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Lojong (mind training)

Practice Library

Lojong (mind training)

34 teachings in the library cover this practice.

  • Guided Meditation - Releasing a Resentment David Oromith · 14 minutes · recorded March 22, 2026

    A resentment you are still carrying comes to mind, and the hurt of it is acknowledged first. David then turns to where that person's behaviour came from, their own pain and confusion, and to the difference between a person and their mental afflictions, without agreeing the action was okay. Hand on the belly or chest, the words are to the extent I am able, I release, I let go. It closes on deep breaths, released through the mouth.

  • Guided Meditation - Avalokiteshvara, Visualisation and Mantra David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded March 5, 2026

    A full Avalokiteshvara practice led line by line. You visualise the four armed form of compassion, with friends and family beside you, difficult people in front and all beings filling the space, then recite refuge and bodhicitta and contemplate the four immeasurables. The mantra comes with light purifying body, speech and mind, then the eight verses of training the mind, a dissolution into your heart, and dedication.

  • Guided Meditation - Precious Human Life, Motivation and Responsibility David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded September 10, 2025

    Tension drained away on the out breath, then a contemplation built around the Dalai Lama's words about a precious human life. You recall the freedom and leisure you have, and the kindness received from countless beings, and let that gratitude turn into responsibility and a determination held alongside joy. If it fades, go back to the contemplation.

  • D7S1 - The Whole Sequence in One Session, and Carrying It Home David Oromith · 128 minutes · recorded August 25, 2025

    The closing session, and the longest of the week: the whole sequence run through in one unbroken practice, from the breath through the movements of the mind to awareness itself. David draws on a teaching Lama Alan and Eva Natanya gave in June on the four modes of mindfulness, and on why observing the mind and observing awareness can be understood as one practice. He ends on lojong, and on the person at work who need not cost you the patience you came here to build.

  • Session 4 - The Eight Verses of Training the Mind David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded July 2, 2025

    In tonglen we begin with a short visualisation of receiving love, then breathe in a loved one's suffering as a dark cloud, transform it at the heart, and send back well-being, widening out to groups: guided throughout. David covers verse seven, on secretly taking on others' pain, and verse eight on the eight worldly concerns and emptiness, illustrated with bread that is empty of breadness. Tessa asks about research into benefits for others; Michelle raises clutter and body image.

  • Session 3 - The Eight Verses of Training the Mind David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded June 26, 2025

    Loving kindness and compassion are extended from self to a loved one, a neutral person, a difficult person and finally a wide group, guided throughout as preparation for next week's tonglen practice. David works through verses five and six of the Eight Verses: offering the victory rather than retaliating, and viewing someone who wrongs us as a teacher, illustrated with the story of the borrowed baby. Members share how they tried the practice at home and at work.

  • Session 2 - The Eight Verses of Training the Mind David Oromith · 87 minutes · recorded June 18, 2025

    This second session opens with a twenty minute meditation in which we settle body and mind, then recite the eight verses together. David works through the third verse on watching the mind and applying antidotes to afflictions, then the fourth on cherishing difficult people as a rare chance to practise compassion. A poll shows self cherishing can hide inside low self esteem as much as pride. Questions cover compassion versus empathy, accepting compliments, and giving victory to others.

  • Session 1 - The Eight Verses of Training the Mind David Oromith · 89 minutes · recorded June 11, 2025

    This first session on the Eight Verses of Training the Mind opens with a guided meditation on settling the body, taking refuge and generating bodhicitta. David gives the lineage of Geshe Langri Thangpa, reads the text, then works through the first two verses: cherishing all beings as the basis of practice and happiness, and taking the humble position rather than seeing ourselves as important. Stories of Atisha and Drom Tonpa illustrate humility, and questions cover therapeutic lying and patience.

  • Guided Meditation - This Precious Human Life David Oromith · 24 minutes · recorded January 22, 2025

    David begins from Buddha nature, the clear mind said to be present in everyone and impossible to lose or damage, then works through how rarely the conditions to recognise it come together: a human birth at all, the time and the inclination to practise, teachers, books and people who support you. It ends in going for refuge and a resolve to use this life well.

  • Guided Meditation - Recognising the Kindness of All Beings David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024

    Beginning again from the recognition that every being has been your mother, we go through the kindness itself: the nine painstaking months carried, the night feeds, the bathing, the silly faces made just to raise a smile, the hands held through first steps, the words repeated until you could form them. Each stage is extended to all beings across countless lives. It closes on this life, and on the food, clothing and home that come from others' work.

  • Part Two - The Spiritual Warrior, and the Mind Training Commitments Ondy Willson · 98 minutes · recorded October 26, 2024

    The spiritual warrior is on an inner crusade, not one aimed at anybody else. The tantric view that we are already enlightened and held back by a small idea of ourselves, a long visualisation that breaks the rock of ego around Buddha nature, fear as the thing that blocks courage, and the commitments of the seven point mind training read through and argued over.

  • An Introduction to the 37 Practices of Bodhisattvas David Oromith · 42 minutes · recorded July 10, 2024

    David explains bodhichitta and what makes someone a bodhisattva, and places the 37 Practices among the four classic lojong texts. Most of the evening is the life of Gyalse Tokme Zangpo, born in 1295 in central Tibet and orphaned young, hailed a second Asanga at nineteen. Too quiet and humble to attract patrons, he refused to perform village rituals for offerings and wrote these verses instead. The retreat on the text is in the library as a one week course.

  • Transforming Adversity: Navigating Through Difficult Times David Oromith · 82 minutes · recorded October 12, 2023

    The session opens with a brief settling of breath and body, before David works through the Buddha's story of the farmer's seventy seven problems and the hidden seventy eighth, expecting to have none at all. He covers acceptance, the stories that fuel our reactions to triggers, and ways to reframe a difficulty, drawing on the group's own examples of corporate pressure and a distressing house sale, then closes with SOS practices for calming the body.

  • Week 4: When We’re Blamed or Harmed - Transforming Self-Cherishing (23 March 2023) David Oromith · 74 minutes · recorded March 23, 2023

    This closing session opens with a practice of resting in open, non-reactive awareness of body, sight and sound, before David turns to self-cherishing, the habitual sense that my comfort and my losses matter more than anyone else's. He traces it through everyday scenes, a parking space, the last loaf of bread, and sets out equalising self and others as the corrective, citing Shantideva on cherishing others. Questions cover recognising ego in colleagues and guarding against burnout.

  • Week 3: When Things Go Wrong - Transforming Anger (16 March 2023) David Oromith · 73 minutes · recorded March 16, 2023

    The evening opens with a guided breathing meditation, before David turns to aversion, attachment's mirror image, which exaggerates the faults in whoever has upset us until we react to what he calls a three headed green monster rather than the person in front of us. He explains patience as accepting what is rather than resisting it, and compassion as redirecting anger toward the person's suffering. Questions cover staying calm around an angry colleague, and the session closes with a short loving kindness meditation.

  • Week 2: When We Don’t Get What We Want - Transforming Disappointment (9 March 2023) David Oromith · 72 minutes · recorded March 10, 2023

    The session opens and closes with a guided practice in which we settle awareness into the body, then count breaths at the nostrils in a breathing meditation. David looks at why we suffer when we cannot get what we want, tracing it to attachment's habit of exaggerating what a thing will give us. He tells the story of the nun who ended up needing a cow, and offers non-attachment, contentment and gratitude as the antidote. Questions range from technology frustrations to attachment versus ordinary worry.

  • Week 1: Introduction to Mind Training - Rising to the Challenge (2 March 2023) David Oromith · 82 minutes · recorded March 3, 2023

    This new course on lojong, Buddhist mind training, opens with a short relaxation meditation to settle the group. David explains that we cannot stop difficulties happening, only stop them robbing us of our peace, using the spark, fuel and flame image and Shantideva's line: if there is a solution why worry, and if there is none why worry. Questions explore turning anger into compassion, separating regret from guilt, and the habit of rehearsing arguments that never go as planned.

  • Responding to Bad News or a Difficulty David Oromith · 36 minutes · recorded June 19, 2022

    Slow, extended exhales calm the body before we open into stillness, inviting in a current difficulty and meeting it with resilience rather than resistance. David talks about how to respond when bad news arrives, prompted by news that he and Manu must leave their home. He describes stepping back to observe aversion rather than acting from it, then using lojong reframing once the emotion has settled.

  • D6S2 - The Four Yogas of Mahamudra Lama Alan · 98 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    The four yogas, single-pointedness, freedom from elaboration, one taste and non-meditation, and how each maps onto the paths and grounds of a bodhisattva. Lama Alan Wallace reads Atisha's images of realisation complete but not manifesting, the lion cub in the womb whose three strengths are all there and the garuda inside its shell, and describes the mother and child clear light meeting at death. Questions close the retreat, among them what to do when a teacher's conduct has harmed students.

  • D5S2 - Practise What Is Important Lama Alan · 81 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    The closing aphorisms, and the end of the transmission of the text. Lama Alan Wallace explains the distinctive ones: those who harm you, the ones to focus on, then your teachers, your parents and bodhisattvas, with whom both virtue and non-virtue are heavy. He works through practise what is important, do not be bound by distemper, and do not yearn for gratitude. Questions follow on whether to study or first work on your own mind, and from a monk facing conscription who may be sent to fight.

  • D4S2 - The Five Powers and Dying Lama Alan · 86 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    Accumulating merit and purifying obscurations by the four remedial powers, why Atisha counsels offerings to spirits, which Lama Alan Wallace defends by arguing that the physical world is not hermetically sealed against the non-physical, and offerings to the Dharma protectors. Then the five powers for one life and the same five for dying, of which Atisha says there is no more wondrous counsel on dying than this. Questions on brain and mind correlations, lucid dreaming and whether the self is a composite. No guided practice.

  • D3S2 - Near Enemies, and Tonglen Mounted on the Breath Lama Alan · 85 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    Teaching and questions, no guided practice. Lama Alan Wallace works through the near enemies of the four immeasurables, taken from Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification, self-centred attachment posing as loving kindness, despair as compassion, then the progression in tonglen, starting with your own mother and later mounted on the breath, and the aphorism begin the sequence of taking with yourself. A young father asks whether to put family responsibilities aside for a long retreat.

  • D2S2 - Examine the Character of Unborn Awareness Lama Alan · 88 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    Atisha turns the enquiry back on the observer: examine the character of unborn awareness. Lama Alan Wallace asks when exactly a human mind comes into existence and when it ceases, answers that we define it and nature does not, and that in the Madhyamaka view the emptiness of your own mind is nirvana. In the guided practice we rest in awareness of awareness, then thrust that attention into the mind that is aware. Questions follow on choosing a shamatha method and on evidence for rebirth.

  • D1S2 - Attentional Intelligence, and Let the Mystery Be Revealed Lama Alan · 82 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    Atisha's aphorism, once stability is achieved let the mystery be revealed, and why shamatha comes before the cultivation of ultimate bodhicitta. Lama Alan Wallace sets out conation, ethical intelligence and attentional intelligence in turn, and pictures our modern mind as a telescope mounted on a galloping camel in a sandstorm. The guided practice is mindfulness of breathing, felt throughout the whole body, and we note whether each breath is long or short, with introspection watching the attention.

  • D6S1 - Atisha's Mahamudra, the View Lama Alan · 99 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    The retreat leaves the mind training for Atisha's own root text on mahamudra, his pith instructions on connate union, the lineage traced back through Naropa and Tilopa. Lama Alan Wallace gives Atisha's view: the mind's essential nature is its lack of origination, cessation and duration, its manifest nature is luminosity, and the two have never been apart. The practice is Atisha's own instruction, do not modify, do not block, do not think, do not practise, once all uncertainty has been cut off.

  • D5S1 - Criteria, Pledges and Precepts Lama Alan · 94 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    The last three points together. Lama Alan Wallace gives the criteria that show the practice is working, a self-grasping that is diminishing, yourself as the chief of the two witnesses, never parting from a sense of well-being even when distracted, then the pledges, from keeping the commitments already taken to taking no delight in another's misfortune. He then guides a practice on the four immeasurables, bringing people to mind, asking why they could not be free and resolving to free them.

  • D4S1 - Blame Everything on One Culprit Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    Lama Alan Wallace explains the two week gap, a perforated intestine and six days in hospital, then takes up the third point, transforming adversity into the path. In Buddhaghosa's framework he names despair, apathy and delight in one's own good fortune as near enemies of compassion, impartiality and empathetic joy, and works through the aphorism blame everything on one culprit, with Shantideva on self-grasping as the great demon. In the guided practice we cultivate the four immeasurables as the four greats.

  • D3S1 - Self-Centredness and Tonglen Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    Relative bodhicitta, and Shantideva's claim that self-centredness is a root of all suffering while caring for others more than oneself is a root of all happiness. Lama Alan Wallace traces the causes of suffering from the shravakayana through to dzogchen, then turns on Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents for teaching learned helplessness, and Francis Bacon's wish to put nature on the rack, which he calls psychopathic. The guided practice is tonglen with a loved one, a despised person and a neutral person.

  • D2S1 - View All Phenomena as Dreamlike Lama Alan · 86 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    Ultimate bodhicitta, and Atisha's aphorism that all phenomena are dreamlike. Lama Alan Wallace takes apart naive realism and metaphysical realism, arguing that colours, sounds and thoughts are nowhere in physical space and that quantum physics has already discredited the world we assumed was out there, with lucid dreaming as the working example. In the guided practice we observe the sixth domain, mental perception, then follow the Buddha's counsel that in the seen there be just the seen.

  • D1S1 - Four Revolutions in Outlook Lama Alan · 93 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    Lama Alan Wallace opens the retreat with Atisha, the Indian master behind the Seven-Point Mind Training, and the text's first point, train in the preliminaries. He recasts the four thoughts that turn the mind as four revolutions in outlook, a rare human life, death, suffering and the consequences of our actions, and asks whether you are hanging ornaments on the tree of your life or transplanting it. He then leads a twenty minute guided practice in which we settle body, speech and mind in their natural states.

  • D6S1 - Do Nothing a Buddha Wouldn't Do Lama Alan · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    The final morning begins with a twenty four minute practice rather than a talk, in which we rest in awareness of awareness. Lama Alan Wallace then reaches conduct, where equipoise and daily life merge indivisibly and thoughts arise as aids to meditation. Yangthang Rinpoche's commentary adds the detail: sustain that initial moment of freshness, because mental afflictions ride on the current of conceptualization. In the closing practice we watch the mind designate objects and reify them.

  • Part One - Atisha's Root Verses, and Taming the Monkey Mind Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo · 137 minutes · recorded January 1, 2016

    Atisha's Lojong root verses, taken one line at a time. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo opens with why Atisha mattered in eleventh century Tibet, where the emphasis had gone to powers and he brought it back to refuge and bodhicitta, then reads the text aloud as an oral transmission. Realising selflessness needs a healthy sense of self first, she argues, since it is the ego that walks the path towards its own dissolution. Taming the monkey mind, observing the mind at all times, and living in disharmony with the world.

  • Lojong, the Eight Verses of Mind Training Lama Alan · 28 minutes

    Lama Alan Wallace works through the Eight Verses of Mind Training of Langri Tangpa, verse by verse. You learn to hold others supremely dear, to seek out their virtues rather than their faults, to catch a mental affliction the moment it stirs, and to treat difficult people as rare treasure. The closing verses turn to tonglen and to freeing practice from the eight worldly concerns and from grasping at a reality he describes as dreamlike.

  • Great Compassion Glen Svensson · 83 minutes

    Bodhicitta, the aspiration for enlightenment for the benefit of others, and the first of the two main methods for cultivating it: the seven cause and effect, running from seeing everyone as your mother through altruistic intention to that aspiration itself. Glen Svensson explains that great compassion is not simply an aspiration, as loving kindness and compassion are in the four immeasurables, but actively helping mother sentient beings, much more proactive. In the guided practice we draw blessings in on the in-breath and radiate the light of great compassion out on the out-breath.

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