Impermanence

40 teachings in the library are about this.

Session Two - From Need to Care, and the Open Palm David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded July 18, 2026
David shifts the basis of a relationship from need to care, then reads Thich Nhat Hanh on loving in such a way that the person you love feels free. Contentment and gratitude come in as the medicine for attachment, and equanimity as the open palm rather than the fist closed around a songbird that has landed in it. David then guides a practice in which we turn towards the fear of things changing with reassurance rather than argument, and wish a loved one free. It closes on the group's own reflections.
Session One - Three Kinds of Worry David Oromith · 69 minutes · recorded November 24, 2025
The session opens with a guided meditation in which we reset body, speech and mind through mindfulness of breathing, and a second practice in which we watch thoughts arise and pass, labelling them without following them. David sets out three kinds of worry, appropriate, productive and toxic rumination, drawing on an account of the amygdala, then turns to the Buddhist view that anxiety is rooted in fear of impermanence and a wish for control we never really have. He closes on radical acceptance, distinguished from passivity.
A Precious Human Life David Oromith · 29 minutes · recorded August 4, 2025
A contemplative meditation built on the Dalai Lama's reflection on waking gratefully to a precious human life. David talks about how rare and fleeting this human life is, one of the four thoughts that turn the mind in the Tibetan tradition, and why we keep postponing practice for a better moment when now is the only time we actually have.
D7S1 - The Three Marks of Existence in Everyday Examples Lama Alan · 118 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Lama Alan works through the three marks of existence: impermanence, illustrated by a ship that has had every plank replaced yet is still called the same boat; dukkha, the disappointment of expecting another person to be the source of our happiness; and not-self, shown by asking what in the body or mind is truly you, down to a cell phone that belongs to no one until it is claimed.
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 - Contemplating the Four Elements David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded May 1, 2025
Starting from the weight of the body on the seat, David moves through earth, air with the breath, water, then fire, each first felt as plain sensation and then recognised as the same element in the world outside. It closes with a read passage on how the matter of your body has been ocean, birds, trees and moss, and will be again.
Session Four - Impermanence Makes Rebirth Possible David Oromith · 81 minutes · recorded April 14, 2025
This final session on emptiness opens with a guided Awareness of Awareness practice, eyes open, with Padmasambhava's question of what is aware dropped in gently. The rest is a live question and answer from emails sent during the week: why impermanence is what makes rebirth possible, how karma explains a joy that seems to come from nowhere, and what is aware once no self can be found. David also covers the unsettling shaken feeling as insight deepens, and the difference between mind and conscience.
Guided Meditation - The Beginningless Continuum of Mind David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
We turn attention to the thing we call mind, where nothing static can be found, only moment to moment processes, a thought arising one moment and passing the next. The continuum is traced back through birth to the first consciousness of a foetus, which must have had its own prior cause. Since the lives are countless, so are the mothers, and David asks you to see every being you meet as one of them.
D2S3 - Inner Solitude and the Impermanence of All Things David Oromith · 87 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
Building on relaxation, David introduces stability in shamatha, using counting at the belly to steady attention. The verse on solitary places turns out to be less about the physical setting than about a mind not swept along by distraction, shown through an experiment in which most people chose an electric shock over fifteen minutes alone with their thoughts. Questions range from a noisy neighbourhood to attachment inside a loving relationship.
Guided Meditation - Mindfulness of Phenomena David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded November 24, 2024
The eyes stay open and each out-breath is used to let go of grasping, until awareness is open to all six domains at once, noting whatever arrives without preference. You then move from noting to watching how one appearance gives rise to the next, and end by searching that whole web for anything permanent, and for the person your name refers to.
Guided Meditation - Mindfulness of the Mind David Oromith · 20 minutes · recorded November 20, 2024
You steady the attention with a count of twenty one breaths, then the eyes open a little and the gaze rests vacantly as you turn to the space of the mind. David asks you to watch how a thought begins, how it lasts and how it ends, whether any of it feels like yours, and finally whether anything there can be called I.
Guided Meditation - Mindfulness of Feelings David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded November 13, 2024
With the eyes at least partly open, we notice the plain pleasantness, unpleasantness or neither that comes with each sound and sensation. When a feeling prompts you to move you hold still and watch it instead: how it begins, where it sits, how it ends. It widens at the close to the feelings alongside thoughts.
Guided Meditation - Mindfulness of the Body David Oromith · 22 minutes · recorded October 31, 2024
Bare attention on the whole field of bodily sensation, then a close inspection of it element by element: firmness, moisture, warmth, movement. Of each one David asks whether anything in it is stable, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant from its own side, and whether anything says it is yours.
Session 1 - Mindfulness of the Body David Oromith · 91 minutes · recorded October 31, 2024
This first session on mindfulness of the body opens with an extended teaching, tracing how the Buddha added inquiry to shamatha to found vipassana, and a cup shows how perception differs from concepts we add on top. In the body scan that follows, we take attention to sensations of solidity, moisture, temperature and motion, asking whether each is permanent, pleasant and truly ours. Afterwards the group discusses separating pain from sensation, and how calling something mine builds a false sense of ownership.
Guided Meditation - Looking for the Inherently Existing I David Oromith · 22 minutes · recorded June 11, 2024
The sense of I is picked out first: not the hands and not the thoughts, but the one who feels happy when praised and offended when insulted, central, fixed, standing apart. If it exists it should be findable, so the body is checked part by part, arm, leg, head, then the whole, then the mind, thought, feeling, memory, all of it changing. What turns up is only parts, causes and labels. It closes resting in whatever calm comes of that.
The Antidotes to Attachment and Navigating Loss David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded April 17, 2024
The session opens with a short guided meditation in which we settle body, speech and mind, with refuge and bodhicitta. David completes his look at antidotes to attachment: non-attachment, contentment, gratitude and generosity, using the image of a bird resting on an open palm. He turns to loss, telling the story of Kisa Gotami and the mustard seed, and separates the cognitive work of understanding impermanence from the compassion grief itself needs. Questions bring up chronic illness, bipolar and the loss of a parent.
Exploring Attachment David Oromith · 72 minutes · recorded April 9, 2024
A short settling meditation on the breath with refuge and bodhicitta, before David defines attachment: how it exaggerates an object's appeal, filters out its downsides and grasps to acquire or keep it. He traces its reach into possessions, appearance and relationships, and tells the story of the nun and the cat, showing how one small wish can spiral into an elaborate life. Discussion covers attachment versus need, jealousy and grief, including whether loving someone means being attached to them.
Introduction & the Bhavachakra David Oromith · 91 minutes · recorded April 2, 2024
The opening session of a module on the three poisons, with a settling meditation on the breath and refuge before David introduces the bhavachakra, the wheel of life, as a map for the weeks ahead. He explains the three animals at its centre, ignorance, attachment and aversion, and how they drive karma and rebirth through the six realms and twelve links. No separate practice follows. Discussion ranges from craving versus healthy desire to letting go of possessions and fear of the future.
Guided Meditation - Gratitude and Appreciation David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded February 18, 2024
Gratitude is generated deliberately, first for the breath, then for the heartbeat, then for this human body and the unique mind without which there would be no experience. David quotes a teacher: as long as we are breathing, there is more right here than there is wrong. It widens to the room and its sounds, the home, hot water and a fridge, the people behind everything you own, and the planet. The last minutes are your own.
D2S4 - Preparing for Death, and the Three Cleansings Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 62 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024
Purification as preparation for dying, opening with death and impermanence and the seven branch practice. Tenpa defines the pair of words that recur in these texts, misdeeds and obscurations, the second meaning here the factors that trigger afflictions and thoughts that block meditation. The commentary he quotes likens the practice to surgery rather than slow medicine, and to aiming at one problem such as anger. The long guided practice runs the whole text, with the hundred syllable mantra and the three cleansings.
Acceptance and Seeing Life as Like a River David Oromith · 16 minutes · recorded October 9, 2023
In this episode, David explores the profound analogy of seeing life as like a river, and how this view highlights impermanence, acceptance, and the importance of living life in a flexible, fluid way. From understanding the nature of life's rapids to finding serenity in its gentle flows, David discusses how we can embrace the present and navigate life's ever-changing currents with grace and acceptance.
Our Need to Be Liked & Approved Of David Oromith · 34 minutes · recorded September 17, 2023
In the meditation on the sky-like nature of mind we watch thoughts arise and pass like clouds while resting in the clear, spacious awareness beneath them. David talks about our need to be liked and approved of, seen in social media validation, peer pressure and people-pleasing at work, and why tying self-worth to others' opinions is such shaky ground. He offers loving kindness towards ourselves, reflecting on impermanence and the Dalai Lama's reminder that we carry Buddha nature.
Reflecting On Our Impermanence David Oromith · 27 minutes · recorded April 16, 2023
The session opens with a short breathing meditation to settle the body, before we turn attention to how even the most solid seeming sensations are constantly changing. Prompted by the recent deaths of two teachers in his lineage, David talks about why Buddhist practice deliberately contemplates impermanence and our own death, not to bring on despair but to clarify what actually matters: valuing the relationships and time we have rather than getting lost in old arguments or in worry about the future.
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.
Being Ok With Being Uncomfortable David Oromith · 28 minutes · recorded October 24, 2021
The body settles into contact with the ground before we rest attention on the changing sensations of each in breath and out breath, with counting offered for those who want to steady their focus. David talks about being comfortable with being uncomfortable, welcoming each moment instead of insisting it be different, and recognising that difficult feelings are fleeting and survivable. He also warns against letting meditation become another stick to beat ourselves with when we still feel low.
Working Through a Challenge or Question In Our Life David Oromith · 30 minutes · recorded September 12, 2021
After settling the breath and counting twenty-one rounds, you choose one live challenge and hold it in body awareness rather than fix it straight away. David guides an investigation into the beliefs and fears underneath it, then a step back to view it from a wider, more neutral perspective, before asking what the next right step might be. There is no separate talk this week; David closes with a birthday reflection on gratitude and impermanence.
D1S1 - The Homage and the Foundations Lama Alan · 127 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
Lama Alan Wallace opens his commentary on Dudjom Rinpoche's five page manual, the first Dzogchen text Gyatrul Rinpoche taught him thirty one years ago. He works through the title and the homage to Dorje Drolo, and explains why resting in pristine awareness is the most ferocious response to the maras. Gyatrul Rinpoche's commentary supplies what the root text leaves out: the four revolutions in outlook, refuge and bodhicitta. It closes with a guided meditation on motivation.
D3S3 - Three Ways We Are Dreaming Lama Alan · 98 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Total withdrawal, deep into the formless absorptions, or total immersion in the world: Lama Alan Wallace goes through the two strategies and why Gautama found neither was an escape. Then twenty one counted breaths, observation of the somatic field, distinguishing sensations from the feelings we meet them with, and the same attention turned on the space of the mind. The three marks of existence follow as three dreams, one of them a cup of ginger and lemon that could never have made anyone happy.
Guided Meditation - Equanimity, Even Care for the Neutral, the Dear and the Difficult Lama Alan · 26 minutes
Lama Alan Wallace guides the last of the four immeasurables, equanimity. You bring to mind a neutral person, then someone dear, then someone you find difficult, and in each case you see how transient the relationship is and how constantly that person, like you, wishes for happiness. With an orb of light at your heart you breathe in the darkness of their suffering and breathe out loving kindness, closing on the difficult person set free.
Guided Meditation - Tonglen for the Aged, the Ill and the Dying Lama Alan · 24 minutes
Lama Alan directs tonglen through three groups in turn: those worn by old age, those living with physical or mental illness, and those close to death. For each you imagine being in their shoes, then step back and breathe in the darkness of their suffering, dissolving it in the light at your heart, the unborn and undying dimension of awareness. The wish for the dying is a transition met with serenity and without fear. It ends resting briefly in stillness.
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 - The Three Marks of Existence, from Recollection to Direct Inquiry Lama Alan · 13 minutes
Lama Alan begins with a review of your own past: times you held something fleeting as though it were durable, took a person or place to be the true source of your happiness, or grasped what is not yours as I and mine. You then turn to the space of the mind and put the same three questions to experience. Is anything here unchanging? Is any appearance a real well of happiness or suffering? Does anything carry the mark of I?
Guided Meditation - Vipashyana, Searching for the Mind That Observes Lama Alan · 24 minutes
Lama Alan turns awareness back on itself and asks what the mind actually is. Having directed attention to the space of the body, you invert it and inspect whatever was doing the directing. Does the mind have a shape, a size, a colour, a location? Set it in motion when it is too still to see. You watch states of mind arise and dissolve, and close on the question: who or what are you?
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.
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 Glen Svensson · 78 minutes
A guided search for the me who is relaxing the body and focusing the mind, ending in the merely labelled me. Glen Svensson lays out the three ways things exist dependently, through causes and conditions, parts and labelling, using a seed becoming a sprout, a star that can as easily be counted as eighteen lines, and a pen that is a chewing stick to a dog. In a second practice we search for the body among its parts.
Searching for Self Glen Svensson · 74 minutes
The body scan returns unguided, at your own speed and in your own sequence. In a second practice we look for a self in the body, in the mind, and in the two together. Glen Svensson then opens the teaching on emptiness by reading Lama Alan Wallace on what is really there: what we know of the world is only appearances to the mind, and even physics, as Heisenberg put it, shows not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
Not-Self Glen Svensson · 89 minutes
A guided practice covers all three levels of dukkha, ending with the question of whether any experience is completely free of the potential for suffering. Glen Svensson then calls renunciation a bad translation: the term means to move away from suffering, so it is the wish to be liberated from it, and to give up the eight worldly concerns rather than the eight worldly things. In a second practice we look for the autonomous me that seems to be a third thing alongside the body and the mind.
Suffering Glen Svensson · 75 minutes
We move mindfulness from the body to the mind, with a guided practice in which we watch thoughts, emotions and memories against the question of whether anything in the mind is stable and unchanging. Glen Svensson introduces the four noble truths and the word dukkha, whose etymology is a bad hole, an axle that never fitted its wheel. In a second practice we ask of a pleasant experience whether it is really in the nature of happiness. He tells of a retreat in Spain where repetitive food began to taste better once craving subsided.
Impermanence Glen Svensson · 64 minutes
The teaching opens and closes with a guided body scan in which we move from the crown of the head to the tips of the toes on one question: is anything in the body stable, or is everything changing moment by moment? Glen Svensson sets out what vipashyana is, why shamatha has to underpin it, and the four distorted views it works on. Impermanence, he argues, is good news, and he gives the image of the kayak of mindfulness on the river of life, rather than grabbing at flowing water.

Impermanence

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