cherishing "I," the Protective and Defensive "I," and the Social "I." As adults we attempt to function with…
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Wear the World Like a Loose Garment
Send us Fan Mail While meditating we’ve all had the experience of a blissful moment of serenity, clarity, or realization, only to be pulled back into the stresses and strains of daily life. That can feel quite frustrating and even disempowering. We touch the glory of the sacred and are thrown…
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Meditation, Transcendence, and Psychedelics
Send us Fan Mail The transcendent state of consciousness is a non-sensory experience. It is a non-ordinary experience. It can neither be experienced or known through our senses, nor through our usual intellectual capacities. It is an inner, personal, “invisible” experience. Words that point…
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The Dance of Subject and Object: A Journey into Self-Discovery
Send us Fan Mail For a young child, prior to psychological development, the world is experienced through an innocent present moment awareness. As adults, our world is experienced through memory, concepts, interpretations, and perceptual patterns. We no longer experience what is as is. We seek to...
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Person to Presence
Send us Fan Mail Born with a mind and body, we are destined to develop a personal identity as a vehicle for living human life. It can be no other way. It’s an acquired mental structure that assists us in navigating daily life. As we gain greater consciousness, we recognize the limitations and...
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The Hound of Heaven
Send us Fan Mail I first heard Francis Thompson poem, Hound of Heaven, years ago. His words touched me deeply and have since taken residence in my mind. I sense it’s because they touch a very basic human. That call to truth is likely familiar to you as well I now realize that Thompson’s hound is…
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Walking Each Other Home
Send us Fan Mail What more noble experience can there be than walking each other home to the center of our being – to peace, happiness, and freedom. The journey home has never been solely an individual journey. Even the most solitary monk, nun, or seminarian takes their journey in the context of…
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Humans Cannot Bear Much of Reality
Send us Fan Mail “Humankind can not bear very much reality.” These words, words of the poet T.S. Eliot, have echoed in my mind for many years like a persistent Zen Koan. What is this fundamental reality he speaks of? Why can’t humans bear it? If we cannot base our life on a realistic…
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Gone Beyond
Send us Fan Mail The primary aim of meditation is to go beyond the narrow confines of our ordinary self and experience the immensity of life’s possibilities. We aim to free ourself from the tenacious grip of individualism and to awaken to our full humanity. Individualism, with its accompanying...
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Letting Go of Letting Go
Send us Fan Mail In the East they speak of the early stages of meditation as a raging waterfall. We have finally stopped long enough to actually hear the cacophony we live with every day. With practice we experience our innerness as a rushing stream, quieter but still active. Then we come to the...
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Knowables and Unknowables
Send us Fan Mail What is a knowable? It’s any experience, outer or inner, that can be observed and known through our sensory organs or mental capacity. Our sensory system is oriented to “physical” experiences that appear as outer events. Our inner capacity for observation is oriented towards...
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The Power of "Being Knowledge"
Send us Fan Mail There are two ways that we gain knowledge of our self and world. As adults, our default approach is “memory knowledge.” From childhood on we accumulate experiences, learning from parents, schooling, and culture. We store all this knowledge in our mental file called memory. We…
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Effortless Meditation: Simple, Natural, and Profound
Send us Fan Mail The phrase “effortless meditation” may sound to you like an oxymoron or perhaps a clever marketing tease, but it’s neither. This immediate reaction arises from the experience many beginners have when they approach meditation as a process of subduing the mind. That certainly feels...
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Good Enough or Not
Send us Fan Mail The pediatrician and psychotherapist D.W. Winnicott coined the expression a “good enough mother” or perhaps one might say “good enough parenting.” It refers to the manner in which a mother responds to her infant child with age-related sensitivity and care, allowing the infant to...
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The Mystery of Awareness
Send us Fan Mail Awareness is the essence of our meditation practice. It can neither be perceived by the senses nor known by thought. It is not a “thing” in the usual sense. It has no identifiable location, shape, form, texture, color, or weight. In a sense it is nothing. However, that nothing is...
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The Lost Self
Send us Fan Mail Looking back, the first "self" that I lost was in medical training. It was the loss of a healthy personal self. Entangled in the mechanics and pressures of my medical education, I forgot my most basic human needs. I forgot to take time for the simple joys of life and the basics…
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The Mind-Body Connection
Send us Fan Mail Early in practice I realized the limitations of a medical model that reduces health and disease solely to biological factors. It seems quite obvious that we are not mere physical bodies. We are inter-connect beings – our biology, psychology, social relations, and spiritual…
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Two Paths: Direct and Gradual
Send us Fan Mail There are two paths to an awakened and vital life. Each are based on a different premise. The first, the direct path, asserts that the awakened state, is already and always within us. We don’t see our true nature because it’s obscured by our acquired personal self with its opaque...
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Pristine Clarity
Send us Fan Mail The clarity we will speak of here is not the clarity that results from mentally studying a particular issue until there is a conclusive sense of understanding. That is intellectual clarity. And it is important in its place. However, here we are speaking about a very different…
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Self-Remembering
Send us Fan Mail For those who are only familiar with their ordinary self the phrase “self-remembering” may be a bit confusing. However, for others, who have explored further, it is apparent that there are two distinct “selves.” The first is our ordinary day-to-day self and the second is our...
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Spiritus
Send us Fan Mail There is an underlying and troublesome hollowness in the Western psyche. That’s the result of an inability to access our fundamental, natural, and unchanging well-being, an ever-present wholeness in each of us. In response to this loss of our essential self and its well-being, we...
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Love Wthout an Object
Send us Fan Mail We can speak about two kinds of love – love with an object and love without an object. Object-based love involves another person, a physical object, or any experience that is a source of pleasure. We say I love this or that, referring to the object of love. In contrast, love...
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Loss Without Suffering
Send us Fan Mail It is certain that each of us will experience loss. It may come in one of many forms - loss of a loved one, loss of mental or physical capacities, loss of material possessions, or future possibilities. Significant loss often heralds a time of sadness, emotional pain, or perhaps a...
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Nothing to Wait For
Send us Fan Mail There are some experiences that naturally evolve over time. The meeting with our true self and the awakening to a larger life is not one of those experiences. It is here, right now, already, and always. It requires no preparation, no preliminaries, no putting off until another…
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Ultimate Creativity
Send us Fan Mail Thank you for joining me again. Today we will discuss the two aspects of creativity: ordinary creativity and ultimate creativity. We will then share a practice that expands our discussion. Most creativity has its origins in our day-to-day ego structure. We draw upon our past...
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You Will Know I AM That
Send us Fan Mail To create a world of inner and outer sanity, a world free of the limitations and consequences of the mentally fabricated personal self, we must return home to our true self. In the words of the poet Derek Walcott: “The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself...
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Meeting Life's Challenging Circumstances
Send us Fan Mail Life will confront each of us with challenging circumstances. I am often asked how to best meet life's challenges. Perhaps a better question would be from where do meet these challenges. Do we relate to them from our usual personal "I," its habits of perception, interpretation…
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Transcend Your Personal Self
Send us Fan Mail Meditating smarter rather than harder requires that we take a closer look at the personal self, which obscures our true Self. We are so closely identified with our day-to-day sense of self that we rarely give consideration to its origins, limitations, or the possibility that it’s...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
In Meditation and Beyond you will discover a uniquely different approach to meditation. There are two traditional aims of meditation. The first is cultivating a healthy human life. The second is transcending our limited day-to-day consciousness to discover our true self and its extraordinary qualities of human flourishing. Our first session begins by focusing on two quick and sure methods of calming the mind. Whenever your mind is out of control, these will be your go-to practices.one that is simple, surprisingly effortless, and goes directly to the essence of meditation. The first aim of meditation is to diminish, stress, calm the mind, decrease reactivity, and improve the quality of our relationships. The second aim of meditation is the heart and true essence of meditation. This approach cuts through the limitations of day-to-day living and reveals the precious gold of human life - a sustained serenity, natural wisdom, unchanging happiness, and boundless freedom. . We learn how to
HOSTED BY
Elliott S. Dacher, M.D.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Meditation and Beyond have?
Meditation and Beyond currently has 59 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Meditation and Beyond about?
In Meditation and Beyond you will discover a uniquely different approach to meditation. There are two traditional aims of meditation. The first is cultivating a healthy human life. The second is transcending our limited day-to-day consciousness to discover our true self and its extraordinary...
How often does Meditation and Beyond release new episodes?
Meditation and Beyond has 59 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Meditation and Beyond?
You can listen to Meditation and Beyond on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Meditation and Beyond?
Meditation and Beyond is created and hosted by Elliott S. Dacher, M.D..
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