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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 meditate in an entirely new and effortless way. Let’s join together on the journey of a lifetime. If you are ready, you will discover life’s treasures.
May I suggest you refer to my latest book, Meditation and Beyond, available through Amazon as support and more for these podcasts. you may also find further resources on my website: www.elliottdacher.org
35 Episodes
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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 back into the mundane. We think that our experience and insights will change our life, but too often they don’t. Know that you are not alone. Consider the words of St. Francis of Assisi: Wear the world like a ...
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 towards it include: transpersonal, timeless, infinite, wholeness, natural, all-embracing, essential being, pure perception, final truth, sacred, and divine. Although these words point towards a transcendent consciousness, ...
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 pitfalls of identifying exclusively with our acquired self.We are not born with a personal self. We are born into presence, a simple awareness and presence. We never forget this essence of our being and we in...
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 wellI now realize that Thompson’s hound is a poetic metaphor for the irrepressible urge that quickens soul and spirit toward a recognition and reunion with our true self, our divine essence. It has taken time, detours, misplaced pursuits, personal dramas, and s...
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 a community, teacher, and spiritual friends. It's only the ego that perceives this journey as a solitary hero’s quest. That’s the dilemma of modern times. Join me in this discussion and practice.Support the Show...
“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 understanding, how can we live an authentic and meaningful life.It is not easy, convenient, or socially rewarding to pursue a realistic understanding of life. At any moment I can feel my mind turning away from it as quickly as po...
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 habitual and limiting patterns of perception, and perpetual mind traffice imprisons us in a narrow and contracted life. Our personal psychology, chained to the past traps us in tenacious conditioning, denying us access t...
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 heart of meditation which is experienced as a gentle and still river flowing through the flat plains. Finally, at the conclusion the river drops into the sea and is one with the source, the vast ocean of being. The fo...
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 thoughts, feelings, and images that appear as mental events. In contrast, there are also unknowables. What is an unknowable? These are experiences that cannot be observed or comprehended through our sensory system or ment...
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 draw upon this acquired memory-based knowledge, bounded by the reach and character of our life experience, to understand and navigate the inner and outer day-to-day world.The second path to knowledge is “being knowledge....
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 like effort, and it is.Let me share with you a natural and effortless way to experience your true inner self – a meditative state that self-reveals itself, when the mind has been stilled through a natural presence. I...
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 successfully transition to an autonomous and well-functioning adult. But is this accomplishment all we can hope to achieve? Is there more?It can be said that healthy development is an important preparation for the exp...
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 the ever-present basis of all we experience. It is everything. Without awareness we would not know we exist. We would not know our mental or sensory experiences. The emptiness of unconditioned, pure awareness i...
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 of self-care. I was to discover years later that, unknown to me at the time, my deeper true self was lost even earlier in life. That self, I was to discover, was my essential self. Over time, I ...
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 essence are inseparable. It is the mind that remains the most undervalued and unexplored frontier in health and healing. That is why our focus is on fully developing and expanding our understanding of the mind and its ...
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 mental activity and personal dramas. Now let’s consider the second, the gradual path. It is based on evolutionary or developmental theory. It asserts that by improving the quality of day-to-day life we increment...
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 type of clarity – the clarity which spontaneously arises from a spacious, pure, and unconditioned awareness. It doesn’t aim at resolving or understanding anything. It merely allows you to see the truth of what is as...
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 natural, fundamental, and essential Self.We are not born with our personal self. This day-to day self is acquired over many years. Early in life we are given a name, which over time becomes the repository of our day...
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 are mistakenly taught by an ill-informed culture to seek from the outer world that which is missing in our inner world. We seek possessions, fame, fortune, relationships, drugs and even healthy pursuits such as fitne...
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 without an object is an experience that is unrelated to any object. It is somewhat like the perfume that emanates from the flower. However, in this case the flower is our natural self. This love is innate, built-in, to our...
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