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Guru yoga

Practice Library

Guru yoga

13 teachings in the library cover this practice.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Guided Meditation - Refuge, Bodhicitta and Guru Yoga, Resting in Awareness of Awareness Lama Alan · 23 minutes

    You bring to mind an enlightened being in whom you feel deep trust, taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha until you have become a refuge for others, and arouse bodhicitta as your motivation. Lama Alan then invites you to see that being as your own guru, receiving rays of light that transmute body, speech and mind until the guru dissolves into your heart. Releasing the visualisation, you rest in awareness of awareness.

  • 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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