Lineage and tradition

23 teachings in the library are about this.

S3 - Introduction to Dzogchen David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded March 18, 2026
David calls Dzogchen the most accessible of the three, and the pinnacle in the Nyingma school. Great Perfection points not at something to strive for but at a nature already self-perfected, and where Mahamudra works up through ordinary mind, Dzogchen introduces rigpa from the start. Ground, path and fruition follow, with tekcho and the pointing out instructions a teacher may give. It closes with a practice in which we look for where thoughts happen, and a reflection called The Unbound Sky.
S4 - Non-Sectarian Approaches to Dharma David Oromith · 86 minutes · recorded November 25, 2025
David guides a mostly silent meditation, offering light prompts as each person settles into their own choice of calming practice. The talk weighs following one lineage closely against ranging widely, using the image of digging many shallow holes rather than one deep well, and a maze where mixed directions leave you lost. He traces the non-sectarian movement's revival and its caution against cherry picking only the easy teachings. Members share how they have moved between traditions.
Guided Meditation - Loving Kindness and Appreciation for Spiritual Friends David Oromith · 20 minutes · recorded September 3, 2025
Loving kindness turned towards the people who keep a practice alive. David starts with early influences, anyone who showed you kindness and led you towards the spiritual life, then one particular spiritual friend, then your wider Sangha, and finally the lineage of teachers behind your own teacher. Each is appreciated, then wished well.
S1 - Refuge in Good Company David Oromith · 87 minutes · recorded September 3, 2025
Loving kindness is directed towards spiritual friends: early influences, one particular friend, the wider sangha and the lineage of teachers, guided throughout. David explores why the Buddha called admirable friendship the whole of the path, using the story of the monk Magiya, then covers sangha's pitfalls, groupthink, cliques, cult-like devotion and overdependence, and the qualities of authentic friendship. Michelle compares Samadhi to another group; Tracy asks where the community gathers.
D4S3 - Compassion, and Choosing Someone You Can Work With David Oromith · 92 minutes · recorded August 21, 2025
Compassion and loving kindness are two sides of the same coin, as Lama Alan Wallace puts it, but the flavour of the practice is different: here you attend to beings who are suffering, with the active mind that asks what can I do to help. David is practical about the hostile person, having had people go straight for Hitler or Putin and then say they could not wish him well, and suggests an annoying colleague. Afterwards, why brief practices more often beat one long block.
D4S2 - The Buddha's Instructions to Bahiya, and the Stages of Attention David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded August 21, 2025
A few lines the Buddha gave to Bahiya, who urgently wanted teachings, used here as preparation: in the seen let there be only the seen, in the heard only the heard, in the sensed only the sensed, in the cognized only the cognized, without labelling or identifying any of it. David then takes the first four of the nine stages shown in the elephant artwork, where the meditator chases a mind that is following the monkey of involuntary thoughts, and the powers, faults and antidotes that go with them.
D8S2 - The Text's Closing Verses, and Acquiring Confidence Lama Alan · 55 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The commentary reaches the end of Dudjom Lingpa's prose, tracing his own progress through the stages of realisation and the closing dedication verses of the text. Lama Alan explains why realising emptiness must go all the way down, likened to a nail driven flush with wood against one hammered below the surface, and why seeing the self as constructed rather than inherently existent makes choosing to see oneself as a Buddha a genuine option.
D3S3 - Seeing Through the Guru, and Boundless Compassion Lama Alan · 103 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The substrate consciousness as a homing pigeon's coop, the place awareness returns to in sleep and in death. A breath practice leads into a guru yoga visualisation in which we trace devotion through lineage to our own pristine awareness. Lama Alan covers seeing Dharma companions through their Buddha nature rather than faults, cultivating compassion free of a mother's partiality, and what it means to receive a siddhi, in the lama who healed him with a stone heated in meditation.
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.
D1S1 - Meeting Dudjom Lingpa's Text and Its Lineage Lama Alan · 89 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Lama Alan tells the story of Dudjom Lingpa, the nineteenth century Tibetan master who received his teachings through visions and never had a living human teacher. He traces the short lineage carrying this text to him and sets the retreat's format. The session includes a guided practice in which we settle body, breath and mind, and closes with the text's opening lines, where Dudjom Lingpa describes waking into pristine awareness as the Buddha Samantabhadra.
Session 1 - The Eight Verses of Training the Mind David Oromith · 89 minutes · recorded June 11, 2025
This first session on the Eight Verses of Training the Mind opens with a guided meditation on settling the body, taking refuge and generating bodhicitta. David gives the lineage of Geshe Langri Thangpa, reads the text, then works through the first two verses: cherishing all beings as the basis of practice and happiness, and taking the humble position rather than seeing ourselves as important. Stories of Atisha and Drom Tonpa illustrate humility, and questions cover therapeutic lying and patience.
The Twelve Dependent Links of Origination David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded June 11, 2024
In the twenty minute guided meditation on emptiness we search body and mind for a findable self and rest in its absence. David then sets out the twelve links of dependent origination, from ignorance through craving to birth and death, using the traditional images of the blind grandmother and the potter's wheel to show how the whole cycle turns and how it can be reversed. Questions cover whether the six realms are literal or metaphors and what, if anything, continues from one life to the next.
D3S2 - Tonglen, and Vajrasattva as Guru Yoga Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 89 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024
Giving and taking, guided from a past and future self out to one being in need, a group, then all beings, the light given out as Vajrasattva's body, mantra syllables, vajra and bell. Tenpa adds the healing adaptations, nectar heavy, warming or cooling, then shows how Vajrasattva practice itself can serve as guru yoga, the mantra recited in the manner of supplication and the nectar granting the four empowerments as it fills the four chakras. An empowerment is needed only to visualise yourself as the deity.
D1S2 - Why Purification Came West, and Inviting the Lineage Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 90 minutes · recorded January 6, 2024
Tenpa traces how three month Vajrasattva retreats came to be offered to Western practitioners from the 1970s, a tradition begun by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, and restates the key points of body, speech and mind. Loving kindness is guided for oneself, then for everyone on the retreat, then for all beings. The teaching turns to supplicating the lineage, and to mepa, the appreciation that Vajrayana rests on. A second practice invites that inspiration as light and nectar entering through the crown.
D3S4 - The Golden Portal Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 61 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
A practice from the lineage of Akong Tulku Rinpoche, founder of Samye Ling, who taught it for compassion: you become a golden portal, and all the random thoughts and mental chatter come out through it as golden light of loving kindness radiating outwards. The circle of kind beings is practised again, with loving kindness extended to them at the end. Michael Lobsang Tenpa also talks about informal practice, and the Japanese image of practice as a red thread to hold onto at all times.
Taking Refuge in the Three Jewels David Oromith · 79 minutes · recorded November 28, 2023
This session opens with a short settling practice, slow breaths and recalling one's intention, before David explains what refuge means: trust in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, tested against experience, not a creed to sign up to. He works through the five lay vows, avoiding killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxicants, including his own view on vegetarianism. Questions cover confusion between centres and keeping a Christian upbringing alongside this path, before the ceremony itself.
D1S2 - Three Lineages, and Dipa Ma Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 62 minutes · recorded August 25, 2023
A guided practice acknowledging three lineages: the land and everyone who has lived on it, blood and bone ancestors, and the teachers who carried these methods down. Michael Lobsang Tenpa explains supplication as a way of inviting inspiration rather than listing the dead. He then tells the story of Dipa Ma, the Bengali housewife widowed young who turned out to be a concentration prodigy, and her two minute instruction to Wendy Palmer: this life is in trouble, so for now do only loving kindness.
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.
D6S1 - Atisha's Mahamudra, the View Lama Alan · 99 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
The retreat leaves the mind training for Atisha's own root text on mahamudra, his pith instructions on connate union, the lineage traced back through Naropa and Tilopa. Lama Alan Wallace gives Atisha's view: the mind's essential nature is its lack of origination, cessation and duration, its manifest nature is luminosity, and the two have never been apart. The practice is Atisha's own instruction, do not modify, do not block, do not think, do not practise, once all uncertainty has been cut off.
D6S2 - The Fruition and the Rainbow Body Lama Alan · 128 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
The commentary closes with the last two sections of the text, conduct and fruition, where meditative equipoise and daily life merge until no distinction is left between them. Lama Alan Wallace describes the three kinds of rainbow body the tradition reports, and reads the prophecies Dudjom Lingpa recorded in his autobiography, including thirteen disciples who would attain it. Two guided practices carry the whole path, from settling the mind to resting beyond apprehender and apprehended.
S3 - Questions on Guru Yoga and Lineage Eva Natanya · 59 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Questions put to Eva Natanya, starting with where to begin reading in the hesychast tradition: the Philokalia, and the contemporary writing of Father Silouan. She answers at length on whether a Christian can practise Dzogchen ngondro with Christ as root lama, and why she would keep a visualisation as it was transmitted while holding guru and yidam as inseparable. Further answers cover how lineage and authorisation work, and what the words Buddha, guru and lama actually carry.
P1 - The View of the Great Perfection Lama Alan · 124 minutes · recorded January 1, 2017
Lama Alan gives the oral transmission and commentary to a Dzogchen text by Yangthang Rinpoche, who turned eighteen years in a Chinese concentration camp into an eighteen year retreat. Four preliminaries come first, all difficult to find: a human life, the spirit of emergence, a qualified guru, the sublime dharma. The view is not theory: stop looking outward, settle the mind in its natural state, then ask where awareness comes from, where it is located, where it goes. The session opens with a guided shamatha practice.
Tong-len (Taking & Giving) Glen Svensson · 88 minutes
Tonglen, giving and taking, practised twice: first for ourselves and a friend, then we choose one mental affliction to dissolve and one quality to cultivate, before opening out to others. Glen Svensson compares the traditional black rock of self-cherishing with the light at the heart he prefers, warning against holding the smoke to punish yourself. The aspiration to take the suffering and give happiness is the key, and once learnt it can be done on a single breath as you approach a difficult person.

Lineage and tradition

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