Sleep and rest

66 teachings in the library are about this.

Week 7 - Yi, and What Makes a Movement Belong to an Element Dan Brierley · 70 minutes · recorded July 15, 2026
Dan explains what makes a movement belong to an element: partly its physical qualities, like the water lake movement's waist twist pressing the diaphragm onto the kidneys and adrenals, and partly Yi, mind and intention. He describes Yi as asleep in habitual action, and shows how bringing it in deliberately sharpens a movement's effect. The class practises Wu Chi, the five breaths and the full form, each element held with its own intention.
Session Three - Restraint Without Suppression David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded February 11, 2026
In the guided meditation we invite in a memory of anger, tracing what it cost and how a calmer response might have gone. David works through the Buddha's sutta on anger, its seven things pleasing to an enemy, from bad sleep to reputational harm, then four remedies: restraint, discernment, persistence and right view. He tells the anger eating demon story and reads verses on speech and blame. Questions cover the inner enemy as harsh imagery, and how anger builds until it feels like possession.
Afternoon Session Charlie Morley · 200 minutes · recorded January 31, 2026
Charlie leads two guided rehearsals of Guru Rinpoche's nighttime dream yoga practice: falling asleep as a chosen deity, head resting in the guru's lap, attention on the throat centre, and a repeated affirmation to recognise the dream state. He covers sleep position, why Chenrezig needs no empowerment, and dream planning, deciding in advance what to do once lucid. Questions touch on hypnagogic imagery and insomnia. He closes the two-day course with a dedication and retreat details.
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.
Afternoon Session Charlie Morley · 186 minutes · recorded January 24, 2026
Charlie teaches reality checks and the "weird technique" for building daytime awareness that carries into sleep, then walks through the sleep cycle to show why lucid dreams grow easier in the night's second half. He leads a guided lying down rehearsal of four hypnagogic affirmations, among them a bodhicitta version and a Toltec warrior affirmation, before wake back to bed, a technique shown to sharply raise lucid dream frequency. Discussion covers napping, shift work and dream recall.
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.
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.
D1S2 - Body Scan: The One Practice That Is Only About Rest David Oromith · 30 minutes · recorded August 18, 2025
The outlier of all the practices, in that it is not part of any sequence: a guided body scan that is really just about rest, with shavasana offered as a good posture for relaxation. David moves attention from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet, asking for the tactile sensations themselves rather than a mental image or map of the body, and says this is the only one where it may be all right to have a little nap at the end.
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.
D3S5 - Working with Emotional Triggers, and a Wide-Ranging Q&A Lama Alan · 116 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Catching a difficult emotion before it takes hold, using a psychologist's advice on spotting triggers early. Lama Alan takes questions ranging widely: clarity in falling asleep and dreaming, why appearances and awareness depend on each other, and the three kinds of bodhicitta known as shepherd, navigator and king. He closes weighing reports of yogis who show no bodily decay after death as evidence against materialism.
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.
D3S3 - Seeing Through the Guru, and Boundless Compassion Lama Alan · 103 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The substrate consciousness as a homing pigeon's coop, the place awareness returns to in sleep and in death. A breath practice leads into a guru yoga visualisation in which we trace devotion through lineage to our own pristine awareness. Lama Alan covers seeing Dharma companions through their Buddha nature rather than faults, cultivating compassion free of a mother's partiality, and what it means to receive a siddhi, in the lama who healed him with a stone heated in meditation.
D2S2 - Stillness Without Stimulation, and Life After Death Lama Alan · 88 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
In the guided practice we remain still without stimulation or boredom, using the breath as an anchor rather than entertainment. Lama Alan surveys the basic supports of a contented life, food, shelter, clothing, medical care and education, before turning to the first of the text's foundation stones: whether consciousness continues after death. He argues the question cannot be set aside, since the rest of the practice depends on how it is answered.
D2S5 - Shamatha, Materialism and the Question of Rigpa Lama Alan · 101 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
A clarification that wealth, power and prestige are not faults in themselves, only where happiness is mistakenly sought. Lama Alan questions whether a materialist worldview can truly support ethical life, then explains why the Buddha and later masters insist shamatha remains indispensable even for those with deep realisation. The evening ends with a question on pristine awareness and the ground of reality, and a guided practice for settling into sleep.
D6S1 - The Final Stages of Shamatha and Its Signs of Arrival Lama Alan · 102 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Mindfulness of breathing, settling the mind, and awareness of awareness are described as three nested practices, with mindfulness of breathing offered as the remedy for a stressful day and brief pauses through the day as seasoning. Lama Alan then details the eighth and ninth stages of shamatha and the signs of its arrival: heaviness at the crown, physical and mental pliancy, and waves of bliss, and how daily life and sleep change afterwards.
D5S3 - The Oscillation, and Not Rushing Pristine Awareness Lama Alan · 142 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Lama Alan guides an oscillation practice, concentrating awareness and releasing it, then turns to Padmasambhava's instructions for directing awareness to the sky, either side, below, and the heart, without anything to visualize. He warns against being introduced to pristine awareness before genuine stillness arises, since it then becomes only a memory to be dogmatic about. A closing exercise on listening for a distant sound shows how attention can reach outward with no image at all.
D4S3 - Vase Breathing, and What You Bring to the Practice Lama Alan · 159 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Lama Alan teaches the gentle vase breathing that accompanies settling the mind in its natural state, then reframes the practice around a different question: not how the session went, but what you brought to it. A guided meditation follows, alongside an account of the vivid, strange experiences, nyam, that can arise as the mind settles. He closes with the point that nothing arising in the mind, thought, memory or image, can actually harm you.
D2S3 - Settling the Mind in Its Natural State Lama Alan · 154 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
We shift from the breath to the space of the mind, generating a thought or image and watching it dissolve, to grow familiar with observing whatever arises without being pulled in. Lama Alan credits Dudjom Lingpa's gentler approach, taking the mind as the path rather than forcing it onto an object, and the group explores whether thoughts can truly be observed, and why awareness of an impulse before it becomes action is what makes choice possible.
D1S3 - Three Breathing Methods and the Ground of Becoming Lama Alan · 167 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Lama Alan teaches three ways of following the breath, each with its own guided practice: full body awareness from Asanga, abdomen breathing from the Burmese tradition, and the classic Theravada focus at the nostrils with counting. He distinguishes mindfulness from introspection, the faculty that catches laxity and excitation, and describes the ground of becoming, the substrate the mind dissolves into in sleep and at death, reachable through shamatha.
Session 1 - Practices for Relaxation David Oromith · 69 minutes · recorded January 19, 2025
David opens by naming why so many of us live from a baseline of stress, then leads a longer guided meditation of settling body, speech and mind in their natural state, followed by mindfulness of breathing. He explains shamatha and its three qualities of relaxation, stillness and alertness, and how daily practice builds a calmer baseline rather than forcing a blank mind. The session closes with a second guided practice, open presence with all five senses.
S2 - Counting for Stability, and the Nostrils for Clarity David Oromith · 73 minutes · recorded October 29, 2024
Mindfulness of breathing at the abdomen, with two tools added: focusing with the in-breath and relaxing with the out, then a brief count of one to seven. In a second practice we narrow attention to the sensations at the nostrils, for clarity. David separates mindfulness from introspection and describes the early stages towards shamatha, where recovering from distraction more quickly can feel like getting worse. Questions cover posture, when and how long to practise, and memories surfacing as practice deepens.
The Benefits of Improving Our Attention and Mindfulness of Breathing (Whole Body) David Oromith · 87 minutes · recorded January 16, 2024
A guided meditation on mindfulness of breathing across the whole body, following a shortened settling of body, speech and mind, with David explaining why relaxation rather than forceful concentration is the foundation shamatha needs. He sets out the Buddha's four kinds of worldly happiness alongside the three genuine forms of well-being, then the everyday benefits of trained attention: less stress, better sleep, more enjoyment of ordinary moments. Questions address staying calm around family and over-focusing on the breath.
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.
D5S4 - The Eleven Benefits Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 60 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
The eleven benefits of loving kindness attributed to the Buddha, taken one at a time: sleeping and waking comfortably, no unvirtuous dreams, being adored by people and by non-human beings, gods protecting you, no harm from fire, poison or weapons, a clear face, a joyful mind, a peaceful death. Michael Lobsang Tenpa describes how the practice starts turning up in dreams, and what Atisha and Dromtonpa say about the three best ways to die. The golden portal practice opens the session, self-guided.
Guided Meditation - Deep Relaxation for Sleep David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded May 24, 2021
This is a guided meditation designed to help you unwind and relax your body ready for a good night's sleep. By bringing awareness into the body and consciously relaxing individual areas of the body, we allow the mind to let go of rambling thoughts and come to settle in a calm, witnessing mode. This soothing meditation will help take you into a deep, restful sleep.
Illumination of Primordial Wisdom, Question and Answer Sessions, Session 2 Lama Alan · 64 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
Can Westerners achieve shamatha? Lama Alan Wallace answers firmly yes, naming one of his own lamas, Lama Karma, who reached it in six months of very strict retreat after twenty years of practice, and argues that it is rare because conducive conditions are rare. Waves of fatigue in practice mean take a nap. Mantra recitation opens the heart but cannot carry anyone to shamatha, since the mind stays active. Readiness for a strict retreat is contentment when the stimulation is taken away.
D1S2 - Inner Solitude, and Three Ways Into Shamatha Lama Alan · 109 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
Solitude comes first: Lama Alan Wallace calls inner solitude, retreat from the eight mundane concerns, at least as important as the outer and far harder to achieve. He works through the seven qualities of Vairochana's posture, with Gyatrul Rinpoche's advice to find a posture comfortable for you, then the vital points of speech and mind. Three shamatha methods follow: resting unfabricated, imagining a ruby red HUM at the heart, or gazing at a stick or pebble. In the closing practice we try all three.
D4S1 - Searching for the Mind, and Whether Shamatha Is Indispensable Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Lama Alan Wallace separates the Christian meanings of meditation and contemplation from the Buddhist ones, then leads a vipashyana practice from Padmasambhava: place the mind in the space in front of you and look for its shape, colour and size, and ask whether the mind that places and the mind placed are one or two. Eva Natanya agrees within a Buddhist context that no transformation is sustainable without shamatha, but not for the hesychast tradition, where dispassion is worked by the uncreated energies of the Trinity.
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.
D6S3 - Looking for the Mind That Thinks Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Vipashyana on the nature of the mind, guided from the pith instructions of a fourteenth century mahamudra master: what colour, shape or gender has the mind that observes, and where does it arise, abide and cease? Lama Alan Wallace turns from that unfindability to how things do exist, taking the Higgs boson: in dependence upon prior causes and conditions, on its attributes, and finally on conceptual designation. He brings in Wheeler and DeWitt: no observer, and time falls out of the equations.
D6S2 - The Grand Finale of Shamatha Lama Alan · 62 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
A review fires Descartes, materialism and the Buddhist schools in turn on the way to Madhyamaka, before Lama Alan Wallace turns to what he calls the grand finale of shamatha without a sign. He guides awareness cast upward, to each side and downward through the space of awareness, then down into the heart, then released whole into space. Padmasambhava's text gives the indications of flawless shamatha, an oil lamp unmoved by wind, and warns against being introduced to pristine awareness too soon.
D5S5 - Prospective Mindfulness, and Questions on Karma and Free Will Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The session opens with a silent period, with a choice of methods and two combinations Lama Alan Wallace likes, earth and wind and earth and sky, mindfulness of breathing leading into settling the mind or into awareness of awareness. He reviews prospective mindfulness: resolving to notice an anomaly or a dream sign and do a state check, and catching the moment of waking so the dream can be re-entered. Questions follow on free will, whether an android could be conscious, and whether watching an affliction arise accrues karma.
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.
D5S3 - Awareness of Awareness Lama Alan · 88 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace takes up shamatha without a sign, awareness of awareness, which the Buddha counted among the ten kasinas and the subtlest of the methods Padmasambhava teaches. We use an oscillation of arousing the attention and releasing it into space, and three things mean you are doing it incorrectly: distraction, grasping, and losing clarity. Conduct between sessions follows: rely upon unwavering mindfulness, picking thought up and putting it down like a knife and fork.
D5S2 - Shamatha Without a Sign Lama Alan · 55 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
A guided 24 minute practice from Yangthang Rinpoche's root text on the view, meditation and conduct of Dzogchen. Turn awareness in upon that which is aware, follow no thought of past or future, and rest loosely without modifying anything. Lama Alan Wallace then reads the Vajira Sutta, the one place he has found in the Pali canon where the outer world is questioned: the nun answers Mara's who made you with the chariot that is only a word, but leaves suffering as real as it gets.
D4S5 - Why Shamatha Cannot Be Skipped, and Questions on Dying Lama Alan · 82 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace sets the physics notes aside and gives the rest of the retreat to Buddhadharma. He recounts asking the present Dudjom Rinpoche why hardly any Tibetans really teach shamatha, and is told they get bored and Westerners come for empowerments. Lucid dreaming that never questions the daytime reality changes nothing. No practice tonight: the hour goes to questions on karma in dreams, near death experience and dying sedated, closing with a burning coal melting through a cone of snow.
D4S4 - Introspection and the Black Box Lama Alan · 63 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace makes the case for introspection as a science, taking William James's three-pronged psychology and the way mathematicians corroborate what only they can perceive. A silent period follows, shamatha on the space of the mind turning into vipashyana once questions are posed. He then uses Dignaga and Dharmakirti's inference of fire from smoke to argue that the objective world is a black box, and cautions with Heisenberg against granting existence to what is unknowable in principle.
D4S3 - The Space of the Mind Lama Alan · 91 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace fills in the piece most easily overlooked in shamatha on the mind: when nothing arises, attend to the space itself. Mickey Mouse balanced on his head and the Big Dipper's imagined lines show that the space of the mind is not inside your head. In the guided practice we move from shamatha into vipashyana on where thoughts come from and dissolve. He then reads the physicist Henning Genz on real things as excitations of the vacuum, shapeless in itself until it takes on a shape.
D4S2 - Causality Without a Mechanism Lama Alan · 60 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Causality in Buddhism is phenomenological rather than mechanical: had this not happened, that would not have followed, and no bumping is required. Lama Alan Wallace points out that physics is in the same position, since nobody can picture how matter warps spacetime or how measuring one photon collapses the wave function of another light years away. In the practice we deliberately arouse a pleasant feeling, children playing, so that a subjective impulse can be watched arising and fading.
D3S5 - False Awakenings and Dream Karma Lama Alan · 94 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Thoreau on going to the woods to front only the essential facts of life, read out in full, then an unguided period, offered as half subduing thoughts breath by breath and half settling the mind in its natural state. The questions that follow take in false awakenings, one dreamer waking nine times over, and people certain they have achieved shamatha. Lama Alan Wallace gives the Buddha's answer on whether a non lucid dream accrues karma, and the experiment he wants run on where memories are held.
D3S4 - Thoughts in Real Time, Emotions Only in Hindsight Lama Alan · 66 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Settling the mind in its natural state, with a way in for anyone who keeps failing: deliberately generate a thought, Mary had a little lamb, syllable by syllable, watch where it dissolves and hold your attention there so the next arising is caught as it comes. The same is done with an image of a piece of fruit. Lama Alan Wallace explains why thoughts and images can be caught in real time while desires and emotions are only ever noticed afterwards.
D3S3 - Three Ways We Are Dreaming Lama Alan · 98 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Total withdrawal, deep into the formless absorptions, or total immersion in the world: Lama Alan Wallace goes through the two strategies and why Gautama found neither was an escape. Then twenty one counted breaths, observation of the somatic field, distinguishing sensations from the feelings we meet them with, and the same attention turned on the space of the mind. The three marks of existence follow as three dreams, one of them a cup of ginger and lemon that could never have made anyone happy.
D3S2 - Generic Ideas and the Second Instant Lama Alan · 42 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
In the guided practice we take one domain at a time, the visual field, then sound, then the tactile, then the mind, each nakedly, asking whether any of it is owned. Lama Alan Wallace names three ways of not knowing something: not paying attention, projecting what is not there, as racism does, and a blockage that hides what is in plain sight. He then gives the old two-instant account: the first gets what reality is dishing up, the second superimposes a generic idea, static where reality is in constant flux, and fusing the two is delusion.
D2S5 - Evening Questions on Mind and Memory Lama Alan · 89 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
One silent period, each person following whichever method of mindfulness of breathing benefits them most. The rest of the evening goes to written questions. Lama Alan Wallace argues that memories are stored in the substrate consciousness rather than the brain, since your apps are not stored in your keyboard. He gives consciousness two defining characteristics, making appearances manifest and knowing, and calls panpsychism, integrated information theory included, the last gasp of materialism.
D2S4 - The Third Balance: Vividness Lama Alan · 43 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Vividness is the third quality to cultivate, after relaxation and stability. The practice is the classic Theravada one, attention narrowed to the sensations of the breath at the nostrils. Lama Alan Wallace warns that the eyes must stay soft and out of it, since focusing them on the target area brings on headaches. He then adds introspection as quality control, catching excitation and laxity, and offers counting one to ten as a speed bump for a wandering mind.
D2S3 - What Materialism Cannot Explain Lama Alan · 99 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The Burmese method of mindfulness of breathing, attention on the rise and fall of the abdomen, chosen here to enhance stability without losing the underlying ease. Lama Alan Wallace tells how Stephen LaBerge's recurring dream monster kept coming back until he gazed into its eyes and thought, you're just like me, wishing for happiness, at which it dissolved into his heart and never came back. Most of the teaching is a case against materialism: no theory of consciousness in 150 years, and the luminous ether as his parallel.
D2S2 - Falling Asleep and Becoming Lucid Lama Alan · 65 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
In Asanga's approach to mindfulness of breathing we attend to the sensations throughout the whole body correlated with the rhythm of the respiration, relaxing more deeply with every out breath without losing clarity. Lama Alan Wallace then offers it as a way to fall asleep, practised in the shavasana until the waves of drowsiness come in, rather than reaching for medication. He goes through the three researched routes into a lucid dream, and what to do when one starts to fade: rub your body, spin.
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.
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.
D6S1 - Looking for the Observer Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The third phase on the way to shamatha without a sign, guided: we rest awareness in the space ahead with no object, then turn in upon the mind that is observing, probing closely then releasing. Lama Alan Wallace gives Tsongkhapa's pith instruction, focus on the sheer luminosity and cognisance of awareness, and grants Shantideva's point that a candle flame does not illuminate itself: awareness illuminates only the bundle just before it. Pull the observation out of observed, observation and observer, and all three go.
D5S1 - Watching Thoughts Like a Cowherd Lama Alan · 96 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
In settling the mind in its natural state, eyes softly open and the gaze vacant, we watch whatever rises in the space of the mind from the stillness of awareness, as Dudjom Lingpa's cowherd watches cattle from afar. Lama Alan Wallace reads Lerab Lingpa on what the practice yields, empty forms and a non-conceptual sense that nothing can harm the mind, and warns with the story of the student who reached shamatha and did nothing but enjoy it, before mapping the four kinds of mindfulness that lead there.
D4S1 - The Sautrantika View, and the Instruction to Bahiya Lama Alan · 95 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The guided practice is the Buddha's instruction to Bahiya, in the seen only the seen, carried through sight, sound, touch and mental events, and we ask whether we are found by way of them. Lama Alan Wallace sets it inside the Sautrantika account of perceiving the world by way of appearances, and is precise about what is refuted: a self that is autonomous and substantial, running body and mind like a chief executive. The day's task is to notice the thought of I and check its referent.
D3S1 - Free Will, and the Three Qualities of a Student Lama Alan · 107 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
In a detailed preamble Lama Alan Wallace argues that the dispute over free will is the wrong question, and offers Shantideva's counsel to remain like a piece of wood when the mind comes under a mental affliction. The practice that follows is a fourth approach to mindfulness of breathing, from the Dzogchen side: we rest awareness in its own place, knowing itself while the breath is noticed peripherally. He names the three qualities that make a suitable vessel: open-minded, perceptive, eager to practise.
D2S1 - State Checks and Dream Signs Lama Alan · 100 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The first full day opens with a detailed preamble: Lama Alan Wallace asks how anyone can be harmed inside a dream, and answers that we identify with what is neither I nor mine, and reify everything. A guided practice of settling body, speech and mind in the natural state follows, ending in self-knowing awareness. He then turns to Stephen LaBerge's research: the three requirements for lucid dreaming, state checks such as jumping or reading a text twice, and a dream journal to find your own dream signs.
D1S1 - Are You Human? The Three Poisons and the Substrate Lama Alan · 100 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The opening evening is teaching only, with no practice. Lama Alan Wallace starts from a Pali Canon exchange in which the brahmin Dona asks the Buddha whether he is a god, a spirit or a human, is told no to each, and hears the reply, I am awake. He works through the three poisons of the mind, and the dualistic grasping that is the taproot of craving and hatred, runs the ten Buddhist analogies for illusion, and lays out the substrate and substrate consciousness.
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 - Visualisation for Dream Yoga, Orbs of Light at the Throat and Heart Lama Alan · 21 minutes
Lama Alan Wallace teaches two visualisations for the night. You place a small, deep ruby red orb of light inside the throat and let your awareness descend into it and take its form, a gentle shamatha weighted towards relaxation and stability rather than vividness, which you carry into sleep for lucid dreaming. Lama Alan then moves the orb down to the heart as deep sapphire blue, for lucid dreamless sleep, closing with a dedication of merit.
Workshop Part 2 Charlie Morley · 209 minutes
Charlie Morley tells the story of Namgyal Rinpoche, the Canadian who founded what became Samye Ling and was the first Western tulku, and his advice on purification, merit and dream recall. A thirty minute yoga nidra follows, thanking skin, flesh, bones, blood and heart while awareness is held in the hypnagogic state. Everyone then writes a dream plan. The final practice taught is Lochen Dharmashri's white AH at the heart centre, for those with the Vajrasattva empowerment. He then runs back through the whole day.
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.
Cognitive & Emotional Balance Glen Svensson · 90 minutes
The last two balances: cognitive balance, which is vipashyana seeing experience without projecting onto it, illustrated by the coiled rope mistaken for a snake, and emotional balance, which the compassion practices serve. Glen Svensson guides a nature of mind practice in which we search for where awareness is located, and then a tonglen. He then lays out how to integrate all four into daily life, and a review of one good act, one harmful act and one thing received before sleep.
Stillness in Motion Glen Svensson · 91 minutes
Resting in stillness while watching the movements of the mind, a practice Glen Svensson draws from Dudjom Lingpa, combines the two objects used earlier in the course. He reviews all four modules, sets shamatha inside Lama Alan Wallace and Shauna Shapiro's fourfold model of mental balance, and advises on when and how long to practise, on triggers for daily mindfulness, and reviewing the day before sleep. A guided open awareness practice follows. The course closes with the Shantideva dedication.
Tools & Faults Glen Svensson · 85 minutes
In an opening practice we take the rhythm of the breath as our object, noticing whether it is long or short, deep or shallow. Glen Svensson names two tools, mindfulness holding the object and introspection checking that it is still held, and contrasts that older sense with Jon Kabat-Zinn's. The five faults and eight antidotes follow, from laziness to over-application. A second meditation is guided lying down in shavasana, and four weeks of homework are set before Shantideva's dedication verses close.
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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