Stress and burnout

21 teachings in the library are about this.

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 Two - The Laziness of Busyness David Oromith · 78 minutes · recorded May 29, 2026
The second laziness, too busy for practice, the one David calls the most disguised because it sounds so reasonable. The energy of busyness fills every gap: participants in one study chose an electric shock over fifteen minutes alone with their thoughts. David offers renunciation, not giving things up but not being fooled by the promise, and Oliver Burkeman's question of what gets your time. It closes with an experiment, noticing what the mind grabs when a gap appears.
Stress Isn't What the World Does to You David Oromith · 4 minutes · recorded May 17, 2026
A short extract. David on a line he rejected outright when he first heard it, that stress is not what the world does to you but what you bring to the world, and on why he came to find it freeing rather than a way of blaming people for their own difficulties.
The Psychology of Stress & Burnout David Oromith · 68 minutes · recorded May 17, 2026
The talk opens with a grounding meditation in which we settle the body and set an intention. David brings together the Buddhist view that stress is the gap between how we want things to be and how they are with Paul and Eve Ekman's psychology of demand versus felt resource, then works through the three stages of burnout: exhaustion, loss of meaning, and shutdown. He closes with the eight sources of well-being, including optimism, gratitude, connection and play.
D2S2 - Mindfulness of Breathing at the Whole Body, and Why Relaxation Comes First David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded August 19, 2025
The first of the shamatha methods proper, following Asanga: attention on the sensations of the breath throughout the whole body rather than at one point. David makes the case for taking relaxation before stability and vividness, and for why a Western practitioner told to concentrate hard tends to clamp down, yank the mind back and get nowhere. He names the two failures to watch for, excitation and laxity, and why laxity, which runs from falling asleep to a dimness of attention that is not very sharp, is the harder of the two to describe.
Compassion vs Despair: A Buddhist Approach to Witnessing Suffering (David Oromith) David Oromith · 90 minutes · recorded April 1, 2025
Compassion and its near enemy, despair: how to attend to the suffering of others and of the world without being overwhelmed by it.
Caring for Yourself While Caring for Others (David Oromith) David Oromith · 59 minutes · recorded January 26, 2025
This Insight Timer talk for carers opens with a short body based meditation on motivation. David sets out three levels of burnout, emotional exhaustion, loss of meaning, and depersonalization, with the antidote to each, then turns to universal compassion, naming despair as compassion's near enemy and describing the friend based thought experiment for self compassion. Carers share their own motivations and advice throughout, and this first part ends with a loving kindness meditation.
Session 1 - Practices for Relaxation David Oromith · 69 minutes · recorded January 19, 2025
David opens by naming why so many of us live from a baseline of stress, then leads a longer guided meditation of settling body, speech and mind in their natural state, followed by mindfulness of breathing. He explains shamatha and its three qualities of relaxation, stillness and alertness, and how daily practice builds a calmer baseline rather than forcing a blank mind. The session closes with a second guided practice, open presence with all five senses.
Session 3 - Compassion David Oromith · 85 minutes · recorded September 24, 2024
In compassion practice we move from ourselves through a suffering acquaintance, a loved one, a stranger and finally someone acting cruelly, wishing each free of suffering and its causes. David distinguishes compassion from its near enemies, grief and pity, describing how despair once fed his own depression working in mental health wards, and why compassion stays active rather than overwhelmed. Members discuss compassion fatigue, burnout and caring for an ageing parent.
Relax & Go Easy On Yourself David Oromith · 28 minutes · recorded September 15, 2024
A settling meditation that moves from the body into gratitude for the day ahead, then into setting a simple intention for how to show up. David talks about the pressure practitioners put on themselves to progress quickly, drawing on his own teacher's account of burnout among devoted students, and argues that consistency matters more than intensity. He closes with the reminder that patience with our own practice is itself a form of patient acceptance.
D2S5 - Questions, and Essence Love Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 60 minutes · recorded December 11, 2023
An evening given over to questions: basic goodness without conceit, holding all beings in mind without being overwhelmed, vegetarianism without arrogance, phrases that feel mechanical, how Buddha nature can be severed, and what to do on witnessing harm when neither passivity nor impulse will serve. Michael Lobsang Tenpa explains Tsoknyi Rinpoche's term essence love, and the okayness a Himalayan grandmother radiates. The practice at the end is Shantideva's verses of dedication.
A Candle in Darkness - Compassion in the World David Oromith · 35 minutes · recorded October 8, 2023
In the compassion meditation we use the image of ourselves as a candle: we breathe in strength for the flame using empathy for the world's suffering, then breathe out the wish that all beings find freedom from it, until other candles begin to light around us. Responding to a question about feeling overwhelmed by the news, David distinguishes empathy from despair, which he calls compassion's near enemy, and shares the Dalai Lama's insistence on never giving up.
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.
The Six Paramitas - Mental Stability (Samadhi/Concentration) David Oromith · 35 minutes · recorded February 26, 2023
In this mindfulness of breathing practice we follow the rhythmic sensations of breath throughout the body, with a gentle count to seven offered as a way to hold concentration. David turns to the fifth paramita, samadhi, the organisation's namesake, meaning to unify the mind with what it attends to. He describes the four qualities of deep concentration, peaceful, sublime, blissful, and able to quell afflictions on the spot, and how poor attention leaves us stressed and at the mercy of our own thoughts.
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.
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.
What to Do When You Feel Sad David Oromith · 19 minutes · recorded April 10, 2020
In this episode, David addresses the question: what to do when I feel sad and overwhelmed? In modern life, in the pursuit of a successful and happy life, we have a tendency to abuse the mind without even realising it. This leaves us feeling unbalanced, detached, unhappy, easily overwhelmed, and at times unable to function. These are symptoms of an unbalanced mind that is being abused. Now is the time to learn the art of grounding yourself, countering this abuse by cultivating emotional balance, and ridding ourselves of negative minds.
Part One - Virtue, Dharma and the Path Lama Alan · 78 minutes
Lama Alan separates virtue, which anyone can practise and which can still end in burnout, from Dharma, which his mentor defined as engaging with reality in a way that leads to an enduring sense of well-being. Beyond both is marga, where there is no falling back. He quotes the Buddha's five analogies for a mind under the five obscurations: indebted, sick, in bonds, enslaved and lost in a desert track. In the parable of the king's son vipashyana is the minister and shamatha his bodyguard.
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.
Exchanging Self with Others Glen Svensson · 78 minutes
The second method for cultivating bodhicitta, historically called the secret method because it was considered too profound and difficult for the normal person, though Glen Svensson thinks that may be the reverse now, since it tackles self-cherishing head-on. The session opens with great loving kindness, and in a second practice we reflect on the disadvantages of a me first attitude from our own past. He cites a study in which people who use the words I, me and mine a lot had a 35 per cent greater risk of heart attack.
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.

Stress and burnout

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