Calendar

Visualisation

Practice Library

Visualisation

45 teachings in the library cover this practice.

  • Guided Meditation - Avalokiteshvara, Visualisation and Mantra David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded March 5, 2026

    A full Avalokiteshvara practice led line by line. You visualise the four armed form of compassion, with friends and family beside you, difficult people in front and all beings filling the space, then recite refuge and bodhicitta and contemplate the four immeasurables. The mantra comes with light purifying body, speech and mind, then the eight verses of training the mind, a dissolution into your heart, and dedication.

  • 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.

  • Guided Meditation - Buddha Visualisation, Refuge and Bodhicitta David Oromith · 24 minutes · recorded September 17, 2025

    Shakyamuni Buddha visualised in the space in front of you, felt as a presence rather than seen clearly, and inseparable from your own teachers. You go for refuge, then turn to the sentient beings all around and arouse bodhicitta. White light from the Buddha purifies you, and at the end the Buddha dissolves into that light and into you.

  • Hope In Difficult Times David Oromith · 36 minutes · recorded September 14, 2025

    In the candle visualisation meditation we draw in the pain of the world as fuel that makes an inner light burn brighter, then breathe out compassion to push back the darkness. David talks about despair as the near enemy of compassion, how fixating on bad news skews our sense of reality, and how seeking out examples of goodness and empathetic joy restores a truer, more hopeful picture of the world.

  • D6S2 - Seeking What Is Aware, and the Nine-Round Breathing David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded August 23, 2025

    The same practice, with one question folded in: occasionally seek out what is that consciousness that is concentrating, then release the question back into non-doing. David sets out the three levels of mind this tradition works with, the ordinary psyche, the substrate consciousness that shamatha dissolves into, and pristine awareness, and is careful to promise nothing. The session also teaches the nine-round breathing as a preparation, without the elaborate visualisations.

  • Guided Meditation - Tonglen, Beginning with Receiving Love David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded July 2, 2025

    Begins with a preliminary practice of receiving. Bring to mind someone who has wished you real love, and feel it arriving like warm sunshine. Only then does the exchange start: we breathe in a loved one's suffering as a dark cloud and send back light. It widens to a small group, then to as many beings as your courage allows.

  • Session 4 - The Eight Verses of Training the Mind David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded July 2, 2025

    In tonglen we begin with a short visualisation of receiving love, then breathe in a loved one's suffering as a dark cloud, transform it at the heart, and send back well-being, widening out to groups: guided throughout. David covers verse seven, on secretly taking on others' pain, and verse eight on the eight worldly concerns and emptiness, illustrated with bread that is empty of breadness. Tessa asks about research into benefits for others; Michelle raises clutter and body image.

  • D8S5 - The Retreat's Closing Visualisation and Dedication Lama Alan · 42 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    The retreat's closing guided practice, a fourfold visualisation on flourishing: what genuine happiness looks like now, what is needed from the world to reach it, how one would like to grow, and what one would most want to offer others. Lama Alan pictures light radiating from the heart with each aspiration, dedicates whatever benefit has come from the week, and closes with thanks to those who organised the retreat. The group offers him a verse of gratitude in return.

  • 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.

  • Guided Meditation - Taking Refuge and Generating Bodhicitta David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded June 11, 2025

    A long settling of the body first, and a count of twenty one breaths. Then the Buddha is imagined in front of you, inseparable from your own teachers and surrounded by all other beings, and you contemplate what the Buddha, the teachings and the community mean to you before going for refuge. It closes with white light received at the heart and passed on to all of them.

  • Guided Meditation - Refuge and Bodhicitta with a Shakyamuni Buddha Visualisation David Oromith · 25 minutes · recorded February 19, 2025

    Beginning from how rare this human life is, David has you visualise Shakyamuni Buddha in the space before you, with all other beings gathered around. You recite the words of refuge, contemplate the four immeasurables, then rouse bodhicitta. The Buddha finally dissolves into golden light and merges into your heart, and light then radiates out from you to every being.

  • Guided Meditation - Tonglen David Oromith · 20 minutes · recorded February 13, 2025

    One person you love is in pain, and their pain is imagined as dark smoke you breathe in towards a point of light at your heart, where it is extinguished. You breathe out everything good you have. It widens to a crowd with the same pain, then to hunger, thirst and homelessness, and David keeps saying the light is never burdened.

  • Part Two - The Spiritual Warrior, and the Mind Training Commitments Ondy Willson · 98 minutes · recorded October 26, 2024

    The spiritual warrior is on an inner crusade, not one aimed at anybody else. The tantric view that we are already enlightened and held back by a small idea of ourselves, a long visualisation that breaks the rock of ego around Buddha nature, fear as the thing that blocks courage, and the commitments of the seven point mind training read through and argued over.

  • Part One - Destructive Emotions, and an Antidote for Each Ondy Willson · 103 minutes · recorded October 5, 2024

    Spirituality with the religion stripped out, and emotions as the ground of ethics. The four opponent powers arrive by way of Atisha climbing down off his horse: take refuge, regret it, apply a remedy, resolve not to do it again. Then constructive and destructive emotions, a guided meditation that washes an anger out through the soles of the feet, and an antidote worked out for each: patience, empathy, forgiveness, gladness at another's good fortune.

  • Guided Meditation - Purification with a Shakyamuni Buddha Visualisation David Oromith · 22 minutes · recorded July 31, 2024

    The same four opponent powers, this time with Buddha Shakyamuni visualised on a jewelled throne in front of you. After regret and going for refuge, he comes to rest above your head, and white, red and blue light descends to purify body, speech and mind. It ends with resolve and a dedication.

  • Building Resilience David Oromith · 32 minutes · recorded July 21, 2024

    In the visualisation meditation we imagine a pure white light at the centre of the chest expanding to fill the body, representing our own goodness and Buddha nature. David answers a longstanding question on building resilience, describing it as returning to balance rather than never losing it, and names self awareness, self compassion and meditation as the key supports. He closes on starting small, with today's ordinary challenges, rather than waiting for a crisis to test us.

  • Reaching Shamatha and Taking the Mind as the Path David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded March 5, 2024

    David guides a meditation on taking the mind as the path: letting thoughts be rather than following them, picturing an object such as a mug, then staying with the space once it dissolves. He reads Lama Alan's account of reaching shamatha, the pressure on the head, the rush of bliss, and the five obscurations overcome by the five jhana factors, with the story of the warrior, the minister and the unruly prince. Questions cover open eyes, a quietened mind, and visualisation for difficult memories.

  • D3S1 - Questions on Visualisation and Images Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 91 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024

    The fourfold vision quest opens the day, now with an orb of light at the heart or navel. Tenpa then answers four questions sent in by participants: what to do with little aptitude for visualising, where the syllable hum and its mantra garland belong inside Vajrasattva's body, whether he can be kept in front rather than above the crown, and what counts as creating images, from hand made tsatsas to 3D printing. A brief text by Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro closes the morning.

  • Guided Meditation - White Light at the Heart Centre David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded November 12, 2023

    Twenty one counted rounds steady the mind, then a glowing white orb appears at the centre of the chest, no bigger than a golf ball, at the level of the heart. It is enough to imagine it is there. David calls this the root of the mind, where it converges in deep dreamless sleep and at the end of a life, and asks for a loose focus and the sense of meditating from there rather than behind the eyes.

  • Taking Our Practice One Step at a Time David Oromith · 30 minutes · recorded November 12, 2023

    The session opens with a short mindfulness of breathing to settle the mind, before David guides a visualisation of a glowing white orb at the heart centre, inviting you to meditate from that point of clarity. He talks about pacing our practice one day at a time rather than trying to accumulate everything at once, using the Buddha's image of the water pot filled drop by drop and the tortoise who beats the flitting hummingbird. He suggests a varied practice of concentration, loving kindness and small daily mindfulness.

  • The Four Noble Truths: The Causes (Origin) of Suffering David Oromith · 78 minutes · recorded October 10, 2023

    The session begins with a short ten minute practice on the breath, with refuge and bodhicitta. David turns to the second noble truth, contrasting craving in the Theravada with ignorance and karma in the Mahayana, and uses a cup and a bank account to explain emptiness and dependent origination. Questions range across karma, rebirth, labels and identity, and using emptiness to loosen attachment to people we love.

  • Guided Meditation - Body of Light David Oromith · 20 minutes · recorded October 9, 2023

    This is a guided meditation on Tibetan Buddhist practice of 'Body of Light.'

  • Body of Light Meditation David Oromith · 24 minutes · recorded July 9, 2023

    A body of light visualisation: a small, formless white light at the heart centre gradually expands until the whole body, organs and all, dissolves into transparent, luminous space. David explains that this Tibetan practice deeply relaxes the body's energy channels and combines analytical and stabilising meditation, making it a gentle entry point before attempting more elaborate visualisations of a Buddha's form. There is little discussion this week beyond the practice itself.

  • Guided Meditation - Cultivating Generosity David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded January 15, 2023

    You sharpen the mind with twenty one rounds of breath, three lots of seven, and then its creativity is put to work. David asks for a picture of a typical day, where you go, the shops or errands, the people you meet, and for generosity imagined into it: something material, your time, your expertise, a kind word. Their response is imagined too, and the warmth of giving with nothing wanted back. It closes on an intention to carry that into ordinary days.

  • The Six Paramitas - Generosity David Oromith · 32 minutes · recorded January 15, 2023

    In this visualisation we walk through an ordinary day and imagine bringing generosity into it: giving materially, giving time or expertise, offering a kind word. David opens a six week series on the paramitas with the first, generosity, describing three kinds, material giving, sharing the dharma, and offering fearlessness to those who are afraid, and why true generosity means being willing to give up what we are actually attached to, not just what we no longer want.

  • Embodying the Qualities of Tara Thubten Chodron · 105 minutes · recorded November 5, 2022

    Ven. Thubten Chodron works through the poem on Tara who liberates from the eight dangers, taken from her book How to Free Your Mind. Pride, ignorance, anger, jealousy, distorted views, miserliness, attachment and doubt each get an image and an antidote, with stories from her own life against each one. Her argument is that Tara protects by teaching, not by fixing us from outside. The talk closes with a guided visualisation of Tara in green light with her mantra.

  • Green Tara Thubten Chodron · 13 minutes · recorded November 5, 2022

    A guided visualisation, short and complete in itself. Tara is imagined in the space in front of you, on a lotus and a flat moon disc, her body made of green light, one leg tucked in and one stepping out into the world. You make a request in your own words for protection from the eight dangers, and green light flows from her heart into you and everyone around you. Her mantra is chanted alongside the visualisation, Tara dissolves into your heart, and the merit is dedicated.

  • Tong-Len and Loving-Kindness David Oromith · 28 minutes · recorded September 5, 2021

    A Tonglen visualisation: a radiant orb of light at the heart absorbs the suffering of yourself, then loved ones, then the wider world on each in breath, and breathes out loving kindness on each out breath. David explains why this giving and taking practice is an antidote to self cherishing, drawing on Sharon Salzberg's story of realising we are the traffic too. He connects the practice to bodhicitta, the wish to help all beings rather than only ourselves.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Guided Meditation - Visualisation for Dream Yoga, Orbs of Light at the Throat and Heart Lama Alan · 21 minutes

    Lama Alan Wallace teaches two visualisations for the night. You place a small, deep ruby red orb of light inside the throat and let your awareness descend into it and take its form, a gentle shamatha weighted towards relaxation and stability rather than vividness, which you carry into sleep for lucid dreaming. Lama Alan then moves the orb down to the heart as deep sapphire blue, for lucid dreamless sleep, closing with a dedication of merit.

  • Guided Meditation - Generating Bodhicitta, Widening the Field from Yourself Outwards Lama Alan · 26 minutes

    Lama Alan Wallace guides a steadily widening field of care. You visualise an orb of pristine white light at your heart, breathing in your own obscurations to be extinguished there and breathing out loving kindness, then extend that field to those immediately around you, the wider community and all beings. Lama Alan then reflects on how interdependent your material and spiritual flourishing is, and the practice culminates in bodhicitta: may I awaken in order to free every being.

  • Guided Meditation - Tonglen, Breathing In the Causes of Suffering Lama Alan · 25 minutes

    Lama Alan begins from the flow of caring that runs through every choice you make, then imbues it with insight. He reasons through why the true causes of suffering lie in the mind rather than in circumstances: delusion, craving and hostility. Using only the in-breath, you draw those afflictions in as a dark cloud and dissolve them in the light at your heart, imagining the enduring peace. You close by wishing the same freedom for someone heavily afflicted.

  • Guided Meditation - Compassion, Attending to the Core Causes of Suffering Lama Alan · 25 minutes

    Lama Alan Wallace turns compassion towards the roots of suffering rather than its symptoms. You recall times when delusion, craving or hostility dominated your mind, and with each in-breath you draw that darkness into an orb of light at the heart, dissolving it and imagining yourself free. You then rehearse future situations that would once have triggered the same patterns. It closes by extending the same wish to someone you have known to be heavily afflicted.

  • Guided Meditation - Compassion, Beginning with Your Own Suffering Lama Alan · 26 minutes

    Compassion is the heartfelt wish to be free of suffering and its causes, and Lama Alan Wallace begins with your own. You weigh how much mental suffering you have already borne and how little control you have over circumstances, then imagine freedom as an orb of white light at the heart. With each in-breath you draw in the darkness of past and future suffering and dissolve it there. You then do the same for others, closing in simple awareness.

  • Guided Meditation - Loving Kindness, Radiating Light from the Heart Lama Alan · 25 minutes

    Lama Alan Wallace turns from present sensation to imagination, inviting you to envision your own flourishing in detail: what you would love your life to become, and the deeper wishes beneath that. You picture the pure ground of your awareness as a small orb of white light at the heart, radiating through your whole being with each out-breath. The light then flows to a dear friend, and to someone whose voice you would be glad to hear.

  • Guided Meditation - Loving Kindness for Oneself, Envisioning Genuine Happiness Lama Alan · 26 minutes

    You begin by envisioning genuine happiness: a well-being with roots deep enough to survive praise and ridicule, gain and loss, kindness and cruelty from others. Lama Alan invites you to imagine that capacity already within you, visualised as a radiant orb of white light at your heart, and with each out breath to send its rays through your whole being. The field then widens to everyone around you, before a closing rest.

  • Guided Meditation - Loving Kindness for Oneself, Envisioning Flourishing, Receiving and Offering Lama Alan · 26 minutes

    Loving kindness begins with yourself. Lama Alan asks you to envision your own wellbeing, then to picture all you would love to receive from other people and the natural world, flowing in as effortlessly as the breath. You consider which habits you would love to be free of and which qualities you would love to be endowed with, then what you would love to offer the world. The session closes with a moment of simple presence.

  • Guided Meditation - Loving Kindness for Oneself, Envisioning Freedom and Fulfilment Lama Alan · 23 minutes

    Lama Alan turns loving kindness inwards, towards yourself. You ask what you most wish for and have not yet found, what is missing, and what stands in the way of your own wellbeing, seeing clearly that you are not those habits and states of mind. With each out breath you arouse the yearning to be free of them and to find genuine happiness, envisioning that freedom and fulfilment realised here and now.

  • 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.

  • Tong-len (Taking & Giving) Glen Svensson · 88 minutes

    Tonglen, giving and taking, practised twice: first for ourselves and a friend, then we choose one mental affliction to dissolve and one quality to cultivate, before opening out to others. Glen Svensson compares the traditional black rock of self-cherishing with the light at the heart he prefers, warning against holding the smoke to punish yourself. The aspiration to take the suffering and give happiness is the key, and once learnt it can be done on a single breath as you approach a difficult person.

  • Mind & Mandalas - Part Three Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · Ian Baker · 62 minutes

    Questions from those listening. Eva Natanya gives Tsongkhapa's answer to why realising emptiness alone is not enough: living beings need form, and a Buddha must be able to manifest in form. Ian Baker takes the objection that visualisation is a flight simulator rather than a flight, and agrees it can become a trap. Lama Alan Wallace sets out what Atisha and Tsongkhapa said about consort practice, who it is not for, and how badly it has been abused. He closes on Dudjom Lingpa's Buddhahood Without Meditation, and how much effort it takes to reach the effortless.

  • Session 3 - Q&A Vesna A. Wallace · 46 minutes

    Questions to Vesna A. Wallace after the two talks. She explains why the mirror here is a prognostic mirror rather than a dusty one to be cleaned, and why the elements are ultimately five lights of a Buddha's wisdom. Other answers cover how elaborate visualisation diminishes the habitual propensities of samsara while staying a conceptual bridge, why ordinary bliss differs from the bliss of nirvana only in being conditioned, and how brain and mind differ. She closes on drawing the side channels into the central channel.

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