Teacher and student

56 teachings in the library are about this.

Guided Meditation - Arousing Aspiration for Practice David Oromith · 18 minutes · recorded May 19, 2026
David asks why you joined the session tonight, and beneath that what draws you to practice at all, with time to sit rather than grab the most obvious answer. Then a moment when something on the path worked, and a person whose practice you admire or trust, on the thought that if they can do this then perhaps it is not beyond you. It closes looking forward, at what a calmed mind would change, with no shoulds and no pressure.
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.
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.
S4 - Non-Sectarian Approaches to Dharma David Oromith · 86 minutes · recorded November 25, 2025
David guides a mostly silent meditation, offering light prompts as each person settles into their own choice of calming practice. The talk weighs following one lineage closely against ranging widely, using the image of digging many shallow holes rather than one deep well, and a maze where mixed directions leave you lost. He traces the non-sectarian movement's revival and its caution against cherry picking only the easy teachings. Members share how they have moved between traditions.
S3 - Teachers, Etiquette, and Devotion with Discernment David Oromith · 92 minutes · recorded September 17, 2025
In the guided meditation we visualise the Buddha as indivisible from our own teacher, going for refuge and arousing bodhicitta before the talk begins. David covers etiquette in a dharma hall, the three types of unreceptive vessel, and how to address a teacher by title. He explains the three levels of viewing a teacher, from emissary to embodiment of Buddha nature, and warns devotion must stay discerning rather than treating every action as perfect. A question compares Tibetan and Zen shrines.
Guided Meditation - Loving Kindness and Appreciation for Spiritual Friends David Oromith · 20 minutes · recorded September 3, 2025
Loving kindness turned towards the people who keep a practice alive. David starts with early influences, anyone who showed you kindness and led you towards the spiritual life, then one particular spiritual friend, then your wider Sangha, and finally the lineage of teachers behind your own teacher. Each is appreciated, then wished well.
Session 3 - The Eight Verses of Training the Mind David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded June 26, 2025
Loving kindness and compassion are extended from self to a loved one, a neutral person, a difficult person and finally a wide group, guided throughout as preparation for next week's tonglen practice. David works through verses five and six of the Eight Verses: offering the victory rather than retaliating, and viewing someone who wrongs us as a teacher, illustrated with the story of the borrowed baby. Members share how they tried the practice at home and at work.
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.
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.
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.
D6S1 - How View Transforms a Single Meditation Technique Lama Alan · 101 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The same meditation technique becomes shamatha, vipassana or Dzogchen depending on the view behind it. Lama Alan traces reification to an innate ignorance present from birth rather than acquired from culture, and explains why wrong views are the most destructive of unwholesome actions. Realising pristine awareness is a matter of degree, like seeing the moon through cloud, which is why questions turn to finding and trusting an authentic teacher.
D4S1 - Motivation, Guru Devotion and Entering the Path Lama Alan · 89 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The evening opens with a retranslated line from the liturgy, then Lama Alan offers 'taste of the town' as an image for a week's sampling of Dzogchen. Mindfulness of breathing is guided through relaxation balanced with effort, and questions turn to receiving a teacher's blessing without becoming dependent on it. He begins the root text: ethics as the foundation, and the steps of solitude and guru supplication that open the path.
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.
D3S2 - Guru Devotion Across the Three Vehicles Lama Alan · 71 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Whether the universe rises to meet genuine effort toward wellbeing, or whether realisation simply depends on luck, training or momentum from past lives. In this breathing practice we explore the body's capacity to heal and not getting caught in the grip of emotion. Lama Alan sets out three ways of relating to a teacher, from the Buddha's emissary to the Vajrayana view of guru as Buddha, and how each can curdle into idolatry if misunderstood.
D3S1 - Refuge, Devotion and the Two Causes of Suffering Lama Alan · 106 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The refuge and bodhicitta prayers, examined line by line, with the image of trusting a dentist to explain what taking refuge means. Lama Alan introduces guru yoga and a self-empowerment visualisation with Padmasambhava, then leads a breathing practice in which we let go of identifying with sensations as mine, using a scratched phone and an injured knee as examples. The session ends with the three common preliminaries: precious human life, impermanence and suffering.
D2S1 - The Liturgy, and Whether Dzogchen Must Wait Lama Alan · 95 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The morning liturgy is recited once in Tibetan, once in English and once in silence, neither abandoned nor performed by rote. A guided Dzogchen practice follows, in which we rest awareness in stillness while attending to the fluctuations in the space of the body. The text then opens with Dudjom Lingpa stating plainly what he has realised, and the question Lama Alan spends the session on is whether Dzogchen must wait until the generation and completion stages are finished.
D3S1 - Radiant Purity, and What Obscures It Lama Alan · 122 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Awareness is naturally luminous and cognizant, and Lama Alan distinguishes this radiant purity from anger, dullness or craving, which pass across it like clouds across the sun, never touching its nature. He explains why refuge is earned trust, not demanded belief, and why motivation, especially bodhicitta, decides whether a practice counts as Dharma. After the ninefold breathing exercise, the group rests in that awareness as thoughts surface and dissolve.
D2S2 - Sensations of the Breath and the Bodyguard of Shamatha Lama Alan · 98 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Distinguishing the actual passage of air from the sensations it leaves at the nostrils, the final session on mindfulness of breathing covers how to stay with the target area through the pauses between breaths. Lama Alan tells the parable of the minister and his bodyguard to show why shamatha grounds vipassana, then answers questions on posture, including practising lying down for scoliosis or illness.
Guided Meditation - This Precious Human Life David Oromith · 24 minutes · recorded January 22, 2025
David begins from Buddha nature, the clear mind said to be present in everyone and impossible to lose or damage, then works through how rarely the conditions to recognise it come together: a human birth at all, the time and the inclination to practise, teachers, books and people who support you. It ends in going for refuge and a resolve to use this life well.
D2S4 - The Company We Keep and the Qualities of a Teacher David Oromith · 55 minutes · recorded November 29, 2024
Vividness is the third quality built into shamatha, achieved by narrowing attention to the breath at the nostrils. David turns to the verse on avoiding destructive company, using the image of a crystal taking on the colour of whatever cloth it rests on, then to the contrasting verse on cherishing spiritual friends and the qualities to look for in a teacher. Discussion covers balancing this against one's own wellbeing, and advice on meditating with the eyes open.
Spiritual Rebellion: Mindfulness with Attitude Ondy Willson · 117 minutes · recorded September 28, 2024
Ondy Willson introduces her book and the work behind it: the influences of Buddhism, of her own life, and of twenty years teaching mindfulness in the public and private sectors. She sets out the key ideas of a spiritual practice, and how they can give contemporary life meaning and purpose without requiring a religion. With a reading, a meditation, and questions.
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.
D3S2 - Tonglen, and Vajrasattva as Guru Yoga Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 89 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024
Giving and taking, guided from a past and future self out to one being in need, a group, then all beings, the light given out as Vajrasattva's body, mantra syllables, vajra and bell. Tenpa adds the healing adaptations, nectar heavy, warming or cooling, then shows how Vajrasattva practice itself can serve as guru yoga, the mantra recited in the manner of supplication and the nectar granting the four empowerments as it fills the four chakras. An empowerment is needed only to visualise yourself as the deity.
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.
D2S3 - Why We Use Images, and the Hundred Syllable Mantra Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 89 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024
Love as a purifier first, from Garchen Rinpoche, then compassion practice again. Trouble with visualising gets a plain answer: a vague image is enough, and no mental imagery at all is no bar. A Nyingma translator supplies the four components this practice needs, positive images, positive thoughts, positive feelings and trust, the last explained through a washing machine we do not doubt. Tenpa then reads Lama Zopa Rinpoche's short Vajrasattva text line by line, and introduces the hundred syllable mantra.
D6S2 - Concentric Circles, and Finding a Teacher Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 61 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
Loving kindness in widening rings, beginning with yourself and the tiny beings within your own body and ending in any corner of existence. Michael Lobsang Tenpa then answers a practitioner with ADHD about boredom. He passes on Garchen Rinpoche's point that the point four finger widths below the navel is much safer to focus on than the heart centre. He also says how someone comes to have a teacher, and how rarely anyone needs to see one weekly.
The Spread Of Buddhism: Three Main Branches of Practice David Oromith · 69 minutes · recorded September 19, 2023
This session opens with a short settling meditation and a going for refuge, then David traces how Buddhism divided into Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana, using the mustard seed story to show how one teaching suits different people, and a burning building image to contrast liberation with the bodhisattva's wish to help others out too. He explains nirvana against full enlightenment, and the guru bond distinctive to Vajrayana. Questions cover chanting and finding a teacher without turning sectarian.
Finding a Spiritual Teacher David Oromith · 63 minutes · recorded August 30, 2023
This talk on finding a spiritual teacher opens with a short guided meditation in which we rest attention on the sensations of breathing. David traces the teacher's role from early Buddhism's oral tradition to today's very different Western situation, then sets out the levels of teacher, from local dharma teacher to root teacher, the qualities to look for in each, and the three faulty attitudes a student should avoid. Questions from viewers are answered throughout in the chat.
Uncovering Contemplative Creativity Tashi Mannox · 109 minutes · recorded October 12, 2022
Creativity as a contemplative practice, and the responsibility Tashi Mannox gives artists to lift people rather than pour out their angst. He describes the sacred proportions behind thangka painting and Tibetan calligraphy, and breaks creativity into three parts: energy, playfulness and ornament. Copying crumbling manuscripts during a four year retreat taught him that whatever was unresolved in his mind showed up in the line, so meditation comes first. Questions cover learning without a teacher.
Exploring Our Vision of the Path Ondy Willson · 111 minutes · recorded July 15, 2022
Guided imagery as a way of surfacing what thinking cannot reach, and of finding a direction when you do not know which way to turn. Ondy Willson traces Freud on dreams and Jung on active imagination, and how imagery is used in therapy and medicine now. Most of the evening is the quest: a garden, a path with an obstacle and a distraction, a helper at the foot of a mountain, and a higher self at the top who gives a gift. Participants describe what they saw and she reads the symbolism back.
D6S2 - The Four Yogas of Mahamudra Lama Alan · 98 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
The four yogas, single-pointedness, freedom from elaboration, one taste and non-meditation, and how each maps onto the paths and grounds of a bodhisattva. Lama Alan Wallace reads Atisha's images of realisation complete but not manifesting, the lion cub in the womb whose three strengths are all there and the garuda inside its shell, and describes the mother and child clear light meeting at death. Questions close the retreat, among them what to do when a teacher's conduct has harmed students.
D5S2 - Practise What Is Important Lama Alan · 81 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
The closing aphorisms, and the end of the transmission of the text. Lama Alan Wallace explains the distinctive ones: those who harm you, the ones to focus on, then your teachers, your parents and bodhisattvas, with whom both virtue and non-virtue are heavy. He works through practise what is important, do not be bound by distemper, and do not yearn for gratitude. Questions follow on whether to study or first work on your own mind, and from a monk facing conscription who may be sent to fight.
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.
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.
D5S3 - Simeon's Light, and the Clear Light of Death Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 96 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Eva Natanya tells Simeon the New Theologian's own story of being flooded with light while praying, and reads Gregory Palamas on deification as a grace no natural capacity can reach. In her guided practice the heart becomes a chamber of light, drawing in the suffering of others and sending it back transformed. Lama Alan then answers a question on dying with the Tibetan account step by step, from the senses imploding to the clear light, and compares heaven with the pure land of Amitabha.
D4S2 - The Circular Movement of the Intellect Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 132 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Eva Natanya draws out the circular movement of the intellect, which Gregory Palamas quotes from Dionysius: awareness returning to itself and beholding itself in the heart, set beside awareness of awareness in Dzogchen. The meditation is an inquiry: who am I, where did this consciousness begin, could it have arisen from matter or been infused fresh from the divine mind. Lama Alan answers that the guru for all Christians is Jesus the Christ, and realisation comes through devotion and reverence.
D3S2 - The Prayer of the Heart Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 123 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Eva Natanya teaches the prayer of the heart from Simeon the New Theologian, whose instructions are physical to the point of controversy and which Father Silouan, relaying his own teacher, called more a gesture of what happens in that experience than a technique. In the guided practice we let awareness fall from the head into the heart, call on the name of Jesus, then release even the words and rest in the darkness Simeon says comes first. Lama Alan objects to her calling pristine awareness unique.
D2S3 - Mental Afflictions, and Whether You Need a Guru Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
In the vipashyana practice on the mind itself we count the breath to ten, then watch what disturbs the mind's equilibrium, asking whether any mental event is stable, satisfying or yours. Answering questions afterwards, Lama Alan repeats the Dalai Lama's answer on needing a guru: no, but it can save you a lot of time. Eva Natanya adds Gregory of Sinai's warning against practising without a spiritual father. Grief at a child's death, Lama Alan says, is a symptom and not a mental affliction.
D1S2 - I Am Who I Am, and the Hesychast Life Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Eva Natanya opens the Christian side of the dialogue with the question of being in the west and of consciousness in the east, then Moses at the burning bush and a name that was not the answer to a philosophical question. She sets out the apophatic and cataphatic ways of speaking about God, and introduces hesychasm, the life of stillness, silence and solitude. The practice is mindfulness of breathing at the nostrils, and we open into wonder that anything arises at all. Lama Alan presses her on obedience to a spiritual father who has gone astray.
S3 - Questions on Guru Yoga and Lineage Eva Natanya · 59 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Questions put to Eva Natanya, starting with where to begin reading in the hesychast tradition: the Philokalia, and the contemporary writing of Father Silouan. She answers at length on whether a Christian can practise Dzogchen ngondro with Christ as root lama, and why she would keep a visualisation as it was transmitted while holding guru and yidam as inseparable. Further answers cover how lineage and authorisation work, and what the words Buddha, guru and lama actually carry.
S2 - Christ as Yidam Eva Natanya · 90 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Eva Natanya takes the phrase from the Council of Chalcedon, without confusion and without division, and asks what it means to hold Christ as yidam as well as guru. She reads briefly from the chapter on obedience in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, setting John Climacus on examining a spiritual father and then not judging him beside the Lamrim instruction to list a teacher's good qualities and never begin a list of faults. The session closes with a guided meditation on the light at the heart.
S1 - Levels of Devotion to the Teacher Eva Natanya · 98 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Devotion has a lot to do with listening, and Eva Natanya opens with a fifteen minute meditation on the elements and on the heart's own deepest plea. The teaching sets out how the teacher is regarded in the Theravada, the Mahayana and the Vajrayana, and where reifying a teacher turns reverence into idolatry. She compares committing to a yidam with falling in love, since one does not get to choose the form. She closes with a guided visualisation in which we bring our own teacher to mind as light.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Great Compassion Glen Svensson · 83 minutes
Bodhicitta, the aspiration for enlightenment for the benefit of others, and the first of the two main methods for cultivating it: the seven cause and effect, running from seeing everyone as your mother through altruistic intention to that aspiration itself. Glen Svensson explains that great compassion is not simply an aspiration, as loving kindness and compassion are in the four immeasurables, but actively helping mother sentient beings, much more proactive. In the guided practice we draw blessings in on the in-breath and radiate the light of great compassion out on the out-breath.
Equanimity Glen Svensson · 85 minutes
Equanimity as an unbiased mind, undoing the habit of sorting people into friends, strangers and so-called enemies by how they seem to affect us. In the guided practice we step into the perspective of a stranger, a loved one and a difficult person in turn, then back out again. Glen Svensson shows how each of the four immeasurables acts as the antidote to the near enemy of another, so they are best practised as a package. He closes with the four opponent powers and an end of day review of one negative action, one good one and one thing received with gratitude.
Mindfulness of Breathing (Nostrils) Glen Svensson · 90 minutes
In this practice we narrow our attention to the entrance of the nostrils, which is said to be very good for clarity of attention, as the breath grows subtle and forces closer attention. Glen Svensson explains the acquired sign, a mental image of the air element that replaces the sensations as practice deepens, and completes the nine stages up to attentional balance, using a guitar string for the fine tuning of focus. He describes the physical and mental pliancy that marks shamatha itself. Questions cover shavasana, and how far to go without a qualified teacher.
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.
Session 1 - 'Imagination' Vesna A. Wallace · 38 minutes
Vesna A. Wallace argues that in tantric Buddhism the imagined is not ultimately less real than what the senses report, and that what practice makes imaginable surpasses David Hume's mere logical possibility. She then works through three early twentieth century Mongolian ritual texts from the Kalachakra tradition: one performed for a person who has died, praying for their rebirth in Shambhala, one on how to recite a tantra, and one joining that recitation to guru yoga. A lecture throughout, with no guided practice.

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