Settling the mind in its natural state

17 teachings in the library cover this practice.

D4S3 - Settling the Mind, and the Emotions That Surface Lama Alan · 88 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
A guided practice of settling the mind in its natural state, upright or lying down, with instructions to refresh, restore and retain attention whenever it wanders. Lama Alan warns against forcing concentration onto a fixed object, since this tightens and agitates many minds, recommending instead watching thoughts from a distance, as a herdsman watches his flock. He describes what surfaces once the mind loosens: old memories, sudden depression, bliss.
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.
D5S2 - Stability by Effort, or by Letting Go of Grasping Lama Alan · 73 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Lama Alan opens by distinguishing shamatha, only the on-ramp, from the path itself, and contrasts developing stability through effort with simply discovering it once grasping is released. A short guided practice of resting in awareness of awareness follows. Questions take up the rest of the session, including three ways of handling a persistent thought and why reaching for awareness inside the head, instead of resting it in the space ahead, can bring on a headache.
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.
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.
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.
D1S1 - Motivation, Hedonic Pleasure and Settling the Mind Lama Alan · 90 minutes · recorded June 4, 2025
Why we practice, before what we practice: Lama Alan distinguishes hedonic pleasure, which depends on circumstance, from genuine well-being that grows from within, and tells why the Buddha left a secure life in search of a path. He introduces the terms samadhi, shamatha and vikalpa, the obsessive, compulsive flow of thought meditation is meant to settle, closing with a guided practice of settling body, speech and mind in their natural state.
D1S2 - Dispensing with Aversion to Adversity Lama Alan · 76 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Adversity can only become the path if two things happen, and Lama Alan Wallace takes both: dropping the attitude of utter aversion to it, then finding a sense of well-being that holds even when things go badly. He distinguishes suffering itself, which is a symptom, from the mental afflictions that cause it, and repeats Shantideva's point that despondency helps neither what can be remedied nor what cannot. Day one ends with a guided practice of settling the mind in its natural state.
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.
Guided Meditation - The Space of the Mind David Oromith · 15 minutes · recorded April 6, 2020
This is a 15-minute guided meditation in which we turn our attention to the space of the mind - the domain where thoughts, images, memories, and feelings arise. This meditation helps us to become familiar with the true nature of our human mind and the true nature of our mental activity, by taking a step back from being dragged along and instead, simply observing. When we are experiencing crippling anxiety, stress, depression, and other strong negative emotions, it is easy to become overwhelmed and can seem impossible to gain control over our mind. This meditation allows us to see that thoughts, feelings, memories, are not as big, scary and daunting as they seem. Instead, we see that they are formless - they have no shape, colour, size, smell, or tactile properties. By seeing this directly, we can realise our power as the agent, the 'thinker,' and learn to gain control over our mind and our emotions, instead of them having control over us.
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.
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.
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.
Guided Meditation - Awareness of Awareness Released into Open Presence Lama Alan · 24 minutes
You begin with the movements of the mind, attending to thoughts and images without distraction or grasping, then shift to the space they emerge from and ask whether that vacuity is simply nothing or a kind of something. Lama Alan then turns your awareness back upon itself, resting in the sheer event of knowing, and describes how this practice pursued intently implodes into the substrate consciousness. Finally the cord is cut and you rest in open presence.
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 - The Nature of Mental Events, How Thoughts Arise and Dissolve Lama Alan · 24 minutes
With the gaze vacant and the mind settled in its natural state, you turn to the field of the mind and inspect the events arising there. Lama Alan asks how thoughts and images emerge, from where, whether they hold still or change, and how they dissolve. When you find yourself caught up in a thought, that thought becomes the object rather than a distraction. The practice then continues in silence to the close.
Guided Meditation - Settling the Mind in Its Natural State, with the Snorkelling Metaphor Lama Alan · 25 minutes
Lama Alan uses a snorkelling metaphor to move you in stages from the breath to the mind itself. Floating on an air mattress, you rest in the tactile field; then you dip your face beneath the water and turn part of your attention to the space of the mind. Handhold released, thoughts, images and reactions to sounds become the whole object, observed without grasping and without distraction, attentive but not reactive.

Settling the mind in its natural state

Settling the mind in its natural state

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Settling the mind in its natural state

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