Calendar

Vipashyana (insight)

Practice Library

Vipashyana (insight)

77 teachings in the library cover this practice.

  • 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.

  • Guided Meditation - What Anger Does, an Analytical Meditation David Oromith · 22 minutes · recorded February 11, 2026

    A contemplation rather than a settling practice. Recalling an occasion when anger took over, you examine not the story but what the anger did to your tone, your face and your thinking, then what it left behind and what it cost. David asks what it promised and whether it delivered, has you imagine a steadier response, and closes with a determination.

  • Guided Meditation - Feeling Tones, Pleasant, Unpleasant and Neutral David Oromith · 18 minutes · recorded January 21, 2026

    A feeling tone is not an emotion. It is the plain sense of something being pleasant, unpleasant or neither, and it is attached to everything you perceive. We move attention freely across the five senses and the mind looking for it, and then David invites you to get curious about whether a feeling tone is the same as the sensation or something other than it.

  • D6S4 - Finding the Basis of Designation for the Self Lama Alan · 68 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Before returning to practice, Lama Alan explains why greater stability of attention supports deeper inquiry, comparing it to the way trained working memory has been shown to raise measured intelligence. The main teaching then works through Dudjom Lingpa's method of finding the basis on which we label something as I, using examples from a facial blemish to a house, a cup of tea and an electron, to show that nothing is ever identical with its label.

  • D5S4 - Galileo's Moons, and a Realisation Not Yet Stable Lama Alan · 59 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Lama Alan uses Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter to show the difference between shamatha, simply noticing, and vipassana, noticing with inquiry into how something arises and fades. In the guided practice we extend this inquiry to thoughts and emotions arising in the mind. Returning to the text, he examines Dudjom Lingpa's admission that his realisation kept slipping, steady in practice but lost when he was frightened alone in the wilderness.

  • D4S4 - Full Shamatha, and Whether Consciousness Survives Death Lama Alan · 71 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    In the guided practice we narrow attention from the body to the space of the mind, before Lama Alan turns to what marks a full achievement of shamatha: a physical lightness and mental suppleness he traces through the ninth Karmapa, Atisha and Tsongkhapa. He argues shamatha, not vipassana or tantra, is the tool for testing whether consciousness continues after death, drawing on past life research.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Guided Meditation - The Beginningless Continuum of Mind David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024

    We turn attention to the thing we call mind, where nothing static can be found, only moment to moment processes, a thought arising one moment and passing the next. The continuum is traced back through birth to the first consciousness of a foetus, which must have had its own prior cause. Since the lives are countless, so are the mothers, and David asks you to see every being you meet as one of them.

  • D6S1 - Diligence, Concentration and When to Step In David Oromith · 91 minutes · recorded November 28, 2024

    In this patient acceptance practice we ask what changes when a real conflict is met with acceptance, understanding and compassion rather than resistance. David covers enthusiastic diligence and its three kinds of laziness, then concentration as the union of shamatha and vipassana, the Buddha's key innovation. Questions turn on witnessing cruelty, whether to speak when nothing you say will change the person, and how much capacity we have to live out our values.

  • 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.

  • Session 4 - Mindfulness of Phenomena David Oromith · 77 minutes · recorded November 24, 2024

    In the guided meditation of open presence, eyes fully open to all six senses, we then watch one appearance cause another, a sound giving rise to an image, a feeling, a thought, while searching within it all for a findable self. David explains dependent origination through a candle lighting a whole room and the froth on a boiling pot, and why the self is unfindable without being non-existent. Questions cover why 'I' feels large in anger but faint in joy, and sensations clamouring for attention.

  • 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.

  • Session 3 - Mindfulness of the Mind David Oromith · 85 minutes · recorded November 20, 2024

    In the guided meditation on mindfulness of mind, eyes open in space, we count the breath before watching thoughts, memories and emotions arise, abide and dissolve without following or suppressing them. David contrasts passive witnessing in shamatha with discerningly recognising a lustful, hating or deluded mind here, using the Buddha's water and fire imagery for non-grasping. Questions cover guilt at doing nothing, locating anxiety in the body, and inquiry disturbing what it observes.

  • Guided Meditation - Mindfulness of Feelings David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded November 13, 2024

    With the eyes at least partly open, we notice the plain pleasantness, unpleasantness or neither that comes with each sound and sensation. When a feeling prompts you to move you hold still and watch it instead: how it begins, where it sits, how it ends. It widens at the close to the feelings alongside thoughts.

  • Session 2 - Mindfulness of Feelings David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded November 13, 2024

    In the guided meditation on mindfulness of feelings, eyes partly open, we note the pleasant, unpleasant or neutral tone in sounds, bodily sensations and thoughts, without moving to ease discomfort. David draws on the Buddha's teaching on vedana and the image of a songbird held too tightly, and explains why we tend to ignore neutral feelings until boredom turns them unpleasant. Questions cover whether attending closely to pain eases it or makes it worse, and adjusting to unfamiliar calm.

  • Guided Meditation - Mindfulness of the Body David Oromith · 22 minutes · recorded October 31, 2024

    Bare attention on the whole field of bodily sensation, then a close inspection of it element by element: firmness, moisture, warmth, movement. Of each one David asks whether anything in it is stable, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant from its own side, and whether anything says it is yours.

  • Session 1 - Mindfulness of the Body David Oromith · 91 minutes · recorded October 31, 2024

    This first session on mindfulness of the body opens with an extended teaching, tracing how the Buddha added inquiry to shamatha to found vipassana, and a cup shows how perception differs from concepts we add on top. In the body scan that follows, we take attention to sensations of solidity, moisture, temperature and motion, asking whether each is permanent, pleasant and truly ours. Afterwards the group discusses separating pain from sensation, and how calling something mine builds a false sense of ownership.

  • Session 4 - Empathetic Joy David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded October 8, 2024

    The session opens with a short settling practice, then the teaching on mudita, empathetic joy: rejoicing in another's happiness rather than only our own. David sets out what gets in its way, comparison, judgment, envy, using Sharon Salzberg's monkey stuck in tar. Questions cover noticing joy in small creatures and unexpected jealousy. In the long guided meditation we extend joy through a joyful friend, a loved one, a stranger and someone difficult, closing with rejoicing in our own good qualities.

  • 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.

  • Mindfulness & Introspection and Mindfulness of Breathing (Nostrils) David Oromith · 79 minutes · recorded February 1, 2024

    In the guided practice on mindfulness of breathing at the nostrils we track the change in temperature between the in breath and the out breath. David explains vividness as the third quality of attention, alongside relaxation and stability, and describes mindfulness as a rope holding the breath, introspection as the hook that notices when it slips. Questions cover lights and sensations arising in practice, working with pain, and how this differs from mindfulness in modern Vipassana.

  • The Noble Eightfold Path: Samadhi - Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded November 14, 2023

    The session opens with ten to fifteen minutes of guided mindfulness of breathing to settle body and mind, before David turns to the second division of the path: right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. He works through the four strivings and the Buddha's image of a lute string tuned neither too tight nor too loose, then explains mindfulness as holding an object in mind, and describes samadhi and the obscurations that block it. Questions cover what to do when tiredness or stress makes practice hard.

  • D1S2 - Three Lineages, and Dipa Ma Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 62 minutes · recorded August 25, 2023

    A guided practice acknowledging three lineages: the land and everyone who has lived on it, blood and bone ancestors, and the teachers who carried these methods down. Michael Lobsang Tenpa explains supplication as a way of inviting inspiration rather than listing the dead. He then tells the story of Dipa Ma, the Bengali housewife widowed young who turned out to be a concentration prodigy, and her two minute instruction to Wendy Palmer: this life is in trouble, so for now do only loving kindness.

  • Why Do We Feel The Need To Control Everything? David Oromith · 34 minutes · recorded May 23, 2021

    In a vipassana practice on the feelings arising with the five senses, eyes held partly open, we examine whether a sound or sensation is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, and whether that feeling belongs to us at all. Taking up a question from the previous week, David explores why we feel such a strong need to control our surroundings, tracing it to an old survival instinct and the belief that a perfect external world is needed to be happy. We already have the resilience to meet what goes wrong.

  • 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.

  • D2S2 - The Four Kinds of Mindfulness Lama Alan · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    Resting open to whatever arises is neither open presence nor shamatha, Lama Alan Wallace says, because the senses have no reason to implode into the mental. Gyatrul Rinpoche's line that those who achieve shamatha naturally experience compassion, as they view the predicament other beings are in, draws a long commentary. He traces the four kinds of mindfulness from Dudjom Lingpa's revealed teachings, ending in self-illuminating mindfulness, which is shamatha itself. The session closes with a practice on settling the mind in its natural state.

  • D4S1 - Searching for the Apprehending Mind Lama Alan · 127 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    Chasing awareness back to its source, as a sunbeam is traced back to the sun, is the instruction here. Lama Alan Wallace distinguishes vipashyana, which entails inquiry, from the non-judgemental witnessing taught under that name, then puts the questions in Dudjom Rinpoche's commentary: where a thought arose, where it is now, where it ceases, who is the agent of joys and sorrows, and whether that mind has a beginning, end and interim. In the closing practice we put them to whatever arises in the mind.

  • D3S1 - The Demons Are Your Own Appearances Lama Alan · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    Whether shamatha must wait for full retreat is answered with an email from an elderly practitioner in a city flat, whose practice has continuity and bliss: right now we are in the optimal circumstances. Lama Alan Wallace turns to vipashyana, where Dudjom Rinpoche treats the whole external world through the demons we blame for obstructing us, and shows them to be appearing aspects of our own mind, empty yet vividly appearing, like a dream. He then guides a practice, opening all six doors of perception.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • D2S1 - Substantial Causes, and the Telescope of Introspection Lama Alan · 110 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019

    Substantial causes and cooperative conditions, a distinction from Dharmakirti that Lama Alan sets beside relativity theory: matter and space-time influence each other without transforming into each other. No brain event transforms into pleasure, so the substantial cause has to be mental. Shamatha is the telescope, vipashyana the astronomical observations. In the long guided practice we work through the tactile field into the space of the mind, where Maitripa's pith instructions take thoughts as the path.

  • 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.

  • 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 - Open Awareness of the Six Senses, Noting Patterns of Causality Lama Alan · 22 minutes

    You open your awareness to all six sense fields and rest there without distraction or grasping. Rather than simply noting what arises, Lama Alan invites a wider view, watching how one appearance gives rise to another, a thought to an emotion, a sensation to a thought. There is no mechanism to find, only patterns of dependence. You let the will stay passive, taking no ownership, and the session continues 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 - A Body Scan of Feeling Tone, Pleasant, Unpleasant and Neutral Lama Alan · 25 minutes

    Lama Alan leads a scan of the whole body, moving a field of awareness from the crown through head, arms, torso and legs, noting at each place not the sensation itself but whether it feels pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. You stay still, and when the impulse to shift arises you examine the feeling behind it. The scan then opens to the whole body, where you ask how feelings arise and dissolve, and whether you can attend without grasping or preference.

  • Guided Meditation - Mindfulness of Feeling Tone Across the Five Senses Lama Alan · 23 minutes

    Lama Alan opens your awareness to the five physical senses, sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, resting in bare attention with the mental domain set aside. The practice then moves to the second application of mindfulness: not the sensations but the feeling tone that comes with them, pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. When an urge to move arises you stay still and study the discomfort behind it. You end by asking whether these feelings are in any way yours.

  • Guided Meditation - The Three Marks of Existence, from Recollection to Direct Inquiry Lama Alan · 13 minutes

    Lama Alan begins with a review of your own past: times you held something fleeting as though it were durable, took a person or place to be the true source of your happiness, or grasped what is not yours as I and mine. You then turn to the space of the mind and put the same three questions to experience. Is anything here unchanging? Is any appearance a real well of happiness or suffering? Does anything carry the mark of I?

  • 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?

  • Part One - Virtue, Dharma and the Path Lama Alan · 78 minutes

    Lama Alan separates virtue, which anyone can practise and which can still end in burnout, from Dharma, which his mentor defined as engaging with reality in a way that leads to an enduring sense of well-being. Beyond both is marga, where there is no falling back. He quotes the Buddha's five analogies for a mind under the five obscurations: indebted, sick, in bonds, enslaved and lost in a desert track. In the parable of the king's son vipashyana is the minister and shamatha his bodyguard.

  • D2S2 - In the Seen, Just the Seen Lama Alan · 46 minutes

    The Buddha's instruction to Bahiya, in the seen let there be just the seen, becomes a twenty four minute guided practice. We take attention in turn to the visual, auditory, tactile and mental fields, with as little projection as possible. Of everything that appears we then ask whether any of it is unchanging, a true cause of happiness, actually yours, or actually you. Lama Alan follows with a challenge to materialism, arguing that nothing we directly experience is located in physical space.

  • D1S4 - Mindfulness as Remembering, and Introspection as Quality Control Lama Alan · 76 minutes

    The session opens with a twenty four minute guided practice in which we take the three qualities in order: whole body awareness for relaxation, the abdomen for stability, the nostrils for vividness. The word rendered as mindfulness means to recollect, and Lama Alan draws out three types: retrospective, recalling the instructions; present-centred, bearing the breath in mind; and prospective, knowing what to do when attention strays. Alongside it runs introspection, quality control that catches laxity and excitation.

  • 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.

  • Attentional Balance Glen Svensson · 78 minutes

    Attentional balance, the shamatha side of the model, where deficit shows up as laxity and hyperactivity as excitation, both met with mindfulness and introspection. Glen Svensson compares the full body, abdomen and nostril versions of mindfulness of breathing, and the merits of the breath, the mind and awareness as objects. Two guided practices: the rhythm of the breath with the emphasis on relax, release and return, then merging mind with space. Questions cover anxiety and mental afflictions held at an unconscious level.

  • 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.

  • Dealing with Attachment Glen Svensson · 72 minutes

    Attachment is the near enemy of loving kindness, and Glen Svensson defines it as a mental factor that exaggerates an object's attractiveness and wants to hold on to it. In the guided practice you bring to mind a person or thing you cling to, loosen the grip, then look directly at the attachment itself. Glen dispels the common misconceptions that attachment is needed to enjoy things, to have relationships or to be creative, describing how ordinary food grew tastier during a long retreat as his craving subsided.

  • 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.

  • Suffering Glen Svensson · 75 minutes

    We move mindfulness from the body to the mind, with a guided practice in which we watch thoughts, emotions and memories against the question of whether anything in the mind is stable and unchanging. Glen Svensson introduces the four noble truths and the word dukkha, whose etymology is a bad hole, an axle that never fitted its wheel. In a second practice we ask of a pleasant experience whether it is really in the nature of happiness. He tells of a retreat in Spain where repetitive food began to taste better once craving subsided.

  • Impermanence Glen Svensson · 64 minutes

    The teaching opens and closes with a guided body scan in which we move from the crown of the head to the tips of the toes on one question: is anything in the body stable, or is everything changing moment by moment? Glen Svensson sets out what vipashyana is, why shamatha has to underpin it, and the four distorted views it works on. Impermanence, he argues, is good news, and he gives the image of the kayak of mindfulness on the river of life, rather than grabbing at flowing water.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Preparing Body & Mind Glen Svensson · 78 minutes

    Shamatha means calm abiding, and Glen Svensson opens by explaining why, if we want to achieve genuine happiness and well-being, shamatha practice is indispensable. He draws out the difference between pleasurable experience and genuine happiness, and where concentration fits among the three higher trainings. The seven point posture is worked through, then a fifteen minute guided meditation steps through preparing body, speech and mind. Questions cover meditating with a tremor, and whether shamatha is the first jhana.

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