Emptiness

84 teachings in the library are about this.

Guided Meditation - Dzogchen, Looking for Where Thoughts Happen David Oromith · 24 minutes · recorded March 18, 2026
Practised with the eyes at least partly open and the gaze soft. David has you look for where your thoughts actually happen, using an imagined oak tree, a distant lawnmower, the feel of velvet, until no place can be found and you rest in that limitless space. Then a step further, turning awareness towards awareness itself, and a reflection read aloud to close.
Guided Meditation - Mahamudra, Resting in Awareness While Thoughts Move David Oromith · 22 minutes · recorded March 11, 2026
David reads instructions from a Gelug Kagyu Mahamudra root text and comments as he goes, beginning with the seven-fold posture and the difference between awareness itself and what clouds it. You rest in the stillness of being aware while thoughts keep arising, noticed but not merged with, and near the end David asks where the mind actually is.
S2 - Introduction to Mahamudra David Oromith · 86 minutes · recorded March 11, 2026
David sets out the path as a straight one, shamatha then vipashyana cutting through to pristine awareness, and Garchen Rinpoche's answer that Mahamudra alone is sufficient. Mahamudra takes the mind itself as its object rather than reasoning through the five aggregates, cutting the tree at its base. In an experiment David reads out, we rest attention as the flashlight rather than what it lights. It closes in the stillness of awareness while thoughts move, then asks where the mind is.
S1 - The Path of Vajrayana David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded March 5, 2026
David places Vajrayana in context, as a branch of the Mahayana that throws nothing out and makes no sense without renunciation, bodhicitta and emptiness beneath it. Then deity yoga, where the ordinary self dissolves into emptiness and is visualised as Tara or Avalokiteshvara, taking the fruit as the path. Empowerment brings lifelong commitments, and seeing the teacher as a Buddha is no licence to ignore red flags. The evening closes with a public Avalokiteshvara practice, with mantra likened to a lullaby.
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.
D6S2 - Seeking What Is Aware, and the Nine-Round Breathing David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded August 23, 2025
The same practice, with one question folded in: occasionally seek out what is that consciousness that is concentrating, then release the question back into non-doing. David sets out the three levels of mind this tradition works with, the ordinary psyche, the substrate consciousness that shamatha dissolves into, and pristine awareness, and is careful to promise nothing. The session also teaches the nine-round breathing as a preparation, without the elaborate visualisations.
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.
D8S2 - The Text's Closing Verses, and Acquiring Confidence Lama Alan · 55 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The commentary reaches the end of Dudjom Lingpa's prose, tracing his own progress through the stages of realisation and the closing dedication verses of the text. Lama Alan explains why realising emptiness must go all the way down, likened to a nail driven flush with wood against one hammered below the surface, and why seeing the self as constructed rather than inherently existent makes choosing to see oneself as a Buddha a genuine option.
D8S1 - Resting in Awareness, and Why the Mind Must Change First Lama Alan · 95 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Lama Alan opens with guru yoga and refuge before a long guided rest in open awareness, then turns to why merely suspending self-grasping is not enough: freedom takes seeing the emptiness of self all the way down. He contrasts contentment with material needs against an insatiable aspiration for dharma, and argues that outer revolutions bring lasting good only once they grow from real inner change, as when a retreat at twenty-four showed him a mind like a junkyard and he set his studies aside.
D7S4 - The Foundations of Practice, and the Limits of Intellect Lama Alan · 42 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
A wide-angle survey of how Buddhist practice moves from the four foundations of mindfulness and calm abiding through the reasoning of Madhyamaka, and why Dzogchen then asks the practitioner to set all analysis aside once emptiness is realised. Lama Alan explains why pristine awareness can only be known by itself, never by perception or intellect, and recalls a Dzogchen text only coming alive once he received transmission from a teacher.
D7S3 - The Bardo as a Cinema, and Deities as Your Own Mind Lama Alan · 67 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The sense of moving from one life to the next in the bardo, compared to watching from inside a cinema: vivid, but never taking you anywhere. Lama Alan explains why Buddhas and their pure realms are displays of your own pristine awareness rather than places to travel to, and why emptiness must be realised before resting in open awareness or the insight will not hold. A guided practice continues the shift from calm abiding toward inverting awareness onto the observer.
D7S1 - The Three Marks of Existence in Everyday Examples Lama Alan · 118 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Lama Alan works through the three marks of existence: impermanence, illustrated by a ship that has had every plank replaced yet is still called the same boat; dukkha, the disappointment of expecting another person to be the source of our happiness; and not-self, shown by asking what in the body or mind is truly you, down to a cell phone that belongs to no one until it is claimed.
D5S2 - The Training This Text Assumes Lama Alan · 64 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Lama Alan explains why this teaching comes at the end of a long monastic training, after years on epistemology and on emptiness, four of them on Madhyamaka alone, and why skipping it leaves only the appearance of understanding. In the guided practice we return to observing thoughts arise and release in the space of the mind. He shows how the same technique becomes a different practice depending on its motivation, then turns to Nagarjuna's argument against inherent arising.
D5S1 - Six Domains of Practice, and Why Mind Is Not the Brain Lama Alan · 119 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Morning devotions and mantra lead into a guided practice in which we move through the six domains of experience, from sight and sound to the space of the mind alone. Lama Alan works through Dudjom Lingpa's dream teaching from Padmasambhava on the stages of realisation, using ice and water, night and day, to distinguish ordinary mind from pristine awareness, then argues that mental events are correlated with brain activity but never transform into it.
D4S2 - The Middle Stages of Settling the Mind Lama Alan · 80 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Continuing the practice of settling the mind in its natural state, Lama Alan works through the middle stages of attention, from patchy recovery after losing the object to the point where the mind stops wandering off but can still turn dull or complacent. He warns against mistaking this stability for full realisation, and closes by distinguishing shamatha from vipassana as complementary modes of attention rather than different objects.
D4S1 - Two Paths to Practice, and How Appearances Deceive Lama Alan · 116 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Lama Alan contrasts the monastic route of cutting all ties with staying in the world, married or with children, and explains how to weed attachment out of a relationship while keeping the love that comes with it. He turns to why appearances of colour and self are always misleading, since nothing exists in the solid way it seems to, and answers those who say shamatha is no longer achievable by pointing to the Dalai Lama's own encouragement to practise it.
Session Four - Impermanence Makes Rebirth Possible David Oromith · 81 minutes · recorded April 14, 2025
This final session on emptiness opens with a guided Awareness of Awareness practice, eyes open, with Padmasambhava's question of what is aware dropped in gently. The rest is a live question and answer from emails sent during the week: why impermanence is what makes rebirth possible, how karma explains a joy that seems to come from nowhere, and what is aware once no self can be found. David also covers the unsettling shaken feeling as insight deepens, and the difference between mind and conscience.
Guided Meditation - The Buddha's Words to Bahiya, Investigating Projection and the Sense of Self David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded April 3, 2025
Following the Buddha's brief instructions to Bahiya, David takes the domains of experience one at a time, touch first, then sights, sounds and thoughts, attending to each with nothing added. Even the mental map of where a sensation sits is something you have put there. It closes by opening to all six domains at once and asking whether sensations are known is enough, with no I anywhere in it.
Session Three - Perception, Emptiness and Clarity of Mind David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded April 3, 2025
Teaching only this week, with no guided meditation until the close. David examines how appearances such as colour or a table are constructed by the senses and mind rather than known directly, drawing on Guy Armstrong and Donald Hoffman's account of perception, before describing mind as the union of emptiness, clarity and compassionate responsiveness, or Buddha nature. The session ends with an eyes open meditation in which we rest in awareness without an object, then questions on that practice.
Guided Meditation - The Buddha's Words to Bahiya, Bare Awareness of the Six Senses David Oromith · 17 minutes · recorded March 26, 2025
Taking the Buddha's instruction to Bahiya, David works through the senses one at a time, body sensations, sight with the eyes open, sound, taste and smell, then mental activity, dropping the naming and the liking from each. The six are then opened at once into a choiceless awareness where experience simply happens, with no I needed to run it.
Session Two - The Thread That Continues David Oromith · 85 minutes · recorded March 26, 2025
The evening opens with a brief settling meditation, then David works through written questions on emptiness: the four point analysis for locating a self, the example of a liver, and how a personal self, a subtle continuum of consciousness and Buddha nature relate across lifetimes, drawn out through the dream analogy. Discussion runs throughout, and it closes with a guided practice on the instruction that seeing is only seeing, hearing as only hearing, across all six senses.
Guided Meditation - The Four Point Analysis of the Self David Oromith · 25 minutes · recorded March 19, 2025
David asks you to arouse the gut sense of I, the one that flares when you feel embarrassed or offended, then to test whether it can be found: first inside the body and mind, then separate from them. Neither option holds. You rest in the conclusion that the self is a workable label rather than a permanent essence, and dedicate the merit.
Session One - Looking for the Chairness David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded March 19, 2025
The session opens with a settling meditation on the breath, with refuge and bodhichitta for those who want them. David introduces emptiness as the absence of a findable, independent essence, taking a wooden chair apart to ask where the chairness is. A guided analysis then searches body and mind for the 'I' that gets embarrassed or offended. Questions cover non-duality and the worry that emptiness is nihilism.
Session 5 - Diligence, Meditation & Wisdom David Oromith · 79 minutes · recorded February 19, 2025
A guided meditation on refuge and bodhicitta weaves earlier themes together: visualising the Buddha, taking refuge, the four immeasurables, and his light dissolving into one's heart. David covers the final three paramitas: joyful diligence, with its three kinds of enthusiasm and matching laziness, concentration and its nine stages towards shamatha, and wisdom as the direct insight into emptiness underlying all the others. A question asks what it means to ask the Buddha for guidance.
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.
D5S2 - The Emptiness of Self and the Nature of Awareness David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
David guides a practice of watching thoughts arise and dissolve without following them, a step toward resting in awareness itself. He turns to absolute bodhicitta, using a plant pot and an empty bank balance to show how self and things are labels placed over shifting causes and conditions rather than solid entities. Questions cover rebirth, relationships, and resting in pristine awareness.
Guided Meditation - Mindfulness of Phenomena David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded November 24, 2024
The eyes stay open and each out-breath is used to let go of grasping, until awareness is open to all six domains at once, noting whatever arrives without preference. You then move from noting to watching how one appearance gives rise to the next, and end by searching that whole web for anything permanent, and for the person your name refers to.
Guided Meditation - Mindfulness of the Mind David Oromith · 20 minutes · recorded November 20, 2024
You steady the attention with a count of twenty one breaths, then the eyes open a little and the gaze rests vacantly as you turn to the space of the mind. David asks you to watch how a thought begins, how it lasts and how it ends, whether any of it feels like yours, and finally whether anything there can be called I.
Mahamudra: How to Discover Our True Nature Robina Courtin · 133 minutes · recorded October 29, 2024
Ven. Robina Courtin teaches from Lama Yeshe's book of that name, which she edited, and from the Panchen Lama's root text behind it. She sets out the two modes of meditation, shamatha and special insight, then the two routes to emptiness: the analytical one that learns the theory first, and the mahamudra one whose only object of concentration is the mind itself. A short practice on posture and watching whatever arises follows, and questions run throughout.
Session 2 - Loving-Kindness (part two) David Oromith · 92 minutes · recorded September 17, 2024
In the classic loving-kindness meditation we move through ourselves, an admired person, a close friend, a stranger and an enemy, using the phrases may you be well, happy and safe. David works through Lama Alan's antidotes for a difficult person: seeing them as multifaceted rather than a caricature, questioning what exactly is hated, and reflecting on emptiness of self. Questions cover forgiveness, distancing from a difficult colleague, and separating someone's behaviour from who they are.
Day 1 - Introduction David Oromith · 59 minutes · recorded August 24, 2024
The retreat opens with a meditation on settling body, speech and mind through relaxation, stillness and alertness. David then introduces the 37 Practices of Bodhisattvas, telling the story of Gyelse Togme Zangpo giving his robes and blood to a diseased beggar, and outlines how the week will move through samatha, the four immeasurables and tonglen. He closes with the text's opening homage, on how emptiness and compassion stand together, and takes a question on how discussion will work.
Guided Meditation - Looking for the Inherently Existing I David Oromith · 22 minutes · recorded June 11, 2024
The sense of I is picked out first: not the hands and not the thoughts, but the one who feels happy when praised and offended when insulted, central, fixed, standing apart. If it exists it should be findable, so the body is checked part by part, arm, leg, head, then the whole, then the mind, thought, feeling, memory, all of it changing. What turns up is only parts, causes and labels. It closes resting in whatever calm comes of that.
The Twelve Dependent Links of Origination David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded June 11, 2024
In the twenty minute guided meditation on emptiness we search body and mind for a findable self and rest in its absence. David then sets out the twelve links of dependent origination, from ignorance through craving to birth and death, using the traditional images of the blind grandmother and the potter's wheel to show how the whole cycle turns and how it can be reversed. Questions cover whether the six realms are literal or metaphors and what, if anything, continues from one life to the next.
Ignorance & Emptiness David Oromith · 89 minutes · recorded June 4, 2024
The session opens with a brief guided meditation to settle the breath, before David turns to ignorance as the root of attachment and aversion, and to emptiness, the lack of inherent existence in people and things. He uses the cup, the car taken apart and the dream state to show how things exist only dependently, not as solid separate entities. Questions range widely: perception and the shared lamp, applying emptiness when someone is hurtful, and how to love someone who lacks inherent existence.
D2S4 - Preparing for Death, and the Three Cleansings Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 62 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024
Purification as preparation for dying, opening with death and impermanence and the seven branch practice. Tenpa defines the pair of words that recur in these texts, misdeeds and obscurations, the second meaning here the factors that trigger afflictions and thoughts that block meditation. The commentary he quotes likens the practice to surgery rather than slow medicine, and to aiming at one problem such as anger. The long guided practice runs the whole text, with the hundred syllable mantra and the three cleansings.
D1S4 - Regret, Rejoice, Dedicate, and Six Remedial Actions Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 67 minutes · recorded January 6, 2024
Tenpa lays out a daily frame: threefold and fivefold aspirations in the morning, and at night a review that regrets, purifies, rejoices and dedicates. A guided practice starts the four powers with reliance, not regret, then remedy and resolve, with loving kindness for all beings as the remedy. Six kinds of remedial action follow, from the fourth Shechen Gyaltsab's commentary: reciting buddhas' names, making images, circumambulation, reciting sutras and tantras, mantras and meditating on emptiness.
D2S5 - Questions, and Essence Love Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 60 minutes · recorded December 11, 2023
An evening given over to questions: basic goodness without conceit, holding all beings in mind without being overwhelmed, vegetarianism without arrogance, phrases that feel mechanical, how Buddha nature can be severed, and what to do on witnessing harm when neither passivity nor impulse will serve. Michael Lobsang Tenpa explains Tsoknyi Rinpoche's term essence love, and the okayness a Himalayan grandmother radiates. The practice at the end is Shantideva's verses of dedication.
The Four Noble Truths: The Causes (Origin) of Suffering David Oromith · 78 minutes · recorded October 10, 2023
The session begins with a short ten minute practice on the breath, with refuge and bodhicitta. David turns to the second noble truth, contrasting craving in the Theravada with ignorance and karma in the Mahayana, and uses a cup and a bank account to explain emptiness and dependent origination. Questions range across karma, rebirth, labels and identity, and using emptiness to loosen attachment to people we love.
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.
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.
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.
D3S1 - Emptiness, and Transforming Good Fortune Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Dodrupchen teaches adversity by way of ultimate truth in two sentences, which Lama Alan Wallace opens out with the refutation of the four extreme views concerning production. A car never objectively becomes a car, and adversity is adversity when you identify it as such. Turning to felicity, he quotes Padampa Sangye, that people can handle only a little felicity but a lot of adversity, and tells of a yogi who declined cancer treatment. In the closing practice we radiate loving kindness from the heart.
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.
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.
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.
D6S2 - The Fruition and the Rainbow Body Lama Alan · 128 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
The commentary closes with the last two sections of the text, conduct and fruition, where meditative equipoise and daily life merge until no distinction is left between them. Lama Alan Wallace describes the three kinds of rainbow body the tradition reports, and reads the prophecies Dudjom Lingpa recorded in his autobiography, including thirteen disciples who would attain it. Two guided practices carry the whole path, from settling the mind to resting beyond apprehender and apprehended.
D4S2 - The Mind as a Black Box Lama Alan · 123 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
Dignaga and Dharmakirti argued that we only ever meet appearances, so nothing can be validly inferred about a world behind them, which is why the mind only school kept the mind and discarded the world. Lama Alan Wallace then shows Dudjom Rinpoche turning the same blade inward, since the mind that observes is a black box too. Kant's noumena and John Wheeler's conclusion that information is fundamental follow. In the closing practice we seek out the mind as agent and observer.
D5S1 - Apprehending the Apprehender Lama Alan · 124 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
The morning opens with Atisha's line on examining the character of unborn awareness, and Lama Alan Wallace draws out its consequence, that there was never a point at which we became sentient beings. Gyatrul Rinpoche's commentary separates apprehending the mind from apprehending the apprehender, a search that ends not in failure but in seeing one's own face directly. A one minute experiment identifies the interim between two thoughts, not other than rigpa.
D4S3 - The Mind That Observes, and Mount Meru Against Science Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 101 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Lama Alan Wallace turns the search back on the observer: if the mind that is observing has no colour or shape and no location, does it exist, and if not, what has drawn that conclusion? The inquiry arrives at a mind empty of both existence and non existence. In the questions, Eva Natanya sets the Trinity beside the three kayas, and Lama Alan takes on two head-on collisions between the Buddha's own words and science, Mount Meru and the four continents, and Buddhas millions of years before humans.
D5S1 - Guru Yoga, and When Samsara Begins Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 119 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Lama Alan Wallace sets the cataphatic question, what do I need to do, against the apophatic, what can I stop doing, and explains why guru yoga is core to Dzogchen: you cannot recognise yourself as a Buddha while seeing your guru as a sentient being. In the practice we dissolve the mentor into the heart, then rest without meditating on anything. Eva Natanya asks how a Buddha ever became deluded, and how the son of God ever fell, and hears that samsara begins in every instant appearances are seen as other.
D7S4 - Open Presence and the Rainbow Body Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The final session opens with Lama Alan Wallace objecting to open presence being flattened into bare attention, a practice he says a marmot could manage. A silent 24 minute period builds through shamatha and vipashyana into open presence itself. He then reads Padmasambhava on entering lucid dreamless sleep with attention at the heart, the elements dissolving as sleep comes, and how the clear light of sleep prepares one for the clear light of death, closing with the levels of rainbow body.
D7S3 - Nighttime Dream Yoga Lama Alan · 80 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Yangthang Rinpoche's pointing out instructions are completed and then practised, awareness resting in open presence, body relaxed, voice silent, mind unmodified. Lama Alan Wallace then takes up Padmasambhava's stages of dream yoga, beginning with falling asleep in the lion posture, Padmasambhava at the throat and a request to recognise the dream. Recall and vividness come first, then the dream is transformed, one thing multiplied into many. Last comes seeing through it, by jumping into a river.
D7S2 - Pointing Out Pristine Awareness Lama Alan · 59 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace gives one more reason for his research centre, a controlled experiment on past-life recall, and Michelle Alexander's New York Times column asking what if we are all coming back. The guided practice carries Yangthang Rinpoche's root text from shamatha through vipashyana into pointing out, the mind found to be neither existent nor non-existent, its emptiness the dharmakaya and its luminosity the sambhogakaya. He closes on the Vajra Essence, the ground frozen by dualistic grasping.
D6S4 - Searching for the Mind Lama Alan · 63 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
A second pass at vipashyana, this time following Padmasambhava's Searching for the Mind: is the mind that is placed the same as the one placing it, has it any location or size, and is it an emptiness that is nothing? Lama Alan Wallace then draws out what a basis of designation is, teasing one participant over whether a waving hand counts as seeing his body. He argues that the close applications of mindfulness are phenomenology, and belong with the ontology of the perfection of wisdom.
D5S4 - Probing the Mind as Agent Lama Alan · 71 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Consciousness is defined as luminous and cognizant, and Lama Alan Wallace turns Padmasambhava's next phase inwards: who or what is it that concentrates and releases the attention? In the guided practice we keep the oscillation going and probe the sense of being the agent, which he says can cut through to pristine awareness. The Heart Sutra and the Diamond Cutter Sutra follow, where even nirvana is like a dream, the Dalai Lama on why that turns sympathy into compassion, and lucid dreaming as the footstool into dream yoga.
D7S1 - Padmasambhava's Pointing Out Instructions, and Innate Ignorance Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The Dzogchen day. Lama Alan Wallace settles body, speech and mind, then reads Padmasambhava's pointing out instructions from Natural Liberation while we rest awareness in the space in front, without a meditative object. He separates the ignorance we are born with from the acquired kind, such as racism or materialism, and quotes one of the masters whose texts he translated in Open Mind: the awareness of which you are aware can be viewed as a ray of pristine awareness, and walking up that ray gets you to the sun.
P2 - Meditation, Conduct and Dying Well Lama Alan · 139 minutes · recorded January 1, 2017
Yangthang Rinpoche's text is blunt: without the view there is no meditation, only a cheap imitation of it, and poor preparation for death. The session opens with a guided practice in which we probe the mind for its colour, origin, location and destination. He works through meditation and conduct, the nine kinds of activity to be released, guru yoga and the four empowerments, why clinging to bliss, luminosity or non-conceptuality casts you into the desire, form and formless realms, and how to recognise the ground at death.
P1 - The View of the Great Perfection Lama Alan · 124 minutes · recorded January 1, 2017
Lama Alan gives the oral transmission and commentary to a Dzogchen text by Yangthang Rinpoche, who turned eighteen years in a Chinese concentration camp into an eighteen year retreat. Four preliminaries come first, all difficult to find: a human life, the spirit of emergence, a qualified guru, the sublime dharma. The view is not theory: stop looking outward, settle the mind in its natural state, then ask where awareness comes from, where it is located, where it goes. The session opens with a guided shamatha practice.
S3 - Non-Meditation and the Near Misses Lama Alan · 121 minutes · recorded January 1, 2016
Is the method shamatha, vipashyana or Dzogchen? Lama Alan answers that the same practice can be any of the three depending on who does it, then maps understanding, experience, realisation and confidence, realisation being nailing it and confidence countersinking it. The near misses: clinging to bliss, luminosity with grasping, and a non-conceptual openness with no lucidity of vipashyana in it. The session opens with a guided practice from Padmasambhava's Natural Liberation, ending in non-meditation.
S1 - Cracking Open the Egg of Unawareness Lama Alan · 99 minutes · recorded January 1, 2016
The session opens with a twenty four minute practice on awareness of awareness. Lama Alan begins his transmission of Mipham Rinpoche's A Lamp to Dispel Darkness with who a village tantric practitioner has to be: an authentic motivation, bodhicitta and insight into emptiness. Then the fool's gold, the muddled consciousness of dwelling in the substrate, a space devoid of appearances, which yogis have conflated with realisation generation after generation, and why unawareness is what lets confusion in.
Guided Meditation - Open Presence, Approached Through the Buddha's Words to Bahiya Lama Alan · 25 minutes
Lama Alan Wallace leads you through the Buddha's instruction to Bahiya, taking first the visual field, then sounds, then tactile sensations, then the movements of the mind, and in each one letting the seen be just the seen. You observe appearances arising in space with no outside, no inside and no owner. Like a bale of hay whose cord is cut, your awareness then unravels in all directions into open presence, sustained in silence.
Guided Meditation - Vipashyana, Searching the Mind for Shape, Size and Location Lama Alan · 24 minutes
With the body settled and your eyes partly open, Lama Alan asks you to place your mind in the space before you, then look for whatever it was you placed. Is there a single entity that thinks, remembers and perceives? Is it the same from moment to moment? The inquiry narrows to one question: if the mind exists it must have characteristics, so does it have shape, size or location? It ends with you still searching, in silence.
Guided Meditation - Vipashyana, Searching for the Mind That Observes Lama Alan · 24 minutes
Lama Alan turns awareness back on itself and asks what the mind actually is. Having directed attention to the space of the body, you invert it and inspect whatever was doing the directing. Does the mind have a shape, a size, a colour, a location? Set it in motion when it is too still to see. You watch states of mind arise and dissolve, and close on the question: who or what are you?
Omniscience and the Buddha’s Mind Vesna A. Wallace · 120 minutes
Vesna A. Wallace reads the Buddha's omniscience through the Kalachakra tradition, working from Indian commentaries on the Litany of the Names of Manjushri, a text of 162 verses carrying some 800 names. The verses are read as outcomes of the six phase yoga, answering to the purification of 162 channels in the six chakras, and omniscience is self-awareness, all pervasive rather than localised. Questions cover how gnosis differs from wisdom, what emptiness means, and which language to recite in.
Part Four - The Fourth Time, and a Laboratory for Contemplatives Lama Alan · 51 minutes
In the guided practice we settle into awareness of awareness and then turn to inquiry: look for the observer, and find that it has no shape, colour, size or location, yet cannot be called non-existent either. He then has you rest in the emptiness of your own mind and open all six sense doors. Lama Alan explains ground, path and fruition, and the fourth time reached by way of the present moment. He describes the contemplative centre he is creating in Tuscany, and answers a question on reincarnation.
Part Three - Emptiness, Bodhicitta and Buddha Nature Lama Alan · 81 minutes
How the second turning follows from the first. Lama Alan traces the argument from the nun Vajira, who reduces a chariot to a label and with it everything else, through Nagasena and King Milinda to the Heart Sutra, where the aggregates are empty of inherent nature too. He gives the reason for the bodhisattva's turn, the father who is last out of the burning house, and what is needed to reach the path of accumulation. The third turning and Buddha nature follow, and Dzogchen the final point.
Compassion Glen Svensson · 85 minutes
Compassion, karuna, as the wish for ourselves and others to be free of suffering and its causes, which means understanding dukkha at three levels: unpleasant experience, the change in our pleasant experiences, and the potential for suffering that a mind contaminated by mental afflictions always carries. In the guided practice we draw suffering in as black smoke to be dissolved at the heart, moving from ourselves to a loved one, a stranger and a difficult person. Glen Svensson reads from Matthieu Ricard on why compassion burnout is really empathy fatigue.
Summary of Practice Glen Svensson · 81 minutes
The last session draws the four modules together and turns to how to integrate the practice into daily life: shamatha first thing and vipashyana after it, the body scan for impermanence, brief moments of questioning appearances, and an evening review of one negative thing done, one positive thing done, and one thing received. In the guided loving kindness practice we work outwards from a sphere of light at the heart. Glen Svensson also distinguishes an autonomous self from an inherently existent one.
Short-Term Strategies Glen Svensson · 80 minutes
What can be done now, while the long work of realising emptiness is still under way. Glen Svensson goes step by step through the six-step process running from ignorance to suffering and offers something workable at each point: questioning appearances, observing a pleasant or unpleasant feeling as it arises, the four opponent powers for harm already done, and acceptance, which does not mean resignation, for pain already arrived. In the guided practice we then work on attachment itself.
Nature of Mind Glen Svensson · 79 minutes
The mind itself becomes the object. Glen Svensson takes the shamatha practice of resting in awareness and adds questioning to it, which is what carries it over into vipashyana: who is releasing, who is concentrating, who is resting? He maps the three levels of Mahamudra and the nine vehicles of Dzogchen onto coarse mind, substrate consciousness and pristine awareness, and defines mind as that which is clear and knowing.
Stages of Progress Glen Svensson · 88 minutes
Where this practice leads. Glen Svensson maps the four results, stream enterer through to arhat, against the ten fetters, then the five paths, the ten grounds, and the difference between the mental afflictions that block liberation and the subtler stains of ignorance that block enlightenment. A closing practice, taken from Padmasambhava, turns the search on awareness itself: where is it located, has it a shape, a size, an edge?
The Four Steps Glen Svensson · 77 minutes
In two guided practices we begin by imagining a situation with a strong sense of me: the me being praised, then the me being wrongly blamed. Each is searched for in the body and in the mind; in the second, body and mind are mentally dissolved to see whether a me is left over. Between them Glen Svensson lays out the four steps from the Dalai Lama's How to See Yourself as You Really Are, the first being identifying the target. The me that does exist is the mere I, merely labelled on the basis of the body and the mind.
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.
Boundaries Glen Svensson · 85 minutes
How a line drawn to make sense of experience is turned into a boundary, and the six step process by which that grasping becomes attachment, aversion and suffering. Glen Svensson works through the two extremes of existence and non-existence towards Nagarjuna's middle way, and uses the lucid dream as his analogy for realising emptiness while awake. The session opens with a practice on the body as a dependent arising and closes by looking for the me in the flow of body and mind.
Emptiness Glen Svensson · 78 minutes
A guided search for the me who is relaxing the body and focusing the mind, ending in the merely labelled me. Glen Svensson lays out the three ways things exist dependently, through causes and conditions, parts and labelling, using a seed becoming a sprout, a star that can as easily be counted as eighteen lines, and a pen that is a chewing stick to a dog. In a second practice we search for the body among its parts.
Searching for Self Glen Svensson · 74 minutes
The body scan returns unguided, at your own speed and in your own sequence. In a second practice we look for a self in the body, in the mind, and in the two together. Glen Svensson then opens the teaching on emptiness by reading Lama Alan Wallace on what is really there: what we know of the world is only appearances to the mind, and even physics, as Heisenberg put it, shows not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
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.
Merging Mind with Space Glen Svensson · 80 minutes
Awareness is directed up, right, left and down into space, then to the centre of the chest and out in all directions, loosening the sense that it is something small inside the head. Glen Svensson sets out what Buddhism means by mind: its definition as clear and knowing, the six consciousnesses, and the coarse, subtle and very subtle levels. He warns how easily stillness is mistaken for insight into emptiness. A second practice adds Padmasambhava's questioning, and we alternate looking with rest.
Part I: Refining the View Ian Baker · 158 minutes
Ian Baker traces how Dzogchen developed, from early formulations close to Chan through their absorption into mainstream Tibetan tantric Buddhism. He reads the view from images of Samantabhadra and Padmasambhava, and describes his own training under Chatral Rinpoche, who sent him to a cave for a month with a bag of tsampa. Before there was Dzogchen there was Sahajayana, Saraha's innate bliss. A talk and questions, no guided practice, closing with a request to find a poem or song expressing the view.
Mind & Mandalas - Part Three Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · Ian Baker · 62 minutes
Questions from those listening. Eva Natanya gives Tsongkhapa's answer to why realising emptiness alone is not enough: living beings need form, and a Buddha must be able to manifest in form. Ian Baker takes the objection that visualisation is a flight simulator rather than a flight, and agrees it can become a trap. Lama Alan Wallace sets out what Atisha and Tsongkhapa said about consort practice, who it is not for, and how badly it has been abused. He closes on Dudjom Lingpa's Buddhahood Without Meditation, and how much effort it takes to reach the effortless.
Mind & Mandalas - Part Two Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · Ian Baker · 93 minutes
Lama Alan Wallace replies to both presentations with a single image, Samantabhadra as the personification of one's own pristine awareness, and argues that guru yoga, not deity generation, is the one indispensable support for Dzogchen. He traces what each vehicle does with the mental afflictions, from counteracting them to their revealing their true face. Ian Baker brings in Milarepa and Yeshe Tsogyal on tummo, Lama Alan Wallace turns to quantum physics and space-time being doomed, and Eva Natanya closes on mind and the vital energies being of one nature but distinct in function.
Mind & Mandalas - Part One Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · Ian Baker · 88 minutes
Ian Baker opens with an illustrated tour of the mandala, from scroll paintings and sand mandalas to Borobudur, Samye and Mount Kailash, then inward to the chakras and the mandala of the completion stage. Eva Natanya answers from Tsongkhapa's Guhyasamaja commentaries: it is the wisdom realising emptiness that arises as the deity, never an ordinary sense of identity made to look like a Buddha. They close on how practices born outside monasticism were absorbed into it. Teaching and dialogue, with no guided practice.
Session 3 - Q&A Vesna A. Wallace · 46 minutes
Questions to Vesna A. Wallace after the two talks. She explains why the mirror here is a prognostic mirror rather than a dusty one to be cleaned, and why the elements are ultimately five lights of a Buddha's wisdom. Other answers cover how elaborate visualisation diminishes the habitual propensities of samsara while staying a conceptual bridge, why ordinary bliss differs from the bliss of nirvana only in being conditioned, and how brain and mind differ. She closes on drawing the side channels into the central channel.
Session 2 - 'Perception' Vesna A. Wallace · 41 minutes
Perception in the Kalachakra system, where the chakras, the channels and the vital energies shape what can be seen at all. Vesna A. Wallace traces how the waking, dreaming, deep sleep and blissful states arise from drops in the forehead, throat, heart and navel chakras, then follows the six phase yoga through its night time and daytime signs to the image of emptiness. She draws on the Stainless Light commentary and its account of the five eyes. A presentation only, with no practice.

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