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.
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.
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.
True happiness cannot be captured in a memory, a possession, or another person. Armand DiMele explores that argument with Nicholas Vreeland of the Tibet Center, previewing the Dalai Lama’s Radio City teachings on emptiness, and choreographer Alexandra Beller, whose new dance piece stages the futile human habit of chasing happiness outside ourselves.
Diana Winstead spent a year as a shaved-head, robed Buddhist nun in Burma, meditating in near-total silence. Armand DiMele draws out what she learned about sexuality, surrender, and selfhood by removing almost everything modern life is built on, and what happened when she returned.
