Habits and change

50 teachings in the library are about this.

Week 7 - Yi, and What Makes a Movement Belong to an Element Dan Brierley · 70 minutes · recorded July 15, 2026
Dan explains what makes a movement belong to an element: partly its physical qualities, like the water lake movement's waist twist pressing the diaphragm onto the kidneys and adrenals, and partly Yi, mind and intention. He describes Yi as asleep in habitual action, and shows how bringing it in deliberately sharpens a movement's effect. The class practises Wu Chi, the five breaths and the full form, each element held with its own intention.
Guided Meditation - Simply Being with the Urge to Be Busy David Oromith · 19 minutes · recorded May 29, 2026
Refuge and bodhicitta open it, then the body is given permission to come to rest in stillness, the fidgeting and habitual moving being the evening's subject. The breathing slows, and each out breath releases thoughts rather than throwing them. We open attention wide to sounds, sensations and the movements of the mind, attentive without grasping at anything. Each time restlessness or boredom insists you should be doing something, David has you notice that and come back to simply being.
Session One - Procrastination David Oromith · 81 minutes · recorded May 19, 2026
The first of the three lazinesses, the pull of the sofa and "I'll do it later". David sets out the cycle of delay, brief relief then guilt, Shantideva's taste for idle pleasure, and Tim Pychyl's finding that procrastination is an emotion management problem rather than poor time management. In a guided practice on aspiration we recall a moment when practice worked and someone whose experience inspires us. It closes on specific intentions and a two minute version of the task.
Guided Meditation - Forgiving Ourselves and Letting Go of the Past David Oromith · 16 minutes · recorded March 22, 2026
A piece of negative self-talk is brought to mind and held there. David shows the mind as a brilliant storyteller, building a whole identity from one thing you said or did, then shifts the ground from thinking the thought to noticing you are having it. Grace comes next, for being human, and the words to the extent I am able, I forgive myself, I release. It closes with a hand on the chest and wishes to be kind to yourself.
Three Habits for a Happier Life David Oromith · 35 minutes · recorded March 22, 2026
In the loving kindness practice we move outward from ourselves to a loved one, a stranger, a difficult person and finally all beings. David talks about three simple daily habits for counteracting negativity: wishing others well, rejoicing in their good fortune, and harvesting joy from small pleasures, and invites everyone to try all three for a week as an experiment.
Ask Yourself This Question David Oromith · 31 minutes · recorded November 2, 2025
Mindfulness of breathing at the nostrils, with counting to help steady a wandering mind. David suggests that instead of always asking what practice to add, we should ask what we are already doing that perpetuates our suffering, pointing to the twenty years many of us will spend scrolling on our phones and Venerable Robina's comment about clean hoarders.
D7S1 - The Whole Sequence in One Session, and Carrying It Home David Oromith · 128 minutes · recorded August 25, 2025
The closing session, and the longest of the week: the whole sequence run through in one unbroken practice, from the breath through the movements of the mind to awareness itself. David draws on a teaching Lama Alan and Eva Natanya gave in June on the four modes of mindfulness, and on why observing the mind and observing awareness can be understood as one practice. He ends on lojong, and on the person at work who need not cost you the patience you came here to build.
D5S2 - Taking the Mind as the Path: Doing Even Less David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded August 22, 2025
A second session with the same method, to get a bit more familiarity with it before moving on. David reads Lama Alan: in each of the two shamatha methods so far the practice involves doing less and less, and here you are doing even less, no longer preferring thoughts to be absent. He reads him again on how this quality of awareness lets the mind heal and unknot itself as resentment, craving and arrogance come up in a space of loving presence, and answers one participant caught between resting in awareness and attending to thoughts, and another who feels dullness and a sense of falling with the eyes closed.
Habits, Labels and Transformation David Oromith · 30 minutes · recorded June 22, 2025
In the meditation we rest the mind like an open sky, watching thoughts and emotions pass through it like clouds without becoming them. David talks about how labelling ourselves as an angry or anxious person turns a passing habit into a fixed identity, and shares his own trigger around running late to show how, once we understand its cause, even a well worn habitual reaction can be retrained into a new default.
D7S3 - The Bardo as a Cinema, and Deities as Your Own Mind Lama Alan · 67 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The sense of moving from one life to the next in the bardo, compared to watching from inside a cinema: vivid, but never taking you anywhere. Lama Alan explains why Buddhas and their pure realms are displays of your own pristine awareness rather than places to travel to, and why emptiness must be realised before resting in open awareness or the insight will not hold. A guided practice continues the shift from calm abiding toward inverting awareness onto the observer.
Session 5 - Diligence, Meditation & Wisdom David Oromith · 79 minutes · recorded February 19, 2025
A guided meditation on refuge and bodhicitta weaves earlier themes together: visualising the Buddha, taking refuge, the four immeasurables, and his light dissolving into one's heart. David covers the final three paramitas: joyful diligence, with its three kinds of enthusiasm and matching laziness, concentration and its nine stages towards shamatha, and wisdom as the direct insight into emptiness underlying all the others. A question asks what it means to ask the Buddha for guidance.
Reigniting our Practice David Oromith · 28 minutes · recorded January 26, 2025
The meditation follows the Buddha's instructions to Bahiya: in the seen let there be only the seen, in the heard only the heard, as we rest in bare awareness of body, sight, sound and thought without elaboration. David talks about Marcus Aurelius' reminder that our principles are never extinguished, only buried, and that we can reignite them at any moment. He offers a journal prompt for what small change would bring us closer to our values, and the water pot filled drop by drop.
Day 7 - Closing Discussion David Oromith · 92 minutes · recorded January 6, 2025
The final morning revisits the fourfold vision quest meditation, held with loving kindness: what would bring true happiness, what is needed from others, how to transform, and what to offer the world. The group recites all 37 verses together as a closing contemplation, then breaks into small groups on which practice has landed most and what gets in the way, from workplace frustration to a longing for solitary practice. David closes with long life prayers and Shantideva's dedication.
D6S3 - Completing the Text and Living It Day to Day David Oromith · 78 minutes · recorded November 28, 2024
A guided meditation on equalizing self and other leads into bodhicitta and a reflection on the rarity of a human life. David completes the text with the practice of applying antidotes the moment an affliction arises, using the image of a car ignored until the wheels fall off. Discussion covers how the 37 practices map onto the Four Noble Truths, book recommendations, and how to keep the teachings alive once the retreat ends.
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.
Session 3 - The Ten Nonvirtues (Four of Speech) David Oromith · 76 minutes · recorded July 16, 2024
The session opens with a short meditation in which we settle body and breath, before David explains what makes karma heavier or lighter: strength of intention, habit, planning, rejoicing, and whether precepts are held. He then works through lying, divisive speech, harsh speech and idle talk using the four branches of basis, attitude, action and completion. Questions cover polite excuses, withholding information from a parent, blunt honesty, and whether sarcasm in a family can be purified.
Aversion and Patient-Acceptance David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded May 7, 2024
The evening opens with ten minutes counting the breath and extending loving-kindness. David returns to the Dalai Lama's Beyond Religion to show attachment and aversion turn destructive only when out of proportion, then sets out patient acceptance through acceptance, understanding, compassion and fortitude, using the spark and fuel image and the two arrows. Questions cover a job left out of aversion, indifference as a near enemy of equanimity, and looking after oneself.
Gratitude & Appreciation David Oromith · 25 minutes · recorded February 18, 2024
The meditation is a gratitude practice: we begin with the breath and the heartbeat before widening out to the room, the home and the people we are grateful for. David explains why gratitude and contentment are natural antidotes to craving: when the heart already feels full, there is nothing left to grasp for. He recommends keeping some form of gratitude practice, however simple, calling it one of the few habits nobody regrets starting.
D1S3 - Teaching the Four Factors Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 92 minutes · recorded January 6, 2024
A body scan run in reverse opens the session, then loving kindness extended from oneself to a benefactor, a friend, a stranger and all beings. Rejoicing in what is virtuous joins every practice from here on. Tenpa places the practice within the three vehicles and reads the short Mahayana sutra Teaching the Four Factors, in which the Buddha gives Maitreya the four opponent powers of regret, remedy, resolve and reliance. Regret is practical, not moralistic; guilt concludes that we are bad people.
Turning Everyday Life into Dharma Practice David Oromith · 53 minutes · recorded November 6, 2023
No formal meditation until the close, a ten minute practice in which we harvest joy through the five senses and gratitude for this life. The talk is on turning everyday life into practice: difficult people become opportunities for patience and compassion, chores are done with mindful awareness rather than boredom, and pleasant experience is enjoyed with gratitude rather than craving more. Listeners share their own struggles, including a difficult mother and mindful eating with the television on.
Judging and Trying to Fix Others David Oromith · 27 minutes · recorded July 2, 2023
In the meditation we watch the mind with the eyes open, observing thoughts arise and pass like clouds in the sky or passers-by in the street, without following after them. David talks about our habit of judging others for not living as we think they should, and the difference between holding space for someone and trying to fix them. He tells the story of a mother at a retreat who realised that simply showing up and listening mattered more to her daughter than any amount of advice.
Connecting to Communities for Genuine Wellbeing Ondy Willson · 116 minutes · recorded May 4, 2023
Ondy Willson asks whether our trouble with anxiety and depression is partly a symptom of isolation, and answers by working outwards from the self to the communities around it. She sets out what Freud, Jung and Thich Nhat Hanh made of the self, then how conditioning hardens into habit and tendency, and which constructive emotions serve as antidotes. The rest is the effort connection takes, and what headphones, video calls and social media quietly cost us. Three guided practices run through.
Week 4: When We’re Blamed or Harmed - Transforming Self-Cherishing (23 March 2023) David Oromith · 74 minutes · recorded March 23, 2023
This closing session opens with a practice of resting in open, non-reactive awareness of body, sight and sound, before David turns to self-cherishing, the habitual sense that my comfort and my losses matter more than anyone else's. He traces it through everyday scenes, a parking space, the last loaf of bread, and sets out equalising self and others as the corrective, citing Shantideva on cherishing others. Questions cover recognising ego in colleagues and guarding against burnout.
Week 2: When We Don’t Get What We Want - Transforming Disappointment (9 March 2023) David Oromith · 72 minutes · recorded March 10, 2023
The session opens and closes with a guided practice in which we settle awareness into the body, then count breaths at the nostrils in a breathing meditation. David looks at why we suffer when we cannot get what we want, tracing it to attachment's habit of exaggerating what a thing will give us. He tells the story of the nun who ended up needing a cow, and offers non-attachment, contentment and gratitude as the antidote. Questions range from technology frustrations to attachment versus ordinary worry.
Week 1: Introduction to Mind Training - Rising to the Challenge (2 March 2023) David Oromith · 82 minutes · recorded March 3, 2023
This new course on lojong, Buddhist mind training, opens with a short relaxation meditation to settle the group. David explains that we cannot stop difficulties happening, only stop them robbing us of our peace, using the spark, fuel and flame image and Shantideva's line: if there is a solution why worry, and if there is none why worry. Questions explore turning anger into compassion, separating regret from guilt, and the habit of rehearsing arguments that never go as planned.
S4 - Getting Off the Thought Bus, and the Sky-Like Mind David Oromith · 79 minutes · recorded February 4, 2023
After settling with the breath, David turns to the nature of thoughts: how we fuse with them, the story of the two arrows, and the image of thoughts as buses we climb aboard without checking where they go. He teaches thought labelling, simply naming a thought as a thought to loosen its pull, then leads a meditation in which we picture the mind as open sky and thoughts as passing clouds. Discussion covers writing thoughts down to gain distance, and the habit of worrying about worry itself.
S2 - Attachment and Aversion, and the Spark and the Fuel David Oromith · 73 minutes · recorded January 19, 2023
The evening opens with a short guided meditation in which we settle into the body and breath. David then explains attachment and aversion as habits of mind that exaggerate things, using the spark, fuel and flame image and the story of the nun who ends up with a cow to show how solving one craving creates another. A second guided practice follows, mindfulness of breathing at the abdomen with counting. Questions cover expectation, frustration with practice, and whether to let thoughts go or work with them.
S1 - The Mind Makes the Day, and Why We Fear Stillness David Oromith · 79 minutes · recorded January 12, 2023
After introductions round the room, David leads a ten to fifteen minute guided settling practice, relaxing body, speech and mind, breath by breath. The talk that follows is on why the same day can feel bright or unbearable depending on the mind we bring to it, citing research that many would rather feel pain than be alone with their thoughts. A long discussion covers posture, technology before bed, anxious thoughts, and building a daily practice by listing fifty reasons why it is good for you.
Guided Meditation - Reflecting Back On The Year David Oromith · 20 minutes · recorded December 18, 2022
This is a guided meditation on reflecting on our growth in the last year. We often don’t notice the changes and growth we go through on a day-to-day basis, and it’s only when we stop and look where we were that we notice what has changed.
Self-Cherishing vs Cherishing Others David Oromith · 37 minutes · recorded May 8, 2022
In the classic loving kindness practice we move from ourself to someone loved, someone neutral and someone we find difficult. David talks about self-cherishing, the mind's habit of placing our own comfort above everyone else's, from wanting the fastest lane to the last item in the shop. He explains the Mahayana shift towards cherishing others instead, quoting Shantideva that all happiness comes from this and all suffering from self-focus alone.
Making Meditation a Simple Priority David Oromith · 27 minutes · recorded January 9, 2022
We settle into stillness with a body scan, before resting our attention on the natural breath, with counting to seven offered for those who find it helpful. David talks about making meditation a daily habit rather than a rescue for panic, comparing it to brushing your teeth: not a cure but psychological hygiene that prevents imbalance from building up in the first place. He suggests simplifying practice to something as easy as noticing the sounds around you whenever it starts to feel like a chore.
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.
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.
Changing Negative Habits and Cultivating Positive Ones David Oromith · 10 minutes · recorded January 23, 2021
David answers a listener's question on breaking a damaging habit and embedding a good one, using a bus station and a road network: each thought is a bus pulling in, and boarding it often enough turns a dirt path into a superhighway to panic station or anxiety town. A good habit never arrives automatically, so aspiration and conscious effort carry it until familiarity takes over. It closes on Viktor Frankl on the space between stimulus and response.
Developing a Daily Meditation Practice David Oromith · 11 minutes · recorded December 1, 2020
Meditation as cultivating the heart-mind, rather than a tranquiliser taken when stress gets too much. David explains why a formal practice is a support and not the path itself, and why the real work is watching the mind when it is angry, craving or in conflict, not only when it is calm. He uses losing your keys in the house to make the point that the mind is where you look. Teaching only, with no guided practice.
Why You Should Meditate David Oromith · 13 minutes · recorded April 6, 2020
In this episode, David answers the question 'Why Meditate?' and explains why everyone should meditate. When we first try to meditate, we notice that our mind is all over the place. This experience shows us how little control we have over our mind. Having so little control over our mind is the reason why we experience negative feelings and are not able to be happy. Meditation is more than just a fun way to relax, it is essential if we want to experience our deepest wish which drives our day-to-day life – the wish for lasting happiness and freedom from painful feeling.
D2S1 - State Checks and Dream Signs Lama Alan · 100 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The first full day opens with a detailed preamble: Lama Alan Wallace asks how anyone can be harmed inside a dream, and answers that we identify with what is neither I nor mine, and reify everything. A guided practice of settling body, speech and mind in the natural state follows, ending in self-knowing awareness. He then turns to Stephen LaBerge's research: the three requirements for lucid dreaming, state checks such as jumping or reading a text twice, and a dream journal to find your own dream signs.
Establishing a Daily Practice, the Three Food Groups Lama Alan · 9 minutes
Lama Alan Wallace sets out a workable shape for daily practice: a morning session that opens with motivation, makes the mind serviceable through shamatha, then moves into the four immeasurables or tonglen, and an evening session that gathers the day back in. He describes the three food groups of a balanced practice, shamatha, something for the heart and something for wisdom, and encourages you to season the whole day with brief returns rather than sinking into routine.
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 - 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.
Part Two - The Bahiya Instruction, and How Much Jhana Is Needed Lama Alan · 40 minutes
In the guided practice of twenty four minutes, built on the Buddha's very short instruction to the wandering ascetic Bahiya, we move the attention through the visual, auditory and tactile fields and then into the mind, so that in the seen there is only the seen. Lama Alan then reads the discourse itself and draws out the three marks, the enormous one being how often we look for happiness to what is no source of it. A question on jhana follows, the Indo-Tibetan tradition holding access to the first enough.
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.
Equanimity Glen Svensson · 85 minutes
Equanimity as an unbiased mind, undoing the habit of sorting people into friends, strangers and so-called enemies by how they seem to affect us. In the guided practice we step into the perspective of a stranger, a loved one and a difficult person in turn, then back out again. Glen Svensson shows how each of the four immeasurables acts as the antidote to the near enemy of another, so they are best practised as a package. He closes with the four opponent powers and an end of day review of one negative action, one good one and one thing received with gratitude.
Empathetic Joy Glen Svensson · 78 minutes
Empathetic joy, mudita, as the corrective to the modern obsessive focus on the negative. Glen Svensson turns cognitive fusion on ourselves to explain low self-esteem and the difference between useful regret and useless guilt, and advises praising a behaviour rather than a person. In the guided practice we rejoice in another's good fortune and virtues, then travel the timeline of our life recalling every kindness received. He closes with the four thoughts that turn the mind.
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.
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.
Observing the Mind Glen Svensson · 77 minutes
Bare attention comes first, a guided meditation in which we cycle through the visual, auditory, tactile and mental fields, in the seen only the seen. Glen Svensson then moves the object of shamatha from the breath to the mind itself, using Dudjom Lingpa's instruction to let thoughts be as they are rather than let them go. In a second guided practice we watch thoughts, emotions and memories arise and pass with the eyes partly open. Questions cover a noisy home and what to do when a full dream unfolds.
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.

Habits and change

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