Buddhist psychology

59 teachings in the library are about this.

Session One - What Attachment Is, and Where It Hides David Oromith · 72 minutes · recorded July 18, 2026
David separates attachment from genuine love, quoting Venerable Robina Courtin that attachment is I-based and love other-based, and that the two are stirred together like milk and water. He traces it to the feeling of not being enough: in being liked, in being right, and in the roles we hold on to, his own being the tech person on the ward until others arrived who could do it too. In the guided practice we set the two side by side for a loved one and a friend. It closes on the fear of abandonment underneath.
Session 2 - The Eight Verses of Training the Mind David Oromith · 87 minutes · recorded June 18, 2025
This second session opens with a twenty minute meditation in which we settle body and mind, then recite the eight verses together. David works through the third verse on watching the mind and applying antidotes to afflictions, then the fourth on cherishing difficult people as a rare chance to practise compassion. A poll shows self cherishing can hide inside low self esteem as much as pride. Questions cover compassion versus empathy, accepting compliments, and giving victory to others.
D5S5 - Questions on Observing the Mind and Losing the Self Lama Alan · 90 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
A long question and answer session on why observing the mind is not the same as observing yourself, and why introspection can feel impossible even to a trained philosopher. Lama Alan addresses the anxiety that surfaces as meditation grows spacious and the sense of self loosens, and tells of the experiment in which Matthieu Ricard did not flinch at a gunshot while resting in open awareness. Questions also compare Dzogchen realisation with Advaita Vedanta.
D6S3 - Why Dzogchen Practice Is Simply Waking Up Lama Alan · 89 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Lama Alan traces how mental afflictions such as anger and pride do not simply vanish upon realisation but melt into the five wisdoms, and offers a third translation of Dzogchen, the Great Encompassment, alongside the more familiar Great Perfection and Great Completion. He describes the false cave of appearances, likening ordinary experience to a non-lucid dream, and says the entire task of Dzogchen practice comes down to one thing: waking up.
D2S4 - Four Questions on Happiness, and Reality's Blessings Lama Alan · 68 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Lama Alan admits teachings on suffering and hell realms can leave people tense rather than steadied, unlike those raised inside the tradition from childhood. A guided practice puts four questions to you: what would truly make you happy, what you want from the world, how you want to change, and what you would offer it. He closes with a Tibetan aristocrat who lost everything and called it a blessing, asking whether reality rises up to meet genuine practice.
D2S3 - The Buddha's Breathing Practice as a Source of Joy Lama Alan · 99 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The Buddha's own instructions on mindfulness of breathing, moving from long and short breath to attending to the whole body, with Lama Alan's account of his own breath settling to around fifteen cycles a minute in retreat. He describes a quiet enjoyment of the practice itself, a source of wellbeing that costs nothing. The second and third foundation stones follow: reflecting on death, and what it means to stop clinging to this life alone.
D6S3 - Atisha on Perception, and Closing the Retreat Lama Alan · 67 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Lama Alan opens with Atisha's teaching that extrasensory perception depends on shamatha, illustrated with siddhis he has seen and Russell Targ's remote-viewing research. He contrasts the effortful path of tantric practice with the Dzogchen alternative: resting body, speech, and mind in complete inactivity until the mind settles of itself. The retreat closes with a four-part loving-kindness meditation in which we dedicate merit to the group's shared aims.
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.
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.
D1S2 - The Coal Burning Plant, and Genuine Unhappiness Lama Alan · 97 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
The image is a coal burning plant that must be switched off before solar panels can work: hedonic pursuits crowd out the genuine well-being meditation cultivates. Lama Alan applies the same logic to suffering, contrasting solitary confinement with a yogi's cave, same conditions but opposite minds. Questions range from fatigue and rest between sessions to a devotee told repeatedly it is even better to practise Dharma, ending with the value of retreat.
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.
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.
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.
Reducing Attachment Whilst Still Enjoying Hedonic Happiness David Oromith · 30 minutes · recorded February 4, 2024
In the body scan meditation, good for relaxation and well suited to lying down, we move attention slowly through the whole body. David talks about the difference between worldly happiness, which is real and fine to enjoy, and the lasting well-being that comes only from within. He shares a story of holding a bird loosely on an open palm rather than gripping it in a fist, showing how to enjoy life's pleasures without grasping at them, in the world but not of it.
Introduction, the Pursuit of Happiness, and Settling Body, Speech & Mind in Their Natural States David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded January 9, 2024
The opening session of this shamatha module begins with a short intention setting and a full guided meditation on settling body, speech and mind in their natural states, in which we use the out breath to release thought and tension. David introduces shamatha itself and its Buddhist and pre-Buddhist roots, then draws on the Dalai Lama and Einstein to separate hedonic pleasure from genuine, cultivated well-being. Questions cover sleepiness during practice and an unusual shaky, cold sensation one student noticed.
D5S1 - Building a Circle of Inspiration Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 61 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
How to keep the practice alive. Michael Lobsang Tenpa suggests a eudaimonic journal, a book of the antidotes that work for you personally, and a mandala of inspiration made of images, scents, music, quotes and inspiring practitioners. He tells of Sharon Salzberg asking the Dalai Lama whether to teach loving kindness for oneself first, since so many people suffer from self-hatred, which he did not understand. The closing practice runs from oneself to a benefactor, a friend, a neutral person and all beings.
D1S1 - The Four Questions, and Two Kinds of Happiness Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 62 minutes · recorded August 25, 2023
The practice that opens every day here, a vision quest of four questions: how you envision genuine flourishing, what support it needs, how you would have to change, and what gift you want to offer. Michael Lobsang Tenpa then revisits a distinction Lama Alan quotes but did not invent: hedonic happiness, whose kinds and their flip sides are the eight worldly concerns, and the eudaimonic wellbeing that comes from the inside. It closes with harvesting joy, finding what is pleasant in each sense.
Dealing with Stressful Situations David Oromith · 16 minutes · recorded December 19, 2022
In this episode, David addresses a question about how to deal with stressful situations. Firstly, he explores the internal causes of stress and frustration from a Buddhist perspective, and then looks at some opposing minds that can bring us greater peace and wellbeing in such turbulent times. Minds such as acceptance, understanding, and compassion can help us handle stressful situations with greater ease.
Four Aspects of Mental Balance Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded August 29, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace argues that modern psychology mistakes symptoms such as depression and anxiety for disorders, and looks outward for causes that are primarily inward. Drawing on the Nalanda tradition, he sets out four kinds of mental balance, conative, attentional, cognitive and emotional, each able to fail through deficit, hyperactivity or dysfunction. It is exposition throughout, with no guided practice. Questions cover his fourfold vision quest and compassion in wartime.
D2S2 - Compassion, Not Despair, and the Small Adversities Lama Alan · 83 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace returns to a point he had passed over, on training in compassion, and gives Buddhaghosa's analysis of it and its false facsimile, despair, which looks like it and is not. Practise first with minor adversity, the text says, and it will gradually become easier. Whether a thing is agreeable or disagreeable is the way our minds apprehend it, as with a dentist's drill. Half an hour of questions follows, on shamatha and dzogchen and on why expressing a toxic emotion deepens the habituation.
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.
D1S2 - Attentional Intelligence, and Let the Mystery Be Revealed Lama Alan · 82 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Atisha's aphorism, once stability is achieved let the mystery be revealed, and why shamatha comes before the cultivation of ultimate bodhicitta. Lama Alan Wallace sets out conation, ethical intelligence and attentional intelligence in turn, and pictures our modern mind as a telescope mounted on a galloping camel in a sandstorm. The guided practice is mindfulness of breathing, felt throughout the whole body, and we note whether each breath is long or short, with introspection watching the attention.
D2S1 - Renunciation, Refuge, and a Remedy for Each Adversity Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
A general notion is not enough, so Lama Alan Wallace works through the specific practices the text names for particular adversities: renunciation as a spirit of definite emergence, going for refuge, dispelling the arrogance that leaves a person as sterile as soil on a mountain top, purifying non-virtue by pondering the four laws of karma, rejoicing in virtue, and cherishing others more than oneself. In the guided practice we draw the darkness of the world into an orb of light at the heart, the receiving end of tonglen.
D1S1 - Whatever Attitude You Cultivate Grows Stronger Lama Alan · 94 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace opens with gratitude to his teachers, then, following Gyatrul Rinpoche's commentary, says who the text is for: those who put genuine well-being above mundane pleasure. The homage follows, then the text's first lines, on how a mind habituated to dwelling on suffering turns the most insignificant circumstance into great distress, and that depression comes from the mind and not the brain. The session closes with a guided twenty minute practice of settling body, speech and mind in the natural state.
D4S1 - Blame Everything on One Culprit Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace explains the two week gap, a perforated intestine and six days in hospital, then takes up the third point, transforming adversity into the path. In Buddhaghosa's framework he names despair, apathy and delight in one's own good fortune as near enemies of compassion, impartiality and empathetic joy, and works through the aphorism blame everything on one culprit, with Shantideva on self-grasping as the great demon. In the guided practice we cultivate the four immeasurables as the four greats.
D6S1 - Do Nothing a Buddha Wouldn't Do Lama Alan · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
The final morning begins with a twenty four minute practice rather than a talk, in which we rest in awareness of awareness. Lama Alan Wallace then reaches conduct, where equipoise and daily life merge indivisibly and thoughts arise as aids to meditation. Yangthang Rinpoche's commentary adds the detail: sustain that initial moment of freshness, because mental afflictions ride on the current of conceptualization. In the closing practice we watch the mind designate objects and reify them.
D6S1 - Convergence, Not Conversion Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 128 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Convergence rather than conversion is Lama Alan Wallace's theme for the closing day, and where the two traditions find deep common ground is in love and compassion. He works through the four immeasurables, then guides a practice with an orb of light at the heart, drawing in darkness on the in breath and sending out loving kindness on the out breath, widening from oneself to one person and on to every being. Eva Natanya warns how easily one's own pristine awareness becomes a possession of the ego.
D2S1 - The Dzogchen Answer to Suffering Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Lama Alan Wallace gives the Dzogchen answer to why we suffer: we grasp at a body and mind that are neither I nor mine, and fail to recognise awareness that is already signless, boundless and all luminous. In the guided practice we rest in the awareness of being aware, eyes open, without identifying with whatever arises. Eva Natanya raises past lives as the elephant in the room, and is asked what becomes of those who lived before Christ if salvation is a one time offer.
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.
D2S4 - Four Questions on Flourishing, and What Free Will Means Lama Alan · 75 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Tibetan has no words for self-loathing or low self-esteem, and Lama Alan begins loving kindness where it is easiest, with yourself. Four questions follow: your own flourishing, what you would love to receive, how you would love to transform, and what to offer, each aroused with the breath and imagined as already so. Then the Buddha's three kinds of genuine well-being for the contemplative, from ethics, samadhi and wisdom, and free will as the ability to act in ways conducive to one's own and others' well-being.
D2S3 - Awareness of Awareness, Dying Lucidly, and Loving Kindness Lama Alan · 85 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Nothing could persuade you that you are not conscious, and Lama Alan takes that as his starting point. He describes the substrate consciousness, then guides awareness of awareness, released into space on the out-breath and inverted upon itself on the in-breath. What the dying process holds for anyone who stays lucid follows. The session closes with loving kindness, an aspiration rather than an emotion, with the near enemy Buddhaghosa names in the Path of Purification, self-centred attachment.
D2S2 - Observing Thoughts and Emotions, and the Substrate Consciousness Lama Alan · 54 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Paul Ekman's spark and flame: recognising an emotion before the flame of its expression is worth training for, and a neuropsychiatrist rated metacognitive impairment worse than being blind, deaf or physically impaired. In the guided practice we move through the visual, auditory and tactile fields into the sixth, the mind, sorting appearances seen in real time from impulses caught only retrospectively. Maitripa's second method closes on the substrate consciousness, its bliss, luminosity and non-conceptuality.
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.
D1S4 - Materialism as a Learned Delusion, and Innate Self-Grasping Lama Alan · 59 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Ignorance and delusion as the taproot from which the other afflictions grow. Lama Alan separates delusions we acquire from our surroundings from those we are born with, and argues that materialism, the view that a person is nothing but a brain, is an acquired one, quoting Huxley in 1869 and Donald Hoffman on how little has changed since. The innate one is grasping at a separate, autonomous self. We narrow attention to the breath at the nostrils, with counting to ten offered as trainer wheels.
D1S3 - Relaxation Before Stability, and What Makes a Desire Afflictive Lama Alan · 115 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
What separates a strong desire from an afflictive one. Lama Alan defines craving and attachment as decontextualising their object and rooted in misapprehension, so even a little is toxic, and treats hostility and hatred the same way, quoting Bhikkhu Bodhi that there are times for moral outrage. He puts relaxation, stability and vividness in that order, since concentration without relaxation burns people out. The guided practice is mindfulness of breathing, whole body first, then the abdomen.
D1S2 - Tension, Agitation, Dullness, and Stillness Amid Turbulence Lama Alan · 85 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The session opens with a twenty four minute guided practice in which we settle body, speech and mind in their natural states, taking the out-breath as the key and letting the breath run as it does in deep sleep. The teaching then takes three evident inner causes of distress: excessive tension, agitation and rumination, and dullness. Any one of them can be a principal cause, a sleeping pill that stops working was only treating the symptom, and stillness can be maintained in the midst of motion.
D1S1 - Hedonia, Eudaimonia and Where the Causes Lie Lama Alan · 76 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Two kinds of happiness, and only one can grow and deepen. Lama Alan separates hedonia, any pleasure depending on a pleasant stimulus, from eudaimonia, a well-being that cannot be bought or sold, drawing on Socrates, Aristotle, Einstein and John Stuart Mill. He introduces conation, our faculty of desire and aspiration, and asks how intelligently we choose what we want. Teaching only, no practice, closing on principal causes, contributing conditions, and evident, subtle and very subtle causes.
D1S1 - Are You Human? The Three Poisons and the Substrate Lama Alan · 100 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The opening evening is teaching only, with no practice. Lama Alan Wallace starts from a Pali Canon exchange in which the brahmin Dona asks the Buddha whether he is a god, a spirit or a human, is told no to each, and hears the reply, I am awake. He works through the three poisons of the mind, and the dualistic grasping that is the taproot of craving and hatred, runs the ten Buddhist analogies for illusion, and lays out the substrate and substrate consciousness.
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 - 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.
D2S4 - Unhappiness From Within, and the Ambrosial Dwelling Lama Alan · 83 minutes
Genuine unhappiness, with no external referent, comes from the mind you brought into that room, Tsongkhapa's observation set beside a friend who called nine months of solitude a river of gold. Mindfulness of breathing is the one method the Buddha recommends for minds chronically caught up in rumination, and his account of where it leads runs peaceful, sublime, ambrosial, with arisen afflictions getting no footing. A guided practice follows, and he closes on the research centre being built in Tuscany.
D2S1 - Unawareness and Delusion, the Real and the Imaginary Lama Alan · 83 minutes
Cognitive intelligence is telling what reality is presenting from what we project upon it. Lama Alan begins with unawareness and delusion, the twofold root of suffering, then a reflection a camera focuses two metres behind the mirror, a Big Dipper only mental consciousness can see, and a face on Mars. He closes on three points: taking the impermanent for permanent, what is not a true source of happiness for one, and what is not I or mine for I and mine. Teaching only, no practice in this part.
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.
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.
Dealing with Anger Glen Svensson · 81 minutes
Anger, defined here as always carrying the intention to harm, and why Buddhism recommends patience and compassion in its place rather than a right amount of anger at the right time. Glen Svensson guides a practice on occasions when you got angry, on criticism valid and invalid, and on dissecting the irritating person until words are only sounds. He then introduces cognitive fusion, fusing a person and their behaviour into one thing, which turns rejection of an act into attack on the person.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.

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