Anxiety and fear

79 teachings in the library are about this.

Session Two - The Natural Warmth of Awareness David Oromith · 80 minutes · recorded July 21, 2026
In two guided practices we rest in awareness of awareness and then let warmth in on the in breath, without it feeling manufactured. Between them David reads Tsoknyi Rinpoche on essence love, and Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo on our being something jewel-like rather than worthless. Gold covered in dirt is plunged into the water of awareness rather than scrubbed, and the frightened, contracted part of us is warmed like ice rather than broken with a hammer. It closes on a question about bliss, and a dedication.
Session One - Awareness Is Already Here David Oromith · 92 minutes · recorded July 14, 2026
In two guided meditations we rest attention in bare awareness, first noticing the knowing behind sounds and sensations, then meeting bodily discomfort the same way. David draws on Mahamudra and Dzogchen for a way of meeting difficult emotions that is neither suppressing, avoiding, indulging nor fixing, using the image of sky and cloud and Mingyur Rinpoche's panic suspended in awareness. Questions cover using imagery as a support and resting in awareness when emotions arrive tangled together.
Week 1 - What Qi Gong Is, and Meeting the Earth Element Dan Brierley · 67 minutes · recorded June 3, 2026
Dan opens by explaining what qi gong actually is: movement for health, rooted in the breath and close to Dao Yin and Chinese medicine. Warm ups turn the joints and hips before the class meets its first earth movement, the lion plays with the ball, rolling and pressing an imagined ball between the hands to settle digestion. He links earth to the stomach, spleen and the emotion of worry, then closes with massage along the kidneys, hips and legs.
Practising with Joy: Lightness and Humour on the Buddhist Path David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded April 19, 2026
The evening opens with gratitude for a precious human life and closes with a longer empathetic joy practice in which we rejoice in good fortune, a loved one's happiness and even people you find difficult. David draws on the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu to show how humility frees us from self-preoccupation, and how joyful effort, reframing, humour and gratitude counter the mind's negativity bias. He shares his own depression and homelessness as reframed hardship.
Morning Session Charlie Morley · 185 minutes · recorded January 31, 2026
Charlie opens with a short guided breathing exercise before turning to the theory of dream yoga, Milam Naljor: its four stages of recognition, transforming fear, multiplication and unification with a yidam such as Chenrezig. He explains why the practice is considered a rehearsal for death and introduces illusory body yoga, treating waking life itself as a dream. Discussion covers finding a teacher, how this differs from Western reality checks, and how ego motivation can cut a lucid dream short.
Session Two - What Patience Actually Means David Oromith · 79 minutes · recorded January 28, 2026
The session opens with a guided heat and space meditation in which we bring a small recent irritation to mind and track where it lands in the body, before widening into spaciousness and phrases of goodwill. David turns to the sutta of Sakka to show patience is not passivity but a mindful, chosen restraint, backed by verses on non aversion and the story of a maid who provokes her mistress into striking her. Questions cover staying calm at the time but doubting it after, and finding compassion for a difficult sibling.
Morning Session Charlie Morley · 181 minutes · recorded January 24, 2026
Charlie Morley opens with a short grounding practice, then explains what lucid dreaming is: prefrontal cortex activation, neuroplasticity, and evidence from his trauma study, where most participants dropped below the clinical threshold for PTSD in a week. He teaches four techniques, dream planning, recall, diaries and dream signs, then leads a written dream planning exercise, coaching participants on their plans. Questions cover false awakenings, anxiety, grief, and REM sleep behaviour disorder.
Has Worrying Ever Stopped the Disaster? David Oromith · 10 minutes · recorded November 24, 2025
David talks about anxiety as the mind trying to predict and control an uncertain future, generating countless what-ifs. He asks, did our anxiety ever actually prevent the disaster? He names patterns to watch, such as catastrophising and personalisation, and suggests being with uncertainty, so we find an uncomfortable feeling is not the end of the world.
Guided Meditation - Befriending Anxiety David Oromith · 16 minutes · recorded November 24, 2025
A low-level worry or grievance is invited to the surface, whatever shouts loudest, and located in the body as a felt sense, with the palm of the right hand over the chest to signify kindness. You then breathe space around the feeling with a deep in breath, neither suppressing nor indulging it, before warmth and compassion are brought in, supporting yourself as you would a friend. It closes with slow breathing, in for five and out for seven.
Session Two - Extending a Hand to Fear David Oromith · 76 minutes · recorded November 24, 2025
The morning opens with a brief settling meditation, then David leads a longer guided practice in which we extend kindness to anxiety using the shoes framework, five steps spelling its name: sensations, hello to the feeling, a one minute reset, explore, then support. David distinguishes fear from anxiety, unpicks catastrophising and personalising, and offers the this is just a thought technique. Questions cover whether anxiety can ever fully go, and how to receive self-compassion when that feels unfamiliar.
Session One - Three Kinds of Worry David Oromith · 69 minutes · recorded November 24, 2025
The session opens with a guided meditation in which we reset body, speech and mind through mindfulness of breathing, and a second practice in which we watch thoughts arise and pass, labelling them without following them. David sets out three kinds of worry, appropriate, productive and toxic rumination, drawing on an account of the amygdala, then turns to the Buddhist view that anxiety is rooted in fear of impermanence and a wish for control we never really have. He closes on radical acceptance, distinguished from passivity.
D5S2 - Taking the Mind as the Path: Doing Even Less David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded August 22, 2025
A second session with the same method, to get a bit more familiarity with it before moving on. David reads Lama Alan: in each of the two shamatha methods so far the practice involves doing less and less, and here you are doing even less, no longer preferring thoughts to be absent. He reads him again on how this quality of awareness lets the mind heal and unknot itself as resentment, craving and arrogance come up in a space of loving presence, and answers one participant caught between resting in awareness and attending to thoughts, and another who feels dullness and a sense of falling with the eyes closed.
D5S1 - Taking the Mind as the Path: Watching Thought Without Following It David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded August 22, 2025
We turn attention from the body to the mind itself: thoughts, images, memories and desires observed as they arise, play out and pass, without following any of them anywhere. David speaks personally about how this meditation helped with his own anxiety, because it totally changed his relationship with those anxious thoughts: the only power they have over you is the power you give them. He also warns of the version that only looks empty, where you are filling the space by talking your way through it.
Guided Meditation - Meeting Emotion in the Body with Loving Awareness David Oromith · 15 minutes · recorded August 7, 2025
If an emotion is already here you work with that, and if not you recall a recent episode of worry or frustration, then let the memory go and stay with the waves of feeling in the body with no agenda. David then turns attention to the loving attentiveness you have been bringing all along, and you rest in that spaciousness.
Session Three - Meeting the Emotion, and a Renewed Intention David Oromith · 65 minutes · recorded August 7, 2025
Continuing from the previous session, David guides a practice of simply being with an emotion rather than observing or fixing it, drawing on Tsoknyi Rinpoche's handshake practice, resting attention with whatever feeling is present. The talk covers regret as an alternative to guilt and shame, the four opponent powers, and anger's three forms, outward, inward and passive. He answers questions on internalised anger, pausing during conflict and grief, and closes reading Mary Oliver's Wild Geese.
Session One - Why Rejection Hits So Hard David Oromith · 73 minutes · recorded August 6, 2025
David opens with a twenty minute guided shamatha practice, settling attention on the breath and noting its length. The talk sets out the five stages of an emotional episode: pre-episode state and intention, trigger, bodily and mental experience, behaviour and aftermath, distinguishing universal triggers like a sense of rejection from personal ones learned in childhood. He introduces the emotional diary for tracking these, and answers a question on anxiety about being anxious before the break.
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.
Habits, Labels and Transformation David Oromith · 30 minutes · recorded June 22, 2025
In the meditation we rest the mind like an open sky, watching thoughts and emotions pass through it like clouds without becoming them. David talks about how labelling ourselves as an angry or anxious person turns a passing habit into a fixed identity, and shares his own trigger around running late to show how, once we understand its cause, even a well worn habitual reaction can be retrained into a new default.
D5S5 - Questions on Observing the Mind and Losing the Self Lama Alan · 90 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
A long question and answer session on why observing the mind is not the same as observing yourself, and why introspection can feel impossible even to a trained philosopher. Lama Alan addresses the anxiety that surfaces as meditation grows spacious and the sense of self loosens, and tells of the experiment in which Matthieu Ricard did not flinch at a gunshot while resting in open awareness. Questions also compare Dzogchen realisation with Advaita Vedanta.
D2S1 - Hovering, Comparison, and the Five Obscurations Lama Alan · 94 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Lama Alan introduces hovering, staying aware of being aware rather than dissolving into the breath, and traces suffering to grasping at what is not I or mine and failing to recognise what we are, the trap behind both low self-esteem and its mirror, feeling superior to others. He sets out the five obscurations, craving, malice, dullness, agitation and uncertainty, and shows how factors that arise naturally through practice act as their antidotes.
Guided Meditation - Meeting Our Feelings About the World with Compassion David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded May 7, 2025
David invites the worries about the state of the world that you usually keep at arm's length, and asks where they actually live in the body. You then breathe space around the feeling, bring in the warmth of compassion, listen to the story that comes with it, and rest in knowing others feel the same. Nothing here is being fixed.
Being of Benefit: Aspiring Bodhisattvas in a Complex World (Part Two) David Oromith · 82 minutes · recorded May 7, 2025
This second session opens with a gentle practice in which we breathe space and compassion around whatever despair, anger or fear arises when facing the world's crises. David then maps the Eightfold Path onto engaged action, from authentic view and speech through to effort, and reads several of Thich Nhat Hanh's precepts on non-attachment to views, speech and livelihood. Questions cover the ethics of the arms trade during the war in Ukraine and how to pass on values to children without imposing them.
Ecological Distress, Awe, and Emotional Wellbeing (Dr Eve Ekman) Eve Ekman · 113 minutes · recorded April 1, 2025
Dr Eve Ekman on the relationship between our emotions and the state of the natural world, from environmental anxiety to what nature gives back.
Our Essential Nature is Basic Goodness David Oromith · 29 minutes · recorded March 16, 2025
In this meditation we imagine the mind as a clear, spacious sky, with each thought, memory or emotion arising and passing like a cloud, observed without getting drawn in. David talks about the Buddhist teaching that our afflictions, anger, jealousy, confusion, are temporary clouds passing over a basic goodness that is always there, our Buddha nature. He explains why recognising this in ourselves lets us recognise it even in people who challenge us, since their harmful behaviour comes from the same fear.
D5S3 - Non-Attachment, Generosity and the Roots of Ethics David Oromith · 90 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
Desire and aversion are treated as appearances without solid existence, like a rainbow that can be admired but never grasped, or the death of a child in a dream. David works through the three kinds of generosity, giving materially, offering protection, and offering the Dharma, then turns to ethical discipline as the foundation the whole path rests on, using a leaking boat as the image for a mind not yet guarded by good conduct.
D5S1 - Meeting Deprivation, Prosperity, Anger and Craving David Oromith · 81 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
A practice of bare attention across the senses builds toward resting in awareness itself. David works through verses on facing deprivation and prosperity without losing heart, then turns to anger and craving, using the image of salty water to show how craving only deepens thirst. The group asks about rumination, anxiety and turning anger at oneself into compassion.
D4S4 - Bodhicitta's Final Steps, and Meeting Ordinary Scorn David Oromith · 55 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
The final meditation in this sequence combines the great resolve, the wish to free all beings, with the four immeasurables to complete bodhicitta. David turns to verse seventeen, on honouring someone who looks down on us out of arrogance rather than compete for status, and takes questions on where this shades into self-deprecation, whether the bodhisattva vow sounds egotistical, and where limited time is best spent, closing with the girl and the starfish: your bit is worth doing however small.
D4S2 - Everyone's Kindness, and Hard Questions About Rebirth David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
The session opens with a guided contemplation, continuing the previous one, in which we dwell on the care shown to us since birth, through learning to walk and talk, to the ordinary kindnesses that sustain daily life. A long discussion follows on the evidence and doubts around rebirth, including a mathematical objection to universal motherhood. David then turns to using suffering on the path, the image of the two arrows, and the RAIN practice for working with rising anger.
D4S1 - The Continuum of Mind and Turning Loss into Practice David Oromith · 90 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
In this meditation we trace the mind back moment by moment to show it is beginningless, so every being has at some point been our mother or carer. David turns to using loss and theft on the path, drawing on karma and compassion for what drives someone to steal, and the story of Gyalse Togme dedicating his stolen robes to the thieves who took them. Questions cover lingering sadness in a practitioner of many years and whether dedication lessens a thief's karma.
D3S4 - Equanimity and Tonglen, Two Meditations in Practice David Oromith · 59 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
Two guided meditations fill this hour. The first is equanimity, in which we work with a loved one, a stranger and someone difficult, to separate love from the grip of attachment. The second is tonglen: we breathe in the pain of someone we love as dark smoke, extinguished at a point of light in the heart, then send back everything good in return. David addresses the fear that tonglen means taking on suffering, and whether the same ignorance applies to animals.
Session 3 - Mindfulness of the Mind David Oromith · 85 minutes · recorded November 20, 2024
In the guided meditation on mindfulness of mind, eyes open in space, we count the breath before watching thoughts, memories and emotions arise, abide and dissolve without following or suppressing them. David contrasts passive witnessing in shamatha with discerningly recognising a lustful, hating or deluded mind here, using the Buddha's water and fire imagery for non-grasping. Questions cover guilt at doing nothing, locating anxiety in the body, and inquiry disturbing what it observes.
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.
Session 3 - Compassion David Oromith · 85 minutes · recorded September 24, 2024
In compassion practice we move from ourselves through a suffering acquaintance, a loved one, a stranger and finally someone acting cruelly, wishing each free of suffering and its causes. David distinguishes compassion from its near enemies, grief and pity, describing how despair once fed his own depression working in mental health wards, and why compassion stays active rather than overwhelmed. Members discuss compassion fatigue, burnout and caring for an ageing parent.
Three Types of Patience & Self-Cherishing David Oromith · 67 minutes · recorded May 22, 2024
After a short meditation in which we settle the breath, David sets out the three traditional types of patience: not retaliating when harmed, voluntarily accepting difficulty, and patience with the Dharma itself while still learning it. He explores self-cherishing through mundane examples, the last parking space, the electric car charging queue, and the Dalai Lama's wise versus foolish selfish. Questions cover self-care, a barber's story of self-cherishing hidden inside helping, and patience with oneself.
Aversion and Patient-Acceptance David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded May 7, 2024
The evening opens with ten minutes counting the breath and extending loving-kindness. David returns to the Dalai Lama's Beyond Religion to show attachment and aversion turn destructive only when out of proportion, then sets out patient acceptance through acceptance, understanding, compassion and fortitude, using the spark and fuel image and the two arrows. Questions cover a job left out of aversion, indifference as a near enemy of equanimity, and looking after oneself.
Exploring Aversion David Oromith · 91 minutes · recorded April 24, 2024
The session opens with a guided meditation in which we settle body, speech and mind, then refuge and bodhicitta. David turns from attachment to aversion, tracing it from subtle irritation to hatred, and shows how the mind exaggerates an unpleasant contact into a caricature, the three headed green monster. He distinguishes constructive from destructive anger and sets out the four enlightened activities: peaceful, enriching, powerful and wrathful. Questions range across assertiveness, martial arts and the Buddhist view of war.
The Antidotes to Attachment and Navigating Loss David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded April 17, 2024
The session opens with a short guided meditation in which we settle body, speech and mind, with refuge and bodhicitta. David completes his look at antidotes to attachment: non-attachment, contentment, gratitude and generosity, using the image of a bird resting on an open palm. He turns to loss, telling the story of Kisa Gotami and the mustard seed, and separates the cognitive work of understanding impermanence from the compassion grief itself needs. Questions bring up chronic illness, bipolar and the loss of a parent.
Introduction & the Bhavachakra David Oromith · 91 minutes · recorded April 2, 2024
The opening session of a module on the three poisons, with a settling meditation on the breath and refuge before David introduces the bhavachakra, the wheel of life, as a map for the weeks ahead. He explains the three animals at its centre, ignorance, attachment and aversion, and how they drive karma and rebirth through the six realms and twelve links. No separate practice follows. Discussion ranges from craving versus healthy desire to letting go of possessions and fear of the future.
Introduction, the Pursuit of Happiness, and Settling Body, Speech & Mind in Their Natural States David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded January 9, 2024
The opening session of this shamatha module begins with a short intention setting and a full guided meditation on settling body, speech and mind in their natural states, in which we use the out breath to release thought and tension. David introduces shamatha itself and its Buddhist and pre-Buddhist roots, then draws on the Dalai Lama and Einstein to separate hedonic pleasure from genuine, cultivated well-being. Questions cover sleepiness during practice and an unusual shaky, cold sensation one student noticed.
D5S5 - The Difficult Person, and Privilege Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 63 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
The full sequence now reaches a difficult person, and the rest of the evening is questions. Someone who panics around people asks how to believe they have a right to exist. A breathless feeling in the chest is not loving kindness itself, which is mental, but probably some tensing up. Michael Lobsang Tenpa separates self-cherishing from self-care, and answers a question about women and ordination first with lineages of female ordination that died out, then with blind spots and privilege.
D4S5 - The Neutral Person, and Questions Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 59 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
The neutral person joins the sequence, someone you neither like nor dislike but still know. Most of the session is then questions. One asks whether the Dalai Lama allows that a machine could be conscious; Michael Lobsang Tenpa rules out mind arising from matter, then reads the exchange in Gentle Bridges. Others cover how to help without controlling, mindfulness and ageing, and the phrases producing no feeling at all. A short practice and a threefold dedication close.
D2S2 - The Four Loving Kindness Phrases Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 60 minutes · recorded December 11, 2023
Three ways of pointing the wish at yourself, as a mirror image in front of you, as something rising from within, or as something converging from the spaciousness of awareness. Michael Lobsang Tenpa sets out the three approaches to generating it, phrases, imagery and liturgy, then guides the four phrases originating with the Buddha and coming through Buddhaghosa: free of enmity, of affliction, of anxiety, and well and happy. He explains why wishes in the negative are still loving kindness.
D1S5 - Tenderness, and the Metta Sutta Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 61 minutes · recorded August 25, 2023
Two practices on tsewa: holding yourself in awareness as you would hold a kitten or a newborn, then adding a hand on the chest so that the warmth also travels through touch. Michael Lobsang Tenpa explains why trauma needs both safety and connection, and why a plush toy is a legitimate object here. He tells the story of monastics sent into a frightening forest who were given loving kindness as the antidote to fear, and the group then recites the Metta Sutta and dedicates the day.
Week 1: Loving-kindness (Metta): Cultivating an open heart and goodwill towards all beings David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded June 9, 2023
The evening opens with a short settling meditation, followed later by a full loving-kindness practice in which we move from self to a loved one, a neutral person and someone difficult, closing with the Buddha's words on boundless love. David explains metta as a wish rather than a feeling, and names its near enemy, self-centred attachment, and its far enemy, ill will, using the image of a mosaic buried under concrete. Sarah describes how a small act of kindness turned round a strained work relationship.
Connecting to Communities for Genuine Wellbeing Ondy Willson · 116 minutes · recorded May 4, 2023
Ondy Willson asks whether our trouble with anxiety and depression is partly a symptom of isolation, and answers by working outwards from the self to the communities around it. She sets out what Freud, Jung and Thich Nhat Hanh made of the self, then how conditioning hardens into habit and tendency, and which constructive emotions serve as antidotes. The rest is the effort connection takes, and what headphones, video calls and social media quietly cost us. Three guided practices run through.
Reflecting On Our Impermanence David Oromith · 27 minutes · recorded April 16, 2023
The session opens with a short breathing meditation to settle the body, before we turn attention to how even the most solid seeming sensations are constantly changing. Prompted by the recent deaths of two teachers in his lineage, David talks about why Buddhist practice deliberately contemplates impermanence and our own death, not to bring on despair but to clarify what actually matters: valuing the relationships and time we have rather than getting lost in old arguments or in worry about the future.
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 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.
The Six Paramitas - Mental Stability (Samadhi/Concentration) David Oromith · 35 minutes · recorded February 26, 2023
In this mindfulness of breathing practice we follow the rhythmic sensations of breath throughout the body, with a gentle count to seven offered as a way to hold concentration. David turns to the fifth paramita, samadhi, the organisation's namesake, meaning to unify the mind with what it attends to. He describes the four qualities of deep concentration, peaceful, sublime, blissful, and able to quell afflictions on the spot, and how poor attention leaves us stressed and at the mercy of our own thoughts.
S4 - Getting Off the Thought Bus, and the Sky-Like Mind David Oromith · 79 minutes · recorded February 4, 2023
After settling with the breath, David turns to the nature of thoughts: how we fuse with them, the story of the two arrows, and the image of thoughts as buses we climb aboard without checking where they go. He teaches thought labelling, simply naming a thought as a thought to loosen its pull, then leads a meditation in which we picture the mind as open sky and thoughts as passing clouds. Discussion covers writing thoughts down to gain distance, and the habit of worrying about worry itself.
The Six Paramitas - Generosity David Oromith · 32 minutes · recorded January 15, 2023
In this visualisation we walk through an ordinary day and imagine bringing generosity into it: giving materially, giving time or expertise, offering a kind word. David opens a six week series on the paramitas with the first, generosity, describing three kinds, material giving, sharing the dharma, and offering fearlessness to those who are afraid, and why true generosity means being willing to give up what we are actually attached to, not just what we no longer want.
S1 - The Mind Makes the Day, and Why We Fear Stillness David Oromith · 79 minutes · recorded January 12, 2023
After introductions round the room, David leads a ten to fifteen minute guided settling practice, relaxing body, speech and mind, breath by breath. The talk that follows is on why the same day can feel bright or unbearable depending on the mind we bring to it, citing research that many would rather feel pain than be alone with their thoughts. A long discussion covers posture, technology before bed, anxious thoughts, and building a daily practice by listing fifty reasons why it is good for you.
Four Aspects of Mental Balance Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded August 29, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace argues that modern psychology mistakes symptoms such as depression and anxiety for disorders, and looks outward for causes that are primarily inward. Drawing on the Nalanda tradition, he sets out four kinds of mental balance, conative, attentional, cognitive and emotional, each able to fail through deficit, hyperactivity or dysfunction. It is exposition throughout, with no guided practice. Questions cover his fourfold vision quest and compassion in wartime.
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.
Awakening the Being Mind and Natural Intuition David Oromith · 35 minutes · recorded April 17, 2022
In this meditation you bring a real, unresolved difficulty into stillness rather than think it over, examining where it registers in the body and what beliefs surround it, with a question from Viktor Frankl along the way. David talks about how constructive thinking curdles into rumination fed by aversion, using his own dread of a difficult client meeting as an example. He contrasts the overthinking mind with the quieter, more intuitive one that can actually solve things.
Aversion in Response to Tragedy David Oromith · 35 minutes · recorded February 27, 2022
In the meditation we return to relaxation, noticing what changes in the body with each in and out breath, counting for focus, and closing with gratitude for this life. Responding to the war in Ukraine, David talks about telling anger apart from compassion, both arising from seeing suffering. He explains that anger's object is someone to hurt while compassion's object is those in pain, and that only compassion is genuinely active and helpful.
Making Meditation a Simple Priority David Oromith · 27 minutes · recorded January 9, 2022
We settle into stillness with a body scan, before resting our attention on the natural breath, with counting to seven offered for those who find it helpful. David talks about making meditation a daily habit rather than a rescue for panic, comparing it to brushing your teeth: not a cure but psychological hygiene that prevents imbalance from building up in the first place. He suggests simplifying practice to something as easy as noticing the sounds around you whenever it starts to feel like a chore.
D3S2 - Atisha on the Middle Way Lama Alan · 96 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace complements the root text with his own translation of Atisha's Pith Instructions on the Middle Way. Elementary particles, deconstructed by way of their directional components, do not appear at all, and the mind, neither singular nor plural, unoriginated and luminous by nature, is found to be indeterminate. He recalls the Dalai Lama asking the physicist Anton Zeilinger how he reached that conclusion without knowing Madhyamaka. Questions and dedications close the retreat.
D2S2 - Compassion, Not Despair, and the Small Adversities Lama Alan · 83 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace returns to a point he had passed over, on training in compassion, and gives Buddhaghosa's analysis of it and its false facsimile, despair, which looks like it and is not. Practise first with minor adversity, the text says, and it will gradually become easier. Whether a thing is agreeable or disagreeable is the way our minds apprehend it, as with a dentist's drill. Half an hour of questions follows, on shamatha and dzogchen and on why expressing a toxic emotion deepens the habituation.
D1S2 - Dispensing with Aversion to Adversity Lama Alan · 76 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Adversity can only become the path if two things happen, and Lama Alan Wallace takes both: dropping the attitude of utter aversion to it, then finding a sense of well-being that holds even when things go badly. He distinguishes suffering itself, which is a symptom, from the mental afflictions that cause it, and repeats Shantideva's point that despondency helps neither what can be remedied nor what cannot. Day one ends with a guided practice of settling the mind in its natural state.
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.
D2S1 - Renunciation, Refuge, and a Remedy for Each Adversity Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
A general notion is not enough, so Lama Alan Wallace works through the specific practices the text names for particular adversities: renunciation as a spirit of definite emergence, going for refuge, dispelling the arrogance that leaves a person as sterile as soil on a mountain top, purifying non-virtue by pondering the four laws of karma, rejoicing in virtue, and cherishing others more than oneself. In the guided practice we draw the darkness of the world into an orb of light at the heart, the receiving end of tonglen.
D1S1 - Whatever Attitude You Cultivate Grows Stronger Lama Alan · 94 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace opens with gratitude to his teachers, then, following Gyatrul Rinpoche's commentary, says who the text is for: those who put genuine well-being above mundane pleasure. The homage follows, then the text's first lines, on how a mind habituated to dwelling on suffering turns the most insignificant circumstance into great distress, and that depression comes from the mind and not the brain. The session closes with a guided twenty minute practice of settling body, speech and mind in the natural state.
Working Through a Challenge or Question In Our Life David Oromith · 30 minutes · recorded September 12, 2021
After settling the breath and counting twenty-one rounds, you choose one live challenge and hold it in body awareness rather than fix it straight away. David guides an investigation into the beliefs and fears underneath it, then a step back to view it from a wider, more neutral perspective, before asking what the next right step might be. There is no separate talk this week; David closes with a birthday reflection on gratitude and impermanence.
Why Do We Feel The Need To Control Everything? David Oromith · 34 minutes · recorded May 23, 2021
In a vipassana practice on the feelings arising with the five senses, eyes held partly open, we examine whether a sound or sensation is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, and whether that feeling belongs to us at all. Taking up a question from the previous week, David explores why we feel such a strong need to control our surroundings, tracing it to an old survival instinct and the belief that a perfect external world is needed to be happy. We already have the resilience to meet what goes wrong.
Illumination of Primordial Wisdom, Question and Answer Sessions, Session 3 Lama Alan · 93 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
Appearances are handled differently in shamatha, where attention is selective, and in open presence, where it is not, and that difference opens the last hour of questions. Lama Alan Wallace tells a student with no teacher nearby to let the text itself be her lama, relays Karma Chagme on Mahamudra and Dzogchen being one as far as trekcho, and says fear of the mind dissolving means you are really getting somewhere. He ends by giving the oral transmission of the root text in English for the first time.
Overcoming Anxiety and Worry David Oromith · 16 minutes · recorded March 23, 2020
In this episode, David explores anxiety, worry, and stress - how they arise in our mind, how we can overcome them, and some practical tips for what to do about any anxiety and worry that we are experiencing right now. In our life, it can seem that there is so much to worry about and be anxious over, especially in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, and so now more than ever it is important to distinguish between outer problems and situations, and the inner problem of our uncontrolled and turbulent mind.
D1S2 - Tension, Agitation, Dullness, and Stillness Amid Turbulence Lama Alan · 85 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The session opens with a twenty four minute guided practice in which we settle body, speech and mind in their natural states, taking the out-breath as the key and letting the breath run as it does in deep sleep. The teaching then takes three evident inner causes of distress: excessive tension, agitation and rumination, and dullness. Any one of them can be a principal cause, a sleeping pill that stops working was only treating the symptom, and stillness can be maintained in the midst of motion.
Part Three - Final Questions, then Refuge and the Five Precepts Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo · 43 minutes · recorded January 1, 2016
Questions first: whether awakening differs for a woman, how to be selfless without becoming a doormat, and what diminishes ill will. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo describes the bodhisattva as a spiritual warrior rather than a wimp, points to Tara for fearless compassion, and offers humour as a seventh perfection. An eleven year old asks whether she saw snow leopards at her cave. It closes with the refuge ceremony and the five precepts, the Buddha as doctor, the Dharma as medicine, the Sangha as nurses.
Guided Meditation - Tonglen for the Aged, the Ill and the Dying Lama Alan · 24 minutes
Lama Alan directs tonglen through three groups in turn: those worn by old age, those living with physical or mental illness, and those close to death. For each you imagine being in their shoes, then step back and breathe in the darkness of their suffering, dissolving it in the light at your heart, the unborn and undying dimension of awareness. The wish for the dying is a transition met with serenity and without fear. It ends resting briefly in stillness.
Guided Meditation - Loving Kindness, the Four Aspirations from I to We Lama Alan · 22 minutes
After several quiet minutes settling the mind in its natural state, Lama Alan draws on what the Dalai Lama calls the deepest impulse of the heart: caring whether you suffer or flourish. You breathe a fourfold aspiration, to be free of hatred and ill will, of physical pain, of anxiety, and to be well and happy. Then the I becomes we, and the same four wishes widen through the room, the city and outwards in every direction.
Workshop Part 1 Charlie Morley · 214 minutes
For practitioners who have taken refuge, Charlie Morley's workshop opens with refuge and works through the four stages of dream yoga: recognition, transformation, multiplication and unification. He teaches the Chenrezig dream practice, which needs no initiation, and Akong Tulku Rinpoche's three word instruction, walk through wall. After the break comes Padmasambhava's dream yoga from Natural Liberation, with a guided rehearsal of falling asleep in divine form, focus drawn to the throat centre.
Attentional Balance Glen Svensson · 78 minutes
Attentional balance, the shamatha side of the model, where deficit shows up as laxity and hyperactivity as excitation, both met with mindfulness and introspection. Glen Svensson compares the full body, abdomen and nostril versions of mindfulness of breathing, and the merits of the breath, the mind and awareness as objects. Two guided practices: the rhythm of the breath with the emphasis on relax, release and return, then merging mind with space. Questions cover anxiety and mental afflictions held at an unconscious level.
Exchanging Self with Others Glen Svensson · 78 minutes
The second method for cultivating bodhicitta, historically called the secret method because it was considered too profound and difficult for the normal person, though Glen Svensson thinks that may be the reverse now, since it tackles self-cherishing head-on. The session opens with great loving kindness, and in a second practice we reflect on the disadvantages of a me first attitude from our own past. He cites a study in which people who use the words I, me and mine a lot had a 35 per cent greater risk of heart attack.
Dealing with Anger Glen Svensson · 81 minutes
Anger, defined here as always carrying the intention to harm, and why Buddhism recommends patience and compassion in its place rather than a right amount of anger at the right time. Glen Svensson guides a practice on occasions when you got angry, on criticism valid and invalid, and on dissecting the irritating person until words are only sounds. He then introduces cognitive fusion, fusing a person and their behaviour into one thing, which turns rejection of an act into attack on the person.
Emptiness of Person Glen Svensson · 78 minutes
We turn attention to the person. In two guided practices we look for me, the meditator, first within the constant flow of physical and mental change, then by searching the body, the brain and the mind in turn. Glen Svensson describes some common experiences in this practice: being too confused to know where to look, which is a sign that more shamatha is needed; letting the intellectual mind answer instead of seeing through direct observation; and existential fear at not finding, which he says is usually a very good sign. A long reply covers integrating the practice into daily life.
Not-Self Glen Svensson · 89 minutes
A guided practice covers all three levels of dukkha, ending with the question of whether any experience is completely free of the potential for suffering. Glen Svensson then calls renunciation a bad translation: the term means to move away from suffering, so it is the wish to be liberated from it, and to give up the eight worldly concerns rather than the eight worldly things. In a second practice we look for the autonomous me that seems to be a third thing alongside the body and the mind.

Anxiety and fear

Anxiety and fear

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