Emotional balance

19 teachings in the library are about this.

Guided Meditation - Releasing a Resentment David Oromith · 14 minutes · recorded March 22, 2026
A resentment you are still carrying comes to mind, and the hurt of it is acknowledged first. David then turns to where that person's behaviour came from, their own pain and confusion, and to the difference between a person and their mental afflictions, without agreeing the action was okay. Hand on the belly or chest, the words are to the extent I am able, I release, I let go. It closes on deep breaths, released through the mouth.
Guided Meditation - Befriending Anxiety David Oromith · 16 minutes · recorded November 24, 2025
A low-level worry or grievance is invited to the surface, whatever shouts loudest, and located in the body as a felt sense, with the palm of the right hand over the chest to signify kindness. You then breathe space around the feeling with a deep in breath, neither suppressing nor indulging it, before warmth and compassion are brought in, supporting yourself as you would a friend. It closes with slow breathing, in for five and out for seven.
Guided Meditation - Sitting with a Difficult Emotion as a Hurting Friend David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded October 26, 2025
A recent worry or difficult emotion is brought up from under the surface and held as if it were a hurting friend. David asks for no fixing and no dialogue, only hello. We follow how it maps across the body, a swirling, a tightening, a pressure, then the narratives and memories, listened to rather than believed. When the mind starts problem solving, the exhale lengthens. It closes on three energetic breaths sighed out through the mouth.
Session Three - Meeting the Emotion, and a Renewed Intention David Oromith · 65 minutes · recorded August 7, 2025
Continuing from the previous session, David guides a practice of simply being with an emotion rather than observing or fixing it, drawing on Tsoknyi Rinpoche's handshake practice, resting attention with whatever feeling is present. The talk covers regret as an alternative to guilt and shame, the four opponent powers, and anger's three forms, outward, inward and passive. He answers questions on internalised anger, pausing during conflict and grief, and closes reading Mary Oliver's Wild Geese.
Session Two - The Sacred Pause David Oromith · 72 minutes · recorded August 7, 2025
The session opens with a review of the emotional diary from the previous talk, before turning to working with a trigger once noticed. David draws on Shantideva's image of the piece of wood and Jack Kornfield's sacred pause to show how a brief pause, even one breath, interrupts an automatic reaction, and offers a breathing technique to calm the nervous system. He closes with a guided RAIN meditation, recognising, allowing, investigating and nurturing a difficult emotion, and takes questions on anger and trauma.
Session One - Why Rejection Hits So Hard David Oromith · 73 minutes · recorded August 6, 2025
David opens with a twenty minute guided shamatha practice, settling attention on the breath and noting its length. The talk sets out the five stages of an emotional episode: pre-episode state and intention, trigger, bodily and mental experience, behaviour and aftermath, distinguishing universal triggers like a sense of rejection from personal ones learned in childhood. He introduces the emotional diary for tracking these, and answers a question on anxiety about being anxious before the break.
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.
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.
Guided Meditation - Meeting a Difficulty with Inner Strength David Oromith · 22 minutes · recorded June 19, 2022
Stillness of the body, the gaze and awareness, held until the rhythmic sensations of breathing rise up to meet you, with a count at each exhale if engagement slips. A current difficulty is invited in: I want it to be different, but this is the way it is right now. David points out a hundred per cent success rate at getting through every challenge so far, calls it a superhero mindset, and has you sit a little taller.
Preventing Burnout and Cultivating Emotional Balance Eve Ekman · 109 minutes · recorded June 16, 2022
Burnout in three layers, emotional exhaustion, a lost sense that the work matters, and cynicism, and how to keep an open heart without being pulled under by it. Eve Ekman reports her study of a hundred medical residents tracking their emotions twice a day, who turned out to be reporting enjoyment in half the moments they logged. Emotion granularity, pro-social emotions and fierce compassion follow as the remedies. The morning opens with a brief embodied practice adapted from Tsoknyi Rinpoche.
Guided Meditation - Empathetic Joy, Rejoicing in Others' Virtues and Your Own Lama Alan · 24 minutes
Lama Alan Wallace guides the third of the four immeasurables, empathetic joy. You bring to mind someone whose good cheer and well-being you know well, then someone whose kindness, generosity and wisdom visibly benefit others, and with each out-breath you send light from your heart, rejoicing in their happiness and their virtues. You then turn inwards, delighting in your own past joys and your own goodness, before releasing all objects into open knowing.
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.
D2S3 - Between the Spark and the Flame Lama Alan · 58 minutes
Emotional balance, drawn from Lama Alan's work with the affective psychologist Paul Ekman: the seven emotions expressed the same way in every culture, and the refractory period in which no contrary evidence can get in. Shantideva's counsel to be like a piece of wood when you see your mind is dominated by an affliction stands beside Ekman's advice never to conflate contemptible behaviour with the person doing it. Noticing an emotion before it is expressed is where choice becomes possible.
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.
D1S3 - William James on Attention, and the Shamatha Project Lama Alan · 67 minutes
William James held that each of us chooses, by our ways of attending, what sort of universe we appear to inhabit. Lama Alan turns that on narcissism and on low self-esteem, and on why a materialist and a contemplative find different things obviously real. James also thought sustained attention a fixed trait; the three month Shamatha Project, with seventy subjects, showed otherwise. Relaxation supports stability, stability supports vividness, and skipping a step ends in burnout.
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.
Motivational Balance Glen Svensson · 74 minutes
The final module opens with the fourfold model of wellbeing from Lama Alan Wallace and Shauna Shapiro's article on mental balance, and the first of its four: motivational balance, which corresponds to the preliminary practices. Glen Svensson works through its imbalances of deficit, hyperactivity and dysfunction. One guided practice is on settling body, speech and mind, a second on whether trying to manipulate the things around us is an effective strategy. Mindfulness alone, he warns, can make matters worse.
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.

Emotional balance

Emotional balance

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