Armand DiMele and his studio guests probe the difference between painful isolation and liberating solitude, drawing on Buddhist sunyata, Freudian theory, Beckett, and callers’ real lives including veterans struggling to reconnect after combat and a caller who rebuilt himself after losing everything in 2008.
Medicine was never meant to be a collection of procedures and tools. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, physician and UCSF professor, describes her course The Healer’s Art, now taught in half of American medical schools, which helps first-year students reclaim the values of compassion, service, and human connection that drew them to medicine in the first place.
Emptiness is not a problem to solve but a journey to undertake. Dr. Robert Gunn, author of “Journeys into Emptiness,” joins Armand DiMele to trace three stages of emptiness, from painful longing through letting go to a Buddhist sense of wholeness, drawing on the lives of Dogen, Thomas Merton, and Carl Jung.
Therapy can release old wounds, but can it bring you fully alive? Psychiatrist-turned-retreat-leader Dieter Middleston Scheid and his partner Baccha Schwartz describe their immersive silent retreats in Italy, where open sensory attention, slow-motion movement, and ten days without speech help participants rediscover a wordless inner home.
Long-term love requires peeling back the projections we bring to romance and confronting our own patterns, not just our partner’s flaws. Workshop leaders Robbie Gass and Judith Gass join Armand to discuss self-responsibility, the deadening of passion, and simple practices like eye-gazing and shared breath that rekindle genuine connection.
Dopamine, not brain size or specific genes, is what made us human. Dr. Fred Previck, MD, author of a book on the dopaminergic mind, walks Armand DiMele through how dopamine drove language, working memory, abstract thought, and civilization itself, and why its runaway modern excess now threatens the very societies it built.
Depression may be understood through the lens of alchemy: the ancient idea that growth requires destruction, heat, and the joining of opposites. Armand DiMele and co-host Roberta Maria Atti use bread-making and pasta sauce as earthy metaphors for how turmoil, not its avoidance, is what transforms us.
Does sin come from God, culture, or conscience? Armand DiMele and Lisa Arnone, LCSW, survey how Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each define wrongdoing, weigh intention, and offer paths to forgiveness. Callers share personal takes on adultery, faith, and moral accountability.
Armand DiMele and Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, take Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata” line by line, testing each piece of wisdom against real life. The episode argues that genuine new thinking beats hollow resolutions, and that many fears are simply born of fatigue and loneliness.
Can a Buddhist mindset survive inside a financial newsroom? Former Bloomberg News anchor Carmen Roberts joins Armand DiMele and Dr. Sherry Siegel, M.D. to explore how insatiable desire drives both personal unhappiness and Wall Street excess, and how compassion and higher consciousness can redirect that drive.
